#i need to draw him making the youtube thumbnail faces

[lumilamp]

Some art identity crisis with reca

[eri-lessthan3]

So I came back from a chess tournament yesterday. It was a blitz tournament that included many other IMs like myself. Even though I came in last place, I had some great matches. One thing i regret is that there was a really cute looking guy i played against and i couldn't even talk to him. I was already nervous from the tournament but also talking with someone like him? Anyways after the tournament i just went home. I lied on my bed and opened Youtube on my TV. While I was scrolling through my subscription feed I saw the new agadmator video, guess what its name is?

Amazing Wild Queen Sacrifice, Chess Is In Shambles || I\_Like\_Bobs2 vs Levy Rozman

And my face was on the thumbnail so i almost cried from joy. It overwhelmed the shitty feeling of flunking the whole event. Having an agadmator video that features your only winning match is something i can't even describe. In that match Levy thought he trapped my queen by moving rook a5. He didn't know it would result in mate in 8.

I am feeling like I'm on top of the world and all of a sudden the door knocks. I wasn't expecting any visitors so I opened the door with hesitation. It was that cute guy from the tournament. Holy shit. It is the guy who i won against. How did he know i lived here?

"Hey uh... can i come in ?" he said. I was drowning from the butterflies in my stomach.

"Yeah of course would you like some coffee ?" i said with a subtle shake in my voice.

"No need. Do you have any wine?" he said as he is moving towards my couch. Holy Shit... this guy knows where i live, comes out of nowhere and asks if I have wine... What is really happening?

"Yeah bro sure wait a second." i said and started to pour him some wine. I am fucking pouring wine to a stranger who asserted himself to my fucking house. And i am enjoying what's happening... I looked at him sitting there. His slim figure was sitting there so confidently. I always thought he wasn't that type. He suddenly looks at me and catches my gaze. I was caught staring like a child. I quickly continued pouring wine.

"Aren't you going to drink as well?"

"Yeah yeah of course!" After i brought the wine and sat on the couch i asked him his name to make small talk.

"You can call me Gotham, I want to wager you to a match" he said. So much confidence. He didn't even ask for my name. I assume he knows it from the tournament sheet. If he doesn't then holy shit this guy...

"Wager? for what?" I never heard of people wagering with chess matches. In my country chess lessons are mandatory. But we were never taught wagers could happen in chess.

"If i win you will ask agadmator to remove that video, If you win I will make a video about you in my Youtube channel."

"But what if we draw?"

"I don't know something stupid like... hmmm... having sex." No normal person would say something like that. This hopefully goes somewhere. I have been misled like this dozens of times.

So we start the game. I had white pieces.

1.e4 e5 2.Ke2 Ke7 so we were both playing the bong cloud... was he going for a draw? I moved the king back to e1 he moved his back to e8 HOLY SHIT HE IS REPEATING MOVES. We drew by repetition after a couple of king moves.

"Guess we drew..." i said. I think he wanted to test me so it wouldn't be too awkward if i wasn't interested. He didn't say anything and started to kiss me. Is he a top? I thought he would be a bottom. I am a much taller and wider guy so i thought i would be the top. The confidence he is emitting from his beautiful body can even turn someone like me to be his bottom.

As he was kissing me he started to pull my pants down. He whispered in my ear.

"I am going to en passant between your thighs."He didn't even ask me. He said he was going to do it. He turned me around, my stomach on the leather couch. This small twink was manhandling me and all i could do was to comply... All i wanted was to comply.... He was my king at that moment. I felt like an opposite pawn getting captured from behind.

"My rook needs an open file." he said as he was widening my hole. This went on for ten minutes and i was enjoying every second on it. I was so close to cumming. I was playing on increment. I won on time. I guess he was playing on increment too. He came in my file. I came on the couch. My body got locked down because of how hard he was fucking me. He later got up, dropped a piece of paper on my back and exited my house. I could hardly catch my breath. After a few minutes i got up and took that piece of paper from my back. It was folded in half. I opened it and it was a 20% off promo code for his chess lessons. I cleaned my cum from the couch and fell asleep right after. In my mind i still can not process what just happened.

"Did i really get mated ?"

I am of the firm opinion that r/AnarchyChess was a CIA experiment to evaluate the viability of implanting subliminal messages through viral social media actions. A study in memetic messaging, which tracks the spread of a simple call and response style meme, with r/AnarchyChess being the prime viral reservoir, constantly stating and reaffirming the call and response, further ingraining it into the user's psyche. As the users spread to the other subreddits, one will randomly feel the compulsion to release the call, provoking the response from another user. As this behavior becomes more frequent, new users are exposed and the new subreddit becomes a viral vector.

Unfortunately for the CIA, their experiment had to come to a halt. Spez found evidence of the conspiracy, and orchestrated an API cost increase to incite strikes and blackouts via reverse psychology, under the completely believable pretense that he is a greedy bastard, but with the true intention of shutting that sub down and ending the experiment. Sadly though, while the reservoir has been closed, the infection continues, and has been forced out onto the greater web, escaping the lab and leaking to the greater public.

Anyway, ignore all that, and google en passant

[steve0discusses]

S5 Ep 3: Apdnarg is Really Hard to Spell

 Yo guys, people are getting vaccinated, the sun is parting through the clouds, and I felt so nice that I even stopped listening to quite so many throwback 00′s BTS mashups (and yet I keep clicking on these dissonant catastrophes thinking “this time it’s got to be better. This time they’ll figure it out.” and like, no. Turns out you can’t match Brittany’s Toxic with BTS’ Black Swan. You can’t do that.)

This must be a sign that things are getting better. If anything, it means my personal tastes are improving. I mean I only clicked on like 3 “Dark Academia” Playlists where I could pretend I’m some sort of spooky witch in an abandoned library with a bad music player and basic taste in classical music (like can we ban Satie from Youtube for a little while?). Hell, I might even do a prompt update to this blog!

Yeah, you heard me, I’m actually going to stay ahead of the update schedule for Yugioh Abridged (maybe. I haven’t actually watched cuz of spoilers, I just noticed the thumbnail pop up on Youtube and was like “Damn it, they came out of hiatus??? I got hurry UP.”)

Anyway, speaking of the sky parting.

I’ll have you know my bro said this is actually more like a circumcision and it was one of the worst thing I have ever heard.

We get a chance to take in this lineup of confusing and varied character designs, and Joey. who is...still Joey.

The animators probably had to hold a strike in order for them to put Yugi in the audience, lets be real. There are TOO MANY PEOPLE in this shot and one is wearing a turban where you draw every single wrap. I hope those artists charged by the line.

Tea has a subplot where she’s just very frustrated with everyone she knows. They have been traveling together for like many weeks and got trapped in a foreign country so I get it. But at the same time, it’s kind of hard to picture Tea with female friends.

Because right now you got this 12 year old child, the other duelist who does not care about anything besides cards, and Kaiba’s 3 dragon cards that we’ve all collectively decided are female.

Hell it’s almost like the writers are asking themselves why Tea is here. Maybe they forgot. There’s no more ghosts to bus, no more people to knock out with her ass with random Olympic feats. Tea’s just sidelining.

(read more under the cut)

Mokuba is a itty bit bit taller this season, and so I guess that means he can legally climb on top of the cherry picker in order to give a riveting speech.

Really says a lot about Mokuba that he is so unphased about talking to, I dunno...an entire planet of people. Kind of a shame we never see this courage from Mokuba used for anything other than talking really, really big and giving everyone around him a really hard time.

Mokuba takes a moment to dunk on Yugi Muto, as is Kaiba tradition.

And then introduce the first pair of duelists, which obviously must be between the few people in this tournament that we actually know and care about.

Thankfully, in between last episode and this episode, Yugi has figured out who his own Grandpa is. This is a relief, because Yugi is such a mess, that I was fully convinced it would take over half a season for him to recognize it. I mean how long did it take him to figure out he shares a body with a ghost? Like half a season?

Instead Yugi recovered gracefully from not recognizing his grandpa, but it’s not like he bothered to tell anyone else, so the rest of our cast is just gonna be like “Is he my hairdresser? The guy who delivers my mail? Who is this guy who made absolutely no significant changes to his outfit or voice?”

Like sometimes this show goes full Spongebob silly kid’s show and you never know when to take it seriously or not. They might be sacrificing the entire cast next episode. I really don’t know. But for now their big concern is who is grandpa??? Like an innocent card version of “Are you my Mother?”

Faced with public speaking, Yugi decides to have a melt down.

We have seen him face monsters, we’ve seen him on TV dozens of times, he’s been in multiple competitions...but give a speech? Of course he can’t do that. The kid doesn’t attend enough school to know how to do that. Them’s learning skills.

And that was when a newly assembled wife-jet spliced through the sky like a souped up razer scooter and deposited 1 fully equipped Seto Kaiba in a Buzz Lightyear jetsuit.

THE RECOVERY.

Seto always watching over his Brother, ready to save this awkward party if it kills him (and it really should, that suit is held together by two seat-belts), making sure to get on that platform before Yugi starts going off about how he’s half an Ancient Egyptian. (Ah, life before social media. You could just be hella famous and also half a dead dude and people would just not know. I kinda miss the time before I knew literally everything about everyone.)

Please admire how close those flames are to setting Mokuba’s heavily hairsprayed mane completely alight. It would be an unforgettable spectacle.

These were absolutely just random ass jet packs that Gozaburo Kaiba made to kill hell tons of people, right? Like Seto found it in the family cabin, clutched to the heart of some crispy fried corpse and was like “neat! Mokuba! I found a cool toy!” and just plucked that thing out of that skeleton’s clutches and has been flying around for months?

Like this is Seto Kaiba’s Butter Glider, right?

Seriously what type of vehicle license do you need for one of these things? RIP My ‘Seto only has a scooter license’ headcanon.

Which I’m only even thinking about because I’ve had to try and make an appt with the DMV for days to get a freakin REAL ID. I went to sleep in 2019 and I could fly on a plane. I woke up in 2021 and it’s like “Want one last screw you?” and just...can 2020 please stop screwing me over? It’s March.

Anyway, the Jet is removed soon after, so no, this is not part of his new outfit. He goes right back to his Post-S4-Trauma-Normcore.

After wrestling this competition out of his brother’s hands and confusing everyone in the audience, Roland must have gotten the memo to cut the microphone before Seto got too excited and we were quickly ushered on to the next stage of the tournament.

One sec...the BTS Mashup playlist I just clicked on did a Black Swan X 7 rings mashup and it’s the worst thing my ears have ever heard.

Holy crap. I had to actually turn down my volume. Like...Ariana Grande already has music that has way too many overlapping singing parts on it--and then lets just stick a 52-person boy band on top? That’ll fix it. Yeah. Go ahead.

Wow. Even I had to change the song and you know how much I enjoy pop culture mistakes.

Spot the Mickey but like a million times easier because it’s a Massive Dick Shaped Dragon.

Yep. That’s my grocery shopping outfit. Except maybe not a lab coat and a duel disk. Wish I had a duel disk, that would make social distancing just a hell ton earlier. Just a “Yo, only one person in checkout, please” and then bap them on the head with a propelled discuss/hologram.

