#i can't recall who created the first idea

[bookwyrminspiration]

Hm I have. Thoughts over how Kam would pick a last name if then married. Not even the biggest Kam fan, but it’s widely known that Keefe would take Sophie’s last name over her taking his, and I wonder if Tam would keep his or take Keefe or if they just don’t take either of their last names and instead just give any kids they have both last names.

-⚙️

someone once suggested Sophie would let any of her friends take her last name if they wanted so they wouldn't have their shitty family connections; they wouldn't have to marry her for it she'd just let them also have it. Tam and Keefe Foster.

or, I think Keefe would 100% be the kind of person to make up a kickass completely new last name. the problem would be thinking of one that Tam would also agree to, given his eccentric egotistical tastes. Tam seems the kind of person to just be totally fine without a last name, his entire government name just: Tam.

I am positive that both of them would drop their current last names as soon as possible though, they wouldn't keep or merge or double up or pass them on. Those names are dying with them. Whatever they replace it with is secondary to the fact that those ones are gone

they could be silly and make their last name Shadowheart, which is one of the alternate ship names some people use for them given kam's unfortunate other meaning. keefe and tam shadowheart <3

[satcrvz]

COME WHEN YOU CALL!!

title has nothing to do with the fic LOL i just like tv girl.

suguru geto x reader, around 1k words, slight gojo slander

you were bored. you were currently hanging upside down on geto's bed, trying to make out the words on the posters scattered on his wall. geto on the other hand, was laying on his back with one hand in his hoodie, one holding his phone.

he finally decided to speak up on your 4th huff. "baby, i've asked you maybe . . . six times what you want to do."

you used your core to pull yourself up to look at him. "and i told you i don't know! you invited me."

"wrong," he interjects. "if i'm correct, you begged me to let you come over."

"shh!" you threw the build-a-bear the two of you got together. to no surprise, he blocked it before it hit him. moments later you gasp as if you just had the greatest idea ever. you grab the bear next to him and place it in your lap.

"we should play two truths and a lie!" he hums in agreement to your request.

"okay i'll start! let me think..." you glance around the room and play with the arms of the bear as you think of something that might stump him.

"okay i got it!" you clear your throat for dramatic effect. "one, i've gotten lost inside the market for 3 hours," he snickers at this and you warn him to let you finish.

"stop! two, i skipped school for an entire week. three, i've never broken a bone." you lean forward towards him with a grin, "guess."

he brings his hand up to his face to think. sure it was a lot harder than he expected, but he knew you, and he certainly knew when you were lying.

"you've never skipped school for an entire week."

your jaw drops before turning into a grin again. "you cheated. i thought i was a good liar!"

"hate to break it to you, but you're not." you pretend to be offended by his words. "at least you're pretty." you're kicking your feet internally. geto will never fail to fluster you with his words.

"okay!! you go."

"alright. one, i hate pineapples. two, i play guitar. three, i can't swim."

you narrow your eyes at him, looking for any signs of a lie. "hmm."

"i'm gonna say you can't play guitar." he laughs at you and takes this as an opportunity to tease you. "babe? you must not know me at all.."

you raise an eyebrow and decided to recall a certain conversation with gojo, prior to you and geto's relationship.

"suguru can actually play guitar?" you asked as you fiddled with the strums.

gojo takes this as an opportunity to sabotage geto. "nah, that's just for show!" he glances over at his best friend who was sitting on a beanbag. "he uses that to impress the girls he'll never get," he leans over to nudge your shoulder.

he sent a cocky glare to geto to which he payed no mind.

"and you believed that idiot?"

you huff and move to sit next to him rather than across. "it seemed believable! and it was the first thing i thought of after hearing your answers."

"never trust a word that blue eyed idiot says."

"lesson learned," you say. "so which one was the lie?" he informs you that the lie was that he can't swim.

you burst out laughing. "really? but you look like you can't swim!"

"hey!" he raises his arms defensively. "just because i don't swim often doesn't mean i can't."

"yeah, yeah." your eyes dart over to the guitar he has sitting by the bookcase. he follows your gaze and lands on the target.

"what? you want me to serenade you or somethin'?" he grins. that actually didn't sound like a bad idea. "maybe." you look at one of the posters near the guitar and asks if he likes the band. he nodded and got up to reach for the guitar.

"ooooh, you gonna play for me loverboy?"

geto smirks as he picks up the guitar, "maybe i will, if you act right." you pretend to zip your lips and throw away the key.

you watch as his fingers glide and strum against the guitar, creating a tune that fills the room. his expression is one of concentration, which you admired with an adoring gaze.

you smile at him as he finishes and puts the guitar down and joins you back on the bed.

"sugu, i can't believe you didn't tell me!"

"thought you would've put two and two together after seeing the guitar in my room."

"i told you, gojo lied to me!" you scoff.

"yikes! horrible liar and horrible at detecting lies."

you huff and decide to lay down in a way to where you aren't facing him.

YOU

bitch ur a liar

GOJO

whaaatt? ^^

YOU

about sugurus guitar being "for show"

im like so pissed off at you im heavily embarrassed. i look like a shit s/o!!!

GOJO

LOL! my bad :P

you were about to respond when the sound of getos voice went to your ears. he seemed much closer than before. "you're not a shit partner"

"oh my god what the fuck!" you laugh. "when did you get behind me?"

"like, 10 seconds ago."

"nosy." you glare playfully.

he wrapped his arms around your waist and continued to watch whatever you did on your phone. at one point, you'd gotten sidetracked and picked up his hand to play with his fingers and the rings that were on them.

maybe you should've thanked gojo instead of cussing him out. you could give him credit for noticing how nice your boyfriends hands were, you suppose.

[lecsainz]

Could you write friends to lovers with Ollie Bearman? Something really fluffy where they realise they have feelings for each other, thank you.

OUT OF MY CONTROL

˒ ⌕ masterlist . . .

parings: ollie bearman + fem!reader

summary: the one where you and ollie are best friends and ollie finally creates the courage to declare yourself.

🗒️ : best friends to lovers are definitely my favorite trope!

type: fluff ಇ

Ollie had known Y/N for as long as he could remember. He first met the girl with y/h/c hair in elementary school. Ollie remembered the six-year-old Y/N approaching the seven-year-old Ollie, taking his hand, and saying, "You're my boyfriend." At the time, young Ollie had bolted away from her, and every time he saw her, he'd hide. That was until the day Y/N decided she wanted another boy to be the father of her dolls and chose the boy who always ran from her to be her best friend.

Today, all Ollie wanted was for his best friend to see him in a different light. Not that Ollie was afraid to make a move, as he was popular among the girls, but he was afraid that Y/N would distance herself from him as she did with any other boy who wasn't Ethan – a guy Ollie disliked.

What did that blond boy, who played football, have that he didn't? He raced a car at almost 200 km/h and was afraid to compete with someone who kicked a ball.

He couldn't recall when he started having feelings for Y/N. Maybe it was during his first race when she showed up wearing a shirt with his number, or perhaps it was during the countless nights they spent talking at each other's houses. It might have been when he saw his best friend cry over Ethan, either because they had broken up or because they weren't speaking. The fact that he couldn't remember didn't change anything, but he simply wanted to be able to call her his. His girl. His girlfriend. Not just his best friend.

One sunny afternoon, Ollie and Y/N found themselves sitting in the park, chatting away about various topics, as they often did. The laughter flowed effortlessly, and the warmth of their friendship was evident. Ollie knew that he had to find the courage to confess his feelings soon, and he couldn't think of a better place to do it.

As they watched the children playing on the swings, Ollie's heart raced, and he decided it was now or never. He cleared his throat, trying to find the right words.

"Y/N, there's something I've been wanting to tell you for a while," Ollie began, his voice trembling ever so slightly.

Y/N turned to him, her eyes curious. "What is it, Ollie?"

Ollie took a deep breath and looked deeply into her eyes. "Y/N, you mean the world to me. You've been my best friend for as long as I can remember, and I cherish every moment we've spent together. But lately, I've started to feel something more, something beyond friendship. I don't know when it happened, but I've fallen for you, Y/N."

For a moment, the world seemed to stand still. Y/N looked at Ollie, her eyes wide with surprise. The weight of his confession hung in the air, and Ollie felt like his heart was in his throat.

Y/N's expression softened, and she reached out to gently touch Ollie's hand. "Ollie, I... I don't know what to say."

Ollie couldn't help but feel a pang of anxiety. Had he just ruined their friendship? Would she distance herself from him?

But then Y/N smiled, a warm and genuine smile that made Ollie's heart skip a beat. "You know, Ollie, I've been waiting for you to say that for a long time."

Ollie's eyes widened in surprise. "You have?"

Y/N nodded. "Yes, I have. I've been feeling the same way, Ollie. I just didn't want to ruin our friendship by saying anything. But now that you've said it, I can't hold back any longer. I've fallen for you too."

Relief and happiness washed over Ollie. He couldn't believe his luck. "Y/N, you have no idea how happy that makes me."

With a mixture of excitement and relief in the air, Ollie and Y/N leaned closer to each other. The world seemed to fade away as they closed the distance between them, their hearts pounding in anticipation. Their lips met in a soft and tender kiss, sealing the confession of their feelings.

It was a gentle, sweet kiss, filled with the promise of a new beginning. Ollie's hand cupped Y/N's cheek, and her fingers gently threaded through his hair as they shared a moment that had been a long time coming.

[highlandwhackamole]

A Grand(ish) Theory of What the Heck

I love the utterly unhinged, super detailed theories about what's going on in Good Omens, especially in season 2. I hope one or more of them turn out to be true, as some kind of glorious puzzle-box-hidden-code monstrosity. And also I think that there has to be a simpler explanation for things, for the people who are at least Somewhat Normal (tm) about this show. (... I assume such people do exist somewhere...) This is what I have been pondering recently.

The thing that started me thinking about this was this post, containing some promotional materials for season 2 that feature main characters with scenes in their heads. Like this:

Seeing this created a very similar situation in my own head, but with a nice shiny lightbulb.

All the weirdness: the car, the sideburns, the clock, the behavior of the folks of Soho, the vanishing storefront signs. The absence of God. I think this is all because everything we see is in their heads.

I don't mean it's made up. At least not entirely. Memory is already a plot point. Why not explore it on a deeper level? I've read theories emphasizing the minisodes' stories being retold by Aziraphale and Crowley. I think the whole season is like that.

You know that sort of conventional-wisdom-fact-concept that you can only dream faces of people you've seen before (or variations therein), because your brain can't make new faces up? So it just fills in what it thinks is close enough? I think that idea, applied to remembering or recollecting things, could explain so many things that are wonky in this show.

Wonky Things

Crowley parking in an impossible London location? He definitely remembers it was in London, so his brain just stuck some obvious London landmarks in there.

Awkward clattering happening when Crowley throws the stacks of books he's inexplicably carrying around the bookshop? He wouldn't actually throw Aziraphale's books! But he'd like to think he's cool and nonchalant enough to do that, and if he did it would definitely make Some Kind of Noise.

Jim walking toward the bookshop from somewhere mysterious? Maggie and Nina saw him first, and he came from that direction, so he must've walked all that way. They don't know about the elevator in the Donkey.

Aziraphale remembers tartan hills and the Loch Ness monster because he was having a jolly time driving through Scotland, so obviously the scenery must've been whimsical Scottish things.

Nina put the Honolulu roast sign up, so she remembers its presence, but perhaps the occult/ethereal visitors to her shop do not.

Maggie really did text Aziraphale about the rent, but a note through the mail slot is a much more dignified way for a scholarly angel to imagine he received a message.

