#exhales

[ansjsla]

Satosugu sharing sugugu’s bday cake 😭🥹

[frownyalfred]

I’m VINDICATED by the Reacher actor saying he was around 240 lbs at 6’4 because 1) I have been modeling Jason’s physique after him in my head ever since last month and 2) SO many people have commented on my pull-up batfamily fic saying there’s no way Jason could possibly be that heavy.

Yes he can! Muscle is insane! Add some armor and the dude is gonna be hefty.

[basicallyjaywalker]

All I Know

Good evening everyone, the time has finally arrived

@someloserinajaywig for you I present, the final fictravaganza fic: Zane angst. Zangst, if you will. I will admit this is not the best bc i'm not super familiar with writing a Zane POV BUT. I hope it is an enjoyable read regardless

Also, I didn't know if you had an AO3 handle but if you do and would like to have the fic gifted to you, lmk!

Prompt: Zane, The Run and Go by Twenty-One Pilots, and temporary amnesia

AO3 Link

Fic under the cut as well!

His throne was a glacier, built with his own powers, his energy, his essence. 

His throne room was the frozen ocean, vast and inhospitable. The only living beings that dared pass through were himself, his advisor, and the guards that made their rounds. Their punctuality was the only way he kept time anymore.

His empire was barren, overtaken by the ice. His ice. His subjects either learned to cope or succumbed to it. Their preserved bodies littered the tundra, a warning spread through whispers amongst the people. 

He was an emperor. A symbol of might, of terror, of strength. He was an iceberg. He was an all-consuming blizzard. 

He dreamed. 

He hated his dreams. He was always in a vast forest. There was always a snowstorm swirling, obscuring his vision. The air was always crisp, and if he focused he could catch something between sickly sweetness and earthiness clinging to the world around him. He was always acutely aware of the absence of something, though exactly what eluded him. He simply always knew there was always an emptiness within the world. 

Sometimes there were beasts with long limbs and hollow eye sockets, but they did not disturb him. They simply passed by, their towering bodies stretching up into the gray sky. 

Sometimes there was someone with him. 

A man with messy hair, white like fresh snow, dressed in the same color. He wore something over his eyes. The emperor felt he knew what they were called, once, but that couldn’t be true. Nothing like them existed in his empire.

Whenever he saw the man, the emperor would just watch him as he went about menial tasks. The man spoke, but the emperor couldn’t hear him, as if wind was constantly rushing right past his ears and drowning everything out. 

The emperor awoke from these dreams agitated. He tried to get his advisor to tell him who the man was, but he insisted he had never seen nor heard of him before. 

“A figment of imagination, your eminence. Do not let it trouble you.”

And so he did not. His advisor was always right. He had rescued the emperor from certain death after being ousted by the traitor. He restored his throne. He reclaimed his throne room. He returned the emperor to his glory.

---

Zane still had those dreams, even after his return. 

They weren’t uncommon before his tenure as the Ice Emperor. He often dreamed of his father and him wandering the Birchtree Forest where they lived. However, something felt wrong about the dreams he had during and after his time in the Never-Realm. He couldn’t explain it. It was like watching a different cut of a film he’d seen a  million times before. There were details missing, but he couldn’t remember them. 

He tried to reach into his memory banks for them, but was met with nothing. The previous version of his dreams didn’t exist anymore. All that existed was the incomplete, glitched version.

Every time he woke up from that dream afterwards, his face was wet. He hated it. He missed something that seemed to have never existed. More than that, he knew, he hated that he felt like it was his fault for forgetting. His own memories were obscured by a horrific episode of megalomania in which he had no choice. At least, that’s what the others said. Truth be told, Zane tried very hard not to dwell on the thought too much. He wanted to imagine he was forced into that role by the manipulation of Vex, but it was fifty years. He was a conqueror, a destroyer, for fifty years, and never thought anything of it? He’d crushed dissent at Vex’s suggestion, but it was still him who brought the hammer down. He froze the changelings because he was worried they would usurp him. Did it matter that Vex told him a lie and he believed it? Would it have been different if they did want to usurp him, destroy him? 

Perhaps that was why he tried not to delve too deep into his memories of that time. They remained only because he couldn’t wipe them without wiping everything else about himself, but sometimes he wished he could. Originally, his father built him with his memory switch to provide that fresh start, to allow him to forget inconvenient histories like his father’s death and their life prior. He built it to protect Zane from pain. He must’ve believed it was worth the cost, since he refused to remove it despite Zane’s request upon their reunion. At the time Zane believed it wasn’t worth it to avoid the pain if he had to forget all the good that came before, but sometimes, in the dark and cold nights where he couldn’t sleep because of the visions of Ice Samurai and innocents encased in bergs that plagued him, he wondered if his father was right. 

