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stressy-enby · 3 years

Text

Love Letters

Tenya Iida X Writer!Reader

(This is absolutely a self insert leave me alone)

Requests are open!!

Tenya's morning routine was always the same. He was awoken by his alarm at 6:20 A.M. He went to the bathroom and washed his face. Then he'd get dresses, comb his hair, and go downstairs for breakfast. After he'd eaten, he would brush his teeth, and head to class with his peers.

This system was so ordinary, so methodical, that he almost missed the folded sheet of printer paper on the floor in front of the door.

Probably Mr. Aizawa, he'd thought, stooping to collect the note. His teacher occasionally left notes taped to the class rep's door, asking him to take attendance or start class if Aizawa knew he was going to be late. Still nothing out of the ordinary for Tenya.

When he unfolded the paper, though, he was surprised to see not a message from his teacher, but rather a very sweet note; something that Tenya was not accustomed to getting at all.

I hope it does not alarm you to hear that I adore you. Your unbridled passion for heroics, your eyes; which are oceans of kindness, and your aptitude for helping others. Every little bit of you never once ceases to amaze and enamor me. Though you are a vessel for speed, you choose to walk alongside your friends, instead of tearing off into the future. You build me up and make me feel strong, whether you realize it or not. You make me feel like I'm actually worth something. You keep my head up when I feel as though I'm drowning in a sea of my insecurities.

Perhaps one day I'll have the courage to tell you this in person. For now though, this will suffice.

The letter was not signed off, but rather ended with a red pen sketch of a heart. Tenya's eyes nearly doubled in size. He re read the note several more times to make sure he hadn't imagined the loving words. Who could've possibly written it? He wasn't aware of anyone in his class who harbored these kinds of feelings, much less for him, but he had never been particularly good at reading emotions.

Realizing he was going to be late for breakfast if he dwelled any longer on it, Tenya pocketed the love letter and headed downstairs. The mystery would have to wait until after school. His responsibilities always came first, no matter how often his mind still wandered back to the letter in his pocked, yearning to pull it out and read it yet again, just to make sure he still wasn't dreaming.

. . .

Whoever had written the note was smart, Tenya realized. They had typed it, leaving no room for the possibility that he could recognize the handwriting. The only part that had been done by hand was that little red heart, but a doodle wasn't nearly enough to tell him who the author was.

He turned instead to analyzing the words themselves.They were well chosen, poetic even. The fifty cent words like "unbridled" and "enamored" led him to believe that the author was an experienced writer, or perhaps simply read a lot.

Yaoyorozu was a good contender, she was an eloquent speaker. Kaminari also read a lot, he was good with literature. And there was Tokoyami, who seemed to speak exclusively in poetry. Tenya jotted down his ideas, crafting a short list of his classmates.

"Oh, (L/N) writes a lot," he mused, adding their name to the list. (L/N) actually made a lot of sense.

Oh, but maybe it was just wishful thinking. Perhaps he only read the love letter in (L/N)'s voice being he wanted it to be them.

...or maybe it actually wasn't a bad idea.

(L/N) was always writing. They viewed it as a privilege, a challenge. They leapt at every creative writing assignment they got in English class, and the few stories they had shared were spectacularly inventive and elegantly crafted.

Tenya halted, scanning the message again. It suddenly seemed more and more likely that (L/N) was in fact the author.

He chewed his lip. It was too easy. Too convenient. Too perfect. How could someone he already cared for so deeply send him something like this? It was too good to be true. Besides, it was only one note. How could be possibly-

"What if they write more?" Tenya suddenly said out loud, his train of thought coming to a screeching halt. "I'd have a better line up to analyze. I could also ask Present Mic for the short stories assignments he's grading so I can pass them back. I could probably be able to look over at least a few of them and see if I recognize the writing."

A man on a mission, Tenya resigned himself to waiting until the next day to see if another note appeared, and to ask Present Mic about the stories.

Too anxious and oddly excited, he hardly got any sleep.

. . .

Sure enough the next morning, there was a new note. Tenya all but flew out of bed and scrambled to unfold it.

I find myself caught in a storm of uncertainty all too often. I'm tossed from wave to wave in an ocean of fear. You are my rock. You hold me fast and secure in this ever-changing and frightening world. You are safe. You are my home.

You are my everything.

Tenya unconsciously read the letter in (L/N)'s voice again. He felt his heart beat harder at the thought of them penning these beautiful words.

"You don't know that it's them," he scolded himself, unwillingly placing the new note on his desk next to the old one. He tore himself away from them to retreat into the bathroom to get ready for the day.

The new message did offer one new clue already, though. It used the same ocean metaphor as the first one. It was a comparison the author seemed to favor. Maybe he could find it in their other works.

He had to get his hands on those short story assignments before he lost his damn mind.

. . .

Tenya felt slightly uneasy about telling Present Mic he wanted the stories to pass back, even though he was technically telling the truth. He was eventually going to pass them back. When he was done looking through them.

A lie of omission is still a lie, that annoying voice in his head insisted, but he pretended he couldn't hear it, pushing it down. It wouldn't do any harm, he rationalized. And he had to know.

Tenya flipped through the papers, looking for (L/N)'s first. It was a desperate wish that they were the author of the anonymous notes, but it also seemed to make just enough sense to justify thumbing through their assignment.

There. (L/N) always went above the beyond with creative writing, and the five pages of neatly typed text was a testament to that. It was the longest assignment in the stack by two pages.

Wait.... typed?

It was probably a coincidence. After all, (L/N) hadn't been the only student who'd opted to type their story. Tenya was too convinced already that they had sent him those letters for him to entertain the idea that it was simply just a coincidence.

He skimmed the story quickly before class started. He found himself impressed, not for the first time with (L/N)'s abilities as a writer. Each word was carefully selected to craft perfect sentences and immaculate paragraphs full of feeling and vibrant imagery.

He stopped suddenly a page in as the protagonist compared their anguish to a stormy sea, heavy waves tossing them to and fro.

There it is again.

The sentiments from the letters, which Tenya had all but seared into his brain, echoed that of what he was reading now. The vocabulary, the imagery, the deep feelings evoked by each sentence, and even the fact that it was typed.

It had to be them. It had to be (Y/N). It was just too perfect.

. . .

(Y/N) sat a few seats ahead and to the right of Tenya, so he spent quite a bit of class time staring unabashedly at the back of their head. They were scribbling madly on a sheet of lined paper. Lecture notes? Short story?.... Love letter?

People often say that opposites attract. Tenya was just realizing how true that was as he sat in class, half listening to the lesson, half watching (Y/N). He was all angles and sternness, whereas they were flexible and soft. Perhaps it didn't always show physically on their features, but in their mannerisms, and even in their writing, they were stunning curves, twists and turns. With them, you didn't always know where you were going, but it was an adventure all the same. They were a warm, comforting feeling. They felt like home.

An idea bloomed in Tenya's mind, a delectably wonderful way for him to show (Y/N) that he reciprocated their feelings. Having a difficult time smothering his smile, Tenya fished through his school bag for a sheet of lined paper.

. . .

You frowned thoughtfully at your paper, lips pursed. You tapped your pencil against your dorm room desk as you considered your next words.

This was the hardest, part, but still the most fun. The first draft. You could change whatever wording or dialogue you wanted while you were typing it up, nut you still needed a good base. You still had to carefully choose every word that you wanted to use to move your audience.

Tenya Iida

You grinned giddily just thinking of him. He had given almost no indication these past two days that he'd gotten your letters, but you could tell. His eyes had darted around, scrutinizing everyone they landed on. It had felt a bit like being dissected when his gaze had fallen upon you.

There's no way he knows, you had reasoned, giving him a tight smile in return. He's just trying to sus me out. For all he knows, it could be literally anyone.

You had ridden that wave of shaky confidence in your anonymity, all the way to that moment, where you turned around in your desk chair, intending to grab your phone, only for your eyes to fall upon a folded up piece of paper next to your door.

You felt an anxious lurch in your gut as you shakily picked it up. "If this is Iida telling me to never speak to him again I'm going to cry."

You unfolded the message, fully expected the worst, and praying to whatever god was or wasn't out there that you were wrong and that Iida wasn't completely creeped out and now hated you.

You remind me of the ocean waves you write about so often. You're a crescendo of carefully chosen words, actions, and kind thoughts. You're soft yet strong, never backing down from a fight or a friend in need. Your determination and drive impress me to no ends, and make me want to impress you as well.

You've cast a spell on me for quite some time now, but your hold over me was only strengthened by the heartfelt messages you sent me. I'm beyond happy that you share my feelings.

The letter wasn't signed, but it was written in what was distinctly Iida's penmanship. He had ended his message the same way you had ended yours; with a hand-drawn heart.

"Oh my god," you whispered, paper crinkling as your grip tightened around it. You read it again. Then again. And then again. "Damnit, he's right. I do use the stormy sea metaphor a lot."

Note still clenched in your hand, you sped-walked to Iida's dorm room, heart thundering in your chest. The thought that Iida; sensible, respectful Iida would have feelings for a disaster like you was a little discombobulating to say the least, so you were determined to hear it straight from the horses mouth.

You rapped on his door, foot tapping impatiently. The few seconds it took for Iida to answer dragged on for what felt like an eternity. When he finally did open the door, a pleasantly surprised look crossed his face upon seeing you.

You held up his note. "Hi. Um, so."

Iida chuckled, cheeks reddening. He gestured you in as he stepped back to his desk, where he produced the letters you had sent. "So."

"Y-you're not messing with me, right?" you asked nervously. "'Cause if you are I'm going to kick you."

"Trust me, everything I wrote is 100% true." He smiled earnestly. "And you...?

"I think those letters are the most honest I've ever been about my feelings ever." you admitted, shifting your weight from foot to foot. A wry smile played on the edges of your lips. "I was drafting you another one, but you just had to go and find me out and ruin it."

"You can still give it to me," Iida said hopefully, palming the back of his neck with his hand, flustered.

You laughed a little, your own cheeks warming up. You twisted the hem of your shirt. "Uh, can I hug you?"

"O-of course!"

You wrapped your arms around Iida's torso, resting your head on his chest, listening to the drumming of his heart. He slowly followed suit, snaking his arms around your shoulders. He let out a contented sigh, relaxing into your touch. He was so warm. He was a cozy fire in the dark of winter, a blissful reprise from a cold and harsh world.

You pursed your lips, stifling a snicker. I've gotta write that down.

#bnha #mha #tenya #iida #tenya iida #tenya iida x reader #tenya x reader #iida x reader #mha x reader #bnha x reader

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loudest-subtext-in-tv · 4 years

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Something I know no one will ever contend with when they just want to write a hit piece about us, but...

When Moffat said on the A Scandal in Belgravia commentary, “If you watch the show carefully, there’s subtext about John’s drinking,” what did he mean? He wasn’t being flippant, he’s said one of his favorite writers is William Goldman and writers should study him because he “knows everything.” Goldman’s Ten Commandments on Writing say to “put a subtext under every text” and not to be too on the nose.

So what is the “real” subtext to why John drinks, and why does John drink when he’s alone with Sherlock and trying to get him to open up, or otherwise thinking about Sherlock? If the subtext is not about John’s relationship with Sherlock, then like... who else is in the room in those scenes, what’s going on, who is John actually thinking about, and why is it so important to the story that Moffat would include it? What storyline does the subtext of John’s drinking pertain to? It must be pretty big to not have been revealed yet, so it shouldn’t be hard to make a case for.

Similarly: When Moffat and Gatiss say that The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, a movie noteworthy for depicting Holmes as a homosexual in love with Watson, is the inspiration for their adaptation, what do people imagine they adapted from it? Because it wasn’t the characterization, they don’t much resemble the BBC Sherlock characterizations. Barely any plot points were borrowed, and minor ones at that. Why did they pick the big overtly gay adaptation for the basis of their show from a hundred straight alternatives? Why did Gatiss say the thing he liked about it was that Holmes was in love with Watson?

I mean, I know people who hate us will never actually watch it, but the movie is not subtle. The movie isn’t a bunch of gay gags, the movie makes very clear that Holmes is genuinely homosexual and in love with Watson in a deeply painful way that queer people can recognize and relate to, and the same vibe is heavy in series 3 especially. For example, the endings of TSoT and HLV are not gay gags, they are things that happened in the plot and were not presented as remotely funny.

There are two reasonable perspectives on this:

1) It is not especially weird for people who pay attention to what the writers have said about their stories to think all the gay stuff is intentional, and its not weird to have fun chasing down things the writers have taken care to talk about. That’s what fans do, they try to predict where stories are going. No one made hit pieces ridiculing Jon and Daeneyrs shippers because they recognized what the foreshadowing in Game of Thrones was saying, and they were basing it off almost nothing compared to what the showrunners of Sherlock have said and taken care to include in the plot and subtext. People write hit pieces about us because they deeply believe it’s stupid for queer people to think a gay romance could be depicted, we had the misfortune of having a sense of humor about ourselves (calling it a “conspiracy” and ourselves a “cult”), and were enthusiastic about the show and writers whose fandom we’re a part of.

2) The gay stuff is intentional, but all a big joke despite appearances to the contrary. Most of the antis even argued that the gay stuff was intentional, they just thought it was to fuck with people or be provocative. Some of them were even dreading S4, including while it was airing, because they thought we were going to be proven right and we’d be insufferable. If people who hated us worried we could be right, then how delusional could we be?

I can understand someone thinking it all being a big joke is more likely than a TV show depicting a gay romance, but it does not follow that people deserve to be an object of public ridicule because they recognized a bunch of queer allusions and painful queer life experiences that resonated with them and considered that the writers, one of whom is queer and unabashedly obsessed with the works in question, may have positive motives for including those things. It feels like punishing people for doing their due diligence of actually researching the writers’ feelings about things and their influences, rather than just piling on and calling them homophobes. I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s opinions if that’s how they feel about Moffat and Gatiss nowadays, I’m just saying it’s not some shameful thing for people to actually investigate these things and conclude differently. It’s okay to think writers are talented and clever, and their fandom should be a place where it’s okay to explore that.

What makes me most sad about this is that there is genuinely no area of life where people can just play around anymore without being hunted down. Like, politics is fucking miserable, the pandemic is miserable, I just had a friend kill himself a few months ago because of how bad life is lately, a close relative who I never thought would have suicidal ideation has it now, I have been fighting wanting to die for years, in the U.S. none of us have any idea if we’re ever getting any sort of pandemic stimulus again -- so many of us are suffering immensely right now, it should be okay to be goofy and creative in a fandom without someone deciding its their prerogative to profit off us because they think we’re weird, or whatever.

The reason there’s a lot of crazy meta analysis is because this was supposed to be a relatively safe, creative place where people can try their hand at analyzing stories without being graded or made to feel inadequate, so we treat metas a lot like fanfics where it’s not really appropriate to just rip people’s shit apart no matter how illogical it is, and we find things we like about analysis we don’t agree with in that same spirit: it’s a cool idea anyway, it’s artistically inspiring, it got close to a more compelling idea, etc. I have a big packet of fan mails where several people told me they had been scared and self-conscious to share their thoughts on things, and TJLC helped them open up and inspired them to major in literary or film-related majors. People start somewhere and it’s cruel to make fun of them because they weren’t great at something that doesn’t fucking matter.

FANDOM IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A SUPER SERIOUS SPACE. NO ONE PUTS ON A TUXEDO BEFORE THEY LOG IN TO TUMBLR. NO ONE NEEDS SOME OUTSIDER TAKING THE THINGS THEY OFFERED IN THE SPIRIT OF FUN OUT OF CONTEXT TO PRESENT TO A WIDER AUDIENCE THEY DELIBERATELY AVOID BECAUSE THAT AUDIENCE IS MEAN AND SENDS THEM DEATH THREATS AND HOMOPHOBIC AND MISOGYNISTIC SLURS AND SUICIDE ADVICE. IT IS ACTUALLY NOT AN ENORMOUS CHARACTER FAILING TO SHARE BAD ANALYSES OF A TV SHOW, AND SHOULD NOT BE A MATTER OF NATIONAL INTEREST.

But places where people can open up and try things out increasingly can’t exist anymore, because even in a low stakes environment like a fandom there are busybody ghouls who want to profit off being condescending about how people spend their leisure time. It doesn’t add anything to the world except their bank accounts.

#tjlc #Sarah Z

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irelise · 3 years

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Who is your favorite character - Alex or Yassen? And how do you feel this informs your characterization of one or both of them?

Thanks for this ask Valaks, just the type of meta I like!

I will say Yassen is my favourite hands down because I have a Type and Yassen’s character archetype hits all my guilty pleasures. Even before RR and all the delicious whump, Yassen already felt like a character with layers from what little we saw of him - a stone-cold professional but also one with a sense of humour; someone at the top of his field who also doesn’t particularly like his job or his employers and is just thinking of retirement; a hired killer who is purely, unabashedly in it for the money, no complex motives, no dithering over morals - yet he still had enough humanity to speak of love for a man fourteen years dead who had betrayed him, and have compassion and love for Alex who was thrown into the world of espionage far too young. That “I love you” at the end of Eagle Strike gets me every time ;_;

Then came RR: I really enjoy stories about agency (or lack thereof) and Yassen is a fascinating study of that, so a lot of my fic tends to place him in situations where he’s not entirely in control. Canon-wise, It’s easy to say that RR is the story of how he got whumped into being an assassin against his will and on some level that’s true - but he chose to join Malagosto; maybe at first he wanted to simply learn enough skills to survive, but by the time of his graduation assignment he was ready to kill, and it was only down to chance that he got cold feet at the last second. At the end of RR he consciously chose to become an assassin out of spite - (I have my own thoughts about how much sense that makes), but regardless, by that point I don’t think it’s fair to say that Yassen is purely a victim of circumstances with no agency of his own. By the time the main Alex Rider canon rolls around he’s done many unforgivable, irredeemable things under his own will.

