#i could hear his opinions on the character of the iliad

[nerdrooikat]

drabbles about the deer imagery in The Secret History (specifically in relation 2 Camilla) because her becoming a deer/believing that she did stuck in my mind (although this post will mostly take Camilla and the other's recollection of events to be as they recount it – if i examine it in it's effect as an incorrect account, that would be in a separate post)

Obviously there's, on a meta level, an irony to it – Camilla and Charles are named to make fun of the Princess Diana scandal that was happening at the time, and so ironically Camilla transforms into an animal sacred to Diana.

There's also a parallel that I think could be interesting to make between Camilla and Taygete, who for anyone unfamiliar, was turned into a deer by Artemis to protect her from Zeus' sexual advances. Although I think that what happened in the Bacchae was concensual sexually, I think it could possible be indicative in Camilla's narrative role as the "wanted"/"desired" one within the greek class – by Charles, Henry, Richard (although he wasnt there) and even Francis, although he wants to be her more so than actually wanting her.

Additionally, outside of how it actually functions within the story, her transformation into a creature associated so closely with innocence, especially in relation to Diana/Artemis' virginity, might perhaps be tied to Richards view of her as this "pure" and "virginal" person – obviously we know this is far from the truth, and he himself learns this later, but I think it definitely ties into this flawed angelic idea of her he so covets.

I think this interpretation ties into the myth of Actaeon (in terms of "deer transformation myths") although its very interesting to me that they different at key points – Camilla, the "virginual" character, is the one transformed, rather than the sexual transgressor (Charles) or the one who introduces miasma (Henry). But, like Actaeon, she is pursued and hunted – which, another key point – Actaeon is pursued and killed by his own hunting dogs, and Charles returns from the ritual with a bite mark, perhaps tying him into the myth thurther?

[lea-sbian]

*skitters over* Hi :3 Opinions. Give. Hand 'em over (pls)

Lmao of course, I’ve got plenty in stock, what flavor you lookin for?

If this is about the prince of Egypt post then:

Overall a great movie with incredible music, animation, and characters. And although it’s a retelling of a bible story, I think it’s also a really interesting way to approach as a work of fiction, like you would an old Epic like the Iliad. One where god isn’t all good and all powerful, but a character with his own biases and flaws.

An example of what I mean is how god isn’t all good is how he punishes the people of Egypt, (making crops fail, spreading disease, and killing the firstborn of every family, many of whom could be innocent or too young to understand the evils of slavery). You could make an argument of the ends justifying the means but then we’ve hit a place where we could argue about ethics, which is a morally grey area instead of ‘all good.’

And an example of how he isn’t all powerful is how he can’t even seem to change the mind of the one guy who’s mind he needs to change. How can god not just make himself known to rameses himself?

You could say “free will” and all but here’s the thing:

In some interpretations of the original story, there’s also a line akin to “The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart” which implies some level of control over the mind that god has (also this line is referenced in the movie during the song ‘the Plauges’). And even if we interpret it as Pharaoh hardening his own heart, how does god now know that most of the things he’s done to punish him have only made his resolve to keep the slaves worse? Only when Ramses’ only son dies does he allow the slaves to go free, so why didn’t god just do that from the beginning?

And despite all of this, why doesn’t god just strike down the one guy keeping people from being free? Why make all of Egypt suffer for it?

You also could look back even to the other movie dreamworks made adapting a bible story: ‘Joseph king of dreams,’ where at the end of the film, Joseph invites his Jewish family into Egypt before the events of ‘Prince of Egypt’ which kind of implies that Joseph unknowingly helped facilitate the ability for Egypt to make them slaves, which is something that God could definitely of warned him about like he does with the famine. (Unless god didn’t know how the Jewish people would be enslaved by the Egyptians, which would mean he’s not ‘all knowing’ either. In fact Joseph himself was a slave? Idk how he didn’t see that coming honestly)

But even without alll that, there’s the scene in ‘prince of Egypt’ where god confronts Moses about going back to Egypt to free his people, in which Moses essentially asks “why me?” And then god proceeds to raise his voice and basically says “because I said so.” I’m definitely oversimplifying the scene here but that’s kind of how it reads to me now, a parent demanding something be done and when questioned, doesn’t give a real answer, but just “I made you so you gotta do what I say.”

It actually reminds me a lot about how the church I grew up with taught me to just trust in the church and god even if my questions went unanswered. Why can’t women have the priesthood? Why can’t I marry a woman?

There were some vague answers to these questions, but most of the time it boiled down to just “that’s what god said” which didn’t make a lick of sense to me.

I dunno man, if you have a different take I’d love to hear it, but this is kind of how I process Christian media now, seeing how in a lot of ways, God is just a parent who’s parenting style sucks sometimes. He did a good thing freeing his people in the end, but he fumbled as fuck getting there imo.

[corviiids]

I saw your post about Achilles and Patroclus (the one for the ask game) and it was really interesting, I like the points you made and I enjoyed reading it, but I have a question about Achilles' bloodlust before Patroclus' death: what about what he did to Troilus? This happens before Patroclus' death in most accounts, so Achilles is very brutal with it for someone, who says he prefers to ransom the Trojans rather than kill them.

Yes, Troilus had to die, if the Achaeans wanted to win the war, but his death didn't have to be so brutal. Furthermore, Achilles kills him in a sanctuary (Apollo's temple) with no regard for the consequences, and then throws the kid's head to Hector and a few other of his brothers (there are also even more severe versions about what Achilles did to this kid before and/or after killing him)

And then there's Polyxena, who usually is accompanying Troilus and gets kidnapped (and most likely r*ped) by Achilles after he kills her brother. In some versions she was partially the cause of Achilles' death, setting up his ambush by her brothers in Apollo's temple (which in my opinion seems like her way of avenging Troilus' death).

And then the ghost of Achilles demands her sacrifice (either as revenge to her revenge or because he still wants to have her, or both, 'm not sure), otherwise the Achaeans wouldn't be able to leave Troy.

I'm really curious about your thoughts on what Achilles did to these two.

(The argument about the Iliad characters is never ending and there are tons of different takes and opinions. I'm not trying to pick up an argument, I just want to hear you take on this, maybe what versions of these myths you prefer, why do you think Achilles acted the way he did and how does it fit in his characteristic you wrote previously?)

hellooo yeah so first and foremost obviously due to the nature of mythology it's always going to be kind of impossible to have, like, one unified "version" of a character that brings together every depiction of them throughout history, as you said. i think every storyteller is going to add something to a figure that doesn't necessarily mesh with every other depiction. it's like spiderman. it's for that reason that in that post (i had to go read it again lol i forgot exactly what i said but im pretty sure) i only talked about events that happened in or were referred to in the iliad. i.. clearly.. dont have a very good memory so i could very much be wrong about this but i dont think polyxena is mentioned in the iliad and troilus is only mentioned by name, i don't thiiiiiink the story of his death is relayed? i could be wrong! but yeah all of which is to say if my characterisation of achilles seems inconsistent with other myths, it sometimes might just be because it simply is. i dont try to account for every myth bc i would explode into a shower of snails

that said though i think in this instance we can find a compatibility. my point in that post wasn't that achilles isn't ever bloodthirsty or brutal, only that he shouldn't be defined by his bloodlust. quoting my own post bc again i had to go reread it

it's not that he isn't violent or hasn't killed or that he has reservations about taking lives

it's uncontroversial that he committed a lot of pretty heinous acts and clearly has the capacity for great cruelty and does not really weigh kindness or compassion or charity as a major factor in his decision-making. from my post again

he doesn't fight to kill, he fights to win. that's not hugely different in terms of the outcome, given it is in a war context where defeat and death tend to mean the same thing, but it IS different from a personality and character perspective, because it tells us achilles is at worst indifferent to human life rather than actually being driven by a desire to take it. better? worse? doesn't matter, not my point - just different.

achilles is more than happy to commit atrocities. it doesn't bother him to do so, morally. indifference to human life is sometimes indistinguishable from being outright driven by a desire to kill first and foremost. sometimes it's worse. achilles kind of does what he wants - he enjoys excelling at things - he excels at killing. so, stands to reason he might take a particularly brutal or bloodthirsty action if he feels like it. im putting the rest of this under a cut because it got long again

achilles choosing to ransom lycaon isn't proof that he is a merciful soul. it's just that he isn't at war for the love of making war and ending lives in and of itself. he absolutely does not give a shit about lycaon at all as an individual. if someone doesnt have to die, he might decide to let them go (vs someone who's in this because they love killing and therefore would just kill anyway). or he might kill them. if someone DOES have to die, achilles wouldn't go out of his way to make it a kind end. he might if he feels like it. but he might not. the bottom line is he can be bloodthirsty, but that's not his core driving trait. he's not in this to kill, he's in this to win and to be remembered for it. the killing is incidental (if he wins enough then it doesn't matter if his victims survive or not), so it'll happen or it won't and it doesn't really matter to him. so yeah, a plea for mercy might work on him better than it might work on someone who really actively wants to kill people because maybe he has no particular stake in killing them, which is why ive said he isn't fundamentally driven by bloodlust. but like if achilles thinks it might be fun to kill someone in a brutal way, no voice in his head is gonna be like Whoa there champ! How about not doing that? bc his reasons for not killing aren't ethical concerns, it's just a byproduct of what drives him. this is a fine distinction i know but i think it's important. again im not arguing (and wont ever) that achilles is a good moral figure, it's more just about understanding who he is. the killing isn't his goal hence why hes willing to ransom trojan soldiers moreso than the other greeks but if he DOES kill he's probably also going to do it more brutally than others again because his reasons were never rooted in morality to begin with

basically in terms of how im able to marry my view of achilles not being driven by bloodlust with the fact that he does objectively violent and brutal acts, i think those things are compatible with each other bc he can be bloodthirsty without that being the core driving force of his character and the thing that makeshim what he is. does that make sense? the issue i was railing against specifically w that post was that he tends to be depicted as a guy who just wants to fight kill bite kill blood blood blood and i think he DOES act like that guy but that's not the be all and end all of him. killing is incidental to winning, but he can take it or leave it - what i refer to as the breakdown of achilles' character following patroclus' death is the transition in achilles from "i want to win, and i'll kill to make that happen" to "i want to kill for the sake of killing" it stops being about glory and starts being about destruction and pain

[geometricalien]

Between Akashi & Furihata, if one of them died, who do you think is more likely to heal from the pain of loss sooner & moves on with his life?

When has Akashi Seijuurou gotten over anything in his fucking life? This rhetorical jest is an oversimplification of one of Akashi's character flaws which is his need for control. This is all to say, simply based on that, Furihata is the more emotionally intelligent of the two, the one more open and accepting to change. I think they both would require years to fully heal but I think Furihata would be the one to move on sooner.

I've tried to keep it short and direct above for those without brainrot but I AM going to go apeshit below the cut

Oh my god oh my god oh my GOD I'm so glad someone wants to hear me talk about THIS, THIS EXACT CONCEPT- ACCEPTING THE LOVE OF THEIR LIVES DEATH FASCINATES ME ENDLESSLY FUCK

Okay for reference there has been 2 fanfics involving this concept that I read when I first got into akafuri and they have HEAVILY influenced my perception of this question:

- The Truth About Reality; which is literally about Furihata not accepting Akashi's death and through mysticism goes to 4/5 different parallel realities to get him back. It's a favorite of mine and I read it once a year. It has themes of sacrifice and second chances which make it so crucial to the thematic elements of akafuri. Read it please

- Through the Air by Maiokoe; I love the first chapter, literally Kuroko Kagami Takao and Midorima come to Akashi while he is at work and inform him that Furihata's flight just crashed. It is so so so good. The way it plays out, Akashi's mounting fear, his resistance, the way his fear turns to anger then to despair- sometimes I cry when I reread it. And the last lines of the chapter---

What was a world without his lover? What was this life without his easy nature and smiles? What was this life without his affection? What was this world without Furihata Kouki? What did this world mean to him? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What was Akashi Seijuuro without him? He didn’t want to find out.

Those lines have colored my opinion of what Akashi would be like if his husband died so fucking much that it really was eventual that I started my Greek fic where Akashi is Achilles and Furihata is Patroclus. So if you know the Iliad then you know how my fic will play out and exactly where I take a stance on Akashi’s terrible all consuming love.

To talk about the dissolution of happily in love akafuri by the cruel hands of death is to examine how their relationship evolved them and what being torn from their other half would do to them. To be haunted by their after image, to look at their favorite mug, to wear their favorite sweater- who would wear grief better. Who would welcome it, accept its presence. Who would repress it.

Please do not mistake what I'm saying to mean Furihata would move on quickly. Where Furihata is Akashi's light, Akashi is his gravity. He would be adrift and untethered without Akashi. The world would turn upside down. He would feel the expanse of their house, the emptiness of their bed. Furihata would be lost. It would take years to come down back to earth by himself.

Furihata would eventually move out of that house/apartment too full of memories, at the prodding of well meaning friends he would download dating apps, eventually he would go on dates and try his best to not compare them to his late husband because how could a man compare to a god. And then years and years down the line, when his heart only half aches when he sees a hair of red, when he only wears that old ratty sweater on the occasion bad day, he can look up into the sky and smile, thankful for the memories. I think he could even fall in love again, begin a new chapter.

A large chunk of Furihata is lost the day Akashi dies but he grows around the pain and walks on. Accepting the scars, accepting the love and pain, accepting it all.

As I said though, Furihata is Akashi's light. His metric on good and bad. The saving grace that redeemed him and inspired him to become worthy of such love.