Then he would remind himself of his friends. He thought of Pixal and her warm smile, Jay and his neverending bad puns, Kai and his fierce loyalty, Cole and his firm reassurance, Nya and her cunning wit, Lloyd and his unconditional love, and Master Wu’s constant support and guidance. He thought of them and he knew he could never forget. Even if he could build a new life with them, flip the switch, remove it, then make up some grand lie about what happened, those memories were irreplaceable. 

The unfortunate consequence of wanting to remember his friends meant he had to remember every time he failed. 

He had to remember finding Pixal disassembled in the labyrinth beneath Chen’s Island.

He had to remember when Cole fell off the Bounty and into the uncertain shadows of the Oni invasion.

He had to remember Lloyd’s face as he begged, pleaded with Zane to remember who he was.

Every time he failed and someone got hurt. Maybe that was another reason he couldn’t just forget and start over. They couldn’t just reset. They still had to live with the consequences. 

So Zane would lay there in the morning, face wet with tears. If he was unable to forget, how come he couldn’t remember? His father’s voice and the look and feeling of his home when he was young were fading. What was the point of having a computer for a brain if it just lost memories like a normal brain?!

Then one night, he ended up in that place again. His home. 

Tall birchwoods towered into the cloud-speckled sky. Small rays of sunshine peeked through gray clouds, turning patches of snow on the ground into clouds themselves. Dr. Julien sat on one of these patches, with Zane beside him, shaded by the skyward stretching trunk of a tree. He could hear animals going about their lives around them. Squirrels scuttled through trees, cardinals flew through the air, and even a few bees came up and settled on the sparse greenery around them. 

Zane heaved out a single word. “Father.”

“Hello, Zane, isn’t it such a pleasant morning?”

“Father, it’s been so long.”

The doctor tilted his head. “What do you mean? I only left you and Falcon alone for a moment.”

“No, it’s that… Never mind. I simply missed you.”

“Well, that is sweet of you. I’m glad you decided to join me. Spring is almost here, you know. It’s always nice when a bit of life returns to this place. The primrose will be blooming soon.”

“Yes…” Zane took a deep breath. “Father?”

“Yes, Zane?”

“May I ask you something peculiar?”

“Of course, son. What’s on your inquisitive mind today?”

“What should I do if I ever start to forget things?”

He paused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean if years go by and I forget days like this, where we both sat together and talked? What if one day I forget your voice or your face? What if one day I forget… you?”

“Well… that won’t happen for quite a few more years. Why does it worry you now?”

“I’m simply curious.”

Dr. Julien hummed. He pulled his glasses off and painstakingly cleaned the lenses. Zane locked onto his every motion, inscribing it into the artificial synapses of his mind. If he knew how to in the dream, he would motion capture the process so that he could recreate it. 

“I suppose it’s something we all have to deal with. Our brains can only hold so much information. There are days I find myself slowly forgetting the details of my friends' faces, the voices of those I loved…”

“So what do you do?”

He shrugged. “There is nothing you can do. You can swear to yourself you will never forget, that you will commit every minutiae to memory, you will remember a person or place or story over and over until one day it’s simply… gone. I suppose that’s why they invented photographs. You can never forget if it’s preserved, but even those will fade over time, or you can forget the when and why and who of their taking. There are photos in my scrapbook of people I know I once knew, but whose names I can no longer recall… Zane? Are you alright?” Julien reached over, turning his son’s face and seeing the fresh trails coasting down his cheeks. He wiped them with the sleeve of his white overcoat. “I’m sorry, son. I didn’t mean to upset you. I believe I must’ve gotten too wrapped up in my own melancholy.”

“I don’t want to forget you, father. Never.”

“Zane…” Dr. Julien shook his head, his deep brown eyes full of softness. “One day, you will, and it will be okay. You may forget the details of my appearance, or all of our memories together, but you will always remember who I was to you. You will always remember your father.”

Despite the fresh tears still replacing the old ones on his face, Zane nodded. “You will always be a part of me.”

“Yes, I will, son.”

Zane woke up, the wetness of his face following him to consciousness. He sat up, wiping his tears with the sleeve of his pajamas. From the half-closed blinds, a beam of golden morning light shone directly on his bed. 

“I will never forget, father.”