On the Fallibility of Recall

This season is loaded with unrealistic inclusions. The colors are turned up to 11. Some of the scenes are more caricature than believable interaction. Remembering things never copies or reproduces them with what one might call high fidelity.

Scenes recalled by separate memories will inherently vary. One person's hefty jigger might be another person's dash. Who knows for sure where the sun was that day? You and I might recall an event having different lighting or a different color palette, sort of like viewing something with different lens filters.

According to Neil, Crowley is an unreliable narrator of the story of his Fall. He labels the variations in clock times as a continuity error in a show where Everything Is Meant, but he doesn't say whose continuity error it is. He insists that the Bentley is the same through the whole season; maybe it was the same, but remembered differently. Maybe this is part of why there's more CGI but it's harder to spot.

So What?

Is this all there is to it? I sure hope not. I like my Good Omens with enough layers to put to shame an onion wrapped in a cake and covered in a parfait.

Is this possibly the fancy footwork that's distracting from the real magic trick? I wouldn't put it past Our Gaiman. There are a lot of things one could hide in the narrative of unreliable memory.

Is this going to stop me from rewatching and repondering and remaking theories for the next couple years? Not even at gunpoint.

[vivalas-vega]

top gun: maverick masterlist

my blog is strictly 18 and up - minors do not interact

I do not have a taglist, if you'd like to be notified of future works turn on post notifications for @vegaslibrary

please remember that each fic you read represents countless hours the author has spent creating something for you to enjoy. tell them how much you enjoyed reading it. pop into their ask box on anon, write a novel in the reblogs, comment a string of incoherent letters or emojis. I promise it makes our day and is the fuel that keeps us going.

each fic will feature a symbol representing what they include, or eventually will include, but individual parts on this list will not -- you are responsible for your own media consumption so please read the warnings on each post.

key: ✩ author’s favorite ♢ angst ♡ fluff ⚤ m/f smut ⚢ f/f smut

JAKE 'HANGMAN' SERESIN

multi-part series:

✩ new perspectives ♢ ♡ ⚤��(ongoing) 

You and Jake Seresin have been inseparable since age ten... somewhere along the way you fell in love and when college and flight school rolls around you have to make the hardest decision of your life.

prologue / one / two / three / four / five / six / seven / eight / nine / ten / eleven

new perspectives universe one shots + drabbles

match ♡

Jake surprises you at your match day ceremony.

j&j wedding moodboard

easier ♢ ♡ (ongoing)

You secure your first confirmed air-to-air kill on your first mission as team leader... only no one told you how difficult it would be to process and the only person who can understand what you're going through steps in to help.

one / two 

move on ♢ (ongoing)

The love of your life vanishes in the middle of the night leaving you reeling and leaning on the only person you can still trust.

one / two / three

✩ real friends ♢ ♡ (on hiatus)

One day your competitive working relationship with Jake Seresin takes a hit and results in a pact between the two of you that you never saw coming.

one / two / three / four / five / six / seven

shot through the heart ♡ / and you’re to blame ♡ ⚤ / you give love a bad name (mini-series)

Pushed together planning your best friends wedding your forced to notice someone you'd previously overlooked.

one-shots/requests:

✩ flygirl ♡ ⚤ (one-shot)

The Dagger Squad, and more specifically Jake Seresin, decide it's time their favorite bartender experience life in a Super Hornet.

✩ late ♢ ♡

A delayed period forces you to have a conversation you've been putting off with your boyfriend.

mistletoe ♡

Jake comes home to find you amidst a winter wonderland and can't help but fall more in love with you and your spirit.

✩ sunshine ♢ ♡

You and Jake are recalled to Top Gun... only problem? Jake has no idea you're in the Navy.

before he cheats ♡ (request)

While drinking away your breakup at the bar, Jake finds out about your extracurricular activities and steps in.

worry ♢ ♡ (request)

Stressed and overworked, your husband steps in to remind you to take care of yourself before taking care of others.

birdstrike ♢ ♡ (request)

Jake grapples with the thought of losing you after an accident in the air leaves him rattled.

family dinner ♢ ♡ (request)

You and Jake attend dinner with your parents, a diligent homemaker and retired Navy hotshot, and when your parents have their own ideas about your trajectory in life, Jake steps in to stand up for you.

into you ♢ ♡ (request)

Forced to watch the man you want and your best friend getting closer, you push them both away without bothering to clarify the situation.

NATASHA 'PHOENIX' TRACE

boyfriend ⚢ (one-shot)

Phoenix steps in to give you the attention you deserve when your boyfriend spends the night neglecting you.

at your pace ♢ ♡ (request)

Your relationship with Natasha has remained a secret as long as you've been in North Island, until her backseater puts the pieces together and gives her the nudge she needs to come out to her team.

BRADLEY 'ROOSTER' BRADSHAW

firecracker ♢ ♡ (on hiatus)

When you and your childhood best friend are recalled for the same high stakes mission you have to navigate ever-changing relationships along with keeping your familial name a secret.

one / two

✩ longshot ♢ ♡ ⚤

A series of unfortunate events lead you back to your hometown and straight to the professor that's been on your mind ever since you graduated.

one

unexpected ♡ ⚤

An educational trip to the waterfront for Fleet Weeks ends in a handsome naval aviator asking you on a date.

one

DAGGER SQUAD

make the friendship bracelets ♡ (one-shot)

On a whim you decide to surprise the squad with a token of your appreciation.

[torchwood-99]

Elboron's Birth

Elboron is the only named child of Eowyn and Faramir, and because of that I tend to headcanon him as their only child.

I imagine Eowyn struggling a great deal with pregnancy. The limitations on her body and the hormones puts a great strain on her mental health.

Eowyn actually has a subconcious terror of death in childbirth, because as part of Wormtongue's grooming, he planted ideas and suggestions in Eowyn's head of her family being told they must choose between saving her or saving the child, and for the sake of the bloodline, they choose to save the child.

She's actually had nightmares of this exact scenario, planted there by Grima, that she doesn't recall fully in the day, but leave her with a lingering dread and distrust of those around her during her pregnancy.

Faramir would never allow such a thing (nor would Eomer or anyone else), and the standard practise in Gondor is always save the mother first, but the unspoken terror that Eowyn can't quite articulate takes its toll on her and her relationships.

Elboron's birth is difficult, with Eowyn nearly dying at one poin. She is told that it is unlikely she will ever have another child, and Eowyn thinks she's a bad person for being relieved.

Eowyn's recovery takes a long time, and she is stuck on bed rest for weeks. Even once she's allowed out of bed, her strength has diminished and it takes a long time building it back up.

She hates how even now her body still isn't her own, and finds it difficult to bond with Elboron immediately, whereas Faramir takes to fatherhood right away. This causes Eowyn a great deal of shame and further unhappiness.

Theoretically she knows Elboron is her son, and that she loves him, but she doesn't feel it. Her feelings towards motherhood are dominated by her experiences with pregnancy and childbirth, and her shame that she cannot feel an instant affection for her son.

She ends up resenting Elboron because she liked it being Faramir & Eowyn as a unit, and now suddenly there's this child taking up time and attention. And because she can't bond with him like Faramir does, she feels excluded in her own family, a sensation she's very vulnerable to.

Eomer arrives at Emyn Arnen shortly before or after the birth, and adores his new sister-son. This doesn't help, and Eowyn feels herself supplanted not only in Faramir's heart but also in Eomer's. Once more, her male kin folk have created a unit and shut her out.

Everyone is delighted with the Steward's new son and heir, and great celebrations are held, while Eowyn can barely get out of bed. More and more she feels like a vessel for the Prince of Ithilien's heirs, who can be forgotten and discarded now that she has fulfilled her purpose.

Eowyn's family can tell she is struggling. They try to cheer her up by assuring her that she will be out of bed soon, and by talking about how wonderful Elboron is. This is rather the opposite of what Eowyn needs to hear, but she can't possibly say such a thing, because what sort of mother doesn't want to talk about her own son? What sort of mother doesn't allow her whole existence to revolve around her son?

(What sort of mother regrets becoming a mother at all?)

Eowyn is slightly comforted when she tells the midwife a little of what she is feeling, who tells Eowyn that many, many mothers struggle to bond with their child right away, and that Eowyn's exhaustion and unhappiness is very common after the travails of childbirth. This eases some of Eowyn's shame, and she's able to confide in Faramir and Eomer a little more, allowing them to help her feel not quite so neglected.

Faramir is somewhat concerned at Eowyn admitting her own lack of interest in their child, remembering his own strained relationship with his father, but he abides by the midwife's instructions to allow Eowyn to bond with their child in her own time.

Once Eowyn has recovered her strength enough for her to start going about her former duties and interests, herblore, settling law and land disputes, training horses, and she is reminded of who she is beyond Elboron's mother, once she is treated as someone other than Elboron's mother, she starts to recover her own sense of self.

Eowyn and Faramir's duties have the pair working together and mixing together away from the nursery, allowing Eowyn to feel like they are a partnership again.

As Elboron grows more active and starts forming more of a personality, Eowyn takes a greater interest in him, and finds it easier to grow close to him. He's a very bold, curious child, which Eowyn finds enchanting.

According to customs of the Mark, Eowyn has him riding with her before he can even walk. Riding with him in a satchel across her chest is the first time Eowyn is really struck with that fierce, maternal love everyone had promised her. Before that moment, Elboron seemed more like a vaguely sweet and amusing child who now lived in her house. Now he felt like her son.

Eowyn is able to form her own bond with Elboron, as well as entering into a family unit with Elboron and Faramir, and retaining a partnership with Faramir, and an identity of her own through her work and her passions.

The first time Eowyn joins an orc hunt and returns with an orc head on her spear is really bloody cathartic, for sure, and she returns laughing, feeling completely herself at last.

As Elboron grows, Faramir is the more present of the two parents. His emotional intelligence and innate gentleness means he is ideal for working out the needs of a child, and in time, a young man. He takes a more active hand in arranging Elboron's upbringing, and most of the decisions made for Elboron are made by Faramir.

Eowyn is happy to let Faramir take a lead in Elboron's upbringing, but when she insists on something, or feels strongly about some decision or other, they work it out like equals. Eowyn is also very pro-active in passing down the customs of her homeland to Elboron, and Elboron grows up with a very strong sense of his identity as a child of the Mark, as well as of Gondor.

If Faramir is the parent Elboron goes to, or is sent to, when he needs to talk, then Eowyn is the one he goes to when he needs not to talk.

Sometimes if Elboron is angry, or throwing a tantrum or frustrated about something, and Faramir is struggling to talk him through it, Eowyn will say "right, stables" or "you're coming to the stillroom", and she will set him some simply, physical task, such as cleaning tack, watering plants, cleaning potion flasks or weeding a flower bed. She will work beside him, but at a distance, and give him the chance to cool off.

Eowyn knows this works because this is what Theodred did when she got into a state as a child.

Eowyn is also the one who will burst into Elboron's schoolroom and declare that he is riding with her today, or assisting her in some official business regarding the villagers, or checking out some plants growing in the forests. They always justify these adventures by telling Faramir what Elboron learned on them.

Faramir does sometimes mourn that they never gave Elboron a younger brother, or that he never had a daughter, whom he would have doted on, but he does not grieve overmuch and mostly takes joy in his family as it is. Eowyn cannot develop feelings for a child that doesn't yet exist and never will, and quite frankly she is relieved that she will never have another child. Pregnancy was a horror, and there's no guarantee she will like her next child as much as she does Elboron.

