#i feel such an extreme detachment from my body

[thependancer]

An essay on why The Voice of The Cold and The Broken can handle Fury breaking them apart.

**Spoilers for Pristine Cut!!**

The Voice of The Cold and The Broken are one of the few voices able to survive being torn apart by the Fury. Of the Voices that make it to the Fury, The Contrarion leaves first due to boredom. The Hero is next to go as the pain becomes unbearable. The Stubborn perseveres through still however even he can't handle much more.

However, The Cold and The Broken are able to outlast the torture. They manage to even tire out the Fury. So the question is simple, how come these two voices survive? Even when you're just atoms, they are still there, but how?

Lets start with The Cold. The Cold is, in his own words, "unfeeling". He isn't completely detached from feeling, he is just able to disregard it no matter how big or small it may be. This ability is also seen in The Moment of Clarity where despite enduring endless torture, he still acts as himself while the other voices are thoroughly broken.

The Cold is able to endure the pain of the Fury reducing you to atoms as he can simply disregard it. He is completely detached from his body. Hence, he can confidently answer yes to the Fury's question "Are you still here? Are you still you?" Being detached from the body means that he is still here and he is still him. He never thought of himself as the body so why should his identity be threatened by affecting the body? This allows him to withstand the pain. And this detachment is also visible with his attitude after the torture. He is still as "unfeeling" as ever. He does not learn anything from this. He sees the Fury has given up and instead of comforting her, he justs exclaims that the Fury is just like him. That they both just want to feel something. She wanted to see if she would anything if she tortured you and The Cold wanted to endure the torture to feel something. Only when the role is reversed, that you inflict pain on her that when they both can actually feel something, whatever that something is. I believe it is regret. The Cold regrets his inability to feel but quickly disregards it as he does with every emotion, while the princess regrets her torture and we do not get to see what happens to her after she experiences this something. However, that is just my interpretation.

Now moving on to The Broken. The Broken can come to the Fury from the Tower or the Adversary. I will be discussing the Adversary one specifically. In this scenario, you realized the hopelessness of the situation before The Stubborn. You broke. For The Broken, everything is utterly hopeless. So when you reach the Fury, The Broken is able to see that even she thinks whatever she is doing is utterly hopless. He finds connection. He craves that connection. The Fury will tear him apart? It matters as much as the world at this point in that it doesn't matter at all. She is broken and The Broken realizes she wants us to feel what she feels. So he lets himself be torn apart. He is the complete opposite of The Cold. The Cold disregarded the pain and so was able to survive but gained nothing from the experience ultimately. The Broken accepted the pain. He learnt how the Fury felt. He saw the fear in The Hero's voice and comforted him. He reassured The Stubborn that winning and losing didn't matter. He spread his understanding to even the narrator, who had to witness and describe the grueling torture, which is another way of experiencing it.

The Broken, the one who needed comfort the most in any other route, here we see that he is able to handle pressure extremely well. Here, he is still broken, but he is still here. He can see the Fury rages because we hurt her. He can see that the other voices are afraid and hurt and he can comfort them. He feels everything and extends that feeling to everyone who needs it. And most importantly when you reach the mirror, he comforts you. "It's going to be okay.", he says.

And so by disregarding your feelings or by accepting them, you are able to hold yourself despite literally being torn to atoms. Personally I think both of these routes are beautiful.

[love4evalu-art]

Oh my gaaaaahhh Viktor nuestro que estas en el cielo santificado sea tu nombre–

I watched Arcane Act III the same day it came out on Netflix. I can't get my mind off the last episode, more specifically the scenes with Viktor and Jayce.

I have a lot of things to talk about (coftimebombcof) but I'm going to focus on jayvik because this fanart is about them jajaja.

The whole scene, the animation, it was like seeing heaven itself. It was all so beautiful, so perfect and fluid. Viktor's expression when he realized things, the love in Jayce's eyes, the adoration in her words, it was the most beautiful confession I have ever heard in fiction. the revelation that everything, everything was about them even before Arcane began, with Viktor giving the gem to child Jayce, only reinforced in an extremely spectacular way that Jayce and Viktor are soulmates, beyond romance or friendship, they are destined to meet and feel love or fascination for each other in all universes, in all timelines.

There's something I read on Twitter that I really liked and I'm going to take it as canon; when Jayce hugs Viktor and shows him the truth with the visions, we're seeing everything, everything through Jayce's eyes, both us and Viktor. So, Viktor was able to witness Jayce's perception of him, noticing all the love and admiration that was directed at him.

For the first time in his life, and through Jayce's eyes, Viktor was able to see himself as something more than a sick man, destined to die and rejected by the world. For the first time, Viktor saw himself as a person worthy of love. And I think it was there that for once, he genuinely loved himself for who he is. So it makes sense that "only you can show me this" because it's Jayce who will love Viktor despite everything, who will understand him.

While on the other hand, it is Jayce whom Viktor, despite his physical changes, despite becoming almost a deity, whom he will continue to love and appreciate above all things, it is Jayce whom he will yearn for despite being detached from everything else around him (which can be clearly seen when seeing that even being a deity and within that celestial space, it is the blanket that Jayce gave Viktor when he woke up that covers his body).

Jayvik is one of the most beautiful and well-crafted relationships (couple, friendship, whatever) that I have ever witnessed in fiction, and I will be eternally grateful to the team behind Arcane for that. Thank you for letting us enjoy such beautiful soul mates.

Well, people, that was my essay about Jayvik, if there are inconsistencies it's because I'm writing this with google translate 🙏😌

[t4tstarvingdog]

i think i have to become more transgender

[stelashe]

There's always something so alien and off putting in North Europeans movies. It's like watching a world that is quite similar to yours but different,off and sinister

[sagevalleymusings]

Not to shit all over Canton Winer's extremely small and self-selecting sample of queer asexuals, but

the term agender was coined in 2006

the entire premise of The Second Sex was about how womanhood was defined as what manhood was not

The entire concept of "gender critical" is about how gender doesn't exist and has been integral to separatist feminism for over thirty years

Canton Winer is not the first person to use the term "gender detachment." I searched Google, Google Scholar, and JSTOR, and found a little over 30 results from as early as the mid aughts

Increased rates of non-gender conforming identities in asexual populations is already well established. In order to have non-conforming identities in either you have to have already examined your identity. Canton does admit this latter half with no mention of prior scholarship.

I can't find Canton's Gender Detachment thesis on JSTOR or Google Scholar but no examination of gender and sexuality can draw solid conclusions without discussing age and race, at minimum, since these two things have radical effects on how gender and sexuality are perceived

It's also a well studied phenomenon that cis people do not have a concrete sense of gender identity - much in the same way that white people do not have a concrete sense of racial identity. Their privilege as a cis person means that they do not need to think about their gender. "Gender Detachment" isn't a new concept - it is the default.

I tend to distrust people who say "research on [this topic] is pretty slim" because what it means is that they haven't done their research. Searching for asexuality in JSTOR yields at least 200 results, which is smaller than, for example, women, but the oldest cited source (and again this is just on JSTOR) is from 1973.

At some point Canton says "Almost all of my gender detached respondents were assigned female at birth" which is extremely telling in and of itself because this information is nearly useless without context (because knowing they are afab doesn't tell us if they are cis), and actually useless in context. Given what they've said about their sample here and other places, it looks like only 8 or so of the 77 were men to begin with, which means you actually can't draw any meaningful results about gender detachment among men literally at all. That's too small a sample size by an actual magnitude.

Like yes I do think it's helpful for someone this self-important social media savvy to bring awareness to this concept, but from what I've read so far this sounds... I don't know if there's a better word for it other than mansplaining, which I dislike using on non-binary persons, but this is where we're at. You want to be an allosexual amab *inventing terminology* for asexual afabs then as an asexual afab I get to call that mansplaining.

You run in lesbian circles and you discover immediately that this idea of frustration, apathy, and irresolution towards gender has been explored from a scholarly perspective for decades. Lines like "but that work has been mostly theoretical" and "My findings complicate the (often unstated) assumption that everyone “has” a gender identity" are so unhinged from real experiences of lesbian activists *who have written about this* as to be delusional. This PhD candidate has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

Since when have we been assuming "everyone" has a gender identity? Has that concretely been established? Or is that something this author is assuming is an assumption? Because it hasn't been my experience. I've had to push at every job I've ever worked at to change their forms from asking about a person's sex to asking about a person's gender in an attempt to be more inclusive to those whose gender doesn't match their sex. Does that imply everyone has a gender? No, of fucking course not. It implies that we still don't have good language for talking about this, and maybe never will. It implies that asking about people's sex is outdated and asking about people's gender only makes that obvious. It implies that patriarchy is so embedded into our systems of hierarchy that attempts to make that hierarchy more inclusive will still, inevitably, institute a hierarchy with their solutions.