[shrimpalbuspotter]

Do you have any health hcs for the next gen? Can be Both Mental health and physical health, (you can include stuff like autism and ADHD as well)

I refuse to let characters be fine and dandy so i have LOTS. I'm a bit too tired to go in depth, so I'll just name characters and what hc I have for them afterwards. If characters aren't on here it's purposefully because I have no hcs for them. Or maybe I just forgot... I TOTTALLYYY don't project on certain characters. These aren't things I made up on spot either I've genuinely wrote these down before and forgot to ever post about it. THANKS FOR REMINDER

Albus Potter - Depression, Dyslexia, Anemia, had Colic

James Sirius Potter - Double jointed

Lily Luna Potter - Obessive Compulsive Disorder

Scorpius Malfoy - Autism, ADHD, Social Anxiety, had Colic, Dermatillomania, Agoraphobia(?)

Rose Granger Weasley - Allergic to Insulin (tragic), gallstones (removed gallbladder, also tragic, she was 15)

Hugo Granger Weasley - Deafness (wears cochlear implants), Autism

Teddy Lupin - Double jointed, CVID

Yann Fredricks - His immune system keeps realising his eyes exist

Karl Jenkins - Diabetic, Anemic

Polly Chapman - Hypoglycaemia

Dominique Weasley - Asthma

Molly Weasley ii - Narcolepsy

Lucy Weasley - also, Narcolepsy, IBS

Fred Weasley ii - Chronic Fatigue, ADHD

Roxanne Weasley - High blood sugar, PCOS

Craig Bowker Jr - Gets Sinusitis alot, Deviated Septum (the culprit)

Alice Longbottom ii - Coeliac

BONUS:

Harry Potter - Autism, had Colic, PTSD, Depression, Claustrophobia, Diagnosed Paranoia

Hermione Granger - Hard of Hearing, had Postnatal Depression

Ron Weasley - Lactose Intolerance,

Ginny Weasley - Hoarding Disorder (does this have a name?)

Draco Malfoy - PTSD

Oki that's it >_< if there's anyone not here that's like a rarer next gen that you'd like to see I can add...

[skeletoninthemelonland]

does plushtrap have a role in btc? hes the most precious little boi

Yes.

[maxbytes]

thinkin about him so much. thinkin about him real hard

[jacenotjason]

guys i have a horrible idea

[fieriframes]

[What in the world?! [ Exhales sharply ] In negotiation, he who cares the least wins. He. I have never, in my history of doing barbecue, seen this done. Really?]

[revunant]

THE BUILDING THAT HOUSES AZARI'S LITTLE OFFICE is under new management. Management by a different kind of person, who sees nothing but unnecessity and unprofessionalism in frivolous things (in a medical setting, no less!). The room smells like paint, the shelves are empty, the floor is bare. Even the curtains are Venetian blinds now. Cold and white. Jean can’t speak for the entirety of her clientele, but he knows it brings peace to at least one among them. 

“You say you’ve had a breakthrough?”

Breakthrough seems like too grand a word; let alone that a breakthrough isn’t something he should be able to have for himself. Pieter had breakthroughs. Teddy speaks of his hope for them. Azari hopes for them too, he's sure.

Jean looks into his lap and begins to curl his fingers between the tendons of his right wrist. It’s the third time this session that Azari has had to reach over the coffee table to press a stress toy into his grip - a small ball covered in firm spikes, designed for him to cup into the palm of his hand and squeeze, to chase the same sensations with less risk of doing damage. Compliant, he does just that, but he can’t help but cling to the sharper, slightly more feverish sensation of the welts streaking his arm. 

Shameful. Stop that.

“...My son found an old gear a few weeks ago."

It's a slow start, as he tries to assure Azari without words that he's not trying to change the subject. "I put it in my wallet. I never ended up taking it out, and now, by accident, it comes everywhere with me.” He reaches into his pocket to drive the point home, pulling the ‘treasure’ out of the slot where cash should be, laying it on the coffee table - brass, gleaming, but scratched and gouged and eroded by age and duress. “I’ve taken to using it as a bottle opener, or to pry things apart. It works well. And it doesn’t complain when I use it for those things.”

Azari has been very good at entertaining him, his spiels, his thought processes, the warped, twisting ways in which he’s so very wrong about the world, about other people, about himself. But this makes even Azari raise her eyebrow, egging him to continue without having to use the words - a silent, trepidatious go on.

