#i lack context so i’m just Anticipating

[goldensunset]

“how badly did pmd rattle you guys” VERY. pmd2 makes up 75% of my personality

/j obviously but yeah uh. I played that one specifically for the first time back when I was a kid and I think a majority of my interests that followed it were deeply influenced by the experience I had with its story. A sizeable portion of the fandom has this in common I guess 😅

But whatever!! It’s up to you if/when you’d like to jump into it! No pressure 💖

i’m like trying to look up the list of games bc it seems like there are a lot. huh. it runs deeper than i thought…

as i’ve said i never played pokémon as a kid but my older siblings did and in addition to gen 4 i’d like sorta-watch them play super mystery dungeon (i’m pretty sure that was the one we had) and we’d adopt brainrot jokes as a sibling group. ‘picked up a stick and put it in the treasure bag’ was foundational to us. that is literally the only thing i remember. otherwise my knowledge of pmd is all from modern osmosis which includes ok something cool happens with dialga, there is some isekai thing going on, dusknoir betrays you, and y’all are NOT normal about the middle evo of the grass starter from gen 3!!! can’t wait to understand someday

[nicromancytarot]

NICROMANCY GETS SCAMMED - EPISODE 2

All I do on this app is complain.

Hello and welcome to part 2 of me possibly being scammed?? (I feel like this is deserved now, am I just really unlucky or something?)

16th of March @samisinsomniac messaged me for an exchange, I gave them their reading the next day 500 words as I mentioned I preferred, they responded with my reading the next day too, only with around 200 words, but I was thankful nonetheless!

I gave them a thank you, and some feedback on the reading, they also gave me a little bit of feedback for the one I gave to them.

On the 30th of March they messaged me again for some clarity on a situation through another exchange.

I got to their’s as soon as I could (which was immediately since I wasn’t busy that day), they were busy, but that’s ok, they said they would give mine to me by 10pm Indian standard time. India is 5 hours ahead of me, as I am set in the UK.

I proceeded to give their reading to them, 500 words as before, not only did I not receive any thank you, I also didn’t receive feedback. If you’re a Tarot reader, you will understand how crucial feedback is for us to better our talent and improve our work, and they know this very well, as they even mentioned to me during our first exchange for me to let them know how it resonates, and leave some feedback in their ask box.

To make matters worse, they did not give me my reading by 10pm IST. (It’s getting realll)

Here is their response to my reading, the blocked off part is me explaining the person’s feelings for them, I don’t want to put anyone’s personal information on blast, which is why that is covered.

They then said that they would send the reading to me that evening.

It was not delivered by that time either. DUH DUH DUH

I messaged them a tad worried, perhaps they’d been hit by a car and I was just being mad for no reason. They let me know that they had a medical issue, which made me feel evil for pacing my room in anticipation (I didn’t actually do that, only inside my mind palace)

Finally, I received my reading! It was… 200 words, but alas! At least I got it and everyone is alive.

Now the average person would take this as a lesson not to exchange again, just in case they get caught up with another medical issue you know, or maybe the reading is short. (Which ever one is worse. IM KIDDING)

They had a birthday! Turned 18, that’s great, I’m also 18, they messaged me about it, then asked me if I did 18+ readings.

Sometimes I lack context clues, but personally I feel like my confusion here is pretty valid. Plus! Their profile said they don’t do 18+, I’m very valid in my confusion.

Anyways! They ask for my question, I give it, then they give me theirs, they ask if it’s ok, I let them know it is.

But I was hungry and needed to shower, so I also let them know that.

They were doing my reading at 7:26pm, I got out my shower at 10:48pm…. somethings not adding up! So I sent a little message, letting them know about my recent scam, and how I did not want to get scammed again so they would have to send it first.

However, they have not responded, it’s been 3 days, since they apparently started my reading? Now I’m no Tarot Goddess, but I’m pretty sure you would be done with a reading by day 3.

Listen, I don’t wanna fight or argue, I’m just a little funny guy who does Tarot, no fight in me, you message me in caps and I think I’ll cry.

This is not to cause an argument, or to throw hands at anybody, I just don’t like being lied to or taking advantage of as a smaller Tarot reader.

It’s only been 3 days, I was planning on waiting longer to post this, however I feel like now is fine as I’ve clearly been lied to about when they started their reading, which I’m not sure if it was to receive theirs early from me, I got no clue dude, what I do know is I am really tired of people doing this to me, please stop, before I actually cast a spell for you to clip into the back rooms.

Scammers: 2 Nicromancy: 0

Please stop scamming me, you’re embarrassing me in front of my spirit guides. 😔

[fkinkindagauche]

The Most Gourd-geous Pumpkin in the Patch

I did, in fact, start a fic based on this Wiggly Wednesday. The first chapter is up on AO3 - read it here, tags/content warnings over there. Brief description - No Upside Down Omegaverse AU, explicit, Steve and Eddie meet in their mid-to-late thirties over some pumpkins.

Here's a little excerpt.

“Hello?” a man’s voice said. Steve could hear loud music playing in the background. 

“Um, hi,” Steve said. He hadn’t prepared a spiel like he usually did when calling someone, and he froze. Amos meowed loudly.

“Are you a cat?” the man asked, laughter in his voice. “Is a cat calling me? This is wild.”

“N-no,” Steve stammered. “I mean, yes, there is a cat here, but there’s also a person. Me. Steve.”

“Ooooh,” the man said. “The plot thickens. A Steve and a cat. What’s the cat’s name?”

“Amos,” Steve replied automatically. How had this conversation gone off the rails so quickly? Amos lifted up his head at the sound of his name and meowed again.

“Anus? You named your cat anus?” the man asked, incredulous.

Steve rolled his eyes. He hadn’t anticipated how common this response would be when he chose Amos’s name, but a surprising number of people did mishear it as “anus”. “No, no. Amos. With an M as in major. Amos, like the Famous Amos cookies. Or the minor prophet in the Old Testament.”

“That makes a lot more sense,” the man said. “So, Steve and minor prophet slash cookie cat, to what do I owe the pleasure of your call?” 

“Um. I got a card. In my door today. From Munson’s Curiosities. About selling pumpkins.”

“You’re the pumpkin magician!” 

“Well, I don’t know about that. It’s my first time growing them.”

“Even more magical. Those have got to be the most perfect pumpkins I’ve ever seen.”

Steve felt himself blushing. Over praise of his pumpkins. What was going on? “Um, thanks?” he said. “Anyway, I wasn’t sure what you meant, by your message. Did you want to buy my pumpkins, or did you want to sell me some pumpkins?”

“Why would I need to sell you pumpkins when you’re a pumpkin magician?” the man asked. 

“The lack of punctuation on the note made the situation unclear,” Steve explained. 

“Well I feel like the context clues made it very clear,” the man interjected, though he just sounded amused, not annoyed.

“What do you want the pumpkins for?” Steve asked. 

“Need to make sure they’re going to a good home? I get it. I’m doing this Halloween-themed event in a few weeks, and I just thought they would be perfect for decorating.” 

“Hmm. Alright. You can have six,” Steve said. 

“Awesome!” the man replied, seeming genuinely enthused. “How much do you want for them?” 

“Oh, you don’t need to pay me,” Steve said awkwardly. “I just grew them for fun, and wasn’t expecting them to all survive. I don’t actually need eight pumpkins.”

“Let me at least buy you a drink or something, man.” 

Steve thought about it for a second. Did he really want to agree to getting a drink with this rather unconventional stranger? He had grown more introverted in recent years, and generally avoided potentially awkward social situations, preferring to stick with people he knew well. But he had actually been enjoying this odd conversation. “Alright, fine. I can bring the pumpkins with me, and we can meet somewhere for a drink.”

“Fantastic! You doing anything Friday night?” 

“No,” Steve was slightly embarrassed to admit. “I’m free.”

“Great. Meet me at Bobby’s at 8? I have a lot of hair, I’m hard to miss.”

Steve laughed. “Alright. Wait, what’s your name? I never asked.”

“Eddie,” the man said. “Eddie Munson.” Again, Steve felt a vague sense of recognition, like he’d heard the name before, but he couldn’t quite place where.

[ladydisharmony]

fluttercord fanfic snippet :)

some context:

so, i’ve started re-writing bride of discord. arguably the most popular fluttercord fanfiction to date, written by DisneyFanatic2364. i grew up anticipating each episode of the audio drama; i loved it. however, rewatching it (as i’ve done multiple times to torture myself) has made me realize it has not aged well at all. discord’s characterization, the lack of actual chemistry between him and fluttershy and the constant weight of their circumstances, applespike, among other things range from uncomfortable to problematic. because of this, i’ve wanted to take the plot and mold it into something that fixes those issues as well as divulge more into the characters and their feelings.

i haven’t actually read the fanfic (before i continue this i want to read through it one time, to be fair), i’ve only consumed the audio drama, but considering how poorly the characters (most notably discord) are written in the audio drama i can’t image there is much more i’m missing. no hate necessarily, DF just isn’t, or wasn’t, the most skilled writer in my opinion. as a warning, i’m no author either, but i find joy in writing from time to time and i do think i have something of substance.

in my re-write, i have fluttershy taking interest in discord in his hiding period. i think it makes it more interesting that her fear subsides and is replaced by a want to learn about him and where he came from. it gives her a personal incentive to accept his deal without her feeling like she has to because she has no other choice. she doesn’t really want to marry him, but she isn’t being tormented by him after his disappearance nor is she completely miserable in her stay at his estate.

speaking of the deal, when asking for a bride, discord doesn’t really intend to take the marriage seriously. i’m still considering if i want him to ask for this out of hopes one of the elements will come forward, or if he just narrow its down, saying that one of the elements has to “give themselves up”. either way he hopes to ensure or IS ensuring the keeping of their word when they say they won’t use the elements against him. there isn’t a wedding or anything of that nature, that’s too boring. the proposal is them being married and then fluttershy is just someone living in his house that he has to feed sometimes. i want her to still have contact with her friends in some way. discord doesn’t want any conspiring, so either letters or a ‘one person at a time’ visitor rule.

just two of the changes i’m making still working it out but that’s some of my base ideas . if yall have any suggestions i’d love to hear them as im open to critiques or any other ideas, tho there is no guarantee ill adapt to them.

without further ado, here is the snippet. if yall like it enough i’ll continue and publish the chapter :)

➽───────────────❥

The Chaos dimension had made a great home for Discord the last year. It had everything he could possibly need, save anyone to torment. That wouldn’t be an issue soon, however. The Lord of Chaos had been lying low in his little window outside of reality, waiting for the right time to reintroduce himself. he was growing bored of waiting. Discord admired himself in his living room mirror. It was upside down and attached to the wall at an angle, leaving it crooked and ineffective as a floor-length mirror. He was looking at his upside down reflection when it started betraying his movements.

“Can you *please* find something else to do when you’re thinking,” his reflection crossed it’s arms over it’s chest and outstretches its neck, pushing it through the glass threshold effortlessly, “I’m starting to think you’re obsessed with me.”