And I would sincerely hope, though I am not convinced that this was done, that his research doesn't simply drop this term and peace out. Because "inventing" a gender theory term this close to describing gender critical biological essentialism without talking about how close it is to gender critical biological essentialism is irresponsible scholarship. There is an entire movement of women using their "gender detachment" to oppress trans women. If you're going to talk about this, you need to talk about that.

i feel so seen!!

(twitter thread)

[b4ddprincess]

the void state is easyy, but you're still thinking otherwise?

rant, void state explanation, void state induction, you shouldn't allow feelings to hold you back

i'm sure you all have seen many posts like this. but do y'all just read them and not put any effort into understanding how easy it is to get your dream life?

𝐈. 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐕𝐎𝐈𝐃 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐄 . . .

the void state is described as conscious with 0 physical awareness or pure consciousness. the void state isn't an otherworldly dimension, or a multiverse, or a different plane you're "entering". the void state is simply another state of consciousness.

but here's the problem.... no matter HOW 👏🏼 MANY 👏🏼 TIMES 👏🏼 y'all read, "the void state isn't an otherworldly dimension, or a magical place you're entering." IT STILL DON'T REGISTER IN Y'ALL HEADS??? why is tht? we literally tell y'all like it is, and y'all like y'all searchin for a specific answer, so you refuse to accept the fact that the void state is just a 🙌🏽 state of consciousness 🙌🏽 LIKE ANY OTHER STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

you're NOT going anywhere, you're NOT leaving your body, you're NOT gonna end up sumwhere deep in space, and you're NOT dying! IT'S LITERALLY 👏🏼 JUST 👏🏼 CONSCIOUSNESS 👏🏼 DARLIN! what more of an explanation y'all want?

y'all are reading this post cuz you are conscious, and y'all are aware that you are reading a post, becuz you are aware of your surroundings, and most of us use our 5 physical senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. pure consciousness is simply you being conscious, but without any physical awareness, and you aren't using your 5 senses.

𝐈𝐈. 𝐕𝐎𝐈𝐃 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐄 𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐔𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 . . .

now, the "void" state is extremely easy to induce. as in, there are many ways to induce pure consciousness. however, the main way to induce this state is to detach from what you're experiencing/physically feeling. stop hyperfocusing on your surroundings and how your body feel and be in the moment with your thoughts. the only reason why some of us get "kicked out" of the void state is because our awareness is suddenly placed on our surroundings or our bodies. stay calm. you're literally fine. when you try to feel your body, you will tap out of the state because you're bringing awareness to what you're experiencing/physically feeling. that's why you must stay relaxed and still to stay in this state of consciousness.

relax your body -> focus on the darkness behind your eyelids -> affirm/daydream/think -> pure consciousness

guys, guys, guys.... its so EASYYY to induce pure consciousness that y'all should honestly be embarrassed of yourselves...

the void state is described as conscious with 0 physical awareness

👆🏽 the one part y'all often forget. "0 physical awareness." y'all love to hyperfocus on y'all bodies wayyy too much and that's why you didn't induce the void state then. y'all love to rush every single thing, and it's worse when you're rushing at night time? of all times??

just take slow deep breaths until you don't wanna, relax your mind, don't think about the void state, relax your body, swallow if you want to, adjust your body if you want to, focus on your affirmations/thoughts/daydreams, focus on the darkness behind your eyelids and that 👏🏼 is 👏🏼 all! 👏🏼

you will literally induce pure consciousness at that moment. and FOR CRYING OUT LOUDDD it's JUST........ you being conscious with 0 physical awareness. ok? you're not "eNtErInG" anything.

and you're NOT gonna do this with a trying attitude. you hear me?

i DON'T wanna hear it. don't come to me with no crocodile tears, yuh hear me? cuz i literally told y'all what to do, but you wanna rush it and then flood my inbox.

i can understand sum of y'all reasons, but the REST OF YALL..... y'all hadda be jokin..

(my caribbean dialect wanna peek thru on dis post so badly 😒)

𝐈𝐈𝐈. 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐃𝐍'𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐖 𝐅𝐄𝐄𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 𝐓𝐎 𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐃 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊 . . .

ahh yes... desperation. one of our biggest enemies... followed by impatience... followed by our doubts... and the cycle repeats. but where was this desperation rooted? at the thought of getting all of your desires instantly? at the idea that the void state is hard to achieve, and you must do everything right to "get in" to get your desires? where is your desperation rooted?

and then there's fear....... the biggest enemy here.

what exactly are you scared of? failure? living a new dream life in the outer world? what is making you fearful?

if you're fearful of not being able to induce the void state awake, tht's doubt. if you're fearful of time running out on you, tht's desperation and impatience. fear is the main source of those other feelings you experience. you shouldn't allow fear, to control your actions, cuz you're just holding yourself back. and i know you don't want to be held back, but you keep holding yourself back. you run method to method and you may find yourself circling back to a method, and then you circle back to another method... you keep running away from one of the easiest ways of inducing pure consciousness (the 2nd easiest way is to decide and tht has to do with states/loass, but we're not on tht rn).

how many times do i have to tell you the simple things to do to induce pure consciousness? and how many times y'all gonna ignore and ask for a method and then tell me "i didn't get in 😔"? yall are complicating the void state too much, and it NEEDS to stop!

you can literally induce pure consciousness at this time, but no... you're scared of failure when you actually can't fail. it's either you're focusing on your body, or you're not. it's either you're focusing on time, or you're not.

plus, y'all constantly make the void state sound like this big thing, when it actually isn't.

but anywho, i better see a bunch success stories in my inbox, even if it's just a 1 second experience in the void state. i'm gonna delete any asks tht are already answered in my posts, and i genuinely hope yall reflect on this post and apply 💗

i've said my piece.

[aajjks]

Jealousy (m)

synopsis. you love it when he treats you like his slut

warnings. YÄNDËRË, ËXPLÏCÏT CÖNTÉNT, döm tojï, smüt, röügh fückïng, dẽgrädtiön (rëcïëvïng), slüt-shàmïng, pröfänïty, ëxtrëmë pösěssïvënëss, cryïng.

note. hehe. I suck at writing smut, MDNI. SHARE FEEDBACK PLEASE ILY.

Toji is a very jealous man, you should’ve known better.

He’s territorial man, extremely possessive of what is his, he had made that clear the first day you started to date him.

He likes to be blunt, he's a straightforward man.

But yet you wanted to test him, you wanted to test his anger.

So when you were out at dinner a few hours ago, you did not expect to be fucked mercilessly just hours later on his bed.

“You fuckin whore!” He curses at you, pounding into your cunt at a fast pace, you Moan, almost frying from the immense pleasure the movements give you, the pain is barely there anymore.

Oh he makes you feel so good.

It was all worth it, making him jealous was intentional, he’s never rough with you, it frustrates you almost, he’s soft, way too soft, sometimes it gets boring, you like him being gentle, but… you know a man like him Is not like that with everyone.

You know, he treats you special and you love that, you love being his special girl, but damn.

You want him fuck you like he hates your guts.

“Look at you crying like a slut, creamin’ all over me like that.” He’s so filthy with his words right now and you love every second of it. “This is what you wanted right?” Your vision is blurry, your mind is numb, nothing but the feeling of him fucking you so good has you mesmerized but you see the way he clenches his jaw, beads of sweat flow down his forehead, his dark hair sticking onto his face, his orbs are so dark, his eyebrows are furrowed.

Oh he looks so sexy, his teeth nibble on his lower lip.

yes! yes!

You want him to ruin you.

You scream into your mind, too fucked out to physically give him the answer.

“Now your big fuckin mouth is all silent, eh?” He rolls his hips against in such a delicious way you let out a whimper, your eyes roll back to your head at the sensation.

“‘Got me so fuckin angry and jealous, baby.” He confesses, his face is so close to yours, his features are more clear than before, he is so beautiful it makes you want to cry.

Well, you already are.

Toji’s scent is all over your body, all over the large room, you love him so much, you know he loves you so much too.

But it makes you feel so happy as he rants about his jealousy while being so deep inside you.

