#i mean if im not accepted/can transfer to the major i want to study im retaking them next year

[transsexualism]

ALL EXAMS TAKEN!!!! FREEDOM!!!!!! I AM NEVER DOING THAT SHIT AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ggukcangetit]

Dreamcatchers 6

Pairing: jungkook x oc

Summary: DI Jeon didn’t need a new partner. Unfortunately, his superiors felt otherwise; especially considering the extremely high-profile murder that had just taken place in the port city. Recent transfer, DI Choi Yuri finds herself confronted with a new cityscape, unfamiliar people, a hostile partner, and a homicide that is certain to bring back unpleasant memories.  

Genre/AU: fluff/action/mystery | detective! au | police!jungkook, police!oc

Word Count: 5.2k

Rating: NC-17

Warnings: mentions of violence, alcohol, blood, drugs, death. basically stuff you’d associate with a murder mystery/crime drama.

Chapters 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 

A/N:  it’s been a while since i posted and even longer since i updated this fic but its still here and so am i! lol. updates are not gonna be very frequent but i have a list of works in progress that i plan to finish so there will be something or the other being posted at the most random moments.

also, reminding everyone that this story features a named oc because i’m still very unfamiliar with writing second person reader inserts. i’m not aiming for strict accuracy in this story, and all criminal investigation/forensics knowledge i have has been gathered by watching crime drama/procedural dramas! my knowledge of geography is also not totally accurate so apologies for that. once again, one thing right by @hobios​ prompted me to write a police inspector! jungkook story. would highly recommend reading that because it’s probably one of my most favorite pieces of writing!

21st December

"Is this how you conduct a sample analysis?! Where did you even train? I've half a mind to report you and get you kicked out!!"

Yuri stopped at her desk, surprised to hear Seulgi's yelling so loudly that she could be heard all the way from the floor above. She was usually extremely calm and even-tempered, but the past couple of days had seen her irritable, snappy, and downright furious.

"Dr. Ahn sounds really angry," whispered Jisoo, clutching a file close to her chest. "I've never heard her yell at anybody before. I hope she's okay."

"I'm sure everything's fine," said Jeon, walking over to his desk and dropping a bunch of files on it. "Can I talk to you for a second?"

Yuri raised an eyebrow at him, but complied nonetheless. They walked outside, standing near a clump of trees outside of earshot of anyone in the station.

"Guess who I've just brought in on suspicion of murder for the 2nd Nov case?" he asked, lowering his voice.

"No!" gasped Yuri. "Minhyuk?"

"Yep. He's been in the country for a while now. Fancy giving me a hand with the interview?"

"Me? I mean," she bit her lip. "I wasn't part of the original investigation."

"I know, but in light of what you've found out and the fact that you're now my partner, Goh thinks it's okay."

"You told Goh?!"

"I had to. I can't restart the investigation without his permission."

Jeon stared at her for a few moments, trying to gauge her reaction. "So, what do you say?"

"Alright. Let's nail this bastard."

Ahreum was late. She had a meeting with one of her professors to decide on which medical stream she'd specialize in. Despite using forensics as an excuse to distract Seulgi, she was seriously considering it now. Deciding to pursue medicine had been a drastic career switch for Ahreum, and a lot of people had questioned her decision relentlessly. But if there was something she had learnt in the years following her parents' divorce, it was patience and the ability to block out irrelevant conversations. Namjoon had always been immersed in his studies, barely affected by the bitterness existing between their parents. Ahreum, barely in high school, felt lost and helpless during those times. After the divorce, things had become less tumultuous and she was able to see her parents as individual entities. That was when she realized that her father was never going to like any of her decisions, no matter how hard she tried to please him, and her mother preferred to stay aloof at the best of times. Ahreum learnt pretty early in life, that she needed to be there for herself. She loved her brother and parents, though the latter a lot less than the former. Her decision to study English Literature and Creative Writing had been a spur of the moment one - dictated more by the fact that her high school boyfriend was going to study at a major Arts university. She didn't really regret any of her decisions. Her degree had led her to finding a hobby she adored - photography. And having a freelance job meant that she could stay with Namjoon - who earned a significantly larger amount than her - and move whenever he needed to move as well. This was also how she had met Taehyung 3 years ago - a happy coincidence of events when she had been taking pictures outside the museum at Seoul. They had started talking about art and photography, eventually realizing that they lived in the same part of the city. In addition to Yuri, she also considered Taehyung to be her best friend. She had seen him during one of his lowest moments when Seokjin had left home; and then some time later when he had found Seokjin living in the town Ahreum and Namjoon had recently shifted to, she had stayed by him as he grappled with his anger and frustration towards his older brother until an eventual reconciliation.

But at this moment, she was beginning to lose patience with him. Five minutes before she was about to leave for her meeting, she received a bunch of frantic texts from him.

8.25 am

T: ahreum?? are u up??

T: jimins still in custody

T: im so worried

8.26 am

T: u there?

T: i want to visit him...

T: will u come with me?

8.27 am

T: hey

T: ???

T: i didnt sleep much so i dont wanna drive there

8.28 am

T: are u sleeping?

T: ???

He knew she had a meeting today. He knew how important the meeting was for her. She had spoken about it many times. Not for the first time, Ahreum wondered whether Taehyung cared about her beyond what directly concerned him. If it wasn't somehow relevant to him, he never seemed to remember much. It was a careless apathy that had hurt her during the beginning of their friendship, but she had accepted it as a part of him.

Her meeting was at 9 am and she usually needed 20 minutes to get there on her bike. She closed her eyes and mentally rehearsed the points she was going to bring up during her meeting. Her phone pinged once more, breaking her concentration.

8.30 am

T: hey

T: can u pick me up?

She frowned and shot a quick text before pocketing her phone and strapping on her helmet.

A: sorry have a meeting... talk later

As Ahreum sped through the narrow lanes, she was convinced that there was no way she was going to talk to Taehyung today. He would have to manage on his own for once.

Yuri and Jeon sat across from a very nervous Park Minhyuk, his bloodshot eyes indicating that he had been brought in after a rough night.

"Good morning." Jeon began the interview, his notes stacked neatly in front of him. "You were very hard to get a hold of, Mr. Park. Specifically because your company categorically states that you've been out of the country for business."

"I-" His face was white as a sheet.

"When we called your office, we were told that you are often out of the country on business trips. Short trips," Jeon flipped through his notes. "A fortnight, 20 days at max. Your secretary was very obliging - he told us that you traveled on October 12th and returned on October 27th. Then left the country again on November 1st and returned on November 16th. Another trip between November 22nd and December 6th. And finally, one more on December 10th from which you still haven't returned."

"Your phone records are very interesting, Mr. Park," said Yuri, joining in. "I'm DI Choi, by the way, and I will be assisting DI Jeon as his partner on the case. Now -" she opened the file in front of her and took out a particular page - "is this your cell phone number?"

"Yes, but-"

"Our Telecomms division looked over recent activity over the last 3-4 months. While your office confirms that you have been on multiple trips out of the country from October onwards, your phone has been operating in Korea for almost two months. Can you tell us why?"

Minhyuk remained silent, his hands clenched on the table.

"Do you recognize this?" Yuri placed a plastic bag on the table and moved it towards him.

The remaining color drained from Minhyuk's face as he stared at the ring inside the plastic bag.

"Let me help you out, Mr. Park," she continued. "This is an heirloom from your mother's side of the family. There was three such rings - one buried with your mother, one on your brother's finger, and one found at the scene of Son Eunbi's murder. Can you tell us how your ring found its way to a murder scene?"

"I didn't kill her!" Minhyuk looked like he was going to pass out. Jeon poured some water into a glass and passed it to him.

"She was dead when I got there!" he said after gulping down the water. His hands were shaking by this point.

"If she was dead when you got there, why didn't you call the police?"

"I..."

Faced with a possible murder charge, Minhyuk looked frightened but not nearly as forthcoming with an alibi as one would have hoped.

"Mr. Park," Yuri spoke after a period of silence. "Did you know that Ms. Son had a three year old daughter named Gina?"

Minhyuk gulped, his eyes breaking contact with hers. He removed his hands from where they had been clenched on the table, choosing to hide them in his lap.

"Are you Gina's father?" she continued. Minhyuk head shot up at her question.

"H-how did-"

"When did you find out?" she asked.

Minhyuk sighed and rubbed his eyes tiredly. "I guess there's no point in denying it since you know everything." He reached out and finished the remaining water in the glass. "In October, after I came back from a trip, I happened to meet her by chance and Gina was with her. It was odd, the way that she tried to avoid talking to me. And the fact that Gina also had clear grey eyes."

For the first time since the interview started, Yuri realised the resemblance between the Park brothers was limited but striking. Their eyes were the exact same shade of grey - while Jimin looked cold and unwelcoming, Minhyuk's glasses did well to give him a warmer appearance.

"I asked her why she hadn't contacted me when she got pregnant. Or in the three years since Gina was born."

"What did she say?" asked Yuri, softly.

"She was scared that I wouldn't believe her." Tears had started to roll down his cheeks. "I loved her... so much. And then she just disappeared one day. I tried so hard to find her but..."

Jeon poured another glass of water for him.

"I told her how happy I was to hear about Gina. That I wanted us to be a proper family. I was willing to do whatever was necessary if that's what she wanted as well. I think she was beginning to warm up to the idea. I even told my father to postpone my next trip so that I could spend a little more time with both of them. But-"

"But?"

Minhyuk stared at his hands, looking tired and dejected. "He - uh, he wasn't happy when he heard about Gina. My father has very particular expectations."

"What did he say to you? Did he threaten you, Mr. Park?"

Minhyuk let out a soft chuckle. "My father doesn't threaten. He suggests."

"And what did he suggest you do about Gina and Eunbi?" asked Jeon.

"That I stay away from them. For the sake of my inheritance."

"And did you?"

"I was planning to... I-I was meant to travel the next day and I thought I would go and see her once more before I left. But when I got there..."

Minhyuk covered his face with his hands, taking deep breaths to try and calm himself.

"What happened when you got there, Mr. Park?"

"She was lying there... in a pool of blood. Gina was asleep in the back. I-I didn't kill her. You have to believe me."

Yuri and Jeon exchanged a quick look as Minhyuk protested his innocence. They were aware that the homeless man had killed Son Eunbi. The DNA found at the crime scene confirmed the fact that he had stabbed her. But they needed Minhyuk to give them as much information as possible.

"I'm afraid we do not conduct our investigations based on belief, Mr. Park," continued Yuri, shuffling her notes meaningfully. "You still haven't provided us with an alibi for that night. Strange thing - the Park family seem to have a particular aversion towards providing alibis. Your brother was also extremely resistant when we spoke to him."

"You spoke to Jimin? What for?" Minhyuk's expression had changed completely. He looked strangely alert.

"I guess you aren't aware that Jimin was arrested for the murder of Kang Eunwoo on December 15th." Jeon spoke deliberately, hoping to elicit a reaction. And he was successful.

"What?! That's impossible! There's no way he could've done that!"

"Why are you so certain of that?"

"Because he was with me on December 15th!"

"I'm sorry but we can't take you at your word. You can't even provide a proper alibi for yourself on the night of Son Eunbi's murder. How can we be sure that the two of you aren't just covering up for each other?"

It was then that Minhyuk realised that he would need to come clean. There was no way to save Jimin without telling them the entire story.

"Fine," he sighed. "I'll tell you everything."

"Everything?"

"Yes. If it can help Jimin, I'm willing to risk my father finding out."

Yuri glanced at Jeon who gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

"Go on."

"After I saw Eunbi... lying there, I couldn't leave Gina. No matter what my father had said, I couldn't leave my daughter in such a situation. So I... took her away with me."

"Where is Gina now, Mr. Park?" Yuri asked, frowning.

"She's safe."

"Where is she?" asked Jeon, sharply.

"In Busan. I have an apartment there and she's been with me since that day."

"Why didn't you tell the police that you had her? Why does your company believe that you are abroad on a business trip?"

Minhyuk rubbed his eyes tiredly and drank some more water. "I couldn't let my father find out. Jimin and I have an apartment in Busan that we bought under a different name. It was a place our father couldn't find us. Gina's been staying there with me since 2nd November."

"Are you sure your father thinks you're abroad? It doesn't seem like something easy to cover up."

"Jimin helped with that," said Minhyuk, leaning back into the cold metal chair. "He told father that I had run away because he hadn't been understanding of my situation with Gina and Eunbi. Jimin's good at convincing people - it's a talent he's barely ever put to good use."

"So Jimin knew that you were hiding in a secret apartment with your recently discovered daughter?"

"Yes, he did. I have an alibi for 2nd November. I was in a meeting till 9 pm and then stopped for drinks at a nearby fried chicken place till 11 pm. I was a bit tipsy after that, which is why I decided to visit Eunbi and Gina. After taking Gina away from there, I went to Jimin's place, got the keys to the apartment and drove straight there. I think I reached around 2 am."

Yuri jotted down all this information, making a note to check on every new detail that had been mentioned.

"What about December 15th? You said Jimin was with you. Why?" asked Jeon, folding his arms across his chest.

"We meet once a week to make sure everything is going okay," said Minhyuk, pinching the bridge of his nose tiredly. "Sundays are usually the best days for that."

"Where did you meet?"

"At the local ice-cream shop," Minhyuk frowned, trying to remember something. "You know the one near the end of town?"

"The Dairy Berry? Yes, I know which one you're talking about." Jeon gave Yuri a brief nod to confirm that this was a legitimate spot and not something Minhyuk was making up on the spot.

"Gina loves sweet things and I thought it would be easier to take her with me the same day I met Jimin. I think we were there till 10 pm. After that, I dropped Jimin at a bar and drove back home."

"Which bar was this?" asked Yuri.

"Sunset."

"And you drove straight home after that?"

"You can check the dash cam on my car and the security tapes at my apartment building, if you want."

"We definitely will, Mr. Park," said Jeon, surveying him carefully. "In the meantime, you will be in custody until we have verified each and every single thing you just told us. So I suggest you keep yourself hydrated."

Yuri could feel a pair of eyes on her as she spoke to Jisoo and Suho.

"We need to verify everything that Park Minhyuk told us. But there's a lot of ground to cover and we've lost quite a bit of time since the murder of Son Eunbi. So I suggest you recruit some uniformed officers as well." Jisoo jotted down the locations and the times they needed to verify, and nodded to Suho to indicate she had forwarded the details to him. "We need to get the information as soon as possible."

"Will do," said Suho, giving her a reassuring nod.

Yuri waited for them to leave before walking over to the person who had been watching her for a while.

"Did you want to talk about something?" she asked Seulgi.

"I-" Seulgi tugged at her sleek, high ponytail, looking oddly hesitant. She seemed in a better mood than earlier in the morning when she had almost scared one of the interns into leaving the country. "Do you have a minute?"

"Yeah- " Yuri checked the clock on her phone - "just a minute though. I'm waiting for Jeon to get a warrant from Goh."

"Did he-? I mean, Jimin, uh... have you...? You know-" It was strange to see her grappling for words. "Are you certain he's done it?"

Yuri stared at her for a second. This wasn't what she had been expecting Seulgi to talk about. The doctor's relationship with Jimin was even more puzzling than she had originally perceived it.

"We're looking into it right now." She paused, trying to gauge Seulgi's reaction. "But you already know about the blood sample match - that, in itself, is pretty damaging."

"Y-yeah, I know."

Before Yuri could say anything more, Jeon came out of the Chief Inspector's office. "We've got a warrant to search Minhyuk's apartment. Let's go."

Glancing one more time at Seulgi's ashen face, Yuri put on her coat and scarf and followed Jeon out the exit.

Once inside Jeon's car, Yuri debated whether or not she should attempt to engage him in conversation. Her decision was made for her when he drove onto the main road, and lowered the volume of the police scanner.

"What was Seulgi saying?" he asked, his eyes focused on the road.

"Just where we were in the investigation."

"I see."

Yuri fiddled with the button on her coat, itching to say more.

"What's the deal with her and Jimin?" she finally asked.

"I- what do you mean?" Jeon raised his eyebrow and gave her the most puzzled expression he could muster while trying to stay focused on the crazy traffic.

"Their relationship is... weird. He keeps flirting with her, and she is on the verge of ripping his guts out at every given moment. But just now, she seemed almost worried about him."

"I don't really know... they've never really seen eye-to-eye on much." Jeon checked the rear view mirror to make sure he was clear before deftly changing lanes. "Jimin has always been the person who tries his utmost to push everyone's buttons. And Seulgi... well, she has a lot of buttons."

Yuri snorted loudly. "That tells me nothing and everything at the same time. You really have a way with words, Jeon."

He smirked at this, his eyes never leaving the road. "So does that mean you trust me now?"

"No." She looked at him and caught the way his face fell slightly at her response. "But who knows what the future holds..."

The smirk was back.

Ahreum had a terrible headache. She usually didn't get many headaches. So on the rare occasion that she did, it put her in a really terrible mood. The only person who knew how to handle this situation properly was Namjoon. He knew that she needed silence, dim lighting, green tea, fresh bread, and absolutely no unexpected company.

So when Ahreum got home after her grueling 3 hour long meeting, hoping to relax and recuperate, she wasn't too pleased to find Taehyung sitting in her living room, playing a very loud game on his tablet.

"You're back!" he yelled, once she slammed the door to make her presence felt. "I've been waiting for hours. How was your meeting?"

"'S okay," she replied, shortly. Taking off her coat, she opened the middle cabinet in the kitchen and searched for the green tea.

"Great! So do you wanna go and visit Jimin now?"

"No."

"What? Why not? You don't have anything else to do right now. Just come with me. Please!" He had walked into the kitchen and was standing in front of her with a pout on his lips.

As endearing as she always found his antics, Ahreum was at breaking point. She placed the cup on the counter with a loud clink, and turned to face him.

"Because I don't have time to follow you on your every whim, Taehyung. Because I have a life of my own. Because I am studying medicine, which, if you aren't aware, is a very taxing occupation." She paused for a breath, as his mouth fell open in shock. "Because I am not your babysitter. Or your handler. Or your caretaker. And I'm tired of being responsible for you. You're a grown ass adult and it's about time you acted like one."

"Ahreum, I'm-" His eyes were wide and worried, and she felt a tiny sliver of remorse. "I don't think you're my babysitter or handler or whatever. You're my best friend."

"I thought so too. In fact," she said, looking away from him. "I thought we were, or we could be, more."

"W-what? Ahreum?" Taehyung sounded so lost and confused that she was tempted to console him.

She walked to the front door and held it open for him. "I think you should leave now. I'm tired, I have a headache, and I don't want to be around anyone right now."

"Wait! What did you mean by that?" he asked, hesitantly standing at the entrance.

"I'm tired, Taehyung. I don't have the energy to explain everything to you. Now, please," she began closing the door slowly. "I want to rest."

"It's clear!" The uniformed officer confirmed to them, before opening the door further.

"Okay, let's see whether little Gina is here," instructed Jeon, his face drawn into a frown.

Yuri nodded and walked into the room on the left of the large living area. It was a study of sorts, with a large wooden desk, a swiveling chair, and shelves upon shelves of books. She quickly checked to see if there was anyone in the room before shouting "clear!". There was another door connecting to a smaller room, it's walls bathed in bright sunlight and smelling of soft lavender. This was clearly some sort of guest room, judging by the inconsistent decor theme. The furniture looked sleek and modern, but the sheets on the bed were soft and pastel colored. A bunch of soft toys stood leaning against the flat screen tv, and Yuri realised that this was probably the room that had been hastily fixed up for a small child's unexpected stay. And sure enough, soft strands of brown hair peaked through the large covers on the bed.

She walked over to the bed slowly, not wanting to startle the child. Yuri barely managed to stifle a gasp as she looked into the child's clear grey eyes - the same color as both Park Minhyuk and Park Jimin.

"Hello," she said, softly. "Are you Gina?"

The little girl nodded, bringing the covers closer towards her.

"I'm a police officer. I help catch bad people." She didn't respond, staring at her with wide eyes.

"Do you want to go to your dad, Gina?" She nodded vigorously, sitting up at the mention of her father. "Okay, we will. But first, tell me, are you okay? Do you feel pain anywhere?"

The little girl shook her head.

"Are you sleepy?"

Again, she shook her head.

"Are you hungry?"

Slowly, she nodded her head.

"Okay, we'll go and see your dad, and also get you something to eat. Is that okay with you?"

"Yes."

"Wonderful."