Discord rolled his eyes as his reflection-Who he deemed ‘Secondcord’- pulled itself from the mirror completely. “Well you know me, I have an affinity for the chaotic and strange,” he teased his doppelgänger with an un-serious smirk on his face, stepping out of it’s way as it glided to the floor. “Speaking of chaos, I believe my time to shine is closely approaching.” Discord stepped closer to himself, bringing his eagle claw to tap Secondcord’s nose.

“The Gala?” It swatted his hand away, “how clever to pop up on them while their energy is focused elsewhere. That is, until you consider they still bare their elements and you can’t do anything about it.”

“Oh please, I evaded them before-”

“Narrowly. You evaded them narrowly.”

“So I know what to look for! Flashing lights, a big rainbow. That’s not hard to miss. Besides, the plan I’ve been concocting should save me from having to worry about the elements at all!” He falls back and motions his paw, a lawn chair appearing to break his fall. With a snap, a wine glass rests in his palm. Secondcord watched unamused as he took a sip.

“Oh, a plan to deactivate the elements? Do tell! Seeing as your magic is *completely* ineffective in removing them from their bearers I’d love to know how you plan to do so. I sure do hope that whatever that hamster brain of yours is thinking is more permanent than reversing their personalities.” It picked at it’s talon claws, pretending to find them interesting, “Perhaps you’ll encase *them* in stone? Or maybe turn them into wooden puppets, unable to make their own decisions. Oh, I know! You’ll turn the six lapdogs into beautiful paintings and hang them above your mantel. How cruel, to make them watch you have all the fun from above your ‘waterplace’.” He looked to the aforementioned ‘waterplace’, wiggling his fingers. Red water spouted from wooden logs like a backwards waterfall, up into a never-ending chimney.

“Well if you’d stop listening to the sound of your own voice, I’ll tell you.” Discord’s eyes are closed as he takes another sip, then hums. “Although, I do like the sound of that last idea. Maybe I’ll store it away for Lady Loyalty.” He sat like he was a woman suntanning at the beach trying to seduce the person of her affections, “Or maybe for you? it would certainly save me from your sarcastic remarks.” As he takes a third sip of his wine, it’s apparent that the amount of liquid in the glass is unchanged.

“The plan,” Secondcord barked, sick of Discord’s tendency to dance around every single thing he was trying to say.

“Oh you buzzkill, I can never poke fun with you. *Fine*. I’ll strike a deal or two with them.” Secondcord furrowed his brow and lifted his head at his counterparts words, egging him to go on. “I can’t touch their elements, no, but i *can* make it to where they can’t use them. I’ve taken Twilight’s horn before and I can take it again, this time I’ll only give it back if they promise to not use the elements in return.” He lifted himself from the lawn chair, both it and his drink disappearing in a puff of smoke. He began to pace, miscellaneous sounds coming with each of his footsteps. “I have a few other cards up my sleeve, but that’s to be played out.”

Secondcord tilted his head and feigned disinterest, but his amused smile was apparent. “Well, I suppose it’s a step up from you last attempt, I’ll give you that.”

➽───────────────❥

[rambyol]

You know what doesn't sit right with me? The fact that in E4C4 [<-spoilers:] when Bruce finds John in Harley's old room there's the option to Slap John (while he has a Bruise and Tears around his eyes) or Yell at him, but never an option to actually COMFORT (hug) the guy? What kind of conclusions are we meant to draw from that? (Are we meant to believe Bruce is just... more likely to be insensitive or cruel... towards John?... ;-;)

I completely agree with that sentiment. There really should have been an option to comfort John more, however I understand why there wasn’t and what we can dissect from that scene. So let’s jump in!

Now I like a healthy balance between canon, subtextual, and subjective interpretation. So I think it’s important to start with the context behind that scene. Here’s what we know; The Interrogation with John takes place Post-Bodhi Spa/Lab scene. The stakes are very high because Harley has the virus, Riddler’s body has been ruined and is no longer preserved meaning there’s no chance to get a cure, and Avesta and Bruce noticed makeshift bombs around the hideout.

So their main objective is to find Harley. And they were anticipating that the person inside Harley’s office would be Harley. They weren’t expecting John, since he’d disappeared after the agency raided the Lab.

John is the closest and only chance they have to find and stop Harley, so everything that Bruce did in that scene was done under stress and a sense of urgency. And if you play Bruce as a good person in that scene he exhibits a reasonable balance of empathy and compassion whilst also keeping grounded in their situation;

Joker: “There’s no point. It’s over. The Pact. The dream. Us.”

Bruce: “Not yet it’s not she’s still out there. With a deadly virus in a city full of innocent people.”

Without the luxury of time, Bruce comforts John in the only ways he could’ve. Remember, John is supposedly drunk, being erratic, and at times wielding a gun whilst stating he doesn’t care about the deadly situation they’re in. So it’s not extreme to suggest that Bruce, or anyone in such a situation would act cautiously. I mean Avesta is on guard that entire scene because of how erratically John acts.

The alternative to the slap option is the hand on the shoulder gesture that Bruce does, in a way it’s the closest physically intimate act he did which was a step or two removed from a hug. In my ‘The Stab’ post, I mention how physical contact between John and Bruce is gradually built up throughout the narrative, so I guess since John hugs Bruce in the Carnival Bro’s scene, we could interpret Bruce’s touch to John’s shoulder as a moment that anticipates a bigger act of physical intimacy.

There’s definitely something to be said about the lack of acknowledgment towards John’s black eye. He’s just told them that he was physically hit by Harley and there’s no attempt to console him or show concern. Now again, this could be due to the high stakes at play, but of course there’s a broader discussion to be had about male victims of abuse not being treated/taken seriously. (I’m saving my thoughts on this for a future post)

Lastly, I wanted to bring your attention to this moment.

(and I don’t want this to discredit the point about male victims of abuse but rather relate to John’s character and his dynamic with Bruce)

No matter what choice we pick for Bruce, John has the exact same response. I think that, John may have been ‘milking’ this time with Bruce.

He has Bruce’s complete attention (albeit not for the reason one would hope) and spends the majority of the scene venting about how Harley and Bruce let him down whilst also ignoring Bruce and Avesta’s pleas for help only to suddenly change his mind at the end. I think that moment serves as a reminder that John’s intentions and emotions are ambiguous.

And Bruce understands this which is why he doesn’t tolerate any of John’s ambiguity when you select the harsher/objective choices, which can come off as cruel.

I hope that gives you some new ideas or reaffirm ones you had! I’ve been meaning to analyse that scene more but I think all my ideas come under separate topics so we’ll see if I get around to that sometime!

[jiminrings]

michelin aka chef!jin sneak peek :D

Jin can’t lie to you to save himself.

He can’t lie to you in the same way that he bought your engagement ring one month before the supposed proposal and he’d felt so guilty from telling you he went to get groceries instead of going to the jewelry store, he shook you awake on the same night and asked you to marry him with your eyes barely open.

He can’t be dishonest to you like that time you went down a color analysis video marathon on your phone and just blindly agree that brassy tones suited you, so your fiancé’s way of telling you that you are not the expert that you think are is by booking you a personal color analysis consultation the next day.

Jin can’t tell anything but the truth to you. You’re both his strong suit and his vulnerability, therefore taking lying off the table because he’ll literally feel sick if he does. It’s the very reason why just after days of having his contract finalized, all with the precautions of how he shouldn’t go around telling everyone, he finally comes to you with the news. 

“I’m getting my own food show!” Jin ambushes you as soon as you wake up, his very own squeals serving as your alarm on your day-off. You perk up at the news quickly, getting your own excitement in before he continues. “I wouldn’t say own-own because I’m doing it with Taehee, but still!”

If you didn't think you could be any more awake, you do now.

You feel more alert than ever at the mention of Taehee, a name you’ve heard countless of times working in the food industry, but rarely from Jin himself. You never thought you’ll hear it coming from him again, of course — after all, there’s no sense in talking about your ex no matter the context.

There’s a turmoil that starts in the back of your head because if you think hard enough, you’ll recall that Taehee had appeared in your mind despite not being explicitly mentioned during your silly little perilla leaf debate from days before. You didn’t want your friends’ words to get into your head, but in hindsight, everything they’ve said had long infiltrated your brain.

Jin senses the conflict brewing in the furrow of your brows but he mistakes it for something else, going soft at the thought that you’re already thinking this far ahead.

“I have to step down from the restaurant for the time-being but that’s a given, no?” he strokes your cheek, the smile on his face made to be assuring for you. It doesn’t, however, because in your head that’s already too far gone on the slippery slope of Jin and Taehee’s onscreen reunion, your fiancé just raised another inconvenience that you overlooked.

You agree with as much grace as someone who’s been rudely awakened. The knot in your throat doesn’t get fully untangled even when you speak, drowning out your words even to your own ears. “Yeah, yeah, of course. You can’t juggle being the head chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant and hosting your show with uh, with your fellow Michelin-starred… ex, right?”

Jin hums at that, partially out of amusement. He’s not exactly annoyed per se; it’s just that he didn’t anticipate your second thought after congratulating him was to pick out that tidbit.

The problem, however, is that it’s not a tidbit. It’s a catastrophically large chunk in the event that he’s laying out to you. It’s a slice of watermelon contaminating a bowl of cubed pineapples. It’s a banana in a smoothie overpowering every other ingredient. You’re beyond happy for Jin and no one can take that away from you — it’s just that Taehee, being the breathtaking detail that she is, can’t be ignored.

“I think the word would be chef, Y/N.”

“You got it, chef,” you swallow a sarcastic hum, testing out the words in your tongue. “Say, does Taehee-…”

Jin inhales through his teeth, his smile wide yet not as welcoming. He corrects you, albeit a little disappointedly. “She’s kinda your superior even outside of the kitchen,” he reminds you of the use of honorifics and your lack thereof, even if you recall that he’d never done it with his friends before.

You blink once, twice at the correction, the sharp inhale that he had given you seconds prior making you release your exhale that’s much, much slower.

“Oh, okay. Thank you for reminding me, Chef Seokjin,” you comply but not without making a dig at him first, foregoing your initial annoyance for sincerity instead. “Does Chef Taehee know you’re engaged? And it just happens that it’s to me?”

He doesn’t know whether to be amused or to be annoyed at your jealousy. Jin swears he pictured in his head that him breaking the news to you would be a happy event. He didn’t exactly see in his vision that the happy in the event would last five minutes before it turned into an interrogation.

“It hasn’t really come up yet, so no. I don’t exactly make our relationship status as an icebreaker to anyone and everyone,” he answers, raising a hand when he sees another thought form in between your brows. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, sweetheart.”

You soften at his awareness towards the unexplainable unease you have brewing in your head, deflating in comparison to his posture. “I trust you, Jin. It’s just that-…”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to explain to me. I get it,” he shrugs, the smile on his face small yet sincere. “I mean, if roles were reversed and you were me and I’m you-…”

The reminder of your gap between you and your fiancé is enough to make you tune out, unaware you’re even doing it until you hear his parking words. He’s the Michelin-starred chef and you’re the line cook. You both finished the same culinary course, but it’s clear which one of you had reached further with it. He’s only three years older than you, but the things that he achieved at your age trump everything you’ve accomplished throughout your whole career.

You and Jin aren’t equals. You’ve never been and you probably never will. Him and Taehee are the closest to being equals as it can get, but the difference is that she’s his ex and you’re his fiancée. 