Imagine if the sun was stolen from the sky and we were pitched into utter darkness. Until our eyes adjust and we can make out some shapes, you are surrounded in black black. Complete emptiness. Alone more than ever before and for a moment you think it will consume you. That is how Akashi feels for the first year until his eyes adjust to the darkness. He would continue in this shadow life indefinitely, watching everyone else patch themselves together and move on, while he.is.stuck. And he won't admit it and only those brave enough would say it to his face, but he is absolutely wallowing, sulking, in this darkness as self-punishment. that in some twisted sense, this is what he deserves. he digs his feet in, refusing to move. And if out of the corner of his eye a flicker of light dances, he would refuse to follow it. The dark is where he belongs.

He would bury himself in work. He would refuse to move out of their house. Refusing to touch any of the things that Kouki last left them, his toothbrush bone dry in the holder, the book he was reading on his bedside table.

And when his friends compare him to his father- he becomes furious, alight with indignation. He is not cold and cruel like his father had been. "No... you're empty."

It would take him so so long to accept that Furihata would want him to be happy even if its not with him. That he deserves to be happy. Only then would he take tiny half steps out of the cave he buried himself in, the cave that he would have made his grave.

As a side note, I mentioned Furihata falling in love with someone else afterwards... my personal interpretation is that Akashi could not. He would try if only just because he knows Furihata wants him to be happy and knew that Akashi is the most happy when he is in love- but The Akashi heart is a fearsome terrible all consuming thing.

Akashi Seijuurou, is a man who celebrated the anniversary of each milestone of their relationship. Akashi Seijuurou, is a man who is head over heels in love and worships the ground his beloved walks on. Akashi Seijuurou, is a man who calls their partner love- because they are the manifestation of their love. Akashi Seijuurou, is a man who would go to the far corners of the world to see if there was some way to still communicate with their partner if said partner was turned into a worm and would build a terrarium of utmost luxury for said partner and talk to the worm as if it was them, take the worm to see the sun meet the ocean, because they have to hope that their partner still has some consciousness. And if not, then he needs to do that for himself. To fool himself. And once that worm passes, he would be extra compassionate to earthworms because they remind him of them.

The Akashi heart is a blessing to the receiver for there is nothing stronger or purer. The Akashi heart is a curse to the creator if only because they have that one single heart and they are physically unable to take it back.

[doggiewoggiez]

what is the reading list you’ve been doing

This meme. Got reposted from 4chan to Reddit to Twitter and finally to Tumblr. I'll update this post as I read each book. Here's the complete list:

1. Goosebumps #28: The Cuckoo Clock of Doom - R.L. Stine. Very middle of the road Goosebumps book not especially good but not terrible. 6/10 dead sisters.

2. Call of the Crocodile - F. Gardner. This book is a meme on /lit/ cause the dude's batshit and is constantly trying to promote his books that are extremely poorly written. He calls himself a famous author, doesn't believe gorillas or giraffes are real, and advocates chainsmoking cigarettes to help with the writing process. This book is the funniest thing I've ever read and made me so fucking angry by being so awful. 10/10 misplaced commas.

3. No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai. A semi-autobiographical story published before the author's suicide about a severely mentally ill character named Oba Yozo through his life of addiction, women, suicide attempts, and so on. An incredibly depressing read. His whole inner life is laid bare and it's disgusting and grotesque and you see yourself in him and you wish you could hold him and cry for him but even if you could you would never have the power to make anything okay. Beautiful fucking book, genuinely 100% no fucking joke changed my life. 10000/10 shitty cyberpunk adaptations.

4. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky. I cried hard as fuck dude. Another life changer for reals. Dostoevsky had such a deep understanding of human nature whether it be the lowest, most base and vile instincts or the unending capacity for love and compassion that exist in us all. All while being the blueprint for like every heady crime drama like Death Note, Breaking Bad, etc. The shit all you fags like. Most people just remember it as maybe required HS reading and definitely something people are pretentious about but it 100% deserves all the love it gets. Fan fucking tastic. 100000/10 years in Siberia.

5. Becoming - Michelle Obama. A bit too heavily ghostwritten, but when Michelle's voice shows through it's not terrible, it's kind of interesting to hear the inside scoop on White House life. It's kind of sad that Barack is the most interesting part of the book, and book-Barack seems like an extremely interesting and cool guy. But the book doesn't address all his dead civilians. 5/10 drone strikes.

6. Ulysses - James Joyce. The modernist novel, from what I understand. Half retelling of the Odyssey in 1900s Ireland, half a troll on literary critics, all around a pretty damn fun read. Not very far yet. Definitely the most difficult thing I've ever tried to read. Unfinished/10 Agenbites of inwit

7. 48 Laws of Power. This is like, THE sigma bro self help book as far as I've heard. It's pretty iconic, but I'm not especially excited for it.

8. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley. We all know it and love it, I'm interested to read the OG story.

9. Catechism of the Catholic Church 2nd Edition. Book from the Vatican that lays out what the church's official opinions, rules, shit like that are. Will be boring but interesting.

10. The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins. One of the biggest atheist dude books there is and probably by far the most influential. God is bad people who believe in God are stupid etc etc. Hopefully it has something interesting to say and isn't just a jerk off. It might just be a jerk off.

11. The Love Hypothesis - Ali Hazelwood. Some booktok romance schlock afaik. People make fun of it.

12. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole. All I know is it's about a guy in New Orleans in the 60s. Might be good, people seem to really like it.

13. The Art of War - Sun Tzu. Im gonna get so good at surprising my enemy.

14. Kodomo no Jikan - Kaworu Watashiya. Pure pedoslop, I don't think there's even an official English translation so we might not read it but I'm preemptively giving it 0/10.

15. The Iliad - Homer. The story of the Trojan war. All I know is Helen, Horse, and that's about it.

16. The Odyssey - Homer. It's the Odyssey. I think it's funny that it comes after Ulysses since I don't actually know the whole story of the Odyssey itself.

17. Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer - Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth. This is that thing they made a Netflix doc about a while back.

18. The C++ Programming Language 4th edition - Bjarne Stroustrup. Exactly what it says on the tin, by the guy who wrote the language.

19. Empress Theresa - Norman Boutin. A classic, it's a weird self-published story by a guy who's extremely unwell, usually referenced in the same way Sonichu is.

20. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner. His most difficult to read work, about a Southern family at the beginning of the 20th century.

21. Black Future #1 - Whitney Ryan. A very racist BNWO sissification porn story that was probably written as a joke. Possible skip definite 0/10.

22. The Cat in the Hat - Dr. Seuss. You know this.

23. The Trial - Franz Kafka. One of Kafka's most famous unfinished works, about a guy who's on trial for something and he doesn't know what.

24. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis. Supposed to be way darker and more fucked up than the movie, really supposed to chill you to the bone afaik. VERY excited for this read.

25. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon. One of those famous "Really Fucking Long And Hard Books" like Infinite Jest or Ulysses, incredibly autistic foray into WW2 rocket science. Classic Pynchonery.

26. Magick In Theory and Practice - Aleister Crowley. Thankfully it's not the entirety of Magick Liber ABA Book 4.

27. Minecraft Jokes for Kids - Steve Minecraft. Not a real book but we'll substitute Jokes For Minecrafters by the Hollow family.

28. The Jews and Their Lies - Martin Luther. One of the most notorious antisemitic texts, right up there with the Protocols. It's going to be a pretty apalling read but it has pretty damn significant historical value so it's probably worth reading.

29. Dianetics - L. Ron Hubbard. The scientology book. It's way longer than you'd expect.

30. Everyone Poops - Taro Gomi. I don't understand this because girls don't poop.

31. In His Own Write - John Lennon. His writing and art, mostly just a bunch of absurd bullshit. I want to remain neutral and not just hate the book because I hate the guy. We'll see if it deserves that.

32. Bear - Marian Engel. This is that Canadian novel where the woman has a romance with a bear.

33. How To Get A Girlfriend - Chad Scott Nellis. Some bullshit self published thing. I'm gonna be swimming in punani.

34. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck - Mark Manson. Some self help schlock afaik.

35. Gabriel Dropout (vol. 3) - UKAMI. This is that cutesy manga about those angels and demons in human high school.

36. 120 Days of Sodom - Marquis De Sade. Old story of elite sex cults, I'm pretty sure it's the origin of that being like a thing that people conspiracy theory about.

37. Phenomenology of Spirit - Hegel. You probably know Hegel from either Marx or Fallout New Vegas. I know Hegel because a chick at my friend's co-op talked at me about him for like ten minutes while I was way too shit faced to know what the fuck is going on around me at all but I nodded along.

38. Star Wars: The Ultimate Sticker Collection. I bought this used for a buck fifty with half the stickers gone. All the new trilogy ones were still there.

39. The Anarchist Cookbook. Vom hard at the idea of "buying" this but I want to make sure I get the version as it appears in the meme so I guess I'll drop a few bucks on it.

40. An American Life - Ronald Reagan. Practical applications for previous book.

41. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger. Had to read this in high school, hated it, maybe it'll be better this time around.

42. Finnegan's Wake - James Joyce. An early postmodernist work about uhhh fucking whatever it was about. I'm not gonna lie if Ulysses is this hard for me this one will kill me.

43. The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat. I'm not in the know when it comes to music but apparently this guy is like one of the gods of jazz. And he wrote a book on teaching your cat to shit in a people-toilet.

44. Am I Disabled? - The Simpsons S7E7. This is the book Homer reads where he learns obesity is a disability and gets really fat so he can work from home. Story of my life.

45. Serial Experiments Lain: An Omnipresence in Wired - Yoshitoshi ABe. The Lain artbook, with the short manga The Nightmare of Fabrication. Will be very expensive to get ahold of.

46. Pounded by the Pound - Chuck Tingle. We've heard enough about this guy the bit was holding onto the last molecule of funny it had like five years ago but I now had to buy a compilation paperback of his work for this.

47. Ford Capri II 2.8 & 3.0 Owners Workshop Manual 1974-1987. Had to order this from the UK couldn't find any in the US.

48. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov. We all know what this is. Of all things when my mom saw this list this was the book she pointed out as being really good, which I thought was funny.

49. Man's Life Magazine, September 1956 issue. "Weasels Ripped My Flesh." Good god it will be difficult finding the actual magazine, but the weasels story itself has been reprinted.

50. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (2nd Edition) - Harold Abelson et al. I like when people make anime girls have it :)

51. Shiver - Junji Ito. Never been a major Ito fan but a couple of his works I really liked are in this compilation.

52. Neon Genesis Evangelion (vol. 2) - Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. The Eva manga was really good I've actually read it before.

53. How To Avoid Huge Ships - Captain John W. Trimmer. Classic meme because I guess the cover and premise is very funny but I don't really get the joke. It's not that ridiculous sounding of a book, it's just niche.

54. Spice and Wolf (vol. 1) - Isuna Hasekura. Light novel for that manga we've been seeing around. They put a generic cover on it and replaced the anime girl so it could sell to non-weebs.

55. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand. My sister read this in like middle school and unironically no joke started bawling crying sobbing because poor people are so evil and awful.

56. The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Eric Carle. Oh Boy I Sure Hope This Little Wiggly Guy Eats Something Normal! Oh no.. oh dear ...

57. Glow In The Dark - Kanye West. Very very hard to get a physical copy but we'll try. Photo book of his tour of the same name.

58. Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler. Now obviously this wasn't included on the list for the genuine important historical value this book has but that's what I'm going to be reading it for. In reading it critically afaik it really paints a picture of how pathetic and unwell he was.

59. Higurashi: When They Cry. I hear it's really good.

60. This is a naked photo of Daniel Radcliffe posed with a horse.

61. Aberration in the Heartland of the Real - Wendy S. Painting. This is a book on the life of the OKBOMB guy, Timothy McVeigh. I hate how true crime shit has become so polarized as either sensational dogshit to make women walk with their keys between their knuckles or some awful horrible thing that's not worth looking into because "they were just racist/misogynistic/etc" I think it's all very reductive so this promises to be a good read.

62. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation. CIA document on breaking a prisoner and interrogating from the 60s.

63. The Game - Neil Strauss. The Bible for pickup artists.

64. Identifying Wood - R. Bruce Hoadley. Yep, it's wood.

65. Fresh And Fabulous Meals in Minutes - Ainsley Harriot. Lots of memes about him but this is just a regular cookbook.

66. The Turner Diaries - Andrew Macdonald. Far-right racist book that inspired terrorism and hate crimes. People who read it and didn't already agree with it going in have said it's poorly written and just blows, and in the peek I took that seems to be true. It's too influential to not read if I'm going to be reading about Timothy McVeigh. Hard to get since it got pulled from most online stores following Jan 6th.

67. The C Programming Language (2nd Edition) - Brian W. Kernighan & Dennis M. Ritchie. Gonna learn to code I guess.

68. A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara. It's a story about a group of mentally ill gay men living in New York. Has been described as trauma porn written by a woman fetishizing gay men and is on there because channers like making fun of it, but it was also shortlisted for a Pulitzer.

69. The Rose of Paracelsus - William Leonard Pickard. The author was the victim of one of the largest acid busts and he wrote this in prison.

70. The Book of Mormon - Joseph Smith. Interested to learn what the fuck Mormons are actually all about.

71. Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone - J.K. Rowling. Like most people I read these in middle school. They were mid then and they're ass now but I'm not gonna tryhard about how bad they are because you've probably heard enough at this point.

72. A Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant. As someone who doesn't know shit about philosophy I'm excited.

73. Autobiography - Morrissey. Notorious for being published through Penguin Classics which is NOT for Morrisseys. Bad Morrissey. Go to your room.

74. Official Final Fantasy 7 Strategy Guide. I'm gonna get so good at FF7 dude.

75. My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness - Kabi Nagata. Think of the most annoying bpd she/they you know and then imagine a really mid book that she'd become way too annoying about. You've imagined this book.