It was just after 2 pm and Yuri felt completely drained. After they had found Gina, she had insisted on returning to the station to ask Jimin about his alibi for the night of Kang Eunwoo's murder. From what she had understood, he had refused to provide an alibi to protect his brother and keep him out of the police's radar until the situation with Gina worked out. Even though she still couldn't get herself to consider him a pleasant person, his desire to protect his brother had humanized him a great deal in her eyes.

Sure enough, once he was made aware that Minhyuk had come forward and spoken about his daughter and the events of the past month and a half, Jimin looked much less hostile than before.

"I was at Sunset from around 10.30 pm to closing time - which is 2 am," he said, sighing tiredly and rubbing his face with his hands. "You can confirm with them."

While Minhyuk and Jimin's alibis were verified, Yuri received a text from Namjoon, asking her and Jeon to meet him at Seokjin's bakery. It was barely a 2 minute drive there, so Jeon suggested they get lunch over there and make it before Goh finished compiling the list of paperwork for them to finish.

The smell of freshly baked milk bread wafted out of the kitchen, adding another layer of warmth to Seokjin's cozy shop. The man in question picked up the large tray filled with various different confections, and brought it over to the table by the window.

"Peach danish and americano for Namjoon, chocolate fudge brownie and vanilla bean ice cream for Jeongguk, and a snow croissant and hot chocolate for Yuri." He placed everything on the table, before grabbing his lukewarm cup of tea and sitting down with them.

"So you finally find the child, then?" asked Seokjin, sipping the tea. He made a face at the odd taste that tea acquires when it's between comfortingly steamy and soothingly chilled.

"Yeah we did," Yuri replied, when her partner remained silent. "Goh is dealing with Minhyuk and the custody charges. It's no longer in our jurisdiction."

"Namjoon, how's grad school treating you?" Seokjin diverted the conversation, realising that his friend wasn't ready to talk about the case at that moment. "How much longer do you have?"

"A few more months and I should be done." Namjoon wiped the pastry flakes from the corner of his mouth and nearly tipped over his americano in the process. Yuri chuckled at this, suddenly remembering those random moments in high school where Namjoon was a lot thinner and less confident, but still had a propensity for knocking things over.

"Remind me why you're putting yourself through this?" Seokjin broke off a piece of the peach danish and popped it into his mouth.

"The last time I tried to explain that, you spaced out and created a new pastry recipe for your menu. As much as I like helping your business flourish, I'm gonna preserve my energy and only talk about things when necessary."

Seokjin chuckled and picked up a spoon from the dispenser. "Jeongguk, can I get a bit of ice cream from you?" There was no response, and looking at him for confirmation Seokjin's eyebrows shot up in alarm.

"Okay okay, I won't eat any of your ice cream. You don't have to tear up about it!"

Yuri and Namjoon turned towards him as well, not sure what to do when they saw tears slowly sliding down Jeongguk's cheeks.

"Are you okay? What's wrong?" asked Namjoon, patting his shoulder softly.

They sat in silence, as Jeongguk sobbed softly and wiped his face with his coat sleeve. He turned towards Yuri, his eyes glazed with tears but holding a soft radiance unlike what she was used to.

"Thank you."

Yuri felt her face heat up suddenly. This wasn't what she had been expecting. The soft sincerity in his voice startled her. It was nothing like the person she had met only a week ago. She looked away abruptly and nodded her head.

"There's nothing to thank me for. This is our job."

Jeongguk smiled and resumed eating the disgustingly sweet dessert combination in front of him. He nudged Seokjin to take some ice cream like he had originally intended. There was silence once more, but this time, it was very different.

Back at the station, Yuri finished the paperwork for the day. There was a lot to complete, and since they had stopped at Seokjin's for a break, they had lost some time as well. Goh had been very clear about completing all the paperwork for social services to take over the case from them now that Gina had been found.

It was barely even 5 pm but Yuri felt a large yawn coming on for the third time in the past few minutes. She wasn't sure how long she would be able to carry on without getting proper sleep at night. At this rate, she would eventually burn out. There was only so much coffee could do for her.

A light tap brought her attention to another person standing in her cubicle. She looked up to see Jeon holding two steaming cups of ramen, tilting his head slightly to confirm whether it was okay for him to sit down.

"Did you need anything?" she asked, after moving her slightly. He placed the ramen on her desk and pulled up his own chair and sat down.

"I've got a peace offering," he gestured to the ramen. "I wanted to apologize properly for being an absolute dickhead to you. I-" He hesitated, looking down at his hands that lay clenched on his lap - "I don't really have an excuse for my behavior but I had a lot on my mind. Particularly about finding the little girl. And, well... you really don't know what solving this case means to me."

Once again, Yuri wasn't sure how to react. She felt embarrassed that he was thanking her for doing her job - something that he did as well. While she appreciated his apology, his entire being remained confusing to her.

"Don't worry about it," she said, waving her hand dismissively. "And thanks for the ramen; food is always appreciated."

Thankfully, her computer ping-ed with a new email before the atmosphere could get any more awkward.

"Okay, we've confirmed Minhyuk's alibi's for 2nd November and 15th December. He wasn't involved in either murder. Jimin was with Minhyuk till 10.15 pm on 15th December - his car's dash cam confirms that he dropped Jimin off at Sunset bar around that time."

"Fantastic! And what about the CCTV footage at Sunset? Does it confirm Jimin's story? He said he was there till 2 am."

"Hang on, I'm opening the report. Th-" she stopped abruptly, frowning at the screen.

"What?" asked Jeon, looking over her shoulder to read the email.

"CCTV footage does not place Jimin at Sunset from 10.15 pm till closing time at 2 in the morning. He doesn't have an alibi for Eunwoo's murder."

She turned to look at him, an odd sense of foreboding hitting her as she realized that they would have to charge Jimin for murder by the next evening. He held her gaze, his dark eyes reflecting a similar shadow of doubt.

please reblog and leave a comment if you liked this part! thank you! 😊 

[reviee]

three prologue | 1 | 2 |

summary: Post-war. Canon-divergent. In which Team 7 governs Konoha, much to Sakura’s dismay. —SasuSaku

note: third installment of my multichap fic (im surprised, too) and finally my extremely long headcanon of how sasuke tells sakura about the massacre exists. also, read on ffn for easier viewing, linked in the title.

Sakura finds Sasuke’s chakra signature on the south side of the village before she arrives. She is soothed by the feeling, in contrast to the early days of his desertion, when she felt anxiety at every turn.

“Sasuke-kun,” she calls to him and he turns around, looking so painfully familiar to her, as if they were going to meet Team 7, in the way that they did when they were twelve.

They walk together silently, stopping at an empty plot of land. She recognizes it as the old Uchiha district, emptied after the destruction Pein had wreaked on Konoha. Sasuke quickly forms hand seals, and a stone appears, a sharingan carved into its center.

“I’ve been here before,” Sakura says to him softly, looking around. She pauses, wondering if she should divulge the reasons that she had been here. It doesn’t matter anymore, she thinks, if they are to go forward.

She can feel Sasuke’s eyes on her, but they are not accusatory, only curious.

“After you left, I did some studying, on you, Itachi, the Uchiha clan…” to find you, is what she leaves unsaid.

She looks around the field, remembering the old and abandoned buildings that had been here before.

“Most things about the clan were classified, of course, but sometimes I helped Tsunade-sama after hours at the Hokage Tower. Under the properties owned by the Uchiha clan, this was one of them.”

Sakura remembers, as a thirteen-year-old girl, running around frantically attempting to find information on one missing teammate, while her other teammate had also left her behind. For two and a half years she was alone, spending the majority of her time with Tsunade, and only rarely seeing Kakashi.

Kakashi had been embarrassed, she knows now, because he had been naive in his reassurance that everything would be alright. Still, she thinks, she would have liked it if he had at least practiced taijutsu with her. He was, after all, still her mentor.

But, she supposes, she had been Kakashi’s student only insofar as he was Team 7’s leader. To him, Sasuke was his pupil, the one he had passed raikiri down to, and that student had now been using it on his friends.

“There was nothing here, except empty houses,” she looks at the sharingan on the ground, illuminated by dim moonlight, “nothing I could see, anyway.”

“It’s a special seal,” he tells her, “for sharingan users. This is the nakano shrine, where the Uchiha clan held their meetings.”

She nods and they walk descend into the structure. She spots at the far end of the room they enter, a pedestal with a blank stone tablet on it.

“What is it?”

“It is the monument that contains all of the clan’s secrets,” Sasuke replies, “You need the sharingan to read it, and some parts can only be read by those with the mangekyo.”

She nods, unsurprised by the clan’s level of secrecy. Growing up, the disappearance of the Uchiha clan should have been a huge scandal, but she had only heard whispers of a deserter and the word massacre. She knows now that the Hokage must have covered it up and looking at the scrolls had only confirmed that there had been little information disseminated about it.

Even now, she thinks, looking at Sasuke, nobody in the village knew much about the whole clan that had disappeared.

She wonders if it is alright for her to know about this.

“So,” he breaks the silence once again, “you read the scroll I left you.”

She nods. She had a suspicion that it was Sasuke who had left the scroll for her last night, unsealed, but it is good that he is confirming it. She had wondered if this was going to be an open secret between them, or if perhaps he had a point in doing so.

He had known about the truth behind the massacre, she realizes, and Naruto must have, too. Why didn’t anyone tell me, she wants to know, but remembers being left behind, and tells herself she should have expected it.

But, still, she thinks about Sasuke telling her, in his own way, and wonders why.

“I did,” she confirms, “I had no idea.”

He is silent for a moment. “Me neither,” he tells her honestly, “Itachi shouldered the burden all by himself,” he pauses, looking at her.

“That’s what being on the Konoha Council means to me.”

Sakura understands. Last night, she had thought, so this is the truth that Sasuke-kun lives with. She realizes that divulging this information might have been only a part of their roles as council members, but she nevertheless feels connected to him in a way that she hadn’t before.

“Then,” she walks up to the pedestal, standing next to Sasuke, “we should honour his memory.”

“Aa,” he agrees, and picks up the tablet, “I want to fill this with information about my mangekyo, and possibly the rinnegan, as well. There’s only been very few who have awakened the former, and only me who has the latter. For the sake of the clan, I think it’d be prudent to.

“Will you help me, Sakura?”

“Of course, Sasuke-kun,” she replies without hesitation, and he nods.

It is rare for Sasuke to ask her, of all people, for help. He is often reluctant to accept her efforts, even for the smallest injuries, and she understands that sometimes it is because he does not want to trouble her. Don’t bother, he’ll say, as if to tell her, don’t bother with me. But she had never been good at leaving him alone.

“Let’s go, then,” he puts the tablet back down on the pedestal and blows out the torch. “Didn’t you say you were going to cook dinner?”

She grins, thinking about the fresh tomatoes that she had bought that morning, and follows him out.

.

 .

 They eat dinner in silence, but she does not mind because he looks satisfied. She wonders how long it has been since someone has cooked for him and feels happy to be able to do so.

He washes the dishes without being asked to and she dries them. They are synchronized, in a way that Sakura hasn’t felt since their genin days, and she is lulled into a sense that this could be their future.

Sasuke sits on the floor of her living room, his legs crossed primly and his back straight. She kneels in front of him, and watches as he closes his eyes, before she sucks in a breath and places her hands on his face.

“I’m in your care,” he murmurs, and her heart flutters.

Sakura is astonished at the complexity of Sasuke’s sharingan. She had, before the war, briefly examined Kakashi’s eye, which was wholly imbued with what she knew now as Obito’s presence in addition to his own, as two chakras working together. The way it had been implanted had also been rudimentary, but effective, confirmed by the decade of rigorous use Kakashi had gotten out of it. She had been amazed by Rin Nohara’s ability to so rapidly unravel the way that the eye worked, and hopes that she can do the same, for Sasuke’s sake.

She had also seen firsthand how much chakra the sharingan depleted—Kakashi’s inability to deactivate it slowly and continuously burned chakra, even when it had been covered by the headband.

Unlike Kakashi’s eye, Sasuke’s eye is imbued with many chakras: she feels the foreign presence of the chakra that fuels the rinnegan, and the dominance and tightly controlled presence of Sasuke’s own chakra, but most of all, she feels the languid presence of Itachi’s chakra, peaceful and yet overpowering.

She feels the immensity of Sasuke’s sharingan, especially in conjunction with the rinnegan, and understands better how strong he is. It frightens her a little.

They sit like this for a better part of two hours, taking only short breaks so that she could write notes. Sasuke does not say a word, but she is reassured by the sounds of his even breathing. Sometimes she indulges in the sight of the soft lines of his lips, slightly parted, and wonders what it would be like to kiss him. Somehow, despite everything, she feels twelve again.

“Sakura,” he says, catching her wrist in his hand, “let’s stop for tonight. You’re getting tired.”

She blinks and realizes that she has used an immense amount of chakra by intricately tracing his pathways. She lets her arms fall to her lap. Sasuke’s hand lingers for a moment, before he returns it to his side.

She sighs and sits next to him, her back leaning against the couch. She glances at him, blushes, and decides to lean her head against his shoulder. It’s the least he could do, she decides, although she feels slightly apprehensive.

“There’s something else I want to show you,” he tells her quietly, apparently fine with this act of intimacy, and adds, “if you’re not too tired.”

Without lifting her head, she replies, “I’m fine.”

He is silent, and then she feels his fingers on her forehead, just as she had felt them on the day he left for his journey. She remembers the warmth from then, and feels it even stronger now, and realizes that he is transferring chakra to her.

“Sasuke-ku—”

“Just wait,” he tells her, keeping his fingers on her forehead. She closes her eyes.

Suddenly her mind is filled with images—they are hazy, as if she was in a dream, and she realizes it is the Konoha from more than a decade ago. This is the sharingan’s genjutsu, she thinks, and it is so real that she feels the heat of the sun on her cheeks.

She sees a young Sasuke, at four years old, sitting next to Itachi. No, she thinks, these are Sasuke-kun’s memories, and watches as the young Itachi pulls his brother over his lap.

“Big brother will always protect you, Sasuke,” she hears him say, and tries not to cry when she sees the unabashed admiration in the little Sasuke’s face and the tragedy that awaits him.

The scene switches, and she sees a slightly older Sasuke running towards Itachi, who is dressed in full ANBU attire. There is another Uchiha member with disheveled hair leaning against the residence’s front door, presumably waiting for Itachi, and smiling at Sasuke.

This is what his family was like, she muses, before he had lost everything.

“Maybe next time, Sasuke,” she recognizes the words coming out of Itachi’s mouth, before the young Sasuke is tapped on the forehead in the same way she had been.

Her heart clenches.

“Sorry, Sasuke,” the other Uchiha says, “let me borrow your brother for a bit.”

Sakura is filled with a carefree feeling when she sees the young Sasuke’s expression, pouting like the child that he had been. Even Sasuke-kun can make faces like these, she thinks, and briefly remembers similar expressions he had made in their genin days.

He spares her the images of the massacre, she realizes, because they are suddenly on top of a building, surrounded by a vast forest, and she can see Sasuke, around the age he was three years ago, in a black attire. She sees Itachi, bloody, stalking towards him.

“Sorry, Sasuke,” she hears him say with his last breath, “but there won’t be a next time.”

She feels the sensation of Itachi’s fingers on her forehead, the force of the knowledge that he had left with Sasuke swirling in her head.

The scene switches again, and they are now in a cave, and Sasuke is dressed in the same attire he had been wearing during the war. There is a bright light coming from across the room, and she is surprised to see that it is Itachi, with edo tensei eyes.

He is dissipating, she notes, and her mood plummets, now overshadowed by a deep sadness that she has never felt until now.

“…you don’t ever have to forgive me. And no matter what you do from here on out, know this… I will love you always.”

She can feel the weight of Itachi’s forehead against hers, and the complete helplessness that is coursing through Sasuke. She feels as if she cannot breathe, the pain in her chest wound so tightly that she gasps achingly. She realizes that she is suffering for real, that this pain mirrors the one that Sasuke had felt even more profoundly, and that there are hot tears rolling down her face.

Sasuke quickly releases her from the genjutsu. She lets out a small cry as he wraps a strong arm around her shoulders.

He is silent as she cries, his fingers gripping her shoulder reassuringly. Her mind is blank, she cannot even begin to comprehend what has just happened, but she knows that she has never felt anything like it.

Sasuke had shared his memories and feelings of his brother with her, in a way that only members of the Uchiha clan could.

“The Uchiha clan valued love and friendship above all else,” Sasuke tells her, his voice steady and calm, “and feels everything too deeply. When that feeling consumes them, the sharingan awakens. That is the Uchiha clan’s curse of hatred.”

Sakura has nothing to say. The words echo in her head, and she cannot stop trembling. She leans into Sasuke in an attempt to calm herself, and feels him tighten his arm around her, the warmth of his breath on the top of her head.

She falls asleep in his embrace.

[365text]

Hello! I’m a long time follower and I’ve recently been accepted to UC Berkeley as a transfer! I wanted to ask, what do you love about Berkeley? I’m trying to separate the prestige of going to THE UC from my personal feelings about the school. Getting the opinion of someone who has actually attended might be helpful. I appreciate anything you have to say!

hello !! omg “long time follower” what a CONCEPT that means you were probably here at least 4 years ago, considering i haven’t used this blog in the past 3 haha. 

also, CONGRATULATIONS !! i’m so excited + happy for you ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (and i’m laughing at “THE UC” because i forget that we are also called Cal for that reason haha). v understandable to try to get a vibe about the school to separate prestige from the actual experience — i���ll try my best to share what i love about berkeley, though ofc (obligatory disclaimer) every person ultimately has different experiences at the same college, so YMMV :’)

i’m actually making/editing a video about what i’ll miss about berkeley [updated!] that im aiming to post by the end of the week heh so i’ll share it here / update this ask perhaps with a link when im done!

but in the meantime! what do i love about berkeley under the cut heh

berkeley is in general known for their academics / research opportunities! depending on what you intend to major on, it can be a really great resource to strengthen your foundations in your intended field :’) i study computer science, and imo berkeley’s CS program is pretty good — we have some particularly amazing lower division teaching faculty, and also pretty solid access to some innovative / Big Things™ research labs + professors in the field as well. i think in general their STEM is p strong, and i think various majors within the humanities as well. i would just say do your research for your respective interest in that regard, since i think some majors (ie. cognitive science) are probably “better done” at other schools? example UCSD has an actual dept. dedicated to cogsci, whereas berkeley’s cogsci program is just kind of like a program rip

i’m also in the college of Letters & Science (L&S), and what i love about that is the flexibility you have for your major of choice! transferring to EECS is now impossible (?) iirc given I started in L&S, but i was still able to major in CS (after meeting the GPA cap) which is honestly virtually the same degree — you have the same CS requirements, just without some of the COE requirements (like physics or multivariable calculus, which is fine by me LOL). being in L&S also means you’re able to double/minor in L&S majors more easily (anywhere from history to art to english to stats to data science, etc.) without needing to worry about overlapping individual college requirements! 

and one more thing about academics is that it’d probably be ideal if you could talk to someone who majors in the same thing you’re interested in, as i can only really speak to my personal experience as a CS major. the school is honestly really big, and experiences vary greatly within department to department! CS department is HUGE and our class sizes pretty much never dip below like 200-300, mostly averaging around 600-700 even in the upper division. but with smaller discussions, it usually doesn’t feel that bad. but i know that experience is v different for some other majors, where their upper division classes are like 20-30 people!

there’s also a bunch of student orgs / clubs, like a lot of schools i’m sure, that you can take part in! berkeley feels like a very self-driven school, in the sense that you can really feel students’ personal motivations, which drives the vibe that student orgs typically take on (in my experience).

i personally really like the city + campus! i like how berkeley feels like a ~ community ~ and almost a combination of a suburb / metropolitan area. you can find residential areas just by walking 20 minutes north of campus; you can go downtown / into oakland with similar travel time either on foot or by bus; you’re next to BART which gives you access to a bunch of bay area cities; and even tho the campus is an “open campus” which means anyone can come onto campus, it’s not integrated into the city as a school like NYU is — which means you still do get the campus vibe/feeling! also some areas of campus are absolutely beautiful, esp. during golden hour *chefs kiss* hehe.

we have a pretty decent selection of libraries to study in too HAHA. 

i think food in berkeley is def not bad either! near campus won’t be like Top Notch food and it’s not super cheap, but you get a lot more options that a lot of colleges don’t have within like 5-10 min. proximity i believe. but i am not 100% certain about that ¯\ _(ツ)_/¯  but it’s p easy to find good grocery stores if you prefer to cook @ cal, and p easy to find some quick food options that aren’t bad if you’re busy either!

like all schools tho, there are plenty of pros and cons depending on what you prefer / are interested in / what kind of person you are! there are lot of things i could talk about, but i’m not sure what you’d like to hear / what would be relevant for you heh. if you have anything you’d like me to elaborate on / clarify, please do lmk! 

at the end of the day, i think my personal belief is that a person’s college experience is largely shaped by their chosen community (re: people they choose to spend their time with), and if you find people that have the vibe you’re looking for in a college setting, i think it helps the overall experience a lot! sorry this is kinda rambling heh but congrats once again and GO BEARS LOL

[ainsleymorgan]

『MARILYN LIMA ❙ DEMIGIRL』 ⟿ looks like AINSLEY MORGAN is here for HER SOPHOMORE year as a COMPUTER SCIENCE student. SHE is 20 years old & known to be ORGANIZED, BENEVOLENT, INDECISIVE & OBSTINATE. They’re living in NOLAND, so if you’re there, watch out for them. ⬳ lexi. 23. pst. she/hers. 

we’re back at it again folks! this gal has been bopping around my head for a good long while now - i apologize if this is an incoherent mess. give this a little like and i’ll slide into ur dm’s to plot smth ok ily

stats

— background. (death tw, grief tw, cancer tw)

The Morgans have a long, complicated history. Margaret and Callum meet near the end of college (she’s studying English, he lives in town) and fall rapidly in love. The only problem? Margaret’s engaged to her high school sweetheart. When Margaret ends up pregnant, she pretends like it’s her fiancee’s and has a shotgun wedding. Callum goes off to join the army and pretend like his heart wasn’t just shattered in two.