“It's being used for something it wasn't made for. Maybe it was better at what it was made for, but it does just fine now. And it…” There’s a frustrated pause, in which he wrestles with how best to get his point across. This point that he’s been turning over in his mind all damn week, pacing around it in circles like an animal maddened by hunger - because he tends to need to practice his logic to stand a chance of it being understood, and it brings with it a kind of manic desperation. Sometimes it’s like he has to translate every thought he has into a language he doesn't speak. “It doesn’t ask me why I don’t treat it like any of its owners before me. It doesn’t ask me why it’s not still part of a machine. It certainly won’t punish itself for its inadequacy. The only one who can do that is me.”

He shudders at the absolute wrongness of comparing himself to something absolutely above him, even in a scenario as abstract as this one.

“One day it’ll probably run its course. Be worn too thin in the places it’s useful, and not be useful anymore. I’ll probably throw it out. It won’t care. If it could think, it would probably wonder what it could have done better, and thank me for a time well-served. It won’t anguish over not having been good enough, and it won’t bargain for another chance.”

Azari, still quiet, giving him ample space to drive his point home, watches as he picks the gear up and slots it back into his wallet, and in turn slots his wallet back into his jacket’s lining.

Suddenly Jean is aware that he’s spoken for too long, made stark by their usual arrangement being the exact opposite; Azari asks him questions, and then usually asks him clarifying questions, and then re-phrases her questions in a way that doesn’t make him feel threatened, and then tells him what he needs to do. The only reason he’s stuck this therapy thing out for so long, other than probation hanging a threat of imprisonment over his head like a piano on a rope, is that he’s been mostly successful in re-framing it as such;

a new set of orders, a new way of following them.

It’s led him here. Even the harmless spike-ball in his fist is being gripped so tightly that he can feel the points beginning to bruise into the flesh of his palm, leaving a bone-deep ache that’ll still be there tomorrow.

“...I’ve been unfair.” He sounds so much less sure of himself now, no longer reciting something rehearsed. Vulnerability, even in small amounts, has been such a novel kind of terrifying; not just a nakedness, but a woundedness, a vivisection, carved open and peeled apart and just begging for parts of him to be ripped away by the handful. “To Teddy. In expecting him to be this…amalgamation of everyone who’s ever-”

well-practiced, well-trained, he skips over the word owned, and then the word handled, conversation as a minefield. conversation as a dance,

“-had me before him.”

Recognition passes over Azari’s features like a cloud revealing the sun. “It’s not uncommon to expect, or even crave, mistreatment from non-abusive partners after having been mistreated for so long. I’m not surprised that-”

She’s interrupted not by Jean talking over her - he tries to keep that to a minimum - but by him shaking his head and frowning as though in some kind of pain. “It’s not about mistreatment." I thought you knew. I've told you this. "Nobody’s mistreated me, there was no- It was about purpose. It is about purpose. But it’s clicked. The gear can't just be put back in a machine. I couldn’t do the job I did before, either. But I’m doing this one now, so I need to be good at it. Instead of trying to be good at the old one.”

Azari bundles away the urge to re-assert that he’s not an object, and therein is where this analogy begins to unravel, in favour of pursuing another, less futile, thread. “What is the job you’re doing now?”

It’s not a difficult question, but it’s difficult to gauge which answer to give. Jean is all filter. When he says things that are poorly received, it’s because his concept of right and wrong and good and bad and harmful and benign are so warped that no amount of wrangling with consequences and contingencies could have predicted the poor reception. Every cruelty laid into him had, until the moment he’d divulged them, seemed so normal, so innocuous - and now, only ever met with disgust, with outrage. It’s okay. He’s a quick learner when it counts, and one by one, he learns the things that need to be kept un-divulged. 

The only thing is- Azari is an outlier. Jean can tell when she disapproves of the things he says, when she thinks he’s wrong, or mistaken, or being dishonest; but there’s never disgust, never outrage. She may think of him the way the world outside this office thinks of him, but she certainly expresses it differently. 

She listens. The lack of reprobation cuts just as sharply with her as it does with anyone else - always, always, this heavy throbbing pain in his chest, waiting for bad news that these days never seems to come - but at least she can always muster the courage to look him in the eye, and at least she so rarely hurts on his behalf. He can’t trust her with everything, far from it, but there’s an inkling, there, that she knows what he is, and how he must be handled.

“Whatever’s wanted of me,” he says simply. “I just don’t always know what that is.”

“Your husband loves you.” She’s looking down at her notes, but Jean can tell from the stillness of her eyes that she’s not reading anything. “What’s wanted of you is for you to be happy and healthy, and for you to treat yourself less like a machine, and more like a human being.”