76. Children of the Matrix - David Icke. The origin of the reptoids conspiracy theory.

77. Anti-Oedipus - Deleuze and Guattari. Mario and Luigi for your leftist roommate who won't do the dishes

78. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace. It's a book about a person place or thing I know that much.

79. Sonichu #0 - Gonna be near impossible to source a physical copy from its short Lulu run.

80. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe. Obviously of great historical importance but I get a sneaking suspicion that's not why they put it on the list.

81. Bronze Age Mindset - Bronze Age Pervert. This is... Well, it's sure something.

82. Drilled By My Two Cowboys - Aurora Sommers. BBW Cowboy porn 😋💦

83. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky. People say it's his best work and if it's anywhere near as good as C&P was it'll blow me away. Also the Godfather was inspired by it.

84. Spare - Prince Harry. Really unfunny inclusion I can't imagine there's much value in it.

85. Da Jesus Book. That's the Hawaiian Pidgin translation of the New Testament. So basically I'm just reading the bible with extra steps.

86. Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance. Biography on Elon Musk apparently, not especially interested cause good chance it'll just suck him off hard.

87. Where's Waldo (Deluxe) - Martin Handford. Oh god I hope I find him.

88. Dracula - Bram Stoker. Shoulda subbed to Dracula Daily......

89. Bart Simpson's Guide to Life. I'm excited to see what Bart has to say about what I need to do with myself.

90. Bakemonogatari (vol. 1) - Nisio Isin. I've heard of this in passing I don't really know anything about this light novel except there's like girls and they're monsters maybe?

91. Business Secrets of the Pharoahs - Mark Crorigan. Fake book from S8E2 of the show Peep Show, which I've never heard of. It's British.

92. Industrial Society and Its Future - Ted Kaczynski. All I really know about Ted's ideas in the end is that everyone on here says he's based. I definitely want to read him and formulate my own opinion but I will probably also end up agreeing that he's based.

93. My Twisted World - Elliot Rodger. This is the manifesto of that incel shooter, probably a pretty worthwhile read in the same way a lot of this stuff is, a look into a deeply troubled person's mind.

94. Wash Your Penis - Jordan B. Peterson. This doesn't exist so we'll just read 12 Rules for Life.

95. Andrew Tate's Exegesis of the Quran. Unfortunately he did not actually write one though I bet it would be soooo terrible and funny. But we will read the Quran.

96. Art of the Deal - Donald Trump. Time to find out why people respected this guy.

[heyjude19-writing]

Also I had a musing I would hope you could share your own opinion on.

I'm so glad you find him as interesting and intriguing as I do C! 🌈

I'm a sucker for Greek mythos and I cannot wait to see how ur Draco’s journey will unfold. His aesthetic lends itself to the classics, lends itself to the analogy which is why I think I often make this connection. On top of his character being simply compelling, he has an air of timeless and competitiveness that reminds me of the age old Herculean hero that stand the test of time.

I don't like to prophesies too much bc I love to go in reading things blind (I avoid conspiracies and teasers like the plague!) but I cannot help myself in getting excited to see how he will confront and face crossroads and compare them to the great ancients.

If our golden boy will be more likely to pull an Apollo or become Achilles. The thing that makes characters interesting imo is how the deal 'in the complicated'. When they are taken away something they want, or confronted with a problem, do they go red or do they mourn in the quiet and peace? And I think from what little we know of in Draco from the chapters of what we've seen, he is a character that has more than what meets the eye. which makes him all the more compelling to see what happens when he splits.

We all know the well told romance of Achilles and Patroclus on how they were lovers/friends but also fellows competitors and Patroclus went to the Trojan war just bc his lover was destined for greatness there. He was a supportive bf haha. Achilles was very much following (up until the death of Patroclus) a very, 'healthy' doctrine to war. He fell in line and was excellent.

But when Patroclus was killed nameless grief took over Achilles and went genuinely insane with his screams of cry and revenge. He cried so horribly that even his mother Thetis could hear in the depths of the sea and went up to comfort his son. He kept the corpse of his lover in his tent for the entirety of the war as he extracted his revenge that was so bloody it was feral. He slept with Patroclus's corpse, delusional kept it, and threatened anyone who suggested to remove it. He wanted to be buried with him by the time the war was done and made Odysseus swear that he would see this happen. Obv as we know he killed Hector.

I remember shivering in class when I was a teen remembering the poem in the Iliad Book 18, that, he said, 'neither food nor drink shall glide down my throat, for as long as he [Patroclus] is mangled in my tent I only crave murder and blood and the rattling of dying'.

So does Draco follow the same blood wounded vengeful fate like Achilles? Will he move heaven and earth to go on his own Taylor swift reputation era tour? Or will he be a different drum, one of peace and calm like the story of Apollo?

The story of Apollo, as the God of music and dance, prophecies and healing (also God of the Sun, queue the analogy of why I think of Draco for obvious blonde hero reasons :P) fell in love with a mortal man named Hyacinthus who was as well a Spartan warrior prince famous for his beauty and everyone wanted him. men and women, the whole lot!

Include the God of the West wind Zephyrus. But Hyacinthus chose Apollo among his many admirers and they had the best romance dude. They would do all kinds of things together like music, dance, archery, they were both extremely sporty (as Leo is!!).

But Zephyrus was rotting with jealousy of their romance, that while they were playing archery, he blew Zephyrus's arrow off course and it hit him in the head and killed him.

Apollo was obviously inconsolable and mourned his lover and tried to commit su**ide many times hoping to join his lover in death. And bc he was inconsolable, he decided to always remember Hyacinthus by naming the famous flower by him and made music and games after him. And Hyacinthus bloom every spring now.

So it will be interesting to see whether Draco will be the type to be bloodthirsty, angry for his Harry or if he is a blonde hero that's more of a mourner?

These are the kind of musings I catch myself thinking of Draco and would love to know where ur heads at when it comes to it :)

oh wow, lots of theories here. so i read the greek classics much too long ago and most of what i remember is related to the web comic Lore Olympus tbh 😅. i'd say i don't really see a hero vs mourner dichotomy in the drarry story im writing as it's not one of war and violence, but more one of two people trying to find their way back to one another. they've moved past the bloodthirsty, angry part of their lives and it's more a question of coming at a relationship from two different perspectives with the same end goal and trying not to destroy each other in the process.

[katerinaaqu]

Well as I said from many analysis of mine I cannot really call Odysseus "morally gray" either especially in Homer. Post-homeric sources indeed make him closer to the morally gray spectrum but in the Iliad and Odyssey he is much more complicated than that to be squeezed into a simple characteristic such as this. But I absolutely see your point.

He surely does many shady stuff even in homeric poems such as as you said Dolon in rhapsody 10. Even if in a way you can understand that there is no way they could let a spy live in the first place since they were in the middle of the war. Philoctetes is indeed interesting case but again interestingly if seen through the lenses of omen reading you see why the men were divided and why Odysseus would encourage the decision (aka Philoctetes was a friend of Heracles someone who conquered Troy before and was bitten by a snake, symbol of Troy sent by a goddess they needed by their side. ) in a way one can see where these guys come from.

I partially disagree. I should say Odysseus was leading many times with his heart because above all he cared for his companions and did his best for them and it was his tendency of being emotional that put him into trouble in the first place given that he lost himself in anger and sadness when he revealed himself to Polyphemus after the latter insulted him. And I do not see the "leading with your heart in mind" and being complicated or even potentially shady are mutually exclusive. In here we almost see them as exclusive. Odysseus can either "lead with his heart" or "being shady" or "being monster" which is simply a very crude way to cut a character especially someone as complicated as Odysseus in general and homeric Odysseus in particular.

Anyways my problem was not that Odysseus started "too nice" per se. It was that the whole meaning of Odyssey was twisted into not being a man trying to defeat destiny and go home with his comrades, wanting to protect them at any cost and being ruined by anger and the arrogance of human nature but here from the get-go we have a hero for being PUNISHED for being nice. A hero who had every opportunity to help and didn't and then this person turn into a psycho. That simply doesn't cut it for me

There were a million ways indeed of such transformation could have gone well AND use the source at the same time however not only the musical used a rather overdramatic way to use this theme but also did it at the cost of some basic spines of the plot, which ironically would have helped this new twisted meaning imo.

Like I said I have already seen many different versions of Odysseus (heck like I said Homer's version is just it's own thing! In my opinion the most solid version someone who is just and pious but at the same time contrasted by some tendency for violence and anger which you know comes from his personality AND the years of war plus someone who relies in deceit and tricks because many situations called for it) however here my problem is not only that we have yet another version of another person who thinks somehow Odysseus is a monster or needs to be a monster to justify his extremely complicated situation but this time we have a massive screw up of the main plot. I have made many posts on that before and for someone who claims to "adapt the Odyssey" surely stopped following the damn Odyssey. Not just the character but the plot itself.

I now treat it almost the same as Telegony hahaha like "what the hell is this?!" Or as you said "who hell is this guy?!" Because indeed that ain't Odysseus for me also the one I loved from the homeric poems. Sure I appreciate the passion and the work placed in the music in many cases but no I am no longer fixated upon the musical as a musical aka a plot etc. I might of course on occasion hear some of the songs that indeed are catchy

Okay I know tumblr is treating EPIC as if it cleared their skin and watered their crops and I genuinely really really like it the music is excellent but I gotta say this:

I HATE the way it's presenting odysseus' arc and flaws with polyphemus. Like the problem wasn't that he was too NICE?? Where did that come from? The problem was that odysseus was a cocky lil shit and even though he had managed to get away with the nobody trick he went like "actually you got your ass beat by odysseus lol loser". Hybris-nemesis-catharsis is homer 101 and I'm SO annoyed that an entire generation of teenagers is getting this interpretation of the text. A hero giving in to being the "monster" and losing his kindness is a great arc but there are 700 other heroes you could have done that with - not odysseus.

On the other hand, how catchy is Ruthlessness, amirite?

[honeyblockm]

I absolutely NEED your takes on tsoa I think I may die if I don't hear someone else talk about it

well they're kind of /neg so if you don't want to hear me complain about it for a little while then probably scroll away sfjdkj

so like i don't think madeline miller is a bad writer. i think her writing is pretty banging actually. I just think some of the ways she took her book was a little. hmm. WELL. it wasn't for me ^_^. Also i didn't read the whole thing bc i did not have interest in finishing it but i have skimmed most of it. The way Patroclus is characterized irks me especially like bro... he got defanged (in service of playing into, in my personal opinion, some :| mlm dynamics). i really do prefer more the patroclus in the iliad where his relationship with achilles was on more even footing. and he was a warrior! a damn good one! and not at all immune to getting caught up in the bloodlust and violence of the war! the trojans literally have to have apollo kill him because he was going on a huge murder spree, achilles' armor or no! i can see what miller was going for w the stuff about portraying the brutality and cruelty of war ig but to me that's a really odd leap to make for the characterization of a main character. Patroclus is nice, ofc. i love that guy. but mannnn let him kill people let him be affected by culture of his time let him folly!

also i feel like the book wouldn't have gained mainstream popularity with the. ........... crowd if patrochilles' characters hadn't been warped into something that could be crammed into easily digestible weird gay tropes. (though i don't think this was the intention of madeline miller.)

next thing. ehehem once again the (sort of) sanitation of shitty aspects of the iliad like... briseis. idk. i don't always want to read the silence of the girls type bare and brutal recounts of all the shit that happened to women. sure. and i guess it mightve been a precipice point for a lot of people who want to enjoy the protagonists? but it also feels weird how it's glossed over like the book's going wink nudge don't worry guys patrochilles are one of the good ones unlike all the other greeks. there's nuance to be had, though tsoa just seems to skate around it instead.

and oh this is an interesting one kind of related to the previous point but the way most of the women are portrayed is a little.. well why are they all set up as antagonists of a sort (except briseis). why are women like deidameia and thetis set up as obstacles between the two protagonist's epic gay love story or whatever, with only the barest of sympathy for their positions in the world?

