#fell for one of my best friends and have a complicated (non-exclusive) relationship with him even when he told me he's not in love with me

[potato-elf]

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[mira--mira]

Hi!

I was wondering if it would be too much trouble to know how Kou and Tajima met and fell in love 👀👉🏽👈🏽

I LOVE THEM

They're so precious and I love Kou, she is a badass

Of course?? I love Kou and Tajima I'd love to talk about them more lol 😂💖

Do you have a specific version/AU you want to know about? There's a general theme but since Kou is an oc I take a lot of liberties AU to AU (hogwarts au and BoaF are quite different lol), but I'll focus on the general gist and OoT specifically since that's the monster fic.

So first and foremost, no matter what AU Kou is in her parents are as "normal" as normal gets with the Uchiha. They're the closest things to civilians as the Uchiha have and they are by no means powerful. (In OoT, Kou had a younger twin sister too.) Kou was an early prodigy and swung between taking herself too seriously (like Madara) and periods of intense pranking when the pressure got too much (like most versions of Izuna I write).

Kou was almost exclusively focused on training, it was Tajima that that wanted to be friends first and then pursue something more. One of my favorite, and completely unsubstantiated, headcanons is that Tajima was quite the romantic, and amateur poet, as a teenager. He had a huge crush on Kou and constantly tried to impress her, quoting a lot of his original works every time she was around (Izuna gets his creativity from Tajima). Kou liked it and she liked him, but she didn't really get what a crush is or what to do about it. So one day she threw a sword at Tajima’s feet and demanded he fight her properly so she could win and stop thinking about his stupid face all the time. (I’m toying with the idea of having Madara tell this story in-fic and Hashirama have a sudden realization that there were a lot of times Madara would demand to fight him out of nowhere, even if they’d finished sparring for the day. Madara takes after Kou. A lot.)

Tajima did duel her, and he did lose, but it didn't stop Kou from thinking about his stupid face lol. Kou was very awkward in their first stages of dating. She was a mess and had no idea how to act. She'd show up out of nowhere and demand Tajima do random things with her: chores, training, standing together and talking, etc., (not at all the Uchiha's usual methodical courtship rituals) and he was smitten enough that he'd do it. Kou also had an early growth spurt and wasn't by any means a small woman (Madara got his short genes from his paternal grandmother, Kou stood at 5'11 (180 cm~) an inch taller than Tajima) and on their third "official" date she grabbed Tajima and pulled him off his feet to kiss him after he barely got a greeting out. If she had any ability to use katons in OoT, she would have set herself on fire in that moment.

They were teenage sweethearts that grew out of the awkward stage and completely smitten puppy love stage into a solid relationship built on mutual respect that only strengthened when the war picked up and both of them had to make hard decisions and then leaned on each other for support. The war hardened Tajima out of his obvious romantic inclinations but Kou was his one true love that he allowed himself to share everything with. Kou got over (most) of her awkwardness and settled into an unconventional but loving relationship. Kou's approach to love and affection could best be described as a friendly cat trying to bring a human presents. This isn't something Madara would know so it hasn't really been addressed in fic, but that's the reason per se that Kou loved her broken magatama necklace more than any other and refused to let Tajima make another "proper" one. There were a lot of similar incidents in their marriage, tbh.

Tajima broke when Kou died. He respected her choice, would have done the same if their roles were reversed, but he lost the love of his life, his partner, his equal. Because of the Uchiha's complicated relationship with love generally those that can find it in their heart to "love again" are considered blessed (this also applies to non-romantic relationships, having more children, more friends, accepting new siblings, parents, etc.) but Tajima wasn't one of the "lucky ones". I think there's a line somewhere in OoT where Madara says something like "~part of Tajima died with her~" and is going to be brought up again later as a quite literal reference to the Uchiha's ability to love. They love more deeply than any other clan but sometimes it has unintended repercussions.

[laurasinele]

A Fictober19 Harringrove drabble + a story of survival and awareness

Written for Fictober19 prompt 20: “You could talk about it, you know”

Harringrove fanfic (Stranger Things) + the real life experience that inspired it

WARNING: PAST RAPE/SEX ABUSE (the present is mostly fluff)

DMs on the subject are welcome

I honestly had no idea what to do with this. I'm working on each prompt on the same day or the day before, though I try to decide the theme and basic plot about four days prior to publication. I had absolutely no idea about this one. My husband suggested to make it chapter 3 of Magpies, but in that one neither Draco nor Harry are bottling things up, so this line didn't really fit there. Then, yesterday, the 19th, something unpleasant happened to me and I decided I could use this prompt as an outlet. I went through my ships and the idea of pouring myself in my headcanon of Billy Hargrove became strong (mind you. I have not seen season 3, and I am aware things get complicated in that one to say the least, but let me bask into my post-season 2 repressed and traumatised baby who finds solace and love and understanding in Steve’s superhuman empathy and general gorgeousness). 

Click the link for the fic, what follows is the personal experience that inspired it, which you can also find in the fic’s chapter 2.

I am a sex abuse victim. The abuse took place in the form of repetitive non consensual sex in the context of an established relationship, through guilt-tripping mostly, on occasion by overpowering me physically. 

The guilt-tripping went as follows: up until I was 22 my sex-drive used to be well above average. Now I know it was due to a hormonal unbalance and the hypomanic stages of my now diagnosed type II bipolar disorder. Back then, I saw it as a very defining trait of my identity, as I felt free, empowered and connected with my body and my lovers. 