“I’d cheer you on for having your own show. Even if it happens that you share it with your ex.”

Jin looks to you with the same sincerity he had in his eyes when he shook you awake to propose, all because he hated lying to you, so you know he speaks the truth now.

“Okay,” you relent, squeezing his hand. “Just promise me it won’t get in the way of wedding preparations, alright?”

“I promise, I promise,” he assures you, embracing you in his warmth once more until his phone rudely vibrates against you, making him spooked. He takes one look until he bounces back, already fumbling out of the bedroom door. “Whoops. Gotta go. We need to meet with the producers.”

You trail after him with a snort, wanting to atleast walk him out of the garage and into the driveway after you perhaps spoiled a little of his good news. Jin lets you because he can’t say no anyways, laughing at how you’re barefoot on the pavement from the abrupt turn of events.

“Where are you going? The office is that way,” you ask in confusion, more invested at the way Jin’s seemingly forgot his usual routes overnight than the way the pavement digs into your feet.

“Oh, I know. I was just gonna pick Taehee up because she said her car’s getting fixed,” he shrugs like it’s the easiest thing in the world, and the conflicted look on your face attests that it’s not. He sighs, darting out his hand in front of your face to snap you out of your daze. “We’re exes, we’re professional, we’re engaged, and I’m cooking you dinner tonight! You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

You’re placated for the most part, seeing Jin off with a smile as you take your time to get back in the house.

You’ve got nothing to worry about, you convince yourself as you settle back in, checking your phone out of curiosity.

You’ve got nothing to worry about, you desperately convince yourself as you search his ex and click the first article that you see.

Kim Taehee; full-time Michelin-starred chef, part-time car enthusiast  — Say, what’s in Chef Taehee’s apron besides her trademark knife skills and the contract to her food reality show with Chef Seokjin? The keys to her five cars, of course.

.

.

.

EEEEEEEEEEEEE A JIN FIC!!! it's one of my fave pieces that i've ever written and if u ask me (n my patrons), it's a fic with a new-ish style compared to what i usually do!!

wanna read the whole fic now + exclusive drabbles? this piece is exclusively posted on my patreon :D

[sisterspooky1013]

Gaslight, Chapter 6/58

Rated X | Read it here on AO3

Six Weeks Later

She’s in his lap, facing him, the heat of their bare skin pressed together as she grinds her hips desperately. She can feel him, the stretch of him inside her, the slip of his shaft as it brushes over her clit again and again. She digs her fingernails into the flesh of his neck, accepting his hungry kisses as she moans into his mouth. He speaks to her, unintelligible words that make her swell and peak, pleasure coursing through her limbs—

Dana wakes to the throb of an orgasm thrumming between her legs. She squeezes her thighs together and moans before bringing her hand down to press on her strobing clit over her pajama pants. It’s not enough, so she slips that hand under her panties and groans at how wet she is. Moistening her fingers, she slides them back and forth across her hood and is surprised when she comes again, not as strong but still very much welcome. She muffles her whimpers with her head turned into the pillow, and realizes that she has no idea how long it’s been since she last had an orgasm.

The door clicks open and she freezes, her fingers resting over her still throbbing clit. She waits, anticipating the sleepy whine of a child and preemptively embarrassed that she may have woken them.

“Dana?” Cal’s voice whispers across the darkened room.

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay? I thought I heard something.”

Her cheeks flame, and she discreetly slips her hand out of her pants as she changes position.

Michelle had recently inquired, very gently, about the state of her relationship with Cal. She posed the question as whether Dana had returned to their shared bedroom, but the underlying question about whether they had resumed a sexual relationship was obvious. When she informed Michelle that she was still sleeping in the guest room and that a few brief hugs were the extent of her physical contact with him, Dana was asked, without judgment, why that was.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Dana had admitted.

“Are you not attracted to him?” Michelle asked.

“No, I am. He’s a very good-looking man, actually.”

“Is it possible that there’s some guilt regarding your infidelity?”

Dana considered the idea for a moment, then pulled in a deep breath.

“I think that might be part of it. I think I also feel a bit of insecurity about whether I’ll be able to live up to whatever the nature of our sexual relationship was before my accident. In 1992 I’d had a few sexual partners, only one of which would qualify as long term, and it seems likely that I’ll be lacking some—skill, as well as some context,” she said, her eyes on Michelle’s shoulder. “Long term partners may have done more advanced exploration. They know each other’s bodies well, what the other likes and doesn’t like. They may have predictable routines or order of operations—”

“You’re worried you’ll be a lousy lay?” Michelle joked, and Dana laughed mirthlessly.

“Pretty much,” she agreed.

“I think that’s a very reasonable fear. And I think you should consider talking with Calvin about it. Just putting it out there, laying it all on the table, so to speak, can take a lot of the pressure off. I gather he hasn’t asked why you aren’t ready to be physically intimate with him?”

“No,” Dana said emphatically. “He’s very, very respectful. I honestly think if I slept in the guest room for the rest of our lives he may never make mention of it.”

“Sounds like a low pressure situation,” Michelle commented. “It’s pretty ideal, really, all things considered.” Dana nodded. “I’d like to give you some homework, Dana, with the caveat that you should only do this if you feel ready to push yourself and rekindle your romantic relationship with Calvin.”

“I think I am,” Dana said, feeling nervous. “I will admit that it feels a bit lonely at times, being so distant from him.”

“Okay, then here’s what I’d like you to challenge yourself to do: touch him in some way that doesn’t feel completely platonic. That might be a kiss, or a more intimate hug, or maybe just holding hands. Whatever feels good and attainable, try it out and see how it feels. Don’t put pressure on yourself to move back into the master bedroom or have sex, just crack open that door to intimate physical contact and see if you’re inclined to want to walk through it. How does that sound?”

Dana nodded, feeling both afraid and hopeful.

“I think I can do that,” she’d said. “I think I’d like to try.”

“Sorry,” Dana says to Cal, whose silhouette is backlit by the nightlight in the hallway. “I had a dream—a nightmare. I think maybe I was talking in my sleep,” she lies.

Cal crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed.

“Do you remember what it was about?” he asks.

She thinks of him, the man. His mossy green eyes, and the way he moved inside her.

“No,” she says, guilt coiling in her gut.

“Do you need anything?” Cal asks gently.

She is quiet for a beat, then slides her hand, the same that is still damp from her wet dream, across the comforter until the tips of her fingers collide with his.

“Will you lay with me?” she asks, her heart racing.

She can feel his surprise heating up the air in the room, and she senses him tempering his enthusiasm.

“Of course,” he says, standing and pulling back the covers.

He slides in beside her, lying on his back with just a sliver of space between their bodies. She feels a swell of affection at just how patient he is, how respectful, how incredibly understanding he has been every step of the way. Despite everything, she feels lucky that he is the one she chose to marry, and that he is the one who is by her side through this. Most of the men she dated in the past became frustrated after just a few days without sex, and here Cal has gone over a month without so much as a kiss and he has made zero complaints. Perhaps this is one of the reasons she was drawn to him in the first place.

She scoots closer to him and gently lays her cheek on his bare chest. He immediately pulls his arm free and wraps it around her back, which allows her to snuggle even closer. She rests her hand on his belly, and after a few minutes she drapes her leg over his. Cal sniffs wetly and pulls in a shuddering breath, and again guilt kicks at her.

“Are you okay?” she asks, mirroring his question from just a few minutes ago.

“Yes,” he says hoarsely. “I’ve just missed this—missed you—so much, mija.”

The emotion in his voice and the warmth of his body against hers make her feel like she’s been missing it too, if you can miss something you don’t remember.

“I’m sorry—” she starts, but he quickly stops her.

“You don’t need to be sorry. It’s not your fault. This happened to both of us, Dana,” he insists, and it’s far from the first time he’s said it to her. “Let’s get back to sleep, okay?” he continues, giving her a light squeeze. “The kids will be up in a couple hours, and you have a big day tomorrow.”

She sighs, sinking further into the comfort of a body that knows and loves her, and sleeps a deep, dreamless sleep.

When she wakes again, the mellow light of dawn washes the room in shades of blue. She is on her side and Cal is curled up behind her, his breath warming the crown of her head. She stretches a little, flexing the muscles in her back and inadvertently pushing her backside into his pelvis.

Cal stirs, humming in his sleep and thrusting gently against her, and she feels the firmness of his nocturnal erection jab her ass. She stills, both embarrassed and aroused, and briefly debates wriggling back against him to see what will happen. She doesn’t get the chance to.

The door flies open and Abby marches into the room, climbing up onto the bed and crawling towards them. Cal jolts awake and turns his head to look at her, then touches Dana’s hip and pulls her even closer, perhaps to conceal himself from the child.

“Daddy?” Abby asks in an accusatory tone. “What are you doing in Mommy’s room?”

“We’re having a slumber party,” Cal says groggily. “Go downstairs, honey, I’ll come make you breakfast in a minute.”

The child does as she’s told, and they listen until they hear the slap of her bare feet on the hardwood.

“Sorry,” Cal says, though he does not pull away from her.

“It’s okay,” Dana replies, glad that he cannot see her face.

“Is it?” he asks hesitantly. “Okay, I mean? Is this okay?”

“I want it to be,” she answers after a beat. “But I’m afraid—what if it’s not how you remember it?”

He shifts down so that his pelvis is no longer touching hers and hooks his chin over her shoulder.

“You’re worried about that?” he asks. “You think I’ll be disappointed?”

“I think…I think that I’m missing nearly eight years of knowledge and experience. So yes, I worry that I’ll disappoint you,” she admits, and as Michelle had promised, she immediately feels a weight lift off her chest.

“I’m glad you told me,” he says, running the tips of his fingers over her forearm. “But I think you’re wrong.”

“You do?”

“I mean—if you’re basically yourself from 1992, and we met in 1993, I can say from experience that I was not at all disappointed by 1992 Dana’s skills in the bedroom,” he offers.

“That’s good to hear,” she says uncomfortably, and he laughs a little.

“We can take things as slow as you want, mija,” he says softly. “I won’t expect you to bring back the whips and chains right away,” he adds, and she rolls to her back to give him an incredulous look.

“Are you serious?” she asks, and he smiles broadly.

“I’m just messing with you,” he says coyly. “Not that I’m not open to the idea.”

Her belly tumbles and she rolls her eyes. Cal’s expression softens, and something anticipatory settles over them.

“Would it be okay if I kissed you?” he asks, his jaw twitching to the side nervously. “It’s okay if you’re not ready.”

Dana swallows, thinking about her morning breath and the fact that Daniel is the last person she can remember kissing. Thinking about the man from her dreams, and whether he or Cal is the last person with whom she actually shared a kiss. But none of that should matter, she’s learned, because here and now is all she has.

She nods softly and Cal sighs. He touches her cheek, his eyes searching her face before he leans forward and presses his lips against hers. It’s chaste but lingering, and while it doesn’t feel familiar it does feel good. He begins to pull away and she arches her neck up, kissing him again. She feels the brush of his tongue against her bottom lip, and again they are interrupted.

“Daddy!” Abby calls from downstairs, and Cal pulls away from her with a laugh.

“She has a knack for that, be forewarned,” he says, kissing her once more and then rolling out of the bed. “It’s a miracle we ever managed to conceive Pete.”