+ every time i go into the iliad tag i have to scroll past 294020 tsoa posts where everyone acts like a marvel character and honestly, things have earned my undeserved scorn for less. lol

sighs deeply. anyways. it's a fine book. it's literally fine. whatever man there's way worse books and i am speaking from experience. it was kind of fun i liked the odydio snippets. i don't think it's ruining greek mythology or killing people or whatever, I'm just too bitchy to set my differing opinions aside about it. i would know him by touch or whatever that one went is a pretty epic quote. i have another line from it in a tentative webweave document rn. it's pretty cool but i hope queer retellings of greek myths get better from here on out. grits teeth. whatever man

[dragynkeep]

Hey, so I'm writing this ask assuming that you two haven't read "Berserk". So if you have, please feel free to clown on me in your answer. Anyways, throughout time the word "Masterpiece" has been attributed to many pieces of literature. From Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey". To works like "Journey to the West". Even in modern times there are works like, "Dune" and of course, "The Lord of the Rings". And I firmly believe that "Berserk" deserves to be placed in the same category as these pieces of literature. First off the art style. Kentaro Miura, the mangaka of "Berserk", truly pushed the medium to the limit with nearly every panel. He managed to get every thing from the softer scenes between two friends, down to the truly Lovecraftian horror scenes with his artwork. Now I could rant for days about the many anecdotes about Miura and his art, from stories of him editing the drawings, pixel by pixel. To him being declared a master of the craft by titans in the industry at a young age. But there are many others whom have talked about that at length. So next, I will talk about the story. Without going into spoilers, I will say that the content of the story is truly a work of art. You get to see a person that the world has cast out as garbage, slowly claw their way out. Only to lose it all. Then rebuild it again. This is another thing, whilst the fight/action scenes are amazing. I think that is mostly due to the art style previously mentioned. I think where the story truly shines is in the moments after the storm has passed. You get these fragile, quiet moments where characters are left to asses the damage and try to pick up the pieces. It is truly a humbling sight. And lastly we have the characters. The characters, specifically the women characters, are all deep and layered in such unique ways. From Casca, the warrior, to Farnese the religious zealot. We get to see how the world affects these characters. Most of all is Guts, the main character, someone who truly is a monster in his own right, hellbent on revenge. Only to slowly start to let go of that anger and grief and slowly move on. Now I must say after talking up "Berserk" so much, I do need to make one small addendum to my previous statement about "Berserk" being a masterpiece. It is a masterpiece, but will be a masterpiece with an asterisks attached to it's name. for one glaring reason. "Berserk" will never have an ending. Due to the tragic passing of Kentaro Miura in 2021 we will never get to see the end of this journey. Now on a final note I'm going to talk about one last thing. The fact that a lot of "Berserk" was written before trigger warnings were a thing. And I don't mean this in a cringy anti-SJW way. I mean it in the way that "Berserk" deals with a lot of very heavy topics with no warning. So be aware that there might be scenes that are a little much. anyways I hope you give it a read. Don't watch any of the anime, just find the manga and read it. Trust me.

oh god that’s a big paragraph wheeze.

it’s sad to hear that the creator passed, & that the manga will remain unfinished. i don’t know whether it would be best to leave it as is or maybe have someone finish it, whether it’s worth that or not; i wouldn’t be able to say as i was never part of the fandom. that would probably be a differing opinion based on the fan you ask wheeze. however i had heard of the material berserk handles & maybe when i’m in a better place i’ll give it a shot but as is, it holds a lot of triggers for me.

however just because it’s not for me at this moment doesn’t mean it’s not for someone else & i’m glad that you felt such a connection & pull with a piece of media.

[kashuan]

I have a question. Is there a protagonist and antagonist in the Iliad? I've seen people say Achilles is the protag and Hector is the antagonist but it something about that doesn't sit right with me. The Iliad isn't about Achilles or Hector, it's about the war. Yeah, it focuses on how Achilles' anger affects the war, but that doesn't mean it's about Achilles right? It's ultimately still about the Trojan war, and it doesn't really present anyone as the protagonist and antagonist, at least in my opinion. But I'm not too sure about myself so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this! Thank you!

I would say that both Achilles and Hector are the respective protagonists of Greek and Trojan sides, if we’re using the definition of protagonist just as ‘main character who moves the plot forward’. I don’t think the Iliad is more about Achilles’ story than it is Hector’s; they’re both main characters imo. I wouldn’t interpret them as one another’s antagonist either because their conflict is actually a relatively small part of the story? I feel like if there’s any central antagonists in the Iliad it’s probably the gods, because they’re the ones who created the conflict and who continue to strengthen it throughout the story. I have seen a few people argue that Paris is the/an antagonist but at least in my mind an antagonist’s antagonizing actions need to be a little more purposeful than just being a well-meaning clueless idiot lol. tbf, if you’re defining an antagonist as ‘anyone who opposes the protagonist’, you could argue all of these options and more could be true. If you want to just focus in on Achilles’ story alone, I think Agamemnon rather than Hector would sooner be his “main“ antagonist because Achilles’ argument with him is not only the source of his personal conflict at the beginning of the story, but is revisited throughout the entirety of it (whereas his conflict with Hector is only in the last couple of books).

[elriell]

Answer to my LONG ask friend, posting it like this because I imagine it would be way to long or else! 

hi i hope you dont mind me asking, but perhaps any elriel meta will be willing to cover the whole berons alliance with the queen? because i think thats our winning argument in favor of elriels endgame. and i wish im not reaching or overthinking this lol.

why it will be our winning argument? becaue the whole beron pledged alliance to the queen dont mean anything just yet, it hasnt been flushed out yet (sarah left it open ended), and it will definitely be the main conflict in the next book just to set up the final book and war where all the sides has been established whos with who.

because in my perspective, elriels story really will trigger that conflict and rhysands warning in az pov is literally the set up for that conflict.

when i read acosf, i was thinking there is literally no point of beron making alliance with the queen aside him wanting to be the high king, more power, why would he do that when the queen is in the continent and him in prythian, other high lords will surely oppose him being the high king. thus its two (if the queen indeed would help him) versus six since koschei is still trapped in the lake. plus, his alliance is still a secret, surely other courts will learn of it, wont they?

now however possible consequences from elriel, beron perhaps will use the rejecting mating bond—the blood duel—as a reason to declare a war and have other courts against the night court or eris will finally dethrone his father and be the high lord. and with eris being the high lord, isnt that going to be one of the key topic for morrigans book? sarah also confirms morrigan book and she admits that she doesnt know what the novella is going to be, so its same to assume that mor will get a full novel.

fyi, i cant see lucien will challenge azriel though, he is decent and will respect elains choice, but beron as cruel as he is will surely do something sinister.

and i stumbled across an account on twitter and they compare elriels story to helen of troy and the set up of the trojan war is literally the same as elriel. also, beron reminds me of agamemnon in troy movie (2004), both of them want more power. there are a lot of similarities, imo, between elriel and the set up of iliad. in iliad there is also a duel between hector and achilles (this is me reaching lol).

thus, aside from elains connection to the dread trove, elriels conflict also has the logical conflict that tied to the whole overarching plot for the plot of the series to move forward toward the end, because like i said the whole berons alliance need to be addressed and in acosf it hasnt been addressed yet, at least not enough.

im really sorry if i come off as rude by asking this. i would do it honestly, but i dont have the confidence to post anything online (hence, im anonymous) and im not as convincing as the others in terms of flushing the arguments.

also, you are literally keeping me sane when all of elain antis trying their hardest to discredit elriels.

thank you❤️❤️❤️

Hi! I’m that anon who said that Elriel’s conflict with Beron could be the winning argument for our ship since they are tied closely with each other based on Rhysand’s warning in Azriel POV. If you decide to answer that question, would you mind if you answer this one instead? As I’m pretty much still stand on that point however I’d like to add and correct some statements that I think I don’t express clearly in my previous question:)

If you don’t mind, I’d like to post my theory here, anonymously, since I’m not confident enough to post my thoughts online yet as I’m afraid I’ll be judged harshly lol. And perhaps other metas such as you would like to elaborate more on the matter since I think it is a vital plot for Elriel’s book. It’s quite long, I do apologize for that:)

Like I said, Beron allegiance with Briallyn didn’t make any sense to me and it also took me by surprise when I read ACOSF. Why?

A. Briallyn lived on the continent and Beron is in Prythian. Wouldn’t it be better for him to seek an ally that is closer to him instead? We know that Beron wants to be an ally with her because he heard about her ambition. And I suspect that Beron wants to be the High King or kill Feyre since he knows that she has his power. But one thing for sure is that he wants more power.

B. If he indeed wants to be High King or kill Feyre then I don’t believe that the other high lords would comply with him. Therefore, Beron wouldn’t stand a chance against the other high lords and lady in Prythian since it is two (before the queen was killed by Nesta) versus six. Plus, Briallyin lived in the continent thus her allegiance was not something that he could hold on to, imo.

So obviously we know that Briallyn is dead and her allegiance doesn’t mean anything anymore. However, from her allegiance with Beron we now know that Beron for sure set to be the other villain of this new overarching plot alongside Koschei. And I also think that Beron would be the main villain for the next book because a villain as big as Koschei would likely be dealt in the last book.

Now, why is it tied with Elriel? I think Rhysand’s warning in Az’s POV explains it plainly, and I can’t help but think that it is a set up, a foreshadowing, of what would happen in the next book, especially since Koschei’s plotline is not foreshadowed enough in ACOSF and we only know of his onyx box which we get from ACOWAR.

If we acknowledge that Elriel is endgame and their story is next, then Beron surely comes to play in the next book. Their relationship will push the overarching plot one step closer to its climax.

FYI, I can’t see Lucien invoke the Blood Duel himself, he is a decent person so he will respect and understand Elain’s choice to be with Azriel since it is definitely where we are going in the matter of endgame. But, Beron, as cruel as he is, will surely make use of the situation to profit himself, to reach his ambition that is momentarily squashed with Briallyn dead.

These are possible results of what could happen with Blood Duel plotline:

1. Beron would ally himself with Koschei as Briallyn did before because he knows he is outnumbered if he declared a war against the Night Court.

2. Beron could convince other high lords in Prythian to go against the Night Court if Lucien was killed in the Blood Duel, I pray that it will not happen though Lucien deserve some peace and happiness with the woman who wants and loves him voluntarily.

3. Eris would rebel against his father's order for Lucien to invoke the duel, and Beron would be dethroned by Eris and he would be the next high lord of Autumn Court.

I personally lean more on number three, because with Eris being the high lord wouldn’t it be one of the key topics for Mor’s book? It is already confirmed that Sarah pitched Mor’s story as one of the books and she admits that she doesn’t know what the novella is going to be. So, it’s safe to assume that Mor will get a full novel, not a novella one. Seeing her sparse appearance and development we’ve seen of her in ACOSF, then it is also logical to assume that Mor will not be the next book main character.

In conclusion, Elriel needs to happen to address Beron's situation and bring the overall plot of the series a bit higher before it reaches climax in the final book. Is it also possible that Beron’s scenario still can be addressed without it being tied to Elain and Azriel? Yes, but, I will say it again, Rhysand’s warning is a clue, a foreshadowing, of what conflict will be covered in the next book. For an author to drop something as big as that but not happening is a lazy writing in my opinion.

In the previous question I also mentioned that Elriel’s story is kinda similar to Iliad. Their set up is pretty much similar to me, however, I don’t think Elriel’s story will end in tragedy since Sarah doesn’t like to read, write, sad endings.

I’m sorry if I come off as ordering you around, but I really appreciate it if you and other metas also put your thought in the whole Beron/Elriel situation since I’m 95% sure Elain book is next and Azriel will be her LI seeing there is no progress with her and Lucien yet.

And I still stand by my point, you and other Elriel metas keep me sane when all of Elriel antis trying their hardest to discredit all of Elriel’s interaction and feeling in order to make their ship endgame. Thank you so much❤️❤️❤️

Wowza! This has got to be one of the longest asks I have ever received, hahah, congratulations and thank you for taking the time to write it to me! 

I would definitely consider doing such a meta, I am working on my Elriel debunking one currently, chipping away at it slowly! It’s a big boy.

I definitely agree that it is a very important and key point because like you said Elriel will be the trigger that pushes this story forward, giving Beron the push he needs, and also it will give or potential for Eris to step in and also Lucien by proxy. It would as you said accelerate the whole plot.

I have said before and I will say it again, Elriel brings so much plot to the story and ties in so many different characters, that say Gwynriel for arguments sake, doesn’t. I have no doubts at all who are the next POVs.

Agree with literally every ounce of your first ask, they have all the ties. There is no point mentioning The blood Duel if it is never going to come in to play, whether they actually do it or get close too it has to happen now. And if that is the case then Elriel clearly has to happen to get there! I don’t think Lucien would participate because I think he would respect Elains decision but who knows...

I feel like their is potential for his hand to be forced by say Beron or someone else, like you said though all ties roll back to Elain. And her ARC. 

I am so sorry you don’t feel like you can post it yourself, because you clearly have some great well thought out perspective, and you are well spoken. I am sure the fandom would love to hear your thoughts from you, when you are ready of course. Until then you are always welcome to come here and share with me!!