They’ve been over this. They’ve been over this.

But Jean grows weary of trying to correct what has been left so blatantly crooked. Maybe if he keeps righting it, it'll stick in place eventually - but while Pieter instilled in him the resilience, the endurance, the determination to do just about anything over and over and over forever until it works or the sun itself goes cold and dark (whichever comes first), Jean can’t bear to be looked at like some small, broken, weeping thing any longer. It’s always felt wrong. But it’s rasped at his skin for too long, and the bleeding is heavy, and the bones are exposed, and every time someone does it, it feels a little bit like they’re actually, earnestly trying to kill him.

“So I’ve been told.”

Azari sighs. She tries not to sigh at her clients, but sometimes it’s just so hard. 

“You, in your head - you’re the gear.” Long has she been aware that in his winding analogies, he’s always an it - a thing, not a human, never even an animal. His husband, when comparing him to things, has always at least done him the service of imagining him as something living. “You’ve been repurposed for something new. And like the gear, you’ve accepted it, because you think you’re incapable of complaining, or protesting.”

Solemn, he shakes his head. “That’s the problem. I’ve been protesting this whole time.”

Of course- she’s seen it herself- his heels being dug in, while his frayed, sparse support system tries to wrench things from his grip that have only ever caused him unfathomable harm, only sometimes succeeding, but always leaving claw marks behind. Like a dog having poison pried from its jaws, heedless to the fact that it is poison. And she only sees him for an hour a week.

“He asks things of me, sometimes, and I have to decline, because it conflicts with something someone else asked of me, years ago. And this was what always made sense to me. But his orders-” Azari’s eyes practically flash at him from over the coffee table, urging him to course-correct- “-his wishes are more important, because they’re now. I should be pleasing him. Not someone who's been dead for fifteen years.”

There’s a tricky precipice. Azari is at war with what to tell him, as she often is when he stumbles upon the right conclusion for all the wrong reasons. It’s not this that’s the issue; it’s the real risk of him shying away from the revelation if he’s asked to rework his approach to it. If she had known she’d be this stumped, this often, she’d have tried to shrug his case onto someone else’s shoulders.

Not that she’d abandon him now that she knows him, and his family. Jean winds up to try something new.

“Have you ever had something that belongs in the kitchen just end up in the shed one day? A knife, maybe. It’s got oil and paint and all kinds of stuff on it now, and it’s rusty, so you can’t possibly put it back where it came from. It’s not good enough for that anymore. But maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t just want to throw things away, so you put it in an empty plant pot and only ever use it when you need to pry something open.”

He is the knife in this one, too - Azari sees the pattern before it's even conceived. She’s not quiet by choice now, and she keeps her eyes stubbornly on her notebook, knowing how much Jean squirms under a sympathetic gaze.

“Maybe you tell yourself you’ll clean it up and sharpen it and put it back in the kitchen where it belongs.” He’s trailing again, fettered by that fear of being opened up, torn away in handfuls, by fingers less kind than hers. “But it’s never going to happen. It’s easier to get a new one.”

When the silence stretches long enough that Azari’s sure there’s nothing else he wants to say, she leans forward and places her hand palm-up on the table between them, offering contact without expressly asking for it, the only way she’s found Jean’s able to refuse something unwanted. He refuses it now, as he often does, but she still dares speak, despite the ache in her throat. 

“And would you rather be thrown away?”

A pause. She’s almost scared he’s sensed it for a moment, sharp and perceptive and crushingly vigilant as he can be - the pity wringing her dry. It's how he'd see it, but it's not pity. Unbeknownst to Jean, unimaginably to Jean, she doesn’t see him as small or broken or a thing, but as another person in need of help. She’s doing her best to offer it, as is her job, but a little bit beyond that, too. She goes a little bit beyond for everyone who needs it.

“I used to.” The spike ball has been abandoned, his forearm the target of his tension once more. “And if it happens, I’ll let it. But I think what my family needs from me is to stay in the plant pot and occasionally be used to pry something open. That I embrace the purpose I have now, even if it’s not what I was meant for. What I was supposed to be wouldn’t punish itself for that. I won’t, either.”

It’s not music to Azari’s ears. Far from it; an unsteady, discordant heaving and screeching, a whole orchestra tuning their instruments at once. But it’s something, and god help her, something often feels like everything with this one. She withdraws her hand. Together, they reflect, wrap up, and say goodbye.