She watches him with a smile as he leaves the room, then gets out of bed herself and initiates the task of waking up Peter.

Today she returns to her job at St. Agnes hospital, though only part time. While her tenure there prior to her accident had been short, they were pleased enough with her performance during that time that they were happy to accommodate a slow ramp up to full time work. She opted for a four-hour shift that will still allow her to take Abby to the bus stop and be there when she gets home, which should hopefully also ease the family’s adjustment to having two working parents.

There are all the trappings of what has become a typical morning: Blue’s Clues and Eggos, lunches packed and children dressed, Cal returning from his shower in a trim black suit and tie. But there are new things too: Dana dresses in khaki pants and a blouse instead of comfortable house clothes, she puts on a little bit of makeup and curls the ends of her hair. When Cal dispenses vitamins and brings her her Numerol, he steps up close and smirks as she smiles behind her coffee cup. Something feels lighter and exciting, like the thrill of a new relationship, which it may as well be for her. He holds the pill out and when she moves to take it, he clamps his fist closed.

“Gotta pay the toll,” he says playfully, and she sets her mug down on the counter behind her.

She touches his waist, her heart fluttering as he leans down and kisses her. It’s just a brush of a kiss, a teasing whisper across her lips, and she feels the pull of desire bloom low in her belly. He pulls away, still smiling, and holds his hand back out. She swallows the pill with her coffee, helps Peter put his shoes on, and escorts the men of the family to the car before bidding them farewell with more kisses and wishes of good luck.

The late spring morning is bright and already warm, and she walks Abby the three blocks to the bus stop with their clasped hands swinging between them.

“Do you love Daddy again?” Abby asks in the candid, unafraid way that children do.

Dana is surprised, both by the question and by the realization that she hasn’t at any point considered whether she loves Cal, or did, or will. It simply never crossed her mind.

“What makes you ask that, Sweetpea?” she replies, question for question.

“Daddy sleeped in your room so maybe that means you love him again,” Abby says matter-of-factly.

They arrive at the corner where the bus will pick Abby up for school, and Dana tries to decide how to answer.

“I didn’t stop loving Daddy,” she says, though it may not be entirely true. “My brain just got confused for a while after I hit my head and I think I forgot why I loved him, but I’m starting to remember.”

Abby considers this for a moment.

“Did you forget why you loved me, too?” she asks, and Dana kicks herself for not thinking her explanation through.

“No, Sweetpea.” She crouches down, bringing herself eye level to her daughter and pushing a lock of the child’s untamed hair behind her ear. “The way a mommy loves her children is easy. I love you because you’re mine, and I always will, no matter what. You don’t need to worry about that, okay?”

“Okay.”

Daisy, the little girl from across the street, joins them and the children sing a pop song and dance a clearly choreographed dance that makes Dana’s cheeks ache from smiling.

“Oops I did it again, I played with your heart, got lost in the game,” they squawk between giggles, and finally the bus pulls up and carries them off to school, Abby waving at her from the window until it rounds the corner out of sight.

Dana walks back to the house and spends a bit of time nervously tidying and checking her purse repeatedly to be sure she hasn’t somehow misplaced her wallet or cell phone since the last time she checked. She rifles through a stack of mail and flyers from Abby’s elementary school, separating them into things that need to be filed versus shredded versus paid, and comes across the legal pad on which Cal had written helpful notes for her when she first arrived home. It’s both painful and sweet to remember the care he took in trying to make her feel comfortable, and she finds herself looking forward to this evening when she can see him again. She feels a pang of excitement at the idea of curling up on the couch, side by side, and sneaking kisses during commercial breaks of their favorite show. She decides to save the sheet of paper, so she tears it off the pad and goes upstairs to put it in her keepsake box in the closet. Just as she’s slipping it under the lid, something occurs to her and she unfolds it and looks at it again.

Calvin Micheal Rose 5/29/1962

That’s next week. Cal’s birthday is in less than seven days. Relieved to have remembered while she still has a bit of time to plan, she stashes the paper and hurries back downstairs to slip into her heels and head to the hospital. On the drive across town, she tries to think of something special that they might do, but quickly realizes that she doesn’t know enough to pinpoint what might feel special to him. Birthday planning serves as enough of a distraction that it’s not until she pulls into the parking lot and passes a sign reading “St. Agnes Hospital, Provider Entrance” that nerves twist again in her belly.

She stands on the sidewalk outside the doors for a full minute, pulling in deep breaths and letting them out slowly. You can do this, she encourages herself. Finally, she walks toward the glass doors and they slide open, blasting her with warm, antiseptic air as she passes into the vestibule.

Suddenly, she feels lightheaded. She stops, touching her fingers lightly against the wall beside her to ground herself. An acute and haunting sense of deja vu creeps up her spine, and for a moment she’s afraid she’s going to be sick. Someone touches her arm, and she turns her head and tilts her chin up with an uncanny expectation that she will see a familiar face beside her.

“Ma’am?” a muted voice asks, and Dana blinks, shaking her head softly. She looks down and sees a wiry older woman in scrubs peering at her curiously. “Ma’am, are you alright?” the woman asks, her voice and her face coming more fully into focus.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Dana replies, easing herself away from the wall and walking unsteadily through the second set of doors. “I just got a little dizzy. I think I forgot to eat breakfast.”

“Would you like me to get a doctor for you?” the woman asks, following her towards the front desk just inside the doors.

“No, thank you. Actually, I am a doctor, today is my first day. Or my first day back, I suppose.”

“Oh, are you Dr. Rose?” the woman asks with a smile, and Dana nods. “Just take a seat right there, Dr. Rose, I'll page Dr. Thomas for you.”

Dana sits on a small padded bench and waits, unsettled by the familiar feeling she had when she walked through the doors. It’s not the fact that this place feels familiar that unsettles her, and really it should be some comfort to her that it does. But the familiarity wasn’t as much with the space itself as the way it made her feel, and how she felt was afraid.

No, not afraid. Terrified.

Tagging @today-in-fic

[not-your-damsel]

Indiscretion

Likes & reblogs greatly appreciated 😘 ©not-your-damsel ‘23

Indiscretion - in·dis·cre·tion :: /indəˈskreSH(ə)n/ noun • Behavior or speech that is indiscreet or displays a lack of good judgment. Alternatively can be synonymous or associated with - A loss of innocence…

Who? :: GuardianAngel!Keigo Takami/Hawks x Fem!Reader, IncubusDemon!Hitoshi Shinsou x Fem!Reader

WC :: 3,051

AN :: M¡nors DN¡ (I check every like and reblog), if you’re religious or a person of faith, this may not be for you. This chaptered series is going to involve angelology and demonology amongst other topics and things. I don’t want complaints or messages that I’m going to hell, you’ve already been warned so, save the pearl clutching for something actually worthwhile - like real world issues (눈_눈 ) That aside, I hope you all had a gentle holiday season and a happy new year 🥳

⚠️ :: Again, religious content, and a relatively benign wet dream lol. Aka, nothing but good ‘ol dream seggs ૮( ♥️ﻌ♥️)ა

‼️:: Catch and Release part 3 is being worked on, I needed to overhaul the beginning because an idea struck me and I needed to add it. It’s coming, not to worry!

Artist :: I tried to find who this artist was as I found this on Pinterest. If anyone knows or has any idea, please let me know so I can reach them and give proper credit. And, if you know the context/meaning of the very famous, original painting this one is based on, well then, you’re already ahead of the game now, aren’t’cha? ( 눈 ᴗ 눈)

Very Human Feelings • Ch. 1

You weren’t sure when you started finding feathers randomly throughout your apartment. You’d initially thought they were coming from your down comforter and pillows but, that idea left you when you noticed how pristine white they were. You didn’t think you’d seen a more stark shade before in your life. Not only were they an unnatural shade of white, they were quite large, too. None of the feathers in your comforter and pillows were that large nor that white.

It had been going on for a little over a month when you spotted one next to your bed after coming home from work one evening. Only this feather was slightly longer than your forearm - from fingertip to just past your elbow. By now you were worried. How could a feather that long, that beautiful, have ended up perfectly at the side of your bed? As you held it, you pondered, running your fingernail back and forth, grazing against the spine of the feather before your eyes went wide and you stood still. That’s when you heard it. As you sat frozen in place, your eyes grew wide at the thought that someone was in your safe spot, your home. It sounded like someone gasped in your apartment. Your hand that was holding the feather was now shaking as tears lined the rims of your eyes.

“H-hello?”

You felt stupid. Who willingly calls out into their dimly lit apartment to the very probable bogey man intruder? Twiddling the feather between your fingers, you took a few tentative steps outside your bedroom, head looking from side to side. Stepping out into the living room you let your eyes take a fleeting sweep across the place. Nothing. Tiptoeing into the kitchen also revealed the same. That left one more room to check, the scariest one if you were honest. Taking care to not step on the floorboards you knew would creak and groan, you made your way to the bathroom to check once more.

Flicking on the light showed there was nothing, no one you could see or sense but, that left your shower which could be a likely hiding spot. With a gulp and a shaky hand reaching for the curtain, you swiftly pulled it back as though ripping off a bandaid to get it over and done with. You flinched back, your eyes squeezed shut in anticipation. But, when nothing happened, you slowly opened your eyes and again, saw nothing. Nothing but an empty and well kept shower that you had cleaned the other day. Could you have been hearing things after a long day of working the museum? That was very likely.

You walked back into your bedroom and placed the new feather in the vase with all the other ones you’d found throughout your apartment during the past month. You were impressed that this new feather was taller than the vase as it hung off the side of it, making a new decorative piece in your room. You sighed as you eyed your collection. Maybe unwinding from the day would do you some good. After having an uneasy shower, you made your way to your bed, turning down the blankets before diving into your comfy sanctuary for a night of much needed sleep.

Letting out a yawn that made your eyes tear, you reached over to your night table for your bottle of melatonin gummies. Popping a couple in your mouth, you chewed them, the strawberry flavor a pleasant taste in your mouth as you closed the bottle back up. Placing it down on your night table once more, you reached for your tablet to continue reading the latest web comic you were infatuated with. You were hoping to get to the bombshell of a reveal they had been hinting at the last few chapters.

Well, it hardly mattered because within a half an hour you were knocked out with the tablet laying against your ribs just under your breasts when a hand reached out to grab it from your limp grasp. Golden eyes monitored the rise and fall of your chest as you breathed differently in sleep, slower, gentler, watching for any change that would indicate that you were stirring. As his large hand griped the tablet, your head suddenly moved, turning from right to left as you adjusted. The man standing next to you stilled while half his body became invisible, incredibly large white wings behind his back fluffed out as he panicked. Once you stilled again, he detected your breathing had gone back into its slow rhythm of sleep. He willled his body to become visible once more as he quickly grabbed your tablet off you, plugging it in to charge as he’s watched you do hundreds of times before, placing it down on your night table before retreating back to the reading nook bench you had made in the deep window sill.

