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brujahinaskirt · 4 years ago

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@missn11 says:

Ask and ye shall receive, fellow neonate! <3 Bear with me, because I’m about to hammer out 2000 words very quickly...

This massive rant by its topic nature is sort of Nines-critical, so lemme start by saying that, in my own way, I love Rodriguez. (I was partially self-burning in the shitpost that ignited this rant because I SEVERELY exaggerated Nines’s canonical shadiness levels in my ancient fanfiction, and for no other reason than because I was a teenage edgelord. I am appropriately embarrassed, but only by my excess and melodrama, not by Troika’s characterization. I think the writing behind VTMB’s Nines is superb.)

When it comes to Bloodlines, I think he’s one of the most psychologically interesting profiles in the game. In fact, I could never get into LA by Night because they so de-toothed Troika’s vision of him. Not to say LA by Night’s Nines was a poorly-developed character in his own right, ‘cause he wasn’t at all, but “my” Nines will always be unapologetically and only Troika’s: boiling angry, viciously pragmatic, a survivor who doesn’t let anyone too close lest they see through him, whose over-the-top confident façade cracks a little more every time his back’s against the wall. Troika’s Nines is the epitome of greater VTM’s “fallen rebel” archetype, and even though we don’t get to see it on all playthoughs, that makes it even better and more believable.

But as with all characterization in Bloodlines, we have to read between the lines and between our own play styles a bit to piece the truth of the puzzle together...

Besides the direct evidence Troika gives us—i.e. the music cues, which are a bit overbearing if I’m honest (sorry, Troika! ilu); the absence of Nines in Rosa’s prophecy re: people you can trust; and the overt warnings Camarilla-aligned characters give us about him—the biggest red flag about Rodriguez, imo? It’s twofold:

the way the characters he surrounds himself with talk about him and the type of vampire he chooses to fill his den. Namely: Nines exclusively recruits angry, spurned, mistreated people who are younger and far less experienced than he is

those messy, ugly, fleeting moments where you see his toughguy everyman personality crack

So! Starting with point one:

THE PERSONALITY CULT ITSELF

We can’t deny that Nines does not surround himself with peers. He surrounds himself with followers—people who don’t challenge him in any way, who are fanatically loyal, who openly profess their worship of him and their conviction he could never/would never do anything wrong. If you listen to how Damsel and Skelter talk about him, it’s with frightening adulation, often repeating Nines’s lines word-for-word without truly understanding the argumentation behind them. (Damsel’s the main offender here with her “IT’S A PYRAMID SCHEME… it just makes sense, you know? It just makes sense!” And then, of course, she gets pissed and refuses to speak to you when you push her into elaborating.)

Nines has clearly made himself much more than just a friend-figure or a Sire-figure to them. He’s utterly and completely mythologized by the LA Anarchs, held up next to other politically mythologized names like George Washington and Ho Chi Minh. His followers love him… but there’s a pecking order, and like good body shields, they believe their lives don’t matter as much as he matters. And they love that, too. They want to die for Nines. They’re not just willing to or resigned to it; they’re eager to die. Damsel will volunteer this information the first time you meet her. She just can’t wait to prove herself by taking a bullet for goddamn Nines Rodriguez. It’s literally how she introduces herself to new people.

And yet Nines deliberately withholds his attention and time from his followers. He uses his attention as a reward, as incentive. He rations some care and reassurance and help—makes you feel good and gives you reason to crave his attention—and then he pushes you away, back into his adoring ranks until the next “two minutes” you earn from him in which you’re special enough for such an exceptional, important, cool guy to talk to. That’s a classic manipulation tactic, and a classic personality cult tell.

And Troika is so damn fuckin’ brilliant about it because they don’t stop at showing us that an Anarch-aligned fledgling might feel this way—no, they make the PLAYER also feel this way. On our first playthrough of Bloodlines, we’re desperate to talk to Nines. We want the reward. “Let me finish the plaguebearer quests… let me run to the Elizabeth Dane… I hope Nines talks to me again now! Quick, to the Last Round! Maybe if I say the right thing to make him like me, he’ll give me another free EXPERIENCE POINT!” (iirc he’s one of two characters who will do so, and the only one who gives multiple points.)

But at the end of the day, Nines is indisputably the leader of the Anarchs, and even fledgling figures that out. (“Sounds like you’re the Prince of the Anarchs.”) He’s very much the Baron of Downtown LA, even if he won’t use that language. As for the grating day-to-day management and leadership stuff that might make him somewhat unpopular among the Anarchs, though? He fobs all that stuff off on Damsel!

Damsel, his Minion No. 1—whom a lot of players will hate on their early playthroughs, because she assigns tough missions with little to no reward. Damsel, who has no real power role in the Anarchs and functions only to serve Nines. You help Damsel, and you do Nines’s work—i.e. you do the work of the Barony of LA—and he doesn’t even have to take the admiration hit by having to ask you himself.

There’s only one non-follower of note around Nines. It’s Jack, and by his own words, he’s not one of Nines’s people; he disparages them, in fact. And we’ll notice that Jack—who is stronger, older, and wiser than Nines—very much doesn’t talk about Nines the same way Nines’s followers do. While Jack doesn’t directly insult him and occasionally defends him, Jack also has a downright shocking response to the announcement of the Blood Hunt. When fledgling desperately asks what they can do to help Nines—Jack says, word-for-word: I could give a damn.

Something ain’t quite right about this place.

Moving right along:

NINES IS A FAKE ALPHA MALE WHO KNOWS HE’S GOING TO DIE

Part of why Nines is so attractive to someone scared and weak like our fledgling (or Skelter or Damsel) is that he seems utterly fucking untouchable—like nothing scares him, and that must be reassuring when two of your age-old enemies are moving into town. But Nines’s tough, cool, Devil-may-care persona outs itself as a protective shell, too… and this is another thing I think Troika handled so subtly and so well.

You’ll notice that even Nines’s voice is dramatically different in a couple different situations: when Ming Xiao is borrowing his body, when he’s afraid, and when he’s distracted or deeply disturbed. (A successful Malkavian mind read will really slam a crack in his coolguy persona. For a second, the nonchalance shatters and he childishly screams SHUT UP!)

But whether you Malk him or not: In those isolated moments, the Coolguy Nines Rodriguez we normally see frays. Physically, even! His accent loses its burr (that ballsy rural American everyman accent), shoots up to a higher register—and reveals a much softer voice than the one he uses in front of other people. No wonder; part of Nines’s charisma comes from his performance of masculine confidence, and even if it’s not a toxically patriarchal masculinity in the way we often picture it, the fact this performance cracks at all shows it’s not his genuine self. He’s acting. In the way a lot of toughguy men do—but for Nines, whose survival depends upon attraction now, he’s acting toughguy for his very life.

I think those little fray-under-pressure moments are the “real” Nines, or as close as we’re going to get: scared, desperate, worn-down, and very aware of his doom.

Now, all that said…

BLATANT FALLEN REBEL CONCEPT APOLOGISM

I don’t think we can quite throw Rodriguez into the same Mean Monster Morality Dungeon for Evil Vampires as other Big Bads in LA. This is where motivation comes into play, at least for me. We know Nines can be merciless and violent, and he doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice his own soldiers (namely, um, US!) to protect his holdings. But he does seem to have a twinge of genuine anger over injustices wrought upon “little people” (look no further than Nocturne)—one that seems like it stems from a sense of right v. wrong rather than sheer pragmatism. This stands in stark opposition to the rationed pacificism of characters like LaCroix, who simply doesn’t want the headache of cleaning up a pile of dead humans on his nightly to-do list.

Nines also, of course, just doesn’t have the same kind of disaster reach other Bloodlines Big Bads do in how much harm he can cause. When LaCroix gets up to some bullshit, he crashes the national economy. Nines, like, crashes a car into a corporate office window or takes over a street or something. Can’t really compare the two when it comes to the scale of damage done.

And even Nines Rodriguez is, for all his strategy, still an honestly angry person. Not all of him is fake—what’s troubling about him is what he’s willing to sacrifice and do to satiate his anger-passion. It’s the standard Brujah emotional-moral struggle. Even though I agree with much of what he says about bloodsucking late capitalist vampires (tbh he seems to hate vampires in general!), one wonders if it’s not partially the anger-passion that’s warped him into the façade of a noble leader he’s become. It’s not a pure anger anymore; he’s weaponized it in selfish, unhealthy, destructive ways.

But if he’s a fallen rebel—and since he is still apparently capable of some genuine anger and sadness—then we can infer he wasn’t always like this. He fell, and narratively, that’s key to understanding Clan Brujah. Maybe he fell in a way all of us angry rebel-types risk falling if we let our hatred of the bloodsuckers in real life outgrow and consume our care for the real-world little people.

I think we also have to appreciate that—as far as we know—the shady shit Nines does, he primarily does to prolong his power. But for a threatened Anarch like Nines, power doesn’t mean expansion or accumulation as it might for an ascending Ventrue; it primarily means survival. The Camarilla and Kuei-jin incursions into LA have numbered his days, and he can’t possibly have any delusions about this, no matter how much he swaggers. So he does what he can do with the skills and limited resources he has. He corrupts vulnerable, angry, abused people by giving them the appearance of friendship, family, and hope they can become stronger—much like effective gang leaders do.

If he’s morally nastier than other power-players like LaCroix in some way, imo, it’s here. It’s the intimacy with which he manipulates the people around him. LaCroix may lie to you; Strauss may withhold information from you; Ming Xiao may double-cross you. But none of them ask that you love them. That’s not their goal; that’s not how they operate. None of them expect or encourage anyone to happily die for them of their own free will. If they get you killed, you’ll die resenting them—resenting that you had to die, at all.

But when you die for people like Nines Rodriguez, you do it willingly, if only because you believed he cared somehow and that he’d fight tooth-and-nail for you, too. You believed that you were a member of his little outcast family—or that you would be, if you just proved yourself a little bit more. If you just fought a little harder. If you were just a little happier about having the chance to die for the cause. Maybe if you die for Nines, then Nines will love you, too.

I don’t think he does. I don’t think he will. If he’s a true fallen rebel archetype, I don’t know if he can anymore.

That’s enough Anarchs for now! I’m gonna peace out with some copy/pasted lyrics from the theme song of Nines’s den: the ballad of the charming and vengeful Lecher Bitch. Stay sharp, my little Bloodlines fanatics!

Tell me your story Don't worry, I've been there Crown me your savior Don't worry, I'll be there

[Chorus] I said hey You're coming all the way I've got some hell to pay I'm diggin' all the way All the way down I said hey You're coming all the way I've got some hell to pay Gonna rip you every way On the way down again [Bridge] Don't belong lording above me Won't be hard to pull you underground It won't be long 'til you love me And I'll be coming at your back To break it down

#vtmb #vampire the masquerade bloodlines #nines rodriguez #tune in next week for my 5 page essay on why Wong Ho is the only nice person in Bloodlines!#not really #but maybe really #in conclusion nines ain't shit [drops mic]#[is mauled by damsel]

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ex-vengeancedemon · 3 years ago

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Averting Disasters and Other Ways to Avoid Your Problems

Chapter 4

Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Mentions of things that occurred in Angel: The Series season 5.

Main Pairing: Buffy x Spike

Characters: Buffy, Spike, Giles, Willow, Xander, Andrew, Faith, Dawn

Summary: Set in 2008, five years after Spike’s resurrection at Wolfram & Hart. Buffy is living in Cleveland guarding the hellmouth. Spike has left Angel and company and is hiding out in Chicago. The Scoobies are scattered. When something starts going wrong with the slayers around the world, it’s time to get the gang back together.

Masterlist & Chapter 1

"Well it's not like I'm thrilled to see you either!" Spike retorted. "Always buggerin' up the works! What are you gonna do? Whine the slayer's sane?"

"How? What? How?" Xander stammered, blinking rapidly.

Xander seemingly hadn't changed much in the past 5 years. He was still as incompetent and irritating as ever. Although - Spike would admit - both he and Willow did look a bit older. Some might even say a bit haggard, like they hadn't slept right in a year or two. One thing was certain, the ponce's wardrobe hadn't improved a lick. Even Andrew had him beat there. Sad really.

"I'm sure there'll be plenty of time for interrogate the Spike later," Spike replied, waving a hand at him. "Maybe when we're not, say, dealing with a wave of off their nut slayers?"

"You were dead," Xander continued, pointing a finger at him.

"Yeah. And now I'm not. Of all people, you lot really shouldn't be so surprised. It's bloody impossible to stay dead around here."

The shock factor had yet to wear off. A more generous part of Spike's mind knew he couldn't really blame him. The only other person to come back from the grave was, well, Buffy. And people had wanted her back.

"Xander, later," Willow told him. "We need all the help we can get. Especially since we can't ask any of the slayers. It's just us on this one."

"And the librarian," Spike drawled.

"Where is Giles?" Xander asked, finally composing himself a bit.

"On his way." Willow stood up and dropped a book in his hands. Xander coughed as a plume of dust puffed up in his face. "Well?" Willow pressed. "What are you waiting for? Research won't do itself."

Xander took a seat at the table next to Andrew, noticeably at the furthest point away from Spike. Unsurprising really. Git had always had a chip on his shoulder. But, if they had to make due with non-slayers, he supposed Xander might not be... the worst. Although his arrival did beg the question of the one missing party.

"So where's everyone's favorite little ex-demon, eh?" Spike asked. "Anya retire from the Scoobies? She always was the smart one."

The table froze, the rustling of pages coming to an abrupt halt. No one made as if to answer and a grim silence descended over the room. Spike no longer needed their answer. It was clear from their faces. Anya was dead. Gone. Six feet under or what all.

Spike's sardonic demeanor vanished.

"How'd it happen?" he asked quietly.

Andrew sniffled a bit, wiping at his eyes. "She um... she saved me. She died during the attack. You know, at Sunnydale. Same as you."

Xander and Willow remained dry-eyed. Willow's eyes were downcast and she carefully avoided looking at anyone or anything in particular. Xander's face was hard, an uncommon sobriety plaguing his normally lighthearted countenance.

Xander scoffed and shook his head, the frown lines deepening on his face. "In what world is it fair that you come back, and she doesn't?"

"Only the twisted kind," Spike mumbled under his breath. He didn't think Xander heard.

"Xander, that's not really fair," Willow replied softly.

"Yeah. It damn well isn't," Xander snapped back.

A tense pause persisted before Andrew's shudder broke the silence. He had his head in his hands and looked like he was still grieving her all these years later. Guilt will do that to a person.

"I'm sorry," Spike said louder. "She was... well she was one of the good ones."

"She was," Willow seconded with a terse nod.

The room fell back into that uncomfortable silence that had started when Spike mentioned Anya's name. A moment of silence for you, our dearly departed. Buried beneath the rubble of Sunnydale. Gal deserved better. Who the bloody hell didn't?

While the rest of the gang continued with the barrels of books and the magic of boredom, Spike perused the magic shop's other wares. He had no idea what half of the junk did, and he was a bit wary to find out. With his luck, he'd go poking around and wind up a toad.

He picked up a small golden mirror and almost dropped it when he noticed his reflection staring back at him. Only it wasn't him. It was the face of a decaying corpse, rotted through almost to the bone with sickening tufts of hair jutting out at random from his skull. The reflection had no nose or eyes, just gaping holes into the abyss with tendrils of black smoke slowly curling out. He hurriedly put the mirror back face down. Windows to the soul my ass. No more magic mirrors for this vampire.

Spike shook off the disturbing image and made his way over to the cash register in search of a quick distraction. Sitting neatly next to the register was a leather-bound book labeled "Bills of Sale". Had to be a ledger of sorts. Spike flipped through it and spotted Willow's name pop up more than a few times. She'd been quite the little Wicca since he'd been away. Giles' name cropped up a couple times as well. 'Course it did. And then his finger stopped on Buffy. It seemed she had ordered a few things from the mystical multi-dimensional magic shop from hell.

It listed her address. Right there in Cleveland. It couldn't even be that far. Maybe ten kilometers.

Spike glanced up at the gang. They seemed engrossed with their books and chatted sporadically amongst themselves. Part catch-up, part theory, part shared anxiety.

Andrew got up to pull another book from the shelf and Spike slipped out from behind the counter. He made as if to casually pass by the table - as he had done multiple times before already - just as Andrew turned back from the shelf. Spike rammed into Andrew's shoulder, causing him to drop his book.

"Watch it Watcher!" Spike snapped. "You'd think a Watcher would be better at watching where the hell they're going."

Spike continued to mutter under his breath as he walked away from Andrew's somewhat confused apologies. Spike smiled as he gripped the keys in his pocket. A lifetime of delinquency came in handy every now and again. Who was he kidding? It came in handy all the damn time.

***

Spike parked Andrew's car on the curb just outside of Buffy's house. At least, it was the house the address at the magic shop had listed. Dusk was just falling and Spike was sure the Scoobies had noticed his absence by now. He had only circled the block six times. Just to be sure. Hard to tell sometimes with... addresses. With specific house numbers. Maybe that six should really be a nine. Who knows? Could happen.

The house was small. Spike supposed it didn't need to be big if it was just Buffy living there. Seemed odd. Buffy living alone. In a city with none of her old mates. A lot had changed since he died. He wondered if anything had stayed the same.