I said lovers because I had several of them simultaneously. Everybody was informed and agreed to it. Some of them were and still are friends of mine and between them. It was all open, honest and healthy. 

My relationship with my abuser started with him being one of those lovers. Then, evolved into an “official” relationship, but still open. In a natural way, he became my only relationship, as the others either started exclusive relationships or had schedules incompatible with mine, while my boyfriend studied with me and I spent most of the time at his parent’s place to avoid the continued low-key psychological and emotional abuse of my father, but that’s another story.

Still, even though none of us was seeing anyone else, we agreed that our relationship was open. At one point, I mentioned I was planning on meeting one of my past lovers. Just meeting, nothing I said suggested there was going to be any kind of intimacy. He got angry. He didn’t lash out and, after a while of sulking, he reasoned that our relationship was still open but he was not comfortable with the idea of me meeting that particular person because there had been a romantic relationship, and he was willing to have and let me have other sexual relationships but not romantic ones. We debated cordially for a while and I accepted his point. Flash forward several months later at my faculty’s cantina: a very good friend, who actually became my lover later on in my life, and is not anymore but is still a very close friend, started to flirt with me jokingly, as we usually did. My boyfriend joined us at our table, we kept our conversation peppered with compliments and pick up lines and, at some point, it got hot. And it was okay, it was public knowledge that my boyfriend and I were polyamorous. My friend and I accompanied my boyfriend to meet a professor and, along the way, we were making plans for the afternoon. My boyfriend had something to do, at what rose the possibility of hanging out with my friend and see where all the spicy talk went. My boyfriend had been encouraging us and playing matchmaker all the while, and he said something along the lines of “sure, go ahead”, but when my friend and I started to discuss the logistic he got nervous. We noticed and exchanged worried looks, slowing the conversation down a notch. It was all very natural and open up until that moment, but the change in the mood was so obvious that I finally asked what was wrong. He said he wasn’t comfortable with me fucking one of my best mates because, well, he knew the guy. I couldn’t believe it at first. I remembered the first restriction: no ex-boyfriends. Now, not people that we both know. Because he said it in front of my friend, and my friend knew me quite well and recognised the look in my face as more than mildly annoyed, he hurried to say it was okay with him and asked me if I could still give him a lift. That way I avoided an argument with my boyfriend on the topic of “Is this restricting our openness as a couple becoming a trend?”. Not other prospects rose for me nor for him, and we never discussed exclusiveness again. 

Not long after that incident, I fell into a depression. Both the depressive state and the anti-depressants affected my libido enormously. I was practically never in the mood for sex. Sometimes I willingly made an effort when he initiated it, but I realised the experiences were not comfortable for me and forcing myself was only making it more difficult to get my sex-drive back. I explained this. He said it made sense. Next night he tried again. I said no. This went on for a couple of weeks. Then he got, not angry but, dramatic, and said he had lots of trust and self-esteem issues and, that if we didn’t have sex, he felt as if I didn’t love him. I explained for the umptenth time, and emphasized that he already knew this, that my low sex drive was a chemical catastrophe in my brain and had nothing to do with my love for him. That, if something, it was challenging my self perception, as I had identified with my sexuality and explored it confidently and freely from a very, very early age. This was hurting me as much or more as it was hurting him. He calmed down for another week or two. He brought the “I feel like you don’t love me anymore” discourse again. I decided to have sex with him that night. It was awful. I didn’t came nor wanted to. He insisted on making me. He stopped trying with his fingers when I closed my legs, since my words didn’t seem to be enough. That night passed and others came. I said no, he said yes, I said no, he was almost 6’5 feet tall (2 meters) and his hand was bigger than my face. He opened my legs by force (I think he thought it was roleplaying). That made me freeze and I let him have his way. I still tried to say no every next time. I eventually stopped saying yes or no. I just layed there. 

Now, when I started to tell this story to people, the most common first question was: why did you keep going to his place to sleep? The answer is simple: I did not see it as something as bad as going home and facing the tension and scorn and yells from my father. In the great scheme of things, I know now that what my boyfriend did was worse but, because of its duration in time and newness, the situation at my home felt much more real and unbearable. I still didn’t realize what my boyfriend was doing was rape. I just thought we had things to talk about and the moment to do so never came.

The first time I called it by its name it was like an epiphany. For some reason I remember it was March, and I remember I told him: “You’ve been doing it for six months”. We had an argument for an entirely different reason that I don't remember and it evolved into the fact that lately we were constantly arguing. I kept trying to get somewhere in that particular argument because it kept going in circles: he pointed out problems and I kept saying those weren’t what was wrong with us. He asked impatiently and loudly what was it then. And I bursted out, and I didn’t even know the words were inside me, I didn’t had the notion before talking: “Our problem is that you’ve been raping me for six months. You’ve been doing it for six months, and I say no, and you keep going at it and in the end I stopped saying no because it was easier than risking to get hurt. And so I can’t trust you anymore and that's why snap at you for everything”. 

He was horrified. He covered his mouth with his hand and became pale. He seated and whispered “It’s true. This is horrible. This is horrible, horrible. This is horrible.” He kept repeating that word. I told him I had never known it was rape until I said it outloud and that, now that we both knew, it had to stop. He was disgusted with himself and he stopped. For a couple of weeks. 

I never told him again what he was doing. I grew more and more wary of saying no. I just rolled with it: the non consensual sex and the relationship itself. That summer we ended it civilly, because there wasn't a moment we weren't at each other's throats, and we still remembered that we used to be friends. He had even pushed me against his wardrobe to make me shut up once. So we thought breaking up for good, and this is important, he specifically said “for good” and we agreed, was our best option. 

