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maybevillage · 2 months ago

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my thoughts on dawntrail

it's been hard for me to organise my thoughts on dawntrail bc of how annoyed it made me so i'm just going to get into it in my usual disorganised way. i apologise from now for how long this is. spoilers for dawntrail and the dawntrail normal raids. and also the br'aaxskin maps slightly?

dawntrail really was a final nail in the coffin for me. i have no expectations for the story in this game to be good right now and am almost frightened by what they might have in store for the incoming alliance raids and post-expansion. i still like ffxiv and intend to subscribe to it despite knowing from before i got back into it that yoshi-p doesn't believe black people belong in fantasy stories. does it have to be so hard to enjoy (?) an mmo? is that an oxymoron? "enjoy ffxiv"? i don't know. this shit is everywhere. so here we are.

i'm going to criticise dt but i will also go a bit further and indulge in a little embarrassing (for me anyways) behaviour where i come up with some things i would've preferred the expansion had done instead. i find this embarrassing bc i don't consider myself a particularly competent writer, and it's not like i think i have any unique ideas where dt is concerned, it's more that it set up many things that could've been really interesting to me had they bothered to use them instead of writing them totally out of the story. i had really been looking forward to the second half of dt complicating and concluding the first half bc of how much i was enjoying it, so trying to expand the ideas they dashed to the side is also out of necessity for me. to pretend my fanfiction version of dawntrail's second half is canon so that i can continue to enjoy my time with this game and my life.

admittedly i can see why automatically assuming bad writing decisions = the writers are acting in bad faith might be strange. so i thought about that for a bit. to be clear, i don't automatically have an issue with "bad" writing generally nor do i assume ffxiv has bad intentions despite how much i criticise this game and the things i read/watch/play generally. but i also find the intentions irrelevant. stormblood has heart and all but its racist despite whatever vision they had for it. i don't think intention unmakes something as racist. and the second half of dawntrail has these same writing issues that i think stem from racist views, so i'm just not interested in what the intentions were. i can be totally fine with things not being "competently" written bc i don't really believe that sort of thing is objective anyways. but this is not that. i don't think arr is perfect. i think hvw and shb have a lot of flaws and i don't think anything needs to be perfect or appeal to my personal tastes at all times; i just think it needs to tell a story. and that story needs to at least be conscious of how it's informed by racism if it's not going to challenge it when it uses it in its story. but instead of that, we get sympathetic colonialism and awkward and lackluster attempts at being bigger and better in ways that don't matter and "content" and appealing to the audience in lieu of just trying to write something interesting and complicated. that being said, let me just get into it.....

i had the luxury of knowing very little going into dawntrail except for one or two of the jungle-y tourist-attraction "come to tural!" videos about it (and i found those videos strange for reasons i will get into) and this tweet talking about how apparently the writers got... experts to help w the writing of another culture or something i don't remember exactly but basically they were going to put a lot more thought into properly representing other cultures in a respectful way. i had no idea what cultures these were going to be so i was very curious. i have my own thoughts on "diversity training" but okay....... cool....

pre-dawntrail was actually a genuinely refreshing surprise. post-ew was regrettably not very compelling to me bc of how out of left-field it felt. i'm not a fan of references of the other games when they smother the ffxiv story to include these references, and the story i found kind of typical, y'know story beats like death and betrayal that play out kind of typically/bank on our familiarity with these common emotional notes, which is not terrible but i didn't feel connected with much of what was going on bc the world-building was moving very fast, and so on, and felt disconnected from a lot of what we were engaged with previously. i realise these are just recurring problems with ffxiv now. but at the time i was happy to be free of that. erenville coming back to sharlayan with wuk lamat was cool, she's really fun. and i loved that really beautiful solo duty on the isle of haam. i think that + the first half of dawntrail is one of my fav parts of the entire game bc it was just fun. going on a fairly straightforward adventure was a nice change from endwalker kind of tripping over itself in its efforts to be complicated that felt more convoluted than anything. i liked that dt was an adventure devoted to (what i thought would be) something smaller in scale, like how hvw is mostly focused on ishgard, rather than once again coming to the rescue on behalf of the entire universe. like the universe does not always need to be in trouble for something to be fun and interesting. i was hoping something as grand and final as endwalker would've had that covered.

so yeah i liked dawntrail a lot at the start. i felt it knew when to be silly and light-hearted bc it wasn't being silly with stakes that were unbelievably high, and i liked the idea of a wacky and frantic adventure on this completely new side of the map. i really liked wuk lamat shaking with nerves after fighting that large bird on the isle of haam. not the most unique character-thing ever but it doesn't have to be unique to be interesting or well-executed is how i feel about cliches/tropes in general. also bc this is the beginning of the story. i think it's fine to utilise quick and easily understandable tropes to set things up--not to use as the only development a character will ever get. and i liked that g'raha was taking on a sort of wiser role where wuk lamat was concerned as well bc it makes sense to me for him to act like he's a billion years old, even where wol is concerned too. i really enjoyed that early moment on the bridge in sharlayan where g'raha reassures wol to just be true to who they are when they were unsure about accompanying wuk lamat on the rite of succession. maybe being yourself is not my exact choice of advice regarding getting directly involved in a foreign country’s affairs but i thought maybe we were going to explore wol having more interpersonal problems/actually growing as a character/experiencing a little introspection, so i appreciated the direction.

but i was clearly being very premature about my expectations for this expansion because most of these little early things that interested me in the first half went absolutely nowhere. g'raha is a good example. i liked the initial group a lot: erenville being a bit standoffish but not unpleasant or unreasonable, wuk lamat being overly optimistic and naive; and g'raha seemed like a good addition to complement what i thought would be a focus on krile, him being one of the chars who's known her for years + their camaraderie as students of baldesion. we spend time with this specific group. and then for some reason, after giving me this expectation... we just don't bring him along. despite the allure of tural being adventure, and g'raha ignoring the gravity of being on omicron back in ew while the world back home is dying to suddenly remind wol how much he wants to go on adventures with them....... you leave him behind to bring the twins. alisaie is one of my ultimate favourite characters in this game and i was still annoyed by this decision. i'm not a g'raha stan. i don't need any character to be anywhere as long as the reasons they are/aren't are compelling. his reasons for coming i found compelling, so i was disappointed because the game had set up something i found interesting and then just takes it nowhere, so that i feel its absence throughout the whole thing. the twins reasons for coming i did not find compelling. even weirder was how they provided about absolutely nothing to the story???? this is something i realise the entire expansion does: makes me expect something, doesn't deliver it, and instead replaces it with something half-assed that it tries to convince me is important with lazy emotional notes. i was genuinely annoyed with the reasoning for the twins being to learn about engaging with other cultures in order to hone their approach to treating with garlemald. it just felt so uninspired, like they couldn't come up with anything else. and garlemald was obviously an afterthought--only an occasional comment after a quest on how they were indeed listening and learning. and i find the very firm “we are engaging with foreigners” mindset, like the conception of anything that isn't fantasy europe as foreign first and foremost before anything else, outdated. yes going to tural is going to teach me about the virtues in life that are diversity and tolerance bc that's really what other cultures are worth to me yes i'm engaging with a human-shaped lesson and not a person. let's call that lesson lamaty'i.

i mean i suppose i shouldn't be surprised about this "foreigners" lens tural has over it. yoshi-p has said that he is reluctant to add non-white characters to things bc he doesn't want their non-whiteness (if it isn't white, it's "ethnic"!) to give players preconceptions that will influence how they're read as characters. he simply wants them to be treated as the people they are on the inside without these apparently monolithic preconceptions not being white would impress upon them. so just an extremely transparent self-report on his part, but i'm the fool bc i still play this game. so now i get to see the twins fully settled into their role of diplomats which i didn't like in ew either. perfect! they didn't feel hastily tacked on at all and had a lot of interesting things to add to the scenes, especially when they were constantly being left behind in the quests and duties bc the game couldn't bother give the entire group things to do together or things to say. it's so hard to come up with things for our characters to do when we can't just kill them off to provide some vague lesson for someone else (rip papalymo) so let's keep constantly splitting the group up for these tasks. and then by the end, everyone will really feel like their relationships with each other have developed. perfect. i was really feeling the twins' open-minded vibes.

you might not believe me but even this wasn't the end of the world for me… early on i was disappointed but through the gift of my blissful ignorance as to what was in store for me i was still very much enjoying myself…!

bc tural is so awesome. i think the parts that take place in tural on tural's terms about tural are easily the best parts of the expansion. while i don't find competitions personally interesting, i think it was a good storytelling decision bc it gives the player a linear and in-world reason to move through and explore the new areas. what i didn't like in particular was the framing of these new areas as vacation spots, like with the promotional videos. the safari outfit bro was wearing felt outdated to me, and tourism is neo-colonialistic. framing tural as what it can offer to an outsider recreationally is something i think we need to move past already. i also did not appreciate the research we did in sharlayan about ketenramm or his character at all. why are we reading the most typical whitewashed versions of colonial history in this game. why are we calling characters inspired by colonialists “explorers” who "discovered" native lands. at one point i think the game even uses the phrase “the new world” which is crazy to me. surely it's not that much of an ask to not pretend like genocides were some peaceful cultural exchange of crops. it's obviously based on irl like potatoes did come from south america, so surely they could have framed the history of this fictional south america/native american region in some other way. there's a world of fantasy out there. does the way we view the global south always have to be through a colonialist's lens? am i asking a lot?

but okay tural is still awesome so hahaha lets keep moving on. i actually love it there. and you might know this by now but i love erenville. i was so excited when i learned in the pre-dawntrail stuff he had a childhood interest in adventure. particularly discovering the golden city which is a legend i've always found interesting (although i think that's a colonial production as well iirc), and how he seemed to resent that. and i liked that this subtle resentment didn't seem to locate itself in seeing himself as a sort of unrealised adventurer, especially in the company of the ultimate adventurer that is wol, which i would have found cliche. instead he's very pragmatic and focused. is he trying to prove something? maybe to his mentor/mother? will we ever know either way i enjoy this lack of conflict, and how he actually seems very aware of how competent wol is without bringing it up in a way that adds to wol's constant glazing. and i was interested in how adamant he was about his departure from his home, like his new name, not wanting to talk about himself etc. i thought it was all so interesting. thank god they went absolutely nowhere with it by the end of the expansion. i just love when that happens.

i also really like his non-combat role. i think showing his logistical importance was fresh considering characters like tataru always get left behind on the actual adventure. maybe things don't have to be limited to fighting or ability to participate on the frontlines during war…! war in general......! maybe you just need a guy who knows how to handle the punutiy. but we go from the first to the second half of dawntrail so this particular no-more-war dream of mine is a long way away. anyways i was able to guess erenville would be the one narrating the expansion, which i think works really well as he's from tural, so exploring the new areas through the lens of someone who is actually from there i find important. he's also the group’s guide, so in a meta kind of way it’s a fun choice.

i don't think dawntrail had a terribly interesting start story-wise though. for the most part it was the characters and the locations and the actual gameplay that stood out to me, but as i said that might just be my personal lack of interest in competition plots. i feel they're a bit railroaded by the goal being the choosing of a winner at the end. so the story felt kind of flat... but i didn't mind too much. i still liked it, and when the story reaches the first two feats i liked realising that what made wuk lamat different from her more celebrated siblings was her understanding the necessity of engaging with people on their own terms, and the building of a strong community and so on. how she’d meet people along her journey who were so willing to help i found heartening, especially with them showing up across the journey as opposed to the kind of superfluous large crowd of cheers her brothers got at the start of the rite. like i was actually impressed that the story chose to focus on the importance of something so fundamental to life as knowing the people around you and working together with them in this specific way. a lot of things pretend to do this by focusing on the power of friendship etc, but don't actually talk about building community in an aware or complicated way. so this being represented by the feats relating to each location/being tangibly related to the livelihoods of the ppl in these areas was nice to see. it doesn't have to be overly complicated or unique or whatever if it's done well, which i thought this was. and i thought it was interesting bc while i do prefer how esoteric the ffxiv story is usually, i think this kind of plot can actually be complex if only people wouldn't treat it like trusting in those around you was the end of the story. it can be the lesson, it doesn't have to be the whole story. like i think if dawntrail had come at this without the laziness of a shounen manga we could've really had something. it was fairly obvious to me early on that wuk lamat learns to rely on others after the first feat alone, but rather than trying to complicate that in any way it chose instead to just keep repeating this message over and over and over again. through the characters just point blank saying it. i didn't mind too much early on because it was early on and i appreciated the message, like being told by gulool ja ja outright that the purpose of the rite was actually meant to cultivate a ruler was cool. but having finished the expansion i just get so annoyed now that the writing chose to just continually repeat itself as if it thinks the audience isn't paying even like a second of attention to the story, when it could have been doing more with the story/characters like giving zoraal ja speaking lines. what is the reason??? were they just not interested in coming up with more? i wish they would've explained wuk lamat's naivety a bit more, or given her more of a background beyond inadequacy in comparison to her brothers, so that her character development across the expansion could've been more complex? instead they always waste so much time

oh well. i need you to believe me i was still enjoying myself a lot. i loved the first dungeon so much. i love how they made it interesting with those scripted moments, like thancred blowing up the path or bakool ja ja destroying your boat. i like when the playable parts feel more connected to the narrative cut-scene stuff. i loved the upbeatness of it and that it was kind of silly. it made it feel more like an old-school adventure. and the areas are so beautiful and interesting. it's like what i like about botw where a mundane geographical feature can be filled with so much wonder. i was having so much fun.

really my only issue at the start was this flatness/repetition with the characters and the story. i think the moblin part is a good example of how it gets particularly weak. after establishing that wuk lamat is supposed to be learning about the continent and finding herself as a ruler who wants to preserve its hard won peace...they suddenly gamified that process or kind of shrank it into a step by step sort of thing. no intrigue or attempt to show and not tell at all. just help this singular potsworn and you'll recieve a "deep" understanding of earthenshire’s way of life in exchange. i think it would have been totally fine to keep wuk lamat’s learning about tural in a kind of nascent stage so as to not undermine the time required for her goals, even in a fantasy game. for eg i like how she voiced her insecurities but it feels like they speedran her getting over them. why does she need to prove she’s immensely capable of being a ruler so early in her life? isn't this expansion about receiving help from all around you in the places you aren't so good at, or even if you are good at something, you can still get help? to make life a little easier and joyful? it’s not like gulool ja ja is going to vanish from the story immediately once she takes the throne lol as if reaching the end of your narrative importance must always result in your death, right? like i would expect that kind of pretending a dead parent is an important character growth moment bullshit from fire emblem, sure. so what's the rush? what are we rushing towards? don't we have an entire expansion to flesh out and luxuriate in the beauty and richness of tural….? remember xak tural? who’s excited for xak tural? HAHAHAHGGFDGASFGHH why keep wuk lamat's development as a character so straight forward and one-note. as a result it kind of just felt like it was making these emotional or revealing moments that were fairly obvious to anyone paying attention more important than they really were, almost awkwardly so.

and then the usual nonsense.... when this game decides that rather than taking the time to come up with an interesting conflict, it instead makes the characters all act really unaware so that it can introduce a conflict that feels really cheap. even though gulool ja ja specifically tells wol to take care of his daughter; erenville specifically says to look out for bandits......we just….let wuk lamat get kidnapped. it felt like we were all being purposefully obtuse and no excuse exists for that except lazy writing. maybe a situation where bakool ja ja takes a hostage and wuk lamat relinquishes her keystones would have gone a lot farther to demonstrate her resolve and care for her people instead of just making a group featuring some of the most capable people in the universe look totally unaware for reasons i don't understand. i don't know. did the game have to bust out the typically dark-skinned and scarred "crook" character as the bandit like please are you kididng me. the only consolation was that wuk lamat questioned the conditions that would make them turn to being bandits in the first place, which genuinely surprised me, so that the woke left can finally stop complaining.

but okay fine, it's what happens so fine. maybe it was just supposed to establish the lengths bakool ja ja would go to to win? or flesh out more of koana's character? that's fine, i don't dislike that. but there were no real emotional or narrative consequences to wuk lamat losing her keystones that weren't obviously going to be solved later. not even re her already existing inadequacy--and i say that as someone who doesn't believe someone needs to be shamed for their mistakes ever, but idk.... like am i just missing out on what that part really did except shake up the rite a little.. the rite should definitely be shaken up, but the scions suddenly lacking awareness for the millionth time is so aggravating. oh well at this point i’m still enjoying myself greatly bc dawntrail is so refreshing and uplifting and spirited and fun and i have the capacity to enjoy things like koana’s legs shaking when he catches wuk lamat. i would praise dawntrail as knowing how to have fun. i can put a few weak story-telling decisions behind me, i promise.