He watched you as you slept, peace washing over him as the comfort of sleep overtook you. He’s been watching over you more than usual lately and he’s not entirely sure why, but, there was a nagging feeling he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Was it oncoming danger? Was it just an unnatural worry that his kind tended to harbor for their wards? He just didn’t know. All he knew was that he needed to watch over you, and if that meant he needed to skip out on some key meetings up in the Heavenly Realm, so be it. He was fine with that. He was assigned to you, he’d see his job through in making sure you were safe as he silently nodded to himself.

“Keigo?”

Golden eyes widened as his snowy white wings flared out into dangerously sharp points.

“Relax, it’s me, Raphael.”

Keigo relaxed a little, rising from his place in your reading nook to meet the new entity who appeared in your bed room.

“Hey, what’s going on? Why are you here?”

Raphael sighed with a roll of his eyes.

“Are you kidding me? You missed the big meeting and Dad’s very mad about it.”

Keigo’s shoulders slumped s little, head hung low to not meet sharp blue eyes.

“I’m sorry but, I had something important to attend to. I’ll make it up to Him, I’ll go speak to Him directly.”

Raphael’s own wings shook in disapproval.

“Something important? Something important, Keigo? What in the blazes are you thinking?!”

“Would you shut your mouth, Raph?! She’s sleeping!!”

“She cannot hear us!!! Oh. Oh! You have got to be kidding me, Keigo.”

Keigo’s head tilted to the side, straw blonde hair moving with him.

“You remember what happened to Samyaza, right? Right?!”

Raphael was now leaning towards Keigo, anger etched into his features.

“What happens to angels who get too close to their wards?”

Keigo’s eyes widened, darting between your sleeping form and Raphael in worry.

“I-it it it it's not like that! I just have a feeling is all, I-!”

“You have a feeling? What kind of feeling?”

Keigo hated feeling like he was being picked apart, especially under Raphael’s gaze. He was a respectable, high ranking angel who always carried out his work with the quickest efficiency that always yielded nothing but the best results.

“I-I… I just feel like something bad is going to happen is all. That’s it, nothing more.”

Raphael took this time to look Keigo over, looking for any hint that he could be lying to him. He detected nothing. Keigo knew he was using his power on him, looking deep into his heart for any lies being told. Raphael let out a quick breath, thankful he was telling him the truth.

“Hmm. And you were going to report your feelings when?”

“When I was absolutely sure.”

Raphael looked around the room, seeing your sleeping form completely undisturbed at the fact that they were in your space having a slight argument. Blue eyes continued to look around before falling on the vase filled with Keigo’s feathers.

“You’ve been here a lot. Too much.”

Keigo followed his gaze and froze.

“Only to serve as a lookout in case of danger.”

Raphael looked back at Keigo with dead seriousness in his eyes.

“You’re leaving traces of your - no, our existence in her home. You’ve left a feather that large around for her to see? Limit your time here, Keigo. I know she’s your ward, I know you care what happens to her, but, you need Dad’s permission to interfere should there even be a threat towards her. Yeah?”

Raphael’s look softened a little as Keigo listened to what he had to say,

“You’re my best friend, more importantly my brother, Keigs, even Uriel is worried about you. I don’t want to see you cast out of paradise at the expense of some… some human. Yeah, Dad loves them all to bits, but they're fallible, weak. They die easily. They’re both resilient and fragile all at the same time. Don’t follow in the footsteps of Samyaza and don’t even get me started on Lucifer. Our love of humans should only go so far after what happened all those millennia ago. Do not cross that line in chase of things we were never meant to have. Let the humans love one another and let us continue to do our work and interfere where and when we’re needed and focus on our own. C’mon, I see the way Zadkiel looks at you!”

Raphael placed a hand on Keigo’s shoulder, giving a gentle squeeze.

“Yeah. Yeah, I get it. I mean, it’s not like that but, I get it and Zad’s got eyes for Galadriel. They’re a much better match. Is everything alright back home?”

He wanted to change the subject so badly, talk about anything other than why he’s been here in your apartment so much or Raph trying to get him together with Zadkiel for the umpteenth time.

“Well, some of the other angels have been talking about you. Some of them are starting some rumors that yours truly has gone and quashed, you’re welcome very much.”

“What? What are they saying?”

At this, Keigo was actually quite worried.

“Some are saying that you’re falling from grace because you’ve gone and fallen for a human. Some are even placing bets on the next time they see you that your wings will be darker than they last saw you - to see you brimming with sin.”

Keigo’s wings ruffled hearing this, fanning open and coming forward for a good look at them.

“But, they’re just fine! They know I’m a good worker!! I’d never throw my grace out for a human. For any human.”

“Well, why don’t you come back home with me now and put Dad’s worries at ease, then? Also, coming back with me will make our lower level brothers and sisters shut their mouths and have a lesson in doubting their elders. Dad would hate to see them doing such things like that anyway.”

Raphael grinned at Keigo, hand held out to him before a shimmery mist began forming behind his own beautifully large wings. Keigo looked from you back to Raphael and then back to you, not reaching to take Raph’s hand.

“Really?”

Keigo gave a charming angelic smile and declined.

“I’m not done here. I’ll head back home when I am, I promise.”

With a heavy sigh, Raphael dropped his hand and shook his head.

“Alright, man. Alright. But, don’t come and complain to me if Dad rips those wings off… one feather at a time.”

At that, Keigo winced. Raphael smiled sinisterly as for a brief moment thousands of individual eyes opened on each of his feathers, each one spinning around maniacally before Keigo sucked his teeth.

“I promise, I won’t. And stop trying to scare me, I’ll-I’ll handle Dad, don’t worry.”

Raphael closed every eye but the two on his face, winking to Keigo with a chuckle.

“Whatever you say, trouble maker. Later, baby brother.”

Keigo watched as Raphael stepped into the shimmery mist, disappearing entirely before the shimmers dissipated. He finally felt he could relax once more now that he was alone with you again. He’d headed back to his place to watch you sleep, alone with his thoughts. As the hours passed, he stayed watching you, golden eyes never leaving you as you turned and made sounds throughout the night.

At some point, you began making noises that Keigo had heard you make before. He knew what this meant, it seemed you had nightmares frequently. He got up and walked to the side of your bed, watching as your face changed slightly before an entirely different sound came out from you.

You moaned.

Keigo has never heard this sound from you and he immediately worried your nightmare was causing you pain. He reached a hand out, determined to have calm wash over you with his powers. As he’d done countless times before, he reached his hand to your head and began seeing into your mind, seeing your nightmare. Only, he suddenly flinched back as though electricity had shocked his hand.

“Agh!”

Sweat began to bead at his temples as he warred with himself to look into your mind again. Seemed it didn’t matter what he thought because his hand was already reaching out to your forehead without ever having checked in with him. As he’d done before, he began reading your mind and seeing your dream which he now knew wasn’t a nightmare.

Keigo watched as you were being bent over a kitchen counter that wasn’t your own - the whole place in your mind wasn’t one he knew at all. However, he did know the man who was actively thrusting into you so hard that he could hear the way your naked skin would squeak against the marble top as the force of it pushed you upwards. This man you were currently dreaming of is your now ex. Keigo had been there the day he had brought another woman into your apartment, into your bed where you had caught the two of them together. He was also there, standing next to you as you broke down and kicked both of them out, ending the relationship right then and there. He was proud of you back then, had hugged you when you dropped onto your couch after the scumbag left with his chosen sidepiece and you wept into your throw pillow. You hadn’t dated anyone since then, choosing to throw yourself headlong into your work and be more social with your friends instead and the change had done you some good in the long run. Then why in the hell were you dreaming about this absolute waste of space at a time like this? And so… so graphically, too?!

Keigo couldn’t rip his hand away from your forehead. It was as if some sort of force had glued his hand there and would not free it for anything. He watched as you moaned, driving yourself back to meet the man’s thrusts before he bowed over you, consuming you whole as his larger frame draped over you.

“Where do you want my cum? Hm? Tell me where you want it, baby.”

Your breathing was heavy along with his own and you managed to finally say something,

“Inside, fuck, please! Cum inside me!!”

Keigo watched as a devious grin spread across the man’s features before his head whipped over to the side, causing Keigo to take in a sharp breath.

“You watchin’, “Holy One”? Watch. This is gonna make her fuckin’ soaked. Too bad you can’t ever have a taste.”

Your ex reached an arm around to your front, toying with your clit. The moan you let out at that was porn worthy and Keigo’s mouth went dry as you began to slam yourself back to meet his harsh thrusts. Your ex turned his head once again to look Keigo in the eyes, glowing indigo irises meeting golden hues and with one last thrust, your ex grit his teeth and came inside you, his eyes rolling to the back of his head and causing you to whimper in reality. The sound had Keigo both focusing on your physical form while also still seeing your dream. In the physical world, you were now squeezing your thighs together, your hand balled with a fistful of your quilt. The man in the dream refocused and once again looked to where Keigo would’ve been standing, grinning before the dream started to dissipate entirely.

His hand finally left your head and he registered that he was all out of sorts. He’d never seen anything like that, hell, he’d never felt anything like that before and it worried him. But, worry wasn’t all that was there. He was startled, almost scared, his heart beating a mile a second as he breathed rapidly. Of course he knew of humans having sex. It was a giant piece to the pie of human life, to procreate. However, he’s never seen you with anyone, never heard you like that before. He’d always given you space in your “alone time”, so he’s never even been there for that and now he’s seen some very private part of you that he should’ve never seen. To be fair, he thought you were having another nightmare. And that man, your ex, was the cause of the majority of them. Which is why he didn’t understand why you were dreaming about him in this way to begin with.

There was a new feeling blooming within him that he didn’t even realize until he thought about it more. Was this… jealousy? Surely not. Angels cannot feel jealousy. Well, Lucifer did. And Morningstar ended up paying for it with the ultimate price: Being driven out of Paradise. His brother, his friend, was gone and had not been home since all those millennia ago. This new feeling made Keigo absolutely sick. He’d never wanted to fight a human before now and what he’s just seen was still replaying in his own mind.

“Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe for the first time ever, Dad has made a mistake and I’m not cut out to be a Guardian after all.”

Keigo went to sit down at the nook again, brilliant wings curled around him as he watched you again, this time taking you in quite differently than he had just a mere ten minutes ago. As he thought more about the dream, his newfound jealousy had turned into pure unadulterated anger. How had that sleaze known where Keigo was viewing from? And the more he thought about it, the more it became clear that that was no normal dream. The more he recalled, he remembered that the actual eyes of your ex did not fit the man’s eyes in the dream. That was an entity that was controlling your dream and that feeling Keigo had felt before, the one of coming danger, increased tenfold at the realization.

Let me know if you’d like to be part of the 🏷️ list for Indiscretion and/or the Bakugou x Fem!Reader, Deku x Fem!Reader fic series Catch and Release ♥️

@kingdaddydaichi @mxgenderbender @pervysenpaix @deleteddewewted @touyasdoll @touyasdollmain @house-of-elves <- I found you, bby! Was worried you left tumblr altogether 🥺 @chaoskrakenuwu @animedreamworlds @themythicaldisaster @kurocantcommunicate

[kinocomix]

Metal band story devlog 10: OKAY. CHARACTER DESIGNS. LET’S GET TO IT.

