#i feel like the finish on a lot of otherwise good products

[paeonia-horse]

Triangular.

[ggidolsmuts]

"Smart" Home - Le Sserafim Sakura, Chaewon

TW: Aphrodisiac use, purely to make a really stupid tech pun. Otherwise, this is relatively vanilla, but the concept is quite out there... Closest thing would be my Savage(d) and Guilty Pleasures stories? Sorry for the slight spoilers I guess lol

"Sakura-san, are you free later today? Would you like to join me for a coffee?"

"Sakura yah, you're so pretty, you should date! Are you seeing anyone at the moment? I know someone if you're interested."

"Kkura-unnie, a close friend says you're his favorite member, do you want to meet him? He's a good guy."

Despite her popularity, Sakura remains aloof, gently but firmly dissuading any potential suitors. Some wondered if she was just extremely private and already had a partner in secret, but her situation was actually a lot more complex...

"I'm back," Sakura calls out as she enters her house.

"Welcome back, Sakura, how was your day?"

"Tired."

"Would you like to relax? I have prepared the room, today's a training day."

"Oh right, yeah, sure why not." Sakura slips her top off first, leaving a trail of clothes (jeans, bra, panties) as she follows the disembodied voice of AInata. It is the product of Sakura's tinkering, the hobby she works on when she is not crocheting.

"Please strap in." Wholly naked she slips her legs and arms into place and they clasp around her ankles and wrists. Sakura closes her eyes, and she allows AInata to do its thing. It begins with a brush against her lips, not quite a kiss, but something softer—a velvet scarf glancing by. The fabric wraps around her neck, causing goosebumps to rise before it goes to her chest. Slowly it rubs against her nipples, and they grow hard and sensitive. With her legs spread Sakura can feel the beginnings of a trickle down her thighs—AInata was extremely competent at foreplay. The velvet scarf moves further down her body, wrapping warmly around her tight abs, giving her the sensation of being hugged. Her legs are split slightly further apart, and then—

"Unnnngh..." A cock parts her lips, but does not penetrate. The head of it rubs against her pussy, making her get even wetter. Back and forth it rubs, and Sakura bucks her hips, letting loose a moan and yearning for it to enter her. It is a cock she knows will give her extreme pleasure, having been designed and made to her "specifications". She tries to bring her hands down, wanting to shove it into herself, but AInata reacts, bringing her arms back up and making sure she stays spread-eagled. It uses her actions as a cue, and thankfully the dildo pushes into her firmly.

"Ohh, oh yes fuck!"

"Would you like to cum once, Sakura? Or should we proceed with training today?"

"Once first, but make sure you are recording data."

"Of course." Sakura is instantly swept up in pleasure as the cock begins thrusting in and out of her, the wrap around her seeming to pulse, matching the rhythm of the thrusts. In the privacy of her own home Sakura moans unreservedly, her hands allowed to dangle in the air, held up against some imaginary shoulders. It isn't a perfect simulation, but with Sakura's head in the clouds, it is a good enough imitation of a solid fuck with someone.

"Yes, yes, yes! I'm cumming, I'm cumming!" With a loud groan the cock pushes itself deeper into her, mimicking a lover finishing with her as Sakura's pussy contracts around it ecstatically, and audible drops of liquid are heard splattering the floor as more juice trickles down her thighs and legs, before being splashed about by her twitching feet. Limply Sakura hangs in the air, held up only by the restraints.

"Fuck that was good... Report?"

"Loudest vocalization was about 75 dB. Maximum heart rate was 130 BPM, fluid flow was minimal, about 50 cc." AInata continues to read out its measurements as Sakura manages to lift her head and wriggle her fingers and toes. "Vaginal grip was in the 46th percentile, body flush was Pantone 698U, body temperature was measured at 38 Celsius via thermal imaging. Should I continue?"

"No, that's fine, let's discard that run. Let me down, I want a shower before we start training."

"Of course, I will begin sterilizing the room."

"No need, I'll be back in like 10 minutes." Sakura leaves the room and heads straight for the shower, feeling a lot more relaxed after her session. It had been weeks she started the project, and AInata has learned extremely quickly how to pleasure her in the meantime. As she soaps herself up, Sakura's body warms again at the upcoming training session—it's one thing to have AInata get her off, but the thing she looks forward to the most are the training sessions. She doesn't even bother toweling herself off as she re-enters the training room.

"Welcome back Sakura, I sense that you are wet, should I dry you off?"

"Yes please." A robotic limb holding a hairdryer immediately appears, and Sakura simply stands still, allowing the warm air to flow all over her body, drying her hair and skin. "Thank you. Shall we begin the training?"

"Of course, please strap in." Sakura gets in once more, velvet wrapped around her torso. "I will begin training when you give the go-ahead."

"Begin." The breath is pushed out of Sakura as she is instantly rotated horizontally, lying in midair. Her hands are pushed above her head and the wrap pulls on her, as if a heavy weight is on top.

"God you're so hot Sakura, so fucking sexy." AInata's voice is now gruff and deep in her ear, and there is a semi-wet rub against her neck—a tongue licking her, and the firm pressure of a kiss. A throaty moan escapes her when she feels the cock enter her. Sakura's work brings new meaning to the phrase "Deep Learning" as AInata pushes inexorably into her. Rubs on her clit help her get even wetter, and between AInata's dirty talk and the thorough fucking Sakura loses herself to the training. Loud cries bounce around the room, and Sakura cums twice before AInata ramps it up.

"I'm going to share you," it states. Sakura is manipulated on to all fours, and she is looking at the floor of the training room, her own juices splatted on the floor, slowly flowing down the drains. The cock presses into her again, and to her surprise a second one is pressed against her ass.

"Mmm?!" It sprays lube across and into her, and in short order a cock is being pushed into her other hole. It's not a foreign sensation, but having two cocks in her is certainly new training space that AInata is looking into—today's session will be very insightful. A slightly different voice floats into her ear as it slowly pushes deep into her ass.

"You like this Sakura? One in each hole? Let us find out." Sakura can only drool and moan as she is experimented on. It starts off with synchronized thrusts, both cocks pushing deep in her ass and pussy at the same time. Then they begin to alternate—one in, one out. Then they start to drill her, the cock in her ass staying still while the one in her pussy thrusts rapidly. Then it is switched, her ass pounded mercilessly as her pussy stays plugged. The way AInata conducts its training is methodical, but the way Sakura cums is anything but. She clenches erratically around the cocks, unable to keep up with the changing of the tempo. When they withdraw from both holes, Sakura's juices splatter obscenely on the floor, adding to the puddle that isn't draining fast enough. For a brief minute the only thing that is heard is Sakura's harsh breaths and the drip-drop of slick from her pussy. A soft whirr is heard, and then it stops.

"Epoch 1 complete, beginning Epoch 2."

"Oh my GOD!" The re-entry in both holes take her by surprise, this time feeling even better—AInata has updated the cocks, reshaping it based on Sakura's responses earlier. The training regime is the same, the cocks fucking her in various rhythms. This time AInata rotates her into a vertical position, and soon both cocks are thrusting into her rapidly. The wrap around her tightens, making Sakura feel as if she is being slammed between two people. Her legs jerk and twitch uselessly. 

"Cum for us," the merged voices whisper in her ear. A modular fingerpad rubs against her clit, and Sakura screams in blissful oblivion, blood pounding in her head.

"FUCK YES!" Sakura squirts violently, limbs thrashing about and head thrown back. A sheen of sweat across her skin as the orgasm runs through her, her tummy twitching and whole body trembling. If she could see herself, her body is completely flush, as if she has just sprinted a mile.

"Epoch 2 complete, beginning—"

"Pause!"

"Training paused."

"R-Report."

"Vocalization hit 85 dB, in the 100th percentile. Maximum heart rate was 140 BPM, fluid flow at 150 cc. Vaginal grip was at the 100th percentile, anal grip was also at the 100th percentile."

"Did you account for the pressure from using two dildos at once?"

"I did not, recalculating... 95th and 97th percentile respectively."

"Make sure to account for it in the future."

"Yes, Sakura. Should I continue the report?"

"No, that's fine. Save the results for future use."

"Yes."

"K-Kkura unnie?" Sakura's eyes snap open.

"Chaewon?!"

Chaewon had made her way to Sakura's place a while earlier. She wanted to pick something up from Sakura, as well as bring her some coffee since she had seemed so stressed during the day. As with the other members, she lets herself in with the passcode. Ordinarily this would not be an issue, but Sakura did not expect anyone to visit at all.

"Kkura unnie, I'm here! Kkura unnie?" Chaewon calls out into the seemingly empty place. She leaves the coffee on the table and walks about. "Kkura unnie, where are you? Chaewonie is here!" she calls out in a singsong voice.

Then she hears something. Chaewon has never heard it before, but she knows immediately what it is—Sakura moaning. Chaewon probably should have just blushed and left, but she never heard Sakura like that, and the continued moans and cries have left her a little curious and more than a little aroused. She quiets down, slinking in the direction of the sound, following the trail of clothes Sakura had left. Chaewon gets warmer and warmer as she gets warmer and warmer in the hide-and-seek game she's playing with herself. Sakura is louder than Chaewon's ever heard her unnie be—the thought of Sakura letting loose is almost unthinkable.

Nothing could prepare Chaewon for what she sees when she finally finds Sakura, for the unthinkable is merely child's play compared to what is in front of her. Sakura is spread open, nude body for all to see, sweaty blonde hair covering her face. Her pale skin is flushed pink, nipples stiff and quivering as she shakes uncontrollably. Chaewon's eyes are irresistably drawn between Sakura's legs, and they widen as she processes the thick dildo plunging in and out of her, spreading her swollen lips. Chaewon tries to look away in embarrassment, but all she sees next is the large puddle of juice beneath Sakura—just how much, or how hard, did she cum? Entranced, Chaewon watches silently, her breath getting heavier and her panties getting wetter.

"FUCK YES!" She jumps when Sakura screams, the loud rush of slick on the floor thundering in her ear. Speechless Chaewon watches her unnie go from crazed to normal, slowly recovering, and... talking to someone? Chaewon has burning questions, and a burning need between her legs, she couldn't stay silent anymore, she had to ask.

"K-Kkura unnie?"

"Chaewon?!" The blood drains from Sakura's face. "What are you doing here?"

"I-I came to pick something up, I brought you coffee too."

"O-Oh... How long have you been here?"

"A couple minutes, I think?" The two women stare at each other silently—what is there to say, what can be said? AInata breaks the silence.

"Hello Chaewon, I am AInata, Sakura's assistant, would you like a cookie?" Sakura's eyes widen and she opens her mouth, but it is too late, and Chaewon accepts the cookie without thinking.

"AInata?" Chaewon's mouth opens silently as a sudden heat fills her body—both in the real world and on the internet, she shouldn't have blindly accepted cookies, but Sakura's too late to warn her, and soon the aphrodisiac cookie is working its way down Chaewon's body. Sakura had developed it with AInata to arouse herself when she didn't "feel" like training, but in her pleasure-dulled state she was slow to recognize it. "You're... a computer?"

"Yes, Sakura made me."

"What are you doing with her?"

"She is training me—"

"AInata, enough, why did you give her the cookie?"

"I thought she would be useful in gathering more information. I need not remind you that I only have data based on you, which is biased."

"Was what I saw earlier, was that training?" Chaewon interrupts the conversation. Sakura is silent, but AInata is not.

"Yes."

"I want to see it again," Chaewon says immediately.

"C-Chaewon, ah!" Sakura yelps as AInata does as Chaewon wishes, beginning to move the dildos again. Her legs are brought up and spread, and the result is Sakura lewdly displayed for Chaewon, showing just how the training is done. The leader of Le Sserafim's mouth drops open as she realizes that Sakura has been fucked in both holes the whole time—between the aphrodisiac and the sight in front of her Chaewon's mind is melting, and the liquid is going all between her legs.

For Sakura's part, she can barely form a word as she is thoroughly fucked once more, the thought of being watched by Chaewon making her eyes roll. Through her erratic vision she sees Chaewon fidget, beginning to tug at her clothes, rubbing her neck, like she is too warm in her current outfit—the thought of Chaewon taking part in the training as well drive her quickly to climax.

"Oh fuck, oh FUCK?!" Sakura feels a warm fluid filling her pussy, the cock in her seeming to throb. "Nngh!" The creampie-like stimulation makes her spray as the dildo pulls out abruptly, and she splashes Chaewon with her squirt.

Chaewon twitches as Sakura's fluids land on her, her knees going weak. Her tongue brushes over her lower lip, where a drop has landed—sweet, tangy. She watches the fluids pour out of her unnie's pink pussy, and her inhibitions crumble—she gives in to her desires, to join whatever insanity Sakura concocted.

"What, what was that?" Sakura gasps, still recovering and ignorant of Chaewon's state.

"I have been reviewing your browser history, and noticed the presence of the search term 'creampie'." AInata states. "I sought to replicate it with your fluids, assuming it to be most natural. The consistency is of course, not accurate, but based on the data just now I think the effects of a creampie on your orgasm is worthy of further study."

"I-I'll do it, I want to... help." Chaewon's whisper thunders in Sakura's ears. The Chaewon standing in front of her is already unrecognizable, face wet from Sakura's own squirt, thighs rubbing together needily as she looks at Sakura with glassy eyes.

"Are you—"

"Please." The tone with which Chaewon begs her nearly drives Sakura wild.

"Okay, let me get out—"

"There is no need, Sakura, I have prepared another set of restraints in the event you brought someone to help with training."

"I... Okay, good job AInata."

"Thank you. Please remove your clothes Miss Chaewon." Sakura watches her groupmate strip down, pulling her sweater over her head and removing her tiny shorts, revealing her own tight body.

"Call me Chaewon, what's next?"

"Please put your feet and hands in the restraints here." Chaewon follows the instructions, shaking a bit in anticipation as they clasp around her wrist and ankles. "I will now begin training, Chaewon."

A low moan fills the room as a similar velvet wrap is pressed all over Chaewon—her lips, her neck, her breasts, her thighs. She sounds ever so desperate, driven mad with desire by the cookie and everything she has seen today. Chaewon croons when a dildo is placed against her pussy, rubbing her lips.

"Report your findings as you train," Sakura asks in a shaky voice.

"Of course. Lubrication is substantial, ready for training already." In other words, Chaewon is wet, and she is ready to be fucked. The thought is punctuated with a groan as the dildo disappears into Chaewon. The training begins with soft moans, but they quickly get louder as AInata begins pushing on her womb.

"She responds well to deep tissue stimulation." The wording is inexact, AInata showing a rare case of hallucination, but Sakura understands it just fine—Chaewon likes it deep.

"Yes! Harder, faster!" Her desperate cries ring throughout, and under the effects of the aphrodisiac Chaewon is hurtling to her first orgasm. With the pressure of the weighted wrap around her, she's lost in the sensations of getting fucked, even if she's alone. She looks down her body—her own legs are spread, and she's watching the cock disappear into her body. She clenches, and she whines as the cock gets bigger inside her—in response to her tight grip, AInata makes the dildo thicker, testing, and finding that it is enhancing Chaewon's pleasure. In her blissed out mind and the shaking of her own body as she is fucked, Chaewon thinks she's bulging, and the obscene thought makes her cum.

