#i was super inspired by the prompt i received which is the only reason i even signed up

[moonknixght]

Jerk [Marc Spector x GN!Reader]

Summary: Despite having plans for a date with you after meeting with his ex-wife, Marc seems to have suddenly gone off communication, leaving you to be a bundle of nerves until you decided to call him. Heavily inspired by episode 3 of scenes from a marriage. Word Count: 2k Warnings: Angst with no comfort !!!!!!!!! foul language, Steven cameo (that's a sweet surprise than a warning), no mention of jake A/N: Gosh! I apologize for being super late with this one,, this was meant to be a drabble but i got carried away lol. And I'm a little rusty with writing atm, so don't look at me if the writing feels a lil wonky. though, Constructive Criticism is greatly appreciated! PS; The ex-wife mentioned in this is NOT layla its some other lady because we love layla in this household

REQUESTS ARE OPEN!

The drawn out rings of the phone was slowly aiding to a upcoming migraine as you paced between rooms, silently praying that you would get an answer to your frantic texts. A rather uneventful Friday night that you expected to spend with the person you were recently seeing, an unpredictably mysterious man, had come to an abrupt stop.

There was a lot you didn't know about Marc Spector; and that was okay, because it was just the process of 'getting to know someone' was, right? Sure, You had rambled your head off on the first date, all which he listened carefully; but with Marc, you never felt the need to push information out of him. It was like befriending an fragile animal that takes time to trust, but the epiphany that comes after is unexplainably amazing.

Growing from acquaintances to actually seeing each other and looking forward to spending time as a couple was unrealistic, which was why your entire relationship was so fascinating. The patience of talking things out was a quality that you both shared; likely being the reason of such a bond with each other. If anyone would listen, you would never stop talking about how perplexing that was.

As you both started building a line of trust, You came to learn that he was divorced and was in the process of sorting things out with his ex-lover— which, of course, you were fine with. And today, he had mentioned about her coming over, which you were also on board with. But with the plans that were arranged for today still being overdue and Marc falling off the face of earth, you couldn't help but feel.. jealous? worry, even?

It was exactly why you were frantically texting your boyfriend, questioning on where he was and if his ex-wife had taken her leave. The only response that you received was being left entirely on delivered, adding fuel to your already anxious state. You felt like you were just being extremely clingy— and that they were probably still talking.

Your gaze travelled to the clock. 15 minutes to 1 am. Holy fuck. Had you really been texting him for over an hour? Had it been over two hours since you had set your dinner table, waiting for him? The latest that Marc had promised he would be was by 10:30, so it was just utterly ridiculous that it was past midnight and he was still unresponsive.

Swiftly grabbing the unopened bottle of wine kept on your table and making it to the couch, You set your phone down on the coffee table as you took a swing of the drink. It was crazy how this entire thing had gotten you so riled up, but as much as you hated to admit it, you were head over heels for this guy. So committed infact, that you were desperately checking on him for the past two hours; that you haven't even had your own dinner yet. One last call. Maybe he'll pick up.

That was the words that your guilty conscious prompted while you sat in the uncomfortable silence, eyes falling on the phone that lay discarded on the table. Obviously, you were going to feed into your thoughts. Of course you did.

And much to your surprise, it only took three rings to connect to the voice that you were just waiting to hear— but it didn't take you long to notice that it came off in a growl, much to the contrast of the soft spoken tone that Marc usually carried.

"Marc?" "Hey." You let out a sigh of relief, shaking your head ever so slightly at your own frantic actions. Atleast he was doing okay. "Are you okay? Where have you been? I've been—"

"Good. Uh, yeah, but listen, it's not cool to, like, bombard me with messages."

There was a short pause where you sat slightly bewildered. before you felt yourself sink into the seat, like a child who had just been scolded. Even with guilt creeping up, You wanted to still defend your own case, which was the endless worrying you had endured for the past hour, waiting for anything from Marc. Just a simple notice to cancel their date for the night or even to say that he was okay. But instead, You were simply left in the dark.

"Because you were supposed to call me, Marc."

"I told you, I'd call you when she left." "Oh, so she hasn't gone yet?" "No, She hasn't. She's still here." Sipping from the glass of wine and setting it onto the table nearby, your mind was quick to rush into many conclusions, but you kept your mouth shut. Whatever they had to discuss must have been really important. "Isn't it late? How are you both still talking?" "No, She— She's in bed." An exhale could be heard from the other end, as your brows furrowed. In bed? Marc lived in a single bedroom, so did that mean he was taking the couch? But before you could even question it, it was like the male at the other end had almost read your mind, because he immediately cleared your doubts, Albeit, you would have wished he never said anything. "..My bed." Oh. Feeling betrayed and lost would be an understatement of how you currently felt. Confused even, to some extend as a steady silence began to occupy the call. You weren't quite sure how Marc wanted you to respond to that. Did he want to hear you weep from the other side? Or be upset at him? Maybe even yell a few select choices of words for wasting your time? But instead of any of that, pure silence rang through the call and if it weren't for Marc checking if the call was still running, he would've thought you hung up. "Hello?"

The feeling of being let down was coursing through your veins at this point, making itself obvious with the lump that grew in your throat and how you stiffened up in your seat. You weren't sure what exactly to feel, a floodgate on sadness and anger opening like it was a pent up dam that was released. You sniffled quietly, trying to bite back the tears that were pricking at the corner of your eyes. It was unfair how distraught you felt. Another audible exhale could be heard, before you heard Marc's voice again. You weren't even sure why you felt like crying, but it was clear that this wouldn't end well. "Look, I'm suggesting that we should take a break because this is just not.. Not working out right now." "When did it work out, Marc?" "Wh— What are you talking about?" "I said." You spoke, recollecting yourself in a suspiciously gentle manner. "When were you not trying to use me as a way to move on?"

It was his turn to grow silent, and that was pretty much the answer you needed. To think that you gave him the chance, thinking that maybe this time around you could actually be with someone who cared— There were no other words to describe what you've been this entire time. You were foolish. "Goodnight. Sleep well." You'd be lying if you said that you didn't still want him to come back to you. Justify himself properly. Say that this was all some sick joke. But you were also aware that there was probably nothing that would save this. Still, You stayed when he spoke up again, for whatever reason. "Stop. Just Listen. This doesn't have to be.. what you think it is, I just need time to collect myself and honestly, I've been feeling for a while that—"

The urge to laugh was overbearing, and you didn't hold back. "You're so full of shit, Marc." Anger was finally settling in before the male at the other end could even respond to your words, but this wasn't about being courteous anymore. It felt like if Marc had cared for you even a little, this wouldn't have happened like it did. "Own up to what you're doing, asshole. I know you like to evade your responsibilities but just for once, if you have any respect for me, stand up like a man and say it to my face so I can just accept the fact that I've wasted my time and effort on you."

"Okay, Let me stop you here before you say anything else that you're gonna regret."

"No, fuck you. The only thing I regret is thinking that you actually cared enough to be with me. Turns out, your only concern is keeping yourself occupied and acting like you don't give a shit about everything that leaves you. You're a selfish prick."

"Fine. It's over then."

"Good. Lose my number and Have a good fucking night, Spector." The call was immediately cut, and so was the brightness of the candle that you had lit earlier by the dinner table. The dimness eased your volatile temper, but it bought the dejection and uneasiness that had failed to show up during the call. There was an option for you to cry it all out, but for reason, you didn't. A soft sigh escaped your pursed lips as you rubbed your eyes. Maybe you'd end up bawling your eyes out about this when you were nestled into the cold embrace of your bed.

You didn't even feel hungry anymore; so shoving the pasta that you had cooked hours prior into the fridge and cleaning up, you tried your best not to think of everything that just happened, which was difficult in it's own volition. It was just a few dates, so you were technically the one in the wrong for letting your guard down so easily and falling for a man who barely talked to you. That conclusion stung a little, but it helped you feel better as you picked up your phone and the bottle of wine again— too exhausted to take off the gorgeous outfit you had picked out for the night as you opened tinder; trying to scroll away like you were gonna move on.

—

On the other side, Marc had made the mistake of pacing through his room as he made the call, biting his cheeks as it reached it's abrupt and upsetting end. Guilt did lace his features, but reminding himself that this was the last he would ever hear from you made the circumstances a little less horrible. Glancing at the phone as his thumb hovered over your contact, He heard a meek voice call out to him. Not that of his ex-wife, but that of Steven's— who had seen everything from the reflection of the mirror that Marc found himself standing before. "Marc.." The reflection called out to him, a clearly disappointed expression lacing his features as he tried to find the words to even begin expressing how regrettable this would be. Steven didn't have to elaborate, though, because in the few seconds that Marc met Steven's concerned eyes, he knew this would just add into the contrition that already plagued his mind.

Marc tore himself away from Steven who made a lowly attempt at trying to reason with him; walking back to where he had just been previously. It was because Steven knew, and so did he, that he found what it felt like to be loved again through you. But he was undeserving of it. With everything he has done and all the secrets that he hid, he only deserved the toxic relation he had with his ex, which atleast kept his needs at bay; a fair trade for all the arguments he had with her. You were right about him being a selfish jerk. Though it was for all for the wrong reasons.

[ellecdc]

While I don't like to spend time feeding into negativity on my page, I received a rude/aggressive comment which, though it had been sent to me anonymously, I have reason to suspect who it might have been from; so while I'm not going to broadcast it, it prompted something that I would like to remind anyone who might need it [which is truly maybe only 0.02% of you]

I have been on this app for 4 months; I have gotten hundreds [if not thousands] of asks sent to me during that time and I have always made a solid effort to respond to anyone and everyone who has taken time out of their day to reach out to me or even leave comments on my fics because it truly means the world to me

Over the past 4 months and throughout the hundred [or thousands] of asks and just as many comments and messages, I have only ever received 2 negative/rude/insulting asks - both were sent anonymously, one I had responded to and one I have blocked

And while this blog has grown bigger than I have ever imagined possible for myself and I now receive the most number of asks and requests than I ever had before, I continue to try to stay active, diligent in my responses, and enthusiastic in my chats and conversations with you all

I will admit that I have many unanswered asks in my inbox right now from a large number of my mutuals, listed anons, and many more requests that I have been saving for when the inspiration hits - I cannot respond to everyone and everything all of the time and for the most part, people have been very understanding about that

Sometimes I save chats for later when I have the headspace for it, sometimes I'll answer on the whim, and sometimes I save simple chats that I actually think would make for a good fic idea!

But it's important to note that I don't owe anyone the explanation I just gave to you all

The people that you interact with on this app are just that - people

People who have good days and bad days, people who have jobs and lives and loved ones who take precedence, and people who don't actually owe you anything

This is true whether you're a mutual, whether you're a dutiful fan, whether you're a listed anon, or otherwise - blogs don't owe you anything

They don't owe you a response, they don't owe you their time or energy, and they don't owe you their 110% every time you interact with them

I give my best to every single person I have spoken to on here, and some days my best is better than other days. Sometimes I get so excited when I'm out with friends or at work when I notice an ask from someone - mutual, anon, or otherwise - that I reply immediately because I just cannot wait to chat. This means I'm not always sitting down at my computer and able to give every single response the same amount of time or effort because I am a) busy, b) perhaps a little distracted and c) human

But I don't owe anyone that explanation either

This blog has always felt like a super niche book club filled with likeminded people who loved the same things I do, loved the same characters that I do, and who enjoyed chatting about it. It has also felt like a fun and wholesome community that I am happy to be apart of

And while I like to think that my blog is a safe space for everyone and anyone who might want to visit it; it's a safe space for me first

This blog is my space and my safe haven; you are welcome to it - but that welcome is a privilege, not a right - and I am not obligated to cater it to you

Like I said, I have only ever received two rude asks, but even though 99.98% of my messages are positive, the negative ones feel the loudest

Please think before you send criticizing asks to any blog; the 'saddest' thing of all is being both cowardly and cruel to people you don't know

& again, as always, thank you all for being here with me 🫶

-L

[saficswrites]

Commissions are OPEN

Do you like Fire Emblem, gay women, supporting artists, or just really enjoy my work?

Because I’m on VGen now, and I need your help to get verified!

Until I’m verified the only method of transaction available to me is paypal, which severely limits what I can write, not the mention I don’t trust that company within a hundred meters of my livelihood.

This is however a necessary step towards me actually making a living doing this hobby that I adore, and I don’t mind writing sfw fics too.

Thus you are all invited to the Safics… something, it’s an event and I have no idea what to name it. 

The way this will work is that I’ll be opening a batch of safe for work commission slots on VGen for a really low price, and if commissioning artists isn’t your thing you can still help out by sharing or reposting this announcement to increase its reach!

These commissions are likely some of the cheapest I’ll ever offer, and for the price-to-word ratio they will probably be far and above the best deal I’ll give outside of other events like this: I am offering 750-1,000 words, fully edited, for $10 USD. The fics could also potentially be longer if they click with me and I get inspired! In that case, there would be no extra cost associated with the commission despite the total word count surpassing 1,000 words.

That’s 75-100 words for every dollar you spend, and that’s not even factoring in the time spent proofreading and editing!

Because of the nature of this being a larger batch of commissions it may take a bit of time to get all off them done, but I promise to keep my prospective clients updated on their fics progress (including letting them know when I’ve started it) so long as VGen offers me the tools to do so, which I’m sure it does.

The current plan is to release four separate batches of three commission slots, but that may fluctuate as the event goes on.

Additionally, how much say you have in the finished product is also completely up to you! 

-Do you want to mostly be surprised after giving me your prompt? I’ll do it without any input.

-Do you want to have a big say in the direction of every aspect of the fic? I can share excerpts or even the entire draft at multiple stages to make sure it’s going a direction you approve of, while also gathering feedback and advice from you to help make it as good as possible.

-Do you want a mix of those two options? Because I can do that too.

I have experience with both extremes of the writing process from my pretty extensive work offering free requests on Tumblr, for anons I didn’t really have much choice in the matter but when possible I would dm the requestor to ask how much involvement they wanted, and in some cases even share the entire fic as I was writing it!

Because it’s only ten bucks and I’m sure there are at least some fees attached, payment IS due up front, but if for whatever reason I find myself unable to complete the prompt adequately you’ll receive a full refund AND get to keep a pdf of the work in progress draft.

Making this experience as good as it possibly can be for the both of us is something I strive for, but that does go both ways. Overworking myself super hard and burning at this stage out would be catastrophic, and it is something I’m wary of, so because of that the amount of hours I work in a given day will be capped to help keep my work life balance reasonable.

To put all the information in one place: you will receive 750-1,000 words that amount to a fully edited realization of your prompt created to the best of my abilities, either as a pdf file or a google doc.

I cannot give any concrete information on how long each fic will take to be ready, both because of the fact these are batch commissions and because I’ve never done something quite like this before, but I do promise to be transparent with you and offer a full refund (so long as I’ve not yet started on your fic) if the wait becomes too much.