...Having said that, I do still think that even as a fully-fledged Scorpia operative Yassen is still bound in a lot of ways, which is such a delightful contrast for me because of the way his lethality is emphasised. Here we’ve got Yassen, the most dangerous person in the room, capable of killing someone a hundred different ways without even needing a conventional weapon, but when we get a glimpse of his introspection in present-day Stormbreaker when faced with Alex, this is what we see:

“The two of them looked at each other, both of them trapped in different ways, on opposite sides of the glass.”

It’s tragic in a way that hits all my buttons - Yassen sacrifices all his morals, betrays his parents’ memory, turns his back on his own happiness (let’s not forget one of the last times when he felt pure happiness was when he decided not to complete his graduation assignment in New York and he felt like he won a battle against his own darker impulses) - and what does he get in return? A never-ending fight to prove himself the best at a profession he doesn’t even like, a lonely life destined for an premature ending, and all with Scorpia’s watchful, controlling eye in the background.

Oh dear god this reply is getting away from me. Um. I’ll leave the Eagle Strike meta for another day and just say that Yassen’s a character of very sharp contrasts - just look at the sheer range of his characterisations in fic and general fanon - and it’s interesting to poke at that. The aspect of his characterisation that rises to the forefront of each story can be completely different depending on his age, who he’s interacting with, the setting of the story, or even just what I’m in the mood to write. Canon-based AUs are particularly interesting for me just because there’s so much potential for the course of Yassen’s life - and the core of his personality - to shift completely if certain key events had changed; someday I still really want to write that MI6!Yassen fic...

Characterisation-wise I think I tend to focus on the contrast between how Yassen presents himself (controlled and graceful, deadly competence, dubious morals), with some sort of vulnerability below the surface, whether it’s something in the plot/setting (eg his precarious situation in Scorpia - I do adore your headcanon that he’s a tool Scorpia is slowly but surely trying to dispose of while wringing as much use out of him as they can), or an emotional weak spot (Alex).

Speaking of Alex, since this is already way too long, putting discussion of Alex below cut!

Alex, by contrast, I used to not be terribly interested in. Maybe it was because I was very young when I read the books, or maybe because of AH’s own writing which tends to focus more on the action and gadgets and plot than take time exploring the nuances in Alex’s characterisation. Compared to Yassen, Alex has several very strong key traits that tend to stay relatively constant when I write him: leans more to the serious side most of the time rather than pure unbridled chaos; smart mouth that he cannot and will not keep shut especially when some idiot is monologuing at him; independent and resourceful but somewhat impulsive; understimulated by “normal” life ever since Stormbreaker - which leads him into trouble, especially when combined with the fact that I do headcanon Alex as someone with a strong drive to do good and who refuses to turn a blind eye when there’s someone he can help or something he can make right.

Of course, since he’s fourteen, sometimes Alex’s intervention just makes things worse...

It’s only more recently thanks to the lovely writers and meta from the fandom that I started taking more of an interest in Alex - specifically, what happens as Alex gets older? I enjoy coming of age fic with Alex: those times where he suddenly realises he’s no longer a child spy, or the times he realises the moral views he held when he was fourteen are insufficient for navigating the murky world of intelligence - those situations where there’s no clear “bad guy”, or those times when strategic sacrifices need to be made...

I also very much enjoy adult Alex fics - just how does MI6 deal with an agent like Alex? Alex, who has a distrust of authority (MI6 in particular), who’s perfectly willing to disregard all mission parameters if he decides the circumstances call for it, who nevertheless is so effective that Jones makes the decision to keep using him - but will all of that backfire one day?

And what about Alex himself, working in intelligence without a patriotic bone in his body, with the black mark of Scorpia on his record? Alex who’s now an adult with adult coworkers and had hopes for finally fitting into a proper social circle again, only it turns out he still can’t connect with them and is as lonely as he was at fourteen? Alex, who keeps finding himself being compared to John and Ian Rider, the family that he had never really known yet condemned him to this life with no input from Alex himself?

Basically I think there’s bits and pieces of Alex’s characterisation I’m more interested in over others - and the main thing I find interesting about him is the circumstances he’s in: the government-sanctioned abuse and blackmail, the way he grows up a child in an adult’s world. So correspondingly my fic tends to focus on that rather than, say, light-hearted slice of life shenanigans around London or anything to do with Brooklands or family fic, although I’ll gladly read those from other writers! And since Yassen is my favourite over Alex, I think it would be rare indeed that I write an Alex-centric fic where Yassen doesn’t play a role at all.

#asks #meta #meta meta meta #alex rider #yassen gregorovich

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confusednarcissistwrites · 4 years

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okok hi so basically I’ve been working on this lil blurb but idk I think maybe you might be much much better than me for it , ur writing slapssss, but basically it’s a Daniel Middleton piece based off the song Lost by frank ocean where the reader is part of their dealing ring and is in love w danny and gets too wrapped up in the business but danny is too busy with his crush on mckayla to notice ? Idk I know it’s super specific but just a thought I had

OKAY SO

I took a LOT of liberties with this request, but I did it for a reason. PLEASE WRITE THIS FIC. I guarantee that no one else could write it better than you, okay? Also, I’m SO sorry this took me ages to finish and apologies to all my other requests as well. I’m really going to try and get more work out to you guys in the next few weeks.

Alright, without further ado, I hope you enjoy this raunchy ass fic lmao

Third Wheel (D.M.)

(smut, angst, blood, violence, cheating, cursing)

The Bonnie and Clyde of Cape Cod.

You and Hunter Strawberry had been together for as long as anyone could remember. Even in elementary school, you two had reigned over your peers with an iron fist; no one fucked with either of you in fear of pissing off the other. As you both got older, your relationship progressed from a platonic partnership to a romantic one. This often entailed hot and heavy sightings at the drive-in, and mangled noses on faces of guys who decided to look at you just a little bit too long.

You had been happy. He was your constant. You both had an undying loyalty to each other as business partners and lovers.

But then came Danny Middleton.

Danny was a scrawny boy from nowhere who didn’t belong anywhere. Perhaps it was fate that he would meet Hunter that hideously hot day in 1991 in that little convenience store. People didn’t notice Danny until he started running around with Hunter.

You were hesitant, bitter even that Hunter let someone else on the team without talking to you first. You were more of a distributor than a seller, but you had thought you were more involved than to be excluded. The more you heard about Danny, the less Hunter asked you to make drop-offs. You felt you were getting wedged out.

The first time you met Danny was a whirlwind. He’d claimed a cousin of his had a hookup across town, but the rendezvous went south quickly. You vividly remember stepping in between the two, your fist meeting the side of the guy’s jaw with a sickening crack. He didn’t do much to fight back as he was pretty doped up, but you weren’t about to take any risks when he pulled a gun from his belt. Danny sat cornered and slack-jawed as he watched you wail on the man he’d been threatened by just moments before. Once you got him onto the ground, you knocked the pistol from his hand and straddled his middle, slamming the butt across his face. Adrenaline blurred your vision as blood splattered, your relentless attack not stopping until he quit moving. You lifted yourself up, meeting Danny’s terrified gaze for a brief moment before walking out of the house, him tailing behind you.

Hunter was furious when you both got back into the car. “What the fuck happened?” You were both visibly bloodied.

“I took care of it. Let’s go,” you replied calmly, handing him the piece. Hunter looked up at you and then at Danny in the back seat, handing him the gun wordlessly before speeding back to the garage.

When you got back, you sat up on the counter, your head back against the cupboards. Hunter dabbed at your swollen knuckles with a soapy cloth. “You okay, doll?” he asked quietly, looking up at you through his blonde lashes.

“Mhm,” you nodded, watching as he bandaged you up. He pressed a kiss to your cheek before helping you down and walking with you to the seating area where Danny was sat, his head in his hands still lost in thought. Hunter sat down on the sofa and you laid down with your head in his lap.

“You will never pull anything like that again. You hear me?” Hunter’s voice was calm and chilling. “Do you understand me?”

Danny nodded, standing up. “We’ll find another way.”

“Are you even fucking listening to me? I just said no-“

“No, look, you’re upset, I get it. But we’ll find a way to work this out if you just let me-“

“Drop it, Middleton. Go home.”

You pinched the bridge of your nose, willing the pounding in your skull to ease. You listen as Danny walked out of the shop, the bell chiming above the door as he left.

“He’s reckless,” you mumbled, opening your eyes to look up at Hunter.

He just nodded, his fingers brushing over your collarbone as he stared into space in thought.

You didn’t like it. Nothing would change your mind. The business was for you and Hunter, and that was it. Danny was only trouble. And Hunter probably would have agreed with you if the next few days had played out differently.

••••••

In the course of a week, the group was making quadruple what you were before. Contacts were made, deliveries were driven, and money was counted in a circle every night, going three ways. It was the kind of summer we watched in movies, and now you were living the dream. The three of you spent evenings together getting high surrounded by cash; it was unreal. You all grew quite close through inebriated conversations about life and the world. You felt you could rely on either of them for anything you needed at any time.

It was because of this you didn’t speak up despite your growing insecurity in this situation. You’d felt Hunter rarely had time for you anymore, as though you were becoming a third wheel to him and Danny despite your relationship. But who were you to allow your insecurities to get in the way of the biggest break he’d had in his life? So you stayed quiet. Perhaps that was why the resentment building in you grew so poisonous.

You and Danny often jabbed at each other, usually scuffling over little bullshit that didn’t really matter. Hunter acted as a mediator when things got too heated, much to your irritation. He rarely defended you, sometimes even siding with Danny when he was feeling ballsy. You could feel the problems piling up. The rift between you and your boyfriend growing wider, and you couldn’t help but to notice that everything had been fine between you until little Middleton had shown up.

••••••

It was an especially hot August day when everything went to shit. It seemed everyone in town was a bit more irritable when the sun was beating down incessantly, an unbeatable oppressor. You could feel sweat against the small of your back, even as the wind whipped through your hair as Hunter drove across town with the top down. Danny was sprawled out in the backseat, his feet hanging over the rear passenger door. It irritated you to see him take up so much space like he owned the place. Granted, pretty much everything he did irritated you.

You arrived back at the shop, this week’s product in hand. You placed the duffle down on the coffee table, Hunter unzipping it and reaching in to retrieve an order he had to run. “I’ll be back in an hour. Try not to kill each other,” he called, hiding the weed in his bag and heading back out to the car. This wasn’t unusual, but Danny usually left right away, either running his own deliveries or just getting away from you. But today he lingered.

“Y/N, can I talk to you about something?” He sat on the arm of the couch while you fixed a pot of coffee, your back to him.

“Uh, sure?” you replied, not turning to face him. Despite knowing practically everything about each other, he rarely made conversation with you.

Danny looked down at his hands, fumbling with his fingers for a beat before speaking. “Well, you see, I just- I have this thing for this girl. And- well, not just any girl. She’s kinda just-“

“Spit it out, Middleton,” you sang, quickly losing patience with his childish ramblings. Was he seriously coming to you for girl advice of all things?

“Fuck,” he sighed frustratedly. “It McKayla. I’ve been.. talking to her, more or less, for awhile now and-“

He’s interrupted by your laugher. You finally turned around, hands behind you against the counter as you shook your head at him. “McKayla? As in McKayla Strawberry? Are you kidding?”

He gives you a look of offense, his brow drawing together. “Yes, that McKayla. Why else would I be talking to YOU about this?”

You shook your head, pinching your brow. “You’ve done a lot of stupid shit, but this really takes the cake.”

“Listen, I just-“

“After all Hunter has done for you? You’re really going to throw that all away for some girl?”

“She’s not ‘some girl,’ okay? I really like her!” Danny insisted, standing up off of the couch defensively.

“You’re right; she’s your so-called best friend’s sister! I know for a fact he’s told you to stay away from her. But you can’t keep in your pants can you?” You were angry. After all the time you’d spent being loyal to Hunter, he was ignoring you for this kid who wouldn’t even respect him enough to stay away from his little sister.

“This isn’t even about McKayla is it?” Danny jabbed, stepping closer as he threw his hands up. “You’re just jealous I’m into someone and not following you around like a puppy like everyone else, huh? Is that why you’re so shitty to me all the time? Are you into me?”

You snapped, your white-hot temper taking control. Without hesitation, you stepped up into his face, your hands clenched right at your sides. His eyes widened, reflexively stepping back, but you follow. “Shut the fuck up. You have no idea what you’re doing,” you growled, poking him in the chest.

“Just admit you want my attention, Y/N.”

The resonance of your hand colliding with his cheek travelled through the room before you even could think. His back was against the wall, his eyes round, jaw hanging slack, and his hand on his cheek. You both stood and stared at each other for a moment, the sound of the slap still resonating in your ears along with your pumping blood as you waited for him to move. He knew this and unabashedly glanced down at your lips.

You reached out, wrapping your fingers around his throat. You’re not sure why you do it, but you were unable to resist; you needed to put Danny Middleton back in his place. What you didn’t expect was the full-fledge moan that left his parted lips. It startled you for a moment before going right to your head, power-lust settling into your veins as thick as syrup. You smirked, pressing a bit harder to watch the way the scrawny boy’s eyes fluttered and his jaw clenched. He opened his mouth to speak, but you weren’t having any of it.

You crashed your lips into his. Despite knowing there was no turning back from this, you couldn’t find it in yourself to care. ‘Take that, Strawberry.’ Danny’s hands flew up to grip your hips, your kiss all tongue and teeth. It was ravenous, angry, and made you ache between your legs in a way Hunter never had, in a way that came from you knowing you were in control.

“Y/N.. what about.. Hunter?” Danny managed between kisses. He was sweating bullets, but the tent in his jeans told you he had no intention of making you stop.

You pull back half an inch, your grip returning around his throat. “I don’t want to hear anything out of that fucking mouth other than ‘yes’ and ‘no’, am I understood.

He listened to you with doe eyes, pupils blown out. “Yes, Miss.”

You smirked, leaning in and catching his bottom lip between your teeth and gave it a tug. “Good boy,” you praised.

He practically went limp at your words, another whimper escaping him. You both moved in a blur back to the couch, stripping clothes off with each stumbling step. You felt drunk without a drop of liquor in your system. Tomorrow would bring hell, and you knew it, but you didn’t care. All that mattered was then and there and making a statement.

You fell heavily into his lap, both of you clad in just your undergarments. Danny’s length prodded insistently at your thigh, and you remember recognizing that he was a lot bigger than you had anticipated. His hands gripped your waist while you ground your hips against his, kissing him ferociously. You listen intently as soft moans are pulled from his throat.

“What is it, Danny Boy? Never touched a girl before?” Your words were snide, full of contempt despite the ache that was building in you for more. His eyes fluttered, rolling back into his head in response.

You just smirked, shifting down to yank his boxers down. “Well, well, well. Looks like this is where you get all your nerve, huh?” His erection stood rigid and leaking against his navel, visibly aching to be touched. Danny bit down on his tongue, his hands tugging at his hair as he fought to keep quiet. It was bad. It was so so bad, but he knew there was no stopping you; not that he had the willpower to make you stop anyway.

“I asked you a question.”

“Y-Yes, Miss.”

You made quick work of your bra and panties, feeling his eyes on you the whole time. When you finally looked back, you were greeted by this desperate, open-mouthed, horny expression taking over his face. Feeling a surge of power run through you, you placed yourself in his lap. Danny let out a soft cry and his hands flew to your hips as you rocked your hips, sliding his length between your slick folds. It was then you came back to yourself, realizing what exactly you were about to do. It took weeks for you to realize it, but you knew your life had slipped out of your hands. Never again.

Raising your hips, you slid him inside of you. You cursed softly as the very welcome stretch made you see stars. “Fuck, good boy,” you praised.

Danny was a fucking wreck. He was gasping for air, hands gripping your hips in fear of moving anywhere else, but needing to touch you. Your praises turned him on in a way he didn’t know about before. He was reduced to a trembling mess, and you loved every second of it. If someone had held a gun to his head asked him about Hunter right then, he wouldn’t have even recognized his name.

You closed your eyes and began to rock your body, focusing on the feeling of him inside of you. He was forbidden fruit: a new sensation you’d thought you’d never experience. Little did you know how much was out there for you outside of Hunter. Your palms laid splayed out against his chest as you found your rhythm, both of you cursing like sailors.

Eventually, Danny built the courage to shift his hips, beginning to meet your thrusts with his own. You cried out, feeling him brush against your most sensitive places. “Danny, fuck, that feels so good,” you whined, hair falling around your face and swaying in time with your shared movements.

“Y/N..” Danny groaned, an edge of warning to his voice. His hands now roamed over your middle, thumbs brushing against the undersides of your breasts.

“Are you gonna cum? You gonna cum in your partner’s girl?” you taunted him cruelly.

Danny gasped, letting out a higher moan. “F-fuck, yes. I’m gonna cum,” he warned.

You reached between your bodies, rubbing quick circles against your clit. Whimpers of your own increased, the sound of skin slapping skin filling the small room.

That was when Hunter walked back through the door.

#timothee chalamet imagine #timothee chalamet x reader #timothee chalamet fluff #timothee chalamet smut #timothée chalamet request #timothée chalamet x reader #timothée chalamet smut #timothée chalamet blurb #timothée chalamet imagine #timothée chamalet #danny middleton x reader #danny middleton imagine #danny middleton smut #hot summer nights imagine #hot summer nights #confusednarcissistwrites

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palimpsessed · 4 years

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So @captain-aralias did one of these and invited other writers to do the same. And I wasn't really going to because it feels a bit late now and also I've done quite a few other year in review posts for 2020. But then I got to thinking that it would be really nice to have one of these for each year to look back on and compare, which convinced me. So, here we go!