Years pass - Margaret gets her PhD in English and has another kid (this time with her actual husband). Callum leaves the army, gets married too (and widowed a few years later), has some kids of his own. But then they run into each other at a bar in a city far away from the last one they were in together, and it’s like nothing ever changed.

The two get married almost immediately after the divorce papers are signed, and have two more kids almost immediately after that. Margaret becomes an English professor, and Callum’s content with taking care of the gaggle of children their blended family has produced. 

Five years after the last set of kids, Ainsley and her brother Tristan are born. They’re just as unplanned as their eldest sister was, but no less loved. 

They quickly become the apple of the entire family’s eye, doted upon by their army of older siblings. The twins are late to walking, so they get taken to the pediatrician, who says that they’re so used to being carried everywhere by their family that they haven’t felt the need to walk yet. They’re set down more often, and quickly catch up to be able to run after their brothers and sisters.

Ainsley and Tristan are attached at the hip. Despite the attention from the rest of their family, the two maintain that specific bond only twins can. They make up a language that only they can understand, and throw tantrums whenever they’re out of eyesight of each other. 

They’re happy kids, bright and bubbly. And loud. The house is always filled with screams and laughter. It’s an idealistic life, a perfect family.

DEATH TW // There’s an accident when the twins are nearly five. Nobody knows what happened - they swear they were watching the kids splashing in the lake - but suddenly, Tristan’s gone. His body is found in the water later that day. // END TW

GRIEF TW // Ainsley’s too young to understand what’s going on when they bury him. She gets quiet and shy, a once bubbly little girl drawing in on herself. All she knows is that her best friend is gone, and now there’s nobody to actually talk to.

They move soon after, to a town called Lovell, when Margaret gets a job at the local university. It’s something the family needs, after Tristan, and they hope that the change will help Ainsley open back up again.

She doesn’t, not for a while. She’s thrust into kindergarten, in a new town without her twin there to keep her grounded. Her teachers worry about her social skills - she seems to prefer painting or doodling to playing on the playground with her classmates. But slowly, surely, she starts opening up again as Lovell becomes home. // END TW

The Morgans decide that they like Lovell, and that they’re going to stay. They buy a nice house in a quiet neighborhood, with big trees for the kids to climb on. Ainsley breaks her leg falling out of one when she’s seven (she still has the scar on her knee from where a branch snagged). 

As the kids get older and start moving out of the house, Callum decides he needs a project. He’s always loved cooking and restaurants. So he decides to buy one. Calls it the Main Street Diner (not very creative, but it tells you right where it is!), and starts really integrating himself into the Lovell community.

Ainsley spends nearly every afternoon there, sitting at the corner of the counter after school. Her siblings are old enough to babysit, but they’ve hit their moody teenage phase, and Ainsley wants nothing to do with it. Her mom’s either teaching or grading papers or reading, and that’s boring to a nine-year-old. So diner it is.

She spends most of her time at the counter drawing or painting. Each one is proudly displayed on the wall, marking her progress over time. 

Sometimes she helps with little tasks, like sorting silverware or wiping down tables. Eventually, when she hits high school, she graduates to waiting tables to make some money of her own.

When it comes time to think about college, Ainsley decides she wants to go as far away from Lovell as possible. She knows everything and everyone in town - even some of the Radcliffe students who frequent the diner. Ainsley wants something new and interesting. 

She looks at schools in California, eventually gets accepted to UCLA. Ainsley packs her bags and flies across the country. She learns to miss the comforts of home, but enjoys the independence being on the other side of the continent gives her.

CANCER TW // Halfway through her first year at UCLA, Ainsley gets a call from her mom. Dad’s sick, she says. Cancer. 

Ainsley drops everything and moves back home. She takes a semester off of school to help take care of her dad while her mom continues teaching. He gets better, goes into remission, but there’s still the lingering fear that it’ll come back, that it’ll be worse, that she’ll lose him too. // CANCER TW

So she decides to transfer to Radcliffe. It’s local, in case anything happens, but she can still live in the dorms to keep some semblance of independence. And she gets to go for essentially free. She starts working at the diner again, to keep an eye on her dad, though she claims it’s just to make money. It’s a good set-up, for now.

— personality.

Ainsley is super artistic. Literally constantly drawing or writing or doing something creative. There’s usually paint somewhere on her clothes, regardless of how new the clothing is.

Also has this Thing against making her hobby her career, which is why she’s a computer sciences major rather than an arts major. She grew up watching her mom and dad turn their passions into their jobs, which seemed stressful and like it took some of the fun out of it. So she said no thanks.

She still really enjoys computers and coding - mainly web design. Hopes to become a full-time web designer after college, while throwing in some of the graphic design portions of web designing to sprinkle some of the artsy aspects of her personality.

Despite being a computer sciences major and pretty good with technology, she definitely prefers going analog in most of her life. Writes everything down rather than typing it into her phone or laptop, and goes through a million journals (also owns a million more blank ones).

This bitch definitely bullet journals.

Is a fairly organized person, but her room? An absolute mess. Ainsley says it’s an aesthetic mess (it’s not).

The only part she takes care of is the collection of plants on her windowsill. One of her notebooks is dedicated to their care schedule, and notes on how they’re doing.

Her bag is basically Mary Poppins’ tote, but make it a beat-up Fjallraven she bought during a 50% off sale three years ago. Has literally anything you could ever need in it. Paper, pens, snacks, water, first aid kit, you name it. Need some superglue or a needle and thread? Ask Ainsley.

Is simultaneously super indecisive and super stubborn. Will take a thousand years to decide on something, but once she’s picked it, she’s stuck on it. 

Will die on any hill she feels remotely attached to.

That being said, she’s not a super aggressive person. Is actually pretty calm, still quieter than she was before Tristan. The human equivalent of a warm blanket.

Also super gay. So so gay. 

(But she’s never been with a girl bc she’s got issues w feeling worthy of romantic attention!! Or any attention!!)

This bitch needs to go to therapy.

— wanted connections.

aka the part im so bad at

Where my Lovell locals at?

Friends - pls give this cinnamon roll ppl to fawn over she loves her friends !!

Enemies - idk if she’d think of them as an enemy but let ppl be mean to her so she can be kind of mean back

Crushes - either on her or ppl for her to crush on !! she will pine until the day she dies !!

idk what else im bad at this just love me and love Ainsley

[tokkitchen]

[ kim doyoung, 25 ] did you hear? there’s a new addition to the hypehens family! [ tokkitchen ] was starting to get known for [ cooking/baking tutorials & challenges ] and i think they will hit it big this time around as a part of the [ kimcheese ] squad at hypehens. [ shin sunwoo ] is known to be [ cheeky ] and enjoys [ farming simulation rpgs ]. with their vibes of [ flour stained cheeks and freshly baked bread ] and a style that is unique, i think they are going to take the internet by storm!

hi there! this took me a hot minute, but i’ve finally got sunwoo’s page up and running! you can find the basics & background about him there. tl;dr he loves the culinary arts and overall is a genuine but playful person. for the love of god do not call him a flirt or be passive aggressive with him unless you wanna start some drama which i am 100% down for. you can im me on tumblr or discord (kupo#6438, my dp is a pikachu) if you’re down to plot! 

please note that any gif icons posted here and in future posts were made by yours truly.

here are sunwoo’s basics & background copied and pasted from my pages for your convenience.

Basic Information

⥼ Full Name: Shin Sunwoo ⥼ Pronouns: He/Them ⥼ Gender: Cismale ⥼ Birthday: February 1, 1996 ⥼ Age: 25 ⥼ Orientation: Bisexual ⥼ Relationship status: Single ⥼ Occupation: Creator & host of Tokkitchen ⥼ Residence: Seoul, South Korea

Physical Appearance

⥼ Faceclaim: Doyoung of NCT 127 ⥼ Hair: Black, medium length tapered short at the sides and the back, fringe clipped neatly but softly resting just below his eyebrows ⥼ Eyes: Walnut brown ⥼ Height: February 1, 1996 ⥼ Age: 25 ⥼ Height: 179 cm (5'10") ⥼ Build: Slim, very little muscle definition ⥼ Piercings: Ear lobes ⥼ Tattoos: None… yet ⥼ Clothing style: Overall casual to semi-casual and simple, prefers loose fits for pieces like sweaters, hoodies, and t-shirts, prefers fitted for pieces like denim jackets, varsity jackets, jeans, chinos, and sweatpants

Personality

⥼ Positive Traits: Warm, perceptive, playful ⥼ Negative Traits: Blunt, resentful, opinionated If you were to ask someone what Sunwoo’s most remarkable characteristic is, they would most likely mention how he treats everyone he meets like they’re an old friend. To some, that can be comforting, his easy smiles and laughs providing them a sense of security and acceptance. To others, that can be irritating: a stranger acting much too presumptuous and all too familiar for comfort. While Sunwoo does his best to be tactful and mindful of others, it’s undeniable that his personality doesn’t always mesh well with others. Sunwoo is not afraid to speak his mind whenever he finds it appropriate and necessary. He highly values improvement for himself and his loved ones. As such, he is the first to call out his friends on their bullshit, in the most loving way possible of course, seeing it as an opportunity for growth. Though he tries to choose his words as carefully as possible and his intentions are never ill, he can sometimes come off as a overly blunt, and in worst case scenarios, harsh.  In that same vein, Sunwoo never hesitates in building people up and often goes out of his way to compliment them, whether that be on their work or even on their looks, gaining him the reputation of a bit of a flirt. This is completely unintentional, as he’s not exactly aware of the way he holds eye contact with people a little longer than average, or the way his genuine tone of voice can slip into something more suggestive. He gets pretty offended if you accuse him of being a flirt and doesn’t really understand why he’s seen that way. He is an extremely genuine person, despite how he may come off. He always says what he means and hopes that other people will do the same for him. Consequently, he greatly dislikes people who are passive aggressive, finding it a waste of everyone’s time to fish out exactly what they mean.

Childhood

Sunwoo was born two years after his older brother, Shinwoo. His parents both worked at well known companies and earned good money, affording them an upper middle class lifestyle, but as a result were rarely ever home. Sunwoo did his best not to take their money for granted, understanding even at a young age just how much they had to break their backs to earn it.

Adolescence

His older brother excelled in school, earning straight A’s and getting into the first college of his choice. Sunwoo, on the other hand, was just a little above average and often felt overshadowed by his brother’s performance. This subsconsciously affected his work ethic. There would be times, for example, when he would just give up studying for an exam because he knew he wouldn’t be able to achieve the grade he wanted—that is, one that was comparable to his brother’s. Once he was old enough, Sunwoo got a job at local convenience store so he could earn his own spending money without bothering his parents. There, he regained some of his confidence and came to realize that his strengths lay outside of a rigorous school system. Still, he completed high school and decided to go to college, majoring in Business.

Tokkitchen

Sick of eating instant ramyeon for the fifth time that week, Sunwoo put aside his textbook and decided to look up simple dishes to cook. He fell into the metaphorical rabbit hole and found himself watching cooking videos for a few hours, landing on a few recipes that seemed simple enough to try. The next day, he went out to buy the necessary groceries and began cooking. His dish was… okay. It wasn’t completely awful, but it wasn’t spectacular either. Strangely enough, he wasn’t discouraged and vowed to try again the next day since he had leftover ingredients. The next day came, and this time the dish was light years better than before. Pleased with the results, Sunwoo continued to watch cooking videos online and improved his skills little by little. When he was able to perfect a pasta recipe, he invited his friends over to his apartment so that he could cook dinner for them—they would be his “first set of guinea pigs” as he put it. They were goofing around, and one of his friends took out their phone to record Sunwoo cooking. He began mimicking the narrative style of the numerous videos he watched, explaining what he was doing in an exaggerated soothing tone. It was one of the most fun nights he’s ever had. His friend sent him the video a few days later. Sunwoo watched it, cringing at the sound of his voice, but recalled how much fun he had filming it. He immediately began searching his college’s website for rentable video equipment, determined to make a cooking video, but for real this time.  After transferring and editing his very first video—"gourmet" meals using convenience store ingredients—onto his bulky, old laptop, he uploaded it to the internet under the username Tokkitchen, a reference to his apparently notorious resemblance to a rabbit. This was mostly for safekeeping—he knew his laptop was on its last legs and he only had so much hard drive space after all—but he also secretly hoped that maybe he would be able to capture a small audience. Sunwoo enjoyed making these videos so much that he went as far as changing his major to Film (his college did not offer a Culinary Arts major.) His technique and style improved significantly, and his viewer count steadily grew. It wasn’t nearly enough to justify doing it full time though, so after he graduated, he began the dreaded job search.

Present

After a year and a half of uploading videos, and just a month into the job search, Tokkitchen was suddenly an overnight success thanks to a video he had certainly not expected to be his claim to fame. It was one of his more casual videos: a half vlog, half cooking tutorial of caramel flan. Commenters seemed particularly delighted by his inclusion of footage of his three failed attempts at not burning the caramel and the resulting existential breakdown he had following them. He continued this model for his next video, and the next video, and the next video, and his channel views continued to grow exponentially. He has been praised by viewers for his down to earth personality and warm, atmospheric style.

[weissfai-blog1]

Loving the Dangerous You

My mind is now bombarded with so many stories for AePete. I just love Ae and Pete and they are what I will call a soulmate. I learn about Multi-Verse by watching CLAMP stories and what always get me and touch my heart is their aspect of soulmates. That in whatever 'multi-verse' you and your soulmate will be together. A very strong connection. Stronger than the red string of fate. It is the calling of your soul to another. I am creating different AU with Ae and Pete as always.

A university with a different set of rules. AePete AU. My second headcanon.

“Will you be scared to love someone as dangerous as me?”

There’s a hierarchy in every high school and university. The one who tops them all is the Leader and the one who can command so many students to do his bidding. In order  to be the current leader, one must beat the crap out of the previous one. A so-called ceremony. 

Ae become the leader when he was just a freshman, a feat no one ever achieve. He didn’t mean too, but as the man who always steps in to protect his friends, he become one. Regardless whether he likes it or not.

It was actually an accident, Pond was being a nosy ass and without meaning to, he was challenged by the Current Leader, and Ae being Ae, cleaning some of the mess made by Pond, he steps in and in a hand to hand fight won the challenge. 

Everyone was in awe and most of their jaw drops cause Ae may be small but he punch a mean wallop and the leader was turn into a pulp. 

The thing is Ae when in the offense can be deadly that’s why he’d rather use his feet than his hands. So he plans to join the football team of the university.

From that day, respect and admiration was thrown to Ae, even though he doesn’t like the spot light.

The kids (freshmen & seniors) in the school respects their new leader and is awe that he is righteous and will avoid any fight if necessary but when push comes to shove, Ae can kick anyone’s ass. He may be 178cm (5ft8in) only but he can punch someone taller than him and left them in dust.

Many girls are scared of Ae because he may not be taller than some men but he has a sturdy and well-built muscles. His muscles are often flex when playing football. But most of the brave girls can be seen hanging around the football field.

Pond was enjoying it, after all, being the BEST FRIEND & THE RIGHT HAND of the Ai Shorty Boss, he gets to have some gifts too.

Ae doesn’t accept gifts but Pond accepts it on his behalf.

Ae is not interested in any of the girls who confess to him here and there.

He is more focus on football, academics (especially in English cause he is super bad at it) and being a leader.

Being a leader is no joke. Before going home to their dorm (Pond & Ae shares a room) he must check first that no one is hurt badly in the infirmary (injuries that are sustain in school is not his worry). He must also check that no one was being threatened especially the first years who are easy targets.

And when a challenge from other school was officially delivered, he as the leader needs to answer it.

So far, news spread that Ai Ae – The Beast have top the other university leaders and have not lose a fight.

It’s a simple territory rules. There’s five major university in the city. The leaders of each university exist in the first place to stop bloodshed and gang wars that’s form by delinquent students who think they can rule. It is recognized by the university and their professors.

Actually, the teachers are relying most of the time to the leaders cause then the leaders can take care of students who strays.  

The Dorm: GREENWOOD is no ordinary dorm. It was owned by a Japanese man who fell in love with a Thai woman and because they cannot have a baby, built the dorm near the university to take care of many students as possible.

It has a decent bed that host two students, bathroom, study desk and cabinets. Food are served in its very own cafeteria.

Its an all-boys dorm. There are several female dorms but GREENWOOD is most famous for caring the ‘hottest boys’ in the University.

It’s the middle of the semester when a new transfer student was introduced to the university.

Pete is a transfer student. Rumours immediately surround him as the ‘Mistress’ of the other Leader from his previous university.

Pete was said to transferred because of a scandal.

Ae haven’t met Pete because he was busy with the incoming mid examination and football competition with the other department.

But Ae heard a great deal about Pete: looks prettier than any girl, tall, pretty, white, cute, brown hair, slender, cute… there are so many descriptions but the words: pretty and cute keeps on popping out here and there.

Ae can only think of Dear, his highschool friend as cute, Dear is smaller than Ae and often needed help but Ae wont hesitate to kick Dear’s ass especially when Dear is being an annoying prick once or twice.  

Ae met Pete when the later was push to the wall by a student from the other school (Ae doesn’t recognize the uniform) and Pete was about to be punched when he intervene.

Ae was there before that someone landed a punch to Pete, he throws his bag.

Ae was super angry that some twerp from other school will threaten their students. The student tried to fight, but Ae beat him to it, by landing a mean punch on his stomach, the student then doubled in pain and curse Ae and Pete. 

The student shouted, ‘This is not the last Pete! Trump will kill you! Remember that you belong to him! He’ll haunt you! We’ll haunt you!’

Ae turn around and was about to shout and asked Pete when he was struck on his tracks.

Ae never thought that the day will come he will be speechless to see a person so beautiful. The transfer student carefully stand in his full height and Ae notice this beautiful creature is tall, with pretty soft brown hair that covers his forehead, the eyes that stares back at him are teary-eyed but he notice the beautiful brown colour of them – doe eyes, long eyelashes, cute chubby cheeks and red lips form in cupid’s bow.

Ae gulped and shook his head, and when the image of the other is still there, he tried to help him by giving the backpack. ‘Here. Are you okay?’

Pete nodded, ‘Thank you… uhm…’

‘Ae. That’s my name. What’s yours?’

‘Pete’

‘Ah. You’re the transfer student.’ Ae looks at Pete once again and he wanted to change the rumours spreading, this is no cute nor pretty, this is beautiful and angelic if they’ll ask him.

Ae found out that Pete is staying in Greenwood with a room to himself. Greenwood can accept special request like that, though the student should pay double as he is occupying the other side of the room too. There are only 10 special rooms like that.

Since that meeting, many students have observed that Ae treats Pete special, especially Pond who was born to be a nosy best friend. 

When a second assault happen, this time, Ae was not able to be fast enough to help Pete – there were three students who punch Pete and Ae, Pond and Ping was there to help Pete. 

Ae then proclaim to his underling that Pete will be guarded by three or four people especially when he’s busy.