What goes unsaid is what endures; the unrelenting expectation of that punishment coming from elsewhere. Of that punishment being, unshakeably, the right thing to do. Of her, of his husband, of everyone who has touched his life, being morally wretched in their choice not to strike him down for taking things unowed to him, doing things unowed to him, parading as something, anything, other than a knife in a hand or in a drawer or in an empty plant pot. 

They can, must, see it as clearly as he can. They choose to do nothing about it. As is their right.

But the onus to act on it can be his no longer; perhaps never was his. His punishment is to be carried out by those who command him. He is not to receive what he deserves at his own hand. Perhaps the self-flagellation, marks scored into his back as punishment in the absence of all else, had always been an order misinterpreted, and perhaps he’ll see justice for that too. Perhaps the real punishment was the lack thereof, leaving the knowledge of having done wrong to fester. 

Still festering, all the worse for the unrelenting softness of the hands that now hold his. 

[catch57]

good omens 😐

[cyrantelnovapaleorayeeso]

Vulture should have glasses

[stxnekxng]

This is what they went through. Every second. Every miserable second as claws scrape against dirt, memories he shouldn't recall are burning through his mind. These are the very things that had caused that person to shatter, what would it do to him? A mere ember that was due to go out under the hurricane winds bearing down on him. A prison. Trapped again.

Cracked lips bleed, the beads of red liquid running down his mouth and jaw, dripping off his chin as his throat has long gone dry from numerous protests and screams ripped from his throat. Claws have cracked, broken and bleeding at the edges of his nails, a fine crust of dried blood at his scabbed fingertips. The pads of his claws were long ruined since when that moment had faded. They'd been here, Azure had been here. Who knew what was going on now. Even still, his soul burns. He's on fire again, he's burning from the inside out and he can see his organs through his glowing body. Blood dripping from his mouth, a tainted midnight black color seeping in the edges. Smoke drifting from his nose and the edges of his mouth not occupied in spitting out blood. Was it even blood? Could he be truly injured in here? He's not sure anymore. But one thing solidifies amongst all the memories flashing through his brain, playing out before him as his body begins to give under the weight once again. His ruined body protests, a hoarse scream tearing from the king's torn throat.

This was a fragment of the Diyu. It made sense, to eternally punish those sealed within, it made sense. Every segment of it did, it's no wonder it originally came from there. It's no wonder it found its way to him during that journey, he should recognize a double sided blade when it's thrown his way. He should recognize when he should just give up, he should have just dealt with it, he shouldn't have bended his knee, he shouldn't have fell to their tricks. The throbbing in his skull feels like it's being ripped in half by claws, guttural noises escaping him as he smashes his head against the rocky surface of his prison.

Kill him. Kill me. Please. Someone make it end. Were these thoughts they had too? Tormented so horribly with the memories of the past, tormented by his Visage? One who'd suffered in an entirely different way, perhaps he'd never be able to understand. No. He never would. A foolish idiot. A coward. A liar. A fraud. A traitor. The words are like a brand on his flesh, maybe that's what the symbols still raw and bleeding I his arms are. Titles, words spoken about him from those who suffered. He deserved this. He deserved every second of this. It hadn't even been a day most likely and he wanted to call it quits.

He wanted someone to, for once, look at him. Please look at him and realize. Stop looking for the hero, you won't find that king anywhere. He's been long dead. He killed himself with guilt. The same guilt that was beginning to rip apart the fragment of that mentality. Hoarse noises ripped from the simian as his eyes roll into the back of his head, a blood soaked claw raising towards that single flicker of light. Someone please... even as that flicker goes out and he succumbs to the darkness once more. Voices chanting in his ears. Save me.

[shacklda]

Sold you to a pet store!

[dykeomania]

i was really tired but i’d started reading a book for the first time in a minute and i only had a good chunk of it left so i was like ugh ok i’m gonna finish it let me finish it and then i’ll go t bed and so i Finished It and it turned out to be Ssssuper Grisly and Ssssssuuuuper Personal and Very Uprooting so im sitting here and like my stomach hurts right and usually i’m like ok i can put that into writing i can release all of that energy somewhere else But I Can’t Stay Up Late and Write Out All My Anxiety because i’m kind of a fucking Idiot and scheduled a meeting for the morning that i have to be actually Present for so now i’m just laying in bed with all of this anxiety in my body and absolutely NO WHERE for it to GO!!!!!!!!

[buckeyemiracle]

quincy event.....