[lavenderchqn]

"STARS AND RAINDROPS"

synopsis — with Albedo's time-off from work, he decides to paint in the solace of his home... Although there's a seeming lack of inspiration on his part. pairing — albedo x gn!reader warning — all fluff, no warnings ~ notes — COTTAGECORE ALBEDO LET'S GO! I desperately need a bedo skin ingame that screams cottagecore, give that man a flowercrown like the ones in aranara quest.

Nestled in a secluded glade, far away from the bustling energy of Mondstadt City, lies a small yet cosy cottage. Its walls, covered in ivy and occasional roses in bloom, exude a magnificent allure, making it a perfect place to gather inspiration and create greatness. 

The soft gurgle of a river nearby has harmonised with the persistent buzzing of the bees ever since the star-adorned male found interest in beekeeping. It soon became one of his many passions, allowing him to find solace when away from work. Tall trees framed the clearing, leaves rustling gently in the breeze, casting dappled shadows over the sunlit path leading to a lovely gazebo. Here, Albedo sat, surrounded by a world seemingly untouched by time. 

The 'soundtrack' of the garden finally gets the male out of his disassociated thinking state. He has been sitting in front of his easel for what seems to be hours now, stuck in deciding on the subject for his next painting. 

He doesn't usually get time off from work, as expected from the Captain of the Investigation Team as well as the alchemist for Knights of Favonious. The days when he shares said free time with his partner are even rarer… 

And yet here you are, tending to the flowers surrounding your house. Dressed in light and flowy clothing, a sunhat on top of your head. From what he remembers, you've been meaning to repot some small lamp grass plants to illuminate the garden naturally. 

"It will make it easier for us to notice the kitties late at night!" He recalls you saying. Now that he thinks about it, you're right. Even a tiny bit of light would ease the difficulty of locating all those rascals whenever the time for bed arrived. 

Speaking of cats, here's one of them — "Sir Pouncelot" — staying true to his name and trying to catch the bees flying nearby the flowerbeds. Klee had named him that many moons ago, back when he first came into the care of your household. 

"Oh, come on!" His partner shouts, frustrated at the cat jumping all over them. "If you can't behave, you'll get locked in the house." 

The cat almost scoffs at them, irritated at being yelled at. It stops for a minute before trying to rub itself all over their legs and flopping to showcase it's belly. 

"No, no, no. You won't fool me with your act." You can hear the symphony of meows as soon as Pouncelot gets scooped into the air and being brought into the gazebo. "Love, he's your problem now…" 

"Alright, I'll keep an eye on him." Albedo smiles, making eye contact with his partner. "Shall I require your assistance, I'll make you know." 

He blows a kiss in their direction, getting one back in an instant. Off his lovely spouse goes to continue working on their pride and joy. He's now stuck with the orange tabby, that's ready to play with his painting supplies. For such an old cat, he sure acts like a baby whenever chance arises. 

Sir Pouncelot is most certainly happy with this course of events, the blond alchemist being his favourite human out of the two of you. 

It jumps on Albedo's table with paints and paintbrushes, slowly getting onto the male's lap. Ready to nestle in and nap a little, the cat begins to purr quietly. 

"Oh, you…" Teal eyes are now locked onto the matching ones of the kitty. "Don't give them such a hard time…" 

"Mrrp… Mrrrp?" The cat further cuddles itself into Albedo, who now has gotten an idea on what to paint today. He takes another look at you, dressed in your straw hat crouched in front of the flower bed, surrounded by the rest of the cat family. They must've woken up due to the commotion caused by Sir Pouncelot earlier. 

His paintbrush glides across the canvas, the movement slow and steady to not disturb the sleeping loaf of cat bread. Albedo hums some tunes occasionally, enjoying his free time by having some quality time with his partner. 

The moment he gets into his newest creation, time starts to fly by. By the time he finishes, the sun is already setting, you long gone. Sir Pouncelot is no longer in his lap, surprising Albedo with its disappearance.

"Must've gotten quite into it, if I didn't notice…" He says to himself quietly. 

"Oh, you didn't notice a lot, my Prince." His spouse says right behind him, startling the blond half to death. 

Turning around, he finally sees his partner — peacefully lying on the outdoor bench, with an entire fruit bowl on the table next to them. "What were you even painting today?" They ask with curiosity in their voice. 

"Hmmm…" Albedo ponders, unsure how to answer the question. "A family, I assume." 

The painting showcases the flowerbeds surrounding the house, five kitties playing around, as well as a lovely gardener. It's dripping with the feeling of love in every stroke. 

"Well…" All of a sudden, they're standing right next to him. "It's missing a member…" 

"You need to stop sneaking around, Love." He sighs, poking their cheek. "You might be turning into a cat."

"And you need to acknowledge my missing spouse in this painting."

In the end, the alchemist fulfils their partner's request to add the missing person. It only showcases a part of him, sitting on a stool next to an easel. His partner will probably call it 'cheating' and 'unfair'… but at the same time… Albedo did not paint every bee living in your gardens. 

And they most certainly count as family as well, right? 

date of posting — august 5th 2024

[fleetingvow]

Hello, I really loved your writing for Wednesday and was wondering if I could request something.

Reader was hurt badly on the final fight and Wednesday gets worried about her, gets emotional just as she did with Thing. She doesn't leave reader's side until she wakes up and when she does she can't help but hold her because she thought that was it for a moment, and maybe confesses her feelings? You can elaborate it as much as you'd like, I'd just like for that to be the general idea, love some hurt/comfort.

Much love. <3

‘ DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS .

Wednesday Addams x Female Reader.

SYNOPSIS. wednesday addams never cried for anyone, not until she held you fighting for your life, desperately trying to stay alive to return the whispered confession. ( 4.15k words )

NAVIGATION. part one - part two. masterlist.

WARNINGS. major angst. character death ( reader’s ). unproofread. english not being the author’s first language.

NOTE. written in second person’s point of view. another love by tom odell being the angsty essential to produce this fic.

REQUESTED BY. anonymous. thank you for your lovely words, and for trusting my writing to create a perfectly stomach churning plot! do enjoy this work.

LISTEN TO WHILE READING. optional. another love by tom odell.

TAGS. @ryver19 @danysflames

𝗜𝗙 𝗪𝗘𝗗𝗡𝗘𝗦𝗗𝗔𝗬 wasn’t worried about braving the ancient face of Crackstone before, she definitely was now. Not because she was scared of him. It’s because you were the most idiotic person she knew. What were you doing in a battle that you shouldn’t be in? Were you even aware of what you were getting yourself into? She wanted to know what was going through your mind when you marched in the courtyard without a weapon or anything to protect yourself with. Just a glare that wouldn’t do anything.

The fire burning so fierce dancing with the breeze turned slow. Everything seemed too leisure for her liking when she spotted you standing there. It was as if the world had stopped spinning, but it couldn’t possibly now, could it? Xavier was mad enough to try and help, and now you? What were you going to do? Why were you even here?

You weren’t glaring at the pilgrim. You were glaring at her. The blade that was in her possession had shattered and her attention was turned to you. That was the last thing you needed. You hated Wednesday for being the centre of everything because you knew it meant sacrificing so much, even herself.

She used to love seeing you angry and defeated, but not like this. Not this way when you were getting defeated by the monster that stood before her and not her. Not when your hair moved with the wind so slowly as she met your gaze while watching the fire burn in your eyes in the middle of danger. She felt weaker.

You were a vulnerability. A phenomenon in which she, herself, couldn’t even explain.

Paying attention to the movement in your peripheral view, your eyes darted to the figure, slowly coming to the revelation that it was Bianca, in all her grace, standing not so far away from the distracted pilgrim.

You heard a victorious crackle emit from the old man’s mouth, and that’s when you knew. You quickly turned to Wednesday who was trying her best to suppress her noises of struggle. It just made you angrier. Your heart skipped faster in your chest as your mind ran circles in your head, putting it all into shambles that made it difficult for you to think. This anger had neer been felt by you before. It was suffocating, restricting, and it tightened your chest to the point that you almost gasped for air. That’s when you recalled what you came there for.

To help Wednesday put Crackstone back to where he belongs.

You shut your eyes and found yourself a moment before opening them again. When the young Addams thought you had nothing as a weapon, she was wrong. Locking eyes with the siren, you nodded and lifted a hand to reveal the lustrous object from your back. Using your ability, you passed the dagger to the girl who took the blade, understanding the task that she now shouldered.

However, that didn’t provide you much comfort. Wednesday was looking at death straight in the face and your trembling body didn’t stop to just stand around and watch. Your feet dragged you hastily a few feet away from Bianca.

This caught Crackstone’s attention as he slowly turned his head to you, grinning like he faced the Devil in front of him and made a sacrifice for a deal. You couldn’t even describe the disgust and fear you felt as you saw his face fresh from the dead.

“Those who intrude shall join the abomination in the depths of hell!”

You stared at him, narrowing your eyes as you swallowed your spit cautiously to watch his every little move that could be used against you.

What were you doing? You looked stupid! Wednesday’s furrowed eyebrows already said it all. Her heart pounding in her chest almost ripped her open when she saw Crackstone raising the sceptre in his hand, about to conjure such a damage on you. She hated that she couldn’t do anything but look at you, mentally telling you not to do what it is that you’re going to do and run to safety.

You lifted your arm slightly and tried your best to pull the sceptre away, but all it did was drain your energy and create a tension that you couldn’t even control, yourself. You were pulling his source of power, but it seemed as though your telekinetic ability wasn’t enough to do anything. Crackstone was far more powerful. You didn’t stand a chance.

You raised your other hand and conjured an object to hit him in an attempt to distract his attention from the focus he had on his sceptre. He didn’t budge and destroyed it to pieces.

“Enough!” He shouted and with a move of the mace, you were thrown across the courtyard, your back hitting the stone pillars causing you to descend to the ground with an aching body and a sharp grunt.

“Y/N!” It was unrecognisable as to who yelled for your name, but you were tired.

You were shaking extremely now. The statics ringing in your ears became deafening to the point that you didn’t hear what the next thing was. Your vision got blurry, and dark spots started to patch up your vision. You closed your eyelids shut numerously in an attempt to recover, and as you did so, you caught the bits and pieces of what was occurring right in front of you.

Bianca groaned as she toppled on the ground just the same as her. Crackstone looked unfazed as he stood with a stab, the fiery blaze of fire appearing on his back to his lower chest. He turned and soon, it was your turn as you stood. He took the blade to make use of it, but you weren’t having it. Not to Bianca. Not to anyone in that courtyard, except him.

You swiftly got on your feet, ignoring the statics and the migraine that had formed once you stood up. Your limping feet dragged you in front of the siren as you stopped right there with the dagger whipping past the air at lightning speed.

You were getting sick of lifting your hand, but it was needed this time or anyone in this courtyard is dead. You tried to stop the blade from rushing towards you, and for a second, you thought you did.

That was when you caught the smirk on Crackstone’s face. You knew it wasn’t good. So did Bianca. Your eyes widened in fear, but you didn’t have much time to react.

When with that, the blade pierced through your flesh with the sound of the metal cutting through your skin and burying deep in your body as you let out a shortened gasp. With pursed lips, you looked down and saw the dagger on your lower abdomen. The blood was quickly seeping through your clothes, shining under the joined light provided by the moon, the stars, and the fire that Wednesday thought used to burn in your eyes.

Before you completely succumbed to the dizziness was the sight of Crackstone turning to Wednesday. Then, it blurred. All your eyes could gather was the fire getting fiercer in the form of Crackstone’s figure. Was it fire? You didn’t know, but you heard the low monstrous scream that almost made you let out a victorious cry.

But once the final disappearance of his body started in the blaze, it burst into a powerful surge of what his power once was, causing a strong wave that wiped the fire off the courtyard.