His underlings can see that Pete is very special to Ae, even though Ae keeps on denying that he is treating Pete the same as the others. Just that Pete needs more protection.

His underlings just rolled their eyes and shook their head. They knew a man with a crush and yet dumb jock don’t know it himself.

Pete is very shy and told Ae that he is okay, but Ae insisted that he needs his protection. They are friends. And being friends will start who the hell is Trump and why is Pete being assaulted.

Pete was reluctant to say anything but only told him, ‘P’Trump was a friend. We were close when we were little. We grew up together… and his the only one who accepted me…’ 

‘Accepted?’ Ae’s brow furrows. 

‘I am gay.’

‘So?’

‘Ae… I like men.’

‘So?’

Pete this time has his brow frown, ‘Ae. It means I’m not normal. I am different. I can only get attracted to men…’

‘And so? What’s wrong with being gay? Is that a sickness? No. You’re still you.’

‘Ae doesn’t think I’m weird? Abnormal?’

Ae flick Pete’s forehead, ‘You’re weirdly beautiful. I thought you were an angel at first sight. Abnormal? Just because you’re gay? That’s ridiculous. You can love anyone you want, there’s nothing wrong with it. What’s wrong are the people who pushes their opinions to others and hurt others.’

‘Ae…’

‘Now, tell me, is that all? But why are they assaulting you?’

‘Ae… can I not say it now?’ 

Ae sighs and looks at Pete’s eyes. ‘I wont force you today. But sooner or later you will tell me. I don’t want you to keep secrets from me Pete… please.’

Days, weeks and months, Ae and Pete grew closer. So close that Ae thinks there’s something wrong with his heart. He doesn’t know why he wants to see Pete everyday, every freakin’ second of the day. He doesn’t understand the possessiveness he felt whenever Pete will talk to Pond, Sun, Type, Champ, and the others. Hell he even hates it when girls are flirting with Pete. Ae thanks Bow and Chaaim when they dismisses the girls. 

Their rituals are known to the whole university:

Ae and Pete will eat breakfast at the dorm cafeteria

Ae will accompany Pete until he reaches his classroom (even the professors are so used to this scene)

Pete will be seen when Ae is on football practice

Pete will stay in one corner of the room when Pond and Ping delivers to Ae the reports of students who were into fights, who was injured due to street fights and so on. And Pete accompanied Ae whenever Ae visits the infirmary. 

Pete is also present when some sub leaders will challenge Ae. Pete is a witness on how scary and how Ae can punch and kick someone and left them like a pulp.

Sun, the other best friend of Ae asked this to Ae one time, ‘Are you sure Pete is not hiding something more important?’

‘What do you mean?’ Ae asked dangerously.

‘Well, your Angel is always present whenever you are being challenged. But for someone who looks delicate and soft, he doesn’t flinched when you punch someone. Usually someone delicate even Dear will flinched and cover their faces. But Pete just looks and deadpan.’

Ae didn’t say anything because he knew about that. Pete doesn’t look distraught or anything, but would come to him with a towel or a first aid kit. At first he wanted to ask if his okay seeing so much blood, but Pete just took care of him like its his work.

They were all on a ‘group date’ to watch a movie in the city. And Ae was surprised at how Pete was really popular, maybe because at school no one approaches Pete because they knew Pete is under his protection, but outside the school, Pete is being approach here and there. Sun, Pond, Ping, Dear, Oat are laughing and telling Ae he needs to move fast cause it looks like Pete is hot and not only females, but male eyes are following Pete whenever he goes. 

Ae accompanied Pete at the front of Pete’s room. Pete told Ae, ‘Ae, I have something for you, actually for N’Yim. Its snacks from Europe. My aunt bought so many for me. And I’m wondering if you can give them to N’Yim.’

Ae nodded and both entered Pete’s room.

Pete then remembered that his room has a weird switch location and he turns around to open the switch when his lips accidentally graze Ae’s lips. 

There was silence. 

Both doesn’t know how much redness on their face for the whole room is still covered in darkness, only a small dim light from the outside can be seen.

Pete was about to open the switch when Ae stops his hand and grasp his waist and kiss him.

‘Pete. I think… I think I like you. I know that this is not like for a brother, a friend… but something else. A like that wants me to kiss you again… and again.’

‘Ae…’

‘Pete… can I kiss you again.’

Pete nodded and they shared a kiss so hot and so tender.

Ae smiles while he lies on his bed. 

Pete wore a worried frown on his face. He then opens his phone and type a message to

Pete: P’Trump. We need to talk.

Trump: Are you ready to surrender?

Pete: No.

Trump: Then let’s talk tomorrow. 10am. The usual warehouse.

Pete: See you.

Pete stands at the warehouse exactly 10am and true to his words, Trump is there with ten of his minions.

‘Pete. I told you to come back to me. I need you.’

‘P’Trump. I thought you were my friend. But you used me.’

‘Pete. I never used you. You needed me. I am offering you a chance to belong.’

‘I never wanted to belong to a bloody gang!’

‘So you’d rather be a Leader’s bitch?! I heard about it Pete! You’re that midget’s bitch!’

‘Ae is not like that.’

‘Now, you’re defending him. Let’s see if you can lose your touch.’

Trump nodded and ten of his minions surrounds Pete.

‘Please P… don’t do this…’

Trump turn around.

He heard nothing but grunts and screams of pain. It was when he heard a crying that he turns around and he saw it.

Pete standing with a dangerous look on his eyes and face.

All the men are sprawled on his feet. 

‘So you never lose your touch. You’re still the Bloody Angel of Death.’

‘Stop going and trying to make me came back. I will not fight anymore for you. I don’t want anymore bloodshed!’

‘Does your Master know this?’

Pete’s fist tightened and looks at the carnage before him.

All Trumps men are in pain, crack ribs, blood everywhere from their face to their arms. He was not able to stop himself when he crack one’s arm and he knew it was broken.

‘So he doesn’t know… Pete come back to me.’

‘No P. I think its time we end this. Please don’t come back looking for me anymore.’

Pete walks away but Trump shouted, ‘You think he will accept you? He will never accept an abnormal man like you Pete! You’re a psychopath! You have a twisted other side in you! He will despise you!’

Ae was worried when Pete didn’t reply on his text messages and was not in his room. He had and his minions looks for him everywhere, he was so out of his mind of worry when a text message came to him after three days.

Ai Koon Chai: Ae Krub. I’m sorry. There was an emergency at home. I’ll be back tomorrow.

AE: As long as you’re okay. See you tomorrow.

Ae wanted to ask so many things but he held himself back.

Pete at his room balcony looks at the sky. 

‘Ae… will you be able to accept me? The real me?’

Pete Pitchaya Pecharn Worachoti, the only son of Pum Pecharn Worachoti. A hard man whose associated at secret military opts, taught him military instructed martial arts to defend himself, and Pete has been in multiple fights with men a full head taller and has more muscle mass than him and still win easily. 

Pum taught Pete to defend himself especially as he looks so much like his mother, beautiful and skinny. Pum will often throw Pete inside a ring to fight one of the soldiers under Pum. 

Pete has beaten up multiple large men despite him being as scrawny and built as a girl.

Pete then developed a certain side in him, he doesn’t want to fight, but when he is threatened it triggers him to protect himself and most often than not, the other party will end up with either a broken face or a broken bones. 

Trump uses this advantage to help him secure being a leader, after all Trump is the only friend of Pete and the only one who knew about him being gay.

Pete decided to hide this side from Ae. As Ae was very determine to protect him and he doesn’t want Ae to abandon him. With Ae he felt himself and comfortable… and he likes Ae… more than a friend.

But for now, he cannot accept Ae’s like. Because he doesn’t deserve it as he is hiding so many things.

[inyournightmares97]

The Truth Evasion (Pt. 1/2)

Part 2

Jackson Wang, GotSeven’s ace hitman and local strip club owner, has had his eye on the girl who helps the gang stash away their dirty money for years now. He wants to know why you won’t give him a chance, but you’re fairly certain that Jackson can’t handle the truth of your past. There are some obstacles that mere sexual attraction and a good fuck aren’t enough to overcome. 

Warnings: Strong language, mafia!au, violence, maybe some boring financial stuff because this idea struck me while I was studying for my finance laws exam.��I also have no clue when Part 2 will be out. This is just a two-parter, btw. Hopefully next week? Ugh. I hope. 

Word Count: 3k+

The Mafia (Masterlist)

“For fuck’s sake, Wang. Just because it’s called blood money, doesn’t mean that you need to actually get blood all over it. What the hell is wrong with you?”

Jackson Wang grinned down at you. He was dressed in black from head to toe, his hood lowered and the mask on his face pulled down so that it was now resting under his chin. There were smudges of blood on his forehead and cheeks, but you weren’t worried. The blood wasn’t his. It never was. Besides, if the shit-eating grin on Jackson’s face was any indication, then he wasn’t remotely hurt. It had been a routine hit tonight; kill the guy, get the money. But there was more cash here than you’d been expecting. You looked up at Jaebum, who was standing over you, arms folded as he looked down at the briefcases full of cash with a steely glint in his eyes.

“He lied to us. There’s at least 2 million in here,” you explained, waving a stash of notes for emphasis. “Way more than we were expecting. It’s a good thing we took him out, or he would have caused some serious problems for us.”

Jaebum scoffed, rubbing his jaw. “Nobody conducts robberies in our territory without our permission. He was asking for it.”

Jackson crouched down beside you, fingers reaching out to leaf through a small stack of notes. He hadn’t had the time to savor the cash, he’d been rushing to get away from the crime scene after the kill. There was always a rush of adrenaline when he got safely back to headquarters, the money secure and the operation successful. Not to mention that he lived for the spark that alighted in your eyes whenever you spotted the cash. You loved money and Jackson Wang loved you. He nudged you lightly with his shoulder.

“What do you think, babe? Think we should invest the extra million into our wedding?” he joked.

You glared at him, unamused by his antics. “Fuck off, Wang.”

“Hey, I was just kidding-“

“Aside from the fact that I would rather die than go anywhere near a wedding with you-“ you shot him a look of disgust to emphasize your point. “We can’t use this cash directly. See these notes? They have consecutive serial numbers and they’re brand new, crisp notes if you ignore the blood Wang got on them. Guy robbed these from a bank, remember? If we take this money anywhere near a legal source in this country then we’re going to set off a million triggers and the robbery will be traced back to us.”

Jaebum sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “Fine. We won’t use them for anything legal, then. We’ll use it to pay off BTS for last month’s arms trade deals. They’ve been ragging me for the money all day.”

You sighed and shook your head. “It’s not just dirty money, Jaebum. This cash is directly traceable to a bank robbery conducted barely a week ago. The national investigation agencies literally have alerts everywhere for this. BTS won’t touch it either. No, we need to get this money out of the country. It’s going to take a smuggling operation.”

Jaebum blinked at you, eyebrows raised. There was a reason that he trusted you to handle the gang’s finances; you had a way with money, knew exactly what to do with it and how to handle it. He’d been suspicious at first, unable to understand how you turned dirty cash into perfectly legal, accountable money sitting in a bank account within a matter of days. But you’d been handling GotSeven’s money laundering activities for years and at this point, Jaebum didn’t even bother to ask you what you were doing with the money or how you invested it and faked the transactions to get it back. You always returned with more money than you started off with and the money had never been traced back to the gang since you started working for them, so he trusted you.

“Where does it need to go?”

You looked down at the cash and sighed. “An amount this size? Overseas. I know a guy in Macau. He’s got some understanding with the local banks, they’ll accept anything for a 15% cut. He’ll deposit the money there, we’ll have it transferred to the account of one of our shell companies, fake a couple of contractual agreements and it’ll be back in our bank accounts, fully legal and untraceable in two weeks tops.”

Jackson frowned. “Why should we give some fucker in Macau a 15% cut of our money?”

You sighed and rolled your eyes at him. “Because that’s how illegal money works, bird brain. What else are you going to do? I’d like to see you try to deposit one of these notes in the local bank here without having the federal agencies tailing you for the next month and wire-tapping all your communications. Why don’t you stick to shooting your gun around and leave the money matters to people who understand them, okay?”

Jaebum nodded at you, cutting off your rant. “You do what you have to do. We’ve lost our direct links to Macau, though. Our regular guy there got shot dead a few weeks ago. Chinese mafia got to him. Apparently he had a lot of gambling debts.”

Jackson blinked and looked disappointed. “Aw, man. Zhang Wei’s dead? I liked that guy. He came down to my club the last time he was in town, dude knows how to party. We drank some major liquor and he gambled away literally everything he earned while he was here. Crazy guy.”

You raised an eyebrow at him in disgust. “Zhang Wei was human garbage. Do you not have any standards for the friends you make?”

“Aww, are you worried about me getting in with the wrong crowd, baby?” Jackson cooed.

“You are the wrong crowd,” you replied before turning to Jaebum. “How do we get this cash into Macau, Leader-nim?”

Jaebum pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and began dialing some numbers. “I’ll talk to DaySix. They’ve been running some opium trades there of late, I’m sure they’ve got some routes in. I’ll ask the Bear to meet you in the morning for a drop-off. You talk to your finance guy in Macau and help them figure out how to make the exchange, okay?”

You blinked. “I’m not driving around with all this dirty cash alone. Send Tuan with me.”

“You can take Wang.”

“What? No!” you complained, while Jackson folded his arms across his chest and beamed at you. Jackson was the worst security detail ever. He always talked way too much and made you want to steal his gun and shoot yourself in the head. You preferred Mark. He was quiet, kept his eyes on the money and didn’t like pointing his gun around for the hell of it. “Why can’t I have Tuan? He’s better at this stuff.”

“Tuan’s detailing a cop that’s been on our tail a lot lately. It’s a full-time mission, I can’t spare him. Take Jackson instead,” Jaebum said firmly. There was a tinge of authority in his tone, one that told you not to argue with him about small details. Jaebum trusted you but he kept all his gang members in line and you were no exception. You tried to ignore the pleased grin on Jackson’s face as you closed the briefcase full of money and stood up, dusting your knees off.

“Fine,” you snapped. “I’m leaving the money in the safe here, then. I’ll come by to pick it up in the morning.”

Jaebum nodded. “Sounds good. Nice work today, guys.”

You nodded and went into the bathroom, splashing your face with water and looking at the dark circles under your eyes. It had been a long day. The more Jaebum grew to trust you, the more work you had. You’d started off investing some small amounts into shady schemes but in a matter of four years, you were now in charge of all of GotSeven’s finances. You handled the dirty money and invested it in segments; shady real estate, bonds, shell companies in foreign countries, businesses which ran as fronts for the illegal trades. Not even Im Jaebum knew exactly where all the wealth of GotSeven was located, because you’d made it all that untraceable.

It wasn’t easy work. It involved a lot of transactions, a lot of tracing money that didn’t really exist or spreading it in various bank accounts across the world. The only person who really seemed to understand the difficulty of your job was Park Jinyoung; he’d been handling the finances before you came along and he was only too happy to let you take over. I don’t want to spend all night reading about the tax regulations and banking laws in Latvia, he’d admitted to you once. I’m a strategy guy. It’s a good thing we found you. I thought all the accounting stuff was going to drive me insane.

There was a knock on the bathroom door.

“Hey. I’m heading out for the night. Need a ride home?” Jackson’s voice called through the bathroom door.

You sighed and wiped your face with a towel before opening the door. Jackson was standing on the other side, a handsome smile on his face. He’s gotten rid of the blood and taken off the mask; there was nothing hiding his dashing good looks from your naked gaze. Besides, Jackson was always glowing and extra flirtatious after he’d returned from a successful mission. It took him a while to come down from his adrenaline high.

“I don’t know, are you going to keep flirting with me the whole time?” you demanded.

He held his hands up in the air jokingly. “Fine, I’ll tone it down. Come on. The buses probably stopped running and I’ll never understand why you refuse to buy a car. Sometimes I feel like you want me to drive you around everywhere because you like my company.”

You scoffed. “Fat chance. I just don’t want to attract attention to myself.”

“Buying a car would attract attention to you?” Jackson demanded incredulously.

“I work in a convenience store by daylight, genius. Don’t you think my co-workers would get a little suspicious if I suddenly turned up with a brand new car on my minimum wage salary? They think I’m struggling to make rent. Besides, I don’t keep spare cash or store money in the bank. The money Jaebum pays me with is all invested in various financial schemes and securities, I keep some of it in real estate off the coast-“

Jackson groaned. “Oh my god, that’s enough money talk for tonight. Fine. Don’t buy a car. Live in a shitty apartment and take the bus to work even though you’ve probably accumulated a fortune from all the work you do for GotSeven. That makes perfect sense.”

You ignored Jackson, walking past him and getting into the passenger-side seat of his fancy sports car. He would never understand. Jackson was an excellent hit man and he could kill a guy with his bare hands in less than two seconds, but he was addicted to the life. He lived for the money, for the thrill and for the luxury. Sometimes you wished you could loosen up like him, enjoy everything that you got by virtue of working for GotSeven and accept the fact that you could live a comfortable life now.

“Why aren’t you at your club tonight?” you wondered, as Jackson started the car. “It’s Saturday.”

“I left Bambam in charge. His girlfriend’s doing a shift there tonight so he was going to be there anyway,” Jackson replied as he pulled out of the parking and sped away from the headquarters. When Jackson wasn’t taking out guys for GotSeven, he ran a shady strip club downtown. It wasn’t a bad place really, although it was definitely illegal and substituted as a meeting place for a lot of shady deals. When you combined sexy naked girls and alcohol, almost any man could be convinced to part with his money.

“Hmm. Bambam’s really hitting it on with that girl they saved from the trafficking ring, huh?”

Jackson glanced at you. You looked tired, there was something exhausted about your tone and he wanted to know what was wrong. But he also knew that you would never tell him what was on your mind. He made a turn and then blinked at you.

“Do you have anything else going on tonight? We could drop by the club and get a couple of drinks. You look stressed recently, Jaebum must have you working full-time after we struck all those deals with the Russians, eh? Those guys are stinking rich and the loaded us with dirty money. Come on, one drink?”

You frowned at him. “I’ve said it once and I’ll say it as many times as you need me to; I am never stepping foot in that abomination of a place. Leave me out of it.”

Jackson blinked at you. “What’s your problem with my strip club?”

You refused to answer him, just turning your head to look out of the window. Your head was throbbing. It had been a long day staring at the computer screen, tracking down some payments that you’d made to private bank accounts in Europe and accounting for the transactions of one of your shell companies in Barbados. You didn’t have the energy to respond to Jackson. Sometimes you felt like being around him just drained the energy out of you because you had to go to so much effort to resist his advances.

“Okay. You don’t need to get a drink,” he reassured you, his tone softening. “Can you maybe come and take a look at my accounts sometime? I had a couple of tax collectors come in the other day and they’ve been sniffing around. You know me. I do all my transactions in cash, I don’t pay any money to the stinking government and they’re catching on. I got a notice from the Income Tax Department the other day.”

You turned to him, your eyes lidded. No wonder Jackson was on the tax authorities’ radar. Some of those fuckers were regulars at his club and Jackson’s sole method of tax evasion was sweet-talking his way out of his dues. You didn’t want any part in it. “I work for GotSeven. I made it explicitly clear to Jaebum when I first started working there that I wasn’t going to handle your private businesses. Get an accountant to do your strip club’s taxes. Jackson. I find it hard to believe that you can’t afford to hire one.”

His voice became quiet. “I trust you more, though.”

“I’m exhausted, I don’t have the time for shit like this!”

Jackson suddenly stopped the car, pulling over at the side of the road. You blinked at him in surprise and were shocked when you saw his eyes looking at you intently. His gaze pierced through you and you didn’t know how to react when he reached out and placed his hand over yours. “What’s going on with you?” he asked gently. “Look, I know you don’t really like me and it’s always been that way for some reason, but… you seem stressed. Is something going on? Did anything happen?”

You bit your lip and gently pulled your hand away from his. “Nothing happened-“

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Nothing happened, okay? And even if it did, what’s the point in telling you? The only way guys like you know how to solve problems is to shoot a guy dead and then get a beer and a naked girl to celebrate. I don’t need any of those things. So do me a favor and just drive so I can get home, I have an early shift at the convenience store and we need to drop-off the cash with DaySix.”

Jackson was quiet for a long moment and then he nodded, re-starting the car. He drove silently the entire way to your apartment building, his knuckles white on the steering wheel as he finally pulled to a stop. You breathed a sigh of relief when you saw the entrance to your building and moved to take off your seatbelt. But Jackson’s hand closed over yours gently, stopping you from removing it.

