#i hear we are on the way to change our gender on documents too oh my god

[khali-pap]

I'm literally about to cry, congratulations Thailand I am so happy for you all, you are all a sparkling light of this beautiful piece of the world South East Asia, I love you all so much, thank you so much Thailand....

[purplespaceace]

very few characters actually have adhd in media, and when they do, what people mean by that is just that they fidget a lot, not that they have adhd. the only character with adhd I can think of where I’ve watched/read it and I’ve gone, “oh, this character actually has adhd” is Jake peralta from Brooklyn 99. so, here’s my take on how to write adhd, with examples from Brooklyn 99.

I’ll do the best I can to separate them into three categories; the three things people look for in adults with ADHD, which are rejection sensitivity dysphoria, an interest-based nervous system, and emotional hyperarousal.

I’ll also randomly bold and italicize bits so people with ADHD can actually read it.

Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, or RSD

Rejection sensitivity dysphoria makes people with ADHD overly sensitive to criticism, even if they perceive a rejection and there actually isn’t one. Their emotions are also very strong generally. Because of RSD, people with ADHD become people-pleasers and can develop anxiety because they’re so eager to please.

For me, RSD makes me cry an embarrassing amount for any little reason. in your writing, make your characters overdramatic, criers, and/or people-pleasers. They’ll have trouble saying no. They may also be over competitive, as their perceived rejection may include losing.

how does Jake show this in b99? When Jake comes up with a catchphrase and Rosa says it’s terrible, jake is far more hurt than he should be. He hates losing, and he gets overly upset whenever someone says they don’t like him or don’t trust him, etc. he’s also a people pleaser who has trouble saying no.

An interest-based nervous system

An interest-based nervous system includes hyperfocuses and an inability to pay attention. It stems from the fact that we can’t make as much dopamine as neurotypicals. This means that while neurotypicals get dopamine after completing a task, people with ADHD don’t. That means that people with ADHD don’t have any reason to do tasks, especially those they don’t like. This leads to executive dysfunction—people with ADHD will know they have to or want to do something, but they can’t seem to do it. people with ADHD hyperfocus on things that bring them dopamine. I was obsessed with warrior cats for three years. But hyperfocuses can also last a short amount of time—I’ll have a drawing idea in the middle of class and won’t be able to concentrate on anything else before I finish it. this is where our impulsiveness comes from. we can leap into things we think will give us dopamine without thinking, which can lead to injury. We also tend to tell people personal things they don’t want to hear because of this, and don’t have very good boundaries. We sometimes say whatever comes into our head, which can also result in us being rude on accident. Our voices can also get very loud or we can interrupt people frequently because we’re so impulsive. When people with ADHD hyperfocus, they can forget about anything else. I’ll forget to eat if I’m busy reading a Wikipedia article about feminism in the 1850s, and won’t go to the bathroom or drink water either. It’s also important to note that taking away distractions doesn’t help, because we can do things like pick at our skin and daydream—something that people with ADHD do a lot of. Because of executive dysfunction, people can call people with ADHD lazy or irresponsible.

people with ADHD can also be extremely indecisive because ADHD affects our executive functioning, and making decisions requires planning and prioritizing, and task initiation, which are both executive functions!

people with ADHD also have poor memory for important things, but tend to remember random bits of trivia. Poor memory leads to object permanence problems, which means people with ADHD can forget to call a friend back for weeks, forget that they need to read library books in a closed cabinet, or forget that the vegetables they got will go bad. People can sometimes say that people with ADHD don’t care about anything because of this.

people with ADHD can also be prone to depression because of under or overstimulation. Boredom feels painful for people with ADHD. If we’re overstimulated, we can experience sensory overload—if things are too bright or too loud, if too many things are touching us at once—often it’s not because the thing is too intense, but because too many things are happening at once.

We also have something some people call dolphin brain, where we jump from one thing to another. From the outside, it looks really random, but I find that when I’m talking to another neurodivergent communication is generally easier. For instance, someone with ADHD might see a bee at a baseball field and tell their team about the time they saw whales at seaworld because their little brother was also stung by a wasp there. people will see no connection on the outside, but it makes perfect sense to the person with ADHD.

people with ADHD can also be overachievers, either because they hyperfocus on schoolwork or their RSD makes it so that failing at something isn’t an option. people with ADHD can also be very controlling and stubborn, probably because we hyperfocus on something and cant handle it being any different, and any change to our plans can be seen as rejection.

we can also have a hard time ordering our thoughts or doing stuff like math in our head. a lot of the time I number my thoughts like, 1. this reason, 2. this reason, etc. even if theres only two or sometimes I just need the 1. as a transition for my brain. when I don’t write it down or organize it like that it feels like I’m trying to grasp ropes that have been covered in oil (it’s not going to happen) and then my brain gets all jumbled and I have to restart at the beginning. this is probably just me, but it feels the same way when I’m reading long paragraphs of something uninteresting, or even short bits of historical documents because the way they phrase things is really pompous and hard to process.

also, stuff like caffeine calms us down and helps us focus. people who don’t take medication (me) often drink coffee or caffeinated sodas to focus.

another random tip, but if your character with ADHD also is genderfluid or genderflux, they might have a hard time figuring out their gender sometimes, because we can be known to have a hard time putting our feelings into words or our brains will just go, “nope, not thinking about that right now” and move on, which can be pretty frustrating.

people with adhd also have a trait called time blindness, where we have no idea how long something takes and therefore can’t manage our time very well. this often results in us being late or just sitting around the house because we got ready way too early.

we also have something called consequence blindness—we do things and are completely unaware of the consequences. if I don’t brush my teeth, I get cavities. but I don’t think about that when I’m deciding I’m too tired to brush my teeth.

in b99, jake regularly stays up all night solving cases and watches documentaries on random topics. He’s also very distractible—when they’re trying to find the person who sent Captain Holt death threats in the train yard, Jake says he and captain holt should take a train trip together sometime. Jake says that he’ll forget Amy if they don't work together because he’s like a goldfish.

Emotional hyperarousal

This is the only thing people tend to include when writing characters: the fidgeting. People with ADHD tend to need more stimulation than others, so we’ll do things like draw during class and chew on pens.

people with ADHD can also have apd, or auditory processing disorder. we tend to watch shows with subtitles on and may take a second to process what you’re saying, or hear it wrong. The subtitles thing may be partially do to creating just the right amount of stimulation, but if I don’t have subtitles, me and my other friends with ADHD will watch tv with the volume turned up very high. People with ADHD also can have a hard time interpreting other people‘s tone and have a hard time controlling their own. They can be bad at social cues and have poor manners because we don’t pick up on that stuff.

people with ADHD also tend to observe everything or nothing at any given time, mostly based on the amount of stimulation they have—if they dont have a lot in their main task, they’ll need to take in something else at the same time. Likewise, if I’m hyperfocusing on something I often don’t notice anything else, like if someone asks me a question.

in b99, Jake fidgets with things a lot. In the intro, he’s picking up and examining a figurine on his desk, likely because he was bored with paperwork or some other task.

[basiccortez]

Baby Series~ the bump

note: couple more chapters until we find out the gender!! I created a poll to get hear what you guys think the baby(-ies) could possibly be. also, let me know if you want to be added to the tag list! I am going to create a google form thing to fill out for those who want to be added!!!

gender reveal poll

and one last thing. . . send name ideas!!! :) tis all

warnings: mentions of nudity, fluffy shit

Requests and inbox: OPEN

Josh:

Since you told Josh about the pregnancy, he had been super attentive to everything about you. He had secretly made a list of things that had upset you, whether that be your stomach or your emotions. He had also been in tune with the way your body was changing physically. He wanted to document every step of the pregnancy, which is why he had insisted on taking weekly bump pictures.

"Josh," You complained as he walked into your studio with his polaroid in his hands, "Again?"

"Its week 12," Josh smiled and gestured to you to strip. You stood up from your desk and kicked off your shoes and discarding you pants. As soon as your shirt hit the floor, Josh's eyes went straight to your belly, "You're showing,"

"What?" You asked and looking down, noticing the small round bump that was sticking out of your belly, "Oh wow, look at that."

Josh came up to you and placed his arm hand on your bare skin, "This is why I insist on the pictures. Last week, nothing, this week. . . baby."

"Baby has always been here," You giggled and Josh got down on his knee in front of your belly. He kissed the skin and you smiled, "You're going to be a good dad, Josh."

He looked up at you, "I really hope so. You're going to be a good mom, Y/N." He said and you caressed his cheek, "Now! Let's take this picture so I can cuddle with you and the bump."

Jake:

You grunted as you tried for the 10th time to zip your jeans. You couldn't even get them remotely close to zipping. It was the second pair of jeans you put on, and were growing increasingly frustrated.

"You almost ready?" Jake asked coming out of the bathroom.

"No, I'm not," You said, "I have nothing to fucking wear! Nothing fucking fits!"

"Wow, okay," Jake said and walked over to your suitcase, "We aren't going somewhere that special, just to go ax throwing."

"I know but. . . Nothing fits," You said tears welling up in your eyes.

"Its because your bump is growing," Jake said and you looked at him, "You didn't notice?"

"I didn't even notice," You said walking over to the full length mirror, "Oh my god! Jake! Look!"

Jake laughed and walked up behind you, placing his hands on your small baby bump, "I noticed it like 2 weeks ago, starting to fill out a little more. I thought you noticed it too."

"I feel like I should've but I didn't," You said.

"It's just the beginning, soon it'll look like you swallowed a watermelon," Jake said and you glared at him in the mirror.

"You really know how to make a woman feel good about herself,"

"I mean, that's how we got into this mess," Jake smirked and kissed your neck, "We'll go shopping tomorrow, for now, but something on before Sam comes knocking down our door."

Sam:

The mirror was steamed over as you stepped out of the shower. You were ready to turn in for the night, washing the final touches of a long day at work off your body. Sam was laying in bed, fingers strumming over his bass guitar as he was working on writing a new song. You wrapped the warm fluffy towel around you as you stepped out of the bathroom, brushing your wet hair.

“How’s it going?” You asked him.

“Not sure,” Sam said, closing his eyes and letting the music fill his body. You had fallen in love watching Sam play music, whether it was his bass or the piano. You prayed that your babies would end up with the same talents he had.

“It’ll come together,” You said and walked over to your dresser, sifting through to find some undergarments to wear, “I have the day off tomorrow, do you want to go look at-“

“Yes,” Sam said cutting you off.

“You don’t even know what I’m about to ask,” You said turning around with a pair of underwear and sports bra in your hand. You slipped the underwear on under your towel and grabbed the bra to put it on.

“If it has something to do with our babies, then I’m all about it,” Sam said, and looked over at you. He bit his lip and sat his bass down next to him, “You about to give me a show?”

You smirked at him, and grabbed the corner of your towel and pulling the fabric away from you body. Sam’s eyes raked down your body and froze, over the part of your body that was protruding out slightly. Sam moved off the bed and over to you. You held in your breath as Sam’s hands gingerly hovered over your bareskin.

“Can I. . . ?” He whispered and you grabbed his calloused hands and placed them on your skin, “Oh wow,”

“I know,” You said and Sam leaned his forehead against yours.

Danny:

You stood in front of the mirror, debating on if you made the right choice in clothing or not. You and Danny were meeting Josie and her boyfriend for her boyfriend’s birthday dinner. You had bought the green velvet type dress a couple weeks ago and now, it looked even better than when you put it on in the stores.

You turned every which way in front of the mirror, looking at your ever changing body. The dress hugged your small bump perfectly, you just hopped that someone else thought you looked stunning in it too.

“I don’t know which shoes to. . .” Danny said walking into your bedroom with two different pairs of shoes in his hand, “You look. . . breath taking.”

“Thank you,” You said and Danny set the shoes on the bed and moved over to you.

“I didn’t think you could get anymore beautiful, but you just keep setting the bar higher,” Danny said, placing his hands on your hips, “And now, your little baby bump showing,” You smiled and leaned up to capture his lips in a kiss. Danny’s hands moved from your hips to the back of your head, pulling you in deeper. You sighed into the kiss, melting farther into Danny’s body. He pulled away and looked at you, your lips slightly swollen from the kiss.

“We better stop here,” He whispered against your lips.

“If we hurry, we can come back home sooner,”

“I like the way you think, Mrs. Wagner,” Danny kissed you one more time. He looked at the shoes on the bed and then picked a pair.

Needless to say, dinner might have been cut short.

[beneathashadytree]

SECRET PLAN - NORIAKI KAKYOIN X READER

Warnings : one curse word, Kakyoin is in his mid-twenties in this, reader is gender-neutral!

Genre : domestic fluff, slice of life!

Word count : 1.4K words

Synopsis : Noriaki's one-track mind doesn't provide a strong argument in his favor.

Requests : Are closed for the time being, but will be opened soon!

Want to support me financially? Here’s my CashApp!

Masterlist

"Babe? Where are you?" Noriaki's voice called out from somewhere around the house, a slight panic audible in his voice, causing me to frown in worry.

"In the office," I yelled back, my concern growing as I could hear his footsteps hurrying my way, probably frantically searching for me for some reason that seemed urgent.

Rushing through the door in a bit of a panic, he asked, "Have you seen my glasses? I can't find them anywhere."

Not looking up from my laptop as I saved the document at hand, I shook my head, "No, is that what's gotten you all in a frenzy?"

"I'm worried I might've sat on them at some point, and that would've been the third time I change the lenses or frames within the past month," he groaned, and I turned around to find him running his hands through the back of his auburn locks, frustration evident on his face as he lightly tugged, "I've looked all over, and even checked behind the washing machine. Still nothing."

For the first time, I focused on really looking at him, and that was when I couldn't help myself and chortled.

"Have you, really? They might be a lot closer than you think."

Looking slightly annoyed, he gave me a look, "Of course I have, I'm not daft. I turned the couch over, even. Still can't find them," watching me as I tried my hardest to stifle my laugh behind my hand, Kakyoin narrowed his eyes, "You know something, don't you?"

Contemplating whether or not I should just let him suffer in silence, I closed my laptop lid, grinning, "Nothing. I just---I think you should take a look in the mirror."

Frowning, he huffed and walked into the bathroom next door, mumbling to himself for a few minutes, before returning, "You're horrible, all of this just to force me to wash my face? You could've told me I was all sweaty, you know."

"Oh my God, Nori," I couldn't help myself, bursting into laughter as I was once again reminded of just how absent-minded and goal-oriented he was that he often looked past the most obvious things, "They're literally ontop of your head."

"Huh?" patting his hair, he indeed came in contact with the prescription glasses firmly nestled into his waves, "Oh." Growing furiously red at the realization, he pulled them out and tucked them into his pocket, "I should really invest in glasses' cases."

I snorted, getting up from the chair as I unplugged my laptop's charger, "Yeah, probably a better way to spend your cash than buying a dozen video games a month, all of which you'll be finishing within the span of a week."

The redhead rolled his eyes, "Not my fault they're not very challenging."

Chortling, I poked his side, "Or maybe you're just an addict who'd geeked out too much as a teenager and can now perfectly pass every single level within a few hours after buying a game."

Looking a little sheepish now as we walked out of the office and into the bedroom, he mumbled, "I probably should slow down, or I'll burn the console's hardware."

"Yeah, and I'm not cutting down on our groceries just to save up cash and fix it. You're on your own there, honey."

"That's never happened," he indignantly protested, setting his glasses down on the dresser, before starting to undress for bed, and I could only arch my eyebrow at him as I did the same.

"Oh really? Who's the one who said that "we could live without fruits for a couple of weeks" and instead bought a brand new controller because he'd busted his in a fit of rage?"

Buttoning up my pajama shirt, I watched as his cheeks became tinged with a rosy color, distracting himself with folding his dirty day clothes to put in the laundry basket by the door, his muscular back turned to me, "That was one time. And I apologized afterwards."

Shaking my head at him, I began to brush my hair, as each of us finished their respective nightly routines before crawling into bed. After a long day of work and splitting chores around the house that never seemed to end (he was adamant not to move out of this cozy little house, even though we could well afford purchasing a bigger one), we both were far too exhausted to do anything but flop ontop of the mattress and barely move an inch.

Noriaki thankfully took the initiative to pull up the covers himself, twisting his waist with a grunt to switch off the lamp light.

"Sometimes you're a god-send," I groaned as I curled up under the covers, stress dissipating from my body, "I can't feel my back, I swear to you."

"The Speedwagon Foundation gave me a week off after all the extra jobs I took on last month, so all my work's just some paperwork," he shrugged, before pulling me into his chest and snuggling into his pillow, "I do get a bit antsy sometimes though."

"Workaholic," I mumbled under my breath, earning a pinch to my cheek.

We settled in silence for a couple of seconds, before bright violet eyes peered open, "Hey, can we get a dog?"

"Chances are you'll lose it within the first 3 days," I laughed in reply, patting his fringe fondly, "Plus, you travel a lot, so you won't be around much to take care of a dog."

Furrowing his eyebrows, Kakyoin insisted, squeezing my waist, "I'm sure we can manage it. You can handle it on your own when I'm abroad, and when I'm home you won't have to worry about it at all, I can promise you that."

Shaking my head, "I'll worry about the two of you getting lost, honestly. As much of a perfectionist you are when it comes to work, you tend to space out a lot and lose track of things very easily," mustering my best apologetic look, I smiled, "I'm sorry, but you know a dog's a huge responsibility that I won't be able to shoulder on my own."

"When have I ever let you down?" he asked, a small scowl forming on his face.

"Babe. You literally couldn't find your glasses earlier, and they were in your hair. I think that's enough of a disappointment," I teased him, earning a noise of offense from the man in question.

"Hey! It's a common mistake to make," he protested, though his embarrassed flush said otherwise, "Plus, when it comes to serious shit, you can always count on me."

He had a point. I had to hum in agreement, genuinely taking his request into consideration. Honestly, with how stubborn he was, I wouldn't put it past him to buy a dog anyways and coerce me into falling in love with it; I was just as weak for the lovable pets as he was, my only issue was with Noriaki's frequent absences and one-track mindedness. I knew, however, that I'd never be able to put up much of a fight, considering that he would undoubtedly keep his word if he were to promise to take care of the dog as best as he could---though slip-ups would be inevitable, and I was sure that I would have to swoop in sometimes.

"Let's discuss this further in the morning, alright?" I offered, knowing that if I were to set the subject aside indefinitely he'd only persist and grow more impatient.

My lover nodded, "Fine, but don't brush me off. I'm one hundred percent serious about buying a dog."

Chuckling to myself as I let my eyes finally fall closed when his hand lifted to brush at my hair affectionately, I said, "You're so insistent about this, you'd think you've already bought one and will have it delivered in the morning."

Instead of the laughter I expected to hear in response, all I got was his hand stilling in its movements and an uneasy type of silence that urged me to crack one eye open. At that, I saw Noriaki averting his eyes from me, a somewhat guilty look on his handsome---though certainly nervous now---face. Disbelief filling me, I could do nothing but cry out, bolting upright.

"Nori!"

Taglist: @mrsgiovanna @blondeboyfriend @boorishbrambling

[undertale-data]

[Image Description: An Undertale chat box that has “WHY FANS LOVE UNDERTALE” at its center. Next to it are a line chart and an Egg from the Dating Hub on its left, and a CRIME measurer (also from the Dating Hub) on its right. End I.D.]

[Image Description: a pie chart titled, “LEVEL OF LOVE FOR UNDERTALE.” The textbox on the top right reads, “On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the least and 10 being the highest, how much do fans enjoy Undertale?” From the top going clockwise, 12 or 0% chose 5 and below; 23 or 1% chose 6; 98, or 4%, chose 7; 325, or 12%, chose 8; 529, or 20%, chose 9; and 1664, or 63%, chose 10. End I.D.]

It’s clear from all of the data analyzed so far that fans who took the time to answer our survey love Undertale. It is unlikely that they would have taken the time to answer so many questions if they had not, and even less likely that they would have come across our survey in the first place. Naturally, it comes as no surprise that 63% of our responders gave their love for Undertale a score of ten out of ten. 95% gave their love for Undertale a score of eight or higher, and only 12 responders responded with five or below, a number so small that their responses had to be lumped together to be visible on the pie chart. Of those, only 3 responders gave their love for Undertale a score of 1, and based on those responders’ other answers, it is likely that they were only intending to troll. We are very fortunate that the vast majority of responders took the survey seriously, enough so that responses like this are barely a blip in the data.

Now, for our final analysis post of the event, we will delve into the reasons that fans love Undertale so dearly.

(Essay and highlights under the cut.)

There have been countless essays on the impact that Undertale has had on people’s lives. I can hardly add more on the subject than what has already been said, but I hope this summary can provide a brief overview of what stood out among the over two thousand answers given in response to this survey. That said, due to the sheer volume of answers, I could not read every single one in depth—however, I did skim all of them, and some that stood out or were representative of several responses have been highlighted below. If you would like to see what every fan who consented to share their response had to say, you may view the full list of responses here. Note that these responses have not been edited in any way. This document may take a long time to load, as it is over 100 pages long.

(Warnings for mentions of suicidal thoughts in the following essay.)

Several responders loved the theme of choices mattering in Undertale. Whether people played the pacifist, merciless, or neutral routes, they enjoyed how the game reacted to their actions. For some, it even made them consider their own morality. One touching response explained the impact that the theme of mercy made on them. “I realized that Mercy isn't something that's given to those who deserve it. Flowey didn't deserve it. I don't deserve it myself. Shoot, we ALL need Mercy in our lives.” Many fans left similar comments about how the themes of Undertale made them better people.

Undertale changed how its fans treat others, and it also changed how fans treat themselves. The theme of staying determined and the messages of hope in the game were a light to a very large portion of fans. I cannot list all of the fans who said that Undertale helped them out of a dark place, or that they would not be alive if not for Undertale. “DETERMINATION became a metaphor for not killing myself at a really rough time in my life and I’ll always cherish that. Undertale isn’t afraid to go to really dark places but at the same time holds on so tight to its hope.”

Undertale brought fans together in unexpected ways. Some said they met friends or significant others through the fandom. “I wouldn't have met my now husband without Undertale,” one fan said. A different fan who is non-native English speaking mentioned that the game and the fan community helped them to learn English.

It would be impossible to discuss Undertale without mentioning the fan community. Whether for good or bad, many responders mentioned the fandom in their responses. Overall the feelings towards the fandom seem positive, though many made references to “toxic” parts of the fandom without specifying which parts they consider toxic. Others rejected the idea of toxicity in fandom. One response said: “[SLAMS FIST ON DESK] I KNOW MOST PEOPLE SAY THE FANDOM IS TOXIC AND CRINGE OR WHATEVER BUT OH MY GOD. The Undertale fandom, both the UTMV and the actual UT fandom, has been so much fun to be a part of. I've met countless friends because of our shared interest in something related to the game! The art people create can be breathtaking and so inspirational, and the fanfics are so so good!! I've seen people write incredible things for this fandom and it's what made me continue writing!”

One thing that makes the Undertale fandom unique is the way it embraces various AUs. Some fans are tired of AU content, but the majority of responses show a love for the creativity behind AUs. “Roll your eyes at the 50th AU Sans all you want, it's encouraging people to step outside the boundaries of fanart and pushing people to make their own ideas! I mean, hell, it was how I gained the confidence to start making my own original content.” The lack of a judgemental atmosphere seems present in the AU community, according to the responses we saw. There is an interesting balance between AU and canon (sometimes referred to as “classic”) content that another responder pointed out: “The fandom helped keep the game alive all these years, with all of its AUs. Although personally, I always enjoyed AUs that kept characters as close to the classic material as possible (dancetale, outertale) I do appreciate the creativity of the fandom. They almost created entirely new stories with new characters of their own! If it weren't for those people, the Undertale fandom would have probably not been as active as it is now. I do feel like we're getting a resurgence of classic content now too! (In 2021)”

Regardless of the many AUs the fandom has created over the years, the original game of Undertale still feels like home for many fans. They wished they could reclaim the feeling of playing the game again for the first time, but even though we can’t reset time in real life, there is still a special feeling for fans each time they play Undertale. One fan said, “Even the best fics I've read can't capture that feeling of nostalgia/almost-"coming home" that comes with hearing the music and talking to the characters.” This feeling is one that can be cherished time and time again. In the words of another responder: “It always feels welcoming like home or like comfort food that I never grow tired of no matter how many times I go to it.” Others pointed out the strength of the found family trope in Undertale, which likely contributes to this feeling of “home” as well.

As mentioned briefly earlier, the music is part of what makes Undertale feel like home for fans. Even when responses focused on other aspects of the game, many would throw in a comment about the soundtrack at the end. One comment focused on the music said “IT'S SO GOOD like I will literally go through the entire thing over and over and not be bored with it. It makes my monkey brain so happy you have no idea.” Like with the game itself, the music has incredible replay value, an amazing feat considering most of the tracks use the same few motifs. “I think what I like the most about Undertale is how the music attaches you to the story,” another responder said. “They're simple melodies that stick with you throughout the whole game, and they can remind you of both good and bad times.”