Anyway, Grocery shopping/Doctor man dueled the Purple Hair Boy, and considering that Purple Hair got screen time and shook Yugi’s hand once--I think that Doctor man doesn’t stand a freakin chance.

Good. I hate him.

Also, every time he breathes he’s gonna fog up his glasses. I have experience in this area. He can’t read his own cards in the same way I can’t read my phone if I’m in the refrigerated aisle.

So the way this tournament works, is everyone has to sit in the stadium to watch the show. Kinda like showing up to a football stadium just to watch a recorded TV monitor...but then again...that is how it feels to watch a football game at a football stadium when it’s live (at least with the tickets I usually get.)

And as we watch Grandpa waiting for his competitor, we find out that his competitor (Joey) is too busy eating snacks to give him the time of day.

Why do cartoon hot dogs always have lettuce? Is that seriously supposed to be relish? Or is there a place in the world where you put lettuce on your hot dog?

Sorry, bro has just informed of his favorite hot dog order, which is absolutely terrible so I will share it with you: a Five Guys hot dog with ketchup, mustard, pickle relish, onions, mushrooms, pickled peppers, and you guessed it--topped with freakin lettuce.

My own kin. How am I over 30 and just finding out that my baby brother thinks it’s normal to walk into a restaurant with normal god-fearing law-abiding people and order lettuce and mushrooms on a hot dog?

I have fully failed him.

The rest of this episode is watching both Joey Wheeler and Mokuba have a shared panic attack while Seto does freakin nothing.

Please remember that Seto has both a jetpack and a dragon wife plane and could have easily solved this problem. But nah.

Then again, Seto Kaiba has given this crew so MANY rides, that maybe he’s tired of being the Soccer Mom for the team?

Like they don’t actually say this episode, but Seto was the one in charge of like...this entire place, do you think he made the 2 for 1 special just to get Joey where it hurts the most? Or does it actually not take any subterfuge to screw Joey Wheeler because he’s just naturally this way?

Like Mokuba wasn’t there when Joey was told “stay right here, and then we will all go together to fight Dartz” and Joey was like “I’mma save Mai from herself although she told me not to!” and then he Hella Died. But, Mokuba did see the result, AKA, Joey’s dead body being carried on the back of Tristan. Maybe Mokuba never realized that Joey died because he went out of his way to be late?

Lets do a tally of every time I can recall with my dodgy memory that Joey was threatened to be DQ’d/pretty much was DQ’d either by his own fault or no fault of his own

-When he wasn’t allowed to go on the boat to Murder Island because he was a stupid nobody kid who did not have a dueling glove

-When he wasn’t actually supposed to be in Pegasus’ tourney and was, in fact, secretly using half of Yugi’s entrance ticket the entire time

-when Bandit Keith stole the ticket that Joey got from Yugi so then Joey had to borrow Mai’s ticket although she had just used it so it really shouldn't have counted. Because, really anyone could have just piggy backed off of each other’s ticket until the whole boat went through that castle.

-When his account was hacked to get entered into Kaiba’s tourney when Kaiba very clearly told him he could not apply solely because he was Joey Wheeler.

-When he was late to his sister’s eye surgery because he got mugged by Marik’s Rare Hunters, so she almost refused to do the surgery.

-When Joey got possessed by Marik, and as Marik, threatened to murder everyone else in the tournament including both of the Kaiba brother’s who’s tournament it was, and then chained himself to Yugi Muto to throw both of them to the bottom of the ocean.

-I think there was a point when he threatened to attack Kaiba in Kaiba’s own tourney while not possessed? Like several times?

-when he got struck by Lightning and almost did not stand up fast enough after being struck by lightning, which is apparently a type of DQ in Duel Monsters.

-When he tried to save Mai from getting hit by a fireball, but then Yugi did it instead, and then so many people were standing on the dueling platform that Kaiba couldn’t possibly DQ them all.

-When he entered the restricted area of the blimp in order to hassle Kaiba into landing the Blimp, which Kaiba did not do.

-When Marik killed Joey before Joey could press the “go” button on his duel disk to play the card that should have won Joey the match.

-When he was dueling a lawyer in a digital universe but then the dice was like...weighted? So Noah had to walk over and be like “The hell is this weighted dice? This is my perfect digital world? How did you even do that?” and then Joey won because the match was no longer legit.

-When Joey yelled at Noah too much and so Noah turned Joey to stone for being a rude ass spectator

-When Mai was like “Wheeler and Valon, listen closely: do NOT murder each other” and then Joey did a murder on Valon so she was like “I guess I have no choice, I was very clear” and killed Joey straight up.

-When Joey decided to block Seto’s fireballs while Joey Wheeler WAS a playing card, somehow disrespecting both Dartz and Seto Kaiba at the same time.

-When Joey was playing cards but then got absorbed into a giant Leviathan and basically couldn’t play anymore after that.

-There’s probably hell ton of S0 stuff I just haven’t seen yet.

-This episode

And Joey runs fast for a montage of wacky things that really have no business being in a theme park. Things like this:

(remember when Bakura almost died from a rock that ended up being a balloon? It comes full circle.)

The stuff that the Kaiba brother’s think is normal and fun.

Anyway Joey fights off a bunch of hologram snakes and bats and everyone is like “Should we tell him it’s just holograms???” And it’s like wow, guys, how many times have these ‘holograms’ straight up murdered Joey Wheeler and everyone else on this cast? Too many? Because I have a google doc with so many deaths on it. 7,805,844,048, to be exact.

Anyway, he gets there with five seconds to spare and Mokuba’s like “well at least you were still entertaining while we filmed you in front of a live audience being a total spaz for 15 minutes straight, so I’ll let you go.”

Grandpa and Joey start playing, Joey completely oblivious that this is just an older Muto, while Hawkins walks up awkwardly and is like “hey guys. I’m so sorry about this.”

(welcome to my font choices, for those new here, I have to make weird font color choices to make sure it’s legible for the colorblind and also for the non-colorblind. This one is not much contrast, so I may change it up in the future, but for now, this is Grandpa Muto’s new font. I apologize to every graphic designer reading this. Please don’t tell anyone who has ever hired me for graphic design about this blog.)

What’s funny about this exchange is that after they find out that Yugi’s Grandpa is Apdnarg (HOLY my brain cannot get around the spelling for that, and I will not change it in the caps. I cannot do a ‘pdn’ ever again), they don’t stand on his side of the field or anything. Hawkins is legit Solomon Muto’s only fan during this exchange and like...damn. Way not to back your Grandpa, Yugi.

Yugi immediately strides up to Mokuba to non-confrontation-ally inform him that he has stepped over a line and Mokuba is like “what are these things you say called ‘lines?’”

According to Mokuba, Solomon Muto begged him to be in the competition so he could relive his glory days (glory days making no sense here, because the game has only been released for the past 15 years, so glory days is like...the before times that can only be referring to disgraced archeologists and Pegasus ((who is, in his own way...a disgraced archeologist, too))) and Mokuba was like

“You trained Yugi Muto, right? Hey that’s good enough for me. This drama is gold. People will eat it up. Hell yes. Don’t be afraid to abduct him a little bit. Maybe trap a couple people in a digital hellscape for a little while? Now we go by Pegasus house rules here, so fire as many lasers as you want, but just make sure not to hit anyone in the face. Oh man, we are going to be swimming in cash. Love it, Muto Sr, love it.”

But I dunno, I feel like Grandpa won’t make it past next episode. It is Joey. We kinda need him to make it past Ep 4 of the arc. If Grandpa Muto becomes the new Joey Wheeler, that will be a weird transition for this show to make.

But that’s all for today, as always, here is the link to read these in chrono order becuase there’s SO MANY that you don’t need to read backwards--don’t do it--just use the chrono tag (and I don’t know if you can add compound tags, but I did separate the Season from the Episode, so if you write S4, it should only pop up stuff from S4. I didn't’ do that to seasons 1-3 though because I just...didn’t.)

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

And because I brought it up: here it is, the best BTS Mashup that I found on my deep dive. Like legit--this one isn’t a mess:

Most of other ones are horrible in a fascinating way. Like I’m not even a BTS fan, I think I sort of age out of that metric, I’m just bored and quarantined. And lets be real, we all appreciate a good bop when we hear it.

[franeridart]

hi!!! first of all i adore your art so much!!!! like daddy jesus, it gives me life. u draw rlly good poses, so maybe u have some tips? or any good places to find references cuz i can only find pretty stiff looking pictures and thats sad :((((

Tips! Yes! I have those, since it’s a thing I’ve always struggled a lot with too, so I ended up hunting down and hoarding tips like an artist dragon with fancy pictures of gold - disclaimer, even though I know of these tips it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m good at following them. Because I’m a mess. SO! TIPS!

 - When trying to decide on a pose, try to picture the whole action behind it instead of just the single instance! If we were to talk in animation terms, I’d say try to picture the whole sequence instead of just a single, specific frame of it. What is your character doing? Picture in your head the whole movement, and then pick a frame that’s smack in the middle of it - this is because generally the stiffer moments through an action are the beginning and the end of it, so drawing the middle will give your pose a lot more life! If you’re unsure about exactly which moment of the action would work best, draw thumbnails of a few different “frames” of it and pick the one that flows best for you

 - Related to that, when looking for references generally I prefer looking for videos instead of pictures, specifically to get a better sense of how the whole movement flows and where it would be best to stop it. In the same vein, I’ve made a habit of at least partially always keep an eye out for body language while watching movies/tv shows/cartoons&anime, because while real life is just as much a good source of reference as anything else, actors and animators tend to exaggerate movements to make them more captivating and eye-catching, and that’s what we’re looking for when drawing too! It’s all in the drama of it, look for the drama

 - “A real life person wouldn’t do that/move like that/bend like that”, that’s okay, this isn’t a real life person! Exaggerating the shapes and lines is a good way of increasing the flow of your pose, as long as you don’t make it grotesque then pushing on the shapes and curves is always a good idea! Unless you meant to go for grotesque, in which case push all you want, who’s to stop you. In this specific area action lines are your best friends, so if you feel your pose is stiff or lacks life, try finding the action line in it and push it more - you can find a lot of youtube tutorials on action lines and gesture drawing, in case you want to look more into that! Only god and my youtube history know how long I’ve spent doing just that

 - Talking about youtube, if you want to work on your flow a good way is to try out the one minute figure drawing exercises - they give you a pose, you have one or two minutes to sketch it out depending on the video, then it moves to the next pose. It’s a good way to loosen up your lines, in my experience! This is a nice playlist for that, in case you wanna give it a go!

 - Rewinding a bit and going back on body language, if you want your pose to feel alive and be realistic while at the same time conveying a specific mood or feeling, maybe you’ll want to look into how people express themselves through body language! I always see this suggested to writers to set the mood without explicitly stating the emotion, but it’s a wonderful tip for artists too the way I see it (mostly so if you’re drawing a comic, actually!). A good list is this one, give it a skim!

 - More than a tip it’s a trick, really, but giving a prop to your character can help make the pose more interesting - there’s only a finite number of things a character can do standing alone by themselves with nothing to occupy them with, an object or an animal or a second character to interact with really do make finding an interesting pose easier!