“I don’t celebrate with naked girls from the club. I haven’t touched another girl in a long time. You… you know how I feel about you,” Jackson said softly. He swallowed and then squeezed your hand. “You’re not an idiot. I don’t have to tell you how important you are to me.”

You closed your eyes and sighed. You hated this. You preferred Jackson’s shameless, unabashed flirting to the gentle, heartfelt confessions he sometimes made when the two of you were alone. You could joke the former away and snap at him, but you never knew how to respond to the latter. You turned to him with pleading eyes. “Don’t do this again, Jackson. We’ve been through this, ever since I first started working here. It’s been years. Can’t you let it go?”

“I can’t let it go,” he mumbled.

“You need to learn. You and me, it’s never… it’s never happening. I’m sorry.”

Jackson groaned and ran his hand over his face. “I know that. You tell me that every single time, but I don’t understand why. There’s something between us. I know you’re attracted to me. I see how you always check whether the blood on my clothes is mine after I return from a hit. You were the first person to panic when I got shot last year. And when there was a stick-up at the convenience store during your night shift and some fucktard tried to rob you, you called me. Not Jaebum, not Mark, not even the police, you called me and you stayed at my house that night because you were scared. We shared one of the most amazing nights of my life. You can’t keep pushing me away and pretending that you don’t have feelings for me.”

“Watch me,” you mumbled.

Jackson’s eyes were pleading. “Why? Why won’t you give this a chance? Why can’t this happen?”

You took a deep breath and shook your head. “I don’t know,” you whispered.

“You’re lying again.”

Maybe I am. But you couldn’t handle the truth if you heard it, Jackson Wang.

--

A/N I had a day break in between my exams so I wrote this shit. I’m not sure how it is, I haven’t slept in a long time, haha, and I just wanted to post it. I’ll be around for the next 24 hours before I got back into hiatus because I have exams on Friday, Saturday and Sunday too. 

Hope you guys are doing great! 

[aliwept]

WARNING :     MASSIVE TOKOYAMI HC DUMP AHEAD !  part one of ..... many sldkfjds i gotta transfer a lot from old blogs

triggers:  body talk,  religions mentions,  mentions of binding, self hatred and transitioning.

BELIEFS / MOTIVATION:

tokoyami looks at becoming a hero the “wrong” way — or rather, in a way that cripples his success.he doesn’t want to become a hero in and of itself, but to help as many people as he can.

this is usually a good thing, but it is motivated by his extreme guilt and self doubt rather than pure desire, believing that that is the only way to pay for his “sins.” (i.e., the destruction or potential destruction his quirk as/could cause(d).)

he holds himself up to an extremely high standard, (it is impossible to have a totally “pure” motivation,) one of being perfect and disciplined in every way, but he consistently fails to reach that (as any human being would), making it so that he falls deeper into a circle of self-doubt and pity.

he also tends to idealize his friends for their faults, and when those difficult traits show up he gets extremely bothered, then angry at himself for his idealization, then angry for bothering them, & it escalates until he’s simply angry at himself for being what he believes to be a burden.

this is an extremely deeply rooted process, one that even daily actions contribute to, & while the source isn’t completely his parents, it is certainly reinforced by his mother’s abuse & his guilt relating to his father’s death.

PHYSICAL:

he’s not particularly muscled — well, compared to his more muscular classmates. most of his muscle is in his legs & stomach. he does not have a particular training regimen, typically unmotivated unless prompted.

unlike the majority of his classmates, because a lot of his fighting is done with dark shadow moving him (so that it’s harder to predict movements, as well as going from a large range), the majority of the time he’s not challenged physically.

against close attacks, both attacking which he uses his sword for (seen in his dorm room), when allowed. he inherited that sword from his father after his death. he also feels fatigue easily, not so much due to muscles but because of his exhaustion that is his “normal” state, given that dark shadow is nocturnal. (this & his low work ethic. he works a lot harder when training with friends.)

he doesn’t feel the need to bind more than not, given his skinny physique, with his hips being only a little bit wider than the average cis man’s.most of his scars are on his arms, self inflicted from his talons cutting into his skin. parts of his skin are covered in a gel like skin, clear to see the feathers that poke out from them, going much like arm hair down his sides. these are mostly around his shoulders.

most of the feather is underneath skin (though the skin & the feather both have no nerves), visible with the skin being mostly clear (no muscles adding color, only the natural dark pigment) with the rest of the feaher poking out at a low angle to his arm.

HABITS:

he has a diary that he writes in religiously. it’s kept in a hat box under his bed when he returns to the dorm, along with a collection he’s had since he had been able to write.

at times, in nostalgia, he’ll read through his earlier books. he also tends to doodle his classmates in them ! he’s an incredibly private person — especially because his mother ignored his privacy, refusing to let him keep secrets of any kind in ‘fear that he was hiding something’ — but also enjoys putting his thoughts into words.         

PAST:               

tokoyami was bullied due to his appearance / personality. for someone who was already uncomfortable with his body (not knowing what being trans was at that point) this became the root of deep insecurity regarding his appearance, whether it was as simple as hesitation.

he is autistic !! he stims a lot with his hands, though usually it’s in his hoodie / under his cloak, because he’s very self conscious about it.  he also has adhd: inattentive type, bpd, depression & anxiety!

fantasy verse:  he’s a witch & i will fight you on this fact. my boy loves the occult. he’s also. in generally he tends to be superstitious, & more than that enjoys different rituals! it probably won’t show up in my rp cause i honestly don’t know much about that type of thing but ! he absolutely adores things like that, not necessarily because he fully believes them but because they’re interesting & he believes that they probably stem if only in part from fact.

now im gonna add some notes here.  while he is obviously pretty strong,  he has problems with control, considering that not only does he have to react, he has to communicate those thoughts with dark shadow. speed / offense / defense obviously are enhanced w dark shadow, as well as his own abilities (he would still be able to hold his own if he couldn’t use his quirk).

as well, a lot of his stats are basically his stats + dark shadow, which obv makes them higher than they otherwise would be. he also has really high stamina and working out for a long time doesn’t really. make him tired, nor dark shadow, because dark shadow doesn’t get tired & he’s not the one doing a lot of the actual physical stuff. he’s not good w weapons tho in general. note that these are basically during the daytime w/o a huge light source so things change when it’s darker/lighter.

parents:   tokoyami’s mother had the ability to call spirits of the dead to her and talk to them, & his father’s was to house things, as in objects, so he cld like. store things inside of his body. it’s real wild.

a quirk that combined with another in tokoyami’s lineage, so one of his ancestors had the ability to shapeshift, specifically with birds & banged w someone who has a quirk similar to aizawa’s, where it basically ‘stills’ the action of .someone’s quirk, if that makes sense? so down the line people wld inherit a birds’ features, but it would switch. in his dad’s case, he got a raptors ‘arms’ & eyes.

i am here to inform you that not only is he really short, he’s also chubby! espcially as a child. while he now has muscle! :tm: ive made earlier posts about how he doesn’t have a good. regimen & shit so. yeah. just like deku, while he may be muscled, (though he’s less muscled than. most of his classmates) he still is v chubby on other parts of his body.

also ! he’s trans & he has. a large bust, which he does not bind most of the time due to fear of asphyxiation. being demiboy, he is bothered at it at times, but dislikes tight clothes as a whole (like binders). this is because he is easily overstimulated by excessive contact with his body, causing sensory overload.the exception is his neck, which his choker is a source of comfort. (though, warning, there are scars underneath that the large choker hides!)

tokoyami. will say/do something & then become embarrassed by it, after the act has already been done. he’ll fuckin melt on the spot.

tokoyami is absolutely someone to leave ppl on read. or respond w several paragraphs w ‘K.’ like. that’s just how it is. he’s lowkey an asshole in that way but he just. he has to think a lot before having a response but he gets distracted & just leaves it.

he has dark fucking brown skin !!!!! people who draw tokoyami w light skin cause he’s a ‘pale goth uwu !!!!’ are weak & will be weeded out by natural selection.

people he trains with most are ,,,  mostly kirishima, kaminari, aoyama and momo when they’re available

he’s mix of japanese, native american, and indian!

self knowledge questions:  neediness, independence, shyness.

NEEDINESS: being affirmed & nurtured by others is a central requirement for you to feel safe. this means you can be slow to warm up to other people, which is difficult because what you most need from them is their warmth. yet you know how to be vulnerable: to let down your defenses and accept that you need another person. this lack of pretense is a valuable trait, and ultimately more endearing than the macho efforts others make to deny their childlike sides.

INDEPENDENCE: you don’t set out to be different for its own sake; you are more easily guided by what interests & moves you. you are more concerned about what is right for you than about the pressure to fit in. you know the value of selective irresponsibility, of forgetting occasionally about being ‘good’.

SHYNESS: part of you is gripped by the fear that you’ll launch into something and completely mess it up. the upside of this is wise caution: people are indeed often too rash, whereas you know, by instinct, that holding back can save you. probably, you feel shame and self-disgust a bit too much. but when you do feel in your element, you act with a wisdom and sensitivity never found in people with thicker skins.

there’s an au where he’s tamaki’s half brother tamakis hmu

more ramblings cause i lov him so anw. i figure that like. if he had to have a motivator it would be an outside force but basically he’s riding on the fact that he has more physical ability because he doesn’t perform very well in studies. ( bird brain …… )

getting 14th place out of the class on midterms, he’s aware that he’s not motivated & as well as his migraines & other mental illnesses ( adhd, executive dysfunction, etc. ) this means that he doesn’t really reach his “full potential.”

he’s aware of this, though, which causes him to train physically. physically training also allows him to ( a ) feel proud of himself, something that he struggles with ( b ) help him generally, esp with dysphoria ( c ) get his mind off of other things / points of stress.

i still don’t think he’s like. as buff as shouji for example, though part of that is that he’s naturally lean ! & he has trouble motivating himself sometimes but when he stays up late ( due to dark shadow ) it basically wrecks his sleeping patterns, so this gives him something beneficial to do while also exhausting himself, which he hopes will help him fall asleep.

like i know that i said that . . he was skinny / not v muscled ( when compared to his buffer classmates, rather ) but i guess i’ve been proven wrong because it took both Buff McFuck mina and hagakure 2 push him out of the way ( not tht it took that long but that was w them straining / time skips )

so @ this point i Just Don’t Know. he got 9 in the practical which means he’s obv like ?? p good but that was the entrance exam. ( he got 10 rescue my baby !!!! im so proud of him ) & then w aizawa’s exams he started off at 5 & im tryna find the other thing what it ended up as but @ this point i’m just , pretty divided cause i’m not seeing much reason for him to learn to train w/o proper training ( & we kno that he’s not someone who was trained specially like todoroki / momo tho tht doesnt mean it’s not possible & at this point im just ) ya. he’s gotta be able but from what we know he’s not v motivated ? ausdjkfdsfjk we’ll see ig.

tokoyami is a mix of shinto (where his hero epithet comes from), taoist (due to the values), & hindu (again, values). i think for now it’s going to be some mix of that, though i’m going to do some research on shinto values since i don’t know much about it !!!!!

generally, he’s pretty superstitious, just because he knows many myths are based on facts, & the idea of ‘it doesn’t hurt to watch out for them.’ he prefers to avoid possible things that would make him have bad luck.

[itsyourjoon]

You groaned as you silenced your 7.55 alarm to get the 5 extra minutes before getting ready for the coffee date with Hoseok and the new kid you’ll be meeting - Jimin apparently. You knew nothing of the him, except that he is suppose to be a good dancer, considering how much Hoseok praises him and is excited to move him to advanced so soon. It’s not common that contemporary dancers know hip-hop so well. You and Hoseok are barely in the intermediate jazz classes after all.

The five minutes pass way too fast for the full 300 seconds that they actually are. But… a second did just pass as that thought went through your sleepy brain.

Getting ready didn’t take much effort, since you prepared the clothes for today before you went to sleep, after Hoseok texted you anyways. It was just a black printed shirt slightly (or a bit more) too big for you, black ripped jeans with fishnets underneath and of course black shoes. You didn’t aim for a spectacular impression anyways so why bother.

At nine, the café where you and Hoseok always go to (I mean no one makes a better frappuccino than the baristas here) wasn’t that overly full anyways, since most students in the campus already had class or if they didn’t, they were actually in the library studying. Wow. Dedication. You noticed Hoseok’s red mop of hair in your usual seats - a table for four, but who cares if two people sit there, the view to the street is really nice from there - and an additional blonde bundle of hair, stuck under a black beanie. You skipped your way over to them and hugged Hobi from behind leaning down to his sitting figure, when you saw he ordered your usual order already. “Thank you bub! I’m so glad you went ahead and ordered it already!” Hoseok didn’t hide his (slightly) cowardly heart and let out a yelp when he felt your arms around his neck. At that the boy in front of him opened his eyes a bit wider when he saw his companion scared but smiled, shaping his eyes into crescents after the scene unfolded infront of him. You finally remembered your manners towards strangers you’re suppose to meet and quickly bowed, apologizing to the blonde stranger infront of you. “Ah I’m so sorry, I didn’t want to be rude! Hi, I’m Y/n! Nice to meet you!” Saying that you sat down on the seat where your order was - next to Hobi and opposite of the new kid. “It’s okay don’t worry I don’t blame you. I’m Jimin by the way. Park Jimin.” He spoke with a bit of formality. Like this was an official meeting discussing science or important business. You ignored it, so you flashed him a warm smile. “So where did you come from Jimin?” You were genuinely curious about him. Others came from other Korean schools but the word in the college hallways had it that he didn’t come from Korea at all. “Oh my birthtown is Busan, but my parents are forced to travel around the world, staying at one town for around 3 months, before moving to the next because of their job, and I have no choice but to follow, so my last pit-stop was China.” Your brain needed a moment to connect his rushed and already memorized answer, so after the hamster in your head started running appropriately you let out a eureka-like ‘oooh!’ “Sounds lame to be honest. Yeah you get to see lots of stuff travelling but not while trying to maintain a stable education.” You took a sip after stating your opinion, praying for an energy boost from it alone. “Don’t worry about that Y/n! He told me he had A’s in maths classes in China, so it probably wasn’t much of a bother! Plus he now has advanced math, so that again shouldn’t be a problem for our Jiminie here too!” Hoseok butted in in the conversation praising the kid. He just offered him a shy smile, blushing a bit before taking a sip too. Meanwhile you just choked on your drink, hearing the last sentence. “Advanced math! Here!? I hope you will survive Ms. Choi’s classes, I heard she’s really strict. No cheating in any way and such.” Jimin just shrugged like it was no big deal and what he said next was something that would never come out of your mouth, talking about math anyways. “Eh, I don’t need to cheat my way to get an A… Math is my forté besides dancing anyways.” You eyes probably couldn’t be opened wider after that. It was like he was an alien. Or a miracle kid. Naahhh… definitely an alien. “Hobi he’s not human I’m scared.” Both guys just laughed at your expression and tone, leaving you confused more than ever. Hoseok was laughing loud enough for people to look at him as if he’s lost it and Jimin to just fling his body around, laughing silently. The boys calmed down and Hobi wiped away an invisible tear, mumbling to himself about aliens and stuff, but you just rolled your eyes and glared at him a bit. “So Y/n how long have you been dancing for?” Jimin asked a normal question you usually get asked. But it still threw you back to when you found your first love. “When I was 3 years old actually. I started at kids ballet but just frailing and bouncing around like that wasn’t that fun for me, so at 6 I took my first hip-hop class and loved how challenging it could get.” Jimin returned you a slightly questioning look. “It got challenging at the age of 6 already? What studio were you at? 'Give a professional choreography to a six year-old’?” It was an innocent joke that was hilarious to you. Even you don’t know how but his voice laced with sarcasm was just so funny. And to him your laugh slowly got lethal. “Oh no not that. My studio was really nice. I actually showed up at intermediate on accident that day but it went well in the end.” Jimin just gazed at you. At this point the conversation was running fluently and it was the same as if Hoseok wasn’t even there. Except that he was. “Oh yeah, you told me about that day. Everyone praised her to accept the challenge of a class, way leveled up for a kid at 6. And even praised her talent at the end of it.” If you looked at him at that moment, you knew he’d look like a proud dad watching his child win a big grand competition. That’s why you didn’t so you just hid your burning cheeks in your palms. “Aghh… stop I wasn’t that good then.” Jimin looked a bit impressed at it and the admiration he already had for you grew even more. “But you grew into what you are today.”

The more all of you talked, the more you got along with Jimin. You clicked. Even if it wasn’t on a really good trusting relationship, you became acquaintances. He was a cute and interesting person. But still reserved. If Hoseok and you got a bit touchy or cracked your inside jokes Jimin pulled on a frown for a bit. He got different vibes from the two of you. But he didn’t say anything. He just let you be. He’d just met you anyways. During class it was Hobi that asked you what you think of Jimin. And you just answered honestly. “I wish I could say for sure. But he seems like a cool kid.” He’s still younger than you anyways. “At least he’ll have 2 friends in advanced now that we both know he’s a good kid.” Hoseok smiled back at you and went back to paying attention. Advanced. So he will come huh.

Social media au (4/?)

YouTube dancer/college student!OC dancer!Hoseok - the rest of the characters coming soon!

Y/n is a hip-hop major with her childhood best friend Hoseok in the same college. People transfer to the school with a lot of other art majors: contemporary dance, music, drawing & painting and many more.

So how hard can it be to be a YouTube dancer?

PREVIOUS - NEXT

Words: 1,321

OOOOKAAAY!! Being in Spain was all fun and all but finally updating is a true relief. Other than my friend no one has ever read my works (let’s leave wattpad out of this. it was a crisis of the century). If anyone asks I am shook from teh BTS LOVE YOURSELF TEAR SINGULARITY video (the danccers are dope and I have an unpopular opinion on taes dancing but won’t say it cause I know others would def hate me ;))) and WRECKED (im looking at you mr. park jimin your lane is somewhere else) from the concept photos. taes piercing is just a sin.

also i am lonely my friends pls come talk to me ;(( 

edit (cuz I’m always in rush even when not needed): i dyed my hair entirely blonde 2 days ago and everyone was shook lol

[stemcellee]

hi! i love your blog and i was wondering if you had any tips for someone who wants to have a career in the medical field & would like to go to ucla! im honestly so lost with this whole college thing haha ((: thanks!!

Ooh boy I know this feeling I remember being the same way back in tha day!!

Anyways before I add anything I just wanna mention that i do have a Tags Masterpost which has a bunch of information that I’ve written up so far and everything is sorted by categories!! Your best bet would to look under “Applying,” “Information (General),” and “Pre-Med”

So here are some summary tips bc my tags posts can get a little hard to dig through because there’s just so much stuff LOL

GRADE POINT AVERAGE is important (so funny story when i was applying to ucla, i didn’t have many extracurriculars bc idk im kinda a mole rat so yeah all i did was play tennis and take tests so i think my grades were the sole reason for my acceptance LOL but DONT BE LIKE ME DO SOMETHING GOOD BC IT REALLY HELPS)

Speaking of the extracurriculars, don’t do like a million small things. The application has like 5 slots lol you should do a few good, meaningful things that you do for a lONG TIME and that you move up the ranks in

The main pre-med stuff you can do in high school is join health clubs, volunteer at hospitals, take an anatomy class if your school offers it

Think about how your life has really shaped you for that personal statement. It’s never too late to reflect on the smol person you are; think about what means the most to you and why it means so much, and then derive from that how you became Yourself from that. 

Going to community college first is NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF AT ALL (tbh i have regrets i feel like i woulda been more prepared for this hard ass competition if I had some sort of warning aka community college fml) you can finish pre-requisite classes, general ed classes, and pick up all sorts of other application-building things, and then you transfer to UCLA and KILL THOSE CLASSES AND GRADUATE WITH THAT BACHELORS 

Pre-med does not mean you have to choose a science major. Most of us choose a science major because it gets med-school requirements out of the way while we also earn a degree; Like say you major in history but you are pre med: you will take all the required pre-med classes but you also take all your history degree classes. It’s not as common because people don’t seem to like to juggle that kinda thing but it’s not a bad idea either because it shows WELL ROUNDEDNESS 

UCLA is getting more and more competitive with admissions. We has 100,000 applications for the class of 2022 and that’s just insane. It feels a little pressuring, but remember, you really don’t want a normal looking application. The admissions office is gonna get like 80,000 apps that basically describe the same person and it’s not like they get to talk to you in person, so the biggest deciding factor between you and someone else with a 4.0 and is president of Key Club is gonna be the personal statement. I wish i spent more time brainstorming my personal statement back in the day!!