Going to answer your second one separately because I didn’t read the second one first and now I see you said to answer the other one ahhhahaha

[lesbian-kyoru]

What do you think is each character's favorite subject in school?

tohru: not a surprise but baby girl loves home ec!! kind of has to work her butt off studying for her other classes, so she gets to enjoy herself and do something she’s naturally super good at in home ec. loves making little snacks in class for her friends and then sharing them at lunch. the sewing unit takes her fashion game to the next level. when they do a project where they take care of fake babies, she definitely ends up caring for half of the class’s infants like they’re her own. kyo is her partner and everyone teases them about it but she still has a really nice time and thinks kyo would be a great dad :’)) highest home ec grade of all time in their school

kyo: says his favorite is PE but it’s actually math. gets a 5 on the AP calc exam. tells no one but tohru, who then tells everyone and kazuma throws a party and kyo is Not Pleased. isn’t a great math tutor though because he can’t really explain how he gets his answers—he just Knows. checks tohru’s homework for her before she turns it in (read: fixes all her wrong answers when she’s not looking so he can see her huge smile when she gets a good grade back. only feels a little bit guilty). watches math tedtalks. nerd disguised as a jock

yuki: favorite subject is lit!! bullshits his way through class discussions and papers without ever actually reading the books because he’s smart and charismatic. has a premium account on sparknotes. favorite class specifically was one on ancient greek literature and epic poetry—spent the entirety of the class critiquing heteronormative readings of the iliad and taking the piss out of other students because “achilles and patroclus are clearly gay if you have eyes”

kakeru: …...i’ll be real he doesn’t like school lmao. senioritis personified. on his phone during classes constantly. laptop open playing world of warcraft or candy crush or neopets. could not tell you anything the teacher said in the last hour. doesn’t take notes because “i’ve got it all up here yun-yun…..” but doesn’t actually do half-bad on tests. only reason he does homework is because he can pretend to study with yuki while actually just flirting with him. if there’s one subject he doesn’t hate it’s history because he “thinks the fight scenes are fun” (yuki: “you mean world war 1??” “yeah it was exciting”)

uo: autoshop. hates the stereotype that just because she’s a lesbian she must like tools and machinery and automotive tech.....having said that she is a lesbian and she does like tools and machinery and automotive tech. gets a 100 on her project where she fixes a busted up motorcycle, and now she has two motorcycles. all the boys in the class call her senpai and worship the ground she walks on. smells faintly like motor oil all the time but she Absolutely makes it work

hana: creative writing. school is not her thing but she thrives in creative writing because her creativity is 100/10 and her stories are absolutely off the walls. excels in writing spooky yet also homoerotic ghost stories in particular. reads them aloud in class with the lights turned off and a flashlight illuminating her face. has made students cry out of fear. shigure beta-reads her writing. likes to subtly imply that her stories actually happened to fuck with kyo. it works

momiji: band/orchestra!! all the older students lose their minds over how well he can play. first chair violinist from day one. has a solo in every concert; tohru sits front row and films them, always cries. he’s the life of the party at Band Camp(™). even the grumpy bass clarinetists like him. doesn’t get in trouble when he talks waaaaay too much during rehearsal because the teacher loves him

haru: mr space cadet himself isn’t much of a science guy but LOVES astronomy. gets Ds on pretty much every test but he doesn’t care because his mind is expanding. buys a super nice telescope so he can look at constellations at 3 in the morning. develops very specific opinions about each planet. stans the moon. gets really into sleeping at last’s astronomy-themed album. becomes that guy whose personality is “i like space” until the class is over and then he never talks about it again

rin: art! she takes several art classes throughout high school. really loves drawing and painting, but also really likes doing ceramics projects because she likes working with her hands :’)) does a watercolor portrait for tohru as a graduation gift but gets really flustered when tohru sobs into her arms over how beautiful it is. also secretly likes doing little doodles of her and haru—he sees them once in her sketchbook and will never let her live it down

kagura: says her favorite is PE and it actually is PE. goes ham for capture the flag, tends to play too rough when capturing and gets taken out of the game. only person who is actually good at volleyball so she is constantly spiking, setting, and diving for the ball all in the same game, while the rest of her team just kind of fumbles around and tries to stay out of her way. gets first place every time they run the mile even though it’s definitely not a competition. definitely knows her mile time even though it is not a timed activity

hiro: this kid screams history nerd, but like Male History Nerd with a niche interest in military history and very specific opinions about how *insert historical figure* wasn’t actually all that bad. gets his ass handed to him in class discussions on the daily but won’t admit it. is genuinely really smart and has Better Opinions by the time he graduates, so he starts using his history nerd powers For Good as an adult—as in, arguing about inaccurate historical memes on facebook in his free time

kisa: choir. singing stresses her out, but she’s figured out that she can just mouth the words and no one can tell that she’s not actually singing! loves being in the group and hearing the beautiful music around her :’)) everyone is in awe of how cute she is in her lil choir robe. tohru comes to all of kisa’s concerts as well and films them from the front row, also while crying

machi: woodshop. gets sawdust on her clothes and loves the smell. obsessed with digging through piles of splintering and warped scrap wood. loses her damn mind when she gets to use the jigsaw. really enjoys making like…misshapen birdhouses and crooked tables, but woodshop is mostly participation grades anyway so her teacher gives her A’s on all of her grotesque wood creations. she is at peace and is One with the Wood. doesn’t wear safety goggles while chopping wood because she likes Risk

kimi: loves speech & drama. emphasis on the drama. it’s a chance to talk for a long time and everyone has to look at her and listen to her or else they’ll fail!! which is how she likes it. goes three minutes over for every speech but the teacher can’t get her to pause long enough to stop her. comes to auditions in a full professionally-made costume. knows her lines and everyone else’s

nao: AP statistics on the pre-accounting track. has known he wants to be an accountant since he was in diapers. does slightly below average in the class. still studies accounting in college because it’s too big a part of his personality to quit at this point. becomes an accountant. never quite feels fulfilled

[treeni]

Sanders Side Theory: Creativity’s Name and Roman’s Struggles

Theories Masterpost

Well, apparently some people were interested in my Orange side theory and stuff.

So let’s talk about “King Creativity” and why I disagree with every name theory I’ve seen so far and what I think instead. I’m not certain “King Creativity” is ever going to be named in the show, just knowing he existed is probably enough, but wouldn’t it be fantastic if there was a backstory episode? Or even aside episode?

First! Let’s start with the fact that I actually think it’s really interesting that everyone’s defaulting to Creativity being “King” when it is in fact Emperors who ruled Rome. Not a criticize, just interesting thought. Second, Kings were supposed to sit back and let their knights and armies basically do all of the physical work (Unless your Arthur, but it usually got him into trouble so! Moving on!) while you lead them as whatever supreme ruler title you take. However, a Crowned Prince was often at the head of said adventures and battles, in the thick of it all, but was basically indisputably the accepted next in line. (Approved by the courts and all that jazz, I mean historically it didn’t always go that way, but that was the intention). However, a regular Prince and a Duke could absolutely have a power struggle, especially in the situation where the Duke was previously “next in line” before the Prince’s birth. So if Roman and Remus ever did duke it out (also mini theory that Remus chose Duke for the fighting reference) I think one of them could/would become King, but I don’t think that’s who creativity was before the split.

Now I have a particular crowned prince in mind that creativity is named after, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start by talking about some of the most popular theories and why I disagree with them.

CW: for before the “Keep Reading” section. There is mention of metaphorical and fictional murder, war, lgbt theory (not that, that should surprise anyone). Roman backstory (aka things he might regret now.)

Romulus: While I suppose it’s convenient in the fact that its sort of the names combined, Romulus is already the role that Roman is filling in his relationship with Remus. Twins that supposedly found Rome, but Romulus killed his brother Remus to do so and become the ruler. Romulus literally named Rome after himself. This isn’t a hint, this isn’t something that’s upcoming or anything, this is backstory. Roman is literally just a modernized version of the name Romulus. Remus’ banishment to the darkside was his metaphorical murder. It also suggests that Roman took an active role in sending Remus away, which also helps explain a lot of Roman’s current struggle with Janus. Can you imagine the kind of guilt he might be feeling if he was the one who decided his brother was evil and he was good and then he passed judgement? If the darksides aren’t evil, then Roman and he metaphorically murdered Remus, then he wasn’t the hero slaying the beast anymore. Instead, he’s suddenly the bad guy.

Buuuut Treeni, what about Patton??? I hear you say. It would have had to have been morality right?

And to that I say you’re WRONG! And also right. Patton’s kinda been shown to be the most accepting bean of the whole lot, he doesn’t really try to force the others away the way some of the other sides do. Instead, he puts his foot down on his own convictions and refuses to listen to reason. (I didn’t say he was perfect.) Still, he doesn’t try to physically push the others away, not Virgil when he tried scaring Thomas, not Janus when they argued and Patton was clearly distressed by the courtroom situation, and not even Remus when Patton was clearly scared of him (also defensive of Roman). He doesn’t need to, he’s self-assured in his own place and convictions that he doesn’t worry about Thomas pushing him out. Instead, Patton kinda takes the family holiday party route and will do his best to put out the emotional fires and stand his ground on his opinion to Thomas when he needs to. (The ONLY time I could find Patton sort of pushing someone away was when they were in his room and Patton asked Logan to stop. While that could weaken my argument about Patton, I think it strengthens it because it shows how big of a deal it was at the time that Patton tried shutting him down. Logan reacted the way he did by immediately storming off because it’s not something Patton does.) While it could absolutely be Patton’s influence that caused the split, it would be out of character (as he’s currently defined) for Patton to actively push a side away. (I’ll get into some of his more negative aspects in another post if ya’ll wanna hear about it.)

Remember, Roman was the one who tried shutting down Virgil with bullying tactics, Logan too sometimes. Then he tried to use the same tactics on Janus when he tried putting his foot down on maintaining a black and white view point of the world after Remus’ appearance. Keep in mind that Remus actively told us that he blames Roman for his banishment. He compared himself and Roman to Cain and Able. While c!Thomas and even the audience as a whole were sort of led to think of Remus as Cain because of the “dark and evil” association, Remus is telling us that he is Abel. Roman is his destroyer. (Before you feel too bad for Remus, that misconception was also on purpose because while Remus isn’t a liar, he can manipulate a situation with honesty. Again, another post if you wanna hear about why.)

So now there is some general understanding of the twins backstory, you’ll see why Romulus would be a terrible fit for their combined name because Roman is already Romulus. Period. He’s the one who betrayed his brother by “murdering” him and taking over.

Making Romulus the name of who creativity was before because the names kinda morph together would lazy writing compared to very carefully woven details the show has had thus far (particularly in season 2). Okay, that went on a bit of a tangent, so next!

Caesar: This is a person who brought about the destruction of Rome, not the creation of it. (With Rome basically being the metaphorical state c!Thomas is living in now with clear lines between good/bad, right/wrong etc.) While it’s not a horrible ideology, it would be moving forward in a historical timeline instead of backwards. If you subscribe to the idea that Roman and Remus cannot go back to who they were (even with some kind of theoretical re-morphing) Caesar might be who they become, but it seems unlikely that is who they were. Remember that both sides are individuals now and those individual traits they’ve gained since splitting may not re-mesh cleanly back into who they once were. I personally don’t think there’s any “going back” for Creativity.

If they show him as he once was, it would likely only be in either a backstory bit or in a temporary situation where the re-combining doesn’t hold. However, if Creativity ever did become one thing again, I think it would be something completely new and I think Caesar would be a good fit for that in particular.

Aeneas: Again, it would be kinda lazy writing comparatively. Instead of using a sorta combination of the names that had some historical basis, this theory is based entirely on the idea of a convenient ancestor who quested and failed over and over to create Rome. I could have bought this had it been from lesser writers, but Thomas, Joan and the whole team do not mess around in story crafting and really carefully woven in references. I am literally degreed in writing and analysis and I keep finding myself impressed at the layers.

The name Aeneas also implies that the character Creativity was specifically questing for a change and that seems doubtful given the resentment between the brothers. Aeneas was essentially a left-over scavenger trying to scrape together a new home from what he could from already broken pieces and that does not sound like what Creativity is implied to be.

If we look at child development, I would theorize that Creativity is the oldest side. In the creative process, there are two major steps, first is information absorption, then second is application. The first thing any child must do is learn, anything and everything. The world is a limitless and imaginative playground. New material is around every corner and there it takes a while before the distinction between reality and fiction to be understood. It was probably just c!Thomas and Creativity for a while and as the others emerged, they looked up to him. It could even be potentially argued that Creativity was literally their creators.

This would imply that Aeneas would be a pretty terrible fit for him in that case because there’s nothing broken that he’s trying to salvage. The kingdom is his and c!Thomas’ to preside over with the other sides as his subjects. (c!Thomas being the distant “King” and Creativity being the “Crowned Prince”).

So, with all of that out of the way on why some of these theories are probably wrong, what do I think?

I think Creativity’s name is Hector.

Now, hear me out on this. For those of you who have read the Iliad you probably know exactly who I am referencing. You just may not know why. So stay with me here.

1. First, for those of you who don’t know, Hector was the Crowned Prince of Troy, the leader of the army that the Greeks (the perspective we’re getting) are facing off against. He’s also cousin to Aeneas, but actually accomplished things during the war beyond being saved by Aphrodite. This means he’s also an ancestor to both Romulus and Remus (albeit technically less direct). However, Hector’s family is where the royal lineage of Aeneas comes from. Though we follow the story mainly from the perspective of the Greeks (and the gods because they’re TROLLS), the Greek’s are pretty villainous in a lot of their actions throughout the story and they are most definitely the invaders. In this case, I would liken the Greek army to “outside opinion” for c!Thomas. Others interjecting their views on to someone and breaking his own beliefs. In this situation, Creativity would have been his biggest defender and hero, retreating into magical imaginary worlds to escape judgement.

2. So lets get onto the character and why him, shall we? Hector will literally do anything for his family. The war takes place because his little brother, Paris (one of a whopping 49 brothers mind you) either kidnaps, has Aphrodite kidnap or runs away with the Spartan Queen Helen because he fell in love with her. (It varies on the version and she was forced into her previous marriage at about 13 anyway, so Helen leaving willingly for the guy who the gods deem is the most attractive man alive is a popular modern reading.) It would have been so easy for the Trojans to yeet Helen back to Greece, but they don’t and Hector’s defense of her and his brother is a big reason why. Hector even chastises his brother for the mess he’s caused, but still stands by him and defends him. He also defends the hell out of Helen and refuses to blame her for their problems. Then in Troilus and Criseyde (Basically published Iliad perspective shift fanfiction with OCs) he defends the hell out of Criseyde when even Troilus, (apparently one of the 50 brothers) the person who claims to be in love with her, wont. Hector’s truly an all around good guy, great leader and has a very distinctive and personal moral compass that doesn’t always align with what’s being told to him is right. You want a character representation for someone who led the sides despite their clear struggles? Someone with Roman’s charm and heroism, and Remus’ understanding and drive? Hector is probably it.

3. Hector’s death is both a huge symbol for the end of Troy, but also isn’t? Let me explain, narratively speaking, Hector’s death is the point you know that Troy is basically doomed. His end is the representation of the end of it all. His corpse was literally paraded around as Achilles’s dragged it on the back of a chariot for days to show their doom. There was a distinct “aura” shift from Hector’s death as all of Troy mourned his death. We as an audience know Troy is basically doomed from Hector’s death alone. Hector was a person that even the enemy Greeks hella respected as a warrior and leader. Essentially, this was the point that the war that had been raging for about a decade became serious. At the same time, it just simply isn’t the end of the war. There’s the whole horse thing still to come and all that jazz. Still though, Hector’s death is very much a symbol of “everything changes, but nothing does.” Which is the perfect symbol for the twins split to me. Just because they split doesn’t mean that all of the sides did immediately, yet it was still probably the turning point that drove a wedge between the “dark” and “light” sides.