"Fuhnnngh!" Sakura watches her leader's tight body struggle against the restraints, jerking in a powerful orgasm—it was impossibly hot, and Sakura's squirming, her own two holes still filled with cocks.

"I would like to conduct adversarial training." AInata brings up as Chaewon gasps, coming down from her climax.

"What do you mean?" Sakura asks.

"I will train on both of you together, it will allow me to receive more reliable data. I can try what works for you on her, and what works for her on you." Sakura agrees immediately—after watching Chaewon she's too horny to say no now. The cock in her ass is removed, and Sakura is put into the same position as Chaewon.

"I will continue with the training then." Sakura whines much like Chaewon as the cock inside her gets bigger. Her first thought is realizing that Chaewon likes a bigger cock.

There is no second thought, because Chaewon is fucking right, and it seems to stretch her hole and mind to the limit. The two of them are pushed to orgasm after orgasm, taking turns as AInata tries different things on them. Chaewon watches Sakura get fucked to a toe-curling climax before she feels her own position adjusted—now she's tilted forward, hips above her head as she getting plowed from behind. When Sakura recovers, Chaewon is already well on her way to her second orgasm, and it is not too long before Sakura is put into that same position and dicked down. AInata makes changes small and large—the angle, the speed, the rhythm, the overall position, everything is taken into consideration as the two of them cum their brains out.

There is a distinct difference though—unlike Sakura, who has a puddle of juice beneath her, Chaewon creams around the cock stretching her out, the thicker whitish fluid seeming to cling to the cock, and more oozes out as AInata continues its training. Every time Chaewon cums, there are heavy drops of girlcum, dripping from the dildo, and every time Sakura climaxes, there is a wet splatter on the floor. AInata continues the training, until...

"Oh..." Sakura cums once more, and this time she feels the cock filling her again, except it is thicker, more substantial, more satisfying. She watches Chaewon's cum slide down the cock opposite her, and she instinctively knows what's inside her own pussy.

"Fuck Chaewon, CHAEWON!" Sakura's scream jolts Chaewon out of her stupor, and she watches her unnie gush all over the floor—she never thought she'd hear Sakura call her name like that.

"U-Unnie..."

"D-Did you— use her fluids?" Sakura gasps, and Chaewon blushes, realizing what she meant—that her very own cum was filling her unnie!

"I used a mix, the resulting mixture is more consistent with real ejaculate, I will collect more from Chaewon." Before Chaewon can grasp what AInata meant, she feels a cock push against her ass, and cold lube begins spurting in.

"Unnie, unnie, unnie!" Chaewon's cries of pleasure fall on deaf ears as Sakura's eyes are glued to the scene in front of her—as soon as a second cock enters Chaewon from behind, she absolutely drenches the cock in her pussy with girlcum, a deluge of thick fluid running down the shaft. AInata withdraws the dildo in her pussy, and heavy plops land on the floor between her legs—the cock in her ass is still going, pumping more cream out of her. The relative respite is temporary as AInata customizes the dildo for her greater pleasure, and Chaewon seizes up as it pushes into her again.

"Mmmm!" Chaewon can't even form words as the new cock feels better than ever. Her pussy is stretched deliciously, rubbing over her just right, and the cock in her ass also seems to be getting bigger, pulsing and throbbing!

"It's! Inside—" Chaewon falls silent, and Sakura watches her mind disappear—Sakura's eyes dilate with lust as she watches Chaewon's own eyes roll in her head. She creams without pause, like a dam in her is broken as she jerks in a powerful orgasm. When the cocks are withdrawn, the cum-mixture spills from both her holes, and the truth dawns on Sakura—Chaewon was just double-creampied, filled to the brim with their combined fluids. Sakura expects the same for herself, and she tightens in anticipation, but it does not come just yet.

"Commencing DirectInput trial with two people." That's new. Sakura's ass is left gaping as the cock is removed, and Chaewon's mess of a pussy is plugged once more, both women taking only one cock now. Sakura gasps as the cock in her thrusts in, and her hips buck instinctively. Seemingly in response, the cock in Chaewon thrusts in, and she whines and jerks her body. Turns out, it is mimicking their hip movements, for when Sakura snaps her hips forward again, and Chaewon cries out loudly in response—yes, Sakura's the one fucking Chaewon! The very thought drives Sakura crazy, and she's bucking her hips with wild abandon, watching her "cock" drive into Chaewon repeatedly. Of course, as Sakura moves her hips, her own dildo is moving inside her, building her pleasure up as she gives Chaewon pleasure.

"Kkura unnie, Kkura unnie!" At this point Chaewon is well aware of what's Sakura doing, seeing and feeling her unnie's cock drive right through her own body. When Sakura groans loudly in her climax, Chaewon cums with her, fists clenched tightly and toes curled in ecstasy—she can't help it when it's Sakura's cock filling her womb with cum.

And then it's Chaewon's turn. She starts off slowly, testing with a few slow strokes. Soon though, Sakura's begging to be fucked.

Begging her.

"F-Faster, go faster Chaewon-ah! Harder!" She's still sensitive, but for Sakura, Chaewon can go fast, and she moves her hips as quickly as she can, her lower lip quivering as the pleasure rises in her own body. Sakura's abs twitch equally in pleasure, overstimulated but wanting Chaewon to fuck her to an orgasm. Chaewon puts her all into it, and Sakura feels each and every thrust rock her body, the wrap tightening around her, as if Chaewon's slamming her directly. She had never wondered how Chaewon fucks, now she won't be able to not think about it ever again. With a few more thrusts Chaewon delivers in more ways than one, pushing Sakura off the edge as she pumps her full of cum, the two of them cumming together once more.

"Testing simultaneous DirectInput now." Both cocks now move in response to the other's movements, and the two women are bucking haphazardly, each action triggering a reaction from the other—Sakura would buck her hips, which would make Chaewon jerk in response, making the cock in Sakura move and thrust. Sakura's fucking Chaewon, Chaewon's fucking Sakura, and they're cumming at the same time, giving the other a creampie. They both scream when a cock is pushed into their ass again, and it becomes a completely unhinged feedback loop—Chaewon finds herself fucking Sakura's ass, all while Sakura fucks her pussy, and then the input switches, and Chaewon feels Sakura deep up her ass while she pounds into Sakura's squirting slit. They feed off each other's peaks, filling each other with their mixed fluids in every hole, even as Sakura produces more slick and Chaewon produces more cream.

It all finally stops when AInata says so, withdrawing all dildos from their holes and making them squirm at the sudden emptiness.

"Disk capacity reached. Sakura, I will require more space, or to upgrade our cloud storage plan."

"Mmm... Okay, let's stop the session."

"Would you like a report? Vocalization—"

"Later, l-let us down please." They are lowered to the floor and the restraints are removed. They collapse in their own juices, legs weak and limbs a little numb from being restrained for so long. "Chaewon, are you okay?"

Chaewon is not okay. She has watched Sakura get fucked by AInata, then she watched Sakura get filled by her own cum, and then Sakura fucked her, filled her, and then she fucked Sakura back, filling her unnie similarly. Her world is warped, she could never see Sakura the same way again. Yet, she had one thing left to do.

She needed to touch Sakura.

"Kkura unnie..." Chaewon crawls over her shocked unnie. "I need you." She shows her desire with a kiss, and Sakura's too horny to push her away—after watching each other cum and squirt the whole time, she wants Chaewon too. Sakura leads Chaewon to her bedroom, and legs and arms and tongues finally tangle together in the sheets. Maybe it's the cookies still having an effect on her, but Chaewon gets on top of Sakura, driving a thigh against her unnie's wet pussy while she ruts down on Sakura's hip. The friction is delicious and electric for the two of them, leaving them whimpering in pleasure. Le Sserafim is known for their abs, and the two of them put their strong cores to good use, grinding their hips and making sure their thighs are left smeared with the other's juices.

Chaewon succumbs first, whimpering into Sakura's neck as her unnie bucks powerfully, bouncing Chaewon on her lap. She slips a finger into Chaewon's ass and with a yelp Sakura feels Chaewon cream, each squeeze of her ass seeming to produce more from the quivering leader.

"I want you to cum too unnie..." Chaewon whines, using the last of her strength to suck on Sakura's tits, pushing her thigh against Sakura's slit, and rubbing her clit with a yearning finger. The triple assault sets Sakura off, and with a strangled cry she shakes, rattles, and falls apart, soaking the sheets with the last of her cum. When she comes back down, Sakura finds Chaewon sucking on her lower lip, and she acquiesces, kissing and caressing her leader.

Weeks later, Chaewon goes up to Sakura in the dressing room, distracting her from her crocheting.

"Kkura unnie!"

"What what? What's the problem?"

"Nothing, nothing! I was wondering if you wanted to go to the gym together?"

"Gym? Our PT session is tomorrow."

"I know, I meant, do you want to do more... training tonight? With your friend?"

"What? Sakura has a friend?" Yunjin quips without thinking.

"Yah I have friends too you know!"

"Sure sure, whatever."

"Psh. Sure Chaewon, we can train tonight."

"M-Make sure they have enough space," Chaewon whispers, the two of them turning as red as Yunjin's hair. Thankfully, Yunjin is talking loudly, complaining about how her phone doesn't recognize her voice commands, and their manager agreeing that AI is stupid.

Oh how wrong they are.

A/N: I was actually writing a different story, and this one was supposed to be just a Sakura solo thing to use their song title "Smart" and poke fun at smart houses, but then the thought of Chaewon walking in on her and getting roped into it together was too hot and I had to get it out. I mixed the Guilty Pleasure concept (one person feels the other person via something) with the whole tech and smart house thing. The velvet wrap thing is kinda like a weighted blanket, and supposed to mimic the weight of an actual person pressing on you during sex, but I didn't really use it too well, in my head it just helps with positions too, don't think too hard about that part lol. Anyways hope it makes enough sense, thanks for reading!

[little-miss-dilf-lover]

hello lovelyy, hope ur doing good! 🫶🏼 can i request a studying w college matt fluff? where he is like all boyish and sweet and perfect and boyfriend ughhh

ps.: yes I KNOW i only request for him 😭 but im new to the fandom and obsessed w him.. sometimes i feel like the hype on him is kinda gone idk.. so if you do not feel like writing, it its all good! thank uuu and love ur blog! 💐

hii my angel!! I am and hope you are too!! so so cute and ofc!! it depends on who you follow bc matty gets lots of love on my dash. if you want i can rec some matt writers? but if you follow me, I have a feeling you probably follow them already😭 thanks for requesting, hope you like it💌

he’s the prettiest

STUDY BUDDIES.

college matt murdock x fem!reader — fluff

word count. 353

At the end of every school week, you and Matt would have a long, laborious study session to complete all assignments before the weekend rolled around. They would be tedious, but they were worth it when it meant you could have a couple of days together, interrupted and enjoying the other's company.

You would always be far more productive when you were in the presence of your boyfriend, though most would think otherwise. His silent encouragement and support would give you the push you needed to work through your copious papers and assignments - his hard work ethic also rubbing off on you.

You were in your dorm, you at your desk, Matt laying on your bed - braille papers bunched and resting atop his chest —disregarded—

Both of you were trying to cram as much as you could before calling it a night, each of you far too tired to be using your brains in the way you currently are.

"I can't do anymore," you sigh, twisting in your chair to face Matt. "My head will explode," you playfully groan, standing to join him on your bed. 

"I can help?" he offers, scooching across the mattress - making more space for you.

You flop beside him and curl into his side, head resting atop his paper-covered chest. "No. No, absolutely not," you laugh softly, far too weary to give it any more than that. 

"I didn't mark you down as a quitter," he lightly chuckles, stroking a hand up your spine - gently nudging you closer to him. "Shame on you," he teases, pressing a kiss into the top of your forehead.

You peer up at him, his signature boyish smile out and on display. "Did you even finish your assignment?" you ask, gesturing to the papers beside him. 

He hums, tone somewhat sleepy. "Forty minutes ago."

"Forty?" you repeat, lifting your head from his chest, trying to find signs of a lie on his face. "What have you even been doing for forty minutes?"

He hesitates, the corners of his lips tilting back up into a soft grin. "Listening to you."

[seat-safety-switch]

You can learn a lot about how something was built by watching it break. At least that's my excuse for watching over a hundred hours of YouTube "gone wrong" videos instead of actually getting any work done this week. Take, for example, the collapse of a bridge. If you'd never seen one crumble to bits and drop into the water, you wouldn't know they're made out of steel rebar with concrete poured over top. Any bridge you try to make without that knowledge would totally suck ass. In a way, that bridge gave its life so that others could live. Thanks for your sacrifice, bridge.

Among my friends who are especially productive – "capable," if you will – they get into these little funks where they get depressed about not being able to finish their projects. What they do then is create a little tiny side project, small enough that they can start and finish it quickly, and then reassure themselves that they can actually get things done. Even if those things are a little pipe cleaner kitty. Absolutely adorable, and confirms their place as creators of the universe. Destroying things is the same deal for me.

Nothing gets the old creative juices going like turning a perfectly good automatic transmission entirely into neutrals, for instance. It gets other juices going, too, but that's a problem for the highway cleanup crew to worry about. Once I've been freed of the constraint of "this car needs to run right now," then things can get kinda weird. Maybe I want to put a manual transmission in, push an extra pedal. Perhaps I want a Lenco drag-racing transmission, and I need to come up with a disguise so I can trick the guy at the swap meet into giving it to me ("Lenco inspector," I'll bark, "hand 'em over.")

So take it from me. If you're feeling stuck on a project, or otherwise uninspired, go recklessly destroy an object of actual value and watch that sucker fall apart. Holy shit! Did you know springs are in these things? I better save each and every one of these springs just in case they come in handy later. I'll probably need to build something to organize them...

[littlemissstel]

Pit Stop - Shiu Kong

On your way to the mechanics your car breaks down and who better to call then your handler?

SFW, no use of (Y/n), name used is "Doll", not proofread, pre-relationship

dividers by @saradika-graphics

You were feeling good about yourself when you woke up this morning. For some reason your body decided to wake up at 6 am yet you have never felt more rested in your life. You had no jobs today- you didn't need to work for the next year if you wanted to with how much your last hit paid and you finally tried that viral french toast recipe that had been sitting in your "favourites" folder for the last 6 months.

You felt good.

And in your productive haze you had decided that you felt good enough to finally go to the mechanics and fix the irritating engine warning light that had been incessantly pestering you for as long as you had the car...Now especially since another light had just come on.

It was almost time to be re-serviced anyway, so what could go wrong?

"no...no, no, no, no- please no"

You were begging your car as it spluttered back. If it could talk you had no doubt it would be swearing at you right now.

The car moved sluggishly as you pulled over, it wasn't a busy road surrounded by nothing but bushes, trees and discarded litter; and you couldn't help but feel a wave of embarrassment as you came to a stop. Turns out the blinking light wasn't just for show.

"fuuucckkkk"

So what do you do now? You had no one to call...well you should probably start with a breakdown service but then what would you do? Even with your hoard of money you'd rather not pay their prices and, if needed, there's no way a tow truck could fit down these roads.