So initially when I finally decided it was time for some character designs I faced a problem. It was not a lack of skill or frustration at my art, it was the fact that I don’t know what I’m designing really. let me explain:

I think a very important thing to do in general is to be aware of your shortcomings and I try to apply this rule to myself as often as possible without it being self destructive. one of those shortcomings is my inability to draw things that I’m not personally familiar with.

I don’t think I would have ever drawn shoes that weren’t my own, so you can imagine what that says about characters and people.

This tends to bleed into art block and a good solution for it is to usually find inspiration somewhere. I don’t like doing that, nothing wrong about it and before you accuse me of being on my high horse I will gently remind you and myself that there is nothing new under the sun. I will inevitably end up being inspired by something even if I’m not actively aware of it but I find that basing a design on someone else’s design feels derivative, which setting aside the legal issues of me wanting to publish potentially copied designs, isn’t very nice of me to do to my fellow artists. I’m better than that. In any case I needed to try to start somewhere so I tried making a design for character A. this is the classical musician. I didn’t base the design on their personality because that never not felt weird to me. I don’t want to know what someone is like when I see them, that’s not how people work. 

here is the pathetic first attempt, where i went in with “they’re probably tall and skinny” in mind:

I knew that A would be a classical musician, so I really wanted to include at least a vague reference to one of my favourite pianists, Nahre Sol. I think she’s very cool and so I opted to make A’s hair similar to her’s.

The actual image is upside down

It still looked boring as fuck tho so as is the case with character design, you iterate.

Here you can see I drew a crane, which is a thing you can do when you think designing people is boring as fuck which it usually is if you don’t have fun with the shapes. I really liked how the crane’s body looked like a teardrop and how long the legs were, it also was mostly black and white which went well with the “classical musician who wears classical clothes” vibe.

So I tried a more geometric approach, with long legs but It didn’t fit into the vibe I had in mind and the feet were so comically large i anticipated people would be distracted by it:

I defaulted back to a more organic looking teardrop shape and ended up with this which i liked:

Let’s note a couple of things about this: I liked the eyes, but i very quickly realised I can’t have that be the default shape of the eyes, because please look at this monstrosity: 

I came back to it the next day and made a realisation: those are some big legs. So I decided to lean into it and thought It would be cool if she was strong and muscular, and you’ll note that I’m saying “she”, we’ll get to that in a moment.

I had taken the time to think about the fact that I'd like her more if she was more in context. Because floating in the void like that, she’s just some character which was bothering me. So I started small and made a height chart with some general body types/shapes:

This made me more confident in the design because it had some story now, she was very tall and imposing. 

I was reminded of a tweet by Pseudonymjones where she talks about a kid who saw her and called her “the lady with the big muscles” which i thought was cool as fuck in may 2019 and still think is cool as fuck now.

This made me like the character so much more and It made sense to me because of everything that I knew so far about the character and the setting that she would be trans. All my research showed that metal musicians would be very likely to be normal understanding human beings and I already know what not to do and what’s preferable from the research I did for Almost Home.

So I present to you the first sketch of Leila:

Note: when designing characters I always design them naked, because clothes a character design does not make. They help, but you can’t start there.

Obviously the design will evolve naturally (and by the end of this devlog update) and get polished the more I draw her but I think this is a solid start. For starters let’s fix those ankles and draw some more sketches to get a feel for what Leila is like when she moves.

Okay, I’m digging the vibe. I also drew this other one where I forgot to factor in the pelvis when accounting for the length of the legs, so i went ahead and tried to edit it:

It looks a bit better, the legs still look gigantic but I think I want to keep that. I imagine she goes to the gym quite frequently on account of being a tryhard. Perhaps that’s one of the things I could explore in the story?

I also tried messing around with her face a bit. I ended up sticking to the one I originally made, which felt the most natural. Maybe that says something about me and how I go with the first thing I see, but it is what it is.

Also here’s a tip for anyone who might need it, you know those doll dress up games where you drag PNGs onto the model? You can use that system when trying to make variations of a design. I did it with a light pad.

This was when I consulted a friend of mine, Alaa. He pointed out the limbs i drew looked kind of ballooney. This wasn't from a lack of reference, it was the abstraction that was done improperly. You see here's two things to keep in mind: firstly I didn't want her to look muscular despite how strong she is. Obviously some of it is bound to show what with her legs as you'll see but I wanted her to seem like a quirky human at first. Secondly, while it's true that I tried to make the limbs with contracted muscles bigger if that's not tastefully done then it just looks silly. So here's where we're at now:

To the left here's you'll note two things, Alaa suggested making her five heads tall instead of 6 which we'll get to in a moment, and the fact that the musculature seems more real now. Here's what i decided to take from his suggestion: i like that the muscles look nicer in the legs, so i changed the legs to match and shortened the pelvis to make her a head shorter. Now about that missing head. Initially while this made the proportions better this also made her shorter which goes against the “awesome towering person” effect i wanted to give her so i had 2 options. I either could keep the extra length but try to fit it in somewhere which could work but it would add extra time to this entire process which I do not have and I am one human being; OR I could simply scale her up. This would make her base circle bigger which would require some quick math every time i need to put her in a scene but that's not an issue for me. 

And this is where we ended up. This is something we can use to make a turn around ref sheet once we have an outfit(s). For reference, I drew Graham from Almost home who is about the size of an average human:

Yes, Charlie and Graham are not actually short. Everyone is just taller than them cause that's my experience being short, It just never came up lol

Here's what I like about this and here's what I'm glad I did not include: I like the cartooney proportions that still show some respect to the human. I like that she has the stubborn belly fat that some body builders struggle with. I like that while she looks imposing and is to some extent, a lot of her personality traits will contrast that and give her depth and nuance. (Also in case you're curious, her base circle is 1.2 times the size of average characters)

A final note, which is by no means an insult to any stylistic approach or artist, there's a fine line to tread between “muscular curvy woman” and “pixar mom”. Here's a drawing on the back of a receipt that a friend drew with some suggestions on how to push the proportions. Solid suggestions, but they don't really fit the vibe I'm going for which is fine- when we make art not everyone is going to like it and that's just how things are.

And yes, she's still naked. Clothes come at the very end when we know we have all the proportions and visual quirks figured out. Buuut that's something I won't include in the devlog. Gotta draw the line of “okay, spoilers” somewhere. Next week, we'll start doing the rest of the cast.

Devlog updates on Tuesdays.

[thebreakfastgenie]

I think possibly the other reason you might come across as "lacking nuance" is because you tend to be very confident in a lot of the opinions you express and a couple of times I've had the impression that you assume you already know the counter-arguments people will raise to what you are saying and jump a half-step ahead. I think that combined with you being a debate-oriented and a person who maybe likes to have the last word sometimes it adds up to an impression. That's also probably why that other anon said you're a bit scary.

I am not saying this as like a gotcha or an insult but to explain where I think the impression is coming from. In another context it may be referred to as you having a "strong personality".

That’s fair!! I do anticipate counterarguments! Sometimes it’s because I’ve discussed the issue before and have experience with them (this is the case with feminism for example), sometimes it’s just because I’m a chronic over thinker so I’ve just thought of it on my own. Sometimes (this tends to happen with fandom discourse but not only with that) it’s because I’ve seen takes around that I disagree with, but I don’t want to confront OP directly or vague post, so I just make my own post with my own take. But then people reply with the take that got me thinking about it in the first place and of course they don’t know that but I do. People assuming I don’t know something or haven’t thought of something gets my hackles up which I need to work on!

[pinkasrenzo]

mid-year book freak out tag

thank you @bloody-wonder for tagging me💕

haven’t read a lot this year but let’s do this

1. Best Book You’ve Read So Far in 2023? The Tower of The Swallow (The Witcher #4/6) started out slow and kind of all over the place but I loved the focus on Ciri (finally!) and her journey (metaphorical and literal). It seems this is the most divisive book in the series and I get why, the writing style changes abruptly from the rest of the series, the plot is sort of on pause to make space for Ciri’s telling of her journey, and Geralt (alleged main character but is he? really?) is basically sidelined from his own series and also a liiiitle pathetic in this one (he’s,,, not doing great, trying his best but clearly failing, he’s going through It). But! It’s Ciri’s time and she’s my fave and I love her and reading more about her was great! Her character changes so much throughout the series but in this book she goes through hell and back and comes out bloody and powerful and so !!!! complete? like she’s a fully formed person/character now, she’s at the end of the road and ready to take on her (and the world!) destiny and tell it to fuck off and I’m so proud of her🥹

2. Best Sequel You’ve Read So Far in 2023? The Tower of The Swallow (again) for all the reasons above and also cause this is a transitional book of a sort: Geralt has been the main character so far, slaying monsters and doing his thing and we’ve seen Ciri grow slow and steady by his side, but Geralt’s getting old and tired and weary and it’s just time to let go (of the sword, the adventuring life, the narrative) and let Ciri take over, and so she does. She gets her own sword, made to fit her (it was always going to be for her) and she gets her own journey and challenges that break her and hurt her and make her grow and harden her, she gets to learn how far she’s willing to go, if she’s capable (and willing) to hurt people to get her destiny and wether she wants to follow or defy it.

It may have been Geralt The Witcher at first, but it’s Ciri The Witcher now, and she’s a force to be reckoned with.

3. New Release You Haven’t Read Yet, But Want To? Feed Them Silence I honestly have no idea what the plot is but I loved Summer Sons so I’m gonna trust Lee Mandelo on this one and see what fucked up sticky horror they’ve come up with this time👀

4. Most Anticipated Release For Second Half of 2023? Bloom Part II should come out in 2023 but there’s no release date yet so Idk if it’s going to come out this year or not but I’m definitely hype for it👀

5. Biggest Disappointment? Lady of The Lake (The Witcher #5/7) not really a disappointment per se but it could’ve been better? Pacing was atrocious, incredibly drawn out with a lot of unnecessary and repetitive scenes, and when the Big Finale came it was completely out of left field and anticlimactic. I didn’t dislike the finale itself, but it was missing a lot of context (that could’ve been there! if not for those unnecessary scenes drawing out the plot!) and so ended up feeling like a deus ex machina situation.

Can’t say much without spoilering but what was missing the most was probably an entire book worth of Emhyr var Emreis POV chapters, cause I get how he came to his final decisions and why, but it lacks impact, it feels like it’s out of the blue and it makes no sense without actually seeing him get to that point. I can imagine how he got there, but the book doesn’t show it or even tell it in retrospect it’s just like “he’s doing this now” and it contradicts everything he’s done so far. And we get a few hints of what he wants to do vs what he has to, and why, it’s clear he’s battling with contradicting feelings and courses of action but it’s not enough to make the finale and his final actions/decisions grounded in the story.

This book is mostly traveling scenes that are all the same (literally the way they’re written it’s,,, they’re like copy-pasted) that could’ve been cut and replaced with Emhyr POV chapters giving him more time and space to develop as a character and show his internal battle and how he reached the conclusion he did, but no🙄

6. Biggest Surprise? The Underground Library and Other Stories (Chika Toshokan Tanken Tan) it’s a manga short story collection I found by accident, and bought on impulse cause it was a one-volume series and I couldn’t find one (1) scrap of info on the author or the manga (maybe it’s too niche or too new? the mystery is compelling) and it was so good? It’s four short stories, all not exactly supernatural, the author calls the genre low-fantasy which fits.

