#i have no fucking idea how their show is structured nowadays

[blueberry-beanie]

me, two days before the concert: so what was coldplay up to, again?

[itsharleystuff]

- ̥۪͙۪˚┊❛ 𝐌Í𝐀 ❜┊˚ ̥۪͙۪◌

Gif not mine!

— 𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠: Javier Peña x afab!fem reader (implied hispanic/latina)

— 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 7.3k

— 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: After a major fight between the two of you, a month goes by in which you give each other the silent treatment, figuring out if you should start seeing different people. However, Javier has a problem: he can’t get his dick hard for anyone that isn’t you. So, when he sees how easily you can move on from him, he gets awfully jealous.

— 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: 18+ content (minors dni!), sex, possessive/jealous behavior, unprotected sex, p in v, cuffs, slight dirty talk, semi-public sex, use of ‘slut’, pet names (sweetheart, corazón, cariño, hermosa, etc.), praise kink, come eating, oral sex (f! & m! receiving), mentions of drugs, smoking, a bit of angst, very little plot (mostly filth), weirdly structured plot. I think that’s it.

— a/n: there’s some phrases and words in Spanish, some are translated and some aren’t. Let me know if translations are needed :)

No use of y/n.

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈

Javier Peña has never been a jealous man.

It's simply never been in his nature, not even when he was a child playing around with toys that he loved to share. And nowadays? Well, he had other stuff in mind that didn't leave any room for those pedestrian feelings.

As of now, he -supposedly- didn't have anything to be worried about. Specially not women.

Everyone knew he fucked hookers so good that they'd spill all their secrets in his ear, and that he was attractive enough to leave a bar with company just after a couple of minutes from arriving there. But to anyone observant, it was obvious how bad he had it for you.

Still, that didn't stop him from being an asshole.

You remember the last time you two spoke and how it turned out to be a fucking disaster: basically, he didn't like the idea of exclusivity because it involved feelings that he wasn't ready to admit, so you had called him a slut (along with many other insults) and he'd said that you were childish and sensitive. So naturally, everything went downhill after that fight.

Currently, things were pretty tense with Javier, even at work. But things just got worse when the Colombian police sent you onto an undercover mission, nothing really extravagant but still quite dangerous. And apparently, the DEA knew nothing about it.

The task was rather simple: you'd go to one of Medellin's busiest nightclubs and find out if there was a cocaine distribution line working there. The problem was what the agent had overheard from Carrillo. Not only did he knew now that you were at the place, but he also had word that one of the cartel's most wanted sicarios was about to be there too. And knowing the Coronel as well as he did, you were right in the middle of a crossfire. He arrived at the club earlier than any of them, hoping to find you quickly and draw you out before the asset came in.

But, oh hell.

What he saw the minute he stepped in almost made him lose his shit.

⩇⩇:⩇⩇

You had no business being in there this late. You'd already passed down all the information needed to your boss and now you were just waiting for the cartel's member to arrive so you could call Carrillo and let him finish the job.

But in the meantime, you decided to at least try and have some fun. After everything that went on with Peña, you felt like you deserved a distraction.

The music was loud, reggaetón reverberating in your body as you danced, eyes wide awake in case the target decided to show up. The stranger you were dancing with had his hands all over your body, holding you close to him while you moved in synch. He was handsome in a boyish way, and a bit clumsy, but good enough to take your mind off from the irritating DEA agent. At least for now.

To be honest, you didn't lack any attention at the moment. Both men and women would come up to you, hoping to get a piece of what you had to offer. It came without saying that everything about you tonight resulted appealing to the kind of people that frequented the place, being an undercover assignment you did your best to blend in. And it seemed to work out wonderfully. The flashy makeup and short dress that only accentuated your figure made you stand out amongst the rest; nevertheless, what really attracted everyone's gaze wasn't any of that, but the confidence with which you'd walk around the place like you owned it.

"¿Qué tal si nos vamos pa' un lugar más oscurito, mamacita?" (How about we go to a more private place?) The guy, whose name you didn't even know, proposed. And though the idea sounded nice, your job wasn't quite finished.

"Not yet, papi. Dame un par de canciones más." (Let's dance a bit more). He hummed in response, his hands traveling from your lower back to grab your ass firmly.

"Usted manda." (You call the shots). The answer made you smile cheekily as you lean in to him, hoping to connect his lips with yours.

However, you definitely didn't expect to be abruptly pulled back with force instead, ripping you apart from the man's hold.

"What the hell..." you start to complain and twist in the strangers grasp, who started to drag you out the dance floor and keeping your wrists behind your back.

"Hombre, ¿pero qué diablo' le pasa?" (What's wrong with you, man?). Asked your poor companion, glancing over at the guy that took you away from him.

But you knew exactly who he was even before he spoke. You'd recognize that musky cologne anywhere, mixed with the scent of cigarette smoke. Damn, even your body recognized him so well that the way his fingertips dig on your skin flooded your mind with memories from the past.

"Peña." You mutter through gritted teeth, not bothering to turn your head towards him.

"It's agent Peña to you, sweetheart." He snarls, completely blowing off anyone that would try to get in his way to lug you outside.

A new, fueled up rage crept up your spine while he harshly pulls you to te entrance, right were you see the colonel's target going in.

"Let go of me, mierda!" You struggle against him, not wanting to actually put on a fight but just make him reason. "I have a fucking job to do, so let go of me or..."

"Or what?" Javier spins you around carelessly, leaving your face so close to his that your breaths merged with each other's, chest pressed against your own as he keeps you still, his hands gripping you so hard that it would certainly leave bruises.

"I need to call Carrillo. I'm working, even if you don't believe it." You tell him, letting your racing heartbeat start to settle.

The man's eyes were dark, covered by a shadow of anger that matched his stern expression. He was always handsome, but whenever he'd get mad, Javi was hot. Although it was unusual for you to see him like this, him being always attentive and careful, though still very passionate. He would never explode, not even when the stress and tension became too much to handle. But then, you realize...

"No way..." you scoff, keeping direct eye contact. "You're jealous, aren't you?"

His reaction is immediate, turning your body again and flushing your face against the trunk of his jeep Cherokee, bending you over the car. You gasp audibly, feeling the cold metal under your cheek and his body towering upon you while he holds you down by the back of your neck. Javier's lips brush the top of your ear when he leans down to you.

"The fuck do I need to be jealous about, cariño?" He whispers lowly, his hot breath giving you goosebumps and making your knees tremble. "Eres mía, you've always been."

Ah, fuck.

Despite all the shit that you went through with him, the effect he had on you remained the same. No matter what, the agent was aware of it, conscious of how you'd always melt under his touch, he just knew all your sweet spots by core memory and what'll have you squirming underneath him. Yeah, even if your mind tried it's best to erase Peña, your body would always betray you.

"You lost your chance." You mutter in a bittersweet tone. "Now get the hell off me so I can finish my task."

He doesn't instantly let go, but eventually loosens the grip on your nape. Though right when you thought he'd actually let you free, there's a cold metallic sensation brushing on your wrist and you suddenly can't move your arms from your back. The motherfucker had just cuffed you.

"Malparido, hijo de..." You ramble, straightening your back to glance at him in exasperation.

"Don't move." He growls, opening the driver's door and taking his radio out. The agent starts to talk through it, but you're way too outraged as to pay any attention, your vision going red when you catch your name, the words 'Carrillo', 'sicario' and the place were you're at, figuring out that he's doing the part of the job that corresponded to you.

"You're sick, Peña." There's no reply to the snarky comment as he simply shoves you in the back of his truck, rather carefully, considering the situation.

You watch intently while he gets back on his seat, analyzing every detail about him. It wasn't anything special, you had seen him quite often at work after your fight, and nonetheless, now... Something seemed off.

Javier was wearing a red button shirt under his black leather jacket, from which he drew out a pack of cigs and a lighter. He appeared the same, however, you could sense the tension on his shoulders and back, the kind you'd help him deal with before, and it almost felt like he was holding back from doing something. Heck, you hated it. You completely despised arguing with him, being apart from the man almost made you physically unwell.

But that was the root of this whole problem. You were able to admit it; how much you liked him and didn't want anyone else. Him on the other hand, wasn't ready for all that. Although, despite him implying that he couldn't fully commit or correspond to your feelings... Right now, his actions were very contradicting.

Because Javier Peña never got jealous.

And yet, there he was.

Perhaps, if you spurred him on just enough and cornered him in a trap... Perhaps then, he'd be able to admit it. 

"So what now, agent?" You wonder, laying your back flat on the leather sit, feeling the coldness of the material on your exposed skin and trying to find a comfortable position. "You mind explaining yourself?"

He looks at you through the rear-view mirror, brows furrowed and jaw clenched. A challenging fire shines in your eyes when you lock glances with him. But he doesn't say anything, simply starting the car and getting the windows down before lighting up a cigarette.

"What about you, sweetheart?" He asks, the fag hanging from between his lips as he starts driving away from the club. "Care for elaborating on your actions?"

You snort, gaze diverting towards the window. "I was just killing time."

The streets of Medellin were loud and busy, specially on the weekends. But at the moment, the paths were dark and quiet, as if everyone knew that there was a storm coming and they had to stay out of the hood.

"So that's your idea of 'killing time'?" He comes again, tapping the cigar out his window to leave the ashes behind. "Letting random men grope you in those wrenched bars?" You grin, still defying him with your attitude. "And yet, I'm the slut..."

"You must certainly are, Peña." You reply condescendingly, watching the road. "When I was with you, that was it. No one else even crossed my mind. But then, you? How many other women did you have besides me?"

He grunts, taking a long drag without looking back in your direction. You recognize certain spots and locals, but none of them were anywhere close to your apartment. Instead of asking were he was taking you to, the idea you previously had lingers on your mind.

Red light.

"You know, ever since we... Well, ghosted each other. I've actually had tons of fun." His eyes darkened, but no matter all the warning signs he was sending with his body, you just couldn't hold back anymore, starting to play a game that might get out of control. "Actually, you know that guy working with the CIA? Balcázar?"

Javier looked so gorgeous while driving. His big hands over the lever and muscles flexing whenever he'd make sudden moves. Even now, tense as an arrow an white-knuckling the wheel at your words, he was the hottest man you'd seen.

"Shit, he’s good..." you purr, slightly arching your back so he'll get a better view of your breasts, barely contained in that tiny dress you were wearing. "I really miss him. Hated it when he went back to New York."

His stormy glare was on you, watching closely every single move you made. Your legs were briefly parted, just enough for him to peek a sight of your laced underwear. The agent's breathing became ragged and he had to try his best to stay concentrated.

"Careful, cariño." You hear him rasp out with a hint of danger. "You really don't want to go there."

Green light.

He puts the cigarette out and throws the tail away carelessly.

"Ay, Peña." Your voice goes an octave lower, licking your lips. "Don't act like you haven't been to every brothel in the city trying to fill in my spot."

The man huffs a laugh, shaking his head in disapproval. "I know what you're doing." You look at him through your lashes, faking innocence and confusion. "But if you really want me to say it, there hasn't been anyone else."

"Yeah, right..." That mocking tone was really getting on his nerves.

"Not even when we were together." Javi sulks out.

"Then why was it so difficult for you to be serious with me?" You question grimly. "Do you not like me?"

His eyes bore back into yours somberly, as if you'd just said the stupidest thing in the world despite the graveness in your voice and expression, lazily scanning you head to toe.

"Like you?" It sounded like he was struggling not to come off sardonic, cocking an eyebrow at you. "I can't believe you just asked me that."

You lean in towards him when he takes an unexpected turn, inhaling his particular scent mixed with the leather and smoke. Suddenly, he parks the car someplace dark and empty that resembled an abandoned gas station. Kind of creepy, but you recognized the area now. It was a neighborhood located a couple of blocks away from his apartment.

"Why?" You coo, taunting, patiently testing how much he'd spill. But Javier won't meet your glance, focused on the nothingness ahead of him.

"Because I can't even get my dick hard for any other women, for fucks sake!" He howls, rubbing his face with his palm, clearly pissed.

At first, you thought he must've been joking. But the way he said it came out so frustrated that it made it hard to believe he was lying. His bold statement gave you a rush of power, knowing that you had him in mind and body, the man that made every woman he acquainted feel like a schoolgirl crushing on a senior. You understood why he was so mad right now; it wasn't only cause he was jealous, but because he hated seeing that you could easily move on to the next man while he remained stuck.

Though it was a lie. You only responded to him and you wanted to prove him that. But Javier had to acknowledge the mistake he made.

"Perhaps you're just old." You teased, "Have you tried pills for that?"

His reaction was so unexpected that you had barely any time to process the circumstances. He got out the car and opened the passenger's seat, tugging at your arm to get you out the jeep apprehensively.

"Take a guess, sweetheart." He grits next to your ear, his chest pressed to your back.

"Fucking hell..." you mewl at the feeling of Javier's hard boner firm against your ass. His hands hold your waist for a second before manhandling you to the edge of the back passenger's seat, hunching down in front of you with both hands gently gripping the exposed flesh of your thighs and looking up at you with fiery eyes.

"If you want me to say it, fine." He bites, giving up. "I made a mistake. It was stupid." Then his tone denotes the way he's struggling to contain anger. "I can't bear it. Seeing you with other men... It drives me insane. I can't even think straight- shit, I almost blew a whole ass operation tonight just because I saw you dancing with that guy." You gulp, remembering how furious he was just a few moments ago. "But let's not fool ourselves, cariño. We both know you haven't slept with anyone else either."

How he figured that out was a mystery to you. Maybe he truly was a very good agent.

There isn't a retort in your behalf. What could you possibly say anyway? He had you figured out already, he always did.

Back in the day, when you first started working with him, Javier acted like a complete shithead. Him an Murphy would give you a hard time with the DEA, always getting in trouble, messing up your schedules and bribing confidential information out of you. That's how you grew closer to him. Peña used to invite you for dinner or beers as an apology, granted that he always looked forward to take you back to his apartment, of course. Except you had heard the rumors regarding his reputation, and that was a well in which you weren't particularly eager to fall in, specially since he was a coworker.

Yet, it was all in vain. How could you ever say no to him if he'd look at you with those sparkly, deep brown eyes that resembled a lost puppy? You fell for Javi's smug smirk, the groovy hair, plus that confident and bite-back attitude of his, knowing how it would eventually end. Even so, no one could really blame you. He acted different around you, people were able to tell, brighter, more open and honest.

"See, I'm sorry about what I said..." you start, but he cuts you off.

"Don't be. I deserved that shit." The man stands up, taking a bunch of keys from the pocket of his jeans and going to take off the cuffs. "You should feel sorry for all those poor guys you toyed with while thinking about me the whole time."

You stretch your arms and massage your wrists, unwilling to meet his intense gaze, conscious that you'd fall for his charm immediately. He worked smarter, grabbing your chin to raise your face towards him.

"Did you enjoy it?" He hissed, fingertips digging on your jaw with moderate force. "Having other men grab your ass while everyone watches? Teasing the hell out of me in the office with those obscenely tight skirts and talking to Murphy as if I wasn't right beside him?" Your tongue darts out to lick your lower lip, not breaking eye contact. "Answer me, corazón."

"Yes," you respond cockily, "I enjoyed it." His face swiftly sobered, a muscle feathering in his jaw. "But I didn't think it had any effect on you, so it felt like a waste of time and effort."

Javier laughs huskily, bending forward. You close your eyes, thinking he's going in for a kiss, but instead his lips go to rest on your jawline, pressing open-mouthed kisses along your neck and all the way down to the valley of your breasts. As of now, you're a panting mess, already turned on by his adamant behavior. The fact that you were finally getting to feel him like this after a month or so of completely ignoring each other... It felt divine.

Your tug at his shoulder as he keeps nibbling the sensitive skin. The agent knew your body better than anyone else ever could, he'd memorized all the spots that would have you moaning and squirming underneath him, which was the case just now.