You looked at Wednesday who returned the gesture as she glared at you with her sharp narrowed eyes. You plummeted to the ground shortly after with Bianca rushing over.

Wednesday marched forward and pushed the siren aside in haste as she kneeled down next to you. Your breaths were hitching, your hand laid on the dagger, stained with the red hue of your metallic blood. Beads of sweat started forming on your forehead which felt odd to you as you began to feel colder each minute.

“Don’t you dare pull out the knife,” Wednesday’s command made you groan. You could feel the metal in you, and it was the most discomforting sensation.

Wednesday didn’t know how to act or feel. She didn’t even know what to think, but the fact that you laid there on the ground, bleeding out as you trembled made her lose her mind. She couldn’t have that or else she’d lose her composure.

“I’ll call for help,” Bianca proclaimed before running out of the courtyard.

But that wasn’t the end of it all when you and Wednesday’s ears perked up at the sound of a gun cocking in the distance. And lo and behold was Thornhill with a gun in her hand, aimed at the girl who slowly stood up to confront Laurel.

“You brought a gun to a sword fight. It’s probably the first smart decision you’ve made today.”

“I might not get to kill all the outcasts, but at least I get to kill you, Wednesday.”

You groaned and shut your eyes from the stinging pain, your eyes getting tired to keep wide open as yet another fight occurred. Laurel had her gun pointed straight on Wednesday, but it was as if you didn’t feel the pain when a bee appeared followed by Eugene with his bright smile that seemed to crack the tension into two, replacing the delight of the moon to the shine of the sun.

You could’ve exceeded the amount of the stars of thanking him for saving Wednesday, but your breaths were getting shorter, and you knew there and then that this was probably the last time you’ll ever feel your heart beating in your chest.

You swallowed the lump on your throat. No, you can’t cry. Not now. Not here on the ground.

“Eugene, search the school for an emergency medical kit. Make it quick before I dig a grave.”

Wednesday turned to you, not wasting another minute to rush next to you again. She put her hand on your chest to feel the pound of your hope inside. You didn’t like this weak profile of you in front of the girl you so badly wanted to defeat just because you saw a bit of yourself in her.

( Cue the start of the music )

You always hated your reflection, hence why when she attended Nevermore, she had become nothing but a walking mirror yet also an ironic form of what you despised.

She despised you equally. You always gave her that stare she didn’t like. Wednesday found you to be a scuff on the floor she’d walk past on, but you became addicting to defeat that even winning against Bianca had become pointless when she spotted you in the crowd and challenged you in the archery field.

“It hurts,” you mumbled shakily as you tried your best to hold a noise down your throat.

She hated that. She hated that it affected her. Wednesday shouldn’t care for you, not after all the pent up anger she felt when you were around. Not the anger that made her want to stick around you more in order to rub it in your face that she was so much better than you tried to prove yourself to be.

A noise escaped your lips.

That made her close her eyes. She never did that. She wanted to remove the sight of you in front of her, and she thought it was just because you looked so human — weak. Or was it because of the hurt that she felt in her stomach? She has had enough. She wanted cotton to block her ears from your noise. You had been suppressing the noises, but God, this noise was different now. You were suffering, and it made her stomach churn once she noticed that she knew that.

Why would she know that about you?

“Wednesday,” you called, your voice being something she couldn’t get herself to listen to but still tried.

She opened her eyes and clenched her jaw.

“You’re about to cry.” Wednesday remarked dryly, hiding the fact that it made her want to stab her eyes for noticing such a detail. “It’s unnecessary.”

Who was she kidding? She had an arrow that pierced through the flesh of her shoulder and it already stung. What more a stab that she knew what felt like? Especially twisted. It was an electrocution with tenfold the increased voltage on the maimed part of the body. It wasn’t just that. There was more to it than she saw from you now.

You chuckled. “Yeah, I thought that too.”

You didn’t want things to end like this. Wednesday wasn’t a mirror. She was a similarity that you had an opportunity to know and relate to. You had a chance for her to be your friend, but instead of taking that chance, you looked at her like a competition just because you hated the aspect of yourself that you tried to link with her.

Wednesday tensed up when your bloody hand found hers on the dirty ground. Your fingers touching hers making her head spin faster than the Earth on its axis. There was a sensation there. On the spot that your cold hands inflicted upon the place of contact. A slight feeling that caused her to look down at it, her eyes going from anger to something gentle and unexplainable. You were holding her hand. She wanted to process that in her head.

You were holding her hand.

Wednesday wanted to kill after the contact, because the look you had on your face mirrored hers. She knew it wasn’t a good sign.

“Can we pretend like we didn’t try to kill each other for the whole term?” Your voice was barely a voice. The question had become a whisper that only she could hear.

No, no. You weren’t doing this. She didn’t want it. She didn’t need it. The young Addams never asked for it but why were you doing it? God, you were stubborn. She hated you so much!

But you were you. There was nothing she could do about it. You were your own person, and that’s perhaps . . . Wednesday looked at your joined hands once again. It made her feel.

You made her feel.

Every aspect of you made her feel alive.

She thought she’d known thrill and the concept of romance all her life, but she was sure that every bit and piece of what she knew about it could be matched with this — this fluttery feeling in her stomach. The spark crackling on her skin that you were in contact with. Your eyes sending shivers down her spine. This state of you that angered her so much. Her knees shaking from fear of having no one in Nevermore to compete with once again.

Why did she feel this way?

She was supposed to despise you. Wednesday pursed her lips. She looked down at yours. There was a night that she pondered over why the first thing she kept seeing was your lips when she saw you. Then, after that one thought came the billions in her head when she lied still on her cold bed in the middle of the night that would sometimes even last until the light of dawn. She thought it was just because she hated you.

She thought it was just because you provoked such an emotion in her that was far too complicated for her to comprehend. Now, Wednesday wanted to test a theory, but was there even a theory to be tested, or was it the truth?

“I never hated you.”

She heard laughter from you. Was it funny that she said that? Was that statement pointless to you? Did it mean nothing? Wednesday’s eyes narrowed, her eyelashes doing that thing you usually found amusing.

You looked away and focused on the blanket of stars glinting so brightly above you. You let out a breath, “Huh.”

Should you tell her the truth? “Since I’m dying, I think you deserve the truth.”

That made her look up at you again, tearing her gaze away from your hand again. you almost laughed at her if you weren’t so badly injured now.

“I think I never hated you too, Wednesday.”

If an instrument was checking the pounding of her heartbeat, the machine would have gone crazy as the lines came in shambles. It was the same for you, but how would you know? You — why was she staring at you like that?

Why were her eyes the ones glossy now?

“You’re about to cry.” You commented, ignoring the sharp pain that started to become worse now that you thought was like the one before. You didn’t think much of it. Yes, it was painful, but why would you? “It’s unnecessary.”

You gasped at yet another pain. Your hands clutched hers, making her shift in her spot, her fingers squeezing you back.

That didn’t help your already dying heartbeat. There was more to what you said before, but you had to refrain yourself drom embarrassing yourself in front of her just in case this was the last.

And you were sure this was your last.

You vowed never to fall for the traps of love, most especially its romantic form. You saw and experienced many things that you never wanted to look back on ever again. However, you hated how your wall slowly crumbled down for Wednesday who almost shared the same perspective as you, although hers was more glum and grim. Yours was about the matter of love. Hers was about life.

Maybe this similarity was the reason you managed to be close to her. Not that close. Just this close. Just this in which you’d share the peace in front of the quiet lake without saying another word. Just holding each other’s gazes on occasions and looking away, with you clearing your throat and her bumping your shoulder to the point that it would ache later on for no reason. Just stealing glances at certain times while the other was accompanied by another at the Rave’N. Just fighting most of the time. Just acting like nothing happened the next. Just ignoring each other’s presence while looking back when walking past each other in the corridors of Nevermore.

“Y/N?”

You gasped, “I can’t — ” You panted for air again, “Breathe.”

“Don’t speak.” Her trembling hand removed its grip from yours as she stood up, frantic yet graceful when she spotted and obtained the blade she banished Crackstone with on the ground. The girl cut the edge of her long skirt and proceeded to take a long piece, careful not to make her own shorter than it should be.

She then proceeded to kneel down next to you. No, you weren’t leaving her hanging like this. Your truth was barely the truth, and she wnated to hear from you. She badly wanted to hear your voice again in full volume, in that pitch that she always knew.

Wednesday cried for Thing, but God, you? She knew she’d fill an ocean. This couldn’t be happening to her again.

She hated you now. She hated how scared you were making her feel in that moment. Were you even aware of what you were doing to her? She was supposed to be in her best composure, handling this in a graceful way that wouldn’t require her to shake so much, to curse in her head just because you were struggling.

Why did she care?! She cared so much it was too unnecessary, and her eyes were starting to water from this sight of you.

The girl wrapped the cloth around the knife that she couldn’t pull out. She put pressure on the spot but her heart dropped to her stomach the most when a tear escaped your eye.

Wednesday’s eyes widened. She quickly took you by the shoulders and laid your head on her lap in a hurry. Now was the time that she didn’t know what to do the most.

You couldn’t leave her like this.

She couldn’t bear it. She wouldn’t.

She wanted to spend another moment alone in the quiet in front of the lake, staring at your reflections and stealing glances over the water.

She wanted to ponder about you at night, questioning why it was your lips first that she captured when she looked back at you when you passed by each other in the hallways.

She wanted — no, demanded to see your annoying face that kept popping up in her nightmares and daydreams to show up beaming at her, laughing at some stupid joke someone told.

Your life story can’t just end like this.

What was she to do without you? Wednesday could imagine a world where it was just you and her living off the taunts of each other, competing to wind, but enjoying each other’s company.

She envisioned you laying your head on her shoulder after a long exhausting day, ranting to her about how your day went. She could envision herself just nodding, being the same old her that people often thought did not care enough.

Did you care enough?

Because she did. Enough to hold you in her arms, to embarrass herself in front of you.

How the mighty have fallen for the graces of someone like you? You thought.

“If you die on me, I will make history repeat itself just to bring you back and I'll stab you again myself.”

You used what bit of your energy was left to quirk your lips up to form a curve. You liked Wednesday.

It was clearer than the water you occasionally stared at for hours in her company.

“Out of all the people in the world, the ones I share the same blood with, used to tell my secrets to,” you quietly gasped for air to continue, “This, Wednesday Addams . . .”

Your clutch on her arm was starting to loosen as your eyelids started to slowly drop down to meet the darkness.

“This is the only time I feel given a damn about.”

Wednesday’s eyes didn’t know which to focus on. They darted on the dagger, the blood, the cloth, your eyes, your parted lips — “Y/N?” That was the first time her call for someone had a frantic frightened tone.

Your hand on the ground without another sign of movement was a touch of something that amde her feel as if someone had poured acid in her stomach. Her hand made its way to your cheek, not caring whether the blood on her hand got on your face.

Why weren’t you waking up? Why weren’t you opening her eyes and shooting up from the ground to tell her that you were just joking? She didn’t care if it was a fucked up prank, as long as she knew you were still there.

But no, God no, you weren’t.

“Wake up, Y/N.”

She shook you, but there was nothing. She placed two fingers on the side of your neck to check your pulse but she couldn’t get any sign of it.

A tear fell.

Wednesday halted. The girl touched her cheek, wiping the drop of what she vowed never to do again and leisurely examined her finger that shone with the wet surface because of the tear.

There she knew.

Wednesday wished she had realised it before, but no, it took you reaching the end of your own life story before she could even understand.

She knew a bit about you.