If the music sticks with fans in their hearts, then the game’s lore sticks with fans in their minds. Even six years after the release of Undertale, fans are still creating new theories and digging up new secrets. The way the game breaks the fourth wall in particular intrigued many fans and has stuck out through all these years. The awareness that the game shows for the RPG genre makes it memorable. The game plays with the player’s expectations and turns them on their heads, all while reminding the player that they’re in a game. There are few other games that do this on such a large scale, so it’s no surprise that fans cite this as one of their favorite things about Undertale.

Lastly, the LGBT+ representation in Undertale has been a huge draw for fans. Especially in 2015, the sheer volume of non-cishet characters was unprecedented, as one fan pointed out: “It's practically unheard of to see so MANY from just one source, especially during its heyday in 2015-16. Hell, you can't even GET the true pacifist ending without helping two gay couples hook up. It's really nice to see all of them being accepted for who they are and not judged for their sexuality or gender, at least in-canon.” The LGBT+ cast including Frisk, Chara, Napstablook, Monster Kid, Mettaton, Alphys, and Undyne each connected with fans in unique ways. It’s clear how important this is from responses such as: “There are canon nonbinary characters 🥺. i have never seen representation of myself before.” “It made me gay and trans so thanks for that.”

Once again I am overwhelmed with just how much there is to say about Undertale. One responder really understood when they compared Undertale to an iceberg, explaining that there are so many layers to the game that there is something for everyone: “everyone can find something to enjoy in the lore/game regardless of what kind of fan they are! Being able to appeal to various types of fans—from simple happy shipper people to deep dive lorediggers—is the mark of the coolest games!” I would have to agree with them.

It’s been six years, and despite everything, it’s still you. Thank you for reading, participating in this survey, and above all, staying determined.

Highlights:

DETERMINATION became a metaphor for not killing myself at a really rough time in my life and I’ll always cherish that. Undertale isn’t afraid to go to really dark places but at the same time holds on so tight to its hope.

I think the coolest thing was having the opportunity to watch the AU community grow from its bare roots. It's nearly insane how big and complex it's gotten, unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Roll your eyes at the 50th AU Sans all you want, it's encouraging people to step outside the boundaries of fanart and pushing people to make their own ideas! I mean, hell, it was how I gained the confidence to start making my own original content.

i love how the lgbt rep is so naturalized... there are just gay people! and its nobodys business!

The music is my go to answer, but what I really really REALLY love is how the minor characters have so much personality to them when you talk to them. They aren't incredibly important to the overall story, but they're all so likeable and diverse that you just can't help but like them immediately!

I think it was the first videogame I have played that broke the fourth wall that much. Of course there has been other videogames that broke it but just for one or two tongue-in-cheek jokes. The guilt of killing mama goat was also something intense as well that I appreciated as an experience and that I didn't think a videogame could cause on someone.

I love how no character can be seen as completely bad! Everyone builds up Asgore as some horrible villain, but he turns out to be a 'fuzzy pushover' who's broken and just wants his family back by the time you meet him. Then you think Flowey's an irredeemable killer who engineered the suffering of the monsters across many timelines, and he is... but he also used to be the kind and beloved Prince Asriel Dreemurr, traumatized by his death and subsequent rebirth, projecting his best friend onto you.

The fact that choices matter in the game. Your first playthrough and getting the golden ending for the first time. I can never replicate those feelings again, wish I could erase my memories and replay the game from the start.

I wouldn't have met my now husband without Undertale.

(Toxic parts of the fandom aside) The community is possibly one of the kindest I've ever met. Cringe culture is completely dead, and I feel like I can be myself. I felt a very close connection to many of the characters, and I loved consuming content about them when I was in a rough patch in my life.

just everything, the whole game has just impacted my life so much. i know it sounds really lame, but when the game first came out, i would purposely put my hands in my pockets and sway slightly, like sans' idle animation. of course i dont do that anymore haha, but undertale still really impacts me to this day, and i wouldnt have it any other way :)

it made me gay and trans so thanks for that

I realized that Mercy isn't something that's given to those who deserve it. Flowey didn't deserve it. I don't deserve it myself. Shoot, we ALL need Mercy in our lives.

The thing I love most about Undertale is no matter how many times I play or watch a playthrough it always makes me genuinely happy. It always feels welcoming like home or like comfort food that I never grow tired of no matter how many times I go to it. Toriel still makes me feel all warm and cozy in her home, the Skelebros always make me laugh, and I still cry on the inside watching Frisk comforting Asriel. And on the flip side the No Mercy run still invokes the negative emotions in me as well. In short Undertale just feels like a second home to me and I always wish I could stay.

The reader inserts are my favorite way to decompress after a hard day

I think Undertale helped me discover my love for 8-bit games, and made me realize how IMPORTANT music is in video games.

the worldbuilding and character design are my favorite parts of the main game apart from the music! I’m also a huge fan of the random AU music- not for like underswap or underfell i like the stuff where someone makes a megalovania for a random au where gru from despicable me replaces sans as the character. i think its funny

Just... the vibe, honestly? Even the best fics I've read can't capture that feeling of nostalgia/almost-"coming home" that comes with hearing the music and talking to the characters.

there are canon nonbinary characters 🥺. i have never seen representation of myself before.

[SLAMS FIST ON DESK] I KNOW MOST PEOPLE SAY THE FANDOM IS TOXIC AND CRINGE OR WHATEVER BUT OH MY GOD. The Undertale fandom, both the UTMV and the actual UT fandom, has been so much fun to be a part of. I've met countless friends because of our shared interest in something related to the game! The art people create can be breathtaking and so inspirational, and the fanfics are so so good!! I've seen people write incredible things for this fandom and it's what made me continue writing!

There's a scene where Frisk (the player) is going towards what is presumably going to be their death. They will fight Asgore and he will use their human soul to break the barrier and free his people. The music, despite the player's impending doom, is... triumphant. You are not the triumphant one here, and yet, the score invites you to experience the monsters' joy and happiness as they tell you the tale of their subjugation. The monsters are going to be free. This is their victory, but they don't hate you or want you to die. They're just... happy. That scene has always struck me very deeply. I feel it represents the best parts of Undertale.

I loved how well thought out the Geno route was. It really made me feel like I was doing something horrible, and the characters were very obviously reacting to dire circumstances.

I dunno? I like Undertale for it's characters, story, music, secrets and many more. I am not good with Headcanons but I also like the neutral endings and how different they can depending on who you spare and kill

I was very bad at english before, i thought i couldn't progress because i was very shy and not confident. But my sibling and i wanted to have the best experience with this game so we wanted to play it in english. It's this game and the fandom which helped me to make huge progress in english !

THE SOUNDTRACK. IT'S SO GOOD like I will literally go through the entire thing over and over and not be bored with it. It makes my monkey brain so happy you have no idea.

to avoid writing an essay i will say one word. Mettaton

It is like Toby specifically made the games to fit the iceberg meme and it's awesome, everyone can find something to enjoy in the lore/game regardless of what kind of fan they are! Being able to appeal to various types of fans - from simple happy shipper people to deep dive lorediggers is the mark of the coolest games!

I love almost everything about Undertale as a game on its own. The music, the art and especially the characters and how they interact. They made me feel at home. Undertale means a huge amount to me. (I even got a tattoo of the castle when you and MK walk together!) The fandom helped keep the game alive all these years, with all of its AUs. Although personally, I always enjoyed AUs that kept characters as close to the classic material as possible (dancetale, outertale) I do appreciate the creativity of the fandom. They almost created entirely new stories with new characters of their own! If it weren't for those people, the Undertake fandom would have probably not been as active as it is now. I do feel like we're getting a resurgence of classic content now too! (In 2021)

the mystery. toby fox refused to give answers to anything and i think thats very sexy of him.

I just feel guilty for liking it so much when I'm in my 30's. But I recently got diagnosed with ASD, so I guess it explains things a bit. Many ppl consider Papyrus to be neurodivergent, and some adult fans are too, so seeing that makes me feel a bit better.

i think about "Despite everything, it's still you" everyday of my life.

I like how it's just as funny as it can be serious. All routes are this way. I laughed as much as I cried when I played the Pacifist route and then once I opened the game again and Flowey was telling me to let them be happy, I immediately turned off the game. I somehow felt bad.

The Found Family Trope

The True Pacifist Ending is just...man. And the fanworks about saving everyone even when the game doesn't let you? MANNNNNN

I think what I like the most about Undertale is how the music attaches you to the story. They're simple melodies that stick with you throughout the whole game, and they can remind you of both good and bad times.

there's honestly a LOT to love about this game, but i think one of my favorite things about it is just how many lgbt+ characters there are??? i can think of alphys, undyne, frisk, chara, mettaton, napstablook, monster kid, asgore, mad mew mew, the dress lion, the royal guards, and arguably even papyrus off of the top of my head, but im sure i'm forgetting a few from just undertale alone (there's even MORE in deltarune)!! it's practically unheard of to see so MANY from just one source, especially during its heyday in 2015-16. hell, you can't even GET the true pacifist ending without helping two gay couples hook up. it's really nice to see all of them being accepted for who they are and not judged for their sexuality or gender, at least in-canon.

[Image description: A wordcloud in the shape of the capitalized word UNDERTALE. The text is white on a black background, and uses the font found in the game. Some of the most visible words are: Game, Love, Music, Life, AU, Store, Friend, and Feel, which represent the most common words in the essays people wrote about their love for the game. End of ID]

[pensoluv]

Bonus: The Whirring Dawn of Karma

SAGAO new sub-AU: MechanicalGod!Reader, Villain AU

Tldr: Background information of what happened before you’ve dealt with Raiden, for context. This is to be read before you read the Childe and Scara reaction one.

Side characters in this work: Mentions of Raiden, and next main focuses—Childe, Scaramouche, Ayato.

Reader: Gender-neutral

Genre: None, but Not Fluff.

Warnings: Mentions of the your captivity of enemies. Violence. Religious Sacrifices.

Inspiration: Arcane

Song listened to while writing: TRRST by IC3PEAK

Just before you had summoned Raiden from the dungeons, your left-hand-man Akemi* had informed you of something else.

“Yes?” You asked, fully aware of his arrival. His armour clangs and he trudged over behind you.

“My grace, the two harbingers are captured.”

“Good,” you said, turning around. “Bring then to the main room.” You send the lower-ranked follower behind you two, to do your bidding. A trustworthy soldier follows suit.

When the sound of their footsteps had thunked away, Akemi speaks in his deep hushed voice.

“My grace, if I may ask…”

“I’ll answer you later. Where are the rest of the Harbingers?” You cut in, as he hands you the papers.

It’s incomplete, but it seems to had belonged to Childe. One page is of Scaramouche, yet it’s too blurred and messed up to see. Old traces of blood had tainted the parchments. You flip through them while listening carefully to Akemi’s report.

“As you wish. The Harbingers… there are ten harbingers alive. The Eighth had died to the Raiden Shogun, and the Fifth had fled in time. The rest are tied down by our men.”

You hum approvingly in response and refocus on your comrade. “Give me the details at the next hour, would you? Prepare before you come to me.” You pocket the pile of papers, and conceal them with your official garments. You act like you didn’t just discover Ayato’s documented involvement with the Balladeer.

“Now, what question did you have? A reward for your good work—I’ll answer one thing, whatever you want to know.”

You pick up the unfamiliar hesitance in his eyes. His stance is off, and his nervous tics are showing up again. You soften your voice. “It’s alright. I trust you the same way you trust me. Ask anything you like. I’ll pardon any wrongs you might make right now. Would that be better?” You sigh from his petrified state and turn around. Physical distance might unfreeze him, you guess. You only turn around when you hear his breathing pace steadied.

Having calmed down, he nods, then swallows before finally asking. “My grace… where did you come from?”

“Oh?” Your eyes widened. “You’ve chosen a good question, it seems. For your answer, Albedo of Mondstadt had abducted me.”

Aw, Akemi’s shocked. “The Albedo we know?”

A nod from you solidified his thoughts. “The first follower I have, Albedo. That alchemist.” You confirm. “Though, I’ll say that his city was the beginning of their terrorising of me. If you want the details, either go figure it out yourself or earn more answers with your loyalty, ‘kemi.”

“Prepare the Harbingers. I’ll be seeing them after dealing with Inazuma’s archon.” Your voice hardens and its volume raised to command your men.

“Yes, my grace. We will do so-“ The younger disciple of Akemi starts rambling again, and you were spared from that when Akemi shut him up and left you with a bow.

*Footnote: Akemi means ‘beauty of dawn’ according to an adoption website. Could be changed if anyone proficient in Japanese discovers any mistakes in this. I was looking for a Japanese name with a menacing relating to god.

[charmingyong]

Wasabi Chocolates

Genre: Ten x reader (gender neutral), co-workers, one-sided hate to love, humour, fluff

Warnings: the number of times I wrote “oh my god,” swear words, somewhat mentally violent reader (’you’re going crazy~’ because of Ten), physical injury, cats (sorry to those allergic)

Abbrev: F/N L/N = first name last name

Word count: 6k

Plot: You were a good child, always being nice to your classmates in elementary school. Unlike Ten who was always a troublemaker. When your family decided to move away during middle school, you were relieved thinking that you weren’t ever going to see him again. But you were wrong a decade later when your new co-worker was none other than the devil himself.

A/N: You’ll see that I watch a lot of cat vlogs. Please let me know if there are any issues in terms of the gender-neutral assignment.

- ❀ -

“Oh my God! Did you hear about the new guy that got hired in our department? I heard he’s super hot!” Sally gushed.

Your colleagues around you continued to gossip while your gaze was fixed onto the word document on your monitor. It didn’t faze you that the workspace next to yours was going to be occupied soon.

“Wow Y/N, aren’t you lucky?”

You rolled your eyes. Who knew how the new employee was going to turn out in terms of work habits? You were always punctual when completing work before deadlines and arriving for work, except for the times when the brutal winter would take forever to heat your car up. You were hardworking and smart, always getting praised by your higher-ups. You were proud of the compliments, but you mainly did it for self discipline. You loved your coworkers. They were all productive like you and adored you back. You were always genuinely nice to them, ready to help them out whenever they needed a helping hand. It made you happy that your workplace was a healthy environment and you looked forward to working there every day.

You hoped the new co-worker would be no exception.

“We’ll see about that when he starts. When is he coming?” you asked.

“Tomorrow.”

- ❀ -

The next morning you arrived a little earlier than usual, wanting to welcome the newbie and give him a tour around the building. You placed your tote bag that had a poorly self-drawn picture of your cat and turned on your desktop monitor, displaying the wallpaper of your sleeping cat on your bed. You smiled, your heart fluttering at how cute Sakura looked. You heard the doors slide open of your department, signaling an arrival. Removing your gaze from the monitor, you stood up ready to greet them warmly.

Only to have your blood turn cold and your face scrunched up ever so slightly when you realized who it was.

An amused smile grew on his face. “Wow! I can’t believe this. The one and only F/N L/N is my work buddy.”

Ten.

He was the new employee that was going to be located beside you.

The same troublemaker from elementary school. The one who’d make fun of the new kids with accents, start fights with other boys, be loud and obnoxious in class, and worst of all, act all high mighty as if he was the most important person in the school.

You scoffed. There went your hope jumping out the tenth-floor window. Hope for your new co-worker to be no exception to the healthy workplace environment. “I feel a headache coming,” you muttered to yourself.

- ❀ -

Ten had settled down at his workspace, and your colleagues gathered around him, asking about himself. He took out something from his bag, a gift for his new coworkers.

“Wow Ten! You’re so cool!” Sally fanned herself as if Ten’s coolness was too much for her to handle.

“I know right.” Ten had a smug smile on his face.

You scoffed from your seat. “Who the fuck brings wine to work?” Ten had brought a red wine bottle as a ‘please take care of me’ gift. Who was even going to drink it during work hours?

“It looks like someone doesn’t know how to have fun,” he threw shade at you.

You glared at him, your blood boiling the more you heard his voice.

“Y/N doesn’t. That’s why she’s still single,” Mina agreed.

You started at her in disbelief. “Excuse me, but I’m living a grand life.”

“Please, I’m tired of hearing your love stories with your cat.”

Ten’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “Woah! You have a cat? That’s so cool!” he gushed.

You rolled your eyes. “I thought you saw my computer screen already.”

He got onto his feet quickly and bent down to hover over your shoulder. The close proximity between you two sent your heart beating erratically. “Wow... What’s her name? She’s so cute,” he cooed, straightening his spine up.

Your heartbeat went back to normal and you heaved out a sigh in relief. “Sakura, and how do you know she’s a female?”

He held up two fingers. “I have two cats. And I love cats so much that I can accurately guess if they’re a he or she.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, a smirk forming on his face. “I beat you. You have one and I have two cats.”

If you weren’t at work, you would have chucked a pencil at him. And you couldn’t believe your ears. You both had one thing in common after all those childhood years when you’d compare your good self to his bad one.

The day went by super slow, all thanks to the devil. You had given him a tour of the building, trying to keep your cool to the best of your ability whenever he made remarks. Once you explained the work for the day, you tried to focus on your work.

It hadn’t been a few seconds when you felt a poke in the shoulder. “Y/N, how do I do this? What is this supposed to mean? Why are we doing this?”

Like the way your hope did, you wanted to jump out the window.

- ❀ -

A couple of days later, Ten had picked up everything that you taught him, even completing his work faster than you. Your pace had only slowed down a bit because of the living distraction next to you. He had changed the desktop wallpaper to a selfie with his two cats. You weren’t ever going to admit this out loud, but he looked just a little bit cute with the adorable furry felines.

Your boss had announced that there was going to be a lunch party happening at the end of the week to welcome the newly hired employees in the company. Parties and such weren’t your thing anymore. Lifestyle habits changed after adopting your beautiful Sakura. But the reason why you kind of looked forward to it was because of a particular someone from another department.

“You know what this means?” Mina wiggled her eyebrows.

“What?”

“Shoot your shot! Who knows someone will catch your eyes at the party?”

“Or a secret admirer of yours finally asks you out,” Joshua added.

“Which is not happening,” you said. “My luck isn’t that great.”

Flashbacks to your previous failed dates haunted you and you didn’t have it in you to try again. You were happy with Sakura and did your best to stay positive, convincing yourself that your love for your cat was enough to be happy in your successful life.

Your last words had Ten staring at you intently.

- ❀ -

Your group walked to the location of the lunch party on the main floor. Your heart wasn’t exactly beating fast, only doing a few somersaults. Upon entering the main hall, you saw many employees from other departments chatting with one another. Your eyes scanned the area to search for a particular boy.

You found him. He wore a black suit with a white-collar shirt. His dark hair neatly styled. Xiaojun, you believed was his name based on that one time he had delivered a speech at a mass conference. You had never talked to him and didn’t find it in you to do so. You could tell he was way younger than you and that stopped you from approaching him. If you talked to him, it would only make you feel like you were talking to your son than your crush.

Ten followed your line of sight and smirked. “Wow, does my Y/N have a crush on someone?”

Your heart stopped and turned to glare at him. “What the fuck do you mean my Y/N?”

He snickered. “So you like him, huh?”

Sally’s ears piqued interest. “Oh my God! Did I just hear that Y/N has a crush?”

“Finally someone other than her cat!” Mina cried. “Who who?” Her head turned in all directions as if she was going to find someone holding a sign saying ‘I’m her crush.’

You crossed your arms in front of your chest. “Ugh! I don’t! Ten’s just being an asshole.”

“Hey! I only speak the truth!”

Joshua spoke up. “Okay fine Y/N. Let’s say you don’t have a crush. Is there someone in this room that catches your eye?”

Even if someone did, you weren’t going to admit it. But for your colleagues’ sake, you pretended to search the room. “No.”

Before they could force you to go around and show your face, a group of people walked into the hall, carrying various foods for the lunch party and placing them on the white clothed tables lined up near the wall. A guy carried a plate of what looked like chocolates and placed it on the desserts table. You recognized the guy being Yuta, having bumped into him a couple of times when going out for Japanese meals and making small talks. Though you found it weird that he only brought a small box when there were at least two hundred people present.

You remembered Yuta saying that he loved pranking people and if the chocolates were the bait for his next prank, an idea formed in your head.

“Okay guys, I have an idea.”

“Huh?” Mina was bewildered from your sudden declaration.

“I’m going to make your wish come true.”

“Woah what do you mean? You’re gonna ask someone out?” Joshua grew excited by your words.

You nodded. “If someone eats that chocolate Yuta brought without making a reaction, I’ll ask them out on one date.”

Your colleagues showed a mixed reaction of shock and excitement. Ten was silently watching you with his eyes holding a shine.

Yes, you could have been wrong and Yuta may have brought chocolates for people who were lucky to get their hands on it first. But when the first victim when up to take a bite of the chocolate, your theory had turned out right. It was a prank. The woman’s face scrunched up in disgust and turned red.

Ten saw this, trying to think of the possible things that could be inside the chocolates. He could handle spicy things easily, but he didn’t like fruits and hoped those weren’t inside.

He was curious about you, loved annoying you to the point you were pulling your hair. A date sounded like the perfect thing in order to have more fun with you. He knew you’d never agree to one with him, knowing the bad reputation he had as a child. Your reaction to when he first walked into the department on his first day was enough to confirm that you still held onto the ill thoughts of him.  

He walked through the crowds before another person would snatch the opportunity. He observed the round chocolates, definitely handcrafted, and were perfectly sealed off without anyone doubting its contents. He picked one up and headed back to you.

You were puzzled to see Ten hold a piece of Yuta’s chocolate. Your brain feared for the possibility of what Ten had in mind.

Mina squealed. “Don’t tell me you’re going to eat the chocolate Y/N was talking about!”

Ten gave you a mischievous smirk while you shook your head. “Don’t you dare,” you breathed out.

“You didn’t put any restrictions.” While holding eye contact with you, he placed the chocolate in his mouth, not biting it right away.

Your heart felt uneasy. You hoped desperately for Ten to lose the challenge.

He slowly bit into the sweet cocoa shell, testing the filling. He felt the heat of the spicy pungent flavour explode in his mouth, immediately figuring out that the filling was wasabi. Good thing he broke the round shell slowly so he could get used to the taste instead of being thrown under the bus and distorting his face.

Ten chewed calmly as you began panicking. If he finished eating the chocolate without making a single face, you were doomed. Why Ten out of everyone? Why would Ten even be interested in going on a date with you?

After a minute, he opened his mouth.

Your heart dropped.

The pungent smell of wasabi hit your nose but nothing was in his mouth. He finished it.

“So Y/N, this means I get to go out with you,” he stated with a triumph smile.

How do you get away with murder without reading books for ideas?

- ❀ -

You unlocked the door to your apartment, gently opening it to find Sakura sitting by the door, waiting for you excitedly.

“Awe my baby!” you cooed and picked her up.

She nuzzled into your cozy sweater and purred.

“Are you hungry, girl?”

A meow as a reply.

You put her down and made your way to the kitchen. As you prepared her meal, you thought back to Ten’s words on his first day.

I have two cats.

Poor cats. You felt bad for their unfortunate fate of having Ten as their owner.

You placed the elevated food bowl on the counter and called her. She jumped effortlessly onto the counter and stuffed her head inside the bowl.

A notification chimed on your phone, followed by another one, and another one. “Huh, who could that be?” you asked to yourself.

3 unread messages: Ten

You groaned upon seeing the devil’s name. This would only mean one thing.

Ten: tmrw’s saturday

Ten: let’s go on that date

Ten: uwu

You cringed at the last message. He was nowhere near uwu in your eyes. You also didn’t want to go out with him this soon, but it was better to get it over with than having to put it off.

Y/N: fine

Y/N: 2pm at the shopping mall

Ten: see you tmrw babe ;)

You gagged.

- ❀ -

It was 1:52 pm and you waited at the entrance of the mall, scrolling through your gallery on the phone. Why did you come early? A habit of yours. And when you were supposed to be on a ‘date’ with a devil that you despised greatly, it was better to arrive early and calm yourself down before you could murder him at first sight. You chose the mall, thinking it was better to walk around than having to sit across him and look at his face the entire time. Plus, you were almost positive that your window shopping was going to be torturous for Ten.

“Boo!”

“Ah!” You whipped around to see the devil laughing his ass off.

“Oh my God Y/N. You should have seen your face.” Ten mimicked your scream, exaggerating it with a funny face.

You puffed. “Shut up!”

“Okay okay. No need to frown. So what are we here for?” He rubbed his palms together excited for the date.

You rolled your eyes. “This is a shopping mall. We’re obviously here to shop.”

“Yeah but anything in particular?”

You shook your head. If anything caught your eye for Sakura, then that was it. Your plan was to walk around window shopping long enough that Ten would start whining and leave you.

And never dare to go out with you again.