That’s just a few things; but here’s what I tell my sister (a freshman in high school): just live your life. I’m glad that people like the both of you have a clearer idea of what college is going to be like (because of the studyblr community and because of me in my sisters case) but like enjoy your youth. I remember I didn’t know a single thing about college UNTIL I HAD TO APPLY (don’t do that btw) but I lived a good high school life. My sister often feels really pressured because I exposed her to the competition that is college, so she feels stressed about being at the top of her class and what not, but honestly the stress is so pre-mature. You don’t wanna become a robot! Life is not all about studying. Keep your goals straight of course, but don’t miss out on life because of the stress of studying. 

I wish you the best btw and keep working hard; good luck!!

[angieschiffahoi]

I decided to apply for a transfer to another university (my current degree is on hold bc borders are closed and im unable to fly to finish up an internship) and surprisingly got accepted into the double major course that i failed to get into w my gcse score and even got offered a scholarship. idk how its gg to affect my studies as this degree wld take me a yr more w practicals and an internship. i feel more anxious than happy and its making me feel guilty like im not being grateful. i hv always wanted this. Any friendly advice?

Hey, there! First of all, congratulations!

I am not really great with advice (because I am a ball of stress myself), but I can tell you that it is perfectly normal to feel anxious in these types of situations and you shouldn't feel guilty (especially since you're adding one year to your studies and that can be offputting). Just because you really, really want something, it doesn't mean that it will make you instantly happy and excited. Some things, like education take time and effort. They are tiring and difficult and it is ok to feel overwhelmed. If it is something you like to do, that feeling will pass (at times a bit slowly); if instead you find out it's something you don't like - cut yourself some slack. This world is fast paced and it forces us to make choices in very little time. Sometimes we make mistakes.

For now, though: don't worry about it too much. Just take a little time. Maybe if you have time and resources take a bit of a break before you start, so you can jump in fully charged.

Also, try to find something else you like doing, by yourself or with others, so that when you feel stressed and anxious about school, you have something to fall back on and relax. For example, I was excited for my Ph.D. but when I got in, I cried for three days. Because it is a three year committment, it isn't a real job and I'm not entirely comfortable in the academia in general. I was absolutely not grateful, despite it being the thing I wanted. Before the pandemic, seeing my friends and playing RPGs and boardgames every week kept me sane and focused (I had other interests but those instances were the only times I didn't think about work).

But it can be very much anything.

Something I find useful is making a list of all the positive things about this change. Just ignore the negatives for an afternoon. Put on paper why it is what you've always wanted. Why you feel like you should be happy and grateful. List all of the positive things it could do for your future. Ignore the bad for a bit. I don't know if it'll work for you, but sometimes, when I want to give up, I think about why I wanted to do this in the first place and it helps, sometimes it gets me only through a day and sometimes it motivates me for a month. Also, the positive things don’t need to be some grand plan to save the universe, they need to motivate you. It can be something as big as “I want to be a doctor to find the cure for cancer” or as small as “I really like MD beside my name”. This is something you do for you and no one else. 

Anyways, congrats again and good luck! I'm sure you'll do great :)

[nchoi]

hii (〜￣▽￣)〜(〜￣▽￣)〜(〜￣▽￣)〜  again, acacia. so you saw my wallflower and my babydoll. but this time you get to meet the head bitch in charge, super fab, actual blair waldorf, naomi choi. by now, y’all know if you click on this you are obligated to plot with me. xoxo.

****update: i created all of this on the spot & also … it got kinda long... again... sue me. but as always, if you want the nutshell scroll down to the very last bullet point. [in sadie saxton’s voice] you’re welcome.

░ * . ╰ ✯ › ⊰ IM JINAH, CIS-FEMALE, TWENTY-FIVE ⊱ is that NAOMI CHOI ? the FASHION DESIGNER & SOCIALITE. they’re known to be AUTHORITATIVE & BEAUTIFUL. but also VINDICTIVE & IRRATIONAL. unknown to them, they are the reincarnation of HERA.

BACKGROUND

unlike my other two characters, naomi actually grew in a very stable home. her parents are very much in love. therefore she was very much loved. being their only child, she was constantly spoiled. always given whatever she wants, whenever she wants. and of course, she’s used to getting her way all the time. if you couldn’t tell by the gif, she’s bad and boujee. her family is loaded. her father, being the chairman and co-owner of rosewood resort (hotels.) and her mother, being a now retired model turned to a fashion designer. she’s always been surrounded by luxury and will continue to be.

naomi basically grew up in private schools. of course her parents wanted her to be the best of the best. so she was constantly put under (positive) pressure by the them. this of course results her to being the top student of her year every year. she never settled for less, for both them and herself. she doesn’t like to disappoint her parents ever. they are her support system and role models. she strives for their success (and even more than that.)

during high school, she was sort of a bully. she was very ruthless and cold. she had that, “i’ll do anything to get where i need to be,” personality. and if it meant paying someone to transfer the other student threatening her valedictorian spot, then yes, of course she’d do that. people either hated her or loved her. there was no in between. she kept her clique small. yes, a clique, which indeed was very exclusive. invite only. think of regina george. she ran her school and she liked to keep it that way. once she graduated she became more of an adult about things. of course her ruthlessness was still around, but a little more filtered. just a tad bit. she got accepted into almost every ivy league college. but ended up going to harvard. 

naomi grew a very big following. she was very popular on social media due to her sense of style. a lot of fashion magazines, blogs, youtubers, etc all tried to recreate her looks. at first looking the best was just a simple task to her. but eventually, she discovered that fashion was no longer a competitive thing. but just a really fun hobby she had. her love for fashion grew immensely. while she was studying to become a business major, she started up her own clothing line company. first it started with a couple shoes. then it slowly started to build into more. she eventually graduated with a bachelors degree in business management and is now a full time fashion designer.

how she got to seattle: so, although she has a deep love for new york. she found herself most comfortable in her family penthouse in seattle. a lot of her younger memories were spent their. mostly for family vacations. the view is beautiful, more calming than the hustle and bustle of nyc, and she always just felt like she belonged. she is currently living alone. her parents still residing in new york and visiting every now and then. she does travel constantly. but always finds herself back home in seattle.

PERSONALITY+RELATIONSHIPS

naomi’s PERSONALITY is quite something. she has that tell it like it is personality. she just calls it likes she sees it. even if she’s not exactly right. she’s literally drowning in her riches. making her materialistic af. some people might think she’s that dumb bimbo rich bitch. but she’s actually very VERY smart. witty and intelligent to be exact. she’s very particular when it comes to most things. she wants things done correctly. so she often runs by the quote, “if you want things right you gotta do it yourself.” she doesn’t like relying on others to get things done when she knows she could do it faster and better. a little bit of a ocd queen. also, she’s able to throw old things together and make them look better, which is another reason why she became a fashion designer. she’s very dedicated to her work, thus making her very goal oriented. she’s very creative when it comes to her designs. and she’s actually a very good artist, like drawing her sketches. i’m sure she picked up doodling and bullet journaling while growing up. *plays boss ass bitch vine.*

when it comes to FRIENDS she has plenty, at least in her head. she just knows a lot of people through her many connections. so she has many affiliations. but never real friends. she’s very particular with the people she associates herself with. she believes that those around you reflect who you are as a person as well. therefore, she only surrounds herself with the best of the best. she may not be the best person to tell your secrets too either because she’s quite the gossip queen. but she can probably persuade you to trust her. rip. however, if you are a close friend of her’s, she’s very loyal to those who are loyal to her. which means she’d never do you dirty. but that’s only if she really cares about you. she’s a really great listener and she’s willing to give advice to those are willing to take it. plus, she’s the type to spoil the people she loves. so expect the best christmas gifts ever if u rollin’ with her. honestly, she really does need to surround herself with good people with genuinely good intentions. so please, someone teach her what loyalty is. bonus points if they’ve been friends for awhile. displays loyalty.

please flood her with ENEMIES. i know for a fact that she has these. she was bully in high school. so you know this girl has more than enough haters. she uses people, she pushes people around, etc etc. like she has some very evil intentions. and i would love it even more if some of these enemies were girls that she caught her fiance with. that would juicy af. especially since she’s vengeful and irrational. while naomi does have some good intentions, she leans more to the chaotic evil side. she puts fuel to drama and loves to see people crash and burn. why? she wants that reassurance that she is flourishing above all. she never wants to be belittled and will do anything to remain on the very top. also, a rivalry would be perfect. especially if someone is damaging her business. because that’s her baby and she would do anything to protect that as well. naomi absolutely needs enemies. give her many. plenty. an abundance please.

as for LOVERS. naomi has most definitely dated a lot. she’s had a handful of serious relationships as well. she is a beautiful and alluring woman after all. she does believe in love. she’s witnessed it between her parents and wishes for a love like their’s. so of course this girl is a hopeless romantic. and honestly, she needs love in her life. it would totally tear down her tough bitch exterior and show how soft naomi can really be. but that’s probably going to be with her fiance. ok, a little bit about naomi and her relationships. she’d be very loyal to anyone she’s dating. she’d spoil them with gifts, surprise visits, and honestly just give them the whole world. they’d be the only person who’d be able to tell this bitch to stop acting so unreasonable. and *gasp* she’d actually listen. i feel like she’s the type to do whatever she needs to do to please her significant other. sad, but it’s true. she’s not as independent as she makes herself out to be. but everybody needs somebody. am i right?

WANTED CONNECTIONS

FRIENDS

best friend — her closest confidant. she’d never let go of this person. they’re her ride or die // f or nb

winghoe — another close friend of her’s probably the person who got her and her fiance together. // m, f, or nb

exes — she’d be the type to still be friends with her ex. yes, they’ve loved each other. but they’ve come to terms they’re much better off platonic. // m or nb

ENEMIES

victim — someone she’s bullied in the past. just someone to constantly remind her that she’s a raging bitch. // m, f, or nb

used — someone she dated and she just basically used. most likely treated them as a toy in her little games // m or nb

frienemies — just always trying to one up each other. whether it be in fashion, friends, family, just life in general. they’re always in a secret competition. // m, f, or nb

LOVERS

fiance — this would be the love of her life. even if they bicker and argue. she’d be 100% dedicated to them. // zeus deity only

first love — once naomi is dedicated to someone it’s a little hard for her to let them go. especially if it was her first love. this could be drama central yooohooo... // m or nb

on and off — just the person she always runs back to. she’d probably even try contacting them if she ever got into a fight with her fiance. // m or nb

** also, since we don’t have zeus deity yet, her love life is up to be fucked up. pls. f her up.

MISCELLANEOUS

✿ an angel with a halo unbalanced with horns, not a devil but not a saint either?? kind yet has a backbone. softer than what she seems like. humorous and witty though understanding. mistrusting but willing to let loyalty speak. wealthy but tries not to depend on her family. and heavily involved in the king glitterati lifestyle. she is the queen of fashion. and honestly trying to be the queen of life itself. she’s chaotic neutral. she comes off as a bitch, but if you are her friend, she’s very very loyal to you. honestly, her life seems fine. she has parents that love her but push her to be the best of the best. she tears people down for shits and giggles. and can be quite manipulative. but overall, naomi choi is a beautiful, driven, judgmental, opinionated, artistic, and the most problematic head bitch in charge e v e r.

alright. if you made it to the end of this ilysm. this might be kinda confusing cause tbh i’m too lazy to proofread. but please like this shit if you wanna plot it uppppp.

[trendingnewsb]

Sympathy for the Incel

If you want to know why young men are broken, ask them.

There is a cultural crisis emboldening the misogyny and violence of the little-known incel movement (an abbreviation for the self-professed involuntary celibate community of men) and which has now been tied to three mass murders: Elliot Rodger, Chris Harper-Mercer and, this week, the alleged Toronto killer Alek Minassian, who is accused of killing 10 and injuring 15 people in one of the most horrific acts of mass violence in Canada in years.

One after another, media outlets are seeking to understand how this could happen while raising the question of how we got here. The Internet is enabling a community of men who want to kill women, read the headline in The Verge. Can the radicalization of incels be stopped? asked the Globe and Mail. But one headline stood out, from The National Post: What should we do about the incels? Maybe help them. Shouting about what horrible women-hating losers they are (which they may be) is not going to prevent one of them from murdering again.

This, in particular, is the question Im concerned with, and why I am attempting to find whatever empathy or compassion might be possible for the disconnected young men flocking to the movement and who might be at a crossroads. One young man stood out in the countless hours I spent listening to podcasts, videos and chat room conversations within the incel community which I have been following for months now: 19-year-old Jack Peterson, a socially awkward Chicagoan who after hours of interviews agreed to reveal his real identity for the first time to The Daily Beast.

To be clear, Peterson initially did not want to do any media regarding the group, particularly a profile on what the makings of an incel look like, but after considering my appeal that perhaps others might want to reach out if they could have a better understanding, he agreed.

Born Kalerthon Demetro in the suburbs of Chicago, Peterson (his mothers last name) is a high school dropout who lives with his single mother and whose father left when he was two years old. Peripherally involved in the online incel community for years, Petersons first reaction to the Toronto horror was to record a podcast specifically condemning violence and misogyny and underscoring that for the majority of participants, this is not their reality. For him and many like him, he says, the incel community is a means of supporting one another in a world when it sometimes feels like there is no one else.

To listen to the teenager speak, he does not seem psychopathic. He does not seem like he endorses psychopathy. On the contrary, he seems shy and awkward and lonely and angry. He laughs when other incels make dark jokes about killers, but he does not make them himself. He gets it. They are blowing off steam.

Being an incel is not about violence or misogyny, repeats Peterson, who is the only incel who has been on television doing interviews in recent days since the alleged Toronto killer pointed a finger at the incel movement in a cryptic post on Facebook confirmed earlier this week. Yes, for some guys it is, but not for me. Not for many of us.

The challenge in covering the incel movement is that in many cases the cherry-picked and sensationalist coverage reinforces these mens persecution complexes and drives them further into a pit of rage-fueled nihilism. Attempting to find any kind of compassion is in no way to excuse or normalize the deranged among them. On the other hand, it is to see what options we have left in reaching them at all.

In the groundbreaking book Change or Die, author Alan Deutschman writes, [The sense of self is threatened by any major change in the deep-rooted patterns of how we think, feel, and act, even a tremendously positive change such as leaving behind a life of crime and addiction. A change in progress demands new explanations for a past thats now cast in a darker light.

Essentially, reaching someone entrenched within a near-fanatical belief system is often impossible because the ego will put up a fight to the death in order to not deal with the psychic pain of feeling that everything that has been done up until this point has been done wrong. But it is possible.

In Deutschmans book, spanning extensive research on changing past negative behavior to future positive actions, one case study of a parole officer illuminates how he found the most success in reaching the seemingly unreachable. By realizing that the real reason why people dont change is demoralizationthe overwhelming sense of hopelessness and power he applied the theory that the most he could do is to inspire a new sense of hope and power. Indeed, this officer invited 14 of the most argumentative ex-convicts and spent 90-minute sessions listening to them rather than telling them what to do. The response was extraordinary. The parole officer recounted: In one and a half hours they calmed down. They said, These guys arent against us. Now they come back every week and say, At least Im being listened to. In the last year the difference has been huge. They want to make a change.

In speaking to Peterson on the phone, while a journalist is about as a far away from a parole officer as you can get, its amazing the difference that occurs when I listen to what he has to say about the reality of incel culture versus how he sees the media portraying its members.

In his view, as despicable and morally unfathomable as the psychopathic fringe is, the reality of the wider membership estimated in the tens of thousands of active members is far more complex.

The way Peterson tells itand as is supported by his digital footprint of videos, podcasts and commentsfor him and many others, to be an incel is to seek the camaraderie of a group of male peers who provide an outlet where, for once, they can honestly talk about the increasing fragmentation, disconnection, alienation and ostracization they feel in an always-online world in which, as far as they can see, they are not welcome or wanted.

Peterson compared the mischaracterization of incels to the xenophobic broad brush that takes a minority of radicalized Islamic suicide-bombers and uses it to condemn the vast majority of Muslims. Instead, he said, there is an acceptance that there is a vile minority who distorts the vision of the communitybut that it is not his vision for the group.

Like many in the incel community, Peterson essentially grew up without a strong father figure.

His mother kicked his father out because, in Petersons words, he used to beat the shit out of my mother and she got a restraining order. His father was the same age that he is now when he got his 39-year-old mother pregnant, and hes never met him, but they have spoken on the phone a few times.

I dont really have any feelings about him, Peterson says. He just kind of is.

From an early age, Peterson felt a level of social anxiety that was bearable but distinct. His kindergarten teacher asked him why he did not play with the others. He said, I dont know how.

Things started to change around the third or fourth grade. It was the first time the girls started making fun of him, he says, saying he was creepy and gross and weird.

I didnt understand it, he says. I was told either to act like a man or that girls could do no wrong. And yet I was constantly told that men were the cruel, bad ones. None of it made any sense to me. I was just extremely shy. I didnt talk to them, but the teasing was relentless and made me want to kill myself.

In the seventh grade, Peterson transferred to three different middle schools all in one year as the bullying followed him everywhere. By the time he reached high school, he says, one young woman started taking photos of him and sharing them with other girls who openly laughed in his face about how ugly he was and why they did not want him near them. He did not finish his freshman year at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, but dropped out after the first semester. His mother never knew the extent of the bullying he experienced.

I was just ashamed, he says. How do you talk about that?

The profoundly formative pain of youthful bullying has been around forever. When a classmate taunts you and proclaims your worthlessness to all your peers, if you are a kid, the humiliation of such an experience doesnt feel like its happening in a classroomit can feel like a worldwide-televised death sentence.

Very few kids on the receiving end of the cruelty know how to deal with itbecause of a lack of life experience that is just as undeveloped as their pubescent brains.

But for a kid growing up today, the tool of the Internet levels the game. No longer do you wonder, Will anyone ever love me? Now you can Google it, and find secret places and communities and bodies of knowledge that your parents dont even know exist. This can be exciting, emboldening, a total game-changer.

I remember the first time I found a site that even mentioned the word incel, I was like, Woah, these guys are outcasts, too, he says. I kind of felt like, maybe Im not alone.

At the age of 11, Peterson visited 4chan for the first time, and he saw his rage and loneliness expressed as well as the impotence of such advice as just get over it. He didnt know how to. He didnt have anyone to ask. He just didnt want any more ridicule.

It was kind of crazy to see and read a lot of the stuff I did, Peterson says. But it was also the only place where other guys talked about some of the things I was experiencing. Feeling so alone and rejected by the people around you. I was extremely shy then, and still kind of am, but it makes you feel really fucked up to be told youre a creepy loser by a pretty popular girl when youre just sitting there, saying nothing, doing nothing, wishing you were invisible but instead being the quiet freak with the cystic acne all over his face.

He also received an indoctrination into the culture of these young men who accepted him and what they found acceptableand what he would need to as well if he were to finally fit in somewhere.

To understand the increasingly irony-rich language of the users, its essential to read Angela Nagles book Kill All Normies, which exquisitely captures the critical shift in online perspective and the death of what remained of a mass culture sensibility that happened at exactly the same time Peterson began actively engaging with it.

In her brilliant book documenting the culture wars of the extreme left and the extreme right in recent years, focusing on subcultures including 4chan and incels, Nagle describes the attitude rebellion on the site against the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it.

Peterson is one of the best representations of exactly how these culture wars are shaping our young mens identities.

When everything is ironic, nothing is. So they mock it. All of it.

Theres this big hypocrisy in the fact that so many people who say they are all about human rights and empowerment think its actually funny when boys get mocked, he says. I never said a single misogynistic thing growing up. And I was punished. Just because I was weird. I couldnt help it. I honestly wanted to die.

On the contrary, the incel communities he found online seemed different.

When I dropped out of high school, the one place I felt okay about stuff for a little while was when I was online, Peterson tells me. By the time I discovered the incel culture on Reddit, it felt like, Okay, Im not insane. I was reading all these other guys stories about how girls told them they were repulsive. I never identified with the misogyny, but I did identify with the rage at the hypocrisy of just how untouchable women were in society. No matter what, no matter what awful thing a woman did, it was always supposed to be like, Oh yeah, thats female empowerment. But when you have no friends and are getting bullied and humiliated by women constantly and are told to both man up and renounce your masculinity its like the one bright light you see is this community.

By the time he was 16, Peterson finally met in person a young womanfour years older than himwith whom he had been chatting online since he was 12 years old. She did not know what he looked like for some time, and when he finally shared his picture, she told him that she didnt find him attractive. He lost his virginity to her, after which he says she ridiculed his penis size and laughed at him. Later, she sent him copies of messages that she had sent on to other men she was cheating on him with where she explicitly described the sex acts she wanted done to her. (Ive seen corroborating evidence of all of this.)