4. The character Hector arguably died in the name of gay love. Okay, story time. So in the Iliad, Achilles is being a little bitch and refusing to fight anymore because drama between him and the king of Athens, but he’s their best fighter and the Greek’s are basically sorta loosing because of him not helping. His boyf- I mean best friend Patroclus goes out in Achilles armor and leads his army in his place because Achilles is a whiny baby. Except Hector kinda immediately kills Patroclus, thinking he’s Achilles with reinforcements.(This was full body armor baby and distinctive cause baby of a god and all that mocha frappe.) Of course, Achilles has to immediately get angry revenge for his boyf- BEST friend and ends up killing Hector. This would make the character Hector a great metaphor for Creativity if his split had anything to do with sexuality or even acceptance as a whole. (Though we know acceptance is definitely a part of it considering Remus.) We know that Remus wants c!Thomas to explore darker themes and the struggle of sexuality and acceptance could be a possibility in what is to come as a previously “off-limits” theme.

5. A big one is that the destruction of Troy is what eventually brought about the creation of Rome. Essentially Troy would be the metaphor of c!Thomas’ existence/mentality before the sides split into dark/light factions. Then Rome would be the metaphor of c!Thomas’ existence/mentality after the sides split into factions.

6.Finally, the name Hector literally means “to restrain” which would work well for Creativity as he was likely trying to reign in the others from infighting (and you can see how well that went with him being gone). 

Cheers to another rant into the void. Huzzah! God this is nearly as long as some of my seminar papers. Do what you will with this information.

Please keep in mind that I adore Roman as a character. This post isn’t meant to hate on him. It’s meant to bring awareness of the layers of his character. Every Prince Charming was a villain to someone, every hero that slays the beast is a murderer from a different light. 

I don’t bring these things to light to cause pain, I bring them to light to help bring awareness of what’s probably going through his head.

(Yes, in regards to the Creativity being made first thing, I DO even have a theory about existence order, I promise you I have theories about everything. My mind does not stop with this crap. I have theories on everything from what animal association Roman and Logan have to Virgil’s key role in Roman’s backstory. I’ve ranted about a bunch of these things to a few specific people so if you ever want me to go on a rant about anything in particular let me know. I didn’t expect anyone to actually look at the other theory post tbh. Inbox me if you want me to go to unnecessary lengths on something else.)

(Also, correct me on the Patton thing if I’m wrong. I took notes on a recent watch through, but I wasn’t specifically looking for his rejection sooo, if there are other moments of it you can find that didn’t jump out at me I totally accept criticism.)

[thepersephonecabin]

16, 20-23, 36 ? For Riordanverse asks!

16. Where would you live in the riordanverse world (CHB, CJ, The Waystation, Valhalla, the Kane Manor, etc.)?

Camp Half-Blood! I know it’s kind of basic but I have the kind of nostalgia for CHB that most potterheads have for hogwarts. I even have a home-made CHB shirt (though i don’t know if it still fits me because I made it uhhh several weight fluctuation cycles ago)

20. Favorite ship?

It’s a suuuper small ship but i really love NicoxPercyxAnnabeth. I’m a sucker for some good healthy polyamory, and though our little group of shippers are small there are some just incredible fics. Honorable mentions: I would die for fierrochase, and when I, a non-binary, found out Riordan was doing a main character romance with a genderfluid character I uh, big cried. Also a big fan of Thalia and Reyna.

21. Least favorite ship?

So please don’t get mad, this is a personal opinion and not a judgement on anyone in the fandom who does ship this but my least favorite is actually solangelo, but hear me out. I think it’s really great that Rick gave Nico a happy ending with someone who is as kind and caring as Will! I think that’s a great message for younger queer kids reading the books who could benefit from seeing that they deserve happy endings too! So I’ll never begrudge anyone for shipping solangelo, but I have, a weird relationship with the ship personally.

For me, it’s less that I dislike the solangelo ship itself, it’s more that some solangelo shippers especially in the time right after Blood of Olympus came out got kind of nasty to people who weren’t immediately on the bandwagon. For example, I remember some people saying, “hmm I’m not sure I’m warmed up to will and nico as a couple yet” and solangelo shippers coming down and saying that they were being homophobic for it. (additionally, I made a post about this a loooooong time ago but I feel a little uncomfortable about how quickly solangelo grew in popularity with the fandom before it was confirmed canon because it felt crappy that no one had put that sort of energy behind any f/f shit in the riordan-verse. and then, almost simultaneously, people started shitting on riordan for not having any wlw in his books, but when the waystation girls were introduced it was like. radio silence in the fandom.)

so yeah. this is no shade to you if you ship solangelo, it’s more that i got burnt out on seeing the ship. I still think will and solace are cute in TOA, and i still see and reblog good art/fic of solangelo when I see it, it’s just not my cup of tea.

22. Favorite platonic ship (Brotp)?

Do Percy and Tyson count if they’re actually brothers? I love their dynamic and how in school Percy would defend Tyson even though he new it’d isolate him from others even more. Also I know I talked above about liking the nicoxpercyxannabeth ship but I also just like Nico and Annabeth bonding platonically after the books, the idea that they have to be jealous and nasty to each other just because nico had a crush on percy is so tired.

23. If you could save ONE of the people who died, who would it be (pick one, no cheating!!)?

SELENA! Her sacrifice was so poetic and I loved the parallels between her death and Patroclus’ from the Iliad but also! She and Clarisse should be married!!

36. The most controversial opinion that you have about the books (be honest, and friends/mutuals don’t kill the person who answers!!)

Oh gods I feel like I already outed myself on this one with my solangelo answer, but for the sake of fairness I will give another different controversial opinion.

I don’t even know if this is something people are still arguing about because I have weeded the whole conversation out of my dash but back in the day a lot of people on tumblr had beef about the age difference between Hazel and Frank because in physical years Hazel is younger than him. 

I can understand people’s complaints about the age difference because I get that irl even a difference of a few years can mean a significant power indifference. I saw this with a lot of my own friends in the real world and I even experienced a lot of my older brother’s friends pursuing me romantically (the people in question would have been 3-5 years older) when I was in middle school and high school and as an adult I look back at that and I’m so thankful that I dodged those bullets by standing my ground and not getting involved with those people who were older than me.

However, I think it’s also kind of convenient that people will discourse over Hazel and Frank being together, but not for example, Percy and Nico or Nico and Jason who have a similar age differences. And if I’m being honest, if you ask me why I think Hazel and Frank get so much more discourse about the age gap, the only answer that makes sense to me is the fact that there are few ships in the Riordan-verse in which BOTH SIDES of the ship are POC, and HazelxFrank is one of them.

This is something I’ve avoided putting out on my blog, I just try to ignore the whole thing tbh? but Hazel and Frank both separately got weirdly mixed reactions from the fandom and neither are particularly popular compared to some of the other characters. But when you think about it, nico has an age difference with most of the characters he’s shipped with, but I rarely see people upset about it. (not to mention there are so many other ships with significant age differences like leo and calypso, sadie and anubis, and paolo and apollo, etc who i also have not seen age discourse about). so idk. I understand why some people are made uncomfortable by it and that’s totally their right but I do still wonder if some of the frazel hate is misdirected

Send me a number!

[scifrey]

In February of 2017 I had the great pleasure of addressing the Grant MacEwan University English Department with a keynote speech titled “Your Voice is Valid.”

This speech was all about Mary Sues, fandom, and marginalized voices, and is a direct response to the negative reactions that media texts receive when they announce a protagonist that is deemed to be a "Mary Sue".

In the intervening years I think the message of my talk has become even more vital to creators, so I thought I’d record a  new video of the speech to share with a wider audience.

 If you liked this video, you can find more of my writing advice on my website.

Read the full speech on Wattpad, or below:

(Text may not match the video exactly as I did alter some of the phrasing.)

*

My friends, I have a declaration to make. A promise. A vow, if you will. And it is this:

If I hear one more basement-dwelling troll call the lead female protagonist of a genre film a ‘Mary Sue’ one more time, I’m going to scream.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this all before. A major science fiction, fantasy, video game, novel, or comic franchise or publisher announces a new title. Said new title features a lead protagonist who is female, or a person of color, or is not able-bodied, or is non-neurotypical, or is LGBTQA+.

It might be the new Iron Man or Spider-man, who are both young black teenagers in the comics now, or the Lt. Michael Burnham of Star Trek: Discovery, or the new Ms. Marvel, a Muslim girl. It could be Jyn Erso, the female lead of the latest Star Wars film or Chirrut, her blind companion. It could be the deaf FBI Director Gordon Cole from Twin Peaks or Clint Barton from Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye graphic novel series. It could be Sara, of Dragon Age fame or Samantha Traynor from Mass Effect, both lesbians, or Dorian also from Dragon Age, who is both a person of color and flamboyantly queer. Maybe it’s Lt. Stamets and Dr. Hugh Culber, played by Anthony Rapp of (best known for his time as Mark in Rent) and Wilson Cruz, both open out gay men playing openly out gay men in a romantic relationship in Star Trek Discovery. It could be Captain Christopher Pike, from both the original Star Trek series and the reboot film, who uses a wheelchair and assistive devices to communicate. Or maybe it’s Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier, fights with a prosthetic arm in the comics, or Iron Man, whose suit serves as Tony Stark’s ego-tastic pacemaker.

And generally, the audience cheers at this announcement. Yay for diversity! Yay for representation! Yay for working to make the worlds we consume look more like the world we live in! Yay!

But there’s a certain segment of the fan population that does not celebrate.

I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about.

This certain brand of fan-person gets all up in arms on social media. They whine. They complain. They say that it’s not appropriate to change the gender, race, orientation, or physical abilities of a fictional creation, or just protest their inclusion to begin with. They decry the erosion of creativity in service of neo-liberalism, overreaching political-correctness, and femi-nazis. (Sorry, sorry – the femi-“alt-right”).

It’s not realistic. “Women can’t survive in space,” they say, “It’s just a fact.” (That is a direct quote, by the way.) “Superheroes can’t be black,” they say. “Video game characters shouldn’t have a sexual orientation,” unless – it seems - that sexual orientation is straight and the game serves to support a male gaze ogling at half-dressed pixilated prostitutes.

“And strong female characters have to wear boob armor. It’s just natural,” they say.

These fan persons predict the end of civilization because things are no longer being done the way they’ve always been done. “There’s nothing wrong with the system,” they say. “So don’t you dare change it.”

And to enforce this opinion, to ensure that it’s really, really clear just how much contempt this certain segment of the fan population holds for any lead protagonist that isn’t a white, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, cismale, they do everything they can to tear down them down.

They do this by calling that character a ‘Mary Sue.’

When fan fiction author Paula Smith first used the term ‘Mary Sue’ in her 1973 story A Trekkie’s Tale, she was making a commentary on the frequent appearance of original characters in Star Trek fan fiction. Now, I’m going to hazard that most of these characters existed as a masturbatory avatar – wanna bone Spock? (And, um, you know, let’s face it who didn’t?) They you write a story where a character representing you gets to bone Spock.

And if they weren’t a sexual fantasy, then they were an adventure fantasy. Wanna be an officer on the Enterprise? Well, it’s the flagship of the Starfleet, so you better be good enough to get there. Chekov was the youngest navigator in Starfleet history, Uhura is the most tonally sensitive officer in linguistics, and Jim Kirk’s genius burned like a magnesium flare – your self-representative character would have to keep up to earn thier place on that bridge. This led to a slew of hyper sexualized, physically idealized, and unrealistically competent author-based characters populating the fan fiction of the time.

But inserting a trumped-up version of yourself into a narrative wasn’t invented in the 1970s. Aeneas was totally Virgil’s Mary Sue in his Iliad knock off. Dante was such a fanboy of the The Bible that he wrote himself into an adventure exploring it. Robin Hood’s merry men and King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table kept growing in number and characteristics with each retelling. Even painters have inserted themselves into commissioned pictures for centuries.

This isn’t new. This is not a recent human impulse.

But what Paula Smith and the Mary Sue-writing fan ficcers didn’t know at the time was that they were crystallizing what it means to be an engaged consumer of media texts, instead of just a passive one. They had isolated and labelled what it means to be so affected by a story, to love it so much that this same love bubbles up out of you and you have to do something about it, either in play, or in art. For example: in pretending to be a ninja turtle on the play ground, or in trying to recreate the perfect version of a star fleet uniform to wear, or in creating art and making comics depicting your favorite moments or further adventures of the characters you love, or writing stories that encompass missing moments from the narratives.

‘Mary Sues’ are, at their center, a celebration of putting oneself and one’s own heart, and one’s own enjoyment of a media text, first.

Before I talk about why this certain segment of the fan population deploys the term ‘Mary Sue’ the way it does, let’s take a closer look at this impulse for participatory play.

Here’s the sixty four thousand dollar question: where do ‘Mary Sues’ come from?

I’d like you take a moment to think back at the sorts of games you enjoyed when you were about seven years old. Think back. Picture yourself outside, playing with your siblings, or the neighbour’s kids or you cousins. What are you doing? Playing ball games, chase games, and probably something with a narrative? Are you Power Rangers? Are you flying to Neverland with Peter Pan? Are you fighting Dementors and Death Eaters at Hogwarts? Are you the newest members of One Direction, are you Jem and the Holograms or the Misfits? Are you running around collecting Pokémon back before running around and collecting Pokémon IRL was a thing?