She knew you were Y/N and that you used to live in a small home in a small town in Romania where you had a family that pushed you around just because you were an outcast. That you had a gift that none of them could accept, for it was deemed to be witchcraft or that it made them insecure to use as a reason to make you feel small.

She knew you used to have friends who spilled all your secrets that made you fall from your grace. From being at the top down to the six foot level underground.

She knew you had a fling. She knew it didn’t end well. She knew your family put you in Nevermore to get rid of you and find yourself.

She knew that you cried yourself to sleep, knew that you believed that no one cared.

She knew what was going on in the back of your mind when you wiped away your tears in front of the lake.

Wednesday just wished she never looked away when she saw who you were. She wished she never resisted what it was that she felt.

Because what you went through? She knew it was that much of a cut and the stab that Crackstone had done to you was the thousandth.

Or maybe it was the words that were left unsaid?

AUTHOR’S NOTE. part two will be coming up soon! this will be edited tomorrow since it’s so late already and i have to wake up in about four hours again. if you want to get tagged for the next part, just leave a comment. thank you!

[andy-wm]

I have thoughts about the Tiktok JK deleted

<<I realise its a few days ago now and you might be wondering 'what tiktok?' but I've been writing in snatches when I have a few minutes so it took a while. Anyway, here it is...>>

A few posts I've read have suggested JK did the silly>sexy Tiktok challenge backwards. That he did sexy>silly instead. That he was being random and funny.

I disagree.

What he did was unexpected, a little left of centre, and for the people who can read subtext, not random at all but very very clever.

I'll tell you why, (It may not be what you think) but first I need to vent about two things:

1. Give the man some credit. He knows what he's doing.

There are some who love JK but who see him as a naive innocent. He is not. He isn't a child or a himbo.

Saying he did the challenge just because it's trending, and he reversed the order of the content for a bit of a joke, is insulting to him as an artist. It would suggest he has no forethought or understanding of himself or his (global) audience, and his decisions are made on impulse with no idea of the consequences.

He's very intelligent and has plenty of experience with digital media and creating content. Besides being involved in producing complex visual narratives as part of BTS for the last ten years, he has directed and produced seven highly polished and professional GFC videos. And don't forget the MVs for Life Goes On. For the October issue of Vogue Korea he took on the role of Creative Director. That's a pretty big deal. So we can assume he knows what he's doing.

If he produces content in a particular way, it's because it enables him to communicate what he wants to communicate.

2. You may not understand the message. That doesn't mean there's nothing to understand.

A heads up to people who can't work it out... your inability to grasp meaning doesn't equate to 'no meaning exists'. Suggesting that people who recognise what he's doing are reaching or delusional is an insult to both the audience who can read this situation, and to Jungkook, who is sharing his message.

Consider a system of writing you can't decode. Lack of comprehension doesnt mean the writing is meaningless, it means you don't understand the language.

Even if you believe you understand what's being said, please recognise that context may play a role too, that it could reveal a richer and deeper message. Don't just assume the easiest (laziest) interpretation is correct.

(You may have guessed, someone suggested I was 'behaving like the cult' when I pointed out that JK's tiktok was more than being funny ... and now I'm mad 🤣)

Vent over. Now back to he topic at hand...

💜��

What was he was really doing? And why is it not at all random?

Let's take a step back to recall what army has been saying about this...

Almost every interpretation i read suggests he reversed the order (silly>sexy becomes sexy>silly). The reason given is that his tiktok only makes sense if the order is reversed, and this idea is backed up by the caption saying "I go the other way".

But the 'reversed order' theory is based on a hereronormative perspective of what's sexy (and a stereotypical perspective of silly.)

So consider the content of his tiktok from a queer point of view...

For a man in a relationship with another man, the idea that he's with all those women is silly.

It's silly to believe he's got a girlfriend - or several. It's silly to think the womens' names in the song are relevant to him.

He posted this tiktok at a time when he's releasing music that fits the western pop norm of boy + girl, and when rumours of him dating several women at once are rife. The timing is not a coincidence and nor is the choice of background song for this.

All these assumptions and rumours are pretty silly, JK is telling us.

Now let's talk about the second part, the sexy part. Yes it may look silly on the surface, but we have seen him and Jimin make dorky faces at one another when they're flirting. It seems to be the visual equivalent of calling Jimin 'Jiminssssi'.

It's just another way they create distance and avoid 'getting caught'.

Maybe sexy for Jungkook actually is lying on the couch in your sweatpants making corny faces at your boyfriend.

Remember that he puts out 'stereotypical sexy' on command as part of his job so maybe that doesn't feel very sexy to him. Maybe that's work.

In my view (I know this is subject to interpretation) they've been together for years now. This is not the first flush of love. When you've been with a partner for a while, sex is (hopefully) more fun and less serious. Maybe it's about having the confidence to be wholly unselfconscious.

(My partner makes a Pepé Le Pew face at me when he's goofing. No, i don't know why either... 🤣🤷)

But wait, what about that caption?

What about 난반대로 간다?

My beautiful Korean friend (who sadly has zero interest or care about jikook) confirmed the literal translation:

"I go the other way"

"I take the opposite direction".

It's not "it goes the other way" or "this goes the opposite direction". He's referring specifically to HIMSELF.

Jungkook goes the other way.

But it's more than that according to my friend.

It's a bold statement:

"I don't follow the mainstream."

It reminds me of his tattoo ...

RATHER BE DEAD THAN COOL

He doesn't do things just because everyone else is doing them.

"I don't follow the mainstream."

OK. HOLD UP.

This is where it gets interesting.

Then why would he do something as mainstream as a trending tiktok challenge? Especially something as vapid as this challenge?

And why would he tell us DURING that Tiktok challenge that he DOESN'T follow the mainstream?

And then delete it.

Creating content takes time.

And we know he's a busy man.

He's about to release an album. He's doing live performances. He's prerecording for music shows. He's overseas right now... for the fourth time in a month! Does he have time for this??

And he DELETED it...

Did he just WASTE all that time?

No, he did not.

He deliberately chose to do this.

He did it knowing ARMY studies every action, every video, and every media release.

He did it knowing ARMY would already have copied the video before he took it off his profile.

He said on Stationhead that he knows ARMY has it, and is sharing and posting it. He's FINE with that.

So he took the time to create and upload that video. He wants it out there.

He just doesn't want it on HIS page. That's an important part of the story.

So lets go back to the caption.

"I take the opposite direction"

"I go the other way"

"I don't follow the mainstream."

*Said boldly* remember. It's a loud statement, captioning an otherwise pointless very mainstream trending challenge.

So if he's not referring to tiktok itself, or to uploading challenges, what could he be referring to?

...

...

There's only one thing left: Himself.

I take the opposite direction

I go the other way

I don't follow the mainstream

Essentially... I swing the other way.

There's no way a queer man would make that statement and not fully recognise the message he's sending.

As for deleting the video, I'd say he knew it was too risky to leave on his profile, being a celebrity in Korea. He's managing his brand. Deleting it also gives him plausible deniability. He can say he made an error. As I said, he's very intelligent. He knows ARMY will see it and share it. He knows that those of us with a queer eye will hear the message loud and clear.

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈 And we do hear it. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

[hopeymchope]

I wish Spike Chunsoft would just go full "Persona" with Danganronpa and milk it with tons of spinoffs.

I'd be there for every goddamn one of them on DAY ONE, you know. Pick your genre! The minute they figured out how to make a decent third-person DR action game with Ultra Despair Girls, that should've opened the floodgates wide IMO. In fact, if you take any given Persona spinoff, I can tell you how easily/naturally they could develop (and I could get super-hyped for) a Danganronpa equivalent.

Danganronpa Arena is SO obvious. It's the MOST obvious spinoff, and it has been sitting there waiting to be creating for seven goddamn years now. Ever since Kodaka said he wants a DR fighting game. Hey, remember that official DR3 Staff Book art that showed Nanami dreaming about it? Many of us have shared fan ideas for the story and/or for character moves. COME ON, y'all. What's the holdup?? DO IT! DO IT NOW!

Danganronpa: Dancing? FUCK YAS. I mean, there's already some wicked dance remixes of the game soundtracks in that Crypt of the Necrodancer DR content, so why the hell not?? And I recall that @dreamrlu did some great fanart (1) for how the (2) V3 crew could dress (3).

Danganronpa Q, a dungeon crawler? Despair Dungeon already exists, so it's COMPLETELY NATURAL. It's just a higher-quality production of that same concept! And if you haven't seen that fanmade version of the first "Persona Q" opening where it's the casts of DR1 and DR2 meeting up? It's AMAZING.

Danganronpa Tactica? Imagine leading squads from the Future Foundation (including DR1 and DR3 cast members) in missions against remaining Remnants of Despair. I've been playing a lot of tactical RPGs lately, and there's a lot of room to tell a ton of story in this format... plus it's not like you even have to make complex graphics to make it work, so SC doesn't have to worry about struggling with 3D renders if they don't want to. Just consider how Digimon Survive pulled this off with 2D sprite art!

Danganronpa Strikers is, uh, maybe the hardest to justify — but if you set it in the virtual world, that could make it easy! Since Danganronpa S already took place entirely in VR and contained a load of combat encounters, why the hell not do a similar setup for an action game? And if you prefer to keep in the real world, there are still a number of characters I could easily justify making playable in such a scenario — Genocide(r), Sakura, Asahina, Mondo, Nekomaru, Peko, Akane, Great Gozu, Seiko, Munakata, Maki, Gonta, etc. I can even picture some more-unlikely candidates such as Kimura slotting into the roster. I don't even like musou games that much, but ofc I'd play the SHIT out of this one.

Look: I know I'm an insatiable fan who just wants more precious content with these characters. But you can't convince me that these things wouldn't also SELL. The brand reached new heights of awareness and sales with V3, and they haven't really capitalized on that at all aside from giving us "Danganronpa S." We haven't even gotten a new anime since DR3, FFS! And I'm confident that any one of the ideas listed above would sell far better than a weird digital board game with RPG combat set inside VR, frankly. :P

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The (open) web is good, actually

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library tonight (Monday, November 13) at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worst for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they pulling out of the services we rely on. Combine platforms with monopolies with digital flexibility and you get enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

An enshittified, platformized internet is bad for lots of reasons – it concentrates decisions about who may speak and what may be said into just a few hands; it creates a rich-get-richer dynamic that creates a new oligarchy, with all the corruption and instability that comes with elite capture; it makes life materially worse for workers, users, and communities.

But there are many other ways in which the enshitternet is worse than the old good internet. Today, I want to talk about how the enshitternet affects openness and all that entails. An open internet is one whose workings are transparent (think of "open source"), but it's also an internet founded on access – the ability to know what has gone before, to recall what has been said, and to revisit the context in which it was said.

At last week's Museum Computer Network conference, Aaron Straup Cope gave a talk on museums and technology called "Wishful Thinking – A critical discussion of 'extended reality' technologies in the cultural heritage sector" that beautifully addressed these questions of recall and revisiting:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful

Cope is a museums technologist who's worked on lots of critical digital projects over the years, and in this talk, he addresses himself to the difference between the excitement of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector over the possibilities of the web, and why he doesn't feel the same excitement over the metaverse, and its various guises – XR, VR, MR and AR.

The biggest reason to be excited about the web was – and is – the openness of disintermediation. The internet was inspired by the end-to-end principle, the idea that the network's first duty was to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible. That principle made it possible for whole swathes of people to connect with one another. As Cope writes, openness "was not, and has never been, a guarantee of a receptive audience or even any audience at all." But because it was "easy and cheap enough to put something on the web," you could "leave it there long enough for others to find it."