If you’re a writer, I’d also encourage you to steal this. Tag me on your post so I can see your thoughts! 🥰

List of Complete Fics for 2020 1. At the Top of a Tower, With You- General, 900 words 2. Use Your Words- Teen, 16k 3. A Man of Letters, or Five Times Baz Retreats and the One Time He Doesn’t- Teen, 54k 4. To the Manor Borne- Teen, 43k

Total: 4 fics, 113k words

Every one of these fics was written for an event, which, realistically, is the only reason they got finished. I have so many ideas I'm working on all at once, and I came into fandom with a focus on making art, so to actually find the motivation to sit down and write/finish/post a fic was entirely deadline based. And it's a technique I'm sure I will also employ in 2021.

Best/Worst Title?

Well, I've mentioned a few times before that I usually have a title before I have much in the way of a fic concept. I don't really dislike any of the my titles, because they all did exactly what I needed them to do, which was help me focus on what I wanted to accomplish in the fic. Comparatively speaking, though, I can answer this.

Best: Use Your Words - succinct, idiomatic, a book quote/motif that also has the potential to be a spell, does what it says on the tin, is probably what all of us are constantly yelling at Baz and Simon to do throughout the books and the fic itself

(Honorable mention to A Man of Letters because that title forms a perfect heart shape when viewed on mobile on AO3. ❤️)

Worst: At the Top of a Tower, With You - this is also a quote and it fits the fic perfectly, but it is a bit of a mouthful and it has a comma in the middle of it, which, while I love commas, feels a bit off-putting in terms of a title - also, it's always kind of bothered me that it's a Baz WS quote used for a CO-era Lucy POV

Best/worst summary?

Again, I don't really dislike any of my summaries.

Best:

To the Manor Borne: The gang decides to spend Christmas together at Pitch Manor. Romance, hijinks, and holiday cheer ensue.

Anything that lets me use the word hijinks is always good! - it's short and sweet - it does a fair job of setting up the premise for the fic and giving highlights, without giving anything away

Worst: A Man of Letters

I'm not going to include this one because it's so long, I had to cut down the version I posted on tumblr to fit in the AO3 field, which is really why I rank it below my others - it effectively sets up the world of Simon and Baz in Regency England prior to where the story starts, but it is prohibitively long - and it's set up, not summary, so it also loses points for not doing what it purports to do - I could have said exactly what this fic was in one sentence: "Simon and Baz meet at several Regency-appropriate venues over the course of a London season and reflect on their acquaintance in letters", but instead I did the full book jacket version because it was more interesting to me.

Best/Worst First Line?

Oh, this is interesting. I can honestly say that I have no idea where this will go. Going to pull up my docs and find out! Okay, since I only have four fics to consider, and I'm feeling split, I'm going to do two for each. I feel good about my words, but I will say that half of my first lines actually provide information, and the other half are incomplete thoughts. Those were stylistic decisions I made, but when taken alone, it does somewhat limit the effectivness of a sentence when it can't stand without the rest of the paragraph. Perhaps that decision will lure readers in for more?

Best:

In the end, we wind up at Pitch Manor. (To the Manor Borne)

I know that you won't be surprised when I tell you that I do not like writing letters. (A Man of Letters)

Kind of interesting that these both contain key words from the titles 🤔

Worst:

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to do this. (Use Your Words)

I love how the title seems to be answering Baz's question when the two are put together like this 😂

Strange that it should end here, where it all started. (At the Top of a Tower, With You)

The title also seems to complete the first line in this one, too. I'm learning about my writing as this goes on, so that's cool!

Best/Worst Last Line?

Hmm. Okay, again, no idea. Also, a little leery of including last lines for anyone who hasn't read the fics they're from yet. (Tho I guess it's unlikely those people would be reading this😆) But let's see what we've got.

Use Your Words and A Man of Letters have very similar final lines, and both are somewhat spoilery.

Best: The ending of A Man of Letters felt risky to me, in the way that it is formatted and changes tone from the rest of the story. It was something that happened as I wrote it and I loved it. I had no idea if readers would like it, if they would feel like it worked as an ending, but I felt strongly enough about it to let the entire fic hinge on that and I think it really paid off. So, without giving you the actual last line, which is only one word, I'm going to say that one is my best ending.

Worst:

To the Manor Borne: "Carry on, Simon."

It's not bad, it's just not mine.

Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, fewer than you thought, or about what you predicted?

I did not set out to write any fics in 2020. I was supposed to be taking a break from writing. I've been an aspiring novelist for half my life now, and have been going through major ups and downs with my writing. I decided I needed to re-evaluate and figure out if writing was something that was even going to be able to make me happy anymore. The answer is: YES! Just…not original fiction. At the moment. I'm happiest when I can write for the sake of writing and not have to DO something with that writing. Which is why discovering fan fiction was AMAZING!!!! 🥰🥰🥰

To actually answer the question, yes, I wrote more than I thought I would. I also wrote exactly as much as I thought I would, simply because these were all things I signed up for (with the exception of my Countdown fic, but I committed to it as if it were something that required a sign up).

I have a lot more ideas for 2021, but I don't know how many of them will come to fruition. I'm not putting pressure on myself to have to do anything beyond what I sign up for again, because it did work out so well for me starting off.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?

I mean, the pairing and the fandom were in no way a surprise. 😆 They're my only ones, so those were both a given. The genre is also not surprising.

What's your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest?

A Man of Letters, without any hesitation. I adore it so much. It's the kind of fic I know I will unabashedly sit down to read over and over, even if I'm the one who wrote it. I had one reader to please and it was ME. By far, my most self-indulgent fic.

Okay, NOW your most popular story?

That depends on the metric.

To the Manor Borne leads in Comments (107), Kudos (153), and Hits (1992), and Use Your Words leads in Bookmarks (26).

But since To the Manor Borne is top in 3 out of 4 metrics, I'll say that one.

Story most upderappreciated by the universe?

I mean, the least popular by a wide margin is At the Top of a Tower, With You, but I don't know if I'd call it underappreciated. It's short, it's angsty, it's got a very unusual style, it's Lucy POV, it's the first fic I wrote and posted. I didn't really go into it with high performance expectations. I'm proud of it, I just didn't expect it to be popular. It would be nice if more people read it, but I'm not broken up over it.

Story that could have been better?

I'm not even going to touch this one. Everything can always be improved upon, but if I go down that route, nothing will ever be done. This is one of the things I have come to appreciate about traditional art versus digital. With traditional, there is only so much you can do before something is permanent and you have to live with it. It's an exercise in letting go and acceptance. Digital is flashier and more flexible, but I could (and have) spend months on a single piece and never feel satisfied, never stop tweaking. I think that's also the reason I started to hate my novels.

Sexiest story?

Based purely on overall vibes, I find the understated tension of the Regency the most appealing, so I'm going to say A Man of Letters. I didn't actually stray into sex territory in any of my fics (though Simon and Baz have had sex by the time To the Manor Borne starts, and refer to it, and probably do it "offscreen"), but A Man of Letters is the one that feels sexiest to me. Lots of thirsting!Baz and feral!Simon and sensual hand touching (how risqué!) - and YEARNING. That, to me, is the sexiest vibe of all. So. Much. Yearning.

Saddest story?

At the Top of a Tower, With You - for this one, I tagged "angst without plot" and I stand by that. It's Lucy losing her connection to Simon at the end of CO and trying to find a way to reconcile herself to leaving him alone again. I gave it as much of a hopeful bent as I could, with the refrain of Baz's spoken "love" to cling to, but it's very sad.

Most fun?

To the Manor Borne - All of my fics have their fair share of angst, but this one also has some good, silly, holiday fluff thrown in. Since I wrote it for the Countdown, each chapter was based on a different prompt, which led to this one going in all sorts of directions no single fic probably ever should. Plus, it has the most Shepard, and Shepard always makes things more fun.

Story with the single sweetest moment?

Oh my god. I don't know. No, never mind. I do. It's To the Manor Borne, but it's split between the two gift giving scenes, the Constellations and Secret Santa/Gift Giving prompts. These were private moments between Simon and Baz, sharing themselves with each other, being vulnerable, and communicating. It's the gifts they give each other, yes, but it's more so the reasons they chose those gifts, and how they show part of themselves and share their love for each other, through those gifts, that had me in tears writing those two scenes. I'm super proud of them.

Hardest story to write?

Use Your Words - it was written for an exchange and that made it really hard to write it knowing there was this pressure of making my gift-ee happy with the fic. I'm proud of it, and they really liked it, but the anxiety was too much for me.

Easiest/most fun story to write?

A Man of Letters - if there is a fic better suited to me as a writer, I haven't met it. I started writing after reading Pride and Prejudice in high school, so I started out writing Regency and I spent years and years and years of my life obsessed. When I transferred into college, an administrator I had never met before heard my name during orientation and said, "Oh, you're the Austen scholar." (It is a small, private college, and I was a transfer, so the pool of students was even smaller. But still. Many years later, I'm clearly not over it.) I also did my senior thesis on an epistolary novel (Frances Burney’s Evelina), and my English Lit emphasis was for that time period. So, I felt like I had been preparing for this fic my entire adult life. 😂

Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?

I don't think so. I tend to let my writing be dictated by the characters, so I'm always following their lead. Sometimes they'll do or say something that surprises me and takes me down a route I didn't necessarily foresee, but I don't think there was ever a point where one of them did something that made me rethink who they are as a character.

Most overdue story?

I will say A Man of Letters, since that one felt like a culmination of my seventeen-year-old self's wildest writing dreams. But I should probably say the Scooby Doo AU I still haven't managed to finish, because that one has been a WIP since I joined the fandom. Oops. (I'm hoping when I look over this in a year, I can feel smug that it's finally done.)

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Writing at all was a risk for me! And writing fan fic for the very first time! Writing an entire fic told only through letters. And then ending it in a completely different style from the rest of the fic. Doing a multi-chaptered fic for the Countdown, using a different prompt for each chapter, and publishing a chapter every single day for thirty days (with the exception of two days that had art). Signing up for fandom events in the first place!

What I learned from taking risks in my writing is the same thing I learned when I took risks in my art this year. I have a much better appreciation for what I've done when I push myself, I feel better about the end product, and I like it longer. I think it's really good for me to challenge myself creatively.

This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most?

Oh boy. Um. Therapy! Both Use Your Words and To the Manor Borne had their big HEA moments built around sending Simon and Baz to therapy. I don't think that's likely to change for future fics, either. I feel like therapy as the theme for 2020 seems very fitting. (Also, I think I keep sending the boys to therapy because I'm trying to get myself there…)

What are your fic writing goals for next year?

Just to write what I want to write, have fun, not put any pressure on myself, and to take risks in my writing and my art because it will help me to grow.

#fan fic year in review #my fic #at the top of a tower with you #use your words #a man of letters #to the manor borne

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Tumblr’s Top Fandoms of 2020

https://ift.tt/37LLRPI

It’s been a weird and often devastating year, and our social media has reflected that. Tumblr has just released its top fandoms of 2020 and it’s fascinating to see how a year of pandemic and quarantine has affected transformative fandom and broader cultural trends. In a year when almost everyone spent a lot more time at home, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the most blogged about topic on the social media platform, followed by animated dramedy Steven Universe, Belgian SKAM adaptation WtFOCK, K-pop supergroup BTS, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. We talked to Tumblr’s Trend Expert Amanda Brennan about how she interpreted the biggest trends of the year, how this was a big year for animation and international media, and why 2020 was the year everyone stopped worrying about what was cool and just embraced what they love. But, first, some 2020 Tumblr statistics:

Top 20 of 2020

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Steven Universe

wtFOCK

BTS

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Artists on Tumblr

Critical Role

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Boku No Hero Academia

Black Lives Matter

Pokémon

COVID-19

The Witcher

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

The Magnus Archives

Reylo Rey & Kylo Ren, the Star Wars universe

RWBY

Sanders Sides

Catradora Catra & Adora, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Zuko | Avatar: The Last Airbender

Top 25 Ships

Rey & Kylo Ren, the Star Wars universe (m/f)

Catra & Adora, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (f/f)

Richie Tozier & Eddie Kaspbrak, It (m/m)

Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier, The Witcher (m/m)

Aziraphale & Crowley, Good Omens (m/m)

Zuko & Sokka, Avatar: The Last Airbender (m/m)

Luz Noceda & Amity Blight, The Owl House (f/f)

Kara Danvers & Lena Luthor, Supergirl (f/f)

Park Jimin & Jeon Jungkook, BTS (m/m)

Dean Winchester & Castiel, Supernatural (m/m)

Live Action TV

Wtfock

The Witcher

The Mandalorian

Good Omens

Skam France

The Umbrella Academy

Doctor Who

Supernatural

The Untamed

Killing Eve

Animated TV

Steven Universe

Avatar: The Last Airbender

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir

The Owl House

Invader Zim

Ducktales

The Dragon Prince

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Gravity Falls

TV Characters

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Zuko

Catra

Jaskier

Sokka

Adora | She-Ra

Geralt Of Rivia

Katara

Aang

Crowley

Aziraphale

Movies

Frozen

The Old Guard

Star Wars: Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker

Birds Of Prey

Twilight

Hamilton

Little Women

Parasite

Sonic Movie

Lord of the Rings

Movie Characters

Kylo Ren

Harley Quinn

Bucky Barnes

Batman

Steve Rogers

Tony Stark

Rey

Spinel

Peter Parker

Richie Tozier

Actors

Chris Evans

Henry Cavill

Sebastian Stan

Adam Driver

Tom Holland

Pedro Pascal

John Boyega

Robert Pattinson

Tom Hiddleston

Timothee Chalamet

Actresses

Katie Mcgrath

Jodie Comer

Daisy Ridley

Margot Robbie

Zendaya

Lili Reinhart

Naya Rivera

Brie Larson

Florence Pugh

Jodie Whittaker

Books

Harry Potter

Percy Jackson & the Olympians

Warrior Cats

The All for the Game series

Pride And Prejudice

Midnight Sun

The Secret History

The Raven Cycle series

Carry On

Six Of Crows

Authors of Books

J.K. Rowling

Rick Riordan

Erin Hunter

Nora Sakavic

Jane Austen

Stephenie Meyer

Donna Tartt

Maggie Stiefvater

Rainbow Rowell

Leigh Bardugo

Video Games

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Among Us

Pokemon Sword And Shield

Undertale

Minecraft

Sims 4

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Danganronpa

Overwatch

Persona 5

Video Games Characters

Obey Me Lucifer

Obey Me Mammon

Tom Nook

Link

Sans

Cloud Strife

Dandelion

Kirby

Raihan

Arthur Morgan

Animal Crossing Villagers

Raymond

Marshal

Poppy

Fauna

Julian

Claude

Marina

Stitches

Bob

Ankha

Anime & Manga

Boku no Hero Academia

Haikyuu!!

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

Beastars

Naruto

Mo Dao Zu Shi

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

One Piece

Fruits Basket

19 Days

Anime & Manga Characters

Midoriya Izuku

Bakugou Katsuki

Dabi

Wei Wuxian

Aizawa Shouta

Hawks

Todoroki Shouto

Kirishima Eijirou

Lan Wangji

Levi Ackerman

And, now, our chat with Brennan. (This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.)

Den of Geek: I’ve heard you refer to the users as the Tumblr hive-mind or the orchid, whatever it is. I was just hoping you could generally talk about what the Tumblr hive-mind is to you? Which is the way of saying, who uses Tumblr generally? And how and why? If you can even extrapolate those things. Go!

Amanda Brennan: Most of our audiences is Gen Z; it’s at 48%. Our new user registration with Gen Z is even higher; I’m pretty sure it’s 60%. These are people who come to Tumblr because they love something so much they just want to share that love with people who love it as much as they do. I know that feels like a giant umbrella, but that’s the thing: Tumblr is what you make of it. If you love sports, sports Tumblr is intense hockey Tumblr, so good. If you love TV, you’ll have all of that. K-pop Tumblr, totally amazing. Furby Tumblr is off the hook and they make these incredible creations. I’ve recently gotten into Stained Glass Tumblr.

There’s layers upon layers. No matter what you love, there’s something on Tumblr for you. That’s both the easiest thing and the hardest thing about it. You have to go in being like, “Alright, I’m so into this thing, what does Tumblr have for me?” It’s not like the other social media networks, right? It’s really about what you love rather than who you know.

Yeah, I like that. I did want to ask you specifically about the process of how you track trends and how you make decisions about what to track?

We built the whole taxonomy that powers fandom metrics based on what Tumblr talks about. I’m a librarian, as you know, and I kind of reverse engineered it. My first year in review at Tumblr in 2013, they handed me a spreadsheet and they’re like, ‘OK, go to town.” So I was like, “Cool, let me pull out the threads that I see.” We really let the data tell us how to analyze it, if that makes sense. So when it comes to what we track, I have a running notebook that I’ve kept all year of the things that I’ve wanted to have in year in review.

The Witcher has been on my list since it came out. Animal Crossing has been another one. The Old Guard had a huge moment. I was just writing notes, like, “Oh, what is this thing? And we’ll keep an eye on it.” I have an amazing team. We all are into our own pieces of Tumblr. So we’ll all work together to just keep an eye on different fandoms. I don’t know if you know about Minecraft YouTuber fandom?

Yeah. I was actually listening to the latest Fansplaining last night and they mentioned it in that. I was just like, “OK, a new thing.” There’s always a new thing to learn about.

There’s always a new thing. That’s the beauty of Tumblr. It’s so fluid in fandom. You can go from one fandom to another and then you’ll see like, “Ooh, what is this thing?” I’ve got Supernatural on the brain, as who in the fandom doesn’t right now. [This interview was recorded on the day of the Supernatual series finale.] I was telling someone, the whole reason I got into Supernatural was because I saw a gif from the show on Tumblr and I was like, “What is happening? Let me go back and watch this entire series.” That’s the vibe of Tumblr, right? You see a thing and you’re like, “Oh, I need to know everything about that.”

