#find him more interesting as a symbol. but i think it WORKS and is a perspective more people should consider

[dangermousie]

Random other fun things I noticed on my rewatch of ep 1.

The way the camera keeps focusing on his wedding ring makes me think of FoE. But also, she never wears hers (since she's the secret wife, it makes sense) but it's also pretty symbolic since by end of 2, we can tell he's obsessed with her and she wants out of the marriage even via reckless means.

Two eps (and book spoilers) in, it's clear he's not lying. But it's so interesting that the only times we've seen him show any strong hint of his feelings, it's never to her but to others - the ambassador or even 406 (since he loses his temper to 406 in both eps, and he doesn't know it's her, so he thinks it's a random.) It's like he CANNOT admit it to her because it would make him so very vulnerable and he's a man who is terrified of being so - plus he's clearly operating on a very sane principle of "if I can't open up to her, she can't reject me" - it's like those high school kids who send a friend to feel it out with their crush because they can't confront them directly. The most he can manage is this indirect confession that he can backtrack out of to her if he has to. Between all his issues and personality and the fact that it might be hard to convince him any move she makes to reciprocate is of her own volition, it's hard going for these two even if she wanted to make it work which she doesn't. Ironically, by playing as 406, she might find out just how much gone he is for her (and being able to believe it the way she'd never believe an actual confession to her as her, because she could think that's manipulativeness but why would he manipulate her about his feelings as 406?) And I do think if/when he finds out she's unhinged enough to do the 406 thing, he might put at least one fear to rest - that she's vulnerable/fragile/weak enough to only jump him because Mommy ordered. A woman insane enough to do what she's doing now is no (longer a) pushover, if she's acting like she wants him, it's of her own volition.

Her rant is glorious but his face is giving me pause because...does he understand what she's saying? Hmmmm. I mean, he holds everything so close that he could very well know sign language and not let on. I genuinely have no idea.

Everyone has already posted about the indirect kiss but all I can think of is how weird lipstick would taste on wine. You poor simp, just beg her to give you a chance and drink wine from a clean glass like a normal person.

Also there are a couple of really fun moments in the convo where she as 406 mirrors what he told her earlier. Wonder if he will notice.

And the amount of money she asks as alternative to divorce is exactly the divorce penalty!

Also, it's so great to see his freak out when HHJ is threatened. FL thinks it's threat to his career but we all know it's her.

I need more eps! I got spoiled with cdramas and eps every day!

[good-beanswrites]

Fuuta x Kotoko?

Waah I hope the fact that this ran a little long makes up for the lateness -- I really love the idea and was so excited to get the request!! They'd be so interesting and affect each other so much...... it makes me crazy...... It becomes canon divergent at the end because I genuinely think being in each others' company more would influence them both

Kotoko was nothing if not observant. Over the years, she’d found herself in – and gotten herself out of – enough situations to get a good read on the people she interacted with. No matter what this world threw her way, she could always rely on those abilities. And from the moment she met Milgram’s third prisoner, those abilities told her he was nothing but trouble. 

“Oi,” he’d called across the dining table during the first meal they all had shared. “What did you do to get here?”

From the moment she woke up in this strange place, Kotoko had kept to herself. It’s dangerous to charge forward and introduce oneself to a group of mysterious murderers when there are no locks on the doors. She hadn’t spoken a word to anyone, the others smart enough to heed her intense look and stay away. 

Fuuta, on the other hand, was the first to speak directly to her. He stared impatiently.

“Well?”

She noted his directness. His volume. The brashness and vulgarity she’d heard earlier in the day. His motivations and values he’d let slip in his early defenses. His anger and his fear. The suspicion in his gaze, as well as the need for reassurance in his voice. In that moment, the information clicked together in her mind, and Kotoko realized two things:

Kajiyama Fuuta was a lot like her, in the obvious ways.

Kajiyama Fuuta was nothing like her, in the ways that really mattered.

“The same reason as everyone else, I suppose,” she said carefully. He may have revealed his whole hand, but from experience she knew better than to do the same.

A lot of her experiences returned to her as the trial went on. She went through the motions of coaxing secrets out of quiet men, or playing along with cheery girls’ games to uncover what she was looking for. She remembered how it felt on stakeouts as she kept her eye on the warden’s door, and recalled the thrill of negotiation when she had a moment alone with them. And unfortunately, she recognized the immediate sensation of being tailed. She was used to shaking an unwanted follower out on the streets, but it was difficult to do the same when the only places to go consisted of three rooms and a corridor. 

No matter how inconspicuous Fuuta thought he was being, Kotoko got a glimpse of that bright hair retreating around corners just behind her. She could feel his eyes boring into her back, always conveniently whipping away by the time she turned to look. The only thing that seemed to affect his permanently blaring volume was when she was speaking nearby – unlike a real stalker who would tactfully pretend not to be listening in, Fuuta would use the opportunity to jump into all her conversations.

Kotoko was in the middle of her morning stretches when she became aware of his presence lurking around the doorway. After several weeks of the behavior, she’d had quite enough. Kotoko knew that if you can’t shake a tail, there’s only one other option. 

She stepped out of her cell, swiftly reaching for Fuuta’s collar. With a handful of his uniform, she shoved him back against the cell bars. For someone that had creeped on all her daily exercise routines, he seemed awfully shocked at how strong she was.

“Stop following me.” She kept her voice low and even. “I don’t know what you want from me, nor do I care. I will –”

“I don’t want anything from you!” 

He raised his voice in an attempt to sound tough, but only succeeded in coming off desperate. He tried to weasel out of her grasp to no avail. She’d had practice intimidating guys three times her height – it was almost too easy now that she had an inch or so on Fuuta. 

“Don’t give me that oblivious crap. Every day. Every single day, you –”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! You’re the one who acting fucking crazy!”

Even after knowing it was in vain, he kept squirming under her harsh look. His eyes flicked frantically around the room, only able to take in her stone cold expression for a brief moment at a time. He kept shouting his own defenses, his cheeks growing more red by the second.

This time, the information gathered took a bit longer to fall into place. One of her conclusions was something Kotoko was very used to. The other was something she’d never quite experienced before. For the first time in long career of poker faces, she visibly started upon realizing two things:

Kajiyama Fuuta was downright terrified of her.

Kajiyama Fuuta was hopelessly attracted to her.

She hurriedly released him, jerking herself away. “Just… stay out of my way.”  

“I was never in your way!” He shouted after her, his voice still shaking.

She should have stuck to her own demand and kept her distance; she was already aware of how much trouble this prisoner was capable of. But she took pride in her abilities to gather information of interest. And god, was Fuuta interesting. 

Between his constantly running mouth and his never running filter, he was always keeping her on her toes. She’d never met anyone who pressed her for answers like that – Fuuta was never satisfied with the explanations that could placate everyone else. He was always questioning, always pushing back. Though his talk could be as shallow as the older prisoners' melancholy musings, or the children’s gossipy chatter, it was different when he and Kotoko really went at it in a debate.

Fuuta talked shamelessly about society, about the other prisoners, and about her. The others kept their distance from someone as quietly calculating as her, but Fuuta would pour out his thoughts right to her face. He had her back when she was trying to prove a point to the others, but was too stubborn to compromise on any of own opinions when they conflicted. It was refreshing. 

And that was all it was, she would remind herself. The man would be insufferable if he was ever under the impression that she so much as tolerated his company. For everyone’s sake, he should remain completely unaware.

Awareness, however, was the very thing Kotoko prided herself in. She picked up on exactly what the warden was trying to communicate by granting her innocence. She was aware of the opportunities that arose with their disappearance. She noted the best time to fulfill her duties to them. She knew the optimal order to attack each prisoner in, to guarantee success.

It was due to her beloved observation skills that she found herself in cell 003 in the middle of the night. It didn’t matter how many training sessions Fuuta had spectated, or how many she’d invited him to join – he wasn’t as perceptive as she. He couldn’t predict or counter a single one of her movements. It only took a few moments for her to have him pinned on the ground.

“Y-you were serious?” Fuuta managed, even as her weight made it difficult for him to breathe. 

She’d confided in him about her deal with the warden, one late night long before verdicts were announced. She didn’t know what had driven her to do it. It had been a rare lapse in her judgment. The current situation only confirmed why she should never reveal more information than necessary. Why she should get closer to someone than necessary. 

“I am always serious.”

“Kotoko…”

She knew all of Fuuta’s typical arguments and excuses, and she had a rebuttal for each. She wound her arm back, her brass knuckles reflecting in the dim panopticon light. 

“...J-just… do it fast.”

Kotoko’s arm wavered. 

“What?”

“I’m not a fucking idiot. Even before that brat called you innocent, I knew that y-you were the one in the right. I used to think that you and I were the same, but I know that was all a lie. You were always the real hero. M-more than anyone else in this shithole. So…” Fuuta closed his eyes, squeezing tears from them. “Make it quicker than you did for that asshole, will ya?” 

Kotoko gripped her fight tighter. It was trembling. 

Fuuta’s eyes remained shut in fear. In trust. His breathing was erratic as he pretended not to be crying or struggling from the pressure on his lungs. He grit his teeth, preparing himself for what was to come. Kotoko prepared herself as well. 

Releasing a cry, she swung forward. The moment before her brass knuckles clashed with the floor, just to the left of Fuuta’s face, Kotoko realized one thing:

Kajiyama Fuuta was indeed nothing but trouble.

[kiss2012]

rewatched the first three episodes of s3 and im never going to recover

[gertritude-art]

A fun way imo to develop characters is to look at them and ask, "what does this imply?" This unfortunately only works if you already have a character concept in mind, but it's always been useful for me when I need to create some interiority for a character who feels a little flat.

As previously stated, literally all you're doing is looking at a character and performing a rudimentary analysis of them based on what you've already developed. A good example of this is my character Mordred, who early on in his development was conceived of as a sickly looking teenager wearing a full suit and bowtie. This is because I thought there was a lot of potential in this image. "What kind of teenager goes to school everyday wearing a full suit and bowtie?" Probably a kid who takes himself very seriously and has some interest in looking "polished" -- perhaps he even views himself above his peers for how he dresses. And, how might this visual extend to other aspects of him? Is he always someone who goes against the grain? Does he actually have an interest in men's wear, or is this a symbolic image for how he stands against his peers? I bet he has strong opinions on society. Did he buy the suit himself, or did his mom buy it, because one or the other also implies some stuff about the nature of their relationship, if his mother is supportive of his oddness or not, etc. etc. etc. A lot of stuff that you can find out, just from looking at one small aspect of a character! The same kind of process can spiral from anything - a character's actions, a character's thoughts, their beliefs, a line they say, a face they make, a hobby they have... all can be a good starting point for developing them further and figuring out more about them.

In a similar vein, I know that people recommend filling out character charts and stuff, but usually I find it more useful to think of a character in terms of a "scenario" or a "description" than in terms of their traits. "This character is smart" vs. "This characters complains to the teacher when the test has a question that isn't in the book" ; "This person is stubborn" vs. "This is the kind of person who'd rather starve than order food if they said they weren't hungry." Figuring out a character through something like this gives me a specific image of how they might act in a story as opposed to more broadly-described traits. Being as I tend to think up characters with story ideas and scenarios, it's much more helpful for me! "Ah, but how do you do this, Gert?" Easy: you stare at a wall for multiple hours until you have a revelation about a character. This is surely what everyone is capable of [nodding sagely]

[sugar-grigri]

Denji no longer has access to his heart

The golden rule in Chainsaw Man is to focus on the title, since it's the key to reading the story.

Rain, Brothel, Removal seem to be three absurdly unrelated elements, and Fujimoto likes to put it that way, because the challenge for the reader is to find a way of reading that links them together.

This chapter is funny as well as disturbing, deeply sad, and in itself this collection of sensations just makes you uncomfortable, since the tone is always reversed, and the protagonist himself refuses to allow his situation to be a comic spring.

Fujimoto confirms an interpretation that is fundamental to understanding Denji: his character thinks only in terms of short-term objectives, incapable of projecting himself, just as he responds only to the satisfaction of needs without being able to verbalize and think about his unhappiness in a more abstract way.

Denji, for example, isn't thinking about whether sex is actually a solution to his problems, no, it's more concrete than that: he's thinking about whether he's masturbated recently.