All the main characters have some instance of getting lost or being lost (either in life or in a place) and trying to find an exit/a purpose/a treasure, and they’re all incredibly fleshed out considering how short the stories are (40 pages max). The art style is also amazing, it’s so detailed and cosy wether it’s an urban landscape or a countryside, realistic or fantastical and I could stare at it for ages there’s so! much! detail! it’s mind blowing! And it makes it feel so grounded and real? It almost feels like you could touch what’s on the page as if you were there

7. Favorite New Author? Chome, author of the Underground Library, I’m going to keep an eye out for what else they publish next cause if it’s like this collection they’re definitely going to be one of my new faves👀

8. Newest Favorite Character? Ciri, but she’s not exactly a new one, I already loved her from watching the Netflix show, I just love her more now🥰

9. Newest Fictional Crush? No one ʅ（◞‿◟）ʃ

💕Best Ship💕 alas, no ships so far

10. Book That Made You Cry? Not cry exactly but The Tower of the Swallow did make me feel a lot

11. Book That Made You Happy? The Underground Library, especially the last story, it was about a mystery-treasure hunt and it was so happy? Main character’s excitement and curiosity was so contagious and the story itself was also very🥰 perfect story to end the collection on

12. Favorite Book Adaptation You Saw This Year? NIMONA oh it was amazing perfect showstopping spectacular no notes 10/10 execuction! the soundtrack the colours the animation the way the characters move and interact with each others the hUGS they’re MELTING INTO EACH OTHER and the queerness of it especially given all Nate discovered about himself since the graphic novel came out and the added weight of it and how it’s inextricable from the narrative and it’s so! there! uncensored and unfiltered!! and and NIMONA SHES PERFECT my baby my precious she🥺and ballister little meow meow with his big beautiful eyes and okay he’s modeled after Riz Ahmed’s big beautiful eyes but it has nothing to do with how I feel about him I swear I’m so normal about this.

13. Favorite Review You’ve Written This Year? I don’t really do reviews but I’m counting mine and @montdargent rave about Nimona for this one

14. Most Beautiful Cover? It has to be The Underground Library, just *chefs kiss*

15. What Books Do You Need To Read By The End of The Year? Sul bordo vertiginoso delle cose has been in my TBR since 2018 so definitely that (now that I finally have it!) and then I wanted to finish/catch up with the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, also maybe reread the Beautiful Creatures series, and try and finally read a few books I’ve had for awhile and have yet to read (including gifts from friends from literal years ago) but we’ll see if I’ll get around to all of them :”)

[whentranslatorscry]

Hitagi Honeymoon

021

Though I was prepared for it, the words spoken were harsher than I had anticipated, and there was no doubt it had added fuel to the confusion, if not made the situation worse.

Possibly because I was deep in thought in front of the Sleeping Cat, I found myself more deeply engrossed than usual. From a distance, one might think I was genuinely moved by Hidari Jingorou’s sculpture, but from the perspective of someone who had read the guidebook, I could just as easily be the object of ridicule, not even knowing whether the sculpture was crafted by Hidari Jingorou, let alone if he really existed. It made me feel embarrassment deep within.

The truth is, whoever created it, whatever master sculptor with the seeming ability to bring the work to life— whether or not they actually existed— is somewhat beside the point. What's important is that, in the context of a work attracting literally droves of people like a bustling marketplace, one should understand that it's imbued with commensurate emotions.

Though I'd like to say the same of the Killing Stone as well, its lack of touristy development only adds to its eerie charm— it was anything but ordinary.

In any case, my impulsive musings on this allowed me, for once, to think deeply and grow from the experience; enlightened and made aware of a new perspective. Real or not, I owe my gratitude to Hidari Jingorou.

For sure.

Though I'm older now and not so quick to wholly agree and comply with everything the braided, glasses-wearing class president advises, I must also weigh the ethics of giving up on adopting a little girl vampire.

I’m not as quick as a fox in choosing ethical considerations over modern society.

Instead of giving up, let's rethink the approach.

Once more, from the beginning.

How about we make up for what we couldn't do during spring break—instead of thinking about ways for everyone to be unhappy, let's consider how we could bring happiness to all.

Otherwise, there's no point in growing older.

I managed to turn twenty-four, looping my third year of high school, graduating, entering college, getting a job, moving to the US, and getting married. All of this was done so that I could accomplish things that were impossible when I was seventeen or eighteen.

It's about seizing the moment and doing what can only be done now.

There are dates that only an updated version of myself can be up to.

"So, Shinobu, I'm sorry, but I'll need you to bear with me a little longer. We need to come face-to-face. I’m not finished talking with you yet."

Not fully sharing my perceptions with Shinobu, we had already started on the roadmap for our honeymoon and our family life. That was, to begin with, the root of the problem. We became so inseparable before we even united our names that, in a way, I had treated her carelessly... If I wanted to adopt my slave as my daughter, I should have loved her like one first.

Just as every donut hole is part of the donut, so too is a large wound.

At some point, it had become a part of me.

No matter how fresh or painful the wound, it eventually becomes an old scar, and there's no point in regretting it.

"Or maybe treating you as family was already too casual, but if we keep considering and exploring our options, there might just be a way for you to become Araragi Shinobu while keeping your wish intact. If you want, we could even ask the marriage deity over there…"

Hmm... No response.

She should hear me calling out to her, even while asleep.

I was trying to say good things, but in the end, were they only ever the same off-target remarks I always seem to make?

Was I exasperating her?

"Shinobu... hey, Shinobu?"

I felt ignored— or more precisely, as if Shinobu’s presence in my shadow had become completely invisible. Amid the pouring rain, I crouched down and touched the ground, bewildered.

"……."

I couldn’t sense her.

I could still feel the authority of Tokugawa Ieyasu… that he gave the command to build Nikko Toshogu Shrine is a historical fact, I think. In an uncertain world where I don't know what to believe, still, one thing is certain: since who knows when, the blonde vampire who was supposed to reside in my shadow has been conspicuously absent. I couldn’t wait for her to reply anymore.

Could it be that while I was concentrating on my inner conversation with Hanekawa— while my eyes were closed at the sleeping cat— she had snuck away under my nose? It would have been an easy escape.

But where to? And why?

"No way—"

I had no clue where she might be. As I stood up and looked around, if she were to blend into the crowd with her small physique, there's no way I'd be able to find her. But, as for why she would do it, I can think of one possibility. 

This had happened once before.

In my third year of high school, on the day before the culture festival.

"—Maybe Shinobu-chan went on a journey to find herself?"

Not again.

Prev Chapter | Next Chapter

[pterobat]

A few Hellaverse things, Hazbin version:

**I like both series because they’re the kind of visually stunning, nonhuman POV stories that adult animation so lacks. Helluva having more material than Hazbin doesn’t necessarily mean Helluva has richer writing, though, as both have had serious growing pains, but Hazbin’s swift tonal shifts and character turns could easily be solved with more runtime.

**It gives me this crazy kind of joy that someone could get something so blatantly of someone’s very specific id produced by a mainstream outlet—along with a bit of jealousy as I’ve had to keep learning restraint and focus.

** Excessive cursing? No. As long as it’s divided based on characterization—which it is—it’s totally fine. Seeing so many get so worked up over swearing brings me the closest to worrying about Kids Today that I’ve ever been.

**But whatever it is about Hazbin that makes hate-watchers so frothingly angry, keep doing it.

**I thought I was pretty uptight, but the name "Vaggie" doesn't bother me in the slightest and I even like the character.

**Vaggie’s new design is more sensible in its context, but I miss her old pastel goth/ragdoll look, and how prickly she was in the pilot. The second thing would also make Carmilla’s criticisms of her have more substance, because as it is, Vaggie now seems perfectly on the level.

**The Hazbin series is doing its best to catch new viewers up to speed and the pilot is freely available, but I’m going to be dragged kicking and screaming into this multi-medium future where viewers must be plugged in to both social media and fandom to get a basic viewer experience, and they should have just remade the pilot for the Amazon series, and included some of the basic details that only fans know.

**Charlie and her dolls should have gotten a few more shots in, but no, Hazbin turning into a battle with Heaven isn't abandoning the premise. It feels inevitable that Charlie’s thing, no matter how clumsy, would eventually get Heaven’s attention, just that the plot needed more time to bake, and the angel-killing plot need to be added more elegantly.

**But I do think viewers are just too impatient re: worldbuilding, and the reasons for damnation are among the least important things about this series.

**I didn't ever anticipate Adam returning as a sinner since he's presented as the ultimate nepo baby and however unclear viewers think it is, there’s no way the morality system would work against his favor.

**Fun to see Lute as a True Believer who nonetheless is completely fine with Adam’s dickery and faffing about. And I thought her name was “Lute” because that’s a stereotypical angelic instrument, not that it’s short for “Lieutenant”.

**I'm sad to see Hazbin apparently abandon the subtext from the pilot, that Alastor was muscling his way into the hotel like an executive “fixing” a creative vision, and Charlie was just too giddy and accommodating to see it. The only thing left might be keeping Alastor's insulting rename of the hotel. (Though as the Doylist name for the series, it feels a bit off.)

…and I dislike Alastor. Not in any deeper sense than he told a woman to smile and is irritatingly smug, not to mention the unsettling one-finger-at-a-time fashion he touches Charlie’s shoulders. That made it gratifying to see he was under a geas and then got taken down a few pegs.

(Tumblr Sexymen are perfectly good things, however.)

**I hope that Valentino having magical spit doesn’t mean “Poison” is now a completely literal song.

**”Heaven is corrupt” plus “woobie Lucifer” are perfectly good narrative beats. A bit cliche and simple but, I’m still hoping things are more complicated *and* I’m not going to be too upset if they’re not. Because seeing those who really, really dislike these ideas triggers my contrarian impulses and I imagine they’re not evangelists but are literally aggrieved by the most simple Biblical role-reversals.

Besides, we have Emily as a good Angel, and most importantly, Heaven still looks like a sweet place to be, meaning it’s no surprise that Charlie’s naïveté keeps powering her desires to be up there, and letting her overlook the structural problems for material comforts.

But I would like it if pre-Carmilla sinners posed a threat and the Exterminations weren’t just conducted from sheer spite. It’s the kind of gray that you cqn only get from fictional conflicts.

**I guess there is too much red in the series, but only in certain Hotel scenes where the backgrounds are reddish, too.

Otherwise, my only problems with Hazbin’s art style are 1) For all the inspiration that goes into designing sinner characters, most (not all) of the women are either anthro animals or wholly humanoid, often with similar color schemes 2) The forms of sinners are suposed to be symbolic, but many of the designs feel like they were thought of as demons long after the fact.

Fantasy species with wide internal variation are my catnip, but there has to be some consistent baselines, and without those, Hazbin’s “anything goes” demon designs don’t live up to that potential.

It’s good they did the same thing for Heaven, though.

**Also please, please let Lilith or Eve or some other mother character be complicated.

[elodieunderglass]

Ok so going out to a bigger context and a massive bugbear of mine: this is tumblr, so you’ve probably seen a lot of posts from ✨humanities✨ people that go like this.