“Fuckin whore!” He seethes, his mouth attacks your neck, its all teeth and tongue, his wet tongue licks your skin, the feeling is so ticklish that you whine, Toji ignores it and bites the skin hard, sucking marks so he can mark his territory on you.

He’s going so rough on you that you’re sure you see stars right now, your walls flutter around him, your breathing gets older and louder.

Toji curses under his breath, if it is even possible, you feel him getting harder, “f-fuck, quit tightening around me- gonna make me cum..” he groans, his mouth finally detaches from your neck and he kisses your mouth full.

You think you’re going to cum too.

“Nah uh.. sluts don’t get to cum.” He growls into your mouth, you whine as a year escapes your haze filled eyes.

He knows your body so well.

“Shoulda known better than to make me jealous babe, now ‘m gonna make you my own cum dump, jus’like you wanted, right baby?”

Oh shit.

[ginnysgraffiti]

jealousy, unprotected sex, violence, anger, cursing, fingering, fainting, 18+

&. PAUL ATREIDES x yn

could you blame yourself?

no, not really.

not the way you claimed it, at least.

you always placed so much trust and respect in the visions that paul witnessed in his dreams, for they usually concerned the holy war or future events not clear to his complete awareness yet.

however, you never expected something like this.

you couldn't say exactly if it was due to the fact that you and paul had established an increasingly stronger connection and intimacy, but you were sure that it was definitely because of other factors.

paul and his intuitions had been (disturbingly) accurate for weeks, and your boyfriend was even able to see your sexual needs in his visions.

you liked it, yes. it turned you on like hell, and you knew it had the exact effect on him.

you recognized paul's gaze when he had visions of that kind, you glimpsed it through his hungry eyes and you experienced it when his strong hands destroyed your body.

you lived with a certain constant tension, but your inner self knew that you just wanted that moment to come.

"shut that fuck up! take my cock like the slut you are!!" paul's hand slapped your butt, causing a bitter tear to fall from your face.

this excited him greatly and with his other arm he twisted your legs around his waist, making you arch your back to welcome his wet and warm dick as deeply as you could.

you didn't know if it was your fault, but paul was so furious he would have swallowed you alive.

"look at me in my eyes, damn it! or do you want me to call him, uh? to call your beloved feyd rautha and make him fuck you like i do!?"

"paul-"

yet another thrust of his hips brought your hip bones to clash painfully with each other.

you left a loud and pleading moan but his quick fingers choked you in time and reduced it to a pathetic strangled scream.

"who's the one who touches herself while feyd's name slips down her tongue?! her damn fucking tongue! uh?!"

"p-...paul it was just y-y...your vision-"

deadly move.

the bed creaked and for a moment you imagined the springs surrendering to its bloody rhythm.

your boyfriend grabbed your hair mercilessly, almost detaching them from the roots, while his cock was destroying your inner walls beyond limit.

you were crying, but you were just choking on your own moans and sobs, like a sinful child.

it was just a vision, in fact...but now he was going so rough and raw that crying more made you feel real slut.

your sight was still granted to you, even if your retinas were caged in tears as hot as spice.

you could see him, see your boyfriend taking your pussy with a heavenly expression on your face, perhaps the one you wore in his dirty visions.

his mouth was wide open with pleasure and his eyes closed with excitement. he moved his hips for his own burning pleasure, making you aching, sore and wet all in.

"i don't know what would turn me on more, maybe you really deserve to end up in his maniacal arms! you would regret it of course, but it would be too late to go back!!"

you wished somebody could hear you for your own sake.

the wet and sticky tip of his cock was roaming roughly inside you, but the initial pleasure had reduced you to an unbearable burning sensation. you could feel your chest confiding with every sob, but his hands would travel again, landing on your throat already full of purple, almost black bruises.

"you're so soaked, you little whore. you don't even deserve it, on my sheets!!" he groaned, his own anger causing every vein to pump on the smooth skin of his neck, making him there red with anger every time the jugular pumped before your eyes.

he grunted like an animal too proud for the zoo. he wanted to destroy you until you couldn't stand up anymore.

humiliation.

you could feel his tip reaching the deepest places. you knew that paul didn't care about protections in these extreme cases (even if it was the first time he was so out of it), thus implying that he would even risk pregnancy to satisfy his dick to the point of nausea.

"you hold on too well-"

you held the sheets for dear life when you felt him pushing away but replacing his sex with one of his agile fingers between your sores.

you gasped as he pecked at all the soft spots of yours. he knew too damn well you were too vulnerable and breakable when it came to his experienced hands.

at the same time you knew how much effort would be required of him to make you suffer precisely, hoping he would get tired.

"so fucking sensitive-"

he inserted another finger, moving at an exorbitant speed. you could feel your wetness even reaching his wrist.

ashamed again.

"p-paul-...i beg-"

he entered you using his thumb to reach your clit.

you moaned as he lapped at your walls, sliding his sizzling tongue into the heat.

he raised his lips sucking greedily, sliding two fingers in once more.

his grunts made everything wetter.

your body came moaning and shaking, your eyes rolling back.

you whimpered as you felt his cock filling you up, preventing you from coming any further.

"p-...paul, you know you're...the only one i love! a vision doesn't mean anything! i-...i- had always loved you, you're the boy of my life, the one who always had all his trust posted about me. so i ask you praying...believe me..."

your boyfriend moved one inch, hitting your weakest and most stimulated point.

you could feel a slight gag rising in your sore and dry throat as the last bit of lucidity left your body in a deep sleep.

(...)

when you wake up a strong pang pierced your forehead, making the room square and moving around you.

paul was curled up on you, not completely resting on you so that his weight didn't give you even more trouble regaining consciousness.

his white and puffy cheek was resting on your bare breasts, a hint of saliva at the sides of his red and swollen mouth.

you couldn't move so you didn't even try, until you felt something holding you back.

paul was lightly sleeping thanks to a bene gesserit relaxation technique, you could now sense that he was completely alert and attentive to your needs.

his delicate hand was hugging your wrist, listening to your heartbeat since you had probably passed out.

he was making sure you were able to breathe normally.

you assumed he had been in that position since the moment you fainted.

you knew that in the end, he loved you more than anything on that planet.

you were his duchess already.

[itsawritblr]

Holy shit, the New York Times is FINALLY interviewing and listening to detransistioners.

The tide is turning.

Opinion by Pamela Paul

As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.

Feb. 2, 2024

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

A New and Growing Group of Patients

Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”

Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.

They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.

In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.

“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.

Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.

Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.

Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.

Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”

One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.

Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”

But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.

Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.

Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.

In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.

But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.

“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.

Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.

As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”

“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”

When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”

In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.

“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”

Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.

Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.

Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.

‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’

At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”

“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”

She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.

Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.

“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”

While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”

In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.

As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike some of the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.

In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”

But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.

Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The larger threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”

Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.

“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.

Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

*~*~*~*~*~*

For those who want tor ead more by those fighting the cancellation forquestioning, read:

Graham Lineham, who's been fighting since the beginning and paid the price, but is not seeing things turn around.

The Glinner Update, Grahan Linehan's Substack.

Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker, who's been physically attacked for organizing events for women demanding women-only spaces.

REDUXX, Feminst news & opinion.

Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs, A nonprofit of gay people and others within the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"

[nightmareweaverz]

What is Love? (Mr. Gap x GN!Reader) Part 2

Read Part 1 Here

CW: Mild gore/injury, a bit of violence but nothing extreme

Word count: 2536

Since people enjoyed it and I had some ideas, I decided to continue this! We meet someone new in this chapter. Keep in mind it's not gonna turn into a love triangle, tho. The new character serves a different purpose. Enjoy and lemme know what you think!

Another book falls shut with a loud thump next to the armchair that's held you for the past two days. A large stack rests beside it. You've been leafing through many of them lately, especially romance books. Not all of them fit your taste, some you would even call boring. Reading wasn't a hobby of yours when you were in the human world, but here, you've found this more enjoyable than walking around with no real purpose. Even the boring ones become less boring eventually. It’s nice to pretend you are a character in a story, with a different life, one that has purpose. Unlike your current reality.

Until you run out of books. Then you have to go out searching for more. This is one of those times. You've read everything from your last find. It was mostly magazines and newspapers, save for one or two novels, some of them half shredded. But their job is done now.

Crowbar in hand and hood drawn over your head, you detach yourself from the armchair and set out on your little mission. Your previous haul is left behind. There is no point in trying to keep any of the things you've finished reading. They'd only slow you down in this ever shifting maze.