You expected him to play it cool if he didn’t like the idea, but his wide grin and sparkling eyes told you otherwise. “Perfect! We can walk around and see if we find something for our cats. I actually have some art supplies to buy too.”

Your heart dropped, not expecting the uno reverse card.

He noticed your fallen face, knowing the reason behind it and cooed. “Awe your so cute!” He pinched your cheek, in which you swatted his hand away.

He laughed with his crinkling eyes while heat rose up to your cheeks.

“Let’s go!” Ten clung onto your arm and pulled you with him. You didn’t have it in you to pull out of his grasp when your heart was hammering in your chest.

- ❀ -

The next time you arrived at work, you were surprised to find Ten already at his desk. He usually arrived after you.

“Morning Y/N!” he chirped.

You never realized how handsome he really was when sweetly smiling at you.

Every day your cold heart towards him melted whenever he’d ask if you wanted coffee or needed any help. Whenever he’d leave his workspace with his desktop wallpaper displayed on the monitor, you stared at the selfie picture and your heart picked up its pace at the cute cats and Ten’s smile.

One day, you arrived to work with your heart expecting to see the cute kitten in the form of a human, only to be disappointed by his absence. All your colleagues had arrived on time shortly, except for the one beside you. It was past 10 am, an hour after the expected arrival time, which you thought was weird for Ten to be away from work without informing anyone.

Your phone vibrated beside you, displaying an unknown number. “Weird,” you mumbled but answered in case it had something to do with Ten. “Hello?”

“Hello, am I speaking to Y/N?” An unknown female’s voice was heard over the line.

“Yes?”

“Hello, I’m calling from the hospital regarding a patient named Ten.”

Your body froze. Hospital? Patient? “Oh my God! What happened to Ten?” You didn’t know you were loud for others to hear you. A sick feeling formed in your stomach at the thought of Ten being hurt.

“Not to worry too much. He has a minor injury and he requested for you.”

You grabbed your belongings and sprinted out the office.

- ❀ -

Your eyes scanned the room full of patients sitting on the beds, waiting for either the doctor or their loved ones.

“Y/N! Over here!” Your head snapped in his direction, where he sat on the bed with a cast on his arm. The boy really only knew how to smile, even when he was injured with his dominant arm.

“Why the fuck are you here? What happened to you?” you yelled full of anger.

A nurse attending another patient hushed you, and you muttered a sheepish apology.

“I was on my way to work and on the crosswalk-”

“Ten, why don’t you look both ways before crossing the road? Why do you always do reckless things? How are you going to work now? Even worse, how are you going to take care of yourself and your cats?”

“Woah, easy there tiger. It’s just a small cast. I’ll be fine,” Ten waved his free hand in a dismissive manner. “Everything will be okay.”

You groaned, frustrated with his carefree attitude. “Why do you love causing so much trouble? What the hell is wrong with you?”

He didn’t say anything back, opting to stay mute with pursed lips. Of course you wouldn’t have anything to say, you thought.

A man appeared beside you. “Hello. Are you Ten?” he asked the boy on the bed.

Ten nodded. “Yes I am.”

You gave the man a quick glance who wore a black formal suit. He couldn’t be working at the hospital with that kind of attire.

“Hi, I’m Taeyong. I want to sincerely apologize and thank you with all my heart for this morning.”

Wait what? “What happened this morning?” you asked him utterly confused. Why was this man saying thank you and sorry to Ten?

“My son was crossing the road and wasn’t paying attention to the pedestrian lights, almost getting hit by a car.”

You gasped audibly. “Oh no! Is he alright?”

He smiled at you. “Yes he is. All thanks to Ten for jumping into the traffic and saving him.”

Ten? Ten saved a child? Ten risked his safety to save someone? Your heart fluttered as you gaped at the one you’d always call the devil, for once having done an angelic deed to save a child’s life.

Ten avoided your eyes and looked at Taeyong. “It’s not a problem at all. I hope he’s okay.”

Taeyong nodded. “Yes he is. As a form of gratitude, I’d like to pay for your hospital bills.”

“Oh there’s no need-”

“I insist. Please,” Taeyong pleaded, not willing to back down.

Ten let out a deep sigh. “Okay. If you really don’t mind.”

Taeyong smiled warmly. “It’s the least I can do. I’ll take your leave and pay at the front. Take care, Ten.” With that, Taeyong left.

You huffed. “So you were just to leave me in the dark and not tell me?”

He shrugged. “You cut me off before I could explain.”

Oh right. “Sorry,” you mumbled.

He nodded. “Apology accepted... under one condition.”

You rapidly blinked a few times. Condition? “Okay what is it?” You still felt guilty for jumping to conclusion and you were ready to take him on another date if that was what he wanted. But you were still confused that Ten even wanted to go on a date with you earlier.

An innocent smile formed on his face. “I’m going to need help now that my one arm isn’t working.”

You nodded, agreeing to his words, and expected that much. “How can I help?”

“Live with me.”

“WHAT?” You earned another hush from the nearby nurse and apologized again. “I am not living with you. I have Sakura to take care of and she has a problem adjusting to new environments,” you said through gritted teeth.

“Then I’ll come live with you. Louis and Leon have no problem with that,” he stated seriously.

“That doesn’t solve anything. You know our cats have to get used to each other first. Otherwise they’ll just be hissing at each other every day.”

“Anything to do with cats, leave it to me. I’ll fix all the problems.” He smirked for the nth time. “So that means you’re okay with me living with you, huh?”

If he didn’t have a cast on him, you would have grabbed the pillow off the bed and chucked it at his face.

- ❀ -

“Your place is pretty cute. Like you,” Ten said while his eyes wandered around your small apartment. You heard him say the last part but chose to ignore it, assuming that he was either lying or joking.

The old you would have never agreed to let Ten live with you. But your feelings were slowly developing for the devil and you wanted to slap yourself for that. Why Ten out of anyone? And even though you went out with Ten, why was he okay with you?

Oh yes, you both had cats.

All your previous dates had made a dash towards the exit upon hearing your love for your cat. It was only three dates, but it was enough for you to pull the brakes on dating. You couldn’t figure why they had a problem with that. Wasn’t it normal to have a pet? Maybe yours was taking it a little too far and it seemed more like an obsession. You only ever thought about Sakura, bringing every little thing to connect to Sakura during the conservations. Every time you looked at your date, your mind went on overdrive thinking about what Sakura was up to. You had a security camera set up in the living room to check on her through the phone app.

Needless to say, you were more concerned about your cat than your dates, and that made you never hear back from them again.

Upon entry of the strangers in her home, Sakura ran up to the highest tier of the cat tower, hissing as her little furs stood up.

“Sakura don’t worry. They won’t hurt you,” you spoke softly while patting her backside.

Ten chuckled. “Sakura is feisty, just like you.”

You glared at him. “I never show my feisty side.”

He scoffed. “Please, it’s literally written all over your face.” He smirked and added, “It’s quite entertaining.”

You scowled.

Sakura continued hissing in the direction of the other cats. Louis and Leon were still in their carriers, looking around curiously through the windows.

“Meow?”

“Yes Leon, we’re staying here until I get better.” Ten took out a blanket from one of his bags and spread it out in the living room. He unzipped Leon’s carrier and waited for the cat to courageously come out. After a few seconds of popping his head out and looking around, Leon hopped out and nuzzled against the familiar blanket, not minding the hissing from the top of the tower.

Louis was next, and unlike Leon, Louis began his tour around his temporary home.

“When do you have to take your pain medication?” you asked.

“Before dinner. What should we eat?”

“You’re the patient. You should decide.”

He hummed for a bit. “How about ramen? I’m craving for those instant ramen noodles.”

Wow. You could really start tallying up all the similarities that you both had, and the thought of it made your heart skip a beat.

“Perfect. I have a stash of it,” you replied.

He grinned at you and you looked away from his eyes, coughing out of nervousness. “Um, for bed you can either take my room or sleep on this pull-out daybed here.” You were grateful for your selection of a furniture that came three-in-one for your living room. Sofa, additional storage, and bed. It was wiser to go for a multifunctional product when living in an apartment.

Ten’s eyes narrowed in amusement. “Wow is F/N L/N really giving up the bedroom for me?”

You froze. You didn’t think of it beforehand and worried if your heart was going to get caught. He was injured and you didn’t have it in you to force him on the daybed when he could feel better on your queen-sized bed. But if he was going to pull your leg, then you were going to take back the offer. “Fine, be in the living room.”

He smiled kindly. “I wouldn’t take your room even if you insisted. But I really appreciate the thought, Y/N,” he spoke softly.

The way his eyes brightened when fixed on you had your heart ready to jump out the window.

- ❀ -

Sakura’s bed was usually in the living room. But because of the strangers that hijacked there, she moved into your bedroom. It didn’t really make a big difference to you as she sometimes slept next to you in bed. Meanwhile, you were surprised that Louis and Leon had adjusted fairly quickly to both the new home and its owners.

You got out of the bathroom after taking your bedtime shower, cuing Ten to go in next. Walking into the kitchen, you prepared a glass of warm milk for yourself. Leon and Louis began meowing and purring at your drink and so you decided to prepare three bowls of it. You placed the bowls for Leon and Louis down on the floor, in which they began sipping immediately, while keeping Sakura’s on the counter, her preferred location for meals and away from the ‘intruders.’ You picked her up and transported her to the counter, keeping her far away as possible from the other cats.

“Y/N, can you help me?”

You headed to the direction of the bathroom and found him standing like a kicked puppy. “What is it?”

“I need help taking my clothes off.”

“WHAT?” You were not going to strip him naked.

He laughed hard, holding his stomach. “Chill I was joking. At least for the bottoms. Can you help me take off my shirt?”

You felt your cheeks heat up, bashful at the request. Well this was what he meant when he said he needed help, you thought.

You moved to stand in front of him. Your fingers hesitated to touch his shirt and Ten watched you with an entertained expression. Taking a deep breath which you smelled your favourite body wash coming from him, you grasped the hem of his shirt and slowly pulled it upward. You weren’t trying to look at his abs knowing it was going to freak you out. But when your eyes landed on his six-pack abs, you yelped and accidentally tugged on his injured arm.

“Ow!”

“Oh my God! I’m so sorry!”

He chuckled. “Calm down Y/N. My abs aren’t gonna come to life and bite you. I think you should pull the sleeve out of my arm first and then pull it up.”

You did as he said and eventually got him free of his top. So now you were standing in front of a shirtless Ten, his abs staring at you, your eyes avoiding him, and you felt like your cheeks were on fire.

“It’ll be easier to wear a sleeveless shirt... or no shirt at all. Your reactions are so cute to watch,” he cooed.

“Have some manners at least for Sakura.”

- ❀ -

Before you left for work the next morning, Sakura had surprisingly warmed up to Ten. That was good news because she continued hissing at her new housemates. Having at least one soul at home who she wasn’t afraid of would bring her relief. Louis and Leon didn’t give her much attention and minded their own business.

At work, it felt weird to not have Ten next to you even though he was living at your place. The office environment felt different without him just as it felt different when he first joined the company. You used to be irritated of having him as your work buddy, and it was funny that you recently liked having him around, especially when work got stressful. He’d always add humour to every situation and your colleagues loved him for it, motivating them to work with a calmer mind.

Your colleagues asked you about him and when you filled them in on what happened, you wondered what was going on at home without you. You pulled out your phone and went on the security camera app. A hand flew to your mouth before you could scream.

“What is it, Y/N?” Sally asked and appeared behind you, looking at your screen. “Oh my goodness. This is...”

“What what what?” Mina ran up, followed by Joshua.

“Woah,” he breathed out, upon seeing a shirtless Ten lazing around in the living room.

You should have expected it from his words the previous night. Ten was playing with Sakura and your heart was far from okay seeing the two kittens you had a soft spot for being friendly with one another.

“So did the date happen with Ten yet?” Mina asked.

You nodded. “Yeah it did. We went to the mall.”

“Ooo~ How did it go?” Joshua asked.

“Of course it had to have gone well enough for Ten to be living with Y/N,” Sally winked in your way.

Sally was right in the sense that the date went well. Even though you weren’t a fan of Ten back when the date happened, you couldn’t lie to yourself that the date itself wasn’t fun. It was fun going to the different shops to check out cool outfits that looked jaw-dropping good on Ten, and buy some new toys for the cats. You both went to a Japanese restaurant and had sushi for lunch. The wasabi that was provided with the meal made you think back to the wasabi chocolate that Ten ate to win a date with you.

How did it taste like, you thought.

- ❀ -

One day, a meeting in the morning had bad news broken to your team. The deadline for a particular project was the next day, which meant that your entire team had to work overtime to complete it. You texted Ten of the news and he replied saying to not worry about him or the cats. You felt bad that he was going to have to handled everything on his own with his injured arm and an additional cat on top of his. Even though it was a matter of few seconds to check the security camera and see if everything was all right, your stress kept your brain preoccupied with the urgent assignment at hand and not check on the situation at home.

When you arrived home after eleven at night, you were greeted by three cats waiting for you behind the door. Your tired brain noticed that Sakura wasn’t hissing at Louis and Leon, meaning that she had finally warmed up to her new friends.

“Oh my goodness... Ten! Did you see Sakura-” You went speechless upon your entry into the living room.

Ten stood smiling at you with a canvas sitting on an easel behind him. The canvas was a painting of what looked like flowers and vines in the background that surrounded... your face?

“How did you... your arm?” You were impressed that Ten had painted it with his non-dominant hand.

“Being in here all day, I tried painting with my free hand. I’m sorry if it didn’t turn out good.” He bit his lip nervously.

You were dumbfounded. “Are you kidding me? This is so cool! It’s literally flawless. But what is this supposed to be?”

He smiled genuinely at you. “It’s a painting of you blooming around plants. There’s something I want to confess...” he trailed off nervously scratching his head.

Your heart beated faster, hoping that it was something good that he wanted to confess after showing the painting of you.

“I really like you, Y/N. I know I’m not in your good books, but I promise to be one from now on. So if you’re willing to give me a chance, will you let me be your boyfriend?” he asked with a hopeful expression.

You blinked, not believing your ears that Ten liked you back. “You seriously like me?”

He chuckled anxiously. “Yeah. I did ever since the first time I saw you again at work.”

Woah. “So that’s why you wanted to date me,” you breathed out.

He nodded. You grew silent and so he raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to confess back?”

“What?”

“I know you like me too.” His infamous smirk made a comeback. “It’s so obvious and written all over your face every day.”

“Ten?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up.”

“I see you’re not denying it.”

You pursed your lips but failed to stop the smile from spilling onto your face. “Okay you win. I like you too.” You were ecstatic that you were not only going to live a successful life, but a satisfied one as well.

“Good, because there’s another surprise for you in the kitchen,” he stated.

You blinked at him. “What?”

“You’ll see,” he smiled innocently.  

Walking into the kitchen, you found what Ten was talking about. You brought the heart shaped box wrapped with red gift wrap to the living room, excitedly unwrapping it and opening the box in front of him.

The contents of the box being heart shaped chocolates.

“Awe, this is so cute.” You took a bite without any hesitancy and your face scrunched up miserably.

Wasabi.

Ten’s laughter resonated off the walls of your apartment as you dropped the box on the coffee table and sprinted to the kitchen, spitting it into the trash. You stormed back to Ten and crossed your arms angrily.

“You literally promised!” you yelled.

“Yeah I did. But I never said that these chocolates were for you to eat.”

“You said it was a surprise for me,” you deadpanned.

“Yeah but your surprise is this.” He picked up a piece and popped it in his mouth, chewing it as if there was no spicy filling inside it. Once he swallowed it all, he opened his mouth for proof. You were confused as to why he willingly ate the wasabi chocolate. Though you did slightly swoon over how sexy he looked when he ate the bomb so effortlessly. He closed his mouth and grinned at you.

“You owe me another date.”

[prettywordsyouleft]

To Be Continued - Part 2

Summary: As an author, you had created Brian Kang for your current trilogy series to represent the ultimate man that everyone would love, along with Charli Evers - your female protagonist. What you hadn’t expected was for him to find a way out of the story and begin shaping up your world instead

Pairing: Brian Kang x female writer (ft. Park Sungjin)

Genre: writer au / romance / fantasy

Warnings: fictional characters coming to life / a bit of angst here and there / Sungjin as a cop (or does that only affect me?) >_>

Word count: 2205

Preview | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Epilogue 

Once you stopped laughing with your panic, you did what any other logically thinking person would do and rang the police. And you waited at your front door, not touching anything within your home in case you tampered the evidence further. You were already scolding yourself for eating the food prepared for you. What if it had been poisoned? You thankfully didn’t feel any worse off with your cold, if anything, you felt loads better.

Still, the anxiety ran high within you until the two officers finished checking everything over.

“It looks like the person who did this knows you intimately,” Constable Park said with a brief frown. “We’ll run the fingerprints we’ve managed to find through our system to see if they’re in it but I’m not sure what more help we can give you, Miss L/N.”

“Thank you, Constable, I appreciate your efforts all the same.”

“You said you’re a famous author, right?”

You grimaced. “I wouldn’t say famous.”

“I’ve heard of your name before,” Officer Yoon mentioned with a sheepish grin when you glanced at him in surprise. He chuckled as he rubbed the back of his neck. “My girlfriend reads your stories.”

“Ah. Please tell her I said thanks.”

“Could I actually get your autograph to give to her? I’d be in her best books for-”

“Dowoon!” Constable Park cut in sternly, causing the taller man to shrink back.

“I don’t mind,” you offered and headed back to your office for a pen and paper. You stopped when you noticed your favourite pen was missing. Surmising it had been moved during the police search; you reached for another pen and then wrote down a quick message for the young officer’s girlfriend before signing it.

You stopped again, staring at the message still displayed on your screen.

Your biggest fan.

Constable Park was back at your side again and you glanced up at him. “You mentioned just now about me being known and the message here…”

“Just make sure you keep the doors locked and maybe invite someone around to stay with you for the time being. As harmless as it’s all been, we do have more than one fingerprint detected today. Since you live alone and haven’t had anyone over in some time, we can confirm there was a second person in here last night. I know it’s easy to spend time being grateful to your avid followers but be careful with who you share your personal information with.”

A chill shuddered its way down your spine and you nodded hastily, taking the card the man held out. He smiled comfortingly. “If you have any other problems, Miss L/N, this is my direct line. Contact me right away, okay?”

“Thank you, Constable Park,” you replied weakly, reading the card and finding that his first name was Sungjin. You smiled when you looked back up at him. “I appreciate it.”

“Alright Dowoon, let’s head out and I’ll be in contact when we’ve checked the database,” Sungjin – Constable Park – stated and you nodded once more as you handed the autograph to his colleague. Dowoon grinned bashfully and thanked you all the way back to your front door, where you fare-welled the pair.

And promptly locked and latched the front door.

You had lived alone since your early twenties, too independent to work well with roommates. Whilst you had started out in a small, frigid apartment, you had cherished the space alone to create your fantasies into novels. You had only moved to your modest villa within the last year and adopted Binks, the only company you needed on a daily basis outside of your characters.

You weren’t recluse by any means, you just preferred your own company. Socialising was exhausting for your introverted ways, and even though you wanted to play it safe, you slumped down on the couch after the police left and groaned at how exhausting today had been so far.

“I’m sick, that’s adding to it,” you said out loud, and then caught yourself doing so, snapping back upright in your position. “I talk out loud to myself a lot, don’t I?”

Of course, your belongings didn’t reply. And Binks had gone into hiding when Sungjin and Dowoon were here, being afraid of men entirely.

Thinking over the care the stranger had given to even your cat, you decided they had to be female. It didn’t ease your mind any assigning a gender to this person. But it did help you feel as if you were getting somewhere with the mystery behind it.

“And once the police run all the necessary checks, hopefully, I’ll have more answers,” you announced, groaning when you had realised you spoke out loud again. “Oh, whatever! I don’t have to keep my thoughts locked up inside my head or spoken through my fingertips into a word document either! My house, my life!”

And with that, you got up and went back to your desk where you tried to seek out some normalcy for the rest of your day.

You checked emails before conversing with Lily who was animatedly retelling you of her reactions to the final part of the manuscript you sent her. You mentioned to her about what happened too. Lily, however, seemed to be more concerned about something you had written, after exclaiming over your safety. You watched the video screen where your editor, and probably the person who knew you the most aside from your mother, struggled with something.

You frowned. “What is it?”

“You didn’t put your usual The End at the final part for me.”

“Yes I did,” you corrected, leaning back in your chair. “You know me. I always put it at the end of every manuscript so you can’t nag me for more words. The End means I’m not adding to this story anymore!”

“You didn’t put it, Y/N,” she repeated, glancing up at you curiously through her laptop’s camera. “You put something else.”

“Look, I’ll prove it to you,” you announced with pure conviction, clicking on the word document icon on the taskbar and then stopped momentarily when you finally noticed that the story was still open. “That’s strange. I know I closed out of it last night.”

“Out of what?” she asked as you clicked on the tab and watched the document appear on the screen.

You immediately gasped. There, after the final scene of Charli and Brian, was no longer The End as Lily had announced. Instead, the words, To Be Continued had been placed there.

“I didn’t put that there,” you whispered and Lily laughed, unconvinced.

“Don’t be so dramatic, Y/N! Who else would have?”

“I sent it to you right after I finished and I swear I had The End written there.”

“Maybe your writing muse changed it on you,” she teased but you didn’t join her in the amusement. She sensed your shock and blinked a couple of times before focusing back on you. “You really didn’t do it?”

“What if they changed the whole story?!” you shrieked as you jumped to the worst conclusion, scrolling up until you found the line that Brian had spoken to Charli about waiting for an eternity for her. You relaxed a little when everything appeared to be in order. “Maybe I’ll name the third book in this series, Eternity.”

“Wow, just like that, you calmed down,” Lily observed and then nodded. “I like that.”

“I don’t know. I’m just a little sensitive.”

“You were taking medicine last night for the cold, right?” You nodded at Lily’s question and the woman smiled knowingly. “Maybe you took too much at once and hallucinated a little. Or blacked out and can’t remember much.”

“I’m changing it back to The End,” you told her, typing it as you did so. Closing the document, you smiled brightly at the video call. “I’m not adding any further words to Captivated, you hear me? You work your editing magic and I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Yes, Boss!” she cheered, waving to end the call and you powered off your laptop then, making sure to shut the lid down as well.

After finding Binks, you scooped him up in your arms, checked all the doors a final time before heading off to bed for much-needed rest.

You were still a little sick, after all.

You awoke to the sound of your phone ringing the following morning and blearily reached out to silence it. “Hello?”

“Miss L/N?” a deep voice asked and you sat up a little, blinking away your sleep. “This is Constable Park. We met yesterday regarding your intrusion issue?”

“Sungjin,” you immediately said and then gripped at your blankets at your first name slip-up. Clearly, you were still grappling with becoming alert enough for proper etiquette.

He chuckled lightly. “Yes, shall I call you Y/N?”

“If it makes the situation still work well, be my guest.”

“Well, I’m not sure how happy you’ll be to have me calling you by your name, Y/N, in a moment.”

“No?”

“The results are in and there’s no fingerprint matching that in our database. Whilst that’s bad news for us to immediately act upon it, it doesn’t diminish the fact that someone had been there either.”

Despite being under your blankets, you ran cold, wrapping your spare arm around you to try and warm yourself back up. “I see. Does this mean you can’t do anything?”

“I’m afraid so. If you find anyone suspicious in your house or lurking around the outside, don’t hesitate to call me, okay?”

“Of course, thank you, Sungjin.”

“You’re the first person I’ve been called out to that’s called me by my first name, you know.”

“Do you find me rude for doing so?”

“It’s refreshing,” he admitted and you couldn’t help but smile at the thought of being something different for the man. You then bit at your lip, realising you were overreacting all because a man in uniform had stepped into your home.

Okay, so Sungjin was really handsome. And you were deprived of seeing such handsome outside of your stories. Whilst he was no Brian Kang, he would definitely make for a great love story counterpart in a new world. Perhaps he helped the main protagonist and became her protector. Or maybe –

“Y/N?” Sungjin said and you blinked rapidly out of your racing thoughts, coughing a little to cover your embarrassment. “You okay?”

“Sorry, I’m still recovering from this fever,” you admitted, fanning at your face for effect. “Did you say anything else?”

“Yeah, I just told you to keep safe, okay? I don’t need to be worrying about you needlessly, right?”

Oh, you were so going to get up right after this phone call and start typing out these ideas flashing through your mind. However, you gave a moment more to the police officer and confirmed you would call him at the first sign of trouble before ending the call.

Springing up from your bedding, you dashed into your office and perched on the edge of your chair as you opened your laptop and turned it on. You were relieved to find everything in your office in the right place as you opened a new word document and tapped furiously on your keyboard to get down all your ideas for your new police officer au story.

And when you were finally done, you leaned back in your chair and giggled. You weren’t always inspired by people who stepped into your world, but this was solid content you couldn’t ignore.