Going down your list of contacts one caught your eye. Shiu.

He seemed the obvious choice, no? The man drove cars for a living if you take out the other details and you're sure he liked you enough to come get you. Maybe you could persuade him by taking him to get those steamed rice rolls he enjoyed the last time you grabbed lunch together.

The debate in your head could go on forever but, either way, he was your only choice. And so you called, the phone ringing for only a second before he picked up.

"Hello?" his gruff voice was instantly welcomed by your ears.

"Hey, are you free?"

"I can be, why?"

You paused for a moment, sheepishly, before releasing a sharp exhale.

"My cars broken down on the side of-" you looked for a sign, "- in the middle of nowhere. I'm kind of stuck. If you're not too busy can you pick me up? I can send you my location and get someone to deal with the rest later."

"Sure. Be there soon"

"Thank you so much"

And with that the call was finished. Simple enough. You could laugh at yourself for overthinking.

It wasn't another twenty minutes before you saw Shiu's car pulling up behind yours, he came into view wearing his signature suit, though his blazer was discarded allowing your eyes to linger on his broad shoulders. You hopped out to meet him half-way with a grateful smile on your face.

"Thank you again"

"Don't worry about it, you really weren't joking when you said the middle of nowhere though Doll. What were you doing? Having a picnic?" He replies walking over, voice dripping in sarcasm. Believe it or not, you don't have to spend a lot of time with Shiu to realise the handlers sassy personality, just somewhat focused, otherwise you'll miss his double sided remarks.

"No, thank you. I was on my way to the mechanic-"

He stifles a laugh.

"A bit late don't you think?"

"Well it wasn't my intention was it- what are you doing?" you ask as he lifts the car bonnet.

"Checking what's wrong. You have problems with your car and don't think to call the man who works with them?"

"I didn't think you'd want to help me out with something like that...I wouldn't. And it was just the engine light before."

He catches your eye, amused.

"I am hurt Doll."

His arms flexed as he tampered with the car, eyebrows knitted into a subtle frown, he focused- you couldn't help but stare. You had known Shiu was attractive, it wasn't a secret and you were sure he knew it too. You've heard the (watered down) stories he's told you about this twenties and though he jokingly refers to himself as an "old man" he carries enough confidence to show he isn't really bothered by it. You were sure he knew you thought he was attractive too, especially with the amount of times he's caught you staring.

Like right now.

"Doll."

"Yes?"

He walks closer to you slowly with a smirk on his face and you start to feel self conscious with the way his eyes stay attached to yours, not straying for a second.

"Your cars fine...Just low on coolant fluid."

"Right...It did say that..."

He shakes his head.

"Thank you for coming out here though, maybe i could take you to the restaurant we went to last week? As a thank you?" You quirk a brow staring up at him expectantly.

You both stay there for a second, matching each others foolish smiles.

"Didn't know fixing your car would get you to ask me out Doll."

Shiu is my husband.

let me know what you think and please feel free to use my inbox to talk or request <3

[flanaganfilm]

Hello and Howdy Mr. Mike Flanagan! I'm excited to see you here on our humble hellsite. I have so much to say and ask about your netflix shows but for the moment, I want to ask about Doctor Sleep because I enjoyed that movie immensely - it filled me with a pleasant sense of dread, which possibly makes no sense, or a lot of sense.

What was that creative process like? Reconciling book and movie canons, following Kubrick's legacy, working with Ewan and Rebecca and Zahn and everyone else. I'm obsessed with King adaptations and I'm just fascinated with Doctor Sleep.

Alright! Buckle up for yet another long read.

Thank you for your question, and for this opportunity to go back and talk about DOCTOR SLEEP. It's a very special film to me, and a very special time in my life as well.

It all started with a general meeting with Jon Berg at Warner Bros.

The meeting itself started pretty wild - Adrien Brody walked out of the office as I was waiting to go in. Jon introduced us and we chatted for a few minutes, and I was a little out of whack for the rest of the meeting because I had a very potent "wow that was Adrien Brody" buzz going.

We were meant to talk about DC Comics and see if there was anything to do there. I was really hoping to chat about a horror-slanted Clayface movie, and about my favorite superhero: Superman.

Neither conversation went very far. I had just finished GERALD'S GAME, and Jon was a King fan, so he asked about the production. And then he asked if I'd ever read Warners' script for DOCTOR SLEEP.

I had. In fact, I had tried very hard to get a meeting at the studio when the book was first published. Warners owned the rights to DOCTOR SLEEP outright - it was part of their deal going all the way back to THE SHINING - so they immediately began looking into movie options when the book was published. Akiva Goldsman had written a script, and it was one of the first projects I asked about when I signed with WME as a client years before. "That isn't going anywhere," they told me. "I don't think that movie gets made."

They had tried to get me the meeting anyway, but no one at Warners responded. I never got in the room.

But now, here I was. What did I have to lose at this point?

"I did read it," I said. "I'd take a different approach." Jon sat back and smiled. "I love the book, Rose is one of the great villains of all time," he said. I agreed. He probed. "What's wrong with the script?"

"I don't think it follows the book closely enough."

"What would you do?"

"I'd do the book. Streamline it, combine some characters, and you'd have to rethink the True Knot a bit. But otherwise, just do the book. As long as it's a three-hander between Danny, Abra and Rose it'll work. With one big asterisk."

"What's that?"

"I think you have to bring back the hotel. Kubrick's hotel, I mean."

Jon smiled wider. "Yeah, it's a bummer the hotel burned down. King goes out of his way at the start of the book to emphasize that - no Overlook, look no further."

This was my biggest gripe with the book.

I said "When I read the book, all I could see was Kubrick's hotel. I think you do the book as close as you possibly can, until the big fight at the end. Instead of it taking place in an empty field, let it be in the hotel."

Jon: "Do you think King will be upset if you change his ending? You know how feels about THE SHINING, right?"

Me: "What if we gave him THAT ending? What if we let Danny have Jack's ending? Jack sacrificed himself to save his family and destroy the Overlook - why not let Danny do that? Change the ending, sure, but give him the ending Kubrick denied him."

We shook hands, and I called my producing partner Trevor Macy to tell him it was a good general, but nothing was coming out of my DC meeting. By the time I'd made it back to my car, though, Jon had reached out to Stephen King and asked if he'd be interested in me taking a swing at it. Steve, who had enjoyed GERALD'S GAME, said yes.

I was immediately petrified when the call came in that they might want to engage me on a rewrite of DOCTOR SLEEP, with a directorial attachment. I'd have to rewrite the script from scratch, and I kind of felt like they were calling my bluff. But the deal was made and quite suddenly I was adapting DOCTOR SLEEP.

First order of business was to make King aware of what I intended to do. I had just established a tentative relationship with my hero over GERALD'S GAME, and the last thing - the very last thing in the world I ever wanted - was to upset him. We weren't in direct communication, we spoke through agents and emails at this point - but I had to make him aware of the Overlook thing.

I put together a proposal that outlined what I wanted to do - use Kubrick's visual language, and keep the Overlook standing as a setting for the final battle. The initial feedback we got was "no." King really, really didn't like Kubrick's film, and his priority was to adapt DOCTOR SLEEP - not to revisit THE SHINING.

I told him that if he didn't want me to do it, I wouldn't - I'd walk away from the movie before I made something he hated. But as a last ditch effort, I said "imagine the Overlook, decrepit and rotten. And imagine Dan Torrance having walk in to 'wake it up,' the lights coming on above his head as he walks the halls. He finds his way to the Gold Room. To the familiar bar, where an empty glass is waiting for him. And we see a familiar bartender ready to pour for him, saying 'good evening Mister Torrance.' What if that bartender is his father?"

After a bit of a delay, King got back to us. "Do it," he said.

Writing the script was tough. I immediately felt like I had stepped into a very unsafe space. "This is going to piss everybody off," I figured. Kubrick fans would be livid that the movie was being made. King fans might be angry that Kubrick's imagery was being homaged. There was no way to please everyone, so I set about writing the movie I wanted to see most.

It was a slightly nauseous feeling that would stay with me until the movie came out.

I sat down to write with a hardcover copy of DOCTOR SLEEP to my right, and a hardcover copy of THE SHINING to my left. I read both cover to cover, sticking post-its throughout the pages with ideas, or flagging lines of dialogue (or even prose) that I wanted to protect. I managed to put together a basic outline for the movie, which was intimidating and sprawling.

I finally finished the draft and sent it off to Warner Bros. and King at the same time. I was shooting THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE at the time, and thought it would take a long while and a few more iterations before SLEEP would go anywhere, if it ever did.

Warner Bros. shocked us all by coming back with a green light. I've been told that it was one of the fastest green lights in the recent history of the studio, and I believe it.

It happened so fast, in fact, that Steve hadn't read the script yet. I got an email from him on a Friday saying "I read the first half, and I absolutely love it - my son's getting married, so I'll pick it up in a week or so and finish it, but great so far!" I was nauseous... because I knew everything that King was likely to hate was in the second half.

When he finally did finish reading it, about a week later, he reached out and said:

"I think it's really good. In my experience, this is the kind of script studios don't make, because it's TOO good. Hopefully I'm wrong. But no matter how it turns out, thanks for treating me so well. - Steve"

I had the distinct pleasure of being able to write him back and tell him that Warner Bros. had just greenlit the movie. And we were off to the races.

The pressure was enormous. They were spending a lot of money on this movie, and because of the insane box office success of IT: CHAPTER ONE, expectations were very high.

We were given access to Kubrick's blueprints for the Overlook hotel set, which were still held at Warner Bros. While we set about rebuilding the sets, our attention turned to casting.

For Dan, we met with a handful of actors: Dan Stevens, Chris Evans, Matt Smith, and Jeremy Renner all came in to chat about the movie. But Ewan McGregor, who himself was eight years sober (just like Dan), was the obvious choice. "Let's not talk about the Shining yet," he said. "I want to talk about recovery." He was the guy.

For Rose the Hat, we talked with several actresses, including Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman, and my dear friend Karen Gillan - but Rebecca Ferguson knocked our socks off on a 90-minute zoom meeting, and the part was hers.

Finding Abra Stone was more difficult - we auditioned more than 900 girls for the part. We'd narrowed it down to a half-dozen very promising and successful young actresses, including Lulu Wilson (who I'd worked with several times before and adore), but Kyliegh Curran's self-tape audition rose to the very top of the pile. Ewan flew to Atlanta to read with our final picks, and when Kyliegh - who lived 15 minutes from our office, was local casting, and had never booked a job before - finished reading, he turned to us and said "I mean it's her, right?" It absolutely was.

When we cast her, we invited her back to the office after school one day to get oriented. The crew was so excited for her that they decorated the production office in her honor.

As the rest of the cast fell in, we started doing our camera tests and getting excited about what we were putting together. My feeling over overwhelming nausea only got stronger.

We started shooting in September of 2018. The shoot was long, but never exhausting. The cast and crew were uniformly pleasant and happy to be there, and after the soul-crushing slog that had been THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, it was a relief to enjoy working again.

Kate was pregnant with our daughter Theo at the time. She visited as much as she could, but finally couldn't travel any more. Being away from Kate and our son Cody was hard, but I'm so grateful that we got to share some time on set together.

All things considered, this was a smooth shoot. But something happened for me while we were making it that would change the course of my life forever.

See, THE SHINING is about alcoholism. King wrote it while in the throes of his own addiction, and it is a novel about the anxiety he felt about what he could potentially do to his family if left unchecked. It's one of the reasons he was so upset with Kubrick's adaptation - all of that was taken away. This is a profoundly personal story for King.

When he wrote DOCTOR SLEEP, he was decades sober. The story of DOCTOR SLEEP is the story of recovery. This was something that Ewan knew very well, and why he was perfect for the part. He knew what the journey felt like. He wasn't alone - there were a number of cast and crew members on this shoot that were sober. In fact, just about all of the actors who played main characters were sober. I was still drinking at the time, though it had already become obviously problematic in my life, I hadn't taken any meaningful steps to change it.

This photograph was taken on 10/12/2018. This was taken on the day I got sober. I quit cold turkey, in the middle of production. I was clinging to vices at the time. Note not only the cigarette in my hand (I was smoking almost 2 packs a day), but the ash tray that had been rigged to the top of my viewfinder by the camera department. (I don't smoke anymore either, just about four years without cigs as well... and I still miss them.)

I had been writing about addiction for a decade. It was all over my work, going all the way back to ABSENTIA. I didn't realize just how much I was writing about myself, and I still can't believe it took me this long.

I vividly recall writing the scene between Dan and Jack at the bar. My wife pointed out to me after the fact that she could see it then, that something was changing in me when it came to drinking. Something was waking up, and I was processing a desperate need to sober up. That scene represents an internal conversation that is profoundly personal to me. It's still my favorite scene of the movie.

I've been sober now for over 4 years. DOCTOR SLEEP helped me finally make that decision. I finished the shoot sober, and came home to my life with a lot of uncertainty and insecurity. But with the unflinching support of my incredible wife, and some amazing friends, my life started to really blossom. It was pretty immediately evident that this was one of the best decisions I'll ever make.

Meanwhile, though, I had to finish DOCTOR SLEEP.

I LOVED the movie we'd made, but I was still terrified of what King would think of it - not to mention Kubrick's estate.

When we finished the cut, I flew to Bangor to screen the finished film for Steve. It was the first I'd meet him in person, and one of the most insanely exciting and humbling days of my life.

We watched the movie together, and I was acutely aware of each and every little reaction he had throughout.

(With Trevor Macy, my producing partner at Intrepid)

When the show as over, Steve turned to me and said "You did a beautiful job." And ultimately, he added that this film had made him warm up to the Kubrick movie as well.

A week later, we heard from Kubrick's estate that they had also loved the movie.

With King's blessing, and Kubrick's family, I felt that nausea finally subside. I said to Kate, "that's it. That's all that matters. Doesn't matter if the movie crashes and burns - we already won the important battle."

And then, the movie crashed and burned.

A group of us went to see it opening night at Arclight Hollywood (my favorite theater). We were just about the only people there. And I knew immediately that we were going to have a bad weekend.

The movie didn't perform very well. Warner Bros. was disappointed, and ended up scrapping the Dick Hallorann movie we were planning, as well as the Overlook Hotel prequel.

I was pretty crest-fallen. I'd spent years tossing and turning over whether audiences would be divided between the King and Kubrick camps. I'd been petrified that they'd be furious, venomous, run me out on a rail... I'd never considered that they'd be utterly disinterested. Apathy wasn't even on my radar.

Steve called me the Monday after opening weekend with some words of encouragement. "I remember when THE SHINING bombed," he said. "And SHAWSHANK. Give it some time. It'll find its audience. It's a really good movie."

That has turned out to be true. While it didn't set the world on fire theatrically, the movie has over-performed on VOD and streaming. And when Warner Bros. released the Directors Cut (I'm still so grateful that they did that), it popped even more.

So yes, to answer your question - the pressures were enormous. I hope this paints a little picture of what it was like. The biggest gift I got out of it, though, was sobriety.