Lawn looked like it could use a mow. It was a bit unkempt and probably angered some suburban Homeowners Council or what all. But the rest of the house looked nice. All cookie-cutter with that early 90s retro-chic vibe. Bloody hell. Now he was just stalling, examining the bloody architecture.

Spike took a breath and opened the door of the car. The neighborhood wasn't busy and the streetlights had just come on. He made his way up the concrete walk to the front door. Moment of truth.

He rapped on the door and waited for what felt like an eternity. Maybe she wasn't home. Then he heard a shuffling from behind the door. Finally, the door opened, and there she stood. Radiant.

"Buffy," Spike said, barely managing to get the name out.

Seeing her again, alive and standing in front of him, was so much better than revisiting the memories. It struck him that her face had started to fade from his memory the way a worn picture does when you carry it around in a wallet for years. And a picture is nothing compared to the real thing. A shadow of a person. Less than a flat, lifeless imitation.

She gave him a puzzled look, her brows furrowing together in a familiar way. "Spike. What the hell is going on?"

He finally noticed the blood that soaked the front of her shirt and the disarray of her hair. Mud coated her bare feet and a deep gash ran up her calf. Spike could smell the blood. It seemed old. Something was very wrong here.

"Come in," Buffy said, stepping aside to let him pass.

Spike hesitantly stepped across threshold. She pulled him the rest of the way inside and slammed the door shut behind him, immediately jumping over to the window and peaking out behind the curtains at the street as if she thought he might have been tailed. It wasn't exactly the reception he had been expecting.

"Spike, what's going on?" Buffy asked, whirling on him. "Where am I? How'd I get here?"

Spike glanced around, looking for any clues as to what might be causing this bout of frenzied panic. To no avail. The inside of the house looked just fine. Not very lived in. Bare bones. No overturned furniture, no broken glass. Some muddy footprints. But overall, fine.

"You're in Cleveland," Spike said slowly. "Remember?"

Buffy shook her head, becoming more agitated. "Why? Does this have something to do with The First? We need to get back to Sunnydale, now."

#btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #btvs fanfiction #buffy the vampire slayer fanfiction #spuffy fanfiction #spuffy #spike x buffy #averting disasters and other ways to avoid your problems #chapter 4

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lokiondisneyplus · 4 years ago

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Over five popular seasons, the story lines of “Better Call Saul” have unfolded across nail salons, fried-chicken joints and other strip-mall staples of American life.

When new episodes begin premiering next year, though, the locations that give the “Breaking Bad” spinoff its texture could be reined in or done away with altogether. The culprit? The novel coronavirus, which is limiting where the New Mexico-set AMC show can film, potentially altering both its style and substance.

“Like a lot of other people, we’re going to have to be very creative in where and how we shoot,” said Mark Johnson, the veteran producer who oversees the Vince Gilligan hit, whose writers just began collaborating on the series’s sixth season. “A lot of places just won’t let you in.”

Across the entertainment industry, casts and crew are beginning to return to work after a five-month hiatus. In states with loosened restrictions, such as Georgia and New York, production is starting to crank up under tight controls that alter how sets operate. Instead of crew members freely mingling, they’re being divided into “pods" that limit how production departments such as wardrobe or lighting can associate. Covid-19 officers monitor the health of the cast and crew to determine who is allowed on set. “Zones” dictate where those cast and crew can go.

These changes might seem technical, but they hint at the far-reaching effects the virus will have on final screen products. Interviews with 12 executives, writers, agents and producers across the Hollywood spectrum suggest a dramatically transformed world of entertainment. Until a vaccine comes along, they say, covid-19 will change what Americans watch as dramatically as it has where they work, shop and learn. Forget the new normal — movies and TV are about to encounter the new austerity.

Crowd scenes are a no-go. Real-world locations will be limited. On-screen romance will be less common, sometimes restricted to actors who have off-screen relationships. And independent films — that tantalizing side dish in the U.S. entertainment meal — could be heavily scaled back.

“A lot of people believe this is just about getting back to work,” said Mark Gill, a producer and former head of Warner Independent Pictures, the studio unit responsible for independent hits such as “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.” “They don’t realize the massive cultural impact we’re about to face.”

For most of its history, Hollywood created entertainment based on a simple premise: Shuttle in large numbers of people and move them around at will. That’s certainly true of crews. But it especially applies to extras, the low-paid day laborers who pack sets and off-camera holding areas in order to create dense crowd scenes — and, in turn, lend the work real-world atmosphere.

Such scenes have of course been part of some of the most memorable moments in Hollywood history. From “Ben-Hur” to “Braveheart,” on-screen entertainment has become indelible thanks to hundreds of people you’ve never heard of packing tiny spaces, then moving as one when the cameras roll.

Yet the virus has essentially made these hires impossible. Many don’t want to risk their health for a $100 paycheck and remote shot at background glory, and producers don’t want to take on the liability even if they did. “Braveheart" used about 1,600 extras, many from the Irish Army reserves. Experts say the movie couldn’t come close to being shot today.

“Those of us in the entertainment business are not used to being told ‘no’‚” said Lucas Foster, a longtime Hollywood producer who counts the 2005 romantic-action hit “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and last year’s Oscar-decorated blockbuster “Ford v Ferrari” among his credits. “And when it comes to things like crowds, there’s going to be a lot of no.”

Foster understands the challenges personally — he’s one of the first producers to have made a movie in the age of covid-19.

In March, the Los Angeles resident was in Australia, several weeks into preproduction on a new version of “Children of the Corn” when the pandemic began to spread. Millions of dollars had already been committed to the movie, adapted from the same Stephen King story that yielded the 1984 cult hit. So rather than shut down, he decided to proceed — cautiously. Foster created a production bubble, consulted doctors regularly, procured large amounts of tests, and engaged in elaborate workarounds in realms like crowd scenes.

He said it worked, but with major accommodations.

“I had to figure out how to do a crowd with no more than a few people at the same time. And with very specific camera angles. And by taking actors who would normally be close together and making them not close together,” Foster said. “In the end, I’d get the scene I needed but it looked different than it would have before the pandemic.” (Computer-generated crowds, he and other producers say, only work for more distant shots; anything requiring close-ups needs the real thing.)

It helped, he noted, that many of his actors were children, who are believed less susceptible to the effects of the virus, and that much of the movie was shot in cornfields and other vast outdoor spaces, a luxury not all films have.

Producers say the added cost required to implement all the safeguards could also result in a lower-end finished product. Films and TV shows achieve their level of shine through an endless period of refinement, with actors and directors often attempt 10 or more takes of a scene. With everything now going longer — and thus costing more — they may not have the luxury.

One producer of multiple studio hits said he expects the number of takes to drop significantly as the virus balloons budgets. He also expected a diminution in night scenes, which tend to be more involved and expensive than day scenes. He said some productions will be able to make the switch, but not all will be as lucky.

Also unlucky, say Hollywood veterans: movies where characters seek to get lucky. Many insiders say romantic scenes will be a major challenge in movies. Two agents separately reported they had high-profile clients who told them they wouldn’t shoot love scenes during the pandemic.

“I think every agency right now is looking down their client list to see which actors have spouses who are also actors, because then we could try to get them cast, too,” said one of the agents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by their company to speak to the news media. “I’m joking. Sort of.”

The added wrinkle is even if the actors trust each other in real life, many of their characters would still have to take precautions on screen.

“How do you send two characters on a first dinner date when people aren’t really going on first dinner dates?” said a creator of romantic comedies who asked not to be identified because they did not want to be seen as criticizing colleagues who are attempting new projects. “You can send them on a socially distant walk, I guess.”

Writers say that leads to a broader dilemma: how much to incorporate the pandemic into their stories. On one hand, they say they don’t want to pretend the virus doesn’t exist. But acknowledging it poses its own challenges.

“Do you really want your stars wearing masks because that’s what characters would do? Do you want to have people engaging with each other in groups no larger than six? Do you want to write stories where everyone is at a safe distance?” said Mark Heyman, the co-writer of “Black Swan” and “The Skeleton Twins” and creator of the CBS All-Access historical drama “Strange Angel.” “Because a lot of those things won’t be very much fun to watch.”

Yet if creators aren’t willing to do that, he said, it could lead to those shows or movies getting shelved out of a fear that audiences will judge them inauthentic.

Heyman was working on a series set in a high school for Netflix when the lockdowns began. That project has now been put on pause. “It’s not easy to make a show about high school,” he said, “when there is no high school.”

To avoid reminding viewers of the pandemic, creators may take an approach that will lead to an unusual trend.

“I think over the next few years you’re going to see a lot more movies set in the past,” Foster said. “Even movies written for the present will be changed. They’ll make it the ’90s because then you don’t have to deal with these questions. And then you can just put in some cool ’90s music, so everybody wins.”

A few creators have gone the other way, leaning in to the pandemic.

Writers on Apple TV Plus’s “The Morning Show,” set at a news program, have torn up existing scripts to make the pandemic a part of the story line, according to a person familiar with the show who was not authorized to speak about it publicly. But with a lag time of months between shooting and airing, experts say that creators also risk looking out of date by the time episodes release to the public.

Sensing an opportunity, horror filmmakers have also tried to embrace current events.

“The horror genre is very suited to the pandemic and lockdowns �� we’re always trying to create a feeling of being trapped anyway,” said the horror filmmaker Nathan Crooker.

When quarantines hit this spring, Crooker gathered nine noted horror filmmakers and had them shoot an anthology film — short fictional movies connected by the larger virus theme — and titled it “Isolation.” He required filmmakers to use only the materials and people they were in lockdown with, even prohibiting Zoom and other technologies.

“I think we’re going to get a very cool effect that mirrors what people are going through,” Crooker said of his work. “But I don’t know that every movie that gets made would want to look like that.”

One consequence of the virus could turn out to be the movies that don’t get made at all.

Some of the most beloved films of the past two decades, from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” to “Whiplash,” “Little Miss Sunshine” to “Fruitvale Station,” were independently financed. But before rolling cameras, independent productions require insurance policies to protect them from workplace lawsuits, along with completion bonds, in which a guarantor assures they will step in with funds to finish the movie if production is halted.

Experts say no company will cover covid-19 with either policy, effectively preventing production.

“Covid is an absolute disaster for the independent-film industry,” said Sky Moore, a partner in the corporate entertainment department of the Los Angeles law firm Greenberg Glusker who has spent several decades putting together film financing deals. “The lifeblood of independent-film financing is loans, and loans need insurance. Now you have this massive hole in the middle of all of it.”

Moore believes the toll will be vast.

“I think 50 percent of the independent industry goes away,” he said.

(Movies financed by large studios do not buy these policies; Netflix or Disney would just absorb a shutdown or lawsuit as the cost of doing business.)

Even if they can work around the insurance issues, many independent films won’t get made because they simply won’t have the money. “It’s already hard to get funding for a lot of these movies,” said Shaun MacGillivray, a producer who makes large-scale independent documentaries. “And now you’re telling investors the budget is going to be 30 percent higher?”

The independent-film world is trying to push ahead, slowly. The Sundance Film Festival, the epicenter of the indie-film business, where companies like Hulu and Netflix sometimes pay more than $10 million for an independently financed movie, will hold a partially physical, partially virtual edition in January, albeit at just about half the length.

“We are reminded daily of the power of what is made newly visible to us, the importance of what we look at,” Tabitha Jackson, the director of the festival, said in a letter to staff this summer explaining why the festival needed to go on. “My hope for this edition of the Sundance Film Festival is that through a multiplicity of perspectives held by artists and audiences in their various communities we will also come to feel the power of where we look from.” Left unspoken: What happens in 2022, when the well runs dry because new movies can’t be insured and produced?

Whatever entertainment can get made, experts say, will have a more hermetic look. Even television shows, once shot heavily on sets, now often rely on the authenticity of locations; a police procedural feels like it does because detectives are popping into pizza places and apartment buildings.

“We don’t want everything to be a chamber piece,” said Johnson, the “Better Call Saul” executive producer. “But if many shows look different, I think that’s okay, because the world looks different.”

Then, considering the challenge further, he added, “And if that doesn’t work, then at least our show has a lot of deserts and open roads.”

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

Text

How Thor Changed the Marvel Cinematic Universe

https://ift.tt/33NlKGy

Marvel’s Thor, the first theatrical live-action film to feature the comic book giant’s version of the Norse God of Thunder, opened in theaters a decade ago, on May 6, 2011.

Directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring a then little-known Chris Hemsworth in the title role, Thor was the fourth film in the still-nascent Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was also — as we look back at it now — a pivotal one in the development of the MCU.

“I’m very proud of my part of it,” Branagh told us a couple of years ago about his handling of Thor. “Which was providing a sort of backbone that they could comically riff off, but at least it originally contained some of the high stakes Nine Realms import that that larger mythology has to have as well.”

Thor took the franchise off the Earth for the first time and into the cosmic side of the Marvel mythology, introducing audiences to the Nine Realms, the kingdom of Asgard and other mind-bending concepts that comic fans had adored for years but which were a major risk to put in front of mainstream moviegoers.

Even the character of Thor — with his helmet and his hammer and his arch way of speaking — often seemed to skate perilously close to laughable in the pages of the comics themselves. But he was also a mainstay of the Marvel line and a charter member of the Avengers, the superhero team that Marvel based its entire initial run of films upon.

Marvel

Thor didn’t take the Rainbow Bridge to the screen

A Thor movie based on the Marvel Comics version of the character had, surprisingly, been bandied around for years even before there was a Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The God of Thunder debuted on the page in Journey into Mystery #83 (August 1962), created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby. A founding member of the Avengers, he joined Iron Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man, and the Wasp in the pages of The Avengers #1 (September 1963). In the ensuing decades, he has starred in multiple iterations of the Avengers comics, plus many ongoing and limited series of his own.

An animated version of the character debuted in 1966’s Marvel Super-Friends show, while the first live-action incarnation of Thor (played by Eric Kramer) showed up in the 1988 TV movie The Incredible Hulk Returns, a follow-up to the late 1970s series The Incredible Hulk.

While Thor continued to turn up in various animated Marvel properties, it was in 1991 that the first full-length, live-action Thor movie was proposed — by no less than Sam Raimi.

The director, who later went on to make the first three Spider-Man movies and who is now working in the MCU on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, revealed to the The Hollywood Reporter in the wake of Stan Lee’s passing that he pitched a Thor movie to the Marvel Universe co-creator over lunch.

“We worked together writing treatments and took it to Fox and pitched it,” Raimi recalled. “And they said, ‘Absolutely no. Comic books don’t make good movies.’ This was in 1991.”

The rights to Thor bounced around Hollywood for a few more years (at one point it was set up at Sony with David S. Goyer writing and possibly directing) until landing back at Marvel Studios, which had reinvented itself as an independently financed production company in 2005 with distribution through Paramount Pictures. The studio, run at the time by David Maisel with Kevin Feige as president of production, hired Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend and the unfilmed Batman Unchained) to write a script for Thor, with Matthew Vaughn (X-Men: First Class) coming aboard to direct in August 2007.

Marvel

Enter Tom Hiddleston as Loki…

No sooner did Matthew Vaughn sign up to direct Thor than he seemingly left just as quickly, although it was officially announced in May 2008 that he was departing. Creative and budget issues seemed to have sealed his exit. “Marvel loves the script,” he wrote in The Guardian in late 2007. “The only problem is that it has been costed at $300m and they ask how I am going to reduce it by $150m.”

Even though Thor had already been scheduled for a June 4, 2010 release date, Marvel still had to find a director. Talks were held with Guillermo del Toro, but he decided to direct The Hobbit instead (which he ended up leaving as well). At the end of its search, Marvel finally chose Kenneth Branagh, the Irish actor and director best known for his epic adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry V — which kind of provided an idea of the tone Marvel was looking for.

Branagh was finally signed in December 2008, telling MTV News, “It’s a chance to tell a big story on a big scale…It’s a human story right in the center of a big epic scenario.”

Once Branagh was signed, the movie’s release date was pushed back from June/July 2010 to May 6, 2011, providing plenty of time for the film’s extensive visual effects to be designed and created and for Branagh to find his cast — starting with the God of Thunder himself.

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The first person allegedly approached was Daniel Craig, who had just starred in his second James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. It was because of his commitments to the already massive 007 franchise that Craig turned down the hammer-wielding Asgardian, although it’s somehow hard to imagine the tough-as-nails Craig as the egotistical (at least at first), young Odinson.

A long list of young, relatively unknown actors tested for the part, including Chris Hemsworth (who was just making his brief but scene-stealing appearance as James Kirk’s father in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek), his brother Liam, the equally obscure Tom Hiddleston, Kevin McKidd from Grey’s Anatomy, Alexander Skarsgard (Godzilla vs. Kong), Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy), Joel Kinnaman (The Suicide Squad), and others. But Chris Hemsworth ultimately won the day, with Hiddleston landing the consolation gift that would keep on giving, the role of Thor’s villainous adopted brother Loki.

“That was my starting point, was that you have a character with a predisposition toward mischief,” Hiddleston said about playing the trickster god, during a 2010 set visit attended by this reporter in Manhattan Beach, California. “An inclination toward chaos and a delight in imbalance, and you couple that with the fierce intelligence that he has, and a chess master’s ability to manipulate events three or four steps ahead of the game.”