[thatswhatsushesaid]

the text of the novel does not support any of this, but it specifically does not support jin guangyao grooming anyone. I'm going to get to that later because even speculating that he 'is not above' that made me feel some kind of way, but I'm not going to start there. I'm going to start at the beginning.

this is wrong. mo xuanyu's reputation for being a lunatic doesn't develop until after he's left jinlintai, and the mo family are the source of these rumours. prior to leaving mo manor at age 14, there is no indication whatsoever of his mental state. whatever he was like, however, the text makes it clear that he changed dramatically upon returning to mo manor.

this is from chapter 1. pre-jinlintai, mo xuanyu's fortunes were as in flux as his mother's, yes, but what kind of person was he? what was his personality like? we don't know, because after this chapter, mo xuanyu does not have a voice in the story anymore. that makes it all the more significant and crucial and essential, imo, to listen to what he says about himself in his own words. and this is what mo xuanyu says: he confesses in his own handwriting to sexually harassing a fellow disciple, which resulted in him being kicked out of jinlintai.

OP, this logic only holds if we know for sure that the harassment happened in private, and the novel does not say one way or the other. if this harassment happened in public with witnesses, then there is very little that a master spin artist (which I do not believe jin guangyao actually is) could do about it. the text does not tell us anything about the circumstances of this harassment, only that it occurred, and that lots of other people know about it. that means it is entirely plausible that the harassment occurred in such a way that either pretending it did not happen, or preventing the rumour mill from doing what it does best, just were not options. which does, tragically, mean that jin guangyao likely was highly triggered by this experience for the reasons you mention!

...yeah, everyone knows that it happened, including the maid who is serving wei wuxian during their jinlintai visit:

maybe everyone, including the staff who do not mingle socially with the gentry, know about this because they saw it happen. there's nothing in the text that asserts this incident occurred in private. I'm kicking this horse's fierce corpse over and over again just to drill home the point that jin guangyao does not have to be the source of these rumours.

okay, now I'm going to talk about the stuff that really upset me about your post:

good!! I am glad we are in agreement that /gestures @ this, all of that makes no sense, because it doesn't. so why, why, why say any of this:

stop. ✋ we are going to stop the car right here because when you make an assertion like this, that you don't "think jgy is necessarily above that kind of creepy grooming behaviour," this is the kind of assertion that you need to back up with evidence from the text. so where is it? the onus is on you to show the excerpts from the novel that lead you to feel like this is something jin guangyao is capable of. if you can't, then why are you stating that he could be capable of this? what is compelling you to Go There with this specific character, if you can't present evidence to support the claim from the text?

/exhale, okay. moving on.

this is absolutely the kind of story where that would be true, because this is also the kind of story where a man who grew up the impoverished son of a sex worker, who saw firsthand what the life of a sex worker was like (see wwx's empathy flashback of little meng yao throwing himself between meng shi and a john who is abusing her), who loves and respects and works doggedly to remain filial to her even after her death, nevertheless turns around and forces a bunch of sex workers to literally rape his father to death. mxtx will absolutely write characters who are victims of circumstance who still turn around and do bad things.

mo xuanyu said he sexually harassed a disciple, in one of the only opportunities he gets in the novel to actually express himself in his own words. you do raise an interesting point further down that I think is worth exploring, but I also think it is extremely important that we not just... disregard mo xuanyu's ownership over his actions. he believes he did this.

you haven't demonstrated jin guangyao did anything to mo xuanyu's credibility because you haven't provided anything grounded in the text. everything so far has been speculation, and much of that speculation is grounded in an inaccurate read of when mo xuanyu's reputation for lunacy begins.

how has jin guangyao demonstrated an MO for willingly associating himself with scandal, ever? he goes to great lengths to cover up any sign of his involvement with anything that could potentially make him for the jin sect look bad especially after he becomes chief cultivator. somewhat infamously, and I'm paraphrasing here, he tells xue yang in the villainous friends extra that he's free to wreck as many shopping stalls in lanling city as he likes, but he'd better not do it while wearing the jin sect colours. his MO is the opposite of courting scandal.

again, from chapter 1 as wei wuxian is making his way through the written notes that mo xuanyu left behind. there is no reason for jin guangyao to fabricate any rumours about mo xuanyu's mental state, because mo xuanyu's mental state is patently obvious to his entire family.

so now we're getting to the questions you pose near the end of your post and I honestly just... think the most straight-forward answer is the obvious one.

idk, maybe because jin guangyao didn't deliberately ruin mo xuanyu's life, and mo xuanyu knows it?

So like, I'm pretty darn sure Mo Xuanyu did not actually make a pass at Jin Guangyao.