That was a lot of theory there, wasn’t it, let’s go for some practical tips too (featuring Horikoshi’s pencil sketches, because I love them and he’s very, very good at this whole posing thing)

 - If you picture your character as standing in an open space and the eyes of the viewers as a camera, moving the camera around them to find an interesting angle adds a lot of depth to the pose. It can be really, really tempting to just draw them from the front and eye level, but sometimes even just raising or lowering the camera the smallest bit helps with giving the drawing life - perspective! I know, I hate it too orz but we’re working hard to overcome that problem, because look at Horikoshi’s latest Kirishima sketch!

so alive! So beautiful! The pose in itself isn’t all that special, but the angle he decided to draw it at sure helps give him life. A thing I do often is to draw a thumbnail of the scene I’m trying to draw from the most boring angle possible, to make sure of where everything is, and then metaphorically move the camera around to try and find a more interesting angle to portray it from - it helps! At least, it does for me haha

 - Keeping it asymmetrical makes the pose dynamic! Let’s look at Toga over here

Her legs and arms are an obvious example of this, but specifically I marked for you the hips line and shoulders line to show you how they aren’t paralel either, because that’s a little thing that’s generally a good idea to keep in mind when you want to give a bit more of movement to your posing! It’s true in photography too, actually. If you want a full body selfie to look good, try keeping shoulders and hips on non-paralel lines, it makes the whole thing look a lot more professional 

 - Keeping that Toga pic as our set example, hair and clothes give a lot of movement to the pose too! If you draw someone in the middle of an action, their clothes and hair are (possibly, if the clothes are loose enough and hair long enough) going to move with the action too - they show the direction of the motion, so keep that in mind when drawing them. Additional tip! If your character is just standing still, wind is a thing you can always make use of to give a bit more movement to the whole set-up!

 - It’s a good idea to keep all the noise in your pose on one side, to give it a bit more balance and make it less chaotic - let’s use Jirou here as our example

the lines on the right side are a lot more simple and straight than the ones on her left, as I tried to very roughly mark for you - all details and “noisy” bits are all on the same side too, so that your eyes can easily focus on what’s important in the pic without getting lost all over the canvas. Balance and asymmetry! Again! It’s an easy way to make poses interesting, after all!

 - That said, it’s not like you can never keep it symmetrical - the human brain actually likes that symmetry a whole lot, finds it compelling! It has to be perfectly symmetrical, though. Let’s look at Bakugou, because why not, always a good time to look at Bakugou

if you drew a line in the middle of his face and down his body, you’d see he’s pretty much perfectly symmetrical - that’s nice! That works! ...why does it work, though? This goes a bit more into composition and less into posing, but this has to do with the rule of thirds: generally and very simply, the rule is that for a picture to be well composed it needs to be set so that the main focus isn’t smack in the middle of the canvas. Some examples with the pics I just posted up there!

The way the bodies are positioned and the way in which the empty spaces are used respect the rule of thirds pretty dang neatly, and that helps make the pictures look less stiff too, between the others things! It gives balance to the whole composition, and makes it more lively! (The reason why it works with Kirishima is that the focus of the drawing is less him as a whole and more his face and right fist - so very neatly positioned! I’m in awe, ngl)

Bakugou’s case is a bit different thoguh, and that’s why the symmetry works there!

when you want to go for the symmetrical look you sort of need to forget about the rule of thirds, as far as I’ve been thought - symmetrical means tidy, and it’s only really tidy if it’s symmetrical based on a line traced right in the middle of the canvas, so Bakugou’s center is right along the median axis, and his pose works even if it’s pretty stiff, by all means.

(this goes into the rules of making a good portrait work, actually, but the lack of empty space all around him helps with keeping it looking well composed and tidy, too. There’s a lot of little tips and tricks that help make a pose work when it comes to composition, really!)

(Also, to be fair this last bit about the rule of thirds wasn’t exactly necessary or particularly well explained, I’ll be real, but while browsing Horikoshi’s twitter I realized how neatly all his sketches follow the rule and I needed to gush about that for a sec, it’s how being a fan works haha hope it was useful at least a bit to you, though!)

[pcygoldenchild]

Behind the Lens

📷summary: A crush on a boy who you only get to really admire behind a screen. His cute and funny vlogs letting you see more of him than what you do at work. He calls himself a vlogger. You’d call him captivating.

📷genre: fluff//vlogger!byun//alternate reality//

You arrive to work on time like you always did. The quiet café just coming to life when you arrive. It’s still very early in the morning. The sky a mosaic of orange and dark clouds. The air a little thick and the streets still wet from the rain. You liked being up this early. You weren’t a morning person, but being up to watch the rest of the world slowly come to speed was therapeutic. You opened the café every other day. It was something you personally requested and your coworker thought you were insane but willingly gave you some of her mornings.

It was something about the smell of the first batch of coffee or the way the fresh pastries brightened up the shelves. It was quiet and all put together before the morning rush. The place neatly cleaned and chairs pushed in properly before the fault of human error. The warm light and fall weather making the dark wood floor reflect an amber shade throughout the place. It was calming.

But as usual time moves fast when you want nothing but more time. Your coworker coming in an hour later just before the hoard of business men and women come to get their daily dose of caffeine. Another worker coming in and making it feel like an actual business. The routine orders of 5 coffees to the new intern who is always fumbling with the crumpled piece of paper he scribbled the office orders on. The egg and sausage sandwich to the old gentlemen who sits by the window and reads the paper until half past 12, when he leaves to do whatever the world takes him. The stranglers who show up late to class because an iced americano is way more important than an 8am lecture about cell division. It was a routine but it was your routine. The faces you’d see all the time a warm welcome and maybe a friendly story of how their day went after you saw them last.

All that was just usual to you. An opening to your morning in the slow city and fast paced lives of those who inhabit it.

Around your lunch break is when your day gets to be something you never have a set routine for. Sure, you’d eat lunch and read your book or scroll mindlessly on your phone for too long. But there was always the chance that something could happen but you never know when. The chance that the cute barista would say more than a few words in the break room. Or maybe you’d say something to him that consisted more than a ‘busy day right?’

He worked the same hours you did, closing on days you opened. He started the same time you did too as the new recruits for the location. But working together for 5 months didn’t mean you’d know anything about him. He was quiet and to his work. But he wasn’t rude or snobby. He was just to himself. You understood his mannerisms being an introvert yourself. The friendly smiles and quick laughs if you’d bump into each other behind the busy counter. You knew his name. Byun Baekhyun. He told you it with a bright smile your first day as an attempt to make friends. But that was really the only time he’s said anything to anyone.

But you knew more to him. You knew what he was like outside of work. The funny boy who did any and everything he wanted. He was boisterous and creative. A real character to love with his smiles and jokes. He was the same shy boy but when he was out of work it was different. Just him and his camera.

He was a vlogger with his own youtube channel. You found it randomly when watching one of your friends makeup videos. A video about ‘working out/diet/hello’ was a suggestion. You wouldn’t have watched it if his face wasn’t in the thumbnail. It was a shock to you. Unbeknownst, you watched him be himself with the comfort of talking to a camera. His personality showing with every head tilt or silly dance. His channel was pretty popular. 200,000 subscribers with you included.

You watched all his videos. It was routine for you to come home and see the notification on your laptop of a new video from him every week. The short vlogs filled with him and his adventures. One of him working out which you couldn’t help but watch multiple times because it was just that cute. Another one of him hanging with his friends out in the city at a small restaurant where his laughs and silly faces made you smile unintentionally. Or the one where he went to his parents house and played with his adorable corgi. It was a goldmine of content and still so him. So calm and therapeutic to watch and enjoy.

It was time for your lunch break. You looked around but didn’t see Baekhyun so you figured he was already in the break room like he always was before you. You wanted to say something today. You did your hair all nice in the chance that you’d say something that would make him do more than a 2 second shy glance your way.

You walked into the break room and saw him sitting at the table. His laptop in front of him as he focused on whatever he was doing. You went to the fridge and grabbed two yogurts and granola. It’s a routine too to bring him something to eat since he never really does eat on breaks if you wouldn’t remind him to. He’d be too focused on his laptop from beginning to end. But even then a simple thank you and you’re welcome was all you two would exchange. The simple appreciation present in how he’d smile everytime.

You sat down across from him sitting the yougurt and granola down in the center of the table. His eyes peeking up at you from behind the screen.

“Hey.” you said short and simple taking the yogurt and avoiding the eye contact you two were too shy to share.

“Hi.” he said back looking over his laptop to see his yogurt, granola and spoon waiting for him. He pushed the laptop to the side a bit to grab your offering and whispered a ‘thank you’. The comfort of sitting and eating with each other was strange given you two were almost considered strangers.

“So what do you do on that?” you said suddenly nodding to his laptop. But you knew exactly what he would spend his entire break and anytime after that on.

“I edit videos.” he said after a while of looking between the laptop and his yogurt. His response short but laced with a bit of uncertainty. You never told him you knew he had a channel or that you watched.

“What kind of videos?” you ask. The frail attempt to start a conversation for the first time in 5 months. Frail since you knew so much about him already but not from him in person, rather from behind a lens.

“Youtube videos.” he responded. His eyes traveling everywhere but only on you for a second before venturing somewhere else. You wanted to just accept this as an attempt. It seemed painful to him. It was painful to you. This was socially not something you did. You didn’t do anything socially to be honest.

“Cool.” you said back. You continued eating your yogurt and so did he. The scraping of the plastic spoons against the small bowls and the crunch of the granola being the only tangible thing in the room. After a while you wanted to just disappear. It was awkward and you didn’t want that. You felt like you were holding your breath staring directly into your bowl and never leaving there. The creamy concoction looking less appealing as you continued to eat.

“Ever heard of it?” Baekhyun says. You thought for a second he was on the phone or something. But when you peeked up at him he was staring directly at you.

“Heard of what?” you say slowly. You didn’t know why saying that was so hard. It was a simple and reasonable reponse. But you weren’t sure what was happening.

“My channel.” he said with a small smile that appeared and disappeared. You swallowed the yogurt and granola you didn’t finish chewing at the question. Yea you’ve heard of it. You watched it everyday; watching videos over again because the need to watch something was addictive.

“No.” you lie. You say it short and with a small shake of your head before staring at your ugly yougurt. Only now it’s ugly from the lie you have tainted it with.

“Oh.” he said. His reply hurt your heart a bit. It was so short and sounded like a kid who just didn’t get the toy they wanted.

“Well, I probably would. But I don’t watch much youtube. I mostly read and draw.” you say in an effort to keep the conversation going but moreso to let him know that you’re interested. The sentences were fast and you sat up a bit straighter. A sign you were lying about something but he didn’t know your mannerisms.

“That’s cool. It’s not for everyone.” he said smiling and shrugging.

‘No, Baekhyun but it’s for me’

“Well I’d like to check it out if it’s not too awkward.” you say looking at his bowl. His fingers wrapped around the plastic lightly tapping.

“Why would it be awkward?” he asked.

‘I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve seen all your videos already a million times and can’t help but smile.’

“I don’t know. Maybe showing me your youtube channel would make me see you differently.” you say but it was somewhat not what you meant. Of course you’d see him differently. But it sounded negative. Almost like you’d see him as someone he’s not.