Batch comm rules:

Requests must be safe for work, no horny and no over the top violence. Trust me, there’s a reason I will stop accepting Paypal payments the moment I am verified.

I retain the right to reject any request for any reason, even something as asinine as not vibing with it. Forcing myself to create something that doesn’t click with me will result in a final product that neither of us will be happy with and you deserve better from a commission than that.

They gotta be gay. Well not exactly, but Safics is my name for a reason, I’m not super interested in writing mlw or mlm fics, I am completely on board with nblw though. This rule applies much less to platonic fics but I do generally prefer to write stories that are not about men. Also it should go without saying but trans women ARE women and I am completely comfortable writing them, in fact I actually enjoy it!

Because I am underselling myself here tips are appreciated if you really enjoy your fic, but they are in no way necessary much less expected. Positive reviews would be appreciated as well, perhaps even more-so since those are one of the requirements to get verified.

vgen.co/Safics

[ameliagiovanna0]

1, 8, 26, 34, 40, 42, 43, 49

Thank you for the ask, girlie ilu 💕

1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?)

Ooo, I really had to think about this one. For Chenford, I'm going to say When I Taste Tequila or Feel Your Kiss On Me. I really like them. They're super fluffy and (I hope 😅) funny. I'm pretty proud of them, and it's what I try to do with all of my fics. I also feel like it's pretty true to the characters, which is something I really strive for

8. What song would make a great fic (to either write or read)?

OMG SO MANY I HAVE A LIST

I've written a few, but a son that I haven't used but am dying to is The Good Ones by Gabby Barrett

26. Would you rather write a fic that had no dialogue or one that was only dialogue?

I think no dialogue. Normally, I suck at descriptions because I get distracted by the dialogue, so I'd be interested to see what I could come up with without that distraction and see if it's actually still interesting lol

34. What aspects of your writing are inspired by/taken from your real life?

Almost nothing? 😬😅 The biggest thing is that I've never been in a relationship, and all of my fics are relationship fluff. But I do pull from my own emotions, i.e. things I want out of a relationship or my idealistic view of what I'd hope a good relationship looks like. Same with the "negative" emotions I feature. If I write about anxiety and insecurity, all of that comes from my own personal experiences

40. Do you tend to reread fics or are you a one-and-done kind of person?

I absolutely reread. I have notes in my phone for the multichapter fics I liked so I can go back to a specific chapter for a scene that I really liked. I also favorites list I go back to all the time

42. Have you ever received a comment that particularly stood out to you for whatever reason?

Genuinely, any comment means a lot to me. But anytime someone says that I've captured a character well, it's pretty great. Like I said, one of my main goals is to write the character as true to what's on screen as possible, so when I accomplish that, it's a good feeling.

Anytime someone says what specific thing they liked about a fic makes me warm and fuzzy

43. If you take/write prompts: what’s your favorite prompt fic that you’ve written?

A lot of my fics are from prompts/requests, but my favorite is Feel Your Kiss On Me. The prompt itself was hilarious, and I had SO much fun with it

49. What are you currently working on? Share a few lines if you’re up for it!

From my latest Chenford WIP:

Rabbit holes and research were kind of Lucy’s thing. She would mindlessly scroll, maybe even look for something specific, but she would always end up so very far from where she started. One thing would lead to another, and before she knew it, she had migrated from Priyanka Chopra��s Instagram to the Smithsonian website where she found herself reading an article on the infamous woolly mammoth meatball. 

I don't want to give any details because I know myself and I know I'm going to change a million things before I post, if I end up posting it at all 😂

[rontra]

this ask/reply is long so im just putting it together as a textpost help me shark if you're out there

Anonymous asked: hi ok im super super sorry if this is bothering you but ive been meaning to ask it for like 6 months or something . i was introduced to your work via skin game and my brain latched to it ever since i read it. me and some other friends really enjoyed the fic even if it was a short read and i was wondering if youre comfortable sharing chapter 2 either publicly or privately? again im ultra mega sorry if this comes off as creepy or weird or something ive been stressing over it for liek 3 days since i didnt want to bother you :(

either way, love your work so much. your fanart introduced me to both arknights and rwby (though a friend kind of pushed me to actually start watching it lol) and theyre both really great series :) your work is a huge inspiration for me and my friend group and your writing is just insane /pos

(3rd paragraph omitted bc i cant priv reply and im excluding your offsite info even if its under a readme HFDBHJF)

hi shark!! ofc i remember you we are like soldiers side by side in the trenches of takano posting 🫡

so first of all thank you so much for following and enjoying my work 🥰 i'm always happy to help drag people into the arknights/rwby zone HEHEHE i'm glad you enjoy what i make!!! it means a lot to me 😊 thank you!!!

now. THE THING ABOUT skin game ch2. is that it's pretty rough. i had a look at it the last time something prompted me to think about the fic and it's not really presentable (i don't know if i even finished editing it back in ….. 6 years ago… oh god). it also doesn't have all of its art (which might be a blessing in disguise given the art it does have is …. 6 years old… oh god)

getting it to a state i consider readable would take a good chunk of work, which is why i put it off again after looking at it. it's almost 12 thousand words of … uhhh… shall we say… unnnnpolished material. i think i couldn't even share it privately because i would be embarrassed to show someone something so unfinished and janky. not to mention not having all of its art finished. so i got kind of stuck last time and just put it off again bc the amount of work it very obviously needed was like. "Christ OK Not Now" yknow…

it does bolster the spirit when i remember you and your friends. it means a lot to me that you care about it even after so long!!! i just have NO idea when i'm going to get around to editing something of that magnitude @_@ i was really a dummy about chapter lengths back then… HFDBHJGJMK

it's really kind of a shame too becahse chapter 1 and 2 together are sort of the introductory portion for our 2 primary characters. so it feels like only half of the intro is done right now. since ch1 detailed how kyrie ended up at that plaza meeting takano, ch2 would detail how takano ended up there, meeting kyrie. and then we would proceed into the future from there. as a renowned Takano Guy, obviously i was very interested in this, but for various reasons i never finished polishing it and drawing the art…

ch2 also features ikuko so you KNOW its dear to me

overall being like 5-6 yrs old theres a disconnect where i don't feel like ch2 right now is achieving what it should, and i see a lot of concrete problems with concrete solutions, but it's an editing of such Magnitude that it keeps being pushed back in favor of other stuff. oh, ephemeral soul…

some of the art i did get done for it is pretty cute though, like these baby miyos;

so that's pretty good, but i didnt FINISH drawing the art, ARGHH

it is really hard to say. bc when i KNOW there's people out there who remember it and care about it, that does motivate me to return to it. but it has a lot of stuff that needs doing, and is a very old project, so it's unclear to me right now when it would receive the attention it desperately needs before it can be shown to other people... i super can't in clear conscience accept anything like payment/etc for that kind of vague half-promise either, although i appreciate the thought xD

i'm sorry it's such an inconclusive answer, but i am sort of an inconclusive guy when it comes to projects... i jump around a lot as i'm sure you've observed in your time following me 😭 it's important to me to have that freedom, but i do care about SG too, so we just sort of have to see if i can surmount the magnitude of the work i accidentally set up for myself half a decade ago (*turning into stone*)

but it makes me smile when i remember you're out there thinking about this weird little AU. so, thanks. 😌 a soul still burns...

.

and then after all that CH3 was going to have more of best girl 🥺.....

WARGH <- BEARER OF THE CURSE

[kquil]

Hello again pookie!!! 

It’s absolutely okay! I’m glad to hear you had a great Halloween! We don’t really celebrate where I live so it was mostly just going to random dungeons and haunted houses around here with some friends, it was a lot of fun! (We simply needed a reason to hangout and Halloween was our theme haha)

I’m super excited for Christmas!!! I’ve been playing carols and Christmas songs since summer vacation. The Christmas spirit is always high hehe.

Thank you so much for your kind words and reassurance! I had been putting the series on hold because I wanted to read it with a clear mind and it definitely was a good idea. I was able to enjoy it thoroughly today!!

This chapter was amazing. You left me speechless once again. I was literally going through a rollercoaster of emotions and it is very hard for me to experience fan-fictions so deeply, you truly outdone yourself!

Uni has been a blessing to me since my workload has been balanced! But it still gets hectic because there are so many things to do besides assignments and attending lectures! I remind myself that not everyone gets the opportunities I did and I must take care of myself and seek rest every week once a day no matter what. Thank you so much for your concern and reminder to take rest!

I wanted to ask some advice on creative writing. Do you have any recommendations that a beginner could use to get into creative writing? I’ve been interested since quite a while but I’m unsure on what I should look into first or how I should go about on a project. I have so many prompts, ideas and plots written down but I get confused on how to start anything. I thought it would be best to ask someone who I find inspiring (aka you) 

(˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶) .ᐟ.ᐟ

I’ve also meant to ask if you were aware of the on-going genocides in Armenia, Congo and Sudan? And the genocide on Uyghurs. There is barely any coverage on mainstream media. I personally haven’t found a lot of information on Armenia, very basic information I’d have to look more into it but I’ve been following many Congolese and Sudanese resources.

The Uyghurs often get neglected as well, they have a similar situation like Palestinians do. China annexed East Turkestan and renamed it as Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 1949. They have been putting the native population in concentration camps.

Congo’s resources are being exploited for tech. The Congolese people face harsh treatments like rape and bombing for the sake of stealing these resources.

Sudan has been in turmoil due to their resources and for a new occupation by foreign entities that have sent militia to fabricate a “civil war” which has ruined the civilians’ lives. They are on the brink of starvation and have been constantly living in hell since April 2023. Women especially are living in a nightmare. Both the U.S and the U.A.E are involved in this.

Armenians have been facing threats from the Azerbaijan Government/Military of their eradication from what I know. This started last year around October/November. Israel has been complicit of providing weapons to Azerbaijan. I think it is one way or another complicit in other genocides I’ve mentioned as well.

This was very brief and I might have unintentionally given some false or mixed information, I apologize for that in advance but I thought it would be great to bring it to your attention. If you need some resources I’d love to share! Keep them in your thoughts and prayers 🩷

-🌸

hello, my darling! goodness, what a treat to have you in my inbox twice in a row. although you don't celebrate Halloween, it still seems like you had great fun, which is what matters most -- sounds super spooky but with great company so it sounds like a great halloween ٩(^ᗜ^ )و ´- omg! i love Christmas so i'm right there with you! i only wake up to Christmas songs now haha! ♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪

and i'm glad you enjoyed the read, it's really become something quite special to me and to see it being received so well makes me so giddy and proud -- thank you for always taking the time to read my writing and enjoy it to the fullest, that's all i can ask for (ㅅ´ ˘ `)♡

awww~ you have such a good attitude when it comes to uni, you're soooo right when it comes to balancing rest and the workload. i know it'll get tough at times but seeing your outlook, i'm sure you'll pull through no matter how tough it gets (⸝⸝> ᴗ•⸝⸝) keep it up, my darling, you're doing brilliantly ( ˶˘ ³˘(⋆❛ ہ ❛⋆)!♡

omg that's so exciting! creative writing is such fun, i'm sure you'll have a fun time with it. ✧｡٩(ˊ���ˋ)و✧*���thank you also for the high praise, always, you make me blush every time (。>\\<)♡ but i'm more than happy to help! although, i can only lend advice based on my experience so feel free to search and test out other techniques or advice online to help you along -- every writer is different

if you already have those prompts and ideas, the best advice i can give is to set aside some time, find a quiet place, put away all your distractions, set up your preferred writing medium (handwritten or typed), set down some snacks and a drink, and just begin writing. there's no better way to do creative writing than just making a start. of course, only do these for short prompts, you're only beginning after all so be gentle with yourself, and be gentle in your proofreading and self-critiquing too -- the more you write, the more you'll improve over time.

i also encourage reading books, you'll be able to pick up more vocab and writing structure things, you'll be able to see, first hand, how writers phrase things, start paragraphs, invoke emotions, describe environments, flesh out characters etc through storytelling

the way you go about your creative writing is also important to how you go about starting i.e if you want to have your own writing account like me here, create an account and start posting, the more you write and post, the more you'll grow with your readers, who will surely interact with your content and you'll see what things work and what don't -- though, there usually isn't a visible pattern lol (ᵕ—ᴗ—)

if you aren't willing to publish your writing online, that's also perfectly fine but i recommend having a dedicated notebook for your writing or make it fun and aesthetic in your own way. have a pretty notebook just for your writing or a binder that you can easily shuffle pages about or get a USB and dedicate it's entire storage to your writing and/or plans. i highly recommend going on Pinterest and searching something like 'writing aesthetic' or 'creative writing aesthetic/hobby' for visual and prompt inspiration on how to go about it -- if you find something you like or intrigues you, start it right away! don't feel like you have to buy any fancy stationary or anything though, for creative writing all you need is pen and paper or a reliable laptop and you're good, what matters is that you're giving it a go

that's all the advice i can give for now, if you want to ask me anything specific please feel free to reach out whenever and i'll try to respond as soon as i can! wishing you all the best on your creative writing endeavours, you're going to do amazing ✧(⸝⸝> ᴗ•⸝⸝)   

i have no words for the type of inhumane atrocities happening in Armenia, Congo and Sudan, it makes me sick the amount of suffering innocent people, men, women and children, are forced to go through. i, sadly, have not been well informed of these horrific circumstances but thank you so much for bringing them to my attention, my darling, you're an angel. i will keep the innocents in my prayers and hope that their corrupt perpetrators go to hell. those sources will be very helpful, thank you! there's not much i can do but know about what's happening and making sure i never forget what's happening and has happened, I'll make sure those suffering unfairly will be remembered, always x

[intothemertensverse]

Thanks for tagging me! :)

How many works do you have on AO3?

118

What's your total AO3 word count?

1,507,734

Your top 5 stories by kudos:

Gustave Daae's Daughter

Pilgrim Soul

The Nanny

A Love There Is No Cure For

The World's More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I eventually respond to comments because I love reading the comments and would like to talk with my readers but I am also very socially awkward and shy with not great time management skills, so there's often a delay :')

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

Eggs and Toast. It's the only phic of mine so far to take place *after* the canon Events of LND. Echo In This whisper was also pretty angsty

What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

I feel like they (almost) all end up pretty happy tbh! Maybe Tread Softly was slightly happier than most

Do you write crossovers?