That, guys, gals and non-binary pals, is where Mary Sues come from. That’s it. It’s as easy as that.

As a child you didn’t know that modern literary tradition pooh-poohs self-analogous characters, or that realism was required for depth of character. All you knew was that you wanted to be a part of that story, right.  If you wanted to be a train with Thomas and Friends, then you were a train. If you wanted to be a magic pony from Equestria, you were a pony. Or, you know, if you were trying to appease two friends at once, then you were a pony-train.

Self-insert in childhood games teach kids the concept of elastic play, and this essential ability to imagine oneself in skins that are not one’s own, and to stretch and reshape narratives is what breeds creativity and storytelling. It shapes compassion.

Now, think of your early stories. As a child we all told and wrote stories about doing what, to us, were mundane everyday things - like getting ice cream with the fictional characters we know and love.

My friend’s three year old tells his father bed time stories about going on walks through Home Hardware with his friends, the anthropomorphized versions of the local taco food truck and the commuter train his dad takes to work every morning. He doesn’t recognize the difference between real and fictional people (or for him, in this case, the stand-ins that are the figures that loom large in his life right now as a three year old obsessed with massive machines). When you ask him to tell you a story, he talks about these fictions as if they’re real. And he does not hesitate to insert himself into the tale. “I did this. I did that. We went there and then had this for lunch.” He is present in all his own stories because, at this age, he understands the world only from his limited personal POV.

As we grow up, we do learn to differentiate between fantasy and reality. But, I posit that we never truly loose that “me too!” mentality. We see something amazing happening on the screen, or on the page, or on a playing field, and we want to be there, a part of it.

So we sort ourselves into Hogwarts Houses. We choose hockey teams to love, and we wear their jerseys.  We buy ball caps from our favorite breweries. We line up for hours to be the first to watch a new release or to buy a certain smartphone. We collect stamps and baseball cards and first editions of Jane Austen and Dan Brown. We want to be a part of it. Our capitalist, consumer society tells us to prove our love with our dollars, and we do it.

And for fan creators, we want to be a part of it so badly that we’re willing to make more of it. Not for profit, but for sheer love. And for the early writers, the newbies, the blossoming beginners, Mary Sues are where they generally start. Because those are the sorts of stories they’ve been telling yourselves for years already.

But as we get older, as we consume more media texts and find more things to adore, we begin to notice a dearth of representation – you’re not pony trains in our minds any more. We have a better idea of what we look like. And we don’t see it. The glorious fantasy diversity of our childhoods is stripped away, narratives are codified by the mainstream media texts we consume, and people stop looking like us.

I’m reminded of a story I read on Tumblr, of a young black author living in Africa – whose name, I’m afraid, I wasn’t able to find when I went back to look for it, so my apologies to her. The story is about the first time she tried to write a fairytale in elementary school. She made her protagonist a little white girl, and when she was asked why she hadn’t chosen to make the protagonist back, this author realized that it hadn’t even occurred to her that she was allowed make her lead black. Even though she was surrounded by people of color, the adventures, and romance, and magic in everything she consumed only happened to the white folks. She did not know she was allowed to make people like her the heroes because she had never seen it.

This is not natural. This is nurture, not nature. This is learned behavior. And this is hegemony.

No child grows up believing they don’t have place in the story. This is something were are taught. And this is something that we are taught by the media texts we consume.

I do want to pause and make a point here. There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with writing a narrative from the heterosexual, able bodied, neurotypical, white cismale POV in and of itself. I think we all have stories that we know and love that feature that particular flavor of protagonist. And people from that community deserve to tell their stories as much as folks from any other community.

The problem comes from a reality where when it’s the only narrative. The default narrative. The factory setting. When people who don’t see themselves reflected in the narrative nonetheless feel obligated to write such stories, instead of their own. When they are told and taught that it is the only story worth telling. ‎

There’s this really great essay by Ika Willis, and it’s called “. And I think it’s the one – one of the most important pieces of writing not only on Mary Sues, but on the dire need for representation in general.

In the essay, Willis talks about Mary Sues – beyond being masturbatory adventure avatars for young people just coming into their own sexuality, or avatars to go on adventures with – but as voice avatars. Mary Sues, when wielded with self-awareness, deliberateness, and precision, can force a wedge into the narrative, crack it open, and provide a space for marginalized identities and voices in a media-text that otherwise silences and ignores them.

This is done one of two ways. First: by jamming in a diverse Mary Sue, and making the characters and the world acknowledge and work with that diversity. Or, second: by co-opting a pre-existing character and overlaying a new identity on them while retaining their essential characterization. For example, by writing a story where Bilbo Baggins is non-binary, but still thinking that adventures are messy, dirty things. Or making Sherlock Holmes deaf, but still perfectly capable of solving all the crimes. Or making James Potter Indian, so that the Dursleys prejudiced against Harry not only for his magic, but also for his skin color. Or making Ariel the mermaid wrestle with severe body dysphoria, or Commander Sheppard suffer from severe PTSD.

I like to call this voice avatar Mary Sue a ‘Meta-Sue’, because when authors have evolved enough in their storytelling abilities to consciously deploy Mary Sues as a deliberate trope, they’re doing so on a self-aware, meta-textual level.

So that is where Mary Sues comes from.

But what is a Mary Sue? How can you point at a character and say, “Yes, that is – definitively – a Mary Sue”.

Mary Sues can generally be characterized as:

-Too perfect, or unrealistically skilled. They shouldn’t be able to do all the things they do, or know all the things they know, as easily as they do or know them. For reasons of the plot expedience, they learn too fast, and are able to perform feats that other characters in their world who have studied or trained longer and harder find difficult. For example, Neo in The Matrix.

-They are the black hole of every plot – every major quest or goal of the pre-existing characters warps to include or be about them; every character wants to befriend them, or romance them, or sleep with them, and every villain wants to possess them, or kill them, or sleep with them. This makes sense, as why write a character into the world if you’re not going to have something very important happen to them? So, for example, like Neo in The Matrix.

-A Mary Sue, because it’s usually written by a neophyte author who’s been taught that characters need flaws, has some sort of melodramatic, angsty tragic back-story that, while on the surface seems to motivate them into action, because of lack of experience in creating a follow-through of emotional motivation, doesn’t actually affect their mental health or ability to trust or be happy or in love. For example, like the emotional arc of Neo in The Matrix.

– A Mary Sue saves the day. This goes back to that impulse to be the center of the story. Like Neo in The Matrix.

-And lastly, Mary Sues come from outside the group. They’re from the ‘real world’, like you and I, or have somehow discovered the hero’s secret identity and must be folded into the team, or are a new recruit, or are a sort of previously undiscovered stand-alone Chosen One. Like, for example, Neo in The Matrix.

Now, as I’ve said, there’s actually nothing inherently wrong with writing a Mary Sue. Neo is a Mary Sue, but The Matrix is still a really engaging and well written film. And simply by virtue of the fact that an individual with ingrained cultural foundations is writing a story, that story is inherently rooted in that writer’s lived life and experiences. As much as a writer may try to either highlight or downplay it, each character and story they create has some of themselves in it. The first impulse of storytelling is to talk about oneself. We write about ourselves, only the more we write, the more skilled we become at disguising the sliver of us-ness in a character, folding it into something different and unique. We, as storytellers, as humans, empathize with protagonists and fictional characters constantly – we love putting our feet into other people’s shoes. It’s how we understand and engage with the world.

And we as writers tap into our own emotions in order to describe them on the page. We take slices of our lives – our experiences, our memories, our friend’s verbal tics or hand gestures, aunt Brenda’s way of making tea, Uncle Rudy’s way having a pipe after dinner, that time Grannie got lost at the zoo – and we weave them together into a golem that we call a character, which comes to life with a bit of literary magic. I mean, allow me to be sparklingly reductionist for a second, but in the most basic sense, every character is a Mary Sue.

It’s just a matter of whether the writer has evolved to the point  in their craft that they’ve learned to animate that golem with the sliver of self-ness hidden deep enough that it is unrecognizable as self-ness, but still recognizable as human-ness.

For years, mainstream western media has featured characters that were primarily heterosexual, able bodied, neurotypical, white cismales. And, regrettably, because of that, this flavor of human is now assumed to be the default for a character. When people from other communities speak up requesting other flavours, for characters for whom the imbedded sliver of humanity remains just as poignant and relatable, but the outer shell is of a different variety, this is when that certain segment of the fan population looses their cool.

That certain segment of the fan population has been telling us for years that if we don’t like what we see on TV or in video games, or in books, or comics, or on the stage, that we should just go make our own stuff. And now we are.

“Make your own stuff,” they say, and then follow it up with: “What’s with all this political correctness gone wild? Uhg. This stuff is all just Mary Sue garbage.”

Well, yes. Of course it is. That’s the point.

But why are they saying it like that?

Because they mean it in a derogatory sense.

They don’t mean it in the way that Paula Smith meant it – a little bit belittling but mostly fun; a bemused celebration of why we love putting ourselves into the stories and worlds we enjoy. They don’t mean it the way that Willis means it – a deliberate and knowing way to shove the previously marginalized into the center. They don’t even mean it the way that I mean it in my own work - as a tool for carefully deconstructing and discussing character and narrative with a character and from within a narrative.

When a certain segment of the fan population talks about ‘Mary Sue’, they mean to weaponize it. To make it a stand-in for the worse thing that a character can be: bland, predictable, and too-perfect. Which, granted, many Mary Sues are. But not all of them. And a character doesn’t have to be a Mary Sue to be done badly, either.

When this certain segment of the fan population says ‘Mary Sue’, they’re trying to shame the creators for deviating from the norm - the white, the heterosexual, the able bodied, the neurotypical, the straight cismale.

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “I don’t believe people like this are interesting enough to be the lead character in a story.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “I don’t think there’s any need to listen to that voice. They’re not interesting enough.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “This character is not what I am used to a.k.a. not like me, and I’m gonna whine about it.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “Even though kids from all over the world, from many different cultural, religious and ethnic backgrounds have had to grow up learning to identify with characters who don’t look or think like them, identifying with characters who don’t look or think like me is hard and I don’t wanna.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: ”Even though I’ve grown up in a position of privilege and power, and even though publishing and producing diverse stories with diverse casts doesn’t actually cut into the proportionate representation that I receive, and never will, I am nonetheless scared that I’ll never see people like me in media texts ever again.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “Considering my fellow human beings as fellow human beings worthy of having stories about them and their own experiences, in their own voices, is hard and I don’t wanna do it.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “I only want stories about me.”

They call leads ‘Mary Sues’ so people will stop writing them and instead write… well, their version of a ‘Mary Sue.’ The character that is representative of their lived experiences, their power and masturbatory fantasies, their physical appearance, their sexual awakenings, their cultural identity, their voice, their kind of narratives.

Missing, of course, that the point of revisionist and inclusive narratives aren’t to shove out previous incarnations, but to coexist alongside them. It’s not taking away one entrée and offering only another – it’s building a buffet.

Okay, so who actually cares if these trolls call these diverse characters Mary Sues?

Well, unfortunately, because this certain segment of the population have traditionally been the group most listened-to by the mainstream media creators and the big money, their opinions have power. (Never mind that they’re not actually the biggest group of consumers anymore, nor no longer the most vocal.)

So, this is where you come in.

You have the power to take the Mary Sue from the edge of the narrative and into the centre. And you do can do this by normalizing it. Think back to that author who didn’t think little black girls were allowed to be the heroes of fairy tales. Now imagine how much different her inner world, her imagination might have been at the stage when she was first learning to understand her own self-worth, if she had seen faces like hers on the television, in comics, in games, and on the written page every day of her life.

And not just one or two heroes, but a broad spectrum of characters that run the gamut from hero to villain, from fragile to powerful, from straight to gay, and every other kind of intersectional identity.

You have the power to give children the ability to see themselves.

Multi-faceted representation normalizes the marginalized.

And if you have the privilege to be part of the passing member of the mainstream, then weaponize your privilege. Refuse to work with publishers, or websites, or conventions that don’t also support diverse creators. Put diverse characters in your work, and do so thoughtfully and with the input of the people from the community you are portraying. And if you’re given the opportunity to submit or speak at an event, offer to share the microphone.

The first thing I did when actor Burn Gorman got a Twitter account was to Tweet him  my thanks for saving the world in Pacific Rim while on a cane. As someone who isn’t as mobile as the heroes I see in action films - who knows for a fact that when the zombie apocalypse comes I will not be a-able to outrun the monsters – it meant so much to me that his character was not only an integral and vital member of the team who cancelled the apocalypse, but also that not once in the film did someone call him a cripple, or tell him he couldn’t participate because of his disability, or leave him behind.

Diversity matters.

Not because it’s a trendy hashtag, or a way to sell media texts to a locked-down niche market, but because every single human being deserves to be told that they have a voice worth listening to; a life worth celebrating and showcasing in a narrative; a reality worth acknowledging and accepting and protecting; emotions that are worth exploring and validating; intelligence that is worth investing in and listening to; and a capacity to love that is worth adoring.

White, heterosexual, neurotypical, able-bodied cismales are not the only people on the planet who are human.

And you have a right to tell your story your way.

Calling something a ‘Mary Sue’ in order to dismiss it out of hand, as an excuse to hate something before even seeing it, is how the trolls bury your Narrative and your Identity.  We are storytellers, all of us. Every person in this room. Whether your wheel house is in fiction, or academia, or narrative non-fiction, we impart knowledge and offer experience through the written word, through the telling of tales, through leading a reader from one thought to another.

And we none of deserve to be shouted down, talked over, or dismissed. No one can tell you that your story isn’t worth telling. Of course it is. It’s yours.