Then began the gaslighting. I don't know if it was intentional or he is actually that delusional. I had buried the fact that none or almost none of the sex I had had in the last year had been consensual, and moved on with my life. He was still my classmate, one of my closest friends and a constant presence in my social life. I told everyone to support him specially because I'd had more experience in breakups while he was more emotionally unstable in general (and everyone knew this for a fact). 

One day, two friends came to visit me to the store I managed. They asked how was I doing and I said I was fine, that in the end it was obvious that we could not be a couple. They exchanged disconcerted looks. "That's not what he's saying. He's telling everyone you've taken three months off and then you'll be back together". I was beyond shocked, specially by the specificity of it. Three months, he was saying. When they saw my reaction it was like opening a dam. They started to list all the apparently uncharacteristic things he was doing: he was drinking alcohol (he never did before), he was hard-core hitting on everyone, he was always trying to make plans with everybody and he would always talk about himself over any other thing. 

In the span of a few months, he got a girlfriend and dumped her in a very ugly fashion. Two days prior to their breakup, their love was all over his Facebook, and right before leaving for a job abroad he dumped her telling her openly that he didn't love her. By then, our interactions were minimal and I had been starting to flinch whenever  he touched me, but I didn't pay much thought to it until this breakup and a very unfortunate line he threw on me. There was a farewell party for him and, at the end of it, he approached me and said that now that he was single again we could fuck every now and then. I felt cold all over and then fiery fury. I remember clenching my fists. I dismissed his offer politely but sternly, reminding him, as it had been nothing, that there had been issues between us regarding consent. He didn't seem much bothered by my answer. Later on I learned he was telling people he had gone abroad to fuck, so I guess my negative wasn't a big deal at the moment. After that night, "He used to rape me” was always on my mind, every single someone mentioned him, I saw a picture of him or he contacted me. 

I decided to tell, and only to very few people, and still excusing him, when it was too obvious that I was avoiding him, and when I began to have trouble to trust my sex partners. I stopped excusing him eventually, but I never fully blamed him (not that I blamed myself). Years later, I had another boyfriend and I met a girl through him. We became friends, and at some point she told me she had just met a guy. It was my ex. There were months of debating between telling her or not. I settled for “he’s one for long term relationships”, since she prefered no strings attached. However, as she put it, she fell in love. Time passed, my relationship with the man that had introduced us ended, and so my meetings with her where more sporadic. In one of those, she told me she already knew what he did to me. That he had told her. So he knew why I stopped talking to him. 

I talked less and less with this girl, mostly through Facebook. At some point in time he and I exchanged messages. He wanted to talk, I was open to it but in a bad moment so I told him I needed to sort things out first. Never contacted again.

Almost four years ago, she got pregnant. I had assumed, since they’d been together for so long, that what he did to me was an isolated event. I met them to give them a baby shower present. I’d rather have met her alone but I had no time to meet her in Barcelona and she couldn’t drive, so he came along. It was the first time I saw him in years. She left us alone for a while. I asked if the baby was planned. He told me excitedly that it had been a whim after a woman they had just met in a party had told them what a nice couple they were and that they should have children, because some friends of hers had just become parents and it was wonderful. He told me how, when they got home, he picked up a condom an announced it was the last one he was using. He mocked his girlfriend saying “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know” to that, and told me he said “You know what? I’m not using this one either”. And that night she got pregnant. On my 9 months pregnant friend’s mock-indignant words “This one knocked me up!”. I was horrified. I could not understand how they didn’t see how wrong that was. Never met them again. 

Three years ago I saw a picture of the baby doing something cute on Facebook. I hit like without thinking. I had nothing but warm feelings towards the mother. A few days later she wrote a long private message through Facebook saying she needed to cut ties with me because of her baby’s father situation with me. She said I hadn’t wanted to fix things with him when we met last time, and that he came, according to her, so he and I could talk. I was going through a lot: had just lost my job in a project that was practically my creation, had just started managing a store, my husband’s mum was sick with cancer in another town 600 miles away (1000km) and my husband had flown there, and I was left cancelling reservations and calling the guests to our wedding that had been supposed to be in three months from that moment. Less than a week before that message, I had to go to ER because I spent the whole day with tachycardia. So I told her my situation, that I valued her friendship, and I asked to meet later on that month to talk about it. She agreed.

Two days later I was at work, alone, breathing consciously because of my constant anxiety. I got another message from her. It started: “I can’t be friends with someone who thinks my man is a rapist”. I got very angry. I told her I didn’t thought he was, but I knew what he did to me. She talked about it as if it was a lie, when we had both, the three of us actually, existed in a universe where we all agreed it was real. She said he had lost friends because of it. Our common friends that knew what had happened between us had distanced themselves from him, reportedly, because of his new self-centered, party animal, sex-obsessed attitude. I’d had enough. I thought I had it all wrapped up, I ended my day at work and drove to a seaside town to celebrate a friend’s birthday. There, I only told the birthday boy the reason of me changing my mind over attending or not. So, when shit happened, he was the only one who guessed where it came from.