Adding even more gravitas to the production was the signing of the legendary Anthony Hopkins to play Thor’s father, Odin, along with Natalie Portman as Jane Foster, Rene Russo as Thor’s mom Frigga, Colm Feore as Laufey, the king of the Frost Giants, Idris Elba as Heimdall, and others. Also signed: Samuel L. Jackson for his third appearance as Nick Fury (in an end credits bonus scene) and Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton/Hawkeye, marking the live-action debut of the bow-and-arrow-wielding Avenger.

Filming on Thor began in mid-January 2010 and wound down in early May, with shooting taking place at Raleigh Studios in Manhattan Beach, California (Marvel’s studio home in the MCU’s early years), Santa Fe, and other parts of New Mexico, and locations in northern California.

Colm Feore told The Deadbolt that the Shakespearean training which he, Branagh, and Hopkins all shared enabled them to quickly communicate with each other while shaping the characters and finding the right tone: “One of the things that was enormously helpful on Thor was that during the breaks, Tony, myself, and Ken would be talking in Shakespearean shorthand about what the characters were doing, what we thought they may be like, and how we could focus our attention more intelligently.”

During that same set visit to the Manhattan Beach set of Thor, Marvel president of production Kevin Feige told this reporter and others that the movie was going to feature more extensive post-production work than other Marvel films. “When you walk around Captain America or Iron Man, you can get it,” he explained. “With Thor, what you’re seeing is only 30% of what the movie will be. This is the big question mark and to me that makes it the most exciting. I like it when people don’t exactly know what we’re going to do.”

Reshoots were completed in late 2010, while The Avengers director Joss Whedon shot the end credits scene in which Nick Fury reveals the Infinity Stone known as the Tesseract to Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard).

Marvel

Marvel takes a big swing with Thor’s hammer

Introducing Thor and the Asgardians — who were essentially aliens, with technology so far ahead of our own that they seemed like gods to the ancient, more primitive people of Norway more than a millennium ago — was a major gamble for the MCU and its then-president of production (and now Chief Creative Officer) Kevin Feige.

Out of Marvel’s first three films, Iron Man and Iron Man 2 were massive, out-of-the-box hits, while The Incredible Hulk was a middling success at best. Yet all three films were Earthbound and dealt with plausible (as far as it went) science and technology. The science of Thor was — to borrow a phrase from the late science fiction titan Arthur C. Clarke — indistinguishable from magic.

“Asgardians are kind of ‘been there, done that’ when it comes to that kind of stuff,” said co-producer Craig Kyle to this reporter and others on the set visit. “For them to send you across the universe, it’s as easy as turning a key … Their technology is only as sophisticated as it needs to be to do extraordinary things.”

Making Thor, Odin and the other inhabitants of Asgard, Jotunheim and the rest of the Nine Realms into extra-terrestrial beings mistaken for gods by ancient humans took Thor away from sword-and-sorcery and fantasy and more overtly into the science fiction genre. But it also provided the film with a back story and mythology that was perhaps easier for modern movie fans to swallow — more Star Wars than the Völuspá.

“We just kept trying to humanize it all, and keep it very real,” Chris Hemsworth told Superhero Hype at the time about his approach to the title character. “Look into all the research about the comic books that we could, but also bring it back to ‘Who is this guy as a person, and what’s his relationship with people in the individual scenes?’ And working with someone like Kenneth Branagh, who has all those bases covered and has so many ideas, it was a hell of a time!”

In addition to taking the big creative risk of bringing Asgard and Thor to the screen, the movie took several other chances as well. Starting a tradition that Marvel would return to with films like Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor did not function as a traditional origin story. We meet Thor, Loki, Odin, and enter Asgard with only a brief introduction detailing the history of ill will and war between the Asgardians and the Frost Giants.

Thor’s journey in the film is not that of an ordinary character being bestowed with great powers and learning how to use them, the typical arc of a superhero film. He is fully formed here, if flawed, and as the film progresses he learns to be a better version of the immensely powerful being that he already is — with the help of the human beings that he meets during his fall to Earth.

When Thor — the likely successor to his father’s throne — reignites hostilities with the Frost Giants partially due to his own immaturity, Odin decrees him unworthy of wielding Mjolnir and banishes him, powerless, to Earth. That leaves the door open for the crafty Loki — who has discovered that he is not Asgardian after all, but the child of Frost Giants — to manipulate and scheme his way into power himself.

Marvel’s other big gamble was making Loki a much more fully developed antagonist than had been previously seen in many comic book movies. Skillfully portrayed by Hiddleston in a performance that made him an instant star, Loki is an empathetic, nuanced character whose longing for the love and attention of his adopted father — who lavishes more of both on Thor — leads him down a dark path and into a character arc that would take several years and movies to play out.

“I think Loki intuitively feels that he doesn’t belong there, he doesn’t belong with the family in Asgard and doesn’t belong in the pantheon of gods,” said Hiddleston at the time. “He’s confused about his place in the universe … We all reach a point in our lives where we think, ‘What the hell are we supposed to do with our life?’ Thor reaches that point in this film and Loki does as well, so yes, maybe if Odin had made him feel valued and respected and essential to Asgard, then it would have been okay.”

Marvel

Thor smashes all preconceptions

Thor had its world premiere in Sydney, Australia on April 17, 2011 and opened in that country — Hemsworth’s native land — four days later. It premiered in 56 more markets before finally opening in North America on May 6, 2011.

The film earned a 77% fresh rating and mixed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising the performances by Hemsworth and Hiddleston, as well as the grandiose family drama on Asgard, but less impressed by Thor’s journey to Earth and the climactic battle there against the massive golem-like Destroyer sent by Loki to kill Thor.

More importantly for Marvel, the film connected with audiences despite the perception that Thor was largely unfamiliar or dated. Thor earned $181 million at the North American box office and a further $268 million abroad for a worldwide total of $449 million.

While that ranks it near the bottom of the 23 MCU movies released to date (along with Ant-Man and Captain America: The First Avenger), it was a far from shabby showing for the early MCU and proved Marvel’s calculation that it could expand Marvel’s footprint on film beyond already established characters like Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Hulk.

“I liked it when people said, ‘Iron Man’s the B-Team. You’re calling out the B-Team!’ We knew it wasn’t,” said Feige on set about using what were perceived as lower-tier Marvel heroes. “We knew it was going to be great. And that holds true for Thor … here’s another one that will redefine us and at least raise the bar of what a comic book movie is, for both people who’ve read comics and those who haven’t.”

Thor expanded the boundaries of the MCU into the realms of space, alternate dimensions and cosmic conflicts, while putting another key part in place for the impending arrival of the Avengers. And while 2013’s follow-up, Thor: The Dark World, was a misstep and considered one of Marvel’s few outright failures, the studio brilliantly reinvented the character in 2017 with Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok, moving him away from the initial Shakespearean grandiosity and into a more humorous space.

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That in turn allowed Thor and Hemsworth to have one of the most profound character arcs across the entire span of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. His story in those films, the box office clout of Ragnarok, and Hemsworth’s enthusiasm for the role led Marvel to commission 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder — marking the first time an MCU hero is venturing into a fourth solo movie.

Ten years later, while not a perfect film by any means, Thor is still an enjoyable, consciously weird Marvel epic that proved the God of Thunder could bring the lightning even to modern audiences. And while Thor has seemingly abandoned the throne of Asgard for now, his first film’s place in the MCU pantheon is secure.

The post How Thor Changed the Marvel Cinematic Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

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pjstafford · 4 years ago

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On A Love Of Reading and Storytelling

Storytelling came before the reading. I think I was enchanted by words. I was a child and am an adult with a speech impediment. There are certain sounds that simply do not come easy for me. I have to, still today, think about how to pronounce a sound before I say the sound. As a very young child, before I started public education and had a speech language therapist to help me learn, most people, including those in my family, could not understand me. I could rattle on and often did but I wasn’t understood. Still I understood others well. I loved the childhood stories. Cinderella was a favorite as was Hop on Pop. I spent hours alone in my room using playing cards to play solitaire and telling stories to myself based on what cards came up.

When I started first grade I knew the alphabet and to write my name. I was placed in the lowest reading group. We read, all of us, from the same large Red book in the middle of the room. The other groups got their own smaller books. Tom is the first word I learned. Then Jane. I picked it all up as though I was a sponge. Quickly I advanced to the other groups. I read through the children’s books at home.

Then, I started sneaking into my parents room to read their books when they weren’t looking. My mom’s books were kept between the mattress and box springs on her side of the bed. The pictures were erotic. I found the content hard to understand. My father’s books on a nightstand were hard to understand but beautiful to read. The Sound and The Fury incomprehensible at first, but the Title alone fueled my soul.

At the end of second grade my test scores showed I read and comprehended at a twelfth grade level. I learned fast. I think it might have scared my parents a little.

When I was nine every adult and older teen I knew was reading The Cross and The Switchblade. One day I was found reading someone’s copy. My oldest sister suggested they buy me books that would take longer than a day to read that was age appropriate. I collected Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew, but Little Women and Jane Eyre changed my life. Jane Eyre and Jo March were different characters who represented the different sides of myself. It, also, dawned on me that people wrote these books and I began to write. As the girl no one understood, my ability to write, express, reason, persuade, explain was so important. By fifth grade I had a library card, I was allowed to check five books out of the library at a time. Monday afternoon I would go to the library and get my five books, I would return those on Friday and get five for the weekend. Repeat.

In seventh grade, we started the practice of going to different teachers for subjects and class periods and we could select electives. I chose great books. We were given a list of books we could choose from and told during the semester to write three book reports based on the types of reports listed. The types of reports were great. Imagine aliens found this book, what would they think of the human race. Very creative! I turned in all three of my book reports in the second week of class. My teacher said, “you were supposed to select the books you hadn’t read before.” I shrugged. I read all the books on the list before. “All 27?” Yep. She didn’t quite know what to do with me and I spent the rest of the class writing poetry and stories. Towards the end of the class she gave me a gift. “The Rubyait of Omar Khayyam.” She told me not to read it for the meaning but for the rhythm of the words. It was beautiful. I read it for the rhythm and eventually for the meaning. I gave up on Christianity for the last time in High School and started to read the Rubyait like a prayer at least once a week for decades. I was in my forties when I stopped. By then I had read multiple translations and even heard it read once in Persian. It’s lessons about wake, and now, and forget tomorrow or yesterday are the lessons I have failed at and recommitted myself to throughout my lifetime. I read it still, but less than once a week.

With all of this, there is so much I haven’t read of the classics. There is so much I haven’t read of the current. There is almost a danger of having read so much so fast so early in life. I no longer consider myself well read. The books I read when too young to understand I need to revisit. There is no time to keep up with the current writers. I have given up to some extent on the achievement aspect of it. So much better, is it not, to read what enriches, interests, or awakens your soul, makes you ponder or think?

I have a book I am almost done reading for the second time. Two I have recently started and one waiting to be read. I no longer read five books on a weekend. Adulting is so hard.

I write. I write fiction and poetry when I feel in the grip. So many stories outlined left unwritten.

But I write this today simple in gratitude to the writers. Music, poetry, fiction for me and only to a lesser extent television and movies have shaped me, formed me, soul and mind. In case my soul leaves my body tonight, I write this to thank the teachers and the writers. If you wrote it a hundred years ago and I read it yesterday. I honor you today. May there always be readers, writers, storytellers, and listeners, viewers.

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otonymous · 5 years ago

Note

The nsfw alphabet with Lucien bc I’m wondering what Lucien things are

Hi dear Anon!

Thanks for this fun Ask! This was my first time working with the NSFW Alphabet prompt, and it was lots of dirty fun! The fact that it’s about Lucien is a massive cherry on top 😂 Hope you enjoy it and happy reading! 💕

Warning: NSFW/18+: Explicit/graphic language — reader discretion is advised.

The ABCs of Lucien (MLQC Headcanon - NSFW)

A = Aftercare (What they’re like after sex)

Lucien will gently wipe you clean with the softest towels while your legs are still trembling from his previous onslaught

Plants soothing kisses on your knees, stomach and upper thighs

He’s got that tall glass of water already waiting on the bedside table

B = Body part (Their favourite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

He’s weak for your ankles, especially the area around the achilles tendon

His favourite body part: his eyes, because he loves seeing all the colour you bring into his world

C = Cum (Anything to do with cum)

Has no qualms about coming anywhere on your body, but especially loves coming inside you (creampies galore) and in your mouth

If you swallow, he’s on cloud nine and instantly ready for round two (the refractory period doesn’t exist for Lucien)

D = Dirty Secret (Pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

He loves to watch you shower (you may or may not be aware of it)

He’s shaving, but also staring intently at your reflection in the mirror as you soap yourself behind the glass of the shower stall

The man is entranced as he follows the soapy bubbles with his eyes, trailing down your neck, sliding between your breasts…going all the way down to the apex of your thighs

Bonus points if he sees YOU shaving

E = Experience (How experienced are they? Do they know what they’re doing?)

You best believe this man is experienced

There’s a reason they call him Professor — the man will school you in the ways of love

Capable of getting you all hot and bothered with a single glance

This man’s hands, lips and tongue will anticipate your every need and desire

One night with him will ruin you for anyone else

F = Favourite Position

Lucien has a couple of favourites

Cowgirl: because he loves studying your facial expressions as you’re grinding and impaling yourself upon him. Lucien loves to watch you reach your hand down to touch yourself at the same time.

Missionary: the professor loves the versatility of this position, as he can increase the depth with which he’s plowing into you just by throwing your legs over his shoulders — plus it allows him to plant kisses on his favourite body part of yours: the ankles

G = Goofy (Are they more serious in the moment, or are they humorous, etc.)

There is absolutely nothing funny about getting fucked to within an inch of your life (although you can feel free to laugh about it afterwards)

Sex with Lucien is INTENSE — you can hardly breathe when he’s really pounding into you, let alone laugh

H = Hair (How well groomed are they, does the carpet match the drapes, etc.)

Lucien is impeccably groomed and always fresh

Everything matches

I = Intimacy (How are they during the moment, romantic aspect…)

Very intimate — Lucien loves to look deeply into your eyes as he’s buried to the hilt in you; it almost feels spiritual at times

His dirty talk game is strong AND romantic at the same time

J = Jack Off (Masturbation headcanon)

Lucien masturbates daily, while thinking about you (especially when he’s in the shower)

K = Kink (One or more of their kinks)

Doing the deed in public — the man thrives on the thrill of almost getting caught

He actually loves it when people wise up to what the two of you were up to

Anything goes as long as no one actually walks in on you

L = Location (Favourite places to do the do)

His office at the research centre

Also enjoys bending you over a desk in an empty lecture hall

M = Motivation (What turns them on, gets them going)

All that you are is Lucien’s biggest turn on

He loves whispering filthy sweet nothings in your ear in public, just to observe your embarrassed reaction

A big fan of black lingerie, fishnet stockings, garter belts

He’s your slave when you show up completely bare beneath a sleek trench coat, your outfit accessorized only by a pair of stilettos and a string of pearls around your neck

Bite your lip as you touch yourself in front of him - Lucien loves it when he gets a private show

N = NO (Something they wouldn’t do, turn-offs)

Lucien doesn’t share, so multiple partners, threesomes, open relationships, etc. are out of the question

Other than that, anything goes with this seasoned professor

O = Oral (Preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

Enjoys both, but especially loves making you come with his mouth alone — the man lives to study every minute reaction of yours to every flick of his tongue

The professor has a silver tongue in more ways than one 😉- you have never come so fast from oral alone

P = Pace (Are they fast and rough? Slow and sensual? etc.)

Lucien is versatile and adapts his pace to whatever the situation calls for

Lovemaking is often a mixture of both: starts off slow and sensual only to evolve into something rough and wild, and if the man is in a teasing mood (read: often), he will pull back to a relaxed rhythm just as you’re about to climax, driving you insane

He will typically jackhammer into you right when he’s about to come, leaving you breathlessly gasping for air and raking your nails down his sculpted back, biting into the firm flesh of his broad shoulders because you’re past the point of screaming

Q = Quickie (Their opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often, etc.)

He loves sex with you in general and all its variations

You’ll often engage in quickies since he has a penchant for taking you at any place and any time (read: public sex)

R = Risk (Are they game to experiment, do they take risks, etc.)

As long as it doesn’t involve anyone else other than the two of you, Lucien is game to try anything

S = Stamina (How many rounds can they go for, how long do they last…)

The man is a rabbit

Lucien is definitely not lacking in the stamina department and will have you screaming his name for hours until your voice becomes hoarse

His refractory period is so short, it’s almost unbelievable — he’s capable of getting hard again almost immediately after he climaxes

He often has to hold back for your sake

T = Toy (Do they own toys? Do they use them? On a partner or themselves?)

The only toys he has are the ones he procured to use on YOU

Lucien loves to see you pushed to the edge of what your body can handle in terms of sexual stimulation

Professor Kink™ insists on having you insert a discrete bluetooth-controlled vibrator before you attend his lectures, just so he can activate it in the middle of his talk, right when he’s walking by your seat in the packed lecture hall. Ever the talented multitasker, Lucien is capable of teaching even as he’s admiring the bright flush of your cheeks and the tremble of your legs

U = Unfair (How much they like to tease)

Didn’t you know that teasing is Lucien’s middle name? (and you wouldn’t change a thing)

V = Volume (How loud they are, what sounds they make)

The man can get LOUD with his low, sexy moans and he could care less about who hears — he wants the world to know he’s fucking you

The way that he moans and hisses through his teeth when he first enters your wet warmth drives you insane with desire

Has a tendency to pant softly in your ear just as he’s about to come (right before he sucks your lobe into his mouth)

W = Wild Card (Get a random headcanon for the character of your choice)

Lucien loves to discreetly slip his hand beneath your skirt when you guys are riding on a crowded bus

X = X-Ray (Let’s see what’s going on in those pants, picture or words)

The professor is well-endowed: above average length and girth, with a slight upwards curve

The man is cut

Y = Yearning (How high is their sex drive?)