The closest thing to a crossover I'll probably write is Like a Wheel, Like a Wind, which is a PotO au set in the Stephen King multiverse. Other than that, I mostly do AU mashup versions as opposed to actual crossovers (ie Evita au where Christine *is* Evita, not an au where Evita and Christine both exist)

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

hmmmm :') fun fact: ffn does Not remove comments from fics, regardless of what the comment says :0 I received direct hate and even some personal accusations over my portrayal of an ace Erik, which was super interesting because the person in question then proceeded to continue to read and subscribe to my other stories lmao. I also got some bigoted comments over ace headcanons in more private settings as well, even from "allies". Someone got very flustered over the singular gay Erik I wrote once. Gustave Daae's Daughter got some upset comments because it was... a lil darker than what I normally write. Someone had an absolute fit over Christine's choices in Pilgrim Soul in a way that was slightly funny looking back at it ^^; That said, I've also received so many touching and wonderful comments that remind me why I write <3

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

this is a constant source of disagreement between me and my beta reader ahaha I would say "no" and she would. point to the many Scenes :''') I do have occasional explicit moments in my stories, but I don't consider it smut necessarily as the Scenes aren't the main focal point, and the explicitness of them is usually to (try to) convey something other than eroticism. If the thing I'm trying to convey (awkwardness, vulnerability, shame, desire, angst, being conflicted, etc) would be showcased well by an explicit moment, I'll include it to an extent. Otherwise, no

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I'm aware of, though I'm sure with all the AI scraping etc it's gone... somewhere

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes, several! I get why some don't like it, but I love seeing my stuff in other languages and as long as someone asks first and links back to me I think it's really cool!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not exactly! But Rat au and Gremlin au were both originally made in close collaboration with/big inspiration from Ms_Myth, in fact she even wrote a rat au prequel! I've written a few things based off of prompts others have come up with, too, and those phics are typically gifted to the person on ao3

What's your all-time favourite ship?

Erik and Christine

What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

I would like to think I will finish them all, one day :') I do have a few aus I've shelved for various reasons tho

What are your writing strengths?

Angst lol.

What are your writing weaknesses?

I misspell "Christine" twelve different ways and at this point I can't tell the difference ;-; Pacing can also be a struggle

What's a fandom/ship you haven't written for yet but want to?

LotR or Star Wars, but both are so expansive and I'm afraid if I get started in them I won't finish my poto wips... So maybe one day, idk. A ship I'd like to write is Erik/Carlotta lol

What's your favourite fic that you've written?

This is so hard to choose lol omg. I'm currently really enjoying my hotel au, which is only an unpublished wip at the moment except for this. But as far as finished/published stuff, I'm going to have go with Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Fanfiction Author Interview Game

Thank you @brendadaaedestler for the tag!

How many works do you have on AO3?

30 as it stands!

What's your total AO3 word count?

591,986

Your top 5 stories by kudos:

Sticky Notes and Serendipity // collab with @brendadaaedestler // Erik/Christine long-fic // 224 kudos

Say You'll Share With Me // oneshot collection, mostly Erik/Christine // 143 kudos

Our Little Home // oneshot // Erik/Christine // 139 kudos

Starting Fresh // twoshot // Erik/Christine // 99 kudos

my heart is home when my hand is in yours // oneshot collection, collab with @brendadaaedestler // mostly Erik/Christine // 83 kudos

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I always do! I love seeing readers interacting with my fics and sharing what they enjoyed about them, and I always want to show my appreciation for those comments. The only reason I wouldn't is if I missed it somehow or if my frequent co-author has beaten me to the punch and replied already.

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

It's probably Sleep So Long Awaited, which is a play on the end of LND where Erik dies instead of Christine. It's sad, it's got sad Gustave, a moment of peace between Erik and Raoul, and...well, Erik dies. It's not a happy story.

What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

I would definitely say Sticky Notes and Serendipity! The epilogue hasn't gone up yet, but it's super fluffy and sweet, and the entire fic just came to such a happy, wonderful ending. You'll see what I mean on Saturday 😉

Do you write crossovers?

I don't, no. I might write fics inspired by another piece of media, but I wouldn't think I would ever write a proper crossover.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not direct hate? I once received some criticism that was DM'd to me that was definitely not asked for and unnecessary, so that sucked. It was really a big blow to me, and I considered taking down that fic after receiving that comment because it made me super insecure about the entire format of the fic. It came from a person who had been very supportive of my stories for a long time, which made it even worse. Thankfully, my best friend convinced me not to take the fic down, and my critic has now been exposed for not being a good person, so it all worked out in the end.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I don't write it and I won't be writing it.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yep, I have had my fics scraped and posted on other websites at least twice, either by bots or by another user.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have not! Someone offered to translate Like Father, Like Son, but my coauthor on that story was not keen on the idea. It's something I would have to consider because I think I would worry too much about my style and plans for the story being lost in translation and I wouldn't be able to really tell. I wouldn't totally write it off, though!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Ohhhh yes! Like Father, Like Son was my first collaboration, and I write probably about half of my fics these days with my best friend @brendadaaedestler. We have something in the works for NaNoWriMo as we speak!

What's your all-time favourite ship?

Definitely Erik/Christine, I love writing with them and reading about them so very much.

What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

It's not one that I don't think I will ever finish, but I think it will be a while before No Need For Goodbyes ever gets finished. I would love to go back to it, but I've been away from that cast of characters for so long that it can be hard to slip back in. My coauthor also no longer has the time to work on it with me, and it is a very time-consuming project, so I'm not sure when I will get back to it.

What are your writing strengths?

I think that dialogue is definitely my strength. It comes very easily to me and it's something that I always enjoy getting to write.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Getting lost in the dialogue! Sometimes I get so caught up in what the characters are saying and the emotions that they're expressing that the writing can get dialogue-heavy. I always have to make a conscious effort to include scene descriptions, settings, and descriptions of the character's bodies and expressions.

What's a fandom/ship you haven't written for yet but want to?

This is an interesting question that I honestly don't think about a ton lol? I've always been pretty content writing Phantom fic and don't really have the inspiration to jump into other fandoms. Shipwise, I've only written sporadic Meg/Erik fic and only a long time ago, so that one could be fun to explore. There is angst there.

What's your favourite fic that you've written?

It was Like Father, Like Son for the longest time because it was my first Phantom of the Opera fic, my first long fic, I loved the characters, etc. I'm still super proud of that story, but I think Sticky Notes and Serendipity takes the cake. It's my first true multi-chapter fic since LFLS, and I can just see how much my style has changed, how much my writing has improved, and it makes me feel really good about myself. I am in love with the versions of the characters that we wrote, and getting to work so much with Erik's anxiety and making it feel so authentic was a crowning achievement for me. Also, seeing all of the love for the story that Chloe and I have written together makes me feel so amazing. Sticky Notes is my favourite for so many reasons.

Tagging: @starlitexpress @intothemertensverse @sloanedestler @ablatheringblatherskite @shinyfire-0 @paperandsong @jennyfair7 and anyone else who wants to play!

[dylanobrienisbatman]

You're the only one who makes me

A Wellven Royalty Winter Romance, written as a gift for @andthelightbulbclicks for the @troped-fanfic-challenge Holiday Gift Exchange! [Rated T] [7.6k]

Princess Raven of Sky Mountain has been searching for a match for a long time. She had rebelled, of course, but she was ready now, to try to find the right heir to marry. A promise to her father, one that she intends to keep, no matter how difficult it had proven to be. How was it possible that every suitor was someone less interesting than the last?

Maybe getting lost in a blizzard was just what she needed to solve all of her troubles.

Moodboard by @thelittlefanpire

---

Her corset pinched at the skin on her back. Her ribs itched. The lace on her sleeve kept catching, leaving unappealing strings dangling from her wrists. The room was sticky and hot. Her shoes were pinching her toes. The pins in her hair were beginning to give her a headache. Really, she was uncomfortable in every way, and her thoughts were a rotating wheel of complaints.

She didn’t utter a single one aloud.

Raven Reyes was the ever reluctant Princess of Sky Mountain. She was used to standing up straight and keeping her irritation to herself, or at least, not verbalizing it. She could ask the right questions and curtsy just so and she knew every step to at least 15 dances. She spoke three languages and knew poems in five. But that didn’t mean she enjoyed it.

Her fingers itched for the coal burning engine she was building in her bedroom upstairs. She could think of at least three different ways she could be making it work more efficiently as she sat and pretended to be listening to the Duke of the Flower Valley droning on about his country’s glass production.

She wondered if she could find a way to make Sky Mountain a more efficient means of glass production. That would show him.

This party, like every single party she had ever attended, was a waste of her time.

She peered down the table at her father, the King Jacapo of Sky Mountain. He had been watching her, a bemused expression on his face. She shot him a glare and he just shook his head, and glanced over at the Duke. Be Polite, he seemed to say. She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him.

Raven was the only daughter of King Jacapo, and she was his heir. The marriage between the future Queen of Skuy Mountain and any son of any monarch was the most sought after alliance in all of Prymfya, and so she sat, and she was polite, and she waited for the day someone sent her an heir worth listening to.

So far, that day had not come.

When Raven was a little girl, her father had made her a promise. So long as she chose someone who was an heir to their own throne, she could marry whomever she pleased. Her marriage, as long as it was proper, was her choice. She had rebelled, of course. As a teenager she had fallen for a stable boy, and had sworn to her father she would run away with him. She had flirted incessantly with a third son of a Duke during the spring courting season of her 22nd year, but he had merely been to irritate her father after he refused to allow her to ride the motorized bicycle she had built. (He caved, and she got a broken clavicle for all her trouble… It had been worth it.) But eventually, she had seen the error of her ways. She had watched as the other young princesses in her circle were married off to the highest bidder, old men and gross men, men with dozens of illegitimate children and mistresses they kept in their homes, and suddenly the immense gift her father had given her became apparent.

She was 27 this year, and was finally ready to seriously consider a suitor. Of course, that meant there hadn’t been a single man worth considering. A parade of princes and duchesses and even a queen from some far off land had made their way to her fathers court, and each one of them had been duller than the last. So far, this evening was shaping up to be much the same.

When the night finally closed, and the last stragglers who had long overstayed their welcome were heaved into their carriages, she straddled over her window, letting one leg hang out into the cold night air, and leaned back against the frame. Nights like this made her wonder if her father should have simply chosen for her, picked a respectable man with a worthy family and good character and sent her off. It would certainly be easier than this, than spending her nights wondering if this might be the most interesting suitor she would ever meet, if this might be it and if she should just agree to marry him because what if the next was worse? She looked out over the foggy moors of her father’s palace, a night sky filled with the swirls of galaxies far away, a heavy cloud cover rolling in from the east, and wondered if her father would have been better off.

The sun cut through the heavy cloud cover as the morning broke and Raven was itching to be anywhere but in her room, stewing. She dressed quickly, grabbing a slice of warm bread and an apple from the kitchen on her way out to the stables, speaking to almost no one aside from the cook, who always kissed her on the cheek and tucked her hair behind her ears and told her she should eat a little more.

The brisk cold bit at her skin leaving pink on her cheeks, invigorating her in the early morning. She made her way out into the stables and saddled her favourite horse, at the protestation of the stable hand. As she led her white mare out into the cold, she felt the world start to quiet. A long ride on her own, nothing to distract her, no one to talk about unimportant nothing in her ears. It sounded like exactly what she needed.

The ride out was perfect, the brisk winter wind became stinging and skin numbing, her hair tangling in the wind. About an hour and a half out, though, the winter clouds took over the skies and the snow began to fall, first in soft flurries but quickly turning into heavy icy snow. Sooner than she expected she could barely see in front of her horse’s nose. She turned around, trying her best to fully about face to go back the way she came, but her horse reared back, seeing the tree in front of them only seconds before she did. She held tight to the reins, barely avoiding getting thrown from her saddle, and the edges of her senses started to notice the panic she was feeling. She took a deep breath, and then another, but it did nothing to stop her racing heart.

She had heard stories, stable hands and other servants getting lost in the blizzards that ravaged her kingdom. Sometimes they made it back, fingers and noses blackened with frostbite. Other times they were found frozen out in the packed snow, or worse, found in the spring when the last of the snow had melted away. She pushed the image of her frozen corpse emerging from the frostbitten woods, and took another deep breath.

She stepped down off her horse, and tied her to the tree. A stable, sturdy post in the swirl of white around her. Next, she unraveled the blanket from the side of the saddle, finding the cold weather leg wrappings she had stuffed inside and wrapping them up. She slung the blanket over her mare’s neck, covering her ears, and then stepped under her neck, using her as a shield from the snow. She closed her eyes, and tried to think.

She remembered seeing a shack a little while back, but there was no way she could find her way back if she couldn’t see 2 inches in front of her face. She certainly wouldn’t be able to make it all the way back to the palace. She swore, but the sound of her voice was lost in the wind before it reached her ears. She sunk into the snow on the ground, packing it around her feet and pulling her knees up to her chest trying her best to keep her body warm.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, her ears numb and her fingers tingling, before a light pierced the swirling white of the storm. A rider on a black horse emerged, and Raven did something arguably very stupid. She ran out in front of him, waving her arms frantically. Thankfully, his horse saw her much the same way her mare had seen the tree and came to a rearing stop.  His rider was less than pleased.

“You could have thrown me off my horse!” he yelled, barely piercing through the roaring wind.

“I’m so sorry, I’ve been lost out here, I’m not even sure how long. I need help finding- I need help.” Best not to tell a strange man in the middle of the woods who she was, no matter how nice his cloak was, or how well groomed his snow covered horse. “Please, I don’t mean to slow you down on your travels, but there is no telling how long this storm will go on and I-”

He raised a hand to cut her off and she watched as his shoulders sagged in acceptance.

“Get on your horse,” He yelled, and led his horse close to her and tying their bridles together, “I saw a big barn not far off the road, back the way I came. I think if we keep out of the trees and on the raised path we should be able to find it.”

[dramavixen]

Chang Heng: The Man Who Deserves to Be a Male Lead, But Absolutely Should Not Be One

(i.e., I found the opportunity to dunk on Ten Miles of Peach Blossom’s Ye Hua after spending far too long harboring a simmering resentment for that giant man baby)

**Spoilers for: Love Between Fairy and Devil and Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms

I was around 19 years old when I watched the renowned xianxia drama 三生三世十里桃花 (Three Lives, Three Worlds, Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms, A.K.A. Eternal Love or TMOPB for short). I was smitten with the worldbuilding and music, but especially with the male lead. To this day, Ye Hua holds the crown as one of xianxia’s most beloved characters. Not that he did anything super cool—unless you consider bawling over his dead wife revolutionary.

It was a couple years and many more dramas later that I realized I had been conned. Beneath the pretty tears and fantastic dubbing, Ye Hua represents an absolute disaster of a man, an apocalypse for the poor lady on the receiving end of his heart-eyes. How could I, a supposedly mature adult, have been so blind to his deadly flaws (ironic, given what he does to his wife)?

This epiphany blessed me with an instinctual aversion to the xianxia genre. Everywhere I looked, I could only see the shadow of Ye Hua within the male characters who took up his torch—none of these xianxia men are worth shit. And then I learned that the same often applies to xianxia women. All of them need an intervention.