And don’t let anyone call your characters, or your work, or you a ’Mary Sue’ in the derogatory sense ever again. Or I am going to scream.

[gaycrouton]

21 for the smut thing! love your work!

“FIRST ONE TO MAKE A NOISE LOSES”

Scully’s extraordinary competitive. No one would guess from her professional and composed demeanor, but after a few years of knowing her, he could tell. When she was winning there was a certain gleam in her eye, like she was chasing a high. She was almost rabid with her ferocity to win. When she was losing, she was ruthless and would stop at nothing to win. In his opinion, it was that deep seeded desire to be right that fueled it. Some may find it excessive, he found it incredibly adorable.

It didn’t matter what it was; a game, the recollection of a memory, her academics, her professionalism, her work, Scully simply liked to be the best at everything she did.

The first time he realized she was competitive was before they ever got together. It was around the third year of her partnership, and they were on another mind-numbing road trip to a nameless town. To help pass the time he simply suggested they play a game.

“Sure,” she chirped enthusiastically, “What type of game do you have in mind?”

“Want to go with the classic ‘Alphabet Categories’ game?” he suggested.

“Okay, you can choose the category first,” she offered.

He thought for a moment. He didn’t want something as easy as ‘Animals’ or ‘Food’, this could potentially be a game he could use to learn more about Scully and her preferences, so he went with something a little more interesting. “Books.”

Immediately, without a seconds delay, she responded, “Animal Farm.” There was a pleased smile on her lips from his look of surprise.

“Nice, um,” he already was at a loss, “Brown Bear.”

She let out a little chuckle at his answer and incredulously asked, “Brown Bear?”

“Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see? I see a stalling Scully looking at me,” he teased.

“Nice alliteration, Call of the Wild,” she answered, getting back to business.

“The Divine Comedy.”

“That’s an epic poem, not a book, but that’s okay.” So Specific, Scully. “Emma.”

“Freak the Mighty.”

“Great Expectations.”

“House of Mirth.”

Then she was silent. She was silent for a disconcerting amount of time. He even had to look over and make sure she hadn’t spontaneously fallen asleep and that’s when he saw Scully’s brow furrowed and her jaw set with an intensity he’d never seen before. “Scully?”

“I’m thinking.” He let her think too, he let her think for the next five miles. He understood, he’d played enough games to emphasize with the frustration of a mental lapse, but Scully looked like she wanted to combust into flames.

“Can you not think of one?” he prompted after a few minutes of listening to Scully’s cogs turning.

“No, can you?” she asked.

“I can think of a few,” he smiled, sensing her growing agitation. It was rare to rile Scully up and it was fun. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Iliad, I Robot, It.

She refused to let him give her a hint and they ended up arriving at the crime scene before she had an answer, in Mulder’s mind, thus ending the game.

Wrong.

That night in the motel, they were writing part of the case report when Scully loudly gasped. He jumped in concern and began asking, “What’s wron-”

She cut him off with a proud scream, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings!” He was still suffering a mild heart arrhythmia from the suddenness of her exclamation, but the beaming smile on her face was worth it.

She was looking at him with expectant enthusiasm and without missing a beat he chuckled, “Jane Eyre.”

They played until it was finished, and that night he got a whole new understanding of Scully’s personality. It honestly makes sense, in such a big family it had to be hard to stick out. While her siblings stood out through rebellion, she stood out by being the perfect child. Striving for excellence had become a character trait. Years later, and it still hasn’t changed. After they made the next big step in their relationship and became intimate, he jokingly called her out on her competitiveness and she fervently denied it. It didn’t bother him though, just as he loved bantering with her at work, he loved this.

Knowing how intense she’d take this challenge and his intense desire to see her reaction was what fueled him to act on a devious idea. He’d been teasing her all week because last time they hooked up during an out of town case, they got a noise complaint. A big red notice sign on their door because Scully was screaming to god. It wasn’t that he wasn’t verbally appreciative and responsive during sex, but Scully was a goddamn siren in bed. Before they started having sex, this was another thing about Scully he never would have guessed; she was unbelievably, involuntarily verbal and loud. He loved it more than words could describe.

Now they were laying in his bed, Scully on her stomach reading a journal article as he watched her underwear clad form. “Hey Scully, wanna play a game?” he asked innocently, running his hand over the back of her bare thigh.

Her head twitched up when she heard the word ‘game’ and she peeked at him curiously over her shoulder. “What kind of game?”

He crawled over her so he was bracketing her body with his legs and he kissed her way up her body, punctuating each of his words with a  chaste kiss. “A” kiss “fun” kiss “sex” kiss “game” kiss.

When his lips left her neck, she rolled over to face him and threw her arms around his neck, placing her own chaste kiss to his lips before responding. “I’m interested.”

She wrapped her legs around him and he leaned down to start nuzzling her neck, “We can have sex, however we so please.” She made a little hum of pleasure that only made him smile wider, “But, the first one to make a noise loses.” He’d had years of practice with this already. Plenty of late nights with his cock in his hand and his lip between his teeth, masturbating to the woman only a thin motel wall away from him. He’d perfected the art of silent pleasure. This would be the hardest for her and she knew that too by the playful glare she sent him, but his Scully was always up for a challenge.

To cheekily signal her agreement, she nodded her head and used her hands to push his head back down to her neck. He expected this might be done before they began since this was one of Scully’s most intense erogenous zones. He placed open mouth kisses to the translucent hollow of her neck and used his teeth to gently nibble along the thumping artery in her neck. Surprisingly, the little sounds of appreciation weren’t present and he realized she was really going to put up a battle.

He slid his hands under her and she arched her back complacently, letting him unclasp her bra and haphazardly throw it off the bed. He smiled at her and saw a cocky grin aimed at him. He let more of his body weight rest on her as he brought one nipple into his mouth, immediately adding suction. He felt her squirm, but no sound. He raised his other hand to her neglected breast and tried to mimic the ministrations of his mouth, pinching and flicking as he nibbled and licked.

Under his mouth he could feel the rise and fall of her heavily-breathing chest and he quickened his pace. His body was on top of hers, preventing her from flailing much, but he could feel her squirming. He could especially feel the gently grinding of her hips against his abdomen. When he moved to switch his mouth to the other breast, he took a glance at her face and saw she was tense with focus, completely enthralled in pleasure but trying hard to hold it back.

He blew a stream of cold air over her already wet nipple, rejoicing in the way her body jolted in shock, before descending onto his new territory. It was odd listening to the pure sound of their foreplay. He could hear the suction of his mouth as he adjusted his grip, the wetness of saliva against soft skin, the near silent pants that left her parted lips, the shifting of the bed under their weight, the blankets sliding around them, the voice in his head wanting to take her right then and there. It was amazing all the sounds he would ignore when all he cared about was the sound of her voice.

He let her breast go and began kissing down her toroso, starting at her breastbone, and ending when the elastic of her panties grazed his bottom lip. He hooked two fingers under the waistband and slid the damp fabric down her legs. He always loved seeing how wet she got before he even really touched her. He adjusted himself between her legs and rested his palms on her already bent knees. He gave her a teasing smirk before parting them, revealing her glistening wet, swollen pink sex. He slid down so he was on his stomach, his face only a few inches away from his favorite place.

In between the bend of her calf and thigh, he could see her little fist already grabbing onto the bed sheets. This was going to be fun. He anchored his arms around her thighs as he teasingly drew the tip of his tongue along the outline of her inner labia. He felt her thighs tense under his hands and he let his tongue go a little deeper, plunging into her once before agonizingly going up towards her clit.As soon as he was almost to it, he would go back down again, repeating the process over and over until her sexual frustration was palpable in the room.

He was positive this would make her moan, so he suddenly changed the pace and quickly latched onto her clit with his mouth, sucking harder than he normally would have. Her entire body arched off the bed, almost like she was possessed, and he had to place a hand on her lower abdomen to keep his mouth in place. He could hear her ragged breathing behind clenched teeth, but she hadn’t uttered a sound yet. He couldn’t clock her on the sounds of her breathing because with Scully’s adamance she’d probably inadvertently suffocate herself.

He could feel her throbbing against his mouth, both his jaw and his hand could feel the way she was not-so-subtley gyrating her hips against his face. He ran his tongue back and forth repeatedly in the way he knew she loved as he snuck two digits from his free hand inside her heat, curling them upward to find that rough patch that made her toes curl.

He swore she was going to rip a hole in the bedding with how violent her white-knuckled grip was.

After a few moments of this tactic, he could feel her body tensing up and he knew she was going to cum. He wondered what sound would be the one to break the silence. A whimper? A moan? A scream? A cry? Would it be a noncommittal sound or would it be his name on her lips? Would it be God’s? In the moment, would she even consider there to be a difference?

He sped up his mouth and her fingers and her entire body started shaking around him. He could feel her vaginal walls clamp spasmodically against his fingers and her thighs were quivering around the sides of his face, but, aside from some more ragged breathing, there was nothing. He kept sucking and fingering her, expecting to draw out something more than another orgasm, but her hand reached down and grabbed some of his hair, breaking him away from her.

When he looked up he was met with an arrogant, satisfied smile. She eased her legs away from him and brought him up to kiss her, which he did appreciatively. When he was about to lay her back down and start doing his favorite Scully-related activity, she pushed him so he was laying on his back, her legs now bracketing his own. He assumed she wanted to be on top before he realized what she was doing.

Fuck. If there one thing he was weak to, it was Scully giving him head. Just as the woman was proficient at everything, she especially excelled at the art of fellatio. He wasn’t sure if it was a natural talent, a practiced talent, or years of medical training put to the test, but he honestly didn’t care. Nothing mattered when her lips were wrapped around him.

But for the first time in their friendly competitions, he wanted to win. He wanted to drive her to the point of ecstacy where her pleasure couldn’t help but make itself known, the sounds ripping through her throat before she could even think twice.

However, as she nestled over him, her pink tongue coming out to lick her lips, he knew he’d be the loser. It was one thing to remain silent when it was just him jacking off to his fantasies. It was another thing to have the love of your life perched on top of him, ready to make fantasies become reality. He expected she would have lost by now, and now he was throbbing, rock hard, and leaking in anticipation. Even though it’d be hard, he’d be damned it he gave up now.

Mulder bit his lip before she even made the first move. He knew damn well he was going to gasp as soon as she did anything to him. He was grateful for his quick thinking, because as soon as he felt her hot breath on him accompanied by the flat of her tongue running up his length, he would have gasped if he wasn’t forcing his mouth shut.

She raised herself up a bit and gave him a toothy smile before continuing her torture. She puckered her lips loosely over his tip and let all the saliva she’d accumulated in her mouth spittle down lewdly. She ran her tongue back over it when it was on his shaft and she spread it out evenly with her tongue, fully lubricating him. Now it was his turn to squirm. He raised his hands above him as discreetly as he could and grabbed onto two bars of the headboard, trying his best to reign in his control.

She swirled her tongue around his tip a few times before plunging her mouth down on him, only stopping when his head hit the back of her throat. His eyes rolled to the back of his head and he concaved his hips downward in an attempt to avoid bucking against her face. Fuck, she was so good at this. She went down again and she hollowed her cheeks to add suction. He could feel the soft, warmth of her inner cheeks as they slid against the sides of his cock as she slid him in and out of her mouth.

Occasionally, she’d let him fall out so she could blow a mix of cool and warm air along his wet skin, sadistically enjoying the way he arched his back and writhed on the bed. She stroked him a few times with her hand as she ran her tongue along the grooves and ridges of him, especially dedicating time to the meeting of his head and shaft. She caught him off guard by playfully licking him before plunging all the way down. He almost groaned then, but it died in his throat before the sound escaped him, instead he just kept centeching his thighs together underneath her perched form to alleviate some pressure.

She continued her wicked exploration of his cock, what she couldn’t reach with her mouth, she had gripped tightly in her hand, which would follow her mouth and twist down in an opposite direction, hightening his pleasure since he never knew what sensation would come next. All while he slightly feared he’d be what would cum next. He felt her other hand come up to cup his heavy balls and knead them, spending equal time on both. He could feel beads of sweat gathering at his hairline as he desperately clung to the headboard.

Then Scully switched it up by releasing him entirely and adjusting her position. She raised herself a bit more and wrapped her lips around his throbbing shaft once more. She slid all the way down like she normally did and lifted herself up a bit more on her knees. With the tip of his dick, he could feel the hot, damp, smoothness of the back of her throat, but she tilted her head above him so that he slid even further down. She continued until her lips met at his hilt and she cupped his balls once more as she lightly gyrated her head so he felt a whole new set of sensations. He was throat deep in Dana Katherine Scully and a groan from deep in his soul slipped.

Fuck.

Even though her mouth was full of him, he felt her lips smile against his pubic bone and he knew she’d heard. As her tongue moved against him as she lifted her head, he realized it didn’t matter anymore. He just won with the best blowjob of his life, and he was about to win again when he got to hear her uninhibited voice again when they had sex.

She let him fall out of her mouth and she crawled her way up his body, kissing him along the way like he had to her. When he got to his lips, she opened her mouth to deepen it immediately. He could taste himself on her tongue, much like she could probably still taste herself on his. They remained like that for a moment before she broke the kiss, leaning her forehead on his as she caught her breath, “I won.”

He smiled at the happiness in her voice and he wrapped his arms around her in a sensual hug. “You won this time, but don’t think we’re done quite yet,” he teased as he lifted his hips, hitting her intimately with his erection.

He may have been the first one to make a noise, but he definitely wasn’t the nosiest that night.

Woo, that was fun! I’m so glad I got to do my first ever prompt, I had a great time with it. Hope you enjoyed! - Nicole (Twitter/Tumblr: gaycrouton)