Another piece of evidence is the rain. I've always thought that when it rains in Fujimoto's works, it's proof that no lies are being told.

Whether in Look Back with a silent victory, the school moment with Reze and Denji.

But that's not what we're interested in here, because there's no doubt that Denji is sincere, or at least the rain only shows us that he's sincerely desperate.

There's a subtlety....

Denji complains that he only thinks with his dick, but there's another, more philosophical and certainly less funny idea behind this: Denji only thinks through his body.

The rain, the amputation, the brothel - they're all proof that Denji only thinks with his senses.

Denji thought the brothel was the solution to his distress, it's when it started raining that he collapsed, as if the change in weather had evoked his own emotional change. Yoru's solution is amputation, another physical sensation and solution.

Amputation is a solution all the more symbolic because it's antithetical to what Denji is: a demon man capable of regeneration.

To amputate is in itself not to regenerate, and not to regenerate is in itself to be more human.

What distinguishes us from animals (although science relativizes this) is the way we think about our own emotions, something Denji is incapable of doing, or at least has great difficulty in doing.

This doesn't mean he can't verbalize it at all, but when he evokes, he evokes a sensation, a dish (a shitty hamburger, a steak, a ton of sex).

Even when he wants to be loved, Denji formulates it in the form of wanting his heart, almost organically.

No one wants Denji's heart because it's gone

And it makes sense, because Pochita has reassembled his entire body, except for Denji's heart, which has literally been left in that garbage can.

That's why, when Pochita lets Denji access his feelings, the place is symbolized by a garbage can.

When Denji asks Pochita to wake up to find Nayuta, Pochita asks him where his legs are, because Denji's only function is to be a body.

And now everything makes sense again

When Denji spoke his dream to Pochita, being Chainsaw Man, I think there was a certain feeling in every reader: what exactly does it change?

What if it changes nothing? It's normal for Denji not to be able to project himself in the long term, as he should symbolically listen to his heart.

Denji's inability to have a dream, a goal for the future, is symbolized by him and Pochita as children.

It doesn't mean that Pochita is an antagonist (although that could be cool), but that Denji and Pochita are prisoners of their own situations.

Denji doesn't have access to his heart, but Pochita is contractually bound to what Denji wants.

This is also why, when Denji reproaches himself, it's his child self who's addressing him, because the only way to reproach himself, to feel guilty, is symbolized by his old self, the Denji that Pochita may have known. Just as Denji doesn't have access to his heart, Pochita has difficulty gaining access to the person Denji has become, all of which only leads to stagnation.

Denji as a child is also the symbol of a scumbag, the remnant of a lost heart, always dressed in poor, dirty clothes, a past that Denji seeks to escape, but a past that is the only time Pochita has been able to get to know Denji.

I know it's a pretty crazy line, but it's precisely because Denji is Chainsaw Man - a being both fused and disconnected - that he thinks with his dick lol

Saving Chainsaw Man by killing Chainsaw Man has never been a truer statement

Chainsaw Man is Denji's prison but also his only hope

A cage

[hyunsvngs]

kinktober !

kink: tentacles

pairing: kim seungmin x fem!reader

wc: 2.3k

tentacle kink: a sexual interest in tentacles and the imagined creatures that have them.

It had to work. You would die if it didn’t work.

Then again, you’d probably die if it did work. You’re trying to summon Slenderman, after all. No one would understand why except for you. You’ve always had an affinity for all things macabre and dangerous, and maybe you’re a little messed up. After deep diving on Reddit, you were more than dubious that the creature actually existed. You had to find out. You had to see for yourself.

Clearly not that bad, because you hadn’t gone into the woods like they’d told you to online. The October weather was ultimately too cold to be trekking through branches and fallen leaves, even to try and summon your favourite Creepypasta entity - you did the second option instead, drawing a quick symbol on your wall with marker and all of the lights turned out.

The poem felt a little silly coming from your lips, despite Reddit users insisting it’s mandatory for the summoning. It felt even sillier when you stared at the symbol, barely visible through the moonlight flooding in beyond the curtains, but you had to persevere. If he was real, he’d come to your room and meet you. If he was real.

You ended the poem, finally opening your eyes and sighing. You blinked at the wall, quickly looking around the room. What a load of bullshit. Slenderman isn’t real, then. You’d proved it for yourself, and-

“This is fucking ridiculous,” There was a thud behind you, and you spun around on your bed, hazily trying to see who had joined you in your room. You reached over with a squeak, flicking your lamp on. There, in what almost looked like the Slenderman from your dreams - a man, dressed in a suit and dark, ebony hair pushed back from his forehead. He kicked an imaginary stone with his shoe, shoving his broad hands into his pockets and finally looking up at you. He blinked at you a few times, and then raised an eyebrow. “Why are you scared? Did you not ask for this?”

You huffed. “Well, you’re not Slenderman.”

The man groaned, head rolling back. He cracked his neck effortlessly on both sides, and then stared back into your eyes. His gaze was piercing, dark and feeling all too consuming. “I am- I’m like his brother, but not in the way you humans adhere to. He sends me for cases like yours. Minor, petty things.”

“Cases like mine?” You scoffed, resisting the urge to punch the man in his annoyingly attractive face. He wandered over to your desk, wholly unaffected, and started to flick through your diary. “Hey-!”

“Cases like yours,” He repeated, a small smile flickering on his lips at one of the pages. “Sexually charged cases. You are a little fucked up, aren’t you?”

You bristled. You knew exactly what page he was looking at. Your diary was for mundane things, your day-to-day life, but it was also where you detailed your more… late night fantasies. Recently, some rather obscure things had been taking up the majority of your brain, and maybe that’s what had pushed you to summon Slenderman. You’d never admit that, though.

In all honesty, this guy was kind of hot. You weren’t sure if it was the mysterious atmosphere about him, if he was clearly otherworldly judging from his alabaster skin, or if it was his long legs in those suit trousers. If you were of a different state of mind, you’d have believed he was the entity you were trying to reach. There was just one thing.

“Aren’t you a bit short to be related to Slenderman?”

The man stopped. He sighed, and then shut the diary, before turning to you with one long, accusing finger. “First off, I’m not that short. Secondly, I told you, it’s not the same as what you humans think siblings are. Also, I don’t have to prove myself to you.”

You grinned. “You just tried though, right?”

He rolled his eyes, stalking over to the bed. “I think I’ll kill you sooner than I planned. You’re rude.”

“You’re rude too,” You huffed, trying to kick him in the leg from your position on your bed. Instead of catching it with his hands, a pitch-black tentacle sprouted from his back and wrapped around your ankle, effectively pinning it down and rendering you motionless. You gasped, and he raised an eyebrow. “What the-”

“We do have some similarities,” The man began, drawing the tentacle tighter. “We’re of the same species, for one. I suppose I’m not as prestigious as him, but you seem happy enough to have me here, right?”

You blinked. “I would actually prefer if you left, in all honesty.”

“Can’t,” He shrugged, withdrawing the tentacle. Your ankle flopped back to the bed and you grabbed it instinctively, slightly disappointed to feel no traces of the slimy limb. “I need to kill you. It’s in the rulebook, you know? Once you’ve seen one of us, you have to die, or my mission will fail.”

What were you meant to do in this situation? You didn’t really want to die. You hadn’t thought the whole thing through at all. You’d expected to just see traces of the entity, perhaps catch him from the corner of your eye - you were instead left with a sexy long-limbed man standing in front of your bed, basked in the soft orange glow of your bedside lamp.

“Why kill me when you could fuck me instead?” You’d said the first thing that came to mind. The man’s jaw dropped, before it quickly reverted back to normal, his head tilting to the side in confusion.

“You are pretty weird, aren’t you? Unusual. A little fucked up, like I said.”

“That wasn’t a no,” You hummed. The man’s eyes burnt a trail down your legs, exposed in your sleep shorts, and then his eyes were fixated on a patch of skin revealed on your shoulder from where your shirt had slipped to the side. You scoffed, yanking the shirt back into place. “Oh my God, you want to, don’t you?! That’s why you haven’t left!”

He shrugged. “I’ve never fucked a human. It could be fun.”

You blanched. Okay, you hadn’t expected to get this far. After you had, though… Well, he had tentacles. That was something from your deepest, darkest desires, something that you would try to push to the back of your brain and scrunch your eyes shut tightly with your hand shoved down your pyjama trousers. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. You were already getting wet, clit throbbing with need.

He started to move towards you. First, it was one knee on the bed, and then the other joined, starting a slow crawl that resulted in his face getting closer. You hadn’t realised you were moving closer, too, and you gulped. “What’s- what’s your name?”

The man chuckled, face only inches from yours now. His face looked young, you noticed, yet his eyes held a wildfire inside as if there was so much you didn’t know. There was so much you wanted to know. “Seungmin.”

You had no time to debate it, because his lips were pressing against yours. They were soft, plush, and you found yourself whimpering into his kiss. He’d effectively shut you up. Without a second passing, Seungmin was dominating your mouth, pressing his tongue in and rolling it against yours. How did just a kiss feel so good?

You let him push you back into the sheets, forearms landing on your pillow either side of your head for purchase. He deepened the kiss, his hands moving to tangle in your hair as he held you in place. You felt your pussy flutter, achingly horny despite the lack of stimulation, and your breath caught in your chest. 

Seungmin pulled away and you licked your lips, chest heaving. “I.. can I see them?”

“See what?” He mused, thumb brushing along your lower lip. One look at the amused expression on his face told you that he knew. 

“The…” You gulped, legs parting to allow him closer to you. His bulge was thick, pressing tightly against your core. “The tentacles, Seungmin. Can I see them? How many are there?”

“Four, baby,” He leaned down, nipping at your neck. You gasped, hips bucking up, choosing not to comment on the pet name in your haze of lust. “I can put one in your pussy, one in your asshole and one in your mouth. How’s that? Is that dirty enough for you?”

You whimpered, grinding on his bulge. Seungmin allowed it, hands moving to your hips to aid your movement. It had your sleep shorts slipping around, fabric sticking to the wetness accumulated on your folds. You whined, arms thrashing until they settled around his broad shoulders, still clad in his expensive-looking suit. “What about your cock, Seungmin?”

“My cock?” Seungmin scoffed, running his tongue up your neck. It made you squirm, thighs clenching around his slender waist. His hair tickled your skin, dark and perfect as if he’d spent hours styling it. You knew he hadn’t. “I can fuck you without needing to cum, baby. I doubt I can say the same for you.”

“No, I’ll- I’ll probably cum as soon as you put one in, to be honest,” You admitted, cheeks burning crimson with embarrassment. 

“Hmm, that makes a lot of sense,” Seungmin reached down, yanking your sleeping shorts down. It bared your pussy to the room, cold air hitting your clit and the slick on your pussy. It made you jolt, squeaking as Seungmin saw you in such an intimate way. “You’re wet. Are you feeling impatient? Needy, even?”

“Yes! Yes, God, I need it,” You huffed, spreading your thighs further. You were practically spread eagle now, and you ran your fingertips over the soft expanse of your tummy, just barely visible below your shirt. You continued the journey down your body, looking up at Seungmin with pleading eyes, and then you pressed two fingers into your clit. You flinched, wailing at the stimulation. “Ah, I’m so horny, I’m so horny, what the fuck-”

“Stay still, I’ll give it to you,” Seungmin murmured, and then you caught sight of them again. Four pitch-black tentacles sprouted from his back, seeming to forego his clothes and then one was tickling at your entrance. You moaned, because were they suckers?

It was easy to learn that yes, his tentacles had suckers, and he was now brushing one over your clit. You obediently moved your hands out of the way, back to their position on his shoulders. It sucked onto the swollen bundle of nerves with ease, and just as you started to squirm, another tentacle was pressing into your tight, drippy hole. You could feel the amount of slick you’d gushed beneath you, ruining your bed and quite possibly ruining you for any other man. The appendage itself was lubed, brushing through your own wetness and creating a filthy noise that rang throughout your bedroom.

“Don’t squirm,” Seungmin commanded, hand running up your thigh comfortingly. The tentacle pushed in further, and you clenched, wet, heavy breaths coming from your mouth. “That’s it, good girl. Let it push inside you, just like that.”