He maintains his composure well, but you will also find his picture in the definition of “Thirsty”

The man’s sex drive is sky high when it comes to you (and only you)

Z = ZZZ (… how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

It takes a lot to tire Lucien out, so you’re more likely to fall asleep before he does

He loves to watch you drift off to sleep with a satisfied smile on your face after being so thoroughly fucked

——————————————————————————————-

Thanks for reading! Check out more of my work here! 📚

#MLQC #mr love queen's choice #love and producer #mlqc lucien #mlqc smut headcanon #q&a #anonymous #all request line #my writing #MLQC Xu Mo #Xu Mo #Lucien

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confusedinfj · 6 years ago

Text

Story Writing Tips

@realentj gave me some writing tips I've been searching for my whole life. And since I never found them, I decided to articulate them for other people who - like me - are hacking their writing by following vague writing advice. Hopefully this helps at least one person 😊

Also, I'm not saying the examples I've given are good. I'm just trying to demonstrate mild improvement 😂

Common Advice Evils

Write what you know = vague. Write SOMETHING you know. Like emotions and feelings of the characters - that's the reason we can read Sci Fi and fantasy.

Show, don't tell = pages of wasted space. Maybe your character is a hypochondriac who can tell their heart is burning as tears run down their face, maybe they're an emotionally unaware person who just goes 'I was sad - idk why'. Say it like the character would.

More dialogue! = no. Dialogue is boring. More thoughts, thoughts about what people are saying. More thoughts than dialogue. NO: 'hi' 'how's it going?' 'good thanks, you?'. YES: 'hi.' She seemed flat today. I wondered why. 'How's it going?' Maybe she'd mention what was wrong.

Set the scene = too many pointless descriptions. Give us the character's thoughts - if they don't notice anything, don't mention it. NO: I walked into the big room. The walls were red, there were three chandeliers, the floor was shiny, there were people everywhere. The room was hot, there were 15 candles... ' YES: I walked into the room, immediately struck by the size. There were chandeliers on the roof, and I stood there, staring at them.

Avoid writing in the first person = terrible advice. I personally find writing in the first person easy - it helps me know what is and isn't important to include.

Keep it simple = good advice. Overcomlicating your plot will bore the reader. You can have a complicated plot, but you're gonna have to make it SEEM simple.

Let your character suffer = good, but don't make them suffer for the sake of it. Suffering looks different for everyone, there's a lot of wiggle room here. It could be as simple as offending a friend for a few days.

Just write = good advice! It doesn't need to be perfect, I needs to be done.

My tips

Write scenes like a movie. This way you'll have less pointless stuff, and something will always be happening for a reason.

Write images, not ideas. My brain seems to work like Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Scrubs, with all the cut scenes. Let your character think the same way if it's right! So instead of: I thought about standing up on the table, in the middle of the room, and screaming. Everyone would probably stare at me if I did that. Try: I pictured myself standing on the table in the middle of the room, screaming, everyone staring at me.

Format things well. It makes it easier to read. If you press tab on a new line it gives it professional looking indents, and it's much easier to read.

Get good at punctuation. This allows you to get the sound of real speech across while still being readable. So instead of: They were on the left and the right they were everywhere. Try: They were left, right - everywhere!

Don't use semicolons. You're probably not using them correctly, and they look obnoxious anyway. Use dashes instead. They're harder to misuse, and they look much more conversational.

Don't try. Just be honest. Writers who try tend to get bogged down in pointless metaphors and needless imagery. Just write.

Let the deeper meaning appear. Don't force it. If you sit down to write a story about x, y, and z you'll probably bore yourself to death.

Write about people. People like people. Even if you have the coolest plot in the world, no one will read it without people. All the best books almost sound boring when you describe them - they're just about people.

Thoughts and feelings. Not descriptions and dialogue. This is what people read stories for, try to get them right. So while you can do: She had blue eyes, blonde hair, and a blue dress. She had a small face. I was a little scared of her. This tells us more about your character: She had blue eyes - that was the first thing I noticed about her. They felt cold, so I looked away. It describes less, but ways more about the thoughts and feelings of the character.

Be honest. Pls don't sit down and try to skip straight to being Tolkien or Keats. Your writing will sound so forced and inflated.... Just be honest when you write.

Write casually. This is a good way to learn to write well, because you won't be distracted trying to sound smart.

Cut words. Any word you can cut, cut it. Pronouns, conjunctions, phrases that could be turned into one word.... Cut 'em. So instead of writing: He was running after me, and I needed to escape. I ran away quickly, breathing heavily. I didn't know where to go. Try: He ran after me - I needed to escape. Running, breathing heavily - I didn't know where to turn.

CONSISTENT CHARACTERS. Maybe it's totally believable your uptight character suddenly wants to do drugs - but you better make sure it is. Don't make your characters do things for the sake of it. If you want your uptight character to do drugs but can't think of a reason why they would, be more creative - maybe it could be an accident? People hate inconsistent characters, and saying 'they're not inconsistent because they're my characters' is just lazy. My biggest pet peeve: Characters ending up together when they really wouldn't. Don't do it.

Say it how the character would. This means you CAN tell, you don't ways have to show! You can totally just write: it was a big house. Didn't think much of the colour though.

Point out things the character cares about. Don't bother describing everything in the house if the character doesn't think it's important. Your character can walk into a mansion and literally be like: x-box. That's all I saw.

Explain your character's feelings. Sometimes having them cry and say they're sad isn't enough. If you do this well, the reader should feel something too. So instead of just: She was upset with me, so I began crying. I was sorry to let her down. You could try: I'd let her down - she was so upset, she was crying, all because of me. I began to cry too, angry that I couldn't be better, stronger. Obvs don't overdo it 😂

Let your character's thoughts ramble. You can even let them cut themselves off mid sentence. Instead of: I tried to figure it out. Was it possible that she flew? No, that seemed to be taking things a little too far. Try: I mean, I suppose it was possible that - no. No, that was a little too far.

Don't over explain things. Say it the simplest, most obvious way and move on. You can always fix it later if you have to. The best writing is simple and honest.

Write down stuff that feels embarrassing and hurts. I don't usually keep that stuff in its first form, but I do keep the essence. It's helpful to see it written down and realise what you're going for.

Let your character miss things. This works particularly well in first person. It means you don't have to explain or describe every single thing, it's very relieving.

Find your voice. Your character's voice that is. You don't need your voice, you need to hear your character. I like to pick a person and write as if they're talking. They can even have multiple voices, like a lot of people have when they're aeghong or talking to themself. If you can hear your character's voice, it will be harder to write them doing something they would never do - you just won't be able to see it.

Have fun! Write things you think are fun - play around with your writing.

Love your story. Even if you don't like the way you've done it, love the story. Learn to separate the story from the actual writing. That way you'll be motivated to go back and fix it later.

Take advice. If you can find it, and it can be hard to come by. Try out anything suggested, you never know what might work!

Ignore the haters. That is, people who insult you and your writing without giving any tips. They're just mean. So many famous authors weren't published until at least 35. Writing is a skill, keep working on it!

Bonus tip: Don't kill characters for the sake of it. It's annoying. Character death should have a point. Yes, that point can be death can seem pointles, but that point doesn't belong in every story, and it shouldn't be repeated multiple times. Then you just look like a psycho and you'll annoy the reader. Just - don't do anything to your characters for the sake of it. Forced tribulation is annoying to the reader.

Bonus bonus tip: pls don't write a story that hinges on a basic miscommunication. If it can be fixed in two minutes in a conversation, it's probably a cliche... Definitely overused in films!

#not mbti #writing #fiction #stories #writing tips #tips #advice #description #writing style #writing descriptions #writing advice #story writing

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mystech-master · 4 years ago

Text

A while ago, I made a post discussing my thoughts on Nu and Lambda, in it I also described why I personally can’t ship them, even if I also said you could do mental gymnastics to ignore the Saya clone stuff (read it to understand what I mean).

But, they aren’t the only ones to have this issue; What about Noel and Celica, two more MAIN characters who have a similar issue in their storytelling.

I will go into that now, starting with Noel (beware possibly long-ass post)

Noel is one of the main characters, and one of the most important characters in the setting (to many fan’s displeasure), so of course she is highly tied to the MC Ragna, even getting a lot of shippy moments with him. This is in spite of her being a Murakumo.

Now in my Nu and Lambda thing I said that b/c Ars Magus is weird and not an exact science and seem to be made from Saya’s soul not her DNA you could do mental gymnastics to ignore that and make the shipping okay. Could you do that with Noel? I say NO.

Not only is Noel MUCH closer to Saya (seriously put a picture of her next to young Saya from flashbacks and she looks exactly like what she’d grow up to be), but she is also apparently made from the largest chunk of her soul.

The games seem to go along this thought process with her:

Noel is a Murakumo -> Noel is not human -> Noel is a weapon -> cue angst

but the fans have the thought process of

Noel is a Murakumo -> Murakumo Units are clones of Saya -> Saya is Ragna’s sister -> Murakumo Units are clones of Ragna’s sister -> they are Ragna’s sisters.

This gets even more stupid once Izanami comes in and we learn SHE is Saya, not Noel (her being an amnesiac Saya would’ve made things much easier), because then it is like “See, Noel isn’t Saya, THAT’S Saya!”. Also Blazblue has a while thing about roles, like Ragna has ONE little brother and ONE little sister: Jin and Saya, respectively. But fans say he can have multiple little sisters but the story doesn’t because “roles” or whatever (using the weird stage terms that Rachel and Amane use).

Like, here is an idea I had for CS’ plot with more emphasis on Noel actually being Saya rather than just a clone/copy, or at least more focus on her connection with Ragna to HAVE that sibling instead of just taking the “I am not human” thing from the Murakumo:

They escape from the Cauldron at the end of CT, and Ragna now gets a god look at her, maybe he does think that this IS Saya, and you can have a bit of an emotional scene here, but Noel runs off b/c A. she is still shy girl and a MAN is so close to her, and B. this is still the SS-Class Criminal Ragna the Bloodedge. A bit of angst there because Ragna supposedly thought something horrible happened to Saya (based on a flashback in CF with Jubei).

Much, MUCH later, he can meet up with Noel again, before she is kidnapped by Terumi for the final act of being the Godslayer, maybe with Makoto there. This is where they can actually talk and bond for a bit so Ragna has an actual reason to go running off an saving her. This is where Ragna can explain his little sister to the two, maybe thinking that he got Noel confused for Saya since she looks just like her.

But, then they start piecing together everything. Noel has weird memories of Ragna, and she has amnesia from before the destruction of Ibukido after the Ikaruga Civil War. SO, what if Noel IS just an Amnesiac Saya who has trauma induced amnesia from the Ibukido stuff? This is great for Noel because all this time she might also be worried about her humanity after the shit with Nu in CT’s true ending, and maybe a cryptic line from Terumi/Hazama, but now with this information, she reaffirms that she is HUMAN, she has a family (imagine the reaction when she learns that major dickbag Kisaragi is her big brother). We could then maybe cut back to someone watching them cryptically commentating, and when we cut back Noel is in the middle of telling Ragna, her newly re-discovered big brother, about what she’s been up to, her adoptive family and her time at the Military Academy. Maybe here we could also have a gag reel where, like a later one where they try and help Celica improve her sense of direction, Ragna and Noel cook something. We get some fun-sibling time and get to see Ragna’s cooking hobby in semi-canon action. He’d call her Saya, but everyone else calls her Noel since that’s what they know her as (think of it similar to how Vegeta calls Goku by his Sayan name “Kakarot” while everyone else just calls him his Earth name).

THEN we have Terumi come in and kidnap her.

Rachel stops Ragna from running after them for cryptic warning BS, then the fight with Jin, then the fight with Terumi, etc. everything happens the same from there. Only it isn’t some random stranger who Ragna all of a sudden is risking his life for, this is the little sister he lost so long ago.

Then comes the shit with Izanami. One idea that had was that Noel IS still a Murakumo AND Saya, but she is Saya’s good half fragmented off when Izanami was made. Izanami is one part the Origin’s Drive and one part Saya’s Darkness. So Noel breaking off from Saya is kind of like M.Bison from Street Fighter removing all the good from his soul to use Psycho Power, resulting in Rose.

Then in CP, we can have an extra layer of conflict because Noel is trying to save Tsubaki, who points out that she is affiliated with a wanted criminal, Ragna the Bloodedge. Remember, Noel just wants to be a normal girl with a normal life. She already has the issue of her humanity with being a Murakumo, but then you have the more societal BS of being related to a super criminal. She cannot be “normal girl“ Noel Vermilion, AND friends with Ragna the Bloodedge, SS-Class Criminal at the same time.

Tell me that wouldn’t all be a really good alternative.

Also being able to refer to the three MCs as “The Siblings” is just so much easier.

and then we got Celica A. Mercury.

she flops back and forth between, Ragna’s mom, and Ragna’s love interest.

Celica A. Mercury in Blazblue Chronophantasma, is well, a Chronophantasma. A copy of someone who isn’t supposed to be alive in the current timeline. Specifically, Celica is the younger sister of the Great Sage Nine, one of the Six Heroes who defeated the Black Beast 100 years before the setting of the games. the ORIGINAL Celica, after the Six Heroes were almost wiped out by Terumi, proceeded to become a nun/sister in a church built over the remains of the Black Beast’s corpse, as she has a unique Order power to nullify seithr. With her healing magic keeping her young and healthy she lived there alone until Jubei brought the three siblings, Ragna Jin and Saya, to be under her care for an undisclosed amount of time. This is where people get her being Ragna’s mom, even thought nuns/sisters are more just general caretakers instead of parents, but she is still a female maternal figure who looked after Ragna so you can see where people get that.

But then you get “teen” Celica, the one the games show in the story. She is from the Dark War, where she actually met Ragna first. Ragna was sent back in time, with Amnesia, to fill the role of the unsung 7th Hero “Bloodedge” and stop the Black Beast for a year allowing Nine to arm humanity with Ars Magus. Celica apparently fell in love with him because she is very affectionate and familiar with Ragna once she is brought to the future as a Chronophantasma.

The story really does ping pong between her being very motherly, specifically her scolding Ragna and Jin for fighting in CP, and just being a naive child, see her complaining when people get on her case about her awful sense of direction. But it is really hard because the image of the sister seems to flash over her, which the other characters seem to notice, but much like Noel and Saya, no one in the story EVER seems to connect the dots and have that change the relationship between them.

Now I personally don’t like the ship because she is a naive child in a woman’s body, with the stupid no sense of direction gag, to her scolding Ragna and Jin as if they were Natsu and Gray from Fairy Tail who are just fighting for some dick measuring contest when we all KNOW the actual reason is more complicated but the story just seems to abandon that and GGRRRR!!!

But, looking at Celica, really you can;t do the whole “Schrodinger’s Relationship” thing like they’re doing with Saya and Noel and the Murakumos. They need to COMMIT, to a role.

If Celica is Ragna’s MOM, no ifs and or buts, then 1. They need to make her less of a cutesy child. and 2. Maybe age up her design, Litchi has the design vibe of someone who is “older” than the cast, maybe something similar to that. Just imagine another angsty scene of Ragna meeting this woman who has the same face as the Sister who raised him who he KNOWS 100% is dead, so no mistaken identity shit like I already suggested with Saya/Noel, and her looking at him with her face is just MOCKING him, especially since his first two meetings with her in CP are after he gets his ass kicked (once after he is sent back in time after Nu kicking his butt, and once after Kagura knocks him out and arrests him). Also you’d have to undo ALL ship teasing in Phase Shift, or just use one of my friend’s ideas and just have Ragna be a reincarnation of Bloodedge instead of going back in time.

If you want Celica to be the cute girl love interest, and this is the option I feel most people would want either b/c shipping or the cute girl waifu factor that Japan likes (I base some of m reasoning based on “could this be made”, then you’d have to undo all connections between Celica and the Sister. My simple idea was instead of Celica living all those years she dies there, but Nine also had a bunch of other caretakers go with her to help take care of the church. I mean Nine is one of the Great Sages AND a member of the Six Heroes you’re telling em she wouldn’t use some of tat fame and authority to make sure his little sister is safe when she is all alone out there. Seems almost out of character with how fiercely protective Nine was of Celica. Of course this all means that the Sister that raises Ragna and the siblings is less important as she is just a nameless backstory character in a similar vein to Noel’s adoptive Parents, but is is a much easier thing to do than the previous option.

Either of those two options are good IMO, but I still think Celica needs to grow up a bit and release how much everyone around her is an asshole before I can fully ship her and Ragna.

So, what do you guys think? Noel being fully Ragna’s sister leading to much more interesting plot stuff, and Celica committing to either the cute girl love interest or mom role. I feel lkike my ideas are good, but what d you guys think?