The hallways are as creepy and hard to navigate as usual. A locked door here, imminent danger there, some horrific friendly residents and other equally horrific non friendly residents. The usual.

While you're peering inside a vent in an attempt to see if you can use it to get past a wall, Mr. Gap pays you a visit.

“Hello,” he greets you.

“Hello. Can take other room?” You point at the wall.

“Can take.”

“Danger there?”

“No danger. Lots of object.”

That's exactly what you were hoping to hear.

“You take me?”

“Take, take.”

He grabs your arm. Your vision goes black for a moment, as it always does when Mr. Gap moves you from one place to another. Everything goes quiet and you briefly feel a chill envelop you. Then you're in a new place, the room he promised to take you to.

“Thank you.”

Lately, he's been doing a mix of asking for body parts and doing things without wanting anything in return. Whether he’s trying to be nicer or he plans on asking for something later, is unknown to you. The occasionally friendly company is still appreciated.

You turn to the piles of random objects fallen from the human world. A far larger pile than usual. With a little bit of luck, it won’t all be full of worthless junk. You get to sorting through them before an earthquake can do it all in.

“What you search?” Mr. Gap's face peeks out from beneath a toppled over armchair.

“Lots of paper.”

Old dirty clothes, a couple abandoned toys, a lamp, a bike wheel, they all get thrown around in your search. You let out a triumphant “Yes!” when you stumble upon a copy of Frankenstein. It's not romance, but it'll keep you busy nonetheless. You shove it beneath your underarm before resuming the search.

“You like paper? Me like paper,” Mr. Gap comments as he reappears in another nook between two wooden planks.

“Okay,” you say dismissively. Normally, you'd humor him, but this world is unpredictable and you want fuel for your newly acquired pastime before it decide to bury everything beneath a pile of rubble.

You turn over a seat pillow and his face suddenly pops up in the space beneath. He holds out a magazine.

“Oh, thank-”

“Me want your finger.”

This slimy gremlin. You flash him your middle finger, only for a moment, before he can misunderstand and rip it off. The gesture confuses him, but the following grumbles must mean it didn't fly over his head entirely.

“Stop take my paper. Me not give,” you warn that you won't exchange any body parts for magazines he finds before you do.

But he knows this by now. It must simply delight him to see the furrow in your brow and hear you huff in irritation. You return to your task, refusing to grant him anymore satisfaction.

One pile of random objects later, he pops up again, this time with another book. This one is small, made of thick cardboard. The brightly colored cover suggests that it's for children.

“Me give, you teach me,” he says this time.

“Teach what?” He better not be about to ask you to sing itsy bitsy spider.

Mr. Gap opens up the book on a page where a cartoon little boy is offering a flower to a little girl. “What this?”

Where did he find that? Has he been trying to learn more about love? Is that why he's curious about such a gesture? The idea makes you find him kind of cute if it's true. Have you both just been reading romance related material, fumbling like idiots to figure out how it works?

As for explaining it, first, you point at the flower and say the word for it in English, since you're not sure there's a term for it here.

“This flower. Human give flower to person they like. Flower nice, pretty.”

Mr. Gap attempts to speak the new word. “Flower?” He stares at the illustration for another moment, then smiles creepily, the way he always does. “Thank you.”

In exchange, he gives you the magazine he'd tempted you with earlier. It’s a paranormal one. Knowing him, he’s already read through it. Read… Can Mr. Gap read? He doesn’t understand your language when you speak it, but he seems particularly fond of magazines. Is it all for the pictures? Maybe you’ll ask him next time.

You tuck the magazine next to the book and continue through the pile.

Once your left arm is satisfyingly full, you leave the room, now in search of a safe place to sit and read.

The sound of footsteps suddenly approaching nails you to the spot for a moment. Your hand instinctively grips the crowbar tighter, preparing for the worst. Whatever is coming, it better not force you to drop your books and flee. Because then you will be pissed. And you tend to lose control when you are pissed.

Fortunately, what walks in does not prove to be threatening. In fact, it's not even a resident. A young man with messy red hair cautiously steps in, then immediately freezes when he spots you. The sight of him nearly knocks all the air out of you. There is another human in the Other World. A living, breathing human, something you thought you'd never see again.

You are aware of how frightening you look. The bloodied raincoat, the silver hair, the bandages on your face and your blotchy, dark reddish skin. You often turn away quickly when faced with smooth metal, glass and, god forbid, mirrors. It's hard to believe the image you see is you. So his fear of you comes as no surprise. It serves as a grim reminder of what you've become.

“Hello.” When you speak, you use your native language.

“You speak English?!” the young man sounds startled and relieved at the same time.

“Yes… What are you doing here?”

Speaking complex sentences feels far better than you expected. It brings you a type of joy and nostalgia that startles you. Had you been missing it that much?

“I… I don't remember how I got here. Or what I was doing before. I'm just looking for the exit. Can you help me?”

This sounds painfully familiar. You remember when that used to be you. When you still had hope. And that memory tugs at something in your chest and urges you to make sure this man finds that exit. Before it's too late.

“I can help. What's your name?”

Such a human question to ask. The idea of using someone's proper name also makes you happy. When exactly have you become the type of person excited about complex sentences and names?

“I'm Robin. And you?”

You give him your name and he nods uneasily. Perhaps he hasn't been here long enough to be unphased by residents. That's good. It means there's still time.

“Mr. Gap?” you call out as you turn to the nearest crevice you can find. He appears as he always does. “Can take person exit?”

He glances at the human behind you, who is now observing warily. Then he shoots you that annoying grin of his. “Me want your heart.”

“Uh! Not give heart! Lead exit!”

“Not give? Goodbye.” And then he disappears.

You feel a strong urge to smack that grin right off his face. But he's gone and it seems like it's up to you to help this man find his way out.

“What did you talk about?” the man in question asks.

“I thought he'd help, but I overestimated his kindness… Come on, we need to find an elevator. It will take you out of here.”

“Alright… Um, thank you!”

His thanks is met with a dismissive little wave from you. Begrudgingly, the books have to be left here. The chances of finding them again are very slim, but you'll be less efficient with one arm entirely full.

The two of you set out to search for the exit.

The first rooms you pass through are an empty blessing. Robin isn't very talkative. Despite his wide shoulders and tall build, he appears quite timid and frightened. Every time you enter a new room, he first pokes his head in cautiously, then he dares to advance once he knows the coast is clear.

Is this how you used to be? Frightfully wandering the Other World, aided by Mr. Crawling, scared of your own shadow? It's a stark contrast to the apathetic stride you've developed since your return.

“How long have you been down here?” Robin asks after a prolonged silence.

“A while. It's hard to keep track of time here.”

“Is there… no way to turn you back?”

“I had a friend who was searching for a cure. But we got separated…”

You don't want to think about Mr. Silvair or the rest right now. You'd rather just focus on the task of finding the elevator.

“Is your friend like the guy in the hole?”

“Uh, no! That guy is an annoying little jerk who only does as he pleases.” Your face twists in annoyance just thinking about Mr. Gap. He could've effortlessly helped out, but he chose to be a pain instead.

“Oh, sorry.”

The hallway ends with two identical doors. Doors. They're so annoying in this world. Immediate death, sudden threat or a boring room could be waiting behind one and usually there's no way to tell them apart unless you open it.

“Stay back,” you instruct the human as you cautiously turn the doorknob.

Through the crack you've opened, you see a large, mostly empty room apart from a shelf with various toys on it. There are no signs of enemies for now.

“Okay, we can go.”

You step inside, you first and Robin cowering behind you. Everything seems fine as you head towards the doorless exit on the other side of the room. Until the door suddenly shuts and locks behind you.

“Who did that?!” Robin exclaims, startled.

You clutch your crowbar tighter, eyes darting around the room. One of the stuffed animals on the shelf suddenly lunges at you. However, you've spent long enough down here to parry such an attack easily. Swiftly, you swing your crowbar and knock it against the wall. Something shatters inside it. It stops moving.

But you have no time to relax. Robin lets out a startled scream. When you turn his way, several other toys are trying to climb him. One of them has sharp teeth and is biting into his arm.

“Get off him, you pests!” you yell out as you knock them off one by one, always followed by that shattering sound.

When he's freed, Robin quickly backs into a corner, cradling his bleeding arm. He's hurt. That's not good. He hasn't begun to transform at all. So his healing is that of a normal person.

“How deep is it? Let me see.”

“What were those things?! They- they bit me!” He’s panicking.