"Javi..." you sigh, running your hand through his hair.

"You're such a fucking brat." He reflects, kneeling between your parted legs. "A month ago I was merely a ghost to you, a few minutes prior I was simply 'Peña'. But when my lips are on you I'm suddenly 'Javi'?" He boasts with a devilish grin. "How convenient..."

"Mmm..." he laughs gruffly at your loss of words, his fingers hooking your underwear beneath the dress and slowly pulling it down.

At this point you're so wet it's embarrassing. It was probably due to the lack of sex you've had recently, or perhaps you were really growing fond of this new phase of his and the idea of Javier being possessive over you.

"Don't you dare look away." He warns roughly, peeling the fabric off you with a tad of your help. "Keep your eyes on me. I'll only tell you this once."

You nod eagerly. "Javi, are we- are we going to do it here?" It wouldn't be a new thing, you've done similar stuff in the past, though never in such an open space, despite appearing deserted. "Your place is barely a few blocks away..." His lips graze the soft skin of your upper leg, the feeling of his mustache raising goosebumps on your body.

"Can't wait." He stated, voice tinted with lust whilst his palm caresses your calf. "Need you now."

Somehow that made the pit of your stomach feel warmer. The rush of excitement coming from that desire he had for you had gave a thrill of control, completely ignoring how he was the one in charge of this situation. Javier carefully slips your dress upwards, taking in every single reaction you had to his touch and cursing at the sight of your throbbing pussy. The heat of his breath against your exposed core only increased your arousal, seemingly encouraging him.

"Shit, this cunt really did miss me, huh?" You nod again, basking in the contact of his nose brushing your clit, sending shivers down your spine.

In spite of your low whimpers of need, he deliberately denied you of his touch were you most needed him, simply roaming his lips and fingers over your inner thighs and pubic bone. Desperate, you scratch his scalp softly, pulling a groan from him.

"Javi, please..." he was definitely going to make you beg for it, regardless of how much he wanted it too. 

"Did you let anyone else do this to you?"

"No." You breathe out.

"Good." His thumb suddenly falls on your clit, rubbing slow circles. You squeal from the spontaneousness of the action, squeezing your eyes shut for a second. "This is mine." Then he slides down his finger to slightly part your swollen lips, coating it with your slick. "All mine."

"Sí, Javi."

"That's right, corazón." He murmurs, slipping two digits into you. "I'm going to fuck you so good that you won't ever think about anyone else." He sets a pace pretty quickly, pumping his fingers in and out, curling them to hit all the right spots. "I'm the only man for you. Understand that?"

"Yes, shit-" you choke down a moan when he mildly pinches your nub. "You are."

He makes a satisfied noise before diving in your pussy, starting to lick and kiss your clit without pulling out his fingers, maintaining a relentless pace and rejoicing himself in the sounds he'd pull from you.

"Fuck, that's good..." you manage to say, knowing how he likes the praise, your hand messing up his hair.

Javier pulls away for a second, grabbing your thighs to part them further and place your legs over his shoulders eagerly, hungrily looking up at you. You arch your back, ever so responsive to him while struggling to maintain a hold of yourself.

"So pretty." He whispers, admiring how your chest goes up and down from your rag breathing, your face contorted by pleasure as his fingers disappear in your cunt, the squelching sounds of your pussy and the moans spilling from your lips making him painfully hard. "Toda mía."

Your legs were already shaking, your body being so sensitive and needy. Specially for him. Always for him. But it wasn't enough and you both knew that. Though before you can beg him for more, his mouth takes place were his digits used to be, eating you out as if you were his favorite meal, lapping you up kind of selfishly, almost like he did it for his own pleasure.

"Javi, that's-" you can't even form coherent sentences without being interrupted by your cries of pleasure. "Too fucking good."

His tongue is hot and soft between your folds, licking up your slit as he rubs tight circles on your clit, fucking you greedily and moaning graciously against your slickness. Also, the image of him between your legs was always a sight to see, adding to the pool of arousal. You start seeing white spots and the knot in your lower stomach starts to loosen as the orgasm approaches, gripping the leather seat as if your life depended on it. It's a good thing that he's holding you, cause in a matter of seconds your whole body starts to tremble and his name leaves your lips repeatedly.

"I can't- shit!" You pull his hair involuntarily and he groans in response, the sound vibrating through your core and pushing you to the edge. "I'm gonna..."

You can't even finish speaking before you're coming undone in his mouth, feeling the hot waves of satisfaction wash over you. He doesn't pull away until you're practically whining from the overstimulation, trying to regain composure as he licks you clean. When he does, his eyes peer at you, intoxicated with desire as he starts to stand on his feet, towering over you.

"I missed that sweet taste of yours." He licks his glistening lips and you wish he'd finally kiss you. "Can't get enough of it."

Your hands reach his belt, trying to unbuckle it, but he takes your wrists to stop you.

"What's wrong?" You question, genuinely confused.

"I'm taking you to my apartment. I'm doing this properly." He retorts. However, you're too turned on now to care about the place.

"Please Javi, let me do something for you." One thing that made him go stupidly insane for you was the way you were never coy when asking for his cock, looking up at him with pleading eyes. As if having him on your throat gratified you. "I need you."

He almost caved in. Almost.

"Stop that or I'll cuff you again." He grumbles, only making you smile.

"Do it. I don't need hands, I can always take you in my mou-" Javier flips your body abruptly, pressing your face against the seat, and you can hear the familiar sound of metal clipping in.

"Such a greedy slut." He fixes your dress, not without subtly smacking your ass beforehand.

"Mm, can I at least get my panties back?" You ask in defeat, turning to face him, but he was already shutting the door.

"No." He quickly starts the car as you settle on the back, catching a glimpse of your reflection in the mirror. Your cheeks were flushed and lips plump from biting them, eyes still sparkling from the high post-orgasm.

"Do you like me like this?" You wonder as he begins driving. "All fucked out, cuffed and ready for you to take?"

Peña doesn't answer immediately, not daring to look back at you but desperately wanting to do it.

"I do." He answers, eyes on the road. "I like you naked. And dressed too, specially with those pretty skirts. I like it when you tell me how your day was, or when you're reading quietly." His words make your heart flutter, blushing harder. "I like listening to your voice, and the way your gaze always seems interested whenever I talk about me. Shit, I even like you when you're ignoring me." You can almost hear his smile, if that made any sense. "I like you all the damn time, hermosa."

Honestly, you weren't expecting such a straightforward answer, finding yourself at loss of words. Nonetheless, you didn't need to say anything, cause sooner than expected you were being taken out of the truck, flashes of the building he resided in passed right in front of your eyes while he dragged you through the dark, silent halls.

"Javi..." despite having limited mobility, you lean towards him, whispering in his ear. "Please kiss me."

He laughs dryly at your plea and struggles to open the door. "You want that, huh? ¿Quieres que te bese?" Then he takes your arm to drag you in, closing the door behind him.

"Yes, mi amor. I missed you so fucking much." You stay close to him, your face nuzzled on the crook of his neck. His hand brushes the hair out of your face and he presses his lips to your temple.

"Hm, is that right?" He hums and you can feel it against your nose. "Didn't seem so."

You back off swiftly, keeping your eyes locked with his. "I'm sorry, Javier. I really am."

Something shifts in his gaze, a possessive, deep emotion takes over him and he decides to take you up on your previous proposition.

"Prove it." He commands, voice hoarse. "Show me how much you missed me." The idea of getting what you wanted pursed your lips in a mischievous smirk. "I'll kiss you afterwards if I'm convinced."

Instead of responding, you start peppering kisses all over his jaw and neck, going as far along his chest as the buttons of his shirt would allow you. He lazily unbuckles his belt and pants while you lower yourself to your knees in front of him, but doesn't bother to go any further. It was going to be difficult, though nothing you haven't done before, nearly forgetting the cuffs as you craved his taste.

You rub the side of your face on his stiff erection, feeling how hard and hot he was under the tight fabric of his jeans and a low groan scratches his throat. You mouth at it before taking the zip between your teeth and sliding it down, eyes peering up at him at the same time. Javier observes every move attentively, his cock twitching at the sight of your lust-drunken gaze, breath starting to become unsteady when you kiss and lick the head of his dick over the thin fabric of his boxers. You taste the precum throughout it, salty and good, before pulling down his underwear by lightly biting the elastic.

Your mouth waters at the view, jaw going slack even before taking him in your mouth. His girth slaps against his clothed belly, tip red and leaking, just as big as you remember. Shit, you really had missed him. Javier's hand tangles in your hair, running his fingers in between the locks lovingly. He gasps when you press your lips to the slit, kitten licking the top and starting to spread wet kisses all over his length, running your tongue along the shaft, his musky scent getting to your head quite fast. He loved how every time you were on your knees for him it felt like you adored him, as much as Javier did you.

And it was true. Knowing how good you made him feel satisfied your senses, every expression and single noise he'd make could turn you on and push you to edge so easily. The man was simply delightful.

“Fuck, sweetheart…” he sighs, caressing your cheekbone with his thumb when you finally suck him in. “That’s it, wrap those gorgeous lips around my cock. So pretty…”

He lets out a gruffly moan as you take him further, watching as he screws his eyes shut and throws his head back, the sound so divine that it immediately makes your pussy clench around nothing. Javier is thick. And it’s always so hard to get him all in your mouth, but this time you make a double effort. You run your tongue against the veins on the underside of his dick, enjoying the weight of it in you, the taste and the admirable sight of him coming undone while he tries his best not to start fucking your face without warning, laying his palms flat on the wall behind you.

“Shit- that’s…” he grumbles, head spinning from pleasure, unable to make up any thought or manifest anything into words. You start bobbing your head up and down his length, hollowing your cheeks to provide more warmth.

You’re dripping, feeling the slick run down your thighs and the ache becoming unbearable. You squeeze your legs together in order to release some of that need, letting out a whine that vibrates through him and makes his hips jolt into your mouth.

“Fucking hell…” Javier’s hand snakes to the back of your neck, massaging the soft skin. “Does it turn you on to get me off like this, hermosa?”

You hum in response and the feeling sends him to oblivion, letting out a coarse moan that shocks another wave of hotness between your legs.

“What a nasty girl you are.” He mumbles breathily, “My girl.” He’s practically shaking at this point, the head of his cock hitting the back of your throat and your nose pressed against his pubic bone.

Air wasn’t a necessity at the moment, your ears ringing and the corners of your eyes watering. He warned you he was close but you didn’t back out, letting him hold you for support. He gasps out a raspy ‘fuck’ when he releases, hips stuttering and back arching slightly as his cum hits your tongue. You pull apart just enough to lap at the tip while he rides it out, feeling him throb in your mouth while you savor him until he’s completely spent, soft moans barely audible.

You wait until he opens his eyes again, brown gaze meeting yours between shaky breaths. “Will you uncuff me now, agent?”

He huffs a laugh, tugging himself back in his jeans before helping you get up and taking the metal cuffs off. For a second, none of you say a thing, simply staring back at each other with a swirl of emotions between you. But then he says your name, merely a whisper that makes you crumble.

“Don’t do that, Peña.” You scold, turning your back to him and walking towards the couch, taking a seat and listening to the leather crack under your weight.

“What do you mean?” He turns to you, hands on his hips, pants unbuttoned and hair messy.

“When you say my name like you need me and give me those puppy-dog eyes, I actually believe that you want me for anything other than sex.” He seems disappointed, mostly on himself. “So can we just fuck and get this over with?”

“Is that what you think I…?” Javier shakes his head and follows your direction, but only observes from above. “It’s not like that.”

You take off the heels, your feet starting to hurt. “Then how is it?”

His hand goes to your chin, urging you to look up at him. “I’m not good with this… I screwed up back in Texas and I did it again with you.” You gulp, your hands tightly gripping your knees. “I don’t know how to handle this sort of things, and it’s been a while since I felt like this for anyone…”

He takes the jacket off and sits on the edge of his coffee table in front of the sofa, cupping your face in his hands.

“All I know is that every time we’re together, nothing else matters. Things feel right. But when you’re not with me… Shit. Life becomes insufrible. I can’t sleep, can’t think, fuck, I can’t even have sex!” He looks genuinely irritated. “Everything’s about you when you’re away. And I can’t tolerate to see you with anyone else. It’s like someone just took a shot at me.”

You inhale sharply, taking his hand in yours without breaking eye contact. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve came back to you.”

“Precisely. I tried not to be selfish and let you go, but I can’t. It hurts too much.” He pouts, as if the mere thought made him sick. “And you deserve better.”

Inevitably, you roll your eyes. “Don’t bullshit me, Peña.” He furrows his brows at your reply, his palm falling from your cheek to his lap. “That’s crap! You think you know what’s best for me?”

“Well shit, I’m sorry for trying to look out for you.” Javier snarls back.

“I don’t need you to do that, you idiot.” You grab his jaw, taking him by surprise. “I know what I want and I was straightforward about it,” His heart starts thumping against his ribs. “So, if you want me, take me. Cause if you don’t… Someone else might.”

Your statement stirs his pot and his expression shifts. “Fuck no. You’re mine and I’m yours. That’s how this is going to work.”

“Yeah?” He lets out a throaty growl and leans down towards you.

“Yeah.” His mustache tickles your upper lip when he crashes his lips to yours and you whine into his mouth.

It was desperate and demanding, ripping all the emotions from you. Javier tasted like cigarettes, a hint of mint and of you. And you tasted like tequila, honey and of him. His cologne was a little faded, but you could still smell it.

“Say you’re mine, corazón.” He mumbles when he pulls back for air, forehead pressed to yours. “I don’t care if you’re lying, I need to hear it.”

You take him by the collar of his shirt so that he’s sitting down next to you, snaking your hand to press the palm against his bare chest.

“Soy tuya, Javi.” You tell him, laying a small kiss to his lips. “I mean it.”

He smiles cheekily as he pulls you on top of him, spreading your knees to each side of his thighs, your dress slipping upwards. Javier tugs a strand of hair behind your ear and his fingers roam your face as if he wanted to memorize every edge of it by tact alone. His thumb sweeps over your bottom lip carefully, parting your lips briefly before going to kiss you again. This time he does it slowly, taking his time with your lips prior to sliding his tongue past your teeth and relishing on your taste, almost like he wanted to lose himself in you.

To him, the world meant nothing if you weren’t by his side. And now that you were here, he intended to make the most of it.

His hands are everywhere: your waist, hips, lower back and butt, grabbing every bit of your flesh that he could, keeping you close. So close that it almost seemed like he wished to merge into you. You made out for what it appeared to be hours, until the kisses got sloppier but never less passionate, and you started grinding against him. You hold his shoulders for support, creating that delicious friction between your naked cunt and his stiff boner tucked in his pants. He jolts his hips up, making you release a whimper in his mouth.

He backed off, his lips now scrape your jawline, neck and collarbones. You arch your back when his hand slithers to pull down the zipper of your dress, granting him a better view of your tits close to his face.

“My room?” He asks, biting your earlobe mildly.

“Thought you’d never ask.”

Javi carries you to the bedroom with your legs wrapped around his waist, still finding a way to keep his lips on you in the meantime. Clothes disappear in the blink of an eye and you sit at the end of the sheets to help him take off his pants, kissing his abdomen, your dress now discarded somewhere on the floor.

“Eres preciosa.” The way he says it makes you blush, skin burning under his chocolate gaze. “I’m all yours, mi amor.”

You bring his face close to yours, infatuated with his beauty. “All mine…”

“Yes, corazón.”

You lay down on the mattress, Javier starting to play with your hard nipples, nibbling at them, sucking and kissing with his attention focused on all your reactions. You’re so aroused that you’re quite literally dripping onto his sheets, legs trembling from every light stimulation and skin scorching from desire, already spurred on by the make out and giving him head.

“Please, Javi… I- need you inside.”