anyways what was next. the yok huy. i thought they were so cool. i really liked hearing about them as mostly legends before actually getting to meet them, and the peace and remoteness of their home. usual disclaimer of fantasy non-white civilisations being attributed to non-humans or beast people, something i should've mentioned earlier given the presence of the mamool ja, but whatever anymore. the yok huy’s philosophy of living forever in the hearts of those who know you i really like. i think what they offer ideologically here would've been good as a foundation for when the story starts to approach the golden city, a place where, we are told, people live forever. (to be fair i think the game does try to make this connection but just sucks at it.) i was excited to learn more about the golden city, to contrast it with the yok huy's version of eternal life. also how the yok huy were originally conquerors but learned to reckon with the land and with life all around them i felt like would've served as a useful fable for zoraal ja, who was set on the path to conquest despite his unknowable reasons. genuinely just felt like he was failing to express a poorly conceived thought experiment he'd had a few times in his room after arguing with his dad. wouldn't be the first time in this game really important plot threads are poorly/barely expressed. i miss sareel ja

i loved that area beyond the cavern where the yok huy have their murals. i thought it was so beautiful…like a portal. i also loved the second dungeon. breaking through into the sky was so awesome. i was kind of let down by the cutscene afterwards with wuk lamat realising once more along her journey that she would be a ruler who would preserve the peace... bc she had already realised that many times …. like not even reassuring herself but genuinely realising as if it's the first time. but it's fine. epic valigarmanda fight. everyone coming together to fight it was so cool. i really think the game didn't have to keep hitting you over the head by having people point blank say working together = good when you could just feel it in moments like this. even with people like zoraal ja. i loved getting to go through that yok huy portal door and to those beautiful colourful mountains. i loved the cinematic feeling of that trial. these were the moments where i would be like dawntrail is so good like i was ready to be defending it on the forums the way i just thought that all the writing flatness and so on was so inconsequential in comparison to how it would really hit these moments in the right places. like even though i have no idea why bakool ja ja wouldn't be disqualified for releasing valigarmanda considering just how much of a threat to the continent everyone constantly said it was, who fucking cares? literally just enjoy life

yak t'el is awesome. the cenotes are so cool.... i think they did a really good job of making the new environments interesting by incorporating real geographical features and making them feel fantastical in fun ways as well as important to the story, like worqor lar dor and the skydeep cenote. and i thought the feat here was cute. i'm glad nobody ever outright said that was wuk lamat’s father.. how it was handled in a kind of indirect way i really liked. but again in retrospect the importance of those parts to the overall story and growth of the characters is lost on me. why didn't bakool ja ja get disqualified for kidnapping him

mamook is also awesome. i love that nobody wanted to talk to you and its darker and more unsettling feeling. the meteors having a harmful effect on the area combined with their beauty was so interesting as well. i cannot overstate just how much i find the locations so lovely and fascinating. i find it kind of ridiculous that zoraal ja got disqualified considering nothing about him indicated he'd make such a foolish lack of judgment, considering he seems very no-nonsense from the little we do get from him, but okay. attacking an elector is worse than releasing valigarmanda. i thought bakool ja ja being a kind of figure of cult worship was really interesting. i think evil baby experiments are ridiculous, just so simplemindedly objectively evil to an extreme that i found it both hard to take seriously or move on from, two things the game was requiring from me immediately. but we move. focusing on helping the town of mamook outside of it being necessary for the feat was cool, and i like that koana decided to relinquish his role--deviations from the typical competition win-lose plot are fun, so i was a fan of bakool ja ja and zoraal ja no longer competing as well even if it was so sudden in comparison to how much they cared to win before

ketenramm showing up felt so fucking random to me. i genuinely feel like removing him would change nothing except delaying zoraal ja getting a key to the golden city in the most unexplained and asinine way possible but i get it the game needed their blue-eyes representation in there somewhere. and don't you forget it bc the residents of mamook naming his house after them would be all for naught if you did. also that he only showed up to again remind you the only way you can get past trials is through the close bonds you form with others, in case you forgot. but weirdly enough that made me realise that aside from erenville, everyone else in the party is from eorzea. i think despite koana’s focus on introducing foreign technology to tural and that being the solution for mamook's problems, him and wuk lamat taking charge on that helped to avoid an outright foreign saviours plot. but i do wish there had been someone else from tural in the main group overall. like maybe another childhood friend or some kind of character that could provide a different viewpoint for tural, so that the future of tural was in more of tural's hands. i mean turalis still contribute along the way so this isn't egregious or anything, but a 1:2 ratio in wuk lamat's entourage sticks out to me

i thought the skydeep cenote looked kind of random for what i expected of the golden city, which i admit is my fault for forgetting this is a final fantasy game. that isn't to say i dislike it, i actually thought it was pretty cool and i kind of liked the calmness and warmth of the gold yellow lights, how it felt like it was thrumming with secret life, along with the deep and shadowy and secret darkness. but somehow the intersection of technology and fantasy felt more jarring than usual. i think i'm just over the false correlation of advanced (or more specifically desirable since everyone was looking for it) society = "advanced" technology, especially because that advancement is honestly usually just decoration. it's like they fall into the trap of sleek surfaces and lights as progress and don't come up with anything actually innovative beyond that, which i'm only saying having played the whole thing and seeing that they really did not do much. electrope is only advanced insofar as they can use it for everything rather than it being actually interesting. (also the most they could do with this advanced technology was the same kind of convenient comfort bullshit we're inundated with in real life, empty novelties like clear touch screens and astronaut food; souls-as-currency, but i will get to that later). i think the ancients are a good example of an "advanced" society because they don't rely on cheap thrills we've seen before, like there's no big machines that can transport you to different worlds. rather creation magics, being able to wrangle and interact with something that plays with the limits/limitlessness of human creativity, etc. i don't even agree with a lot of the beliefs the ancients had but i enjoyed how its focus as an advanced society was on engaging with the things i think people live for, as opposed to inventions that keep our drinks warm for us. to be fair, i think i said this already, alexandria does try to introduce some thoughts on death and memory etc, i just think it does a bad job of it

anyways, after we leave mamook, what now? the ceremony where we crowned two new rulers was a better decision than i thought ffxiv capable of. but two heads are better than one can't be the only thing this expansion has to say, even if it says it so much. at this point i'm dying to go to xak tural like i am repeatedly saying to my sister and my cousin how much i want to get there to finally see where erenville's story might go, and finally get anything re lore for vieras in the first, and also the previous locations were so lovely like life was looking up......hehehehahahahaHAHAHA

i like shaaloani but i am unhappy with how arbitrary the story there was. why drop a filler arc in the middle of the expansion? i don't want a date with erenville in the middle of the expansion, i want something that connects the first part of the story to the other and develops what we've already been given. i know that's asking for a lot. what is this game's absolute refusal to use its characters or its own interesting plot hooks. not even use them effectively at this point i literally would just be happy if they used them. i'd expect a police corruption (redundant btw) b-plot from the post-expansion maybe. i don't totally dislike it or anything i just think introducing shalaaoni could have been handled way better. and even with the spotlight on him the only thing we learn about erenville in that moment is his real name. nothing insightful about why he left his home or why he chose a new name or even about what his life in his hometown was like. just his name.

the dome itself i thought was cool. that feeling of urgency and disbelief as erenville realises that's where his home is. i was still feeling pretty positive about where the story would lead despite all these things, if you can believe it. the blissful ignorance thing, if you remember. and then we get back to tulioyallal.

dawntrail’s second half:

i split this up into parts bc of how difficult writing this has been. i actually could not believe we were doing this again. yet another expansion with non-white characters being invaded by some hostile force. this happens in rhalgr’s reach, it happens in thavnair, and now tuliyollal. it feels lazy every single time. all my hopes for an interesting and complicated story were dashed instantly. i mean genuinely plummeted. time for another meaningless war with a force they're going to try and make both unquestionably hostile and sympathetic. the problem is that i’m playing a fantasy rpg game, but i still have to ask if its really so impossible for something to be fun and complex without having to rely on conquest. does there have to be some flimsy, simple-minded understanding of good and evil pick a side slog premise for this game to have purpose. was this really the only way they could think to test wuk lamat.

and why on earth do we do meaningless shit like watch gulool ja ja die. why is his honour worth more than his life. and then they're gonna have wol continue to say that people we can yet save/not doing so is indolence adage as the answer to any remotely challenging ethical argument they face despite the group of us just watching him die. that just pissed me off so bad.

in my opinion the expansion just totally loses focus once all this happens. no time to mourn gulool ja ja but plenty of time to go on tours with sphene to try fake grapes. it's like i'm back on mare lamentorum but the only rabbits for malms around that were making me feel less homicidal was erenville. recounting this half of the expansion is actually difficult for me bc of how much i dislike it but i’ll try. i realise part of my problem is i've been trying to engage with the story as if it's worthwhile to me personally, which it isn't, because i think it's such a departure from what came before it shouldn't exist. so i'm just going to try my best. i will say that if you like the second half of dawntrail and me criticising it will upset you beyond disagreeing with another person on a video game, then here is your chance to stop reading. i'm serious, bc i know criticising things is par the course for me but i really do not like this part of the game!!

first of all, finally getting to erenville’s home and it not even existing anymore was such a disappointment i was starting to feel deeply unsettled. ffxiv is no stranger to just getting rid of the parts it doesn't want to develop (rip ysayle) but this was a new level to me. except for shaaloani, they throw the entire upper half of the CONTINENT away. the south americans had their moment but alas the well of good ideas has run dry and it's time to introduce reskinned shadowbringers. remember shadowbringers? everyone loves shadowbringers. forget doing anything new and interesting--although considering how they could barely lift a finger to give the turali characters any introspection maybe i should've forseen this--its time to focus on the feelings of a singular white woman. wake up!

what disturbs me about this half of the expansion is that in its refusal to give a damn about the characters from the first half, it upends what it established in that half as well. krile has been totally forgotten at this point and because of how the golden city actually gets realised her backstory feels weak, and erenville's backstory can now go literally nowhere. and in the ways the latter half does engage with tural, it is now no longer on tural's terms, but a coloniser's. the story is no longer about tural as tural does, but about its reaction to colonialism. the only way they could think to complicate a story about a non-white location is through its reaction to colonialism. erenville's home is not only completely displaced, the remaining citizens get assimilated into a totally other nation. now i don't care what anyone thinks, you cannot create or consume media and think that those actions are totally separate from the world we live in, because people are not objective creatures. they make decisions in real life and we interact with and understand those decisions in real life. the "necessity" of a fictional plot point cannot justify a real life decision made by people who can control their writing decisions. i say this because it is not lost on me that in an expansion initially focused on a south american inspired region that also draws a lot from native cultures, the plotline diverts into turali people being forcibly assimilated (because out of necessity is still force) into a more modern and technological society, for their "benefit". and this is framed as a good thing because the colonialist ruler is soooooo nice to her people you can't believe how nice she is. like it doesn't matter if she's a complex villain or w/e actually and the narrative is actually trying to say she's bad because we're going to kill her by the end because of how bad she is. because she's sooo nice and everyone loves her and she loves them. so she's sympathetic. and now turali citizens can enjoy modern conveniences like food that comes in bags and energy drinks and somehow still waiting in lines at offices. forget the fact that we displaced an entire village in the process. like what in the capitalism

i genuinely think this game believes more in koana's original philosophy, in the “virtue” of modern technology, than in anything else. even if we use wuk lamat's increasingly simplified good triumphs over evil mantra to lead us to the end. i say this because alexandria's advanced technology is what rescued people from the destabilized lives they were living as a result of the storm surge and so on, and because of solution nine even being a location in this game. it justifies what happens to yyasulani. you get a tour from the queen herself (who everyone constantly praises along the way, although all she does is walk and talk) that demonstrates how the technology improves their lives and so on. everyone is so quick to tell you that they love their lives, that it's fine, things are okay etc. except i do not care. i do not care what the fictional characters think about this because i cannot accept this is what they chose to do with the the story of tural. "we're okay with colonialism!" why.

"need" like whatever....

sphene is my least favourite character in the game. she's not even an actual character to me. i think i hate her more as a concept, not only because she represents to me how dawntrail stopped being even remotely good but also how she represents video game trends that really frustrate me. everyone else looks like they're a part of the world they're in but she looks like a genshin impact character cameo, and i don't even mean that like "genshin is killing character design" i mean that she literally looks like a hoyoverse character to me. i'm assuming the idea was to have her look ethereal considering her situation but it doesn't scream vestiges of a lost culture to me as much as feeling like she's from a completely different intellectual property. i also cannot stand the young girl who is actually a billion years old trope. it's so ridiculous. and i didn't think i was going to have to rehash my distaste for female villains who are young but weirdly knowing and also not human and kind of evil in a coquettish and indirect way but are still very violent, so soon. i was trying to really find the words for it describing meteion back in my post on endwalker but i still find it difficult to really hone in on the trope. still, what stands out to me now is the lack of autonomy these characters have. they're still very much a threat/dangerous, but they're being controlled by something else, but they still have to be put down by the end. it's like a combination of fetishes, like a quirky and alien manic pixie dream-like sort of girl, the only type of this girl you'll ever find, who is also dangerous, but still retains a level of innocence whether through age or morality and so on, because female characters are just not allowed to be autonomous. yotsuyu came close to being villainous and not absolved of this and then they made her regress into a child. i thought sphene was at least going to be evil of her own volition, which was interesting enough, but she couldn't even get that.

i figure part of it also has to do with how sympathetic they tried to make her. her people are working OVERTIME to glaze her. to be clear, i think the idea of a ruler referring to a nation and its people as "my people" is silly no matter who is saying it. i dont care if she views her people as actual people vs her subjects or whatever. its about as relevant as saying "nice prison" to me because the niceness of the prison does not excuse the prison existing, but this is a fantasy game with rulers so sure. what gets me specifically with sphene though is that i find it genuinely bizarre how she literally does nothing to demonstrate how benevolent she is and yet they can't stop saying it. we're literally just constantly told she is nice. at this point the game has just fully stopped bothering to show anything, it just tells it to you. npcs outright tell you that sphene is the best ruler ever, even going so far as to laugh after wuk lamat explains the violence inflicted upon tuliyollal by zoraal ja, because whoops, they would just never believe sphene could be that bad. it doesn't matter to me that the reasons her people love her aren't meant to be known to us just yet, because they don't take the time to demonstrate it in any interesting way. so it just feels disconsonant to wade through this part. and now shene is calling wuk lamat her pet name by accident bc everyone was doing it so she thought it was her name and oh silly sphene you silly girl of course wuk lamat is going to be like of course you can call me that we're so close now even though you are condoning zoraal ja's massacre. why ff is so bent on these gaps in logic and letting characters get away with being imperialists as some cheap way to make the morals grey is beyond me. the scions are apparently willing to tolerate anything once it's delightful enough.

heritage found itself is really flat for the same reasons. the opening parts where you're exploring the ruins of erenville's home were interesting enough but otherwise it felt like the story lacked direction, like it doesn't have anything for you to do. where this location would have really benefited from you discovering what on earth could have happened to erenville's home/what the dome was, and maintaining that intrigue, instead everything you need to know is told to you, as you're toured around from point a to point b and so on, by a character you just get told about rather than see her do anything. i figure this is because we are just over halfway through the story and they've decided to introduce a totally new kingdom with an entirely separate backstory from everything they'd already spent levels 90-96 establishing. why bother do anything interesting with the quests when there's no time to do anything else but spit the worldbuilding at you. oh but don't forget to try the solution nine food that makes you lose weight. and you're just in time to watch wuk lamat's mother die. heritage found is also visually slapdash, which i think could work if it was like a dedicated decision to make the place look like an incohesive combination of the two cultures. but it just looks like a jarring mess of assets, turali rug + electrope table. why would they not just use a regular wooden table. it's not really like me to complain about the aesthetics, i typically prefer to focus on storytelling that i just find bad. but i really cannot express just how much nothing was resonating with me. compared to the richness of the earlier half of the expansion, even when the story had been flat, the second half just felt so rushed and empty to me.