“Perhaps it’ll help me live out my Sungjin desires too,” you admitted sheepishly before glancing at your pen stand. You remembered about the missing pen and searched on top of your desk and then scooted your chair back to look on the floor. “Where did you go, favourite pen?”

Not finding it anywhere, you pouted right as your stomach grumbled. “Ah,” you said weakly, clutching your stomach in your hand. “I best feed myself and Binks. Hopefully, that pen will turn back up.”

Once you had eaten and quietened Binks’ demands for his morning affection, you got dressed and readied yourself for a trip out to the grocery store. Next, you had to write out a list of what you needed and went back into your office, sitting down at your desk and reaching for some paper.

Your attention turned to your laptop, where you found your favourite pen sitting upon it. “What the…”

And looking up at the screen, another message awaited you.

 Sorry, I didn’t realise I had taken it with me after writing you the notes.

 Glancing around yourself, you froze with the fear that rose within. You hadn’t heard anyone inside the house during this time. Yet, there was proof someone had come in again. You looked to the window, it was firmly shut. There was no way anyone could have gotten inside the house without walking passed you first.

You then started to shake.

Had they been in here all night long again?

Just as you went to get up and fetch your phone to ring Sungjin back, you noticed a second tab open on the document screen.

It was Captivated. And once again, the last words read, To Be Continued.

_________________

Part 3

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[DAY6 Masterlist] | [Main Masterlist] | [Request Guidelines]

[flying-nightwing]

Act IV: The Finale

Hi people! Finally the last part of this short serie! Honestly I had no expactation for it but I think it might slither into my all time favourite things I’ve written. I won’t lie, I think I’m in love with this last chapter. I feel like it’s the part we really understand both characters and their motivations in relation to each other. Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! 

Edit: I realize I have kept this gender neutral! so I change it on the infos on the first part and this one

Parts 1-3 in Masterlist!

Pairing: Tim Drake x gender neutral reader

Word count: 3456

Warnings: language, mention of violence (non-graphic)

“... And this is why I have taken the decision to repeal the vigilante act. All measures taken by the city and GCPD to collaborate with vigilantes on the matters listed are to be repelled at this instant. We will no longer tolerate criminals telling us how to protect our city and all arrest mandates out for vigilantes are to be reactivated--”

Tim passed a hand in his face after Bruce turned off the TV. There was some serious tensions going on in the batcave, especially after this gruesome live tape of the mayor, visibly held hostage in some kind of basement, delivered the new order to cancel all the work they had achieved to at least stop the cops from trying to hunt them down instead of focusing on actual crime. 

The first thing he had done once he came back to the cave was to research you in any database he could hack into. He started in the state registry, knowing you had told him you had been an orphan. He had no idea what was a lie and what wasn’t in what you had told him, but that was apparently true. The picture attached was a younger version of you, that was clear, but any update on your whereabouts stopped at age 11. Then, he tried to look for a driver’s license, passeport, any ID documents you could have. He also hit a dead end with that too, so he looked into less savory types of repertories. 

He finally found you in the mercenary databases, with a clear, recent picture and your… Impressive record. As he scrolled down your list of confirmed hits, he felt his stomach sink further and further. Marco Rizzo, the philanthropist, the kidnapped mayor, and it went on and on. What truly put him on the floor, however, was to see your credentials. You were Falcone’s main gun and you had trained under various mentors including Slade Wilson, out of all people.

You were the real deal and he had let himself fall for you, hard.

He felt stupid now. Did you even know who he was at night? Had you gone to him to throw him off your scent? Even after discovering all of this about you, a part of him still hoped you had no clue. It would hurt less to know it was a coincidence you bumped into each other rather than a calculated move from you. 

“So… Your date uh?”

Tim cringed when Bruce spoke up. It was even worse to hear it out loud. 

“I don’t wanna hear it” He mumbled, keeping his eyes dead set on the wall. He knew he had acted irresponsibly, he knew he should have seen the signs sooner, he knew he should have remained alert and not let himself be charmed by you, or let himself be sidetracked from his mission. It was a rookie mistake. 

“Talk about sleeping with the enemy” Damian snorted from behind them. Tim turned around, glaring at him. He was sitting in a computer chair, casually eating noodles with chopsticks and watching the exchange like it was a movie. Of course, the demon had spied on the conversation.

“Damian!”

“What?” He looked at Bruce, shrugging nonchalantly.

Bruce sighed, shaking his head. He returned his attention to Tim again. “What do you want to do now?”

Tim didn’t reply straight away. He was conflicted, angry, sad, disappointed; he had rarely felt such a cocktail of emotions like that. On one hand, he wanted to wallow in self pity. It seemed like the one thing left to do, as life finally sent someone he could see himself get with but made them the exact opposite of what he stood for. But he couldn’t, he had to put a stop to this madness. He had to confront you. 

“We’ll need to set a trap” He finally spoke, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “A contract that can’t be refused, draw them out. I’ll take care of it, it’ll be better that way”

“Are you sure you’ll be up to it?”

“Yes” Tim snapped, and Bruce took a careful step back. “I won’t be fooled twice. I can do it”

“Alright, just making sure” Bruce wasn’t convinced, but he still trusted his son. He knew he'd do the right thing if push came to shove. “What did you have in mind?”

Tim took a deep breath. “50 millions for a bullet in Bruce Wayne’s head”

---

It was too good to be true, and your suspicions of foul play were confirmed when your eyes spotted the red and black sticking out of the grim portrait of Gotham’s roof tops.

You knew something was up when you were offered a 50 millions solo contract. You usually went out for 15 millions for high profile targets, but curiosity got the best of you. The only thought of potentially pocketing that much money was enough of a motivation for you to at least find out what was up. But now, it was clear it was a set up as Red Robin himself was waiting for you. It was too bad for the money, but the prospect of facing a real Gotham vigilante for the first time was exciting. 

“I’ve beaten you twice already” You smirked. “You called me for a third?”

A scowl set on his masked face. “Trust me, there won’t be a third” He spoke up in a gravelling voice. “Either you come with me here and now, or we do this the hard way”

“Oh, now you’ve got me interested” You teased as you circled him. “Do tell me more about this hard way of yours”

He deployed his staff. Your eyebrows raised at his challenge. “You’re arrogant” He stated. He wasn’t wrong. “It’s gonna be your downfall”

“... Or not” You shrugged, not stopping your assessment of him. “Still waiting on the monologue detailing your plan to stop me, by the way”

“There isn’t one”

He lunged. He did it so quickly and smoothly you almost didn’t see him move. Your reflexes allowed you to roll out of the way just in time, and the way the staff collided with the cement told you it wouldn’t have been a long fight if that had hit its intended target: you. You looked at him and you regained your footing, reevaluating the situation. You were skilled, but you doubted it would be enough to go toes to toes with Red Robin, now that you had had a glimpse of what he could actually do.

You raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Catch me if you can”

Before he could process your world, you turned around and jumped off the building, landing on the roof a dozens of feet lower. You didn’t waste time taking off, knowing he would be right behind you. You ran across the rooftop and leaped off the ledge and above the alley to grab onto the fire exit on the next building over. You hurried to climb it, ending up on yet another rooftop. You ran alongside the pool and jumped over the tables, kicking them back to try and slow down Red Robin, who was little by little gaining on you. Fuck, he’s fast, you thought. You weren’t even tempting to look back, but you knew with the sound of his footsteps alone. 

You hadn’t planned on him being able to follow you that easily, not even cursing behind you as you took another jump over a considerable gap between buildings. You were fast, faster than most. Making exits had always been your strong suit, whether it was on foot, by car or otherwise. However, the only times you had faced him were when you had a rocket launcher as a deterrent or when you were driving an actual race car. Now that the field was levelled, you didn’t have the advantage anymore. You knew you wouldn’t be able to outrun him if you kept going on that way, so you had to change your strategy.

You took a sharp turn to the left and grabbed a clothesline, pulling out a knife from your belt and severing in behind your grip. You took a good running start and let yourself fall on the building on the other side of the street, pausing to glance at Red Robin standing where you had just been seconds ago. He was trying to find another way to cross, but there was none and even he couldn’t make that jump. You gave him a wave and a wink before taking off again. However, on the corner of your eyes, you still could see him tracking you relentlessly, not letting you get away so easily. 

You jumped over an alley, and instead of landing on the next roof, you aimed for the first balcony from the top. With your shoulder first and your head tucked in, you went straight through the sliding door window and rolled on the landing to smooth your fall. You glanced beside you at the terrified man in his underwear who was cowering on the couch and looked behind you, shrugging.

“Sorry for the mess” You didn’t wait until he replied to walk out the apartment. You jogged down the stairs, knowing Red Robin would have lost your trace now. Or so you thought.

You halted your steps when you noticed him waiting at the bottom of the staircase and leaning on the rail with a nonchalant expression, like it had been easy to predict you would come out that way. He returned the little sarcastic wave you had given him minutes earlier, making your face fall. You turned around and climbed back the steps back to the first floor, barging in and running across the hallway until you reached the window at the end. You took the time to open this one, seeing as he had not yet reached the floor. You slipped through it and climbed down the wall to land into the back alley. You were about to head for the streets when an already too familiar red and black figure blocked your way.

You took off in the opposite direction, well, until you came face to face with a brick wall. There was nothing to climb onto, no fire exit to use, no way to get away. You closed your eyes and cursed under your breath as footsteps reached you. He wasn’t in a hurry, his pace was tauntingly slow and confident he had you trapped. You recomposed yourself before turning around to face him.

“You forced me to make a mistake” You stated with a sigh. “Impressive”

“Told you” He said, taking a step toward you. “Arrogance did end up being your downfall”

“I don’t suppose we could have a rematch, uh?” You tried, smiling coyly. “That staff didn’t seem such a bad idea in hindsight”

“If you thought you could win then, you wouldn’t have dragged me into this pointless chase” He scoffed, and your eyebrows raised. He was right, but damn. “Unless you want a beating at that too”

“Ouch” You chuckled. “That really hurts my pride”

“Good” He smirked. “Now that you know you won’t get away from this one, just do the logical thing and surrender. There’s nowhere to go”

You held eye contact for a moment before slowly raising your hands. “Alright” You complied with a nod. “You earned that one”

He took careful steps toward you, alert to whatever quick move you would do. But you could recognize when you were beaten, so you didn’t plan any surprise move. Getting caught by a vigilante was an eventuality, even you knew you wouldn’t escape them forever. You just didn’t think it would have been this soon. He grabbed your wrists, and once he was sure he had you solidly enough, he twisted your arm behind you and pushed you rather roughly into the brick wall.

“Woah there champion” You coughed out in surprise. “I feel that spark between us, I really do, and I admit I am partially to blame for it, but I’m kinda seeing someone? And I’m really into him so if you could just. Stop manhandling me that way, that’d be great”

You felt him take a considerable step backward, and his grip on your arm dropped. You frowned, carefully turning around to face him. You didn’t understand why he had let you go, and his blush combined with his bewildered expression only made you more confused.

“Okay, what is going on, now?” You asked, not taking your eyes off him. It was like he was a completely different person now, and you couldn’t point out exactly why it was suddenly so familiar. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, jeez”

“I’m not” He defended too quickly, his voice wavering. Your eyes squinted even more as you took one step forward. He didn’t move, it was like he was frozen in place. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over for you”

“Uh” You took another step, and he squared up, trying to cover the fact he had totally lost his edge over you. You could have made a run for it, you knew it would have been ridiculously easy at that moment to evade him, but something held you back. You scrutinized him, your head tilting to the side. He gulped, and suddenly it all pieced together. That reaction to your flirting, you knew it all too well. Your eyes widened, before you gave him a sympathetic smile. “You know, while this mask does suit you, I prefer to see your eyes, handsome”

His muscles tensed for a second or two, but his shoulder sagged soon after. He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “How long have you known?”

Your eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean, how long?” You asked. “Thirty five seconds ago”

“You didn’t know before?”

“Uh, no” You replied. “What does it matter?”

“You… You didn’t go on a date with me to distract me from your trail?”

“No, I went on a date with you because I like you?” You raised an eyebrow. “I would have been way more careful with my lies if I had known, fuck I was so obvious, no wonder you figured it out. Besides, I just told you I’m really into you--”

You were surprised by the sudden movement of his arm that sneaked behind your neck and brought you flush against his lips. Okay then. You returned the kiss without hesitation holding on to his shoulders under the sheer force he was applying against you. It was a lot different from the shy boy you had met at the racetrack, but then again, he was Red Robin right now, more so than Tim Drake. You could have never connected the two if it hadn’t been from your flirting from up close. Before you knew, he tore himself from you and jumped back like you were actual fire, cursing under his breath. You blinked slowly at his sudden absence from your immediate vicinity, then rolled your eyes. Dramatic much?

“What is it now?”

“You’re still a criminal” Now he refused to meet your eyes. 

“Are you-- Is this because of what happened in the alley the other day?” You sighed, throwing your hands up before letting them fall back and slap on the side of your thighs. “I’m sorry, okay? I wouldn’t have ran you into the garbage pile if I had known it was you. And I wouldn’t have threatened you with a rocket launcher either-- Shit okay I see your point, I’m really sorry about that too”

“No!” He yelled. “I mean, yeah, kind of. But you kill people for a living, I can’t--”

“What does it change?” You asked. “You liked me before you found out. You were about to hand me to the police, I still like you! In fact, if you could ram me into the wall once again like you just did, I wouldn’t--”

“Please stop talking”

You grinned. “Does it turn you on?”

“Y-No” He replied, correcting himself last second. You raised a subjective eyebrow. “Stop that”

“Stop what?” You asked innocently. “I’m just saying it’s on the table. If I had known it was you when you did it, I would have enjoyed it so you’re welcome to do it again”

“Do you ever stop flirting?” He deadpanned. He crossed his arms against his chest, but it definitely didn’t have the intended effect. Instead, you just checked him out even more, since his muscles were very well defined in that suit. You liked it.

“With you? Not a chance, handsome”

And here came the blush again. He looked away and gulped, ignoring your self satisfied smile. You could do that all day and never get bored of it. Still, you regained a somewhat serious expression for the conversation that was inevitably coming.

“So now what?” You spoke up. “You give me to the cops? We pretend nothing happened between us? Because I’ll be honest with you, I don’t want that. I meant it when I said I liked you”

“My job is to stop crime, and the people who commit it” He began with a sigh. “I just can’t ignore the fact that you are one of the bad guy”

“That’s valid” You nodded slowly. “But this is just a job. I don’t do it for the power trip of taking people out, I do it because I’m good at it, and because I like the money that comes with it. Although, I’ll admit I do enjoy making dramatic exits from time to time--all the time”

Tim snorted. Of course you liked your exit, that had been obvious from the start. But even if he did not agree with your job, or with the lack of morals that came with it, he had to recognize the difference between you and the typical Gotham criminal. From what he had found out so far about you, you never caused casualties in any of your contracts. You always kept the mess to a minimum. You were a far cry from the Joker or Poison Ivy, for that matter.

Even if you couldn’t see his eyes clearly, you could just see the gears turning in his head. Would it be so bad if he let you go? What if he kept seeing you? He could agree with you on one thing: behind his reluctance because of your job, he really didn’t want to pretend nothing happened. He liked you a lot, and it absolutely frustrated him that the one god sent person he instantly clicked with was on the other side of his moral spectrum. 

“Tell me” You said softly, bringing back his attention to you. “If you had never found out about my job, would you have asked me on a second date?”

“Yes” He didn’t hesitate in his answer. It was like you could read his mind, reminding him of how well you fit together. He wanted both to scream and to kiss you again. 

You took a deep breath, letting him think some more. You could very much suspect the news of your activities was harder on him than his were on you, so you understood the need to let him a little space while he figured it all out. You had half expected him to go ahead with his initial plan though, so you prepared yourself mentally for him eventually binding your wrists and dragging you to the nearest precinct. 

That’s probably why you were surprised when he took a step aside, no longer blocking you from leaving. You didn’t move, only stared at him.

“I won’t give you a free pass if I catch you doing shady stuff” He sighed, gesturing to the exit of the alley. “ But for this time, I guess I’ll see you next time you do something stupid”

“Not before?” You raised an eyebrow. The corner of his lips slightly lifted.

“Maybe before”

“Is that a yes on the second date?” You asked, hopeful. “7:30 next Friday at that lobster place you mentioned?”

“Will you be working that night?”

“I won’t!” You hurried to confirm. “I swear I won’t”

He let out a long sigh like he was reconsidering his entire life. “What the hell, sure”

“Great!” You grinned wide, stealing a quick kiss on his lips. 

“Go, now” He ordered, gaining back his more authoritative vigilante voice. Oof, that was hot, you thought, but you kept it to yourself for once. “Before I change my mind”

“See you on Friday, handsome!”

He watched you run out of the alley, finding himself suddenly excited at the prospect of seeing you again, whether it would be as Red Robin or as himself on a date with you.

[fedtothenight]

this competition asked to write a short story in the dystopian genre and my entry's below - don't rb!

the sweetest fruit

The boy gasped, straining against the padded frame of the jeep just as the vehicle slowly came to a halt. ‘Look!’ he shouted, pointing at a spot about a hundred feet from the group. ‘Look, Mum! That’s so cool!’

Half-instinctively, his mother had already grabbed a fistful of his tank-top, ready to yank him back. She had spent the entirety of the trip sitting as still as possible, facing forward, eyes stubbornly fixed on the self-cooling top of the car in a pointless effort to fight her motion sickness: her patience was already wearing very thin without her eight-year-old personal safety hazard trying to get himself killed.

‘Ethan, for the love of God,’ she snapped. ‘I already told you to stop leaning over the frame! Do you realise how dangerous that is?’

‘No, Mum, you’ve got to look!’

‘Emma, darling,’ her husband whispered, a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘You should really look at this. It’s magnificent.’

Whatever it was, even her fifteen-year-old daughter - who had spent the last thirty minutes texting her friends back home without so much as a glance at the scenery - was jaw-slacked, so she slowly got up on her wobbly knees and peered over her shoulders.

In the shadow of a tree, protected from the sweltering heat, two lions were feasting on a zebra. Perhaps belatedly, as it’d taken her a second to drink the sight in, she realised that the poor thing was still alive: writhing as blood, red and hot and pulsing, gushed out from where the bigger lion - the male - had bitten into its back.

The smaller one, the female, soundlessly sank its teeth into the dying animal’s neck, and the latter gave one last weak kick, finally falling limp. When the lioness stood again, it was almost impossible, from this distance, to see her eyes amidst the bloodied mess on her face.

‘Oh, my God, Matt,’ Emma said. ‘This is beautiful. Nature truly is beautiful.’

‘You don’t really get to see this kind of show anywhere else today,’ their guide said from the driver’s seat. He sounded proud, as if he’d hunted and fed the zebra to the lions himself.

Alberto wasn’t wrong, Emma reasoned. Given that they were parked in the middle of the privately-owned biggest North American savanna, he - or rather, his employer - was the one effectively feeding the lions. Like feeding mice to cats. She glanced at her children, glad they could have a window on a reality that was long gone. To think it would have taken a trip around the world to watch this spectacle - imagine the motion sickness then! If only, she considered wistfully, there could be a way of replicating glaciers just as accurately.

‘Honestly, it seems a bit unfair that they get to eat real meat,’ Ethan said at the dinner table a few hours later. He was picking at his plate, moving the fried grasshoppers they’d been served for dinner around, but not really eating any. ‘While we are stuck with insects and microprotein or whatever.’

Emma pinched the bridge of her nose. She was tired and sunburnt, her sensitive pale skin suffering under the blistering sun of the region, so different from the temperate weather back home North. She had a splitting headache, too. She was, yet again, at the so-called end of her tether. ‘Ethan…’

‘You should be glad you get to eat at all,’ her daughter said at the same time. ‘There’s a reason it’s illegal to eat meat. These animals are here for show, anyway. They were originally from Africa.’

‘Shut up, Becca,’ Ethan mumbled. ‘Everybody knows there are no animals in Africa. There’s nothing there.’

Becca’s cheeks were tinted pink, eyebrows furrowed. ‘Of course there were animals. There were animals everywhere before the Climate Crunch.’

‘Both of you, stop it,’ Matt interjected. ‘Ethan, your sister is right. You should be grateful that we are here in the first place. That said…’ He leant forward, voice down to a whisper: ‘I have a surprise for you. Or, well, Richard has a surprise for us. When he arrives tomorrow, he’ll bring us real meat. Bovine meat.’

‘But it’s illegal,’ said Becca.

‘It’s technically illegal,’ Matt acknowledged. ‘It’s not if you know how to get some and no one from Animal Conservation finds out. Do you think our president only eats insects? Please, Becca. Use that big brain of yours.’

‘Yes,’ Ethan snickered. ‘Use your brain, Becca.’

‘That is too generous,’ Emma said. ‘Inviting us here in the first place was, when even he hasn’t gotten here yet. Now this. I wouldn’t know how to repay him.’

Truly, all she felt was jealousy. Her guts twisted with the sheer force of it. Yes, she had known that Richard was comfortable. The gated, heavily guarded estate spanned for thousands of acres, comprised the 5000sqt villa they were staying at (five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a cinema, marble floors and solar panels on the rooftop), an indoor swimming pool inspired by vintage photos of Amalfi, two indoor tennis courts, and the savanna they’d explored earlier in the day. ‘The biggest conservation area in North America since they repurposed the Midwest,’ he’d bragged in a video call, two weeks before. ‘You will love it. The holiday you deserve. Make yourselves at home.’

But meat? He could get meat?

Matt’s family had designed DeNuketify, which was basically the only effective way of purifying ocean water from whatever nuclear waste Japan kept spewing so that it could be used and, most importantly, drunk. They had managed to flee the continent with the last handful of greencards about the time her family did, too, taking their precious Queen’s accent with them to found Nova London. She was the governor of Nova London now, for God’s sake. The bloody queen herself was long dead but she was alive, and yet, yet - they had never had meat.

‘We don’t have to, Emma,’ Matt said. ‘We just need to remember how lucky we are to enjoy this meal, this house, this holiday. Look at that,’ and he nodded towards the TV screen again. ‘Actually, Alexa!, volume up!, I think the Italians have finally surrendered.’

The war correspondent’s voice grew louder. She - they, Emma reminded herself: Becca always told her not to assume anyone’s gender - was wearing a dust mask and reading from a bundle of documents. ‘The last military hospital in the island of Palermo was destroyed four days ago by a Canadian airstrike,’ they were saying. ‘The rebels surrendered soon after, followed by the group of extremists in the Nebrodi island. Etna had already surrendered last year.’

‘It’s important to remember that these actions were necessary to finally put a rest on the instability of the region,’ they added. ‘Canada will fund a complete restoration of the Southern archipelago. The remaining civilians will be provided with a shelter and then, when the time comes, a suitable job. Nova Italia will be the sixteenth Canadian state, the fourth offshore. There are also hopes to extract petroleum from the seabed of the sunken city of Gela.’

‘Watch them make it into a holiday hotspot,’ Matt commented. ‘The weather is still nice there.’

‘Ooh, I heard about this.’ Becca picked her phone back up and started furiously typing away. ‘There’s this journal entry soldiers found over there, under the rubble, that’s gone viral. It was translated into English. Wait, I’ll pull it up. Alexa, volume down.’

‘I’m not sure I want to hear it,’ Emma said, uneasy. ‘We’re on holiday. Should we not watch a movie? Something funny?’

Becca waved her away, as if she was an annoying fly. ‘It’ll be good practice for my drama class.’

Matt didn’t help—he simply shrugged, half-apologetic, as if to say: Let her do her thing.

Becca made a show of clearing her throat, too, before she started reading from her phone—her high voice now grave, studied, as if she were speaking to a larger audience: ‘I wonder what peas taste like.’

Right then, the scene on screen changed to footage of what looked like a destroyed village, something out of an apocalyptic movie. Emma found herself unable to look away.

‘Nonna used to say that her own great-grandmother grew them in her garden. Figs, too,’ Becca read. ‘They say they were the sweetest fruit.’

Emma wondered if this journal was actually written by a child or a teenager. It didn’t sound like an adult at all. She couldn’t help but picture a girl, a brunette, not much older than Becca, perhaps a rebel, or a trainee nurse on the sweet cusp of adulthood, holding this journal of hers, or perhaps a gun. It violently reminded her that her own daughter, too, would have to serve her time in the Forces in three years.

On screen, the Canadian soldiers walked among the ruins, zigzagging between torn up clothes and discarded weapons, surely looking for surviving rebels under the rubbles.

‘Isn’t it silly that we can hear the fighters overhead and that all I can do is think about food?’ said Becca. ‘I wish we could also eat figs and be happy.’

On screen, the camera zoomed in on a long-forgotten man's shoe, some crumpled photographs, on a pile of bodies in black bin bags.