I reached out to King a year later, on my first sober birthday. I hadn't told him I was sober, but it felt like time to do it. I got to thank him. "I never told you this, but I sobered up while we were shooting DOCTOR SLEEP, and I don't think I would have done it without your words. Living in that story, and marinading in the concepts of recovery and redemption made it possible. I just want to thank you."

He wrote back his congratulations, and then mentioned "as it happens, I'm off to celebrate 30 years myself. It only gets better and better."

And he is absolutely right.

DOCTOR SLEEP was the perfect project for me after the nightmare that was HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. I fell in love with making movies again. And I found a new and wonderful gear for my life. It has only made everything better - my marriage, my work, my experience walking around on planet earth. I'm so grateful for it.

When I think of DOCTOR SLEEP, I think of Ewan sitting at the bar and looking at the glass in his hand. "Man takes a drink, drink takes a drink... and then the drink takes the man. Ain't it so, dad."

Ewan understood those words better than I did when I typed them into the script. I understand them much better now.

There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not profoundly grateful for my time at the Overlook. And for myriad of ways my life has been changed because of it.

[cressidagrey]

Something good and right and real - Chapter 8

Summary:

Azriel had spent centuries believing that he of all people didn't deserve a mate. And if anything, the last three years had just galvinised that particular belief. And then he meets her.

The first time Oriana met Azriel, she thought that he reminded her of a skittish cat. Shy and a little bit broken. Good for him that she absolutely excelled in fixing the things around her.

Warnings:

Rhys Bashing, Discussion of Murder, Discussion of Mental Illness

Notes:

I put a lot of world building into this. If you don't recognise it from canon, I probably invented. Or I forgot that canon existed.

(thanks to @firefly-graphics for the super pretty dividers!)

Of all the things that finally gave Oriana the spark that she needed to figure out the problem that she had with Azriel’s fighting leathers…well, nobody would have thought that would be a children’s bedtime story. 

But it was. 

She read about dragons and the power of love…and came out of it with her brain literally smoking with ideas. 

Chainmail. Human Knights wore chainmail. 

She didn’t for one moment think that that was going to work for Azriel. 

But the dragons made her think of scales and suddenly it was three days later, Azriel returning from a mission from the cauldron only knew and her forge was absolutely covered in bits of adamantium. 

And Oriana’s hair was standing in every which direction. 

“You look like you had a productive time,” Azriel quipped and she looked at him bright-eyed and excited. But she wasn’t going to tell him a single word. 

She had even sworn his shadows to secrecy. She thought they were more amused by her request than anything, but after she had explained what she was planning, they were happy to agree. 

She was going to finish this…and it was going to be perfect. 

“Oh, I was,” she agreed immediately. “But please, take me out for the rest of the day, because I think otherwise I may become one with the forge.”

She wasn’t even joking. She should really leave it one of these days. 

“We don’t want that,” Azriel agreed, a grin playing on his far too handsome features as he leaned down to press a kiss against her unresisting lips. 

She happily twirled her arms around his neck as she kissed him. 

“I came to kidnap you,” he said softly and she grinned at him. 

“Is it kidnapping if I come willingly?” she wondered. He shrugged. 

“I have no clue,” he admitted. 

“Knife work?” she asked him and he shook his head. 

“No, but we’ll be…near the clearing,” he said. “It’s getting warmer. So I thought…Picnic?” he asked her and her smile filled her whole face. 

She had learned early on that while Azriel didn’t often talk about his feelings…they were there in every single action in all the time he made sure to spend with her. He was the one who got her flowers just because and who brought her chocolate from her favourite shop, even when she had never mentioned it to him. She was the one who just left things in his path, waiting for him to find them, not wanting to overwhelm him. 

It worked for the two of them. But still, the thought that even when he had just come back home, he had come back straight to her, but still managed to bring along a beaten-up knapsack filled with food and drink…well that was adorable. 

They took the usual flight route, the wings beating behind his back rhythmically and Oriana yearned for a moment when the opportunity would arise and she could reach out to touch them. 

Still, as he touched down it wasn’t the usual clearing they used whenever he taught her how to try and stab somebody with that knife of hers. 

He hit the ground but didn’t put her down as he carried her forward. 

She felt the moment they passed the ward boundary. “Yours?” she asked and he nodded. 

“Mine,” he agreed. And then, suddenly, they left the forest behind them and she stared at the perfect mountain lake that stretched just feet away from them. 

Azriel let her down gently and her feet hit the floor as she felt the sunlight kiss her skin. It was getting warmer in Velaris, Spring having truly arrived, Sumer just coming around the corner. 

And for just a single moment, she couldn’t quite believe the beauty before herself. This was…gorgeous.

The water was nearly azure blue, the sun happily shining down onto their little slice of paradise. 

It was all there. Perfect.  

“I love it,” she breathed, turning around and catching Azriel watching her, a shy smile playing around his lips. 

“Good place?” Azriel asked her, quietly. 

“Are you kidding? It’s the best!” she exclaimed, already crouching down so that she could remove the shoes she wore. She stared across the lake as she fussed with her laces, finally getting rid of them. She was so going to put her feet in the water. 

Only then, she caught the cabin that had been built on the other side of the lake. Or maybe a cottage was more fitting. A fairy tale cottage. Built out of grey stone, overlooking the lake. Ivy growing along it, a bright blue door…

She froze. 

If there was a house there…then how had Azriel warded it against…

“That’s yours,” she said softly, realisation setting in.  “The house is yours, isn’t it?” she asked him. 

“Yes,” Azriel agreed, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “I should have known that you were going to figure it out,” he teased her softly.  

She rightened and then turned to watch him watch her, a near-bashful smile on her face. 

He was sharing that with her. Ever since he had told her how he had gotten the scars a week or so prior…ever since then he had started opening up to her about more of his past. Sometimes inconsequential things, but she still hoared all of them like precious gemstones. 

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” she finally said. She couldn’t even imagine how much that had taken from him, because he seemed to be so fiercely private and guarded about so many things. 

“It’s you,” he said like that made that all…easy. 

Oriana smiled. 

And then she turned back around and waded into the water without even waiting for anything else. 

“I wouldn’t… suggest that,” Azriel started to warn her, but she ignored it. 

The pebbles were comfortable under her feet, the water icy. “Why? Don’t you like the cold?” Oriana asked him with a laugh, tugging her skirts up higher so that they wouldn’t get wet. 

“This is icy,” Azriel said, sounding worried on her behalf, but she just grinned at him. 

“I was born in the mountain. You are aware that we bathe in the hot springs and with clear spring water, all the time, right?” she asked him, turning to look at him over her shoulder. “Communal bathing is even part of our culture,” she told him matter-of-factly. That didn’t stop Azriel from staring at her like she had just grown a second head. 

“What, don’t act like you have never done that before,” she teased him. “You seriously want to tell me that Illyirans have nothing similar?” she teased him. 

She was getting used to the water, still cool on her skin but no longer icy and she looked over the lake as she wondered if it was hot enough that she could get away with it… 

“We…Illyrians have Birchins,” Azriel finally admitted. She cocked her head to the side. “We go in there to…sweat.”

“Is that something like steam chambers?” she wondered. She knew that. They had that in the mountains.  

“Sounds similar,” Azriel agreed and she decided that she only lived once and as such she was going to take advantage of the beautiful water.  

That was all she needed as she made that decision, stepping back to the shore only to start opening the ties at her back that kept her dress closed and then pulled it over her head. 

“What…What are you doing?” Azriel asked, his voice sounding a mixture of hoarse and garbled. But that didn’t hide the sudden stab of arousal that she got through their bond as she pulled the dress over her head and dropped it to the ground next to her shoes. 

“What does it look like?” Oriana wondered as she stepped out of her undergarments. “Taking a swim in your lake.”

Azriel made another sound like he was hurt or possibly dying. Oriana was far too amused to stop now. “You are welcome to join me, of course. If you want…”

And maybe, just maybe, a part of her was far too curious. 

And then there was the fact that ever since she had taken off her necklace, he had been…hesitant with her. Not with talking with her, but with touching her, with pressing issues to her…they were always chaste and gentle, and a part of her was yearning for something more. 

He didn’t answer. She was wading in the cold water, taking a deep breath when it was deep enough that she could start properly swimming. 

 “Unless I am hurting your delicate sensibilities?” Oriana teased him, biting her lip. 

The growl that came from the shore in response made every hair on her body stand up in response. Her arousal was a sharp stab in her lower belly, the heat low and molten. 

“Maybe it’s too cold for me,” Azriel’s voice came from the shore, low and dark but she listened to the sound of clothing being removed and she bit back a smile. 

 “You aren’t mated for me for nothing,” Oriana gave back with a soft snort. 

She had fought for decades with her gifts until she knew that she had the kind of control over the fire within her that she wasn’t going to accidentally set anything on fire. 

However, that also meant that there wasn’t much that she hadn’t tested to figure out the extent of her power. And so it was the work of nothing to let the water around her grow hot until it was hot enough to be steaming and bubbling and then let go of her power until it cooled down enough that it was still hot, but no longer boiling. 

“They do say that Autumn Court Faes have fire in their blood,” she quipped. 

“And here I thought that that was only about males,” Azriel said with some amusement, suddenly behind her, a broad hand curled itself possessively around her hip and she grinned like the cat that got the fish and the cream for dinner both. 

“Oh, you know…We can’t have males have all the fun,” she teased him, even when warm lips suddenly pressed against her pulse point. 

Her breath hitched in her throat. 

“Oh, love, I think you are having plenty of fun. You enjoy teasing me, don’t you, you horrid mate,” he teased her. “Just starting to strip off all your clothing without nary a forewarning…”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it. You are a male,” she gave back, but her voice was starting to sound surprisingly breathy and he pulled her against a broad chest, taking her weight. 

“Of course, I enjoyed it,” Azriel whispered into her ear, making her shiver. She craned her head so she could kiss him properly, his lips pressing to hers. 

She gasped against him, letting her hands slide over his shoulders, feeling the slick, damp skin underneath her hands, a spiderweb of scars covering them. 

She pulled back and came eyes to eyes to his naked chest for the first time, the bronze skin seemingly glowing in the afternoon sun, only interrupted by intricate lines of black tattoos. 

Oriana couldn’t help herself from reaching out to touch them, from sliding her fingertips over the skin that held them. 

“What are these?” she asked Azriel curiously. Not Bargain marks, were they? They looked different. 

“Illyrian warrior markings,” Azriel answered, his wings rustling behind him. “Luck and Glory in battle. We get them after the Blood Rite.”

He had mentioned that to Oriana in an offhand way a few days ago. 

“They are beautiful,” Oriana said softly, his wings shifting once again, as she pulled her hand back. “Not as beautiful as your wings though,” she said with a grin. 

They seemed to act without conscious thought of him, stretching out further, so that Oriana could see every inch of their massive expanse. 

She swallowed. 

Unwillingly, suddenly there were her sister’s words in her mind again. 

She watched as the blush stole over his cheeks and her toes curled into the pebbles in the ground beneath her. 

“Can I…May I touch them?” she breathed and he swallowed. 

“Yes.”

Somehow this was different than the night she had spent sleeping beneath one of his wings, feeling the weight of it on top of her body. Now was the first time that she actually got to feel the soft, leathery texture underneath her fingertips, the veins that shot through them, the scars that pebbled against her fingertips. 

She was so very gently as she touched him, not sure how…how much prefer to exert but she didn’t seem to…They trembled against her hands and she pulled back. 

“Don’t…” Azriel pressed out hoarsely. “They are just…sensitive.”

Sensitive?

She took another deep breath, the scent of forest and cedar that surrounded him having grown musky and she could pick out the undercuttren t of arousal. 

She was quite sure that she smelled no different. 

“Are they?” she asked instead, fingertips going back to gently tracing the lines of veins, and then up until she reached the talon on the edge of it. She wrapped her hand around it. 

Azriel reacted with a hiss. 

“Yes. And unless you want me to have my way with you right now, you should let them go,” he told her hoarsely. 

She let him go. 

And then leaned up to press a kiss against his mouth, pressing her chest against his, feeling her nipples grow hard by the sudden touch. 

He held still, even as his hands came up to cradle her face. 

“Promises promises,” she sing-songed breathlessly, looking into hazel eyes that were so dark they were nearly black.  

“I always keep my promises,” Azriel told her darkly, dipping down to kiss her again, hands slowly brushing down her back and now it was her turn to shiver. 

“Do you?” She asked him breathlessly, for a moment forgetting what they were even talking about. 

“I do,” he assured her. “I always do.”

And then he kissed her again, and all thoughts flew her brain because her whole world narrowed down to just Azriel. 

Just Azriel and the touch of his skin against hers, his mouth on hers…the cool water of the lake. 

It was his shudder that made her pull back, as she had realised that the water was too cold to stay there for much longer, even when she warmed it with nary a thought once again.

So out they went, with Azriel first, too much of a good male to sneak a peek…Oriana didn’t have that problem. She looked at her piece, taking in the broad shoulders, narrowing to a trim waist, the massive wings that were still flaring wide…the scars that dragged one right down his back and over his ass. It was quite a nice ass. 

Nice legs as well. She shouldn’t be staring. She still did it. 

She liked looking at him like that. 

And she would kind of like to see the other side too. 

She slipped back into her dress and sat primly down onto the picnic blanket Azriel had brought along, eating her fill of sandwiches and cookies and then promptly decided that other tactics were fine too, and laid her head on a strong thigh as she stared into the beautiful sky. 

She sighed softly, closing her eyes, for once in her life utterly and irrevocably happy. 

She couldn’t even remember the last time she had felt that way before Azriel. 

She picked up one of his hands, intertwining their fingers, one broad wing acting as her personal sun umbrella…

“I was thinking…” she started. 

“Always dangerous,” Azriel quipped and she snorted. 

“You are so right,” she agreed easily. “Still, I was thinking…if we properly accept this mating bond…do you want a ceremony?”

He was quiet for a moment and she opened his eyes to have him watch her, his eyes so soft, so wide…like he couldn’t possibly imagine that they were talking about this. 

“Whatever you want,” his voice was hoarse as he said these words, picking up their joint hands to press a kiss to the back of hers. 

“But I asked you,” she prodded gently.  

“I really don’t care. Anyway, I get you is good in my book,” Azriel said softly. “But if you want a proper ceremony then we’ll do that.”

She smiled softly. 

“I just want you,” Oriana assured him. “It’s about us. Not about anybody else.”

Besides, she had done the whole marriage thing once already. The proper way. With all the ceremonies. And look how that had ended. 

So maybe this tie, when it was just about them…just the two of them, the way the Mother had intended…Without anybody else’s opinion weighing on them, because they were both adults and could do whatever they wanted for cauldron’s sake…that seemed nice. 

“Though before we do that, I have some…requests,” Oriana finally said, fingers tightening around Azriel’s.

He hummed a question. 

“I want you to meet my family,” she said quietly.  “Eventually everybody, but we can start with Cyrus and Briony, and their younglings.”

At least then Azriel wouldn’t be a completely overwhelmed mess at the end of it. “You already met Cyrus so that should be easy. Just dinner, nothing fancy,” she assured him. “And a second thing:  I’ll take you dancing at least once.”

“That’s all?” he asked her, sounding incredulously, after waiting for a moment. 