He wastes no time to compel, maneuvering a hand to your lower back and aligning himself to your entrance, keeping your legs spread. You feel him inside, splitting you open with no previous warning and the tight grip of your cunt feels like homecoming to him. You hold your breath until he bottoms out, enjoying the sweet stretch he provided. Then your whole body quivers, a sheen layer of sweat covering both his golden skin and yours, a couple of curly locks sticking to his temples from it.

You watch him from below through hooded eyes, every inch of him inside you making you feel so full and complete, the outline of his fingers dig in your waist to keep you angled. You bear down on his cock, enveloping him in the warm, welcoming grasp of your body. He holds your hand above your head and leans down to kiss you again, drowning his own moans in your mouth as he draws out slowly to set a pace with his hips, the wet sounds of you pussy and skin clapping against skin sending a thrill of excitement down his spine.

You get it then, as he pours out all sentiment into you, overcome by passion. He is yours. Even though he just said it, only now does it become evident to you. This is Javier’s way of proving it.

He grabs one of your thighs and lifts your knee to the crook of his elbow, the new angle spreading you further open and allowing him to hit deeper. The impact of his tip hitting every right spot relentlessly forces you to break apart from his lips, your head thrown back into his pillows while practically screaming for more, his face nuzzled in your chest as he melts into you.

“Shit baby, I won’t last.” He warns, sinking his teeth to leave a mark between your breasts. You can feel it too, hot shots of ecstasy creeping up the pit of your stomach every time his cock jumps inside you.

You tug at his hair, a strangled moan escaping his lips. “Do it in me- Please, fill me up.”

Your request sends him right to the edge, his thrusts becoming careless as he starts grinding into you, Javi’s fingers quickly finding your swollen clit. The sole touch made you writhe and reach your high in absolute bliss, clenching your walls around him and crying out from raw pleasure. He fucks you through it, overwhelmed by the sensation. You feel dizzy, barely conscious when he finds his own release, your name spilling from his lips like it was the only word he knew, coming in warm spurts inside you. His spend is dripping from your pussy and thighs when he pulls out and sits up to admire the absolute mess he just made of you.

“Well…” he says, guiding his finger to push his seed back into you, making you whine from the overstimulation. “Hope that made it clear.”

You smile, every muscle in your body weeping from exhaustion. “Yeah… I’ll have to make you jealous more often.”

He groans in annoyance and you pull him back on top of you, spreading tender kisses all over his face, laughing in the meantime.

“Not funny.” He grumbles, despite the grin forming on his lips. Javier rolls to your side, coming to lay down next to you and immediately holding you against his sturdy chest, wrapping his arms around your waist to spoon you. “Stay with me.”

His plead is barely a murmur that filters through your ears and you’re too tired to figure out what those words actually mean. You simply let your eyelids drop and retort with a hardly audible ‘always’.

[osleeplessflowero]

got a bit in my feels recently, and came up with this as a result of that. enjoy :] might get a little angsty. but dust is here to help :) Remember, if you are going through a rough period in your life..you're not alone. Someone out there really cares about you. Keep going, you're doing great.

A chill breeze blows through the morning air. Grass is covered in dew from the rain that fell the previous day. A fog is present, showing up in random areas.

..You weren't in your room when he checked. Dust had wanted to check on you, see how you were doing. But you weren't in your room to begin with, which worried him a little bit. He mentioned this to Nightmare, who suggested where you could possibly be.

A portal opens, Dust steps through. Shoving his hands into his jacket pockets and glancing around before spotting an old children's playground. An entire area for children to play, alone now and rusted. Likely having not been touched in a good while. He spots you lying down on the roof of a play structure, and decides to walk over to avoid spooking you with a shortcut like he's done before.

He climbs up, sitting beside you. You turn your head to look at him with tired, lonely eyes. A vacant expression on your face. It's..odd, to him. He's so used to seeing the bright and cheery-eyed version of you that..the idea of you being in a state like this had never once crossed his mind. So worn down..lost. Unsure.

"..he told me i'd find you here." He starts off, turning his skull to look at you. You smile a little, but this one is more..sad than he's used to.

"I figured as much." You reply, turning your focus back to the dim sky that's eagerly awaiting the sun's arrival. He rests his hand beside you, waiting in case you want to hold it at any point. You appreciate the gesture, even if you don't outright say that.

"what's on your mind?" He asks, kicking his legs back and forth as they dangle off the edge. "..It's a lot." You reply, your eyes narrowing a little almost making a pained expression.

"i've got plenty of time." He reassures you with a fond smile you've grown to love. Tears prick at the corners of your eyes as you avert them away from him..his smile lowers a little at that.

"Everything is so fucked, Dust. It sucks. Life is just..it's all too much for me to bear. It's just weighing down on me. ..I wish I could go back to being a kid. Not having to worry about anything other than what to play with next. Not having to worry about what tomorrow brings, because back then..every single day was fun. We could look forward to the future. But now that we're in it?.. All I seem to want is to go back. Not have to grow bitter with the rest of the world. ..My mind is still young, but my body isn't. And I hate that."

"..i get that. ..wantin' to go back to when everything was peaceful. bright, cheery. the world nowadays can be pretty damn cruel when you're grown. you know more. you realize more. ..how messed up a lot of it is."

You turn to him.

"but yet..growin' up doesn't mean it's the end of the world. that you can't find happiness in it anymore. ..you still live, even if you're not an innocent kid anymore. you can still find joy in the little things around you. and when things get tough..you've always got someone around who you can talk to about it. like me, or..any of the others. we'll always take the time to listen to you. a lot's goin' on in the world right now, sure. but you can't let that drag you down. ..i know that i can't escape my past. my actions, what i've done."

You sit up, leaning on his arm a bit and placing your hand over his, squeezing it.

"i can't go back. and..i've come to terms with that. i can't undo what i did. but..i won't let that suffocate me now. there were times where things were fine, i can always look back to them and smile. but i also wanna find those little good moments now, and savor them. like..hm, like when we met you." He smiles at you, and you return it.

"you mean a lot to us. more than you realize. you take care of us, so..let us take care of you too when things feel grim. at the very least..let me. i'll always be here to listen."

You reach up your hand, wiping away your tears.

"Thanks..Sans."

He leans his head on top of yours. "anytime, sweetheart."

The sun slowly begins to rise, casting its light over the playground. Dust looks down to ask if you want to go home yet, when he sees that you've fallen asleep on his shoulder. With a fond smile, he picks you up, going through a portal and returning to Nightmare's castle.

[webcomixwastaken]

Honestly, every time I see someone insist they need AI for writing, be it for getting an idea or drafting their piece or even basic grammar my instinct is to say:

"Just... GET GOOD."

Like, have no ideas? Then read more books in ALL sorts of genres, styles, and authors. Even read different age groups (if you only read YA but are over the age of 20, I promise you there is plenty of Adult out there you will love. Find it. You deserve it.) Do the same for movies, shows, and plays. Go to festivals and exhibitions and concerts. Dabble in different hobbies to observe and talk to people, all sorts of people. EXPERIENCE LIFE, that's how you'll be inspired to write about it. Know the world and how you feel in it beyond what the internet tells you to. (Also, you'll find out that your "brilliantly unique concept" has likely been done before and that your personal life experience will be the thing that makes it genuinely unique.)

Think your writing is bad? AI can't make it good for you. AI is a shitty writer. If you want to write I assume you like to read. (If you want to write but don't like to read then you have an incredibly tough, nigh impossible road to "being a good writer" ahead of you.) Again, read as widely as you can. Fanfic alone will not help you unless you only want to write fanfic which I do know applies to a lot of people. There's a fantastic thread floating around here that explains why writing for fanfic vs writing original work for publication are very different spheres. And as someone who reads a bunch of both, the best fanfic still has structure, character development, and actual plot, very similarly to books. (This is very much my subjective opinion, but I despise "no plot only vibes" -- to me both are integral to a good read. This 100% applies to tradpub too; the social media trope-focused marketing annoys me to no end. What is your story ABOUT?? If you can't tell me I have no interest in reading it.)

Instead of taking the shortcut that is actually sending you back to the start anyway, just... GET GOOD. And you get good by BEING BAD. Compose some trite purple prose nonsense rife with cliches. Have all your characters be shameless Mary Sues. Or, as I see the most often in early writers, be pedantic and repetitive as fuck because you don't know that you're doing it yet until after a year or so you look back and go "why the hell did I talk so much about this irrelevant thing? it totally disrupted the momentum of the scene and doesn't even develop character." And then, you'll realise that you've learned how to edit! Congratulations! You must understand that AI doesn't know this. AI is just plagiarising a couple hundred thousand people. AI has no brain. Don't trust it. Don't even play with it. It is a pathetic zombie concoction that only causes damage to others and the environment. Trust YOUR BRAIN. You are SO MUCH SMARTER. You KNOW what you want and like, you have way better ideas and images you want to convey. And in time you will know how to convey them accurately and compellingly in a way that sounds like you.

And finally, AI for grammar and spelling? Hoo boy do I have some opinions. Well, just one. Which is to simply GET GOOD!!

People bitch that English is a difficult language to learn but hey! All languages have their rules and nuances, so that's merely subjective! Whatever language you want to write in, learn those rules!! Seriously, just GET GOOD!! it's doable! I do it! In fact, many people do it and have DONE SO FOR YEARS.

Honestly, I don't use ANY kind of grammar software beyond the basic spellcheck automatically built into browsers and word processors nowadays (the ones that give you wiggly lines while you're typing and even then I rarely right click to accept since I find it faster to simply retype properly) because I KNOW MY SHIT. I know how to construct sentences, use consistent tense, punctuate properly, and capitalise or italicise or utilise any other convention of the English language I wish to follow or break because this is my craft, and I know how to shape it to become what I want my work to be.

So here is where I expect people to be all like "but what if I'm NOT a native speaker of the language huh huh??" Well, you're choosing to write in this language though. Do your level best -- and here is where I will say that this grammar stuff IS the most forgivable aspect anyway. Spelling errors or janky phrasing never hurt anyone when we can tell it's coming from a place of true diligence and effort, in fact one of my favourite fanfics of all time was set a summer camp and the NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKING author wrote "councilor" until about chapter 20 when they asked us, utterly mortified, in the notes why nobody had corrected them (because the plot and characterisation were immersive AF and felt like it came from a real person with real experiences). Some of the most poetic syntax and delightful descriptions I've come across were from people writing in not their first language, or even second or third -- children and adults alike, still learning and still TRYING because they took this shit seriously and were putting in their all.

This is the part that I personally cannot comprehend (but in a practical way I do, only because I see it EVERYWHERE) of people claiming that they just can't "get" grammar and need some brainless software running on codes and algorithms to "correct" them - don't you want to be FREE of this dependence?? Wouldn't you prefer to write KNOWING that it says what you WANT it to say instead of hoping that maybe 30% will remain after a program strips it of voice and style (and then because you're no longer paying attention, it also makes your sentences just WORSE and not "succinct" at all)?? Don't you want to be grown and confident with SKILLS instead of whining for help (which just boils to someone doing it FOR you, not actual help) all the time???????? Like seriously!! Have some self-esteem!!!!! You deserve it!!!! GET GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have been teaching fiction writing as my day job for nearly a decade now and when my students fret over their sub-par skills I always ask them how old they are. Because they should know that 9 year olds aren't supposed to spell everything correctly. Instead, they're supposed to make mistakes so they can learn how to fix them. Then, they should practise and practise and practise until they're 19 and realise that the habit has developed so beautifully that they're finding it HARD to make mistakes!

And if you're 29 and still struggling, no it's not too late. The best time was to start 20 years ago but the second best is now. Writing is pretty much a lifetime gig so keep going, and GET GOOD!!

[yellowocaballero]

I'd be interested in those writing shortcuts 👀 (don't feel pressured though)

Yeah sure! This is in reference to this and this posts.

These are all pretty 'fic style' stories, because they scaffold off pre-existing canon. It's like you're walking inside of a pre-built house and you're putting up new wallpaper and designing the rooms. Novel style is like if you're building the entire house. So these are really great for fun and if you have writer's block or have problems starting a story. They're also really good if you're practicing your dialogue, scene composition, characterization, etc - they are not good for developing skills on how to build the house, but if you're trying to work on actually making a readable story they're great methods to practice. They're also a lot easier to make good lol.

While writing these out I realized that they're almost entirely AUs. This is because I like AUs. You don't have to do AUs, you can adapt these however you want if you just like writing canon. Loser. Anyway, these are my low-effort stories:

A series of disconnected scenes that take place over a long period of time. If you have an idea in mind (or you just want to use the OG work's timeline), then you can show scenes or moments over a long period in time. For example, ages ago I wrote an AU story following the life of one character. One scene for 2008, one for 2010, one for 2012 etc.

Rewriting canon. If you have an AU idea or have a way in mind to change canon to something you think fucks harder, then you can use pre-existing episodes or season plotlines and just add your own flavor to what already exists. If you write for BNHA you aren't allowed to do this. That's the rule. How is all BNHA fic 600k AUs where one extremely minor detail is changed. God they're boring.

Alternate viewpoint/missing scene of a story you have. Like you can do this for canon too but that sounds super boring. This is actually something I do in order to help the quality of the main story - if I'm finding myself writing a super complicated character, I write another story about him from his POV to help give me a handle on him. Or write her parts of the story from her perspective. It's a writing exercise to help me figure out the character and it is also easy and fun.

"X Meets Y". Do you really like Legally Blonde? Do you think your favorite character being Elle Woods would be really funny? Stuff like that. Would it be really funny if your blorbo was Sharpay Evans? Yes it would be. Yeah I DID write a story many years ago that was "X meets Teen Beach Movie", why?

I don't know how many other people out there have extremely convoluted entire AU ideas, but if you have the whole AU in your mind then it is incredibly easy to write little stories or snippets from the AU. Like, so easy. A stand-out scene in your mind, the life of one supporting character, an alternate POV, whatever. Literally whenever I want to write something absolutely 0 effort whatsoever I go back to one of my 3 bugfuck stupid AUs and write something for them again.

This is actually something I think everybody should do, because it is basically how I learned story structure: find the trashiest, most formulaic genre you can. Watch or read something from that genre, or just collect genre conventions. Use the pre-packaged and pre-written formula to structure your own story and fill in the blanks.

(Also, these aren't very tropey or reliant on shipping/romance beats, which is nice if you want to get away from that stuff)

Nowadays, I find all of that helpful when I feel like doing something 0 effort. When I was a less experienced writer and I deadass did not know how to build a house, then these were really helpful for learning what wallpaper looks good and what arrangement of furniture creates good fung shui and what couches go best with that coffee table. They're also good passing. Seriously, these are like the most popular stories on my AO3. People eat this shit up. Why. They're so lazy.

IDK, these are what I do because they're the kinds of stories I like to write! What you find easy to write will be different. This is all a very personal list. I can see my personal thumbprint (no romance, AU central) really clearly. I'm kind of curious now: what are y'all's favorite low-effort, easy, fun stories to write?

Also as a heads up if your story doesn't have any sort of conflict in it, then it will actually very difficult to write. Trust me. Conflict makes you voom. Do it. Please. Love of god.

[sequoiareachesforthesky]

Today I wanted to talk about family structures and how diverse they can be and then it derailed into talks about education. Like the woke public schools that conservatives are so afraid of, that kind of things. Enjoy!

Warning : rambling. A lot of it.

Thank Satan I grew up surrounded by somewhat diverse family structures that didn't all fit the "straight married couple with 2.5 children" archetype, because being taught that this is the one and only way to live a happy life sounds scary to me.

My aunt divorced in her late 30s and is currently living her best life with her new boyfriend. And nobody makes a fuss about it, like good for her and her ex-husband if they needed to end their relationship. Divorce is healthy.

I have three uncles, none of them ever got married. I don't know much about my mom's brothers but my other uncle has been single for as long as I can remember and is absolutely thriving. He spends time with his friends, and puts time into his passions (mainly old cars). And never has anyone in my family said anything about him being single. Or even suggested that it should be something to be talked about. Because guess what, it's not a fucking problem and people aren't defined by their relationship status.