For several reasons, like for one thing hitting on your own actual brother who is also your boss is genuinely insane behavior, in a way nothing else we know about the guy actually matches, other than his reputation for being crazy which mostly seems to originate from the same point as the sexual harassment allegations. which tracks because even with rampant societal homophobia, that's such a crazy thing to do people would question it if it didn't come paired with the information that he's insane.

Then there's the fact that if that had actually happened, there's basically no way master spin artist jgy would have let it get out, because actually experiencing that would trigger his sense-of-uncleanliness issues so hard.

But what we see is that somehow Everyone Knows that it happened, but also that Jin Guangyao totally didn't tell anyone, because he's too merciful and kind and respectable. It just mysteriously leaked somehow that this private scandal happened.

(Also, to step up a meta level, the gay goth kid who was never quite accepted into his own family and wound up self-destructing was in fact guilty of the homophobic allegations spread by the powerful man who manipulates reputation for personal advantage? This is not the kind of story where that would be true. The thematic dissonance is too much.)

The only way it's believable that mxy made a move on jgy is if jgy spent a long time maneuvering him into it, hinting and deniably flirting and just generally being maximum skeeze, just a huge elaborate incestuous honeypot, just to bait a 'ruined reputation' trap. Which makes no sense at all.

I don't think jgy is necessarily above that kind of creepy grooming behavior but I do think he would hate it, and definitely wouldn't resort to it when sowing rumors would work just as well. and expose him to less risk.

So Mo Xuanyu didn't do it.

So what we've got is that Jin Guangyao systematically obliterated this kid's credibility.

No one would listen to anything he said after being expelled in that sort of context, especially anything against Jin Guangyao, whom he now has obvious motive to smear. This was a preemptive strike against some kind of leak.

It's exactly the kind of thing jgy would do--it targets individual vulnerability, leverages the weak points in Mo Xuanyu's reputation into gaping chasms, in a way that associates jgy with scandal but makes him personally look better. also shows signs of jgy projecting his own issues onto others. The MO fits.

And his motive is easy to construct: Mo Xuanyu had had access to his secrets, such as Wei Wuxian's manuscripts and probably a lot of the other ugly shit. And Jin Guangyao needed him silenced, due to some thing or other, but as with SiSi didn't want to have to kill him.

(A fascinating thing about jgy as a villain is the moments where he yields to sentiment pretty consistently contribute to his destruction.)

But then we come around to: so why didn't Mo Xuanyu sic Wei Wuxian on Jin Guangyao, then?

In cql wwx does have a curse cut for jgy, to keep him in the plot and create an additional open storyline to resolve, since viewers are gonna be denied romantic catharsis, but in cql the homophobia plotline isn't there because all the gay is censored, and mxy allegedly hit on qin su instead. which is less utterly unhinged to do though still big wtf.

In the book, mxy summoned the Yiling Patriarch just to kill the Mos. (Which he didn't even do lmao.)

So I've always been sort of poking at that, like if you're destroying your own soul to get revenge, why spare the person who deliberately ruined your life?

Even if he had done the thing, it was weird! Maybe even weirder; if you're in a headspace where making sexual advances anyone should be able to predict are unwelcome seems like a good idea in the first place, there's a pretty good chance getting punished for them isn't going to make you think you were in the wrong. Otoh there is a zone where he could have done it, gotten the backlash, cleared his head a bit, realized it was fucked up to do, and therefore not held a grudge in that particular direction, but it's still weird. (And also he definitely didn't do the thing.)

But if he was so angry, why was he not angry at Jin Guangyao? Who definitely kicked him out of the Sect, all else aside?

And then I looked at the passage in Jin sect where we swap to Jin Ling's pov and he tells us one of the few first-hand things we hear about Mo Xuanyu: He thought Jin Guanyao was the most amazing person in the whole world. He adored him.

And being betrayed and rejected by him didn't turn that into resentment. Even though he resented the other side of his family enough to want them gratuitously murdered.

So you know what I think happened?

I think Mo Xuanyu thinks it was an honest misunderstanding. That Jin Guangyao, his idol, falsely concluded that his gay little brother was creeping on him based on a misinterpretation of his admiring behavior, and was appropriately revolted. And that Mo Xuanyu doesn't blame him for it. He blames himself.

He went back to his mother's family to rot genuinely feeling like the ruination of his life was his own fault for being creepy. And died like that.

Because of that, to a considerable extent. How can you bend any of your will to saving yourself, to getting out of an abusive situation and seeking a better one, when you don't think you deserve to be saved?

Fucks me up.