‘Grandma - I miss her - left me a poetry book, too, from T.S. Eliot. I hope the book is with me when I die, so I can give it back to her when we meet again, afterwards. So I can tell her that T.S. Eliot was wrong.’

On screen, one of the soldiers approached and showed a little trinket to the camera: a bloody, heart-shaped locket that must’ve once been golden, hiding the miniature pictures of two brunette children that would never have a name.

‘That’s enough,’ Emma said. She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. ‘Stop reading.’

‘The world may have not ended with a bang, but it didn’t end with a whimper, either: the world didn’t end at all. Sometimes,’ Becca finished reading, ‘I wish it had.’

‘What a load of rubbish,’ Matt scoffed. ‘Everyone should feel lucky to be alive. I bet this journal is a fake. Alexa, turn the TV off.’

As the screen faded to black, Ethan finally popped a grasshopper in his mouth. ‘I can’t wait to have meat tomorrow.’

[ghostofcitrus]

more gender crisis bc i need somewhere to document this shit and also if u wanna read and say smth that’s cool too 🥺 fair warning it’s kinda longgg. but there’s a tl;dr and i tried to make the paragraphs short so it’s easy to read and i sorted the thoughts by paragraphs

ok so when i see a girl or group of girls or smth i, for the most part, am like yeah same. i have the same lived experience and like yeah u look cool and i relate in a lot of ways.

but like i also feel the same w non-binary ppl. i see agender ppl and i’m like oh nice that sounds like how i want to live MY life!! i get jelous. i saw a gender ambiguous person the other day and i thouvht i was going to lose my mind i was like AKSJSHJSJSNS Y O U. I WANT TO BE YOU. i talked to them i was like 😭😭i love your hair😭😭 and it was so compelling just seeing them i got my hair cut later that week. i like it.

and i cut my hair and i’m like y e s. and i’ve always wanted a very small/flat chest and have planned on getting a breast reduction (meaning i want basically no tits. i’m like a DDD rn. and i’m short and have a baby face so that’s like. very noticeable. pain.) ASAP. but i like dress and being seen as a girl? but i also want to be non binary, but it feels like something im striving for. i don’t feel like i’m there. i feel like i WANT to be there but i just keep hitting roadblocks.

when i think about OTHER girls, i’m like yeah. i relate to that. but when i think about myself. fully isolated. i want to present like a feminine agender person. i am connected to my girlhood. girl, sister, girlfriend, daughter... all of them accurately describe me. but i also like person, sibling, partner, child.

i like femininity. i like being seen like that. and being seen as a girl is cool and fine. but i don’t feel like it accurately describes all of me. but i’m like scared??

i want to be a “girl” in the way that when u look at me ur like ... is that a girl? my face i like lmao. it’s round and feminine. cool lol. my body.... i wish with like all my heart i woke up one day w/o titties or major curves. but i’ve literally work so hard to accept and like myself in my body. YEARS of forcing myself to look in the mirror and compliment myself. deconstructing fatphobia was a big part of it. but in my head. with no mirrors around. i think of myself as less curvy. a small fame, but not really curvy. much more neutral features. i forget what i actually look like. but when i do look in the mirror now i’m like she’s pretty. i like how she looks. nice. but it doesn’t really feel like me. but i feel cool. it’s like nice makeup that’s someone else chose for u and never comes off. like yes. that’s nice. but... it’s not like “me”. i feel like that about most of my features. but i’ve grown up in them. i don’t hate them. i think they look pretty and i feel confident enough like this. and after all the work i’ve done to get to this mindset... it’s just not what i want.

i think part of what’s messing with me is i’m automatically more comfortable with other girls/afabs, like we just share experiences and i can generally understand how they socialize. guys like,.. not so much. but most of my actual friends have ended up being guys. but im naturally wary of guys. and most around me end up being fucking republicans anyways. and another part of what’s getting to me is when i’m going about my life, i enjoy being stereotypically feminine. like i like to be taken care of, feel small , that bs. maybe it’s internalized misogyny that i feel like the only way i can be that is as a girl.

i also think i just have no idea what it would really feel like to go about the world non-binary. like i just want to keep blending into the background. i don’t want to be that noticeably different, i’m already autistic.

i think it’s also weird bc since middle school have been having periodic gender crisises but they always end in me just getting embarrassed, finding transmeds on the internet and also getting embarresed, not wanting to stop being feminine, or deciding it’s just not worth it.

and i think another thing is, i’ve always felt more connected to girls, but always on the outskirts of that, but that might just be because i’m autistic. but like i’m feminine in the sense that i like dresses. and being taken care of that and that shit. girls tend to really fucking irk me a lot of the times. i don’t really feel “connected” to them, more like “stuck” with them but making the best of it. some are pretty cool :) tbh it’s mostly just other autistic or queer girls i vibe with. other than that.. i struggle a lot to feel connected.

speaking of being autistic.... i’m realizing a lot of what i’m feeling is similar to how i felt when i first started to consider that i was autistic. when i was alone or in a space i was totally comfy in, i felt very confident that i was autistic. but when i was around people, i was like no i’m definitely not. and even now. i know i mask whenever i’m not alone. but i’m literally so fucking used to it it’s not hard at all. it hardly feels like a mask. just a different version of me. not the most authentic, but it’s how i operate around others. so whatever. not what i like per say. but in most cases, i can deal with it and still be perfectly happy (ish). this is exactly how i feel about all of this gender shit.

but i think part of my hesitancy to identify like this is i’ve never met ppl irl who identify as non-binary. that wouldn’t be a group for me to find and relate to and be comfortable with, i’d just be the different one. and i’m already different. and people don’t really get neopronouns and that shit.

ok and i’m anxious about my boyfriend as well. he’s a straight guy, idk how he’d feel about me being non binary. but i don’t want to sacrifice our relationship, so it’d be fine, because i also like my name and pronouns now. i like the shortened version of my name better tbh but i think my name sounds cool. mostly because saying it is a vocal stim for me, same with my partners name fore some reason. i just think they’re good names. they feel good to hear and say. and i’ve always been described that way and i’m like yeah that’s me.

i like dresses. feminine clothes? yes pleaseee. i like how girl are generally the ones who get taken care of. i like feeling small and dainty. i like being silly and cute. but like ... silly and cute arent like “girl things”?? but idk.

but i like “girl”. not “ladies” or “woman”. that feels too much like “female” and the only time i feel like i relate to that at all is in very specific situations. i’m feminine. i like that. i wish i could be feminine in an androgynous way tho????????

TL;DR: closing thoughts. if i were the only person on earth and i could do whatever i wanted like magically. i would change my appearance to look like my picrew... but like for an ex think Crona from Soul Eater of Ed from Cowboy Bebop. both of them are androgynous but when i see both of them i’m like they’re kinda feminine too! like that’s what i want to look like. i’d probably go by Citrus and neopronouns and maybe she/her (they’re fine but i feel like i’m lying about being non binary when i use them). ya know. how i want to be. but in reality. i am scared of that. it sounds like a lot of work and a big change that i could probably never really achieve. i also hate change. and constantly explaining shit.

also do cis people PINE over this shit the way i am? i’ve done this multiple times for years. not consistently bc tbh i have other shit i need to spend energy on but when i’m not pouring energy into somewhere else i tend to circle back to this. maybe that’s a sign that i’m right.

[annecoulmanross]

A Re(sponse)-Re-Re-Review, Re: The Terror (2018)

I’ve recently read through all of the gorgeous review posts of The Terror (2018) from @rhavewellyarnbag​ and I just want to say that I think they’re incredibly beautiful and thoughtful responses to this show – all three amazing rounds of them.

I started out simply collecting quotes that were amusing to me, but my notes document very quickly became full of my own responses and confessions. Basically, I ended up making my own response/review of the whole thing, which is what you’ll find in this post.

So, thank you @rhavewellyarnbag​ for your many insightful thoughts about this show and my responses are below the cut! (Also, your repeated efforts to drive Goodsir to the hospital are a truly noble service, and bring me comfort in these dark times.)

01x01 – “Go For Broke” (One, Two, and Three) 

“Ciaran Hinds looks like a grand old walrus.”

This was the line that made me realize I needed to start keeping track of quotes that made me laugh like a seal barking.

“‘You should cherish that man.’ I cherish that fucking line of dialog. I don’t even mean it in a filthy way. That line is so goddamn sweet, I could punch myself in the face.”

Amongst all the beautiful content produced about this show, almost nothing will ever surpass, for me, this description of this line of dialogue paired with that post about “Idiot Boat Caesar, who knows a slow-burn when he sees one.” Sir John has an astonishing capacity to be truly warm on rare occasions, and this is one of the few scenes in which we really get to see James experience that warmth, both genuinely and, here, in the form of a truly gentle, well-meant rebuke that probably cuts James far more than we see.

“This is an interesting scene with the diving suit. This could potentially go very badly. The man in the suit may be dispatched by the mysterious horror following them, or, in order not to give it away, and to show a scientific curiosity, he may die of decompression of the suit.”

Fun fact: one of my great-grandfathers apparently died of decompression from using an early-model diving suit. I learned this when I was word-vomiting to my mother about The Terror. I am now even more terrified of historical diving suits. All diving suits, really.

“If James’ characterization plays around with gender, it does so in this sense: James is constantly acted upon, by the bullet that wounded him, by the disease that fells him, by others’ opinions of him.”

Watch me attempt to cite your reviews of the The Terror in a dissertation, because everything about this description is exactly the gender framework around which I’ve draped the two historical men with whom I’ve fallen in love, one being my actual subject of research, the other being James Fitzjames.

“I’ve previously compared James’ bravery, his very person, to a woman’s beauty: bestowed upon her, not earned; understood to be temporary; dependent upon others’ admiring, desiring of it. Does James exist when no one is around to observe him?”

I adore everything about this description and also it makes me cry.

“There are a great deal of unfortunate classical references in this episode.”

This is my entire mood about The Terror, always. The nods to Philoctetes and Medea as components of the Argonaut myth that Sir John invokes are also distinctly worth exploring in this context, though I’m not going to do so here because the Argonautica (broadly speaking) is not my speciality.

01x02 – “Gore” (One, Two, and Three)

“James and Sir John are about the same height. They look not dissimilar, which James probably liked.”

Oh James.

“Strangely, [Sir John] doesn’t seem particularly pleased with James, who adores him.”

It’s true, and it’s quite painful. I don’t think Sir John is a good role model for James, but it doesn’t lessen the fact that I know James is perceptive enough to know that he’s not being adored in return, and that’s a brutal thing to know.

“You don’t have to be a drunk redheaded sea captain to see that James is empty, hollow, aching, desperate to be the things he tells you he is, desperate to see himself reflected back at himself. Desperate to be loved.”

I have a type, and this is it, apparently.

“Goodsir is a character from another sort of work, entirely. That’s its own kind of tragedy, the tragic juxtaposition. Goodsir is a sweet, gentle, utterly ordinary little pudding, an incidental character plucked from a more innocent narrative, and he’s no-doubt going to die horribly.”

This is the early impression of Goodsir, before any of us see what’s beneath Goodsir’s surface, but it’s also not wrong at all. In another sort of work (perhaps, as noted, a work by Jane Austen), Goodsir is (uniquely, among these men, perhaps) capable of living a sweet, gentle, utterly ordinary little life, with a more innocent narrative.

“It’s strongly implied that Irving’s imagination is so open that he has to work to close it.”

That’s certainly true of the historical Irving, as I read it. I have many more complex thoughts and feelings about Irving now than I did after just watching the series through the first time, but I’m not sure whether that’s because his story-line is actually rich, or because I’ve come to like him separately. (Unlike, for instance, Fitzjames, whom I have come to adore separately, but I can safely say does also have a rich story-line in these ten episodes.) The real Irving is more elusive than I think I at least gave him credit for originally.

“Oh, James Fitzjames, you overly-familiar little strumpet, you.”

I’m sobbing.

“Scurvy doesn’t care what kind of person you are.”

In many ways this is true, because we do see scurvy acting indiscriminately on different men, here, without a care for age or station or morality. But also scurvy, in this narrative, attacks most vividly those with some sort of previous wound that the scurvy can reopen. Notably James, but also Morfin, whose flogging-scars we never see but can assume from his conversation (also, for that matter, Jopson, who, historically, had a major scar on his leg, of unknown origin). Scurvy may not truly care what kind of person you are, but if you’ve led a dangerous life, scurvy has one more way to hurt you.

“Who among us has not been desperate to discuss our interests, to the point where there is almost a flirtatious edge to the broaching of the topic?  One must be careful, so as not to give away too much, both for the gentle handling that one’s interests require, and for the sake of not alienating some poor rando who made the mistake of asking a bland, vague question simply to be polite.”

Ah, so I see you understand, then. I’ve taken to apologizing in advance of discussing the gorier elements of the Franklin expedition, as though I’ve exposed myself in public. (But seriously, this is the most excellent description of the discomforting feeling of very more obsessed with something than is socially acceptable.)

01x03 – “The Ladder” (One, Two, and Three) 

“John Ross is the Jacob Marley figure, I take it.”

The beginning of many intriguing resonances between this show and Dickens’s Christmas Carol, and I think, one of the most elegant. The actor who plays John Ross would be an excellent Jacob Marley.  

“Jopson would not talk about Francis’ drinking! You take that back, Gibson.”

This is what I adore about Thomas “Mr. Hears Everything” Jopson – he’ll only ever tell things about others to Francis; he’d never tell things about Francis to others. That’s a moral compass upon which we can unerringly rely, and one that is in no way affected by the magnetic changes at either pole.

“The spyglass sticks to the skin above Francis’ eye, as though it wished to force him not to look away.”

This is an amazing take, especially re: the way spyglasses are used to show foresight and the future in this show. Francis is forced to know look at what is coming for them, the future that waits ahead, hungrily salivating for his men.

“James is completely shattered, but he looks luminously beautiful.”

He does, doesn’t he?

01x04 – “Punished As A Boy” (One, Two, and Three)

“Lady Jane’s response is: ‘Fuck you. I know Charles Dickens.’”

Much as I detest Dickens, and much as I have my own problems with Lady Jane, she is never anything less than badass, particularly here.

“Lady Jane, clad in burgundy, ‘the wine-dark sea,’ stands between Francis and Sophia.”

Oh good god that’s it, though? It was through Lady Jane that I first found the Franklin Expedition, oh, four years ago (it feels like four hundred), and the first thing I ever said about the matter was “I’m confident that she knew Greek.” I’ve never been able to prove it, but she writes, in her letters, like someone who reads Greek. Lady Jane is well and truly our Homeric Hera. Brilliant and vengeful and matronly and brutal. I do adore her.

“Of course Goodsir’s never been lashed.  He’s a nice man.  He’s probably had the opposite of a flogging.  People probably throw roses at him when he walks down the street. I know I would.”

I’d be happy to attend this rose-throwing Goodsir-parade. I already have a bad habit of bringing roses to the pseudo-graves of historical men whom I love; we can add Goodsir to the list without too much hassle.

01x05 –  “First Shot’s A Winner, Lads” (One, Two, and Three) 

“[Re: James and “Your nails are a terror, Mr. Wentzall]…the checking of collars and fingernails is a very maternal duty.”

I love spotting feminine traits in James, but what I’m getting out of this is actually imagining James’s adoptive mother Louisa Coningham examining the fingernails of a very young James. It’s an adorable, if slightly tragic, image.

“Irving doesn’t seem like a hard man, but like a man trying desperately to be hard, and often failing. He should have forgotten about the navy, stayed on land, gone to France and become an early Impressionist painter.”

This fantastic description of Irving makes it even more tragic that he DID try to forget about the navy and stay on land, and it didn’t work. Canon divergence AU where Irving moved to France instead of Australia?

“We’re told, repeatedly, including by Goodsir, himself, that Goodsir isn’t a doctor.  It’s a fundamental misunderstanding: people think they know who Goodsir is, or who he wishes to be, but Goodsir has no desire to be anything but what he is. Perhaps appropriately, it’s Hickey who recognizes and names Goodsir (“You’re an anatomist.”) One may say that Hickey ‘reads’ Goodsir. Though, Hickey’s understanding is, as it often is, flawed.  He may know what Goodsir is, but he doesn’t know who Goodsir is.”

I very genuinely wonder – did Goodsir want to be thought of as a doctor, by any of them? What were Goodsir’s thoughts and preferences on the matter?

01x06 – “A Mercy” (One, Two, and Three)  

“What Sir John left them was a means of dissembling, a facade. Cheer in a cheerless time, which holds the dangerous allure of forgetting.”

This is perfect, because Carnevale, at its center, is “the dangerous allure of forgetting,” in no small part because, structurally, Carnevale fills the role of the Homeric island of the lotus-eaters. (It is also a labyrinth, though, and that’s an interesting doubling.)

“The half masks in the trunk have the semblance of the faces of dead men we’ve seen. The creature has the habit or practice of biting a man’s head in two, or biting off part of the cranium.”

I had never noticed this but it’s entirely true.

“Francis is bracketed by Thomas’, neither one of them a doubter.”

I will SCREAM

“‘I don’t like to hear a woman laughing now.’  I suppose it’s fortunate that Jopson’s professional life allows him to be around men, exclusively.  What would Jopson have done later in life?  Marriage is obviously out of the question if women’s mirth causes him such distress.  Would he have stayed on boats?  Francis promotes him to lieutenant, but would that have made him happy?  He has a love of, an instinct for caring for others that obviously can’t be transposed onto a marriage, both because of Jopson’s limits and because of Victorian gender roles.  The best possible course for Jopson would have been valet, a gentleman’s gentleman.  His rank and background would have made him an asset, and no more devoted valet would there have been.”

The fanfic writes itself. (I have nothing to say yet, I just adore this speculation; more below, though.)

“The drop of blood falling from James’ hairline onto the mask’s cheek to make a kind of morbid beauty spot is a gorgeous image, like a piece of decadent poetry.”

I personally find James unbearably beautiful, and the whole extended sequence with the dress and the drinking and the blood dripping is so subtle and lovely and I think, like with poetry, what we get out of it is never simple.

“James is dressed as Britannia. Which makes James mother to them all.”

Though I, selfishly, would have loved to see James in something more scandalous than his Britannia costume, I think it’s symbolically the best possible choice for him. This is an outfit that is technically crossdressing, but it’s very subtle thanks to the choices James makes – we don’t see any dramatic woman’s wig or other feminine elements. This is an outfit that reminds the men of home; reminds James of home, and of his adoptive mother, whose poetry was full to the brim and spilling with Britannia.

“Blanky looks great. I wonder if the visual reference to the Ghost of Christmas Present is intentional.”

I’ve always assumed he was meant to be Bacchus, but of course the Ghost of Christmas Present has more than a little Bacchus in him also. All of these Christmas Carol overlaps are exceedingly interesting – John Ross’s Marley warning Franklin’s Scrooge, and now the Ghost of Blanky Present reminding Crozier that others are – for good or ill – having fun without him.

“One may imagine that Edward has disguised himself as someone who enjoys parties.”

OH GOD.

01x07 – “Horrible From Supper” (One, Two, and Three)  

“Hickey can’t move on from humiliation, because he would see that as more humiliation. Keeping the humiliation alive in his mind is the only way to gain some mastery over it. He holds the wound open, so that no one can deny that it’s a wound, that it happened, that it mattered, that he matters, but it means that he can never heal, never be whole. Scurvy.”

The Hickey/Fitzjames parallels are STRONG here. Also, this resonates really well with a conversation I had with a friend about Eleanor Guthrie from Black Sails – she’s unable to move past being hurt and I just can’t fault her for it, even as her stubbornness just hurts her more. And I feel that sympathy for James, too – he’s bottled up so much hurt inside, and it has kept hurting him his entire life. If Hickey didn’t “hold the would open” by, you know, making wounds in other people, literally, I’d probably even feel bad for him.

“There is an emotional and psychological toll, which Francis tries desperately to reduce by keeping the men together, reinforcing the bonds between them, persistently humanizing them.”

The Jopson’s promotion scene warms me on cold nights. That’s all.

“Jopson’s role is the opposite of Lady Silence’s: the fact of her gender alters nothing about it; Jopson’s informs it.  Make Jopson female, and he clearly functions as Francis’ wife.  If Jopson is male, though, what is he?  A paid servant, in the literal sense, but his obvious pleasure at caring for Francis long ago eroded the patina of duty.  I think we can safely say that Jopson loves Francis, loves and cares deeply for him.  Is invested in Francis’ safety, well-being, happiness.  Enjoys the details of his service to Francis, beyond the enjoyment of a job well-done.  Add a sexual component, and it becomes a marriage.  Leave it out, and the relationship is something else.  Drop Jopson into a marriage with a woman, and he becomes a husband.  Leave him with Francis, and he remains Francis’ wife.”

This is what I find so fascinating about Jopson – everything about his identity has the potential to be contingent, to change, but as the expedition’s tragedy unfolds, we see all of the possible threads of Jopson’s future cut off, one by one. From the beginning, Jopson can’t be female, and thus can’t serve a wifely role in British society, even though he’s clearly fit for it. We learn that Jopson has some very specific PTSD triggers related to women that might prevent him from ever being married to one, even if he wanted to be. Jopson seems to wish to continue serving Francis in perpetuity, to continue being as close to a wife as Francis will ever have, but Francis, sober, no longer needs the same kind of care that Jopson used to provide, and, eventually, Jopson becomes unable to care for Francis at all, so that Francis has to care for him. Jopson is all change, all tragedy.

“I would like to thank the director, cinematographer, anybody else who may be responsible for that stunning shot of James in profile. James really is beautiful, even, maybe particularly, at this stage of his infirmity. I’ve said it at other times, but there’s something, well, I suppose, romantic about his illness, because he is young, and beautiful, and heroic, so desperate to be loved, and so loved, in the end.”

*sighs* I’m not okay about James.

01x08 – “Terror Camp Clear” (One, Two, and Three) 

“I don’t know how I didn’t notice before, but James is a leggy creature.”

I will still treasure the term “a leggy creature” when I am in my grave.

“Sir John was not a top, and I know that for a fact, because I just got Lady Jane on the Ouija board, and she told me.”

I WILL SCREAM.

“[Francis] doesn’t look on James as a sick person in need of careful handling. There’s no sense of the separation necessary for pity between Francis and James. He is this way toward James because he cares about James.”

I know we all joke about the quote “it’s rotten work” / “not to me, not if it’s you,” but this is what that quote has always meant to me (the Anne Carson of it, that is, not the original Greek). Caring for someone via pity, via distance, takes effort, is painful, is rotten, even though it is sometimes worth it. Caring for someone via care, via love may still take effort, and may still even be painful, but there is no separation, no alienation, from the service of providing care. That’s where Francis’s tenderness comes from, I think. That closeness.

“James, you big, beautiful racehorse.  Even chapped and cracked, he’s radiantly beautiful.  He has such a warm quality.”

In the confessional spirit of this review, I will admit: I find James more attractive than I am capable of expressing. The interesting thing, to me, is that I don’t have the same response at all to Tobias Menzies or to any other character I’ve seen him play. He’s a great actor, certainly, but he doesn’t do it for me. But James does. I’m still puzzling this out.

“James’ bravery is treated somewhat like a woman’s beauty, in that he believes it to be conditional, temporary. It’s dependent on others’ appreciation of it; when he’s alone, James doesn’t feel brave.”

I will say, admitting that it’s probably James’ femininity that is attractive to me gets you a long way toward understanding why I do find him so terribly appealing.

“Oh, please, baby Jesus, don’t let Jopson flip. Jopson’s one of the few things I have left to hang onto, here.”

Jopson will never flip, such that Jopson’s death really is the point of no return, here. He’ll die before he flips. (Notably, it’s important to be clear that by “flip,” I mean turn his loyalties away from Crozier. I have reconciled myself to the idea that, though Jopson is upright and innocent in a way even my James isn’t, he is capable of violence and even unjustified, offensive violence. But only ever in the service of his captain.) And again here, Jopson very well might not be immune to the seduction Hickey’s definitely attempting, but bending to Hickey’s wiles means betraying Crozier, and that’s an impossibility for Jopson.

“Bridgens, who’s a cozy old piece of furniture…”

….and Henry Peglar would like to sit on him. (I get it Henry, I do.)  

01x09 – “The C, the C, the Open C” (One, Two, and Three) 

“Oh, Bridgens. Where’s Henry? Where did Henry go?”

I think a real triumph of this show is getting you to know, by this point, that when you see Bridgens, you should ALWAYS ask yourself, “Where’s Henry?” Because yeah, “They are each other’s loved one,” and there can’t be either one of them without the other. Bridgens knows this, and makes himself into a memorial for Henry. The only kind of monument Henry Peglar can ever have: Bridgens, with his own body, preserves Peglar’s words for the future, for us. I’m just going to cry for Bridgens and for Peglar for a minute, that’s all. Please excuse me.

“Hartnell watches Bridgens pick up Peglar, Peglar’s arm around Bridgens like, ‘… Wait a minute…’ Hartnell also misses Hickey’s innuendo about Armitage.  Tom Hartnell tragically has no gay-dar.”