Supernatural Series Finale: Why Dean’s Fate Works

By Juliette Harrisson

Supernatural: The Internet’s Best Reactions to the Series Finale

By Kayti Burt

Hmm. Yeah, for sure. I was interested in talking to you or getting your insight into how trends you saw or data you saw that were maybe tied to the very unique experience of being in the middle of a pandemic.

Yeah. I was looking back at the predictions that I had made last year and like four of those things didn’t even come out. It was just so unexpected. There’s two things that we really saw tied to the pandemic. The first was “cottagecore” as an aesthetic. It kind of touched everything because it’s soothing, it feels comfortable. In March and April in the early days, when you didn’t know what to do, you’re stuck in a forest isolation. Cottagecore has got this vibe of chosen isolation. It was very fantasy-driven and something to reach out for.

That evolved also into nostalgia. I think this year’s really big theme is nostalgia and comfort. We saw huge returns to fandoms like Twilight and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Avatar going on Netflix was such a world-breaking moment. Not only did it introduce a new, younger fandom to the show, there’s a lot of Avatar content once you get into it, but it brought people back to a younger time in their lives. Remembering and rewatching. The Avatar fandom, as you see, it’s all over all of the lists. Zuko is number 20 on all of the things on Tumblr this year. Avatar was able to redefine people’s year. Because you know what, we’re all at home, I’m going to binge Avatar. Reignite my love for this fandom.

A lot of TV too, because TV is episodic, you get lost in it. Movies had a really rough year. When we look at the movies, movies like Megamind were trending this year. That comfort movie that you go back and watch 17 times.

Yeah. I was curious about that too. The balance or proportions between older fandoms and newer fandoms, like the Avatar example. I was curious how much that changed this year? How much you thought it was tied to the pandemic? How much is tied to accessibility and things, like Avatar coming to Netflix? Do you think that is an interest in older fandoms? Or that it’s going to continue past the pandemic?

Yeah. I think another high-level theme of this year is the rejection of cringe culture. I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but I’ll tie it all back in. I think people are realizing what their values are and not being afraid to admit that they like a thing. Not caring what other people think of the things they like. Unabashedly loving the things they love. That’s why I think we do see a resurgence in these older fandoms.

Because people who may have loved them their whole lives, or may have been nervous to share that they liked it when they were younger they’re not afraid anymore. They’re like, “You know what? Twilight, it’s not that great, but I love it. This is my emotional support vampire.” Recognizing that you can be critical of something. You can see where its flaws are, but you can still love it. That duality of fandom is something that is going to persist into next year. That freedom to just like a thing, because you like it. Be able to see its flaws, but still be like, “You know what? Overall, this brings me joy and the world is melting down.”

I’m on board with that mission, that plan for 2021. I did want to ask about the role of non-English language media, especially live action stuff. Generally because I was someone who fell into The Untamed this year, but I saw that there were two SKAM remakes as well that are on the top 10. In general, have you seen over your time at Tumblr, and maybe especially in the past few years, an increase in non-English language content? Do you think that is mostly English speakers and Americans being more open to that or being able to find it easier? Or do you think it’s also an influx of people from outside the United States coming to Tumblr? Or both?

Interesting. The data that we work with is actually stripped of all user information. I don’t really have an insight into where these people are coming from. I do think that users in general are more open to content in any language. Tumblr is more interested in characters than where the story comes from. Thinking about The Untamed, it’s just such a compelling story, it doesn’t matter if you have to read subtitles.

To parallel it to something in major pop culture, Parasite. People are becoming more open to just watching content because it’s good. SKAM is really fascinating to me because the number one live action show is wtFOCK. Then, I think two years ago, 2018, the original SKAM was number one at some point. This show really transcends language barriers. It transcends geographical barriers. At the core, the story of the teenagers is just so relatable to anyone. We’ve seen lots of translation happening and not just into English. Translation of SKAM into other languages, just because people want more of these characters and their iterations, no matter what locale they’re based in. I’m waiting for some professor to have a class on it, because it’s so fascinating to me.

I also wanted to ask about how you thought the election cycle affected Tumblr this year, if there were any trends or data that you were like, “Yes, of course this is what people were doing on Tumblr this year.”

Tumblr has always had this backbone of social justice. This year, it came out stronger and in more force. No matter what fandom you were in or interests, everyone I know on Tumblr was participating in sharing social justice stuff. Even politics, if they weren’t from the US, those kinds of memes that were like, “I feel for you”. The way that fandoms do. I see your show is ending and I’m sorry.

The one thing that Tumblr really had leading up to the election was such an appreciation for the postal service. Especially Gen Z, their world is so much larger due to digital connection. Mail order, just as well as sending letters and keeping in touch with your digital friends is just as important as keeping in touch with your IRL friends. All of the artists on Tumblr, so many of them turn to mail order to replace cons. This is their livelihood. By the time the fall hit and the postal service was having all these issues, people are ready to jump in. There were the Transformers dressed like mail people.

https://morethanmeetstheass.tumblr.com/post/626466946047705088/i-completely-forgot-to-post-this-guy-here-this-is

There were all these comments like “support your postal workers,” “support the USPS.” It really boils down to the fact that we are all connected and the mail service is something in the US that connects everyone. Even overseas. Supporting these artists whose livelihood went from IRL to online and having to deal with all of this.

And the “Super Putin Election.” The confluence of those elements. I was just surfing on my personal computer and I was on Tumblr and I saw a post being like “Destiel’s canon.” I’m like, “Excuse me?” I immediately texted my team. I was like, “Open up your work computers, let’s go.”

It’s time.

We all signed on trying to figure out what’s going on and watching the numbers. That, to me, is thrilling. I said this to someone else, but it felt like the night of The Dress. To have that moment where everyone on the internet is feeling the energy. The things that kept getting layered on top of it. Putin and Sherlock and all the anime mysteries. It was breakneck speed, and it was really thrilling just to be in that moment, and so Tumblr.

I did want to ask you about an increase in animated fandom and potentially anime fandom. A lot of these things I’m anecdotally or just observing things in my own little corner of the internet. It just seems like animation and anime, probably at least partially because Netflix has accumulated a much larger anime collection and seems to be investing in these sorts of things. Have you seen that increase? Could you talk about it, if so?

It plays into what we were talking about earlier, twofold. That nostalgia vibe, the late nineties anime vibe, that art style. Also your comfort zone and being open to more stuff just because it’s good. Not worrying about reading subtitles and stuff like that. But anime in general had a huge year. Haikyū!! ending also transposed into other fandoms because that moment of the final panels, it brings people together. People being so excited to see this massive thing come to a close. You might not be familiar with Haikyū!! in general, but you’ll see the fanart and be like, “Oh, I feel that.” It’s the emotion of it.

The popularity of Avatar did also open people’s doors to like, “Oh, well, what else can I watch? What else do I want to learn about”? Boku No Hero was consistently on our Week In Review every week. BEASTARS is another Netflix anime that’s at the top. Then Mo Dao Zu Shi, thinking about The Untamed, the story of Mo Dao Zu Shi is so fascinating. I don’t think I can name another piece of content that has that storyline. People are just ready to take it all on.

I did want to ask you, I think you’ve probably talked about some of these already, but what were some of the biggest fandom moments for you on Tumblr this year?

Oh boy. So many things going canon. Catradora was a huge, huge moment. I cried watching that. The Witcher, Jaskier, introducing this whole new world to Henry Cavill. I saw a post yesterday that was like once Superman was goth, a lot more people realize that he’s hot. Repurposing and looking at things in a new way. Among Us, so huge. There is a user who is doing a comic about White and Pink being in love. She’s giving them lore. She’s giving them backstory, personalities. It is amazing.

Unus Annus, I am not very into streamers, but I’ve caught some of those videos. When they had their final stream, I was tuning in. I was like, “Are you really going to delete the channel?” Then they did. Just watching the fans have that moment, even though I am not in that fandom, it was wonderful so meaningful.

Harry Potter being taken by the fans. Fans own Harry Potter now, and that’s what matters. The Old Guard also came out of nowhere and really blew Tumblr away. The Immortal Husbands. I love that ship. I’ve got to touch on almost all of the places, MCR, My Chemical Romance. Those fans have woken up and they didn’t get their tour, but they will. They’re not going to sleep until they do.

Because we maybe all have Supernatural on the brain, to a certain extent. I’m just curious how you think, that show’s been on for 15 years. The fandom has gone through literal generations. How do you think the fandom is going to change?

There’s always going to be a supernatural gif for everything. People will continue gifing it. It’s going to surpass what it is and it’s going to become that comfort show. This is a personal anecdote, but when I go to the dentist, every single time supernatural is on. It’s just like, “Oh, I get to watch my boys while I’m getting my teeth cleaned. That’s good.” It’s always going to be there. It’s always going to be there for people when they need it the most. We’re going to see a lot more fan creations. People love these boys, men now they’re adults. People love these characters. I haven’t watched this season. I am going to watch the finale tonight. I’m going in almost cold. I know that a lot of fan favorites have returned. My prediction for Supernatural fandom going forward is seeing these side stories come through in fanfiction even more than they already do. Lots more Charlie. That’s personal of mine because I love her.

I don’t think you’re alone in this.

Yeah. Who doesn’t love Charlie? Seeing these smaller characters come out and just shine in their own fan works, more so than the world might’ve provided them in canon.

It feels dangerous to make fandom predictions based on what happened this year, but if you have any predictions and or hopes for the coming year in terms of Tumblr and fandom?

Where we’re at now and going forward, it’s all about true authenticity. Screw what people think. We’re rejecting our old ways of thinking. We’re about flipping perspectives and forgetting what you thought was important in exchange for what you truly love. 2020 has helped us all figure out what our values at our core are. It’s about choosing something that makes you happy, that supports you, and your people. Choosing the happiness of those around you and making sure that you’re fighting for the goodness in life. Which sounds really sugar sweet, but one of the things, again, that I love about Tumblr is it is about putting people first based on the things they love. That’s what I see happening.

Explore the rest of Tumblr’s Year in Review lists here, and let us know what your biggest 2020 fandoms were in the comments below.

The post Tumblr’s Top Fandoms of 2020 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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jincherie · 5 years

Text

pebbles to recommend!

✑ in the light of recent situations and the fact that a few of you have even been so kind as to share some love and positivity with me, I’d like to share some of my own! these are some of the fics that I’ve been reading and loving lately! I haven’t had time to read much, but I hope u all enjoy what I’ve managed to stumble upon as much as I have!

ps. lets leave them something nice and let them know how fantastic they are!

✎ blood magic by @cakebite

maknae line x reader | magic au, fantasy au, royal au, yandere au | series

➥ in a word, fantastic. i’m not sure how many of you know, but yandere is my guilty pleasure and it’s not that often that I come across it being actually well written and portrayed. This is one of the few fics for the genre that I’ve read and deeply enjoyed. But aside from that, I love the way this world is brought further to life with each and every installation, I adore the fantastical nature, the little tidbits and factoids revealed to me one by one-- it has me thirsting for more! This is a read I easily got immersed in, and it’s not yet complete but I’m looking forward to more adventures in magic, mystery, fantasy... god I’m ready.

Part of why I love well-written fics of this genre is the inner workings, the finer details and each little turn of the cogs that makes the clock tick. I absolutely love that in this fic that is incorporated so seamlessly. From the beginning, there is tension and there are stress conditions-- and while they maintain and level out, with each introduction of the boys (without reader knowing they’re the princes, which is a dynamic i die for btw) and further build of their relationship, along with the glimpes of their background and the environmental factors that are probably going to lead to one or all of them Snapping... it all blends together in a magnificent mass of tension, and for each update that comes I’m on the edge of my seat. I don’t think there has been one in a while, but this is the kind of fic that I’d drop whatever I was doing to read!

✎ quarter quell by @chinkbihh

jungkook x reader | hunger games au, yandere au | series

➥ another yandere story, another insight into my guilty pleasure. again, i don’t often rb or rec many yandere fics simply bc its not often i find one that really pins it and I love enough to rb-- but luna never fails to provide, and I’ve found myself enjoying a number of her stories, most recently this one!

Usually, what I look for and enjoy reading about is the slow build, the climb and increase in yandere behaviour as they grow more comfortable/more obsessed with the character. Even so, this fic dumps it all on its head and I find myself loving it nonetheless. It’s the setting, the unique conditions that allow the yandere features to come out immediately and unabashedly-- and watching the integration of it all, how every aspect of oc’s situation is working together, is fascinating,, and putting yourself into oc’s shoes is terrifying. Luna puts a lot of effort into her fics and each installment she publishes is long and carefully put together,, and that’s something I really appreciate. I love a lot of her works, and this one in particular, because there is always just such attention to detail, such immersion around it all that draws me in and hooks me. I’ve seen her musing about where to take this on her blog and to be honest I’m really excited to see wherever it goes!

(ps. please send some lovely things her way if you end up checking this out, we all have times where we’re a little more in need of some tlc than others!)

✎ immortals by @bang-tan-bitches

ot7 x reader | supernatural au?, drama, smut, dark fantasy | series

➥ this is one i read a little further back, but one I definitely am still hooked on! What I really love about this one is just.... the mystery of it all. I’m a sucker for dark fantasy and urban fantasy and this bad boy rolls it all into one. Each installment reveals a little more and yet,,, not enough to fully satiate your hunger for knowledge. there are a lot of conditions, restrictions, barriers for the reader-- the push and pull of her innate desire to go to them vs. the constraints of her life and her thoughts is delicious. I remember in particular that each little interaction with each member made my tummy dip, they were so cute and so... thrilling? These two have a real talent and it shows through with fics like this one. I’m not sure when the next installment is, but I’m definitely waiting for it with baited breath!!

✎ beastly gods by @lemonjoonah

taehyung x reader x ?? | hybrid au, dark fantasy au, slight dystopia au?? | oneshot

➥ i read this as soon as it was posted and honestly.... I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. there’s something about it that just carves out a piece of you and replaces it with a piece of itself. It’s so memorable!! I love it dudes. The whole tone and vibe of the fic from the beginning, the chase and the combination of thrill and fear,,, and Taehyung.... I love the way that the story was set, the premises and tone, and I love how it was maintained all throughout-- what I abolutely love the most about it is that it allowed for that fucking FANTASTIC twist of an ending!! This story, to me, had OOMPH, and I love that man. I’m going to revisit it sometime soon and I definitely recommend checking it out yourselves. I wish I had read it more recently so I could gush more readily, but definitely check it out for yourselves and send some love!!

✎ agape and pragma by @uwugalore

ot7 x reader | hybrid au, poly au, smut, fluff, angst | series

➥ this is one that i’ve been reading consistently, and have been hooked on from the beginning. from the very first chapter the premise is so heartbreaking, and i was able to really align with the oc and what she was feeling, how her world had been turned so upside down. and then, seeing throughout the following chapters as the members slip into her life & home one by one, healing the pieces of her bit by bit... ugh i might have wept. it’s so soulfully sweet and lovely, this fic, and the spots of angst really just serve to make it sweeter. I love a fic that makes me soft and fuzzy while still having some hot as fuck smut, and this definitely serves that. plus hybrid au! already pinpointing several of my weaknesses. i definitely recommend checkig this out because it quickly became a favourite of mine :)

✎ beautifully misfit by @orphicbts

maknae line x reader | hybrid au, angst au, smut? (subby maknae energy) | series

➥ this is another kind of recent one that I’ve been enjoying over the past few months, and can i just say it’s got a firm hold of my heart and my future puth. If you’d read florescence u know i have a budding weakness for shy boys, blushy boys, and GOD when she introduced each of the boys it had me cooing--- ESPECIALLY jimin. i cant wait for things to bud and bloom and develop, the little hints of nice things the reader is going to do-- ahhh i can’t wait until jimin gets glassses!!! and sees oc all the time!!! and blushes more!!! aaah!!!

It’s just so very sweet mixed in with the little tidbits and aspects of their past which, are sad and angsty but mfkgjdg u know.... u know that hurt/comfort shit hurts so good. I’m really super excited to see where it goes and how their relationship and dynamics develop in the coming parts!

✎ home by @zerotexas1975

jimin x reader | hybrid au, fluff, angst? | series

➥ I remember reading this when the first part came out ages ago and immediately being hooked, because I saw the prompt by hybridfanfiction that it was based off and love it. And straight away it was so sweet and cute and wholesome, and as we’re quickly discovering I’m an absolute slut for shy boys!! It was standalone for a while, but let me tell u when i saw there was a second part out i screamed and dropped everything to read it-- and!!! it’s so good!! she’s starting to implement the plot now and she’s making us WORK for that sweet validation, work thru the angst on the near horizon, and i appreciate that. it took such a turn that i really wasn’t expecting it but I love how the dynamic between them and the relationship has budded and begun so far.

✎ euphoric endeavours by @/haveagreatday (AO3)

ot7 x reader | vampire au, college au, mate au, poly au | series

➥ this is another fic that I’ve been reading for a long while, and from the very beginning I loved the fire of the reader, the spunk and how she wasn’t afraid to go up and confront one of the biggest names on campus. and then reading further and observing the change, the transition in their dynamic. when she found out, vs where she is now. I really love the way she had the reader change and grow, and that seems to be a very big theme in this fic that I really admire! The reader consistently looks to herself for ways to grow and change, and do the boys. The story is so rich and in depth with their history and backstory, all the dynamics and the goods and bads of their past and how it affects them i the current day. I definitely recommend it for an investment and a good time.

✎ twisted tails & thunderlight by @stskpop

// ot7 x reader | hybrid au, poly au, angst | series

// ot7 x reader | supernatural au, fantasy au, witch au/magic au | series

➥ twisted tails is one that I found recently, and although there’s only one part out that I’ve seen, I really love where it seems to be going so far! it’s an interesting spin on the au that I haven’t seen very often, but god... I’m really excited to see how she’s going to spin it and how it’s going to play out. how the grief they must be feeling over oc’s sisters death is going to work with everything else happening, how they’re going to interact and feel about her.... I’m keen to discover how it will all blend together.