The tentacle was narrow at the tip, but it flared much further out after an inch or so. The stretch made your pussy leak even more than what was imaginable. You didn’t think you’d ever been this wet. The appendage was long, but Seungmin kept pushing more and more until you were taking around five inches of it, and you whined, reaching down to press at his stomach.

“Too big, too much,” You protested, but Seungmin shushed you, pressing a kiss into your cheek.

“Your pussy’s just too little, baby. Too tight,” He grunted, and then he pushed another inch in. “Take it. Take it for me, and I might think about giving you my cock later.”

“Your- would you?” Your eyes were teary, toes curling into the bed. “Been good. Tryin’ to take it, ‘s just- it’s so thick, so long. Seungmin, Seungmin, sir, sir, you said you- you’re not gonna kill me?”

“How can I kill such a sweet thing?” His hand moved to your cheek, before moving down, wrapping around your neck. The pressure was light, but very much there, making you moan out into your room. “You’re whining so pretty for me. Calling me sir, taking this just like it’s my cock. You’re dirty. I have to keep you around, don’t I?”

You nodded, legs thrashing on the bed. Your chest heaved, a blotchy pink rash overtaking your skin. “It’s good, it’s so good, so thick, oh- Oh, I think I might…?”

“You think you’re gonna cum?” Seungmin scoffed. “Already? Alright, do it. I’ll let you. Just this once, okay?”

You keened, hands gripping onto his shoulders. Your fingernails must have been digging into him almost painfully, but he didn’t flinch, staring straight at you with the same dark, piercing gaze. Your pussy clenched down, tight and fluttering, and then you were-

You gasped, eyes fluttering open as you attempted to look around your bedroom. The sun had just begun to rise, but your boyfriend was awake, and pulled you into his chest upon seeing your eyes open. 

“Sounded like hell of a dream,” Seungmin smirked, his eyebrow raising. You bit your lip, staring up at him. “Was it about me?”

“Always is,” You mumbled, burying your face in his shirt. He chuckled, shoulders shaking as he rubbed down your back with a tender, broad hand. “It was dirty.”

“Yeah? Another reenactment of how we first met?”

You sighed, brushing your hand down one of his tentacles. It laid bare on your bed, and twitched with approval as you fidgeted with it.

“Yeah, something like that.”

[churipu]

JJK MEN & THEIR SLEEPYHEAD GF !

featuring. toji fushiguro, yuuta okkotsu, choso x fem! reader

warnings. absolutely nothing

note. anon, first of all, again, i'm so sorry i accidentally put your post up in the queue list when it was unfinished and the pen symbol wasn't there so i screenshotted this before deleting the og post. i hope this post comes to find you by itself :(( second of all, thank you for liking the first part, means a lot to me <33 last of all, hope you enjoy this one!

TOJI FUSHIGURO. i feel like he's the kind of person who doesn't mind having a sleepyhead gf, in fact he'll gladly sleep with her no matter what time or place. he'll just look and then you're asleep, all of a sudden he's asleep too.

people find it odd how you and him are able to just doze off anywhere, especially toji being a pretty "busy" man. would ditch his work sometimes just to have a nap with you, and i feel like he's the type of guy who would use you like a bolster when you both sleep. so you just lie there, arms by your side — while he on the other hand, is all up on you, holding you close to him.

sometimes toji would chuckle upon seeing you asleep at the most random time and places, in a diner, in a fast food restaurant, in the park standing up (and you woke up because apparently a kid bumped into your leg), just anywhere. he finds your sleepy habit quite interesting really.

"toji... 'm tired."

"when're you not, hm?"

he absolutely loves it when you just clung onto him like a koala for a nap, makes him feel proud (oh and i feel like he's the type of person who would take pictures if you sleep with your mouth open with a string of drool coming out of your mouth, he says that it's adorable. you don't think so though).

YUUTA OKKOTSU. yuuta is just so adorable. i feel like he gushes out a lot when you fall asleep on him, like he will silently fawn over you but at the same time he doesn't know what to do. should he let you be? wake you up so you could sleep in a more comfortable place? or carry you to the said comfortable place?

he just ends up waking you up because of how fidgety he is, "yuuta?"

"i'm so sorry, did i wake you up? sorry.."

honestly, you don't even care about the whole wake up thing. you just wanted to sleep so you always end up latching onto his side like a baby, "five more minutes."

it's never five minutes, longest is twelve hours. although yuuta doesn't mind — he even joins you for a bit, and if he has to go, he will make sure you're tucked in well and comfortable with a pillow fort he built just for you incase something (the monsters comes for you) happens.

CHOSO. i feel like he gets confused at first to why you're always falling asleep near him, he even asked this "Google" to that — and Google did not in fact help, but instead drove him into a state of panic because it told choso that you were dying. so when you fall asleep the next time, choso wakes you up almost immediately.

"don't die on me."

you didn't know what he was talking about and assumed that he was just messing around so you closed your eyes, and he had a full blown breakdown because he thought you were actually dying.

but when you told him it's because you feel safe to sleep near him, he's never been so much happier. and whenever you fall asleep, he always has a blanket ready for you both. so here's how it goes, you fall asleep and lean your head on his shoulder, he drapes the blanket over the both of you, he leans his head onto your head and falls asleep.

you both always end up in such an uncomfortable position after (either with your hand or foot in his face, or vice versa), but you guys never cared, at least the sleep was good.

"cho, get your foot out of my face before i bite them off clean."

"'m sorry, it just happens."

© CHURIPU 2023 , DO NOT COPY OR REPOST ANYWHERE !

[coldwind-shiningstars]

Dungeon Meshi is obviously primarily about food, eating, and crucially survival through eating, but it's also focused on other aspects of survival. Sleep, rest, social ties and social exclusion. There's even extensive commentary on things like personal grooming (Marcille’s hair, Toshiro becoming depressed and no longer shaving), clean bathrooms, and other things. When it comes to disability these things are referred to as instrumental activities of daily life (IADLs), which are more complex things like shopping, housework, and cooking, which people need to do to survive, and activities of daily life (ADLs) which are the basic bare bones needs: eating, toileting, etc. Dungeon Meshi is concerned with the logistics of living and finding joy in those logistics.

This is super related to disability! Yes, Laios is autistic, this has been apparent from the beginning. But what does being autistic mean for him and the story? Mostly, it means his desires, goals, and the ways he goes about achieving them are strange, foreign, or baffling. He has different priorities than other people and the way he expresses those priorities are strange. They affect how he socializes, how he eats…

So, it absolutely makes sense that there would be a minor sideplot about activities of daily living and what it's like to be out of sync with everyone else when it comes to prioritizing things. It's Mithrun Time (he's gonna mith all over the place) and I'm so SO interested in the interplay of disability, caregiving and the logistics thereof, and intersectionality & privilege. Who needs care? How do other people feel about them needing care? How do they receive that care? And who do we think is worthy of receiving care and how does that interact with all these other factors?

Bunch of manga and extras spoilers past the cut:

“So, what's wrong with you?”

I see a lot of people talking about Mithrun's non-eye disability as a depression allegory, which I think is true, but I think it's also metaphorically/symbolically both a traumatic brain injury and a trauma response to sexual assault. The sexual assault aspect is pretty clear if you look at any of the symbolism of the actual disabling event: just look at it.

Mithrun is lying in bed and the goat comes to him, lifts him up and puts its mouth on his abdomen and lower pelvis. The eating is sexually charged, as is the particular way he struggles and protests. It's intensely violating, and things that were once desirable are lost. And the dungeon lord group therapy session involves a lot of people talking about the demons like an abusive lover; Mithrun, even though he wanted to kill the demon so badly, still says that they're gentle.

As for the brain injury, chronic TBIs can cause a wide variety of symptoms. Some immediately relevant ones are anhedonia (lack of enjoyment), executive function issues, poor interoception (trouble understanding what's going on in your body), cognitive impairment affecting ability to reason/multitask/plan/solve problems, changes in behavior and personality, depression, agitation, and restlessness. We see… basically all of these, in Mithrun, as downstream effects of the loss of desires. He can't tell when he's hungry, tired, or out of mana; he can't perform ADLs consistently even if he knows he'll die without doing them and dying without doing them will interfere with his long-term goal, he had drastic personality changes, he oscillates between impatient and totally withdrawn.

Brain injuries can also affect more complex tasks and ability to sustain lengthy periods of complex cognitive work. A common example is losing the ability to read and process longer passages; maybe you can read the words but you can't read a paragraph, or maybe you can read paragraphs but now you get a migraine after 15 minutes. Mithrun's skill loss is not related to reading but the effect is similar – he is and was extremely skilled in a particular area of magic, but also disabled in ways that specifically hinder his skill in this area – to teleport things properly you need depth perception and a sense of direction, and he lacks both of these! And while he's still an incredibly effective fighter it seems like he pretty frequently makes those sorts of mistakes.

This is treated often as a gag and it is genuinely funny but it’s also very real, to no longer be as good at the thing you were good at before you became disabled. Kui takes several throwaway gags seriously later on, not just this one. Another ~gag that's not really elaborated on is the bathroom thing, but I appreciate its inclusion anyway, since even if it's presented humorously it doesn't feel meanspirited in a way a lot of “diaper jokes” do. I think people need to talk a lot more about bathroom issues in a wide variety of disabilities, and I think it's nice that a guy I can already picture the “poor little meow meow” posts about also has this issue, you know?

Preferences vs Desire

Even referencing PTSD and TBIs it's hard to really grasp what having no desires means, and the characters don't generally ask, while Mithrun explains it in vague terms. “Desires” is a very broad term and indeed he has lost access to a wide but related variety of things. Unfortunately this lead to him often being treated as nonagentic.

Mithrun does still have preferences, even if he doesn't express them and has no desire which would drive him to seek out pleasant things and avoid unpleasant ones. He'll comment on the taste and texture of foods, for example – sure seems like he has an opinion!

People treat it like his preferences don't matter since he doesn't usually bring them up unprompted, and he's often in situations where there aren't other options.

Kabru seems best at not doing this (and, noncoincidentally, also seems to be the best at actually caring for him; the Canaries have a lot more Resources theoretically than Kabru And Mithrun Eating Monsters And Kabru's A Bad Cook, but although they are loudly distressed by the two of them disappearing it seems to have positively affected Mithrun's general health)

But, uh, acknowledgement that someone has preferences at all is a really low bar to clear and Kabru also doesn't seem to fully understand how Mithrun's brain works. Mithrun’s caregivers want him to eat when they want him to eat. They want him to rest and drink when they want him to.

He lacks the desire for a number of mundane things but also seems to lack the ability to tell when he needs them. He can't explain why he faints; is “I am out of mana” considered a desire for more mana, one that can be eaten? He can't sleep on his own; it's not only that he lacks “the desire to go to bed” but he can't do anything with his own exhaustion, even if he notices it. He comments on the unpleasant taste and texture of several meals; he may be unable to want to not eat it, but he definitely can tell when he dislikes something. But he also seems to be unable to tell when he's hungry.

Kabru will acknowledge these preferences but there's not really other food options, and Everyone Must Eat. Kabru doesn't know the details of Mithrun's condition yet but you can see the immediate frustration here and the way he offers food to him like Mithrun's a child.

Sure, he won't directly communicate preferences, so that makes it extra hard, but you can always just ask, and if he tells you he tells you.

The pathway between opinion and taking actions about it may be lost in Mithrun but the dungeon forces other people into a similar position – it forces them to eat food they don't want to eat so that they can survive or accomplish other goals. We've seen this with Marcille from the beginning. It's difficult with Mithrun because it seems like there is always going to have to be some sort of someone else overriding his autonomy – yeah, he's not hungry but he still needs to eat or he'll faint. Yeah, he's lying about whether or not he's clean but he still needs to wash or he'll die. Yeah, he needs to take a rest instead of keeping moving or he'll faint. But he's not unique in being in a situation where he has to do nonpreferred things. The difference is more that he lacks the ability to independently do anything when it comes to ADLs, preferred or not, which makes it into someone else’s choice and responsibility.