but there is nothing i hate more in this entire game than what they did with cahciua. i was experiencing genuine horror when i realised that's what that marketable purple creature was during the part where we first see it. i actually could not fucking believe it. i genuinely think only erenville's refusal to accept any of what was happening was grounding me at all until the end of the expansion at that point. the first relevant black female character ever in the main story of this game and they can't even bear to have her be physically present because a woman being dark-skinned is just too unsettling for people. they can't even bear to have her be alive. and when she does get to show up she's that horrendous ashy colour that makes dark skin tolerable to racists. all my hopes for the first black woman in this game gone. all the character development i thought erenville was going to get, all the subtle comments about his mother that they dropped throughout the expansion for god-alone-knows-why reasons now, just pushed aside to make space for terribly developed fictional europe for the millionth time. for the millionth insurrectionist plot. they don't even bother to give a reason for how she died. it's never discussed. who cares. erenville just has to suffer through these very strange emotional torments, losing his home, losing his only family, because this game must torment its dark-skinned characters. i suppose it's the perfect excuse to stop having to write his dialogue on the map. he's so distraught now he can just keep saying "..." when you talk to him. so that they can devote more energy to writing... the twins? no, they're still too busy recounting every single thing that just happened moments after it happens. how about krile? will she finally do something other than ask if anyone knows anything about the golden city?

i was going to avoid talking about solution nine because i wanted to avoid being mean about how it looks, but there actually are some things i can say about it that will hopefully be more productive than just ragging on about how much i dislike anachronisms. in a way, the aesthetic choices for the place are perfect for what solution nine is like, and what i've been kind of loosely saying about technological "advancements" that are solely appearance and lack substance. consumerism, for one thing, i find really strange to introduce to the larger world of ffxiv. the way the turali citizens could accept their new home because it offered them unnecessary material comforts, entertainment as distraction etc. and then i realised that aside from mirroring consumerism in real life, what solution nine was reminding me of was gentrification. the very specific look of sleek stores selling neatly packaged products with trendy labels in glass cases and all the empty space; this focus on products and convenience. and of course that an area had to be displaced for solution nine to exist in tural, and the whole culture of yyasulani being dissolved into this gamer snowglobe.... how are we still falling into the trap that tall buildings and large sweeping spaces are the ideal cityscape? if we're going to go the unabashed futuristic route i at least wish they had been more unique with the designs rather than just recreating tron with squid game symbols on the faces. i personally thought even the train in garlemald was too reminiscent of real life, so s9 was just too much for me. and it's not that i think living in huts and small villages are solely an aesthetic rooted in the past and thus lend to some idyllic pastoral fantasy, more like i just think the aesthetic they chose for solution nine was too specifically something else to feel like a natural part of ffxiv. they could have leaned more into the aesthetics of the skydeep cenote. solution nine feels like an alien's pastiche of an internet subculture that it vaguely understands to be popular. the citizens of alexandria live in a place where the only foliage is palm trees and the only thing on offer at home is energy drinks. a grieving mother is dressed in the same manner as the flirty nightclub bartender. it feels like there's no meaning. it's just uncanny and silly in a bad way. it doesn't feel lived in. and amongst it all sphene is still wearing her xenoblade princess dress and saying "look over yonder" as she points to a neon motorcycle.

the tour sphene gives you here is even funnier to me than the one in heritage found because the game tried to dedicate a few cutscenes this time to showing you just how benevolent sphene is. even when she's still barely doing anything. levin sickness is a throwaway concept that has very little weight this late into the story, so i'm not sure why a boy suffering from it is the angle they chose other than this game's reliance on cheap emotional tropes. still, it's not like i'm asking sphene to miraculously cure him using her own lifeblood to prove to me she's a good ruler. i'm really just at a loss as to why the game is so bent on telling me she is one? why her being a sympathetic colonial ruler is so fucking important? i do not think this game needs to put a large blinking sign that says "colonialism is bad!" for her character to be interesting. it's more like all we get of her so far is the same flatness that i had an issue with in the first half, where the writing is so unable to complicate its characters it can only make the same point repeatedly. the difference though, is that wuk lamat at least proves herself. sphene is just so ineffectual as a ruler compared to what people say about her it is actually jarring to me. when she's showing you the residential district she says she's so proud of it... because her people worked so hard to build it. she can't answer wuk lamat's question about what her favourite foods are without being like "sorry i find i get too stuck thinking on those who labour to make us the food to really pick a favourite"…like i'm fucking sorry????????

a citizen comes up to her and quite literally says sphene i need help, the king has closed the arena and i can't make a living to get souls anymore, which understandably makes me really anxious about my life in this society devoted to getting souls. and sphene says there's nothing i can do for you because the arenas are closed for zoraal ja's war that i'm abetting, but as you are one of "my people" please remember that i love you all and if you ever need to vent about how anxious you are because of my actions as a ruler, i'm here to listen. and some random character is getting mad at him because he was being insubordinate to their most beloved queen of queens, and the citizen is like okay thank you queen sphene i feel better now. like???? WHAT DID SHE DO? what did she actually do?????? in the solo duty when zoraal ja starts having the citizens of alexandria massacred, a civilian literally says about sphene:

but unless i have forgotten...she didn't fight? she moved parts of the terrain around, sure, but i don't think she did anything within the sphere of personally fighting to protect her people that requires this? why is this game so focused on playing up her actions? why does it wait until the final act to show her doing anything at all? like i don't deny she loves her people, but all of this farce before she or anyone finally does more than just say it? really?

i don't remember what comes next so i'm just going to skip to the next heinous writing decision i can think of. gulool ja? i really want to know if the post-stormblood writer is in charge of this part of the expansion or something, because of the similar trashy drama plotlines it chooses to rely on to try to develop the characters, rather than just devloping the characters. what is zoraal ja having a son supposed to do? they could've just had zoraal ja voice his insecurities out loud to himself in a room (or to sareel ja, since ultimately that amounts to the same thing considering what sareel ja's narrative importance ended up being) and it would have been a better shot at understanding zoraal ja's feelings towards his father and his siblings than whatever him having a son he doesn't even acknowledge is supposed to mean. why did they try to speedrun all of zoraal ja's character development in the same trial where we are removing him from the story? it wasn't even anything so complex that we couldn't have just learned it earlier on in the game. instead they just redo the yotsuyu trial where he fights the shades of his family....? and then for him to call wuk lamat her pet name all of a sudden at the very end before he dies? what the fuck? that was all just so rushed

i just don't even know what to say about otis. i'm sorry... i don't care. i like otis, actually, and i think it's cool that the robot he's trapped inside of looks like a mamool ja, and i also liked the really eerie tone that scene where he introduces the endless takes on by the end, while he just laughs like he's telling a funny joke. that was fun. but it's hard for me to really want to reckon with the latter half of dawntrail as if i believe any of it is the direction the story should've taken, so i just won't.... i like otis but i just don't........really have any attachment to anything that happens in the second half of the expansion. it's like my problems with endwalker...where because it loses focus so much they have to just keep introducing more bullshit into the story to try and make sense of the earlier bullshit and i don't end up caring about any of it because it's all just a lot of bullshit. preservation is a half-assed attempt at intrigue that feels clunky and undercooked, its influence on the story just one of the many things the writers would rather say in passing than demonstrate. the time displacement between tural and alexandria is laziness. introduced to avoid writing the actual consequences of dropping an entire kingdom on top of xak tural because everyone has had the time to get over it, as well as being the source of one of the many cheap shots at more emotional moments. and gulool ja exists so that solution nine can have a ruler when we ultimately kill sphene, i guess? but that wouldn't be necessary if alexandria didn't exist in this expansion, which i don't think it needs to, so all of it just feels like nonsense to me. didn't we just spend the entire first half of the expansion trying to cultivate a new ruler for tural? but gulool ja just....gets to be the new ruler of alexandria bc he's zoraal ja's son? okay. let's just continue before i hurt myself thinking about this. living memory is next.

i actually forgot the scions were all here with us now because of how little they are contributing to the story at this point. of course y'shtola was there for a few moments to explain things like she always does, and once she does that they switch to giving us g'raha for the second half of the story while the twins are otherwise occupied or something. i'm fine with the scions not having large roles, but just sprinkling them in feels silly. apparently i'm not the only person who thinks so, and i really was not surprised to see yoshi-p say they took a half-assed approach to the scions because it was very obvious while playing it. alphinaud and alisaie felt like puppets, and once g'raha comes along he adds very little. honestly i think this expansion had some of the least interesting writing in between the cutscenes ever. i have a similar problem with other media and just have to wonder if it really is a recent video game thing. where instead of having anything fun to say characters just repeat banal things like what it is they have to do or how they have to make things right or bring whoever and so and so to justice. or they just repeat cliche phrases. or they repeat what was just learned. nothing interesting, and it makes me miss the writing from the earlier expansions. like during the second bout of fighting in tuliyollal there was a scene where it cuts to like..thancred and urianger cutting down some of the machine soldiers before delivering some pretty typical lines...just so that we remember the scions are there and are participating all in the few seconds the game is willing to spare them. it's like...this game balances so much and does it so poorly when it really should be cutting things down and focusing on developing a few things well....

like i thought endwalker was bad at balancing things introducing elpis so late into the expansion, but elpis at least just adds on to things we already know from previous expansions. an entirely new kingdom in the second half of dawntrail, which is already separating itself from prior knowledge as a totally new continent, is too much. the expansion suffers so much from being rushed. one of the most egregious consequences is how they handled krile. she's barely a distinctive character in this story and she's one of the main characters!! when we're all back at the skydeep cenote to finally head into the golden city, the earring krile is constantly asking about because they can't think of anything else for her to do finally has some importance, and she's about to use it for the largest moment in the story that holds relevance for her personally, the pinnacle of her personal quest....and it doesn't even open when she tries. it opens for gulool ja instead. like i really couldn't believe it. they really contrived this scenario to make gulool ja, who they only bring into the story because they didn't want to give zoraal ja even two more lines, more important than krile who has been striving towards being an actually fleshed out character since heavensward? what is the fucking point!!!!!

when we finally get to living memory i just felt all my annoyance compound. i don't know why i was shocked that my first thought was that it looked like amaurot. i mean this game is just so bent on recreating shadowbringers. sphene is trying to sacrifice the current living population to maintain a population that is virtually already dead. where have i heard that before. cahciua asking us to shut down living memory was actually really interesting, but that leading to her dying.....i was just so over it. she barely got a chance to be a character and interact with erenville in any meaningful way aside from calling him a pet name i'm now going to have the pleasure of seeing define their relationship forever, and then she's just going to die. how does erenville feel? still just saying "..."? okay great

i was going to say why do we waste so much time in living memory, but i suppose it's only a waste of time to me because as i said i don't think any of this should exist. for example, otis' play was fun but erenville's reaction was my own. thank god he still hated everything around him. i'm sorry, but his mother is going to die and we're wearing mascot costumes and acting in plays? and why is the only introspective moment for malms around a conversation about death in a gondola with G'RAHAAAAAAAAAA who wasn't even there the whole time? why would it not be with krile? why would it not be with erenville? they're the ones actually losing people from this excursion. they're the ones who have yet to develop at all from this entire expansion and in this entire game??? why on earth are we having the moment where a character finally gets to display some interiority with g'raha who literally gets the chance to do so whenever you cross his path? why must this game be so bent on pandering? why did they literally put all of krile’s development at the very end of the expansion and rush her to meet her parents? you don't even bear witness to her time with her parents because you're too busy running off to get the latest alexandrian panacean product that you have just got to try ice cream sweets and treats and all sorts of convenient delights that you must have because thats what they have waiting for you in alexandria! why is that how they choose to have the player spend their time? why would a little novelty like that matter more than a major character's arc finally resolving itself? all of krile's world building dissolved into a quiz show that barely lasts a few minutes because they don't even want to tell you let alone show you anymore, they just want to throw it out there because you're going to eat it up and expand on it through fanart and fanwork anyways if the game doesn't give you a choice otherwise. she should have been learning about where she's from throughout the entire expansion, but they care so little they just drop it on you all at once and then you never see it again. but hey, at least with her story you get that key to the other worlds. yup. krile you are so important

now that things are wrapping up erenville and cahciua need to have literally any time together at all their final moments. here's a cutscene where she continuously makes light of his very justified emotions towards what's happening, where he makes allusions to how this is what their relationship is like and how it's clearly been unresolved for him for a long time, kind of like how he's been implying this the entire expansion. are they going to take this in any kind of concrete direction?

i mean i wouldn't be complaining if the answer to that was yes. to me it's so obvious that she is focusing on her own emotions rather than what he's saying. all of this on a flying capybara ride? i will never understand why this game chooses to throw novelties at you like ice cream or flying capybara when it could be using its time to have its characters actually talk to each other. i have said that so much this entire post but they just do it so often it makes me angry. all of these complicated emotions erenville seems to have in his relationship with his mother just tossed out because all she needs to do is tell him he needs to do what she couldn't do...go out and explore the world...being a gleaner wasn'mt enough erenville you need to follow my dreams...and okay he's fine now! he's fine. all that sadness totally gone. forget her abandoning him as a child to the point that the reason he knows what his name means is because some other villager told him, and not his own mother, because she wasn't there. why did they make a black mother neglectful. this game is so fucking insufferable. it sucks because i actually really liked that each location we passed through in living memory we permanently altered. that has to be the most interesting decision the game has made at this point, permanent consequences for a kingdom that struggles to reconcile the permanence of death. i like when video games tie the interactive functions to the story. but i just couldn't enjoy it because of how much i hated everything else.

ultimately my problem with dawntrail is that it stops focusing on tural to introduce a narrative i just don't give a single fuck about. and i don't give a single fuck about it because i'm sick of these poorly handled colonialism plotlines! and i'm sick of the cheap writing and overused plotpoints because the writers are more focused on appealing to an audience than they are just writing an interesting story. if you like the stuff to do with alexandria i'm happy for you--i don't. i think it sucks. i think it's reflective of everything i whinge about on twitter whenever there's some livestream showing the latest string of uninspired triple a spiritually bankrupt video games. and i don't mean that in the sense of some moral highground, like i don't think i'm better than anyone because i'm some critical freak on the internet. i only mean that i'd love to just play a game and not feel such intense declines in writing quality. at this point i just don't know what to think about ffxiv anymore. there's too much wrong with this game. heavensward and shadowbringers genuinely just feel like outliers to me now, and i just have no hopes anymore for what the post-expansion will bring at all.

alternate dawntrail:

the final part of my criticisms of dawntrail i'm doing by expressing what i would've liked the expansion to have expanded on. thus i'm removing alexandria entirely. i've actually waited to discuss the bit about souls because strangely enough it's kind of where i was hoping the golden city would go ideologically. spoiler, i don't think what the story does with alexandria/solution nine is an effective critique/commentary on capitalism. i don't think dawntrail is an effective comentary on anything. but whatever. let me just get started.

one thing i was initially thinking dawntrail might use as a major theme was nature. there were a lot of natural threats this time around, which i thought was really interesting. even remembering the isle of haam solo duty made me think that they might introduce ecological terrors as the conflict. the fight in that solo duty was an overgrown bird that was killing other species on the island which i thought was really cool. another big example was the storm on the way to tural. i originally thought it was just to shake things up at the start, so i was really intrigued when the consequences of the storm continued throughout the expansion and interfered with the lives of the people in tural. i really liked how it altered the tural you would've learned about, like different groups on the continent recovering from it, the routes you had to take to get to different areas being altered by it (like the stairs in many fires), and that parts of the rite centred on helping them with that recovery, etc. while it's not particularly fantastical or epic or w/e i guess, i thought it was interesting and made sense to me as something a ruler of an area would have to know how to help people with, so i thought it was a cool recurring thing. alexandria's problem was literally an overabundance of lightning aether, so it just doesn't seem all that farfetched to make the recurring storm turn into more of the usual esoteric final fantasy threat either. i think it would've been really cool/creative to have a storm as a conflict.

the hanuhanu as well really made me consider the theme of environmental threats and connections to the environement, considering their feat was all about how important reeds are to them not just as a source of food but as a religious item, and helping them rediscover their own festival i thought was a good example of this. the first dungeon as well with that overgrown insect that is again just killing a lot of animals in the area and gorging on them for reasons beyond survival like making itself stronger during the fight (although i guess that could be considered survival lmfao since we are trying to kill it)... etc. there are just so many moments where the characters either have to face an ecological threat as opposed to a manmade one, or are learning to connect to the world around them. when you go help erenville catch the punutiy, the existence of vidraals, helping the people of mamook learn to live in an environment that is so hostile to them its affected their social lives and culture to the point they've oriented their lives around the creation of blessed siblings. even the existence of the train in shalaaoni, where the residents of mehwahhetsoan mention they don't like it because it upsets the roneek that are so connected to their lives, and also areas in shaaloani being completely transformed after the discovery of cereleum? they could have easily made the part about shaaloani about the train, right? and not just a montage on getting it to work again?