My mom went to a lesbian wedding when I was around 8 (I remember being very disappointed that I couldn't come with her because I've never been to a wedding before and it sounded like a lot fun). She made sure to show me and my siblings pictures and videos of the event. To make sure we understand that there's no problem with a family composed of two moms and a daughter (she was from one of the brides' previous marriage, again with divorce being treated a totally normal part of life, because it is).

I also grew up in a place where multicultural and mixed families were basically the norm I feel? At least that's how I was seeing it. The fact that my classmates had parents from overseas, or ethnically marked features wasn't a big deal (that's also why I'm now still very bad at recognising said "ethnic features" or foreign accents, or even knowing where names are from, because I didn't see any of those things as a difference honestly. Like how do people go "ah yes, this person is definitely from Eastern Europe". Like what??? How???). Anyway, that may be why for a while, I really struggled to understand why racism existed as a child. Like I knew it existed, I was told it was bad but I didn't understand why it was a thing in the first place (but isn't the case for most children? We're just here to enjoying the slides in the playground, we have no idea about the colonial heritage of our societies)

(sidenote: I may be mixed myself (wasian) but the history and current societal impact of racism is definitely not a topic I would say I'm very knowledgeable about. And of course looking back on it I did hold racist beliefs as a kid and there were instances when I witnessed structural racism. It just took me a while to realise it and to try to become a better person. My point here is about family structures and how I personally was exposed to a lot of mixed families, including my own, and that in that sense, race and culture have never been something I could have worried about when thinking about the idea of "founding a family". Like whatever happens happens you know)

And that's not even going into all of the friends I had who were raised by only one parent, the ones who would spend one week at their mom's then one week at their dad's, the ones who got nieces/nephews because they had much older siblings (sometimes step siblings), the ones who were adopted, and so on and so forth. So yeah, to me, it's normal for families to come in all shapes and forms. That's why nowadays, when I get introduced to new views of family and relationships, it doesn't really take me long to get it.

Sometimes I think back on my childhood and realise that I got actually pretty lucky to be in contact with many kinds of family structures, with none presented as more correct or desirable. Because now that I'm older and that I've met people who are very cautious about sticking to traditions (*cough* catholic bourgeois *cough*) and who even get anxious at the idea that they won't be able to get their straight wedding with three children that they shall raise in a pavillion in the suburbs, I really think that damn, it must suck to be them.

Anyway, judging others for having a view of "family" differing from your own is cringe, and I really think we should queer the world a bit more because why were my 12 year-old classmates so surprised when I told them that polyamory is fine to me (and even a logical way to look at love and relationships in my brain), that I didn't wanna have children later, and that I didn't if I would get a husband or a wife later, or if I would get married at all. I remember the shock in their eyes and being very confused as to why, because I was like "uuuuh, I thought homophobia didn't exist anymore? And that people should live the way they want?" (Also I've recently been diagnosed with ASD after being in denial about it my whole life so that may explain some things, since you know, the intersection between autistic and queer identities isn't even an intersection anymore).

This post was originally about family but since it intersects a lot with queerness, I just wanted to share a thought. Sometimes, I wonder if I could basically be considered as "assigned enby at birth" with how I was taught that gender doesn't matter and encouraged to be whomever I want to be without following gender norms. (This last paragraph is to be taken more as a joke than anything, but like honestly, that's why I never personally found the need to identify with the term "trans" or "non-binary". Because I just don't care personally, thanks to my upbringing. And that's why I'll always advocate for children to be exposed to queer content because me, my siblings, and probably most children from my community were and it makes for such healthier adults istg. Like yeah, I didn't care about my gender identity or whatever but the second I was put in an all girls school, I understood that it very much mattered to other people and that made me so furious, I totally get why so many people are attached to their queer identity. Because when you're in a fucking horrid environment, of course you're gonna have a strong emotional reaction to this stuff.)

All of this to say : I was raised by a woke family, went to a woke school that taught us that climate change is going to kill us all, that we should welcome all refugees, that beauty is found in difference and diversity, that disabled people should be accommodated (there was a class in my school for specially made for children with mental or learning disabilities because yes, they do have a right to education too actually), that children in general have rights and are not just objects, that solidarity is important (we made cakes for the local food bank when we were in kindergarten it was very cool. and many many fund-raising campaigns for people in need. we would mainly provide food and sanitary products, and the goal was to make a wall in the school hall with all of the collected products. it was great). We would sing songs about international solidarity and fighting against racism and water access inequalities at the school choir (looking back on it this feels a bit surreal to be frank). I was raised in the exact environment conservatives are freaking about. Heck the street where I lived was named after a communist song 😭. And you know what's the funniest thing about all that? It wasn't even that "woke". The way we were taught about societal stuff was a nice effort, but a bit clunky at times. There were still a lot, and I mean a lot of ableism against the students from the "special needs" class I talked about previously. I still got called a racist slur by a classmate when I was five. I still had so much stuff to unlearn as I got into teenage then adulthood.

What many would consider "woke" in the way I was brought up is, to me, the bare minimum. And that's why it hit me in the face like a baseball bat when I went from this great, though imperfect public school to a private middle school where boys and girls were separated in different classes. Where the students weren't mobilised to collect food for people in need in their local community but rather to pray for them and maybe give a little money to support missionary trips to Africa and things of the sorts. Where the school choir was mostly for learning Christian songs about thanking God for his eternal generosity. I was atheist btw, and attending religion class and masses were mandatory which felt a bit like infringing upon my freedom of religion but whatever I guess!! "Your parents chose to put you here so you don't have a say in the matter." a teacher once said.

So now, let me ask you a question and answer it immediately? Which of those two education systems is better? THE PUBLIC ONE OBVIOUSLY. I LOVED SCHOOL. I LOVED PEOPLE. I LOVE LIVING IN AN OPEN-MINDED COMMUNITY. AND THIS FUCKING PRIVATE CATHOLIC SCHOOL, WHICH ISN'T EVEN THE WORST OF ITS KIND BTW, ALMOST MADE ME FORGET ABOUT THIS LOVE. IT BROKE ME MENTALLY. IT COULD'VE TURNED ME INTO A PERSON I WOULD'VE HATED. AND FOR THAT I CAN NEVER FORGIVE IT. There might have been good individuals in this school, friends I made, teachers who were genuinely great people. But this school system wasn't made to help us grow into good people. You've heard it all before, how it just turns us into good employees how will preserve the system as it is, maintain the status quo.

When people tell me that education is better in private than in public school, it makes me laugh. I was always top of my class in this so called top-notch private school. Even though I was the public school kid. And even then, I would have been fucking humbled by students who spent their entire school years in the public system. Because those private school don't make you smarter, they won't help you get better grades. Even if they did, what good does it do? It's not about the grades. It's about being a person that finds their own path, their own way to live in society. Not necessarily this society, they can build their own. But how are we supposed to rely on each others and find community when we've been taught to always see the other as competition?

I wanted to talk about family structures and how diverse they can be, but I realize now that what I really I wanted to talk about is family as in finding each others, living together, embracing diversity and loving. In your own way, because there are so many different ways of loving, and so many people and things to love. But it's always love. It's caring. And this care for the people and the things about me, I got it from my education.

It's always about education.

[checkxmaster]

It... really broke Chad's heart to hear not only about what had been done to Rain, but to hear how it had made her feel. The concerned furrow in his brow only deepened and he swallowed hard to see the scars she showed him. "Jesus Christ..." he whispered. It wasn't like Chad was a squeamish sort, that wasn't it at all. He'd seen his fair share of scars and wounds in his life, so they didn't bother him. It was the idea of his friend and former teammate going through that kind of hell and being treated like a laboratory guinea pig that both frightened him and made him incredibly sad.

A sincere, I'm so sorry, was ready to go on his tongue, but he held it back, knowing that Rain wasn't one to be pitied. She hated that, because she hated to feel fragile or like a victim. Instead, he indirectly complimented her strength. "I... don't think I could've survived all that..." he said truthfully. "Bastards," he added. "Well fuck 'em. You survived and they're never gonna get their hands on you again." Was that an observation? A wish? Or a promise? Maybe a little of everything.

"Do... Do you think... That feeling you have, the foreign body sensation... Do you think it's psychosomatic, or scar tissue, or that they actually implanted things inside you? Because, if it's the latter, and it's something like trackers or computer chips or anything of that nature, I might be able to locate them. Maybe we could take them out? I'm sure you're not too keen on more surgery, but the feeling of having things stitched up inside you can't be great either..."

Chad was... honestly just trying to help in a situation he could probably do very little about. He might be able to locate some of her implants, if they even existed, but he was no surgeon, that's for sure. "At the very least, if they did implant transmitters or trackers, I can probably remotely disable them so there's no chance of them causing you any problems in the future."

"Are you in any pain?" he thought of next, wondering if she had the same problem he did with his scars. "'Cause I've got a whole pharmacy in here. Can't sleep most nights unless I take something, thanks to being made a human chew toy that night." He rolled his damaged shoulder as he reached up with his other hand to massage it a little. The painkillers he'd take earlier were working well enough, but nothing really helped the uncomfortable tight, tugging sensation caused by the scar tissue.

He was glad that the conversation turned light again, mostly for Rain's benefit. Damn, she'd really been through a lot. It made Chad want to help to just make her life a little less arduous. She was a good person, and she deserved to have help if she needed it. Not that he'd say that out loud. He didn't want a swift kick in the ass, after all. His ass if he was lucky. Laughing as she responded to his playful dismissal of her, Chad couldn't help but think that Rain was most in her element when she was being a bitch. And of course that word was used with the utmost affection. "Of course you would've. Five seconds? I don't even think it would've taken you that long," he joined in.

When she started to ogle an automatic pistol on his gun rack, he grinned. "Take her, if you want," he said with a happy shrug. "I don't use that one, really. I've been partial to my rifle lately. I'd be glad to see her getting used by someone who appreciates her." He turned to look at the boxes of supplies on his shelves. "I've got ammo for 'er... in... uh... here," he said, sliding a box off the shelf and putting it on the floor by the gun rack. Hoarding may have been an undesirable habit when life was normal, but nowadays Chad was glad that he saved almost everything he came across.

To put it lightly, Chad was overjoyed when Rain took him up on his offer of a team-up. "Yeah? Great!" he said with all the innocence of a kid on a playground. "I can definitely move thing around, make room for another place to sleep. I took out some of the structure in here that wasn't really doing me any good, so there's more room inside than usual." Even then, he'd filled it up with stuff, but there was still some space to work with.

"I can try to look at your bike, but... vehicles aren't really my area of expertise. Not unless the problem with it is a big, digital control panel," he joked. "We might be able to attach it to the top of this beast, though, and take it with us." There he went again, not wanting to leave anything even remotely useful behind.

"The hell is your problem, dude? Did you seriously forget about me? Or what, you think I'm a clone? Be for real."

It was getting dark, so Chad pulled his armored vehicle over to the side of the road and set about preparing to settling in for the night. Over the years, he'd accumulated a lot of tech to help him survive, from computers and GPS, to motion sensors, timers, and alarms. Generators and power storage units were essential, as were solar panels and other methods of harnessing power as electrical grids began to fail seemingly everywhere.

Some of the tech he built himself, having raided hardware stores for parts, and others he'd acquired from abandoned police stations and homes. It passed the time, to sit and occupy himself with building computers, or to set up surveillance systems, or to create spreadsheets to catalogue all of his supplies, and he liked to keep his skills sharp. Why? He didn't really know anymore. Maybe it just kept him sane. He had about a million flashlights, flares, weapons, and a multitude of ammunition types, complete with all the batteries, solar chargers, hardware enhancements, additional parts, and optional adjustments he could store.

Metal boxes, backpacks, and duffel bags were stacked in an almost hedge-maze-like fashion inside the armored vehicle he'd taken over after it had been abandoned by the military. His bed was little more than a shelf nestled into all this organized chaos, but he found it strangely comforting to be boxed in while he slept... especially since he was alone most of the time.

Occasionally he joined up with some survivors, but he found it difficult to remain with them. Their goals were vastly different, with civilians wanting to find somewhere safe to hunker down and barricade, and Chad wanting to keep on the move to see what he could do to screw Umbrella over or help other people.

He'd gotten his motion sensor perimeter up around his mobile home, as it were, and had just taken his nightly dose of painkillers so he'd have half a chance of sleeping. The deep scars from where the licker had grabbed him as well as the pain of a few broken bones that hadn't quite healed properly from being thrown off the train on the way out of the Hive had him pretty much in near-constant pain. He'd learned to live with it, and as long as he was busy and moving, he could ignore it. At night, though, he needed some extra help from good ol' pharmaceuticals. Just over-the-counter, though, nothing too heavy. He couldn't risk not being able to wake up if something significant went down. And absolutely nothing with an Umbrella logo on the bottle.

That was when one of his alarms went off, indicating that something was moving in the near vicinity of the vehicle. "Really?" he groaned, his head falling to the right as he lay in his bed to look at the screen across the way. Sure enough, it was blinking. Sighing, he sat up and typed away, looking at the camera feed indicating movement. To his severe disappointment, it wasn't one of the undead. It looked like a soldier of some kind. "Just perfect," he said cynically. Grabbing a couple guns, he went out to investigate. What he found was... startling, to say the least.

It... it was Rain. His heart began to pound. No, Rain's dead. Don't get fooled again by those stupid clones. Man, they were creepy... Clones of his now-deceased friends and comrades that often times acted nothing like the originals. The Rain ones... were always particularly nasty. He lifted his rifle, leveling it at her. "That's far enough," he said coldly, assuming this was a clone. How can it not be?

But then she spoke, and almost simultaneously he began to notice that she looked a bit older. The clones always looked young, pristine. Swallowing hard, Chad found it difficult to breathe with how vigorously his heart was now pounding, rattling his ribcage. Faltering a little in his resolve, the tip of his rifle slowly dipped a bit and he stared incredulously at her.

"N-no, I-... Of course I didn't forget about you, but..." But you're dead. You've gotta be. Forgetting Rain - or anyone else he'd lost in the Hive due to his incompetence, poor planning, and cracking under the pressure - was never an option. He saw their faces almost nightly in the twisted horrors of his guilt-fueled nightmares.

Chad blinked, not knowing what to do. The rifle lowered just a bit more at the mention of clones. "Yeah, actually, that's exactly what I'm thinking. Wait, you're-... Are you telling me you're not a clone?" Oh, how he wanted to believe that, but he'd been fooled before, almost fatally. "Come on, don't fuck with me..." he said, more with a crestfallen type of exhaustion than with any sort of real intimidation attempt. "If you're not a clone... then prove it."

If this really was Rain, the real Rain, then he was about to feel like a huge jerk momentarily. But if it wasn't... he couldn't afford to let his guard down...

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[kae-karo]

B, K, R for the ask meme!!

ooo hello hello dear thank u so much!!

send me fic writing asks from this list!

B:  What was the first fandom you read fic in?  Which was the first you wrote fic for?

ahhh throwback lmaooo i first read and wrote fic for the phandom (dan and phil phandom lmao i know there's a few of those) this is weird to say when most people my age grew up with fandom from like ages 12-13, but i really didn't get much into fandom until i was out of college?? i did follow a few people who posted stuff about doctor who when i was like...a freshman in college or so and i'd just started watching the show, but i really didn't even know that fic was a thing at the time? which like. really that sounds so bizarre looking back lmao

but yeah! dan and phil phandom for both!