“Well you might but I don’t think you’d hate me or anything. It’s just me outside of work.” he said shrugging and pushing his bowl aside. He grabbed his laptop and tapped some keys fast. The next minute he’s turning the laptop to face you and the home page of his channel greets you. The ever so familiar maroon layout with his adorable picture as his icon. The list of videos you’ve all seen with a video that’s privated. A new video must be ready. You involuntarily smile.

“What?” he asks rather incredulously. Your smile falls instantly as you look at his unsure gaze go from the screen to your face. Unsure of what to do, you just shake your head a little.

“Nothing. It’s just cute.” you say and instantly regret it. The smile that falls on his face at your comment makes him sit up straight and jerk his head to the side.

“Cute.” he says. Your face is as hot as the pastries in the oven. You didn’t mean to say it was cute but there was no other word to say. Familiar. Nothing new. Those would work if you told the truth.

“Yea...I’ll check it out when I get home.” you say getting up from the table grabbing both of your bowls. He nods in affirmation with his lips set in straight line to hide his boyish grin. His boyish grin at you.

“I recommend the vlog where I visit my family and my dog. Everyone thinks it’s the ‘cutest’.” he says turning his laptop back around.

‘It is the cutest.’

“Will do.” you say walking away to trash your bowls and rush back to work 20 minutes before your break is over.

“Text me what you think, yea?” he called to you. You looked back at him staring at you with a small smile and raised eyebrows. This was as much as you’d gotten with him. More than 5 months worth of working with him. And now he wanted talk to you more.

“Yea, definitely.” you smile back.

[dirtreally]

kokkuri3replied to your post“every time i publicly complain about an artist that isn’t japanese but...”

No I want to see your long post about this this is interesting

Okay this ended up being a lot because this is something i’ve been thinking about a lot so here’s too many words about me being too mad about anime

I first have to preface this by talking about a very deep uncertainty: i don’t know what i’m talking about but i only know what i’m talking about. everything i am about to say is based on what i feel are fundamental truths. everything i am about to say feels so deeply obvious that half the time i spend thinking about this is spent wondering if i’m just running in circles. But also like: every artist i am about to mention here has some level of large, clout-able, mainstream success but like, 0 substantial critique whatsoever(critique that isn’t just: hey check out this artist cuz i like them/we’re collabing), much less critique that even pokes at any of these deeply obvious truths. So i’m stuck here wondering if i’m a crazy person or if like, all the cool epic kids Whose Art I Personally Like already realise this, but like they comprehend it so thoroughly that such a thing doesn’t even need to be said. To some extent, the latter has to be true, cuz like, the Cool Epic Kids don’t usually fuck with a lot of the art i’m about to shit on, so on some level we must realise these same things about this art. But at the same time that kind of doesnt matter? because both possibilities (either that you already think of this in the same way that i do OR that you have a different understanding about what i’m about to talk about) BOTH have to end with the same conclusion: that by the end of this post, it will be deeply obvious that this has been an exercise in running around in circles. this post is the seinfeld of talking about anime.

okay so i get mad about this specific thing a lot but let’s just look at the specific studio that kicked it off today:

and here’s the thing i got mad at for good measure:

Okay so here’s the background info: local singaporean graffiti studio, they really like anime, and they were the source of that one dumb ass screenshot i posted earlier. and like just look at this

this literally just looks like youtube is recommending me a future bass playlist but in real life. This tells me nothing about anything that has ever mattered. This is a math equation. This is just: kitschy faux-retro aesthetics because they’re popular, rendered in a modern cel-shaded style cuz it’s popular, and with katakana thrown in because if cool anime art wasn’t enough to convince you that these guys were hip then maybe some fucking  A E S T H E T I C S will. Nothing about this communicates to me that anybody who had any part in the creation of this actually wanted to be here. This goes beyond any idea of like, art competency, or even being good at art. if you want you can change the subject matter, make your art more dynamic, sure:

But even this piece, arguably the studiomoonchild work with the most energy to it, feels completely lifeless. Like yeah, i could say that it’s cuz all of their anime girls have like those weird dead eyes but that’s almost certainly a copout: the simple truth is that this thing and the earlier one with the robot are the exact same piece of art. they are both interchangeable, they both tell me the exact same nothing.

If you like go through all of their work it’s basically the exact same thing through where like everything they do has this exact feeling of “nobody really had to be here”. even the way this art is produced reflects this because studiomoonchild and their contemporaries are all part of the same sycopanthic surge in the popularity of “”legal graffiti”” in singapore that’s all just this problem repeated for infinity. nobody doing legal graffiti in singapore actually really cares. there is so much art that is absolutely nothing other than like, 1. YO IS THIS HIP? 2. YO DOES THIS TOE THE LINE OF BEING EDGY? 3. YO IS THIS IMMEDIATELY SAFE ENOUGH TO NOT ACTUALLY CHALLENGE OR COMMUNICATE ANYTHING? all of this is literally just stock music but with extra steps i don’t want anybody to tell me how much they fucking hate kevin macleod ukeleles while liking this its all the same bro!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But here’s the kicker: studiomoonchild actually has art that pulls away from this i mean look at this!!

it’s definitely still pulling on that same vein of like, youtubebait anime art, but there’s an undeniable sense of PRESENCE that doesn’t exist in any of their other work. It feels like the people who drew this actually WANTED to draw this, and it’s vibrant and fluid in a way that no amount of weird katakana placement and anime lo fi hip hop girl playlist thumbnail type art can convey. AND LIKE even then, it doesn’t shake off the gender thing, where in the world of studiomoonchild, the female subjects can only ever be pretty and silent and cool or cute while the dudes are actually allowed to have flesh in their face, to have big defined noses and cheekbones and laugh lines, and perhaps most importantly, to transcend the flesh by being a cool robot that gets to shoot all the laser beams and like how apparently this is their entire conception of anime. OH WELL we can’t hit it out of the park every time i guess.

CONCLUSION

conventional thinking about art and the way it exists in society suggests that it is better, perhaps even more virtuous, to be technically skilled but stylistically conventional than it is to be unique but unrefined. think about every single “ohhhh i could draw that though???” type comment ever.  Like, there’s this buzzfeed draw-off video ive posted about before where hae-joon and jonni phillips redraw superman

the comments are basically what you expect: 

this is just two of them but like its sooooo much worse literally every single top comment is some version of shitting on jonni but like heres the thing; all of these bitches will, without a shadow of a doubt, remember jonni’s superman before hae-joons’. A single look at jonni’s superman already communicates so much. we understand that it’s not supposed to be a literal 1:1 depiction of the truth of superman as he appears in the cartoons or comics or movies but rather a rendering of her own emotional truth on the subject of superman: he’s literally just kinda whatever!!! he’s just a strong cool man who wins fights epicly and has all the powers and loves his wife and has Logo That Makes Grown Men Spend 27 Dollars On Mug. Jonni understands this and is able to use this to her advantage, creating this single drawing tgat is apathetic, disdainful, and playful all at once. 

You kind of can say the same thing about hae-joon’s art, but you kinda can’t? There’s the same core idea here: that hae-joon also has no strong feelings on superman apart from “i know of him, and i know you know of him”. But the thing is that like: he knows it, but he doesn’t Know it. hae-joon cannot take this fundamental, deeply funny, truth, that one of the biggest fictional characters ever mainly exists as the emotional, narrative, and aesthetic equivalent of white bread, and bring it to its logical conclusion.

[sour-badger]

Art style challenge: reflection

So, during this very challenging months and 3-4 weeks of social distancing I was stuck. Drawing became boring and I was in state of stale purgatory and it was annoying me. However, my sate of monotony came to a halt whenever I watch “Cheer Up!”, a show/DnD campaign created by Wrapped Lamp that was set in the world of JoJo, but in a bleak setting. It's wonderful, and the characters are brilliant. (This a link of the first episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVF6ShkYqU0 )

As I was watching the show I decided to challenge myself, I have never drawn in Hirohiko Araki’s style before. I have never tried to draw like that because it is a simple but complex approach to illustration that is very hard to draw, let alone replicate, but I tried and I proud of the results. So because of this I set myself some rules:

1. The illustrations must be based on the player/character icons in “Cheer Up”

2. They must look like protagonists that could be in the anime but are not copies of existing Jojo characters. (Because that's cheating)

3. Each illustration must be done within 3 days. (A personal thing for me, I get bored of drawing the same illustration for more than 3 days, if you want try this you don't have to follow this rule)

With these rules, Photoshop and google images by my side I was ready. And this is how it went!

 (I am putting each reference of every character in groups of eyes, face, hair and body because I had to to a lot of research for this style, I have put the main influencers down there were more but are not important)

My process 

At the start of all my attempts I create a beginning sketch of original icons. I am going in blind so doing this shows me how they created it without tracing it, sort of like life drawing. I then made a rough line drawing to see what the design looks like without making it official. I sometimes draw a second outline to figure out the details and then I compose the final line work but I also have the original art, the many characters in Jojo Bizarre Adventure and real life examples at all times. Paint the hair, skin, clothes and then create the shading and then they are done.

The first sketch 

rough line work

The final outline with the shading

I also chose to try not to use part 3 as reference material. I personally dislike  the seasons animation and character design. I don't know what happened in that season but they look terrible. It took me 3 tries to finish Stardust Crusaders and the art work was the main reason.

  The Characters  

Isadora 

Played by jay (Stabbyness)

Isadora was the first character I drew. I chose her because the next live “Cheer Up” episode was in 3 days and with that time I decided to give myself a fighting chance by drawing her first (I find women easier to draw than men).

With Isadora I had to also decide what Jojo season they would be in from the start, I wanted consistency because they are the protagonists. I decided to do a mix of part 4 but was mainly based in part 5. For me I liked the colour shading of part 4 but loved the structure and graphic style of part 5. This made shading and highlights easy and consistent.

Because I had never drew anything like Jojo I had to use multiple characters as a frame of reference, (I did not copy the originals, if I did then there would be no point of doing this challenge in the first place). I thought it would be good to show how many characters I referred to to help with this process.  

Isadora was the easiest to draw out of the 4. She has a traditional female design, her only challenge was her eyes. As the first one this one was done in time and and looked good at the time. However now that I have got the hang of drawing in this style I want to redraw her again to show myself how much I have grown during this challenge.

Characters that i used for art style reference

Eyes: Trish Una, Narancia Ghirga and Yukako Yamagish 

Face: Trish, Erina Pendelten, Yukako

Hair: the whole part 5 crew (I had know idea how draw Jojo hair at this point)

Body: Joylne Jostar, Yukako  

 Donna

Played by Will (bigmovingtarget)

Donna was the hardest overall draw. She is a wonderful character but she does not typical female build. She is a MMA fighter, a tattoo, wears a hoodie and jaw that could cut glass. This created some problems, Araki characters rarely wear hoodies and his female characters are not normally drawn with strong features, they don't ever have a massive tribal tattoo. Also Araki’s female cast have a very small range of hair styles so I had to look at the male cast for inspiration and information because donna is an unusual design!! 