So when Love Between Fairy and Devil’s Chang Heng graced my screen and started exuding extreme Ye Hua vibes, could you blame me for thinking “oh hell no”? I was not ready to get hurt again. Over the course of the drama, I learned to heal and love again, but because of a single caveat: Chang Heng is destined to never get the girl.

---

The Walking Red Flag

As with all good science experiments, we need to establish the control element. Ye Hua will act as that today. What about Ye Hua is so unforgivable, yet allows him to remain as one of the faces of xianxia?

TMOPB was met with explosive popularity upon its release in 2017 and remains one of the most well-known C-dramas to this day. It’s not a reach to say that its success prompted the wave of xianxia dramas released in its wake, nor to claim that its influence inspired a new formula for the genre’s plot structure. It wasn’t entirely original in concept, but its impact on pop culture shouldn't be understated.

The drama’s primary selling point is the love story between esteemed goddess Bai Qian and Heavenly Crown Prince Ye Hua. Through a series of unfortunate events, Bai Qian loses her memory and powers, becoming the “mortal” Su Su. Ye Hua is the smitten deity who really, really wants to be with Su Su even though their relationship is strictly forbidden due to Reasons That Definitely Exist and Are Valid.

Dramatic irony is also at play. Bai Qian and Ye Hua are betrothed to one another long before they fall in love in the mortal realm, but are unaware that their beloved and their future spouse are one and the same person. Their love is essentially a fated relationship disguised as a wild goose chase.

Once Su Su “dies,” Ye Hua deteriorates into a lovesick shell of himself. His longing, guilt, and grief over her death have since established themselves as the picturesque representation of tragic elements inherent to the xianxia genre. Ever since Ye Hua did it, everyone and their grandmas think it’s the new hip thing to get their lovers killed and then cry over it.

Ye Hua could take one step into my house and I would kick him to the curb, install new locks, and file for a restraining order. I fear this man far more than I fear the typical drama villain. Because imagine what he’d do to someone he hates, if this is what he does to the person he loves:

I’ll give him a pass on some of his early flirting techniques, which includes shenanigans like injuring himself to elicit her care and attention and also sleeping in her bed without her express knowledge. (Off to a promising start, aren’t we?) He's a lovestruck fool, ignorant to proper methods to woo the ladies.

After Su Su takes an interest in him, he tricks her into marrying him. Fine, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But he doesn’t see anything wrong with marrying her while she’s unaware of his true identity. He doesn’t even pipe up about it after she gets pregnant. Meanwhile, Su Su marries him because she’s lonely and trusts that he’s someone who can always be there for her—you know, like a good spouse tends to be. He is not that.

Ye Hua thinks he can outsmart the heavens with his amoeba brain and tries to fake his own death so he can be with Su Su. He fails miserably.

Su Su finds out who Ye Hua truly is after she’s captured by his Heavenly Lord grandpa, who fully intends on punishing her for their relationship since she’s a “mortal” and easy to bully.

Ye Hua fears that openly expressing his love for Su Su will get her killed. To avoid this, he comes up with the ingenious solution of pulling the whole “I have to treat you like garbage to protect you” bullshit. Dearest Ye Hua, please name me one scenario in any drama where you saw this method working out well enough for you to try it for yourself.

For obvious reasons, Su Su starts doubting that Ye Hua truly loves her. This doubt peaks after manipulative female support character Su Jin accuses Su Su of pushing her off the Zhu Xian Tai (“Fairy-Executing Terrace”) in an attempt to kill her, a plot that results in Su Jin going blind. Ye Hua, in another effort to “protect” Su Su, personally digs out Su Su’s eyeballs as retribution—even though he knows that she didn’t do anything wrong, and even as she sobs and begs him not to do it.

Blind and abandoned, Su Su explores the palace every day through touch and commits its layout to memory. After giving birth to her son, she uses that knowledge, finding and leaping off the Zhu Xian Tai to kill herself.

She doesn’t die, of course. She regains her memories as a goddess, but is so tormented by what she endured that she decides to wipe away the memories of the entire relationship. Then they reunite and fall in love again, yada yada yada.

All of that content makes for great angst. I still need a tissue box or two to make it through the episode where Su Su throws herself off the Zhu Xian Tai. If anything, my frustration toward Ye Hua makes me cry even harder because goodness, the audacity of this asshole. He acts purely out of selfishness, desiring to keep Su Su at his side at any cost, even if she’s the one paying it. This isn’t to say that Ye Hua gets off scot-free. He also willingly takes punishments in Su Su’s stead and wants to follow her after she dies. But so what? Does his suffering reduce Su Su’s pain at all? Does that change any of what he does to her? And he doesn’t even get her eyes back for her afterward; she has to do it herself!

What makes Ye Hua truly irredeemable in my eyes is that he still ends up with Bai Qian. Her forgiveness is only natural, as her love for him exceeds her hate. That sounds romantic, but only if you ignore how he caused her enough pain for her to prefer death. And even if she forgives him, why does she have to take him back? Unless she so desperately needs a reason to jump off the Zhu Xian Tai again.

While I understand that the show is more marketable when the lead couple has a “happy” ending, it doesn’t sit well with me that that’s the end result for Ye Hua and Bai Qian. Ye Hua expresses remorse, tons of it; otherwise how could so many viewers readily forgive him? But it’s simply not true that once we show enough remorse, we should earn back the things and people we lost. Once some things are over, they’re truly over. If that applies to anyone, it should definitely apply to someone like Ye Hua.

---

Wake Him Up Inside

And so we arrive on the subject of Chang Heng. Oh, Chang Heng. I see his tiny face and I just want to wrap him up in a blanket and feed him s’mores.

Chang Heng’s character shares many foundational similarities with Ye Hua: he crushes on someone while unaware that she’s actually his long-lost fiancée, has too many responsibilities, and struggles to balance those two problems. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the writers had Ye Hua in mind while creating Chang Heng. Every single word of wisdom he utters is a not-so-subtle jab at Ye Hua’s erring ways. It’s the sweet honey of vindication, I tell you.

Before he gets to that point of self-awareness, Chang Heng treads the same path as Ye Hua. He wipes Xiao Lanhua’s memories of him without her permission. He doesn’t dare reveal his feelings for her because that would be counter to his duties. Even after painstakingly creating medicine to help with her dysfunctional spiritual root, he ends up pretending that he never did such a thing. In his deepest subconscious, he believes his love for Xiao Lanhua is a weakness. The main difference between him and Ye Hua is that Chang Heng has the decency to distance himself beforehand, knowing that he is in no position to have a relationship with her.

Two things prevent Chang Heng from transforming into Ye Hua 2.0: 1) he isn’t the male lead and 2) Dongfang Qingcang’s existence.

Imagine a world in which Chang Heng is the male lead. When Xiao Lanhua is accused of being a traitor, he would almost certainly pull a Ye Hua move and negotiate with his brother. “I know she’s innocent, but I also know that you must punish her, so please just spare her life”—that type of thing. (The reason I think this isn’t just possible but probable is because later in the actual drama, he enthusiastically agrees to a plan in which he and Rong Hao would kill Xiao Lanhua’s body with DFQC trapped inside, and simply build Xiao Lanhua a new shell to live in. Bro, what the hell.) Because Chang Heng doesn’t fully understand how useless he is, that would be the limit of what he can do for her. He would seriously believe that he has no other choice in the matter.

But someone else is the male lead. When DFQC comes along to rescue Xiao Lanhua, there’s no compromise to be had. He’s taking her with him and that’s the end of it. I, for one, have never felt so validated as when DFQC beats Chang Heng to the floor and then just...walks away, like he’s making a stop at the supermarket.

DFQC: Are you going to save her? Or are you going to save your Shuiyuntian?

That someone can behave this way is a major culture shock to Chang Heng. How can someone just do whatever they want? What about rules? Watching DFQC whisk Xiao Lanhua away serves as loudest of wake-up calls: DFQC intends to put Chang Heng in his place, showing him that he does have a choice in the matter. But he can neither defeat DFQC nor abandon his responsibilities. Until he can overcome those obstacles, Xiao Lanhua will always be out of his reach.

While Xiao Lanhua sparks love in Chang Heng with her desire to protect him, DFQC is the one who makes him question his priorities. Exactly what should he be doing that he currently isn’t? How is it possible that he’s a god of war, yet can’t protect the one he loves?

Chang Heng realizes that distancing himself from Xiao Lanhua accomplishes nothing but forcing her further out of reach (proud of him for realizing that one because let’s be honest, we don’t love Chang Heng for his brain cells). He also has an extreme edge to him, so he hops straight over to doing the exact opposite, rebelling against the arbitrary rules of heaven, constantly trying to bring Xiao Lanhua home, and openly expressing his feelings for her. Later, even if it means becoming a mortal, even if it means letting her go to someone else, nothing is off-limits.

---

The Fine Line Between Helplessness and Incompetence

A lot of xianxia plots depend on characters being helpless and subject to the fates. In my childhood memories, xianxia dramas commonly had at least one main character who was a low-ranked human or deity. Bullied and unable to fend for themselves, their journeys to improve themselves and protect what mattered to them were ones that touched and inspired people who could relate to their common identities. These characters aren’t given many choices in such situations, yet they consistently choose to fight back.

This zero-to-hero trope has become less convincing over time as the trend turned into telling the stories of “chosen ones.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, except now all of these dramas are trying to convince us that these gods with unlimited power are...powerless. They’re all hero-to-even-bigger-hero tales, if you will.

It’s not impossible for gods to be forced into making certain decisions, but it’s quite rare that a xianxia persuades me into finding it believable. If we look at Ye Hua again, he gets outsmarted by some random woman who's jealous of his wife. He also snubs Su Su to placate an old man. You’re trying to tell me that that’s the best a dragon crown prince can do? If I lived in the heavens, I’d live in fear of a revolution every day if those are the capabilities of my future leader.

When it comes down to it, Ye Hua is not helpless like our heroes of old—he’s incompetent. And it’s hard to sympathize with a guy who loses everything not because outside forces overpower him, but because he himself sucks major ass.

LBFAD, a drama where every one of the three leads is someone of super high rank, is the only xianxia in recent years which puts into perspective how huge power translates into huge responsibility, and why that pushes characters into feeling like things are out of their control. Be it DFQC’s and Chang Heng’s duties to their people or Xiao Lanhua’s destiny to save all life, it’s hard for any of them to decide when to give in and when to rebel against the heavy weight of destiny.

Chang Heng is a pleasant mixture of both helplessness and incompetence. Is it not endearing the way DFQC easily crushes him, yet he still goes flying into enemy territory proclaiming that he’s going to save Xiao Lanhua? I don’t know where his confidence is coming from and I don’t think he does either, but it’s heartwarming to watch him try and fail with flying colors.

When Chang Heng hops over to Cangyan Sea to bring Xiao Lanhua home without a solid plan, DFQC is again the guy to remind Chang Heng that he still needs to do better. Good intentions are a solid starting point, but are worthless if he can’t convert them into something practical.

CH: Xiao Lanhua, is someone threatening you? Do not be afraid. Tell me, and I will protect you.

DFQC!XLH: No one has threatened me, and no one has forced me. [...] I am also no longer the inconsequential lowly spirit that you all take me for, nor am I a traitor or a spy in collusion with the Moon Tribe. I can happily be myself. Compared to my days in Shuiyuntian, when anyone could step all over me, this is over a hundred times better. [...] Suppose that I go back with you. Can you guarantee that you will clear my name from collusion with the Moon Tribe? Suppose that your Lord Yun Zhong insists that he will not pardon me; would you dare go against him? Suppose that he uses that heavenly rule nonsense to ask you and force you; could you promise my safety? Suppose that anyone dares to harm me or blame me; could you reduce them to ashes?

Aside from making Xiao Lanhua understand that Chang Heng’s mainly just a pretty face, this interrogation forces Chang Heng to consider what’s at stake. Protecting Xiao Lanhua and following the rules are mutually exclusive decisions. His struggle to circumvent this issue isn’t trivial, seeing as it’s challenging his entire belief system. But he can either start questioning what he’s capable of, or let Xiao Lanhua get hurt again.

What stands out to me about this interaction is when DFQC also tacks on that Chang Heng “cannot even tell [her] something [she] wants to hear”; that he won’t even claim that he can keep her safe. Maybe I’m just that jaded, but his refusal to tell pretty lies is what I adore about Chang Heng. It’s a matter of life and death, and if he can’t promise her safety, he won’t. If he lies to her and to himself, then he could never become the straight-shooting Chang Heng we all know and love.

DFQC might be his inspiration, but Rong Hao being simultaneously Chang Heng’s best friend (potentially more; oh what could’ve been) and a foil to his character is an enormously overlooked dynamic. Rong Hao frequently tells Chang Heng that they’re the same type of people, that their love for their respective ladies is what corners them into making less-than-optimal decisions. Each time, Chang Heng’s instinct is to rebuff him.

RH: Because the two of us are the same. I have no choice. And you, ultimately, will also have no choice.

CH: You do not have a choice? You chose to conspire with my brother, to disturb matters, to catalyze the three realms’ largest war in the last tens of thousands of years!

Chang Heng’s newfound philosophy is that everyone has a choice. You may be dealt an awful hand, but you can still choose to play or fold. His friend’s decision-making comes off as foolish arrogance to him.

But Rong Hao is right in one respect. They are similar: if Ye Hua represents an alternate universe version of Chang Heng in which DFQC doesn’t exist, then Rong Hao is suffering a version of Chang Heng’s future in which Xiao Lanhua/Xi Yun sacrifices herself for the greater good, yet is forgotten by those she dies for. Chang Heng can remain optimistic because the person he loves is still alive and loved by others. Rong Hao is comparatively hopeless. He can only wait to witness the impending devastation before realizing that the harder choice is oftentimes the better one.

We will never know how Chang Heng would react if in Rong Hao’s exact position. But whatever he would choose to do, he would not absolve himself from responsibility by claiming that he had no other choice. The results may be out of his hands, but the initial choice is what he can decide for himself.

Chang Heng reminds me much more of traditional xianxia protagonists. Every obstacle they face only drives them to seek enough strength to change the status quo. While Chang Heng may never win against DFQC, he’ll keep trying. (Or he’ll convert him into a brother; that works too.) Everyone will say he doesn’t have a choice, but he wants one and he will get one. Ah, my heart is so full. I don’t want perfect characters. I want characters who strive to do better, especially in a world that pushes them down, and he suits that to a tee.

Meanwhile, Ye Hua over here blinds his wife due to...societal expectations? My god. He just keeps getting worse the more that I think about him.

---

I’m Sorry. But At Least I Love You!

There always has to be an arc where the lead couple’s relationship splinters because one party draws back in order to “protect” the other. It’s accompanied by an intentional lack of communication, so the other person thinks that they’ve been left behind. Remember when this trope used to be cool? Yeah, I don’t either. Because it never was.