K:  Do you have a guilty pleasures in fic (reading or writing)?

slkdfjlkdsf i feel like any time i see the term 'guilty pleasures' i have to clarify that i like. don't feel guilt in any capacity for enjoying these things? it's more just like. this is stuff i probably don't mention or talk about much? of which i would say ovipos (when it's not tied to eggpreg) thank u zhongli for awakening that one lmao. and probably mermaids when i come across an intriguing fic with that as a premise? on the less spicy side, i do love a good truth serum/forced admission of feelings, esp if it's tied to enemies/rivals lmao. close contenders depending on the context are probably aphrodisiac/fuck or die/sex pollen and tentacles

R: Which writers (fanfic or otherwise) do you consider the biggest influence on you and your writing?

oh wow this is a really good one sdfkjsdfjl and tbh i'd probably be very hard-pressed to take apart my writing style itself and trace it back to certain authors/writers? i cut my teeth on first person pov, which i could probably owe back to some of the books i was a big fan of (first thing that comes to mind is 'shatter me' by tahereh mafi). i think that overall the slew of ya novels i read when i was younger probably had a pretty healthy influence on my writing style? i'm super picky nowadays with the kinds of writing styles i enjoy reading (both in books and in fic) but i was definitely always drawn to books that focused more heavily on emotions and reactions and internal motivations, so ultimately i probably sought out more of that and it played into the kinds of ways i prefer to write. i'd also have to call out rose as an influence which she's hardly on tumblr nowadays so she won't see it lmao but her writing is absolutely what i'd call poetic and evocative and i think she has introduced me over time to a lot of writing styles i might otherwise not have sought out/seen. i also think often of a dan and phil fic i read many many moons ago (x) that really sticks with me and comes to mind now and again, specifically for this:

THE END.

(For you, that is. For me and Phil? This wasn’t the end, nor was it the beginning. It was just another moment, just somewhere in the middle. Just one peak of happiness in a mountain range. Just a minute of soft light and a minute of peace. Just a minute of conviviality, of just the two of us as one. Of love. This wasn’t the end of the story, and this wasn’t where happiness began. It was us. It was now.)

idk something about this like, clings to me stubbornly even years upon years after i first read it. it serves as a reminder of multiple things for me personally, including the idea that the story i'm writing isn't (and shouldn't be!) the entire story that exists out there - it's just a fragment of time that i've shed light on and shared. it's the freedom to make a story exactly what i want it to be, to tell everything i want to tell and nothing more, nothing less. to (much to my worldbuilder friend's chagrin) not worry about the structure and workings of the entire monumental universe surrounding that story, and to better know and understand when and how i want something to end

send me fic writing asks from this list!

[hellyeahheroes]

GM: It’s more like people’s sense of the immense energy compressed into certain words. It’s not the word itself – as Wilson reminds us ‘fuck’ is a ‘bad’ word but it doesn’t sound much different from ‘folk’, a ‘good’ word, and it means the same as ‘coitus’, another ‘good’ word. So where exactly does the wickedness and dirtiness of ‘fuck’ reside?

Words become fetishized for reasons good or bad and the more fetishized they are, the more taboo they become, which confers an aura of outlaw sexiness that attracts some people to them.

Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bob Wilson himself, all made a point of saying that words should not be given this kind of power because once they have this power, they can become fetishized and weaponized. If you de-power a word then it can’t be used to trigger other people in the same reliable way, but we’re just not in that phase, with the dislocated politics of culture right now. I think people got it right to take down some of these structures right now and perhaps it’s okay to retire certain radioactive, abusive terms as long as we make sure we’re creating new words in other areas.

As a for instance, when I was a kid there were no words to describe certain aspects of my own experience. I’ve been non-binary, cross-dressing, ‘gender queer’ since I was 10 years old, but the available terms for what I was doing and how I felt were few and far between. We had ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ both of which sounded like DSM classifications rather than lifestyle choices! I didn’t want to be labelled as medical aberration because that’s not how it felt, nor was it something cut-and-dried and done. I didn’t want to ‘transition’ or embody my ‘female’ side exclusively, so I had no idea where I fit in.

Terms like ‘genderqueer’ and ‘non-binary’ only came into vogue in the mid-90s. So kids like me had very limited ways of describing our attraction to drag and sexual ambiguity. Nowadays there’s this whole new vocabulary, allowing kids to figure out exactly where they sit on the ‘color wheel’ of gender and sexuality, so I think it’s OK to lose a few contentious words when you are creating new ones that offer a more finely-grained approach to experience.

When we make the jump to a non-Roman-alphabet-based emoji language for purposes of radio telepathic communication, things will change once more.

Grant freaking Morrison just in an official, published interview refered to himself* as non-binary gender queer. This is huge as it means some of the most influential works in comics history were creations of a non-binary writer who only needed science and our understanding of gender to catch up enough to form terms that reflect his identity (which in itself shows how important such progress is).

* - he did not specify prefered pronouns but the interview still uses “him” at one point so I assume he approves of that until proven othertwise.

-Admin

[rigelmejo]

march - just some thoughts

i have read more this month than any other month? and its not slowing down its only 3/12 so i have 2/3 of a month to go and i’ve read 26 chapters. even if these chapters are ‘short’ at 10 pages, if i wanna count by ‘20 page’ chunks i’ve still read 13 chunks so far. and i’ve still got more time in the month left. most other months i’ve managed to read ‘a lot’ i read 10-20 chapters. so i’m doing really good.

grammar is a weird thing? in reading i feel like its quite easy now to understand. when listening or watching - same. and yet if asked ‘why do i say/type X’ or ‘why is it written/spoken like X’ i have absolutely no explanation in my head. i could not explain the grammar if prompted. this puts me in a weird place and i feel like i SHOULD go over a grammar guide again just so i can WORD what i’m intuitively understanding.

this is a bit bizarre to me because within the first 6 months of study i DID read through an entire grammar guide just to get an idea of what i was about to look at, and it hardly made sense once actually reading/watching/listening. i understood the guide fine, but actually Seeing chinese i was still confused. i would reference AllSetLearning’s Chinese Wiki on some basic points, then after 6 months i just stopped. now its been what 1.5 years and - reading is so easy, listening is so easy, grammar wise. none of the grammar confuses me. but i no longer ‘explicitly’ have any idea what the fuck the grammar is. i used to. i studied it explicitly before trying to read/listen. and yet now that i can read/listen, i have no idea how to explain the grammar. i can listen to a podcast and i don’t think about what the grammar is i just get it. i read and just know what i’m looking at. its like english - i cannot fucking explain it. Which makes speaking/writing a bit hard. Because when i try to check if i’m right i have no fucking clue HOW anymore - i just say/write what comes to mind and HOPE it makes sense. i have no way to conciously check for errors except ‘does this feel right’? And that’s not good enough for me lol. So I definitely do need to eventually read a grammar guide for explicit explanations again.

Technically I think “English and Chinese Grammar Side By Side” grammar book would be an excellent one to use. Because i read the first 50 pages of it and it compared it to english (so it explained english too), and it was very easy to understand and started basic then got more involved. 

I’m probably gonna use my very old Chinese Grammar Self Taught by Thimm book instead. Just because I really like that book. Then I guess use another after (probably Basic Chinese Sentence Patterns since its modern and perfect for ‘catch your own mistakes’ study and much shorter than Eng+Chinese Grammar side by side). 

Anyway I’m in a very weird place right now lol. I know i’m understanding grammar that is stuff I never even studied initially in the grammar guide, but unable to explain what it is, and a lot of stuff i did explicitly study in a grammar guide i completely forgot the explanation for. My reading and listening is GREAT, because all my effort only has to go into learning new words lately! its relaxing! Its the only part i need to do! But my writing/speaking i am very concerned about because being able to check myself for mistakes is something i’d like the ability to do.

how grammar is presented really makes a difference in how well i get it. there is some serious benefit to ‘show simple first then build up what you know’ that text books tend to prefer. versus like grammar reference books that may start with some in depth stuff.

i tried to read a japanese grammar guide the other day and 1 it was great but 2 it covered some ADVANCED stuff i never learned in genki 1+2, and so it was Explicit grammar description of stuff i had literally years ago been immersing in japanese and Still not conciously known about. So i felt. Overwhelmed lol. I felt so confused. I feel like I might switch to Tae Kim’s grammar guide primarily just because its structured with basics covered first. and i feel like until the basics are again glued into my brain, seeing even more advanced stuff just confused me so much i had no idea how to remember it. which is funny because? my usual strategy with grammar guides is to just read it and let what sticks stick and what is confusing be moved on from, in the hope i will later see it again and understand it better. so like based on what i usually do i should’ve just been able to read through it (and i’m gonna try anyway lol). but truly japanese grammar just... my mind does not like wrapping around it and remembering it. (chinese grammar is so much easier for me... so much easier....;-; )

i have been tempted to just Restart Nukemarine’s LLJ (Lets Learn Japanese) memrise decks, because I KNOW they worked for me last time really really well. And they include Tae Kim grammar lessons. And I know if i did it then maybe i’d get back to where i was years ago pretty fast.

I tried Earthlingo app. Its a cool idea, I don’t think its worth it though unless you planned to get Rosetta Stone (since Earthlingo is FREE). Earthlingo features 1000 words per language, taught to you by exploring video game worlds as an alien. Its a cool concept, but since all words seem to be nouns then you aren’t even learning the most common verbs/adjectives. And 1000 words is not a lot. And you could learn 1000 quite fast if using srs flashcards like Memrise or Anki (think weeks if you push yourself, and a month or two months if going at a regular pace). Earthlingo you have to slowly explore the worlds so that eats time, you have to choose to test yourself (so you don’t review nearly as often as flashcard apps), and one test includes walking around the world clicking the object which you’re given the word for (takes time to find the right object). All this means a word that might take maybe 15 minutes to study over a few weeks, might instead take much longer to study and learn. I don’t use duolingo because it generally covers so few words (usually 2000-4000 i think which is good for a beginner resource but you have to do the WHOLE course to get to all those words and i take so long on duolingo that could take YEARS for me versus a month on a flashcard app or clozemaster). Duolingo I also don’t use because it very slowly paces learning material (it takes me months/years to get through 1000 words on duolingo - just personally i go so slow on it, i think faster people would find a use for it). Likewise Lingodeer takes me AGES to get through (and i think covers 2000 words nowadays? I’m shocked Duolingo has more words for the japanese course tbh). However, Lingodeer is by far the best ‘app’ for Japanese grammar lessons in app practice form. Even if basically all the apps feel pretty slow to me in how fast they give you new info. Earthlingo is cool that its free, and for learners 12 and under i think it would be super useful as a way to engage them and keep them studying (since what child likes flashcards? whereas as a child i would’ve loved this). But as an adult Earthlingo is sooooo slow on how fast you can learn words, and it does not even offer very many words (1000 is a nice bare minimum but without verbs/adjectives it can only be a supplementary learning tool for beginners at best).

Link about Lingodeer having 2000 words in a course. (Since its SO hard to lookup how much vocabulary lingodeer includes :c )

Nukemarine’s LLJ memrise decks (which I’m considering going through again but ToT agh flashcardssssss.... they sure do work though agh)

http://www.chinese-grammar.com/beginner/ - this is the site I read a chinese grammar guide on at like Month 3. I am rereading it now maybe it will help me remember wtf grammar explicitly is. ToT (A tip, read Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced sections). Last time I visited the site you just clicked a section, then saw each fully explained grammar point and clicked ‘next’ it was nice. Now its laid out a little less ideal for me, but its still got all the same nice info! (Also honestly if you are a beginner I really DO like this grammar guide... it introduces basic info first, gradually gets more complex, and i could follow its logic knowing like 200 hanzi and 100 words ToT. its very easy to understand even if it takes a while to apply that info).

im probably gonna read hanshe more today. i’m at the point where either i know enough vocab, or the writers style has just ‘clicked’ idk. but now i just am not getting bogged down by unknown words and am just. speeding through enjoying the plot. Also rip me this novel has 155 chapters and im only on chapter 30.

watching japanese lets plays is really fun! i feel like im 3 years old cause i just see nouns i can learn pretty easy in context cause i know the game well, and hear some vaguely familiar verbs, but its fun! also it helps i know kingdom hearts 2 like by heart so. a lot of it makes me instantly cheerful and nostalgic. roxas’s voice is so cute in the japanese version.

oh i almost forgot: I found a book recently for chinese that for it’s like 10 page grammar guide summary at the beginning ALONE i think is more than worth the 4 dollars it costs to get. It has a ton of compound words and its a reference book in mandarin and cantonese (it has pronunciation for both, all characters are in traditional). I got it initally because it as a bunch of compound words and I’d like to get better at knowing a lot of common ones. But the intro to the book has a page explaining sentence structures in chinese, then examples. Its so straightforward and to the point. I love it. The book is “Understanding Chinese: A Guide to the Usage of Chinese Characters” by Rita Mei-Wah Choy. (There is also a companion book for individual hanzi, which is nice but this book specifically I’m finding more useful).

what i really like about Listening-Reading method, and reading, as study activities: no matter how I do them it is only improvement. I have a tendency to ‘redo’ material i don’t feel i fully mastered, or refuse to move on. So when i have duolingo, flashcards (sometimes i can move on if i ignore reviews/make myself do new stuff), books, grammar guides, self guided classes - i have a tendency to redo the material. over and over. and not progress and challenge myself. whereas with reading - every time i look up a word its useful because its new or something i clearly Need to review (not something i’ve actually learned and can move past reviewing). so whether i reread material or read new stuff, as long as i run into things i find somewhat challenging (feel the desire to word look up), i know i am running into new material i can learn. Same with listening-reading method: whether i finish a book or just skip to random books, any new chapter i do will give me new words to learn/remember (until i’ve reached a point of perfect listening comprehension which is a WAYS away). There’s no way for me to mess it up. I can give up a book im bored with, i don’t have to stick to one resource to the end. 

someone tell me why professionally made chinese audio books almost NEVER line up to the chapters???? whyyyyy ;-;

Even More Notes lol:

So I read so much in Pleco, which auto pronounces, I have COMPLETELY forgot. 得 地 - for these two, when they’re attached after a description like 淡淡 慢慢 高兴 etc, when are they pronounced di versus de???? i’m pretty sure  得 is pronounced de when its an adjective like ‘-ly’. but for  地, i don’t remember if when part of a describer if its pronounced di or de????

[quotes-of-dreamland]

Physics in Another Dimension: An Essay About Halcandran Wayfinding by Mod Susie

*clears throat*

So!

I know a lot about space. I’ve been interested in space for aaabout as long as I can remember, and learning about it is where I get most of my physics lessons. I’m decent enough at the game Kerbal Space Program, which is literally a game about rocket science so hard it’s practically not a game, and I’m a sucker for science fiction.

As long as they don’t lean too hard on the fiction thing.

That being said, Kirby flies around at what must be lightspeed on a star barely 4 times as big as he is with no cockpit.

I’ve already gone through all the stages of grief, and have decided to cope with this by saying “there’s an atmosphere in space and also fuck gravity as a concept”.

And then I decided to better my coping mechanism by inventing my own physics. This is a long one, go get some popcorn.

So, if there’s air in space, and some kind of gravity, then there might be wind! That explains the wings on the Halberd and the Lor, plus the sails on the Lor too, but more on that later.

I was recently inspired, however. See, I’d pictured a scenario where Magolor accompanies the group to fight the Grand Doomer in RTDL, and I’d pictured a cute little scene where after the fight, he shows Kirby a little wayfinding trick and shows them that he knows exactly where they are in Another Dimension, by using the stars (checking what angle he’s looking at a constellation at), space-cardinal direction (by looking at the direction the weird tubey-net-geometric thing is flowing), and faint Another Dimension structures in the area, he shows them that, if they were sailing in Another Dimension, he’d be able to find this exact spot.

And then I thought about it more.

I added on to that scenario: “no idea how this happens but like, half the cast is trapped in Another Dimension, and luckily Magolor is with them. Because he knows where that spot in Nutty Noon is, not only can he get them back to the dimension Popstar’s in, but he can get them ON POPSTAR.”

Let’s backtrack a bit.

In KSP, the game I mentioned earlier, there are... many bugs.

It’s gotten a little better nowadays, since the games in version 1.10, but in all the beta versions it got a little crazy.