And thunderlight... can I just say, I love love love this one! I found it through twisted tails and !!! i love it!!! it’s so rich from the very get go with plot and narrative exposition, the way everything is being set up so smoothly. I’m absolutely hooked, I want to know who this demon is, and whether it’s going to have the gratifying happy ending that I crave so badly... god I love it, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next installment!

!! let’s use this as an opportunity to make their days!! I think it would be really awesome to use this to spread a little more love & positivity, so please send something nice their way and even feel free to reblog this with some fics you’ve been loving yourselves if you’d like! I’d love to see what you’ve been into and check it out!! :) <3

#fic rec #i'm so terribly sorry by the way #to those of u lovely enough to tag me #i'm sorry that i didn't reblog #all the tags have gotten a bit lost #and i've been working too much to have responded in a timely manner #:(#but anyway!#i hope that this can put a smile on some of ur faces!#lets have some fun and spread some good vibes w this :)

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lexa-el-amin · 5 years

Text

through her eyes

She couldn’t take her eyes off of the peculiar girl. There was something about her that day…Who was she trying to kid? There was something about the girl that she had noticed every day. Because she had been watching and observing said girl ever since she had first stepped foot in the quaint coffee shop Clarke worked at.

It was all in the little things or maybe they weren’t so little after all because they stood out so unabashedly, Clarke thought everyone should have noticed them too but at the same time, she wished everyone was oblivious to them. She would like to think that she was the only one that had noticed those quirks the girl had never failed to do.

And Clarke wondered if she would ever get the chance to know the stories behind them.

Supposedly she could at least try talking to the girl, really talk, but every time she stood face to face with the brunette, she turned into a bumbling idiot. In addition to her eccentric way of doing things, the girl was also astonishingly gorgeous. And Clarke was incredibly shallow (that didn’t escape her attention), she just loved seeing beautiful hot girls, who wouldn’t?

The green eyed girl was so easy on the eyes, too easy as a matter of fact, that just looking at her could make Clarke blush; her heart fluttered as all coherent words seemed to elude her. She desperately wanted to make a good impression on the girl, she just didn’t know how. But she did know a thing or two about the girl.

She did know how the girl would show up at exactly 7.45am after she had walked past the café 2 times, starting from the corner of 17th Ave. And then she would stand right outside the door for 22 seconds before stepping inside. Clarke knew because she had more than once counted the seconds while watching the girl through the window with great interest and profound curiosity.

The memory of the girl’s luscious lips moving so subtly along the second she was counting by was just a little something Clarke had subconsciously held dear to her mind. And still, Clarke refused to believe that she was a stalker-ish creeper just because she was observant. Right. She was starting to lose the argument to herself.

And then the girl would stand in line that had already formed since the crack of dawn with a book covering her face. It was always a different one every time. Clarke wondered if the girl was actually an avid reader or that the book was just a cover, a decoy, stopping anyone to break through her personal space.

Though Clarke could easily imagine the girl as being somewhat geeky and the thought only fired her infatuation more, the girl (at least the one she had been building up in her mind) was nothing less than endearing and cute and quirky and…Clarke realized her obsession had moved way past than just a silly crush. And she didn’t even know her name. It was ridiculous.

Surely people would hastily assume that by being a barista Clarke could at least get the girl’s name as she took her order. But no, it would be way too simple and the girl was by far the most complicated human being Clarke had ever encountered. Because instead of giving out her name to be written down on her cup of coffee, the girl would utter just one letter.

At first Clarke thought that the letters were just random but then she paid even closer attention to it and after 4 weeks of ‘investigation’, Clarke had come into the conclusion that the letters spelled out into a legible, actual name. Lexa Woods. But still, she couldn’t be so sure. Third time the charm, they say. Now was her chance to test that theory of hers.

As the girl finally got to the front of the line, Clarke brushed off her green apron clad outfit and gave out her most charming smile. “What can I do for you today?”

The girl, Lexa, possibly, hopefully, put her book aside and looked at her intently with a tight smile adorning her lips. “Ah yes, I’d like-” She came to a halt as she averted her gaze to the menu boards hung on the walls behind the counter.

Clarke waited patiently, knowing all too well that the girl wasn’t really trying to make up her mind. She just had to count to 22 before she made her order. Clarke knew that the girl had always ordered the same thing and it would be…

“A cup of hot vanilla latte with 2% milk in grande size please and…”

“One blueberry muffin to go?” Clarke concluded lightly, remembering that on Tuesdays the girl never stayed at the café.

The girl looked taken aback for a brief second but soon got her bearing back. “Yes, please.”

“Excellent.” Clarke quipped rather cheerily, cringing inside because she realized that she was overdoing it. She didn’t want the girl to think that she was overly chipper for no legitimate reason. But of course, if the girl would have preferred, Clarke would be the most cheerful person in the whole wide universe.

“Who should I make it out to?” She asked with a new air of confidence, arching her eyebrow, lifting up the paper white cup in one hand along with a black sharpie in another. Please say L, please say L…

“L.” The girl stated carefully. “But not like Elle like the brand, it’s just-” She stammered on, her right hand flailing aimlessly yet elegantly, eyebrows furrowed in concentration. And Clarke smiled, thinking that it was one of the most adorable things she had ever seen in her life.

“It’s just the letter L, right?” The blonde offered, hoping that the girl would appreciate her quick understanding of the situation. She had overheard once or twice how her coworkers would talk about the ‘strange’ girl and she hated that.

She hated that people would make fun of someone they didn’t know. She hated the fact that the girl would feel obliged to explain herself just because she had a tendency to do things differently. And Clarke had promised herself that she would do anything she could just to make her feel comfortable and understood.

“That’s right.” The girl affirmed, subtly exhaling a breath of relief. Clarke didn’t miss how she looked a tad more relaxed and that the corner of her lips had turned slightly upward, forming yet another smile, even though it didn’t last for more than a couple of seconds.

“Okay then.” Clarke chirped gleefully, scribbling down on the white cup. “Anything else?” It was just a formality to ask even though she already knew the answer.

“No, that would be all, thank you.” The girl said, reaching for her wallet and a metal box out of her messenger bag. The metal box was one other thing Clarke had noticed, it was a candy box, mints to be exact (based on the cover that read ‘Mark & Spencer’s Mints’) but when the girl opened it, it was filled with coins.

Clarke thought it was cute. Yet again. But then everything about the girl was cute to Clarke. She was way over her head already.

“Then it’s gonna be…” Clarke typed in the order to the machine, waiting for the receipt to come out. “It’s $9…”

“$9.25. Here you go.” The girl swiftly interjected, sliding out money over the counter and like Clarke had expected, it was an exact $9.25. Just like always.

Clarke felt like she knew this girl, like she wasn’t just another stranger; not just another face in the sea of people rushing in and out the shop every day. And she hoped she could get a chance to know her more. Clarke didn’t realize that she had let her mind wander and her eyes fixed solicitously at the girl until Lexa dipped her head down, showing the first sign of her nervousness under the scrutiny of Clarke’s intense gaze.

Clarke broke out a smile that looked a little guilty. “Your order will be ready in a bit. We hope to see you again.” She concluded, handing out the receipt.

Lexa took the piece of paper and quickly shoved it in between the pages of her book. And she gave Clarke a tight smile before she strolled away to wait for her order by the pick-up counter, not without subtly slipping $5 into the tip jar. As the girl covered her face with her book once more, Clarke decided that she was gonna go through with her plan.

—–

She was waiting for her order, internally counting the seconds. She couldn’t help it, the way she couldn’t deny her lungs from breathing. Rationally, she knew nothing bad would happen if she were to stop. But maybe she didn’t want to stop. She had found that doing things in such ways was almost like a comfort to her.

They made her feel at ease, like nothing was out of place; nothing was out of her control. She couldn’t find the logic in that, but she had stopped caring about logic behind every action she ever done. Sure, she was well aware of the way some people would snicker and talk behind her back about how weird she was.

But she had grown used to it, she didn’t expect much from people anymore. She wished to be understood, but she wouldn’t expect it. Expectation was nothing she could afford.

There was one person though that had surprised her, the barista girl, Clarke. Yeah, Clarke the barista girl. Lexa chanced a peek at the girl through the upper brim of her book. Clarke reminded her so much of the protagonists she’d read in books. Clarke seemed kind, friendly and colorful.

She had never given Lexa a strange look. Sure, she got curious sometimes, at first, but who wouldn’t with the way Lexa was acting? But Lexa had never seen judgment in those blue eyes or heard a mocking snigger out of her lips. Clarke acted like she understood her, like everything that she did was…normal.

It had been her normality for years, but people rarely saw it that way. But the girl had given her reason to believe that perhaps some people were still good and kind. Lexa wouldn’t say it out loud, but she was hopeful. Just a little bit, there was nothing wrong with that, right?

Sometimes, on days when she could stay and sit on the table by the side window, right next to the wall with a hummingbird mural surrounded by famous quotes, she would rack her mind with the thoughts of actually talking to Clarke because Clarke had been nothing but sweet to her. When she had the chance, Clarke would pass by her table just to comment on the book Lexa was reading.

‘Oh, I’ve read that. It’s so sad.’ or ‘Oh my God, have you got to the part where that character die when really there’s no legitimate reason for them to die? It sucks!’ or just a simple, ‘how’s the book going?’ As if she actually cared, Lexa thought it’d be nice to have someone care about even the smallest thing that she was interested in.

But of course she never managed to give any sort of response. She got frozen in place, awed by the fact that this girl took the time to pay any attention to her. Words eluded her and the next thing she knew, Clarke had moved on to clean up the next table. She should stop anyway, she knew she stand no chance.

Not when she could barely utter a word without having heart palpitation. She despised the fact that interacting with stranger was such a hassle for her. She wished she was different, bolder and courageous. Maybe someday…

Lexa snapped her head up, acknowledging someone clearing their throat. And she regretted looking up so quickly, unprepared by the warm smile and mesmerizing eyes that greeted her. “Your mind must be a very fascinating place.” Clarke remarked reflectively, tilting her head in such adorable manner.

“I…It’s…” Lexa slapped herself internally. Why can’t speaking come easy to her? Instead of responding properly, she grabbed her cup of coffee and the brown bag containing her muffin and bowed her head down. She could feel her cheeks warming up and her fingers trembling.

“Uh, thanks…” She mumbled apprehensively, straightening her body once more. She looked up to give Clarke a smile and then hastily turned her body around. She didn’t look back; there was no way she would risk doing any more damage than what had been done.

But as she reached the door, she heard Clarke yelling, “Have a nice day!” And god, Lexa wanted nothing more than just go back and tell Clarke that she was such a beautiful soul.

She halted all motion, standing still right outside the coffee shop with a bag of muffin and a cup of hot coffee in her right hand. She needed to just regulate her breath and calm her nerves first before she embarked on a journey to her campus ground. That was when she noticed something, writing on the cup’s collar. She scrunched up her eyebrows in confusion.

She never found any on the collar before, only on the cup, those letters/’codes’ indicating the content of the cup. She slowly rotated her cup, intrigued and anxious. She read word by word carefully, attentively. Her breath hitched. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She couldn’t believe that someone really did pay attention to her and cared enough to let her know that they truly saw her.

Written on the collar was a sentence that Lexa would never forget.

I wish I could see the world through your eyes, Lexa Woods.

-Clarke

She snapped her head up, she felt out of breath. The world around her seemed more vibrant somehow. Someone had figured her out; someone had actually taken interest in her quirks and learned her name. And she felt this pull, an indescribable force urging her to turn her head around.

She felt as if someone was calling her and when she finally did look back, she was once again greeted by those spellbinding bright eyes that had never conveyed prejudice and a sincere smile that made her heart skip a beat. Maybe hope wasn’t lost after all.

—–

I hope you enjoy this, thank you for taking the time to read it and also for the nice exchange we’ve had these past two weeks. It’s 1.5 hours away from midnight where I am so I’m wishing you a happy new year!

Sincerely,

Dev (secret Santa no more!)

#clexa fanfic #clexa secret santa #clexa secret santa 2019 #css 2019 #thanks dev :)#submission

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doodlelolly0910 · 6 years

Text

Close Encounters of the Spiritual Kind

Summary: Emma Nolan spent a lot of time alone, and that was fine by her. Because one is never truly alone. She should know. She can talk to dead people. What she didn’t expect was one of these spiritual encounters to hang around, taking her down a rabbit hole of missing women, revenge, and, least expected, love. Can she save the day and Killian Jones? Is there even another choice?

Read it from the beginning on AO3 and FFN!

A/N: Sorry this is updating so late in the evening! I've had a super busy day! I'm not going to say much about this chapter, just that it's another turning point :P As always, thank you to @kmomof4 for her fabulous beta skills and for generally being an awesome person, and to @courtorderedcake for making the AMAZING artwork for this fic. Also thanks to you, lovely readers! I appreciate and adore you all! Hope you like the new chapter!

Chapter 15

Water sluiced over Emma's body in hot rivulets, working the weariness from her muscles and bones. The water had finally stopped pooling a brownish red at her feet as it washed away the blood on her skin and hair, now running clear. Milah's presence had died down after the discussion earlier. It must have been exhausting to remain at that level of contact for so long. Most encounters didn't even last a fraction of that time. And frankly, Emma was quite ready for a break. It was nice to have some privacy, especially since she wasn't even safe from Milah inside her head, although it seemed she only picked up on thoughts that she intended to speak but didn't.

Emma wasn't sure how long she'd been standing under the stream of seemingly unending hot water, but she was fully intent on taking advantage of the moment before she had to dive headfirst back into the craziness that had become her life.

Jefferson had heard about the explosion and connected the dots. He had been furious, demanding that Emma return to base, threatening to call Regina and pull the plug, but she had begged a week out of him. A week with Hook, working the angle they'd come up with. He was adamant that this was the worst idea she'd ever come up with, especially since Emma refused to provide him with Hook's identity (in the poorly concealed guise that she simply did not know it), but at least she didn't have to hide her new alliance from him.

Well, she may not have told him that her cover was blown where Hook was concerned, but what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him. This was about Gold. Taking him down, once and for all. Both of them understood what calling off this op meant.

This was their Hail Mary.

She cranked the water off when her legs grew tired of standing, drying herself with a scratchy terry cloth towel, and moving to stand in front of the sink. There was a dingy mirror there and she wiped the steam from it to survey her appearance. She looked like shit.

Bruises mottled her skin, concentrated especially where she had collided full force with the earth on her hip and shoulder. Her head still felt like her heart was pounding directly inside it, but at least the nausea and blurred vision had died down. The ringing in her ears remained, though, a result of being so close to the explosion. Dark circles ringed her eyes, betraying exactly how much sleep she'd gotten in the last two weeks since this all started.

A soft knock sounded at the door.

“Swan?” Killian's voice asked gently through the thin particle board. “I have some clothes for you.”

Emma wrapped the towel around her, covering herself, and cracked the door. Hook's grin immediately widened at the sight of her, his eyes unabashedly raking over her barely concealed form and she rolled her eyes, snatching the bundle of fabric from his arm and slamming the door in his face again.

“No need for hostility, love,” his muffled voice teased. “Just appreciating the view.”

“You're about to appreciate my foot right up your ass,” she shot back, dropping the towel and aggressively yanking on the over large sweats he had given her, her muscles protesting the movement, and rolled them at the waist as they were about two sizes too big for her. She put her bra back on and pulled the (also too big) gray t-shirt over her head, hearing him chuckle on the other side of the thin barrier between them.

“If you say so, Swan,” he patronized, sounding slightly further away than before. Emma bristled at that, gathering her ruined clothes and flinging the door open with force, making it rattle on its hinges. She stomped her way into the small bedroom like room until she was standing in front of where he'd moved next to the queen sized bed.

“Let's get one thing straight, buddy,” she said, pointing a vicious finger in his amused face. “I'm here to do a job. Nothing else. So you can keep on looking, but this,” she motioned between them with her finger, “not gonna happen. Okay?”

Hook's expression didn't waver for a moment, holding her gaze so she could see the laughter dancing within the blue depths of his eyes.

“You're rather fetching when you're angry, has anyone ever told you that?”

Emma let out a noise that was half growl, half screech in exasperation and pushed past him, dropping her clothes with the rest of her things. She glanced at her gun and wondered briefly exactly how terrible it would be if it accidentally went off in the direction of his foot before retrieving the comb he'd set out for her and gingerly pulling the snarls from her towel dried hair. She braided her hair and tied it off with a rubber band she'd found sitting on the table next to the bed and sat on the mattress with a bounce, Killian's eyes on her the whole time.

“Okay, when I said you could keep looking, I didn't expect you to take it literally,” she said, not even turning to look at him.

“I'm a very literal person, Swan,” he replied lightly, moving towards her. “Are you almost ready to go? We'll stop by a shop I know and get you some clothes that fit, not that it doesn't speak to the primal male in me to see you in mine, and then we will get some supplies together.”

Emma stiffened and fought the urge to tilt her chin down to sniff the fabric covering her body to see if it smelled like him. Of course it would. She was in his damn clothes. He did this on purpose. She just knew he did.

“Yup,” she said, popping the ‘p’ at the end of the word. “Let's go.”

Emma was grateful that either Will or Killian had had the foresight to drive her car back to the compound. She needed to be the one that drove, needed to feel a little more in control. Less than an hour later, they were in a consignment shop in a quaint little part of the city that Emma had rarely been to. Of course it would be a second hand shop. Two spirits on the regular weren't enough to deal with.

“Time to make it a party, I guess,” Emma muttered under her breath and got out of the car. Killian was already waiting for her on the curb, his blue eyes watching her as she struggled not to wince getting out of her seat. She adjusted her oversized clothing and made her way towards him. She really needed to tell him what to expect in a place like this.

“Ready, Swan?” His voice interrupted her nervous thoughts and she blinked up at him, fighting the urge to chew on her nail.

“Uh, in just a minute. Before we go in there, this is a second hand shop, right?” she asked.