That dynamic nurtured an environment where people could have "time to warm up to ideas." This is in sharp contrast to the social media world, where "[anything] not immediately successful or viral … was a waste of time and effort… not worth doing." The social media bias towards a river of content that can't be easily reversed is one in which the only ideas that get to spread are those the algorithm boosts.

This is an important way to understand the role of algorithms in the context of the spread of ideas – that without recall or revisiting, we just don't see stuff, including stuff that might challenge our thinking and change our minds. This is a much more materialistic and grounded way to talk about algorithms and ideas than the idea that Big Data and AI make algorithms so persuasive that they can control our minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

As bad as this is in the social media context, it's even worse in the context of apps, which can't be linked into, bookmarked, or archived. All of this made apps an ominous sign right from the beginning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Apps interact with law in precisely the way that web-pages don't. "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

Apps are "closed" in every sense. You can't see what's on an app without installing the app and "agreeing" to its terms of service. You can't reverse-engineer an app (to add a privacy blocker, or to change how it presents information) without risking criminal and civil liability. You can't bookmark anything the app won't let you bookmark, and you can't preserve anything the app won't let you preserve.

Despite being built on the same underlying open frameworks – HTTP, HTML, etc – as the web, apps have the opposite technological viewpoint to the web. Apps' technopolitics are at war with the web's technopolitics. The web is built around recall – the ability to see things, go back to things, save things. The web has the technopolitics of a museum:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/09/11/brand/#dconstruct

By comparison, apps have the politics of a product, and most often, that product is a rent-seeking, lock-in-hunting product that wants to take you hostage by holding something you love hostage – your data, perhaps, or your friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

When Anil Dash described "The Web We Lost" in 2012, he was describing a web with the technopolitics of a museum:

where tagging was combined with permissive licenses to make it easy for people to find and reuse each others' stuff;

where it was easy to find out who linked to you in realtime even though most of us were posting to our own sites, which they controlled;

where a link from one site to another meant one person found another person's contribution worthy;

where privacy-invasive bids to capture the web were greeted with outright hostility;

where every service that helped you post things that mattered to you was expected to make it easy for you take that data back if you changed services;

where inlining or referencing material from someone else's site meant following a technical standard, not inking a business-development deal;

https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

Ten years later, Dash's "broken tech/content culture cycle" described the web we live on now:

https://www.anildash.com/2022/02/09/the-stupid-tech-content-culture-cycle/

found your platform by promising to facilitate your users' growth;

order your technologists and designers to prioritize growth above all other factors and fire anyone who doesn't deliver;

grow without regard to the norms of your platform's users;

plaster over the growth-driven influx of abusive and vile material by assigning it to your "most marginalized, least resourced team";

deliver a half-assed moderation scheme that drives good users off the service and leaves no one behind but griefers, edgelords and trolls;

steadfastly refuse to contemplate why the marginalized users who made your platform attractive before being chased away have all left;

flail about in a panic over illegal content, do deals with large media brands, seize control over your most popular users' output;

"surface great content" by algorithmically promoting things that look like whatever's successful, guaranteeing that nothing new will take hold;

overpay your top performers for exclusivity deals, utterly neglect any pipeline for nurturing new performers;

abuse your creators the same ways that big media companies have for decades, but insist that it's different because you're a tech company;

ignore workers who warn that your product is a danger to society, dismiss them as "millennials" (defined as "anyone born after 1970 or who has a student loan")

when your platform is (inevitably) implicated in a murder, have a "town hall" overseen by a crisis communications firm;

pay the creator who inspired the murder to go exclusive on your platform;

dismiss the murder and fascist rhetoric as "growing pains";

when truly ghastly stuff happens on your platform, give your Trust and Safety team a 5% budget increase;

chase growth based on "emotionally engaging content" without specifying whether the emotions should be positive;

respond to ex-employees' call-outs with transient feelings of guilt followed by dismissals of "cancel culture":

fund your platforms' most toxic users and call it "free speech";

whenever anyone disagrees with any of your decisions, dismiss them as being "anti-free speech";

start increasing how much your platform takes out of your creators' paychecks;

force out internal dissenters, dismiss external critics as being in conspiracy with your corporate rivals;

once regulation becomes inevitable, form a cartel with the other large firms in your sector and insist that the problem is a "bad algorithm";

"claim full victim status," and quit your job, complaining about the toll that running a big platform took on your mental wellbeing.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/18/broken-records/#dashes

The web wasn't inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee's decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as "branded communities." The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn't even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since. After three or four attempts to replace the web with various garbage systems all called "MSN," Microsoft moved on to trying to lock the internet inside a proprietary browser. Years later, Facebook had far more success in an attempt to kill HTML with React. And of course, apps have gobbled up so much of the old, good internet.

Which brings us to Cope's views on museums and the metaverse. There's nothing intrinsically proprietary about virtual worlds and all their permutations. VRML is a quarter of a century old – just five years younger than Snow Crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

But the current enthusiasm for virtual worlds isn't merely a function of the interesting, cool and fun experiences you can have in them. Rather, it's a bid to kill off whatever is left of the old, good web and put everything inside a walled garden. Facebook's metaverse "is more of the same but with a technical footprint so expensive and so demanding that it all but ensures it will only be within the means of a very few companies to operate."

Facebook's VR headsets have forward-facing cameras, turning every users into a walking surveillance camera. Facebook put those cameras there for "pass through" – so they can paint the screens inside the headset with the scene around you – but "who here believes that Facebook doesn't have other motives for enabling an always-on camera capturing the world around you?"

Apple's VisionPro VR headset is "a near-perfect surveillance device," and "the only thing to save this device is the trust that Apple has marketed its brand on over the last few years." Cope notes that "a brand promise is about as fleeting a guarantee as you can get." I'll go further: Apple is already a surveillance company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The technopolitics of the metaverse are the opposite of the technopolitics of the museum – even moreso than apps. Museums that shift their scarce technology budgets to virtual worlds stand a good chance of making something no one wants to use, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that museums make a successful project inside a walled garden, one where recall is subject to corporate whim, and help lure their patrons away from the recall-friendly internet to the captured, intermediated metaverse.

It's true that the early web benefited from a lot of hype, just as the metaverse is enjoying today. But the similarity ends there: the metaverse is designed for enclosure, the web for openness. Recall is a historical force for "the right to assembly… access to basic literacy… a public library." The web was "an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally." Museums were right to jump on the web bandwagon, because of its technopolitics. The metaverse, with its very different technopolitics, is hostile to the very idea of museums.

In joining forces with metaverse companies, museums strike a Faustian bargain, "because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone."

The GLAM sector is devoted to access, to recall, and to revisiting. Unlike the self-style free speech warriors whom Dash calls out for self-serving neglect of their communities, the GLAM sector is about preservation and access, the true heart of free expression. When a handful of giant companies organize all our discourse, the ability to be heard is contingent on pleasing the ever-shifting tastes of the algorithm. This is the problem with the idea that "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach" – if a platform won't let people who want to hear from you see what you have to say, they are indeed compromising freedom of speech:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Likewise, "censorship" is not limited to "things that governments do." As Ada Palmer so wonderfully describes it in her brilliant "Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet" speech, censorship is like arsenic, with trace elements of it all around us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMJb3AxA0s

A community's decision to ban certain offensive conduct or words on pain of expulsion or sanction is censorship – but not to the same degree that, say, a government ban on expressing certain points of view is. However, there are many kinds of private censorship that rise to the same level as state censorship in their impact on public discourse (think of Moms For Liberty and their book-bannings).

It's not a coincidence that Palmer – a historian – would have views on censorship and free speech that intersect with Cope, a museum worker. One of the most brilliant moments in Palmer's speech is where she describes how censorship under the Inquistion was not state censorship – the Inquisition was a multinational, nongovernmental body that was often in conflict with state power.

Not all intermediaries are bad for speech or access. The "disintermediation" that excited early web boosters was about escaping from otherwise inescapable middlemen – the people who figured out how to control and charge for the things we did with one another.

When I was a kid, I loved the writing of Crad Kilodney, a short story writer who sold his own self-published books on Toronto street-corners while wearing a sign that said "VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR, BUY MY BOOKS" (he also had a sign that read, simply, "MARGARET ATWOOD"). Kilodney was a force of nature, who wrote, edited, typeset, printed, bound, and sold his own books:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-late-street-poet-and-publishing-scourge-crad-kilodney-left-behind-a/

But there are plenty of writers out there that I want to hear from who lack the skill or the will to do all of that. Editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers – all the intermediaries who sit between a writer and their readers – are not bad. They're good, actually. The problem isn't intermediation – it's capture.

For generations, hucksters have conned would-be writers by telling them that publishing won't buy their books because "the gatekeepers" lack the discernment to publish "quality" work. Friends of mine in publishing laughed at the idea that they would deliberately sideline a book they could figure out how to sell – that's just not how it worked.

But today, monopolized film studios are literally annihilating beloved, high-priced, commercially viable works because they are worth slightly more as tax writeoffs than they are as movies:

https://deadline.com/2023/11/coyote-vs-acme-shelved-warner-bros-discovery-writeoff-david-zaslav-1235598676/

There's four giant studios and five giant publishers. Maybe "five" is the magic number and publishing isn't concentrated enough to drop whole novels down the memory hole for a tax deduction, but even so, publishing is trying like hell to shrink to four:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Even as the entertainment sector is working to both literally and figuratively destroy our libraries, the cultural heritage sector is grappling with preserving these libraries, with shrinking budgets and increased legal threats:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

I keep meeting artists of all description who have been conditioned to be suspicious of anything with the word "open" in its name. One colleague has repeatedly told me that fighting for the "open internet" is a self-defeating rhetorical move that will scare off artists who hear "open" and think "Big Tech ripoff."

But "openness" is a necessary precondition for preservation and access, which are the necessary preconditions for recall and revisiting. Here on the last, melting fragment of the open internet, as tech- and entertainment-barons are seizing control over our attention and charging rent on our ability to talk and think together, openness is our best hope of a new, good internet. T

he cultural heritage sector wants to save our creative works. The entertainment and tech industry want to delete them and take a tax writeoff.

As a working artist, I know which side I'm on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Mimara,_Zagreb,_Croacia,_2014-04-20,_DD_01.JPG

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[dedalvs]

Is there something up with the High Valyrian wiki?

https://wiki.languageinvention.com/index.php?title=High_Valyrian_language

I've had this link bookmarked since ages. I can't seem to load the page. I've tried all sorts of browsers and it is still not working. i wanted to get back into actively learning HV again and duolingo is kinda annoying so. Is there a different page/resource the wiki has moved on to? I also seem to recall an old forum for HV with a bunch of really good resources for it. is it possible for you to provide a link? Thanks so much anyway!!

Good question! This wiki, which you can find here..

...is a labor of love—not just from me, but from a team of dedicated individuals who want to get information about my languages up somewhere more or less permanent, editable by many, and all in one place.

For years I have had a hosting plan from DreamHost. For a fixed fee, DreamHost allows you, essentially, infinite storage. I've got a dozen or so websites hosted by the same DreamHost account. I have to pay for the urls (a yearly fee; everyone pays these), but the hosting itself is covered, no matter if I had one website or a hundred.

Creating a wiki that would function like Wiktionary was my idea. I love Wiktionary, and love the idea behind it. For example, let's say you wanted to look up mate. This is an English word. It's also a subjunctive form of matar "to kill" in Spanish. It's also the word for "saliva" in Swahili. It's also "dead" in Tahitian. It's also a word in several other languages. It's kind of cool to take an abstract form—going just by spelling—and seeing that it's a word in a bunch of different languages, all with different etymologies (some related, of course. For example, mate has something to do with death in a lot of Oceanic languages. In Hawaiian it's make, which looks like an entirely different English word!).