And one of my favorite youtubers at the time was someone who spent all their time finding bugs in the game and having fun with them.

His name’s Danny2462, and he made a discovery back in 2014 that I THINK might still be in the game. And that is the Phantom Forces Glitch.

Basically, at some point he’d made something out of the air-intake pieces you use to build planes in that game that, for some reason, was skipping across the water in a very not-physically-possible way, and decided to try and build a boat using this glitch.

Putting a seat on it so he could put an astronaut on it didn’t work, so he used a ladder for them to hold onto and therein lies the glitch.

When he made them climb to the top of the ladder (which was the side of his air-intake boat), the boat started moving.

By itself, completely unprompted, no engine. He could even steer the thing!

Basically the game decided that the astronaut was pushing the boat, while riding the boat.

If this worked in real life, you could grab your waistband, lift, and then you’d start flying because you were lifting yourself. “Pick yourself up by the bootstraps” taken extremely literally.

He named this the Phantom Force Drive.

Back to Kirby.

I’ve decided that the way Halcandran Rafts work, you will need the following:

2 wings 1 sail the actual base of the raft an oar for the Halcandran to hold a Halcandran something pointy on the front

Using this you can sail.

1: The sail and wings are like the air intakes, and they also use the wind/current to change directions and maintain a speed. 2: Everything has to be connected together in some way, so you still need the raft part of the raft. A hangglider won’t do. 3: The oar is to help the Halcandran steer, by pushing it out past the length of the raft they can shift the airflow and do things like turn. It also has one other important use... 4: Halcandrans float. They float depending on the gravity around them, always off of the surface they’re on top of. They apply the same amount of force downwards, of course, because *~physics~*. 5: We’ll get to the pointy bit later. You could also replace it with magic, though.

So, you put your Halcandran on your raft. Doesn’t matter how makeshift or complicated the raft is. It’s pushing down against it via floaty magic... but.

If the Halcandran leans against the sail, the raft will float.

The wind will pick it up by the wings and sail, and the Halcandran’s floaty magic is pushing the thing like an engine.

Fuck you, physics.

Now, let’s get back to the pointy bit. Any of ya’ll seen Star Vs.? The ending totally sucked, right?! Staying on topic, if you haven’t, don’t there’s a thing there called Dimensional Scissors. It’s one of  the only good things about the show a little magical artifact in the form of a pair of scissors. You open the scissors, hold them out in front of you, then drag them down to tear a hole in time and space, and can go to different dimensions using them. No shade to those who like Star Vs., i did watch the whole thing after all

You know those previously-mentioned geometric net tubey thingies? I’ve decided those are like currents, and you go REAL FAST in em.

I’ve also decided that they’re rifts.

If you go into one, you can use something sharp to temporarily tear it open, and if you do this in the right place at the right time, you’ll end up in a different dimension, depending on where and when you are.

A good example of this is actually in RTDL: Hal never explained why Another Dimension seems to collapse after the Magolor fight, but you can still go there in Star Allies and everything looks fine.

What you’re looking at is Magolor’s spell fading, meaning the rift he created is falling apart around you. Thank you Lor for reopening the thing.

So, because Magolor tracked the stars in the Nutty Noon rift (in the scenario, remember the scenario? it’s been 27 paragraphs since then, time flies), he can actually find that same rift in another dimension using a makeshift raft, use something sharp to cut into it, and land on the sky tower.

Ta-daa!

If you actually read all this, thanks, I tried to make this sciency rant as funny as possible so it was bearable, (sorry for making fun of Star Vs/ sorry for mentioning Star Vs depending on where you stand), I’ve dedicated so much time to thinking about blue and gold and brown space cats that live in another dimension and I Need To Scream.

Yours truly,

Mod Susie.

[taesbetch]

Creatures Of The Night | 02

Pairing: Jungkook x Reader

Genre: Angst, Fluff, Smut: Vampire!AU

Summary: Creatures of the night, Soul mates, a war between species. You had thought all these things were nothing but folktales. But as the world hidden in plain sight crashes into your day to day life you struggle to keep up. Going from being hunted to the leader of a vampire groups mate, your world is turned upside down and the fight to survive is on.

Word Count: 3.6k

Previous |

Silence. 

Rain poured down. The glass doors to the side of the house covered in rain fogged the view of the outside. Your eyes moved from the glass to the side of reyas face. She sat forward, staring at the tv placed in front of the couch you both sat on. 

Clearing her throat, she looks over to you. 

 "You've hear of vampires, werewolves and witches right?" she started, to which you nodded your head in anticipation.

"Well surprise, we exist" she smiled sheepishly. You took a sharp breath before proceeding with your questions. 

"and you're..." You trailed on motioning for her to continue. 

"Get comfortable, I'm about to tell you the whole history of my kind" she said getting comfortable on the couch. You titled your head, not being able to help your’e growing curiosity. 

"you mean about witches?" You asked slowly, Still not too sure which category your friend fell into. Reya smirked as she ran a hand through her hair. 

"Not just witches, I'm talking about creatures of the night" she stated taking a deep breath.

"a long ass time ago witches, werewolves and vampires used to live among humans in peace, everyone knew about us, it wasn't a secret nor was it scary. Now we all had an agreement, vampires would feed only when necessary and not to kill, werewolves would chain themselves up when the full moon would approached and witches would not practice what would be known as 'black magic'. This arrangement worked pretty well...until things started changing, you know the saying people fear what they don't understand, yer well that started happening, humans started to fear what they could not control, vampires started thinking they were superior, werewolves started despising vampires and witches got a little rebellious" she explained a little bit.

"What do you mean by rebellious?" I asked curiously.

 "We’re oddly powerful beings, some witches can do things you wouldn’t even imagine possible! and i think...Well i think witches started realising that.Anyway, nowadays we hide amongst humans, living the human life by day and going amongst our natural activities by nights....well that's how it's supposed to be anyway" Remee said looking down at her hands.

"What do you mean by..suppose to be? you asked confused. 

"well....vampires were sort of banned to the forests, there are some groups who are very well behaved and live with the humans very well, there are some vampires who you could consider vegetarians and only feed off animals.....and then...there are others, who think they own humans, they think humans are just blood bags and theirs to play with. It makes me sick. It makes a lot of us sick, including the werewolves. They think vampires shouldn't even exist anymore, some of them have made it their mission to wipe out the entire vampire race...it's a good time to be a witch, no witch trials, no witch hunts, I'm not being burnt to death, not being involved with the werewolf vs vampire feud is great, and no one really knows I exist" she stated rolling her shoulders as if a weight had been lifted off of them. 

You stared at your friend. Your mouth open a little in shock. She was living this whole life and you had no idea about any of it! magic was real...these mythical creatures WERE REAL. 

"What about soulmates, ya know for werewolves like in twilight how he had an imprint and stuff, is that real? Do werewolves have claws!? Like in human form? OH MY GOD CAN YOU FLY ON A BROOM!?" You asked excitedly.

"Oh my dear child, you have a lot to learn. First of all, werewolves and vampires have soul mates, don't ask me why, I don't know I'm not a vampire or a werewolf, but every year there's a mating ceremony, i don't know all the details but i think they feel some type of way when they have either met their soul mate or are about to. I pretty much just know everyone has one. Yes werewolves have claws if they want to and no I cannot fly on a freaking broom stick" she said smirking, giving you a quick eye roll. 

"Wait okay, at school they were talking about you being a low rat witch, or an ultimate witch? Can you explain that?" you asked wanting to know everything you possibly could.

"So, there are vampires, werewolves, witches and others, their irrelevant. So in these groups, there are other groups, rankings if you will. For werewolves there's omegas, betas and alphas. For witches there's low rate, middle class, higher society and ultimate. For vampires its subservient, intermediary and rapturous, rapturous vampires are dangerous and those guys at the school, yer that's them." she said turning very serious.

"Why are they after me? And what one are you?"

"That night when you saw them, they didn't kill you, they must of thought you saw them as vampires which means their obliged to kill you and its complicated" she sighed sadly.

"wait! But I know about them now, what does that mean!?" You asked as worry and fear finally found its way to your stomach again.

"Don't worry about it! as long as your with me they can't lay a finger on you without getting whopped, you'll be fine, just stay the hell away from them and for the love of god, do not go outside this house at night, are we clear?" Remee said sternly.

You nodded quickly and hugged your body tightly at the thought of your blood being sucked out of your body. 

"Now get some rest, don't sweat it, they can't get in the house without either me inviting them in or them ripping through a magic force field, which I doubt will happen" Remee said getting up from the couch.

"I’ll see you in the morning" she smiled before walking up the stairs to her bedroom. 

You sighed before fully laying down on the couch, this is all a little much for one. 

your eyes averted back to the glass wall, your eyes adjusting as you see what looks like an outline of a male figure.

You furrowed your brows in confusion as you slowly approached the glass. The rain seemed to know you  was close as it got heavier. The closer you got to the glass the less you could see. Standing right in front of the glass your heart stops. Small sounds almost like footsteps got your heart beat picking up. Squinting your eyes you tried in vain to see but it was no use. 

SMACK!

A hand appears on the glass in front of your face. Screaming you move back as jungkooks glowing red eyes and white sharp fangs come into view. The water making his white tee cling tightly to his body showing off every muscle and his godly structure, the fangs from his mouth wide and ready as he laughed at my scared composure.

"Calm down, I told you he can't get in" Reya stated calmly. You wipe around to see reya standing behind you, her eyes narrowed at the man outside. 

 "just because I can't get in doesn't mean I won't find a way my dear witch" jungkook smirked as he paced back and forth in front of the glass. 

"Try your hardest, you'd have to kill me to get in and oh yer, I'm in here and you're out there" Reya smirked coming closer to the glass.

 "I don't know what ranked witch you are, but you aren't the only witch I know, your gonna wish you never interfered" jungkook said standing in front of Reya on the other side of the glass. You could cut through the tension between them holy moly.

"Excuse you? I interfered? Who came into my school, looking to kill my best friend, endangering my classmates and oh yer whose house are you at right now?" Reya sassed as she tilted her head to the side giving him a 'who do you think you are' face.

 "Don't get sassy little witch, enjoy your night cause it'll be your last...both of you" he said turning his head towards you before winking.

---

You tossed and turned, begging yourself to sleep. The silk sheets wrapped around my body as you lay in the darkness. you tried to calm myself down, taking deep breaths in. everything's going to be okay, Reya will be okay, I'll be okay...right? You let your mind drift to reya thinking about how you hadn't seen any family members in the house whilst you had been there. 

---

You sat at the breakfast table anxiously waiting for reya to come downstairs so the two of you could head to school. Skipping downstairs reya smiles at you as she holds a gold necklace with a emerald gem.

"What's that?" you asked as she places it around your neck. 

 "a charm, it will give you a temporary link to me, if you ever end up alone or in danger just think about me and it will teleport me to you, unfortunately it only works three times and then this becomes useless but it'll be good enough for today" Reya explained. 

She watches as you nervously play with the necklace your hand shaking slightly. 

“Its okay y/n, I’ll protect you” she said softly, taking your hand in hers. 

As the two of you walked into the school gates your heart clenched tightly with anxiety, your eyes scanned the crowd of people landing on jungkook and his crew. You're feet stopped as reya stopped to talk to some classmates but you couldn't stop your heart racing as the boys stares became more intense. 

"Reya their looking" I whispered as you clung onto her arm.

 "whatever fuck them, what are they gonna do you in a crowd full of people" she stated as the classmates walked away, allowing you two to talk properly. You bite your lip nervously as you looked back over to the boys, jungkook sending you a sinister wink. 

 "Y/N relax, nothings gonna happen to y-" Reya started but someone tapped my shoulder. Turning around like usaine bolt you were met with a smiling girl whose eyes were glued on reya. 

"hello witch" she smiled, her tone dripping with venom. 

"hello bitch" Reya said pulling me closer to her as she smiled back at the girl. Shocked at how quickly the two had engaged in such bitter interactions you shuffled back letting reya stand in front of you. 

"well how rude, aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?" she asked twirling her perfect brown hair between her fingers. 

 "this is eunji. Okay bye." Reya said bluntly.

oh so they know each other...

"not so fast, I hear you've been playing with bangtan, you know they have connections right? Not a good bunch to mess with" she smirked as her arms crossed.

"Does it look like I care? The mating ceremony is coming up, don't you have bigger things to deal with?" Reya said rolling her eyes in annoyance.

"that's true, but... here's the thing, I know jungkook and I are meant to be soul mates, meaning his problems are my problems, therefore being the amazing girlfriend I am I'm going to get rid of those problems for him" she said her smile fading real quick, only to be replaced by growing fangs.

"NOT here" a booming voice spoke as a firm hand was placed on eunji's shoulder. A small pout came onto her face as jungkook moved to her side. 

"And if you want to kill, kill that one, the human is all mine" he said, his piercing gaze looking right into your soul.

You shivered as Reya scoffed and glared.

 "Like id die by the likes of you" she said smirking as eunji was infuriated by her comment.

"Well maybe I should just kill all your friends" eunji stated stepping closer to Reya. 

"go ahead, I'll just kill all of yours, oh wait! You don't have any" Reya sassed stepping closer to her. 

"Play smart blood sucker, don't underestimate me" Reya said through gritted teeth towards jungkook.

"Don't underestimate you? Trust me I didn't, she's not the only one I could call to come and take care of you" jungkook smirked as he guided eunji away.

Releasing your breath that you were unknowingly holding you looked to your best friend. with an aggravated roll of her eyes the two of you left for class. Ending the first encounter of the day.  In class you could feel the stares of jungkook burning into the back of your head, of course he had to be seated right behind you. 

"I can feel your heart burning"

You jumped in your seat at the whisper behind you.

 "I'm not scared of you" you whispered paying  close attention to the paper in front of me. 

"Why? Cause your witch friend will protect you, you'll get her killed you know" he replied. You could practically hear the smug look on his face. 

My body froze...I don't want to be the reason my friend dies, but she can protect us both? 

"Ya know if you just hand yourself in nothing will happen to her right?" he whispered again.

"Shut up" You snapped at him. Your head started throbbing as you attempted to return your attention back to your school work. Jungkook had whispered something else but you actively chose to ignore it, looking at the clock hoping time would fly faster. 

----

The lunch hall was booming with excited students but the dooming black cloud of your head had your energy drained. 

"Reya I need to go to my locker, I'll be back" You said getting up from the lunch table. 

"Do you-"she started but you shook my head.

 "I have this remember" You smiled and pointed at my necklace. Reya relaxed and continued eating motioning me to go ahead.

You walked with purpose through the continuously emptying halls. Students rushed to lunch and you rushed to your locker. Get your wallet and go. that's all you had to do. As you rummaged through your things you forgot that there was need for caution. 

 "Look here" jimin smirked as you closed my locker. Jumping back you gasped, Moving back as he moved forward. Quickly, the boy grabbed your wrist. 

"not so fast princess, jungkook would wanna see you" he laughed as he started to drag you further from the lunch hall. Fumbling, you slowly grabbed your necklace but just as you grasped it jimins turned round to look at you, his eyes widening at the sight of the necklace. With the same lightening pace as before , he ripped the necklace off of your neck. 

"you don't think I don't know what this is? I for one don't feel like being flung against a wall again so you can understand right?" he said continuing to drag you into a classroom.

Jimin shoved you into a classroom, pushing you into the centre as spread bangtan members turned their attention to you. 

 "tsk tsk tsk, you shouldn't of left your friend" Jung kook laughed as your heart pounded against my chest. 

"I would kill you now, but unfortunately that might make us a definite target, I don't know what kind of witch she is which means I don't really know how to kill her, don't tell her I said that, so did she tell you what type of witch she is?" jungkook asked as Jin sat you down on a chair and Namjoon sat in front of me.

"no? She told me about what types there are but I don't know anything else" You said struggling against Jin's grip.