#blazblue #my thoughts #noel vermillion #ragna the bloodedge #celica a mercury

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echodrops · 5 years ago

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Hshshsnansna seeing that ask got me in a HUGE HaaH mood. Like, I went through and read a bunch of asks, and I'd probably go reread the fic itself if I had time. So!! Is there anything about HaaH you've always wanted to share but never had the chance to? Headcanons, worldbuilding, backstory, hidden details- anything at all??

Oh friend… There is so much. I have a Word document that’s like 17k of JUST headcanons and world-building for this fic kghsdkjhdkfg I’m not crazy, I swear.

It took me a while to respond because I had to comb through and find stuff that wasn’t spoilery, but tada, have some Home and a Half Hunk and Shiro (and Matt) headcanons and backstory under the cut!

Also, as for hidden details… Same as the Garrison professors in the show were named for staff members, Neuhahn and Ania are named after IRL contributors to the Voltron animated series–Chris Neuhahn was a producer and Ania O’Hare was the casting director.

And here are some Hunk, Shiro, and sorta Matt headcanons/backstory that shapes their characters in HaaH. (Please note, these headcanons ignore absolutely everything from about season 6 of the actual show and on. I stopped watching Voltron after Season 6 because I just couldn’t handle the writing anymore. T_T)

Hunk:- He’s mixed ethnically, and although his parents are from Samoa, his family tree actually spans many different countries, mostly in Polynesia, including Tonga, but even places as far away as Malaysia.- His parents were converted to the LDS church by Mormon missionaries in Samoa. A few years before Hunk was born, his parents moved to Utah to be closer to the church, so Hunk has only ever been to Samoa once, on a vacation to visit family.- His first name is actually “Hyrum,” and until he met Lance at a Garrison-sponsored summer astro-camp when they were nine, everyone just called him by his real name.- Lance actually meant to call him “Incredible Hulk” at camp, butttt to nine-year-old Lance’s utter mortification, it came out “Incredible Hunk” instead. “Hunk” stuck.- He has a little sister who is even more sensitive than he is.

- Although Hunk’s parents originally agreed on the plan to move to America, after the family arrived, they experienced difficulty fitting in with the very selective Utah culture, and Hunk’s mother grew disenchanted with the church. Employment was difficult to find in their small, rural town, and Hunk’s parents both struggled with being isolated from their extended families. Tensions over whether or not to remain in America, as well as over money, led to some miserable fights that contributed to Hunk’s aversion to conflict when he was younger.

- Hunk sometimes had to play the role of family peacekeeper, working hard to make sure that his youngest sister wouldn’t notice the strain.

- Nevertheless, despite their share of troubles, the family is extremely close-knit. Hunk values his family and their opinions more than anything in any world.

- Which is how he ended up agreeing to go to Garrison, even when he really just wanted to help his parents kickstart the restaurant they were planning to open. His mother felt that working in a family restaurant, even if Hunk is a great cook, would squander his incredible academic and engineering talent (which Hunk thought of as just a hobby), so she begged him to go and continue his schooling instead. Hunk couldn’t say no to his mother, even if the thought of being shipped off into space terrified the living daylights out of him.

- Hunk doesn’t curse and is somewhat uncomfortable with people cursing, at least in front of him. Although Lance used to have a pretty colorful repertoire, when he learned that cursing made Hunk uncomfortable, he immediately adopted all of Hunk’s weird Utah replacements instead. “Holy crow” and “let’s kick some trash” are things they actually say seriously.

- Hunk is always down to cuddle and is never embarrassed by asking for or giving cuddles to anyone. He would 200% cuddle Shiro if he thought Shiro would let him. (Shiro would, in fact, let him.) Hunk’s favorite person on the team to cuddle is actually Keith, because Keith (who was taught to comply by Garrison scientists with all unexpected/unsolicited touch) will just sit obediently for hours letting Hunk hug out all his stress. Hunk knows that something is off about Keith’s behavior, but his leading theory—that Keith allows the hugs because he’s touch-starved—is unfortunately false.

- Hunk knows the lyrics to every Disney song EVER.

- And he’s like a dog with a bone when it comes to secrets. Once he discovers that someone’s keeping something under wraps, he goes a bit crazy with curiosity and cannot stop thinking about what they might be hiding. The rules of privacy go totally out the window when he gets like this, but time and again, Hunk’s adage that it’s always better to tell the truth bears itself out.

Shiro (and Matt?):

- Shiro is the only member of his immediate family whose first language was not Japanese. His grandparents on both sides immigrated to the US from Japan due to work transfers relatively late in life, when their own children, Shiro’s parents, were already young adults. As the first family child to be born in America, Shiro’s parents strongly emphasized the need to learn English well, which unfortunately resulted in Shiro being pushed away from learning Japanese when he was young. Even though he’s a capable conversationalist now, he’s struggled his whole life with regret over not learning the language when he was young and could have picked it up easier.

- There’s a running joke in his family that he’s actually an ogre in disguise, given that he is much taller than many of his other family members. Tradition demands that the first photo of every holiday gathering is a joke group shot in which Shiro’s posed so his entire head is outside the top frame of the picture.

- Shiro was mercilessly bullied as a child because of his height. The other children frequently suggested that he didn’t belong in their grade because he was too big and that the school must held him back multiple times for being dumb. (Shiro was never held back. In fact, he had excellent grades from kindergarten to the day he graduated from Garrison—and no, not because his parents forced him to study; in fact, throughout his schooling, they often ended up having to force Shiro to go to bed already instead.)

- On top of being teased for his looks, Shiro was naturally shy. He barely spoke, even to his teachers, and would stumble miserably if he was put on the spot in class, contributing further to the rumor that he was stupid.

- Shiro loved learning, but he hated everything that happened in school and didn’t have a single real friend outside of his cousins until he went off to middle school and met Matt Holt in sixth grade.

- Barely two weeks into their first middle school year, and it was already obvious that Matt was the school’s biggest nerd; he’d been bumped up two grades because of his obvious genius and was the textbook definition of an alien conspiracy theorist (It’s not a conspiracy if they’re REAL, guys!) But the strange thing was that no one bullied Matt—he was just so quick on the sarcastic (and biochemical) comebacks that teasing him wasn’t even worth it. Instead, the school’s resident assholes took it out on targets a little less likely to corrode their homework with miniature magnesium bombs—read as, they picked on polite, well-meaning Takashi Shirogane instead.

- Out of pity more than anything else, Matt finally stood up for Shiro one day and ran off the assholes. (It was not, as Mrs. Shirogane insists, with a home-made taser. It was not.) After something like that, well… You sort of feel obligated to befriend a guy, don’tcha?

- Becoming friends with Matt Holt transformed Shiro’s life. Even if Shiro wouldn’t originally speak up for himself, he was ferociously proud and supportive of his first real friend, and learning to be bold for Matt taught Shiro the value and meaning of standing up for not only others, but also himself. Being friends with someone as off-the-cuff and tricky as Matt helped Shiro grow more spontaneous, less self-conscious, and ultimately much more confident—even if, to this day, most of that confidence is still focused on helping others, rather than on being self-assured.

- It was Shiro admiration for Matt’s father, Sam Holt, that led Shiro to take his childhood obsession with military history a step further by actually joining the military. Shiro and Matt enrolled in Garrison together, although Matt was part of the research rather than the combat division.

- Matt was the one who convinced Shiro to get his hair styled in an undercut. It was originally just a dare, but Shiro ended up loving it afterward. The “Undercut Incident,” as it has come to be known in the Shirogane family, was the official straw that broke the camel’s back and resulted in Mrs. Shirogane declaring Matt Holt a “bad influence,” the only impact of which was that Matt had to sneak in through Shiro’s bedroom window instead of coming to the front door when he wanted to hang out.

- Shiro has received two separate Medals of Honor for making dangerous supply deliveries to war-torn countries across the globe, delivering the vital food and medicine that helped save hundreds of lives. He has also been part of several missions to save stranded astronauts from failing international space stations.

- Shiro is actually a giant memelord, but his crushing sense of responsibility keeps him from indulging in quality shitposting in front of anyone he actually knows. He had a ridiculously active secret Vine account before leaving on the Kerberos mission. His snaps are legendary. Deep down, Shiro dreads the inevitable day someone connects him with his cringey social media accounts.

- Literally the worst at adulting. His mom still filled out his tax forms for him and booked his dentist appointments. He has no idea what the hell he’s doing leading Team Voltron when he can’t even remember which of his clothes are machine-washable and which aren’t.

- When they were in their third year at Garrison, Matt conned Shiro into volunteering as a camp counselor for Garrison’s summer astrocamp program, even though Shiro had minimal understanding of how to take care of children and mostly just BS’d his way through, hoping that none of his campers had anything close to a serious issue.

- He won “best camp counselor” the very first year he volunteered. Mostly because Lance cheated and voted for him 23 times, but still.

#Home and a Half #HaaHVLD #voltron headcanons #Hunk headcanons #Shiro headcanons #Matt headcanons #I guess lol #matt holt #hunk voltron #takashi shirogane #Voltron

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amandaoftherosemire · 5 years ago

Text

Bulletproof -- Part Ten

Fandom: Marvel/College AU

Pairing: Bucky Barnes X Reader, Platonic!Steve Rogers x Reader

Characters: Bucky Barnes, Gamora, Natasha Romanoff, Steve Rogers

Author: @amandaoftherosemire

Rating: Mature

Word Count: 6,927

Format: Series (Complete)

Warnings: Implied smut, platonic nudity, sexual nudity, explicit language, fluff.

Summary: You and Bucky take some time to flirt. You have your last session for Steve’s art project. You run into Bucky in their kitchen and make some plans.

A/N: I wasn’t intending to have a short hiatus but real life intruded. I am working on catching up, however, and this is my first peace offering. I thought about adding angst to the warnings, but for the first time, I don’t think the angst is enough to worry about. This chapter wasn’t difficult to write; I just didn’t have any time to do it. 😄🤷 I hope it’s as much fun to read as it was to write, because I had a blast with this one.

Edit: Added banner by @hellzzzbelle and keep reading break. I should probably not get these ready to post when I’m severely sleep deprived.

Part Nine here

Texts from reader in italic indents; Texts from Bucky in bold indents.

Monday night saw Bucky laying on his bed reading and trying to ignore the faint lingering scent you’d left behind. He loved that his bed still smelled like you, but it was entirely too distracting when he was trying to concentrate. Why he’d decided to major in chemistry as a pre-med student he didn’t know, especially on nights like these when he was being smothered in endless, tedious reading.

Even though he hadn't seen you since Saturday morning, he'd been in a phenomenal mood ever since. Watching you grill Steve had been not only fun, but informative. Discovering that Steve's date was your friend, that you'd introduced them in the hopes that they would hit it off, had been both a surprise and a relief to Bucky.

Surprise because he had assumed you and Steve had been getting closer to dating rather than further away but setting him up with someone else sure made it seem like you were looking elsewhere. Bucky was determinedly ignoring the guilt still sitting in the back of his mind. A small, snide voice would not stop reminding him that Steve may have still been looking at you until you set him onto the mysterious Peggy. That same voice also kept pointing out that if you hadn't been looking at Steve, it might have been because you were too busy looking at Bucky.

Relief and elation were currently drowning out that guilt, however. Relief because he knew now you weren't hurting because Steve had gone out with someone else, had, in fact, picked out the shirt that had so offended Bucky. Elation because he wasn't a consolation prize; you hadn't turned to him out of a need for comfort, but because you'd wanted him with the same mindless desire he had for you.

His current mood also might have something to do with the fact that the last time he'd seen you, earlier today, you'd been across the street running to class as he'd been on his way back to his apartment. You'd paused when he'd wolf whistled at you and given him a long, hot look out of hungry eyes and a sassy grin before you'd blown him a kiss and resumed your quickstep. That look had set him up all day long.

A hint of blue in the corner of his room caught his eye. You’d left the bra you’d been wearing the other night on his floor. He’d hidden it from Steve under a pile of clothes, but they’d shifted and exposed a little of that pretty color. He got an idea and hopped up with a grin.

He grabbed the bra and propped it up on the table he used as a desk. He then grabbed a note card and a sharpie and jotted a quick note:

If you want to see this again, come hang out with me. I miss you. – Bucky

He set the note against the bra and snapped a picture on his phone, sending it to you in a text message. Smiling in anticipation, he settled back on the bed with his phone on his stomach, his book back in his hand, and his eyes unseeing on the page as he grinned.

You heard your phone buzz with a text message but ignored it. You’d put your phone on silent while you did your calculus homework for a reason. You had to take insanely hard math for your degree; you had to concentrate, at the very least while in mid-problem.

Once you'd gotten to a spot where you didn't think your brain would melt if you took a break, you picked up the phone to check what you'd missed. Bucky's message made you grin. You had been planning to get the bra back when you went over for your session with Steve, but if Bucky wanted to ransom it, you'd play along. You snapped a quick picture of the textbook and pages of equations spread across your bed and sent it along with a quick message.

I miss you, too. 😘

Figuring you weren't going to be getting any work done for the next little bit, you decided to stretch your legs and grab a snack. You stuffed your phone in your back pocket and opened your bedroom door into the living room. Padding toward the kitchen on bare feet, you waved at Nat and Gamora as you walked by. Gamora was quizzing Natasha in Mandarin; she was learning multiple languages with an eye toward pre-law.

"Ni hao," you chirped as you passed on your way to the kitchen on light feet, feeling smug. Whatever was going on with you and Bucky, you were having fun. Right now, you were something more than friends, something less than lovers, but the discovery of what exactly you could be to each other was turning out to be incredibly exhilarating.

You were staring into the fridge, ostensibly trying to decide what to eat, but in reality you were daydreaming about that wicked smile Bucky had shot you from across the street earlier. Whatever else, you knew Friday night was not going to be a one-and-done. He was simply too delectable to resist.

You straightened when your phone vibrated in your pocket, coming to a sudden decision and grabbing a bottle of water out of the fridge. You leaned on the counter that separated your kitchen from your living room with your elbows and forearms flat and smiled indulgently at the phone in your hand.

Bucky's message had taken a few minutes because he'd spent most of that time staring at your message with a big, dumb grin on his face. He knew he was being ridiculous, that your message could hardly be taken for a protestation of unending devotion, but he couldn't help himself. For the first time, he felt like everything he wanted was within his grasp.

Huh. It’s cool that you’re learning an alien language but now I'm worried that trying to understand extraterrestrials might break your brain. Is there anything I can do to help?

Not wanting to push it, but desperate to keep the conversation going, he added the little bit at the end as an invitation. He didn't want to fuck up your studies, but he needed to talk to you, to know that he wasn’t merely dreaming, that you were with him in this. Hoping his stupid joke would make you smile, he grinned like an idiot when your response came through.

😄 Says the chem major. But it's standard for engineering, so I'm afraid there's nothing you can do. How are you holding up?

Bucky wasn’t the only one grinning like an idiot. You were also stretching one leg and twisting it back and forth as you beamed at the phone in your hand and typed out your response. Gamora lifted an eyebrow in your direction, shifting Nat’s amused attention to you, not that you noticed.

Bucky, meanwhile, was delighted to see you were willing to keep the conversation going. He was still absently carrying his book around, though he was long since done paying attention to anything but you. He crossed to the desk and went to grab a cigarette out of the pack when he realized he still had the book in his hand. He tossed it on the desk rather than give up the phone, too focused on both answering you as a friend and as a flirt. He sent two texts, one right after the other.

Chem is mostly about algebra, thank god, because I hate calculus. I'm doing okay. I only cried twice this week. I also hate anatomy.

You know, you could come over here and study. Or I could come over there. Then we wouldn't miss each other. 😏

You didn’t know it, but your face was easily giving you away to Nat and Gamora. The two women were much alike, with oddly similar trauma in their childhoods. Natasha was there on a gymnastics scholarship, which was also how she and Gamora met. You didn’t know much, but she’d been born and raised in Russia. Though she was too young to have trained under the Soviet gymnastics model, remnants of that worldview had remained active in post-Soviet Russia. Natasha had gotten caught in one of those remnants. They had made her a phenomenal gymnast and a deeply traumatized woman. She, like Gamora, had a watchful care that made it difficult to hide anything from her.

Right now, your face was sly, an expression they’d seen; but you were biting your lip in breathless excitement, something neither of them had seen in years. Altogether, your body language would have been obvious to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of what a human flirting looks like. You were as subtle as neon.

Once at the open window, Bucky lit the cigarette and kept an ear tuned toward your apartment in the hopes that he would hear something to add to this amazing interaction. He was wrapped up in this minor chitchat with you as though he thought you were about to impart the meaning of life. When your next text came through, he felt like you had.

Why you lying to me like that? 🤨 I happen to know for a fact that is demonstrably untrue. You showed your appreciation for my anatomy quite thoroughly the other night.

Which is how I know we won't get any studying done if we "study" together.

“Who’re you texting, sis?” Gamora called out, using the nickname she used only when she knew you were up to something.

“Nowhere,” you replied, loudly, your voice a little panicked.

Bucky couldn't hear every word coming out of your apartment through the open balcony door, the approaching summer making the fresh air a necessity as the temperature climbed, but he heard enough. Gamora's voice came through loud and clear and he assumed she was closer to the door. As she spoke your text reply came through, and for the first time since Saturday morning you acknowledged what had changed between you. The opening of that subject had him rock hard and riveted.