“Robin, you have to calm down and let me see your injury. It's gonna be okay. I'll get you out. But I need to see your arm first.” You try to be gentle. At least that's not something you've forgotten how to do yet.

He stares with wide eyes full of terror at first. But with each new reassurance, his breathing slowly relaxes and his trembling seizes. He offers you the arm. Gently, you roll up the torn sleeve of his shirt. Nine deep little cuts in a semicircle ooze blood on his forearm. It's not fatal, but leaving it untreated would be unwise.

You quickly glance around the room until you spot the dark void beneath the bottom of the shelf. You hurry to it at once.

“Mr. Gap! We need medicine! Person hurt. Blood,” you announce in the other language.

Mr. Gap does appear. He throws one look Robin's way, then grins at you. “Medicine? Can bring. Me want their finger.”

“Oh, for the love of- Give you my finger!” you try to bargain, not in the mood to explain that giving him a human's finger would defeat the purpose of asking for medicine.

Mr. Gap looks almost offended. Perhaps because you usually never say yes to his demands when he asks for your body parts. “Why?”

“Need medicine! Hurt! If outsider give finger, lots of hurt!” you explain, exasperated.

His face twists in displeasure. When he looks at Robin again, his eyes narrow, like he suddenly can't stand him. “Me not want your finger. Me want their finger.”

“Uh! You slimy little sewer rat!” you insult him, fully aware he hasn't a clue what you're saying, but probably able to tell from your tone it isn't nice. Then you turn away indignantly.

“Did your friend not want to help?” Robin asks timidly when you return to him.

“He thinks everything needs to be a transaction. It's fine, we'll manage without him.”

You lift up a part of your raincoat and rip off a piece of the white garment beneath it. Robin holds out his arm once again and allows you to bandage it.

“Why are you going to such lengths to help me?” he murmurs.

Why? You ask yourself that in turn. Perhaps because you didn't make it out. Perhaps you don't want another person to step outside and feel like a shark in the middle of a city, scary yet powerless and out of place.

“I just want somebody else to make it home after I couldn't.”

“I'm sorry…”

“It's fine. I don't need you to pity me. Just try to stay alive. Come on, let's go.”

You tilt your head towards the doorless opening. Begrudgingly, Robin pushes himself away from the corner and follows you out.

You both fail to notice the small roll of bandages that rolls out from beneath the shelf just as you pass it.

[seireitonin]

Dating Toby?? Like is he clingy, jealous or protective of his partner??

(I don't know....this is my first time doing these things.....)

Toby brain rot :3 this is how I see Toby mixed with some canon information! (I’m gonna try to keep it realistic)

What would it be like dating Toby?

Toby’s life is filled with tragedy

Abuse, death, murder, mental illnesses, being a slave to Slenderman

It’s all bad

So when he finds you, someone that accepts him and loves him despite all that, he’s not letting you go

He’ll do anything for you

I mean to the point it’s unhealthy

Because hes obsessed with you

Like really obsessed with you

He’s super touchy, not only because he likes to feel close to you, but it keeps him grounded

That’s important to him because his disorders/ mental illnesses cause him to hallucinate or space out

He’s not gloomy he’s actually upbeat but when he remembers something from his past or the current state of his life he goes through episodes of depression and mood swings

They can get really intense and as you’re with him you’ll learn how to support him through it

Just laying with him, making sure he has water and reminding him you’re here for him will help lots and lots of physical affection

If his mood swings get violent he’ll isolate himself from you but it’s heartbreaking to hear his suffering

His swings can go from extreme anger to intense sadness to reckless happiness

Since he hasn’t had much kindness or interaction in his life he doesn’t have the best social skills

He’ll say whatever is on his mind with no filter and that includes you too

So he’ll say mean things unintentionally a lot because he doesn’t understand how what he says can be hurtful

And he might try to call you sensitive for it too

“Ugh you’re overreacting I didn’t even say anything that hurtful. It’s just what’s on my mind”

He literally doesn’t understand how it can make you feel because he’s a bit detached with emotions

It’s gonna take a while for him to understand but he loves you so he’ll try to understand for your sake and will work on apologizing

He can also just be rude or a jerk sometimes in general

Toby likes just spending time with you to the point where you’re connected at the hip

He won’t say he loves you with words but he says it with his actions

He brings you gifts, holds your hand, goes on walks with you, holds you and try’s to be better for you (even though it’s really hard because he’s set in his ways)

He talks a lot so sometimes you’ll just listen and smile

Since he can’t feel pain, when he gets back from missions you’ll have to help him check for injuries to make sure he’s okay

He doesn’t say it but he appreciates it

Sometimes he’ll just stare at you because he loves you so much, taking in your every detail

He notices everything about you, from your body language, how you tan in the summer and lighten in the winter, he even knows how many times you breathe in a minute

Toby eats a lot of instant ramen so be prepared to eat a lot of that at first but you start to cook for him because he needs to eat better

Toby never expected to have a girlfriend since he’s a lot to handle but he liked the way you handle him

He’s full of himself literally thinks he’s gods gift to earth so sometimes he puts himself before your relationship but he’s trying to change that

He’s really funny especially if you like dark humor

He’s a jealous man. You’re his no one else’s

If someone even looks at you romantically he’ll go crazy on them

Remember, Toby is still a murderer and enjoys murdering

Chasing them down and threatening them and if it escalated kill them with a smile

He does it all for you. Everything is for you.

“You know I love you, right?”

He looks at you covered in blood

Toby likes it when you wear his sweaters

He wants a family one day and hopes you can give that to him

He’s possessive over you but does it out of intense love and obsession

He wants to keep you safe by any means necessary because he’s so used to losing the people he loves and he really doesn’t wanna lose you

Toby drives a pickup truck and likes to drive you around in it

He likes to sit in the back of it with you and look at the stars in an open field

Since Toby’s older his tics have calmed down but they’re still there and he still has the occasional tic attack

You’ll have to help him through those because sometimes he can’t even talk when he’s having one

Stuff he can squeeze, ice pack on his forehead and making sure he doesn’t hurt himself

He’s happy you don’t see him as a burden like everyone else did

He’s never letting you go

He didn’t know he could feel love this intense

[lua-magic]

South Node in various houses and your Past Life Karma you are carrying over.

South Node in first house: you will face identity crisis in life! You ask yourself “WHO AM I”? You feel you don’t belong to this world!

South Node in second House:  You feel detached from your family and the money in family!  You often ask yourself who are my family, race, religion?

South Node in third house: You will have lot of breaks in your thoughts! You know multiple languages, but can’t express yourself to others.

South node in fourth house: You will be detached from your mother, house, place of birth and your emotions as well.

South Node in fifth house: You will be detached from the fame, position, and have no expectations from your kids.

South Node in sixth house: You can’t fight, you can’t take revenge, you are detached from your enemies. You FORGET, FORGIVE AND MOVE ON EASILY.

South Node in seventh house: You are detached from your partners and even your life partner.

You lack interest in marriages and networking.

South Node in eighth house: You are psychic and have deep interest in occult; you are detached from the sexual desires. Transformations regarding your body happen slowly with the age.

You might develop gut issues and stomach problems.

South Node in Ninth house: You are detached from your religion and keep questioning the deeper meaning behind the rituals. You love short travels, and love to follow spiritual practices.

South Node in Tenth House: You are detached from your work and monthly income.

You don’t like to work 9 to 5 daily just to get money. You seek work that satisfies your soul.

South Node in eleventh house: You are detached from your friends circle and seek for spiritual network. You are detached from your gains, and focus more on spiritual gains rather than just material gains.

South Node in Twelfth house:  You are detached from the material world of pleasure and think about letting go everything and get liberation. You are extremely giving and spiritual soul who has direct connection with superconcious.

Please support me on patreon.

[neos127]

love is hard for park sunghoon (or is it?) — psh

office employee!sunghoon x fem!reader; genre. dating for convenience to real love, fluff notes. small drabble based on the manga ‘love is hard for otaku’ bc sunghoon gives nifuji vibes in these glasses!

otaku — is a japanese word that describes people with consuming interests, particularly in anime, manga, video games, or computers

sunghoon was positive that he was unlovable. he was a video game otaku who slaved away at his nine to five job and had rarely felt the touch of a woman. that was until you came along, like a bright ray of sunshine moving into his cloudy life. you were very different from him, loud and obnoxious at times with a very outgoing personality. sunghoon claimed that you weren’t his type, but the lie was long forgotten when he looked at your beaming smile and bright eyes.

for some reason that sunghoon couldn’t comprehend, you were interested in him. you talked to him first and were the reason behind the man becoming a flustered mess. sunghoon tried to tell you that being interested in him was a bad idea, his relationships never worked out because of his workaholic attitude and obsession with his handheld gaming device.