I was literally cucked, Peterson says. That word doesnt have any meaning anymore, but thats what I was. I still wanted to see her though. She was the only girl who had ever expressed interest in me, even though she tore me down and told me how ugly I was. It was still better than nothing.

According to Peterson, the relationship finally disintegrated when she began choking him and tried to go after him in her car. He ran to a nearby store to get help, and has the actual footage of the security cam showing him flailing against the glass window. The police came, and to cover for the girl, he said that he was suicidal. He spent three days in a mental institution because of it.

This was a turning point for Peterson.

He finally aligned himself fully as an incel. He was, in the words of Internet argot, black-pilled.

Anyone who has dabbled in understanding Internet lingo is likely familiar with the term red-pilled (inspired by the film The Matrix, where Neo is offered a blue pill where everything stays status quo or a red pill where the ugly truth is supposedly exposed). Adopted by mens rights activists around 2004, to get red-pilled is to subscribe to the particular ideology that feminism is a cancer and men are the real victims. But what does it mean to get black-pilled, as many refer to this communitys belief system? It sounds as bleak as it is.

Essentially, the philosophy is that everything is broken and the answer lies in refusing to engage in a meaningful or constructive way with society. (The phrase black pill first appeared in 2012 on a blog called Omega Virgin Revolt.) A critical part of being black-pilled is recognizing, with zero sentimentality or euphemism or explaining away, that women do not like genetically inferior men. They now have infinite options in the form of men who are higher status (be it, economic, physical, or intellectual) because of the breakdown in societal monogamy and now high-status men can game apps and use hypergamy (or dating up) to their advantage. (Meaning, a less attractive woman will nowadays reject a less attractive male if she is suddenly able to have meaningless sex with a high status man, who can juggle multiple women. This leaves men who are not as good-looking in the dust.)

Incels theorize that once you are black-pilled, you are finally given the gift of brutally honest Darwinian truth that, essentially, the game is rigged, so why bother? With such entrenchment in the truth of the doctrine comes freedom. No longer do you have to run around in circles. You can accept the world for what it is and settle back into your status on the lower rungs.

If you are red-pilled, you might take this theory of female behavior to use it in manipulative pick-up strategies to try to game women into thinking you are higher status or to find the weakest prey.

If you are an incel and have never had a single successful romantic attempt or only disastrous ones, this type of theorizing provides that wonderful feeling of certainty that comes with confirmation bias and the emancipation from regret of knowing that nothing could have been done anyway. Which is why many incels describe being black-pilled as an awakening from humiliation. Like finally realizing that you have been the subject of a joke that everyone else has been in on the whole time.

For a young man like Peterson, spouting such beliefs, he seems not so much a product of toxic masculinity as a failure of masculinity itself.

No one is teaching these men how to be men. This doesnt mean men in the sense of mens rights activists, but a healthy, balanced (not extremist) definition which includes someone who treats women well but also treats himself well by not being afraid to think for himself with opinions that deviate from the loudest, most hateful elements in the community.

But isnt the worst parts of the incel community hate speech? And shouldnt such hate speech be eradicated?

In Nadine Strossens timely new book Hate, she makes the case for countering bad speech with more speech, and illustrates how in countries where hate speech speech laws have been enacted, support for racist and xenophobic politicians has risen. In Europe, hate speech laws have in fact been used as a means of stifling dissent amongst the disenfranchised.

Equal justice for all depends on full freedom of speech for all, she writes.

Not only that, but as Keith Whittington argues in his new book Speak Freely, offensive speech is crucial to safeguard because of its utility in generating, testing, and communicating ideas.

One of the most brilliant defenses of the subject is Jonathan Rauchs 2013 essay, The Case for Hate Speech in The Atlantic, where he thanks the loudest and most noxious voices he faced along the way in his fight for gay marriage. [W]e won in the realm of ideas, he writes. And our antagonists–people who spouted speech we believed was deeply offensive, from Anita Bryant to Jerry Falwell to, yes, Orson Scott Card–helped us win.

For the incel community, of course, many of the ideas espoused are in defense of their identity as the losers of society, which frees them of the need to take personal responsibility.

I think thats a valid criticism, Peterson says. I get sick of the guys who seem like they just want to keep others down no matter what. Its almost like you are scorned when you experience a little bit of success.

The podcast Peterson recorded after the Toronto attack represents the incel community as not seeming as extreme as a cursory visit to the incel-tracking site We Hunted the Mammoth or the incel-mocking community Incel Tears might lead you to believe. On these sites, in the communitys most chilling screengrabs, posts include suggestions that in order to truly terrorize the women who have rejected incels over the years, perhaps mass acid attacks and rapes could be coordinated in order to inflict the same damage upon women that these young men feel has happened to them.

In contrast, Petersons podcast discussion contains an unusual degree of literacy about sociological phenomena, including the Japanese trend of hikikomori, or isolationism and utter retreat occurring with young men, which many incels predict will spread around the world in due time.

But at its core, it is still a conversation littered with misogyny and resentment.

At one point, someone says that women use men like emotional tampons. Another brings up the possibility of mandated girlfriends (or state-sanctioned rape, as shown on the new season of The Handmaids Tale). A joke is made that the best-case scenario is when incels go ER (or Elliot Rodger). There is discussion about the evolutionary benefits of sexual violence, which harkens Rodgers infamously deranged advocacy of a program where men could kill all women because if women were able to choose their own mates, their inferior brains would devolve humanity completely. Someone laughs about the idea of blackmailing women into having sex with them by threatening to post nude photos online. Peterson himself brings up the idea of access to assisted suicide for incels to prevent future attacks, and he suggests that talking to those who wonder about incel culture might help with improving our image, especially if you attach a face to the incel phenomenon, I think that that makes it more sympathetic.

Peterson clarifies to me: He was not suggesting it be him.

I meant someone else, but then it turned out, I guess I was the only person dumb enough to show my face in videos I made online, he says. So here we are.

When I ask him about the references in the podcast to Rodger, he responds, That guy was fucking nuts. I dont really joke about going ER, but I dont tell the guys who make those jokes not to do it because I know theyre being sarcastic. All this shocking stuff is often just the guys trolling. I would argue that I dont think anybody is going to be stupid enough to believe that sanctioned rape is being talked about as an actual suggestion. Sometimes the most ridiculous shit makes me laugh, even though I dont condone it. So if I do laugh at some of this stuff its probably me laughing at something because its fucking stupid.

The psychopaths are the problem, not the incels, he says.

If someone is going to carry out an attack like this theyre gonna have to be severely mentally ill to be capable of that, he says. Making jokes or being active in the incel community doesnt cause it. Being mentally ill does.

But what about when jokes arent just jokes?

I mention how last year when the Nazi website The Daily Stormers guidebook was leaked online, it contained the message: The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. So what about when such humor is actually a means of subversive propaganda?

I can see that, Peterson acknowledges. I mean, Ive had guys tell me some really fucked-up shit, and Ive told them, you know, get some help because I dont want you to hurt anyone. But I do think that making dark jokes for people who arent mentally ill helps keep a lot of us from going crazy.

And how exactly does he feel about the disparagement of women in saying that they use men as emotional tampons? Men do the same fucking thing, Peterson says. Thats not a one-sided thing. Men can use women emotionally, too.

And what of the suicide idea?

What it really comes down to is that Id rather these mass shooters and attackers just kill themselves than kill 10 or more innocent people. So maybe if it was easier to commit suicide wed see less of these attacks. Im not condoning suicide but I prefer that to innocent people dying.

On the incels.me forum, a stated list of rules for participation include guidelines that are stricter than most elite private clubs in America.

No women allowed. No exception.

Yes, this means that a forum dedicated to decrying success with women has as one of its primary rules a focus on enforced isolation. Other rules also brutally shut out any chance to provide advice or mentorship to other young men.

A few months ago, when Peterson was using the forum, he suddenly found that he was banned from having certain privileges in the chatrooms. Even the incels, it seemed, were rejecting him.

In response, he filmed and put on his YouTube one of the most astonishing, hyper-granular deconstructions of modern Internet life Ive ever seen.

It is bizarro land for anyone not deep in the world of Internet language.

To create the video, he spent three days nonstop (two days spent up for 24 hours straight in between passing out) to create a meticulous 30-minute PowerPoint video that he filmed objecting to the ban and making his case that he in fact was a genuine incel using a barrage of evidence and minutiae and dictionary definitions and failures of logic to try to break down the bullying he felt he experienced on the forum.

And, if you want to get brutal about the absurdity of the exercise (and the insanity such subcultures can create amongst its members), to prove exactly why he was just as reprehensible to society as the rest of the incels.

It was pretty ridiculous, he says in retrospect. Its like American Vandal, Netflixs mockumentary on super-deep-dive crime docs, except with the heartbreaking element of seeing how brainwashed a young man is into trying to obtain peer approval.

At one point in the video, he even includes a diagnosis that he is paranoid schizophrenic as evidence that he ought to qualify as an incel because of this mental illness. The reality is that after he was given that diagnosis, another psychologist said he was not. Instead, the doctor told him (and is evidenced in the video), he was making himself sick with his own thoughts.

All of this humiliation is laid out for his fellow community of incels to seeand all of it to get back into good standing in the incel community. Thats how bad isolated young men want status and the reassurance of having a community to call their own. Even when the group identity is in how perversely low and entrenched their status really is.

Is it any wonder that these boys need a father figure?

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (no relation to Jack) has been known to be moved to tears in interviews when discussing the crisis of alienation he sees amongst young men today and the need to provide them with tools that will reach them.

As he told Tim Lott of The Spectator late last year about his 90 percent male audience, Im telling them something they desperately need to hearthat there are important things that need to be fixed up. Im saying, You guys really need to get your act together and you need to bear some responsibility and grow the hell up. The lack of an identifiable and compelling path forward and the denialism these kids are being fed on a daily basis is undoubtedly destroying them and that is especially true of the young men.

Lott then observes the author of The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos displaying a level of vulnerability on the subject that is striking.

At this point, to my astonishment, Peterson begins to weep. He talks through his tears for the next several minutes. Every time I talk about this, it breaks me up, he says. The message Ive been delivering is, Find the heaviest weight you can and pick it up. And that will make you strong. Youre not who you could be. And who you could be is worthwhile.

As psychologist William Pollack articulates in the documentary The Mask You Live In about the boy code that warps masculinity from an early age: The way that boys are brought up makes them hide all of their natural, vulnerable, empathic feelings behind a mask of masculinity When theyre most in pain, they cant reach out and ask for help because theyre not allowed to or they wont be a real boy.

In fact, boys express depression in a completely opposite way than girls. They act out. But most people see it as a conduct disorder or just a bad kid.

After the Parkland high school shooting in March, one of the foremost activists in trying to address the crisis of reaching out to troubled young men before they become killers met with President Donald Trump to say his piece. Every single one of these school shootings has been from young men who are disconnected, said Darrell Scott, the father of the first student murdered at Columbine High School almost 20 years ago. In response, he founded Rachels Challenge to intervene with action rather than yet another toothless spectacle of condemnation of the empirically condemnable violence itself.

In a tweet rant posted during this same time by Martin Daubney, the editor of the English lad magazine Loaded, he articulated a similarly jarring portrait of collective angst from young men who feel callously tossed aside and branded as innately wrong, which only serves to compound the sense of victimization even further.

Im mindful of a seminal TEDTalk by Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, Daubney wrote. He looks at school shootings, and says: Boys who hurt, hurt us…They say todays boys feel part of some grand problem. You could frame it as #ToxicMasculinity: the notion that all males are to blame for the actions of a minority of damaged individuals. This is identity politics at its most destructive. Because we live in a world where every male indiscretion is used to attack all males. Im saying this: many boys are switching off. Were losing them.

How does an incel feel about all of this concernextended within the realm of ideas and intellectualism?

Itd be nice, Jack Peterson says, if he just had someone else to talk to about it.

I like Jordan Peterson a lot, he admits in a tone that sounds more upbeat than the rest of our conversation. I was going to go see him with another incel but that guy ended up not being able to go. But I bought a VIP ticket so I get to meet him next week.

In the wake of the Toronto attack, Peterson is unique in that unlike many in the incel community who have scrubbed their social or taken down their WordPress blogs that chronicled their life, he decided to see what happened when he went on TV to talk about his life in this widely reviled community now most associated with mass murder.

The decision to do so was gutsy. Especially considering the against-the-agenda talking points he is now presenting in condemning misogyny and violence.

The reaction he has received from other incels has been negative. And the public certainly doesnt like anyone who might be an incel.

Its an unwinnable place to be for someone who might still have a chance of climbing out of the twisted, self-fulfilling prophecy gutter that such dangerous places can become for young men who dont think they have anywhere else to go.

But Peterson doesnt regret doing the media and putting his face out there.

Instead, he speaks with an inverse of the perverted sadism of the Toronto attacker. It is a nihilism of potential that is in stark contrast to the nihilism of murderous revenge.

As he describes the decision, you can almost hear an epiphany clicking: When you dont care when you have nothing else to lose, it can be used for good or evil.

I dont know why I said yes to identifying myself as an incel, he says, mulling it over. I just felt like, you know What do I have to lose?

Of course, within the incel community itself, the answer is clear.

He could very well lose his status as an incel.

They called him all the predictable names. He was a cuck. He was a status-seeker. He was an opportunist. He was a number of slurs that are not fit to print. But for an incel, the worst insult he received of all was that he was a fake.

And, this being incel-world, the name he was called was targeted and precise.

You see, for incels, each man within the community self-identifies with how they qualify for their incel status. For instance, mentalcels achieve their status as a result of mental illness. A braincel is that way because of intelligence. A truecel has never had sex, a relationship, any kind of success at all.

Thus Peterson was called a fakecel. No, Peterson says, thats wrong. He definitely still is an incel. He is a part of the group. Where then does he now belong?

Peterson is quiet as he considers the answer.

I think something where I can help people, he says. I like talking about the positive stuff more, even if its frowned upon.

He considers a while longer.

I dont know, he considers, maybe Im a hopecel.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/sympathy-for-the-incel

from Viral News HQ https://ift.tt/2ruveDU via Viral News HQ

[datenight]

hey, i was thinking of u bc im from sort of a similar background and i lowkey rlly look up to u, but it's my first yr at this fancy newengland liberal arts college and ngl it SUCKS and it's way harder than i thought it'd be to come from a low income background/shitty public school/somewhere everyone here assumes is just full of hicks. (½)

i'm strongly considering dropping out to get my RN or at least transferring to my state school... any perspective on this? ppl keep telling me to give it more chances, that it's not even second sem yet, but every day i feel like i'm gonna burst. sry this is a lot, no worries if u don't have anything, ur still a role model for doin what u do and i respect u a ton. (2/2)

first of all i’m thank you for messaging me and i’m sorry if i’m responding to this late!! (i haven’t checked tumblr in like 2 weeks bc i’ve ironically been so busy with school stuff rip) also this is going to be a kinda long response because i love talking about college so i’m going to put it under a cut!

first of all, it means so so much to me that you would say you consider me a role model! that really made my night and meant a lot to me so thank you so much ❤️❤️❤️

in regards to your question about transferring it’s ultimately up to you but in my opinion it sounds like you’re really unhappy at your school and i think looking at transferring might be a good option for you. if it’s something you’re really thinking about i would also advise doing it sooner rather than later because, generally speaking, the further you get in your degree the less likely your credits from your past institution are going to transfer over.

i’m a senior in college right now and i’ve gone to the same university since the start of college. i go to a small southern liberal arts university and i’m lucky enough to have had a really good experience here for the most part!

my younger sister on the other hand is a sophomore and transferred to a new university this semester because like you she was really unhappy at her old school and i think it’s definitely been a good move for her. it was also good she got out when she did because not a ton of her credits from her first year transferred over to her new school. i’ve had friends who have transferred to my university who have had similar problems. i think this really varies by degree type though (my sister is a chemistry major and i know the natural sciences are very particular about degree requirements whereas i’m studying sociology and women’s studies which seem to be more open to accepting course substitutions) but this is one practical thing to consider when thinking about transferring.

in regards to place i can tell you there is 100% a bias against the rural south in academia (and everywhere else in the US tbh) that has a lot to do with class, amongst other things. i even see it where i live and go to school even though we are very much in the south. for example, i’ve had professors tell me that they’ve had to catch themselves from rolling their eyes and dismissing students because they speak with strong southern accents. i haven’t spent a lot of time in newengland but it wouldn’t surprise me if a huge bias existed there as well especially among other students (most of whom have probably lived in the north their whole lives.) it’s really unfortunate but i definitely see how coming from a low-income southern background could lead to feeling alienated at a fancy liberal arts college.

this is a very long response but basically i would encourage you to do what feels best in your gut! you’re going to know yourself better than anyone else and you’re going to know what’s best for you. from your message though, it sounds like you might have already made up your mind and you might just be worried about how it would look to other people if you transferred after one semester. and if this is the case, don’t be, there’s not one right way to move through college. my dad took 7 years to graduate from undergrad because he transferred, took time off, and changed his major a few times but now he has his masters degree and he’s been out of school for years. all that’s important is that you’re happy and secure and in an environment where you feel like you can enjoy your studies! and if you’re at a school that’s making you so unhappy you’re not going to be able to put out your best work anyway.

i hope some of this was helpful! if you want to message me again to chat some more please feel free! 

*also to clarify, i don’t come from a low-income background so i can’t really speak to that experience. i do live in a region with a lot of poverty and i sometimes talk about this and the way i’ve seen the people around me affected by poverty but don’t think it would be right for me to claim that experience as my own

[trendingnewsb]

Sympathy for the Incel

If you want to know why young men are broken, ask them.

There is a cultural crisis emboldening the misogyny and violence of the little-known incel movement (an abbreviation for the self-professed involuntary celibate community of men) and which has now been tied to three mass murders: Elliot Rodger, Chris Harper-Mercer and, this week, the alleged Toronto killer Alek Minassian, who is accused of killing 10 and injuring 15 people in one of the most horrific acts of mass violence in Canada in years.

One after another, media outlets are seeking to understand how this could happen while raising the question of how we got here. The Internet is enabling a community of men who want to kill women, read the headline in The Verge. Can the radicalization of incels be stopped? asked the Globe and Mail. But one headline stood out, from The National Post: What should we do about the incels? Maybe help them. Shouting about what horrible women-hating losers they are (which they may be) is not going to prevent one of them from murdering again.

This, in particular, is the question Im concerned with, and why I am attempting to find whatever empathy or compassion might be possible for the disconnected young men flocking to the movement and who might be at a crossroads. One young man stood out in the countless hours I spent listening to podcasts, videos and chat room conversations within the incel community which I have been following for months now: 19-year-old Jack Peterson, a socially awkward Chicagoan who after hours of interviews agreed to reveal his real identity for the first time to The Daily Beast.

To be clear, Peterson initially did not want to do any media regarding the group, particularly a profile on what the makings of an incel look like, but after considering my appeal that perhaps others might want to reach out if they could have a better understanding, he agreed.

Born Kalerthon Demetro in the suburbs of Chicago, Peterson (his mothers last name) is a high school dropout who lives with his single mother and whose father left when he was two years old. Peripherally involved in the online incel community for years, Petersons first reaction to the Toronto horror was to record a podcast specifically condemning violence and misogyny and underscoring that for the majority of participants, this is not their reality. For him and many like him, he says, the incel community is a means of supporting one another in a world when it sometimes feels like there is no one else.

To listen to the teenager speak, he does not seem psychopathic. He does not seem like he endorses psychopathy. On the contrary, he seems shy and awkward and lonely and angry. He laughs when other incels make dark jokes about killers, but he does not make them himself. He gets it. They are blowing off steam.

Being an incel is not about violence or misogyny, repeats Peterson, who is the only incel who has been on television doing interviews in recent days since the alleged Toronto killer pointed a finger at the incel movement in a cryptic post on Facebook confirmed earlier this week. Yes, for some guys it is, but not for me. Not for many of us.

The challenge in covering the incel movement is that in many cases the cherry-picked and sensationalist coverage reinforces these mens persecution complexes and drives them further into a pit of rage-fueled nihilism. Attempting to find any kind of compassion is in no way to excuse or normalize the deranged among them. On the other hand, it is to see what options we have left in reaching them at all.

In the groundbreaking book Change or Die, author Alan Deutschman writes, [The sense of self is threatened by any major change in the deep-rooted patterns of how we think, feel, and act, even a tremendously positive change such as leaving behind a life of crime and addiction. A change in progress demands new explanations for a past thats now cast in a darker light.