I took my phone out to take a picture of our group, but saw the notifications of audio messages from Facebook Messenger, from my abuser. I walked away to listen to them. I was calm, I assumed he’d be apologising. I opened the first one and it was three seconds of silence and then my name in his voice and his tone was furious. My knees gave up, I leaned against a light post and slid down until I sat on the floor. The next words were “I am very indignant. How can you say I am a rapist?”. Then he proceeded to insult me, blame my father of everything, say I was laughing at real rape victims face, accusing me of having raped him… I fell in hysterics and doubted myself. I thought for a moment it was my fault. Now, the birthday boy was the friend my abuser had banned me from having sex with, and he was also one of the two friends that came to see me at work and told me that my ex was saying we were getting back in three months. The other friend was also there. They both knew and they both, when they finally understood what was going on, prevented me from listening to the rest of the audio messages (and more kept coming), and told me I wasn’t imagining things. They told me it happened and they told me I wasn’t a liar. The panic came and went for a long while. I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t look at my friends, more than a half of which didn’t know what happened back then and what was happening now. I ended crying in a friends shoulder saying “I should have strangled him”. This episode kick-started almost 3 years of severe depression and anxiety, unemployment and relationship crisis, from which I’ve been recovering only for the last six or nine months. And, in case you haven’t thought of it, I still was having trouble trusting my sex partner when this happened, so I still needed to reconstruct my identity separated from my sexuality. 

Through 8 years of my adult life, this is something that has been following me, that I’ve tried to manage on my own, and that he has had no remorse in bringing back when his life wasn’t going well. After his audio messages, I learnt that he and his girlfriend were swinging with a couple who I had only met once, being friends of a friend. I asked my common friend to not say anything about my relationship to my abuser and she answered “Too late. He told my friend about everything”. I asked, because I wasn’t sure and I didn’t understand. My friend confirmed that “everything” meant he told my friend’s friend he had been my boyfriend and he had raped me repeatedly. I was puzzled and disgusted. It had just been months since the audios, since him denying it. This friend of a friend is now closer to me and my husband, cut ties with him and has never mentioned it to me.

This last indirect connection with him was about three years ago. I live in a small historic village near Barcelona. As far as I know, my past abuser lives in Barcelona and does not know where I live. Yesterday, I was sitting at a cafe’s terrace with my husband and my dog, telling my husband how amazed I was by the response to the Merlin/Arthur drabble being it such an old fandom, when I lifted my head from my phone screen and I saw him, with two more people, in tourist gear. I was wearing big sunglasses, and I stopped talking, hoping he wouldn’t recognise me behind them, but he was looking at me. He looked like he wanted to say hi, and veered towards me. I stammered a bit but kept saying what I was saying to my husband, pointedly looking at my abuser with a very serious face and tone.I waited just for a beat for him to change his mind and stop looking at me, and walk past my table without stopping. I told my husband. He congratulated me on my reaction and offered to get me a second breakfast pastry. 

My abuser passed again near our table with his partners, and this time he didn’t glance at us. I had my heart hammering a hole through my ribcage and I was angry that I had not yelled at him, that I had not hit him, that I had not finished it. Then I realised that, although now I am physically and emotionally exhausted, it is because of the sudden trip back and forth in time and the mental exertion it caused since I am bipolar and hence more sensitive to this things. It was not because I am not over him and what he did. I didn’t had to finish it because it had finished already, sometime in the last three years, and I did it just by investing in myself and my loved ones, just by not having my abuser’s ominous presence obscuring it all. Just by speaking up. Just by avoiding hatred and toxicity and choosing healthy affection, honesty and trust. 

If it happened to you, or is still happening, say it. Say it to your abuser, to the people who loves you, to those who love them. Tell the authorities, tell as many people as you can. Put space between you and the facts, between you and your abuser. The first person you need to help and save is you. Talk to someone, anyone, but don’t shut it down. Don’t keep it hidden because it rots.

[postgamecontent]

The RPGs of the Super NES Classic #2: Super Mario RPG - Legend of the Seven Stars

Original Release Date: March 9, 1996 (JPN)

Original Hardware: Nintendo Super Famicom

Developer/Publisher: Square/Nintendo

There was a time where the idea of Mario being in a role-playing game was absolutely bizarre. Now that Mario's had several turns at the genre it's not nearly as outlandish a concept, but just about everyone I knew who was into games at the time was quite surprised by the mere existence of Super Mario RPG. Looking at it from a Japanese perspective, it's not that strange, I suppose. RPGs were hot, parody RPGs were already a thing, and Mario wasn't any more out of place than Doraemon or Godzilla. In the West, though, things were different. Console RPGs were about to break out on the back of an incredible marketing campaign from Sony for Final Fantasy 7 and the meteoric success of Pokemon, but they weren't there yet. The ones we did get typically fell into the fantasy genre, with the odd science-fiction game to mix things up. The best-known console RPGs were heavy on melodrama and usually played things reasonably straight. So yes, the news of the Final Fantasy folks making an RPG starring Nintendo's mascot kind of came out of nowhere.

Super Mario RPG represented the culmination of what was seen as one of Nintendo's closest relationships with a third party. Square had been peddling their wares almost exclusively on Nintendo's hardware for quite some time to great success. From Nintendo's perspective, having both of the major RPG publishers in Japan on their platforms exclusively was a real boon, and Nintendo had even gone so far as to publish Final Fantasy overseas to try to get it off the ground in the West, just as they had tried to do with Dragon Quest. It was in pursuit of that Western success that Super Mario RPG was born. Square had been trying hard to get the Western console audience to bite on RPGs the way their Japanese counterparts had. They pushed the Final Fantasy brand as widely as was possible for a company of their means, made a spin-off that served as a beginner RPG, and even tried setting up an American development team. Perhaps what they needed, it was surmised, was an established star. For Nintendo's part, Shigeru Miyamoto had apparently been interested in seeing Mario star in an RPG. The deal was made and Super Mario RPG entered development early in 1995.