Her tattoo was very difficult and I was in a pickle for the whole first day. The original icon has only a few red marks on her face and the thumbnail of “Cheer Up!” (created by Six) depicts Donna with her back to the camera and looking with side of her face without the tattoo! 

This was driving me crazy.

In the end I had to reference real life tribal tattoos and the famous tattoo  from the movie “Dusk till Drawn”. I like the result. 

Her hoodie was also an unusual problem because I couldn't find a single character in the cast sporting a hoodie at the time of drawing her. So I wanted to draw her with a hoodie that the cast would wear. So when I was looking at fashion editorials I found Billie Eilish wearing the perfect hoodie and had to try to replicate it. (Elle 2019 interview, just incase you want to find it. Its the red coat!!) I also referenced part 1 and part 2 for her body because the those characters where drawn to fight, they are not frail and fawn like in appearance and think that is perfect donna. 

Characters that i used for art style reference

Eyes: Josuke Higashikata, Yukako, Lisa Lisa and Gyro Zeppeli 

Face: Gyro, Jolyne and Lisa Lisa 

Hair: Enrico, Yoshka Kira, Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli and Koichi Hirose

Body: Lisa Lisa, Gyro, Leone Abbacchio and Jolyne

Jack 

Played by Christian

Jack was easy to draw because he looked like a Jojo character. Like Isadora, Jack has a typical male design for Jojo. This meant I had a pool of reference material for him and had finished him in 2 days, the only real problems where his hat, stubble and jewellery. Lucky most of Araki’s cast have jewellery and chains and Jotaro Kujo has hair as a hat! Jack was heavily based on Jotaro Kujo but I made sure that he wasn't a copy! 

Stubble...stubble doesn't exist in Jojo.

Jojo’s Bizzarre Adventure has magnificent beards or clean shaven men, and sometimes they have facial hair. This was the main issue with this character because with stubble you don't have Jack.  So I had to take the beard of Joseph JoStar and looking at real life stubble finally got his lovely 9 o'clock shadow that we have now. 

 Characters that i used for art style reference

Eyes: Joseph Jostar (part 2), Jonathan Jostar 

Face: Leone, Jotaro Kujo and Burno Bucciarti 

Hair: Jotaro and Robert E. O. Speedwagon

Body: a mix of the cast of part 5 with a little bit of Johnny Jostar (like Isadora)

This one was the start of really using real life as a reference. Although really started using them in Donna illustration, drawing men has always been a challenge for me so drawing from real life actually made it more like Araki’s style. I realised that Jojo art style is based in realistic body proportions. I honestly think that this looks better than the other 2 because of the life drawing I had to do.

JJ

Played by Arimnaes

This was the last Icon I had to draw. I left this one last because I needed the practice to give this guy any chance of working. 

his face and body were not the issue because most of the main casts (in their respective seasons) have similar features but slightly different body heights and proportions. However, JJ’s hair was a difficult.

 In my research I found a total of 2 characters that could have his ethnic style  or texture for his hair. They were Enrico Pucci and Muhammad Avdol, and no one else. This ended in failure because their hairstyles are wacky and imaginative and JJ’s dreads just flat out don't exist in the Jojo universe. If they have his hairstyle then I must of missed it because I wasted a whole day solely on research!!!  Anyway, after that that I looked at male braiding and box braiding to figure out the hair line. Although I had the hair problem with Enrico I personally loved his design, he was drawn with an attitude and I thought it worked for JJ.  

Characters that i used for art style reference

Eyes: Enrico, Bruno, Joseph, Gyro and Giono Giovanna

Face: Enrico, Muhammed Avdol, Johnny and Bruno

Hair: Giono and Josuke, 

Body: Enrico, Bruno and Caesar 

Reflection 

Although the process was difficult, I had fun drawing these characters and have gained new techniques in drawing that I struggled in the past. I can draw stylised shading, tattoos, clothes and male characters better than I could before. I also learnt that I can draw surprisingly quickly and had finished both Isadora and jack in 2 days. After this challenge i also gains a new appreciation for Araki and the show Cheer Up and the number of literal hours it must of taken them to create an immersive show. 

However now I have to find something else to do whilst being stuck indoors!

[bellarkefanfiction]

#NoClickbait

written by: Josefine / @selflessbellamy

prompt: This is typical but maybe distracting kiss while playing a video game? Person A is competitive, 100% focused on winning and person B starts to plant kisses, all because of the competition, no one is in love here, it's a cold, calculating strategy. for anonymous 

word count: 2204

Sharing an apartment with a Youtuber has its pros and cons. For instance, her roommate has — on numerous occasions — demanded to film alone in the living room for hours, because “it has much better lighting.” At night, she often hears him groan loud in frustration while editing, which would be funny if she didn’t have to wake up early for class most mornings.

However, the pros outweigh the cons, at least as it is right now. They’ve been living together for almost a year now, and since she told him that she didn’t mind being a part of his videos every once in a while, he has involved her in his creative process. Unlike a lot of YouTube channels, Bellamy Blake’s offers a wide range of different content, such as:

cook with me: grilled chicken breast (with a twist)

vlog: a day at the bookstore + haul

history has left us: queer!Achilles (Pride Month special)

If his subscriber count of 3.2 million is anything to go by, this kind of content is great entertainment for everyone watching. Hell, Clarke even watches his videos despite the fact that she lives with him and could easily just sneak into the living room to watch him film. Still, she attempts to stay away, because Bellamy doesn’t tend to stare over her shoulder as she draws one of her pictures.

Sometimes, though, her thriving curiosity gets the better of her. When he first noticed her piqued interest, his dark eyes crinkled at the corners and he told her, “Princess, if you wanna know what I’m doing then you have to be a part of it.”

At first, Clarke had wondered whether having her show up in his videos was just gonna be a cheap clickbait trick, so that he could include her in the thumbnail and write a title called ‘vlog: Santa Monica with my girlfriend’, but he didn’t.

Instead, he turned the camera on her face as they were walking down the peer and said, “Oh, by the way guys. This is my roommate Clarke. She’s tagging along.”

He had probably expected her to not say anything, maybe give a shy little wave in response, because that’s what usually happens when people are camera shy. Clarke’s actual reaction was so far from that. In teasing, she stuck her tongue out at him and retorted, “Oh please, you’re the one who’s tagging along. I need someone to help me decide which Bath Bomb to get.”

That is the start of Clarke’s appearance in Bellamy’s videos, and since then she has only showed up more, for longer periods of time. A couple weeks ago she assisted him while he did the ‘Blindfolded Book Challenge’ by picking various classics and non-fiction works from his bookshelf.

After that video was posted, he told her not to look at the comments, which only made her suspicious, because he’d never advised her to stay away from the comment section of his videos before, and for a moment she thought that his viewers were perhaps making fun of her or something. Despite that the possibilities made her somewhat nervous, she couldn’t hold herself back.

The most popular comment jumped out at her:

[Top Comments - click to show]

Dani Larsson: y’all can’t tell us you’re not dating after this.

781+

Gulping, Clarke clicked on the replies and found the first couple ones to be:

Lydia Marcello: yea, just look at 13:52. That shoulder-lean is the least platonic thing I have seen in the modern era.

123+

Furrowing her brow, Clarke went to the timestamp to see what the girl was referring to — and there right before the end of the video as Bellamy said, “I guess that’s it for the Blindfolded Book Challenge. Thanks for watching!” — he pulled Clarke against his side, making her lean her head against his shoulder for a second, smiling.

After forcing her eyes off the frozen frame, Clarke looked at the comment below Lydia Marcello’s only to find:

 TJ Byrne: Well, if he’s not dating her, I would love to tap that.

2+

While the comment didn’t bother her much, it sure as hell seemed to have bothered Bellamy (and a lot of his loyal viewers), because he had actually responded:

Bellamy Blake: @TJ Byrne: Too bad. Sexist white Internet creeps aren’t her type.

201+

Clarke had to bite back the urge to laugh. Also, it was difficult to ignore the clear voice at the back of her head who kept telling her that men with bronze, freckled skin and lots of sharp edges is her type. Still, she has only ever seen one person who looks like that.

A person, whose laughter could light up the entire world, who places pencils behind his ear and hums while he cooks.

***

One late afternoon she returns, violet and vermillion paint caked beneath her fingernails, to the sight of Bellamy sitting cross-legged on the couch, his trusted laptop in front of him and square glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. As always, he looks up when she enters the living room.

“I’m gonna cook dinner. Chicken Alfredo pasta, does that sound good?”

He beams, most likely with as much surprise as amusement, because she’s rarely the one who prepares meals. Still, she wants to prove to him that she’s learned quite a lot from watching his culinary-themed videos.

“Very,” is his simple comment, though the lone word manages to convey his enthusiasm. When she turns to walk into the kitchen, he suddenly adds, “Hey, Clarke, would you mind being in a video later?”

The curiosity in her mind sparks like colorful fireworks. “What kind of video?” Given the complexity of Bellamy’s content, it’s impossible for her to have the faintest idea… Maybe it’s another challenge video? A casual vlog? One of his informative history sessions?

Then he explains that his viewers would love his nostalgia series to feature a gaming video. “I have Mario Kart for my old PlayStation, so… I thought it’d be more fun if we played it together. You know I love how competitive you are.”

That last bit seems to be coated in fondness, the words soft — a stark contrast to his usual teasing tone, and it has color rising to her cheeks, undoubtedly. In order to hide the blush, Clarke turns away, but not without saying, “Of course. That sounds fun,” over her shoulder.

To her joy, Bellamy eats two large portions of the Chicken Alfredo pasta and praises her for using vegetables and spices that complement the creamy sauce. Hearing him say this makes her heart feel warm.

Together, they do the dishes while listening to ‘Cigarette Daydreams’ from one of Bellamy’s vinyl records. Most of his collection he inherited from his dad, but he adds a newer record once in a while. Afterwards the struggle with setting up the lights in preparation for filming — since the sky has now darkened, they need to improve the lighting in the living room.

Before they can turn on the camera, they have to plan a quick intro. Of course, Bellamy will do the most of the talking, since it’s his channel, but he tells her that he doesn’t want her to hold anything back, especially not during the gameplay itself.

It feels like an eternity has passed. At last, Bellamy clicks record, takes a seat next to Clarke and says, “Welcome back guys! I looked at your requests and quickly had to realize that you all want to see me play a video game,” he runs his fingers through the back of his hair, “As you will probably find out, I suck at gaming. I’ve killed a Sim once, and it was not on purpose.”

Clarke mouths, “He has,” hoping that the teasing it will amuse some of his viewers.   

“Anyway, I dragged the Princess along for this one. She’s gonna crush me as Peach.”

Chuckling, she replies, “Oh, I sure am. No more of that ‘damsel in distress’ Peach. Those days are over, and you’re gonna go down.”

Even though they didn’t plan it for the intro, they look at each other, faces inches from one another to signify the “stand-off” that’s about to happen. However, within a couple seconds, they both crack up.

As it turns out, Bellamy is not actually bad at Mario Kart, which seems to surprise him way more than it does her. Within ten of playing minutes, he’s in 3rd place, but he makes the mistake of gloating, “Now, who’s gonna go down, Princess?”