in my mind there's just so much having to do with the natural environment just scattered around this expansion that they just don't take anywhere conclusive. it flavours the story for sure, but in an expansion that should've only been about tural it would've made so much more sense to me to tell tural's story in a way other than being assaulted by foreign invaders. everywhere has problems, wouldn't it be fine for those problems to come from tural and be dealt with by the people of tural utilising all the rich cultures of tural they took the time to introduce and develop??????? the rite of succession involved learning about the people around you, and the people of tural are obviously connected to the lands they live in in different ways. i mean erenville, one of the main characters of the expansion, is a gleaner for fuck's sake. he specifically specialises in handling and procuring rare species. and he had lofty expectations to live up to, why not intertwine his personal conflicts with these types of themes???? why couldn't they have just forsaken the imperial violence JUST THIS ONE TIME to focus on all of these really fresh and interesting things theyyyyy fucking introduced!! i didn't have to come up with any of this shit it's all just in the game being left hanging in the fucking wind!!!! in my mind the story could have been laid out so easily just from focusing on those common threads like this:

firstly, the three siblings and bakool ja ja competing is a fun concept. i like that at the start the game makes it seem like the contestant who can't win no matter what is bakool ja ja who stepped on wuk lamat's taco and just seems like an asshole, when it's actually her brother zoraal ja who has dreams of conquest. i think they really missed out on elaborating on the relationships between the three siblings and their father. time that was spent wasted on repetitive scenes and so on could have gone a long way to developing them as characters beyond what we got. for example, we could have learned more about koana, who mentioned how little he appreciated his life back in mehwahhetsoan because he found it unstable, disliking how they moved with the roneek and thus don't typically stay in one place. i think they could have easily expounded on that to say maybe that's why he left to sharlayan to pursue foreign technologies as a path to improve the lives of people in turali, so that when his character arc culminates in learning why that's not necessarily the best path, because he's failed to consider the ways of life of other people, it's not just because we've heard wuk lamat say he's super smart and that's it. like iirc koana talks about how family is really important to him, so it would make sense to me that if he found his life unstable or whatever and loneliness is a big problem for him (when he got left behind as a child), the themes of community and working together that dawntrail is so focused on would not have been hard to tie into a relationship with the environment theme and the specific difficulties that he seemed to have with that growing up.

zoraal ja they really could have done more with how he was apparently pressured by the expectations of being a blessed son, and this need to outdo his father to prove himself. this barely ever comes up. it comes up more in a conversation with the wandering minstrel getting the EX version of his trial than it does in the entire game. his attempt at growing a second head in the trial was more character development than what he got in the entire game. that's what i mean by showing and not just telling btw. and you think him so easily besting someone who actually has two heads like bakool ja ja in that one cutscene could've been used to mean something, but no, just a throwaway scene to show how strong zoraal ja is, i guess? no thoughts on how he really views his siblings, or how his inadequacy led him to think that unrestrained violence is the only answer. i think the yok huy being ultimately failed conquerors, them dying out from sickness (wow another ecological threat) and realising they had to reckon with what they had (so the world around them, ok) rather than continuously trying to conquer out of fear for their own safety...would have made a lot of sense to apply to zoraal ja's character that's largely built on insecurity while again tying into what i said about this overarching theme of the environment. environment could even be also read as place in the world, since we're all connected/the overarching lesson is learning to help each one another. zoraal ja's departure from that would have made sense with him as the villain

bakool ja ja too i think could have gotten more development, as a child an entire village treats with reverence? because that village is slowly dying from the environment around it? how would that affect him? and i don't understand why they wouldn't measure his character against zoraal ja's more considering who they both are but this game literally does not think so what more can i say.

another thing i think they could've utilised more was the vidraal. the way they introduced the concept of the vidraal felt more consequential to my understanding of tural than it ended up being, which is a shame because i thought it was really interesting. i know the concept of them is already similar to primals as well as the auspices in that stormblood sidequest, but this is final fantasy so i personally would not have minded if pseudo-primals were more of the main fights in dawntrail.

so having said all of this, i would have conceived of a dawntrail without alexandria as somewhat like this:

you have the rite play out as normal, except developing the four main contestants more as characters this time. taking the time to focus on wuk lamat's relationship with her siblings, for example. then around the time the story reaches mamook, the plot should develop beyond the rite. like helping mamook with its problems and having people turn around on years worth of resentment and isolation that fast was way too rushed. they could have slowed the story to focus more on mamook, and rather than having mamook doing these extreme and unexplained baby experiments and then us hightailing it out of there, maybe they could've been doing something that's more plot relevant on a whole. for eg, while i like the lack of explanation as to how vidraal are really born, i think maybe the people of mamook or something could have been exploring the creation of a second, pseudo-vidraal instead. or even as an accident as a result of their experiments. idk a weak idea all things considered but at least it would make sense to me, if the expansion was interested in absurdities in nature (like the large isle of haam bird or bug final boss in the first dungeon) and trying to redress those balances/seeing "absurdities" not necessarily as a bad thing (i mean bakool ja ja/gulool ja ja and even zoraal ja are also "absurdities"), then idk it just doesn't seem that farfetched to me. and then that way a vidraal could be the second trial and zoraal ja could be the final one, like i think he should've been. if dawntrail really was meant to be like a new a realm reborn arc, fighting two primals for the first two trials is not an issue to me. like how hvw is ravana and then bismarck, or how sb is susanoo and then sri lakshmi. i think it would've fit pretty well to have turali versions of primals as a kind of introduction to tural considering this is final fantasy. the only reason i'd hestitate with this idea is that we've moved past the idea of "beast" people summoning gods, but i think this could be averted just because the game is now doing a lot (apparently) to move past its former conceptions of the non-human races and primals, so i don't think it's impossible to realise this in a way that isn't old-fashioned. and the people of mamook are quite literally doing eugenics crimes to create augmented creatures anyways, so. well. creation of new vidraal is what disrupts the rite. and you don't have to fight it right away either. in my mind it's like:

ok'hanu/wachunpelo -> earthenshire that doesn't take two seconds -> the yok huy with valigarmanda -> y'ak tel -> mamook -> and while the vidraal is currently a threat they have to follow and not one they have to put down immediately, shaaloani, where you can learn more about koana/his char gets developed/he has yet to relinquish his claimant position and works with you to put down a serious threat to tural once more -> yyasulani

thus the second half of dawntrail could take you to xak tural. rather than waiting on getting a permit to explore the second half, it makes more sense to me to go to xak tural out of necessity if that's where the vidraal has gone, or something. and yyasulani is the village that apparently had has some of the best hunters around blah blah, so going there to learn how to deal with it would be cool. turali people dealing with a turali threat. also the perfect place for erenville and his mother to develop as characters. cahciua could even be an npc you bring along for the trial since we're currently living in my impossible dream world. then you kill the vidraal and then yayy now you can focus on the golden city for real! whooo!

i don't think the golden city should be an open secret in the way it is because of how dangerous it is. i think it would've made more sense for them to get properly rebuffed every time krile asked about it, so that when zoraal ja gains access to it it's not in the fuckign silliest way possible bonking ketenramm over the head in his house with no fucking doors and just stealing the keys he somehow knew he had. i think the golden city would've had more mystery if they hadn't known it was real from the very start of the expansion and hadn't discovered it and then just turned around to go back to tuliyollal. both of those decisions just felt so arbitrary.

but i was really excited when i first learned that the golden city was a place where people lived forever because i really like stories that use that concept. i think there are a lot of stories that play with memory as the ultimate way of living forever (one of which i think alexandria just kept reminding me of it was so weird, but i don't want to spoil what it is), and i think that's always really interesting, so i will say that using that as a conflict is one of the better parts of alexandria, and was weirdly not too different from what i was hoping for ideologically. what i wanted was a utopian but eerie place where everyone leads blissfull and idyllic lives as a result of them not being able to die, so the "value" of life as a concept is now just totally lost on them. they become ignorant/unempathetic to pain and strife because they no longer experience it etc. it could even have been a sort of antithesis to how meteion looked at the world, life = endless strife vs life = endless bliss. and of course this is where the ideas the yok huy introduced of living forever in one's memory could be challenged/introduced/complicated/whatever. like if the golden city was actually being used as zoraal ja's lair by this point, seeing as he exits himself from the rite and then hides away in it, if the story had actually been keeping up with the yok huy as a like underlying myth for tural, then they could really have made their story on conquest as a fool's errands/living on in memory reach its narrative conclusion in this final stretch of the story. i was also thinking the golden city could be like a ghost town populated by the spirits/souls of people for centuries (not like amaurotine shades or anything, like i don't mean simulacrums), kind of like how the endless are not "real", so again i was surprised it was similar to what i had been thinking. i just really wish the golden city had been a place from tural, and not a totally different kingdom. every time i do a timeworn br'aaxskin map i feel genuine agony wishing they had just made the golden city look like all of those beautiful and mystical and still natural/turali rooms instead of living memory, which i just find hodgepodge and out of place with the rest of the game. its construction as a kind of forced paradise doesn't come out well to me i genuinely just think it looks poorly constructed and random. and if the golden city was in tural they could grapple with whether a soul is really a full human or not and actually keep it relevant to what we had already learned from the yok huy, rather than throwaway moments like this........:

and that's all that gets said on that! but lets just keep thinking pointing something out = analysis. anyways... even the fact that people's memories were being erased so that this false happiness could be preserved would've been good had they just done more with it. like forgetting someone as a kind of "death" could have been such a cool concept. this too:

this kind of manufactured happiness is what i was hoping the golden city would deliver when we got to it, but the latter half of the game is so distracted by gulool ja other things that you only really get these things through dialogue, and at the very end of the story, rather than feeling any of it in the city throughout. it's too busy establishing a whole other kingdom to focus on these sorts of themes that could have been complicating the first half. like, if the first half had actually been about connecting with the natural and living world around you, the second half being about disillusioned souls disconnecting themselves from natural truths to live in a false reality could have really expanded on that. like what does it mean to actually live a life that "balances" itself with the lives of others? you repeatedly learn that the history of tural was all the different groups being at war with each other. the tural you visit is a place where they're all learning to live together. the tural you visit is a place where people feel connected to/are deeply affected by their environment. why would an ff story about a rite to cultivate a new ruler in this type of place not want to expand on that history and those connections in an esoteric and fantastical way? can a place both have a train and not disturb the migrations of the roneek? ffxiv is really just not equipped to answer those kinds of questions LOL

the commodification of human life theme in the second half of dawntrail could've also been a really interesting contrast to the themes of nature in the first half, had it been written well. souls as currency, or to paraphrase the language of the game, "soul cells being delivered based upon one's work evaluation to encourage exemplary performance", is obviously a kind of "extreme" capitalism. it's a "fantasy" version of capitalism (though it's really not all that fantasy) sustained by the oxymoron of (i'm assuming anyways based on how little the process is explored) a fair meritocracy: the only thing we really own in an increasingly capitalist society, our literal lives, has now become a form of payment, paid out by some undefined and vague "work evaluation" that measures people based on the extremely impartial (sarcasm, if that's not clear) notion of what they are able to contribute. this kind of farcical system combined with an area that seems overly concerned with conveniences, treats, shallow entertainment and so on, in contrast to tural which is largely more focused on the natural world and connections with others, building community and helping each other... it's not like i can't see the makings of a commentary on what "really matters" in life or the consumerist society we currently live in... if the game actualyl cared about putting either halves of the expansion in conversation with each other...............

i think this is where this expansion fails as a critique/commentary. it points things out, sure, but it doesn't really comment on them. i mean it can barely connect its plot points together. its more like it points things out and won't make up its mind on how it truly feels. the citizens of tural lose their culture and their memories/identities, the residents of alexandria experience an "extreme" consumerism that devalues human life--but this is all ultimately framed as okay because heritage found/solution nine continue to exist as places for players to experience recreationally. neither of these places feel primed to change. while the writing isn't totally neutral, that doesn't make it an effective critique. honestly the game only seems to make solid statements when something is evil in a way a child could understand. otherwise, all anyone really seems to say is they know why the souls thing seems weird, but it's just a matter of cultural difference. the writing justifies this extractory lifestyle by making it a necessity for the people who live there, because of the overabundance of lightning, or bc of the dangerous beasts they need to hunt or whatever. and never mind that in the arcadion they use souls for entertainment that wol willingly particiaptes in. they don't write it to be a bad thing inherently, its only a problem now because the souls are doing bad things to people. same with alexandria, which stops being a problem of colonialism because everyone is okay with being colonised actually and also more importantly sphene is using the souls for Evil, which is Bad. the expansion spends a lot of time trying to valorise the way of life in alexandria/s9 anyways despite all of this. they want you to try to understand and accept the culture of s9. that's why you go on tours and get to try foods and get to dress your wol in trendy techwear and you hear how good of a person the queen in charge is at all times. the constant incongruencies with how it treats the endless feel like the perfect example for how little this game ever wants to take a stance. cahciua is literally telling you to "kill" everyone in living memory, which is okay because they're all just memories. but you treat them like people, that's why you're giving them a sentimental light show before you do it. the momentary spectacle makes it okay that erenville's mother is going to "die" because shallow treats like that are all we really need, apparently, anymore. both the characters and the players. flying capybaras. and she's not really going to die because she's not actually alive. but she's going to die.

a big thing for me is that alexandrian comfort subsisting on the lives of others just feels too morbid considering the world we live in right now this very moment minute second. how the imperial core is propped up by the labour of the global south. dawntrail is informed by colonialism in history sure but colonialism is a modern day problem. like is that what's being mirrored by sphene wanting to keep her modern day paradise of products running forever by killing everyone in tural?? and even if the game was drawing this parallel....why? to say what? to simply say "it's bad"? i do not think ffxiv has the range or care to comment on topics like this! a commentary on capitalism or colonialism from square enix is not something i would find valuable, but games like ffxiv are hellbent on talking about the latter. i know it's an aesthetic at this point, an easy way to create a dramatic conflict they can pretend they have nuanced feelings about despite barely being able to say "colonialism is bad". whatever keeps the ubiquitous good vs evil plots people who play video games like this are subjected to going. i genuinely think this game was doing a better job of being a critique when it was just solely about turali people working together to live their lives and move on from their history of bloodshed. this game could not let tural be tural without drastically modernising it/assimilating the place into eorzea's larger military project/introducing bullshit technological conveniences it doesn't hesitate to frame as desirable. that this is the type of story they chose to write about a culture that isn't white just makes me glad to finally put this part of ffxiv behind me and never think about it again.

#ffxiv spoilers #dawntrail spoilers #what's really getting me is i would've finished this earlier but accidentally backspaced and lost all of my edits i had made for like 2 hrs #that was god telling me to stay my hand #but i'm finally free #i'm finalllyyyyyyyy freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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1800istealtoads · 2 months ago

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killing yourself is CRINGE and i am COOL. imagine someone finding your body that would be so embarrassing. the ick. They probably wouldnt even feed me to the forest because no one listens to me in this house. ew. I dont even want to kill myself its like i imagine it being so awesome and then when i get to the party im like "oh yeah i dont like parties" like its just overhyped tbh. But a guy can dream. Its like fanfiction for the media that is bad and problematic. u watch the movie and youre like oh man this is garbage actually im turning it off. unfortunately in this scenario you are horny for the characters

#killing yourself fandom

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nctstar · 3 years ago

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jealousy, jealousy

You should’ve known better than to have taken dating advice from Lee Donghyuck, but the green-eyed monster inside you was growing restless.

pairing: idol!taeyong x fem!reader

other members: lee haechan, suh johnny, jeong jaehyun, lee mark, and the rest of the dreamies. Ft. giselle of aespa.

word count: 2.8k

genre: romance, fluff, slight angst

warnings: suggestive scene and references (minors proceed with caution)

disclaimer: this is a fanfiction purely from my imagination. I do not know the nct members (or giselle) and do not claim that they act like this in real life. I also do not condone any of the activity by any of the characters in this fic.

a/n: wow this took me a long time to get through, sorry about that. I also feel like it’s not my best :( but it’s something. Only the title is inspired by olivia rodrigo’s song, not anything else in the story. Thanks for the love <3

You should’ve known better than to have taken dating advice from Lee Donghyuck, but the green-eyed monster inside you was growing restless.

“I’m not jealous, Hyuck,” you rolled your eyes as he laughed, not believing you for a second. Donghyuck was born with a naturally low attention span and had the permanent personality of a pre-pubescent child, but somehow, he always knew exactly how you were feeling.