There's also a theme in Dungeon Meshi that comes up a bit of people being pushy about ADLs but from a slightly different perspective, and they're usually right. You see this in Senshi most commonly; he pushes the residents of the Golden City to actually eat even if they don't need to and can't taste it, and while he's correct in that Yaad does get enjoyment from the food even without taste he's still not quite listening to Yaad. Similarly, Kabru is correct in that he can get Mithrun to sleep without a sleeping spell, but he also ignores the way Mithrun says several times that he doesn't expect massage to work. There's a few aspects to this – wild but expected that the elves would choose the “just knock him out with a spell” route, the “easy way” Senshi always talks about when it comes to magic, instead of actually paying attention to other solutions. But also, generally, people know their bodies best, and sometimes even if you're really sure you have the trick to help them you have to listen to what they tell you.

tvtropes dot org frontslash DisabilityTropes

This is going to be a harder section just because it's so subjective; it's nearly impossible to think about the ways in which disabled people are viewed by the people around them/wider society with any degree of objectivity just because there are so many factors that go into it. But I do think Mithrun is consistently treated as relatively nonagentic and there are several ways this can manifest: being treated as a doll/pet/child, being treated as a weapon, and being a surface for people to project onto.

He's framed or treated as childlike intermittently through the manga; scattered about, just a little vibe in the way he's drawn, like the "say aah" above and Pattadol and Cithis through the teleportation scroll :

That's a middle aged man! And he's framed like a toddler getting picked up or misbehaving.

Which doesn't mean they care about him any less; his squad is really fond of him for someone who's technically like their parole officer. How dare you do this to our captain! They love him dearly; this is obvious and he comments on it! They respect him, too, as the leader and as a strong fighter. But loving someone and thinking they're a skilled fighter doesn't mean you respect their autonomy fully.

There's also an element of everyone projecting their own issues onto him; Kabru with their shared Dungeon Trauma. The canaries all suggesting wacky, midlife-crisis desires. He doesn't ever express that he minds any of this, except when they try to stop him from making particular decisions. They also don't often understand why he'd be motivated to do a particular thing, and in fact some of these projections may actually be correct! But while noodles and pottery may be good later-on goals for him, I think it's striking that a) Kabru was the closest to correctly guessing what desire Mithrun might acquire now and he was still guessing the exact opposite (suggesting a desire to not eat Falin but to help Laios, vs Mithrun's actual desire, which was to eat Falin with no thought given to the promise he made at all) and b) it's a desire that actually makes perfect sense with what we know about him, not something totally new.

And, finally, he's a weapon: people are willing to caretake him because he's good at killing things dead. If his only desire is to kill demons dead, it's easy to start seeing that as who he is. I don't think he'd argue that “trying to kill demons” takes up the majority of his life (it's his only goal and he's obsessed with it) but even if there's only one thing that matters to him he has autonomy (in the sense that he can make his own choices about what to prioritize and formulate his own plans) and personhood.

Politics and privilege – who gets to access care?

One of the things we're first presented with when it comes to Mithrun is that he is intensely capable at handling dungeons. Yeah, there's the immediately visible prosthetic eye and the navigation issues, but the Canaries are built up as being incredibly dangerous and skilled, and he's their captain; they all immediately defer to him. He's intense, he curbstomps an entire room of guards, he's efficient, he's brutal, he's strong physically and magically.

In short: yeah, he's very disabled. He's also still very useful.

At the risk of oversimplification, even within his particular disability, he's much more disabled than Marcille is (she lost something relatively simple and easy to miss, she has no catatonia-moment) but less disabled than Thistle, who seems to still have at least one desire related to the king but is still primarily catatonic. It seems like Thistle is not unusual among ex-dungeon lords, even if there's enough noncatatonic dungeon lords to form a support group later. When Milsiril finds Mithrun, she immediately intends to mercy-kill him – this seems to be a condition the elves are familiar with but consider terminal, at least to the degree Mithrun is affected, and people seem unfamiliar what it means to keep living in this state because Mithrun is unusual in that he survives at all. And he's “allowed” to survive initially because he's not as disabled as he could have been (still has a desire) and that desire is useful. They aim him at the dungeons and off he goes. It takes twenty years for him to recover enough to do it, sure, but they're elves. They can wait. He can still be useful.

Relatedly, when he loses the ability to pursue his desire he's immediately much worse off than he was previously.

The no-desire catatonia is something that can recur and the elves continue to not know how to handle it. If Kabru wasn't there to problemsolve I think he'd have just… stayed there with his increasingly distressed squad.

Speaking of his squad, there's also a fascinating power dynamic going on with just the inherent structure of the Canaries; criminals are assigned as his caregivers. There's the inherent unfairness to the criminal Canaries about them being given extra duties, this strange rich noble guy who's now their Responsibility. There's so much possibility for resentment in normal caregiving relationships, much less being forced by your jailor into caregiving someone. But there's also an element of the power the prisoner Canaries now have over him and his most basic ADLs and needs. Assigning Cithis to his care is such a can of worms! The dynamics of the situation are frankly awful for both of them; of course she resents him initially. It would be strange for her not to. When Pattadol catches her making Mithrun do embarrassing things, she instantly reminds Cithis of her lower-status – she's forced to care for this nobleman and then forcibly reminded that she's beneath him.

She's responding to having menial, low-status tasks forced on her by trying to humiliate him, and although he doesn't have the ability to care enough to stop her it's still a deliberate removal of dignity. He's the instrument with which she is punished and she punishes him in return (until it's not fun anymore and she understands him a bit more.)

Mithrun is a long-lived race, who has structural power over the shorter lived races simply because of how long they live. The dwarves and elves try to actively keep certain knowledge from other races, restricting their access to technology, and other expressions of distance. Senshi spends nearly the whole first season not listening to Chilchuck trying to explain that he's an adult and treating him like a child, and Kabru repeatedly says that the elves do the same thing (and tbh we see them doing it). There's even the fact that it took him twenty years to recover enough to join the Canaries again; a shorter-lived race might have died from old age in this time, or become too old to work in this capacity, and then wasted away without the drive to return to the dungeons. But they're elves; the other elves can afford to wait, and he's not going to age out of dungeoneering any time soon. Being an elf probably contributes to his wealth in the same way skin color contributes to wealth inequality in the real world.

Dungeon Meshi doesn't really go into race in the sense of skin color much, and Kui is writing from a different cultural standpoint than I am. While tallmen are quite accurate when it comes to skin/hair color (yes, even Kabru and his blue eyes; it's rare but possible) and cultural references, the elves, uh, absolutely are not, both in the sense of “dark skin & pale hair and eyes trope” and sense of the royals having jet black skin.

Still, I feel like race is so connected to care and caregiving in the real-world west that I would be profoundly remiss not to mention it. Skin color might not matter to elves in the racism sense, but it matters to humans and humans are the ones writing and analyzing this story. (And I fully expect as the fandom grows with anime-onlies people will like Mithrun more because he's white (has white features) than they would if he had darker skin, because fandom is also baseline racist.)

I don't think we can just not mention that Mithrun is pale-skinned and both Cithis and Kabru, his primary caregivers over the story, both have dark skin.

Racism means white people are more likely to get good medical care, the type you need to get diagnosed and prescribed caregiving. Racism means wealth distribution is uneven, favoring white people. Race affects immigrants taking on undesirable jobs like caregiving for low pay. Racism is a profound stressor which means it contributes to who becomes disabled in the first place in that it can worsen health outcomes.

Similarly to race, gender may not be very obvious when it comes to this subplot within the story but the gendered dynamics of caregiving in the real world are something I do want to touch on. There's an oft-cited statistic about how men are much more likely than women to divorce their partners when their partners are diagnosed with a serious condition; I don't like relying too much on those sorts of statistics because they can be so misleading but it does gesture at something very real, culturally. Even if men aren't supposed to be caretaken, women are supposed to be the caretakers. Certainly, it's not Mithrun's fault that he can't cook and can't do laundry and probably can't do most housework, but I do also think about all the posts passed around about “my boyfriend who won't do housework.”

Again, none of these privileges make him less disabled and less in need of and deserving of care, they're just worth talking about when we talk about caregiving in general.

It's Rotten Work, Even If It's You

People expect disabled people receiving care to be grateful, to accept anything, and to try and make it easier for the caregiver if they're able. Requiring care is an incredibly disadvantaged position, even as actually receiving it can be so tangled up in privilege. Caregiving is tremendously difficult work, it's true, but there's a particular vibe people want from disabled people – all those movies about not wanting to be seen as a burden. Never complaining. Being grateful.

And, uh, well…

Mithrun basically accepts anything his caregivers do, but he's not grateful at all! I appreciate that in a disability portrayal. He'll also lie to and ignore his caregivers, which is Annoying but is definitely an expression of autonomy even if he's probably not doing it specifically to express his autonomy. He's not going to thank you. He's not going to make it easy. He'll accept a lot of things considered “undignified,” and he's not mean or unpleasant in the sense that he's taking advantage or anything, but he's certainly not a model patient.

He's running off back into the dungeons just when you think you've finally gotten him somewhere safe.

There's always a strange tension in caregiving, I've found. It is incredibly intimate but a lot of it is done by total strangers. A number of caregiving tasks are viewed by the wider world as entitled but placing those tasks in the hands of strangers is a remarkably tough place to be in. As a disabled person, I've had to accept my bowel movements being discussed with my parents’ friends, all sorts of being physically moved places not against my will but without my permission, even my pubic hair being shaved off by a stranger (nurse) while I was unable to speak or move. When people are feeding you, making sure you use the toilet, rubbing your feet to make you sleep, helping you with hygiene – people are working so hard to help you. Are you supposed to just accept them doing whatever they want to you?

There's also a dynamic where people will say they don't mind caring for you, they're happy to do it, and then as the years go by and you continue to need care the resentment just builds up. Caregiving is hard work. It's often thankless. The goodness of people’s hearts can run dry, when it's been twenty years and you still can't bathe yourself.

Aaand I need to continue in reblogs, because I'm out of space for images. Please hold. edit: you can find part 2 here

[theemissuniverse]

FLIRTY INTROS MK MALE CHARACTERS X GODDESS!READER

SUMMARY : Flirty intros with reader that’s Goddess reader. Reader is goddess of sexual love and beauty. Raiden and Fujin are her younger brothers. This is based off MK 11. If this gets enough likes I’ll do women

ABOUT CHARACTER : (Y/N) is able to put people under love spells. It is also hinted that when she has sex with warriors, she gains their power. (Y/N)’s beauty makes her very conceited and flirtatious than from the other Gods. (Y/N) is good neutral. This means she is mainly good but works with villains. She also has glowing tattoos along her body that symbol love and sexual freedom.

CHARACTERS: Liu Kang, Kano, Kung Lao, Kabal, Johnny Cage, Erron Black, Shao Kahn, Noob Saibot, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Jax, Geras, Nightwolf, Kotal Kahn, Shang Tsung, Kollector, Baraka, Raiden & Fujin (obviously brother and sister banter for them)

LIU KANG VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : I can feel the sexual tension between us, monk

Liu Kang : I find you very beautiful Lady (Y/N)

(Y/N) : You’ll find out the rest of me is soon enough

(Y/N) : Ever lay down with a goddess?

Liu Kang : It was never really on the bucket list

(Y/N) : Well add it and then check it off

(Y/N) : Kitana is such a bore

Liu Kang : Then who’s more interesting?

(Y/N) : Look right in front of you

(Y/N) : My brother was right in choosing you

Liu Kang : I’ll honor him for his decision

(Y/N) : Honor me instead

(Y/N) : Hello, gorgeous

Liu Kang : Are you flirting with me, Lady (Y/N)?

(Y/N) : Just wanted to compliment you before I destroy that beautiful face

KUNG LAO VS (Y/N)

Kung Lao : If I win, you have to let me take you on a date

(Y/N) : If I win, you have to go down on me

Kung Lao : So I win either way?

Kung Lao : Double date with Liu Kang and Kitana?

(Y/N) : You could not handle a woman like me

Kung Lao : Oh I think I can

(Y/N) : You’re quite handsome

Kung Lao : And you’re quite beautiful

(Y/N) : Such a shame I’ll have to ruin that pretty face

(Y/N) : You’ll be one of the first I breed with

Kung Lao : *chuckles* Of course

(Y/N) : Confidence is a trait all my children will share

(Y/N) : Are you jealous of the chemistry I share with Liu Kang?

Kung Lao : Hardly. You know you are mine

(Y/N) : Oh am I?

KANO VS (Y/N)

Kano : Aren’t you lovely to look at

(Y/N) : You can look but you can’t touch

Kano : I like me a challenge

Kano : You know, you don’t act high and mighty like the other Gods

(Y/N) : Is that a turn on for you, Kano?