In Dothraki, the word tor is the number four. It comes from Proto-Plains *tur (and so would be tur in Lhazareen). It's also the word for "tower" in Hen Linge (this is one of the words coined by Andrzej Sapkowski, not created by me). In Noalath, from The Shannara Chronicles, it's the word for "wolf", and in Shiväisith, the language I created for the Dark Elves from Thor: The Dark World, it's the word for "sword". While it's true I didn't create the Hen Linge word, I created the others, so you can see it's a form I'm fond of, where the shape is possible.

Anyway, that's kind of cool! And that was the point of the site.

As it happens, the High Valyrian section of the site is…massive. To give you an idea, at the moment, the wiki has over 220,000 pages. Most of those are High Valyrian pages. This is because there's a dedicated team for High Valyrian that has added pages for every single noun, adjective, and verb inflection for every existing word on the wiki. To give you an idea, every verb of High Valyrian has around 200 forms (ipradagon "to eat", ipradan "I eat", ipradā "you eat", ipradas "s/he/it eats", etc.). Every single form for every single verb has its own page. This was accomplished primarily with a program that populated the inflectional pages, but however they got there, they're there.

Certain things on the wiki are templates that need to go through and "check" every single page. Additionally, a webcrawler goes through and checks every single page on the wiki. This requires a lot of RAM. As a result, periodically, the entire website just...shuts down.

Obviously this is not cool. I asked DreamHost about it, and though we have infinite space, we don't have infinite RAM. The first step was to disable all web crawlers. You know about SEO, and how you can do things to increase the page rank of your site? Well, we needed to do the opposite. We needed to make the site disappear from the net, effectively. And we did. This is why even if you type "David J. Peterson wiki language invention" into Google you get nothing. It's like we don't exist. We're there, but you have to know we're there and go to the site specifically. That helped, but our own programs still shut things down.

The second step was to get a private server (technically a virtual private server) for the site. This cost me an extra $25 a month ($300 a year) from what I was already paying. This definitely helped, but sometimes things get to be a bit too much, and so the site still shuts down. This is what you experienced.

You know how Wikipedia begs you for money every year? It's because of this. It's one thing to create an awesome resource; it's another thing for people to actually use it.

Hosting already costs me about $250 every two years, and every year I renew the urls for about 15 websites, which is another $300 a year. If I upgrade the VPS to the next level, it's even more money every year. And that's just me paying it.

Right now, we're in an okay spot. The site shuts down every so often, but most of the time it's more or less stable. Unless I start making a lot more money regulary, that's the way it's going to stay.

So if you go to the site and it's down, I'm very sorry, but it will be back. May take a few days, but it'll come back (as long as I'm alive, anyway).

[theoceanoasis]

Rodimus going through serious spark break as he recalls the last time he carried. It ended in him losing the sparkling and he dealt with that alone.

Now he’s sparked again.

He spends his days wondering how he’ll tell drift and ratchet. If he even should tell them.

He couldn’t keep the last sparkling so why assume he can carry this one?

FW

He ran to the bathroom being as quiet as possible so he didn't wake Drift and Ratchet. Who were exhausted and needed their rest after working yesterday.

Throwing up what little he had in his tanks from the night before. He rubbed his belly and froze in horror.

He stood up in a daze and found himself wandering his ship until he made it back to his room. He left so abruptly he didn't even tell Ratchet or Drift where he was going.

Digging through his bottom drawer he reached into the back where he kept an emergency case of sparked tests, just in case. With shaking hands he pulled it out. Having never expected himself to be in this position since he'd always been so careful. Terrified after the last time he'd been sparked.

Waiting for the results felt like the longest few minutes of his life. He paced back and forth trying not to freak out.

"It's going to be okay. You'll be fine. You probably ate something bad. There's no way you could be sparked.

He glanced at the test and collapsed in horror. He found himself wailing as he hugged his middle rocking back and forth sobbing. He couldn't do it again. Not after he lost his first one. He shook his head in denial.

"I can't. I can't."

He sobbed, remembering the pain he'd felt after losing his sparkling. It had been shortly after Nyons destruction when he'd been a shell of himself.

The stress and pain of losing his city caused him to miscarry. It was one of the worst experiences of his life and for a long time he never thought he'd recover.

When he first found out he was sparked he'd been scared. It had been an accident and he didn't know how Soundwave would react.

His Conjunx had been supportive and amazing the entire time. Although it was unexpected they were both happy and would love their little one no matter what. Soundwave was always taking care of him even when he was busy fighting in the arena he always checked in with him.

He knew he was busy both with fighting in the arena and helping Megatron with the Decepticons. But if he ever needed him Soundwave was always there. He loved him so much and he couldn't wait to spend his life with him and the little family they were creating.

Both of them were determined to change Cybertron for the better. Even though Soundwave worried. He continued his work as a Nyonian rebel wanting his sparkling to grow up in a city free of Functionalist rule. Both of them were so hopeful of the future and the life they were creating. Their own little sanctuary amongst the chaos of their world.

Then his home was destroyed and everything fell apart. He remembered the shock and horror as he stared at the firey remains of his beautiful city.

Soundwave had immediately rushed to his side and was the only thing stopping him from running into his city and joining his people.

Stricken with grief he'd collapsed into his arms and sobbed. Soundwave took care of him the entire time as he grieved his home wishing he'd died with them.

He took care of him when he couldn't get out of bed making sure he took care of himself. He held him when he cried and supported him any way he needed. He listened when he told stories of his home wanting to keep his people alive. He supported and encouraged his ideas for a memorial and helped him come up with a plan.

He promised him vengeance swearing that he'd kill the person who destroyed his home. He promised to help him any way he could and stayed by his side the entire time.

He was so amazing and he didn't know how he'd survive without him. For a while things were starting to get better they were no where near perfect but at least he had his little one.

He promised to raise him in Nyonian culture. He wanted his little one to have strong ties to Nyon so that his home wasn't forgotten.

Then one day he'd woken up with blood between his legs and this time he fell into a depression that almost killed him. He didn't think he'd ever recover and sometimes he still struggled to get by.

He remembered screaming in agony as he held the bloody sheets in his hands. Sobbing uncontrollably as he begged his sparkling to come back.

He knew Soundwave was grieving during that time as well. But he'd been selfish and made it all about himself. Soundwave had to take care of him when he refused determined to kill himself.

All he could think about was his loss. First his home and now his sparkling. For him it was too much to take and sent him over the edge. All he wanted was to die and join his little one in the all spark.

He knew he was hurting Soundwave when he refused to speak or even acknowledge his existence.

He spent his days laying in bed staring at a wall. It had been the hardest time in his life and then as if he couldn't get any more selfish he up and left one day without a word. After everything Soundwave did for him he couldn't even leave him a message saying goodbye because he was too much of a coward.

He couldn't do it anymore. He was hurting the love of his life. Who was having to take care of him while grieving their little one. He was too selfish for someone as amazing as Soundwave and he could only hope he found someone better after he was gone.

He went back to his home city planning on killing himself, uncaring of Soundwave's feelings. He'd just lost his sparkling and now he was going to lose him.

He never deserved him. Soundwave was too good for him. He was a horrible Conjunx and an even worse carrier.

Instead of dying like he planned he chose to betray him and join the Autobots. He fought against him ignoring his attempts to reach out and talk. He severed all ties with him because he couldn't take the pain. Every time he looked at Soundwave he was reminded of what he lost.

Soundwave should have hated him. He should have resented him for all the pain he caused and yet he never stopped trying to help him. Even after everything he did Soundwave still loved him.

He never wanted to have another sparkling. He never wanted to go through that pain again and now he was going to experience it all over again.

He sobbed clawing at his tanks. He was a failure his body couldn't carry to term and he couldn't take losing another sparkling.

He shut himself in his room refusing to come out. Even when people tried talking to him he ignored them, demanding they leave. Ratchet and Drift tried speaking with him only to be yelled at.

Eventually everyone left him alone. He stepped down from co captain no longer able to lead his crew. Not that it mattered when he'd be dead soon.

It hurt but he knew he deserved it after all the pain he's caused. The only thing he can do is kill. Even his own body kills the life growing inside of him.

He paced the floor touching his growing belly and knowing it wouldn't be long now. As his sparkling grew. The worst he felt knowing he was going to lose his little one and trying desperately not to get attached even though it was so hard.

He broke things off with Ratchet and Drift ignoring their requests to talk with him. He lied saying that he wasn't ready and that he didn't feel anything for them.

He knew it was for the best. They didn't deserve having to deal with the mess that was him. He didn't want them to know about the sparkling and go through the pain of losing their little one. It was better if they never knew about the beautiful life growing inside of him.

Both of them had been angry and hurt when he'd broken things off. Especially Ratchet who yelled at him for leading them on and refusing to talk like an adult. Both of them were hurt and said things that haunted him and made him wonder if they ever truly loved him or if they were just putting up with him. He felt ashamed and broke down sobbing trashing his entire apartment after they left. Neither of them came back after that, their relationship completely destroyed.

He sobbed memories of his loss flashing before his mind. He knew he'd abandon them eventually, when he lost his sparkling and it was better to break things off now and save them the grief he caused Soundwave.

He didn't deserve them. They were too good for him and deserved so much better than a failure like him.

He thought about taking his life many times. It kept him up at night as he lay awake rubbing his growing belly. Everyone would be so much happier once he was gone.

Ratchet and Drift could forget about him and Soundwave could finally move on.

Before he left with the Lost Light. He met up with Soundwave because he deserved to know that he was leaving. The two of them talked about everything. Both of them cried together as they finally grieved their loss and it felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

He told him that he was in love with Drift and Ratchet and that he was going to tell them.

Soundwave was dissapointed but understood. Promising to always love him and that if he ever changed his mind he'd be there for him. If he didn't that was okay as well. Because he'd still be there for him and that he wished him the best in life.

He was amazing and deserved to find someone special who could give him a family something he'd always wanted, but could never have with him and his broken body.

Even though he loved Drift and Ratchet part of him would always love Soundwave and the love they shared. He would forever hold a piece of his spark.

Before he left the two of them decided to spend one last night together and that's what it made it worse. He didn't know if the sparkling was Ratchet and Drifts or Soundwave's.

It didn't matter now. None of them would ever know. Just like Drift and Ratchet he couldn't tell Soundwave. He'd already grieved one sparkling he didn't need to grieve another one. He couldn't put him through that pain again,

The only thing stopping him from ending it all was the life inside of him. He wouldn't kill himself until after his sparkling died. So all he did was lay in bed all alone waiting for the inevitable.

It was better this way. He couldn't hurt anyone else if he died like he was supposed to all those years ago. Once he was gone they would all be free and able to move on with their lives while he got to join the all spark with his sparklings.

[shush-itsasecret]

"I don't know why I'm here"

I saw a YouTube comment that mentioned something about writing a fanfiction where BEAST Odasaku visits Dazai's grave and yup I ain't giving any spoilers just read!! I started working on its art first and then some ideas about the fanfic popped up in my head so here it is!!

Only read after you've already read both sides of "The day I picked up Dazai" and BEAST for complete understanding.

Kindly-

Don't repost without giving credit

Tag me and credit if you draw the idea

No Odazai shipping in this post. I only view them as besto friendo

4. ENJOYY!!

--

The sky is dark. Maybe it will rain today. The slow, cold breeze is blowing, taking with it the gloomy heat of Yokohama. I see some children making paper boats on my way. They were probably planning to play with them in the streets after it rains. Origami. That's what it's called. An old Japanese art of making different animals and objects by the mere act of folding paper. I think I remember Sakura mentioning that she was learning to make origami turtles. I'll have to ask her about it later.