Ye Hua might have some fun with this, but LBFAD doubles it by making both the male lead and second male lead utilize this strategy: DFQC, in order to force Xiao Lanhua to fall out of love with him and spare her life in the process, and Chang Heng, who refrains from pursuing Xiao Lanhua in the beginning in order to keep her out of his brother’s view.

I’m tempted to be lenient in both cases. DFQC’s predicament is written well enough that he does seem truly out of options in that situation—every possible choice is wrong. He either breaks her heart and she survives, perhaps so he can explain his actions later, or he lets her die. Or, you know. He could communicate like she asked him to, and they could try to find a way out together. Instead she stabs herself. So you know what, no free pass for DFQC, but at least he makes up for it later.

(I have to get another jab at Ye Hua in here. When Xiao Lanhua commits suicide, she does it to save DFQC. It’s an act of love and sacrifice. Su Su literally seeks death out of unadulterated heartbreak and betrayal. Big difference there, huh?)

I mentioned that Chang Heng’s actions are out of responsibility, so it’s hard to fully blame him. At the same time, the reason Chang Heng can’t win over Xiao Lanhua is because he doesn’t act on his feelings until it’s too late. Simply “protecting her” is not enough: people don’t love others in the hopes of being protected. They love someone to walk alongside them through all the good and bad in life, together.

Chang Heng shines in the ending episodes. He still wants to protect Xiao Lanhua, but he also becomes the one person who understands and accepts her own desires. Knowing from experience that acting one-sidedly is but a temporary solution to a much larger issue, he listens to and considers what she wants. When the two tribes are on the brink of war and Xiao Lanhua doesn’t want to return to Shuiyuntian with him, even after learning of her lost identity as the Goddess of Xishan, he respects that. When, as Xi Yun, she confides in him that she’s pretending to not remember DFQC, he is hurt by how cruel she is being to him, but in the end chooses to understand her.

CH: Your life will truly be in danger this time, Xiao Lanhua. I absolutely cannot let you go back there.

XLH: Lord Chang Heng, are you really going to stop me? My lord, you are a god of war. I am merely a plant with a damaged spiritual root. If you insist on stopping me, then there is nothing I can do. But I will definitely not give in.

CH: You will die. Is that right? [...] You and Dongfang Qingcang love one another. You would rather pretend not to know him than to harm him in any capacity. Then what about me? How could you...how could you ask me to marry you and then personally send you off to die? Did you consider me at all?

XLH: Chang Heng...I am sorry.

CH: I do not want any of your ‘sorry’s. You clearly know that what I want is not for you to say sorry. Are you going to tell me that you do not have a choice?

XLH: That is not true. It was me who chose to live with the Goddess of Xishan’s destiny. Chang Heng, you are the only one who can help me.

Oh, Chang Heng. He’s come to his senses, but everyone he loves and respects falls apart. Saving DFQC from his dreamworld, bringing Xiao Lanhua back from the dead, sacrificing Xiao Lanhua, burying his best friend...what a rough schedule. Scratch giving him s’mores, he needs a drink or two.

Everyone in this drama grows into a better version of themselves, but Chang Heng practices the deepest empathy of any of them. To be hurt is to understand others’ pain, and he really does learn to understand.

---

Such is the beautiful tragedy of Chang Heng and his love for Xiao Lanhua. It’s bittersweet that Chang Heng knows to let go, but comforting to recognize that they’re better off not being together. Only with them apart can Chang Heng’s love stay as pure as it is.

Take that, Ye Hua. I’ll admit, I appreciate Ye Hua for showing me the perfect example of a guy that I should not even spare a glance at. Otherwise, Chang Heng supremacy declared; respectfully, please get that other man away from me.

[writingwithcolor]

What Does Our "Motivations” PSA Mean?

@luminalalumini said:

I've been on your blog a lot and it has a lot of really insightful information, but I notice a theme with some of your answers where you ask the writer reaching out what their 'motivation for making a character a certain [race/religion/ethnicity/nationality] is' and it's discouraging to see, because it seems like you're automatically assigning the writer some sort of ulterior motive that must be sniffed out and identified before the writer can get any tips or guidance for their question. Can't the 'motive' simply be having/wanting to have diversity in one's work? Must there be an 'ulterior motive'? I can understand that there's a lot of stigma and stereotypes and bad influence that might lead to someone trynna add marginalized groups into their stories for wrong reasons, but people that have those bad intentions certainly won't be asking for advice on how to write good representation in the first place. Idk its just been something that seemed really discouraging to me to reach out myself, knowing i'll automatically be assigned ulterior motives that i don't have and will probably have to justify why i want to add diversity to my story as if i'm comitting some sort of crime. I don't expect you guys to change your blog or respond to this or even care all that much, I'm probably just ranting into a void. I'm just curious if theres any reason to this that I haven't realized exists I suppose. I don't want y'all to take this the wrong way because I do actually love and enjoy your blog's advice in spite of my dumb griping. Cheers :))

We assume this is in reference to the following PSA:

PSA to all of our users - Motivation Matters: This lack of clarity w/r to intent has been a general issue with many recent questions. Please remember that if you don’t explain your motivations and what you intend to communicate to your audience with your plot choices, character attributes, world-building etc., we cannot effectively advise you beyond the information you provide. We Are Not Mind Readers. If, when drafting these questions, you realize you can’t explain your motivations, that is likely a hint that you need to think more on the rationales for your narrative decisions. My recommendation is to read our archives and articles on similar topics for inspiration while you think. I will be attaching this PSA to all asks with similar issues until the volume of such questions declines. 

We have answered this in three parts.

1. Of Paved Roads and Good Intentions

Allow me to give you a personal story, in solidarity towards your feelings:

When I began writing in South Asia as an outsider, specifically in the Kashmir and Lahore areas, I was doing it out of respect for the cultures I had grown up around. I did kathak dance, I grew up on immigrant-cooked North Indian food, my babysitters were Indian. I loved Mughal society, and every detail of learning about it just made me want more. The minute you told me fantasy could be outside of Europe, I hopped into the Mughal world with two feet. I was 13. I am now 28.

And had you asked me, as a teenager, what my motives were in giving my characters’ love interests blue or green eyes, one of them blond hair, my MC having red-tinted brown hair that was very emphasized, and a whole bunch of paler skinned people, I would have told you my motives were “to represent the diversity of the region.” 

I’m sure readers of the blog will spot the really, really toxic and colourist tropes present in my choices. If you’re new here, then the summary is: giving brown people “unique” coloured eyes and hair that lines up with Eurocentric beauty standards is an orientalist trope that needs to be interrogated in your writing. And favouring pale skinned people is colourist, full stop.

Did that make me a bad person with super sneaky ulterior motives who wanted to write bad representation? No.

It made me an ignorant kid from the mostly-white suburbs who grew up with media that said brown people had to “look unique” (read: look as European as possible) to be considered valuable.

And this is where it is important to remember that motives can be pure as you want, but you were still taught all of the terrible stuff that is present in society. Which means you’re going to perpetuate it unless you stop and actually question what is under your conscious motive, and work to unlearn it. Work that will never be complete.

I know it sounds scary and judgemental (and it’s one of the reasons we allow people to ask to be anonymous, for people who are afraid). Honestly, I would’ve reacted much the same as a younger writer, had you told me I was perpetuating bad things. I was trying to do good and my motives were pure, after all! But after a few years, I realized that I had fallen short, and I had a lot more to learn in order for my motives to match my impact. Part of our job at WWC is to attempt to close that gap.

We aren’t giving judgement, when we ask questions about why you want to do certain things. We are asking you to look at the structural underpinnings of your mind and question why those traits felt natural together, and, more specifically, why those traits felt natural to give to a protagonist or other major character.

I still have blond, blue-eyed characters with sandy coloured skin. I still have green-eyed characters. Because teenage me was right, that is part of the region. But by interrogating my motive, I was able to devalue those traits within the narrative, and I stopped making those traits shorthand for “this is the person you should root for.” 

It opened up room for me to be messier with my characters of colour, even the ones who my teenage self would have deemed “extra special.” Because the European-associated traits (pale hair, not-brown-eyes) stopped being special. After years of questioning, they started lining up with my motive of just being part of the diversity of the region.

Motive is important, both in the conscious and the subconscious. It’s not a judgement and it’s not assumed to be evil. It’s simply assumed to be unquestioned, so we ask that you question it and really examine your own biases.

~Mod Lesya

2. Motivations Aren't Always "Ulterior"

You can have a positive motivation or a neutral one or a negative one. Just wanting to have diversity only means your characters aren't all white and straight and cis and able-bodied -- it doesn't explain why you decided to make this specific character specifically bi and specifically Jewish (it me). Yes, sometimes it might be completely random! But it also might be "well, my crush is Costa Rican, so I gave the love interest the same background", or "I set it in X City where the predominant marginalized ethnicity is Y, so they are Y". Neither of these count as ulterior motives. But let's say for a second that you did accidentally catch yourself doing an "ulterior." Isn't that the point of the blog, to help you find those spots and clean them up?

Try thinking of it as “finding things that need adjusting” rather than “things that are bad” and it might get less scary to realize that we all do them, subconsciously. Representation that could use some work is often the product of subconscious bias, not deliberate misrepresentation, so there's every possibility that someone who wants to improve and do better didn't do it perfectly the first time. 

--Shira

3. Dress-Making as a Metaphor

I want to echo Lesya’s sentiments here but also provide a more logistical perspective. If you check the rubber stamp guide here and the “Motivation matters” PSA above, you’ll notice that concerns with respect to asker motivation are for the purposes of providing the most relevant answer possible.

It is a lot like if someone walks into a dressmaker’s shop and asks for a blue dress/ suit (Back when getting custom-made clothes was more of a thing) . The seamstress/ tailor is likely to ask a wide variety of questions:

What material do you want the outfit to be made of?

Where do you plan to wear it?

What do you want to highlight?

How do you want to feel when you wear it?

Let’s say our theoretical customer is in England during the 1920s. A tartan walking dress/ flannel suit for the winter is not the same as a periwinkle, beaded, organza ensemble/ navy pinstripe for formal dress in the summer. When we ask for motivations, we are often asking for exactly that: the specific reasons for your inquiry so we may pinpoint the most pertinent information.

The consistent problem for many of the askers who receive the PSA is they haven’t even done the level of research necessary to know what they want to ask of us. It would be like if our English customer in the 1920s responded, “IDK, some kind of blue thing.” Even worse,  WWC doesn’t have the luxury of the back-and-forth between a dressmaker and their clientele. If our asker doesn’t communicate all the information they need in mind at the time of submission, we can only say, “Well, I’m not sure if this is right, but here’s something. I hope it works, but if you had told us more, we could have done a more thorough job.”

Answering questions without context is hard, and asking for motivations, by which I mean the narratives, themes, character arcs and other literary devices that you are looking to incorporate, is the best way for us to help you, while also helping you to determine if your understanding of the problem will benefit from outside input. Because these asks are published with the goal of helping individuals with similar questions, the PSA also serves to prompt other users.

I note that asking questions is a skill, and we all start by asking the most basic questions (Not stupid questions, because to quote a dear professor, “There are no stupid questions.”). Unfortunately, WWC is not suited for the most basic questions. To this effect, we have a very helpful FAQ and archive as a starting point. Once you have used our website to answer the more basic questions, you are more ready to approach writing with diversity and decide when we can actually be of service. This is why we are so adamant that people read the FAQ. Yes, it helps us, but it also is there to save you time and spare you the ambiguity of not even knowing where to start.

The anxiety in your ask conveys to me a fear of being judged for asking questions. That fear is not something we can help you with, other than to wholeheartedly reassure you that we do not spend our unpaid, free time answering these questions in order to assume motives we can’t confirm or sit in judgment of our users who, as you say, are just trying to do better.

Yes, I am often frustrated when an asker’s question makes it clear they haven’t read the FAQ or archives. I’ve also been upset when uncivil commenters have indicated that my efforts and contributions are not worth their consideration. However, even the most tactless question has never made me think, “Ooh this person is such a naughty racist. Let me laugh at them for being a naughty racist. Let me shame them for being a naughty racist. Mwahaha.”

What kind of sad person has time for that?*

Racism is structural. It takes time to unlearn, especially if you’re in an environment that doesn’t facilitate that process to begin with. Our first priority is to help while also preserving our own boundaries and well-being. Though I am well aware of the levels of toxic gas-lighting and virtue signaling that can be found in various corners of online writing communities in the name of “progressivism*”, WWC is not that kind of space. This space is for discussions held in good faith: for us to understand each other better, rather than for one of us to “win” and another to “lose.”

Just as we have good faith that you are doing your best, we ask that you have faith that we are trying to do our best by you and the BIPOC communities we represent.

- Marika.

*If you are in any writing or social media circles that feed these anxieties or demonstrate these behaviors, I advise you to curtail your time with them and focus on your own growth. You will find, over time, that it is easier to think clearly when you are worrying less about trying to appease people who set the bar of approval so high just for the enjoyment of watching you jump. “Internet hygiene”, as I like to call it, begins with you and the boundaries you set with those you interact with online.

[glowingbadger]

Hi it’s me, crawling through the window. Would it be possible to get a crumb of arranged marriage w/ Hubert? His line w/ Dorothea about being willing to get married for politics sake has fueled my brain rot for him.

Good God I need to secure my windows-

I mean HELLO FRIEND ANON YES IT WOULD BE MY PLEASURE

Lol actually though, I have been thinking about this for Hubie since we all started chatting about that arranged marriage stuff! I think it's a perfect concept for him~

This like... got weird while I was writing it though?? Idk man hahaha it ended up on the less-spicy side of what I usually write, and with some very weird dialogue in places... Idk, I hope y'all like it. Maybe if there's interest, I'll follow this up eventually with a more smut-focused piece?

I've been traveling and working so much lately that I just don't even know what writing is anymore or how it works hahaha

TW: A brief mention of non-con

Hubert (FE3H) x Reader ("wife," neutral pronouns)

Arranged Marriage - semi spicy i guess?

"Frankly, he's a pain," Linhardt must be able to see your surprise and confusion written across your face. He goes on, "He's reliable and capable, of course, but also the most persistent nag you'll ever meet. Actually, no-" he glances upward as though to cross reference his own thoughts, "No, her Majesty is worse. But Hubert is a close second to be sure. Always on and on about sleep schedules and proper nutrition and etiquette..." He sighs and closes the massive tome on his lap, as though to close the conversation with it, "frankly, he's an insufferable mother hen. Does that help?"

"Well, it's... Not what I expected," you admit with a shrug, "but thank you all the same."

~

It's been several weeks since the papers binding you in marriage to Hubert Von Vestra had been signed- and this alone had sufficed. No ceremony, no grand ball, just paperwork and a handshake with your father. A handshake that ensured that, even under the Empire's unification, he would maintain nominal control over his considerable portion of land, and in return, would swear absolute loyalty to her Majesty. It was a beneficial arrangement for all parties, and you were not ignorant to the part you played. You were hardly even a bargaining chip- moreso, a hostage.