Kano : Very much

(Y/N) : You’re loyal only to yourself

Kano : I got some loyalty to fit you in, love

(Y/N) : I will make you the most loyal of them all

Kano : So are you the dominant or submissive one?

(Y/N) : I’m the one that puts you in the ground

Kano : I’m feeling you’re more like a switch

Kano : Hello, baby. You miss me?

(Y/N) : Maybe. Did you miss me?

Kano : A lot, lovely

KABAL VS (Y/N)

Kabal : You got me under some spell, babe?

(Y/N) : You are not worthy for that kind of witchcraft

Kabal : Well damn

Kabal : Screwing me wont make you faster

(Y/N) : Actually that is precisely how it works

Kabal : Ah, shit

Kabal : You’re cute when you dress in all white

(Y/N) : You’re cute when you keep your mouth shut

Kabal : Ha. Got you to admit I’m cute

(Y/N) : Are you prepared to die Black Dragon?

Kabal : Not gonna lie. That voice is sexy

(Y/N) : It will be the last thing you hear

(Y/N) : Kneel before your goddess

Kabal : Not gonna lie, that’s tempting

(Y/N) : Cute

GERAS VS (Y/N)

Geras : Beauty will not save you

(Y/N) : So you admit you find me beautiful?

Geras : *sighs*

Geras : I have never seen a God full of themself before

(Y/N) : It is merely fact that I am better than the rest

Geras : It is truly a wonder

Geras : I am immune to all your powers

(Y/N) : As if I need them against you

Geras : Making a grave mistake

(Y/N) : Kronika’s minion

Geras : My purpose is more than you know

(Y/N) : I do not care for your purpose

Geras : In the New Era, you will be more humble

(Y/N) : Is that apart of your imagination?

Geras : Soon will be reality

JOHNNY CAGE VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : Johnathan Carlton

Johnny : Ooh. Not the government. What’d I do?

(Y/N) : Practicing for when I scream it

(Y/N) : Are you always this insufferable?

Johnny : Come on. You know you like me

(Y/N) : Like is a very strong word

Johnny : Why are goddesses always so hot?

(Y/N) : I am the only goddess you know of

Johnny : Well yeah. Still hot

Johnny : Flowers or chocolates?

(Y/N) : Neither, Earthrealmer

Johnny : How bout me?

(Y/N) : You couldn’t handle a goddess

Johnny : I beat Shinnok. I think I got this

(Y/N) : I still cannot believe that happened

ERRON BLACK VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : You know that gun won’t kill me

Erron : You don’t like a little foreplay?

(Y/N) : As if you can get there with me

Erron : What I gotta do to prove I like you?

(Y/N) : Kneel before me

Erron : I got no problem getting on my knees for you

Erron : Fighting a pretty lady just ain’t my style

(Y/N) : Then maybe we should find another way to get physical

Erron : You ain’t gotta tell me twice

Erron : Women with tattoos are always hot

(Y/N) : I will make you regret even breathing

Erron : Yeah, still hot

(Y/N) : How much is on my head?

Erron : More than a lifetime

(Y/N) : How disappointing you’ll lose out on the money

FUJIN VS (Y/N)

Fujin : Stay away from Shao Kahn, sister

(Y/N) : He wouldn’t dare to harm me

Fujin : You think that

Fujin : Raiden and I are only trying to look out for you, sister

(Y/N) : I’m the older sister, Fujin

Fujin : You sure don’t act like it

Fujin : Shang Tsung will say anything to have your soul

(Y/N) : I am aware, brother

Fujin : Then why are you bonded to him?

(Y/N) : When will you and Raiden admit that I’m the better one?

Fujin : When hell freezes over

(Y/N) : I guess Sub-Zero will have to take a trip down in the Netherrealm

(Y/N) : You and Raiden don’t know how to have fun

Fujin : You’re just a childish, spoiled, god

(Y/N) : I know you are but what am I?

SHAO KAHN VS (Y/N)

Shao Kahn : Join my concubines

(Y/N) : *laughs* You could not handle all of this, Shao Kahn

Shao Kahn : You will bend to me eventually

(Y/N) : Sindel is a catastrophic bore

Shao Kahn : A bold statement

(Y/N) : An accurate statement

Shao Kahn : You are far too beautiful for me to believe you are Raiden’s sister

(Y/N) : It is something I haven’t found the pleasure in bragging about

Shao Kahn : Let me take you away from that fool

Shao Kahn : A woman like you belongs with a man like me

(Y/N) : How so Shao Kahn?

Shao Kahn : Our power combined will be beyond imaginable

Shao Kahn : Kung Lao is not worthy of your affection

(Y/N) : And you are?

Shao Kahn : I will break his neck again

RAIDEN VS (Y/N)

Raiden : I believe Nightwolf is interested in you

(Y/N) : No overprotective speech brother?

Raiden : Out of all the suitors, he is most worthy

Raiden : Stay away from, Liu Kang

(Y/N) : He is not just your chosen one

Raiden : I do not need him distracted right now

Raiden : Sister

(Y/N) : The non fun brother

Raiden : Here we go again with this

Raiden : The Black Dragon are not to be trusted

(Y/N) : I know this, brother

Raiden : So stop hanging around Kano and Kabal

(Y/N) : You’ve let rage consume you completely

Raiden : I do it to protect Earthrealm

(Y/N) : Some protection you are

NOOB SAIBOT VS (Y/N)

Noob Saibot : Such beauty like yourself is rare

(Y/N) : Are you flirting with me, shadow?

Noob Saibot : I will bring you to death to live in your beauty for eternity

Noob Saibot : I’ve been looking for you

(Y/N) : Looks like I am found

Noob Saibot : Come with me

Noob Saibot : The shadows yearn for your touch

(Y/N) : They cannot have me

Noob Saibot : Yet

Noob Saibot : Death clings to your embrace

(Y/N) : Only for you Bi-Han, I will grant it

Noob Saibot : That is all I want

Noob Saibot : Join me in death

(Y/N) : Not happening

Noob Saibot : I’d hate to do this the hard way

SCORPION VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : I like men that have fire

Scorpion : I will not entertain your advances

(Y/N) : A fireball fool rejects me?

(Y/N) : I think my sign is a Scorpio

Scorpion : Why does that matter?

(Y/N) : Ugh. You are so difficult to flirt with

(Y/N) : Takahashi Takeda is your best student. I bet he’d be great at other things

Scorpion : You will stay away from him

(Y/N) : Jealous Hanzo?

Scorpion : You are playing with fire

(Y/N) : Aren’t you the expert in that?

Scorpion : Playing with a man’s emotions will cost you

Scorpion : I will not indulge in your pyromaniac fantasies

(Y/N) : It’s almost as if you can read my thoughts

Scorpion : A goddess and a scorpion will not work

SUB-ZERO VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : It’s getting a little hot in here

Sub-Zero : What does that have to do with me?

(Y/N) : Sorry. That line was for Scorpion

(Y/N) : I bet you’re good with your hands

Sub-Zero : I can show you in Kombat

(Y/N) : Please. Demonstrate

(Y/N) : Frost is a lost cause

Sub-Zero : There might be hope for her

(Y/N) : The hope is shattered

(Y/N) : So cold I feel goosebumps

Sub-Zero : You will feel more than that

(Y/N) : Are you speaking of kombat or something else?

(Y/N) : You are in the presence of greatness

Sub-Zero : That I am

(Y/N) : Now submit

SHANG TSUNG VS (Y/N)

Shang Tsung : (Y/N)

(Y/N) : Stay away from my brothers

Shang Tsung : Yes. We should keep this between us

Shang Tsung : Come closer

(Y/N) : What will you do if I don’t?

Shang Tsung : You cannot resist me for long

Shang Tsung : Liu Kang admires you well

(Y/N) : Of course the chosen one does

Shang Tsung : He cannot admire you for long

(Y/N) : You cannot have my soul, sorcerer

Shang Tsung : I was thinking of something else

(Y/N) : *laughs* You are not worthy of that

(Y/N) : You have affections for Sonya?

Shang Tsung : Am I sparking something in you, goddess?

(Y/N) : Just can’t believe you’d be interested in someone so boring

JAX VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : Well aren’t you easy on the eyes

Jax : Is a goddess really flirting with me?

(Y/N) : Very much so

(Y/N) : You and I keep crossing paths

Jax : I’m not complaining

(Y/N) : I bet you’re not

Jax : There ain’t nothing more attractive than a goddess

(Y/N) : You flatter me, Jax

Jax : I can do more than that

Jax : So how many rounds can you go?

(Y/N) : With my power? About ten

Jax : You know I’m talking about Kombat right?

(Y/N) : Put those arms to use, Briggs

Jax : And do exactly what, (Y/N)

(Y/N) : You know what

KOLLECTOR VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : Low life thief

Kollector : I will steal what is left of you when I am finished

(Y/N) : You’ll never have all of me

Kollector : You are the true embodiment of a goddess

(Y/N) : Yes, I know

Kollector : I will break you apart and sell your parts

(Y/N) : To what do I owe the displeasure

Kollector : The Kahn wants you

(Y/N) : If he wants me then he can come get me himself

Kollector : Pretty girl

(Y/N) : Ugh. You

Kollector : You will regret your distaste

Kollector : And what do we have here?

(Y/N) : Someone worth more than your life

Kollector : We’ll see about that

BARAKA VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : Baraka

Baraka : Shao Kahn’s concubine

(Y/N) : Ha. He wishes

(Y/N) : Creature

Baraka : Submit to the Tarkata

(Y/N) : My standards aren’t low enough for you

(Y/N) : Keep looking, Baraka

Baraka : You are not all that, goddess

(Y/N) : How dare you!

Baraka : Face me in kombat

(Y/N) : You must have a death wish

Baraka : My wish is for you to die

Baraka : You are unworthy for the tarkata

(Y/N) : You dare call a goddess unworthy?

Baraka : Rightfully so

KOTAL KAHN VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : Kotal Kahn

Kotal Kahn : You will stay away from Jade

(Y/N) : I can make you forget all about her

(Y/N) : You are Kahn no more

Kotal Kahn : Kitana takes my place

(Y/N) : Which means you are unworthy

Kotal Kahn : Shao Kahn only brings out destruction

(Y/N) : You’re no more innocent than he is

Kotal Kahn : The innocents are damned

(Y/N) : Why do all men fancy boring women?

Kotal Kahn : Jade is not boring

(Y/N) : Your heart desires for a common assassin

Kotal Kahn : You are truly breathtaking (Y/N)

(Y/N) : I do not need a fallen Kahn to remind me of that

Kotal Kahn : But your mouth is ugly

NIGHTWOLF VS (Y/N)

(Y/N) : Be on your guard, Nightwolf

Nightwolf : You really are stunning

(Y/N) : Yes. And deadly

(Y/N) : My brother claims that you are interested in me

Nightwolf : I um..that is interesting

(Y/N) : Don’t turn back on me now

Nightwolf : I’ve never met anyone like you

(Y/N) : *chuckles* Are you flirting with me, Nightwolf?

Nightwolf : Would that bother you, my Goddess?

(Y/N) : Are you going to let me win like you let Scorpion win?

Nightwolf : I would never pose kombat on you, Goddess

(Y/N) : Shame. I like being wrestled to the ground

Nightwolf : We shouldn’t fight

(Y/N) : This is merely an exercise

Nightwolf : I will prove I am worthy, Lady (Y/N)

A/N: I hope you guys liked this. It took me a long time to make

[lover-of-mine]

Hello and welcome to Anna thinks they just kickstarted Eddie's queer arc and *coldplay starts to play* it was all yellow (and blue). (metas on the blue and yellow here and here if you feel like reading)

I feel like at this point I have made the point that I think Eddie's queer arc is gonna be yellow where Buck's was blue very clear (post on that here, more on the theory applied to buddie here), so I'm watching for any amount of blue or yellow around Eddie. The whole thing comes back to the way 704 is very blue and yellow and the climax of Buck's bi arc, the coming out scene since it's the one scene Buck chooses to come out, is also blue and yellow, but Buck himself is blue.