As I entered the cemetery, the earth felt soft and damp under my feet. The familiar smell of wet soil hits my nostrils. Wet soil always smells nice, like reminiscences of the beloved past. But right here at this moment, it felt like the finishing touch of the scenery. It smelt like how a freshly painted portrait smells of paint. I make my way over to the other side of the vast graveyard.

My feet came to a halt in front of a certain melancholic gravestone. Gravestones aren't melancholic. They're just pieces of stone. But this one exerted a strange, eerie aura. The name written on it felt unreal too. Everything about this grave is different. Even the soil smelt differently. It smelt of loneliness and forced heartlessness. The image of his last meeting with me flashed vividly in my mind. The youngest port mafia boss, Osamu Dazai, now lay silent in his eternal rest. They say that death is the same for everyone, and it makes everyone equal regardless of what their life is like. But I doubt the same could be said about this man here. His last words echo in my ears.

"Goodbye, Odasaku"

Odasaku. The name felt strange yet familiar. He was the first who called me by that name, yet it felt startingly nostalgic. Like when you....nevermind. I can't think of a way to describe this feeling.

"I don't know why I'm here" The words coming out of my lips aligned perfectly with my thoughts, leaving no space for contradictions.

"I thought you'd like to be the first one to hear it" The wind blew whistles as if nodding in response. "Kunikida-san and Akutagawa are helping me with the editing. The story you're about to hear is still raw but it's completed nevertheless. I hope you like it" I slid down beside the gravestone. The atmosphere felt welcoming. It was the first time I was reading my story out loud. Maybe it will prove helpful, giving me insights and a new perspective on it. I fixed myself in a more comfortable position and leaned on the gravestone.

The words slipped out of my mouth easily, as if they had been waiting to be listened to by this person. As if from the moment this story came to me, it had waited patiently, solely to make Dazai it's first reader. Or well, listener in this case.

I think I'm forgetting a few parts. it's easier to remember the stories others have written than to recall one's own story. My lips moved easily, in perfect harmony with the whistles of the wind. An instrument. I realized that I was like an instrument at that moment, my words being my music. They decorated the air like stars on a dark, lonely night. Dark clouds roared, and the wind whispered back, creating a back-and-forth melody. Maybe I could spend a little more time here.

I don't know how long it's been now. I left my wristwatch at home for some unknown reason. A few hours is my guess, though I'm not sure. I look up at the sky. A few cold droplets hit my face.

"I'll get going now" I stand up, brushing the dirt off my clothes. The coat had gotten dirty with the mud but that doesn't concern me right now. Akutagawa's babysitting the younger ones today. I hope they don't sneak out and play in the rain. They'll catch a cold if they do.

"When are we meeting next?" I was genuinely startled. There was nobody around. I could have seen them with my Future vision ability if anyone had come. They say that on rare occasions, under specific conditions, the shrieking of wind can sound like a human's voice too. The only odd thing was that I recognized this voice too well.

"I'll come again. There's more to the story and I forgot some parts too." I said to no one in particular. The words left my mouth and evaporated in the air, becoming a part of the scenery. When I looked back at the grave, it felt less lonely now.

I take out a cigarette and the matchbox I always kept on me. 'Lupin', it reads. The breeze behind my back gently blew through the leaves and grass, waving goodbye like an old friend. I think I'll come here again. This place might not be so bad after all.

[violeteyedhero]

Glass Onion and the Mona Lisa

(Major Glass Onion spoilers obviously)

I saw a post yesterday that showed the Mona Lisa next to the final shot of Helen sitting on the beach, posed the exact same way, with that same unreadable smile. I think in that moment everything kind of clicked for me, and I think I understand now how it was used as a motif. I poured things out on twitter and I'm gonna do it here too.

So the Mona Lisa is introduced about thirty minutes into the movie, before anything has technically happened. We are shown that Miles purchased it, had it put in his living room (full of volatile hydrogen gas), behind a glass door, and that he can override the glass just to see her face. He looks at it with some awe, but to do something so arrogant and dangerous is not something that you do when you just admire the art...it's a power move. It's a rich man flaunting a priceless artwork and saying, look at me, I don't give a flying fuck about the consequences.

Then, he talks about how he saw it when he was six, and how he longs to be immortalised like the painting. Smash cut to Andi.

Now, I have only a rough recollection of Da Vinci's story, but something that I do recall is this--we still don't know who was the true subject of the Mona Lisa. There were at least two women who it could have been (as well as Da Vinci's male student/lover and Da Vinci himself). There's even still a fair bit of debate as to whether he painted it at all. The truth has long been obfuscated. Only the physical painting by Da Vinci matters to people. The subject is irrelevant.

Not long after this scene, we discover that 'Andi' is not in fact Cassandra, but Helen, employing the rich bitch voice that the sisters created as kids. An elegant, unreadable woman with an ever-changing mood and smile, and an air of absolute mystery. Her character is framed, in the first half at least, as the real-life Mona Lisa.

As the story goes on, you can see how important this parallel becomes. Miles constantly reiterates how he wants to be mentioned in the same breath as the Mona Lisa. In the same way, he wants to be mentioned in the same breath as Andi Brand. He tries to be like her, cheat her, steal from her, surpass her, and take her life from her. He uses the image and money that he gets from being her partner, and uses it to steal her ideas and kill her. He obfuscates her role in the company's founding, takes it for himself.

Andi as a person is dead, but the world doesn't know that yet. For now, Miles gets to keep her image and everything she's built for himself. Not for admiration, but for power. The world just sees her as the subject of his work. Secondary, and irrelevant.

Enter Helen, who steps into her sister's role and uses her image to get to the truth. The others don't know who she is, but Miles should. It's glaringly obvious, but he never thinks to look beyond the glass between them and see who she truly is or why she's there. And he doesn't let go of his need to show off how powerful he is.

Because like the Mona Lisa, the envelope is in plain sight. The last piece of Andi's work is hidden within the Glass Onion, just behind his fake napkin--the one he took credit for.

Miles loses, in the end, because he's so deeply arrogant and idiotic. He plays dirty to get what he wants, and can't help but mount his prizes on the wall. But Helen understands that, at the end of the day, she is a third grade teacher from Alabama, and a black woman against an absurdly wealthy white man. He will not face consequences for this. He won't even be arrested for Andi's murder.

So what does she do? She literally destroys the glass. She annihilates the illusion of his brilliance. She destroys the layers of the onion, shows the rot in its core--his persona, his wonder fuel--and then, she destroys the Mona Lisa. Because it is a painting, something that he chose to put in danger. And the world will see if it is gone.

She brings down the glass barrier, but he destroyed the painting the moment he set foot in Andi's house. And maybe this way, even if he isn't remembered as the murderer of Andi Brand, he will always be remembered as the destroyer of the Mona Lisa. It's a small sort of justice, but it's the only thing that Miles will answer to.

The dust settles, Helen goes to the beach. She ends the story sitting as the Mona Lisa did, her arms crossed, expression unreadable. There's no illusion anymore, no glass between us and the subject. We can look into her eyes. It's a moment where the subject of the art reclaims the narrative, not unlike OJ's ending shot in Nope. The painting may now be gone, but the Brand sisters have been immortalised in a way. Andi is gone, but Helen is alive and true.

[exuberantocean]

I want to talk about responsibility in Our Flag Means Death. And I want to talk about it specifically after watching Stede blame himself for Ed's actions and I want to talk about it after watching a number of people in fandom blaming Izzy for Ed's actions.

Because they were Ed's actions. Ed absolutely did those things. No one forced him to attempt to kill Lucius. No one forced him to strand half the crew or torture Izzy or drive the boat into that storm. These are things Ed did of his own free will.

I hope, I really hope that people understand that ultimately the one responsible for Ed's actions is, well, Ed. Because he was the one to do them. Was his mental health good at the time? Ha, God no. But while that certainly makes it easier to understand his actions, it doesn't excuse them and it doesn't make them right. They are still his actions, his responsibility.

Did Stede's failure to show up at the end of season 1 cause Ed's mental state? Look, it was crushing (for both of them in different ways really). But look, Ed could have assumed something happened to Stede (which really, something did happen to Stede) rather than leap to the conclusion that Stede rejected him. And even given that, most people who break up with or are rejected by a loved one don't do *vague handwave at the first 3 episodes of season 2* ...all that.

There's nothing wrong with Ed feeling rejected and sad. There's a hell of a lot wrong with his actions.

Did Izzy's words and actions cause Ed's mental state? Well, obviously they didn't help. If I recall correctly, Izzy's made some sort of comment to Stede about ruining Blackbeard which surely contibuted to Stede's mental state and his actions at the end of s1 but, you know, Stede's a grown man and his actions are his own. Similarly, Izzy's taunts to Ed at the end of s1 come from a place where Izzy had a specific idea of how Ed was that was, well, perhaps not as wrong as some fans would like to think, but certainly incomplete, lacking, perhaps even misunderstood.

Perhaps misunderstood works best. Izzy knows the confidence that Blackbeard has always seemed to hold, the command, the compacity for violence, but he lacks the understanding of who Ed is. It's understandable that Izzy would want that back (I mean, I hate to break it to you, but they're pirates, the violence thing is part of all that). But, you know, I don't think Izzy's ever been a character motivated by just a desire to fuck things up. He's no Iago. Izzy clearly loves Blackbeard and that's perhaps his greatest flaw. He loves Blackbeard so much, but doesn't understand Ed at all.* ** Regardless of Izzy's motivations, he does play a significant role in escalating the situation. He words contribute to both Stede and Ed's turmoil. I'm not saying he has zero accountability here.

But.

Ed always had a choice one what to do, how to react. His actions remain his own. He could have ignored him, or tried to get over Stede or had Izzy tossed off the ship or any number of things. Instead, Ed chose to do what he did.

More importantly, by denying or ignoring Ed's own capability for his own actions, I feel like it overlooks what I see as the most powerful potential storyline in the show (obviously, I have no clue if they'll actually go this way, but I hope they do).

Ed, the man who feels unlovable has done horrible things. And, just maybe, he can still be loved. (Oh let's face it, we know he will be - he is already by Stede.) I don't even mean just by Stede (I mean, let's face it, Stede's likely to continue blaming himself for this), but by the crew he so badly treated. It will be interesting to see how things move forward. Regardless, I can't wait to see what happens next.

Who hasn't done horrible things? I mean, hopefully not at Ed levels of horrible. But God, what a lesson to be learned, to be loved even after your worst. One of the reason I think we humans are so compelled to create and follow stories is that we learn so well through them. How many of us out there feel unlovable, unloved, as deeply as Ed? How many of us are drowning in our misery, pulled down by weight of our own trauma, or our wrongdoings or perceived wrongdoings?

And how many of us are just as wrong as Ed was? Not because we aren't capable of bad-because new alert-we all are, but because we aren't defined by that and because we aren't destined to be defined by our darkest moments. And because humanity is even more defined by it's compacity to love and forgive than it is for our compacity to hurt and destroy.

Because I want to watch both that boat and it's co-captain rebuilt together.

*This is, perhaps, why Ed could never love Izzy. Because all Izzy saw was Blackbeard and Ed needed someone to love Ed - someone he could be Ed with and that be okay. Perhaps things will shift between Ed and Izzy after this...I mean, things must shift between the two after this, but perhaps Izzy will finally start seeing Ed? Who knows.

I also think Izzy's work at protecting the crew and his attempt to fix the situation (woefully too late) is worth something).