“Aye,” he replied, his brow furrowing as he tried to follow her train of thought. Emma bobbed her head once and looked down to her feet.

“Do you remember how I said Milah found me?”

“Something about a shirt? Wasn't it?”

“Ah, yes. Yep. See, I kinda have a thing about places like this. Sometimes the clothes that are donated belonged to people… well, people only I can talk to anymore…” she trailed off.

“Oh,” Killian replied, slightly surprised as he put the pieces of the puzzle together. “And these things are like a… trigger? When you're near them?”

Emma shook her head. “It isn't usually enough to be near them. I have to touch it. And suddenly I can see and hear things that no one else can. It's a little unsettling. And I've never experienced it with someone who, uh, knows about it.”

Hook seemed to weigh her words in his head, as if he were plotting the best course of action here. A slow, easy smile slipped onto his lips and he reached for her hand, tucking it into the crook of his bad arm and taking Emma completely by surprise.

“Well, I'll just have to touch the clothes first until you find something you like. We are shopping for knickers, aye?”

Emma snatched her arm back and slapped his shoulder, although it didn't come off nearly as aggressive as she wanted it to. She knew he was teasing and the thought of him handling her underwear… well, it was time to change the subject.

She marched past him, chin tilted up, and swung the door to the shop open. She gestured inside, allowing him to enter first with a mocking bow, mimicking his previous gesture from the compound.

Clothes shopping was a lot more fun with Hook than it was with Ruby, she found. He had made some genuinely helpful selections for her perusal, making it so she didn't even need to touch anything until she was sure she liked it. She didn't know how much she appreciated the gesture until it was actually happening.

It was a little strange how quickly Hook had flipped from staunch skeptic to making adjustments in his own behavior to accommodate for her “gift”, but it touched her in a way that no one else had been able to. She watched him as he jokingly held up items against his own chest on hangers, his tongue poking teasingly out of the corner of his mouth and laughed along with his jokes (even if her laughter was accompanied by a patented eye roll). She felt an overwhelming sense of comfort as they shopped and she was surprised to find the walls she had carefully constructed around her heart over the years slipping just the slightest bit. Killian Jones was unlike any man she had ever met, and, at least in this moment, she was glad to have him with her.

In the end, Emma ended up picking out two tank tops, a t-shirt, a sweater, and a pair of jeans and leggings, none of which (thankfully) sparked an encounter. Much to Killian's dismay, she did not get any underwear, but then she reminded him that they were in a second hand shop and, while they only accepted new in package items on that front, it was just a little much for her to consider.

“Does this mean you'll be going commando, then, Swan?” he murmured in her ear as they approached the cash register, his hand finding the small of her back with ease.

“Wouldn't you like to know,” she said with a bat of her eyelashes and she smirked as Killian's Adam's apple bobbed in his throat.

“Perhaps I would.” She heard him murmur as she approached the smiling red headed girl behind the counter. She flushed, her steady gait faltering for a moment, but she recovered herself quickly and smiled back at the cashier, loading her items on the counter.

“That'll be $38.57,” she said, packing the items into a bag for her. Emma dug in the pocket of her borrowed sweats for the money she had put there, extending the cash over the counter. The clerk's fingers swept over Emma's, the silver ring on her middle finger swiping over the flesh of her palm and Emma knew it was coming before it even happened.

Suddenly, she smelled fresh gingerbread and heard a voice she didn't recognize humming a song.

I love you, Addie, the voice said and Emma froze, her eyes blowing wide and she fought back the sudden shaking in her palm as she reached for her change.

“Have a good day!” the girl chirped, completely clueless to the inner turmoil Emma was having. Emma gave her a tight smile and said nothing, snatching the bag off the counter and bolting for the door as quickly as she could without looking completely mental.

She burst from the door and the encounter had all but faded away, the last remnants of baked goods still lingering in her sinuses, but she knew it, too, would be gone soon. She took several deep, calming breaths in the fresh air and let her heart rate return to normal.

“Swan?”

Killian. Shit.

She'd forgotten he was with her for a moment in her panic and she felt her heartbeat kick back up at the thought of having to explain her behavior to him.

Best to get it over with.

“Yeah?” she asked, turning to face him, her hands balled into fists at her side, making the plastic of the bag in her left hand crinkle.

“Are you alright, love? Did one of your… er… moments happen?” His voice was truly concerned and, instead of calming her, it only freaked her out more.

She nodded sharply, not meeting his eyes. “I think it was the clerk's grandmother maybe? I touched her ring,” she explained.

“That's…” here it comes, Emma thought, “amazing, love. Why didn't you tell her?”

If Emma's jaw could physically touch the pavement, she was positive it would have been scraping the concrete right about then. Killian was looking at her with such curiosity and fascination that it sent a thread of panic straight through her.

“Why didn't I tell her? Are you serious right now? What happened to ‘not this bit again’?” she snapped. Hook sighed.

“Look, Swan, I know I haven't been the most supportive of your… talents, and I won't deny that it is quite a shock to hear that someone you loved very much is still trying to reach you from the other side, but I…” he tapered off, stepping slightly closer to her and Emma held her breath. “If I can start to believe, anyone can. You can't expect people to believe you if you never tell anyone. You should tell her.” His eyes blazed into hers, willing her to take a leap of faith in herself, as he was with her.

Emma was sure she was going mad. Or he was. Maybe both of them.

"I am not a walking freak show! I'm not Sylvia fucking Browne, I'm not some foofy bullshit psychic bitch, and I just want to be left alone,” she ranted, flapping her arms at her sides. “I never asked to be this person. I just want to live my life! You have no idea what it’s like to feel crazy day in and day out, never knowing who you can trust enough to tell and I-"

Emma's mouth was still trying to move, spill over with reasons why, but it was hard to do with Killian's lips sealed against hers. She was shocked still, arms suspended mid air, interrupted in their wild gesturing, her mind overwhelmed with the thought of how perfect, how right this felt, and that was absolutely besides the point because Killian fucking Jones was kissing her. Her body finally caught up with what was happening and she pulled back, but his hooked arm had looped itself around her waist and held her fast to him.

"Please, darling, do shut up," he murmured only mere centimeters from her lips before her stunned psyche could formulate a response to the kiss at all. She felt anger boil in the pit of her stomach as she registered what he'd said, the sensation mixing with the fear and attraction already simmering there.

"You shut up," she growled, then fisted her hand in his shirt and slammed her lips back into his.

Kissing Killian Jones was unlike any other experience she had ever had in her life. His lips were softer than she expected, moving with expert precision over hers, his hand wrapping around the nape of her neck as his thumb stroked over her jawline. He nipped at her bottom lip and she opened for him on instinct, gasping at the first touch of his tongue to hers. He let out a soft little sound in the back of his throat that she might have missed, had they not been pressed so tightly together, and he tilted her head with a firm but gentle press of his fingers at her neck to kiss her more deeply. He kissed her like he would never get enough, stealing the very breath from her lungs until she felt like they were going to burst.

She pulled back when the need for oxygen became too much, still clinging to his collar like it was the only thing keeping her upright. Based on the slight sway in her balance when she broke away, it probably was. They stayed in each other's space in silence, save for the sound of their panting breaths intermingling in the air.

"That was..." Killian began, sounding completely wrecked. Emma released his collar and stepped back, blinking up at him and hopefully clearing some of the haze from her eyes. He looked just as wrecked as he sounded, his hooded eyes simmering with a dark heat, and she was sure she wasn't hiding her reaction all that well either. She needed to shut this down.

"Me shutting you up,” she filled in for him. He appeared confused for a moment and then a look of understanding swept over his features that made her heart clench tighter than it already was. “Let's get back."

She turned and began a stiff walk back to her car before she heard his soft murmur towards her retreating form.

“As you wish, Swan.”

#captain swan #cs ff au #cs ff #csff #cssns #close encounters of the spiritual kind #emma swan #captain hook #captain swan supernatural summer #killian jones #monday update #captain swan ff #chapter 15

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

Link

WARNING: LONG ARTICLE! (It’s worth it, though)

It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” So declared the headline of a Washington Post column in March; one imagines Katharine Graham spitting out her martini. The article, by a twenty-seven-year-old columnist named Elizabeth Bruenig, drew more than 3,000 comments (a typical column gets a few hundred); a follow-up piece, urging a “good-faith argument about socialism,” received nearly as much attention.

By now, the rebirth of socialism in American politics needs little elaboration. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primary, and his continued popularity, upset just about everyone’s intuition that the term remains taboo. Donald Trump’s victory, meanwhile, made all political truisms seem up for grabs. Polls show that young people in particular view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been around since 1982, has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since November 2016, and dozens of DSA candidates are running for office around the country. In June, one of them, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, upset New York City Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, knocking off a ten-term incumbent and one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

The meaning of socialism has always been maddeningly slippery, in part because it has always meant different things to different people. Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete. Karl Marx himself spent more time critiquing capitalism than describing communism, a habit that subsequent generations of leftists inherited. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that, while he couldn’t define it, “I know it when I see it.” Socialism sometimes feels like the inverse: socialists know it when they don’t see it. Bernie has only made things murkier by defining his brand of socialism in terms hardly indistinguishable from New Deal liberalism. “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production,” he declared in the fall of 2015, at a speech at Georgetown University, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” But while the meaning of American socialism in 2018 begins with Bernie, it doesn’t end there. Every political movement needs an intellectual movement, and when it comes to today’s brand of socialism, it’s the thirty-five-and-under crowd doing much of the heavy lifting.

The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

Bruenig, the Post columnist, is perhaps the most prominently placed of a small but increasingly visible group of young writers unabashedly advocating for democratic socialism. In writing her attention-grabbing article, she helped elevate a discussion that has long taken place on Twitter. Of course, the relative merits of socialism—and Marxism, Maoism, anarcho-syndicalism, you name it—have been debated in lefty journals and academic circles for a century or more. Members of this new generation, however, aren’t just talking among themselves; they’re trying to take socialism mainstream. And unlike their predecessors, they have reason to think Americans will take their ideas seriously.

They’ve got a double challenge. The first is to convince skeptical Americans that, despite what they may have learned in high school, socialism doesn’t have to mean Stalinism, and it doesn’t lead inexorably to the gulags of Soviet Russia or the starvation of Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela. The second may be even trickier. They must explain how their version of socialism fits, or doesn’t, into the American political system while showing how, specifically, it is distinct from traditional Democratic Party liberalism. In other words, they must not only defend socialism in the twenty-first century; they must define it.

Nathan Robinson hated Bernie Sanders before he loved him.

It was the fall of 2015. Robinson, a doctoral candidate at Harvard and, at the time, a recent law school graduate, had been steeped in socialist thought since high school, when he discovered the writings of anarchistic socialists like Mikhail Bakunin and Noam Chomsky. Socialism has always been dogged by the question of whether it’s possible to participate in electoral politics while remaining truly radical. Like many leftists, Robinson initially saw Sanders as an example of intolerable compromise.

“Based on Senator Bernie Sanders’s public statements, one of the following things must be true,” he declared on his blog in October 2015. “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it.” Sanders, he explained in a follow-up post, was “not asking for public ownership of the major sectors of the economy,” but merely calling for expanded welfare and regulations. “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.”

(Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, sees socialism not as an economic platform, but as a strong commitment to certain principles.)

Those turned out to be among Robinson’s last blog posts. In January 2016, he launched Current Affairs, a deeply irreverent leftist magazine, with backing from a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Despite being essentially a one-man operation, Current Affairs quickly developed a substantial following on the left thanks to Robinson’s extraordinary writing talent—especially his knack for composing viral takedowns of conservative intellectual hucksters like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

By 2017, Robinson seemed to have fully shed his earlier hostility toward Sandersian socialism. Here he was, last summer, writing on the difference between leftism and liberalism: “As Nancy Pelosi said of the present Democratic party: ‘We’re capitalist.’ When Bernie Sanders is asked if he is a capitalist, he answers flatly: ‘No.’ Sanders is a socialist, and socialism is not capitalism, and there is no possibility of healing the ideological rift between the two.”

That’s a long way from calling Sanders an ignoramus or a liar. What happened?

Much has been made of how Sanders has pulled the Democratic mainstream to the left. Presumptive 2020 presidential candidates are racing to capture the Bernie vote by declaring their support for policies—single-payer health care, free college—that once seemed impossibly radical. But Robinson’s evolution on Sanders is representative of a complementary phenomenon that has received less notice: Sanders seems to have also pulled the far left closer to the mainstream. The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

“Those of us who consider ourselves on the more radical left were kind of disdainful of the political system,” said Robinson. “It was a real minority within Occupy saying you should even contest elections.” Sanders’s tantalizingly strong primary run—roughly equivalent to the MIT basketball team making the Final Four—made some lefties reconsider. For the first time, it seemed as though they could actually win. But winning requires engaging in politics, and politics requires some degree of pragmatism—a recognition that the achievable will always fall short of the ideal. That, in turn, requires giving up the ideological purity of the fringe.

Consider Jacobin magazine, the leading publication of the Millennial far left. It’s a magazine that wears its Marxist affections on its sleeve, with the tagline “Reason in Revolt.” Across the first seventeen issues, by my count, the word “Marx” or its derivations appeared an average of about forty times. But, since then—that is, beginning in summer 2015, when people started feeling the Bern—that’s fallen to only about twelve times on average.

Bhaskar Sunkara founded Jacobin in 2011, while an undergraduate at George Washington University—which now makes him, at age twenty-nine, something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists. The magazine doesn’t have a strict party line. In May 2015, its website ran dueling pieces on Sanders’s candidacy. One, by Ashley Smith, called Sanders’s campaign an “obstacle” to the formation of a new left. But the other, by Sunkara, argued that the left should welcome Bernie’s run, “even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough.”

Since then, while Sunkara continues to distinguish in theory between Sandersism and full-blown socialism, Bernie has practically become the magazine’s mascot. A Jacobin Facebook ad, which reads, “It’s not you, it’s capitalism,” features an image of Sanders superimposed over the Jacobin logo. The winter 2016 issue featured a cartoon of Sanders on its cover, alongside Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party. And a health care–focused issue from earlier this year reads as an extended brief in favor of Medicare for All, Bernie’s single-payer plan, featuring a fawning Q&A with Sanders. The editor’s note that opens the issue begins, “When future historians chronicle how Medicare for All was finally won . . .” To cast Medicare for All—not even fully socialized medicine, since it would nationalize insurance, but not providers—in such grandiose terms is a striking shift of the socialist goalposts.

(Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, is at age twenty-nine something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists.)

“We push for social democratic reforms in the here and now,” Sunkara told me, though he insisted that his long-term vision remained as radical as ever. “There’s a need to at least dabble a little bit more with strategy and some more policy-oriented stuff, instead of just merely trying to build an opposition movement and mainly talk about theory.”

Not everyone on the left is happy about it. Socialists, the leftist writer Fredrik deBoer wrote last year for Current Affairs, “seem to be falling into the models of the welfare state without really knowing we’re doing it, sliding rightward as we talk about a reinvigorated left, slouching towards liberalism.” At its core, he argued, socialism means moving sectors of the economy into communal ownership—not merely expanding the welfare state, which is social democracy, or perhaps social insurance, but not democratic socialism. Taking issue with an op-ed by Sunkara in the New York Times, deBoer worried that the Jacobin editor’s “alternative” vision “does not look very different from a more humane, more nurturing liberal capitalist state.”

Nathan Robinson, who published deBoer’s piece, and is currently at work on a book about what socialism means to young people, doesn’t deny that his own thinking has become less doctrinaire. “I’ve sort of come around to the idea that ‘socialism,’ the word, should less be used to describe a state-owned or collectively owned economy, and more used to describe a very strong commitment to a certain fundamental set of principles,” he said. “It should be used to describe the position that is horrified by solvable economic depravations, rather than a very specific and narrow way of ordering the economic system.”

For Robinson, the heart of socialism is not this or that policy, but rather the fundamental values that should drive our politics. During the election, Hillary Clinton bragged about having the support of “real billionaires” like Mark Cuban and Michael Bloomberg, in a shot at Trump’s refusal to disclose his finances. Obama, after he left office, was promptly seen vacationing on Richard Branson’s private island and partying with celebrities on billionaire David Geffen’s yacht. That makes someone like Robinson skeptical that the Democratic Party is actually committed to reducing inequality—which, after all, would require taking back some of the wealth of people like David Geffen.

A socialist, in other words, is hungry for a little class warfare. Sunkara, in the intro to his Sanders interview in Jacobin, wrote that while Sanders “may share some of the same policy goals as progressives like Elizabeth Warren,” the difference is his “confrontational vision of social change,” which involves calling out “the millionaires and billionaires” who are hoarding too much wealth.

Or, as Robinson put it in a Current Affairs essay (published under a pen name, a habit he has since dropped) titled “It’s Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich,”

After all, there are plenty of people on this earth who die—or who watch their loved ones die—because they cannot afford to pay for medical care. There are elderly people who become homeless because they cannot afford rent. There are children living on streets and in cars, there are mothers who can’t afford diapers for their babies. All of this is beyond dispute. And all of it could be ameliorated if people who had lots of money simply gave those other people their money. It’s therefore deeply shameful to be rich. It’s not a morally defensible thing to be.

If Sanders and the prospect of political power have made some preexisting radical leftists start talking more like New Deal liberals, the even bigger effect of his prominence has been compositional: by defining socialism in an especially capacious and inviting way, he pulled in people who might otherwise still identify as liberal or progressive. “What Roosevelt was stating in 1944, what Martin Luther King Jr. stated in similar terms twenty years later, and what I believe today, is that true freedom does not occur without economic security,” he said in his Georgetown speech in November 2015. “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.”

This kind of talk is enough to make a certain kind of liberal’s eyes roll clean out of her head. What Democrat doesn’t believe in those things? But Sanders couldn’t have claimed this ideological real estate if his overwhelmingly Millennial supporters didn’t feel that mainstream liberals—embodied by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment that lined up behind her—had abandoned it.