This actually starts in the locker room in 701 tho, but we have established that Buck is blue, so they are in the wrong colors. They're also in the wrong colors during the will reveal, which is interesting if they follow through it this particular symbolism the way I'm expecting them to.

The will reveal is interesting because they don't match their backgrounds the way Buck does in the coming out scene, but the backgrounds have the right colors, but I digress.

The thing is, the thing that I keep waiting to happen, happened. The sandy yellow shirt. Something about Buck's journey to blue, is that he is in darker shades of blue while Eddie is in neutral tones, mostly black, until he reaches a shade of blue that's basically the color of Oliver's eyes, so it's a brighter color.

So my working theory is that Eddie is gonna mirror that, and we will have Buck in neutral tones while Eddie finds his golden yellow, that right now I'm 90% positive will be the shade behind him in the coming out scene, but Eddie's arc will be lighter shades working up to the darker ones. And this is a promising start.

But I wanna talk about Eddie's arc on the episode. Because his arc is blue and yellow, but he's drowning in blue. Which is the wrong color. And not just because the uniforms are blue.

Something in particular that's intriguing me is the fact that they changed the waiting room of the hospital, so it is yellowish now, where it used to be a more neutral blue color.

Something else is the fact that this is the school from 504, an episode called home and away, that has "you're the guy who likes to fix things" conversation, where we actually discuss the way blood family knows you differently than a significant other. So we have a few s5 callbacks going on, and I feel like this will be a pattern, even though I don't think Eddie is in route for another full breakdown, I think deconstructing parts of who he is will have a lot of callbacks to his s5 arc.

The dialogue of the ambulance scene is very interesting too, because Eddie is talking about fixing someone's heart in less-than-ideal circumstances, and he actually manages to pull it off after some struggle. I'm probably reading too much into it, but the fifty/fifty on 2 attempts is making me 👀 because if we take this to the more metaphorical possible Eddie and his own heart, unless we are talking Buck, he failed all times, but it interesting to think Shannon vs Buck since Ana and Marisol where superficial relationships. Considering what we know, how young he was and the way his relationship with Shannon got to serious to fast vs the way Buck squeezed his way into his life and Eddie did take some leaps of faith in less than ideal conditions, I can see a symbolism hidden there.

The talk with Bobby is also interesting because of the whole yellowish setting and the implication that the issue can be traced to the mustache, and since we know the mustache is gonna be important for Eddie's character in the following episodes.

But the thing that had me screaming was actually the shop scene. I wrote a meta on this (you can read it here) but 911 uses blue and red for parenting issues. And the shop, the car the dad is working on, and the equipment are blue and red. And that makes sense, they are talking about parenting. Eddie is there as a father, at least at first.

And all of this is happening while Eddie is in white.

After they go outside, while Eddie is talking about being a father in a more detached manner, he is surrounded by the blue and red, even though the chair is yellow.

But while the dad is talking about his struggle understanding his kid, he is blue and yellow. This is interesting even though I don't want to sit here and say that Weston is queer just based on the fact that he's a cheerleader, because yes, the blue and yellow is used for Buck, but is also used for henren, and if we expand on the 911verse, it is also used for tarlos, so the metaphor there.

And attached to all the struggles Eddie has expectations that were placed on him, and specifically 517 where Eddie talks about his father not wanting to seem weak, and how that obviously affected the way Eddie grew up and how he moves on to defending Weston by saying he survived something he knows soldiers who wouldn't, we have something here. Because we don't have the focus on the red anymore once Eddie starts talking.

The green elements of the scene are interesting in the same way I said the orange is interesting about the birthday party (read that one here). Eddie is a green character, I feel like a lot of us associate him with army green, but if I'm right about the color theory we have going, Eddie can't live his life as a secondary color. That's where getting to his yellow comes in.

Eddie needs to move on from that. We talked a lot about the green army armor, with that jacket he wears when Shannon dies and when he leaves the 118 (first 2 pictures up here) so he needs to stop hiding behind the green. And the green is there, but it is out of focus, it's not supposed to be the main thing even tho it does take a lot of space in Eddie's frame. Mostly because you can see the yellow very clearly behind the dad, but not the green car behind Eddie, the edges are blending, which is good. He is moving in the right direction.

He also ends the episode drowning in blue again, which, yk, wrong color.

He's also in the same color he was in 506 after the whole kidnapping and yet another moment Eddie risks everything because there's a kid involved. But this time he can't go home to his kid. Someone give him Chris back right now (set on this parallel here).

So, since Buck's queer arc was blue and yellow, and Eddie just started an arc with those, I am choosing to believe they just kickstarted Eddie's queer arc.

That's all for today, if you read this I love you 💜

taglist (interact with this post if you wanna be tagged, or send me a message, just let me know):

@sparkedblaze @hermioneindisguise @eddiedisasterdiaz @mosaicstardust @stagefoureddiediaz @kejfeblintz @glasscities @angelcamael @sparkedblaze @caw-salem @dreamofsomepiphany @100ceruleaneyes @linus-lucy @chaosqueery @gina-spike @chimchiminie98 @elvensorceress @dangerpronebuddie @ijustdontlikepeople @182daysof @steadfastsaturnsrings @sparklespiff @inell @joshwritesfics @lunarsolar1 @dingdongfries @wolfdeans @jesuisici33 @miles--to--go @hopefuldreamers-world

[reds-skull]

CW FLASHING IN THE VIDEO (3rd from the bottom)

This is it. 3 months in the works, the comic (and video) are finally done.

A little over a year ago, I uploaded the first work in Revenant AU, Ghost's origin comic. I never thought I'd write a whole series for this, but I'm so glad I did. I got a whole new hobby out of it, haha.

I already began working on part 2, but this for me marks the start of it. I'm really excited to get back into this world!

Under the cut there are some comments on the comic I thought some people might be interested in (don't wanna make this post longer than it already is lol). I will upload the frames from the video separately, with comments on it there.

Bottom line is, thank you for letting me just go wild with this :)

Okay, I'm mostly gonna talk about the part where Fate shows Makarov the 141+Farah. Makarov doesn't see the Fate of people as literal images, he often has to interpret odd symbolism in the flashes he gets from the Weave of Fate.

I decided to go for a style I saw in a collection of calling cards in MW3, mainly from this one:

You can really see it in the faces and pitch-black cel shading.

I'll be going in order of appearance, starting with Farah.

Obviously, each of the "flashes" shows the Reaping of each person, Farah being crushed under rubble. Behind her is a helo of green gas, which symbolizes the Russian experimental gas. The motifs around her are more interesting imo - they're taken from the Urzik flag (and yeah apparently it's "Urzik" and not "Urzikstani"... according to the wiki at least). Wings, plants (feels to me like a pomegranate and some sort of crop, but I couldn't find what it is specifically), and a moon, upside down.

I'm skipping ahead a bit, but I've had the idea to make a drawing of Gaz in the Hanged Man pose since I started the AU basically. I tried sketching it once, and it went bad so I gave up lol. But I decided to come back to that here, and add some sort of tarot connection to all of them. I know practically nothing about tarot, googled the meanings of each, they fit well enough, I called it a day lol.

So Farah is the Moon, upside down.

Price is next, showing him taking control of the brain of someone. I didn't use the flag of the UK for the 141 (it'd be kinda boring...), instead I took the Taskforce 141 logo, and broke it down to different elements.

I took the laurels for Price, both framing his illustration and sitting above his head like a crown. I decided he will be the Emperor.

Next up is Gaz, the Hanged Man of course. Gaz gets both the wings and the stars (I changed mine to 4-pointed because... I like them better). Pretty clear why, both symbols relate to the sky. The illustrations kinda follow a rough day cycle, if that makes sense. Farah being night, with the moon. Price with his golden and purple color palette, twilight. Gaz being sunrise, and Ghost and Soap, day. This is why Gaz has a sun behind him.

Ghost was fun because he's the only inhuman one out of the group. I'll let you think what that implies, that even in Fate's Weave, Ghost is an outlier... Ghost gets the skull, and the card "Death". That one was easy, but what I did add is blood flowing down the skulls, like tear tracks...

Soap, the problem child, gave me the most issues as always. For once, it wasn't his fucking face, it was the flames behind him, and overall contrast and readability issues. Soap's illustration is probably packed with the most "hidden" details, though they're obvious if you've read the fic and Konchar's side story. The headless man behind Soap is Konchar himself, holding 4 chains with dog tags on them. The 4 soldiers from Soap's squad, who he killed before Soap was Reaped. Soap's pose is from the moment he came to his senses, after getting shot in the head and destroying a large part of Verdansk. He has 4 swords, pointing at him and downwards, so his card is 4 of Swords, upside down.

Between Soap and Ghost is a circle and a triangle. I'll explain that in the post concerning the video, since that's where I got that from.

If you read all of this, thank you so much! There will be another post for you to read in a moment lol

[my-castles-crumbling]

bookshop au - @wolfstarmicrofic - word count: 388

Today was the day.

After months of mooning over Leather Jacket, the nameless customer that came into the bookshop Remus worked at every Tuesday, Remus was going to do something. Say something.

Right?

But when Leather Jacket walked in, Remus's resolve broke, and not even an encouraging look from Lily made him feel more confident.

"Hey. How can I help you today?" he asked the man, trying to control his smile. He got way too excited to see him, considering he didn't know his name.

"How much do you know about knitting from the 1800s, Remus?" Leather Jacket asked, his light eyes boring holes into Remus's heart.

"Not much....erm....you can probably find it in the crafting section," he answered helpfully, leading the way.

It took them almost an twenty minutes to find the book the man needed. A whole history of knitting, starting from ancient Egypt. All the while, they chatted and laughed and it was so easy, and Remus found himself wishing it had taken longer to find the damn book.

"Remus, can I ask you something?" Leather Jacket asked, his eyes bright.

"Erm, sure," Remus nodded, feeling self-conscious. Did he know?

"Do I look like the type to study ancient knitting?" the man asked, his tone genuine.

"Erm...no? I dunno," Remus stuttered, feeling like this was a test he was not understanding.

"What about symbolism in ancient American poetry? Growing foreign vegetables during the off-season? Teaching children to sing in Vietnamese?" Leather Jacket said, listing off some of the topics he'd requested previously, still serious.

"Erm...well, I've never thought too hard about-" Remus shrugged, but the man cut him off.

"I just...I come in here for you. To see you," he man smiled a bit. "I thought I was being bloody obvious, but I'm starting to think-"

"Wait, you do?" Remus asked, genuinely shocked. He'd just thought the man had niche interests.

"Yes!" the man laughed. "Alright, let me do this proper. Erm...I'm Sirius. Like the star."

Remus grinned to himself, remembering the first time Sirius had come into the shop. For an Astronomy book.

"And I'd like to take you for coffee, maybe?" Sirius finished, looking slightly nervous."

But Remus grinned. "As long as we don't have to talk about the history of knitting."

Sirius sighed, chuckling. "Absolutely not."

[dollyhyuckii]

𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗮𝗹- 𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗽𝘀⋆୨୧˚

word count- 924 ♡

content- bf s.coups! x reader! ♡

genre: fluff ♡

warnings- kissing/everything is in lowercase on purpose ♡

୨୧˚authors note -this is for the seventeen drabble week! , you can read all of them here!

as the early morning sunlight poured through the window, casting a golden glow over the small apartment, s.coups stirred awake. it was just another hectic thursday, or so he thought. the buzz of his phone jolted him from his sleepy haze. his boss had sent a flurry of emails, each one a urgent reminder of deadlines looming. today was going to be chaotic, but today also held something special, something that would change everything.

you still slept peacefully next to him, your hair splayed across the pillow, a serene smile resting on her lips. s.coups heart swelled with affection. he had planned this day for weeks, and as much as he dreaded the work that awaited him, his mind was solely focused on the evening ahead. he was determined to make it perfect.

after a rushed breakfast and a frantic scramble to get dressed, s.coups stepped out into the crisp autumn air. the city buzzed around him, a symphony of honking cars, people chatting , and the distant sound of construction. he walked quickly, weaving through the throngs of people, his mind racing with thoughts of you and his future together.

the clock ticked relentlessly, and between meetings and deadlines, he couldn’t shake the sense of urgency building inside him. he had to find that rin, the perfect symbol of his love, before the date night began. it was all he could think about as he glanced at his watch repeatedly, willing the hours to pass more quickly.

finally , with a few hours to spare, s.coups heart raced as he approached the small jewelry store nestled between two bustling cafes. the bell above the door chimed softly as he entered, greeting him with the comforting scent of polished wood and fresh flowers.