Your new husband had made no secret of what manner of harm may befall you if your family were to renege on their deal. Fortunately, you know your father to be a reliable coward, so you have no reason to believe he would be bold enough to step out of line.

Hubert Von Vestra is a terrifying man. A zealously loyal man of storied cruelty and a frigid disposition. His frame looms over you whenever he's near, and though he's hardly placed a finger on you since you'd been given over to him, his mere presence is... arresting. There's a sort of charisma to him that's equal parts frightening and fascinating. Perhaps it's madness brought on by your circumstances, but you can't help wanting to glimpse just the slightest bit into that brilliant, ever churning mind.

Unsurprisingly, he has been resistant to your attempts to understand him. He hardly indulges you in small talk, and if you were the paranoid sort, you'd think he intentionally makes himself busy when you're around. Eventually, perhaps out of sheer stubbornness, you'd settled on a routine of bringing coffee to his study adjoined to your bedroom in the evenings. He'd been visibly surprised the first time. It wasn't until the fourth night that he'd given a curt "thank you." About two weeks in, he'd actually sat back in his chair and laid down his quill pen to receive the cup from your hands. After a month, he'd leveled his narrow gaze at you and said,

"I cannot begin to fathom what satisfaction you glean from playing 'maid' to me."

"Well, I, uhm," you hadn't expected him to address you so directly, but you managed to say, "You... work so hard, I wanted to do something for you, I suppose."

His expression is inscrutable as he replies,

"You are aware that my work was much the same before you arrived."

"I am," you say softly, "But- all the same..." you trail off, and Hubert seems content to let the matter rest. And so you leave him be amidst his reports and correspondence, coffee at his side on the desk. Yet for as unproductive as your exchange might have seemed, it does leave you with an idea. The thought to learn about the man from those who knew him long before your arrival at the capitol.

~

Your investigation into the true character of your husband does not stop with Linhardt. In fact, his testimony only leaves you with further questions. But perhaps the others would say otherwise; perhaps the United Empire's most up and coming crest scholar simply inspires maternal behavior. This has to be the case- you simply can't imagine that the notoriously ruthless heir of the even more notorious Vestra lineage would be so... Doting.

And yet the more you learn of him, the more contradictory he seems.

Caspar's take is much like Linhardt's- a picture of a man far closer to a school marm than any assassin or master of torture. Ferdinand seems both smitten and incensed by him, oscillating wildly between the two. Then eventually, to your shock, Bernadetta takes the initiative to speak to you about Hubert of her own accord.

"I'm, uh, really so-sorry to bother you!" she approaches with arms drawn close to her chest and eyes resolutely avoiding yours, "I- I just heard that you were... asking about Hubert, so, I, uh..."

It takes some time to prompt her further. You assure her again and again- no, this isn't intrusive at all- yes, you'd very much like to hear her perspective- no, you're not mad at her. In truth, you're endlessly intrigued about what a gentle soul like Bernadetta would have to say about a man feared across the continent. Finally, she manages,

"He's... actually really kind!" she blurts out, as though the words would abandon her if she gave them the window of opportunity. Your eyebrows raise slightly.

"You think so..?"

"Yes, completely-!" she stammers, "I know he's super, super scary, and powerful and spooky and cold and, uh, all of that. But still," her voice falters as she continues, "He only scolds people when they do something dangerous. And he only hurts people to protect others. I... I know he's done some te-terrible things. But... he's always been nice to Bernie," finally, she meets your eyes with an imploring look in hers, "So, uh, I'm really grateful to him. And I think it would be really nice for someone to reach out to him. If... if that's not too weird or anything. For you."

You smile warmly and nod,

"Thank you, Bernadetta. I know it can't be easy for you to come to me with all of this, but... I'd like to try, if I can."

The opportunity doesn't come in the way you expect.

At first, it seems the night will proceed like many others before. You bring a cup of coffee to your husband's desk, setting it down quietly so as to not disturb him. He's silent, but this is common enough, so you head back to the bedroom to undress for the evening. All nights prior, he would lay beside you long after you'd settled in, then rise to resume work in the morning before you woke up- all the while never allowing your bodies to interact in any way.

Tonight, just as you're about to close the door to Hubert's study behind you, long fingers catch around your wrist, visibly startling you.

It's the most physical contact you've had to-date, but he only says,

"One moment."

You whip around to face him, a touch of anxiety evident in your eyes. It's clear in his own that he notices, but if anything, he only seems amused. He steps forward, his taller frame menacing you as he speaks,

"I understand that you have been busying yourself with some manner of investigation as of late."

It takes a moment for his meaning to reach you. When it does, your face burns and you can't bring yourself to meet his scrutinizing gaze,

"Oh, uhm..."

"I assure you, my dearest wife," he says with barely concealed venom, "anything that I do not wish for you to know will be kept from you. Aside from which, your efforts thus far have proven amateurish at best."

Something seems off about his tone. You could understand if he felt uncomfortable or hesitant about your efforts to learn about him, but this seems far more grave, more... business-like. He steps towards you once more, and you step back in turn. Yet before long, you feel your legs bump the edge of the bed. A gloved hand trails a fingertip down your jawline to your chin, then urges you to look up at him.

"Whatever you are planning, my dear, I promise it will be fruitless. You had best rethink how you spend your days before your actions bring you to harm."

"No, I-" your brow creases deeply, your face burns, your body burns hotter and you don't want to consider why, "I've just been trying to learn about you as a person, nothing else. We're- we're married, after all, so..."

He gives an abrupt, dry laugh.

"Ah, so I am to believe that you've been interrogating my allies out of some misguided affection, is that it?"

"Hubert, just listen to me!" for a moment, you feel bolstered, defiant, and you straighten your posture, "You won't tell me the first thing about you- the only way to learn so much as your favorite color is to ask someone who's known you for a decade!"

Briefly, he does seem to consider your words. But his eventual reply is as aloof as any prior,

"If you're no spy or politician, then you're worse- a fool." he says, and before you can respond, he's seized both of your wrists and pushed you back onto the bed. For a moment, the room spins and your voice leaves you. A shrewd eye watches you with cruel condescension as he pins you against the sheets.

"I should think that you'd be well aware what I'm capable of," he nearly whispers, "I personally ensured that the rumors spread through your father's territory and further still. Do you think that anyone would even dare lift a finger to help you if I chose to seek retribution for this recent behavior?" He draws nearer, his grip tighter at your wrists, "Perhaps as punishment, I'll simply take my pleasure from you by force."

Your lips tighten, you take a breath. Then, meeting his gaze directly, you reply,

"You won't."

His visible eye narrows.

"And what evidence do you have to prompt such unfounded confidence? Perhaps you have crafted a flattering falsehood of me in your mind," a mocking smirk curls his lips, "Am I a misunderstood sentimental sort to you, then? A sad, lonely man for you to save?"

You scowl, though you suspect it looks more like a pout to him.

"I don't know what I think of you yet- not completely. But I don't pity you like that, and I don't think you're sad or lonely. I know you're not."

For the first time, it seems that you've caught him off guard. That frigid mask falters for just a moment, and you go on before he can replace it,

"You're surrounded by people who care about you. I've seen it for myself. Whatever you've had to do in the service of your ideals- it hasn't kept the people around you from wanting to know and understand you, even if it's despite you."

Hubert is silent for a moment. His gaze bores into you like he thinks he'll discover some hidden layer if he can just keep digging. Then, he sighs,

"How did I ever become bound to such a troublesome spouse..."

When you wrest your arms from his grasp, his hands fall away with little resistance, and you think that perhaps he had never truly intended to keep you in place by force to begin with. He moves to leave the bed, but your fists find the front of his clothing and tug him back down to you.

You press your lips to his without hesitation, and you can feel him inhale sharply, his entire body rigid above you. His lips are surprisingly soft, his scent like coffee and old parchment, and though your heart threatens to burst from your chest, you hold firmly to him by his clothes. Near imperceptibly, he leans down against you, and your fear, along with any remaining doubts, begin to dissolve. Knowing he won't pull away, you let your hands relax against him, running up his chest where you can feel his own pulse pounding. It's so human, so entirely reasonable and normal. Now, at last, Hubert Von Vestra is merely a man of flesh and bone.

Your tongue meets his naturally, your lips parting in time with his as your kiss deepens to a fevered pace. One hand reaches that sharp, handsome jawline, reveling in the erotic sensation of his mouth moving against yours. And yet, all the while, his hands remain staunchly on the bed beside you. He doesn't touch you- doesn't even let his body meet yours.

It's impossible to tell whether passion or madness drives you to bring your teeth to his lower lip, a single insistent bite communicating desire mounting faster than you can contain. And for a moment, you sense something new; a sound catches in Hubert's throat, a reaction he fights to stifle. Then, he pulls away. His pale skin is tinted a rare shade of pink, and his hair is ruffled out of place enough to reveal both narrowed eyes. His cloak has spilled around his frame to surround you both, and somewhere in your frazzled mind, you imagine that you're caught in some beautiful, velvet-lined trap.

"I- must... return to my work." Hubert says stiffly. He pushes up from you and turns away, leaving you still flustered on the bed behind him. You sit upright, holding your arms tight around your body as you watch him straighten his hair and clothes.

"You, uhm..." your face reddens still as you search for the right words, "you could... join me in bed, if you liked."

Hubert turns to the door of his study, speaking without daring to even glance your way,

"Anything that you offer to me now will be born from the impulse to survive. I have been bargained with before." His shoulders slack just slightly, his voice low and sober, "The proudest nobleman will even sell off his own child to a monster if he feels it will spare him its teeth."

You open your mouth to protest, then shut it without a word. You feel that you know your mind and heart, even in this moment, but you lack the words to convince a man like this. In a feeble attempt, you murmur,

"You don't frighten me, Hubert. Not anymore."

He half turns toward you, though his hand remains on the handle of his study door.

"You yourself said that you do not know what you think of me," he says, "As such, I will not lay a hand on you until the day that you do."

You stare down at your hands in your lap, barely registering the sound of the door clicking shut as he leaves you in the bedroom. No matter how you try to sort out your tangled thoughts, the memory of his lips on yours won't leave them. If anything, it eclipses any sense of reason, standing resolutely in the way of your path to clarity. Letting out a groaning sigh, you fall onto your back on the bed, staring blankly at the ceiling as if it could offer you any advice.

What do I think about my own husband? You wonder, the thought nearly enough to make you laugh. Well for one, he's a pain.

[catcze]

Hi there! Super duper quick, but I’m going to go on a break / hiatus for the next week or so! 

I’m sorry its kind of sudden (or maybe not idk) but yeahhhh–– there are a few reasons! I won’t go into too much depth, but I don’t want to just dip out for a bit without proper explanation (unlike the other times i’ve gone on hiatus)

But that’s utc tho bc even if i say i won’t go into too much detail i am still, at my heart, a chatterbox lmao

Original Navigation Post !!

For one, i think I’ve started to look for validation in tumblr too much? Like,,,, I’ve never been one to need validation before. But recently I feel like I’ve been seeking that out in tumblr which, when I look back on it, feels kind of funky to me? And obviously it’s not wrong to look for validation on here, that’s not what I’m saying. But just for me personally, it feels strange and debilitating to rely as heavily heavily as I do on things in this way, so i kind of need to distance myself for a bit.

This next one isn’t really much of a surprise at this point, but it’s kinda obvi that I’ve been lacking motivation and inspiration to write. I’ve probably written less than 10 things in the last two, maybe even three months. I just I don’t like the things I try to write, and I like them even less when i try to force myself, which sucks so much because I receive so many good, breathtaking prompts in my inbox, but i feel like I can never do them justice, but at the same time i don’t want to post the prompts with me just, like, screaming and keysmashing yk? Bc i feel like that can’t properly encapsulate just how much i love the things I’m sent. So yeah I really do miss being able to look back on the stuff I write n go ‘holy shit I actually made that? Whoa’ and I kind of need to get myself out of this funk for a bit bc I hate it.

Lastly, as I’m sure some of you know, finals have been whole rough recently. I only got out of its chokehold, like, a few days ago, and I’m jumping right back into the fray on January 3. Safe to say I’m still tired from the whole thing that was hell week, and I just need time to sorta, like, exist in my own space for a bit. 

After I post this, I won’t be answering any asks until I get back, and I’ll be deleting the tumblr app from my phone to distance myself from the site for now. Though I might come on eventually to catch up and read some fics, because I’ve barely been reading or supporting any kind of fics recently, which i feel super guilty for. So if you see me rb fics, they’re all queued up!

I’m super sorry I won’t be around for the holidays or for New Year’s, but I hope everyone enjoys :DD I’m sorry that i won’t be able to actively provide a safe space for you guys who view the blog as such, or that I can’t be a listening ear or someone to talk to in the coming days. But still, feel free to send me things in my inbox while I’m away. Brain rots, thoughts, life updates, whatever you’d like! I might not be able to respond to each ask individually, but hopefully being able to type something out and sending it my way will be able to bring you comfort of some sort <3

Anywayyyy so, like, yeah :D I’ll get going for now. Thanks for 4.8k followers so far, even though I’ve been really lacking on content these past two months–– I’ll try to write at my own pace while I’m gone, maybe finally do those event prompts and answer some really old asks. Hope everyone has lovely holidays and a lovely new year, also! Much love n much smooches babes <33 

[writing-in-april]

Good in Red 

Spencer Reid x Female Reader

Summary: Spencer loves the color of your lips

A/N: I definitely wrote this cause my favorite color is red lmao... I also wrote this all today cause I was feeling super inspired to write this all of a sudden- so extra extra bonuses today for my 1000 follower celebration!! This was also supposed to be a blurb but it was at like 900 words when I finished so I just decided to make it a little bit longer. Thanks for reading and requests are open!

Warnings: 18+, sub spencer, red lipstick, marking with lipstick, oral sex (M receiving), unprotected sex

Main Masterlist Word count: 1.1k

Red was without a doubt, your favorite color. You often wore it to work, having a nice rotation of skirts, cardigans, blazers, and every other article of clothing any woman could own in your favorite color.

Today however, you went with something a little more subtle, but simultaneously it was more bold than any of the other red pieces you had worn in the office beforehand.

This time the only red that was on your body was the color that decorated your lips. Your pout was a bright bold red today, standing out strikingly against the rest of your ensemble that was made up of black. You had gotten a bunch of compliments about your bold lip color as soon as you had made your way into the office this morning, namely from Penelope who wanted to know exactly what color and brand you had used.

The one person who had been oddly silent this morning was Spencer, you had even heard from Hotch who was usually stuck up in his office on a paperwork day like today. Your eyes shifted in question over to the desk that Spencer inhabited, he hadn’t spoken a peep to you besides a squeaked out good morning. When your eyes fell on his lanky frame and cute face you noticed that he was already staring at you. Well, actually he was staring at your lips.