“What did you expect I was gonna ask of you?” she asked with a snort. “That’s all. You’ll probably meet so,e friends of mine when we go dancing as well, but that’s all, I swear.”

“Alright,” he agreed with a shrug. 

“Don’t be too enthusiastic,” Oriana said with a laugh. “Now is the time to tell me any requests you have, by the way.” 

The last thing she expected was the words he blurted out next. “I want you to meet my mother.”

For a moment Oriana’s brain felt like it was freezing before it started working again. His mother?

“She’s still alive?” she blurted out, her eyes flying out and Azriel’s eyebrows furrowed. “I am sorry, it’s just…you never talk about her,” she hurried to add. “I just thought that…” She had died in some tragic way centuries ago and Azriel still grieved her and didn’t talk about her because of that? 

Yeah, Oriana had thought that. 

“No, she’s…alive,” Azriel said, but the way he said that last word made her…curious. He stared at everything but her. “She’s not… well ,” he finally said carefully. 

“She’s…her mind fractured. Rhys has tried to…help her, but every time we try, we just make it worse,” Azriel explained quietly. 

Oriana just swallowed. 

She had heard of that happening before, of the kind of sickness that no healer could help with because it wasn’t an illness of the body but the mind. 

And even mind-healers could not always save somebody once it had…gone down a road like that. If Azriel’s mother’s mind had truly fractured…then everything that made her herself…all of that was gone. 

“So…I try to make her as comfortable as I can. She had a house in the Illyrian Steppes…It’s called Rosehall.  I have a… friend that takes care of her. She’s half wraith and somehow that makes all the difference,” Azriel said softly. “She keeps her company. And tells me when she has a good day so I can go visit…”

Just imagining her own mother in such a state was making Oriana feel like somebody cleaved open her heart. And Azriel talked about this so softly, like this was just how it was and there was nothing he could do, to make it any better. 

“When my mom has a good day, she recognises me. She’s not scared of me. I get to talk to her…even when she doesn’t answer. But she’s…there,” Azriel said, one corner of his mouth lifting up as he recounts that. “But they are getting rarer every year. 

“If she has a bad day then…then she thinks I am my father,” he whispered, his voice dipping into self-loathing. “She’s terrified of me then.”

She didn’t know what she was supposed to do, other than sit up and embrace him as tightly as she could. 

“And you think that me meeting her…that would be good?” Oriana finally asked hesitantly. “I don’t want to make it worse, Sweetling.”

“You can’t make it worse,” Azriel said softly. “Maybe it’s stupid but she’s the only…blood family I have.”

She understood that. 

“Then I’ll be honoured to meet her.”

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

“So when should we do it?” Oriana asked him, practical like always, still draped over his lap. He would gladly spend weeks just like that, breathing in the warm scent of fire and home. 

“I’ll need a few weeks. I need to arrange for leave,” he said softly. He didn’t want to wait. Not when he still was terrified that she was going to change her mind. 

But he needed to somehow figure out an explanation for Rhysand that was going to be accepted without too much fuss… and wasn’t the truth but also wasn’t a lie.

Something that made sense. 

Azriel wondered if he could get away with simply asking for a break. 

Would that be accepted? Or would that then be a whole other thing? He didn’t know.  

“Ah, yes, the Mating Frenzy ,” Oriana commented, waggling her eyebrows. 

He opened his mouth to respond to that and then closed it again with a resounding click. 

Yes. 

The Mating Frenzy . 

Something he was suddenly realising he was utterly terrified of. 

And Azriel also realised that he had no idea how to deal with that fear. He hadn’t even thought about it before. 

Being with Oriana, being her mate… of course, he had thought about a time when maybe they would officially accept the bond. 

But it had been somewhere in the depth of his heart, where he didn’t allow himself to go too often, in fear of being disappointed again. 

He was still waiting for something to go wrong. He always would. 

Would always be waiting for Oriana to wake up one morning and realise that she was mated to a monster. 

But still, he had…longed for a moment when she would offer him something to eat and all he needed to do was to accept it. To accept that she loved him and that she wanted him and…

He had hoped for that moment. 

He had kissed her, he had put his hands on soft skin and held her, he had thought about how it would be to do so many other things with her…dark at night when he was along with his thoughts…but the idea of…Everything was stripped away until only the base instincts were still there…that terrified him. 

What if he hurt her? What if he was so rough with her that…that he did something that he would regret for the rest of his existence? What if he harmed her in a way that even the quick healing of faes could do nothing against? 

Oriana’s sudden touch against his face startled him. 

He could just stare at her as she cupped his cheek, somehow having moved so that she was straddling him and he hadn’t even noticed. 

Whenever he was with her, his situational awareness suffered and he felt like a youngling again.  

“You aren’t going to hurt me.” 

Oriana said this like it wasn’t even something that she was worried about. Like it was crystal clear that this wasn’t going to happen. 

She said it with all the trust in the world. 

He wished he had only a tiny bit of her trust in him in himself. 

“That’s what you are worried about, isn’t it?” She asked and he just about managed to nod. Oriana’s eyes were warm, the flames flickering comfortingly. He still couldn’t always put a finger on it, when she pulled the glamour up or when it decided to go away on its own. It was always surprising him. Though he loved the flames so much more than he ever had loved the flat blackness.

 “It’s gonna be fine, sweetling,” Oriana promised him soothingly. 

“You don’t know that,” he forced out. She didn’t. He could do something horrible. He had done horrible things in his past and he would do horrible things in his future. He always would. 

“I could…” he could do that. So easily. He may have taught her how to use a dagger, but if he really wanted to…she didn’t have any chance against him. 

“Yeah, and I could set you on fire with a thought. Won't do that either,” she quipped. 

He froze. 

Right. 

Sometimes he forgot how fucking magical Oriana was.

“I don’t doubt that you are physically stronger than me, Azriel, but I do think that I could probably shock you enough to stop you for at least a moment,” Oriana said quietly. “That’s all I would need.”

“And then there is also the fact that hurting me would go against every one of your instincts. I am your mate . You aren’t going to hurt me,” she pointed out reasonably. “We could…if it’s going to calm you, we could have sex before we even think about triggering the Mating Frenzy,” she suggested. 

“No!” He blurted out. “Maybe it’s stupid but…” but he wanted…he wanted their first time to be when they were really mated when the Mating Bond needed to be consummated. 

“It’s not stupid,” Oriana assured him fiercely. “This is about us . We do what we want. What anybody else wants doesn’t matter in this particular instance, Azriel.”

She was right. Oriana was right, as always. It didn’t matter. 

But for Azriel who had spent a whole life doing what other people told him to do…that was… freedom . 

It was their mating bond. 

And if there was anything in his life, that was just his…then it would be that , wouldn’t it?

It would be the bond that Oriana and him would forge together. It would be just for the. 

And so they should also…have it exactly like they wanted. In every way. 

“I’ll offer you food and we accept the bond and then we’ll stay holed up for a week or so,” Oriana said with a smile. “And I look forward to that. Very, very much.”

He did too. 

Not the sex. 

Well, also the sex. Making her his in every way that he could get away with…that was appealing in so many different ways. But he was also looking forward to just having that much uninterrupted time with her, to do nothing but kiss that flawless, soft skin and touch her everywhere. 

“Though I would suggest that we do not do that at my apartment. My neighbours are busybodies,” Oriana said with a grimace. “But you seem to have a perfectly fine house right here. Far away from anybody that could want to check on us,” she teased him. 

He did. 

He looked at the house that he had bought over a year ago. 

Then it had just been to get away from Cassian and Nesta and the whole Elain thing. 

He had never even thought that he would get to bring his mate there. 

But now he did. 

The house that he had bought for himself suddenly seemed like it could be a place for both of them. 

A sanctuary. 

Removed from their day-to-day lives. He would still work for Rhys. Oriana would still have her shop and tinker away in the forge. 

But then, when it was the evening, they could both come home. They could cook in the kitchen or go swimming in the lake…or go to their bedroom and ignore everything that happened out of their little slice of peace. 

They could make it a home. They could fill it with warmth and happiness and nobody could tell them differently. 

“I…I want to show it to you,” Azriel finally said. “I want you to see it.” He wanted Oriana to www the house and think about their future there. 

“I thought you would never ask,” Oriana said with a grin. He couldn’t help but grin as well, as he pulled her to her feet, as she pressed a peck onto his cheek. 

He held her hand as they ambled along the shore, around the lake, towards the house. 

“I bought it nearly a year ago,” Azriel explained softly. “I was staying with my brother but he was freshly mated and…I didn’t really get much sleep,” he said with a sigh.

That was an understatement. 

Cassian and Nesta’s enthusiastic couplings had given him more than one sleepless night. 

And if they were quiet then his head had been swirling with thought of Elain and Lucien. And then…well, he had his usual nightmares that he always tended to have, one way or another and all of it had just been horrible. 

“They were loud?” Oriana wondered, sounding like she was biting back some amusement.

“Oh yes, they were,” Azriel said darkly, making her giggle. She had no idea how loud. 

“You could just enchant your doors, you know,” she teased him. 

Great. 

“Thanks for that suggestion, oh mighty Enchantress,” he gave back sarcastically, making her laugh even louder. 

“But them being loud was only half the problem,” he admitted. “I was happy for them. I really was but I also…I wanted what…I wanted what Cassian had. Both my brother found their mate just months apart. And there I was…I was…I told you about me being in love for 500 years? and then…the female that…”

“Chose her mate over you?” Oriana ended his sentence. “You did tell me about that.”

Yeah, he had. It was better to be honest with her about all of that. Better for her to hear all the bad parts. 

“All of that happened and…I wasn’t in a good place,” he admitted, as they reached the house. He helped her up the stairs to the front door, painted a bright cobalt blue. “This was…This was the only place I had where it was just me. Nobody else. Nobody that wanted anything from me, nobody that expected me to be anything…it was just me.”

Just him and his shadows. But even they had left him in peace if he requested that. Like right now. They didn’t like the rays of sunshine that much. 

Azriel had spent so much time sitting outside on the Veranda and watching the starry night sky. It had been…peaceful. 

Just him, in his house, with only the sounds of the lake and the forest surrounding him. 

“It was your safe space,” Oriana said softly and he nodded. It was. 

He opened the door. 

Oriran walked in and he wanted nothing more than to tattoo that view into his brain and never forget it. 

She was here. His mate was there, right there with him. 

He wanted to remember everything about that moment. From the damp hair that curled down her temples, to the way her eyes widened, how her braid swished behind her as she walked into the living room, the big windows at the back showing the lake in all its beauty. 

Somehow, she just completed it. 

“It’s beautiful,” Oriana breathed as she took in the light wood floors, the exposed beams at the ceiling, the view .

He saw it through her eyes now. He had fallen in love with the privacy and the place, where it was built. Near enough the center of Velaris but far enough outside that he had some peace and quiet.  

“Where is the furniture?” Oriana suddenly wondered and he grimaced. 

“There isn’t really any?”

She turned around, staring at him. 

“…Azriel, where did you sleep?” she asked him. 

“Mostly on the floor,” he admitted. The look of an utter nightmare on her face made him hurry to add: “I grew up in a cell, at least this has windows!” 

Suddenly he just knew that was the wrong thing to say. 

She opened her mouth to respond and then closed it again. “You know I have a lot of things to say about this but I somehow doubt that any of that is gonna change your opinion of why you shouldn’t sleep on the floor. So I am just going to say, that I am not going to sleep on the floor. I am a delicate princess and need my beauty sleep. In a proper bed. With at least 2 blankets and no less than 3 pillows.”

He blinked at that. It was true, her bed had absolutely been covered in pillows. He had just thought they were all decorative.  

“What, do you think I don’t?” Oriana questioned him, raising one sharp eyebrow and he couldn’t help but grin. 

“You are beautiful with or without your beauty sleep,” he promised her. “But if you want to absolutely cover our bed with blankets and pillows, you can do that too.”

“I’ll move in with you. If you get some furniture,” she told him pointedly, making him laugh and move so that he could hug her. 

“I thought maybe you were just going to bring yours with you,” he told her, pressing a kiss against her hair as he tucked her against his side. They could just rebuild her apartment in the house. That would be fine. The house was bigger so they absolutely would have the space for it. 

Even for all the weird metallic wall art she seemingly insisted on. 

Though now he wondered if that had some meaning that he wasn’t aware of. 

Oh well, he was sure that Oriana would educate him about all of it if he asked her. And he wanted to know. He wanted to know everything he could away with. 

She poked him in the ribs. “Be honest, you just want the ugly blanket,” Oriana told him sagely, making him laugh out loud. 

That absolutely horrible and ugly blanket that he adored, because she had made it and always wrapped him up in it after he came back from a mission. It was nearly as good as a hug from her. 

Yeah, he loved that stupid blanket. 

“It’s such a good blanket,” he agreed with her. The best. 

“Still if this is gonna be our home…we’ll need stuff that we picked out together ,” Oriana said seriously. “Like a new couch or something.”

That sounded nice. Making that place theirs. 

“I want table linens,” he mumbled in her hair, breathing in the scent of Jasmine that clung to her and she sounded utterly aghast.  

“You want table linens ,” she repeated. 

He just shrugged. He did. He really did. He wanted the stupidest, most domestic things that he could buy. Table Linens. In white. For their home, for their table, where they would eat dinner.  

“Alright, you can pick out table linens,” Oriana told him graciously. 

“I thought we should pick out stuff together,“ he complained half-heartedly. She rolled her eyes. 

“Apparently you have opinions about table lines that I don’t even know about. You are on your own with that, Sweetling.” 

[crossedwithblue]

The Sharmas, and vegetarianism in India

I just finished the books and this stood out to me. One side of my family is Jain, a small religion philosophically very similar to Buddhism, with a similar emphasis on nonviolence and the complete avoidance of harm to any human being. This includes:

No meat, obviously. Eggs are also excluded (as in the more general Indian definition of vegetarianism) No root vegetables, even, because you have to kill the whole plant to get them. Interestingly, non-lethal animal products are fine - milk, honey, wool - so it's not the same as veganism. I'm not sure what the position is on the hidden life-cost of milk i.e. the death of male calves because it's a waste to keep most around. This is common enough that retaurants will have 'Jain options' on their menu/allow you to request a Jain version of a dish, and it's a widely understood dietary requirement (though most people in India seen to think Jainism is a branch of Hinduism. It's not, it's a completly splintered-off heterodoxy, but we don't need to get into that).

They also don't use leather or silk since that does require death to produce, though my granny does have a 'peace silk' sari that's made without boiling the cocoons.

No eating after sunset and no eating food kept overnight, because they had some concept of germ theory and knew that bacteria bred more after dark. Pre-fridges, this is generally a pretty good idea in a hot country, anyway.

A yearly ritual where you meditate and ask forgiveness from any creature of any kind that you might have injured, deliberately or not. It's meant to be an acknowledgement that you've done wrong and a meditation on forgiving other people because everyone's fallible. You also exchange this with anyone you can - friends, family etc. I have very very mixed feelings about this one, how valid and meaningful it usually is in-practice and its actual effect on most people's mental health, but I'll leave that out of this post LOL

In the same vein, a prayer ritual you do at the temple where you repeat the same request for forgivness while repeatedly moving from a standing position to kneeling and prostrated with your head on the floor, the gradual standing - kneeling upright - kneeling fully - completely prostrate timed to the lines of the request. As my mum pointed out, it's also pretty good exercise, like a slowed-down bungee squat that's also gentler on your joints. I can picture El doing it for mana.