Dumb uneducated masses: hurr durr historians lied to us! I never learned about this in school! Historians say dumb things like “we don’t know if gay people ever existed” but I saw a TikTok about gay people in history. A conspiracy I think from the Man

Buff victimised wojack historians: we are not hiding things from you! We are doing important work on these topics in our theses! A tiny amount of intensive educated research would bring you the knowledge you crave! I’m a gay history PhD with gay history book ACTUALLY. You are all illiterate, and blaming us only shows your lack of education.

Another historian: god it’s so frustrating how stupid the public is when our academic publications are RIGHT THERE.

Another historian: smh it’s the way they’d prefer to get misinformation on tumblr and TikTok.

Historians in particular do this a lot. I could link you to a few distinct posts that do exactly this with 40k+ notes. and lots of sanctimonious people complaining about how the public have NO information literacy, and ALL of these complaints are PERFECTLY addressed in Ratbin and Huguenot (2001) “Gender and Ungender in Mesopotamia” which these morons would KNOW if they only (paywall)(paywall)(paywall). You have seen multiple popular posts on tumblr where extremely intelligent, kind, smart, educated people are not realising that in their complaints about their discipline’s massive communications issue, they are repeatedly demonstrating why they have a comms issue. You have possibly even reblogged it, without realising the massive flaw at the heart of the rhetoric. We usually trust historians to have good rhetoric! If they don’t, who does?

But surely this is common across academic disciplines? Well, we note that sciences have an entire professional field called “science communication.” When someone asks a science question on social media, scientists usually sprint to be the first to give the clearest answer.Scientists consider it a personal failing if the public don’t understand a key update in modern science, and will often go out of their way on social media to spread correct content in accessible ways. Science grants and funding bodies and journals require that scientists have plans to communicate, and make accessible and publicly serviceable, pretty much every piece of funded research and increasing amounts of published research. Scientists go into schools and talk to little kids and have festivals -for free- they don’t get paid for this and yet you can call up any ambassador association and ask for a lecture and get one. Science communicators pound the pavement, working as park rangers and forest school leaders, comedians and podcasters; an ENTIRE LINE OF WORK involves getting paid by researchers to translate, communicate and promote their science. There are companies and people for whom this is their paid, actual factual salaried career.

And I cannot stress enough how easy it is to get any given science PhD student to come and do any form of science communication for free. They will do it for free , and they will thank you for the opportunity.

The attitude in the sciences is “if the public don’t understand, then we’ve failed to communicate, and need to do better.” There is an entire professional field dedicated to doing this; as OP says, science museums do not scorn to stoop to the level of children.

Now I return to the image of the science PhD student, who is quivering with anticipation at being asked to talk about sea turtle conservation to small children, who will objectively never give them funding, in the true belief that it is good for society and sea turtles to do such things. We can intuit, from pop culture, the scientist personality: the belief that you can save the world. if you just get the work done and the words right and people believe you, you can save the world. We instantly see the fears and hopes of scientists from this; we can study the psychology and history of the Mad Scientist trope, exploring what happens when the motivations of this personality become no longer socially acceptable. We can see this belief that science, like a key, could open the lock that saves the world; this explains the franticness of the personality that gladly spends its free time forging different keys. The hope here is the beautiful perfect Argument, a shining radiant Key, that one presents to The Public, and suddenly they cry out and fall down and say “Of COURSE! we care about ocean acidification so much now! We will immediately overthrow everyone who doesn’t care, and fix it at once.” To this personality, knowledge sharing is survival. The more people who are educated enough to appreciate and admire and pay the scientist, the better the scientist has of realising their hopes (saving the world) and avoiding their fear (getting it wrong and failing forever.)

Now we turn to the graduate student in fine arts, and contrary to what we would think of progressive bohemian artists, we often see a different set of fears and hopes that are conservative. Conservative, fundamentally and etymologically, means to hold; to grasp; to keep; to spend small amounts very cautiously. perhaps they are seeking to curate and preserve previous works, like OP’s curators: or perhaps hoping to create valuable works of their own, to sell for a living to a special population of discerning rich people. Either way, if Just Anyone could create a work that appeals to rich collectors; if Just Anyone could declare what is art; if Just Any Object could be found to have value; if Just Anyone could look at curated objects and understand them with context and appreciation: it rather undermines the idea that collecting this education is inherently valuable. And thus we see the response: the public should educate themselves. An arts education is good to have, and probably makes more customers, but people should go and get one, rather than being given it for free; we know that most people won’t, but that’s okay, because it’s important that the Knowledge itself is curated. The best people to understand and interpret these works have won the right to do so through proper curation of the Knowledge. In a sense knowledge should be hoarded or handed out sparingly because that is how it simultaneously retains value, and ensures the good quality of the most knowledgeable people.

Similarly, history does not attract the “save the world” nerds in the same way that science does. And that’s honestly fine. It’s a burnout personality - kind of a psychological complex - too dependent on externals. The Locked Tomb does not feature the apocalypse of a mad historian.

But you can’t desire the fruits of the hard work that the science community reaps (public appreciation, attention, funding, pop culture) without doing some reflection about why you want all fruit and no work. And no, it isn’t that Nobody Cares (And Should Get An Education So That They Care More, Which They Won’t, Because Nobody Cares About Humanities Anymore, Because The Sciences Are Luring Them Away with their Wiles.) nobody cared about pretty much any part of science until someone found the key to the comms. Plastic straws in sea turtle noses, save the bees, plant more trees, feathered dinosaurs, genes that cure cancer - all images, all stories that made people care. If the sciences are better storytellers, then don’t sulk; tell a better story! Maybe more people would care about the humanities if you secured their passions as children! Maybe the fact that nobody is reading your book is giving clues about accessibility. Maybe the public don’t really read that many paywalled papers, and you should be doing podcasts and press releases and tumblr essays about them. Maybe the fact that people prefer TikTok means that YOU SHOULD MAKE A BETTER TIKTOK.

Science communication says: you don’t understand the results of my science education? No problem! Let me show you! Don’t worry - even a kid can learn it. We’ll make it fun! Where did we lose you?

While the humanities are spending far too much time saying: you don’t understand the results of my arts education? Well you should get an arts degree, and then you would. If you weren’t so stupid and easily misled by TikTok, you would have simply gone to a university library and placed a hold on my book - what do you mean you’re twelve.

If you read all this and it makes you feel defensive: good! The storytelling arts shouldn’t rest on their laurels. It should be a challenge, a provocation, the red gleam of the other racehorse’s eye as it pulls away from you. You should be champing at the bit to prove me wrong - to tell a better story at ONCE - to change the world.

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

[professorchaos]

i am so excited to see someone else headcanoning butters as having DID! i’m a system personally and thought i was the only one who saw butters as having DID, so thrilled to see im not alone in that

thank you so much for sending a message! i'm glad that some of my posts may have resonated with you.

when i started posting about it waaaay back in 2017-18 (?) i couldn't possibly have anticipated that i would still be getting asks like this 5 or 6 years down the line. i think i was probably the first to openly discuss this headcanon with correct terminology, which i say not because i'm proud of it or bragging or trying to seem like i own it or anything like that, but just for some context when i say that i was nervous initially and really never could have expected the steady stream of support through the years, the many wonderful and creative people who have messaged me to say things like you are saying now. i've felt very strongly about it from day one, and there was kind of no groundwork before, so i'm very happy to have been able to lay some down for people in the future like yourself who are looking for solidarity (for lack of a better word, "content") like i once was.

(by the way, it's pretty cool that the headcanon only got more plausible post-post-covid, huh? i was very excited about that!)

[soul-dwelling]

Do you think any readings of black blood as some metaphor for STD's could have been intended by Ohkubo or it's just all in the heads of fans that want to make childrens media "dark and mature" and or edgy trolls that just want to be abrasive for the sake of it

Oh, I’m going to go off the rails towards the end of this post. 

Let’s start with the actual answer to your question before my rant kicks in. 

I can’t remember encountering this reading, or having made that interpretation (although it wouldn’t surprise me, after 10 years with this fan blog, with thousands of reblogs and original posts, that there isn’t a post where I or someone else didn’t bring it up). 

I think what mitigates that reading for me is that the Black Blood, while passing along the same condition from Crona to Soul, is presented as passing along a more mental condition of “madness” (admittedly, Ohkubo’s portrayal of madness in his fiction is not directly aligned with how it works in our world--seeing as he is writing magical fiction, not something strictly realistic). 

So, I’m too distracted by “shared mental condition due to an ‘infection’” before I think, “Um, is this tapping into something problematic where Ohkubo is not portraying STIs well?”

I can’t figure out an author’s intention (even though enough of my replies today are trying to do that). But what I see from Ohkubo, I don’t see enough other context clues to make me think he intended for the Black Blood to be read as a metaphor about STIs. Given how the manga wraps up with the entire world under a form of madness, I don’t see how that speaks to anything about STIs. 

And now, the rants--and neither one is in response to your question, they are just tangential and on my mind given *waves hands at how fucked up everything is right now in this real world we’re stuck in*. 

(And before anyone says, “Ohkubo’s Chapter 113 predicted COVID,” no, he fucking didn’t. If anything, at best, I could say, between how Soul Eater ends with everyone just tolerating the Madness of Boobs, and how Fire Force ends with Shinra forcing onto everyone else a lack of concern about dying, this is more like Ohkubo darkly anticipating, by logic or cynicism, how humans would create to something: they would just accept the problem and, rather than avoid it or try to fix it, just normalize it, because they are too lazy and heartless to give a shit about the problems they are putting onto other people and would rather go without a vaccine or a mask or social distancing--and yes, I am ranting now, because goddamn it, this shit has gone on for years and has compromised the health and livelihood of so many people who can’t afford the financial, mental, emotional, and physical costs.)

I don’t think it’s only that fans want to make it dark or mature or want to be edgy trolls--that’s all part of it. But some fans just want dark humor to let the tension out, to work through their fears or traumas. I would not tell someone dealing with an STI that they can’t crack this kind of a dark joke--they’re dealing with this problem, I’m not, let them speak about their own experience, even if I don’t agree with the interpretation or find the experience to be in such contrast with the tone of the original work. Same if someone did indeed want to read this as similar to COVID (even as my rant above, more so in anger at the “___ predicted ___” memes that just piss me off, shows I’m not a fan of that reading, either). 

And I would quibble over whether we can put Soul Eater into children’s media--but that’s a discussion about how much of the series can definitely be handled by children, how norms and demographics differ between Japanese audiences and audiences in other settings, how there are children who can handle something thought not to be for their age group and some children can’t, so the entire demarcation of something as “children’s media” and something as “adult’s media” has more to do with reception and engagement that varies person to person rather than a necessarily blanket category. 

(...Almost like why book bans going on in my fucking country are fucking tiresome: you can leave a book in a library, you can guide a kid to check out that book or not to check out that book, but removing the book from the shelves is the fucking wrong move because now a kid who can handle that book or even adults who also are at that library now can’t get it. It’s also why it's foolish to ban books that are LGBTQA+, or perceived or promoted as such--first of all for the reasons I said above about leaving books there to find their audience, but also because you’re acting as if “LGBTQA+” is synonymous with “adult” when no it fucking is not and when you’re acting like a child can’t be LGBTQA+ when we have seen repeatedly yes they fucking can.)