Oh precious Hartnell. This lack of gay-dar is part of why Hartnell had to get written out of what I’m currently writing (I’m sorry Hartnell! It’s not you it’s me.)

“There’s something of a horrible wooing about it: Goodsir, like an unwilling bride, forcibly taken from his own people by unscrupulous men, installed in as luxurious surroundings as can be had, with his trousseau, for the purpose of catering to an unspeakable hunger.  His innocence is taken from him, and he’s turned against himself. His body is stripped naked and consumed.”

(a) What a horrible and horribly accurate description. (b) This is another one of those places where this show is unafraid to place male characters into narrative metaphors of womanhood. For me, the most vivid is always Jopson, but Goodsir is also often made to face this sort of feminine role, and for Goodsir it’s so much more often about violence and shame.

“James says “I’m not Christ,” before he tells Francis to feed the men his body.  It seems like something of a non sequitur, until one imagines James’ train of thought.  As the impulse to give his body to the men occurred to him, so may have also come a last flicker of self-mockery: “What, James, do you think you’re Christ, now?”  So that his announcement that he’s not Christ comes in response to this: he knows who he is, and who he isn’t.  Finally, he knows this.”

I think that’s exactly what went through James’s head. And more than that, I think back on that beautiful gif-set that placed James’s “I’m not Christ” beside Francis’s “Like Christ, but with more nails.” Francis, whose self-hatred is clear and undisguised, begins to heal by recognizing what is Christ-like in himself: his suffering, and the compassion that is borne from the suffering. James, whose self-hatred is buried under masks and lies and stories and gilded dresses, begins to heal by admitting what is not Christ-like about him: his mortality, his humanity; and that doesn’t make James any lesser, and James finally, finally begins to see so.  

“Can’t Jopson’s story end differently, this time?”

That’s what hurts. In no version of this story that happens with Hickey AND the Tuunbaq AND the inevitable deaths of 129 men, should James die any different, or Goodsir, or Bridgens. If they were going to die, they should do so showing bravery and brotherhood; agency and defiance; commitment and love. There are other men who deserved so much better than the ignoble deaths they got (Irving comes to mind) but Jopson is the warmest light and receives the coldest death. There’s no reason for his story NOT to end differently, except for the sheer narrative cruelty of it all. The Terror is brilliant because it knows to reserve this sort of agony for the worst possible gut-punch. Any more than one, or maybe two, utterly, pointlessly cruel deaths, and we would be immunized. But we have no immunity to prepare us for the dizzying nausea of Jopson’s death.

“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.  Death, ultimately, isn’t mysterious. Whatever might happen to one afterwards is immaterial to the living, still bound to this plane of existence.  One may fear it, but once it happens, it’s over.  Love is a way of life, though.  It changes over time.  It changes the person who feels it, and the person they feel it for.  Both Francis and Jopson were changed by their love for each other.  Jopson goes to one mystery still in the grip of the other: it’s Francis he sees, reaches for, cannot touch.”

Jopson’s death is still haunting me. It’s like Tantalus, all that food that would save Jopson’s life, if only he could eat it, and yet he crawls right past, toward Crozier. What does that say about Jopson? The way the world tortures him is to hold Crozier just outside of his reach – what on earth is Jopson being punished for? (These aren’t intelligible thoughts anymore; I’m just broken-hearted for my boy.)

“In a narrative that encourages empathy for everyone and everything from a colonial expedition to a monkey to an eldritch monstrosity that rips men’s heads off, why should Hickey be exempt?”

A beautiful way of putting it. I’m still working through my initial disgust at Hickey, but intellectually, I can’t help but agree.

01x10 – “We Are Gone” (One, Two, and Three)

“…the experience of being through so much with these characters that I care about so much has been like living several lifetimes.”

My mother, who has not yet watched this show, told me recently that she thinks these characters have become my family. In part, this is due to the historical research I’ve been doing on the real men of the Franklin expedition, but the show played its own large role in making me fall in love with these men, making me desperate to live as many lifetimes with them as possible.

“Why does Goodsir do it, though?  He seems to have made up his mind before Francis appears, and with Francis comes the hope that Edward will rescue them.  If anything, Francis’ presence makes Goodsir more resolute.”

As another dear friend said, Goodsir definitely had the plan in mind before Francis showed up, but the plan needed a trigger: it needed Francis, a good man worth dying for. Someone for Goodsir to look at and say, “Maybe my actions will help this man.”

“I think I just confessed to being in love with a man who doesn’t exist.”

Ahh, this lovely club. Even the men I’m in love with who actually lived two thousand years ago don’t really exist, at least not in the way I love them.  

“The Terror is like a play put on by a theater company that has no female actors, so all of the men must play female roles…without any women to place in certain contexts – caretaker; lover; victim; object of desire – those dramas necessarily play out on the bodies of the men.”

Watch this space. The Terror is a classical Greek tragedy, and I can prove it.

The description of Goodsir’s preparation for death is richer and more complete than anything I will ever write. GO READ IT.

I also think it’s fascinating to see this scene through the eyes of a reviewer who readily admits “This is an unusual case. I like Goodsir. I don’t usually like the men I’m looking at. I care for Goodsir.” I confess that, though I also like and care for Goodsir, when I am looking at “eroticized male bodies” in media, I only really “feel at home in a text” when I also like and care for those men. If a male character is too morally objectionable to me, I find no erotic appeal to viewing him, because I am so distracted by my own sense of his evils. I simply cannot find anything to pull me, aesthetically or sexually, to someone like Hickey. (I can never find anything sensually appealing about Hickey/Tozer, for instance.) I am pulled to James, in contrast, because he is beautiful to me visually, and because his life (as far as I can see) shows me a person who cared, who tried, who loved. Who is worthy of my care and trust.  And though I don’t think I’m in love with Goodsir in the same way than I am with James, I care deeply for Goodsir and thus can find the appeal in watching him, visually.

“‘There is wonder here.’/ ‘Then, there will be the angels.’ The first thing angels ever tell any human being who beholds them is not to be afraid.  Wonder isn’t always delightful, isn’t always something that humans can understand, or possibly, even, survive.”

Fear is something I don’t often enough examine closely with this show, though it is so terribly central. “Be not afraid” and “We have too much fear.” How can one dispel fear? Wonder obviously isn’t enough; wonder might even make it worse. Being told not to fear rarely works out so well for those visited by angels. I think, sometimes, that all we can do is – as Peglar does – admit to those we love that we have too much fear, and hope that they can help us carry it.

I can’t NOT give you the end of the first round of these reviews, because, like the description of Goodsir’s preparations, it’s literature: 

“The Terror, a show taking place one hundred, sixty years ago, manages to be timely without even trying.  Lead poisoning.  Environmental catastrophe.  The baggage of colonialism.  The treatment of indigenous people by white people. Information and misinformation.  What it means to be a leader.  What it means to be in a marriage.  The role of women in society.  Gay marriage.  Income inequality.  Ethical consumption.  Consumerism. Members of the armed forces working far from home.  Mental health. Addiction.  All of these fit neatly into what can also be taken at face value, a well-constructed and -acted tale of adventure and loss set in a faraway place and time.  The Terror never tries to force meaning on the viewer, never struggles under the weight of its lofty aspirations- because it has no aspirations.  It’s an utterly guileless production, seeking nothing but to present its characters and situations honestly.  In doing such a simple thing, it has created the world.”

And, finally, I leave you with: “I’m not looking for a way out.  I just want more time with the characters. I don’t want to leave them.” To me, this gives an answer to David Solway’s question “Do you have a tolerance for ongoing narratives which generally turn out to be the same narrative?” And that answer is “yes.” I think there’s a tolerance – or, even, a hunger – for ongoing narratives that turn out to be the same narrative, in this fandom, because why would anyone want a way out anymore, if it means the end of our time with these characters?

I know I don’t.

“The end of The Terror isn’t a sad end, nor is it a hopeful one.  It’s not even properly an end, because we know what comes next. What comes next? Well, we do.”

[aizenat]

Regarding claims that asexuals weren't around, I have read old documents from well before AVEN was made discussing how the community viewed asexuals as a flavor of bisexuals since both groups feel equally attracted to all genders. The difference of that equal attraction to all genders being zero for for asexuals was a later distinction. Just because the labels weren't made yet doesn't mean asexuals popped into existence when AVEN was made! (This is similar to how the lines between the lesbian and bi women communities used to be a lot fuzzier back then, with both gay and bi women being labeled under the lesbian umbrella. Labels have changed over time.)

It is indeed different from BDSM because BDSM is a fetish about how people like to perform sex and is not directly related to attraction, marriage, and other orientation-relevant topics. Your comparison makes it seem you misunderstand asexuality as a function of sexual performance rather than orientational attraction. Which is wrong. It is 100% about attraction! Within the label of asexual, people still fall on a spectrum of liking sex to not liking sex independent of their asexual lack of attraction to any gender. It is not abstinence it is not preferences in bed, it is purely the lack of ability to be attracted to others. You may have defined LGBT+ as only "same sex attraction" but plenty others in the community--dare I say the majority of the community defines it as simply not being straight and/or cis.

Asexuals get medically mistreated in similar ways to gay and trans people through attempts at conversion. Asexuals get bullied, abused, correctively raped, etc by violent homophobes for all the same reasons too. Asexuals do not perform attraction and romance to the satisfaction of homophobes. Asexuals need community for the same reasons you do. They need similar protections from discrimination against orientation. This push to exclude asexuals is a rather recent trend that helps nobody, only serves to divide a community of vulnerable people that is strongest when united.

You’re a fucking liar, and disgusting and I hope you know that. 

You don’t get to retroactively tell people how they identified. You’ve “read old documents from well before AVEN was made discussing how the community viewed asexuals as a flavor of bisexuals since both groups feel equally attracted to all genders?” Liar. You mean you’ve read RECENT articles of people analyzing texts describing bisexual people and reading that as “asexual” even though that’s not how those people identified. 

You want to know how I know you don’t know SHIT about gay history? “This is similar to how the lines between the lesbian and bi women communities used to be a lot fuzzier back then, with both gay and bi women being labeled under the lesbian umbrella.” That never happened! Lesbian/gay women identified as such, and bi women identified as bi! Back then, bi woman said they were bi with their whole chests! They didn’t go around calling themselves lesbians! They do that now! Like what the fuck revisionist bullshit are you on about? Fuck off. 

Asexuality is not a sexual orientation because by your own definition, asexuals do not feel sexual attraction. What kinda nonsense? And there is no way for an asexual to “like” sex or whatever nonsense. You guys just made that up because in our hypersexual world, you don’t know the difference between someone with a low (or, hell, a healthy) libido and an actual asexual person. 

And shame on you, and there is a special place in HELL for you, for bringing up violent homophobia and conversion therapy and corrective rapes. Are people going around writing laws forcing you to have to have sex with someone? If you ever wanted to adopt, would the agency disqualify you for being asexual? 

The medical ish is real, and obviously traumatic, but to pretend that’s on the same level as conversion therapy (seriously, a deep, dark, HOT place in hell for you for that!), is deplorable! You have obviously never been to one, been threatened to be sent to one, or even spoken with someone who went through conversion therapy to pull that out of your ass. 

This is the reason why people don’t like you idiots. You take what could be valid critiques of our society’s views towards sex (hypersexuality, medicalization of low libidos, conservative expectations of relationship dynamics that treat people as broken for not wanting or enjoying sex) and morph them into fallacies, half truths, and false equivalences. You’re literally taking the experiences of other groups of people, and trying to say they happen to the same degree, and from the same place, as what asexuals face when that is just NOT true based on reality. 

You could grow up to be an adult, quietly never get married or date, and live your entire life without having sex and no one will kill you for it. Homophobes don’t care that you’re not fucking other people. They don’t care enough to use gay panic as a defense to murder you, they don’t care enough to ban you from marrying, you weren’t ignored during the AIDS crisis, you wouldn’t have to hide the fact that you don’t have sex from colleagues for fear of getting fired from your job for it, you don’t have to worry about being sent to camps to be electrocuted or sent to mental institutions or religious conversion therapy camps. Not now, not 20 years ago, not 50 years ago, not EVER. 

You can play the “we’ve always been there” game because there have always been people who probably would ID as asexual today, but the vast majority of those people got married, had kids, and that is more due to the fundamentalist religious nature of western society, especially in America, than it would be due to homophobia. Completely intellectually dishonest. 

Don’t fucking send me any more fucking shit, and if you do, come off anon so I can block you. In fact, I’ll make it easy and turn it off so you don’t hit that button by mistake. 

I have seen and experienced first hand real life traumatic homophobia, so don’t ever in your life try to come at me with that shit. I spent years thinking *I* was asexual because I was repressing my sexuality.

And that’s the biggest issue I have you with weirdos. Talking about “you can like sex and have sex and be asexual” nonsense. I see so many kids coming up that are taking LONGER to realize they’re gay/same sex attracted because they don’t relate to the hypsersexual, porn-obsessed way sex is portrayed. And they hear THIS nonsense and think “oh, I’m asexual.” Then they grow up, get interested in sex, and have literal mental breakdowns over their identities because they made not wanting to fuck their hogwarts house badge. 

We’re not talking about grown adults who have gone through numerous experiences coming to an understanding of their sexualities. It’s a bunch of kids who don’t realize that it’s normal to not experience overt and raunchy sexual attraction, that only wanting to sleep with someone you’re in a relationship with is literally normal, and who aren’t even old enough to legally rent a car trying to tell grown adults about their lived experiences. 

Fuck off mate. Just fuck off. You’re an idiot, and if you think you’re going to convince me of your side, you’re not.

And you really want to know how you’re not LGBT. Because with all the alphabet soup terms that have come up to describe bisexuality 40392092039220 times in recent years, gay people have (for the most part) not said that these people aren’t same sex attracted. Because, despite how unnecessary, they are same sex attracted. But you lot are the ones actual homosexuals and bi people are like “nah, you lot are weird. We don’t know you.” And there’s a reason. Because this response, aside from being intellectually dishonest, historically inaccurate, and filled with logical fallacies and bad-faith arguments, was at it’s very core WEIRD. 

You’re weird. Now sod off. 

[addicted-to-dc]

Red Hood’s Little Monster (Part 6)- Red Hood/Jason Todd X Gender fluid!Reader

Welp, I’m actually posting something! Hopefully you all will enjoy this VERY long fic. Also, I currently do not have my tag list on me, so I cannot tag anyone for a while, not until I can find my list.

Warnings: Anger issues? Flirting?

"Come on, man, you gotta help me out," you begged, barely suppressing the urge to roll your eyes at your own words. "I just need one identity, I don't care who, but I need one now."

Norm shook his head, pacing around the room while biting his nail, "You know that I can't do it in less than a day! I need at least a week in advance to do it, to make sure it is prepared properly and won't get any red flags! You know if you get caught while using a passport and documents from me, that could damage my reputation!"

"Oh come on! You gave me one in three days," you spat, trying to keep your emotions in control, "and I'm offering double the pay that I gave you that time! I don't give a shit what gender, race, hell, I don't care what age, just give me a goddamn passport and a picture of the poor bastard. You know that I can handle situations like these, can you?"

He pointed at you, shaking his hand as he muttered a few curses. Wiping his face, he scratched his beard as he thought up for some type of solution, something that could save him from being killed by you. As soon as he thought of something, he ran into the back room and dug through his things, searching for the one type of person that would guarantee her a way to escape. Grasping onto the documents, he walked back into the room and handed you what you requested.

Looking over the documents, you scanned over the man in the photo. He had a handsome face, but his face would definitely blend in. His dark skin glowed in the sunlight of the photo, making his dark brown eyes look like honey.

"What happened to him?" you asked Norm, pocketing the documents.

"Disappeared without a trace," he replied solemnly. "He had no family, friends, or next of kin, so you will not deal with any unwanted attention."

"Did you know him?" you questioned, watching his eyes shift to the floor. "If this is too personal I will not take-"

"No, take it," Norm stated, waving you off. "He was a... a good guy, a loving one, too, but his kindness got him killed. It's somewhat comforting that a little bit of him will be back, y' know?"

You nodded, "Thank you, Norm. The money will be transferred to you tomorrow, I just need to get a head start before drawing attention to your bank account."

"I know the drill by now," he chuckled, patting you on the shoulder. "Stay safe out there."

"You, too," you replied, adjusting your jacket before leaving the building.

Stepping out into the sun, you pulled your sunglasses onto your face and continued forward, determined to slink back into the shadows like you always did. You had the upper hand now, but for how long? They had more resources than you by far, but it would take time for them to get everything. Your father's quarrel with Bruce Wayne would spark arguments if he requested help from him, but there was the possibility that his familial instincts will suspend the fighting.

Huffing, you moved forward on your path, heading to the nearest alley to shift. It wasn't the most inconspicuous, but it was better than going into a populated area and having questions arise. Leaning against the wall, you breathed heavily as you looked at the picture of the man, absorbing his image into your head as your body started to burn. Gritting your teeth, you felt as your muscles, bones, and other insides shift and grow, creating an exact copy of him. The shift was oddly less painful than your last ones, but you couldn't focus on that now. Pulling your hood up, you stretched out before walking out the other end of the alley, quickly getting used to the height difference of this body.

Opening your wallet, you pulled out the ID of your previous form, folding it in half and snapping it before throwing it into the nearest dumpster. Digging into your pocket, you slid the new one in, staring and memorizing all of the information. He had a California license, had a height of 5'11" and weighed 194 pounds. His birth date was August 20th, 1995, and his address was Norm's. You would read the documents containing more information on the way to your destination, but now you needed to sell the look of someone traveling. Looks like you were going to blow a lot of cash.

--------------

Walking through the airport, you pulled your cheap carry on suitcase, which was filled with clothes and other useless items, as you continued forward. You made sure not to look at the cameras, knowing that it would draw attention to you. Sighing, you glanced around and rubbed your eye, your exhaustion getting the better of you. Your contact had assured you that you wouldn't have to deal with security, especially when you still had your suit on. As advanced as it was, it wouldn't make it past the metal detectors that nearly all were required to pass through.

Clutching the handle, you looked around for your contact, searching for her obnoxious bright red hair. Before you could notice someone running behind you, you felt an impact against your back. It nearly made you throw a punch, but you were able to see her head notched into your neck before you made the mistake. Smiling, you laughed and turned around, hugging her to keep the act going. Her honey-colored eyes stared into yours as the both of you pulled away, but kept close physical contact.

"It's been a while since we've seen each other," she smiled, wrapping an arm around your waist, "and I must add that's one delicious form you've taken."

You chuckled at the redhead, remembering how much you hated her personality, "Might I remind you that I am a minor."

"A minor that can shapeshift into a very scrumptious adult," she smirked, removing her hand from your waist, "but I know my boundaries."

She led you through a corridor away from the TSA infested area of the airport. The sound of your footsteps reverberated through the hall, making you scan the area cautiously. From what you memorized of the blueprints of the airport, you were heading back to the loading dock, and your plan did not include going there.

"Is there a bathroom somewhere I can go before we leave?" you asked, looking around. "The coffee is kicking in."

"Don't worry, assassin, they think you're taking a private jet in the opposite direction," she stated, continuing forward. "Your plan worked, but we needed to take a more subtle route to our flight."

You didn't like the change in your plans, but even you knew that she was telling the truth. The Mya you knew wouldn't sell a customer out, especially if the customer could snap her neck before she could realize it, but that didn't mean that this was Mya.

"How's your brother and sister?" you asked, remaining behind her.

"They're okay, Gram is still in college and Grace dropped out, she's focusing on the family business currently," she replied, turning around. "Why the sudden curiosity?"

You shrugged, glaring down at her, "Because Grace is dead, you were the one who asked me to kill her, remember?"

Before she could react, you had her pinned against the wall, using your weight to keep her there. One hand held her own down while the other had her neck in its grip, squeezing just enough to make sure she wouldn't try anything.

"Who's helping my father, telepath?" you questioned her, squeezing tighter.

She dropped her disguise, revealing herself to be Miss Martian and telling you everything you needed. Without hesitation, you released her and let her fall to the ground. You ran a hand through your hair, frustrated beyond belief.

"How did they find me?" you asked yourself pacing around, completely ignoring the incapacitated Martian beneath you. "This chase needs to end right now, I can't stand this frustrating goose chase."

Rubbing your face, you sighed and glanced at the Martian, examining her while she tried to recover her breath. She was a white Martian, which was rather odd all things considering. You couldn't remember if they were outcasts of Mars or something else, but you didn't care at the moment.

"Are they waiting for me at the exit?" you asked, watching as she nodded 'yes'. "Well, I better go greet them."

Continuing down the corridor, you tried to mentally prepare yourself for what was about to occur. There had to be more than one hero helping them out, there definitely had to be. You had to admit you were slightly surprised that heroes would help the Outlaws, but who were you to judge the heroes' choices. They're always going off about 'discovering your better self' and 'forgiveness is always an option if you mean it' or however it's phrased.

You didn't believe in that crap, and you knew that if someone was trying to kill you, you wouldn't be given those options. You were too dangerous to be kept alive, too dangerous to be around potential loved ones when all you had to hear was a few code words to make you lose control and kill those around you. You couldn't risk that, especially when Talia al-Ghul has a thing for your father's family, your adoptive grandfather if you can even call him that.

You resisted the urge to pull out your weapon as you got closer the exit, making it more difficult to keep your nerves on edge. As soon as you rounded the corner, the three Outlaws could be clearly seen blocking the doorway.

"Unpleasant to see you three again," you stated calmly, examining your surroundings. "Where are the other junior heroes?"

"Somewhere around," your father replied coolly. "Now, are you going to come with us consciously or unconsciously?"

"I was expecting to explain everything before you'd make that decision for me," you answered, remaining vigilant. "If I come with you, death will follow. The League of Assassins will see it as an opportunity to weaken its enemies, and I will not be able to stop them from doing so. So, if you value your lives and the ones around you, I suggest you let me disappear and let go whatever semblance of fatherly instinct you developed. I'm not yours, I wasn't raised by you, I wasn't taught to love or look up to you, we just share a genetic code."

You waited for a response, some sort of reaction from your father, but you couldn't identify anything from his body language. His red helmet obscured his face, which gave him the upper hand in this current situation.

Pinching the bridge of your nose, your frustration grew exponentially as his silence continued, "Are you going to just stand there, or actually respond to me?"

He stepped forward, making your hand instinctively go for your weapon, "The League can't touch you, (Y/N), we'll make sure of it."

"You can't be serious," you said, nearly laughing at his statement. "They are everywhere, no matter how secure it is. If they aren't affiliated with them, they are being blackmailed or have their families on a watch. They know how to break anyone, hell, they broke the great Batman many times."

"I am not Batman," he nearly growled, "and the League will have to go through me to get to you."

"This is exactly what they want," you sighed, knowing what would transpire in the future if you went with them.

Arsenal stepped forward, patting your father on the shoulder before looking in your direction, "Listen, kid, we'll make some precautions if that will ease your conscience. Even if it happens, we'll be able to deal with it."

Gritting your teeth, you punched the wall beside you, punching through to the next room. You retracted your hand and sighed, your anger contained for the moment. Thinking about your other options, you could escape them once again, but they would find you again and again. Dusting off your hand, you stomped toward the three adults and walked past them.

"Let's go before I change my mind," you huffed, hoping that you would not regret your decision in the future.

[fandom-collective-writers]

Reader x Nobunaga Oda - Tangled Limbs

Title: Tangled Limbs

Fandom: Ikemen Sengoku

Character: Nobunaga Oda

Genre: Romance + smoot

Warnings: Sexy time

Kinks: hOHOHO lemme tell you we got dirty talk, nipple play, mutual masturbation, wall sex, probably more

Intended Gender Audience: Female Audience

Word Count: 2136 words

POV: second person

Authors: @mythiica​ and @rikumorimachisgirl​

Requested by: @elievalentine

Other comments: we took this and ran with it; sorry for the late posting! We both had issues with technology/not having access to a computer, but trust us, the smut in this makes up for it. We hope you enjoy!!

You might have poked yourself hundreds of times trying to complete the kimono, but you finally manage to finish it. The fabrics that Nobunaga bought you seem to shine in the sunlight, and it is very soft to the touch. Happy with your creation, you slip it over your shoulders and tie it in the front. The pattern overlaps and flows seamlessly – as if it is a single piece of fabric.

          Twirling around in front of the full-body mirror, you smile widely, and with the first ray of the sun just peeking through the horizon, you quickly make your way to Nobunaga.  After knocking on the door to the tenshu, you wait for him to reply. You hear his voice through the screen and enter quickly.

         “Look, Nobunaga!”

         He lifts his head from the documents he had been reviewing and grins when he sees you. “You made this?”

         “Of course I did!”