If you thought this was intense enough, the monks and nuns take it to another level. They eat nothing but boiled vegetables, lentils and grains, and I believe are not allowed to wear any clothing but what is purely plant derived, so they are closer to veganism in that sense. They have little brooms they use to sweep the path ahead of them to avoid stepping on insects (which, since they spend a lot of time on the road physically walking from place to place, presumably slows them down as much as you might imagine. They wear masks over their face to avoid inhaling small insects and keep out bacteria as much as possible (presumably the tiny insects are more of a concern if, again, you're pretty much sleeping out in the open in a rural area).

Not Jain any more, but upper-caste Hindus from some regions, essentially the priest caste, are also pretty strict vegetarians to the point that they're quite snobby about it. They are vegetarian because they consider it necessary to ritual purity, and look down on people who aren't - according to my mum, who went to uni with a lot of people like that, the reason why they accepted her relatively easily was because she was also a very strict vegetarian. I'm not sure if those guys avoid root vegetables too - mum had to start eating them at uni, anyway, because she would have struggled for food otherwise.

The Sharma family's insistence on strict mana reminded me of these practices a lot. They won't use any malia because you cannot get it without deliberately causing harm to another living being, even if that's just a blade of grass. I don't know if Novik was aware of this but it's pretty plausible and if she was, it adds a lot of context to her making El half-Indian and giving her paternal family similar beliefs. My headcanon is that they are indeed Jain - there's a pretty big community in Maharashtra/of Marathi origin.

[steddieunderdogfics]

This week’s writer spotlight feature is: @oh-stars! ohstars has 91 fics in the Stranger Things fandom and 69 of them are in the Steddie tag!

@lady-lostmind recommends the following works by @oh-stars:

Fuck. I Think I Love You.

The Men We've Become (Series)

Yours (all along)

Hidden Depths

Distance

"ohstars has a way of making heartache feel so good. Every time I read one of their fics I know I'm in for something special, and will inevitably go through a wide range of emotions while I'm brought along for a ride with the characters. I love the way they show so much through small details, letting the characters actions speak for themselves a lot of the time and the insight you get as a reader when you catch glimpses of the story even the character hasn't realized yet and getting to watch them grow throughout the story. They have a way of showing the beauty in the little moments, and letting you linger in the sweet in-between of big points, letting the story build on itself slowly." -- @lady-lostmind

Below the cut, @oh-stars answered some questions about their writing process and some of their recommended work!

Why do you write Steddie?

I think a lot of my ships boil down to Golden Retriever x Stoic Character. Add in that I adore when there’s a character who would sacrifice themselves to an inch of survival (if that) that gets the love and comfort they deserve, Steddie hits the spot. I’ve always been a big Steve fan but none of the ships prior to season four really inspired anything in me. And it took a minute for Steddie to click (which I think is the case for a lot of us, volume two just hit different), but when it did, there was no going back. I really enjoy exploring their relationship within the universe and everything that comes with – from sexuality crises, coming out, saving the world, and Stobin struggling with Steve liking a gremlin of a man. They just love each other so freakin much, y’all.

What’s your favorite trope to READ?

Misunderstandings, hurt/comfort, and kidfic are all tied as my favorites. It’s hard to pick just one because it really depends on my mood, but a good hurt/comfort is always the vibe.

What’s your favorite trope to WRITE?

Slow burn. It’s kind of a cop out answer because it can be used in any fic and with any trope, but I love the build up.

What’s your favorite Steddie fic?

I read so much that I don’t know if I have one fic that’s my all time favorite. Bandaids for the Heart by LexiRoseWrites and Steve’s First Bruise by cairparavels are ones I think about pretty often.

Is there a trope you’re excited to explore in a future work but haven’t yet?

I’ve been toying with a royal au in my head for months, if not a year now. I just haven’t nailed the plot yet to want to put some real effort behind it. Once I have a better idea of the story, I can’t wait to dive in.

What is your writing process like?

Up in the air at the moment. It changes a lot over time. Something will work really well for a few months, then suddenly it doesn’t. Most of the time, I can’t seem to write unless I’m sprinting. Usually that’s a solo sprint, but I love writing with other people. I do a little light plotting ahead of time, then let the characters take the reins… which is probably why I hit so many walls throughout a fic.

Do you have any writing quirks?

I don’t know if I have any quirks that are unique to myself. I’m very particular about my format when writing. I can’t write without it being double spaced, times new roman, 12 pt, and justified, which is 100% a product of schools enforcing that format for projects. And I have a hard time actually sitting down to write without the help of writing games like sprints and the word game. Otherwise, I don’t do much editing? I do the bare minimum and post… which isn’t ideal. That’s the opposite of what I’d advise.

Do you prefer posting when you’ve finished writing or on a schedule?

I would love to be someone who can post on a schedule consistently, but it rarely happens. Usually I can only succeed with that when a fic is a part of an event, otherwise I always get behind on my schedule.

Which fic are you most proud of?

You carved the space for my sadness to be seen for once (hold on to me) has a very special place in my heart. Out of my Steddie fics, it’s probably the one that I hold most dear, but I’m incredibly proud of The Man That I Could Be. It’s taken a lot for me to be proud of that one, but it was a whirlwind of an experience. I still go back to it and can’t really believe I wrote it to begin with, even though I have vivid memories of writing some of those scenes.

How did you get the idea for Yours (all along)?

I had an initial idea of doing a teacher AU but also wanted to explore lavender marriage Stobin, so I just… ran with it. I didn’t know where I was going in that first chapter’s first draft, just let Eddie’s voice take over. The plot and idea formed the more he revealed to me, with a few standout points acting as markers to get me through.

When writing Yours (all along), what was something you didn’t expect?

I didn’t expect my big bang artist m0momercy to be inspired by as many scenes as they were! Whenever I write a big bang or event fic, I’m very aware of which scenes I think would be visually compelling versus ones that would be harder to create for. I may dabble in art, but I don’t consider myself an artist, so it really took me by surprise that they were able to take the most random (but beloved – that scare scene is everything to me) scenes and create magic out of my words. I adore them and their work (please go check them out!!), so it was really great getting the honor to work with them on this project.

What inspired Hidden Depths?

This one was based on a prompt for @steddiesummerexchange. I had been wanting to do a nerd Steve fic, so this was the perfect opportunity to explore what that would look like!

What was your favorite part to write from Fuck. I Think I Love You.?

The playlist!! imfinereallyy created the playlist for @strangerthingsreversebigbang and the art to go along with it, so I had the opportunity to create a story around their song choices. I listened to that playlist exclusively (rip my spotify history on that one) while writing it, tried to find new ways to interpret the songs and incorporate them into the fic, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

How do/did you feel writing The Men We've Become?

Honestly, it’s a blur. The first 100k of The Man That I Could Be was written in a month, with the rest over the next few months. It’s a beast of a fic, the longest I’ve ever written. When I think back on that time, I genuinely think something possessed me when writing. I was sitting down and knocking out 5k writing sessions almost daily, tapping into depths I wasn’t really sure I had. It’s kind of insane to me that I finished it.

What was the most difficult part of writing Distance?

I wrote this fic as a part of @steddielovemonth and was doing my own 90-Day writing challenge. Honestly, the hardest part was remembering this was a writing exercise to see a snapshot of Steve and Eddie’s relationship, rather than a longer fic. I wanted it to have the feel of a longer work with the satisfaction of a one-shot. Keeping it short and in the moment, not letting myself get lost in the tangents, and having the fic have a grounded feel was really important to me so I’d hope that I was able to succeed there.

Do you have a favorite scene and/or line from any of your fics?

I know there are lines that I’m proud of but for the life of me, I could not tell you what they are or where to find them. My two favorite scenes that come to mind though are the opener scene in you carved the space for my sadness to be seen for once (hold on to me) and the scene in chapter four of The Man That I Could Be – aka Steve’s breakdown/grief scene.

Do you have any upcoming projects or fics you’d like to share/promote?

Oh gosh. I do plan on writing again soon, with a few FandomTrumpsHate fics coming out by the end of the year and new chapters of you carved the space for my sadness to be seen for once (hold on to me) coming soon. Otherwise, I mod a lot of things! @steddiebingo sign ups start November 1st and @steveharringtonbigbang starts January 1st!

Thank you to our author, @oh-stars, and our nominator, @lady-lostmind! See more of ohstars's works featured on our page throughout the day!

Writer’s Spotlight is every Wednesday! Want to nominate an author? You can nominate them here!

[miwtual]

hey kai if you want could you do a tutorial on how to put gifs inside shapes (like your MARGOT ROBBIE as HARLEY QUINN in the DC EXTENDED UNIVERSE) it looks so good

howdy anon! i’ve answered something similar to this before, but i figured that a proper tutorial would be nice, so thank u for sending an ask about it :) 

as per usual, you will need basic giffing knowledge for photopea, as well as the website itself, to complete this tutorial. this tutorial is also very wordy, but i do have some images to help with the process. if you have any questions about the process, please feel free to send in another ask.

without further ado, let’s go!

so, when making your gifs, the first thing you need to do is make sure that they are the same amount of frames. otherwise, your gif will end up looking strange with one gif looping faster than the other one. 

once you have all of your clips you want to use for the gif you’re making (i will be using two, but you can use more than that!), decide which one you want to be in the shape that you’re going to be choosing. for the sake of this tutorial, i am going to be using a simple circle shape, but you can use any variety of shapes however you’d like. i have some notes below about different ways to get different shapes:

on your left toolbar, directly under the “move” tool, there is the option for a “rectangle select” tool. right clicking this option also allows for you to choose ellipse select for circles. by adding a new layer to your canvas (on the top options, go to layer > new > layer), you can use either of these shapes to make a rectangle or circle, which you can then fill in by going to edit > fill…

on your left toolbar, above the “zoom” and “hand” tools, there should be a rectangle. right clicking this should give you the option for other shapes, such as ellipses, lines, and custom shapes. depending on what you want for your gif, you can choose any of these options for your own gif shape, but beware that these shapes are all fairly limited to what photopea has to offer.

for other shapes that photopea doesn’t offer (like the starburst shape that mattel uses for barbie edits, for example), i will go to google and just look up things like “mattel logo shape png”, or whatever other shape i’m looking for, and try to look for a transparent png. while this does give you a lot of options, you may not be able to find a transparent option (i use remove.bg to help with that!) or you may have to do some editing around the edges to get the shape the way you want it (many of the mattel logos have a big MATTEL in the middle that ruins the edges of the starburst shape, so you’ll have to fix that, for example)

more notes about choosing your shape:

if you get a shape off google, make sure that your cropping fits that shape! if you have a shape that is some weird dimensions that arent a 1x1 ratio, your gif cropping will have to reflect that so it fits in the shape.

you should also know how big you want your shape to be on the finished product — for me, the entire gif canvas is going to be 540x540, so i’m going to make the shaped gif 240x240 so that both the big gif in the background and the shaped gif are visible in the final product. this will all depend on what you are doing for your gifs, though, so play around with different shapes/sizes in another canvas the size of your final product.

first thing’s first, make your gif for within the shape however you want. as you have (probably) seen from other gifsets of mine, there’s multiple ways you can choose to make the gif within your shape: you can do like this edit and have a colored overlay, or you could do like this edit and have normal coloring with a pop of color, or some other thing that you’d like to do! for this edit, i’m going to keep the sanji gif within my shape colored fairly normal with a pop of blue to match his shirt. my gif, as of now (without the shape), looks like this:

from here, add your shape on top of all your layers (as i said before, your gif should be cropped so the shape fits perfectly within the cropped gif!). go to the very bottom of your gif frames, and put that shape directly under the first frame (which is likely titled “_a_Background” or “_a_frm0,50”, depending on how you gif your gifs) while still within the gif folder you most likely have, especially if you follow my tutorials. this part is tedious, but starting with that first frame, go through every frame of your gif, right click, and select the “clipping mask” option. because you have that shape at the very bottom, every layer above it will follow the same clipping mask to put the gif within the shape. after your done, your frames should look something like this:

and now my gif looks like this: 

which isn’t what i want, because i want that blue color in the shape with the rest of the gif! there’s an easy way to fix this, if you’re like me and have that gradient color: click and drag all of your adjustment layers into the folder with your gif (i know, goes against everything i’ve said before in my other tutorials, right?) so that you can do the same thing you did with your frame layers and create a clipping mask for those gradient color layers. you don’t have to do this for the other adjustment layers for your coloring, by the way, just for the gradient color layers! now my gif looks like this:

much better! and now that we have the shaped gif finished and in its shape (make sure you save the psd!), you can sharpen and export your gif by going to file > export as > .GIF and you’ve made your shaped gif! 

now you can make your other gif to be behind the shaped gif; i won’t provide a tutorial for how i made this gif, other than it follows my usual coloring + a gradient layer to make the entire gif blue:

now that you have both of your gifs, we can move on to putting them on the same canvas!

after putting both of your gifs on the same canvas, position the shaped gif wherever you’d like to place it on the canvas. you can center it, place it in a corner, whatever you want! it’s your gif, your choice. i placed my circle sanji gif towards the bottom left corner of the canvas because i wanted to be able to see both the little gif and the larger gif clearly. :) 

from here, you can do a number of things to make the shaped gif stand out; what i did for mine is add a shadow behind the gif and an outline of the circle that’s off centered from the circle gif itself. here’s how i did both of those things:

shadow: double click the shaped gif’s folder to open up the “blending options” pop up menu. check the “drop shadow” option towards the bottom of the list, and adjust it to how you want it to be. once you’re happy with how the shadow looks, click “OK” to close the pop up menu. below are my settings for this particular shadow on this gif, but this may change depending on your own gif (feel free to play around with these settings!):

off-centered outline: this is specifically for circles/rectangles; if you have another shape that you got off google, for example, this part of the tutorial will not work (but if you want to know how to do something like this for a shape like that, i can create another tutorial! just ask <3). create a new layer (layer > new > layer through the topbar menu) and create an ellipses the same size as the circle i created earlier. from here, go to edit > stroke… to make the pop up menu show up (you will not be able to preview this when you edit this layer, so if you’re unhappy with how it looks once you click “OK”, use CTRL+Z to undo and try again!). once you have the shape as you want it, go to select > deselect on the topbar to deselect the section you just made, and use the move tool to move the shape around however you want. if you want to make the shape less intense, change the opacity located near the layers menu (i put mine at 30%). below are the settings for my shape, which you can of course play with as you'd like for your own gifs:

now that you’ve done that, do anything else you’d like to do to your gif — add text, put a watermark, whatever you’d like! after you’re finished with that, save your psd and then go to layer > animation > merge to merge all of your gifs together before going to file > export as > .GIF. and then you’re done! congrats, you’ve just made a shaped gif in photopea! :) 

[jessaerys]

your fav mello/near fics??? thank yeww (also love your drawings!)

oohh this reminds me i should pick up my ff.net archival reclist project up again...