Briahna Gray, a contributing editor at Current Affairs who was recently hired as a politics editor at the Intercept, told me she probably wouldn’t have identified as a socialist in 2015. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said. Gray, a Harvard Law School–educated lawyer, has made a name for herself by embodying an intersection of identities that’s rare in media: a leftist, Sanders-supporting black woman. That has given her credibility to puncture the “Bernie bro” stereotype and take on Sanders critics who dismiss his movement as insufficiently attuned to racial or gender issues.

(Briahna Gray, an editor at the Intercept, came to socialism more recently. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said.)

“The most disappointing part of the 2016 primary was centrist candidates convincing Americans that policies that are implemented in wealthy nations all over the world, much less wealthy than ours, are completely a fantasy world,” she said. (Clinton declared during a primary debate that single-payer health care would “never, ever come to pass,” and later ridiculed Sanders in her campaign memoir for essentially promising Americans free ponies.) This was a recurring theme in conversations with young socialists. To their ears, the term “liberal” has come to represent an intolerably unimaginative posture toward politics: less “Yes we can” than “Not so fast.”

Still, the worldview Gray sketched out—“where socialism is used to mitigate the negative effects of capitalism”—sounded like good old Keynesian liberalism. If you’re someone who believes a word should have a fixed meaning over time, or who believes in the importance of the liberal tradition, then this approach—socialism as liberalism, just more liberal—can be deeply exasperating. Sean Wilentz, a historian and longtime friend of the Clintons, captured some of this frustration in a recent essay in the Democracy journal. “[T]here is something essentially dishonest about trying to assimilate the New Deal legacy as ‘socialism,’ ” he wrote, referring to the speech in which Sanders tied himself to Franklin Roosevelt.

There’s no denying that much of what today’s socialists are demanding fits within the liberal tradition of a Ted Kennedy or Paul Wellstone. Advocating something like single-payer health care, but calling yourself a socialist, can look like mere positioning. In fact, the socialist writers I spoke with didn’t really have a problem with that. “Part of it is just a rhetorical claim,” said Ryan Cooper, an opinion writer at the Week who identifies as a democratic socialist. He said that the core aspects of his political agenda are creating a “complete welfare state” and reducing inequality by democratizing ownership of capital. Why use a term as loaded as socialism to describe those ideals? “The point is to say, ‘Here’s a left,’ in a way that just could not possibly be co-opted by Andrew Cuomo types.”

Nathan Robinson echoed the sentiment. “I used to call myself ‘progressive,’ and then the term became used by everybody, and now it doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “If you’re trying to say, ‘I’m further to the left than Obama and the Clintons,’ you’re stuck!” (Disclosure: I’m friendly with Cooper, who is a former Washington Monthly web editor, and Robinson.)

The divide may owe as much to differences in memory as to ideology. If you’re old enough to remember Democrats getting absolutely creamed in three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s, then you’re old enough to remember them seemingly needing to pivot to the center to regain power in 1992. They didn’t compromise their core values (they would love a complete welfare state, if only it were possible), they just did what they had to do to win votes from what looked like an overwhelmingly conservative electorate. That included getting cozier with Wall Street and members of the plutocracy to ensure a stream of campaign funding that could rival the right’s.

But if the 1980s are when you were born, that’s not your experience. You remember that the Bill Clinton years were pretty good—but yielded George W. Bush. We got eight years of Obama—then Trump. If cautious, corporate-friendly liberalism gives way time after time to revanchist Republican administrations, is it really doing its job? If liberal figureheads stop even talking about a truly ambitious social safety net, how long should we keep assuming that’s what they want, deep down? Someone under thirty-five years old has no memory of a Democratic presidential nominee, let alone president, to the ideological left of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, that young person is broke: a report by the St. Louis Federal Reserve recently warned that households headed by ’80s babies have 34 percent less wealth than expected based on earlier generations at that age, and are thus “at greatest risk of becoming a ‘lost generation’ for wealth accumulation.”

Telling a young radical that, despite all their sharp disagreements with the liberal mainstream, they’re really a part of it, is a bit like telling a football fan that the Cleveland Browns are actually good because they won some championships in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s fair to wonder how many years a political movement can distance itself from certain principles before it runs the risk of a rival movement claiming them for its own.

(It must be said, too, that “liberal” is an unfortunate term. It belongs to that category of words—like “sanction” or“oversight”—that mean both a thing and its opposite; thus a “classical liberal” is really a free-market conservative. An acute instance of this problem is the even more awful “neoliberal,” which itself has two meanings: one is simply Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire capitalism; the other, elaborated in the pages of this magazine in the 1980s, is more akin to the “New Democrat” philosophy of Bill Clinton. But these definitions overlap, because Clinton added financial deregulation to the agenda.)

It’s a bit unfair to ask the term “liberal” to cover every political position to the left of conservative and to the right of seizing the factories. The socialist label might be annoying, but it’s useful. Of course, the policies Bernie Sanders and many of his followers are calling for fit within the American liberal tradition, if you go back far enough. But to insist that they therefore owe loyalty to liberalism itself is to get the point of political movements backward. Ask not what you can do for your ideology; ask what your ideology can do for you. If young people increasingly feel like liberalism as it exists today doesn’t represent their values, then perhaps it’s up to liberalism to win them back.

If you think the Millennial socialist movement is only about protesting Clintonism, however, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.

The tricky part of advancing ideas under the banner of “socialism” is threading the needle between two contradictory critiques. The first is an evergreen: that real-world socialism inevitably leads to catastrophe and dictatorship, and only someone totally ignorant of history could deny this. (A representative headline in the National Review: “Despite Venezuela, Socialism Is Still Popular in the U.S.”) The second critique, as we’ve seen, is that self-identified socialists actually aren’t socialists. (David Brooks managed to make both these points at once in a recent column. The idea that capitalism is inherently flawed, he wrote, has “been rejected by most on the left.” Nonetheless, today’s progressive left, drunk on populism and identity politics, “seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.”)

Few people seem to be working harder to tackle that challenge than Matt Bruenig, the twenty-nine-year-old founder of the People’s Policy Project, a one-man socialist think tank—and the husband and intellectual teammate of Liz Bruenig, the Washington Post columnist. I met them for lunch near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., in April. Former high school sweethearts who met on the debate team in Arlington, Texas, they’re an odd couple, by which I mean both that they are different from each other and that they are individually odd. Matt is tall and scruffy, with a paunch and a patchy beard. Liz is barely five feet tall and had her hair pulled into a tidy bun the day we met. He is hyper-analytical and obsessed with economic policy. She is a religious Catholic—her pro-life views have made her enemies on the left, whereas Matt, she joked, “loves abortion”—and more concerned with philosophical questions than policy specifics. “I make a much more romantic case for socialism than Matt does,” she said.

(Matt Bruenig’s one-man think tank, the People’s Policy Project, specializes in left-wing policy wonkery.)

Matt gained some notoriety in 2016 when he was fired from his part-time blogging gig at Demos, a liberal think tank, after directing a stream of Twitter insults at the head of a different liberal think tank. At the time, Liz was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with their daughter, Jane. I asked what happened after the kerfuffle.

“We went to Twitter boot camp,” Liz said.

“Who was the drill sergeant?”

“Me.”

In 2017, Matt launched his crowd-funded think tank, which immediately began being noticed in liberal policy circles. His work, which in its faith in winning arguments by marshaling the right facts calls to mind a socialist Ezra Klein, is often cited in places like the Atlantic and Vox, and he has been quoted as an expert by CBS News and elsewhere. Even among prominent young lefties, his Twitter presence, even post–boot camp, stands out—277,000 followers as of June.

(Elizabeth Bruenig, a twenty-seven-year-old columnist at the Washington Post, has devoted columns to making the case for socialism.)

The Bruenigs argue, as Liz has written in the Post, that “it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or.” Much of Matt’s work revolves around making the case that real socialist policies have been implemented successfully in other countries, particularly Nordic nations like Norway and Sweden. The question of how to describe the governance of these places has become quite contentious, because if these healthy, happy, rich nations are meaningfully socialist in some way, it’s hard to argue that socialism always ends in disaster. Conservatives protest the most loudly, but liberals, too, deny that socialism is afoot in Scandinavia. These countries are, we’re told, “mixed economies” or “social democracies”—bigger welfare states, sure, but fundamentally capitalist systems.

But in a post last summer, Matt used data from the OECD library and the International Labour Organization to show that a strong welfare state is only one part of the story. Most strikingly, at least some of the Nordics come out ahead on that textbook aspect of socialism, state ownership. In Norway and Finland, he wrote, the government owns “financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP,” compared to 26 percent in the U.S. Norway’s government owns around 60 percent of the nation’s wealth—nearly double the level for the Chinese government—including a third of its domestic stock market. “There is little doubt that, in terms of state ownership at least, Norway is the most socialist country in the developed world,” Bruenig wrote a few months later—“and, not coincidentally, the happiest country in the world according to the UN’s 2017 World Happiness Report.”

The Norwegian example figures prominently in what is probably Matt’s most interesting policy proposal. In a New York Times op-ed last November, he argued that the easiest way to combat American inequality would be a “social wealth fund,” which he described as akin to an index or mutual fund, “but one owned collectively by society as a whole.”

Norway has such a fund, he pointed out, which is valued at over $1 trillion and is used to pay for its generous welfare state. Alaska has one, too, paying its citizens cash dividends from the proceeds of a diversified investment fund that, like Norway’s, started with oil money. Under Bruenig’s idea, the federal government would create an investment portfolio—perhaps by selling federal assets, or through “taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy,” or by redirecting recession spending by the Federal Reserve—and distribute a regular cash dividend to every American, or every American adult, each of whom would have one equal share in the fund. If the fund came to own a third of the nation’s wealth, he calculated, that would have meant an $8,000 payout to everyone between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four in 2016.

In addition to arguing for a social wealth fund, Bruenig published a long paper authored by Ryan Cooper, the writer at the Week, and Peter Gowan, a Dublin-based researcher, arguing that the best response to the problem of housing affordability would be a massive new “social housing” project, in which the federal government would pay to build ten million homes over the next ten years. Unlike traditional American public housing, this would be “designed to cater to people of various income levels, rather than just serving the ‘deserving poor.’ ” Again, they point to Europe for proof of concept: in the 1960s, facing a housing crisis, Sweden built one million social-housing units over the course of a decade, increasing its housing stock by a third. In Vienna, Austria, they report, “3 in 5 residents live in housing built, owned, or managed by the municipal government.”

(Continue Reading)

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veridium · 6 years

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“Stolen Sleep” Cassandra x Olivia

Summary: The Seeker returns to Skyhold in the middle of the night to find Olivia in unexpected sleeping arrangements. Sweet, sweet, sweetness ensues in this unexpectedly undramatic reunion.

The return to Skyhold was late in the night – quite unusual for them, given their usually prompt schedules. Nevertheless, Cassandra was glad to be back. The Plains felt like a lost cause the longer they spent there and the more they kept having to leave and return. She could forget for the next several hours that they would have to return in a week or so, hopefully for the last time before they could move on to another mission location or goal. These matters could wait, though – for now, she had one, single-minded purpose, and that was to find Olivia.

Figuring with the late hour that she may be sleeping in her quarters, Cassandra’s fatigued footfalls found their way to her door. Opening and shutting it, hearing that familiar creak as it did so, she took care not to cause too much noise. The intent was null when she looked and saw no one in bed, the sheets neatly made with no body to be seen. Her brow furrowed – it was quite an anticlimactic moment. She then thought about the only other place Olivia could be found at this time of night, and she sighed to herself.

Out she went, down stairs and up them again, hearing the goings-on of unpacking from down in the courtyard. Eventually she traversed the final series of stairs and up to the door of the Mages’ study tower. One window on the base floor lightly illuminated from what she suspected to be the fireplace, all over floors were dark from the view from outside.

Slowly opening the door with care, she peaked towards the corner where Olivia’s workspace was. But, there was no petite frame of a blonde woman steady at work with a mass of candles surrounding her – not this time, at least. She scanned the room, seeing no signs of movement or activity; all of the candles were out, burnt down to the quick or blown out some time ago by the looks of the dried wax. Her eyes at last made their way to the fireplace again, the only source of light. There was a tall lounge chair facing the hearth, not usually there, at least from what she could remember.

Then, she noticed the pointed, limp foot hanging off the side – a sign of life, in an otherwise dead end.

Cassandra pushed the door, exhaling softly. She knew she had found who she was looking for. Stepping quietly inside, she closed the door behind her but not all the way. Slowly she crept over, not entirely sure what shape she would find Olivia in but nonetheless eager to see her at all after weeks of separation. Eventually, she rounded the side of the tall, red cushioned chair to uncover her at last.

Olivia was hunched onto one side of the chair, shoulders bunched as she leaned against the curved rim of the back rest. Her head was down onto her right shoulder, her loose waves of blonde hair caressing her cheeks and forehead. She had curled her legs up against her upper body, but they had since relaxed and fallen a bit in her sleep. Cassandra stood still and took the sight of her in – the way her eyelids were softly fluttering, her lips parted in relaxed slumber. The firelight flickering shades of oranges and reds on her complexion.

Then, she noticed her sleeping attire – one of Cassandra’s linen shirts that went underneath her day armor – a size or two larger than Olivia’s body would need. The fabric bunched in excess around her hips and left one shoulder exposed. She noticed the way Olivia’s arms were folded against her chest, as if she had been hugging herself, pretending that it was Cassandra holding her back in one of her garments.

Her heart skipped a beat – clearly, Olivia had not expected her to be returning any time soon.

The Seeker sighed, and a soft grin appeared on her face. She turned her attention to the fire, and found a pale of water sitting beside it, clearly meant for whoever was last to leave in the Tower to put out the fire. She crouched and grabbed it, taking care not to cause too much noise, but as she tossed the water against the flames the hissing sound of the doused embers betrayed her intention to be discrete. She turned to look, and saw Olivia begin to rustle in her position. She remained still, awaiting whether or not her lover would awake from the disturbance.

When Olivia groaned and simply slouched lower in her chair, Cassandra knew she had gotten away with it.

Now, it was time to resolve the nature of her sleeping arrangements. Returning to the chair, she bent down onto one knee to be at level with Olivia’s body. First, she lifted Olivia’s right arm and wrapped it around her own shoulder, pre-empting her mission to pick her up off the chair. Making short work of that, she then slipped a hand underneath the middle of Olivia’s back, and the other under her thighs. The bare skin on her legs felt cold, and she wondered how long she could have stayed like this without catching a chill. Once she had her grip around her, she lifted upwards, stepping back up onto both feet as she picked her woman up from her less-than-ideal “bed.”

Olivia groaned again, a soft, suspicious breath as her head curled in against Cassandra’s shoulder. The Seeker hadn’t thought it all though, realizing her traveling armor would probably be less-than-comparable comfort to the cushion of furniture. Olivia wasn’t the lightest load for a tired warrior’s body, but she wasn’t the heaviest, either – she was, however, the most missed kind.

Stabilizing her foothold, Cassandra let Olivia quiet down against her hold before she started heading for the door. Scooting the door open with her foot, she slipped out into the outdoor air, and used the same heel to push it shut behind her. Now making her way to the stairs and down their path, she hoped the walk to her chambers in a corridor behind the Great Hall wouldn’t be too great of a distance for Olivia to not stay asleep.

Though, a little piece of her heart wished she would, so she could see the look on her face when she realized she had returned.

Walking with her upper body as still as she could manage, she could hear Olivia’s rhythmic breathing and the hot air of her exhalations against her neck. From across the grounds, Cassandra caught a look of the Inquisitor, having made her way from the courtyard up the first flight of main stairs. Seeing Cassandra steadily walking with Olivia in her arms, Theia almost immediately understood the nature of the situation – and she nodded after her with a smile. After all, she had her own sleeping woman to greet up in her chambers.

Cassandra managed a grin at the corner of her mouth, before her walking took her out of view for the Inquisitor and the remaining people on the grounds. Eventually, she made her way through the hallways, through one or two heavy and inconvenient doors, and into the corridor where the door to her quarters was.

Just as she had a clear cut path to the destination, she felt the arm Olivia had over her shoulder tighten its hold ever-so-slightly, the thickness of her armor making it more difficult to notice such hints of movement. She kept focused on her goal, all the while she could feel Olivia’s body grow more restless.

Then, a sound.

“….Mmmmm,” Olivia hummed, her face scrunching a bit.

Cassandra couldn’t help but smirk but tried to do so without drawing any more attention to herself. She hadn’t contemplated what Olivia would do if she woke up being carried by someone whom she would assume to be a stranger. Maybe she was in for a swift kick in the ribs, or punch in the gut, out of defense. This made her add a hurried pace to her steps, and a swift kick to the door cleared her path inside.

“…C-Cassandra?” Olivia breathed, her eyes still closed.

Kicking the door shut behind her, Cassandra’s grin grew broad, and she allowed her hips to sway a bit more as she walked towards the bed.

“Shh,” she whispered, standing at the foot of the untouched bed, “I’ve got you.”

Olivia exhaled roughly, as if deep in sleep. She hummed a soft affirmative sound. “This…is a dream?” she cooed again.

Cassandra smiled as she lowered Olivia into bed, freeing up a hand once she did in order to pull the blanket and sheet back and over Olivia’s curled up body.

“I am afraid not, my Love,” she replied, pulling the covers over her and tucking them in a bit around her shoulders. She then sat down beside her, one arm resting on the other side of her back. She could see Olivia grin widely, the dimples of her cheeks unabashedly showing.

“I thought so. My dreams are…” she took a heavy breath, “they are never this good.”

Cassandra shook her head, stifling a bittersweet chuckle. Her gloved hand went to Olivia’s thick head of hair as she pulled a few wily strands out of her face. “Well, now I am here, and you can daydream with me as long as you wish.”