Your lips puckered a bit in realization, you were trying not to break out in a wide smile as to not tip him off that you noticed his eyes trained on your painted lips. Deciding to play a slight little game with him you picked up your white coffee cup. You pressed your lips delicately on the rim of the cup and only took a slight sip of the coffee held within. When you pulled away a perfect mark of crimson sat on the rim of the pristine white mug. Looking back up at Spencer, his eyes were going back and forth from the edge of the mug to your red stained lips. He still hadn’t noticed that you were looking at him, so you spoke up to get his attention, “Spencer?”

Once his eyes met yours his face flashed a similar color to the one on your lips. Your eyebrow twitched up in question towards him, but he would not meet your gaze again.

It was no secret to yourself that you wanted Spencer, but you had been struggling with ideas with how to approach him about it. You had tried to do it the subtle way, unfortunately each of the flirts flew over his head each time. Maybe being blunt with him would help him understand just how much you wanted him.

“Spencer, why were you staring at my lips?” He looked startled in response to your blunt questioning. He squirmed a little in the desk chair making it sway a little back and forth.

When you arch your eyebrow up in question a second time to prompt him he finally gave you the answer you were looking for, “Y-you look good in red.” His cheeks were about as red as your lips as he admitted the reason that he was staring so intently at your lips. Deciding to finally enact on what you wanted you moved towards his desk with a seductive sway in your hips, then leaning over so your lips were resting close to his crimson tinged ears.

“You can see me in something else red if you come to my apartment tonight, at 11.” You whispered in his ear before sauntering away, making sure that a hint of your lipstick hit the edge of his ear, marking him subtly as yours.

——-

When you heard the hesitant knock at your door after work you knew exactly who it was. Spencer was here.

“Come in.” Your voice was demanding with a hint of seduction reeling in Spencer further. When he finally opened the door all the way and he got a good look at what you were wearing his jaw dropped wide open. You were decked out in a set of red lingerie that matched perfectly to the lipstick that adorned your lips, with a robe to match of course.

“Close your mouth, you’ll catch flies.” You brought your manicured nails up to shut his jaw. He gulped hard as you gripped his jaw with your fingers, forcing his eyes to look at you even though he squirmed under your gaze. You could tell he wanted to say something else so you prompted him,“Come on speak up, pretty boy. What do you want to say?”

“Y-you look good in that red too.” The stutter in his voice mirroring the one earlier in the day, with his red cheeks to match.

Blinking up at him with coy doe eyes, you bit your lip a little in anticipation,“Thank you for the compliments today, Spencer. Can I show you how thankful I am?”

You made sure to fully show Spencer how thankful you were, taking his cock as far down your throat as possible with your ruby red lips. He whined and begged the whole time, wanting to feel you cum around his cock right before he came instead of cumming in your mouth. The only reason you obliged his request was because he had been such a good boy for you, but if there was ever a next time (Which you were sure there would be) you would make sure you got to taste his cum on your tongue.

As you bounced up and down on Spencer’s cock, your once pristine crimson lipstick smeared from kissing him passionately. His own lips were stained with the evidence; his bottom lip all puffy and pouty from the way you bit it earlier in the night. As you swirl your hips Spencer brought his fingers to rub at your clit to help you finish together. Once your highs washed over the both of you with a cry of thank you, you leaned down to lick up the evidence of his release that coated his stomach, making the lipstick spread even more. As you leaned up to look at the fucked out masterpiece that was Spencer Reid you realized something.

He looked good in red too.

—

Tag list (message me if you want to be added):

All works:

@shotarosleftpinky

Spencer Reid/CM:

@calm-and-doctor @destiny-tsukino @safertokiss

Sub Spencer:

@thatsonezesty13 @pastathighs @virtualpeanutartisanjudge @calm-and-doctor

[shoichee]

okok hc or fic: reader was teiko’s “head” manager(?) and her talent was being a medic (if someone gets injured they’re back on the court in under a minute type thing) and training plans. suddenly momoi’s talent blooms, she starts working w/ everyone in the team (+ reader’s crush akashi) and people think she’s a better manager than reader. because of this, she overworks + collapses in front of her best friends kuroko + kise (don’t let akashi know yet i have plans for that 👀)

HELLO? YES OFFICER? I JUST FOUND A BANGER REQUEST RIGHT HERE? YOUR BRAIN IS SO BIG AND SEXY IVE BEEN DYING TO WRITE THIS🏃🏻‍♀️💨 part 2 here and part 3 here AND update: part 4 here

Akashi x Reader

[Teiko!manager Headcanons]

you had a knack of being a natural chiropractor in loosening up tense muscles instantly (for more fluid play) or easily putting in back dislocated joints

basically you have crackhands

in your free time as a hobby and a job as the “head manager” (that Akashi announced to the team himself), you’d often bury yourself in anatomy studies and gym plans on the internet and databases to review over Akashi’s team training routines to see if they were effective and safe; oftentimes, you’d return back with improved plans, and as time went on, Akashi entrusted you with creating the plans yourself completely

you took on the job so eagerly to impress the Teiko captain, if you were being honest to yourself

your enthusiasm even inspires Momoi, Teiko’s other manager, to work harder

no one in Teiko knows physiology better than you, and as expected, it was also your best subject along with health

Kise often looks at you in horror and respect at how you don’t cringe/flinch at the loud cracks resonating across the room or court when players come to you for instant relief (the origin story of how he came to call you (y/n)-cchi was the very fact that you manage to put back his dislocated shoulder in 3 seconds flat one game)

when Kuroko first joined the 1st-string, he was a walking magnet for injuries, and you ended up being there for him every single time… nosebleeds? check. sprained ankle? check. nausea from over exhaustion? check.

both you and Kuroko relish in the fact that everyone in the team can never understand how the both of you do some incredible things with your hands

both of you being quite dexterous, you both often teach each other your specialties for fun; it’s almost shocking to see Kuroko effortlessly loosening up a stress knot and you pulling off a well-done palm pass

you admit, you do juggle a lot of responsibilities… from being a makeshift nurse, to a chiropractor, to a budget gym coach, and even to being moral support

Momoi often reminds you to take breaks being the caring person that she is

you often showed her the ropes and tricks of being a manager, on top of your duties, and you find it really endearing that she’s so earnest in learning from you

even if you enjoyed doing what you do, part of the massive workload is to try to get into Akashi’s good graces

talking to him about basketball duties is easier to achieve than talking to him outside of the extracurricular

you might be a tad bit insecure about it; after all, what middle schooler is already so accomplished in academics, sports, and everything you could think of? wasn’t he also studying to take over his father’s company??

to you, who only starred as Teiko’s humble manager, it felt hard trying to establish common ground for conversation outside of basketball

so you stuck to working hard at your position, hoping that your work ethic would get his attention one day; you were a firm believer of actions over words, so you hoped your actions would come off as genuine

picture you and Momoi running across campus with stacks of papers for the team… it makes most of the teammates’ hearts melt at the sight

your work certainly got you praises from other teammates, but out of all players, Kise was the one who figured out your motive

you felt absolutely morbid; to think that Kise, of all people, would figure you out like the back of his hand

Kise being sweet as he is, offers to help you get with the captain but you merely prompted to threaten to break his arm if he spilled your crush to anyone else

“(y/n)-cchi… I’ve been thinking.”

“Yes, Kise?”

“It’s really cool that you’re working so tirelessly for the team, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a reason why you work so hard.”

“O-Of course I do! I want to see you guys all succeed!”

“Then I’m curious as to why you always look at Akashicchi—o-ow, ow, ow!! (y/n)-cchi, I’m sorry! So can you please let go of my—ow!”

“H-How did you know?!”

“I-It was as obvious as day, (y/n)-cchi! I’m pretty sure even Kurokocchi found out about this before I did!”

“N-No way!!”

“Tell you what, I’m super duper knowledgeable in this stuff! You can count on me for this sort of advice—OW!”

spoiler alert: Kise was right in that Kuroko definitely noticed your attraction to Akashi before anyone else… he just never brought it up to you

one day, Kuroko comes up to you to whisper:

“(y/n)-san, have you realized that Akashi-kun has been observing you recently during practice?”

“W-Wait! Is he looking over here right now?”

“Not that I think. He’s occupied with the coach right now.”

“D-Do you think this is a good sign?”

Kuroko gives you a small smile before he replies, “I would like to think so. Keep working hard, (y/n)-san.”

and you do, you’re constantly on top of your game for the next season until Momoi suddenly gets more recognition for her “precognitive defense” skills

her newfound talent was extraordinary and never-before-seen, and her ability became more critical to Teiko’s victories than your own skills

you were happy and proud for her, because after all, her achievements were extremely deserving to be praised

it’s only when some 1st-string players started making offhand comments about how you weren’t really needed in the 1st-string and was more suited to the lower strings that placed seeds of doubt into you

these people would often compare you to Momoi in how she improved much more despite you being in the team for longer

there’s also talk about how your skills are more useful for 2nd-string and 3rd-string players because Momoi’s ability is already sufficient enough for Teiko’s starters

after all, how would a player even be injured if they can predict their opponents’ moves to avoid such incidents?

there’s also the fact that Akashi has been calling Momoi more frequently to research on upcoming teams for analytical data because her talent has become very useful to ensuring victory

the same peers and adults who gave you praise were the same people who began to ignore you or dismiss you; that being said, the collective change in attitude is definitely subtle enough that it would fly under most people’s radars

Kuroko was the first to notice and defend you against a small group of players who were bold enough to badmouth you in the gym

Kise would find out a little later about the somewhat unpleasant gossip about you and would pull the “no you” reverse card, returning back with MEANER underhanded comments that would send these shit talkers CRYING HOME (manga Kise strikes here unexpectedly eh?)

Murasakibara is someone who would be slightly uncomfortable with the gossip about you, especially since you’ve always been so helpful and kind to the team and himself; he’d either leave the room himself or easily scare them away with his looming height and presence without saying a single word when he enters the room “minding his own business”

Midorima is a bystander judging from how he’s reacted to the Teiko dynamic changes in the actual show // he, of course, wouldn’t like the nasty talk about you but would actually mind his own business, choosing to focus on himself and what he has to do to contribute to his team; he assumes that you would work hard the same way he is and let your contributions do the talking

now Akashi surprisingly wouldn’t hear much of the gossip, since his presence alone SHUTS them up and commit to their practices like normal; after all, it’s very clear that Akashi doesn’t tolerate this type of behavior in the team (example: Haizaki), and it’s more apparent that he wouldn’t hesitate to drop kick them out especially since he has a soft spot for you (which Kise never fails to bring this up to you, but you think he’s reaching too much into it) // TLDR; the teammates mostly have the common sense to not utter anything bad about you… maybe one kid would slip out and get punished for “bad sportsmanship,” but Akashi merely assumes that it’s just one bad apple and not necessarily… the many others as well

Aomine???? bro he ain’t even at practice wdym (HELPPP LMAOO) // jokes aside, if he catches wind of players shit-talking outside of the gym… say at the convenience store or when he’s walking home or something, well… they wouldn’t have a good time…

Momoi simply chastises the gossipers when they try to talk shit on you to make Momoi herself look good, and it leaves? such? a? horrible? taste? like, she wants to believe that they’re just really poor jokes and not what they really believe in, and the teammates merely reassure her that they’re just bad jokes and that they “wouldn’t do it again;” poor Momoi wholeheartedly believes them

the weird talks about Momoi being “the better manager” just signalled to you that you haven’t contributed enough to the team yet, and it motivated you to work even harder

oddly, you weren’t jealous of the fact that Momoi was receiving more positive attention than you

you were more afraid of the fact that you were going to get left behind, and this fear only tightened its hold on you when more teammates (who used to talk to you a lot) have changed their tunes when they speak with you now, compared to them talking to Momoi

and you felt that the Generation of Miracles would do the same too… including Akashi

it wasn’t an irrational fear for you because he’s already been calling Momoi a lot more frequently for help than you recently

so you even offered to mop the gym floors after practice, offered to stay later than usual to be the one to lock up the gym for anyone (cough, Kuroko) who wanted to practice whenever they wanted

at one point, you even tried to do what Momoi does: researching on upcoming teams and making your own predictions (that didn’t really work, and that cost you a few nights’ worth of sleep every single time)

not to mention that you still had regular school like any other student? you were the epitome of a mess

Kuroko was with you in the empty gym, you putting away the extra basketballs in the storage closet while he practiced his dribbling, until he heard a crash in there and a few basketballs rolled out the door

you collapsed right when you rolled in the basketball cart

POOR KUROKO HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO // he just tries to give you a piggyback ride as he abandons his plans of practice and tries to jog to the nearest local clinic

that’s where he bumped into Kise, who was heading home after an evening shoot when he saw the two of you

chaos ensue as Kise freaks out and Kuroko had to calm him down himself after answering the never-ending questions

at least the doctor there gave relieving news that you only collapsed from over-exhaustion and that the bruises from the fall were very faint

Kise makes a joke to Kuroko about, “What’s with you and (y/n)-cchi falling to the floor and fainting? You guys can’t be that alike.”

when you shortly regain consciousness, you were met with a… very stern Kuroko and Kise, who were both ready to hear your explanation and to scold you to oblivion

to your surprise, they were understanding; Kuroko understands the feeling of not being enough and working hard to meet other people’s expectations, and Kise understands the struggle of juggling multiple things in his schedule (come on, student, athlete, and model?)

they still scolded your ears off:

“(y/n)-san, you idiot. Why didn’t you ask anyone to help out?”

“That’s…”

“(y/n)-cchi, do you think we’re undependable?!”

“Er, no, that’s…”

you were still dizzy from the fall and the lack of proper sleep (and maybe nutrition if we’re being honest), and you were just a ball of stress

you kind of begged your best friends not to tell a SOUL to anyone about this incident, especially to Akashi… you didn’t want to look even more incapable in his eyes than you already were

they do agree on one condition: for you to take AT LEAST a day or two off school to completely recover and rest up (you reluctantly agree; besides how were you going to explain the bruises that can’t be covered to your peers?)

HELP WHY ARE KISE AND KUROKO THE BEST LIARS TOGETHER ON CAMPUS LITERALLY NO ONE SUSPECTS A THING… except Akashi, the ever sharp captain, felt something was amiss

especially since some Teiko players emanated a feeling of relief at the news of you not being here that day, or the next

Akashi would play detective sleuth and find out what’s really going on sooner or later

End Note: gonna cut this off here b/c I KNOW this anon got a juicy part two i FEEL IT

[animecreator3000]

About the Boueibu iceberg

@delphoxqueen asked me to explain about my list for the iceberg so here it is. I might update this from time to time with links and stuff if I stumble across the original posts. This is all from what I know so feel free to add new info. Also, spoiler warning for RobiHachi and the Boueibu manga and novels. (This is like a masterpost it’s very long)

1. There’s a theory in tumblr about which decade the series is set in, using data like the friday the 13th calendar in s2 ep11. In HK we got a second number for when the next monthly Pretty Boy Contest was happening and using the one from Love it was theorized that around a decade had passed since then, which ended up being true.