“you too? my past boyfriends never understood my obsession with mangas and idols. but it seems like you would!” you said, your voice twinged with excitement. after that you had basically proposed the idea of dating for convenience and oddly, sunghoon agreed. maybe it was because he was just lonely and severely touched starved— or maybe it was because your stunning smile made sunghoon’s heart skip a beat or two. he supposed if the two of you were dating for convenience, it wouldn’t be crazy to actually fall for one and other…right? he was your ‘boyfriend’ after all, it only made sense.

sunghoon couldn’t help himself. you were so understanding and you could relate to his lifestyle unlike people he dated in the past. you also never left sunghoon alone, even when he was furiously smashing the buttons on the controller of his gaming console. you would casually sit behind the man, legs thrown over his as you read your manga.

“you comfy back there?” sunghoon spoke up, readjusting his glasses and clearing his throat. he hoped that you couldn’t feel how hard his heart was beating or the way his body had become hotter under your touch.

“yeah i’m good.” you mumbled, a slight smile on your lips as you nuzzled the side of your face into his back. your eyes never left your manga and sunghoon could tell that you were highly invested.

“did you need anything?” you asked, surprised that sunghoon even spoke. whenever he played his game, he went silent. the only sounds that emitted from his mouth were annoyed grunts and a slew of curses.

sunghoon sighed and turned off his game, detaching himself from you to put his controller away. you whined at the loss of contact which soon turned into a gasp when sunghoon practically pounced on top of you. he took the manga from you, the book seeming so tiny in his large hands when he snapped it shut.

“m’sorry i’ve been neglecting you.” sunghoon mumbled, his glasses slowly sliding down his face. you pushed them up with your finger, smiling at the way they slid down his nose again.

“you don’t have to apologize. we decided to date because we understand how each other operates, is that not correct?” you asked, surprised that sunghoon decided to apologize. you felt it was unnecessary, you were just happy that he allowed you to be in his presence.

“but i want to. you’re…different from other girls I’ve been with…in a good way of course. and for some reason, that makes me actually want to give you my attention.” sunghoon explained, the delivery of his words sounding extremely awkward. you giggled, finding it amusing how inexperienced he was when it came to relationships, but you appreciated his honesty anyway.

“if that’s your way of saying that you’re attracted to me— then I feel the same.” you said, reaching up to mess with sunghoon’s hair. he caught your hand mid air, bringing it back down to his lap before playing with your fingers.

“yeah um, i am positive that i’ve fallen for you. i know we only dated for convenience but, i really do like being in a relationship with you.” sunghoon confessed, avoiding eye contact with you. using your free hand, you grabbed his chin, turning the man’s face to look at yours.

“i really like being in a relationship with you too, hoon.” you replied, a small smile on your face. sunghoon was sure he would’ve combusted on the spot due to the way your nickname for him rolled so easily off your tongue. the man had never felt such emotions before and he was surprised by how much of a hold you had on him. he was sure that he would get down on his knees and beg for you— if you wanted him to jump, he would ask ‘how high?’.

sunghoon smiled, an actual real smile where you could see his adorable fangs. you hadn’t seen much of the expression before, but at that moment you concluded that it was your favorite thing in the world.

“can i kiss you, sunghoon?” you asked timidly, watching as the man’s eyes widened behind the frames of his glasses.

“yeah…yeah of course you can.” he answered, his heartbeat picking up the pace by a tenfold. you smiled at his nervousness, leaning over to place a hesitant kiss on his lips. before you could pull away, sunghoon grabbed the back of your head, holding you in place as he deepened the kiss and forced you to open your mouth a bit more. you let out a low whine, the sound going straight to sunghoon’s gut. he shivered against your body, wrapping his arms around your waist and pulling you into his lap.

“what are you doing to me?” sunghoon groaned once he pulled away, moving his face to hide in your neck. you chuckled and patted the top of his head.

“it’s just my charm. only a select few can see it so, congratulations! you’re special!” you explained, playfully tapping the man on his nose. he scrunched it up cutely, letting out a small chuckle at your enthusiasm.

“yeah, lucky me.” sunghoon mumbled, his voice monotone as ever. to most people, it may have sounded sarcastic and as if he didn’t actually mean it. but sunghoon’s lovesick eyes said otherwise…and you knew sunghoon better than most people.

©neos127

[kooki914]

Nobody asked and yet you're getting it anyway, my Dess interpretation! Tbf I love a lot of other people's Dess designs maybe more than my own based on complexity/symbology alone, but this is what my original take for her was so I'm sticking to it. Extremely long list of factoids for her under the cut!

Dess hasn't seen a hairbrush in 8 years.

Opening her first fountain was an accident, and so was entering the dark world, but it was something she desperately needed at that point. She was knighted by Spade King, before being dubbed the Roaring Knight by the general public after she opened the second fountain and people started (correctly) assuming she was trying to cause the apocalypse.

Dess is mtf trans! She was out since she was 9, and took puberty blockers for a while, but stopped after she disappeared because she, y'know, didn't have access to them anymore. Strangely, even though she's been off of them for so long, there's very few side effects. You can just see her Adam's apple sometimes and muscle mass started building for her easily, but that's it. She's silently grateful that her dad didn't pass down any beard-making genes.

The reason why it's been so mild is due in part because of the effect of being in the "void" for too long, aka the space so dark and isolated you can't even feel your own limbs. She was stuck in the code of the game, basically, and it's had adverse effects on her mentally and physically, the only positive effect being less testosterone production in her body.

The physical effects are odd. Though she's grown and her body's age is what it would've been if she never disappeared, she's still in the same clothes she was when she ran away, but they sized up with her. The black nail polish she had on is still there too, not even chipped. As previously mentioned, her hormones are out of whack but, somehow, she's still clearly a grown adult, as if she just went through a very, very mild puberty.

The mental effects of being stranded in the literal nothingness are as expected as they are odd. The standard effects of not having contact with another person for so long have, somehow, never taken hold. It's like the social part of her brain was just put on pause. However, part of the madness she DID get was her very much considering her memories might just be made up. As if she was always here and managed to, somehow, delude herself into thinking she had a life outside of this place, when she never did. Essentially, she stopped existing, but retained some level of consciousness.

The whole "not existing for a while" thing as well as the fact that she's pre-hrt trans means she absolutely hates mirrors. Give her a mirror and she'll give back about a hundred shards of it. When she was younger she usually just had dysphoria over looking too boyish (hence why she never cut her hair) but nowadays she has weird feelings about something as simple as Having Knees (the existential horror of having a body after being formless in the nothingness during your formative years).

Her journey as the Knight was mostly about rediscovering herself, trying to find purpose and trying to help the people around her. She spent her whole life feeling helpless, and wanted to destroy that feeling, for everyone. Her violent behavior was rewarded by the equally maladjusted Spade King, and they teamed up under the pretense of helping all of darkner kind.

Dess set out to cause the Roaring, per his instruction, without knowing what it even was. All she knew is that, apparently, she was the only one who could, and that gave her a sense of purpose. Once she learned it'd bring about the end of the world, she was so detached from the world that she carried on anyway, not concerned with the life that could be lost because, god, she spent so long outside it, how COULD she know what life was worth now?

Dess went by neutral pronouns (they/it) as the Knight because it was another mask she used to distance what she Knew of herself and what she Had to be (kind of like Asriel calling himself "Flowey" in Undertale, actually). Being called "her" was too familiarising and humanising, being called "he" made her break out into hives and start killing, so she stuck with the alternatives for utilitarian reasons. Somewhere along the way she got sick of it and started missing her feminine pronouns, but decided to just stick to the bit anyway. The world was gonna end soon anyhow, who cares?

Once she's out of the role of Knight and back in the light world, you bet your ass she's switching back to exclusively she/her. Fuck neutrality, this girl needs gender affirmative language.

Rediscovering music, and specifically playing and making music, was one of the things that helped Dess get back in touch with being a person again after the whole Knight debacle. She plays piano and harmonica of her own volition, and the violin because of her mom's insistence, but her true favourite will always be the guitar. She was a little small as a kid so playing it used to be difficult, but now that she's an adult having it in her lap is easy, and honestly it just makes her feel alive. One of those dreams she had as a kid that she forgot about along the way, y'know?