Sadly, this game would prove to be the last collaboration between Nintendo and Square for quite some time. Scant months before the official release of Super Mario RPG, Square made the announcement that changed the entire video game landscape in Japan and arguably the world. Final Fantasy 7 would be their most ambitious project yet, and it was coming exclusively to Sony's new PlayStation platform rather than Nintendo's Nintendo 64. To say Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, did not take this announcement well would be an understatement of the highest order. It would be several years before Nintendo and Square would mend fences and do business together again. What should have been a celebration of a great on-going business relationship ended up being its eulogy instead.

While Super Mario RPG wasn't exactly the game to break down the JRPG walls in the West, it did do fairly well for itself considering how late it released in the Super NES's life cycle. It turned out that with some careful considerations, Mario was a really great fit for a light-hearted RPG that would appeal more widely than the usual game in the genre. Of course, with the relationship soured with Square, Nintendo went in a very different direction for their next RPG starring Mario. Intelligent Systems drew some ideas from Super Mario RPG for their Paper Mario RPG on the Nintendo 64, but it was very much its own thing on the whole. Meanwhile, several former Square employees, many of whom had worked on Super Mario RPG, set up their own new studio called AlphaDream in 2000. Headed by Square's former president Tetsuo Mizuno, the team self-published just one game before beginning a long-term second-party relationship with Nintendo, the greatest fruits of which being the Mario & Luigi series of RPGs.

For a lot of English gamers, Super Mario RPG was their first experience with Japanese RPGs or even RPGs in general. I've noticed there is a lot of affection for the game and its characters, with many of its fans believing that the Mario RPGs never got better than this. I can appreciate that perspective, but I'm not sure that I'd agree with it. The game was attempting a very unusual hybrid of mechanics and themes, and it doesn't always work out for the best. As we would similarly see in the later Kingdom Hearts series, there's a little bit too much Square in here at times. By that I mean the game occasionally feels decidedly unlike Mario, sliding into odd bouts of melodrama and opting for a slightly darker tone than we would see in later Mario RPGs. The pacing is a little hit-or-miss, too. That all being said, I have tremendous respect for this game simply for being largely successful at navigating the tumultuous waters of mixing a beloved side-scrolling action mascot and his world with turn-based battles and leveling up.

Outside of battles, the game didn't do anything particularly unusual by action-RPG standards. The game takes on an isometric perspective and involves a fair bit of platforming and navigational puzzles. These are all things we've seen before, even among the limited selection of games I've covered on this very site. The angled view of the action can make things somewhat tricky as usual, but Super Mario RPG is wise enough not to ask too much of the player in this regard. Anything truly maddening is relegated to optional content, ensuring that even a moderately-skilled player will be able to see the story through. Battles take place in a separate screen, and basically follow the turn-based rules of games like Dragon Quest or earlier Final Fantasy titles. The big innovation here was in including timing-based commands that, if successfully performed, could increase the amount of damage you deal to enemies or reduce the damage you take.

It was a smart way to bring a little bit of familiarity to a situation foreign to action game fans. Sure, you had to pick what Mario was going to do from a menu, but when he leaps into the air to jump on an enemy's head, carefully-timed button presses will allow him to bounce off of his foe's head and keep on going, just like in the platform games. This semi-action based combat would become the hallmark of Mario RPGs, with increasingly complicated mini-games introduced as time went on. Aside from pulling some of the action elements from the platformers into the game, these commands also kept the players fingers busy during battles. For players turned off by how hands-off many RPGs tended to be, this was a welcome element.

There's something else I have to give Super Mario RPG credit for, too. Namely, this is the game that started to flesh out Mario's world and the characters who inhabit it. This game was Princess Peach's second playable appearance in a non-sports game, and the first playable appearance of Mario's frequent foil, Bowser Koopa. The villainous king of the Koopas had never been presented as anything other than a nefarious bad guy before this game. Here, we saw a somewhat-likable oaf who was more egotistical than evil. This would eventually lead to Koopa starring in his own RPG in the third Mario & Luigi game, and certainly did a lot to endear the character to players. Mario's party is rounded out by new characters Mallow and Geno, who seem to have gone over a lot better with players in general than they did with me.

Beyond the playable cast, we also got a lot of world-building that allowed us to see the Mushroom Kingdom and other locales in ways we hadn't before. A village of Toads, the resident staff of Peach's castle, and even seeing Koopa interact with his henchmen all helped contextualize the platformers we had been playing for years. The game also features numerous nods to other Nintendo properties, to an extent that no other Nintendo title had done before. Do Samus and Link exist in the same universe as Mario? Smash eventually tells us that they sort of do, somehow, but it's first suggested in Super Mario RPG. Sure, it's just a bit of silly fun, but it was neat if you were a fan of Nintendo's wider world of releases.

My own experience with this game is somewhat strange. I bought the game the day it released for just over $100 Canadian, a typical price for Super NES games at the time. I blasted through the game over a three-day weekend, and having little desire to replay it, sold it on to a friend for $95. I was already a big fan of Japanese RPGs by this point, and I found Super Mario RPG to be a little too lightweight for my liking. To be fair, it was following a stretch of RPG releases that included Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. There was only so much it could do. To be honest, very little of the game stuck with me at all. I first replayed it a few years ago when it got released on the Wii Virtual Console. It's a little clunky, and the art really hasn't aged well at all, but the core gameplay is solid enough. It's simultaneously more in some ways and less in others compared to the later Mario & Luigi games.