Essentially, reaching someone entrenched within a near-fanatical belief system is often impossible because the ego will put up a fight to the death in order to not deal with the psychic pain of feeling that everything that has been done up until this point has been done wrong. But it is possible.

In Deutschmans book, spanning extensive research on changing past negative behavior to future positive actions, one case study of a parole officer illuminates how he found the most success in reaching the seemingly unreachable. By realizing that the real reason why people dont change is demoralizationthe overwhelming sense of hopelessness and power he applied the theory that the most he could do is to inspire a new sense of hope and power. Indeed, this officer invited 14 of the most argumentative ex-convicts and spent 90-minute sessions listening to them rather than telling them what to do. The response was extraordinary. The parole officer recounted: In one and a half hours they calmed down. They said, These guys arent against us. Now they come back every week and say, At least Im being listened to. In the last year the difference has been huge. They want to make a change.

In speaking to Peterson on the phone, while a journalist is about as a far away from a parole officer as you can get, its amazing the difference that occurs when I listen to what he has to say about the reality of incel culture versus how he sees the media portraying its members.

In his view, as despicable and morally unfathomable as the psychopathic fringe is, the reality of the wider membership estimated in the tens of thousands of active members is far more complex.

The way Peterson tells itand as is supported by his digital footprint of videos, podcasts and commentsfor him and many others, to be an incel is to seek the camaraderie of a group of male peers who provide an outlet where, for once, they can honestly talk about the increasing fragmentation, disconnection, alienation and ostracization they feel in an always-online world in which, as far as they can see, they are not welcome or wanted.

Peterson compared the mischaracterization of incels to the xenophobic broad brush that takes a minority of radicalized Islamic suicide-bombers and uses it to condemn the vast majority of Muslims. Instead, he said, there is an acceptance that there is a vile minority who distorts the vision of the communitybut that it is not his vision for the group.

Like many in the incel community, Peterson essentially grew up without a strong father figure.

His mother kicked his father out because, in Petersons words, he used to beat the shit out of my mother and she got a restraining order. His father was the same age that he is now when he got his 39-year-old mother pregnant, and hes never met him, but they have spoken on the phone a few times.

I dont really have any feelings about him, Peterson says. He just kind of is.

From an early age, Peterson felt a level of social anxiety that was bearable but distinct. His kindergarten teacher asked him why he did not play with the others. He said, I dont know how.

Things started to change around the third or fourth grade. It was the first time the girls started making fun of him, he says, saying he was creepy and gross and weird.

I didnt understand it, he says. I was told either to act like a man or that girls could do no wrong. And yet I was constantly told that men were the cruel, bad ones. None of it made any sense to me. I was just extremely shy. I didnt talk to them, but the teasing was relentless and made me want to kill myself.

In the seventh grade, Peterson transferred to three different middle schools all in one year as the bullying followed him everywhere. By the time he reached high school, he says, one young woman started taking photos of him and sharing them with other girls who openly laughed in his face about how ugly he was and why they did not want him near them. He did not finish his freshman year at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, but dropped out after the first semester. His mother never knew the extent of the bullying he experienced.

I was just ashamed, he says. How do you talk about that?

The profoundly formative pain of youthful bullying has been around forever. When a classmate taunts you and proclaims your worthlessness to all your peers, if you are a kid, the humiliation of such an experience doesnt feel like its happening in a classroomit can feel like a worldwide-televised death sentence.

Very few kids on the receiving end of the cruelty know how to deal with itbecause of a lack of life experience that is just as undeveloped as their pubescent brains.

But for a kid growing up today, the tool of the Internet levels the game. No longer do you wonder, Will anyone ever love me? Now you can Google it, and find secret places and communities and bodies of knowledge that your parents dont even know exist. This can be exciting, emboldening, a total game-changer.

I remember the first time I found a site that even mentioned the word incel, I was like, Woah, these guys are outcasts, too, he says. I kind of felt like, maybe Im not alone.

At the age of 11, Peterson visited 4chan for the first time, and he saw his rage and loneliness expressed as well as the impotence of such advice as just get over it. He didnt know how to. He didnt have anyone to ask. He just didnt want any more ridicule.

It was kind of crazy to see and read a lot of the stuff I did, Peterson says. But it was also the only place where other guys talked about some of the things I was experiencing. Feeling so alone and rejected by the people around you. I was extremely shy then, and still kind of am, but it makes you feel really fucked up to be told youre a creepy loser by a pretty popular girl when youre just sitting there, saying nothing, doing nothing, wishing you were invisible but instead being the quiet freak with the cystic acne all over his face.

He also received an indoctrination into the culture of these young men who accepted him and what they found acceptableand what he would need to as well if he were to finally fit in somewhere.

To understand the increasingly irony-rich language of the users, its essential to read Angela Nagles book Kill All Normies, which exquisitely captures the critical shift in online perspective and the death of what remained of a mass culture sensibility that happened at exactly the same time Peterson began actively engaging with it.

In her brilliant book documenting the culture wars of the extreme left and the extreme right in recent years, focusing on subcultures including 4chan and incels, Nagle describes the attitude rebellion on the site against the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it.

Peterson is one of the best representations of exactly how these culture wars are shaping our young mens identities.

When everything is ironic, nothing is. So they mock it. All of it.

Theres this big hypocrisy in the fact that so many people who say they are all about human rights and empowerment think its actually funny when boys get mocked, he says. I never said a single misogynistic thing growing up. And I was punished. Just because I was weird. I couldnt help it. I honestly wanted to die.

On the contrary, the incel communities he found online seemed different.

When I dropped out of high school, the one place I felt okay about stuff for a little while was when I was online, Peterson tells me. By the time I discovered the incel culture on Reddit, it felt like, Okay, Im not insane. I was reading all these other guys stories about how girls told them they were repulsive. I never identified with the misogyny, but I did identify with the rage at the hypocrisy of just how untouchable women were in society. No matter what, no matter what awful thing a woman did, it was always supposed to be like, Oh yeah, thats female empowerment. But when you have no friends and are getting bullied and humiliated by women constantly and are told to both man up and renounce your masculinity its like the one bright light you see is this community.

By the time he was 16, Peterson finally met in person a young womanfour years older than himwith whom he had been chatting online since he was 12 years old. She did not know what he looked like for some time, and when he finally shared his picture, she told him that she didnt find him attractive. He lost his virginity to her, after which he says she ridiculed his penis size and laughed at him. Later, she sent him copies of messages that she had sent on to other men she was cheating on him with where she explicitly described the sex acts she wanted done to her. (Ive seen corroborating evidence of all of this.)

I was literally cucked, Peterson says. That word doesnt have any meaning anymore, but thats what I was. I still wanted to see her though. She was the only girl who had ever expressed interest in me, even though she tore me down and told me how ugly I was. It was still better than nothing.

According to Peterson, the relationship finally disintegrated when she began choking him and tried to go after him in her car. He ran to a nearby store to get help, and has the actual footage of the security cam showing him flailing against the glass window. The police came, and to cover for the girl, he said that he was suicidal. He spent three days in a mental institution because of it.

This was a turning point for Peterson.

He finally aligned himself fully as an incel. He was, in the words of Internet argot, black-pilled.

Anyone who has dabbled in understanding Internet lingo is likely familiar with the term red-pilled (inspired by the film The Matrix, where Neo is offered a blue pill where everything stays status quo or a red pill where the ugly truth is supposedly exposed). Adopted by mens rights activists around 2004, to get red-pilled is to subscribe to the particular ideology that feminism is a cancer and men are the real victims. But what does it mean to get black-pilled, as many refer to this communitys belief system? It sounds as bleak as it is.

Essentially, the philosophy is that everything is broken and the answer lies in refusing to engage in a meaningful or constructive way with society. (The phrase black pill first appeared in 2012 on a blog called Omega Virgin Revolt.) A critical part of being black-pilled is recognizing, with zero sentimentality or euphemism or explaining away, that women do not like genetically inferior men. They now have infinite options in the form of men who are higher status (be it, economic, physical, or intellectual) because of the breakdown in societal monogamy and now high-status men can game apps and use hypergamy (or dating up) to their advantage. (Meaning, a less attractive woman will nowadays reject a less attractive male if she is suddenly able to have meaningless sex with a high status man, who can juggle multiple women. This leaves men who are not as good-looking in the dust.)

Incels theorize that once you are black-pilled, you are finally given the gift of brutally honest Darwinian truth that, essentially, the game is rigged, so why bother? With such entrenchment in the truth of the doctrine comes freedom. No longer do you have to run around in circles. You can accept the world for what it is and settle back into your status on the lower rungs.

If you are red-pilled, you might take this theory of female behavior to use it in manipulative pick-up strategies to try to game women into thinking you are higher status or to find the weakest prey.

If you are an incel and have never had a single successful romantic attempt or only disastrous ones, this type of theorizing provides that wonderful feeling of certainty that comes with confirmation bias and the emancipation from regret of knowing that nothing could have been done anyway. Which is why many incels describe being black-pilled as an awakening from humiliation. Like finally realizing that you have been the subject of a joke that everyone else has been in on the whole time.

For a young man like Peterson, spouting such beliefs, he seems not so much a product of toxic masculinity as a failure of masculinity itself.

No one is teaching these men how to be men. This doesnt mean men in the sense of mens rights activists, but a healthy, balanced (not extremist) definition which includes someone who treats women well but also treats himself well by not being afraid to think for himself with opinions that deviate from the loudest, most hateful elements in the community.

But isnt the worst parts of the incel community hate speech? And shouldnt such hate speech be eradicated?

In Nadine Strossens timely new book Hate, she makes the case for countering bad speech with more speech, and illustrates how in countries where hate speech speech laws have been enacted, support for racist and xenophobic politicians has risen. In Europe, hate speech laws have in fact been used as a means of stifling dissent amongst the disenfranchised.

Equal justice for all depends on full freedom of speech for all, she writes.

Not only that, but as Keith Whittington argues in his new book Speak Freely, offensive speech is crucial to safeguard because of its utility in generating, testing, and communicating ideas.

One of the most brilliant defenses of the subject is Jonathan Rauchs 2013 essay, The Case for Hate Speech in The Atlantic, where he thanks the loudest and most noxious voices he faced along the way in his fight for gay marriage. [W]e won in the realm of ideas, he writes. And our antagonists–people who spouted speech we believed was deeply offensive, from Anita Bryant to Jerry Falwell to, yes, Orson Scott Card–helped us win.

For the incel community, of course, many of the ideas espoused are in defense of their identity as the losers of society, which frees them of the need to take personal responsibility.

I think thats a valid criticism, Peterson says. I get sick of the guys who seem like they just want to keep others down no matter what. Its almost like you are scorned when you experience a little bit of success.

The podcast Peterson recorded after the Toronto attack represents the incel community as not seeming as extreme as a cursory visit to the incel-tracking site We Hunted the Mammoth or the incel-mocking community Incel Tears might lead you to believe. On these sites, in the communitys most chilling screengrabs, posts include suggestions that in order to truly terrorize the women who have rejected incels over the years, perhaps mass acid attacks and rapes could be coordinated in order to inflict the same damage upon women that these young men feel has happened to them.

In contrast, Petersons podcast discussion contains an unusual degree of literacy about sociological phenomena, including the Japanese trend of hikikomori, or isolationism and utter retreat occurring with young men, which many incels predict will spread around the world in due time.

But at its core, it is still a conversation littered with misogyny and resentment.

At one point, someone says that women use men like emotional tampons. Another brings up the possibility of mandated girlfriends (or state-sanctioned rape, as shown on the new season of The Handmaids Tale). A joke is made that the best-case scenario is when incels go ER (or Elliot Rodger). There is discussion about the evolutionary benefits of sexual violence, which harkens Rodgers infamously deranged advocacy of a program where men could kill all women because if women were able to choose their own mates, their inferior brains would devolve humanity completely. Someone laughs about the idea of blackmailing women into having sex with them by threatening to post nude photos online. Peterson himself brings up the idea of access to assisted suicide for incels to prevent future attacks, and he suggests that talking to those who wonder about incel culture might help with improving our image, especially if you attach a face to the incel phenomenon, I think that that makes it more sympathetic.

Peterson clarifies to me: He was not suggesting it be him.

I meant someone else, but then it turned out, I guess I was the only person dumb enough to show my face in videos I made online, he says. So here we are.

When I ask him about the references in the podcast to Rodger, he responds, That guy was fucking nuts. I dont really joke about going ER, but I dont tell the guys who make those jokes not to do it because I know theyre being sarcastic. All this shocking stuff is often just the guys trolling. I would argue that I dont think anybody is going to be stupid enough to believe that sanctioned rape is being talked about as an actual suggestion. Sometimes the most ridiculous shit makes me laugh, even though I dont condone it. So if I do laugh at some of this stuff its probably me laughing at something because its fucking stupid.

The psychopaths are the problem, not the incels, he says.

If someone is going to carry out an attack like this theyre gonna have to be severely mentally ill to be capable of that, he says. Making jokes or being active in the incel community doesnt cause it. Being mentally ill does.

But what about when jokes arent just jokes?

I mention how last year when the Nazi website The Daily Stormers guidebook was leaked online, it contained the message: The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. So what about when such humor is actually a means of subversive propaganda?

I can see that, Peterson acknowledges. I mean, Ive had guys tell me some really fucked-up shit, and Ive told them, you know, get some help because I dont want you to hurt anyone. But I do think that making dark jokes for people who arent mentally ill helps keep a lot of us from going crazy.

And how exactly does he feel about the disparagement of women in saying that they use men as emotional tampons? Men do the same fucking thing, Peterson says. Thats not a one-sided thing. Men can use women emotionally, too.

And what of the suicide idea?

What it really comes down to is that Id rather these mass shooters and attackers just kill themselves than kill 10 or more innocent people. So maybe if it was easier to commit suicide wed see less of these attacks. Im not condoning suicide but I prefer that to innocent people dying.

On the incels.me forum, a stated list of rules for participation include guidelines that are stricter than most elite private clubs in America.

No women allowed. No exception.

Yes, this means that a forum dedicated to decrying success with women has as one of its primary rules a focus on enforced isolation. Other rules also brutally shut out any chance to provide advice or mentorship to other young men.

A few months ago, when Peterson was using the forum, he suddenly found that he was banned from having certain privileges in the chatrooms. Even the incels, it seemed, were rejecting him.

In response, he filmed and put on his YouTube one of the most astonishing, hyper-granular deconstructions of modern Internet life Ive ever seen.

It is bizarro land for anyone not deep in the world of Internet language.

To create the video, he spent three days nonstop (two days spent up for 24 hours straight in between passing out) to create a meticulous 30-minute PowerPoint video that he filmed objecting to the ban and making his case that he in fact was a genuine incel using a barrage of evidence and minutiae and dictionary definitions and failures of logic to try to break down the bullying he felt he experienced on the forum.

And, if you want to get brutal about the absurdity of the exercise (and the insanity such subcultures can create amongst its members), to prove exactly why he was just as reprehensible to society as the rest of the incels.

It was pretty ridiculous, he says in retrospect. Its like American Vandal, Netflixs mockumentary on super-deep-dive crime docs, except with the heartbreaking element of seeing how brainwashed a young man is into trying to obtain peer approval.

At one point in the video, he even includes a diagnosis that he is paranoid schizophrenic as evidence that he ought to qualify as an incel because of this mental illness. The reality is that after he was given that diagnosis, another psychologist said he was not. Instead, the doctor told him (and is evidenced in the video), he was making himself sick with his own thoughts.

All of this humiliation is laid out for his fellow community of incels to seeand all of it to get back into good standing in the incel community. Thats how bad isolated young men want status and the reassurance of having a community to call their own. Even when the group identity is in how perversely low and entrenched their status really is.

Is it any wonder that these boys need a father figure?

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (no relation to Jack) has been known to be moved to tears in interviews when discussing the crisis of alienation he sees amongst young men today and the need to provide them with tools that will reach them.

As he told Tim Lott of The Spectator late last year about his 90 percent male audience, Im telling them something they desperately need to hearthat there are important things that need to be fixed up. Im saying, You guys really need to get your act together and you need to bear some responsibility and grow the hell up. The lack of an identifiable and compelling path forward and the denialism these kids are being fed on a daily basis is undoubtedly destroying them and that is especially true of the young men.

Lott then observes the author of The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos displaying a level of vulnerability on the subject that is striking.

At this point, to my astonishment, Peterson begins to weep. He talks through his tears for the next several minutes. Every time I talk about this, it breaks me up, he says. The message Ive been delivering is, Find the heaviest weight you can and pick it up. And that will make you strong. Youre not who you could be. And who you could be is worthwhile.

As psychologist William Pollack articulates in the documentary The Mask You Live In about the boy code that warps masculinity from an early age: The way that boys are brought up makes them hide all of their natural, vulnerable, empathic feelings behind a mask of masculinity When theyre most in pain, they cant reach out and ask for help because theyre not allowed to or they wont be a real boy.

In fact, boys express depression in a completely opposite way than girls. They act out. But most people see it as a conduct disorder or just a bad kid.

After the Parkland high school shooting in March, one of the foremost activists in trying to address the crisis of reaching out to troubled young men before they become killers met with President Donald Trump to say his piece. Every single one of these school shootings has been from young men who are disconnected, said Darrell Scott, the father of the first student murdered at Columbine High School almost 20 years ago. In response, he founded Rachels Challenge to intervene with action rather than yet another toothless spectacle of condemnation of the empirically condemnable violence itself.

In a tweet rant posted during this same time by Martin Daubney, the editor of the English lad magazine Loaded, he articulated a similarly jarring portrait of collective angst from young men who feel callously tossed aside and branded as innately wrong, which only serves to compound the sense of victimization even further.

Im mindful of a seminal TEDTalk by Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, Daubney wrote. He looks at school shootings, and says: Boys who hurt, hurt us…They say todays boys feel part of some grand problem. You could frame it as #ToxicMasculinity: the notion that all males are to blame for the actions of a minority of damaged individuals. This is identity politics at its most destructive. Because we live in a world where every male indiscretion is used to attack all males. Im saying this: many boys are switching off. Were losing them.

How does an incel feel about all of this concernextended within the realm of ideas and intellectualism?

Itd be nice, Jack Peterson says, if he just had someone else to talk to about it.

I like Jordan Peterson a lot, he admits in a tone that sounds more upbeat than the rest of our conversation. I was going to go see him with another incel but that guy ended up not being able to go. But I bought a VIP ticket so I get to meet him next week.

In the wake of the Toronto attack, Peterson is unique in that unlike many in the incel community who have scrubbed their social or taken down their WordPress blogs that chronicled their life, he decided to see what happened when he went on TV to talk about his life in this widely reviled community now most associated with mass murder.

The decision to do so was gutsy. Especially considering the against-the-agenda talking points he is now presenting in condemning misogyny and violence.

The reaction he has received from other incels has been negative. And the public certainly doesnt like anyone who might be an incel.

Its an unwinnable place to be for someone who might still have a chance of climbing out of the twisted, self-fulfilling prophecy gutter that such dangerous places can become for young men who dont think they have anywhere else to go.

But Peterson doesnt regret doing the media and putting his face out there.

Instead, he speaks with an inverse of the perverted sadism of the Toronto attacker. It is a nihilism of potential that is in stark contrast to the nihilism of murderous revenge.

As he describes the decision, you can almost hear an epiphany clicking: When you dont care when you have nothing else to lose, it can be used for good or evil.

I dont know why I said yes to identifying myself as an incel, he says, mulling it over. I just felt like, you know What do I have to lose?

Of course, within the incel community itself, the answer is clear.

He could very well lose his status as an incel.

They called him all the predictable names. He was a cuck. He was a status-seeker. He was an opportunist. He was a number of slurs that are not fit to print. But for an incel, the worst insult he received of all was that he was a fake.

And, this being incel-world, the name he was called was targeted and precise.

You see, for incels, each man within the community self-identifies with how they qualify for their incel status. For instance, mentalcels achieve their status as a result of mental illness. A braincel is that way because of intelligence. A truecel has never had sex, a relationship, any kind of success at all.

Thus Peterson was called a fakecel. No, Peterson says, thats wrong. He definitely still is an incel. He is a part of the group. Where then does he now belong?

Peterson is quiet as he considers the answer.

I think something where I can help people, he says. I like talking about the positive stuff more, even if its frowned upon.

He considers a while longer.

I dont know, he considers, maybe Im a hopecel.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/sympathy-for-the-incel

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