"Did she tell you about us? As in vampires?" jungkook asked standing behind Namjoon

"not much" You answered weakly, giving up on struggling.

"Well, some vampires have special powers I guess you could say, Namjoon here can look through people memories, see into their minds if you will" jungkook smirked.

"go ahead, there's nothing to know" You scoffed, rolling my eyes. You had no idea where this sudden braveness was coming from, but you were over the vampire who was hell bent on destroying you.  

"oh yeah, one more thing" jungkook said motioning for Namjoon to do his thing, as Namjoon placed his hand on your head you screamed loudly at the pain rushing through your body. The feeling of namjoon running through your head made you want to scream, it was irritating and painful. You let of another scream of pain as the man dug deeper. 

"its gonna hurt a little bit" he smiled at pain. 

As Namjoon removed his hand you gasped for air.  

 "She doesn't know anything" he stated causing jungkook to sigh. As jungkooks mouth opened to speak the door slide open. 

"What's going on in here?" everyone's head snapped to a boy at the door, he had a built frame and a jawline that could cut.

"I knew I smelt wet dog" Taehyung stated as the boy at the door and four others walked in closing the door behind them.

 "Blood suckers, what a pleasure. Are you okay Y/N?" one them asked, you nodded quickly as you shook of Jin's grip. You let out a deep sigh of relief. 

"How do you know my name?" You asked confused, You had never really seen these boys before. 

"Your Reyas friend aren't you? She talks about you a lot" one of them smiled making my knees a little weak.

"Well nice to meet you, but can you please leave? We're dealing with something" jungkook said motioning to the door. 

"No one's going anywhere" Reya said entering the room and quickly shutting the door. You sighed again as your freind walked towards you giving jin a slight shove as she grips your arm walking the two of you towards the outskirt of the room. 

"Remee I don't think you should-" the main boy said but Remee quickly interfered, she seemed in a rush...

"I'm a witch, I know you guys are werewolves it's a long story blah blah blah we have bigger fish fry" she stated quickly, she looked nervous and scared which Is new because she never looks nervous or scared. 

"What's wrong? why do you look like you just met the devil" Yoongi asked worriedly, Him along with the other vampires quickly picking up on her demeanor. 

"Because I basically just did, a hunter just strolled into our school" she said angrily. Everyone looked as if a bomb had just been dropped on them.

The war and problem between the three kinds vanished at the mere mention of a hunter. 

"Why now?" one of the werewolf boys asked 

"and so close to the mating? No hunter has ever interrupted a mating before" Namjoon stated. Everyone had quickly become anxious and tense and the quick change in the room had you concerned. 

"Chan and bach, go and tell the pack, be careful" one of the boys said.

 "Young-hwa wont alpha jai over react a little...considering..." Chan stated worriedly

 "he still needs to know now go" young-hwa ordered. Chan quickly scurried out the classroom.

"Witch, can you tell who it is?" j-hope asked, Reya shook her head sadly. "they've been masked" she sighed. 

"but how would they know that the mating was going to take place in Hammington? No hunter has ever come here before, it's not like this town is a known supernatural playground." Jin wondered out loud as everyone nodded along in agreement.

"someone must have called, and I bet it was you" jungkook hissed pointing at Remee. Everyone looked at jungkook confused of his accusation, jungkook looked around noticing that everyone was confused, he raised his hand shaking his head.

"it's possible that she hates us that much, she's willing to throw everyone under the bus" he explained his accusation. 

"Okay first of all, yes I hate you but not that much, hunters are crazy and I would much rather just kill you myself. Plus I'm a rogue witch, I don't have a coven, that would be like signing my own death wish, also I like these guys, why would I endanger my own friends? I get why you would think me, but it's not me" Reya said crossing her arms.

"Yer I don't think it was Remee, but who called doesn't matter right now, the mating ceremony is happening soon which means all werewolves and vampires will be vulnerable" yong-hwa stated seriously.

You furrowed my eyebrows in confusion.

 "I thought a mate makes you guys stronger?" You asked a little shyly. 

 "They do, but in order to get stronger we have to get weaker first if you catch my drift" one of the wolf boys started giving you a wink.

"Min-ho, no one is catching your drift, they just get weak for the day, no one knows why, it just happens" Reya explained more clearly.

I nodded as yong-hwa gave min-ho a light slap on the arm.

 "So what do we do?" taehyung asked looking at jungkook and young-hwa.

 "we have to figure out who it is first, then we'll figure out how to deal with them" jungkook said pinch the bridge of his nose frustratingly.

"You. Link our minds so we can communicate, Go home and do some magic, try find this asshole. You guys try and warn the other creatures of the night, they can be pretty reckless, we will look around the school" jungkook said pointing to whoever relevant at the time he was speaking. 

"I hate being bossed around" yong-hwa said before the three of them started walking out. 

"I swear to god if my life wasn't endanger" Remee mumbled before grabbing my hand and making me follow her. As you were getting dragged out your eyes connected with jungkook one last time. The man smirked, sending you aw ink before turning to his men and focusing on the matter at hand. 

a hunter...they must be pretty scary if these people are so willing to put aside their feuds... You looked at reya and the intense look of fear on her face...this must be really serious... 

[merakiaes]

How To Get The Girl - Finn Shelby

Pairing: Finn Shelby x reader

Requested: Yes. 

Prompts: #65 and #66 from the fluff-list.

Warnings/notes: It’s 2.30am and I’m running on no sleep so if this is shit and really boring, I’m sorry. I’ll probably go in a re-write it tomorrow. 

Wordcount: 2595

Summary: Some bad flirting and a piece of advice leading to Finn landing a date. 

Whether or not you were new to Small Heath or just passing through, Finn didn’t know. The only thing he knew for certain, was that your beauty was unlike anything he had ever seen in his life; completely incomparable.

You had been coming to the Garrison every night for the past week to drink with your brothers. Or, at least he guessed they were your brothers. You all had the same colored hair, the same facial structures, and very similar laughs.

You seemed to be far too close to be just friends, but at the same time, not close in the same way you would a romantic interest, which only left the sibling-alternative.

Finn had lost track of the conversation at hand with his brothers and friends, their voices and laughs practically falling to deaf ears as he stared at you from across the room while sipping his whiskey.

Arthur finally seemed to catch on to his little brother’s unusual silence, however, shoving an elbow into his side, rather roughly in his drunken haze and asking loudly. “What’s got you so distracted tonight, eh, Finn boy?”

Finn glared at him and kept quiet, turning his gaze back to you. But when he didn’t give him an answer himself, Isaiah took it upon himself to give it for him.

“It’s that girl! He’s been pining after her ever since she came in the first time on Monday. Not that I blame him, she’s fucking magnificent.”

Arthur and John each let out a drunk yell, scooting closer to their youngest brother and putting their arms around his shoulder almost in perfect sync. “There’s a fine looking lass.” Arthur agreed.

But John only let out a loud laugh, ruffling his hair around while shaking his head. “Not a chance. Fancy girls like her don’t go for boys like us. She’s born from money, that one.”

Polly snorted from where she sat on the opposite side of the table, raising an eyebrow at her nephew. “And how would you possibly know that?”

John waved a hand in your direction, where you were laughing carelessly to something your brothers had said, having no clue in the slightest to the conversation currently going on behind your back.

“Look at the diamonds around her neck and listen to the accent of the company she’s in.” He said, shaking his head again with a teasing smile playing at his lips as he took a drag of his cigar. “Those are London boys. And you were born in the slums. Don’t get your hopes up.”

His discouraging words drew a scoff from Polly, but she chose to stay out of further conversation, knowing she would without a doubt lose her temper otherwise.

Instead, Tommy chose this as his time to join in, sitting up in his chair and putting out his cigarette, blowing out the final drag of smoke before speaking.

“Well, he’s also a Shelby.” He noted, looking at John, before turning to Finn and taking that back of his neck in his hand. “And since when have us Shelbys had any trouble in finding women, eh? All he needs is a little boost.”

With that, he gave him a small shake and then proceeded to tell him what he needed to do to get your attention.

No matter how hard he tried to be, he wasn’t his brothers. He had their charm, without a doubt. But the difference between them and him was that they knew how to use it, and he was absolutely fucking clueless.

At nineteen years old, he wasn’t a virgin. But the only girl he had ever slept with was the whore his brothers had hired for him on his eighteenth birthday.

He had told Tommy when reporting back that very same night that he never wanted it like that again, and he had stuck by it, not having felt a woman’s touch since. Barely even held a conversation with one, if you didn’t count his aunt and brothers’ wives.

John, Arthur and Isaiah let him in on their tips and tricks, as well, giving him examples of lines and words that could be used to ‘lure any lady in’. Some of the things they told him to do and say seemed absolutely bizarre, but what did he know?

Their biggest mistake, however? Not telling him in which context the different lines should have been used.

He probably should’ve been able to figure that out himself, but like earlier mentioned, he hadn’t had much practice on the subject of women and quite frankly, he wasn’t like his brothers at all personality-wise.

Rather than being loud, daring and fierce, he was soft, shy and careful, and when finally having gathered the courage to walk up to you at the bar, really fucking nervous, which was probably what fucked the entire thing up.

He could practically feel himself dying from shame when he slid up beside you with an overly cocky smirk, speaking out: “Rumor has it, I make you nervous,” like his brother’s had advised him to, only to get little to no reaction back.

It wasn’t an unusual occurrence for you to be approached on a night out, quite the opposite really; you honestly got more surprised nowadays if you weren’t approached by at least one man.

You didn’t know what it was that made them think you would ever be interested when they delivered such bad pick-up lines, just like this one. 

You admired them for the attempts, but never gave them much of a response, and this time was no different, as you simply snorted at the lame line.

But when you turned your head to the side to turn him down like you did every other guy and caught sight of his face, your attitude shifted in an instance.

Unlike the cocky, overly confident boys you were used to, this was not one of them. 

Sure, he still sported a cocky smirk on his lips. But his eyes were so insecure and soft, going together perfectly with his innocent, freckled face, and instantly caught your attention.

So, rather than shooting him down like you had originally been planning, you twisted your body to face him, completely forgetting about the drinks your brothers had sent you to retrieve.

You raised an eyebrow. “Are you flirting with me?”

His smirk instantly widened, but it faltered slightly every once in a while, showing you clearly that this wasn’t something he usually did. “That depends, is it working?”

His voice was casual and sure, but his nervous face betrayed the entire act of confidence he had put on.

“Well, I have to be frank.” You chuckled, tilting your head to the side slightly. “Your skills of seducing a woman are absolutely shite and I usually don’t care for boys who strike up a conversation by tooting their own horn, but you’re cute and you seem nervous, so I’ll let it slide.”

He obviously hadn’t been expecting you to talk back with such ease, his smirk falling in a matter of seconds and his freckled face taking on a pink tint. He began sputtering for a response, and you couldn’t help but throw your head back in a laugh.

“Oh, the fearless mettle disappeared just like that, did it?” You questioned, amusement evident in your voice, and he must’ve taken it as if you were mocking him because the next second, his face had taken a sour turn.

“I’m not nervous.” He defended, but the intensifying blush on his cheeks told you different.

“No?” You raised an eyebrow, giving him a lopsided smile. “Then how come you still haven’t offered to buy me drink?”

“I don’t have to buy you a drink. My brother owns the place.” He was quick to reply this time, actually shocking you but still causing you to laugh a genuine laugh that pulled all the way to your eyes.

“Does that line usually work on girls?” You asked, and instantly he turned flustered again.

“No.” He disagreed, stuttering over his words. “I mean, I don’t really talk to girls much.”

You snorted, raising an eyebrow. “You don’t say.”

The blush on his cheeks deepened even further at your sarcastic remark, and you were starting to feel guilty. 

He obviously had no idea what to do in the situation he was currently in and although it shocked you to even say it, you found him interesting and didn’t want to scare him away.

So you dropped the sarcastic act, putting on a genuine smile and chuckling lightly. “Relax, I’m just having a bit of fun.” You comforted him, now in a tone much softer than before, sticking your hand out. “I’m (Y/N). What’s your name?”

His entire body seemed to relax at the sight of your outstretched hand, shoulders slumping and a small breath escaping from between his lips. 

He took a moment to react, before reaching out and taking your hand in his, shaking it carefully. “Finn. Finn Shelby.”

His hand was softer than you had expected it to be. Your brothers were all hard workers, all having served in the war. Their hands were rough and scarred and calloused. Bit Finn’s hand was smooth, indicating that he had yet to put in any hard labor in life.

And you found yourself liking that.

“Well, Finn Shelby, let me ask you something.” You said once he had let go of your hand again, licking your lips and leaning in a bit closer, peeking a glance at the table at the other side of the room that you had seen him sitting at before, and where its occupants were obviously trying to listen in without looking too obviously – and failing miserably at the latter. “Is it your brothers who taught you how to flirt? Because they didn’t do a very good job.”

He glanced over at said brothers just like you had, before turning back to look at you, a sheepish expression now settled on his face. “It usually works better for them.” He admitted lowly. “But as soon as I try anything they do, I mess up.”

Your eyebrows furrowed slightly at that. 

You got the feeling he wasn’t just talking about the flirting, and you found yourself puzzled about this boy. Not even five minutes into meeting each other and he was already, in a way, talking about his feelings; oversharing.

But you found it sweet. A guy that wasn’t overly masculine on a toxic level and could talk about his emotion was something this cruel world needed a lot more of in your opinion. 

There was nothing attractive about men who couldn’t own up to the person they were on the inside. In fact, those were usually the ones who grew up to be the really bad ones.

“That’s because you’re not them.” You answered, shrugging with a smile. “A piece of advice? You need to adapt to your own personality, use your own personal charm to your advantage, and not try to mimic someone else’s.”

He laughed at that; a genuine laugh that didn’t seemed as forced as everything else up until that point. “I wish they would have given me the same advice.”

“Well, their advice might not have done you very good, but you still got me hooked, didn’t you?” Your flirty attitude turned back on just like that, and when yours did, so did his, but this time in a natural way.

He raised an eyebrow, adjusting himself where he was leaning against the bar so that he was more comfortable. “Did I?”

“What would you do if I said yes?” You asked, raising an eyebrow to match his own, to which his grin only widened.

“I would ask you on a date.”

Your lips trembled and you had to force yourself to keep your calm in order to not break into a full smile.

“And when and where would this date take place?” You hummed, your head that had previously already been spinning with the alcohol you had consumed throughout the night now spinning even more with the buzz of the excitement you were surprisingly feeling by talking to him.

“Seven o’clock tomorrow night.” He answered, not even taking a second to think about it, shocking both you and seemingly himself as he caught himself and slowed down with a sheepish smile. “Dinner, a movie at the pictures, and then back here where I would introduce you to my brothers.”

You snickered, leaning your chin on the palm of your hands and narrowing your eyes slightly at him. “Taking me to meet your family already on the first date?” You teased. “You sure do move quickly, don’t you?”

Much to your surprise, he didn’t blush at your teasing this time, instead just giving you an equally as teasing smile back. “Just using my own personal charm to my advantage.”

Your eyebrows shot up, your confidence faltering for a slight moment as he was now beginning to take control. “And using my own words against me. You drive a hard bargain.”

He took a slow step closer to you, and whether or not it was intentional, you could admit you felt heat rise to your cheeks when his fingers brushed against yours at the surface of the bar.

You glanced down at your touching fingers briefly and he did the same, before looking back up at you with questioning eyes. “Is that a yes?”

You didn’t get the time to answer before your oldest brother called out your name from your table. You threw a look over your shoulder, noticing they were all now standing up and beginning to get into their jackets, without a doubt tired of waiting for the drinks you were supposed to bring them some five minutes ago.

“Just a minute!” You yelled back at them, hurriedly turning back to Finn who was now looking at you expectantly. 

You bit your lip, looking around at the bar and luckily spotting a newspaper and a ballpoint pen lying around within reaching distance.

You stretched your arm out and grabbed them, clicked the pen and started scribbling your address in the corner of the first page with as clear letters you possibly could.