Now that you'd opened it, he was happy to continue it. When he heard your pathetic response to Gamora's question, a wicked smile bloomed on his face. His eyes sparkling, he tapped out a quick reply.

Baby, I don't appreciate your anatomy. I worship it. And I'll gladly do so again whenever you'd like. And you're right, if I have your anatomy in front of me, I'm gonna want to study you, not my textbook.

Bucky had this expression, this curve to his lips, a dip to his eyelids, a lift to his cheek that caused irreconcilable desires within you. On the one hand, that smug, you-know-want-me smirk made you want to punch him.

To help you protect yourself, and give you (and Steve, who had these lessons also) a better chance of winning one of the many, many fights one or both of you started, Bucky had taught you the basics of bare-knuckled boxing. Sometimes, you wanted to use your fist and everything you'd learned to wipe that smile off his pretty fucking face.

On the other hand, he was right, the fucker. You did want him, and that smirk just reminded you of it, made you want to curl and coil around him like a serpent in search of warmth.

Since you’d now seen him smirking like that while in the throes of passion, his eyes burning and his heart pounding against yours, you had begun to fear that the second desire had become dominant. If you could have seen Bucky as he typed his response, wearing that smirk in spades, you’d have known you were doomed.

The response itself made you squeak a little in agitation as you remembered just how much you'd enjoyed exactly what he described. You'd certainly felt worshipped, and the knowledge that he saw it the same way had your knees going to rubber. However, you couldn’t forget you weren't alone. Because you could see Gamora and Natasha watching you out of your peripheral vision (you were not going to look at them you were not going to look at them you were not going to look at them), you knew you they were about to get nosy.

Going for casual, you straightened and turned around to lean with your back against the counter, tapping out a response as quickly as possible. You didn't know why, but you wanted to keep this flirtation between only you and Bucky for a little while longer. There was something exciting about keeping it secret, though you were doing a terrible job of keeping it.

Straight up? I can't do this right now because both G and Nat are looking at me like they're onto me. Also I have to finish that calc, and there's no way I can do that while trying not to think about fucking you.

Bucky's heart kicked like a mule when he saw your text. He'd always cherished your style of honesty, especially with him, but this was new. He fucking adored this kind of honesty on this exact subject. The blunter you wanted to be in expressing how you wanted him, the more enthralled he was.

So, changing the subject, I took both calculus and algebra this term, like a moron, so I've cried every day. I'm expecting to spend all of dead week in tears.

Still trying to maintain that casual demeanor, you grabbed your water bottle and an orange out of the bowl of fruit on the counter and headed back to your room, keeping your eyes trained on your phone. You didn't even look at Nat and Gamora out of the corner of your eye, too terrified to be caught by one or both. Since you were studiously ignoring them, you didn't see them watch you walk by, identical pitying looks on their faces.

You thought you had a chance of escaping without an explanation. They shared a look. Cute.

Meanwhile, Bucky was having to talk himself out of pushing, of seeing if you were as easily diverted by this subject as he was. He didn't want to go back to his reading, didn't want to let you go back to your equations. He wanted to keep going, to tell you he'd dreamed of you every night since the night you spent together, wanted to ask if you'd done the same.

Bucky stubbed out the cigarette and was considering going to the kitchen for a beer when your answer came in. He wasn’t hearing anything out of your apartment now, so he wandered out of his room, his attention still on his phone. Instead of testing the boundaries, he typed a response that mostly disguised his baser urges, at least for the moment.

Let me know if and when you'd like to come back to this conversation, gorgeous. I'm FASCINATED.

You rolled your eyes in exasperation, but only because your skin was heating just thinking about the other night. You made it into your bedroom before you sighed long and loud in pure lust, leaning against your door. You jumped when your phone vibrated in your hand.

I'll accept the change of subject. For now. 😏 And if you need a shoulder, mine's always available, babygirl.

When you sighed this time, it was pure romance. You knew it was silly, that the offer of a shoulder to cry on was hardly a declaration of undying love and fidelity. But something about the sexual invitation immediately followed by the emotional one was another slug in that useless vest of yours.

Giggling happily, you hopped onto your bed as you texted Bucky back, giving in and enjoying the giddy anticipation for once instead of trying to stifle it.

Good to know. 😊 Now, about that bra. Is there a time frame on when I can ransom it with my company?

As he passed by Steve's studio, Bucky saw the light underneath the door that told him his roommate was once again working late into the evening. It wasn't until the last couple of months that Steve had taken to working behind closed doors. Bucky wanted to knock, to nose his way in and find out what Steve was hiding, but he was busy hiding secrets of his own. Keeping his head down, he walked by without a sound as he replied.

Nope. Only rule is: if you want it, you gotta come and get it.

You were sitting cross-legged on your bed, the papers and books scattered around you long forgotten. You hadn’t had this much fun flirting with anyone in forever. There was something about the way the old melded with the new, the familiar with the unfamiliar, that left you breathless.

You can't be that lazy.

Bucky laughed out loud when he straightened from his stoop to check his phone. He'd grabbed a beer as he went, turning with the intention of raiding the cupboards for anything salty and crunchy he could find in there. Once he'd snagged a bag of chips to go with his beer, he started back toward his room with his thumb tapping out the honest truth, hoping you'd accept it.

I'm not. I miss you that much.

Bucky’s answer had you sighing again, a smile wide and dreamy stretching across your face. Not that you'd admit it to anyone, least of all yourself, but there was a fair amount of giddy anticipation making your heart jump in the kind of excitement that comes from hope.

As soon as I have a spare minute, it's yours. 😊

Bucky sat on the side of his bed to stare at your response, a happy but baffled smile on his face.

Somehow, he was charming you, though he didn’t really understand how. He knew how to talk his way into a woman’s bed. He’d never tried to talk his way into anyone’s heart. But still, every time he saw you, spoke to you, he saw you open a little more to the love he wanted to give you.

Dizzy with delight, but still confused, he fell back on what he was good at. When he saw what he’d typed, however, he decided to let it stand, curious to see how you’d respond.

Do I get to decide what to do with that minute?

You laughed out loud when you saw Bucky’s text, unaware that two sets of ears were listening outside your door and two sets of eyes were narrowing in suspicion. You figured Bucky was up to something, but your curiosity insisted you play along.

I was all, how much trouble can me and Bucky get up to in single minute? and now I’m laughing so hard I might die. But sure. Why the fuck not? 😉

This time it was Bucky’s turn to laugh out loud, delighted with you and the world in general. He hadn’t expected this conversation to turn out as well as it had, but he’d discovered that the thoughts he’d always kept to himself had a match in you. The knowledge was intoxicating.

You ARE trouble, babygirl. Not that that’s a bad thing. I loved being in trouble. Please, let me know if and when I can get in trouble again.

Oof. Bucky somehow managed to find a way with every word to make you feel insanely sexy. He seemed enchanted, addicted to you and the thought was dizzying in its power and possibilities. What if you were enough?

Your heart pounding, an excited smile on your face, you took a chance.

Soon. I adore the way you get in trouble. Have a good night, pretty boy. 😘

Bucky’s laugh had drifted in through the open balcony door and though Natasha and Gamora were listening at your bedroom door, the dark beauty had ears like a cat and heard it easily. Silently, she indicated that Nat should stay at your door while she moved closer to the balcony.

When your final text came through, Bucky muttered, “Sexiest woman on the planet, I swear to god,” and fell back onto his bed to stare at the ceiling in starry-eyed frustration. He shrugged philosophically. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d made do with his hand and thoughts of you. He was simply grateful to now have memories instead of only dreams.

Gamora heard Bucky’s low exclamation and smiled in amusement. Once it became clear that the fun was over for the moment, she and Natasha settled back on the couch and very quietly discussed the situation. Nat, still wary and unwilling to see you hurt so badly again, was less enthused than Gamora, who approved as long as you were happy.

Still, Nat liked to hear you giggling like a girl even if she rolled her eyes. Though she was wary, she agreed to give Bucky the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Gamora, on the other hand, fully intended to help Bucky woo and win you in any way she could.

She'd thought that your plan to seduce Bucky had been the dumbest thing you'd ever come up with, but based on what little you'd confided about your night with him, Gamora had come to the conclusion that Bucky was as stupid in love with you as you with him. In that case, as long as you kept sashaying cheerfully around the apartment she was on his side and working on his behalf. She understood Natasha’s wariness, but the fact was she’d never seen you happier.

She just hoped he didn’t fuck it up.

The following Friday saw you sitting for Steve for the final time. He was working on the last of the four works that made up his final project and this was the last chance the two of you had to get together before it was due. Thankfully, he was nearly done; he only wanted to see if one last sitting added anything special to this last one.

Steve's final project was four works, each in a different medium and depicting mythical or legendary creatures. Working together over the last few months, the two of you had found a rhythm that allowed you to express a mood or emotion with your face and form in a way Steve could interpret into images. The nature and depth of your relationship had given him an opportunity to do so in a way he would not have had with another model. It had been the best challenge he'd ever set himself and he was incredibly proud of the work he'd done.

Not only was he thrilled with what you'd helped him create, he was deeply grateful for the chance to deepen and strengthen his friendship with you. Over the course of a school term, the two of you had forged an even stronger bond than ever before. The act of trusting him with your body like this made you vulnerable in a way almost more powerful because of its lack of a sexual component.

Steve had been intensely aware of both that vulnerability and the trust you'd shown him in allowing it. His care in the face of that vulnerability had cemented the certainty that he was the best friend anyone could ever hope for. After everything the two of you had been through together, you had already trusted Steve with your life. Now, however, you'd trusted him with your psyche, and he'd taken the utmost of care. You could count on him, no matter what, beyond a shadow of a doubt. You knew it, because you knew him now as well as you knew yourself.

Which is how you knew the creative process was frustrating him at the moment, rather than energizing him as it did when it went well. You wondered what he was struggling with and hoped forcing him out of his head with conversation would help.

"Last one, huh?" You spoke into the quiet, but it was easy, as were the words, and the sound didn't break the silence so much as scatter it. "I'm kind of going to be sad. It was a unique experience."

Steve looked over at you to find you smiling sweetly at him. He smiled sweetly back, but you still weren't wearing the expression he was looking for. He needed something mischievous to match the Kelly-green frock coat hanging mostly open and giving you a rakish look. His lips twisted wryly, thinking back to that first horribly awkward day.

"I know what you mean. Nerve-wracking, but ultimately worth it."

"Right!?" Your voice was happy and excited, and your smile spread to light up your face. "I feel like we're better friends now than we were when we started." Your tone softened, as did your expression as you continued. "It means the world to me. You mean the world to me, Steve."

Steve's cheeks flamed and he ducked his head, a pleased and tender smile on his face. "Feeling sentimental, huh?" he teased.

You lifted a brow. "You're not? Then why are you blushing so hard?"

His face went even redder, if that was possible, and he struck back, partly to tease, partly because he couldn't stand it anymore. "If we're better friends now, why don't you want to talk to me about what's going on with you and Bucky?"

Steve felt like a dick when the smile fell from your face. "Wow." You blinked in surprise at the sudden change of subject. "I didn't know you’d been practicing your passive aggression," you shot back, then immediately regretted it at the look of chagrin that crossed Steve's face.

You'd always been honest with Steve, however, and you felt guilty shutting him out. You just weren't sure what to say, really. You figured you might as well tell him that. "Because I don't know what's going on with me and Bucky," you sighed.

Steve rolled his eyes. "Come on! I’m dying of curiosity over here!" He fixed you with a suspicious look that made your lips twitch in exactly the way he was looking for and his attention immediately shifted back to the painting even as he kept speaking to prompt more of that mischief to light your face. "Bucky’s been in a great mood all week. And you’ve been conspicuously absent."

"Would you like to do my homework?" Your eyebrows lifted in challenge even as the gossip about Bucky sank in. He had been a ray of sunshine every time you'd texted with him but hearing about his cheerful disposition from Steve made you wonder if it had the same cause as yours. You were getting confident enough in whatever was between the two of you to bet that it did.

"I would not." Steve replied quickly and firmly. He wanted nothing to do with your homework, considering you took science classes as electives.

You grinned and Steve got to work adding the lightest of shadows to your face to capture that roguish expression. "I’ve been buried. I feel like we’re barreling towards finals--," Steve slanted you a look of pure commiseration at that, "--and I want to put in an appearance at the boys’ frat party tonight. Gamora asked me to go in case she needs help with Quill. I had to bust ass to have the time to waste on a party."

Now that you mentioned it, Steve could see the signs of sleeplessness around your eyes. Your sunny disposition masked it well, but you were clearly very tired. He understood well. The end of term had snuck up on him, too. It wasn’t the first time and he didn’t expect it to be the last.

“Why would she need your help?” he asked, well aware Gamora was more than capable of dealing with Peter Quill.

Your mouth twisted in sympathy tinged with amusement. Quill had been chasing Gamora all year, but she had been only barely receptive. She had a soft spot because he had a roguish charm that made her smile and a genuinely good heart for all he hid it behind humor and a thoughtless careen through life. She claimed she wasn't interested, but you suspected she didn't want to be, which you knew from experience was a very different thing.

You shrugged, not sure why yourself, and gave Steve the same excuse she'd given you. "In case she decides to turn him down again. She’s afraid she might actually break him this time."

Steve raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment, too focused on the hint of white he was brushing along the curve of your lower lip. He didn't ask again, knowing that he would only need to stay silent long enough. He knew you'd give in eventually if he gave you enough time to feel guilty.

He wasn't wrong, but not for the reason he thought. When he wanted you to feel guilty enough to give in, he gave you what you privately thought of as the eyebrows of disappointment. You couldn't stand this look for more than a couple of minutes. You always gave in because he looked so damn sad and you just couldn't resist it. That didn't mean you liked it.

"Ugh!" you exclaimed, the sad, shamed feeling crawling up your spine and making it impossible to keep silent in the face of that particular expression. Giving in, you continued, telling Steve some of the truth, "Bucky is being… sweet." Your face softened as you thought of the brief but electrifying chat you'd had with him the night before. "Attentive. He texts me every day just to check on me." You shrugged, going for casual, but Steve could see the stars in your eyes. Though it wasn't the expression he needed, he still loved to see you so happy, especially considering who was responsible.

"Last night he texted me on his way home," you went on. Now that you were confiding in Steve, you wanted to keep going, if for no other reason than you needed another brain to help you figure this out and no one knew Bucky better than Steve. "I told him I was slogging through my reading for molecular biology and dreaming about a latte. Twenty minutes later he was at my door with a salted caramel cold brew. I don't know what's going on." The last you said with a touch of petulance that had Steve's lips twitching.

"Sounds like Bucky wants to be your boyfriend." Steve spoke casually, but completely honestly. Bucky hadn't treated anyone that way since high school, when he'd been chasing Dot, the last girl he'd dated seriously. He couldn't help himself; when his heart was engaged, Bucky always went overboard.

Steve realized when your gaze turned inward as you considered his words that he may not have gotten the mischievous smile he'd been looking for, but he'd gotten something far better. His hand was careful but sure as he added the light that had come into your eyes at the realization that you'd have said the same thing if Bucky had been treating anyone but you this way. That astonishing thought led to ideas of how you could test the concept.

Steve didn't know what gave your sly smile the sultry edge it had, but he also didn't really want to ask. He simply appreciated that he'd finally gotten the mischief he'd needed to finish his work.

Bucky twisted the knob on his front door with his heart pounding. He shouldn’t have skipped class again, but he couldn’t make himself go when there was a chance he’d find you here alone.

He had noticed a pattern. If he was right, and you were here, he hoped he could talk you into staying awhile. The smell of fresh coffee had his breath catching. He dropped his bag next to the door and moved toward the kitchen.

He went hard as a rock when he stepped into the kitchen to find you standing at the sink, rinsing out your coffee cup. “Oh, babygirl,” he murmured, his voice already heating, as he leaned against the doorframe. “What are you doing here?”

Your heart had started racing as soon as the sound of the front door closing verified that your dawdling hadn’t been in vain. The mischievous smile Steve had been looking for earlier spread across your face as you set the cup in the sink and turned slowly. "Same thing I’m usually doing on a Friday morning," you replied and braced yourself against the counter, letting the edges of your robe fall open to bare a leg.

Bucky's eyes dropped immediately to that bare expanse of skin, his mind quickly falling into speculation as to how much more of your skin was bare underneath that infuriatingly tantalizing robe. "Which is?" he rumbled as he pushed away from the frame to ease toward you.

"None of your beeswax." Your eyebrow lifted in challenge as you shot him a teasing smirk. You shifted as Bucky approached, but neither away nor in denial.

Rather, your posture seemed to open and invite so that he was smirking in response by the time he stopped in front of you, his arm coming up to grab a coffee cup from the cabinet behind your right shoulder. He was close enough that you could feel the heat of his body seeping into yours.

“Uh-huh,” he retorted as he set the cup on the counter and reached around you for the coffee pot “And why are you still here?” he asked with a knowing smile as he poured coffee simply for the excuse to stay close to you. “Steve should be gone by now.”

“He is.” You weren’t certain Bucky was asking if you were alone, but you confirmed it anyway. “I was finishing my coffee. Do you go to class anymore?”

The sound of sultry teasing in your voice combined with the challenging yet inviting body language had Bucky’s breath shuddering out on a laugh as he put the coffee pot back. “How could I when I knew you might be here waiting for me?” he murmured. Instead of picking up the cup, he moved closer, his hands gripping the counter on either side of you, caging you in with his big, sexy body.