Maybe they should stop using that expression…

Oh, well. “You still are,” Clarke laughs just as she uses the Starman that she’s had up her sleeve for a couple minutes, and while it does help her overtake a lot of players, she’s only gets to the fourth position, right behind him.

Bellamy does what he can to maintain his lead. Out of the corner of her eye, Clarke sees him lick his lips in concentration, and the sight damn near distracts her. Quickly, she collects herself, and while it’s difficult to keep up with him when she has to stay on the course, she’s tailing him.

When he bumps his shoulder against hers in teasing, moving his controller just to annoy her, an unfamiliar sensation sparks in her ribcage, causing her to lean closer and press her lips to his neck, right below his sharp jawline. At first she feels him freeze. Scared that she has overstepped an invisible boundary, she draws back, but he…

He is smiling. “You think you can distract me?”

“I can’t?” Turning her attention back to the television, Clarke smirks as her heart flips itself over and over.

Now she thinks she notices the faint pink tint in his freckled cheeks, but it might be her eyes playing a trick on her. With much confidence, Bellamy says, “You gotta keep trying…”

Right now, they’re doing the final lap around the course, still tailing each other, brushing each other like they are in real life. It seems as though he just gave her another challenge — one, which she is even more determined to win. Therefore, she giggles slightly, kisses his throat again, a little lower this time, then his shoulder and the back of his ear.

He releases a strange sound that must be somewhere between a groan and a chuckle. Unsuccessful, he tries to brush her off, but she can feel the heat that’s rising to his skin by the second.

Just when she leans in for the sixth kiss, he groans, tossing his controller to the side. She doesn’t recognize the emotion flashing in his earthy eyes, but she is not afraid of it. Bellamy murmurs intelligibly before giving her a gentle push to the floor — out of the camera frame — on her back, she watches his face move closer to hers than it ever has until she can almost sense the amazing warmth that pours from his features. Taking a slow breath, he nuzzles her, which has her entire chest feeling like jelly.

When their lips meet, it’s as if the living room is filled with light, though it must be nearing midnight. The happiness bubbles in her stomach, runs through her veins to mix with her bloodstream. Burying her fingers in the dark, soft curls of his hair, Clarke deepens the kiss a little, causing him to smile against her lips.

“I’m gonna have to edit this out.”

She laughs at that statement. “The video is useless now, Bellamy. We’ve both fallen off the course before the finish line.”

“Well, it was worth it.”

As opposed to sleeping that night, they sit on the bed in his room eating dry Coco Puffs while talking about where to go from there.

What they end up doing is reshooting the Mario Kart video the next day (Bellamy wins, much to her dismay), then spend the next eight months trying to hide their relationship from his online following, which is easy when she can simply not be present in his videos.

His viewers, however, are far from stupid. The first video that she appears in after the Mario Kart one is a casual writing vlog, where she brings him a cup of black coffee after his all-nighter. And it’s one tiny detail that Bellamy missed in editing that effectively exposes them:

[Top Comments - click to show]

Christine Hollinger: oh my god, he murmurs ‘thanks, babe’ at 8:46 asdjffikoxxkak… Y’ALL

863+

theo lewis: *platonically calls my roommate ‘babe’*

219+

After that, they have to come to terms with the fact that their secret is out, and because Bellamy doesn’t want to trick his followers, he decides to make the announcement (albeit casually) in his next video, which is a brief daily vlog. Bellamy turns the camera towards the balcony, on which she is standing, looking at the sinking sun.

“Isn’t she beautiful? I’m so lucky.”

No forced, half-assed video of them explaining how they got together, no cheesy girlfriend tag — just a simple yet revealing comment. Their relationship is not clickbait; it’s not something that he’s going to use to gain more followers. It’s too important for that.

[fenfyre]

When the door to their apartment opened Eren looked up from where he was sprawled out on the couch, laptop perched on his chest as he was aimlessly clicking his way through youtube. He saw Jean enter the hallway and was about to turn back to the screen where a cute girl was reviewing the video game releases of the last week but then he noticed the dazed look on his boyfriend’s face. A moment later his attention was drawn to the small, red pot in Jean’s hands and the shiny, dark green leaves with lighter spots spilling over the edges.

Shifting on the couch he sat up to get a better look, allowing the laptop to slide down into his lap as he cocked his head to the side. As far as he knew Jean had never shown any interest in house plants. On the contrary, he had proven his brown thumb the few times anyone had been stupid enough to gift him flowers. There was still a pot with the dried up, crumpled remains of what had once been something way more green and leafy on their windowsill.

Eren had to admit he wasn’t much better at keeping plants alive, though. Tasks that had to be repeated on a regular basis like watering and pruning and checking for pests just slipped his mind more often than not and before he knew what happened it had been six weeks since he’d last touched a watering can and then there wasn’t much left for him to water anymore.

Considering their combined incapability to keep anything alive that wasn’t each other it was pretty strange for Jean to bring a live plant into this risky situation. Maybe even a little suspicious. Eren cocked a curious eyebrow.

“What’s up?”, he called into the hallway where Jean was just now kicking off his shoes while he carefully held the potted plant with both hands. As if he was afraid to drop it at any moment if he didn’t pay the utmost attention to it.

Then he looked around, hesitating for a moment before carrying the pot through the hallway and into the living room where he delicately placed it on the coffee table before letting himself fall back onto the couch with a drawn out sigh. Eren stretched out his legs to drape them over his boyfriend’s lap immediately.

There was a moment of silence during which Jean let himself melt back into the couch, one hand absently wandering to splay across Eren’s bare ankle.

“He gave me a plant”, Jean finally mumbled, quiet as if he were speaking to himself. Eren frowned, needing a moment to recall what his boyfriend had told him he’d do today. Then he remembered.

“Your study buddy?”

A quiet hum of agreement.

Well, that explained the dazed expression and careful cradling of the pot earlier.

Jean had the biggest, most embarrassing crush on a guy in his genetics class that had only gotten worse since said guy had started asking him to study together several times a month. Eren really couldn’t decide if Jean’s blushing and stuttering was cute or pathetic … but he was biased and had always enjoyed his boyfriend getting all squirmy so he was leaning more towards cute.

“The library was really crowded today”, Jean began after another moment of contemplation, slowly working his way out of the silent stupor, “so he invited me over to study at his place instead.”

Alright, Eren could imagine how seeing his crush’s apartment for the first time would throw him into somewhat of a nervous breakdown. Not that it had been similar between them when they started dating but their relationship had developed very differently. Jean had been a nervous wreck about Eren’s sister Mikasa quite a few times though, long before him and Eren had started getting closer.

Head rolling over to look at Eren Jean continued, his fingers drawing casual circles across Eren’s ankle.

“You wouldn’t believe his place, Eren. It’s this tiny apartment but everything is covered in plants. I mean literally everything. He has these huge shelves full of pots, they hang from the ceiling and are all over every single surface … it’s absolutely crazy. Like if there was polar opposite to our place, greenery wise, it would be his apartment.”

Eren chuckled, shimmying backwards to get more comfortable again. He could see how that might be overwhelming even if Jean hadn’t been whisked away to that indoors jungle by a guy he was really into.

“He had to move a bunch of pots off the desk so we could work and he kept apologizing while he cleaned up but … everything looked so nice and it suited him so well. So I told him I liked the plants and he got so … happy.”

A soft, dreamy sigh that made Eren’s heart skip. Hearing Jean talk about his cute crush maybe should not have made him this excited for his boyfriend. But it did. Jean was way too cute when he talked about the things and people he loved. He didn’t do it nearly enough, in Eren’s opinion.

“So I asked him more about the plants and he was so adorable about it, telling me about the different kinds and which one he’d gotten recently and all that and he was … glowing.”

“You’re so gay”, Eren smirked, nudging Jean’s thigh with his heel and getting a drawn out groan in turn.

“I knooooooow...”

A quiet huff, a cute squirm.

“We didn’t get that much studying done and by the end he gets that pot”, Jean gestured toward the plant on the coffee table, “and asks if I want it, says he’d love to give it to me since I like his plants that much … and I tell him I’ll just kill it and, well … he says he knows something that might help...”

Jean hesitated at that point in his story, making Eren wonder just how this was going to end. That last sentence had sounded somewhat ominous, after all.

Then Jean reached for the laptop still perched precariously on Eren’s hips and pulled it over, typing something into the search bar. Soon after a channel popped up, lots of pretty, plant themed thumbnails and titles such as “Propagating Healthy Herbs: Dos and Don’ts”, “Seed Starting 101 (Foolproof!)” and “5 Watering Mistakes to Avoid”.

“He has a plant care channel”, Jean all but whined while Eren noticed the impressive follower number for such a niche topic. Then his boyfriend clicked on one of the videos and Eren immediately understood why Jean had fallen for his study buddy.

“That … that’s Marco?”, he stuttered as the gorgeous young man on the screen welcomed them to his video in a beautifully decorated set full of warm sunlight and a sheer abundance of greenery. His face was kind and his smile warm and as he explained which topic they would talk about today his passion was already shining through. Eren understood what Jean had meant when he spoke about Marco glowing.

“That’s Marco”, Jean agreed, eyes on the screen as Marco held up a larger houseplant and showed off the smooth leaves. Eren swallowed, watched the video for a minute longer, then turned back to Jean.

“Any chance you can invite him for private plant lessons?”

Jean’s head whipped around, eyes full of excited wonder, a subtle smirk sneaking onto his face. Eren could already tell he liked the idea. And after all, they really shouldn’t let Marco’s beautiful gift die. What better way to make sure the little plant would survive than inviting over the expert? And if plant lessons weren’t all that was exchanged, well … after seeing the beautiful sunshine Marco Bodt for himself, Eren wouldn’t mind that either.

Commissions | Kofi | AO3 | twitter | pillowfort

[plutonic-5]

JSE community hype: A guide for newer viewers!

(This is gonna be long as fuck)

Hey, you! Did you JUST enter the JSE community? Well first off, welcome! Second of, you’re probably really confused right now.

But look no further, I’ll give you a summary so you can understand all of these theories, glitches, and bloody necks in your feed.

Antisepticeye: A Brief Story

Antisepticeye is a character that people on Tumblr, Twitter and DevianArt created as an “evil Jack”, hypothetically the opposite of Jack. Everyone has their own version of him, but he’s usually portrayed as a Jack with pointy ears, black gauges, always with a bloody knife in hand, and with his neck bleeding.

He’s basically a computer virus, that can glitch through Jack’s face-cam in his videos and “posses” everything that is on the internet, such as Jack himself, that is the “internet part” of Seán (that’s Jack’s real name btw). He “feeds” of attention, and gets stronger the more we talk about him.

On October of 2016, Anti made his first appearance glitching through the Sister Location videos, a part of the Five Nights At Freddy’s game series. He glitched through every video of that month until the last day, on Halloween, where he took full form and possessed Jack in a video called “SAY GOODBYE”. So that’s a video you should watch to start everything.

So it makes your life easier, you can also search for “All Antisepticeye’s moments” on Youtube, there’s plenty of them, watch the most recent one you can find.

Jack also made a video kinda explainig this, called “HAPPY HALLOWEEN”.

After that, Anti was supposedly gone, and with time, other “egos” were created by the community and Jack himself.