The game doesn't quite have its tone properly set, for one thing. It feels torn between trying to reconcile the silly nature of Mario's universe with an actual RPG-length plot. Later games in the series would pull back somewhat on trying to develop characters, instead opting for a greater emphasis on events and comedy to stretch things out. That gives Super Mario RPG a feel quite unlike other Mario RPGs, if nothing else. It also feels less confident in venturing too far outside of RPG norms in some ways. The various party members feel in a mechanical sense like the usual templates, something future games would expend a lot of effort to break away from. Still, there's some comfort in Super Mario RPG's embrace of the familiar. I'm not sure if this makes much sense, but if I'm in the mood for an RPG, this game does the job better than the later Mario RPGs in spite of their generally higher quality.

Given its slightly complicated rights issues (the game contains some Final Fantasy music among other bits), I'm glad that Nintendo has made it somewhat readily available through multiple Virtual Console releases and its inclusion in the Super NES Classic. While I don't think of it as highly as some others, it is one of the better Super NES RPGs to get an English translation. It's still a lot of fun, and trying to play the original game on today's TVs can be tough due to latency issues interfering with the timing of battle commands. I suspect that so long as things remain friendly between Square and Nintendo, Super Mario RPG should continue to see releases wherever Nintendo opts to plumb their back library. I only wish it had seen a Virtual Console release on the New Nintendo 3DS so that we could have the whole Mario (& Luigi) RPG series playable on a single console.

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Next: Secret of Mana

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[xialing-gf]

broken hearts club: chapter 3 (peter parker x reader )

summary: it’s hard to love somebody who’ll never love you back

wc: 1.339

loosely based on the song “ the broken hearts club” by gnash

chapter 1//chapter 2

“Nothing will happen, right? Promise me,” You sighed, impatiently crossing your arms as you waited for Peter to conclude the dialogue he and Liz only recited around you for the thousandth time.

“I promise. Okay, now go have some fun!” Peter kissed Liz one last time before she left the apartment. Once he closed the door, you launched into your usual fussy mood.

“C’mon Peter, you know what I’m going to say,” You fell backward onto the couch and glared at the black TV screen, waiting for him to recite your standard response to Liz’s insecurities.

“I know, I know, I know. ‘You could do so much better than her. Why do you put up with her?’ You already know the answer to that,” Peter sat down next to you, his eyes meeting yours, not showing any emotion in his expression. You had a harder reading his feelings ever since he had to start to push you away due to Liz’s complaints that you two were ‘too close for her liking’. He’d changed for her and seemed to genuinely love Liz, while she appeared to only want compliments and comfort from him.

“It’s not that simple.’ How much more complicated could it get? You either are both in love or not. She doesn’t have to keep asking you if you’re in love with her or not. Plus, I have the human decency to not hook up with a guy who already has a girlfriend,” You rolled your eyes, turning the TV on by clicking the green button on the remote. Even before Liz found out you were accepted into NYU, she consistently bugged Peter about the fact you came forward about your old crush on him (not that you were completely over him). Peter telling her about what his internship was really about didn’t satisfy her need for his trust.

“We do love each other. It’s just… you wouldn’t trust your significant other if they were hanging out with somebody who used to have a crush on them, would you?” Peter glanced at you curiously as the TV blared with the din of some comedic talk show.

“Yes, because if I truly love somebody, I would trust them. I hate to break it to you but she’s a hundred percent going to break up with you once college starts because she’s going to get too tired being insecure about whether she’s the love of your life or not. You have done literally everything you could’ve to prove your love and trust in her; yet, she still doesn’t believe you when you tell her you love her,” You knew you were waltzing straight into a minefield with the train of words spewing from your mouth but you wanted Peter to be treated better. Liz practically lost her mind when you announced that you had gotten accepted into NYU was evidence that she wasn’t fit for him. Of course, the first logical explanation for you applying to NYU was because you wanted to be with Peter, definitely not because you had worked your behind off to get into one of the top-ranked schools in the entire country.

“Liz and I have some figuring out to do, I guess. Can we just not talk about it right now?” Peter sighed as he grabbed the remote off the couch and switched the channel to a serene nature show.

“No, we need to talk about it right now. You always keep pushing me away and I know you probably think I’m just some jealous hoe who wants to steal you from Liz but Peter, I’ve been your best friend since forever. My feelings are completely irrelevant right now, and the only situation that matters is yours. You need to remember who you are without Liz. I’ve been trying to sugar-coat this but ever since Liz found out you were Spiderman, she’s been leeching off you. She doesn’t even care that you could die doing what you do! She used to actually care about you but now, she’s got Spiderman as a boyfriend and she only cares about Spiderman, not Peter Parker! And I hate that you’re letting her do that!” Your voice was slowly raising but you didn’t want to pretend everything was fine and play along with his ‘nothing’s wrong’ game. It had been a painful two months after homecoming, and both you and Ned had grown tired from watching from the wings, not stepping up to prevent the inevitable disaster on the path Peter was following.

“You know what? You don’t know what you’re talking about! I know that you want the best for me, but I think I determine what’s best for me,” Peter huffed and you grabbed the remote from his hands and shut off the TV.

“I’m not going to run away and use my usual ‘I need some space’ excuse. It’ll only result in you pretending to have forgotten about tonight and ignoring my questions until I stop asking and we move on and repeat the same motions over and over again. I’m tired of not being able to do anything! I don’t care if you hate my guts for what I’m saying but I’d rather see you be happy than pretend you’re fine!” You were on the verge of yelling, barely keeping your emotions intact. You stood up, crossing your arms to show that you weren’t going anywhere until you got answers.