You lifted your hands to slide them slowly up his chest, fascinated by the way his eyes fired in response. “Cocky. Why would that matter?”

“Not cocky,” he rumbled, his arms coming around you and his body pressing to yours, “starving.” His head dipped to breathe into your ear as his hands began to roam over your back. “Because I just can’t stay away from you.”

In the next moment, his mouth was on yours and you were drowning in him once again. You knew you should be worried at how quickly he had you desperate for him, but since he seemed similarly afflicted, you gave yourself up to the heat, letting your heart lead this time, if only a little.

By the time Bucky reluctantly pulled his mouth away to rest his forehead against yours, his hands had a firm grip on your ass as he pressed you firmly together. Your hands were fisted in the hair he’d let grow almost to his shoulders and you were using the leverage to arch and rub against him. “Tell me to stop, babygirl.” His voice was a rasp, and though the words were a warning, the tone was a dare. “I can't stop myself, not when it comes to you.”

“What if I don’t want you to stop?” You didn’t know how or why, but something about the way Bucky treated you, a glint in his eye, the brush of his hand, allowed you to find this seductive creature inside yourself. Powerful in your confidence, and to Bucky’s eyes the sexiest thing he’d ever seen, again, you pulled away to yank at the tie at your waist. Running your hand under the edge to bare yourself to his gaze, you shot him a coy smile and bit your lip.

Bucky’s hands immediately accepted your invitation, following your hand to leave you naked in front of his burning gaze. “Good god,” he almost moaned as you arched into his touch, his hands wandering ever more frantically over you, “is this for me?”

As his hands closed around your bare ass, you boosted yourself up, with his enthusiastic assistance, to wrap your legs around his waist. Your mouth a breath from his, you smiled. “I can’t stay away, either.”

Awhile later, you were still wearing your robe, on one shoulder at least, while you caught your breath pressed between the kitchen table at your back and an equally winded Bucky Barnes at your front.

“Holy shit,” you croaked, your normal voice off somewhere with the rest of your breath.

Bucky wheezed out a laugh in response. “You're dangerous, babygirl," he murmured as he nuzzled into the crook of your neck. "You should have a warning sign on you, like 'Caution: Highly Combustible'."

"Me!?" you exclaimed in mock outrage, prompting Bucky to lift his head so he could see the look on your face. He loved your expressions when you teased him like this, playful and sweet. "You're the dangerous one; everyone knows it." You went on with a raised eyebrow in playful challenge as you pushed at his chest to indicate you wanted to sit up.

Bucky reluctantly disentangled himself from you, though he'd rather have scooped you up to take you to his bed for the rest of the day. He knew that wasn't an option, however, not this close to finals. He'd never be able to talk you into it. He hiked his boxers and jeans back up; he'd been too frantic to be inside you to bother undressing beyond the necessary to make that happen. You'd been too frantic to complain.

He collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs and grinned at you as you sat up and pulled your robe from its tangle around you to slip your bare arm into the other sleeve. "Obviously we've come to different conclusions. We should collect more data." He was smiling sweetly, which had you opening your mouth to retort but you stopped at his next words. "Let me take you out tonight, just you and me. Dinner, a movie, dancing, whatever you want."

Your hands slowed as you tied the robe closed around your waist, though your heart was racing again, this time in hopeful excitement. "Like a date?" you asked, your voice carefully casual.

"Yes." Bucky's voice was anything but casual, and had your eyes lifting to his as they blazed with intensity. "Exactly like a date."

Your expression turned sweet, and Bucky knew he'd made the right call in asking you out like this. He wanted to show you how special you were to him, so he hadn't considered the usual trappings, but he could see he needed to be direct in his intentions as long as you wouldn’t let him speak his heart.

“I’d love to go on a date with you, Bucky.” You were feeling shy and vulnerable, so you got to your feet to allow the robe to swirl around and cover your body.

Bucky hopped up to snag you around the waist and squeeze, making you giggle. “Really?” he asked excitedly, and you realized he was as caught up in this as you were. The thought settled you more than anything else had. “Whatever you wanna do, name it.”

You had opened your mouth to answer when you remembered your promise to Gamora. “Fuck!” you exclaimed, fighting the urge to whine. “I promised Gamora I go to that stupid frat party with her.” You rolled your eyes and sagged petulantly in his arms as you’d done a thousand times before.

Bucky simply tightened his arms, used to your antics of old and happy to play the classic games, absence not making the heart grow any fonder, because he’d always loved you, but making the heart more steadfast, now that it knew the pain of missing you. “Tomorrow, the next day, whenever?” He grinned as he nearly begged.

You straightened to wrap your arms around his neck and look into his eyes. You were seeing everything you needed and wanted there but you couldn’t yet believe you weren’t seeing it only because you wanted to. Still, you were willing to try. “I’m swamped until after finals, but I promise we’ll go out on a date as soon as my last final is done.”

Bucky’s face lit up like the sun and took your breath away. “I’m holding you to that, babygirl.”

“Come with us tonight,” you heard yourself saying and hoped to god you didn’t end up regretting attending a frat party with Bucky considering what happened last time.

His lips twisted wryly, and you wondered if he was thinking the same thing you were. As a matter of fact, he was, but he was also dismissing it as immaterial because he didn’t plan on leaving your side the entire night. “Where would you put my chances of talking you into a closet to make out?”

The roguish grin he shot you had your shoulders relaxing. “Well,” you replied in a considering tone, “that was one of my fantasies in high school, so… high eighties?” You finished with a shrug and your mischievous smile.

“You, too?” he asked with wide eyes and a self-satisfied smirk even as he sweetly nuzzled your nose and mouth with his own. “Then I’m fuckin’ in.”

Part Eleven here

Taglist: (Tags are open.)

@learisa @angieptt @mia-at-work @midnightdream83 @wwecrazed2010 @allandoflimbo @emaywhyayy @cheekygeek05 @lovely-geek @diinofayce @suz-123 @hellzzzbelle @olukewarmo @fairchild21 @thefridgeismybestie @fandomsstolemylife00 @thatawkwardlittlefangirl @australianhorrorstory @buckybarneshairpullingkink @c-ly-g @wishingforahome @strangersstranger @whiskeyandwashitape @eyesfixedonthesun22 @ingenue-q @joe-mazzello-is-my-dad @destiel-is--endgame @lbouvet @rishlo @bibliophile1773 @miraclesoflove @nerdy-bookworm-1998 @irritated-bisexual @peaceinourtime82 @badassbaker @walkingtravesty97

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#Bucky Barnes x reader #Bucky x reader #platonic!steve rogers x reader #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky fanfiction #marvel fanfic #mcu fanfic #bucky barnes fanfic #implied smut #fluff #mcu au #marvel au #college au #bulletproof #pantswrites #series

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olliya · 5 years ago

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How popular is MadaSaku in context of other Madara’s and Sakura’s ships? Part 2 - revamped

Thank you @purple-possibilities for your suggestions about searches of multi-words phrases on ff.net. Putting the phrase between quotation marks worked and I could include 4 additional phrases into searches for each ship!

Additionally, I noticed and error! Grrrr... Even though I took under consideration that Tobisaku may mean Tobirama x Sakura and Obito x Sakura, later on I switched from manual to automatic layout of formulas in my excel. And, of course, automatic layout had no clue about Obito/Tobi thing...

So, important errata: Tobirama had only 13 fics (as opposed to 31 which I reported) according to Ship Names Searches. I corrected it also in the original post.

I’m posting the improved version below, but for those who are not into reading this again: Including additional Ship Names in my search didn’t change much. Lee and Ino switched places 6th and 7th, Madara x OC ship gained a lot of entries, but not enough for a position change, and that’s basically it.

Finding the popularity of ships on ff.net is both easier and more complicated, depending how do you approach the problem.

Let’s break down the task into two parts.

Approach 1

FF.net has a Pairing Option that was introduced in October 2013. This function makes the names of characters appear in square bracket, for example: [Madara U., Sakura H.] indicating that those characters form a romantic pair in a given fic.

When using Filters (Figure 1.a.) after choosing the character of interest, one can tick the Pairing Option, and then browse (using up and down arrows) through all the characters of the fandom. The number of fics tagged with Pairing Option between the character of interest (here: Madara) and every character B (here: Sakura) appear on the bottom of the panel (Figure 1.b.).

Data gathered through browsing through all of the Naruto characters with Pairing Option On give unequivocal results. The only limitations of this method is the relatively late introduction time point of Pairing Option (introduced in 2013, while Naruto started publishing in 1999), and sometimes peculiar definitions of “Characters” on ff.net (example: Naruko as a separate character, “Team 7” as a “Character”).

Results for Madara and Sakura are presented below (Figures 2. and 3.) For clarity, ships with four or more fics are shown for Madara. In case of Sakura, all the ships with >4 fics in a graph would blur the picture. Therefore, her Top 20 ships are presented in Figure 3., and the rest is summarized in the Table 1. The analysis was performed on 22.10.2019.

However, ff.net was launched on 15.10.1998 (which precedes publication of Naruto by one year) so there is a 14 year-worth of fic creation when the Pairing Option wasn’t available. To get the complete overview of ship popularity it is necessary to include the body of work created in the earlier years of ff.net.

This issue was addressed through Approach 2.

Approach 2

During the period of 1998-2013 fics were labelled with ship names in the summaries, and readers would look for ships of interest typing ship name into the search box. During those times certain conventional phrases were coined for the ships, and putting those in the summary allowed potential readers to find the story. Searching ff.net using selected phrases and collecting the corresponding fic numbers gives insight into those part of fanworks. Employment of search engine is shown in Figure 4. on the example of phrase “madasaku”.

I performed searches for common ships, basing the list on the ships with 4 or more fics as found using Pairing Option (see: section above).

I searched for the phrases that were and still are still commonly used ship names in Naruto fandom.

In general, there are three common ways to indicate a ship:

a) Merger of names, usually using first two syllables of both names, usually (but not always) with male name being first part of the phrase. Example: madasaku, and (less commonly used) sakumada. For the M/M and F/F couples, both orders are used, and it is impossible to predict which form is more common. Example: sakuhina and hinasaku would be used with similar frequency. In case of names composed of two syllables or shorter, one syllable is often used.

b) Name_1xName_2 – complete names of characters separated by letter “x”, without spaces in between. There is no strict preference as to which name goes first more frequently, i.e. sakuraxmadara is equally plausible as madaraxsakura.

The same naming scheme exists also in a version with spaces (example: Madara x Sakura). Searching for such phrases (and all phrases including spaces) required putting the Ship Name between quotation marks (”Madara x Sakura”).

c) A combination of the above, i.e. shortened versions of names connected with an “x”; with spaces (example: mada x saku) and without spaces (madaxsaku - again searched using apostrophes)

Search engine of ff.net is case-insensitive, i.e. searching for “madasaku” will bring the same results as searching for “Madasaku” and “MadaSaku” (thank gods).

Naming convention that is common on AO3, i.e. separating character names with slash “/”, isn’t correctly recognized by search engine. If the phrase is written without usage of spaces (example: Madara/Sakura) the search results in list of fics containing “Madara” and “Sakura”, not necessary together (slash symbol gets ignored). When phrase “Madara/Sakura” is searched with quotation marks, slash still gets ignored and results include all entries with any symbol between the names. Therefore, the ship names weren’t included in this analysis.

Other potential ship names variations (using “*”, using “&”, and surely a multitude of others variants that I couldn’t think of) were not included due to their relative infrequency (and limits to my capacity and imagination).

For every ship included in the results of Approach 1 (total 43 searches for Sakura’s ships, and 12 searches for Madara’s ships), I searched for the following phrases (on example of MadaSaku ship):

madasaku

sakumada

madaraxsakura

sakuraxmadara

madaxsaku

sakuxmada

madara x sakura

sakura x madara

mada x saku

saku x mada

Certain ship names don’t follow the usual rules and/or required special treatment. For example, for the ship Gaara/Haruno Sakura the common name merger is GaaSaku (and not GaaraSaku). Tsunade/ Haruno Sakura is equally often (or rarely, because it is very rare) abbreviated to TsuSaku and Tsunasaku. Fics tagged with TobiSaku name merger may mean Senju Tobirama/Haruno Sakura as well as Tobi (Obito’s persona)/Haruno Sakura – in this case, fics were manually inspected, and assigned to correct categories. Ship with Naruko (which scored relatively high in Pairing Option analysis), was not possible to correctly assess, because the merger name “narusaku” is identical for the merger of Uzumaki Naruto/Haruno Sakura (for good reasons).

All the fics for given pair were summed up (i.e. for Uchiha Madara/Haruno Sakura ship the fic numbers retrieved through searches for “madasaku”, “sakumada”, “madaraxsakura”, “sakuraxmadara”, “madaxsaku”, “sakuxmada” “madara x sakura”, “sakura x madara”, “mada x saku” and “saku x mada” were added together). The obtained results will be referred to as those of “Ship Name” in this analysis.

Results for Madara and Sakura are presented below (Figures 5. and 6.). In case of Sakura, including all the examined ships in a graph would blur the picture. Therefore, her Top 20 ships are presented in Figure 6., and the rest is summarized in the Table 2. The analysis was performed on 22.10.2019. The additionally searches performed on 31.12.2019 did not take under consideration fics published after 22.10.2019, to reflect the state of fandom on the day of main analysis.

This list presented in Table 2 is not a comprehensive one. There are certainly more ships with >10 fics that were not included. One prominent, detected example is Chōji, who has 13 fics in as a ship partner of Sakura, but was not included in Table 2 because according to the Pairing Option he had no fics with Sakura.

Limitations of the method

Employed method depends on performing six independent searches and summing up the numbers from those searches. A fic tagged with more than one of the searched phrases will be counted multiple times. For example: if a fic contained phrases “MadaSaku” and “MadaraxSakura” in its summary, it was counted twice. In extreme case, one fic would generate ten data points: one real, and nine false.

Nevertheless, since the same treatment was applied to all the pairings, the errors should be distributed in the same way across all the ships. Therefore, even if the numerical values obtained through this analysis don’t necessarily correspond to reality, the results should reflect respective relations between the ships (i.e. “ranking” should be correct). This assumption is true however only if all the subdivisions of the fandom follow the same customs and tagging etiquette. I.e. if creators writing for SasuSaku followed a habit of including only one Ship Name in their summaries, while creators of MadaSaku tended to include multiple Ship Names, then my method of analysis would overestimate the significance of MadaSaku ship. However, I am not aware about such trends existing in Naruto fandom.

Additionally, Ship Name tagging system allows for tagging infinite number of ships in one fic, therefore certain fics have been counted multiple times.

Discussion

When considering fics tagged with Pairing Option, Sakura ranks as Madara’s second most popular ship partner, after Hashirama and before Tobirama. As on AO3, it is telling that a relatively “exotic” pairing with OC ranks 4th among Madara’s ships.

Madara is the 9th most popular ship partner of Sakura. Comparing and contrasting Sakura’s data between ff.net and AO3 would be an interesting analysis in its own right, but here I will only point out the switch of positions between Naruto and Kakashi as Sakura’s ship partners (Naruto is a strong 2nd on ff.net, while Kakashi takes this position on AO3); and relatively low, 7th place of Ino (strong 4th on AO3).

When taking into account data gathered though Ship Names Searches, Sakura ranks as Madara’s 2nd most popular ship partner (after Hashirama and before OC).

Madara, on the other hand is Sakura’s 15th most popular ship partner. Since Ship Names Searches results are mostly derived from fics published in earlier years in Naruto fandom, his lower place can be explained by his very late appearance in the franchise (on-panel in February 2008 - almost 9 years after Naruto started publishing and in person in the story in October 2011 - 12 years after begin of publishing).

Data gathered in this analysis present a unique opportunity for looking into the development of ship popularity over time.

Results from Pairing Option reflect mostly the state of fandom in years 2013-2019, while the results from Ship Names Search show the status from the earlier years. The exact division is however somewhat blurred as some fics published before October 2013 has been retroactively tagged using Pairing Option (even if the majority of older fics remain untagged). The reverse is also true – many fics published after introduction of Pairing Option, even as recently as end of 2019, fail to use it. Additionally, many fics are tagged using both systems: the Pairing Option and Ship Name in summary.

Nevertheless one can tentatively regard Pairing Option results as “new”, or “current” ones, while the ones coming from the Ship Names Searches as “older” ones.

Figure 7. presents position changes in Top 12 Madara’s ships. Ranking from Pairing Option analysis was regarded as current and compared to the “older” ranking composed from all the fics tagged with Ship Names (regardless their publishing date). A positive value in the Figure 7. indicates a gain of popularity, for example: Tobirama gained 2 positions among Madara’s ships when comparing the “current” and “older” results.

This analysis reveals that certain ships (with Tobirama, Naruto and Hinata) gained, while ships with OC and Itachi lost on popularity. Dramatic loss of Itachi ship popularity is very interesting and one can speculated that it could be caused by Tobi/Obito reveal.

The same analysis was performed for Sakura’s ships and is presented in Figure 8.