“Look, I came here to talk to you tonight, and after Chenle came and told you that he thinks Giselle has been flirting with Taeyong, that’s all we’ve been talking about for,” he swished his head dramatically, flicking out his phone from the front of his jeans, “um, exactly 28 minutes. So yes, you are in fact, jealous.”

You couldn’t help the cloud of disappointment that shrouded your expression instantaneously, proving him right. Gritting your teeth, you exhaled, exasperated. “Okay, fine!”

He sucked in his front teeth, shaking his head rhythmically from side to side. “Oh,__. The first speed bump in her otherwise perfect relationship. Just how will she manage?”

This earned him a slap on his forearm from you, but it didn’t stop his giggling. He was right. Again.

You and Taeyong were known to be the perfect couple, even amongst the tiny group of people who actually knew about the relationship. You were far from perfect, but you could attest to the fact that Taeyong was beyond flawless. Just like the untouchable standard he maintained in his rapping, his dancing, his leadership, he kept that same standard as a boyfriend. You were extremely lucky to be dating someone like him.

But sometimes, it felt like he was…too perfect.

You know that sounded ridiculous to say out loud, and whenever the thought even crossed your mind, you pushed it away. You felt guilty and spoilt, like a rich girl who, with the snap of her fingers, could get anything she wanted at any time, no questions asked.

But of course, Hyuck understood you immediately.

“Yeah, Taeyong-hyung’s no fun. Too responsible all the time.”

“Maybe cos he has to look after brats like you,” Johnny retorted, winking at you at the same time. You smiled back, but the bad feelings remained brewing in the pit of your stomach.

“It’s not quite that, though. I know like,” you gulped, suddenly worried about what the next thing you wanted to say would sound coming out of your mouth. “jealousy can definitely be toxic, especially if people get possessive or controlling.”

“Are you trying to tell us,” Hyuck leans in, a mischievous spark lining his eyes, “that you want him to be kinky?”

“Ew! Johnny, help me out here.”

Johnny shrugged his shoulders, sipping on his iced coffee, suddenly a clueless bystander.

“I just want him to…like,” heat rushed to your face in embarrassment, by both the thought of what you were going to say next and Hyuck’s kinky echoing around your head. “really want me, you know? Like, ‘hey, this is my girlfriend, __.’ Not act so…neutral around her.”

Johnny nodded, interested again. “That makes sense, you should just tell him that. I don’t think that sounds crazy.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” You were done listening to Hyuck, you remember telling yourself as you started walking towards Taeyong, but he gripped your forearm, holding you back. You turned around, giving him a death stare that didn’t faze him at all, probably because he was used to it. Lifting a single finger up, he smirked, “You could make it far more interesting than just a boring conversation.”

After hearing Hyuck’s idea, even the ever-so nonchalant Johnny was riled up.

“Okay, now THAT’S toxic. There’s no way that would work in the right way.”

“Yeah, yeah, communication is key to a happy relationship, blah, blah.” Hyuck rolled on his heels. “But so is fire, and passion. They lack that. I’m simply helping them light the spark.”

“This is crazy, __. Tell me you’re not actually gonna do that. Taeyong’s gonna get really upset.”

You weren’t listening. Johnny and Hyuck’s voices suddenly faded out in the background and became white noise for your brain, which was focused on only one thing. Your eyes stuck onto the scene, the sides of your vision blurry, irrelevant. Your heart pounded harder at every passing second, and in that moment nothing else mattered but Hyuck’s idea, which your brain gripped onto like a lifeline.

There she was, her arms wrapped around your boyfriend’s shoulders, her face turned towards him. His face towards hers, inches away. He was smiling at something she said, and you wished you could’ve erased the picture from your memory forever.

“Truth or dare!” Hyuck rolled out the dare at the end, looking right at you. Amongst the dozens of partygoers who immediately began to form some sort of haphazard circle, he nodded at you ever so slightly, and you averted your eyes to right in front of you, where Taeyong and Giselle sat side to side. Taeyong didn’t even meet your eyes, too busy listening to her, swirling his drink around his cup.

Two could play at that game.

“Hey, Jae.”

“Hey.” He replied at once, as if he was waiting for you to say something the entire time. He was, probably.

“Everyone and their mother knows that Jaehyun-hyung has a crush on you, __. It’s so obvious, even Taeyong-hyung can’t ignore that. You’re gonna use that to your advantage.”

His dishevelled hair rested against his forehead, deep brown eyes peeking out from underneath. “Glad to see you here.”

“You too,” you smiled as wide as possible. You sucked at flirting – Taeyong had done most of the flirting to get you – but it didn’t matter with Jae. He always had his eyes on you.

“Remember, don’t be afraid to turn the heat up.”

You plucked at an imaginary ball of lint on Jaehyun’s blue sweater, pitching your voice slightly higher. He jerked away a little, looking surprised, and confused. Good.

“Oop, sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.” You blinked up at him, trying to mirror the distance between Taeyong and Giselle. “Lint balls annoy the crap out of me. Do you wanna be on the same team?”

“For…?”

You threw your head back, laughing just a bit too obviously. “Truth or dare, silly!” Your hand rested on his upper arm, and he chuckled nervously, obviously still a bit surprised at your demeanour. You had never acted like this in your entire life.

“S-sure.”

“Alright, Jaehyun-hyung!” Hyuck pointed at him, and together with the grandeur of his voice and the magnetic pull of everyone’s eyes, it felt like he was shining some sort of imaginary flashlight onto Jaehyun’s stunned frame. “Truth or dare?”

“Um…” he glanced at you quickly, but you caught it before he could look away. Leaning into his ear, you breathed, “Truth.”

“Truth.”

“Excellent. So,” Hyuck made a great show of looking onto his phone, on the supposed app with all the questions and dares on them. You knew the real plan.

“Who in here do you think is the best kisser?”

Some of the girls hollered at the question, and the boys, unbeknownst to what was really going on, cheered in response. In the midst of the mayhem, you looked at Taeyong for just a second, but he didn’t seem bothered at all.

“Um…”

Poor Jaehyun. You could practically feel the nervousness radiating off his frame as he fumbled.

“You gotta answer honestly, hyung. Otherwise, you lose the point.”

“Right, okay, um, well, I wouldn’t know. Can’t I pass it?” Of course Jaehyun wouldn’t answer that.

“What’s the point of starting with him if he’s not gonna mention me?”

“The most important, yet commonly overlooked part of a great story is the description of the setting. The reader doesn’t think twice about it, but it sets the mood for the rest of the story. If you want to tick someone off, you gotta set the mood first.”

“Yeah, okay. We all know you were thinking of __, though.”

Oh damn. He really went there.

At the sound of your name, Taeyong finally perked up, his head turning towards Hyuck. He looked like he wanted to say something, but Hyuck was already moving on.

“__. Your turn. Truth or dare?”

Taeyong’s eyes were boring holes into your skull now, going deeper and deeper the more you avoided his persistent gaze. Confidence and the thrill that came with doing something dangerous flooded your systems, and you spoke. “Dare.”

∞

The ride home was painfully silent, but you felt like that spoke volumes. Taeyong was never quiet. He always had something to say, bringing out the little extroversion you did have. Instead, his gaze remained steady on the road, hands gripping the steering wheel, and you kind of wished Johnny had driven you both home like he was Hyuck and Mark.

Anything to cut the tension in the car, which was getting more suffocating by the minute.

When he finally pulled the gear into parking, you wasted no time getting out, dropping your purse in the process, which slipped out of your lap. Bending over, you quickly realised that Taeyong had noticed, but his expression read something like it took everything in him not to comment.

The silence between you two only broke once he closed the door of his apartment. “Yong, I-“

Before you could even take a breath in, his lips closed in on yours. Your body froze in shock at first, but the feeling of his arms wrapping around your hips was irresistible, and you soon melted in his arms, your eyelids drooping in response. Your mind empty, body ablaze, you two stumbled to his bedroom. No words, only sounds.

Afterwards, you lay in his bed alone while the shower ran in the background. Your body felt cold and empty, but your mind filled once again with thoughts of the night. What you had done. The look on everyone’s face. The look on Taeyong’s face. In all honestly, all that thrill and exhilaration disappeared into thin air mere seconds after it had happened. All that was left was a simmering pot of guilt, the heat of shame evaporating you from the inside out.

So deep in your thoughts, the sound of the sliding door opening almost made you jump out of your skin.

Apologise.

You opened your mouth to say something, and then closed it again. You couldn’t bear to look at him, even though you two had been so close only moments ago.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what, __? Kissing my bandmate in front of everyone?”

You had never heard Taeyong speak like that before, and his voice felt like poison in the lining of your stomach.

You choked in a breath. “I don’t know what came over me, I swear. It was a stupid dare. Of course, it wasn’t supposed to mean anything. It was Hyuck’s idea.” You felt stupid saying that last thing, because it didn’t excuse the actions of a grown woman with her own bodily autonomy, but you couldn’t quite help yourself.

Taeyong looked appalled, his eyes wider. “I don’t quite follow?”

Okay, fix this.

“Okay, okay,” you sat up on your bed, looking directly at Taeyong. His hopeful eyes stared back at yours, and you noticed a droplet of water dripping down his right eyebrow onto the lid below. “I need to tell you something.”

You wrung your hands, a nervous habit you had. “I…was jealous.”

He only furrowed his brows, and you sighed.

“Of Giselle. And Hyuck said that I needed you make you jealous back.”

Taeyong looked as stunned as your cat when you caught it roaming around your kitchen in the middle of the night. But as soon as the expression flashed across his face, his features softened, and he smiled gently. You braced yourself for another blow anyway.

“You took relationship advice from Haechan?”

“I don’t know what came over me, Yong. But,” and for once you didn’t want to hold back anymore, “my feelings were valid. She was all over you, and I didn’t feel like your girlfriend anymore.”

He looked at the ceiling, slowly dragging the towel down his shoulder and walking towards you. He sat next to you, and your legs felt the bed dip under his weight.

“You’re right. Your feelings were – are,” he emphasised, “valid. You should’ve told me sooner.”

“I just, didn’t want to have to tell you, you know? I wanted you to be like ‘hey, this is my girlfriend, Giselle’. Not just let her be.”

“__, you are my girlfriend. Not Giselle, never her. And you're right, I shouldn't just let her be, and I'm sorry I hurt you because I didn't."

He continued. “And I don't know, maybe it’s because I have a lot of eyes on me which is why I don’t naturally announce you that much. But I so want to. I don't have doubts. I’m so happy I’m with you, and you’re not anything less than special to me. I’m just constantly worried people are gonna find out and spread it to the public, which we already talked about is something we don’t want right now.”

You nodded, remembering your first conversations with him at the beginning of the relationship, and the way you yourself had emphasised that. “That makes sense. I didn’t think of it like that. But I’m glad you understand me anyway.” Somehow, even though you had thought this conversation would be like the greatest mountain you would climb, coming out on top, it didn’t feel like it was that bad.

You look through the wet tendrils of hair that adorned his forehead, the way the overhead light was reflecting off his perfect nose, those soft lips you wanted to kiss again so bad. “Thanks, love.”

“Yeah, of course.” He leant in to peck you on your lips, and you felt okay again.

“And also, I’m gonna keep an eye on Jaehyun from now on.”

You laughed. “Honey, you are terrible at being intimidating. And who’s jealous now?”

“I’m not,” he pouted, dragging out the syllables. “Honestly, this is all Haechan’s fault.

“So true.” You agreed, leaning into his shoulder before closing your eyes.

∞

“Boys, time to pay up!”

The slam of the door shook the floor, signalling the young men to venture out of their rooms looking dreary and confused. “Geez, it’s so late.” Jisung yawned.

“Whatever, you all owe me.”

“I just can’t believe,” Mark scratched the back of his head, dropping his phone and keys on the benchtop, “that she would do that.”

“Well, jealousy makes people do crazy things. Even someone as level-headed as __.”

Chenle grabbed Haechan’s hand, stabbing the notes into his palm. “I’m going back to bed.”

Haechan winked. “Thanks for the tip, Chenle.”

Jeno scoffed, legs dangling off the handle of the couch. “This kid is unbelievable. Jaemin, can you spare me…”

Jaemin didn’t even look up from his phone, but his body moved up out of his seat of its own accord. He strode over to Haechan, the wires of his earphones dangling side to side with his steps. “Here, from me and Jeno.” Haechan went to grab a wire, but he jerked his head away just in time.

“Hyung, how much was it?” Jisung looked puzzled, sleep still stroking his face as he rummaged through his wallet. Haechan sighed. “It’s fine, you can buy me food sometime.”

“Where’s Renjun?”

“Out. But he voted yes, so he’s fine.”

“Damn, okay. I feel stupid now.” Mark rubbed his eyes as he flopped down in the middle of the couch, and, almost as if on cue, Jeno got up and left. He realised he was the last of them to do so.

The room suddenly felt quiet, not only because of the silence, but in the sudden lack of energy too. Haechan sat in the seat in front of Mark, leant over, sliding the notes through his fingers. It was dark, the light barely making out his shadowy figure, but Mark could sense that something was off about him. Somewhere underneath the pride, the unwavering confidence, the casual demeanour, he sensed something raw and honest hidden inside. He had an idea of what it was, but he had to think twice before asking.

“She has no idea?”

Haechan laughed so bitterly that Mark kind of wished he wouldn’t answer any more than that.

“Yeah,” he muttered, staring at the notes in his hand now. Mark shuffled awkwardly in his seat, looking away. “I mean, for someone so smart, she is really stupid sometimes. Can't tell who really has a crush on her.”

He chuckled, and for once it felt forced out of his throat. “It’s fine. I’d like to keep it that way anyway.” He flicked his hand, as if trying to will the hurt away from his body. “Besides, who else will keep their relationship in check if not me? Johnny? Most certainly not that giant man.”

“You really are unbelievable.” Mark let out a low whisper, shaking his head side to side.

Haechan only smiled wistfully in response, pocketing the money. “I know, Milk.”

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deaneverafter · 3 years ago

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There's a post asking casgirls if they were deangirls or samgirls during s1-3 and most of them say they were deangirls and I fucking hate it

Ho boy, I have so many thoughts about this.

1. Ew, imagine the lack of taste needed in not having Dean as your favourite, embarrassing as fuck, couldn't be me. When someone goes out of their way to offer the information of someone other than Dean being their favourite, I have to wonder what's inside their funny little heads 😬😰🤭

2. I have to be honest, I can't imagine anyone genuinely loving him and then just stopping, I simply can't, so I would have to believe that these people never really loved or appreciated him despite what they say. And, you're right, this sort of betrayal sucks and is frankly, revolting, but, I guess quality over quantity for the Dean girls 😔

3. I don't know if this makes it better or not, I don't know if the results have been shown or if they've been told, but if they've been told, I'd be wary of them, since some factions here have a habit of "exaggerating" the truth.

4. In the same vein as the above, in that it's still from the research point of view, but let's say the results really haven't been falsified. Even then, it's a biased sample to begin with. They might be trying to present it as "oh, look at all the Dean girls leaving for Cass", but that's inaccurate because the sample wasn't Dean girls who left. The sample was Cass girls, who had to say someone was their favourite before Cass was in the picture (plus, we know the shippers on both sides hate the "competition", so they could hardly say Sam. I know they try to pretend that Sam is the number # 1 heller king, but uhh, I think we all know that's a laughable idea, to out it kindly). And, as we know, most Cass fans are aware that his association with Dean is what makes him relevant. Plus, now that I think about it, any time I've heard someone claim to be a Cass fan, they almost always have also started watching the show because of the ship. And what I've realized is that people who start watching the show with the expectation of this ship or because they're waiting for Cass, they only see the fanon version of Dean they've seen in fanfiction. Even when there's no Cass, they can't see Dean, not really. I was talking to a friend about this, that shippers tend to only see the fanon version of Dean, and I think this is especially true for those who have never watched the show without knowing the fanon version. They can only see the repressed, violent, needing-to-be-fixed man that they're waiting for Cass to "fix" and then own, so abandoning the fanon version isn't really too hard for them. Additionally, when Cass shows and Dean doesn't follow the script they were told from fandom, he becomes public enemy number one (incel behaviour much?), so it's a double whammy. Plus, even on top of that, they're not invested, because they simply don't care about Dean as his own person and about the story. They're just waiting for a character who came and long overstayed his welcome.