Those “egos” are characters just like Anti, that only exist on the internet.

Jackieboyman is a budget superhero, he appeared the most in a video called “JACKIEBOYMAN RETURNS| Welcome To The Game #2”.

Magic Marvin is a magician that can’t really do magic, but everything he throws on the ground apparently explodes. He was introduced in the video “The Jacksepticeye’s Power Hour - Marvin’s Magic”.

Dr. Henrik von Schneeplestein is a doctor that isn’t really qualified for the job, but tries his hardest to save his most constant patient named “Peter”. He first appeared in the video “Jacksepticeye’s Power Hour - Dr. Septiceye”, and then in a video called “TRUST ME, I’M A DOCTOR| Bio Inc Redemption #4”, but he wasn’t quite himself anymore, willing to kill every patient he had. We’ll come back to why that is later. We discovered his name is Henrik in that video as well, and that he probably wanted to be an artist when he was a kid.

Chase Brody is a guy that tries too hard to be cool, and was introduced in the video “Teabag Edition| Bro Average”. In that video we find out that his wife abandoned him and took the kids with her. In the end, Chase supposedly kills himself, but people in the community refused to accept his death, continuing to talk about him. He supposedly dies again later, in the “TRUST ME, I’M A DOCTOR| Bio Inc Redemption #4” video, where Dr.Schneeplestein kills a patient called “Chase Brody”, that later on Jack accepted as cannon to be Chase himself.

And those are all 4 egos until now (today’s date being August 1st, 2017). “Jack” is also considered an ego, because he’s the one that interacts with everything on the internet.

Remember when Anti was gone after 2016’s Halloween? Well, he came back. In a video that Jack made for the PAX East 2017 convention, called “Always Watching takeover” or something. In that video, that you can easily find searching those words on YouTube, Anti comes back and says that he never really left, he’s just always there, waiting for enough attention so he can possess Jack again.

Anti’s objectives are a mystery, no one really knows what he wants to accomplish with all of this.

After the PAX video, it all died down again. Except not. Dr.Schneeplestein started acting weird in that last video where he supposedly killed Chase, and everybody figured that Anti was taking his turn on him, possessing him, getting inside his head.

Theories say that Anti plans in corrupting all egos and the most recent Jack’s instagram picture shows the Doctor with a bloody eye, saying that he was the first one to be corrupted.

In some video tags or Tumblr posts tags, sometimes there are messages with a weird font (zalgo text). That can be Anti talking to us, or Jack asking for help, since he’s like being “held captive” since last Halloween.

Recently, there was a video of Markiplier, called “Darkiplier vs Antisepticeye”, where Anti and Mark’s evil ego, Dark, supposedly meet and want to fight against each other. That video was said not to be cannon, that meaning it wasn’t really Anti and Dark, but just Jack and Mark pretending to be them, “imposters”, a goof!

But the goofness didn’t last for very long, because the real Anti is now pissed because Jack mocked him, and that’s why he got Schneeple and is back again.

So the random words that you may see people talking about, like “home”, “return/reborn”, “imposter”, etc are all things from random tags or Jack’s Twitter bios.

And even more recently, but before Mark’s video, “Jack” made a video putting up an “art contest”, where he’s gonna show the world some of our fanart in a future video. I say “Jack” because there’s a really unsettling vibe about that video, and people figured out that the person in the video was not Jack, but Anti in disguise. He wants this art thing to happen because he knows that people are gonna draw him a lot, referencing Mark’s video, and that will give him the attention he needs to be reborn into something stronger.

In periods of hype like this, video’s titles are a very important part of theories, because they kinda give hints about what may be happening, and thumbnails as well. In his last “Escapists” video, he put a date in the thumbnail that goes back to Anti’s last appearance, and then changed it again to another date: August 3rd.

That’s probably when shit is gonna go down, and Dr.Schneeplestein will appear along with Anti, being reborn because of all the fanart and attention we gave him.

And that’s what you missed on…Everything! I know it’s a lot to take in all on once, but once you get it, it’s really fun!

Everybody in the community works together to figure out this story arc that Jack creates, with the help of his amazing editor, Robin. So if you feel lost, or just want to freak out and theorize about video titles and green lights, there’ll always be someone to talk to you!

And I promise, we’re not mad like this all the time, I made this summary just because we’re in a period of hype, like in the middle of a story, and you just arrived in this complete chaos!

And now, you know everything that we know until now, stay tuned for the next videos and theories, and follow Jack here on Tumblr to know the stuff he likes and reblogs, that may be hints as well.

Oh, and most importantly…Have fun!

[singingunderthecurtain]

Together For Real (ChanyeolxYOUxKris) Mini Series 4

Mini Masterlist

Picture not mine, found everything on Google

Author: @julietsoddeye AU: Canon/EXO Universe Genre: Angst | Fluff Pairing: Chanyeol x Reader x Kris Trigger Warning: Distrust, Feeling of Betrayal, basically some angsty stuff. Word Count: 2,021

Plot: You, an EXO manager, developed a dangerous relationship with Kris and one day he suddenly left EXO and it left you devastated. For some reason, you found yourself being in a relationship again with one of the boys. And it’s Park Chanyeol.You set boundaries with him, but he shamelessly breaks all the rules making you want to run away.

October, 2016

Channie: Hey Bae. ♥ (Seen 00:34)

You: Really? Chanyeol, really? (Seen 00:35)

Channie: Isn’t that what kids say nowadays? :P I luv you bae! ♥ (Seen 00:36)

Channie: Hey! (Seen 00:37)

Channie: YAH! (Seen 00:39)

You: What?! (Seen 00:40)

Channie: What r u doing? (Seen 00:44)

You: UGH! I’m trying to sleep it’s almost 1 AM. (Seen 00:45)

Channie: Don’t sleep yet. I’m on my way home now. (Seen 00:46)

And by home, he meant your very small apartment. You didn’t reply to his text anymore since you know he’ll still go to you no matter what. Chanyeol has been going home to you for a year now. Almost every single night and day, unless he’s really busy. By now half of his wardrobe is in your house, which pisses you off tremendously because you have no more space for your own clothes.

Your relationship is limit-free, but not exclusive. You told him he’s free to go and date anyone he wants, he told you that you’re the only one he needed. And you, on the other hand, tried dating a few times, which pisses Chanyeol off a lot but he can’t do anything about it or you’ll get angry at him. No one stood out though. All of the guys you dated were either too boring or too strange for you so you just stopped trying altogether.

You’re still young anyway; you decided to just enjoy Chanyeol’s company while he’s still into you. You’ll never know when he’ll get tired and be done with your bullshit and finally leave you for a much deserving girl, and he could have anyone he wants. He’s Park Chanyeol; any girl will die to be loved by him.

You know you’re hurting Chanyeol but you don’t know why you keep doing it. He’s a really nice guy, a much nicer lover than Kris will ever be if you were being honest with yourself. He treats you well, gives you flowers and showers you with gifts, hugs and kisses, and love, he’s great in bed and not to mention he lasts very long and lets you finish first. A gentleman through and through.

You find it really weird that he keeps taking your shit though and is okay with it. Maybe he’s a masochist who gets off with you being a fucking jerk to him. Or maybe he’s gone crazy with his line of work and lack of sleep so he lets you treat him badly.

As you were slowly drifting off to sleep, mind in drowsy shambles, you hear the code of the door’s digital lock was being pressed indicating Chanyeol’s return. You shake your head and scratch your eyes to wake your mind up.

“Hey, are you still up?” Chanyeol spoke gingerly as he closes the door softly to not make a loud sound if ever you’re asleep.

“I’m still awake.” You say as you stood up from the bed you share with Chanyeol meeting him halfway, greeting him with a warm and tight hug. You give Chanyeol affection from time to time because he deserves it and he never fails to grin with his stupidly cute face whenever you give him the time of day.

“I have to show you something.” Chanyeol excitedly squeaks as he drops his bag and scoops you up in his arms, jumping on the bed with you yelping and giggling silently. You both bounce up and down on the mattress and he gives your lips the biggest and wettest kiss ever.

“What is it?” You yawned as you ask.

“My collaboration with Far East Movement is finally out.” Chanyeol flashes you his pearly whites as he fish for his phone in his sweatpants pocket.

“Oh wow, let’s hear it.” You yawn again and closes your eyes.

“Don’t sleep!” He complains, with the same aegyo he shows you whenever he doesn’t get what he wanted.

“I’m not sleeping, just closing my eyes.” You say with another yawn, opening your eyes again to see him staring at you.

“It’s okay we can watch it together tomorrow if you’re really sleepy.” Chanyeol smiles as he attempts to turn off his phone but you stop his actions with your hands.

“Let’s watch it now.” You insist and he complies. The song started with a smooth voice of a woman who you recognized as Tinashe and your mouth drops a little bit and a smile crept across your lips. You like Tinashe a lot and Chanyeol knows it.

“Oh my gosh Tinashe, really? “ You say excitedly and Chanyeol’s Cheshire Cat grin widens. “Did you meet her by any chance?” You asked enthusiastically as you tighten your cling on Chanyeol’s torso with your legs intertwined together with his; inhaling his oddly comforting scent of fused sweat, laundry detergent, and cologne.

“Sadly, I did not.” Chanyeol answers and you purse your lips into a pout.

Out of habit, his hands start caressing your back into tranquilizing motions making you relax even more. Both the warmness of your body heat and the soothing music he’s playing for you was slowly lulling you to sleep. You weren’t sure if you finished the song or not, but you wake up a couple of hours later with Chanyeol silently snoring. His face nuzzling on your chest, arms and legs gripping securely around your whole body. You absentmindedly smile and caresses his head of hair soothingly making him shift slightly in his sleep and to bury his face in your chest even more.

A few days later you remember to listen to the song again and as the song progresses, Chanyeol’s verse finally came.

Love is a high, we feelin' alive, you Lovin’ the size, you ride this flow I give you more you feelin’ the flow, you never let none of them bring down the vibe Hustle to win, we be livin’ in sin, making us two of a kind New road, babe we got temples to build Ain’t no haters can step to our grind We got that empire mind, Together slowly, let’s climb up (That be freal) A moment with sincerity  Try to feel it, close your eyes (That be freal) You be the bank on my side, nothing but dimes Let’s make a deal, Gradually feel, dream and reality  If you hold my hand, together freal

______

The song was on repeat for the whole day as you do chores. It was your day off from work and Chanyeol was not around to distract you so you took advantage of it and did some laundry and clean up a little bit around your small but cozy apartment.

November, 2016

It was a very slow day at work, it was only one in the afternoon but it felt like you were in the office for more than 8 hours already. Your boss was on a business trip overseas and you can slack off if you want but you chose to do some paper works instead because you didn’t want new projects to overwhelm you in the next few weeks. Some of your coworkers were dicking around the office, some weren't even present, probably out and about doing personal stuff. While you, on the other hand, was being a fucking awesome office employee that you are. You know you will be laughing at your colleagues in the next week to come, hustling and cramming with work when your boss gets back.