Olivia’s eyelids fluttered but remained closed. She tucked her arms in against her chest, hands sliding in between her neck and her pillow. “Why aren’t you kissing me, if this is real life?” she sounded more clever and cunning, like she did when she was awake.

Cassandra rolled her shoulders a bit, feeling the sore ache in their muscles. “Being gone makes me forget that I have the privilege of being able to do such a thing, and I did not wish to wake you.”

Olivia breathed through her mouth, her brow softly furrowing. “Silly.”

Smiling again, the Seeker lowered herself over her, and pressed her lips against Olivia’s cheek. The hand she had rested in her hair cupped the back of her head as she did so. Parting her lips from her, she pressed her forehead against hers rather than withdraw, and closed her eyes as she breathed her in.

“I have missed you,” she whispered, smelling the spices and rich vanilla undertone of her skin and hair.

Olivia then reached and placed her hand around the back of Cassandra’s neck, her thumb comfortingly rubbing against her short hair. Her eyes still closed, but the cognition in her affection giving a hint as to how awake she had became.

“I have missed you, too, my Love. Come to bed.”

#oc stuff #olivia sinclair #olivia x cassandra #cassandra pentaghast #femslash #olivandra #ficlet #FLUFF

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hilunawrites · 6 years

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25 Lessons on my 25th Birthday --Part 2

Thank you so much for all the love and reblogs of Part 1— ”25 Lessons on my 25th Birthday!” I’m glad my lessons could help some of you, and I hope you get as much out of Part 2 as the last. For these next ten, if one or more of the lessons resonate with you, please reblog and let me know which ones! You can find Part 1 here. Now let’s jump into it:

11.) Don’t blindly accept rules and boundaries “set” by society.

Society has a lot to say about how we “should” live our lives: the “correct” path in life to follow and in what order, “good” career choices versus “poor” ones, “normal” relationship practices…the list goes on and on.

Each of us is on our own path in life. These societal rules and boundaries don’t take into consideration that we all start from different points, have different priorities and belief systems, and, frankly, don’t deserve to be limited to such an extent during our time here on Earth! If you want to have a baby first and go to school later, become an artist, or have a polyamorous relationship—YOU DO YOU. Your internal guiding system is infinitely more important. You are no less than those that choose to abide by societal expectations.

12.) Don’t forget where you came from.

I know not everyone comes from a happy place or a happy family. Maybe you were over-the-moon ecstatic when you could finally get the hell out. My family and I have a strained relationship, and I’m happy to have some distance from them. My hometown on the other hand? I miss it desperately. When I left, a hole in me formed that won’t ever be completely healed.

Either way, whether you love or hate where you come from—it’s helped shape who you are today. You’ve learned invaluable lessons during your childhood and as a teenager about yourself, your beliefs, your likes/dislikes, and your passions. Where you come from has shaped you in huge and subtle ways, and you are here, exactly how you are in this present moment, because of your past. And with some reflection, you can learn a lot from that and continue on your way into the future.

13.) Communicate.

A little obvious this one, but an indispensable lesson nonetheless. NEVER. STOP. COMMUNICATING. And I mean clear, direct, honest, and open communication. If you just say what you mean without beating around the bush or teetering towards passive-aggression, you will sustain solid relationships with others, based on mutual trust and respect.

Also, don’t expect anyone to be able to read your mind! This is one of the most unfair and egocentric things we expect from other people. No one else is in your head with you--don’t assume people will know why you feel a certain way or what you want/need them to do! Spell it out for them. For example, “I need you to show your love for me more, and this is how… ” So much hurt and frustration could be avoided if every human practiced effective communication.

14.) Decorate your home.

I’ve noticed several times throughout my life that I never truly feel at home unless I decorate it. I would switch bedrooms as a kid or move to new apartments and postpone decorating my new space for months or even years! A big mistake. It was only after I finally put up my posters, pictures, quotes, cards, and art pieces from friends that I truly felt at HOME. I feel euphoric as I look around and take in MY space. It welcomes me, it welcomes others, and I feel like I’m claiming my little corner of the world, marking it as my own. In a way, it makes me feel a little powerful, being able to express myself however I wish in my home decorations.

15.) Don’t call them “guilty pleasures.”

We all have that one thing (or several things!) we think we “shouldn’t” enjoy—usually because it’s unpopular or criticized by the majority of people or our closest friends. As a way of fitting in, we deny ourselves the opportunity to indulge openly and unabashedly in our “guilty pleasures.” How sad is this? We’re only on this Earth for a limited amount of time, why not enjoy the things we enjoy? Don’t waste time worrying about what others will think of you listening to that One Direction album for the umpteenth time—relish every second you spend partaking in that activity! It will feel so much better than the alternative, trust me. Just take solace in the fact that everyone has pleasures that could be criticized by others—so let’s just like what we like and get off each other’s backs!

16.) It’s okay to cut people off.

You are under no obligation to keep toxic people in your life. Whether these people are strangers, acquaintances, friends, or family—you have the right to fill your life with people who lift you up, not tear you down. Whether that means you set healthy boundaries with problematic people or drop them completely, be sure to make the right choice for YOU. The choice that makes YOU feel free and safe. Take care of yourself first, before you worry about how your choices affect others.

And when it comes to family, you do not have to love someone simply because you share blood with them. Sometimes they honest to God do not deserve to have someone as spectacular as you in their life. Find your chosen family and lean into them. They will support you.

17.) You don’t have to win every argument.

I have a terrible habit of trying to use logic in order to “win” every argument. I rationalize, I explain, I call out the other person on inconsistencies or hypocrisy. If I can destroy all the holes on their side, and sew mine up nice and pretty they won’t be able to deny that I’m right and they’re wrong. Then they’ll apologize and we’ll move on—right? Wrong.

In the end, “winning” doesn’t feel as good as I think it will. The other person is still upset, frustrated, and fed up with me. We move on, sure…but have we actually gained anything from our disagreement except more grief?

I’m trying my hardest to listen more and speak less when I’m having an argument. If we are all willing to self-reflect and validate the other’s feelings before jumping to the defensive, disagreements will be resolved more smoothly, quickly, and respectfully. This way we can move on without as many residual feelings of resentment.

18.) Hug and cuddle people often. And animals too.

Of course this depends on whether you’re a touchy-feely person or comfortable with animals—which I am! It’s just science: hugging someone for even 20 seconds releases oxytocin, the “love hormone,” which can do wonders for your mental and physical health. I love hugging, cuddling, kissing, all of that. It helps my lungs open up, and I can breathe better. I feel safe—like the other person is a human wall of protection.

And I could never forget my dog, Dobby. He is so soft and cuddly, I sometimes can’t resist leaning over and giving him a big squeeze. He loves to lie with me, placing his head in my lap or over my legs and letting out a deep sigh. In those moments, I can hardly take his utter adorableness!

These physical touches make me feel closely connected with the people and animals around me, and these connections spark positive emotions of happiness, safety, love, and belonging. Who couldn’t use a little more of that in their everyday life?

19.) Stand up for what’s right, even if you’re standing alone.

A scary thought right? Especially for those of us who don’t like the spotlight…

There are some things that I know are absolutely wrong (sexism, racism, homo/bi/transphobia etc.) and I am often placed in situations where I have a choice to make. Do I speak up and break the silence? Or do I let the inappropriate and unacceptable comment or action remain unchecked?

When I’m the only person who realizes what’s going on is wrong, it makes it that much harder to stand up for what’s right. I might be punished or retaliated against in some way, shape, or form. They may ignore me, criticize me for taking things too seriously or overreacting, or even ostracize me from a particular group or community.

I once worked at a place where people openly made racist comments and were willfully ignorant about their culturally appropriative actions. This was particularly concerning because my colleagues and I worked in close proximity with young children who were soaking everything up like a sponge. Long story short, I stood up for what was right, even though I was standing alone—none of my colleagues were willing to stand with me—and just a few miserable weeks later was forced to quit.

Now that sounds like a terrible story—why should we stand up if we’re just going to be shut down and punished for “speaking out of turn?” First, I planted a seed. Sometime down the line (even if it is years from now) my ex-coworkers will be forced to reflect on their teaching methods which will no doubt become outdated and unacceptable with time. Second, I got myself out of an environment I now know I couldn’t have worked in long-term. And third, I’m able to share my story and continue encouraging others to also stand up for what’s right. It’ll take time, but one person standing up will lead to two, then ten, then 100, then 1000, until widespread change takes over the whole world.

20.) That being said, don’t be afraid to step back if you need to.

If you’re not emotionally able to handle a situation you’ve gotten yourself into, it’s more than okay to step back. If you remember from Part 1, you come first. ALWAYS. If you need to take a temporary or permanent break from something, do it. Just living, let alone fighting for equality or standing up to others, takes a lot of emotional strength and courage. Self-care is imperative to your success in all areas of your life, and sometimes the best thing you can do for you is to step back and take yourself out of a situation which has become toxic or spiraled out of control. No need to feel guilty. Be selfish. I’m serious. Everything else can take a back seat while you take care of yourself. Nothing is more important than your well-being.

I hope you enjoyed lessons 11-20 today! I’ll post my final 5 lessons on July 18th, my actual birthday (O_O). Again, if any of these lessons resonated with you, please reblog and let me know which ones! I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Those of you who enjoyed Part 1, I’m tagging you here: @alinakerrin, @theouterdark, @awkward-sappho, @atgit, @crucioandcoffee, @skullszeyes, @sarcastictinydancer, @ilike-art, @fangirling4mynicoandazriel, @macemason, @brookexautumn, @whitewolf756, @ducklingxkitten, @axel-writes, @neodesta

#writeblr #writing #mywriting #amwriting #lunawritesoriginal #writing positivity #lit #advice #anxiety #depression #mental health #selflove #activism #standup #speakout #speakup

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thesinglesjukebox · 6 years

Video

youtube

CHILDISH GAMBINO - THIS IS AMERICA

[6.33]

And this is your #1 single, America.

Jibril Yassin: Listening to this without the video makes you realize just how much praise we've thrown at Donald Glover for essentially remaking Mother. It's just a shame the song feels like a patchwork of different moods: the capable and effortless singing and the passable rap schemes clashing at each possible moment. It's chaos supplanted by a million Atlanta rapper adlibs featured here -- notable because his past work revelled in his outsiderdom status. Now he relishes in being a medium. What the fuck does Childish Gambino wants us to think about him? The Billboard #1 means that once again somehow Young Thug wins so I'll take that. [5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Hearing that clatter of noise ripping the seams of the Coloring Book gospel felt viscerally thrilling at first. Yet the momentum of it soon died down as Donald Glover muttered ad libs in placement of real lyrics. If this excitement and then immediate bore from violence was the point, then it relies way too much on its visuals to get that across. As pure audio, it's fragments of unfinished ideas coalesced into what barely passes as a song, and those fragments depend upon too much subtext for it to hopefully bear some meaning. [5]

Tim de Reuse: Every word of the lyrics and every frame of the music video begs to be picked apart; that's Charleston, that's Parkland, that's the way white Americans revere gun culture. It's an assault on all fronts, and despite the pull of its main sonic gimmick, an assault on all fronts cannot be incisive. So it contains no arguments or calls to action, working mainly as a mood piece for anxiety, instability, dehumanization, and dread, writhing into itself, and young Thug's haunting outro is the only place where the horrors alluded to are felt rather than just referenced or replicated. Is it effective? Well, it certainly leaves an impression, but it's not as focused as it could be, and to get any kind of solid message out of it you've got to put in just as much as you're going to get out. [6]

Alfred Soto: A compelling statement of protest that doesn't mind flirting with the exploitative and why not -- the video, that is. A fitfully compelling protest whose tonal variety compensates for its lyrical shortcomings -- that's "This is America." Like many #1s, it's a vessel for listeners. Few hits in the twenty-first century benefit from a cultural moment like Donald Glover's. This is America? No -- this is America. [7]

Will Rivitz: There isn't much I can say about "This Is America" that Doreen St. Félix hasn't already said, so let me talk about its place as an "ambiguous document" on terms in which I feel slightly more authoritative: As a nuanced, complicated, and enigmatic dissection of Black existence -- which is about as specifically as one can describe the song and its accompanying visuals, since any narrower portrayal risks an uneasily reductive summary of its purpose -- Gambino's newest is excellent, aesthetically compelling and subtly difficult in all the right ways. As a pop song that's raced to number one on the charts with the force of a "God's Plan," it's less successful, so instrumentally and allusionally dense that, aside from Gambino's chorus and ad-libs, even a dozen listens in I still have trouble tracking its structure -- and a pop song that isn't easily accessible tends to fail at providing the populist unification that the best of that ilk inflict on a club at 1 AM. As a song, period, it's also a little weak: for all its bassy bluster, its aggression is pallid compared to the distortion of a Clipping or a Death Grips, and its Yeezus-cum-TLOP blend of gospel and snarl doesn't quite reach what made both of those albums so excellent. This, as much as I do love it at times, is what makes the single-number rating system we have on this site a smidge simplistic: we're rating songs based on a singular scale with which we try to summarize all of its qualities into a one- or two-character final word. On "This is America," the ambiguity that St. Félix characterizes so well can't properly be reduced to a score, because the song succeeds and half-succeeds and half-fails on so many disparate levels that it doesn't really do the song justice. That said, I've listened to this one the past two weeks about as much as I listened to "Plug Walk" last month, and I gave that one a [7], so here we are. [7]

Stephen Eisermann: There've been more than enough think pieces and Twitter threads about on this song that I won't try analysis. Instead, I want to highlight how impotent the song is without the accompanying video: how it's a great addition to the accompanying video. This song is good, sure, but the video makes it great. [7]

Julian Axelrod: "This is America" feels like an anomaly in so many ways: It's a song that meets Donald Glover's outsize ambitions, which have previously made him feel like an auteur in search of a masterpiece. Its popularity is partly due to an eye-catching viral video that justifies the hype and amplifies its song's message rather than overshadowing it. And most impressively, it's a cultural and political statement that actually feels suited to how we live now. The song builds and buckles under its oppressively sunny tension, like a powder keg with a smiley face plastered on the front. But check that title again: While "This is America" is clearly a product of our current climate, its anger is nothing new. As long as you live in a country that refuses to let you breathe, the only true rebellion will be dancing on its feet. [8]

Jonathan Bradley: Who is Childish Gambino? This is what I ask from "This is America." Because we know Donald Glover: he's Troy from Community, he's a trash punchline rapper, he's a shockingly impressive nu-funk singer, he's Atlanta's dramedy auteur of the late 2010s. And now he's the ghost of Kendrick Lamar (because Kendrick invented political raps for the '10s the way Chuck D did for the '80s), he's Earn Marks, he's this shuckin' and jivin' shooter playing callous with life. Or has he surpassed performance; is "This is America" any black man playing the best role a white society can ask of him? "Have you seen 'This is America'," people ask of me, and I say, "no, I still have some episodes of Atlanta left to watch." As protest, aren't they as meaningful? As video, "This is America" doesn't resolve. Is this America? Well, song as shareable content is not new; pop history is articulated through tunes that capture an audience's spirit for their times. As song: the choir is lovely. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Remember when a bunch of white people thought it was OK to roll their eyes at Donald Glover for feeling "too white for Blacks, too Black for whites" on Camp? Some people dished out laundry lists of other Black people who were, in their minds, definitive proof of Glover being a fraud. Invalidating his experiences was a sure way to make him -- and other Blacks who felt similarly -- even more insecure about their identity. Here we are, seven years later, and Donald Glover's finally "made it" according to the standards set by white gatekeepers and lay internet folk (one and the same?), and it seems as if people consider the vivid depictions here as being astronomically different -- more artful, more profound -- than what was present in his earlier discography. It's been stated that "This is America" is not the lead single to the upcoming Childish Gambino album, indicating that this is a standalone product meant to be engaged with both aurally and visually. Glover knows: a video is going to be far more affecting simply because of how people approach one. Music is far more susceptible to passivity; people can hear, but they don't listen. Still, it's impossible to ignore the prevailing pernicious attitudes that lead to uniform declarations of "This is America" as a powerful political statement. Does everything need to be so painfully explicit and overt in its intentions to qualify as such? There's a sort of dysconscious racism underpinning how writers and fans are content with categorizing "This is America" and Donald Glover as political while denying such a label to the various rappers who provide ad-libs here. So let's break it down: Young Thug provided one of last year's most heartbreaking verses while mourning the murder of Keith Troup. BlocBoy JB dedicated his recent mixtape to Simi, a friend who died by gunfire. On "Work Hard," Quavo proudly declares that despite dropping out of school, he's rich enough now that his mom doesn't need to work. Slim Jxmmi says essentially the same thing on "Brxnks Truck" and unabashedly celebrates his affluence on "Growed Up." Kodak Black, who's namedropped here, explains how people don't see potential in him because he's "a project baby" on "Misunderstood," and spends another song later on Project Baby 2 sounding absolutely suicidal. And 21 Savage's "Bank Account," one of the most popular rap songs of last year, saw the rapper elegantly illustrating how being a successful Black man doesn't mean you can suddenly present yourself as vulnerable. It's funny: that everyone here is relegated to ancillary elements in the instrumentation ensures that people won't decry the presence of a less "conscious" (i.e. less "worthy," less "real") rapper. Glover understands this, and this decision is an effective middle ground between making significant impact and allowing all these other rappers to have a voice. It's moving because Glover's doing the exact opposite of what his Camp detractors did: unifying, validating, and empowering. The result is a beautiful tapestry that seems to be delivering a message hidden underneath a more obvious one. Every Black rapper is making political music. Every Black rapper is showing what it means to be Black in America. Every Black rapper deserves the attention to detail that has been poured upon this song and video. To think otherwise -- to discredit and disparage the truths of these Black people's lives -- is to disagree with the more obvious realities presented in the video. It's happening, and that is America too. [5]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Childish Gambino

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