Her and Asriel were just family friends at first, but when they ended up going to the same class together too, they quickly became best friends. They were there for each other through everything, Dess got Asriel into games, he was there when she came out, and they were practically inseparable. Asriel was a hard worker and Dess was a super active sports kid, they balanced each other out well and were known as the highest achievers in their class, the golden kids.

Kris and Noelle got dragged into their adventures basically on accident, Noelle because Dess was the one babysitting her all the time, and Kris because they wanted to spend time with their brother. They often spent time outside together because Dess loved being anywhere but at home. She didn't mind Azzy's house, though. Kris was a lot to deal with sometimes and Dess scolded them in a lot of the same ways adults scolded her (minus the hitting them over the head with stuff, what was all her). She has no idea the impact she's had on their behavior.

She was always kind of violent, but when she was younger it wasn't really an issue, more like an excuse to get her into sports. She learned to act out because causing problems was the only context in which she'd get attention from her very busy parents. With Noelle specifically, Dess took on a semi-parental role and quickly developed a habit of taking on way more burdens than she could handle. Even with Asriel as a best friend and the Dreemurrs as a surrogate family, the control her mother Clarice commanded over her life was just too limiting. It all boiled over.

Dess started lashing out at other kids around when puberty hit, starting fights and genuinely hurting people. She never got expelled because her mother was the mayor, but Dess started getting grounded more and more often, which meant less and less time with her only real friend, and more with her very dysfunctional family. She loved Noelle, but her little sister became another responsibility, another liability that could get Dess in trouble, it was way too much for her to handle maturely when she was only 13.

Dess "disappeared" because she ran away from home. She hated living there, but neither of her parents could admit that, hence her disappearance being so "mysterious" to the other townsfolk, they genuinely thought she vanished from inside the house. It was only after Kris admitted they saw her in the woods near the bunker that night that the case got more complicated, and the legend only grew more terrifying.

Her original plan was to just catch a bus to out of town and hope for the best, but when she ran into the woods in pitch blackness, she couldn't find her way around. She was too reliant on light, and couldn't manage in darkness. She found the bunker in her aimless wandering and, hoping to sleep off the night and make up excuses in the morning, she went inside. She couldn't have known that nothing was in there.

The effects of her sudden disappearance rippled throughout the whole town. Most obviously, Asgore got fired for not being able to find her and Rudy quit his job to be a stay at home dad for Noelle's sake. Less tangibly, Asriel and Clarice both started burying themselves in work to avoid grief. Kris and Noelle socially shut down for a few years, it's why neither of them have any real friends other than the strained relationship they have with each other. Asriel took on Dess' habit of "be anywhere but home" when his parents started having marital problems, and Kris latched onto him even harder to avoid losing any more people in their life. Through all this, Dess was nowhere, silently wondering if anyone even noticed she's gone, if her life was even real to begin with.

One of the strange things that happened to her while stranded in nothingness was almost being able to hear someone mumbling to themselves. When she called out, the voice vanished, only to re-emerge an uncertain amount of time later and excuse himself for getting startled. He just doesn't get guests often, you see. And guests get him even more rarely. It was refreshing to hear a consciousness separate from her own, but his mind was even more broken than hers, unable to answer her questions about what was real and what was imagined as he seemed to think he himself was a product of unreality. Plus, he never really stayed for too long and he never wanted to talk about himself either, as if mentioning his own name could shatter him to pieces.

The reason Dess didn't lose her mind from to his influence like Jevil and Spamton did was because she's just fundamentally pragmatic. You can throw philosophy and existential questions at her all you want but as long as she talks and thinks, she exists, which means reality is Something, even if it's completely eluding her grasp. It might also have something to do with her being a (homestuck warning) Void player, meaning the idea of the innate meaninglessness of life and unanswerable questions about reality itself don't really sound earth-shattering to her.

She used her knife to open fountains at first, the one she brought with her from the light world, but along the way she picked up a rapier and decided it was way cooler than a knife so it's her go-to now. She's not actually that good with swords, though. She uses them like baseball bats. Despite this, Spade King still praises her as if she's the best warrior they've seen in generations. It might've gone to her head.

Her relationship with King is fundamentally a mentor and a student. He gave her flawed information, but taught her a lot about herself, the world she found herself in, and the role she could choose. And, that's the most important part, he let her CHOOSE, because he was genuinely under the impression that she was just a really powerful darkner and not a lightner. His strictness and high standards reminded her of her parents, mostly her mom, but his willingness to give HER control over her own destiny is what made her favour him over every other adult in her life. Discipline that treated her like a valued person rather than an asset was basically unheard of for her until then. Plus, reminding her of her parents gave Spade the bonus of every time he encouraged her on anything it'd activate the "parental approval" neurons in her brain that were terribly starved up to that point.

From Spade's point of view, the Knight (as a darkner) is everything he wants to be, but can't be. At first he mentored her mostly as an excuse to live vicariously through her, but in getting to know her better he discovered they have a lot more in common than he first thought. Unregulated emotions, unresolved pasts, the constant feeling that you need to do More and Louder in order to make any kind of impact... he started to genuinely care about her. If/when he's redeemed, finding out the Knight has been a lightner this whole time might not even be that much of a betrayal. Seeing her face and learning her name as she apologies for lying is like reconnecting with his own wounded, younger self. Letting it be water under the bridge means he doesn't lose connection to himself again, doesn't lose connection with his best student. Plus, December IS a nice name.

She met Lancer, but didn't pay him much mind. She was busy with overthrowing the other Kings and was too tired to be a babysitter again. Due to her rancid vibes as the Knight (and the fact that she quickly became the favoured child even though it wasn't her intention) Lancer doesn't like her that much. She left Card Kingdom pretty quickly, anyway (Spade's advice to seek another worthy kingdom to grant a fountain to), so she never got much of a chance to get to know him, even if she wanted to.

Her relationship with Queen is even more fraught. Due to Queen's tendency to mimic the "mother" personality for every lightner she meets individually, as well as her more Explicitly Controlling tendencies, Dess quickly became rebellious and then antagonistic towards her. Queen tried to choose FOR her, to get her to open fountains on HER terms, and Dess wasn't having it. Yes, following Queen's instructions would've caused the Roaring much, MUCH sooner, but, like. Not at ALL in a satisfying way.

She has no idea who Gaster is. When asked, she'll assume he's a Darkner. If asked about the man in the nothingness, she'll shrug it off. Now that she's out, she doesn't know if he's actually real or something she just made up in her head, though she laughs that off as well. "I sound a lot like him when saying that, huh?"

Learning Asriel goes to college is complete whiplash for her. Her sense of time is WRECKED. Like, yeah, she can wrap her head around Noelle and Kris being teens now, but ASRIEL??? What do you MEAN he's not still stressing over chemistry exams and cramming for spanish class, and is, like, actually studying something he's interested in???? Unheard of.

She makes fun of him SO much for his little beard stubble, dude. It's all in good fun, but like, you can only be called "mini Asgore" so many times by your childhood best friend before it starts to cut deeper. On the flipside he has literally nothing bad to say to her. She nearly caused the apocalypse, but like, he gets it. He would've done the same in her shoes (hooves??). He thinks her Dark World armour is so kickass and he could never pull it off like she can.

Unsurprisingly Asriel has a crush on Dess. He always kinda had one, even when they were kids, but reconnecting as adults just Fully bashed him over the head with the fact that he's had repressed feelings for her and he has NO idea what to do about it. He's anxiety incarnate and thinks Dess already KNOWS he has a crush on her and just isn't saying anything because she's playing it cool, or doesn't wanna hurt his feelings, or thinks he's too lame to date or something. He thinks she's the coolest person who ever lived and has no idea how to cope.

Meanwhile in reality, Dess is a clueless aro/ace. She doesn't really know what having a crush even means. She thinks being a couple is, like, flirting and fighting behind closed doors (you can tell the only couples she knew personally were her parents and Asriel's parents), so she thinks it's just exhausting and doesn't know why anyone bothers. When Noelle tells her she has a crush on Susie Dess is like "Hell yeah, love is love........ wait do you mean you like her or you want her to crush you with a boulder" and Noelle sweats for a while before replying with "b-both?"

Dess has never been to Castletown. Most likely will never go.