“can I help you?” asked a friendly salesperson, her eyes sparkling with interest.

“im looking for an engagement ring,” he replied, trying to sound calm despite the butterflies dancing in his stomach.

“of course! do you have any preferences?” she asked, guiding him toward a display of shimmering diamonds and colorful gemstones.

s.coups scanned the selections, imagining how each ring might look on your finger. he wanted something classic yet unique, just like you. after what felt like an eternity, he spotted it, a delicate rose gold band adorned with a petite diamond that sparkled with a fiery brilliance, reminiscent of your bright personality. “this one,” he said, feeling a rush of excitement.

once the purchase was complete, he tucked the small box into his pocket, his heart racing with anticipation. thoughts of their favorite spot, the quiet little Italian restaurant where they had shared countless laughs and moments, filled his mind. tonight would be special.

as the sun dipped below the horizon, s.coups hurried home, a mix of nerves and excitement swirling in his chest. he quickly showered, changed into his nice clothes, and decided to surprise you with a bouquet of your favorite flowers , sunflowers. they symbolized adoration and loyalty, a perfect representation of how he felt.

when he arrived at the restaurant, the familiar aroma of garlic bread and marinara sauce enveloped him, instantly making him feel at ease. the space was intimate and filled with soft, romantic music. you were already seated at their usual corner table, your eyes lighting up when you saw him.

“hey baby.. you look beautiful !” he said, placing the flowers in front of you.

“they’re beautiful, love.. thank you!” you leaned in and kissed his cheek, you’re warmth melting away the stress of the day. you both chatted and laughed, enjoying the meal, but s.coups mind was elsewhere. as the main course came to an end, he felt the time drawing near.

“baby.., can we take a walk?” he suggested, his voice slightly shaky.

“yes , of course!” you replied, excitedly. the crisp evening air felt refreshing as you both strolled hand in hand along the twinkling streets, the world buzzing around them.

finally, you both reached the small park that held so many memories, picnics, late

night talks, and laughter echoing beneath the stars. s.coups heart raced as he turned to face you, the moment he had been waiting for finally upon him.

“my love , there’s something i need to tell you,” he started, his voice steadying. “you mean everything to me, and i can’t imagine my life without you.”

he knelt on one knee, retrieving the small box from his pocket. the world seemed to fade away as he opened it, revealing the stunning ring that glimmered in the moonlight.

“baby, will you marry me?”

your hands flew to your mouth in shock, tears brimming in your eyes. “oh my gosh! yes! yes, of course!”

s.coups slid the ring onto your finger, his hands trembling, and as soon as it was in place, you fell into each other’s arms. both of your lips met in a deep, passionate kiss, all the tension and excitement of the day melting away. it wasn’t just a kiss, it was the kind that spoke volumes, where words couldn’t. you both lost yourself’s in each other, hands roaming, hearts pounding.

you pulled back for a moment, your forehead resting against his, both of your breaths ragged as you both smiled through the tears. “i love you,” you whispered, your voice thick with emotion.

“i love you too,” you replied, his heart swelling with joy and relief.

you both stood there, wrapped in each other’s arms, kissing again, the city fading away around them. in that moment, nothing else mattered. it was just the two of you, your love.

[sunayyyy]

Worst fandom mischaracterisation/headcanon of each bat-associated character, in my opinion (these are in no particular order) :

1. Duke Thomas is the sane, rational, "normal" one.

Have you ever read the We Are Robin arc? Duke is fucking unhinged, his introduction was him jumping off a bridge to escape cops. This is a kid whose father is immortal and is the first metahuman in the batfam. He lost his parents in the most horrendous way possible (joker venom. They're still alive, but it's horrifying) and organised a whole gang as a child. He threw down with a green lantern and 2 shot his ass. Hopefully, this headcanon is just a product of people not really knowing the character and goes away soon once people find out more about him, when he isn't just the token black guy in a fic or a background character in batfam drama.

2. Stephanie Brown is quirky and sassy, and ONLY quirky and sassy. She's over her trauma with Black Mask and Cluemaster!!

Stephanie Brown is a very interesting character, with an origin story that is very similar to jason todd. She's been through hell, yet she constantly gets infantalised by the fandom, which gets kind of ignored in favour of talking shit about how people infantilse tim (super valid and I'll come back to it later on in this post). You most commonly see this in timsteph stories where they show her as the immature first love, and how as tim grows up, he needs to date more "serious" people, as if tim wasn't the main reason their relationship never worked. This is also common in stephcass fics, although on a smaller level. Writers tend to make stephanie the bubbly outgoing girl that balances out all of cass' angst (some of those fics are really good, but they mould steph in a specific shape so she can be a prop for cass to heal). On an even smaller scale, I've seen both romantic and platonic jaysteph stories where stephanie appears as the "good" victim who let go of her animosity to black mask and cluemaster, and so now, she can help jason let go of what happened with the joker, and bruce's abuse. Obviously, this is a disservice to both of these characters, but people tend to focus on how it's more of a disservice to jason instead of steph. Let my girl express her trauma and heal, and stop using her as a prop for other characters! She wasn't just cutesy as robin, she threw the fuck down. Her introduction included hitting tim in the head with a brick!

3. Slut/himbo Dick Grayson is reductive of his abilities as a leader, and is not only offensive to real survivors of SA, but incredibly racist towards Romani people.

Do I really need to explain this one? Dick Grayson is a symbol of hope that bruce wishes batman could be. This man is a natural born leader and has stepped up to the plate multiple times, both during his time with the titans and as batman. He's charismatic and lovable and a genuinely intelligent man, but for some reason, he gets depicted as a dumbass who has to deffer to bruce or tim or babs any time he has an issue with detective work. Yes, you can delegate. Of course, you can delegate, but going straight to tim and rattling off the case you JUST accepted doesn't make sense, ESPECIALLY if you're on seperate cases and tim or bruce have to postpone their work just to solve it for you. As for the other part, Dick has been heavily implied to be demisexual, given that he only has sex with people he has genuine feelings for. He wouldn't just sleep with any random woman who compliments his ass enough. Also, having an SA victim be characterised as a slut is both reductive of their trauma and a weird way that some authors justify how he's "over it." Really doesn't help that he was slut shamed (canonically!! why is this canon??) by the rest of the titans after sleeping with mirage, who pretended to be kori. Additionally, it's really weird if the first thing you think of when you see an attractive romani man just sleeps around. People don't say that about other conventionally attractive characters, even ones who HAVE slept around. The only character i can think of that gets characterised like this is bruce, but that's an image that he cultivated to keep batman hidden.

4. Jason Todd was always doomed by the narrative. He would have died if bruce hadn't intervened. Also, pit rage.

The tragedy of jason todd was, and always has been, that he was doomed by the AUDIENCE. He wasn't just an angry, reckless child, and calling him the angry robin is stupid and reductive. Was he angry? of course he was, but so was dick, and so was damian. Using a single word to describe a person is never going to be enough. Jason was notoriously compassionate to victims, especially women and children, and sex abuse victims. He got pissed when the system he was asked to believe in was shown to be ineffective, to the point where bruce believed he killed a man over it. The kid had a bright future ahead and loved school, modt of robin!jason's shitty qualities came from bruce and alfred compartmentaling his image and shitting on him to ease their guilt over his death. Pit rage is also a cheap way to take away his autonomy, an easy pass to explain the shitty things he's done. I like it when the pit has side effects like glowing eyes or increased healing or something, but pit rage is stupid. It's either used to force characters to forgive jason since he wasn't himself or as an angst prompt for jason, another testament to how he came back wrong, or a way to have him hurt a character to further up THEIR angst (*cough* titans tower AU fics*cough*). Yes, he did shitty things. Let him do shitty things without giving him an easy out. Otherwise, your story isn't compelling at all.

5. Feral Damian Wayne is just straight-up racist, no?

I love damian. I think that, for the most part, he's been written pretty well. However, damian suffers from the fact that he's an arab character in a post 9/11 comic, and thus there is bound to be some casual racism, both in comics (like when tim assumed he was too uncivilised to know what a handshake is) and fandom. Has damian wayne done a lot of shitty things, especially to tim? Yes, absolutely. But that doesn't make him feral. He was raised by assassins as the heir to the throne and to the greatest hero in the world, raised to think that blood relations are the only ones that matter, so of course he's dismissive of tim. He's also a prince who was raised in luxury, who was born as royalty and has experienced more opulence during his birth thsn most peoole do in a lifetime, although this opulence is extremely conditional, with horrifying requirements (the story with damian having a metal spine as a child is insane). Does it make what he did to tim right? Definitely not. Does it excuse his actions? Also no. But it does explain them, it tells us where it came from. Being traumatised and having extremely high expectations of both sides of your family doesn't make you feral.

6. Tim Drake is just a small little baby who can't function without his coffee.

Let me preface this by saying that i don't like tim drake. At all. As a huge fan of the al ghuls it was a real kick in the balls having Ra's be reduced to a creepy pedophile who wanted tim as an heir, and sent a woman to rape tim in order to carry his child. Also, I hate how DC decided to prop him up by shitting on jason todd. However, this doesn't mean that I don't enjoy his YJ run and that I don't enjoy some of his comics/fics. That being said, nothing on this earth pisses me off more than tim stans. You know the ones, the people who want damian hanged, who want dick and jason and bruce to fall to their knees and beg for forgiveness. Tim has been through an insane amount of trauma, and that's understandable, but please, for the love of god, don't create more whump for tim at the cost of other characters. You can hate damian, I wouldn't blame you, but remember that he's like 10 and tim put him on a hit list. Dick never wanted to put tim in arkham, and he didn't have time to support tim when it came to an honestly insane (although ultimately correct) conclusion. Also damian as robin was alfred's idea, and damian was the one that put on the costume preemptively, dick got pissed at damian for that. When it comes to jason, I'd say it's complicated. While titans tower was fucked up, it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. My first introduction to the fandom was through jason todd since he was my favourite robin, and then i learned they brought him back to life when i played injustice. The number of fics and posts that mention that jason went to the tower specifically to kill tim is insane. When i got into comics, it was like whiplash; it wasn't a one-sided beatdown, tim was conscious until the end, the goofy ass robin suit jason had on, jason never slitting tim's throat (that happens in hush, and even then i don't think he really slit his throat, since the art shows that the skin was kinda nicked), all of that was wild to me. BftC is one of the shittiest comjc book runs when it comes to characterisation in general, and I've already discussed dick and tim, so it's only fair to talk about jason and tim. There's no justification here, honestly, other than shitty writing i guess. The other side of the coin is enemies to caretaker jason and tim, which is so fucking wild?? they're like 2 years apart, and tim is extremely competent, he wouldn't pass out mid patrol because he forgot his coffee.

7. Bruce Wayne doesn't believe people can change and doesn't care about Crime Alley.

For the first one, please fucking read a single comic book. Just one. Better yet, maybe research why batman doesn't kill. You know, the most popular thing about him? As for the second, it's mostly just a way to show how jason is better than bruce and how he's right to take over the alley since no one cares about it. Now I LOVE jason todd. He's my favourite comic book character of all time tied with gambit and Dr. Strange. But I hate it when you create angst or comeuppance by blatantly ignoring the chatacter and their motives. Bruce became batman so that what happened to his parents can never happen again, and this includes helping the poor people in crime alley either through patrolling there or by setting up countless charities to improve life there. You can make the case that batman avoided crime alley after jason died. It's not canon, but it would make sense. However, I dont see him ever giving up on the alley, both to prevent what happened to his parents, and to help people like his dead son. I fucking hate bruce, he's done a lot of shitty things, but making shit up just to make him worse is getting old.

8. Misc

There aren't really enough mischaracterisations about cass and babs to warrant separate paragraphs, so I'll just reiterate the infantalisation of cass and babs having no qualities outside of oracle, master hacker, and dick grayson's on and off lover.

[driftward]

Let's talk about Zoraal Ja.

So early on in Dawntrail, shortly after Krile's first Echo off of Zoraal Ja, I was like, we are going to find out there is something fucked up happening to this guy. Maybe there's actually an Ascian in there purposefully fucking things up, or whoever the big bad of the expansion turns out to be rewired his head somehow, or, you know, some flavour of brain fuckery.