2. The stage play had a few original songs and characters exclusive to it so unless you watched the full performance, you probably weren’t able to witness all of them. One of the characters is called “Robato Deniro”, as romanized in the stage play booklet I own.

3. The nurse and the cafeteria staff from the s1 mobile game appear in the background in around the first half of s2 ep3.

4. S2 had an unfinished manga that was only available online and was never released on physical format; it was centered around the defense club and sometimes the conquest club and Beppu brothers. All that’s left from what I know are the scans linked on magicalgirlsandcerulean’s blog.

5. This isn’t that obscure because it’s talked about in the anime, but I’m mentioning it because I think many people dropped it before the ova, where right at the beginning it is revealed that the alien that resucitated Mr. Tawarayama twice was, as described by Io, a “mulberry-colored naked mole rat-looking thing”, and was nicknamed “Moley-san” by Yumoto. At least in the anime, we had never heard before of who this was and it never appeared on screen nor was mentioned again.

6. In HK ep8, Karurusu promises the knights to grant a wish if they show him how earthlings spend summer. Kyoutarou reveals at the end of the episode that he wished that summer lasted one more day so he could spend it doing nothing, which prompts Ichiro to theorize that it’s the 32nd of august, and the next day is the second 1st of september.

7. The stage play was was held from march 10th to 13rd, of which the latter is Ryuu’s birthday. There’s an additional recording of a small celebration with cake focused on Ryuu and Io.

8. Atsushi mentions his older sister in the flashback at the beginning of s1 ep4, but she never appears or is mentioned again.

9. There’s a few posts on tumblr theorizing about what happened to the Hakone parents since Yumoto only says in s2 ep3 that according to Gora, “they are busy with their hot springs tour”. En mentions that it’s a bit suspicious, but it’s all the information we have from the anime. Posts talk about the parents perhaps passing away from an accident or an illness, thus the reason why Gora was so worried about Yumoto’s cold in s1 ep10, but from another post I think it’s implied in the second novel that they actually left their home when Yumoto was still a toddler.

10. It’s no secret that the surnames of the characters are all real onsens in Japan that even the seiyuus have visited, but apparently the Arima onsen has two different kinds of water, “kinsen (gold hot spring)” and “ginsen (silver hot spring)”, with different properties each, and the Kusatsu onsen water also has certain properties, both that were used to build the characters. Additionally, Ryuu’s favorite food are Sato Nishiki cherries, which are grown in the same prefecture, Yamagata, as his onsen, Zaou.

11. The press club lose relevance after s1, with only Kinosaki and Tazawa reappearing briefly in s2 ep2 to interview the Beppu twins after they arrive at the school. Tazawa doesn’t even have lines. Hireashi is mentioned by Zundar in ep11.

12. What the heck

13. Exclusively in the manga we see that Arima met Kinshiro and Atsushi when they were little and they were good friends, but when they met again as adults, Kinshiro seemingly didn’t remember Arima. Atsushi, however, stated that Kinshiro’s talent is remembering people’s faces and names, so Arima wonders if he’s just trying to distance himself from him. He also explains to Akoya that he follows Kinshiro and obeys him because as a child, he was fascinated by his radiant smile. This is never talked about in the anime.

14. Like the previous point, the anime never shows Akoya being bullied, at most just a slight dislike of his full name, but the manga shows that he was made fun of for it and how he actually hates his surname, to the point of introducing himself formally to the president and vicepresident of the student council as “Holy Angel Akoya”.

15, 16, 17, 19. Batonama lives were the livestreams done through the franchise by the defense club seiyuus on youtube and niconico. They’re all on youtube, without any kind of translation.

Love-ko is a girl with a shell bikini drawn on a piece of cardboard that was used as a girlfriend in the Batonama Love! lives, acted by the seiyuus themselves.

RobiHachi has one episode full of official Boueibu artwork and a parody of the series too, a Love-ko doll appears, and Wombat appears as well, named “The Don”. It received an english dub, so for a bit, people were excited that Wombat was going to speak in english too. Also, various mechas appear in both Boueibu and RobiHachi.

18. The director of Fairy Ranmaru (Masakazu Hishida if I’m not wrong) revealed in an interview that he was inspired by Boueibu and aimed to make a show like that.

20, 21. The website super-groupies.com has results for defense and conquest club lingerie sets, dc and VEPPer tote bags, the Beppus’ scarf rings, dc bath sets and the pumps magicalgirlsandcerulean mentioned. I’ve found the s1 Loveracelets and Caerula Adamas’ ring on different sites, the True Loveracelets on TheChara’s twitter and the Happybraces (apparently called “Hapibure”) on broccoli.co.jp but I’m not sure where exactly they were all announced and sold, so I’ll just drop that.

22, 33. Boueibu was originally pretty much a copy of Sailor Moon, I think they were all going to be called “Lackluster Moon” and that stuff and be literally Sailor Moon genderbent. They were all different from color palettes to physical features (except Yumoto’s), and Ryuu was a shota, even smaller than Yumoto. Their names were also very reminiscent of the five Sailor Senshis’. Even if they made it more original, the show is still clearly inspired by Sailor Moon (just look at Caerula Adamas lol) and Pretty Cure. It has also referenced, very blatantly, animes like Doraemon, Detective Conan, Aikatsu and even Vocaloid, when Kyoutarou tries to guess what Karurusu is saying with ““Just Google It, Asshole”?” in ep1.

23. Wombat’s real name and the name of his planet sound like gibberish to the earthlings and ends up being named after the Earth animal, but Zundar, Dadacha, Karurusu and Furanui all have original names. And I think Hireashi means “goldfish”?

24. If you google “zundar technology”, it’s actually a company in Shanghai, China. Aren’t Wombat and Zundar always talking about “advanced alien technology”?

25. Zundar and Dadacha are siblings, so are Karurusu and Furanui, and so are their father King Kamopapa and their uncle minister Wao, but neither are the same species and, except the first two, not even the same color. But they are supposedly related because they share birthmarks or something like that...

26. Everyone who’s in this fandom knows about the pixel blur and voice pitch censor from s1, but I’ve added it anyway because it’s so rare for mahou shoujo and shounen animes to explain why the heroes aren’t recognized when transformed.

27. A good while of s2 ep11 is spent discussing Zundar’s ex-wife and his problems to give child support. Naturally, he gets mad at this.

28. “Money doesn’t betray” (s1 ep6) and “The despair hidden behind your smile that comes from not being understood” (s3 ep11) are sentences that came out of nowhere and implied that the people they were said by (Io) or about (Taiju) respectively had some kind of angst going on but were never explained at all. They’re famous for just that.

29. The Beppu twins’ house in Andromeda shown in flashbacks had strange green circles that apparently are from another anime I don’t know but honestly I didn’t get it very well... It was revealed on a tweet from Takamatsu.

30. Alien language mostly appeared in s2 due to the many flashbacks of Aki and Haru in Andromeda, but in Boueibu s1, it appears on the Zundar Needle before it is shot on the human. It appears a lot through RobiHachi as well, due to being a story about travelling through space. There might be an alphabetical chart somewhere, but I can’t assure it exists, I might even have dreamed it.

31. Hikaru Midorikawa as the melon monster, Kousuke Toriumi as the bishounen monster, Yoshitsugu Matsuoka as the kotatsu and panda monsters and Takuya Eguchi as the remote controller monster in s1 and 2, before going on to voice the main cast in HK. Keisuke Koumoto voiced Hatchi Kita in RobiHachi as well as Akihiko in Boueibu, and the characters look similar.

A new addition is that so far Boueibu is the only anime I’ve seen where children weren’t voiced by female seiyuus, but by actual children. Personally, it’s charming and makes it so much more realistic, specifically since no women appear in the franchise at all either (not counting Protag-chan in the game).

32. Speaking of seiyuus, Can I Destroy The Earth? had a dub shown in ep11/12 (?) that made Gora the villain that wanted Earth to stay the same and not progress, against the monsters that supposedly wanted to bring good things to earthlings. Aki and Haru quickly dismissed this dub as fake. (I made a mistake in the title in the previous post btw)

34. As seen in the glossary in the Boueibu Mook (I think, but might not be the mook), Caerula Adamas’ speeches are based on an old japanese detergent commercial that went “Gold, silver, pearl, gift”.

35. In the manga there’s a short parody of the first chapter of Sailor Moon with “Pretty Boy Guardian Gakuran Akoya”. The conquest club manga was released before the anime, so I remember reading somewhere that a fake website appeared for the Gakuran Akoya manga, before turning into the conquest club manga website in the day of its release.

36. Cgi was used a few times in the anime: s2 ep10 for a short sequence of the defense club on a rollercoaster and the carousel monster, ep11 for a cenital shot of the Battle Lovers singing, and HK ep12 for the Honyalaland soldiers and the Wao mecha.

37. The toothbrush incident in s1 ep7. (It’s definitely well-known but it’s so weird lol)

38. “We hope we can see each other again someday!” Something along those lines was the last text to appear in the last episode of HK, implying a s2. We all know how that went.

[roadmotel]

Hi!

This is a super long ask and I hope it's interesting instead of annoying.

I have just finished reading the book "The Carnivorous Lamb" by Augustin Gomez-Arcos, and one of the main plot points is the love between the protagonist and his brother. Needless to say, many passages reminded me of the brothers. And then I thought I'd send them; even if they're not material for your blog, I thought you might enjoy taking a look, since the book has a very beautiful and evocative style... If it's not your thing, I apologize in advance! All in all, I love your blog and I hope you're having a nice week <3

Here it goes:

Father coming in at neutral moments to plant a kiss on my forehead, then hurrying out (did he love me, I wonder?), my brother, rooted to the spot, devouring me with his eyes. The house gone mad, blind anarchy stealthily taking it over,

Page 28

This ritual of waiting, which I have lived minute by minute since five o’clock in the afternoon last Friday, strikes me as completely useless. It brings me nothing new. Written in my cells when I was a child, it has ruled my behavior ever since. And my behavior has never been more than an appendage of yours, somewhat like a dog’s tail in relation to the dog. What can I do, though? When someone else’s life is the only space you have to live in, you can’t choose but to wait. Whether you come as a lover or an executioner, I am ready to receive you. More ready than ever. With all the obligations that waiting for you imposes on me. But don’t come as a brother, to profane me in the family blasphemy; if you do, my waiting for you will assert its rights. So open the door. Come in.

Page 55

I no longer had any trouble understanding the softness of my brother’s look, and the ever stronger, fiercer desire I felt to melt into him. With me, he acted like a creator. He sensed—no, he was sure—that he was shaping me day by day into the image of something special that he loved unconsciously. And passionately.

Page 70

I felt I should minimize the whole thing, but was petrified by a hardness on his face I had never seen before. A dangerous light glinted in his eyes, and an animal’s clenched teeth showed between his tight lips. The black-and-blue mark someone else’s hand had put on my behind had enraged him—even though I didn’t always emerge unscathed from our own wrestling matches. A savage heat started burning in my flesh, and I suddenly felt proud of having caused the bruise, which had the magnificent power of showing me the strength of my brother’s passion. My skin became translucent, the better to show Antonio my pre-adolescent frailty. He couldn’t take his eyes off my bruised flesh. “The bastard! The bastard!”

Page 90

“I won’t even let my parents raise a hand to him. Do you think I’m going to let you?” “I am his teacher, not his.…” “…brother,” finished Antonio, in a voice as sharp as a whip-crack. “I’m his brother. Me.” They watched each other in silence. No need to explain further.

Page 92

Within me, my brother’s presence stirred a craving for apocalypse. The Latin words falling softly from his lips tickled the most secret parts of my body, as if he were speaking directly to me and not to God.

Page 167

I could detail the disturbing contents of your dreams, the things you yourself don’t know, one anxiety after another. I could tell you if I knew the right words … but who could prompt me, who could give me those mysterious words? I know you so well, I can’t describe you. There is a you of you I can certainly describe. But I can’t tell you a thing about the other you of you, my you.

Page 235

You cross the hallway. You try to open my bedroom door, but it is closed. And locked. You order me to open it, as if I still belonged to you. You beg me to open it, as if you still belonged to me. But I don’t open it, and I don’t stop shouting.

Page 255

You lick our tears from my eyes before they stain my face, like someone trying to get drunk. You feed on us. And you say: “Easy, easy. I’m here.” But I know you don’t want me to stop, because you really do need to feed on me.

Page 256

And this is a classic passage, you might have seen it around before:

“I love you because you’re mine. I love you because I possess you. I love you because you need love. I love you because you’re disorder, and I don’t like order. I love you because when you look at me I feel like a hero, and always have. I especially love you because I’ve finally understood that I can’t talk about my love to anyone else but you, and that’s what real love is. Two beings who make up one solitude, one silence. And I love you because touching you makes me feel I’m more of a man than anyone.” You look at me as if you were in me. And you are in me. And outside me. Everywhere.

Page 262

oh please don't apologize! i’ve actually read this book, i think i’ve even posted a few quotes from it on here. it's incredibly well-written, unsettling, and confronting. funnily enough, i actually found out about this book because years ago i watched the film from beginning to end (also about an intense sexual relationship between two brothers) and there was a quote from it that i really liked:

“i love you because you’re mine. i love you because you need love. i love you because when you look at me i feel like a hero. it was always like that. i love you because when i touch you i feel more a man than any other man.”

so i googled it and the carnivorous lamb popped up and i read the premise and was like wait was the movie based on this book? but there was no acknowledgment of the book in the movie’s credits and i couldn’t find anything about it being an inspiration for the movie on wikipedia so i was like holy shit. then i read the carnivorous lamb (and loved it like it’s really incredible) and realized that from beginning to end completely ripped off the book. even the opening lines in from beginning to end are super reminiscent of a specific passage from the carnivorous lamb. 

the movie opens with:

“i was born with my eyes wide shut. sure, everybody is born with their eyes closed. but mine were closed so tight, they formed wrinkles. i remained with my eyes closed for more than two weeks. my mother, contrary to expectations, didn’t worry [...] while he [brother] stared at me through the thick, soundproof nursery glass window, i without any reason opened my eyes, and looked straight into his.”

and in the book, ignacio says:

“from the moment i opened my eyes, an incredible sixteen days after i was born, you [brother] were always sure of everything where i was concerned. it was all laid out in advance for you, even the unexpected. do you remember? mother used to say i was born with the will to stay blind forever.”

god, apologies for my rant but that literally always comes to mind whenever i think about the carnivorous lamb like how did they get away with just straight up plagiarizing agustín gómez-arcos in that movie lmao? anyway! thanks for sharing your favorite quotes i actually have a couple of these highlighted in my book!