I guess that all makes the sting a little less, knowing that they never really cared about Dean to begin with, but I agree absolutely. It's rude and, not to be dramatic, but it's disloyal. I wish they'd just own up to the truth, that they never really cared about Dean, nor the story, just the version that lives in their heads, instead of giving actual Dean girls a bad rep. Because frankly, especially after everything that's happened, I don't really understand Cass (or Jack, for that matter) being someone's favourite as they're presented in canon. But then, I have taste, so maybe that's my issue

#this turned into an essay #i apologize for that #but i have no patience for disloyalty #we don't need no fake stans

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hannie-dul-set · 4 years ago

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who in svt would agree to platonically kiss you

maybe you're a writer and would want to know how it feels to have peppered swipes of love gently sprinkling your face for the piece you're trying to write. or maybe you're trying to fake having a boyfriend to get your ex off your ass. or maybe you're just weird and/or read too much fanfiction and hope for your own 100k f2l love story with your best friend. whatever your dumb reason is, here's a list of who will agree, who will smack you upside in the face, and who will permanently delete you from his contacts!! let's find out!!

seungcheol: dude he'd agree to (platonically) marry you in order to get your nosy relatives off your ass for being single for so long. just give him a signal and he'd be ready to make out in the middle of a bunch of greasy bodies in a club just to get some weirdo to fuck off because duh?? that's what friends do?? right??? | rating: 9/10 minus one point simply because he'd probably fall in love with you and that would ruin the platonic bit.

jeonghan: "about time you gave in, babe ;))" a little shit. would tease you relentlessly about your apparent, subconscious desire to punch him for him. angel is all talk though, because once you're already inches away from him, he'd panic and chicken out because holy fuck ahaha this shouldn't happen. pulls away from you last minute. would tell you your breath stank of cilantro as a cover up | rating: 3/10 he's a fucking loser don't even try.

joshua: he'd laugh, crinkling his nose and say wow that would be wild haha, but proceed to ignore you. he may have turned into the bare-armed, testosterone monster that he is now, but joshua still wouldn't want to kiss anyone he isn't in a relationship with. that's what his mother taught him and he isn't gonna disobey her cause of you. maybe try asking him out first <33 | rating: 1/10 the one is there because wow you might get him as your boyfriend.

junhui: sorry, but jun would ask you first. you'd be sitting in his living room, watching netflix at god knows what the fuck am and he'd be like "hey. movie's boring. wanna make out?" and you'd be like sure until all of a sudden oops you're not only platonically kissing anymore wow what a slip up | rating: 10/10 you're both a matchmade in horny heaven.

soonyoung: look. soonyoung is wild. soon is down for anything. soonie will probably stab himself with a fork just because you told him he can't. but that's the thing— he'd only do it if it was a challenge. ask him to kiss you because you've been lying to your friends that you had a boyfriend and they wanted evidence? his cheeks will start flaring. tell him "oh i that's fine. i knew you'd be too much of a pussy to agree" then damn you've just unleashed the tiger | rating: 6/10 because of the extra effort you have to put in.

wonwoo: jeon is a simple man. he is a classy man. a simple "no" without even looking at your direction is the only thing you're getting from him. you'd whine, telling him please— i wanna write this story for one of my classes perfectly and the main guy is a nerd and you're the only loser i know. he'd close the book he was reading, leaning into your face ever so slowly, right before smacking the fucking book on your head because wow. the audacity of you | rating: 0/10 but 10/10 if you wanna come back to your senses.

jihoon: what the fuck why would you even consider asking him you evil monster you just wanna watch jihoon shrivel up like a dried grape painted in a fresh coat of red | rating: invalid. error. don't even try unless you want to get guitar smacked when he finally recovers from shock.

minghao: if you were a stranger, yes he'd agree. but you're not. you're his friend and he knows about your gross habits and that's just a no for him like ew. unless you're desperate for whatever the fuck reason. only if you agree to be his poor PA during his monthly, ig outfit photoshoot this weekend and you start to wonder if this is really worth carrying three bags of outfits, one for his accessories, and the amount of muscle pain? thought so | rating: 4/10 if you're crazy and actually go through with it because if he's gonna do it, he's gonna do it right.

mingyu: he'd agree. mingyu is a sweetheart of course he would. the only drawback is that he'd be a huge fucking mess and be like "kiss??? kiss me?? you want?? ahaha o-oh yeah sure totally i'd love to ki— i mEAN since u asked haha" his brain would start whirring like a broken microwave when you do and start thinking is this okay?? do friends do this?? oh my god?? | rating: 7/10 but i doubt he'd even be able to look at you in the eye after this lmao. you got to kiss him but at what cost ://

seokmin: "omg!! sure!!! let's kiss :D" okay, maybe you suggested it because you're a demon and you wanted to see him flustered but oops, seokmin is actually down for it because he is so full of love and would kiss you again if you asked. you're like???? wait i didn't plan it this way, seokmin i— OOPS he already gave you a tiny smooch. he's smiling, asking you if you want another one and smoke is literally emitting from your head rip | rating: 8/10 your brain is fried but at least he's cute.

seungkwan: "excuse me?? you want to kiss me?? know your place, loser" kwan isn't gonna tolerate this kind of troglodytic behavior. you haven't even asked permission from his parents, court him with a million bouquets, chocolates, and vitamins and you're expecting him to agree to kiss you?? wow the sheer shamelessness of some people smh | rating: 2/10 tiny chance that he'd agree if you tell him it was for attention.

vernon: he didn't hear you the first time. second time. wait is this the fifth? until you're literally up at his face asking him for a smooch because you wanted your roommate to believe you actually went out to get laid instead of playing animal crossing at vernon's place because the vibe of his room matched the cozy atmosphere. she would start clowning you if she found out. poor vernon is surprised. frozen. but he manages to stammer out a "sure" and you've already left but vernon was still thinking of you | rating: 6/10 bcs oops haha didn't mean for it to turn angsty

chan: would say yes without giving it much thought until he realized what you were doing and he's like oh shit you were actually serious okay we're doing this. but wait we're in public y/n what the fuck. and you're like shut the fuck up the guy that's been bothering me is here and he's like oh okay. would be embarrassed for the next few days but let's say you got into a petty argument and chan would be like "ooh you wanna kiss me so bad" and you're like "fuck no" and he'd say "you already did" and you're like god damn it | rating: 7/10 because he's gonna use it against you lol.

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nonbaznary · 3 years ago

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ao3 tag game ✨

thank you so much @wellbelesbian for tagging me in this! i really liked reading your answers, lol. sorry it took so long to post this, but here it is!!

how many works do you have on ao3?

currently i have 28! i deleted a few last year, unfortunately, but i’ll work this year to get that work count higher 🤲

what’s your total ao3 word count?

31522! weird number but i’ll take it

how many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

on ao3, five. or, i guess, technically four, because two of them are Carry On Series and Simon Snow & Related Fandoms. the other three are BIG BARF EW EW EW Voltron: Legendary Defender, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. ew. ew. i have this thing- sticking to fandoms for authors and sometimes even works i now hate. anyways, i want to start writing for other fandoms too. i used to do stuff for riordanverse (mainly percy jackson, and i still have some WIPs), miraculous ladybug (not the greatest, but im watching it with my lil sis and its fun to try to fix that shit) and uhh i think it was the dragon prince? and she-ra and carmen sandiego? which were fun. so yeah!

what are your top five fics by kudos?

5. Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing

Gen, m/m, snowbaz

After a whole life of hurting, Simon and Baz finally get to healing. Baz adores it.

4. Of queer weddings and family parties

Gen, m/m, snowbaz

Baz and Simon are loudly queer in family events, especially now that they're engaged.

3. Move, I'm gay

T, gen

Inspired by the tweet: "sobbing at this lil girl at target. dad tries to get her a dress and she just YELLS “no I’m GAY I CAN’T” and her dad just sighs so loudly and goes “no you’re not gay, I’m gay. You’re five.”" Or: bad gay humor is generational, and often unintentional! - for @sharing-a-room-with-an-open-fire

2. Here, kitty-kitty…

T, gen + m/m, snowbaz

Simon adopts a cat. Baz pretends to hate him. It's probably safer for everyone this way… - for the @carryon-anon-fest

1. (Spend my days) Dreaming 'bout you

Gen, m/m, snowbaz

Life has been amazing for Simon and Baz. Simon can't stop daydreaming about their future together. He has a million questions to ask Baz. That's easier said than done, though. Written for the Carry On Exchange (Baz's Birthday Flash Round!) - for @letraspal

do you respond to comments? why or why not?

yeah, totally! i mean, at least i try to 🥲 im not really active on ao3 (and not always logged in because i forget to check that) but every time i get in i try to check my inbox and answer as much comments as i can, even if theyre just replies. i LOVE feedback on my fics and i think chatting about fics is really cool

what’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

👁👁👁👁👁 uhhh

ive had some pretty bad angst fics. all hurt, no comfort, definitely no happy endings. a lot of main character deaths and shit like that.

BUT none of these are still up, so i’ll go with one that is and i actually remember- recently, (I'll shut my mouth) I'll let you go, which is my least read and interacted fic ever (i mean, FAIR) a nicodemus & fiona fic from when he was Turned. yknow, the nice stuff

have you ever received hate on a fic?

no, i dont think so? not that i recall. ive had people whod send me like . personal hate? but still loved my fanfiction and told me so lol. but i dont think ive ever gotten hate on a fic. if i have, i completely forgot about it, or just straight up never saw it

do you write smut? if so, what kind?

not really? ive experienced and tried to get into it some little time ago but its not really my sort of thing. guess its still too awkward and embarrassing for my developing queer little brain. a few friends keep reminding me to try my hand at that because we do have fun talking about it lol, and im curious to see how itd turn out. and id definitely like to try to write some fics with more of a hint of seggsual stuff and not feel like crap for it!

have you ever had a fic stolen?

nope! (or not that i know of…)

have you ever had a fic translated?

ive been asked if people could translate my fics to spanish (and one in english when i wrote more in portuguese) but ive never actually seen my translated fics posted? 🤔 im fairly sure someone sent me, like, in DMs, a translation of one of my fics, but i dont think it ever saw the light of day

what’s your all-time favourite ship?

i dont really do those! i mean, that definitely are some ships that i will treasure for a long time, but i dont really choose all-time favourites for basically anything fandom-related. my taste changes very often, so thats not reallt a thing for me fkkdkdkd right now, its snowbaz, obviously (snowshaz is also starting to grow a lot in my lil polyamlm heart)

have you ever co-written a fic before?

i have! i used to do that ALL THE TIME when i first got into fanfiction, but lately not so much. i miss it though, it was such fun, and it helped me get even more ideas for fics. we'd have groupchats for fics, and sometimes even go like RPG-wise to develop scenes / dialogue. when i stopped co-writing often, i would still pitch in with a few chapters / scenes for my friends’ fics, and they’d do the same for mine. i loved it, and i think the readers thought it was fun too!, but i stopped writing frequently altogether so its harder to do that, i guess. maybe now that im getting back into writing in general i’ll get back into that too. also, renée and i are planning to co-write something soon, so !!

what’s a wip you want to finish, but don’t think you ever will?

wow, so many of my WIPs fit into this... my post break up art teacher simon fic. my band au. full like the moon, which is an exes-to-friends-to-lovers thing i think i posted the prologue to. the watford drama society au. most of my longfics, probably. lol

i have a bunch of fics that i might not even actually start writing. like, self indulgent fics that arent coherent at all and dont make any fucking sense. fics that are basically just a few random scenes splashed together and left aside. i like them, but... eh

what are your writing strengths?

queer stuff. angst angst and angst, i guess. people usually say im good with humor, and dialogues, so these!

what are your writing weaknesses?

as it probably became clear, if it wasnt already obvious; long fics! planning, actually writing a BUNCH of shit, and getting to the end. endings, in general, aren’t really my jam

what are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in fics?

i like it! dont really have a problem with the concept in general, but i do think its decent to leave the translations in the notes (or make it really, really obvious from context if possible)

what was the first fandom you wrote for?

harry potter, i think! i discovered fanfiction with harry potter, more specifically the marauders fandom, bc i used to look things up about them and only fanworks wouldve touched the subject 🥲 so thats what started my interest in fic

what’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

this is a hard one, because all my current favorites are still WIPs ✨✨✨ as in, do you want me (dead)? and my golden AU, mostly. but im really fond of And if you have nightmares, we’ll dance on the bed. i loved writing it, i love baz and penny’s relationship, and i think people should pay more attention to penelope’s trauma, because it's definitely there. it felt good to adress it. also note how literally all of these are named afted songs / lyrics LMAOOOO

tagging @thesebookishdelights / @aqueeriano / @punkjuliandiaz because i said i would 😌😌

#ao3 tag game #aspen talks writing #pen and paper

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wind-becomes-lightning · 3 years ago

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A present for making jonin

Kakashi x OC fanfiction snippet

Sayuri is a gutsy little girl.

Who is Sayuri Uchiha? The basics. [x]

Decided to publish some things from my 30k word Kakashi X OC fanfic I have written manically over the last few weeks. I hope you can bear with me, its not the greatest I just feel like sharing. (God I’m so fucking insecure ANYWAY)

It had been half an hour of waiting. Obito was late - again. Kakashi hated waiting for Obito. His teammate was always late to every meeting they had ever had together and no matter how many times he was reminded of punctuality he just couldn’t help but be too late. How annoying. Sometimes he picked Obito up himself. Making sure that he wasn’t late again. At least this way they had the opportunity to go onto missions as planned. Master Minato seemed as unbothered as always and Rin, well, Rin never was angry at anybody for anything. She was too kind to everybody. Come to think of it, he had never seen her angry. Her calm presence grounded their four person team. Obito and Kakshi were headstrong and constantly at each other's throat, but they still listened to her. It was a superpower.

“As if he could ever come in time”, he grinded his teeth in anger “Especially today it would have been nice.” Minato smiled at him knowingly. Yes, I should be patient with Obito, the boy thought. I should understand that he is someone who is late. It happens. Master Minato had said that so many times that he could lecture himself on it. But today he had been promoted to Jonin and as such he had expected Obito to come congratulate him. Just today Obito should have been on time to support him. But I guess it was his fault for believing in the Uchiha. What a clan that one was. Always secretive and closed off and worst of all late. Or maybe that was just Obito. Who knows. He was not interested in finding out.

As if she had heard someone thinking negatively not only about Obito, but also about the Uchiha clan in general, Sayuri pushed through a line of trees and walked towards them.

This girl again, Kakashi thought and he carefully watched her movements. In any moment she could jump on him again like last time. “Senpai”, she said, waving and running at the same time. Ew, she was mocking him again. Rin started giggling. Kakashi felt embarrassed. Why would this girl not just leave him be. He had a reputation to maintain. But obviously those Uchiha girls did not know how to accept rejection. They were surprisingly popular among the boys of other clans. It was the eyes that enamoured them. But he was different. He didn’t care for this sharingan. He was strong on his own and made the rank of jonin on his own. None of it was for him.

She stopped an arms range away from him, unmistakably to avoid being thrown by him like last time. She smiled at him. Her hair was once again braided to both sides of her head. Those Uchiha clan members sure had deep black hair. Kakashi had never seen it anywhere else. “I’ve heard you actually became Jonin”, she said. “Hm”, he replied to confirm it. He still had no idea how news traveled so fast to her. Probably Obito. Yes, that was stuff he had time for, but he was late to missions. “I thought I’d give you a present”, she said and her smile now changed into a devilish grin. She had a plan for something. That can’t be good, he thought. Surely she just meant to prank him somewhat. He searched her eyes for a hint, but they were too black and deep to figure out. Rin giggled again and that pulled him back to reality.

“You don’t need to give me anything”, he said dryly and he tried to turn away from her. Sayuri quickly leapt forward to grab his wrist with her left hand. Once again he noticed how forceful and strong she was even though she was slightly smaller than him. Master Kushina really did make monsters out of girls. Everybody in their age group said so. “Senpai...”, she said again and pulled him closer to her. “Drop the senpai”, he said. He hated that sort of thing. None of them were in the academy anymore. How useless to be formal in this sort of position. He tried to wriggle himself out of her grip which just led her to hold his wrist tighter.

Then many things happened at the same time. She quickly used her right hand to pull at his mask, which Kakashi was ready for. Instinctively he grabbed her hand and pulled her up, slightly lifting her off the ground. She moved her head forward and with his mask half down and - kissed him. On the lips. Then she let go of his hand and pulled the mask up onto his nose again. It all happened in a matter of seconds. “Congratulations again, senpai” she said, still being lifted up by his grip. This was not like him. He didn’t freeze in unknown situations. He was a Jonin now, a grownup, he knew how to handle things. A kiss. He had never done that before. He had never even thought about it before. He could feel his cheeks warm up, but it was not comparable to Sayuri. When he finally looked at her again he could see that the colour on her face could rival a ripe tomato.