         “With your own hands?” he teases. “Come, let me inspect it closer.” Nobunaga reaches out and offers you his hand. You place your own in his and sit down. He pulls your sleeve close so that he may admire the fine stitching. “I don’t believe you!”

         “Nobunaga!” you whine, pulling your hand back.

         But he shakes his head. “I’ll have to ask you to take it off so I may look closer.” You whip around, suddenly blushing, and stare into Nobunaga’s eyes. He is casually leaning his head against his arm, looking at you with wide eyes as he wears a sly smirk. “I bet you look even better with your clothes off, anyways.”

         “W-What?”

         Nobunaga stands up to match your height and wraps his arms around your waist, rocking you back and forth. He tucks his chin into the crook of your neck and kisses the exposed skin. His touch makes you pulsate with electricity, and you shiver at his mercy. “Come now, I’ll help you…” Nobunaga’s hand slips past the fold in the kimono and his fingers graze your nipple.

         You arch your back against him when he pinches your bud and twists it slightly. When your mouth falls open to moan, Nobunaga slips the fingers of his other hand past your lips. You choke slightly on his digits, causing saliva to dribble down your chin. Panting heavily, you try to twist your neck so that you can see him, but Nobunaga keeps your jaw in place.

         He lowers his head and whispers into your ear, “Won’t you show me what else those nimble fingers of yours are good at?” Nobunaga’s voice is low and husky like he knows that his voice can turn you on easily.

         Leading you to the futon on the other side of the room, Nobunaga removes his hand from inside your kimono and spins you around. He works quickly to remove his own clothing, suddenly fueled by an urgency to take you right then and there. You simultaneously strip the kimono you made and are careful to fold it and put it away. Nobunaga catches your wrist and throws the clothing article onto his desk before cupping your face and kissing you deeply. He cares little for the formalities, and demands he have you.

         His tongue invades your mouth, and you moan against him as your hands trace the muscles of his torso. You can’t help but grind against his erection to tease him back, but he bites your bottom lip in annoyance when you do.

         Nobunaga takes a seat on the futon and pumps his member slowly while keeping eye contact with him. You take a seat between his legs and reach for his cock, but Nobunaga stops you. “No, come here,” he orders.

         Though you are confused, you do as you are told and take a seat next to him. Nobunaga pulls your leg over his lap, exposing your cunt to him. He wraps his arm around you and rubs his fingers against your slit. The position is strange, but it allows you to give Nobunaga a handjob – so you lean forward slightly and run your fingers down his length, showing off your nimble fingers, as he called them.

         You don’t recall ever doing mutual masturbation, but besides the hassle of tangling your limbs with him, it’s quite the thrill. Nobunaga’s movements are completely fluid – his fingers slip in and out of you before he starts to rub your clit mercilessly. You pant heavily as he drags his tongue across your neck. “You’re slowing down, princess. Is that what you do your fabrics when they give you a rough time?”

         The lit in his voice angers you, but this is merely a ploy to urge you to match the lust burning in his blood.

         Because you do not reply immediately, Nobunaga grips your ankle with a hand and yanks it swiftly, causing you to slip from your position. “Nobunaga!” you squeal as you scramble to sit up. “I thought you wanted me to-”

         But, like the tease he is, Nobunaga cuts you off by smashing his lips against yours. His fingers reclaim your clit, and he is quick to remind you of the pleasure you had been experiencing not a few minutes ago.

         “Oh, I do want you to… so be a good girl and make me cum at the same time I make you cum.”

         Your breath hitches in your throat at his challenge. Certainly you were not expecting this when you decided you wanted to show Nobunaga your new kimono. Nonetheless, you would not change your place for anything in the world.

         His smirk is contagious, and you feel the corners of your lips curling upwards. “Yes, my lord.” You curl your fingers round his hardened length and rack your memories for the things he likes the most. As you strum your fingers along the side of his member, you rub his frenulum until his breathing becomes more labored than before.

         Nobunaga grunts and arches his back before curling his fingers inside of you. The squelching sound arouses him greatly, and he catches your bruised lips with his own to kiss you.

         When you press the tip of your finger to his cock, Nobunaga bites your bottom lip to suppress his moan. You pump his member until the prominent veins in the side of his cock bulge against your palm. Your essence dribbles down your open thighs as you reach your climax — Nobunaga is soon the follow as his seed shoots forward as a strangled rendition of your name escapes his mouth.

You wake up to the feather-light feeling as someone strokes your hair ever so gently. Outside, you hear birds chirping happily, and inhale the delectable aroma of miso soup wafting in the air. As you squint your eyes as you adjust to the brightness of the room, you hear him chuckle beside you.

         "You finally decide to wake up, " Nobunaga whispers in your ear just as he stops stroking your hair.

         "I didn't even know I fell asleep, " you respond while rubbing the drowsiness of your eyes. You then notice him staring at you, with a mischievous smile upon his handsome face, and you blush. "So…"

         "So?"

         You feel your face turning several shades redder by the second. "Did you like it?"

         He traces your jaw fondly.  "Did I like what? You'll have to be more specific." Your pout makes him laugh, and the sound instantly lifts your spirit. "I don't deny that I liked our little morning tryst."

         "Me, too, Nobunaga. I'm so happy." You boldly inch closer to give him a peck on the cheek, before getting out of the futon, much to his disappointment.

         "What are you doing?"

         "Getting dressed, " you respond as you pick up the discarded kimono from the floor. It was slightly wrinkled from being carelessly thrown off, so you shake it a few times.

         "But it's still early."

         "No, it's not. I'm the chatelaine and I've got a job to do, " you remind him while you slip the sleeve over your shoulders.

         "Yes, your job is to make me happy, " he declares arrogantly. As he spins you around to face him, you gasp in surprise at how he'd gone from lying on the futon to standing behind her in a matter of seconds.

         "Nobunaga… really?"

         He backs you up against the wall and starts to trail kisses your cheek down to your jaw and your throat. "Why are you in such a hurry to leave?" He ran his hands up and down your body, cupping your breasts as he continues to pepper your neck with kisses. Once more, he slips one hand in the open lapel of your kimono and took one of your pebbled nipples in between his fingers. As his hands played with your breasts, his mouth settles on your pulse point and begins to suck on the tender flesh. You moan and begin to feel wet and warm down your core.

         "Still thinking of leaving?"

         "I… I…"

         "Perhaps I have not made myself clear, " he murmurs as he presses his middle finger into your hot core. Your raspy whimpers as he pumps his finger in and out encouraged him to continue his ministrations, and you feel your legs turning to jelly. Your eyes widen as he drops on his knees in front of you and lifts one of your legs over his shoulder.

         "Nobu - ah…" you moan as his tongue skillfully laps at your wet folds, flicking his tongue against your clit. The sensation is far too strong, you suddenly feel the need to hold on to something to keep you upright.

         "Hold on to me, " he says, his voice vibrating against your sensitive pussy. With your hands tangled in his hair, he shifts his head to a different angle. And as he slips his tongue inside you, lapping at every bit of your sweet nectar, you were so sure you had died and gone to heaven.

         The moment you came down from your high, Nobunaga stands and you sag against him, catching your breath. "You are amazing, " you whisper, and he laughs heartily.

         "Of course I'm amazing. I'm your boyfriend, " he says cockily, and adds, "but I do hope you don't think that was the end because we're just getting started."

         And with that, he hoists you on his waist and enters you in one swift motion. You throw your head back and moan as you feel him fully sheathed inside you, but he doesn't move. You usually love how considerate he is in giving you time to adjust to his size, but not today. He's made you want him so badly, you grind your hips against him to coax him. "Nobunaga… please…"

         "Please what?"

         You frown at him. Was he really going to play hard-to-get now of all times? "Now's not the time to - ohhhh… " You throw your head back as he rolled his hips and pushed every last inch of his cock inside you.

         "You were saying?" The smug look on his face says it all - he was going to make you pay for even thinking of getting out of his futon earlier. You feel him pull his cock out, leaving the tip at your entrance, before pushing in at a slow and steady pace. You whimper and thrash against him impatiently, but he continues to smirk at move leisurely, knowing the pace of his movement is pure torture. Desperately, you hold his face and kiss him deeply, your tongue slipping in his slightly open mouth. You move your legs around his hips as he picked up the pace and started pounding on you relentlessly.

         "Yes, yes… just like that…" You dig your fingernails on his back and throw your head in ecstasy. Your moans become louder as he drives his cock inside you harder and harder every single time.

         As you reach your climax, you feel your muscles clench around his cock, and you marvel at his self-control as he allows you to come down from your orgasm before moving inside you once again, building up his own orgasm. It doesn't take long before he grunts and shoots his seed inside you, and you moan at the heavenly sensation of being filled by his cum.

         Nobunaga pulls out and takes an uneasy step backward. Exhaling slowly, he stretches his back and runs a hand through his hair. Sweat makes his muscles gleam in the light and mattes his hair down to his forehead. He picks you up again and tucks you into the futon before laying down next to you. He pulls you close to inhale your scent.

         “For the record, the kimono is beautiful.”

         “Thank you,” you reply softly as a blush spreads across your face.

         He takes your hand and kisses your palm. “But I still prefer you without clothing~”

[vocalfriespod]

Wikitongues Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi. Welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie Gillon: I’m Carrie Gillon.

Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa. I’m a wee bit sick.

Carrie Gillon: Yes. But at least you have a voice.

Megan Figueroa: Just in case anyone was wondering.

Carrie Gillon: People were.

Megan Figueroa: It’s the podcasting – it’s the life. Sometimes, you have to go on the air when you’re sick. [Laughs]

Carrie Gillon: We have an email from Jeffrey. “Dear Carrie and Megan, I recently finished listening to ‘Practice Makes Easier’ and I wanted to tell you how it helped me. I’m an attorney specializing in start-up companies in the San Francisco Bay area. “As you know, or at least can imagine, this area attracts immigrants from all over the world with high concentrations from China and India, among other places. Many of my clients are founded by and employ a large number of non-native English speakers. At on onsite presentation I gave today, I think I was one of maybe three native English speakers in the room.

“Thinking of the episode, I made a special effort to remember that many folks were not native English speakers. I usually like to think of my job as translating law speak into English, but now I’ve come to see that maybe there’s a second step of translation involved as well. I’m putting an extra effort into being as clear as I can and also very, very patient. In the words, try not to be an asshole.”

Megan Figueroa: Aww, Jeffrey! [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: “I just thought that you should know that your podcast is actually changing behavior. I enjoy it very much, although I sorta hope I wasn’t an asshole before I started listening either. Please keep up the good work. Jeff.”

Thank you so much!

Megan Figueroa: Wow! A little sneak peek behind the scenes again. Carrie was like, “I have an email” and I was wondering if it was tooting our own horn. And she kinda hinted that, yes – yes, it is. But I didn’t know it’d be tooting our horn so good.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, no. This is really nice. It’s exactly what we wanna do in the world, right?

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. That’s fantastic. I doubt that people that listen – I like to think that people that listen to our podcast aren’t huge assholes – raging assholes – in the first place. I’m sure Jeff was not a huge asshole in the first place, but I really appreciate that email. Thank you.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. Me too.

Megan Figueroa: I mean, I, too, learn from our podcast because, I mean, we have people that – we have guests on here for a reason because we don’t know everything. It’s definitely made me more thoughtful as well.

Carrie Gillon: Me too.

Megan Figueroa: I like hearing that. And thank you, Dr. Melissa. There was a little Twitter fiasco around a very racist tweet related to language that we missed that we didn’t get to talk about. Luckily, someone screen shot it because it was deleted.

Carrie Gillon: Well, rightfully so. This was definitely one of those tweets that you should be like, “Oops.”

Megan Figueroa: I think that that’s what happened. Because it’s – I actually don’t know how many people follow this Twitter. So, I’m looking at the screen shot and it’s @HSTeachProbs – “teacher problems,” “high school teacher problems” – and it says, “‘I ain’t trippin’ is probably one of the most annoying phrases a student can say. What are some other annoying phrases your kids say that get under your skin?”

Carrie Gillon: “#Stuffstudentssay" and I'm fixing this: "#teacherproblems.”

Megan Figueroa: Then, you shared with me someone’s lovely tweet. This is @KaiserMoore. “I feel like all the white teachers saying that African American Vernacular English is annoying should be removed from predominantly black schools. They’re clearly holding prejudice against the students they are supposed to be there to help.” Which – absolutely.

Carrie Gillon: The reason why I even saw this was because someone else quote-tweeted it and said something like “All teachers should be removed from all schools” – “Any teacher who has these ideas should be removed from all schools.” And I was like, “Yeah. You’re right.” I mean, yes, it’s more of a problem when you’re in a class with black children, but if you’re infecting children with these ideas regardless of their race, it’s very problematic.

Megan Figueroa: Absolutely. I mean, that’s gonna be coming through in whatever you do, then. Obviously, when you think that you hold different ways of speaking above each other and, as we’ve learned on the show, that means that you are holding people above each other. I mean, you’re creating a hierarchy here and you’re passing that on if you believe that – if you’re teaching kids from that point of view.

Carrie Gillon: If we wanna fight white supremacy, I mean, the biggest source of it is white people, right? We want the white kids not to pick up on these ideas. Granted, obviously there’s gonna be other places where they can. But at least in the school we should be helping them not pick up these ideas.

Megan Figueroa: It sucks though because that’s still the biggest population of teachers just from the way that things have shaken out is white women.

Carrie Gillon: Yes. There are a variety of reasons for that. Because it used to be, at least, more gender-balanced but then the pay was so bad men won’t do it anymore. And then, yeah, there’s obviously reasons why it’s mostly white women. Obviously, not all white women are gonna have these kinds of racist ideas but many, many do.

Megan Figueroa: Right. Let us hope that there’re some that hold this view that, when told, they’re like, “Oh, shit.”

Carrie Gillon: “That was a bad thing to think” – yes.

Megan Figueroa: Yes.

Carrie Gillon: Well, let’s hope that because they deleted the tweet, they realized how bad it actually was.

Megan Figueroa: And not just because they were like, “I don’t wanna deal” –

Carrie Gillon: “Deal with it.”

Megan Figueroa: Exactly. It’s sad for me because this is a reminder – I don’t think that this is uncommon. That’s the problem that this is –

Carrie Gillon: It’s incredibly common. I mean, we know this. I didn’t get this exact message from my classes but – from my teachers – but something kind of like it that there were “correct” ways of speaking and “correct” ways of writing. And, yeah, there was hidden anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity and anti-everything else in there. It was just more subtle.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. Absolutely. No. It’s not an innocuous thing to say, “I ain’t trippin’ isn’t” – “I hate when my students say that.” This is no innocuous. This is part of a much bigger problem. I dunno. I dunno what the message is here. Just the message that we always have, I guess. Don’t be an asshole.

Carrie Gillon: At least, at the very least, keep your bad ideas about language to yourself because it’s not helping you. It’s not helping the kids that you teach, and it’s not helping the communities around you. Stop.

Megan Figueroa: I know. Think about it a little bit – about where this is coming from our why you might think this.

Carrie Gillon: We all have things to unpack. All of us. All of us have grown up with bad ideas about language in particular and other things in general.

Megan Figueroa: Absolutely.

Carrie Gillon: You’ve gotta work through it but don’t work through it on Twitter. [Laughter] All right. Yeah. This is episode really fun and uplifting.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. It almost sounds like we never have anything fun or uplifting to say. Like, “Let’s preface this by saying, ‘Hey! This is a fun, uplifting episode today.’”

Carrie Gillon: I guess they’re usually a least somewhat uplifting. It’s just that there’s something even more uplifting about this one because it’s the living languages episode, right? It’s about Wikitongues, which allows people to upload their own language video or audio – although they encourage video – so people can at least record what their language is actually like right now regardless of what it was like in the past, regardless of what it will be like in the future, just a snapshot. It’s just – I love it.

Megan Figueroa: I love it too. It’s a reminder that language is living. And it’s okay that it changes.

Carrie Gillon: Language will always change no matter what you try to do. Colonization had this huge impact on many different languages, and I don’t wanna ignore that, but it is what it is. Languages would’ve changed even if that hadn’t happened.

Megan Figueroa: Right. To have a little place on the internet to celebrate what your language sounds like now is lovely.

[Music]

Carrie Gillon: Okay. Today, we have Daniel Bögre Udell who’s the co-founder of Wikitongues, a non-profit organization that aims to document all of the world’s languages. Welcome, Daniel.

Megan Figueroa: Thanks for being here.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Thank you for having me.

Carrie Gillon: Of course!

Megan Figueroa: Excited to talk about this today. I’ve heard of Wikitongues, but I don’t know much about it. I don’t know anything, actually. I don’t know how old or young – you’re gonna tell us all about that, right?

Daniel Bögre Udell: It’s funny. I’ve been following Vocal Fries on Twitter for a while and so, Carrie, when I found out that you and I would be on that show together, I was excited because it was an opportunity to meet you too.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. It was an interesting experience. It was really strange being on a TV show that will be shown soon, I think. It was all very professional. There’s a panel. And I was, like, way far away if you’re in Phoenix. And that was in London, I believe.

Daniel Bögre Udell: It was my first remote talking head experience actually.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. Me too.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, wow. Was it a BBC thing?

Carrie Gillon: No. It was a Turkish news channel. I don’t remember what it was called. Do you remember, Daniel?

Daniel Bögre Udell: Off the top of my head, I do not. Well, the show itself was called “Round Table,” but I don’t remember what the network was.

Megan Figueroa: Okay. Well, very cool. We’ll have to share that when it comes out.

Carrie Gillon: Definitely. So, tell a us a little bit about Wikitongues. How old is it? Why did you start it? Etc.?

Daniel Bögre Udell: Sure. Wikitongues started in 2014 as a non-profit initiative to crowd-source documentation in every language. We started with oral histories because that is a kind of linguistic documentation that is easy to do without a lot of training or advanced equipment. Pretty much anybody with a smartphone or with access to a smartphone can produce them.

We did that for two reasons, 1.) language revitalization is only possible when accessible documentation is available in the language in question and, from a question of representation and inclusion, we thought it would be an interesting online project to try and represent every language in the world, which is in effect representing every culture in the world.

As we grew, we started to get the question, “How do I save my language?” which is an incredibly loaded question and one to which there really isn’t a systemic answer despite all the work on language revitalization over the past few decades. Starting this year, we’re actually teaming up with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to build a toolkit for people who wanna get started with language activism in their communities.

The idea is giving people a framework to do a health check on their language. So, if you are worried about the future of your language, you can actually assess what it needs because different languages need different things, right? If your language has already been documented and the community has that documentation, maybe what you actually need is a framework for community organizing to keep it relevant for young people. Or maybe your language actually is undocumented or under-documented and you actually need to start from the beginning with oral histories, dictionaries, whatever.

The idea is to give people the framework for doing this health check and then a roadmap to achieving what needs to be achieved. Because over the past 30 years, there has been a ground swell of language activism around the world and there are successful cases of languages being revitalized, or perhaps a better way to put it is there are successful cases of cultures keeping their languages alive – people asserting their cultural sovereignty.

There are universal lessons there, we think, that can be applied because there are cases of languages being revitalized with the help of a government. And there are cases of languages being revitalized in an entirely unfunded and grassroots way with no institutional support. Then, there are cases where people have attempted to keep their languages alive and not succeeded, right? Our hope is to be able to build a very wide and open front door to the process of language activism.

Megan Figueroa: You said, “crowd source,” and I think sometimes – I’m always skeptical when I hear that because it’s so sad in the US how we have to crowd source, like, people’s medical bills and all this stuff. But this is one of those things where I feel like crowd sourcing is the right thing to do, that way the community can be involved. You may hear from groups that we didn’t know that wanted some outside help or whatever – or these frameworks to work with.

I like the idea that the internet can be used for crowd sourcing in this way, especially when we get kind of jaded when we see all the ways where it’s kinda sad that we have to crowd source things.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Yeah. The internet is powerful technology, and all powerful technology has good and bad application. In this case, I think it’s good application. What we’re doing would not be possible without the internet. One really positive thing from the past few years is that increasingly more and more people have access to internet. It’s not always stable. It’s not always good. But, for the first time, they have it.

What’s interesting is every now and then we’ll get contacted by someone who just got internet in their town, and the internet’s not very good yet, but they wanna contribute soon. There was someone who reached out to use from the interior of Papua New Guinea. One of the first things that he wanted to do was see if there are other people around the world that are concerned about this, and he found that there were.

It’s a very, very exciting thing that makes me very optimistic. I really am pretty confident that the internet is going to be a really positive thing for marginalized peoples because it offers a way to organize around your language when your community has been culturally displaced.

Carrie Gillon: It’s been great to see, for example, on Twitter people using their language – just tweeting in their language and not using the dominant language, which has been really fun.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Absolutely. It really creates an opportunity for breathing space for your language because one of the most challenging things for language revitalization movements is, if your community has been culturally displaced, it becomes almost impossible to use your language in the ancestral homeland because it’s been displaced by a more dominant one.

With the internet, you can circumvent that and create Whatsapp groups and Facebook groups and other online forums where you can use the language on a daily basis without the pressure of a locally dominant one. That’s an increasingly common tactic among language activists. And it usually leads to good results.

Carrie Gillon: What has been one of your favorite results that you’ve been a part of?

Daniel Bögre Udell: That’s a really good question. We’re just starting to scratch the surface of support for language activist movement, so I would feel very uncomfortable necessarily giving Wikitongues credit for an actual language revitalization initiative. We have definitely been a platform for people looking to amplify some of their work.

I don’t wanna say I have a favorite, but some of the ones from the past year that have been particularly meaningful to me is the Kihunde language in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It only has about 200,000 thousand speakers. Children are learning it but it’s very under-documented and it has no institutional support. Wikitongues has been a channel for a man named Hangi Bulebe, who is at the center of this effort to keep the language alive, teach it to children, standardize it, and all that.

He said that being able to share the language on a global platform like Wikitongues has helped accelerate work for him because he says when people in the community look at him skeptically, he says, “Well, look, people from other countries care about our language. Why can’t we?” That, he said, has resonated with people. I met him in person for the first time in Rwanda a couple months ago and this was one of the things he said, which was just fabulous.

Another movement that we have been a platform for amplifying is – and, really, that I just feel privileged to get to be close to – is the effort to revitalize the Tunica language of Louisiana, which went dormant in 1948. If you haven’t had any of the members of that community on your show, you should definitely invite them because they’re doing really, really cool work and they love sharing it with the rest of the world.

They’re one of the languages that prompted Ethnologue to add a “reawakening” category to the language vitality scale because they – the language went dormant in 1948. In the 1980s, a woman named Donna Pierite decided that she wanted to revitalize it, and that was partly because her husband is Choctaw. He was learning Choctaw. Choctaw is a language that is still being taught to children and still spoken natively.

She paused and said, “Wait. We don’t actually have our language anymore. But we had one.” So, she would go to Baton Rogue and New Orleans to photocopy old dictionaries and grammars and things that were kinda stored away in university archives, and she brought the language home that way and made it a family activity. She reclaimed Tunica, taught it to her children.

For a long time, they were the movement – their family was the movement to revitalize Tunica. In the 90s, they started sending out newsletters – physical newsletters because the internet mailing lists were still a fresh technology – and other families started to get involved in that way. Something happened in the late – like, 2010 or something around that year – where they got some support, academic support, from linguists in New Orleans and over that next few years they were able to convince the tribal government to actually allocate funding and resources for the program.

Now, I think upwards of 10% of the tribe is enrolled in language immersion. They have 32 new fluent speakers, hence the new “reawakening” category. This is very inspiring to me, personally. One of my more immediate ancestral languages is Yiddish, which means I also have a connection to the Hebrew language, which went dormant in the second century and was revitalized in the 1800s by Jewish activists at that time.

For a long time, that was the only instance of a dormant language being reclaimed by its people. The Tunica are another case of that. In so enthusiastically promoting their work online and around the world, I think it’s a source of inspiration for other people. So, those are two cases that I feel very grateful to have been close to.

Megan Figueroa: I know people are in their communities doing work, but sometimes the help or support they need is really just amplification, which is really great that Wikitongues can do something like that. Those are really good examples of it. Because maybe the framework that they need is just how can I get a bigger audience to hear our oral histories because this is something that we want to share, or we just want people to know what we’re doing.

So, it’s really great that that’s where Wikitongues is coming from. Because linguists have gone into communities and kind of been this savior-type people. They try to be the savior-type people or force things on people. I know, just, linguistics has this terrible history, so it’s really lovely to hear something where it’s like this is about the people and what they need – or what they want – and sometimes that’s just sharing.

Daniel Bögre Udell: There’s one language activist in Scotland – his name’s Àdhamh Ó Broin – and if either of you watch that Showtime show, Outlander, he’s the Gaelic dialect coach for that show. He’s very, very intent on keeping alive his dialect – or his variety of Scottish Gaelic – which is moribund. They’re classified as moribund. Scottish Gaelic, obviously, is not classified as moribund.