“Please calm down, I promise I’ll think about it,” His words seemed to have a tone of sincerity to it so you reluctantly sat down next to him, blowing out a frustrated breath. Liz was really getting into your head which was exactly what she wanted. She probably wanted you to leave Peter for good and you were not planning to give her the satisfaction of proving her correct.

~

“You listened to her? How could you?” Liz dramatically screeched, her sharp, staccato voice ringing through the apartment. You could even hear from outside the door, and you froze with your hand halfway through the motion of knocking on the door when you heard Liz.

“Liz, I’ve been friends with Y/N since we were children and she would never want to bring harm to me. She isn’t trying to target you; she just wants to make sure everything is fine and I have to admit, she’s right. We haven’t been the same ever since you found out she got into NYU,” Peter sounded worn out as if he had been arguing non-stop for hours.

“Well, I have a good reason to be worried! Who knows what she’ll do to try to steal you from me?” Liz sounded desperate as if she was running out of reasons to back up why she had every right to accuse you of being the fault in their relationship.

“Are you even listening to what you’re saying right now? When did I exclusively belong to you? I might be dating you but that doesn’t mean you own me as a person! You’re so self-centered! I’m tired of you never taking the blame for anything and not understanding how hard it is to balance school, you, Y/N, and the Stark internship at the same time! I just need some space right now!” The silence that followed was too intense for you to handle and you couldn’t help but anxiously bite your lip and hope for the best.

“I’m leaving,” Liz obviously was trying to sound calm but her voice was shaking with uncontrolled anger. She opened the door and her mouth dropped open in surprise when she saw you. Liz pressed her lips together and brushed past you with ferocity.

You quickly stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind you. There was no hesitation in you hugging and comforting your best friend as he fell apart in your arms. The boy who was once the reason for you joining the broken hearts club now was joining you in the dismal club of people whose hearts were crushed into stardust.

-

looking for more peter parker x reader fics? check out my peter parker x reader masterlist

[gabrielalexandebrubaker95]

Reiki Crystal Grid Templates Astounding Tricks

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Reiki Master On Vanderpump Rules

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So before buying your first choice of which are characterized by seven frequencies.The history of Reiki is, and you will find that it isn't a one-time thing; it's holistic, a process, and many just want the pain subside immediately and what they charge.The traditional Reiki symbols come from a detached perspective, as if she tried.The left ovary energy seemed too hot, and you will get rid of modern Reiki as modern age voodoo.You will instinctively know while you draw it.

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Reiki Healing Jobs

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[djatoon]

Politics and the loss of a friend

This has been a tumultuous couple of years on the politics front. First there was Jeremy Corbyn, against all odds, winning the Labour Party leadership contest (it must be said, against a small rabble of policy vacuum opponents). Then there was the EU Referendum, now known as Brexit. And then Donald Trump won the presidency in the USA, again against the odds. All three events have had some impact on my life, and certainly on my thinking about politics (although the Trump victory has marginal interest only being, as it is, ‘across the pond’). Before I dip into these topics in an attempt to position myself in this period of politics, I should say some things about my background.

Although now living a middle-class ‘lifestyle’ (er, actually, a ‘life’), and having a middle-class career, I was brought-up in a working-class family in Newcastle upon Tyne. My dad worked as a decorator, labourer, security guard for city parks, then warehouseman for Kimberly Clark (think bog rolls). My mam was a housewife (when we were young), before working as a home-help for old people. Money was very tight, holidays exclusively camping, mainly in the north (although one fortnight was had in Cheddar in Somerset when we were very young). I didn’t do great as school, just missing out on a pass for the 11+ (me and my parents were interviewed, and evidently the teacher didn’t think I’d get any academic support at home – she was right about that), so I ended up in ‘secondary’ school. I was doing well at secondary, but midway through my planned time there, the brand new Comprehensive education system intervened and I was moved to a new, much larger high school, which proved to be poor, and my focus fell away, as did my results.

But I got lucky. I landed a job in an office, where I rubbed shoulders with people who pretty much all had had a better education than me. During this post-school period, I suddenly became interested in reading, and devoured novel after novel, alongside much self-development material, and I began to punch above my qualification weight. A senior manager mentored me and encouraged me to leave and go to Newcastle Polytechnic to study business. Someone fired a starting pistol, I started running, and I never looked back, and there followed several professional qualifications and, in my thirties, an MBA, all in parallel with what became a successful career in procurement and supply chain management, with company cars and big salaries included. I was/am a working-class kid made good.

In those post-school teenage years, I studied economics and sociology at the local technical college and, for the first time, became aware of politics and ‘class politics’ in particular. Evidently the odds were stacked against me from the off, and the chances of me achieving what we now term ‘social mobility’ were slim indeed. Most didn’t make it. But, like I say, I got lucky and met good people who were prepared to help.

The long-term impact of this start in life has engendered in me a feeling of separation (although, it must be said, it wasn’t really that exceptional at the time – many followed a similar trajectory). I felt working-class but I had aspirations of betterment and personal fulfilment. I don’t feel working-class anymore, for obvious reasons, but I still feel a strong desire to improve, to take personal responsibility for my personal development, learning, and control of my ‘destiny’. I’m ‘big’ on self-determination. And playing fair.

Now, when asked about my politics, I’m very clear – no single party has ever represented the wide range of my political views. I’m interested in individual policies, not programmes. I have, at various elections, voted Labour, LibDem, and a long time ago, Tory. I am a floating voter. Sometimes I don’t vote at all. But one thing that remains important to me whoever wins - accept the result, move on, and live my life. It’s only fair, a win is a win, and next time my preferences might just be better represented.