Her and Kris reconnecting is a bit awkward at first, mostly on account of the fact that Kris and their posse are the ones that had her bash her over the head as the Knight to get her to behave in the first place, but Dess doesn't really focus on that. Kris thinks they hurt her, she just thinks of them as a little hero. Susie kinda helps facilitate them talking like people again, at least at first, because she has no baggage with Dess other than hitting her with an ax over dark fountains and getting stabbed in return, but like... Out of all the people they fought Dess is the only one who actually said sorry for being a jackass, so it's all good in Susie's book. Kris is just happy to have Dess back, man, that bunker and their memory of it has been haunting them for entirely too long, now.

Like Kris and Asriel, Dess learned how to play piano in church. Unlike them, and unlike Noelle, Dess has actually become fully agnostic after her time in the void. If there IS an angel looking out for her, it certainly isn't one that could've helped her, so what's the point of worship? Plus, Asriel and Noelle are two angels looking out for her as is! Why add divinity to that? (I am extremely subtle, I know.)

To this day, she's still apologising to Asgore for getting him fired. He is still apologising for not being able to find her. It's a pity party.

No-one tell her parents but she smokes weed. Once she reformed from being the Knight, she had a lot on her mind, man, weed is the most harmless thing she could've taken to cope. Seam is a good dealer, they have the good stuff.

She's absolutely called King "dad" by accident before. He doesn't really mind. No-one tell Rudy though, he's gonna be pissed.

On that note, I feel the need to add that she was never as close to him as Noelle was, because he only really started being an active parent after Dess went missing. It's kinda tragic, and he feels REALLY guilty about it, but if he ever verbalises that guilt he's gonna actually crumble into dust. His confidence is all a mask as is, actually admitting that he was kind of garbage at being a dad with his first kid is just gonna make it so much worse. But, until Dess hears an apology, she's not really gonna be able to actually mend their relationship, so they're at an impasse.

Inversely, her time away from the light world kinda made Dess forget the way her mother acts. She sorta got a bit of "once away from the abuser you forget the abuse", especially knowing she herself was a kid when it all happened so she kinda started justifying her mother's actions to herself when away from her. After like 2 weeks of living with her again Dess fully remembers why she ran away and packs her bags to live literally anywhere else. Preferably with King if that's an option, though that might just make Lancer move out as well.

She doesn't know what minecraft is.

[transgenderer]

So there's an octavia butler short story, the book of Martha, where God gives an author (closely patterned on butler herself, but possibly intentionally less creative) infinite(?) power to remake the world, to fix humanity and/or its problems before we destroy ourselves. After considering a variety of options (it's possible she's only allowed to modify human nature? But the story never stares that. Maybe she's just not good at considering all her options) she just gives everyone extremely pleasurable dreams. So they're less ambitious I guess. And in general have nicer lives

Anyway this story has stuck with me in two ways. The first: so, assume you're not just gonna like. Give humanity infinite resources or whatever. How do you make a utopia? Well to me the answer seems obvious, based on my experience of my own psyche. The human mind needs more affection. It's too easy for annoyance or some petty issue to overwhelm affection. And then we are cruel and selfish and all this stuff. Like. Idk, I feel like I've experienced moments of clear-eyed saintlihood. My brain produces that...outlook/emotion/whatever. But it won't stick there, of course. But it feels like it wouldn't be too far a jump to just get the human brain to stick there more easily. Still let us access other states, for variety. Give us some sense of others freedom or whatver, so our care for each other doesn't make us all busy bodies. But like. It would only take the tugging of a few chemical strings to fix human nature. A little less rage, a little more philia.

This is of course an important piece of evidence that if there is a god he doesn't love us. He could have made us full of lovingkindness. He could have made us not want to hurt and humiliate each other. But he didn't. Because all that nastiness helps us succeed in the social games that increase our mating frequency, or selectiveness, or whatever, presumably, and so selective descent with modification doomed us all forever. Or, God is real but cares about something else. Maybe beauty. Maybe he feels the glory of war is worth it.

But the second thing, is noticing which parts of our world feel like a Martha has already been there. I was looking at the sky on the train home today (hmabhrg! There was a William Blake exhibition), admiring it, and I was struck again by how...excessive, superfluous, overflowing, decadent, additional it is. The sky could just be a simple blue, fading evenly to black. Clouds could always be blobby and indistinct. We could all be congenital shortsighted, so they were always blurry. But instead they're just this part of the world, detached from all the specifics of earthly life, that is achingly beautiful, most nights! Sunsets are so beautiful it's cliche, it's boring! That feels like a gift from a Martha. Someone a bit uncreative trying to fix the world in a way that doesn't shake it up too much

[mya-valentine]

Can I request how the genshin guys Wriothesley, Alhaitham Kaveh, and Diluc help and s/o with mental issues? 👉👈 it could be on the extreme ends too and that is very difficult to deal with.

I've been lurking your blog so far and really enjoy the way you write. It feels analytical and true to the character themselves

Headcannon: Wriothesley, Alhaitham, Kaveh, and Diluc Helping Their S/O With Mental Issues

A/N: Awww, thank you so much. I'm glad you like my work ☺️ I try very hard to make sure it's in character, which can take some time, so sorry if it took longer than you hoped. But, I hope you enjoy this

Wriothesley

Wriothesley, as the Duke of the Fortress of Meropide, has dealt with countless tough situations and hardened individuals, but when it comes to his S/O, his tough exterior would soften. He may not be the most emotionally expressive, but he would offer his unwavering presence. His approach would be calm and steady, understanding that extreme mental health issues require time and patience.

Wriothesley would be a rock for his S/O, always available to listen, hold them when they feel broken, and remind them that they aren’t facing their struggles alone.

If his S/O were engaging in self-destructive behaviors, Wriothesley would address it firmly, ensuring they seek help. He’d make sure they know he’s serious about their well-being while also ensuring they don’t feel judged.

Understanding the mind-body connection, he might encourage them to engage in physical activities, like training or boxing, to help release some of their emotional pain. He would emphasize physical strength as a tool to channel inner turmoil and feel more in control.

Alhaitham

Alhaitham is highly intellectual, preferring logic over emotion, but that doesn't mean he would be cold or detached. His intelligence would shine through in how he approaches his S/O’s mental health struggles.

Alhaitham would study mental health thoroughly to better understand what his S/O is going through. He’d offer them resources, not in a pushy way, but so they have tools available when they feel ready.

He wouldn’t smother his S/O with affection or pressure them to talk before they’re ready. Alhaitham values autonomy and would give his S/O the space to process their feelings while subtly reminding them that he’s always available.

When his S/O feels overwhelmed by their emotions, Alhaitham would gently steer them towards rationality, helping them break down their thoughts. He would help them find clarity amidst their mental chaos by calmly discussing what’s troubling them and offering practical solutions.

Kaveh

Kaveh, with his emotionally sensitive nature, would be deeply empathetic towards his S/O’s mental health struggles. He’s someone who wears his heart on his sleeve and wouldn’t hesitate to openly express his concern and love.

Kaveh would be incredibly understanding and affirming, constantly reminding his S/O that their feelings are valid, no matter how extreme. He’d be the type to hold them and offer comforting words, reassuring them that it’s okay to not be okay.

Being an artist, Kaveh might encourage his S/O to express their emotions through art, writing, or other creative outlets. He would guide them to channel their mental struggles into something beautiful, helping them process emotions in a therapeutic way.

Although this may not be the healthiest response for Kaveh himself, he would have a tendency to put his S/O’s needs before his own. He would be the type to stay up all night talking them through their feelings, even if it drained him emotionally. Kaveh would feel a deep responsibility to be there for his S/O, no matter what.

Diluc

Diluc, though quiet and reserved, has a deeply caring heart, especially for those he loves. He understands hardship and loss on a personal level, so he would approach his S/O’s mental health struggles with a mix of seriousness and tenderness.

Diluc would want to protect his S/O from their own struggles, even if he can’t fix everything. He’d be highly attentive, observing their emotional state, and would always offer gentle support when he notices them struggling.

Knowing that sometimes words aren’t enough, Diluc might silently offer comfort by being near, inviting his S/O to spend time with him in the quiet of Dawn Winery. He’d ensure they have a peaceful environment where they can heal at their own pace.

Diluc would likely be the one to gently suggest seeking professional help if the mental health struggles became too overwhelming. He wouldn’t push them, but he’d make it clear that their well-being is his top priority and that it’s okay to seek outside support. Diluc would even help arrange therapy or counseling if his S/O needed it, wanting them to have the best care possible.

In all cases, each of these characters would handle extreme mental health difficulties in their own way, but the common thread is their unwavering support, patience, and dedication to helping their S/O through their struggles, no matter how hard things get.

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