He is linguistically trained, right? He is actually a linguist. He just happens to be a dialect coach. He’s very able to do the documentation work. That is not a challenge for him. For him, he said his biggest desire is just to talk to other people who are doing this work because sometimes it can be lonely. There’s a huge community building and solidarity aspect to it.

I do wanna say that at least in my experience over the past several years, there’s been a huge shift in linguistics to be the discipline that supports people in this work, especially the new generation of linguistics who’re doing incredible work. The question is, how can we standardize some of these processes? Like, the Tunica did something correct, right? That can be replicated, not exactly the same way because every community has different needs, but there are universal lessons that everyone can have been there just aren’t enough field linguists in the world to help everybody who needs help.

It needs to be thought of in these systemics terms. I’m excited that we can be part of that conversation and hopefully, actually, behind some producing materials that can be useful to people.

Megan Figueroa: Well, I really like the idea that can be their own community’s field linguist, so that’s something that can facilitate that because you’re right that there aren’t enough PhD field linguists that can go everywhere or have particular skills for a particular community. The idea that you could be your own community’s field linguist is really great.

It’s funny because I’ve been thinking, I dunno, all these think pieces about the new decade and has the internet ruined us and what has the internet done in the last 10 years. It’s nice to hear these stories about how the internet can actually make the world smaller in a good way.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Yeah. I mean, I’m very optimistic. I think the internet obviously has its problems, but I worry that a lot of the critiques of the internet come from jaded people who live in places that have had the internet for a very long time and who just spend too much time on –

Megan Figueroa: Twitter?

Daniel Bögre Udell: – following people on – yeah. And I love Twitter, but you can unfollow people if they’re annoying. So much of this is – nobody who just got the internet last year is mad about it. Right? So, a little global context would be nice beyond “Partisan arguments on twitter are mean-spirited and therefore the internet sucks.” So much of the critique is that. It’s just so limited and is unfortunate.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of bad actors on the internet, but it’s true that in some ways you can make your experience better by blocking the ones that are for sure bad actors and focusing on the ones that are good, which is what I do try to do.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Right. There’ve been bad actors since before the internet.

Carrie Gillon: Of course. Just because the internet’s so powerful, it’s really to easy in a bad way, just like it’s really easy to use in a good way. Let’s focus on the good!

Daniel Bögre Udell: That’s right. It’s like nuclear technology – double-edged sword.

Carrie Gillon: Absolutely. 100%. Why is this work so important?

Daniel Bögre Udell: Why is this work important? I think this work is important because language is the vehicle of expression for communities. When a language disappears, it means that a community has collapsed. I saw this BBC headline the other day that was – it was just a headline. I didn’t actually read the article. But the fact that this is the headline that got written as it did is so indicative of how the discourse around this stuff needs to improve.

It was like, “Yeah. Yiddish used to have ten million speakers in Europe and now those numbers have depleted.” [Groaning] Right? It’s like, “No. There was a genocide that murdered everybody.” What we’re talking about is Ashkenazi Jews in Europe were the victims of a massive genocide. That’s why Yiddish’s number of speaks have depleted.

And that’s how we talk about all these languages. Like, Lakota isn’t a “dying” language, Lakota is a language that is taking work to be kept alive because the community has been at the blunt end of genocide, land theft, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of systemic racism. Language revitalization is a way for communities who have been marginalized to assert themselves on the global stage. It’s about justice. It’s about reparation. That’s why I think it’s most important.

Then, there’s this more intangible question of knowledge. Because, in languages, there’s almost always unique vocabulary, which sometimes have biological applications, which is why there’re fields in biology that work with local language speakers to accelerate conservation. It contains prehistories. We know about the Bantu migration and the Bering Strait migration in part because of how languages change across vast geographies. It’s so important. It intersects with everything.

Megan Figueroa: I’m so glad that you brought up the point about Lakota’s not dying – or to say that a language is “dying” – I’ve heard a lot of people starting to say that they don’t like to hear this kind of language around a language, like saying it’s “dying.”

I think that’s such a good point because I’ve been thinking a lot about intergenerational trauma. Even say the Jewish people that did survive the holocaust and did speak Yiddish, there may be some trauma there that makes you not want to pass on a language. I see that in Spanish in the American Southwest. I’m learning more about this and how that’s happening in Ireland with the Irish language.

To remember that things have been done – horrible atrocities have been done – to people and what happens with language is kind of the consequence –

Carrie Gillon: -knock-on effect.

Megan Figueroa: Exactly. I think that’s so important for people to sit and think about.

Carrie Gillon: The thought I had was – I didn’t realize until really recently because I am not Jewish but, I dunno, like a year or two ago someone posted something about, “Did you know that in 1939 there were more Jewish people on the planet than there are now?” and I just couldn’t even believe it. I mean, I believed it, obviously, but you know what I mean? It was just like, “Oh my god. That’s so true.” Obviously, that’s true as soon as you say that.

The tie-in with Yiddish is also very important and, yeah, we really need to talk about these things differently. I know some of the language has changed towards “sleeping” or “dormant,” but that still doesn’t get at the heart of it, which is what you’re talking about, Daniel, which is like, “This is the result of genocide usually.”

Daniel Bögre Udell: Or, if not genocide, at least forced assimilation. The Occitan people weren’t necessarily victims of physical genocide in France, but there was a concerted effort by the French government to erase Occitan identity, culture, and language, and forcibly make the French. How did they do that? The beat children in school who were speaking Occitan. They forbade the use of Occitan in the public sphere.

And, low and behold, within a generation, the people kinda had their culture squeezed out of them. That’s the nicest case. It’s funny that you bring up the intergenerational trauma because there is this other counter-discourse that I hear sometimes which is that, “Well, if the community doesn’t wanna teach their language to their kids anymore, that’s their choice.”

Going back to the Yiddish case because that’s my personal one, it’s like, there’s a reason that my dad wasn’t taught Yiddish. It’s because Ashkenazi Jews fled Europe and they either went to Israel, or they said we’re gonna speak Hebrew now and reclaim this ancient language, or we’re gonna go somewhere else and assimilate. And if we assimilate, they’ll be nice to us.

It’s sad. Language is about so much more – so much more. I was talking to another person you should get on the show. Her name’s Hali Dardar. I forget home to pronounce her last name. She’s from the Houma community in Louisiana. Their language, when it went dormant – potentially problematic description, but for lack of a better phrasing – it was undocumented.

Unlike Tunica, there were no complete dictionaries and grammars gathering dust in libraries. So, they’re in the middle of reconstructing Houma before they can consider reclaiming it. When I asked her what her end-goal was, it’s like, do you want this to be the mother tongue again of Houma people? And said, “Maybe. But I just want us all to feel Houma and not forget.”

That’s really what the core is. Revitalizing language is about community. It’s about history. It’s about your ancestors, your descendants, your place on earth.

Carrie Gillon: And the stories about who you are.

Megan Figueroa: I mean, I think about it because – I’ve talked about it before – how I feel like Spanish was forcibly removed from my generation. But Spanish is always gonna be there for me when I want to learn it. It won’t be, perhaps, not my family’s Spanish, but it’ll be there for me.

Whereas, these languages, are they gonna be there? That’s the question. We want them to be there. But, again, just this horrible ways that we have treated other human being where we’ve got to the point where we are where there are some languages that are, for lack of a better word, “dormant,” it’s not true for everyone that that language will be there for them, unfortunately.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Right. That’s why the documentation side of things is so important. We have one oral history of a language from Vanuatu called Lemerig. It has two known speakers. From what I understand, there isn’t really any active movement to revitalize the language and the culture.

If in 30 years there is, there emerges that desire, it’s important that the language be there for the community to bring it back. With the Tunica case, the last native speaker was the Chief – Sesostrie Youchigant, I think was his name. You can ask them when you bring either Donna or Jean-Luc or any of them on the show.

He worked with a linguist named Mary Haas to produce dictionaries and grammars because he knew that he had to leave the language behind for the next generation. It took 30 years. He passed away in 1948. It was the 80s when Donna Pierite started this movement again. So, thank goodness it was there. Thank goodness he did that. The documentation is so important and the first step, really.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. It’s the first step that it’s necessary but not sufficient.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Yeah. I’m convinced that there’s actually been a huge shift in the history of cultural diversity over the past couple years and we’re just starting to realize what that is because I think this statistic that half the languages in the world are gonna disappear in 80 years keeps getting touted and that statistic is from the 90s. Even then, there were different estimations.

But let’s be charitable and say this estimation was correct. That was the 90s. There was no Tunica revitalization – well, I guess they had started, but it was still a couple families. There’re just a lot of cases of languages being in a better – and cultures, really, communities – being in a better position now than they were in the 90s.

I mean, there’re probably cases of others being worse. So, maybe the net is not any better. That’s part of what makes this so hard because it’s so vast a scale.

Carrie Gillon: It’s really hard to estimate how many languages really are under extreme threat or just a little bit of threat. It’s hard to really know for sure because we don’t – and no one person has that amount of information. We can’t possibly know.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Exactly. That’s why I think another thing that needs to happen for an infrastructure to sustain cultural diversity at scale is beyond there being these systems or these frameworks for people to do the work in their communities. There needs to be a better survey method that’s more frequent, more consistent.

Carrie Gillon: Because even census data isn’t that good. I mean, it’s really good but, like, it’s not very frequent and it’s not that deep.

Megan Figueroa: It’s different from each country, right?

Carrie Gillon: Exactly. Each country does it differently.

Daniel Bögre Udell: When you look at Ethnologue or Glottolog – they work with what they have. This is no knock on them. But sometimes you’ll see the last datum about this language is 1980. It’s like, “Cool. That’s where this language was 40 years ago.” A lot can happen in 40 years.

I was having a conversation with a Shanghainese person. That’s her heritage language. She doesn’t really speak it. She’s American, I think. But she was like, “How long until Shanghainese dies?” And I was like, “Well, damn. That’s a question.” I was like, “It’s not even classified as endangered.” Maybe it’s not. Maybe this is just her perception. Or maybe she’s getting news from relatives back home that the language is not spoken anywhere near like it was 10 years ago, and the census isn’t even caught up with that.

Of course, Beijing is not gonna be taking censuses about this stuff because they’re one of the few countries that is still actively working to assimilate minorities. This stuff is really messy. There needs to be a better survey method that would probably rely on some self-reporting, which is its own unreliable can of worms.

Carrie Gillon: But I think it’s the best that we would have in this instance. Because there might only be one speaker, and so who else is gonna report it but that one person?

Daniel Bögre Udell: Exactly. There would also have to be a way to report and track language revitalization that would be okay. There’s a new initiative on the ground – and then also keep track of all the different ones. Because the Tunica case is really interesting. It’s got incredible momentum over the past 10 years. But for the first 20 years, it was just a few really persistent people. There’s a lot of variables to track, I think.

Megan Figueroa: Well, and of course, most of these languages do not have institutional support. With institutional support would come, perhaps, some better numbers on things. But that’s not what’s happening. That’s not the reality.

Carrie Gillon: I’m curious about the Yiddish case. I know there was a revitalization effort. Is that still ongoing? And if so, are you involved in that at all?

Daniel Bögre Udell: Not yet. I’m decided that I’m gonna start with the – I’m learning Hebrew right now. And once I get conversational, I’ll move over to Yiddish. The reason I did that is just because all Jewish languages are Hebrew plus something else, right? So, I was like, “I’ll start with the oldest one.” There’s a certain ancestral quality to it that has drawn me to it. I will learn Yiddish when I get a little more proficient in Hebrew.

There is a lot of Yiddish activism right now because, for a long period, the only community that really kept it alive were the different orthodox communities in North America. There was a secular – what was really depleted, as the BBC said, was the secular Yiddish world, which was lively and had theater and literature and all this stuff.

There is a movement to bring that back. A lot of young, especially diaspora, Jews in North America are starting to rediscover that because it really is the one that we can go back a couple generations and find an ancestor speaking. In fact, another guest you should get on the show is a woman named Sandy Fox. She lives between Tel Aviv and New York. She’s part of that whole movement. She actually runs a feminist podcast in Yiddish.

Carrie Gillon: Cool! Definitely need to have her on.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. Definitely!

Daniel Bögre Udell: She’s great. So, there’s a lot of that. That’s definitely happening. What’s interesting is because the orthodox communities, especially here in New York City, they kept the language alive, it was there for the rest of us – as you put it, Megan – because they had kept the language alive, it was there for the rest of us when we were ready to come back.

Megan Figueroa: As a kid – I’m very millennial-age, and the internet came around for me when I was like 8 or 9. The best part about it is – well, it wasn’t Google then, but whatever kind of search engine I had – I could ask questions like, “Is Yiddish still spoken?” Because I remember watching “Laverne and Shirley” and being like, “What did they say? Like, ‘schlemiel,’ ‘schlimazel’?”

[Excerpt “Laverne and Shirley”]

Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!

[End excerpt]

I was like, “What? What is that?” Being able to finally ask – because I was just this kid in Phoenix, Arizona. I knew Mexican culture and that’s about it. I didn’t know whether Yiddish was spoken or was it fake. This is where I was at 8, based on who was around me. I’m just so happy that kids these days – or anyone, I mean, I’m not saying you have to be a kid to know whether if Yiddish is spoken and where – to be able to go to the internet and be like, “Tell me.” Just how powerful knowledge is about language.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Exactly. It’s history, which is interesting and important. So, your ancestral language is Spanish?

Megan Figueroa: Yes. Well, my dad speaks Spanish and my – I have traced it back five generations to Sonora, Mexico, my family.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Incredible. Do you speak it now?

Megan Figueroa: A little bit. I’m more receptive, so I can understand it. I get really skittish about speaking it because I have this shame of people expecting me to have the knowledge that they expect of me because of my last name or because my dad spoke it. That’s where my baggage is at.

Carrie Gillon: There’s also a lot of shaming from other people like, “Oh, you don’t speak the real Spanish.” Makes it hard.

Megan Figueroa: Exactly.

Daniel Bögre Udell: That stuff is so toxic. We’ll get comments on our YouTube channel a lot in that vein like, “This person is not speaking the language well.” And it’s like, “Well, okay. Of course not because of the history of how this person got access to their language. Calm down.” Celebrate that they speak it. It’s all right if it has some loanwords from the dominant language. Our thing is always like, “Okay. Then you send a video.” Sometimes, people do and, sometimes, they go away.

Carrie Gillon: That’s a really good response.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Because that’s our thing, right? We’re not policing authenticity.

Carrie Gillon: No. Nor should you. How would you?

Daniel Bögre Udell: It’s funny how ubiquitous the desire to police authenticity is though because we get those comments from a wide range of communities on every continent. There’s always that person who says, “This person’s not speaking well.” I get the desire to keep the language alive in its most robust state because it probably has better vocabulary than the loanwords that this person is using – but celebrate that they still speak it.

Carrie Gillon: Well, there’s also dialect differences too that sometimes people either forget about or don’t wanna admit exist. So, you come from the wrong family? Oh, that means you’re not speaking correctly. I’ve definitely encountered that as well.

Megan Figueroa: That’s why I like to use the pronouns like “my Spanish,” “This is what my Spanish is,” or “That’s what your French is.” I think it gets around that because, again, I do have these insecurities but it’s like, “No, this one’s mine.” I try to remember that when people are cruel. But it’s true. The policing comes from inside the community, outside the community. It's everywhere.

So, people send videos to Wikitongues?

Daniel Bögre Udell: Yes.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, that’s so cool. I mean, I’m sure there’s just audio recordings as well, but to see videos, what a great resource to have.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Video’s important because it puts a face to the language. It makes the evidence of language and culture a little more explicit. It’s also necessary if you’re looking at every language because at least 300 of the world’s languages are signed. You cannot have an audio recording for that language.

Megan Figueroa: Exactly. That’s exactly the point I was getting to is, I’m so glad that they’re video because – yes. Myself, I probably made this mistake growing up too, a lot of Americans think that ASL is the signed language, but there’re so many signed languages.

Daniel Bögre Udell: In my travels I found this to be a global misconception.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, really? Okay.

Daniel Bögre Udell: I mean, not ASL exactly, but most people think that there is a sign language that all people who are deaf in the whole world speak somehow. And then when you say, “No, they all have different languages,” people have a hard time processing that until you say, “Well, there’s different spoken languages and it’s the same thing.” And they go, “Oh.”

Carrie Gillon: This is probably the most common misconception about language that I’ve encountered as well is that there’s one sign language. For once, it’s not just Americans.

Megan Figueroa: I always like to drag Americans under the bus – [Laughter]

Daniel Bögre Udell: What’s more American than that?

Megan Figueroa: It’s just a recreational activity. [Laughter] I do it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, I just think it’s great because, like I said – I’m obviously a linguist, a trained linguist, now – but the internet’s helped me so much to learn about language. I hope our podcast does that as well because I think there’re a lot of things that people might be too scared to ask.

I like to remind everyone that I am very naïve. I’m still – in my 30-plus years and after a PhD program – I’m still very naïve. And I think that we can’t be ashamed.

Carrie Gillon: We can’t possibly know everything.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. You can’t be ashamed. If you have to go and Google, “Where is Yiddish spoken?” after this, that’s okay.

Carrie Gillon: In fact, I encourage you to do because you will learn something for sure.

Daniel Bögre Udell: It’s totally fine. People always get confused about – because they don’t understand that there’s multiple Jewish languages, and so they’ll confuse Yiddish and Hebrew a lot. And I’m like, “No. Very different.” One’s close to Arabic and one’s close to German. Then, there’s also Ladino and Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Farsi and Judeo-Malayalam, which is one that I just learned about recently and I’d never even known about existing.

It’s like, okay. Because I think that’s the other thing, I think, when people start, they get really intimidated because culture is so vast, and they don’t wanna be perceived as ignorant or they don’t wanna offend people – a lot of eggshell walking. And it’s like, “No. Just ask the questions. As long as you’re being respectful, it’s fine. No one should be expected to know everything.”

Carrie Gillon: It’s impossible.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. How are you supposed to know it until you learn it?

Carrie Gillon: And it’s impossible to know everything. It’s just impossible. Just learning a little bit every day, that’s good.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Exactly. Learn one new thing every day.

Carrie Gillon: I think that’s a good life lesson.

Megan Figueroa: I think it is too. It’s also a great plug for listening to Vocal Fries.

Daniel Bögre Udell: By the way, I love your name. Because I actually found you through Twitter because I’m not an avid podcast-listener. I remember when I saw that, I was like – follow.

Carrie Gillon: I’m pretty proud of that.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Are your listeners well prompted on the whole vocal fry?

Megan Figueroa: Yes. And we don’t get hate mail about our voices. I think that that is also a really good thing is like, “Okay. We’re coming right out, and our name is the Vocal Fries, and we’re about linguistic discrimination. Don’t shit on how either one of us talk.”

Daniel Bögre Udell: It’s true. You have a built-in defense barrier, which is pretty cool.

Megan Figueroa: I hope it makes our customers – our customers? – our guests –

Carrie Gillon: What? [Laughs]

Megan Figueroa: – our guests feel comfortable too because we’re like, “You’re safe in this space.”

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. No shaming allowed.

Megan Figueroa: There is no language shaming here. That’s for sure.

Daniel Bögre Udell: No language shaming, baby.

Carrie Gillon: Exactly. How can people support Wikitongues?

Daniel Bögre Udell: Oh, there’s a lot. We’ve only worked with about 500 language communities. I’ve kind of been off the grid for the past few days taking long walks and recovering from New Years, so the number’s probably a little higher now – maybe it’s like 504 or something. But that’s only 14% of every known culture.

There is an endless amount of contribution still to be done to this seedbank of linguistic and cultural diversity. Please, send us videos of your language – whatever that language is and however you speak it. We love all dialects, sociolects, idiolects, accents. Then, of course, you can also donate to Wikitongues – wikitongues.org/donate. Or, if you’re a Patreon user, you can make a monthly pledge on Patreon. You can subscribe to us on YouTube, which also helps.

Wikitongues is a non-profit. All contributions are tax-deductible. They go primarily to supporting the documentation work or now, also research on language revitalization as we work with the Living Tongues Institute to build this toolkit.

Finally, we have grown almost entirely organically over the past five years. Word of mouth is also an insanely valuable contribution to building the community that we’ve built. So, talk about us to your friends, help make the name known more around the world.

Megan Figueroa: Again, I feel a little naïve because I didn’t – I mean, you’ve been around for about 5 years now, and I just never pursued you further, and I feel guilty now. But I’m glad to know you know. That helps, right?

Daniel Bögre Udell: Oh, yeah. Hey, I never messaged you guys. I never tried to slide into the Twitter DM because we’re on the same – [laughter].

Carrie Gillon: Which you definitely could have. We encourage people to let us know if they have something interesting to talk about.

Daniel Bögre Udell: DMs are open.

Megan Figueroa: You know what would be a fun way to contribute – now that I’ve just spent time with family that I actually like, I know not everyone likes their family because family – but you could do that with your elders is ask them to contribute, and you can do it yourself. You can help them. You can use your smartphone. It’s a way to preserve some of your family’s culture too.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Absolutely. That’s something that I should have clarified a moment ago. Send us your language, but you can also send us your friend’s language too. You can send us your neighbor’s language. You can help people to participate. There was one volunteer in our very early days named Plator Gashi from Kosovo. He travelled all up and down the Baltics and must have contributed oral histories in up to 30 or 40 different languages.

Megan Figueroa: Wow. That’s very cool.

Daniel Bögre Udell: He is a remarkable individual. But, yeah, it doesn’t have to be you speaking is what I’m saying.

Megan Figueroa: Absolutely. That’s what I was thinking because I know some people might be shy. You don’t have to do a video either, right, it could be audio only?

Daniel Bögre Udell: It could be audio. We won’t publish it on YouTube if it’s just audio, but we will archive it. We’re on the verge of rolling out an accessible archive on our website so you can actually browse every video we’ve ever done, which is a long time in the making. But when you’re a non-profit, resources are limited, and tech is resource intensive.

We also are on the verge of rolling out templates for other kinds of documentation like phrasebooks, wordlists. If you do want to send us videos in the meantime, these templates are not yet out, but if you wanna send us videos, just head over to Wikitongues.org and you will see “Submit a Video” in the toolbar. There’s a form to fill out and a Google form if that doesn’t work.

Megan Figueroa: Awesome. We’ll be happy to update our listeners whenever ya’ll make progress on the new templates or projects.

Daniel Bögre Udell: Thank you. There’s a lot this year. I am grateful to have kicked it off with the Vocal Fries. Thank you for – [excited exclamations]

Carrie Gillon: Thank you so much.

Megan Figueroa: Well, it was so lovely to meet you virtually.

Daniel Bögre Udell: You too.

Megan Figueroa: Do you know how to say, “Don’t be an asshole?”

Daniel Bögre Udell: No. Not yet.

Carrie Gillon: That would be high level.

Megan Figueroa: It’s fine. One day.

Daniel Bögre Udell: That’s a great thing to learn how to say in a language. That should be a core phrasebook – we should add that to our phrasebook template.

Carrie Gillon: You should. Even if you make it slightly nicer and just say, “jerk,” I still think it’s an important thing for people to be able to say.

Megan Figueroa: Or “Be nice.” Something like that.

Carrie Gillon: “Be nice” is probably already in there, I’m guessing.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah.

Daniel Bögre Udell: “Don’t be an asshole”’s more fun though, right?

Carrie Gillon: It is way more fun!

Megan Figueroa: That’s why we always tell our listeners to not be an asshole. They know we mean it with love.

Carrie Gillon: It also feels more boundary-enforcing, which is sometimes really important.

Megan Figueroa: I can see that, yeah. I never thought of it that way.

Daniel Bögre Udell: On that note –

Megan Figueroa: So, don’t be an asshole.

Carrie Gillon: Don’t be an asshole. [Laughter]

[Music]

Carrie Gillon: Okay. We would like to thank our newest patrons for this month. Russell Lee Goldman, Paige Andrews, Jeff Goldman, and Ellen Pearleberg – or “Pearlberg.” It’s probably “Pearlberg.” I went a little French there.

Megan Figueroa: I love seeing names that I recognize from Twitter!

Carrie Gillon: Me too.

Megan Figueroa: Yay! Thank you so much.

Carrie Gillon: Thank you. If anyone still listening would like to support us, we have $2.00, $3.00, and $5.00 levels. The $2.00 level, you get a thank you. The $3.00 level you get a sticker. Actually, you get multiple stickers. You get a sticker every few months. $5.00 level you get the stickers and our bonus episodes.

Megan Figueroa: Yes. Our latest one is about child language, and I get real salty. So does Carrie.

Carrie Gillon: So do I but, yes, you do more so because it is your area.

Megan Figueroa: Yes.

Carrie Gillon: Thank you so much. We’ll –

Megan Figueroa: See you next time.

Carrie Gillon: See you in a couple weeks.

[Music]

Carrie Gillon: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, for Halftone Audio, theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

[End music]