it is of note that it's been a looooong while since i've combed the archives and there's a couple of common tropes i don't usually read due to personal taste, so i'm sure there's a lot of good fic i'm unaware of and/or forgetting about! this has totally renewed my interest in making a comprehensive personal reclist >:) perhaps i'll come back and edit this post every now and then.

i owe comments to nearly everyone mentioned here i am SO sorry. it's a lost skill that i am working on developing again. at the very least i've got everyone in one place so i can go down the list this year. i encourage everyone reading from this reclist to leave a comment too!

i wrote "off the top of my head" but this got VERY long so under the readmore it goes

obligatory classics

• the famous @tierfal 's sidetracked (2010) and full of surprises (2009). rated e and m respectively. these are like the allegorical little black dress in the wardrobe of the platonic ideal of the mellonear oneshot. seem to be pretty well known across the ship fandom • stripped (2009) by blueberryash/@tka-trashfire on tumblr. explicit. i haven't read this in a while but i remember it capturing the delicate gossamer tension of the ship in a way that was sooo bittersweet and nostalgic. • to speak of rules and privilege (2008) also by blueberryash/@tka-trashfire, gen, a manifesto on tenderness, soooooooooo soft, changed the game, near being afraid of thunderstorms was immediately adopted into personal canon. big time influence for the way i write near and mello's pre-canon relationship re: big brother, little brother. • an understanding (2008) by blueberryash/@tka-trashfire, rated T, short and sweet, razor sharp prose, the aesthetics of the little piece live rent free in my head. • dual(2011) by ramasi, @ramasi here i believe. rated m. historians say this might be one of the first examples of mellonear choking kink ever recorded,

•scarification (2012) by gacrux11 on fanfiction.net, rated m, big time dead dove do not eat. sorry this one leans early 2010s era grimdark melodrama but i love it sjkdfkjfd. not enough dead dove fics about the boys if u ask me. • salt in the wound (2007) •tempus fugit (2007), and • white out (2006) by vaudevillain king on fanfiction. net. a beloved rare find. all of them are rather grimdark edgy products of their era, but some of the best the era had to offer. they make me so nostalgic for my teenagehood on fanfiction.net. i get the impression these might've been written even before death note was finished? • birthday smut (2009) by kleine_aster on livejournal. explicit. this one is SO funny to me because it is both really, really good, very in character, but unfortunately it suffers from almost satirical misogyny that afflicted fujoshis back in the day. near literally is like oh that bitch... like. he would not fucking think that but i can edit quickly in my brain as i read. bisexual mello rights! otherwise really sexy imo. i might be writing something that's kind of in conversation with this fic.

RARE finds

(please tell me if you enjoy any of these, i want to feel like an explorer that's brought back treasures from far away lands)

contemporary favorites:

• you've heard about it before and you will hear about it again: the archer ensnared (2023) by jabbernatty, rated e. a jessaerys obligatory syllabus read, the fic that made me go fulltime yaoi disease. i owe so much to jabbernatty they are my white whale my friend my enemy the writer i've psychically imprinted on from the beginning. honestly too scared to even leave a comment given the jessarys archer ensnared lore. may one day may contact and pray i don't come across as insane • postmortem (2023) by the_hemlock true gen, a favorite of ALL time. it's only tangentially mn really, it is 99% about near trying to piece together the mystery of lawlight post-canon, but the characterization and prose are some of if not the best i've ever come across. reads like it could be a piece of canon material. if you only read one fic on this list i'd pick postmortem. • it's friday i'm in love by neallo/@neallo rated m. possibly my all time fave in the neallo cinematic universe. something about the after-hours longing and the standing in the kitchen by the refrigerator lights, as the poets say. i love when stories feel like you're cutting out a window to peer into a larger universe that is just out of reach. perfectly captures what it is like to have a maddening crush • i want to hold you (hostage)(2023) by neallo/@neallo rated e. thee defining fic of this current modern mellonear era. manages to walk the line of kinky/sexy/sweet/fluffy all at once. plot twist of the century in the last chapter. near is properly as bananas insane as mello is in this fic, which is the marker of a good mellonear dynamic. really everything by morgan neallo is a safe bet for a great read • there's nothing i want but you (2023) by neallo/@neallo rated t. wammy's era mellonear obsessiveness that is soooo teenagery and yet a portent of just how codependent they might one day get. cute and ominous. • armageddon/kill game (2024) by bolide/@bolide-archive came out of nowhere a couple of months ago and ascended to the top of the game like a dark horse. rated m, chess au. one of my favorite interior mello narrations and one of the most similar to my own interpretation. such naturally talented prose. i rotate lines from this in my head all the time. still in progress but i have faith that it will be completed :') • how to burn down the sacred loom (2023) by dornishviper/@vriskarlmarx a contemporary CLASSIC. the less you know going in the better. beautiful prose, beautiful structure. they don't make fic like this anymore • the house always wins (2023) by mer_curia/@vivi-scera. screaming with my mouth closed. holds a special place in my heart given that it is my posting that convinced vi to give the ship a try, and i was rewarded with a fic that is so catered to my tastes i honestly had to read it through my fingers. SO good, the manifesto on wammyscest, so rather controversial. heed the warnings. • moonlight (2023) by tsukinousagi/@quicktimeeventfull rated t. an austere, cold little glimpse into a vampire au. it's giving let the right one in. so melancholic. one of the saddest near examinations out there. •proximity tells (2018) by abysmallypresent, rated m. truly lives up to death note's second-by-second minutia while managing to keep up the tension the entire time. great characterization. •silhouettes (2015) by bad blood/eroticcodependence, @wxmmyshouse on tumblr. unrated, post-canon compliant. made me CRY! elegantly short and simple, bittersweet and so so wistful. •arsonist's lullabye (2023) by tzviaariella/@tzviaariella. rated t. this one has a heart-wrenching air of realism to it that exists outside the chaotic universe of death note, one of those examinations of picking up the pieces after the titans have all gone away. very bittersweet.

honorary mentions

• let's die somewhere prettier (2020) by firesafinething also one of my absolute favorites, unfortunately it is discontinued and it is likely it will never be completed. sad! the premise seemed SO promising. in my mind i file it right next to postmortem mentioned above. the exploration of the tragedy of 27 year old near we could have had in a better timeline. one day i will leave a comment so good maybe it will bring back the fic from the land of the dead • august underground by me & @firebuggg rated e, in progress. >:) (shamless self promo)

[thelonelyshore-if]

Yasmin nsfw alphabet please?

Okay I have finally finished Yasmin's alphabet I'm so sorry it took so long y'all. It's below the cut <3

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

Sex hypes Yasmin up, and she’s not really a cuddler. She usually feels very productive afterwards so she might get right back to her day, but she isn’t opposed to cuddling, if that’s what her partner wants. Especially if it’s later at night and they can fall asleep together.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Yasmin likes her thighs and hips quite a bit. On a partner, she's a sucker for lips.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

She has very little opinion on cum on her own, but if it’s something her partner is into she’s perfectly willing to put on a show. Licking someone/a toy clean, tasting her own cum, or her partner’s–while it isn’t a turn on of hers, it can be plenty fun if the audience is into it.

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

There are a few people in town she occasionally sleeps with. There aren't any feelings involved–it's just some casual fun–but all parties agree it's best to keep this quiet. Once MC is in the picture, though, she doesn't really have a desire to see any of them anymore. 

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

Very experienced! Yasmin enjoys sex. She's good at it, and definitely knows what she's doing. 

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

If she's bottoming she enjoys riding her partner or otherwise still physically being on top. When she's topping she prefers either missionary or doggystyle, depending on the day. 

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

She's very playful and teasing, but typically in a flirty/sexy way. She isn't so much into joking around in bed; but she isn’t deadpan, either. Sex is supposed to be fun!

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Depends on the season–if it’s summer she keeps her bikini line very neat and might even style further, if the mood strikes her; if it’s winter, though, she simply keeps things trimmed.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

Yasmin, for all of her ‘I only want to be friends with benefits’, is intense in bed. She can be lighthearted and sexy and teasing, yeah, but she gets into it in a major way. She can be very romantic when lost in the moment, but typically brushes it off afterwards. You were just having fun, yeah? Later in the story, though, if MC pursues a romantic relationship with her, she can be veeeerry romantic in bed. Doting and sweet, when she wants to be.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

She enjoys it, but not as much as sex. Touching herself is fun, and she does it well, but give her a partner any day. Still, it’s a good way to relieve some stress or have some fun if she’s stuck at home for whatever reason.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

Yas is fairly dominant, and she loves being in charge and taking care of her partner. She’s into leather and some light BDSM and punishment and making her partner beg. She has a strap that she gets as lot of use out of. At the same time, she likes doting on her partner, praising them, etc. She’s flexible <3

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

At home…………in theory. She’s a private person, since her reputation in town is important to her, so if asked she’d claim that she’s only really into private sex. Now, that being said, sometimes the mood strikes you, and if your car is parked somewhere fairly hidden…well. What happens, happens ;)

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

Passion and talent both really turn her on. She likes watching someone do something that they’re skilled at, especially if it’s something like a sport or performance. It’s sexy, when somebody cares about things. Also she’s just a flirty person overall, teasing one another also really gets her going.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Roleplay is fun in theory, but she can’t take it seriously in practice. She’s tried it a few times but as soon as either she or her partner started ‘acting’ she would just burst into laughter. It just kills the mood for her.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

Big fan lmao. Yasmin’s favorite thing is watching someone suck off her strap, but she enjoys getting eaten out, too. She likes giving, as well, but does prefer to receive, generally speaking.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

Whatever you want, babe ;)

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

Yas loves quickies. Sneaking away for a quick fuck is exciting and hot, and it can be kind of fun to see what you can get away with. 

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

She’s down for experimenting and risk-taking! She likes changing things up, and is always interested in trying new things; though she is also comfortable sticking with the usual, for the most part.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

As many as her partner can handle. Yas is a big fan of multiple orgasms–giving, especially, if her partner is someone who can have them. At the same time, she’s a fan of quickies, as mentioned, so she’s perfectly happy with something short and sweet, as well.

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

Oh yeah she loves toys. She has a few straps she’s a big fan of, and a collection of other gear she gets a lot of use out of. She enjoys her own toys, of course, but also does really like using them on her partner.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

Depends on how into it her partner is. Yasmin enjoys teasing, but if the person she’s with isn’t super enthused by the idea, she’d rather just get down to it. And she doesn’t enjoy being teased at all.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

Oh Yas is super loud in bed lol. Like, she can be quiet and subtle–especially if she’s being a little irresponsible and isn’t at home–but she likes being able to talk and moan as she pleases.

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

Yasmin is a huge fan of marking and being marked, but only where nobody can see. It turns her on to know that either she’s been marked, or that she’s marked her partner, and they’re the only people who know. Like a secret little show of ownership. She thinks it’s hot (and also cute, in a way).

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

Yasmin loves her body and isn’t shy about showing it off, especially to somebody she’s sleeping with. She’s curvy, with stretch marks on her hips, stomach, and ass. She has a few moles scattered across her body, and shaves off most of her body hair (unless it’s winter).

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

Very. She likes sex, it makes her feel good, and she enjoys doing it as frequently as she can.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

Yas basically can’t sleep afterwards. Instead she’s often energized. This can cause issues if she’s had sex right before bed, but she’s a big fan of taking a shower with her partner to wind down and then falling asleep together <3

[hyperraduo22]

my long list of random dps headcanons

+ includes spencer and stick !! :))))

• neil only has problems with reading in one eye and still to this day cannot figure out why. he assumes it’s genetic atp

• meeks and pitts do not like excessive gore in movies although pitts is more prone to dislike body horror— they won’t get physically sick from looking at gore they just generally don’t like it and get easily squeamish from it

• pitts likes pink lemonade simply cause it’s pink

• whenever knox gets a fortune whether from a fortune cookie or one of those mechanical tellers, he takes it so seriously for the next two weeks

• meeks and todd are slow eaters

• neil is the pickiest eater out of all the poets although he’s slowly learning to get over it and try new foods. cameron and meeks try to encourage him little by little since they used to be picky as well but got over it

• todd has sensory issues when it comes to texture. if he feels something he doesn’t like for a long period of time, he could possibly get anxious and start crying from it. example: he absolutely hates the feeling of shedded snake skin and will never ever stick his hands in those “guess what you’re touching” boxes at those wilderness exhibits— bro is traumatized from it

• despite popular belief of neil hating roller coasters, i think he has a neutral opinion on them and there’s some he can tolerate and some that he does like. although he’s very picky with roller coasters and there’s some he absolutely refuses to go on even with todd

• cameron actually likes trains a lot and hyperfixates on them (and yes there’s a bittersweet story behind it from his childhood)

• pitts loves anything s’mores flavored

• stick knows how to bake really well and the dps always ask (more like beg atp) to be his personal taste testers cause they know the finished product will be delicious

• meeks cannot eat spicy food for the life of him. he tried cajun food once and he loved it but some of the cheyenne peppers knocked him tf out- like his face was redder than his hair

• knox loves rooftop dining (rich bastard)

• charlie has a personal barber that he always goes to even when he becomes an adult

• todd’s mom is a lesbian (( i wanna post my dps family headcanons so bad cause this deserves context😭 ))

• pitts grew up with a compromised immune system and spent his days inside a lot during late elementary school and a little bit into middle school. since meeks was also pressured to do good academically at such a young age and ended up staying inside more often, the two bonded over that and meeks didn’t mind taking care of pitts when he got sick<3

• charlie and cameron are really good at golf

• cameron prefers taking chewable pills whenever possible since he has trouble swallowing larger pills

• meeks can name the 50 states in alphabetical order off the top of his head

• todd and pitts have that friendship where they always support each other no matter if they both know what they’re doing/saying is dumb and absolutely wrong by all logical standpoints

• pitts is better in biology and anatomy. the only reason why he’s passing chemistry is cause he’s good with remembering chemical reactions and organizing his work during lab projects. otherwise stoichometry fucks him up badly

• todd chews on the ice whenever he has certain cold drinks

• stick crochets in his free time— he even crocheted a blanket for spencer and spencer still uses it to this day :(((

• spencer can get really invested in dramas or sports shows and end up having really dramatic reactions at the things that happen on tv— stick has witnessed this once and bro was dying laughing the entire time. every since then, the duo watch tv together and it feels like a therapeutic bond between the two

• ^speaking of spencer and stick, they’re childhood besties!! they have that bond where even when they separate for long periods of time, they’re able to reunite and catch up/have nothing change between them

• because todd loves bird watching and meeks loves stargazing, they invite each other whenever they’re doing those activities and hype each other up whenever they spot something rare (ie. rare bird species or a rare celestial event) <3

• because stick likes to feed hummingbirds around the campus from time to time, todd sometimes joins him so he can also appreciate the birds

• whenever he reads up that an eclipse is coming up, meeks gets all the poets together on the rooftop to watch it

• pitts actually knows how to play a few songs on piano but hasn’t touched a piano in a very long time

• charlie learned to play clarinet in a orchestra/symphony that played for the town and raised money for local charities—that’s right. he’s so rich that his parents didn’t enroll him in private lessons but rather a more professional band class with other kids. he originally wanted to try out the oboe just cause (he also secretly loved the oboe solo in that one tchaikovsky piece) but his parents obviously made him do clarinet instead. he would later teach himself saxophone

• charlie has an immunity to ibuprofen and some other over the counter drugs (don’t ask why. he’s probs the type of person that gets headaches or body aches easily- whether self induced or not- and took so much ibuprofen over the course of a month that it doesn’t work anymore)

• cameron has sensitive teeth and gets toothaches easily from cold foods like ice cream. therefore, he’s careful with his portions when eating certain desserts, takes smaller sips when drinking water at restaurants (or he just asks to have no ice in his drinks), and he prefers drinking room temperature water

• stick is scared of butterflies- like i’m talking bro has a full on phobia of them cause of some traumatic childhood incident- but still thinks they’re really beautiful :(((

• ^because of this- when walking outside, spencer will make sure there aren’t butterflies nearby for stick. he’ll either swat them away or gently pick them up and make them fly away elsewhere like the true best friend he is🫡

• no matter the circumstance, spencer just does not give two fucks about true crime whatsoever. you can make him watch a true crime doc and he’ll either get bored or be like “really? that’s all the killer can do?” “…couldn’t they like- i don’t know- not enter a complete stranger’s home??” “i could’ve beaten up that guy you know.”