To what place does this bring me when I’m discussing politics with friends and colleagues? The answer is that it can be an uncomfortable place indeed. Of course, people are often sceptical, floating voters themselves, and they’re not wedded to any particular party or programme. Socially, at least in my network, politics has been a fringe issue or one where differences of opinion are pretty-easily accommodated or comfortably tolerated. Even very close friends who have always, say, voted Labour or Tory, I have perfectly respectful relationships with, and we can discuss politics (and political differences) reasonably and enjoy the occasional heated debate without the threat of falling out. But, with one or two people, it’s more difficult. In fact, one long-term friendship was severed this year, after differences of opinion (I like to think respectively on my side) over Corbyn and Brexit became too much for my estranged friend.

The falling-out with this particular friend (that’s him on the right) has been very illuminating for me. I learned some new things about the politics of attachment and party loyalty that I really hadn’t considered before, themes that have never been important to me. As a floating voter, with no party ‘home’, I was suddenly faced with a friend who was fiercely loyal to party (Labour, as it happens, but that’s not the key factor). I was suddenly arguing with someone who was a campaigner (a real one too), and not just someone who disagreed with on, say, Brexit, the NHS, education, whatever. I began to think of him as a person who consumed, and was active in, politics in a way that had never attracted me. It was a genuine sadness that politics eventually trumped friendship.

Since those early years of self-development and late education, my desire to learn something new every day has sometimes become all-consuming. I feel uncomfortable standing still, treading water, perhaps because I think that if I stop I’ll stop for good, and simply fade away into boredom. I feel compelled to learn more about any topic I’m engaged with, despite realising that the more I learn, the mass of what is still to learn is far beyond my capacity to absorb in this or any other lifetime. But I keep going. I have come to the conclusion that my friend (and others like him) know enough of the answers to not care about seeking new ones.

Their (I think possibly his) pursuit is in the direction of certainty, to decide what is right and what is wrong (I really can’t believe it was always this way with him). Being clear about which side of the argument they must come down on is a priority – moving from political ambiguity – to ‘belong’ to one group at the expense of another. Perhaps this is what it means to be a party member – the overarching desire to commit to a philosophy, a programme, to a series of rehearsed arguments that are deemed superior to the arguments of ‘the other side’. Policy shortcomings are overlooked for the greater good, and to protect ‘the programme’.

There’s another way of putting it, and perhaps a definition of a ‘campaigner’: A person who ask few questions (particularly the difficult, contradictory ones), because they’ve already been provided with the answers by their leaders and their ‘fellow-travellers’. Curiosity is the burden of other people.

So, when a Corbyn or a Brexit comes along, they have already decided what the answer is, and they see little need to ask further questions. Well-developed arguments that challenge their prevailing thinking creates cognitive dissonance, and they get angry. Their confirmation bias means they only consume news and opinions that support their prevailing views. Everything else is rejected, not engaged with or argued against. Instead, it’s ‘shoot the messenger’ time. Those on the other side are liars, charlatans, evil. In the case of the friend I’ve lost, he never genuinely engaged with the substance of the opposing positions on Brexit, but instead thrashed about cursing politicians and non-compliant commentators. The chronology of my and my friend’s ‘falling-out’ was complicated: first he rejected me, later apologising (three months after the vote), but then continuing to behave so poorly that I rejected him. One of his last comments to me was that “I can’t be with people who voted Brexit. I behave badly in their presence.” Moments later he was declaring that he’d do anything in his power to stop Brexit, as it was “an abomination”.

Sometimes there’s another factor in play here, and that is when a political position becomes entwined with self-image. These are the people who label themselves ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, ‘socialist’ and, worst of all, the (more-righteous-than-thou) ‘progressive’. Each is like a ‘badge of honour’, but to me it’s more like outsourcing your thinking and decision-making to others, leaving the badge-wearer accepting that their leaders have the main arguments covered. But it’s just lazy thinking. Of course such lazy thinking undoubtedly exists on both sides of the political spectrum, and that’s why the best arguments don’t come from the zealots; instead they almost always come from those who acknowledge their uncertainty.

All this attachment to self-image generates that cognitive dissonance again when a friend or colleague, previously deemed to be part of the ‘in-crowd’, expresses views that conflict with the agreed script. It’s even worse this time, because a disagreement on the issue is considered a personal attack. This friend of mine became apoplectic when I presented the other side of the argument – he considered it an attack on his personal wealth and I was ‘promoting’ materials that would “ruin my retirement”. That such hostility could develop from what was an honest attempt to get into the detail of the main issues was, as I suggested earlier, quite shocking. All the more surprising as, for years, we’d enjoyed political debate and were broadly aligned on all the main political issues. That was, of course, until Brexit came along.

I’ll write about the main components of Brexit in a separate post, but I’ve learned a couple of important lessons from all this:

One - my career has involved much negotiation, and I see issues like Brexit through the lens (or filter) of the negotiator – asking about the ‘interests’ of both sides, how will the negotiation play out, and each sides’ strategies and tactics. I find the process fascinating and informs my own teaching and consulting work. But all this ‘navel-gazing’ is just time-wasting to the person that has already made up their mind, and new ‘facts’ simply don’t matter. 

And Two - Don’t assume that just because I am enthusiastic in exploring the pros and cons of a particular idea or policy, that others share that interest in spending loads of time learning more about it too. After all, we all have limited bandwidth, and maybe I have too much time on my hands.