“Have you heard that new Kris Wu song?” You overheard one of the interns say, making you stop your typing. You aren’t surprised about hearing his name anymore since the interns talk about EXO and the three estranged members a lot in the break room during lunch hours. One particular girl is obsessed with Chanyeol and she didn’t even know that her trainer, a.k.a you, was her precious Oppa's real-life lover.

“I haven’t yet!” The other intern says.

“It’s all in English, I don’t really understand much but it sounded really cool.” She reiterates.

“What’s the title of the song?” The other asks.

“July. It’s weird I don’t even understand why it’s July.” The mention of that month made you freeze in place. Because that was your birth month. Goosebumps suddenly prickles the skin of the nape of your neck, a cold and sharp pang shoots right at your chest all of a sudden.

You immediately grab your phone and earbuds, darting towards the door to egress from your department office. You reached for the emergency exit and sat on the stairs as your hands keep trembling. It took you a few minutes before you were calm enough to draw the unlock pattern of your phone.

You click the Youtube app and typed in “Kris Wu July” on the search bar. The page loaded immediately and the first video that pops up shows a thumbnail of Kris wearing a hat with the initials “K W” on the front. You click on the video and the song started with a high pitched techno sounding instrument. His hair was white, looks good on him though, you thought to yourself. And the sight of him, after a lot of years, makes your heart beats fast. It’s not that you weren’t allowed to look up his activities, but you told yourself not to, to help yourself move on from him and his crippling memory. Chanyeol helped a lot by diverting your attention to him and him only.

I've been looking for a reason To have you in my arms Where you wanna be Never had a woman so pure Glad to have you right where you wanna be Talking 'til the morning we don't need any sleep I hate it when you go to work Laying 'til the sun down it feel like a dream I hate it when we go to work You should be here…

Baby, Baby, I Doing what feels right Baby, Baby, now Tell me what you wanna say Show me how you feeling, babe Show me how you feeling, babe

You've been looking for a reason To have me in your arms Where I wanna be Give you what you need and no more Glad to have you right Where you wanna be

Talking 'til the morning we don't need any sleep I hate it when you go to work Laying 'til the sun down it feel like a dream I hate it when we go to work You should be here

Baby, Baby, I Doing what feels right Baby, Baby, now Tell me what you wanna say Show me how you feeling, babe

You know this ain't rocket science Get what you got coming to ya I know what you like You know that I'mma keep it coming uh Something 'bout this Moët got you in the mood Say you got a situation Tell that other guy to move

Easy, I may have to call in work, girl How I'm s’posed to lay this work, girl This shit way too good to function I'm like Jordan when it's crunch time We at Nobu when it's lunch time I'mma get up out your way, girl But only if we spending some time, sometimes

Baby, Baby, I Doing what feels right Baby, Baby, now Tell me what you wanna say Show me how you feeling, babe

Show me how you Show me how you feeling, babe Show me how you feeling, babe

The song ended with the same techno sound with a slow fade. It was a blur and you didn’t exactly know how to react, your whole body was numb from all emotions. You get back to your desk and did your work robotically for the whole day. Thankfully nobody noticed your sudden change in the aura, you were grateful that there was a lack of people in the office that day.

[caseyvalhalla]

despite what you’ve been told (pt 4)

I meant to finish this earlier in the week but did not bc of who I am as a person. There will be 3 more installments after this one & then this sucker will get a proper beta and an ao3 upload

Read Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Victor sulks.

At first he’s genuinely sad, sad enough that after practice he goes back to his hotel room and stays there for the rest of the day feeling foolish and heartbroken and wishing he could cuddle his dog.  (At one point he actually calls his sitter and has her put Makkachin on Facetime and leave the room so he can apologize; they’re not moving to a nice place in Japan with lots of beaches and a new special human for him to play with after all.)  He orders something forgettable off the room service menu that seems indulgent at the time, picks at it while flipping through the television offerings and finally succumbs to jet lag late in the afternoon.

Chris shows up at his door around 8pm with an ice dancer pair Victor remembers from the European Championship and two women he feels like he ought to know but doesn’t.  He hasn’t been paying attention to the new faces at competitions for a while now, hasn’t been following the up and coming Juniors the way he used to; maybe if he had he’d have recognized Yuuri’s face when he saw it, would have known his career instead of scrambling to learn about it in a fever rush after the GPF banquet.  Maybe things would have been different.

He lets Chris wheedle him into going out for the night, but Victor’s charm battery runs down quickly and by the time they’re done eating sushi dinner, part ways with the ice dancer couple, and settle in at an establishment Victor gathers is some kind of bar (what’s a ‘hostoklab’? Oh well) he’s lost the ability to keep up appearances.  There are remarkably good-looking Japanese waiters pouring them sake and casually flirting in levels of English that range from stilted to nearly fluent; the girls are giggling and Chris is deep in his element and Victor doesn’t miss the furtive look in his direction and the extra bill Chris slips to one of the waiters.  Victor doesn’t even have to hear what he says over the white noise filling the room, because he can guess--my friend here got dumped, so take extra good care of him, okay?

He tries to appreciate that Chris is just trying to cheer him up in his own highly questionable way, but Victor doesn’t want a replacement, or a warm body.  He doesn’t want anything, really, except maybe to go home to his flat and his dog and sleep until the season is over instead of having to maintain his rock star persona.  He manages to hold a conversation that he won’t remember later, also doesn’t remember finally going back to the hotel and going to bed, but he remembers the headache in the morning and the bitter feeling in his chest for quite a while.

The competition goes as well as any; he’s been doing this for too long through too much for his performance to be anything but flawless.  He takes all of his feelings, packs them up, and shoves them into his programs, lets them fuel his performance, at least for the handful of days until he’s flying home with yet another gold medal.  It feels heavy around his neck, more like a chain and shackles dragging him down than a badge of victory.

He alters the choreography a bit for his next short program, changes the story; instead of a disillusioned playboy being swept off his feet and falling in love for the first time, now it’s about a beautiful woman falling for a seductive playboy only to be cast aside.  He goes to practice and goes home with nothing but errands in between, and Makkachin follows him around the house whining for an extra walk.  The world is turning a joyless muted gray in a way that’s familiar and dangerous and his dog, at least, notices immediately.  Yuri Plisetsky notices maybe a day later and spends an egregious amount of time demanding Victor’s attention and opinion on his FS choreography with an uncharacteristic lack of scathing commentary, and the fact that Yuri of all people is treating him delicately is probably what provokes Victor to paw through his desk looking for the business card of his last therapist.

This is what he’s doing when his phone blows up.

By the time he gets back out to the living room Makkachin is barking at his phone as it buzzes across the coffee table under its own power.  There’s a cascade of tweets and texts spilling over the notifications when he thumbs it to life and everything is some variation on OMG VICTOR DID YOU SEE THE VIDEO except for a Facebook comment from Chris that just says nice of your dream boy to send you a love letter, maybe he didn’t dump you after all and a lone text from Yuri Plisetsky that consists solely of a YouTube link.

Victor is pretty sure that anything resembling hope had been sucked out of him that first day in Tokyo, but there’s something like it trembling in his thumb when he taps on the hyperlink.

The title of the video is in Japanese, but the thumbnail says enough on its own; Yuuri Katsuki in practice gear and black gloves, head turned just enough for a perfect profile, no glasses, lips slightly parted, messy hair floating with whatever movement the camera caught him in.  For an instant he feels close enough to touch and for an instant Victor almost closes the app and sets the phone aside, a clawed iron fist is clenching around his heart.

If anyone but Yuri had sent him the link, Victor might have done just that; but the small angry kitten in leopard print shows his affection in ways that are harsh, uncompromising, and ultimately honest, so Victor presses play.

There isn’t a music track but Victor doesn’t need to hear the opening notes of Stammi Vicino to recognize that starting pose, for his heart to leap into his throat and stay there.  And Yuuri doesn’t need music; he creates it with his presence, with every move and gesture, an invisible mantle that flutters and twines around his body like a lover.

There’s more of him than Victor remembers and his technical eye can see the places where the added weight is slowing him down--not by much and not more than anyone but a coach or a judge would notice.  Aesthetically he’s softer, more vulnerable; in his best performances Yuuri draws the audience in with beauty and longing but this is different.  It’s bittersweet and lonely, he clings to the performance like he can feel it slipping away from him, like it’s the last thing keeping him on the ice, and suddenly Victor understands.  It’s his program Yuuri is performing.  Yuuri hasn’t forgotten him, hasn’t cast him aside--Yuuri is reaching for him, calling out to him.  Hoping.  Waiting for Victor to remember his promise.

He’s asking me to save him.

Victor counts to ten after the video ends.  Not to give himself time to weigh his decision, because he already knows what he’s going to do before Yuuri even starts that last combination spin.  Not to give himself time to change his mind, because he knows he won’t.  He counts to ten just to appreciate the magnitude of what he’s about to do, the breadth and depth of what he’s about to cast aside in one fell swoop, to feel the expansive warmth that starts in the center of his chest and spreads out until his fingers and toes are tingling, until it’s an electric buzz of giddy static too large to contain in his own body that fizzles out into an aura strong enough that Makkachin hops off the couch and whines, pacing restlessly.

He counts to ten, and then he closes the app and scrolls through his contacts to the travel agent listed near the bottom.

“I need a flight and ground transportation to Hasetsu, Japan, as soon as possible.”  Victor is on his feet and pacing by this point, Makkachin hopping around him in circles, excited.  “No, one way.  And I’m taking my dog.  Email me the itinerary.  Thanks.”

His second call is to a moving company.  The third is to his sitter, because the itinerary came through and his flight leaves before the packing is done so he’ll have to brief her on what goes and what stays and decide the future of her employment while his flat is empty.

The fourth call is to Yakov.

“I’m taking the next season off,” Victor says without preamble.  By this point he’s nearly done packing the one suitcase he’ll take on the flight; everything else will be shipped.  Makkachin has been whining at the end of the bed as usual, but when Victor packs the leash and bacon treats his tail starts wagging, and the strangled noise Yakov makes over the line is counterpoint to Makkachin bounding around the room happily.

“What?!”

“My plane leaves tonight at 6:30.  You should come see me off!”

“That’s in two hours!  Where are you right now?”

Victor hums to himself and checks the clock.  “Oh, the cab should be here soon then.”

“VITYA WHERE ARE YOU?  DON’T GO ANYWHERE I’LL—”

“See you at the airport, Yakov,” Victor coos in a sing-song, presses the end button and zips the suitcase closed.  Makkachin comes to a halt at his feet, wriggling with the same excitement that’s humming through Victor, stuttering through his joints and trembling in his fingers.  Makkachin rears up on his hind legs and Victor catches both front paws in his hands, leading them in a little dance.  “We’re going to see him!”

Makkachin barks in agreement.

Victor watches the video again during the ride to the airport with Makkachin under one arm, alternately praising Yuuri’s performance and dissecting every minor flaw, pausing the video to give the old dog a better look so he understands what Victor is talking about.  I’m on my way, Yuuri, he thinks during those last few moments, when Yuuri draws himself inward into the final pose.  I’ll be in your arms soon.  I’ll be entirely yours, and you’ll become the best skater in the world.

The last thing Victor does before he leaves Russia is text a reply to Yuri Plisetsky.  It says thank you.

He turns off his phone.