• knox and spencer have a brotherly relationship and have known each other since middle school. knox would invite spencer to tag along with him and charlie, obviously tease him in the middle of class, and he’d ask for help on school work. plus knox and charlie have stood up for him on multiple occasions and help raise his confidence in social situations

• stick has hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) episodes from time to time. sometimes they sync up with spencer’s random nosebleeds and they both sit in the nurse’s office together.

—————

okay now i wanna post dps family headcanons and stick and spencer headcanons now🏃‍♂️🗣️

let me and todd’s lesbian mom cook

[alexanderwales]

Art and the Artist

I generally prefer to read things without knowing much about the author. There aren't that many cases where it adds much to the work to know that they were a plumber before they got into writing, or that they immigrated from Jamaica, or that they served in World War II. To my thinking, a piece of media should stand on its own and not need the context of the author's life story. If you have to open up with "this story is about the Holocaust" then in my opinion, you've already failed as an author.

With that said, it's often inevitable. Sometimes it's just the nature of the work itself, and it would bleed into your understanding even if there weren't a little "about the author" blurb at the end. Sometimes a story is painful obvious in how personal it is, or the metaphor to the real world is so poignant that it's impossible not to make the connection. And sometimes you just get a sense of a person from their writing, particularly if you've read a lot of their writing. It can be the authorial voice you come to understand, the things they choose to show you, the way their mind works, and you think to yourself "yeah, I could get along with them".

And other times, you find yourself drawn to the author because they're the person who best knows their own work. A book leaves lingering questions, and it might be better for you to understand it by communing with other people, but the author is often right there, and you want to hear their takes on their own work, what they were thinking, what lies behind the scenes, the cut chapters and the ways the ending might have been different. You finish gobbling up what the author has prepared for you, and then you gobble up the scraps in the kitchen, and when that's not enough, you start gobbling up the author: you read interviews, you read their blog, you start as a fan of their work and become a fan of them.

Sometimes their understanding of their own work does not match your understanding, and that can be a little bit heartbreaking. Sometimes the stuff behind the curtain is awful and bad, worsening your enjoyment of the text because now it seems phony and poorly thought out. Sometimes an author turns out to be a piece of shit.

Usually, I can move past it. If I like a book or a movie, then I like it for the feelings that it produces in me, and the person who created it is irrelevant except maybe for the fact that they're getting $5 from me or whatever, which is not the level of microutilions that I generally worry about.

Sometimes it impacts my understanding of the work itself, casting a shadow over the things that I once felt, tainting the art.

I was a big fan of Louis CK. The self-deprecating humor did it for me, the introspection and irreverence, the way he was saying things that felt real and true, things that I had always noticed but never really considered. And of course I found him funny. But then there were allegations, and his mea culpa, and I stopped finding it funny. Partly that's because his comedy was autobiographical, so the taint was worse than it might have otherwise been, but part of it was the comedy itself: if the comedy rests on me recognizing myself in Louis CK's stories about himself, I'm going to be less able to do that if drawing those comparisons gives me a curdled milk feeling.

I was a fan of Buffy and Dollhouse and Firefly and Cabin in the Woods and Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog, and I think that these don't suffer nearly as much from being from the mind of Joss Whedon. It's easier to dissociate the stories from the man, and harder to read his personal shittery into the character arcs and setting details and elemental units of plot. Some of that is just the medium: comedy specials are the product of a singular vision, while television shows and movies are the result of team of people working together. Even then, I think shitty people can make good art, so long as they're good at separating their shiftiness from their art. Most people with a bit of awareness would do this naturally, I think: they know what's unpalatable, and present an image to the world, which also comes from the art they make.

Information about the artist informs a reading of the art, as much as we might try to have it not do that. I think some art survives revelations better than others. Someone who writes about murders being revealed as a murderer certainly seems like it would poison my enjoyment of their books. But it's the nature of art that's it's all pretend, and sometimes people don't create because they're spewing self-confession onto the page. Then, I think, you're usually safe.

I hadn't written this with Neil Gaiman in mind: it was sitting in my drafts folder, as so many posts are. But I think Gaiman's work will, for me, survive the accusations, even if the man himself is exiled. I'm certain there will be passages and plots that read differently, places where he can be seen defending himself, chapters that are now unseemly. But I think that for me, the stink of his crimes will wash off quickly, and I'm hopeful that unlike other cases, separating the art from the artist is easier for me.

[megumi-fm]

26th to 30th Apr; doa🚲 complete!!

hi. gah. okay. here's my wrap up for the month

📝 prepped for and completed the last set of internal tests for this degree [2/2] (which I got through after much cribbing and whining and quite literally projecting study topics onto my blorbos 👍 ) 📝 started GRE prep!

🎓 got some gradecard related paperwork done 🎓 spoke to my prof regarding my internship deliverables for uni—report format, certificate requirements, etc etc

📥 I voted! it was the first central elections since I turned to an adult and the whole experience was quite interesting

💻 completed a bunch of tasks for my internship

💻 made like a super extensive flowchart about all the work done at my internship which took me like a total of 20+ hours T-T 💻 finished preparing my Uni Internship presentation! 💻 submitted the presentation to the assistant guide, waiting on her response to make changes atm

🍶 7+ glasses of daily water intake 🎵 svt's new single is out and I've been going insane about it and thus this challenge comes to an end... I had started this off as an 18day daily habit tracker but then it kind of grew out into a challenge for the month. Special thanks to Yumi the loml <3 (@thelastneuron) for starting the Days of April challenge (Yumi idk when you'll see this but i miss you and I hope you've been kicking ass during your hiatus). also massive thanks to Zip (@zipstidbits) for leaving the kindest comments/tags on my post during the past week and to Tanishka (@booksbluegurl) who is literally the sweetest and has been sending in asks and keeping me company during this challenge <3

there's a lot more i wanna yap about in regards to how the month went but I'll leave that under the tags xD goodnight besties <3

month end brainrot

april started off with dips and more dips but by the end of the month it feels like I've caught up. productivity is a wave so as long as I keep riding at it i'll be okay.

also. progress is cumulative. even the seemingly inconsequential completion of daily tasks has lead to an overall improvement through the week. things add up

I spent a lot of time this month (and moreso this past week) feeling dejected that I've been leaving my tracker posts (and my digital planner entries) incomplete... but like. the whole point of trackers and planners (and this studyblr) is to get work done. work is the priority and the tracking is a means to an end. so if im getting work done that is already a win. yeah... i've had to keep reminding myself that

there is no one-tool-fix for tracking and journalling. what works for planning out one task will not work for the other. I need to strop trying to fit all my plans into one formulaic strategy box

on that note. it's time to return to handwritten journaling. digital journalling (notion + YPT + discord + tumblr) was fun while it lasted <3 but my brain needs novelty again so it's time i switch back. I think I finally have an idea for a system that could be sustainable for me... although I say that every time I switch to a new form of tracking. but hey. as long as it helps me get work done for whatever duration of time, it's good enough

using kpop and kdrama references to make notes and study really paid off. ngl I only did it cause I was super desperate but incorporating stuff I couldn't understand with a topic I really like paid off. It also gave me the motivation and momentum to study for much longer than I otherwise would have

last but not least. my water intake has been really good this month! I've also been eating healthy and I've been cooking more my phone usage has also been reduced by a lot. sure none of them have had a perfect streak but i started at zero and it feels like I've levelled up quite a bit. the exercise component has been a bit difficult to maintain given my workload :/ i need to figure out what to do about that...

yep. that's it for now. this month really tired me out, I think im gonna lay off daily challenges for a while. For now I guess I'll stick to my (bi?tri?)weekly tracker posts xD

[imagitory]

Do you think Wish would have been better if they kept the concept of romance between Asha and the star boy, and the kind and queen being a villainous couple?

TL;DR...maybe.

I admit, I do really like human!Star and Magnifico/Amaya being a villainous couple as concepts -- but I don't think adding those ideas alone would've fixed Wish's shortcomings. Because I strongly believe the main reason so much of the Wish fandom has latched onto the idea of a romance for Asha in particular comes down to people feeling more for their mental AU concepts of Asha and Star than for Asha and the rest of her canon cast in the real finished product. There are no relationships in Wish -- ones featuring Asha or otherwise -- that I feel really prompt much investment or emotion in the audience.

Asha's mom and grandpa really don't have much time devoted to them, especially early on when we could establish some real history and pathos in their relationships with Asha. (Positive examples of this would be Ember and her dad in Elemental, Tiana and James and Eudora in The Princess and the Frog, or Mama Coco and Miguel in Coco.) We never even learn Asha's mom's dream even though it's picked up multiple times and the narrative makes such a big deal about Magnifico crushing it. The few lines discussing Asha's deceased father could've been cut from the story altogether and we would've lost nothing. Asha's friend group gets so little focus as individuals that it's hard to even remember most of their names. They were clearly envisioned as just "the Seven Dwarves but as teens," and honestly, them being vaguely like the Dwarfs is the only real impact they leave on a lot of people by the end. Or did a bunch of kids that went to go see the movie beg their parents for dolls of Simon and Bazeema after the movie was over? Asha and Star's dynamic can't be that interesting because Star doesn't spark any real character growth or change in Asha, nor does Asha really bond emotionally with Star. Star honestly just floats around looking cute for most of the movie, rather than doing that much of consequence. Valentino doesn't provide any significant emotional support for Asha, the way that even other cute Disney "pets" like Pascal or Pua do for isolated characters like Rapunzel and Moana. He also doesn't advance her journey in any meaningful way like Sebastian or Jacques and Gus do for Ariel and Cinderella, respectively. Asha and Magnifico's hero-villain relationship has no teeth because they have no real history prior to the events of the story (unlike Ursula using Ariel as a way to get back at her father Triton or Mother Gothel raising Rapunzel in isolation in an attempt to use her hair's magic to keep her young) and they don't serve as any kind of narrative foil to each other (unlike Jafar, who like Aladdin also uses magic and deception to try to advance his own goals, or Scar, who like Simba at the beginning of the movie "just can't wait to be king" and is focused way more on the perks of kingship rather than the responsibilities). Even Amaya and Asha can't have much of a relationship because there's no time set aside for it, and even if Amaya put in a good word for Asha with Magnifico, she didn't speak out on Asha's behalf after Magnifico vindictively cast her aside and really only decided to fight alongside Asha after Magnifico "went too far" by threatening Amaya herself (as opposed to, say, anyone else).

When my mum and I went to go see Wish, we came out of the theater feeling oddly blase about the whole story. My mum even -- upon me asking her about her thoughts on this topic before I sat down to write this -- admitted that although she "wanted to see evil defeated," and all that, she honestly just hadn't cared about any of the characters that much. She wanted Magnifico to lose because it was justice for Magnifico to lose -- not because she was actively rooting for Asha, her friends, or Rosas overall. She wanted good to triumph and evil to fail, but none of the characters and their relationships had made her that invested in seeing how that came about. And considering that every single character in every story ever written is largely shaped by the relationships they have with other characters, that means that Wish's primary failing is not a lack of romance, either for its main lead or its villains --

It's a lack of love.

Any kind of sincere, selfless, development-inducing, chemistry-fueled love. Not necessarily romantic love -- Disney's Revival work has actually shown just how diverse love can be through films like Zootopia, Encanto, and Frozen -- but real love between the characters, built on the back of history and camaraderie and meaningful screen time. Love that adds layers to their personality, fuels their choices and actions, and ultimately helps them bloom into better, more complete people. Instead I would argue that the only "love" in Wish is with ideas from past Disney projects -- that's why there are more Easter eggs and overt meta references to other projects in this movie than there are scenes that actively stir your emotions. You know -- the way Mulan does when she decides to steal her father's armor, or Marlin does when he gingerly picks up Nemo's cracked egg in his flippers and cradles it, or Cinderella's stepsisters do when they rip apart the dress the mice made for Cinderella, or Pinocchio does when he watches in horror as Lampwick turns into a donkey, or Tarzan does when he comforts Kala after he comes out dressed in his biological father's old clothes and she starts to cry.

The reason a lot of fans love these two ideas -- villain!Magnifico/Amaya and human!Star/Asha -- so much is because these two relationships, even just in concept art, prompted more emotion out of them than any relationship in the entire finished film.

Perhaps if that same level of emotion was brought out in these relationships in a real movie, that would've helped, but only if the rest of the film had also been trimmed down and edited so as to help tell a story with those two elements. Slim down the overstuffed cast. Have Asha's family actually have a point, or cut them. Give Asha and Magnifico some sort of real history and/or compare-contrast dynamic. Develop Star as a character. Give both Star and Asha character arcs. Make the music more essential to telling the story.

Without a lot of additional changes on top of those two concepts being used, I think the ideas of a hero and villain couple would've only just made the list of ideas that were only half-baked in the final product longer. After all, if Star was Asha's love interest, you'd still really have to have good writing and a lot of chemistry between the two characters in order to sell your audience on a love story between them. Not saying it can't be done -- Tangled and Elemental both did it quite well -- but just throwing the two characters together as is (namely, rather underdeveloped) and making them romantic partners by itself isn't enough. Honestly, I think a platonic or even familial-esque relationship between Star and Asha could've been just as powerful, if that love between them really came through. Just look at the bonds between characters like Judy and Nick from Zootopia or Miguel and Hector in Coco. Even keeping Star as less explicitly human could've been fine, if the relationship between them and Asha was strong enough. Stitch and Lilo's relationship is rock-solid in Lilo and Stitch, and Stitch isn't even remotely human. Even Soul did something kind of interesting with Joe Gardner and his relationship with 22 by giving them something of a mentor-student bond. Maybe a quasi-"young parent/child" relationship between Asha and Star could've even been interesting, if it was written well!

I do think both ideas had great potential in giving Wish more of an identity that could help set it apart from its predecessors -- I mean, we've never had a human character have a romance with a supernatural being or a villainous couple in a Disney animated film before -- but including them wouldn't have fixed Wish by itself.