Your brothers had now started heading past you and out the door, and the oldest one – the same that had called for you – had stopped behind you with your jacket slung over his arm, waiting for you to finish.

You clicked the pen and put it down at the bar, carefully ripped the corner with your address written on it off and folded it in two before pushing yourself off the bar.

Finn did the same and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he watched your brother help you into your jacket wordlessly, respectfully minding his own business and not intervening.

Once you had gotten situated in your coat and pulled your hair back out from under the collar, you reached the note out for Finn to take.

He took it with a small smile, and you returned it with a smile twice as wide.

“It was nice meeting  you, Finn Shelby, and I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow.” You grinned and leaned in to plant a kiss on his cheek.

His skin was warm against your lips, no doubt from being flustered from your entire interaction. 

And your little finishing touch did nothing to calm his racing heart, having him even more flustered than he had been before when you walked out with your brother in tow, leaving him to go back to his own brothers with the good news.

[theliteraryarchitect]

Hi! I have a very old story with a pairing that I quite enjoyed back in the time. Because some things didn't add up I decided to rewrite it. So I read a chapter, rewrite it and... My old action scenes were very detailed, fast paced and nice to read. Nowadays I write very introspective and don't focus on the outside as much. That makes my action scenes boring. Also I was much more eloquent. (Compare: "felt like his larynx would burst" and "couldn't breath") How do I reclaim parts of my old style?

Hi! This is, yeah, this is important. I’m so glad you wrote me. Lemme see…

How to Write Like You Used to, Before You Learned Stuff that Fucked Up Your Natural Creative Flow and Turned Your Writing into Boring, Stilted Garbage

Ok, that’s maybe a little dramatic, but hear me out. Lots and lots of writers start out doing pretty awesome, interesting stuff, both on the prose-level and the story-level. Then they decide to learn more about writing, or they get some  “feedback” from readers or betas, or god forbid they go to a critique group or something and then they start second-guessing the shit out of themselves. The first thing that happens is they start to dislike writing, an activity that used to bring much joy. The next thing that happens, usually much later, is that they look back at some old stuff they wrote and realize it was way better, but have no idea how to get their groove back.

I know because it happened to me. Here’s what I did to reclaim my old writing self. Hopefully some of these techniques will work for you, too.

Forget everything you’ve learned about how you’re “supposed” to write.

Like, everything. Plotting, characters, setting, sentence structure, world building, e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.

Prioritize feeling good.

Write how it feels good to write. Do run-on sentences feel good? Use ‘em. Does writing a 10-page description of a teacup turn you on? Do it. You can edit it later. But if you don’t write something that excites you at the outset, you’ll have nothing fun or interesting to work with when you do get to the editing stage. I talk more about this concept here.

Write for yourself.

Don’t worry about whether anyone else will like it. Write what you like, how you like. Be your own #1 fan.

Write fast.

The faster you write, the less time you have to think. The less time you have to think, the more you’ll be able to access your natural way of writing instead of forcing yourself to write how you think you “should.”

Don’t show your early drafts to anyone.

That’s your baby. Keep it safe. Getting feedback (even if it’s positive) on your writing too early in the process can kill your creative spark. Take the time to get intimate with your own work and develop it into something that won’t break under the weight of other people’s opinions before you put it out there. Remember: Your relationship to your writing is the most important thing. Nurture it!

Trust yourself.

I’m not saying not to take feedback or constructive criticism into account at some point. I’m also not saying not to try to learn how to be a better writer. I’m saying trust what turns you on. Trust your intuition. Trust that there’s something special there. Trust that eventually someone else will see that, too. I wrote this post after I got a piece published that I’d stood by for years, even after a ton of people told me it was weird and that they “didn’t get it.” Basically, in the words of a writer friend of mine, if you don’t back yourself up, how the fuck can you expect anyone else to do it? Be your own best ally.

Hope this helps!

[leam1983]

Cyberpunk 2077 Thoughts

Having perused Dark Horse Books’ The World of Cyberpunk 2077 over the past few days, I’ve gotten a better feel for the various basic hooks that structure V’s inception as a protagonist. The short of it is the Polish wizards are on the right path to nailing Pondsmith’s treatment the same way they nailed Sapkowski’s works.

Consider the following as half a brain dump, half a series of prospective spoilers, and also half projection, so either skip this, find some other entry to read, or come back to this come late November.

I know I mentioned three halves, but it’s late and I don’t give a shit.

I’m serious - DO NOT PRESS ON IF YOU’RE THE TYPE TO BLOW A GASKET IF YOU’RE INADVERTANTLY SPOILED. 

The latest Night City Wire as of August exposed three incipient “life paths”, or starting branches of V’s path. I’ll tackle my personal narrative approaches to them in the order of my choosing.

Nomads: CP2077 is set in a world where much of what we understand to define a family has been blown up, tossed around by climate change and nuclear fire and then stitched back together using grit, resourcefulness and the last dying embers of human decency. Nomads are less a group of people defined by blood relations and more a cadre of individuals that share something more significant than mere genes. It might be a common history, a set of shared hardships, a yen for similar automotive and engineering-related projects - whatever it is, that something pulls people together in ways Corpo rats and street kids will never experience.

This seems to define even the average Nomad’s degree of education. Surprisingly, Nomads are the most well-read group in Coronado Bay’s greater area, some caravans reportedly including entire RVs packed with books. Nomads generationally elect teachers and record-keepers and seem to care for those cultural remnants of the old world, before Pondsmith’s paranoid alternate sixties kicked off more than a century’s worth of technological progression and rampant dehumanization. To a Night City native, a Nomad’s speech patterns appear precious and uselessly florid, while they might appear almost normal to us - maybe slightly touched by the fact that Grandpa Joe or whatever really wanted you to have your Greek classics down before you were old enough to repair your first CH00H2 carburetor on your own.

That new, mega-clustered version of family matters immensely to the Nomads. You identify to yours the same way Orcs in Shadow of War might refer to their clan, or the same way a Scottish clan might design specific visual cues identifying its members. In normal circumstances, Nomads live, thrive and die in service to the clan - and the opening segment for V’s Nomad origins suggests that something happened to his clan. They’re gone, or so the narration says, without going into further detail. Is V responsible? We don’t currently know. As it stands, however, he is a lone Nomad in a clan of one, and soon finds himself pushed out of the Californian wastes and into Night City’s neon-drenched streets.

Seeing this, I considered the narration as an admission of guilt on V’s part. He feels responsible, and hopes that grinding his way to success will in some way atone for what he’s done. Consequently, my Nomad V would be as gruff as could be, but as moral and upstanding as the setting allows. He considers himself as having been invested with an example to set, and would intend to set his sights on more than just filthy lucre. Honest filthy lucre is what matters to him, if that concept even is possible: he might deal in unsavory types and illicit activities, but he always does so with a certain moral rectitude - as a tough and gruff, lean and stringy type you can occasionally catch in his battered Thornton pick-up truck with his feet up on the dashboard and a dog-eared copy of Plato’s Republic in hand. Jackie honestly wonders how he can put up with that Greek pendejo’s endless words and the lack of scrolling animations, while V keeps his Kiroshi optics’ News ticker locked onto grassroots Leftist RSS feeds that stoke a bit of an ignored Rockerboy ethos in him. Quoting Marx in Night City might feel like trying to teach lab rats in the finer points of string theory, but it at least feels genuine to him, compared to the predigested sociopolitical pap Militech, Arasaka and their ilk are more than happy to spew on the airwaves. 

There’s a lot to be pissed off about in Richard Night’s failed utopia, a lot of fat cats to gut and buildings to burn. Still, he leaves the glowering act and the churning rage to Johnny Silverhand’s imprinted ghost. Being more of a down-low, gun-toting choomba than a classic Street Samurai, Vincent “V” Carson thinks first and strikes second.

Vinnie isn’t much for electric guitars and anarchy in the UK, much less in the Free State of Southern California; but he does love the occasional Leonard Cohen ballad or the occasional shot of Johnny Cash’s melancholy. Having picked up something of a Northern Texas drawl while cruising, he might feel like Harry Dresden’s Good Ol’ Boy cousin, magic tricks here pushed aside in favor of a measure of dermal plating and a good ol’ fashioned twelve-gauge and revolver combo. Not being much of a techno-fetishist, he considers his optics and his skull jack as being begrudging concessions to an era that looks down on fully “ganic” types. Having grown up with TV serials and the occasional visor-based Braindance all depicting cyberpsychosis as something vile that utterly dehumanizes its sufferers, he’s naturally wary around anyone who seems a little too giddy with the prospect of taking a few scalpels to perfectly decent muscles and bones.

His Thornton is where most of his Eddies go, and yes, he’s named his truck Suzie. Suzie’s done right by him, and he’ll do right by her - unless someone else with a pretty smile and a working moral compass makes him swoon.

Street Kids: if you weren’t taught on the highways or in corporate arcologies, odds are you became a positive blip in an otherwise grim statistic, one of the myriad fucked-up kids raised by other fucked-up kids with more seniority than you. With no roads and paid-for nannies, you survived off of grifts, grit, violence, deceit, smarts and gumption - and that, in its own screwball way, creates its own blood ties. You’re wise by Heywood’s standards - streetwise, that is - and you speak the back-alleys’ lingua franca of threats, insinuation and casual intimidation like no other.

If only Jackie hadn’t fingered that Rayfield, huh? This beaut could’ve been paydirt! Well, at least for a week or so, judging by the fact that hundreds of car thefts are reported across Night City on a daily basis. At least, Dean - who also goes as “V” - got to make a new friend while out in the pokey, and managed to shake a few proverbial trees... They’ve got a short-lease in with Trauma Team’s frequency and could maybe hook themselves up with a sweet finder’s fee for anyone who’s on the verge of death at the hands of the city’s Scavengers...

Little does V know, that’s selling Trauma Team as well as their clients painfully short. Shows of gratitude don’t mean anything if you’re not packing the right social status. He barely remembers his birth parents as it is, and grew up the fifth grubby prospect of one of the Valentinos’ “school clubs” (hence the nickname) - where the points of study refer to the proper observances to be held in Jesus Malaverde’s presence, intensive Chicano and Spanish immersion, as well as the handling of common types of weaponry.

Vincent and Dean would be likely to shoot one another, if placed in the same room. One clings onto nearly-lost value systems, while the other commodifies what can be discarded like so much flesh - only inasmuch as his efforts to pacify his unofficial five or six abuelas force him to forego extensive modifications. His knives and wrist-mounted data port are his main tools of the trade, although Dean keeps his hacking creds along the bare minimum. Why bother, when melting an ATM’s ICE wall and whacking the cops with a baseball bat is all you need? There’s a type of gun for nearly anything else, if someone knows where to look...

Dean has no last name, and is consequently registered as “Dean Smith” in the city’s Census records. That doesn’t suggest, however, that he wouldn’t want to make one for himself. As he’s less focused on the city’s legends than on its kingmakers and pawn-movers, Dexter DeShawn strikes him as someone to emulate, watch and learn from - all with a decent degree of caution.

Being on top matters a little less to him than eventually pulling Heywood’s stings. With a little fear and a lot of persistence, Dean “V.” Smith knows that one day, he won’t go hungry on a weeknight. To that end, he’s certainly a hearty eater, here paired with extensive free-weight training regimens and the use of anabolic stimulants. Oh, sure, he’ll speak of family and blood like the best soldier festooned in Santa Muerte visual codices, but his friend Jackie’s got a mind like a slow and steady steel trap.

Either Dean blows his new fellow Street Samurai out of the pond, or he does. Unlike Jackie, however, Dean isn’t realistic about it. Friendships are a rare gift in Heywood, if not the rest of Night City, and Dean’s convinced that Jackie could conceivably look past his final betrayal.

Corpo: nowadays, we’re mostly familiar with the idea of one-percenters creating a bubble of affluence for themselves. Boarding schools, private villas, prebooked vacations across the globe’s priciest spots, access to the hottest trends on the minute of their inception - what this tends to forego is the level of social disconnect that’s required in order to stay relevant. We’re only just waking up to the consequences of letting an aging, crusty first-generation Yuppie be crowned the ruler of the free world, and even someone who’s behind on their Bret Easton Ellis could tell you that Donald J. Trump is a sociopath and a narcissist.

Take that mindset, and cultivate it into an ethos that’s taught to children from a very early age - children who live, eat, shit and breathe in accordance with their parent corporation’s tenets. The more placid, mid-tier lifers in the genre are called sararimen, in reference to William Gibson’s use of the term to designate low-level company workers in Chiba City. A bit like Shenzhen’s factory workers and execs, everything in a corpo’s life is in service to the corporation.

In Night City, as of 2077, two major players have installed this culture of total obedience in their roster. Their names are Militech and Arasaka. One is a juggernaut in the field of military-grade personal defence, the other has a wider grasp and reach, but is more fragile. Arasaka owes that fragility to the last fifty years having involved its re-establishment and reconstruction. Fifty years ago, Night City’s Corpo Plaza was blasted open by a thermonuclear discharge that sent the Japanese giant packing. The charges had been set by three Edgerunners: Rogue, Morgan Blackhand and Johnny Silverhand - accessorily a well-respected Rockerboy and front-line member of the band SAMURAI. Only Rogue survived that fateful night, or so the street lingo goes, having gone on to start a legitimate consultation business as well as a fruitful career in the hospitality business. Her bar, the Afterlife, is Night City’s hotspot for every techie, script kiddie and accomplished cyber-spelunker.

Our gal Vivian knows this. She knows this, because Vivian “V.” Banks lives two lives.

In one of them, she’s a lean and hungry Junior Executive in Arasaka’s Counter-Intel division. In that line of work, you either fuck someone’s prospects or protect your own, or ensure that no up-and-comer just out of the company’s Law School program manages to push you off the board. She knows full well that in centuries past, corpo-speak was made up of mild euphemisms that at best referred to destroying a rival’s prospects or lifelihood. Taking a life was something that required careful deliberation, especially when tossing a fat severance bonus into an aging CFO’s three-piece pockets and letting your erstwhile rival snort cocaine off of the rolling hips of Tahitian dancers was so much cheaper...

Nowadays, zeroing someone is commonplace.

You’re born for Arasaka, and chances are you’ll die for Arasaka just the same. Viv’s killed, lied, cheated and even stole her way to her position, remorse being this vaguely churning sense of coldness in her gut that keeps one-night stands coming in and out of her bedroom. She only remembers her parents as being credit-chip enablers and personal enhancement drug addicts, cutting ties with them so completely on the day of her official hiring that it felt more like a tacit understanding.

On most days, sex and booze keep the cold at bay. On most days, Vivian Banks is a class-act of a sociopath. The stronger she gets, however, and the more paranoid her targets become - which reinforces her own paranoia. Before long, playing the part of one of Arasaka’s several poisonous flowers won’t work anymore.

Unfortunately, she trusts no-one. No Fixer could put her in contact with any hacker she’d trust, no rando fresh off the street with a retro-tinted National Arms plinker would satisfy her. To climb up the ranks and maybe share tea with Old Man Saburo himself, she needs a spotless performance record. She needs skills.

More importantly, she needs a reputation. That means leaving Arasaka Tower and mingling with the experts in their own field - and it means filling out her back book of successful hits. The drinks at the Afterlife are decent enough, but what she’s after is an official in.

If she can get to Rogue, or maybe even hook up with a ripperdoc not bought and paid for by the company, she might be able to score both new skills and increased performance...

If it were as simple as slitting Janet’s throat in HR and diving her way to an orgiastic performance review quite innocently left on the department’s server, she would’ve done that already. Viv is my obvious Pure Stealth build candidate, my main-line hacker and would-be engineer with a thing for black power skirts and designer offensive augments.

With that said, we’re months ahead of schedule, all the good shit’s already come out, so we’re stuck playing the waiting game...

What are your own character or build ideas for Cyberpunk 2077?