“I think you can let her down now”, Minato said softly from behind them,” I don’t think you have to worry about another, eh, attack”. He laughed at this statement and Kakashi immediately let go of Sayuris arm. She dropped back onto her feet and they just looked at each other for a second. Black eyes to black eyes. He could see her knees shaking. Stupid, brave, little girl. Gutsy, he had to give her that. This must have cost her all the bravery she could muster. He felt a kind of admiration for her in that regard. “I think I’m…”, she began saying quietly, but was cut off by a male voice saying “Sayuri, what are you doing here”, followed by someone running right into them. Completely out of breath and sweating: Obito had finally made it.

She immediately turned on her heels and ran. She threw Obito a small “Nothing” and then she disappeared between the trees. Kakashi stared after her. All of this felt like it had happened to another version of him. Like a lighting clone. But Rin was still giggling so he knew that it had been real. “No lecture about me being late?”, Obito asked and looked from his teammates to his captain and back to Kakashi. “What's so funny?”, he smiled at Rin. “You missed quite a show”, she said, “Sayuri gave Kakashi a present for being Jonin, oh that reminds me! We all wanted to give you presents now.” Obito seemed confused at this, but before he could ask for further details Kakashi had already moved the conversation on. He didn’t want Obito to know. He really didn’t want this to make the rounds at all. He was a jonin now, he had other, more important things to worry about.

#naruto #naruto shippuden #kakashi hatake #hatake kakashi #wow there are double tags possible lmao #oc adventures #oc: sayuri #au: ikigai #fanfiction things

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too-scared-to-do-this · 4 years ago

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Of the Devil’s head

Chapter eleven - Hell’s fire couldn’t beat this

Sander’s sides fanfiction

Wordcount: 2851

Ship: prinxiety (*cracks nuckles* This is going to be fun BJ)

TW: cursing, a bunch of flirting, friendly banter, naked torsos, a lot of flustering and a very shitty-ly described kissing scene. If I’ve missed any, let me know. <3

Summary of the whole story: They say, the one that wears the crown rules all - the living, the dead, the walking, the crawling, the rooted, the sane and the mad. They say, once you own the crown, you become the most powerful being on Earth and beyond. Roman’s stolen bigger things - a measly little crown won’t present a problem, even if he has to steel it straight off of the devils head!

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Chapter eleven - Hell’s fire couldn’t beat this

“You know, for being the Devil, you aren’t such a though guy.” Roman grinned, holding Virgil a little tighter to himself subconsciously. He knew that was a lie, but couldn’t help but tease.

The demon just chuckled and rolled his eyes. “Oh please. Have you seen my fangs?”

Ro smirked. “Yeah. Sharp and pointy. But don’t make you scary.” that was a lie as well. But it did bring him over to his next point. He’s green eyes got darker, eyelids lowering. “They make you look rather hot.”

A shower run up Virgil’s back at the purr. Yap. Nope. This was not happening. He immediately pushed up, away from the Human and darted out of bed. “I’m gonna go take a shower.” he stammered out.

Roman blinked at the red-faced Devil running around franticly, pulling out drawers left and right. He blinked again, as V pulled out a bunch of different pieces of clothes. He watched as he turned towards him, fabric flying through the air, and he couldn’t watch anymore. His sight was obscured by endless darkness - Virgil managed to hit him square in the face with a shirt. (He had a really good aim when stressed or embarrassed.)

“You need a change too. You can wait until I leave if you wanna shower - I’m not sure what Humans do… Is it like cats? Like, do you lick yourself clean? Because, ew, disgusting. But anyways…” that whole thing was rushed out in one nervous breath, deep voice pitched a lot higher. Cheeks a deeper red then before. “Shower.” he quipped and slammed the door behind him.

And that’s when Roman just… started laughing. “What? The devil can’t handle a little flirting?”

The demon, redder than Hell’s fire at this point, let his forehead fall against dark wood. Oh, almighty Hades, why did this thief have such power over him? This was unhealthy.

Roman was still laughing his ass off. Lucky he hasn’t fallen off the bed yet, from how he was trashing around. Yeah, he was a complete goner. But at least now he knew how to get the devil flustered! Oh damn it, the demon was cute when red!

And obviously, Virgil could hear it even through the sick lock door. He sighed and threw his close on the closed toilet. “A shower? Really?”

This was getting harder by the shortest passage of time.

What was the point anyways? He didn’t even need to shower! He could just snap his fingers and be done with it! The bathroom was built only because the running water seemed to calm the king down when he was in the midst of a panic attack. Yet he couldn’t think of a better excuse then a dumb shower! He was the Devil for dark’s sake!

“Hades, let’s just get this over with.” he rolled his eyes, and for once, actually got into that shower.

Meanwhile, Roman was still trashing around on the bed, laughing like crazy. It physically hurt at this point.

It wasn’t a long shower, but it seemed like forever to both creatures. One laying on bed, still kind of getting over post-laugh giggles and the other wrapping a towel around himself and leaning on the sink. Dark hair dripping purple from the die (he’ll have to touch it up later) and body still glistening from droplets.

Virgil wasn’t really sure what he was going to do now.

there was a man in his bedroom. One he literally slept on top of. A very, very gorgeous man! Infront of who he just completely humiliated himself. How will he now show his face?

The devil glanced into the mirror and bit his lip. Maybe not literally naked - he should really get dressed first. And then worry about facing the liveling.

He grabbed the clothes he threw aside, pulled all the pieces on. Just to find that in his hurry, he threw his own shirt at Roman.

“Shit… This is just great.” he sighed. All his former clothes were long gone, down the laundry drop.

Now. He could just snap his fingers to make a new one appears, or…

The glint was back in all six of the king’s eyes. He grinned to himself, fangs showing. “You mess with me…” he hummed, leaning closer to the mirror fixing his damp hair over his eye. “…I mess with you.”

Roman was on the bed still, trying to get his mind to stop coming back to how cute the demon was with red cheeks when the door creaked open.

He sat up immediately, about to say something snarky to tease the poor Devil, but he didn’t get to that. Mind completely short-circuiting, heart in his throat and words nowhere to find he eyed to exposed torso of the pail demon walking around in front of him. Did this man really not know what effect would this have on Roman?!

Oh, Virgil knew, believe me. He knew very well. Walking out like nothing, half naked with a towel around his neck, hair still wet and droplets of water still glistening on his skin here and there. He didn’t bother to look at the thief. Those holes that were being burned into his torso were enough to go by. And also, the fact he acted oblivious would make Roman even more flustered. That was a bonus.

Don’t get him wrong, it wasn’t like he was so proud of his body. But when you have time on your hands, why not work out, Eliminate at least one of the many insecurities. So yeah, he had a sixpack. Big deal.

Big deal indeed! Roman was dying on that bed! Mouth hanging half open, fully entranced by the beautiful chiseled entity in front of him. And then there was a shirt - again. Muscles moved as the delicious stomach got covered completely, only arms exposed.

The thief shook his head. “Why would you do that?!” he hated how clipped his voice sounded.

Virgil finally looked up at him, fully grinning on the inside. On the outside though, he just bit his lip and blinked innocently. “What?”

“T-that!” Roman moved his hands around rigidly, gesturing at Virgil whole.

“Oh that. I forgot my shirt.”

“Uhm. Yeah, yeah. You just so happen to forget your shirt. And then walk out looking like Michelangelo’s David!”

And that was all Virgil needed. His inner grin reached the poutside, wider and more menacing than ever. He latched onto those words like a lifeline. “Oh, liveling, you think I’m as hot as David?”

Roman’s cheeks grew even redder. “For you, information - I was talking about how pail you look. Not how hot he is.”

“Oh, so you have a thing for statues. Good to know.”

“No! Zeus! You were the one to bring it up!”

“I knew the guy personally; I can say he’s hot. You on the other hand, thiefy, you didn’t. What’s your excuse?”

“Wait, you knew David? How old are you?”

Virgil stopped to think for a second. Well… he didn’t really have an answer to that. “I’m not really sure.”

“Old enough to know him apparently! Man, you’re old!”

“And you apparently have a thing for old folks and stone-carvings.”

Cue offended thief noises. Virgil just snorted, walking towards the Human. “You didn’t deny it. So you admit you have a thing for me?”

“What?! No! You’re too old for me.”

“And you apparently can’t say anything other than old.“

“I’ll let you know! I can do and say a lot of things!”

“But escaping Hell isn’t one of them.”

“Low blow man!” Roman gasped dramatically, hand flying to his chest.

“I’m just saying… I could show you all the good hiding places.” Virgil grinned to himself, fangs showing again. This was way too much fun. The frustrated look the thief wore was priceless. He propped his hands on the mattress, leaning slightly towards Ro. “That way you might actually have a chance to succeed.”

“Hey!” Roman grabbed the first thing he could find and threw it at the crownless king. Hit him perfectly square in the face.

And then Ro remembered that this was still the Devil, he just threw a pillow at.

Oh no…

Virgil blinked. What just happened? He looked down at the pillow that plopped down guiltily between his hands and then back up at the reddening creature. “Did you just… throw a pillow at me?” he frowned in confusion.

The sitting one gulped. “Mayyyyybeee….?” he smiled nervously.

Virgil blinked again with eyes bigger than saucers. He looked back at the pillow.

And he burst out laughing. The low rumbled of baritone climbing under Romans skin like a parasite.

The Human didn’t know what to do! He couldn’t help but watch the creature. Fangs glistening in the dim light, cheeks hiding his already sunken in eyes. He was so adorable.

Virgil looked up just in time to catch Roman averting his eyes. His cheeks were getting pinker than before (which was saying something). And the king couldn’t help but smirk. “Are you blushing, Roman?”

Gods, hearing his name from the devil’s mouth! “What?! No! You must be hallucinating!” Roman turned his face away completely, cheeks getting dark red at this point.

Virgil bit his lip to keep him from grinning (it didn’t help). This was just too funny - watching this helpless human squirm.

“I’m pretty sure you were blushing.” he leaned even closer to Roman, watching him coolly.

“No, I wasn’t!” Ro peeped up, cringing at the sound of his own high-pitched voice.

By now Virgil was a mere breath away from the boiling thief. He bit his lip again, grin loose. Eyes sparkling with a mysterious glit. “Then why are your cheeks red?” he whispered, running his knuckles along Roman’s cheek.

The liveling was speechless. He was pretty sure he swallowed his tongue. “I-I did not notice.”

Virgil’s grin darkened. He could just kiss him right now. Lean in and kiss him right here. No one would know.

He had no idea where this newfound confidence was coming from. Maybe the ages of being alone. Maybe the feeling of this rush. Maybe even the fact that Roman was coming undone under his touch the same way Virgil felt himself fall apart under his.

And maybe it was the whole situation they were in

He didn’t realize he was staring at Romans lips. But Ro did notice. Every time he glanced up from V’s.

Funny how little time these two needed. But Hell was timeless after all. It could have been three days, or even three years Roman was stuck down there. There was no way to tell.

What he could tell though, was that ‘stuck’ was so far off from the way he was feeling down here. With this demon.

Who was looking at him as if he was his last wish.

Roman couldn’t take it anymore. It was now or never.

And suddenly Virgil wasn’t thinking anymore. Instead, he was pulled on top of Roman, pushing him into the pillows. Lips on lips.

Why did it take him so long?

---------------------------------

Why was this so hard?

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed it :)

I’ll be back as soon as possible. Big ending’s coming up, so get ready!

Tag list:

@romano-hottopic

@vpow

@a-formless-entity

@lovelivingmydreams

@alice-only-me

#of the devil's head #Virgil the king of hell #roman the thief #ts virgil #prinxiety #virgil sanders #anxiety sanders #ts roman #roman sanders #creativity sanders #thomas sanders #Sander's sides #what else should I tag?

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mirrorthoughts · 3 years ago

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Not Afraid #4 - Steter - AO3

(On AO3)

(Teenwolf, Steter, Peter Hale, Stiles Stilinski, Derek Hale, The Pack (Teen Wolf), Not Beta Read, Not edited, Just a little something I'm writing for a friend as part of an advents calendar, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence)

Summary:

I read somewhere on tumblr about Stiles not being afraid of the Alpha and... Well this is my take on it? Most of my knowledge of this fandom is from fanfiction and watching season one once, so... don't expect canon accuracy 😂

I'm writing these chapters kinda NaNo style with a lower word count, so... as the tags say: Not beta read, not edited, not even really read twice. Will probably be edited at a later date. Maybe x"D Tags, warnings and rating might change depending on how long this piece is going to get.

Chapter 4 of 11

(Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 5) (Part 6) (Part 7) (Part 8) (Part 9) (Part 10) (Part 11)

“I know who he is. At least I think I do.” Stiles looked back to Derek, frowning at the answer he hadn’t expected. Next to him the Alpha started growling again, though so low that Stiles almost couldn’t hear it. Other than Derek, it seemed, who shrank into himself, pulling his head between his shoulders.

“Use your words, oh Alpha!” Stiles couldn’t help but snark at the wolf and promptly the growling stopped and he had the Alphas attention once again. He could see the red eyes staring at him, the wolf’s maw, working as the Alpha opened and closed it, pulling his lips into a wide grimace that did nothing to hide his sharp teeth. Still, Stiles didn’t feel threatened. It felt more like- “Derrrek,” the Alpha more rumbled than said. It didn’t really sound like a human. Not even like Derek or Scott sounded when they had to lisp around their beta teeth. But then the Alpha’s face also was more wolfish, with a lot more fur, looking more like a snout than Derek’s and Scott’s face had ever looked.

Stiles frowned and looked up at the moon. Not entirely full anymore, but maybe enough to-… “Shit…” He pressed his lips together, looking back to Derek. “That’s your uncle, isn’t it? Comatose human, awake wolf?” Derek looked away from them but still nodded, maybe embarrassed, maybe ashamed what had happened to his uncle. Other than the Alpha - wait, what was his name again? - other than Peter who’d started growling again. Well. More like rumbling. If Stiles would’ve been pressed for an answer he would’ve said the Alpha was purring as he stepped closer to Stiles, snaking an arm around Stiles middle and pulling him in. Stiles squeaked in surprise as a cold-ish snout and hot breath simultaneously hit his neck and made him shudder.

“Uhm… Derek? A little help here?? What the hell is he doing!” He still wasn’t afraid. He was still sure that the- that Peter wouldn’t harm him. But still, someone pressing his nose (or snout or whatever) against his neck and maybe even nibbling at it with his sharp teeth was definitely not something Stiles was used to! Hell if anyone else other than Derek would’ve been here he would probably die of mortification for being… well. Alpha catnip maybe? At least the rumbling in Peter’s chest had turned a lot louder now that Stiles was pressed against it. Or maybe it just felt like that for him since he could actually feel the rumbling right next to his shoulder.

And Derek didn’t even try to help, just stared at them with huge eyes Stiles was not entirely comfortable with. “…Derek? C’mon, big guy! Stop the staring, help the Stiles?” He flinched when a wet… tongue?! licked over his neck and turned to stare at the Alpha, his hands already raised, to put them over the wolf’s snout, pushing him away. Or at least trying to. “No licking the Sti- no licking me! Understood? Ew!”

He stared into the huge eyes that had somehow lost most of their threatening red glow in the last few minutes, now looking a lot lighter, more purple-pink-ish. He wasn’t sure what that change meant, but before he could ask Derek, the Alpha’s eyes crinkled and Stiles flinched again when he felt the wet tongue against is palm. “Eww, no! No! Bad wolf!” he cried out, letting his hands fall off the wolf’s face. He again looked for help from Derek, but while the Alpha, while Peter was huffing short breaths in what seemed to be laughter, Derek just stood there, his face in his hand. Well that was reassuring… not.

#my story #my stories #steter #teen wolf #stiles stilinski #peter hale #stiles x peter #english #SeiKaze #no german translation

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hyperpsychomaniac · 4 years ago

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Who Says You Can't Go Home - Chapter 2

Darkwing Duck (90s series) fanfiction

Sequel to my recent fanfic The Other Side of Me

Summary: Down on his luck, the Negaverse Launchpad crashes at Launchpad’s parents looking for help. Launchpad, who has avoided visiting his family since he started working with Darkwing, returns in a panic to ensure his double isn’t causing trouble. And then it gets awkward.