But as we go through the story and ultimately see him at his defeat, no, nothing so extreme as all that. He seems to be just Like That, and I thought it odd. By all accounts, it seemed he must have been raised okay. Gulool Ja Ja seems to have been an alright father figure, good enough to have raised two other kids into decent adults. They have their own sets of issues, but nobody's perfect, and they both do a good job course correcting for their shortcomings.

What the hell happened with Zoraal Ja? Why did he turn out the way he did?

Gulool Ja Ja is a blessed sibling, which we are not just told are exceedingly rare - we are shown so, explicitly, and we learn what the cost of a blessed sibling is to the Mamool Ja. A cost that their people bore in order to try to better their lot and win a war against the Xbr'aal. Gulool Ja Ja did not so much win their war as much as he simply ended it, bringing peace to both peoples.

That peace is simply, however, not that old. When we visit Iq Br'aax, we slowly learn the story of how that peace came to be, but throughout it, I could not help but notice that we were only getting one side of the story. The celebrated meal of Xibruq Pibil was meant to be a symbol of bringing peoples who were historically enemies together, but where were the Mamool Ja to share it with? And why did none of the Mamool Ja present seem to know how to create the recipe?

There is a peace, but here we see that it is a flawed peace. In the side quests, you learn that trade happens between the Mamool Ja and the Xbr'aal, but only in secret. The younger generation knows peace, but the older generation is still cagey about the not all that distant history with their neighbors in the forest.

And so the Mamool Ja still continue their practice of enduring the terrible loss of so many stillbirths in an attempt to create more blessed siblings. Their culture, especially the remnant that chooses to remain in the forest, is still trying to make its place in the larger world and improve their lot. They are still living in a land that makes for harsh conditions for living.

And in this we see a few things. One, Gulool Ja Ja is not perfect. He did a good job, but not a great one. The work of peace is going to need to be an ongoing project. And two, I believe it sets the foundation for why Zoraal Ja is the way he is.

He was not raised in Mamook, but he is still Mamool Ja. And like Gulool Ja Ja, he is a miracle. The trueblood son of a blessed sibling, who were long believed to be sterile. We don't know anything about his mother, and I suspect she had little influence on his life. But judging from the way the fight against him goes, and the visions we see of the people in his life, he may not have had a mother, singular, but I think he definitely had nursemaids.

And they certainly remembered what life was like in Mamook. And that history is not so old. And so early on, he is told he is special. He is told he is destined for great things. And probably, at least a little bit, there are whispers of how he might surpass his father one day.

The seed of a terrible imposter syndrome is planted.

And none of what happens requires Gulool Ja Ja to be a bad parent. In fact, I think what we get is the result of him trying to be a good parent. It seems likely he probably met his kids where they were at, encouraged their interests, and let them be who they wanted to be. Wuk Lamat probably sparred with him, and certainly got his sociable, outgoing tendencies. Koana, quiet Koana, I like to imagine he expressed an interest in sciences, and knowledge, and Gulool Ja Ja probably made sure he had the best tutors, and when the time came, made sure he had a good send off to Old Sharlayan.

And quiet, taciturn Zoraal Ja who rarely speaks. I can imagine Gulool Ja Ja let his son keep his peace. He probably assumed his son wanted his space, and left him to it. And Zoraal Ja, the miracle, watched his father. His father's living accomplishment was peace in Tural. Zoraal Ja will bring peace to the entire star. Gulool Ja Ja loves a good fight, enough that he challenges people to come to the palace and face him. Zoraal Ja will be a better fighter than his father. Gulool Ja Ja was a leader. Zoraal Ja is the leader of the Landsguard, and will succeed his father as Dawnservant.

It's interesting, I think, to compare and contrast Zoraal Ja with Bakool Ja Ja, who are more alike than they are different. Both are miracle children, both are impossible children. The Mamool Ja thought that a child born of Hoobigo and Boonewa was impossible - until the birth of the first blessed sibling. And they also believed a blessed sibling, in turn, was sterile - until the birth of Zoraal Ja, the miracle.

And both of them, I think, are carrying the weight of their people with them. Bakool Ja Ja explicitly, but I don't think Zoraal Ja got to escape it just because he was raised in Tuliyollal instead of Mamook. Even if the aforementioned nursemaids did not explicitly put the idea in his head that he might be the future of the Mamool Ja, he is not an idiot. They definitely told him he was a miracle, destined for great things.

And absent guidance from his father, who probably just wanted him to be his own person, he decided for himself what those great things would be.

Zoraal Ja is intent on completing them alone - to his ultimate detriment, in the trial in Mamook.

And while they are so very similar, the difference between Bakool Ja Ja and Zoraal Ja is that Bakool Ja Ja not only never wanted this, but he was eventually offered a path out. A way to be free of the yoke of the responsibilities his culture put upon him before he was ever even born. But Zoraal Ja never got that chance, because his burdens were not being forced upon him. He took them upon himself.

And he carried them until his death.

In the end, Gulool Ja Ja was probably a decent father, but not the right kind of father for Zoraal Ja. Zoraal Ja's ambition was born of a terrible inferiority complex that he nursed until it festered and swallowed him whole. He could have found his own freedom, but he could not see it past the shadow of his own father, who he was obsessed with eclipsing.

And so we're left with this. Zoraal Ja died in a completely avoidable tragedy of his own making.

[cinnbar-bun]

Straw Hats- Reversed AU HCs

AU: In which YOU are the character of a very famous franchise, and they are regular people who are fans of your series.

Note: GN!Reader, crack, very unserious

Luffy

Thinks you’re neat! Super cool!

People think he doesn’t really “get” you and just likes you for your awesome powers and/or cool appearance, but he drops like an innocent yet profound tidbit about you that shows he really is thinking of you.

Honestly probably only has a bootleg figure of you courtesy of Ace. It’s goofy as hell but he adores it.

Maybe has one of those printed graphic tees.

Ace and Sabo joke about his love for you but then Luffy throws his slippers at them.

If he sees anything with you on it, he’s just gushing over it.

Loves finding funny comics with you online.

Zoro

Guy who likes you for your powers.

The same guy who is also a weeb in front of the mirror and tries to replicate your awesome moves.

Help his roommates caught him-

I think he’d get those compression shirts/shorts with you or a symbol of yours for when he works out.

Also the guy who’s working out to your voice like those ASMR videos so he can pretend you’re praising him and congratulating him.

Gets into fights with Sanji about who’s the bigger fan.

I don’t see Zoro as the type to “collect” things, but he’d probably have a keychain of you around his belt or something as a good luck charm.

Might even have an action and poseable figure of you like a Figma.

Nami

Likes you lots, but also recognizes your merch potential.

Works alongside Usopp to produce fan merch or zines for you to make money.

Has a unique piece of jewelry with your symbol/iconography to wear.

She’s not wearing “obvious” for merch, because she just isn’t about that.

Probably has a few very expensive figures of yours that are special edition or anniversary editions that she managed to get at a steep discount.

Reads a bit of fanfic but tends to mostly peruse fanart of you.

Tends to have multiple ships for you- she doesn’t really favor one over the other she just thinks they’re interesting.

Likes to do cosplays of your fits, though. She’s gotten very popular for her lovely cosplays. She tends to handmake most of her cosplays, but Usopp and Franky add to the amazing accessories.

Plays the gacha game for your series, and her amazing luck means she gets practically all your units easily.

Usopp

The artist of the group who has seen and had to do heinous things for a commission.

Unlike the others, he IS making a self insert and HE IS DOING ART AND COMICS WITH YOU AND HIM AS THE MAIN COUPLE!

Has made a name for himself of making doujins and art for you. His store has seen lots of purchases for his doujins.

Nami basically is his account manager and has made him raise commission prices many times in order to pay their rent and so he can realize how valued his work is.

He mostly just posts his work but does like answering questions from fans and posting about how awesome you looked in the new episode.

Always making art and stories from you.

Has done fanfiction for you but it’s mostly with his OC/SI and his artwork tends to be more well-known.

Always does special drawings for your birthday and various holidays.

Plays the gacha and has bad luck so he has to whale for your unit. He insists he prefers just regular console or PC gaming instead of gacha.

Sanji

Number one fan, he WILL get into arguments about you and inject you into everything.

All your figures, all your merch, all of it in one specific room dedicated to you. Sanji even has a lifesize figure of you in a cool/cute pose he religiously cleans (and prays to ngl) every day because AINT NO WAY HIS LOVE IS GOING TO GET A SPECK OF DUST ON THEM!!

His work as a chef makes him busy, but he likes to wear small things of you like a brooch or something on his uniform to cheer him up through the day.

Makes videos cooking things you cooked or dishes you liked within the series.

He sometimes shows off his collection and Zoro calls him a loser and they get into fights in the comments.

Commissions art of you (probably Usopp) to hang up in the (Y/n) room.

I feel like he would do a persona/self-insert but also I feel like he’d be like no!!!! I cannot sully my beloved like that!!! So he focuses on just you.

Blocks people who are fans of you and does not like shipping anyone with you, hell no his mellorine is HIS!!!

Has done fanfic, mostly self-insert, and that’s pretty much all he reads. No ships.

Robin

“Oh, (Y/n)? Yes, they are an interesting character. I like them.”

[1 Million word count fic series, tagged: slow burn, character exploration, heavy angst, found family, Book 4 of 7]

“I just think they’re neat.”

Probably the mother fic writer for you and/or one of your ships.

Doesn’t socialize much online, just tends to post and scroll through the fics for you and answers comments under her fic.

Likes to support her fellow creators so she does look into the art and projects other fans have made.

Does try to create her own aesthetics for her blog and fics, but sometimes she just commissions Usopp to make her things for her fics to fit her vision.

Is really into unique and often abstract or “dark” art of you.

Yes you’re her favorite character, yes she will still make you suffer in her fics and art for the ~development~.

It’s a running gag with her peers where they ask her how she will torture them next.

She finds the Nendoroids of you are quite cute, so she bought one to go on her desk.

Franky

Franky likes making garage set figures of you.

He’s also a bit of a dork, so he will often make you pose with a super sentai outfit or large gundam robots (since they’re also a part of his crafting hobby).

Makes videos showing off the new figures he made of you.

He loves you cuz you’re his hero, you just amaze him!

Printed a photo of the art your creator did where you guys were all dressed like super heroes or something- suuuuppper up his alley and he loved seeing it.

He likes collecting the manga/comics for your series and keeps them on his personal shelf.

Franky also helps Nami/others with specific cosplay accessories. Franky is known for his craftsmanship, so he’s made plenty of cosplay gear for others that are above and beyond.

Him and Usopp have collabed to create the original figures of you that Franky adores.

Does those videos where he takes cheaper/smaller figures of you and adds to the base and design to make it more “epic”.

What the hell is “fanfiction”?

Brook

Goes by the username “Soul King” and uploads his covers of your franchise’s music.

He really loves you though so he’s often rocking your shirts while he’s recording the music.

He does a lot of different genres for your theme covers- jazz, heavy metal, lofi, piano, music box- he’s done em all.

Whenever he’s not recording covers of his music and does streams, he very proudly shows his figure of you and a poster he has hanging up on his wall.

Also plays the gacha game, has pretty good luck but never with your units.

“Wow! 5 Sugo-rares! Who are they- GOD DAMN IT IT’S JUST THE OTHERS!!! RATE UP IS A LIE!!!”

Brook is a menace though and I’m gonna keep that under wraps for various reasons.

Maybe in the future I might explain further.

Jinbei

Jinbei is classy, unlike many of the others here (we will not name names).

He’s more likely to “make” his own merchandise for you.

Handmade doll with a lovingly sewn kimono, for example.

Fancy tea set that is painted with your symbols but it’s so subtle and chic that some of his viewers don’t even realize it’s from some random franchise he likes.

He prides himself on his traditional and handmade crafts and you’re just an avenue to experiment with them.

He likes to design the kimonos and outfits with you in mind and the season. He shows the process of creating it in these calm and quiet BTS videos.

Really they are beautiful and the amount of love and skillmanship put into the work he does is fantastic, it’s awe inspiring.

Does not know what a fanfic, a gacha, or what a “fan edit” is. He’s an old man he’s got things to do, man.