Read Chapter 1 first

***

Doing nothing but sitting in the roadside diner, situated on the road leading up to his hometown, made Launchpad want to squirm. Someone was going to come in and recognise him. There was no one here he wanted to talk to – apart from his parents. To top it all off they were wasting time. The Thunderquack was parked a few miles away, out in the desert, where it wouldn’t be found. It was close enough they could call it if needed. Drake had driven the sedan the rest of the way in. After Launchpad had tried to rouse him from sleep. And after Drake had said he wasn’t moving until the sun came up.

Then Drake had insisted they stop for breakfast. “If we tear in there,” he’d said. “Your parents are going to wonder how we drove here so quickly. Just relax. A couple of hours won’t make a difference. I need coffee; my sleep schedule is way out.”

Not that coffee had been a bad idea. On his third cup, Launchpad was finally starting to feel the effects. He’d managed to grab a nap whilst he waited for DW to wake up and then again as he’d driven into town, but the caffeine, now that was really doing the job. Being a bit more awake didn’t make him any less apprehensive about waiting though.

“Launchpad, you haven’t touched your breakfast,” said Gosalyn. “It weirds me out when you don’t eat your food.”

Launchpad prodded a short fat sausage around his plate half-heartedly.

“Yeah, I think you need to level out the caffeine, buddy.”

“Huh?”

Drake pointed to Launchpad’s leg, which bounced up and down under the table.

Gosalyn snorted. “Yeah, better eat something before the diner thinks a T-Rex is coming. Rar.”

Launchpad forced his leg to still. Why did this whole thing make him so nervous? But he couldn’t even explain what he was doing with his life over the phone. In person? He wasn’t sure whether he’d rather his parents realised he was hiding something or thought him a failure and a deadbeat. He’d wanted to come visit. And that was the worst part. He’d wanted to, but still hadn’t made the effort. They made it difficult, and DW made it difficult, and he’d wanted to find some way to make it work but it had always been impossible to broach the subject. Either with DW, or his parents. Now, he was here and he wasn’t ready. But still, helping his parents with whatever trouble the Negaverse Launchpad had caused was plenty good enough reason to put up with all the stress. He could deal.

The bell above the diner’s door dinged. Launchpad cringed down in his seat just in case it was someone who might recognise him.

A young woman entered. She was decked out all in bright pink, inclusive of her armoured motorcycle jacket. She removed a hot pink helmet and shook out her hair, then looked inside the helmet, sniffed, and made a face. “Bleh. I hate long rides.”

Launchpad shot to his feet. “Loopey!”

His little sister, not so little anymore, turned at the sound of his voice. “Ee! Launchpad!” She pelted across the diner. They met in the middle of the floor and Loopey threw her arms around her brother’s neck. “Mom and Dad didn’t tell me you were coming too.”

“Short notice,” Launchpad mumbled into her hair. Even with the definite smell of motorcycle helmet he caught the scent of her cherry blossom shampoo. He’d always thought of it as what pink should smell like. He squeezed her tight for good measure then set her back down on the floor. “Wait, coming too? Mom and Dad invited you? Now?” Surely, they didn’t want his kid sister’s help with some weirdo from another dimension.

“Yeah, they’ve been bugging me to come visit for the last month of two. But you never seem to come when they invite us so I just assumed…” She shrugged. Then slapped him on the shoulder. “But this is going to be so much fun! We can go out flying together. There’s this real neat place I can bet you haven’t flown yet and I’ve got to show it to you.”

Gosalyn stepped around Launchpad’s hip and looked Loopey up and down with a frown. “Launchpad, is this your girlfriend?”

Loopey grinned. “Ew. No. This stinky weirdo? I’m his sister, Loopey.”

Gosalyn’s face brightened. “He is stinky, isn’t he?” She stuck out a hand. “I’m Gosalyn Mallard. Pleased to meet you.”

“This is Drake, my housemate,” Launchpad said, as DW wandered over to the join them. Better make things clear before Loopey got any ideas into her head like his mother seemed to.

“You didn’t tell me you had a sister.”

“You’ve never asked me about my sister.”

“LP, how can I ask you about someone I don’t know exists?” Drake cut himself off with a huff. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Likewise. I’m going to grab a bagel and a coffee then head to Mom and Dad’s. If you don’t mind waiting we can arrive together. I think they’d like that. And, you know, if you want some extra backup. Though I see you made sure to bring some.” Loopey winked.

Well, he had already resigned himself to waiting, what was another few minutes? Launchpad retrieved his coffee then trailed Loopey up to the counter. He waited while she ordered her breakfast then reached out and brushed her sleeve. “Hey, did Mom and Dad tell you they had someone visiting?”

“Yeah, they said it was someone you knew. But they didn’t give me much details beyond that.” Loopey studied his face for a moment. “Okay, big bro. You going to tell me what’s going on? We’ve got a guy visiting whose name is also Launchpad, which is weird, especially because there aren’t too many families who give their kids aviation themed names. And you look like you’re a thousand feet up and just remembered you forgot to fill the fuel tank. What, is he like your evil twin or something?”

Launchpad pushed his nearly empty coffee cup around the counter. His hand trembled against the white ceramic. Which was totally from the excess caffeine on an empty stomach. “Not quite. More like my severely messed up and slightly dangerous twin.”

“Mom and Dad never said we had another brother.”

“Not like that. It’s like, well, the entire universe has a twin. It’s complicated, and I’ll try and explain it to you, or maybe get Drake to. He’s better at it.” And smart enough to make it sound plausible whilst leaving out all the Darkwing stuff. “But I came back because I was worried about Mom and Dad. I just want to make sure he isn’t causing them any trouble.”

Loopey put an arm around his shoulder. “Well then. You’ll definitely want me for back up, huh?”

***

Launchpad let Drake drive again. He was still tired and he could feel his hands trembling. Stupid caffeine. The grass and gardens greened as they pulled up outside his parents’ house, to that little circle of garden that everyone who lived on a large property out here had decided was an acceptable radius to maintain. The house itself was low-set, with a big wrap around porch. It was a strange mix of nostalgia and pure dread that sat in the bottom of Launchpad’s gut.

Beside them, Loopey’s motorcycle rumbled to a stop. Gosalyn stared longingly at the machine. “Would’ve been funner on a motorcycle.” She was pouting because Drake hadn’t let her ride with Loopey. Which apparently she should’ve been allowed because she rode a far more powerful bike all the time. Drake had pointed out that was with her own helmet and Loopey had only brought one.

With any luck, the Negaverse Launchpad would just need a good talking to and DW wouldn’t need to get involved at all. Launchpad drew in a breath, steadied his hands, and got out of the car.

The front door slammed and their mother came barrelling off the front porch. “Launchpad! Loopey! You’re both here!”

“Mom!” Loopey saved him from the embarrassment of the first hug. She pelted past him and threw her arms around Birdie McQuack.

“Hey, sweetheart. Launchpad…” Still clinging to Loopey, Birdie reached out a hand towards her son.

Launchpad felt a smile tug at his lips. “Hi, Mom.” He wrapped his arms right around the both of them. Then introduced her to Drake and Gosalyn.

“You are both welcome here anytime. Any friend of my son,” Birdie said with a knowing wink, “is like a son to me.”

Launchpad flushed. “Mom.” He had to forget the awkwardness. There were other things to deal with. “Where’s the other Launchpad? What’s he gone and done? If you need me to talk to him, or move him on out of here just let me know and…”

Birdie put her hands on her hips. “Now, Launchpad. That poor man needs help. Not to be tossed out in the cold. I think he’s still dealing with a lot of things. He seems to be getting better this last month of so, but…”

“Wait, last month? How long has he been here? I… I thought…”

Birdie bit her lip and, suddenly, she didn’t seem to want to look her son in the eye. “Um, well… it’s probably been about… two months now?”

“Mom! I thought… well, so he was okay, and then he’s done something just now like…”

Birdie shook her head. “I told your father this was a bad idea. No, he hasn’t done anything. Well, just minor things. Like mess with my rosebushes. I don’t know what got into his head but I gave him a firm talking to and he seemed to get the message.”

Launchpad’s fists tightened. “You said on the phone he was making you uncomfortable. If he hasn’t actually done anything why’d you call me out here?” Not that he didn’t want to grab the other Launchpad by the collar and demand to know what he’d been thinking. But he’d been worried! He’d been stressed the whole flight here.

“You know, I really do think he could use your help again. He couldn’t stop talking about what you did for him back in Saint Canard. I feel like your father and I have done all we can for him. But that’s only part of the reason we wanted you here. The other, well, it was mostly your father’s idea…” She trailed off and lowered her gaze.

“Mom,” prompted Loopey. “I thought you told me you just wanted us all back here to spend some time together and all you had to do was convince Launchpad and…”

The gears ground and grated into place in Launchpad’s head. Far too slowly. How could he be such an idiot? “Convince Launchpad,” he said, coldly. “You mean by lying to him and telling him you were worried his potentially dangerous double might do something to hurt you?”

Drake put a hand on his arm. “Okay, LP,” he said, voice low, and a cheesy fake grin on his face like he was trying to convince everyone else that it was, in fact, definitely still okay. “We’ve been here like five minutes. Cool down. Give your parents a chance to explain, and maybe, you know, maybe it won’t be as bad as you think.”

Launchpad fists unclenched a little and he forced himself to breathe. His mother opened her mouth to say something, but then the growl of an engine cut into the morning air. It wasn’t a plane. A heavily laden down Gator buggy - twin seater, offroad with rollover bar - struggled over the crest of the small hill leading up to the house. The struggling engine let up as it made its way down the gentle slope towards them and grumbled to a halt.

“Okay, buddy, if we both go for the seatbelt at the same time we are never going to get out of this thing.”

“Hang on, Mr McQuack. I’ll get yours first.”

Ripcord McQuack and the Negaverse Launchpad were both crammed into the Gator. It was designed for two people but they were clearly pushing it to its load limit. Launchpad stuffed his fingers down between their legs to find the seatbelt release.

“Ow!” Ripcord just about rolled out of the driver’s seat. He rubbed at the side of his leg. “If you insist on wearing those things could you at least file the blasted spikes down?”

Launchpad’s double pushed the studded bracelet around his wrist self consciously. “Sorry.”

Launchpad swallowed and his hand went to his beak. Gosalyn had patched him up good and those wicked looking spikes hadn’t left any permanent marks. But it was hard to forget the sting when they'd torn into his beak, wrapped around his double’s fist.

Ripcord smiled faintly. “Come on. I’m just kidding, son.”

Son? Launchpad felt his fists tightening again.

The other Launchpad caught sight of him and grinned. “Hey, if it isn’t my better half! Didn’t think I’d get to see you again.” He undid his seatbelt and swung out of the Gator. The whole machine rocked.

“Yeah. Me neither.”

Ripcord stopped just short of Launchpad and flexed his hands down by his sides, like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. He forced a smile. “Hey, son.”

Launchpad swallowed. All he had to do was open his arms; that’s all his father was waiting for. Ripcord wouldn’t barrel into a hug if it wasn’t something his kids wanted. All he was waiting for was an invitation. Launchpad kept his hands stubbornly at his sides. “Hi, Dad.”

The faint smile faded. “It’s good to see you again. How long has it been?”

Yeah, try and make him feel bad. “You two seem to be getting on really well. Which is great, but Mom kind of gave me the impression you were worried he was going to cause trouble.”

The Negaverse Launchpad held up his hands. “Hey, woah. I told you guys, I know I’m a bit rough around the edges, but if I do anything you don’t like all you’ve gotta do is tell me.”

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” said Birdie. “You haven’t done anything.”

Ripcord locked his gaze with Launchpad’s. “Well, we had to do something to get our son to actually come visit us once in the next decade.”

Birdie put a hand to her face. “Rip, no.”

Ripcord jerked at the sound of his wife’s voice, and then flushed.

“I knew it! I came because I thought you guys needed my help. Now I find out its just Dad trying to trick me!”

Drake winced. “LP…”

His father wouldn’t quite look at him. “I wasn’t trying to trick you, it’s just… well what was I supposed to do? And seriously, how fast did you drive here? Your mother called you yesterday. So apparently it isn’t that difficult to get your butt out here.”

“Because I was worried! I can’t believe this!” Launchpad stomped past his father.

The Negaverse Launchpad raised up his hands. “Hey, listen, I never meant to cause any trouble. I just needed somewhere to go, and…”

He’d been heading for the Gator. But Launchpad stopped and glared at his double. “Why are you even here,” he growled, voice low.

“You told me not to go back to Saint Canard! I needed help, I couldn’t think of anyplace else to go.”

Launchpad stabbed a finger into his chest, hard, and didn’t really care that the jab brought a very dangerous look to his double’s eyes. Yeah, go on. Get violent in front of his family. But it stayed just that, a look. “Stay away from family. You’ve got your own, don’t you? Maybe go back to them.” Then he hoisted himself into the Gator, started her up, and tore back over the hill, towards his family’s hanger. He needed to clear his head. And there was only one surefire way to do that.

***

“Dad, this is super awkward,” Gosalyn whispered.

Her father flushed. “Gosalyn, shush!”

Everyone ignored her anyway. Loopey made the first move. She went over to her father and put her arms around him. “Hey, daddy.”

At least, as far as she could get around his broad torso anyway. Ripcord broke into a smile, one that was not forced like the one he’d given Launchpad, and engulfed his daughter in his arms. “You’re trying to be cute to make me feel better, aren’t you?”

“Totally.”

It was probably the right thing to do. The poor guy definitely looked like he needed the hug. Gosalyn wasn’t sure what had gotten into Launchpad. Sure this was awkward, but he was kind of being a jerk to his father. She fought with her dad her all the time. But if she hadn’t seen him in ages she’d at least give him a hug and be happy about it.

Loopey turned to the Negaverse Launchpad. “I’m still not real sure what’s going on here. But I’d… I’d like to talk to you. I just think I need to go talk down my actual brother first.”

Launchpad smiled faintly. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

“Well,” said Birdie, “Lets go inside and we’ll get your something to eat.” She gestured for them all to follow her. Ripcord trailed inside behind her. He still looked down in the dumps.

The Negaverse Launchpad fell into step beside her father. “Um listen… ah… Drake. I’m real sorry about, you know, trying to light you on fire. We’re going to have to spend time together here anyway so… we don’t have to be friends. But I’m not your enemy is all I’m saying.”

Drake scowled up at him. “Well, I guess you’ve managed to behave yourself here for the last few months. As long as you don’t do anything that requires a certain dashing superhero get himself involved, I’m willing to give you a chance.”

Gosalyn huffed. Her father may have been fooled but she was not so easy to trick. She shouldered past the Negaverse Launchpad, which kind of hit him in the back of the knee, and just resulted in spinning her around. She recovered, and fixed a glare on Launchpad’s startled double. “I’ve got my eye on you,” she hissed, and then turned and ran into the house.

“She doesn’t like me, does she?” she just caught Launchpad saying as the screen door slammed behind her.

Well, he wasn’t so dumb now was he?

The next half an hour was… weird to say the least. First Birdie showed them pictures of Launchpad as a kid. Which was about the only interesting part. Gosalyn grabbed the pictures off her and shuffled through them. Baby Launchpad was so cute, and chubby, and falling over in nearly every photo she imagined that, at that age, when he crashed out of something, he’d bounced. “Dad, where are your baby photos?”

“In a box. Which I burnt. Then sunk.”

Ripcord was pretty quiet but every couple of minutes he’d fidget, get up, and ask something like: “I’m going to the kitchen, does anyone want another cup of tea. Or a snack?” Then go and push a few things around in there, even through no one actually wanted anything. Then he’d come and sit back down and stare forlornly at the centre of the table.

Birdie and her Dad seemed to be having a fairly normal, if boring, adult conversation. At least until Birdie asked: “So, do you and Launchpad have any plans for the future?”

“Er…” her father absentmindedly stirred the tea he’d finally let Ripcord get for him after he’d asked for the third time. “Pardon?”

Ripcord put a hand to his face. “Birdie,” he said, voice low. “For the last time they’re not a couple.”

Drake turned pink. “Wait… what?”

Gosalyn shot to her feet. “Mr McQuack, I think I will have that snack after all.”

“Sure, kiddo. You want me to come and…”

“No, I can get it.” Gosalyn ran into the kitchen. Her shoulders slumped and she let out a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness.” She made her way out the kitchen door and onto the porch. She breathed deep the desert air. It was a little dry, but better than awkward adult conversations. She rubbed her hands together. “Now, what trouble can I get into around here?”

***

Chapter 3

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