Inspecting changes in Sakura ships’ rankings allows for several interesting observations. Minato, Shisui, Madara and Sasori are among greater winners. It is symptomatic that all, except Sasori, are characters that appeared (or became relevant) later during the franchise. Among the characters losing in popularity as Sakura’s ship partners are members of Konoha Eleven (Lee, Kiba, Sai, Neji), an Akatsuki member (Deidara) and OC. It should also be noted that five top positions (Sasuke, Naruto, Kakashi, Itachi and Gaara) remained unchanged.

To further examine the “current” and “older” state of fandom, upon harvesting Ship Names data I sorted the fics according to publication date and took note of how many fics were published before and how many after 01.10.2013 (approximate date of introduction of Pairing Option tool).

If one repeats the analysis from Figures 7. and 8. considering only fics published before 01.10.2013 as “older” ones, the following pictures appears (Figure 9. and 10.):

Using this definition of “older” fics (i.e. fics tagged with Ship Names that were published until October 2013), the gain of popularity of Tobirama ship becomes even more evident (gain of 7 positions). Ships with Itachi (as in the previous analysis) and Sasuke (undetected in the previous analysis) lost on popularity.

Sakura ships’ dynamics according to this definition of “older” fics show even more pronounced positions’ gains of Minato and Shisui, but otherwise similar trends to previous analysis.

Analysis of ship popularity on ff.net is a challenging one, but since this platform was, and still is main archive for Naruto fandom (407 thousands fics vs 49 thousand on AO3) it is important to address this issue even if methodology is far from perfect.

I am open to all the comments, suggestions and hints, as the data collection was a major effort and I’m sure that this data can be used in many other different ways.

And, your feedback showed me that people are interested in such stuff. Thank you for this!!! I have at least three further ideas for analysis, and now, when I have some experience and first insight into data, it will be easier.

#multisaku #madasaku #fandom statistics #naruto stats

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crqstalite · 5 years ago

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damn, things get really fuckin’ dark if you let them in knights. basically a disorganized essay with no theme, rhyme, reason or even real thesis on why the dark outlander can quickly turn the expansions into an absolute clusterfuck.

obviously, spoilers below the cut.

as i assume most of you know, i played a light leaning neutral warrior (mellena) through knight-forward first. the main cast stayed the same throughout, koth, senya, arcann, theron, lana and so on. theron was still alive at the end of onslaught, arcann and senya were still alive and so was koth. mellena was a peacekeeper of the galaxy. she romanced theron, mostly everyone was happy with her. she was good with zakuulans, assisted the republic during iokath and sabotaged the empire for them while placing the blame on the other darths and effectively destroying the new dark council from within.

but a dark sided outlander? holy fuck i wasn’t ready for what could happen and what did happen.

THE ISSUE WITH KOTH.

koth fuckin’ up and LEAVES with the gravestone (chapter sixteen, battle of odessen) if you let too many zakuulans die and have less concern for them than he does. there are a few main decisions you have to make to get him angry with you, the first being in chapter three, outlander, if you let the generator blow in favor of your own life, chapter four, the gravestone if you kill the exiles, and anarchy in paradise (i reference this chapter a lot in this section) if you blow yet another generator. once you do most of these, specifically the last one, you’re locked in to lose koth for the rest of the game.

he shows up again during wrath and ruin for voss, then leaves, then appears again in dark reunions when he needs help with vaylin and scorpio on the gravestone. he later leaves even if you offer him to stay, making a remark about it being better for the alliance if he just disappeared.

here’s the issue that i have with koth’s character in respect to his relationships with other characters.

tora and the rest of the crew that was acquired on asylum. obviously they knew him longer than anyone else, but tora says this after he leaves in chapter ten, anarchy in paradise, ‘we’re with you. as captains go, koth wasn’t a complete hutt-stain, but you provide a steady paycheck and nice toys.’ tora’s obviously just a tad gung-ho about everything, but even len doesn’t mention anything to you about it later down the line. they aren’t even angry with you for letting their captain go. i know relationships are tough but jesus christ i thought they’d be angrier with me.

theron and koth didn’t have much history outside of meeting in chapter nine, the alliance but you can just as easily turn theron against him (i’ll get to the corresponding exchange during chapter four of kotet, where dreams die). wasn’t surprising, i figured it wouldn’t be. can’t be mad over someone you did even know. theron’s being held hostage when the gravestone as being stolen and is dropped off on odessen before koth leaves, and that you can’t blame the man at the end of your excursion on zakuul after chapter ten. no harm done here, and personally i didn’t care much for theron on khaak’s runthrough.

the exchange mentioned earlier with theron and koth here during chapter four, where dreams die. to set the scene, you’ve just found theron and koth after a disorienting trip on iokath, halfway through you found torian. torian says, ‘what’s the traitor doing here?’ in reference to koth. theron answers, ‘he picked up my holo-signal to the others and i let him in, against my better judgement. told him if he moves he’s dead.’

that isn’t even it. i figured theron would be more forgiving, even chastise me for being rude to him earlier, but instead he threatens the man.

koth answers with something along the lines of wanting to help, and khaak answered, ‘you’ve “helped” enough, koth. you had your chance to be a hero’. theron follows up with, ‘the only reason you’re here is so you won’t cause more trouble out there. don’t push it.’

but lana and koth do have history, in fact they reference it quite a bit in chapter three, outlander, and you can turn her against him rather easily too. i can’t pick out any memories of her being particularily upset about koth’s leaving or your actions leading up to it and after it. i know the excuse here is that she’s pragmatic and not emotional, but there’s an underlying issue here that needs to be talked about.

khaak romanced lana, hardcore went sith wife with her. which i can figure was helping along an emotional dilemma for lana. on one hand, she had ties to koth for helping her find khaak, and seemed to respect him for it and enjoy his company. on another hand, she has ties to khaak for being her girlfriend, and subsequently the alliance commander who she’s known for years upon years longer than knowing vortena. she has no ties to zakuul other than through koth, and doesn’t even really bat an eye when the outlander blows the generator in the city. she is imperial, first and foremost, though most literally follows you to the end of the galaxy no matter what you do. in battle of odessen (if you shot down senya and arcann), she responds to theron’s ‘guess i’m glad you’re showing some remorse’ with ‘senya made her choice. she betrayed us, just as koth did. but right now we have more pressing concerns.’

another note here is that khaak did let the generator overload in chapter three (lana even approved of the decision to let it blow and have them escape first, i think saying ‘we can’t save everyone’), and because of one little decision for lana in chapter five, from the grave, (i’ll talk about this at a later date and why it was stupid) asylum was damaged because of valkorion’s power. i won’t say i don’t understand why he left, he thinks you’re supporting the other factions more than zakuul, but koth doesn’t even attempt to talk to you or understand your reasoning before taking off. i guess in an angry moment like that, he can’t, and bioware didn’t develop his character enough to do so effectively. (that i’ll also talk about at another date).

there is an exchange in the following expansion that my heart definitely cracked over though, and deals with another issue i have with koth.

setting the scene, the outlander and lana find koth on the gravestone during dark reunions. khaak was civil enough with him, agreeing to help to disable the bombs koth put on the ship (yet another issue i’ll talk about later). koth sadly says lana’s name after this agreement, before she responds, “there’s nothing left between us” and stomps off into the gravestone. that leaves the commander and koth alone, and if you romanced her (like i did with khaak), he says this, “you’ll be good to her, right?” [this entire scene is pictured above]

khaak responded “lana means everything to me.” which prompts koth to answer, “that’s all i needed to hear”. which leads me to believe that they definitely were together at some point, before one of the two decided something wasn’t working and acted accordingly. a personal headcanon of mine, but it still shocks me lana was so quick to brush off the man she’d worked with for canonically the last five years to get you out. a lot of people speculate it wasn’t a serious romance if there was one, especially if the pc romanced lana before kotfe. no matter what, i figured koth would come first and was bracing for the scolding to come from lana at some point, but it never came. she essentially didn’t care, and was either more concerned about her current lover or the alliance. that’s some hardcore bullshit if i’m being honest, but i also wasn’t raised sith so i digress.

you do also apparently have the choice to kill koth in that chapter. i didn’t take that option (falls under the ‘hey wait this is really dark, stop’; another issue i’ll talk about later), but i am curious what would’ve occurred if i had.

personally, i think if koth was treated the same as lana and theron, given more flirt options, more character development and not disappearing after hearts and minds to fuck off to zakuul, he would’ve been a great character and a lot more appreciated by the fandom. his actions did have deeper meanings, and though most see him as little more than a self-absorbed douche obsessed with zakuul, zakuul, zakuul, i don’t hate his character. obviously i do still have issues with koth in general, his personality grinded the gears of both my warrior and smuggler respectively. given he’s never known anything but zakuul, but at least lana and theron are sympathetic to the opposing factions.

i’m not saying lana didn’t have the right to act the way she did, but there has to be a hardened part of her heart against a dark side outlander for pushing him away.

THE ISSUE WITH ARCANN AND SENYA.

playing with mellena, she got beat around by arcann for an expansion but did forgive him eventually and accepted him into the alliance. she kept senya as well, though she technically betrayed her in battle of odessen. all light side options.

now, this is where things get morally ambiguous. a grey area, if you will. arcann has only ever known zakuul, ever. he doesn’t know about the outlands that you came from, and only was ever taught how to act by valkorian. he’s angry with you for essentially taking his father’s power when it should’ve been his after years of being by his side and doing everything he can to be worthy. of course he’s violently hunting you down because of it. yes, he tries to kill you multiple times. is this excusable? for his background, it is. he doesn’t know better.

senya really believes her son can be redeemed, and on a light side run, he can be. but without knowing this, lana’s concern of ‘extermination is safer. the alliance can’t risk war against both of valkorion’s spawn’ during wrath and ruin seems like it is a good idea. with how the gravestone was stolen from out under your nose (dark side in the previous expansion with koth), any sane commander would cut their losses and go anyways. murdering arcann before he can stab you again is the best idea than assuming voss (which depending upon your actions on their planet years prior, good or bad) will be able to heal a tyrant, especially during the literal destruction of voss-ka.

senya’s death was painful. it really was. but to even attempt to kill arcann in his current state, you’re forced to. mandalorians are also sacrificed in this fight when the commander sends them after the tiralls (though never mentioned by torian surprisingly enough). however, it isn’t really you she wants to kill. it’s valkorion, and she’s acting under the idea that it’s him causing you to do these things, and by killing you, she’ll be rid of him and will be able to escape with her son. valkorion has a touching moment with her before her death, and the line she says before being killed is extremely sad.

‘you are truly the daughter valkorion always wanted.’

personally i hadn’t expected it, it may just be a sentence but i holds so much power. senya believed in you at one point or another, but by saying this, she’s literally giving you her parting words. she trusted you, and you betrayed her. but both expansions and even some of the vanilla game are all about vitiate anyways, and senya wants justice for what happened to her children. with your violent actions in line with things valkorion would do, it’s understandable why senya would associate you with being his daughter. still, that hurt in a way it really shouldn’t have.

arcann’s death was even more painful, really. he even tries to ally with vaylin to take down the outlander that killed his mother. even though she’d been gone out of his life for the longest time, it haunts him. it hurt him, and he’s determined to kill you for doing so. with the relationship he and senya can have if you let him live, he’s justified because he was half healed by the voss. knowing his mother died pushed him over the edge, hence why he’s out to kill you.

arcann sees his father for the last time before his death, and his strength is absorbed by you in a way that lana compares to how valkorion had done so with you years earlier.

in the end, senya and arcann are misunderstood by the dark sided outlander. khaak’s reasoning extends past vitiate, the eternal empire and everything else, but just a dark sided outlander with no past does stand to gain a lot by killing the tiralls. senya, because she stands in your way if you kill arcann and honestly continues to badger you for not considering the zakuulans (chapter twelve, visions in the dark when you consider sending kaliyo in to follow aric and havoc squad in the spire) , and arcann by having him out of your way and not plotting in the shadows.

neither character, like koth, is inherently bad. in fact these two are (beyond lana and theron) my favorite characters. their stories are engaging and exciting, and even vaylin’s fascinated me to no end. they are purely zakuulan, and with such a fractured family there has to be stories there that no one expected.

the reason they act the way they do is because they’re out of their element, koth in the outlands for the first time over the course of five years and still trying to protect his people, senya for wanting only to protect her children after the war with the republic and empire begins, and arcann for only wanting his father’s validation. all three characters did need more fleshing out for them to be more effective. senya was done well, with some missing elements. arcann needed to have more story behind him than just ‘im valkorion’s kid and im trying to kill you because you took his power instead of me raaaa’ and ‘oh i was reedeemed. guess i’m cool with you now.’ even his romance path doesn’t reveal much about him. you really have to stretch the story to even comprehend his personality, and wading through the fandom, it isn’t agreed upon just how old he and senya are, nor what his life was like in between cinematics.

THE ISSUE WITH IOKATH.

iokath (war on iokath, patch 5.2 that is, yes the little half an hour patch not the two chapter excursion in knights) isn’t particularily bad. in fact i thought i was a nice addition (also probably because i played it nearly two years after it was released and didn’t have to wait another couple months for the traitor arc), especially for a warrior and trooper to reunite with dorne or quinn. it can be emotional for characters that knew them or even romanced them. mellena had a reunion with quinn that was rather unhappy, but fit well for both characters. thank you bioware.

it does fall flat for someone like khaak, with no relations to either character, but it’s who you ally with that can really get you. khaak turned her back on the republic to ally with the empire (depending on a character’s story, someone who fought for the republic beforehand or didn’t, this can be a very tough decision), and there are quite a few places where you can hammer it home for theron that you’re fighting against his father. and the codex doesn’t help with your guilt either.

“Theron was born from the love affair between two Republic heroes: Jedi Knight Satele Shan and Republic Captain Jace Malcom. Their romance was short-lived, and Satele only discovered her pregnancy after the two parted ways. She kept the child a secret and gave birth in hiding. Though Satele wanted nothing more than to care for her newborn son, she had to uphold her duty to the Jedi Order. She surrendered Theron to the care of her Jedi Master--Ngani Zho--to continue serving the Republic. Theron was briefly raised as a Jedi, but the older he grew, the more obvious it became that he was not Force-sensitive. He ultimately left the Jedi Order and joined the Republic Strategic Information Service. Theron excelled in his covert work as a spy, and finally met Jace Malcom and learned that he was his father. They worked together on Operation End Game and parted on good terms. In the following years, they shared the occasional father-son meeting, but struggled to grow close. Though the meetings were awkward, Theron always felt a fondness for his father--a feeling he never had for his mother, who he felt abandoned him for the good of the Republic. Theron's relationship with Malcom reached a breaking point when he left the Republic to help found the Alliance. Malcom saw this as a betrayal, but Theron refused to bow to the Eternal Empire's oppressive army. Harsh words were exchanged during their last holocall several years ago. They haven't spoken since.” - SWTOR Codex, Theron Shan: The Secret Son

the codex really hammers home that you’ve turned a son against a father. theron had never been close to his father, but by doing this, you’ve only fractured it further. and yes, you. theron only left the republic because he was helping you found the alliance, and turned his back on his father as well.

personally, i thought this was so bad i couldn’t even bring khaak to respond how she would’ve, which would’ve been to tell someone to cut their losses and leave. that’s how painful this scene between theron and his father ended up being, and theron even screams an emotional ‘father!’ after the throne fries him, the first real father-son interaction he and theron even have. malcom even asks theron to tell his mother he was sorry before dying. khaak couldn’t do much but literally just give him a moment with his thoughts. troy baker did so well in this scene, his voice shaking as it actually sounds like he was choked up. definitely a tear-jerker.

however, it also sets up crisis on umbara extremely well, considering your outlander was the one who allied with the empire and essentially killed his father by pushing him to get the superweapon without knowing much about it. unlike the light side route (which is much more a facade on theron’s part because he has no ill will towards you, in fact probably respects you more because you did ally with the republic), the dark side route is much more believable. you are the empress, though you said you’d fight for peace and are instead violently quelling rebellion on zakuul against your rule. whether theron thinks that far ahead, of course he’ll be angry with you for it. you’re most literally a person he swore to protect the galaxy against, and you screwed it up. now he left the republic and his father for an extinguished dream. he’s allied with the faction he once fought against, all because of you. maybe his betrayal is only to gather intel on the order, but he definitely doesn’t have remorse for you at some point.

to be continued with everything after the traitor arc :)

#swtor #star wars the old republic #dark sided outlander #outlander #ds #dark side #star wars #koth vortena #senya tirall #arcann #lana beniko #theron shan #jace malcom

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tommynikkivincemick · 5 years ago

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Can I get a nsfw a-z for Nikki (bass daddy) please?

I got,,,,, way too into this. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, and if you’d like me to elaborate on any points, I totally would. I give you: Bass Daddy. Enjoy xx

A = Aftercare (What they’re like after sex)

Half the time after sex, Nikki busies himself getting you ready for another round, laying on the dirty talk and kissing and biting you all over, teasing you with his fingers (or his tongue, if you’ve been especially good that night). But when the two of you are really done, aftercare usually consists of a stiff drink and a cigarette for him and a glass of wine for you, and a nice long soak in the bathtub for both of you. Nine times out of ten he will be showering you with compliments and telling you how good you were for him, all whispered softly in your ear.

B = Body part (Their favourite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Nikki is an intense, all consuming lover; so when it comes to your body, he fucking worships you. But if he had to pick a favorite part of you, it would be between your mouth and your breasts. Your mouth because he loves the way your lips curve up into a smirk, your smile that shows the teeth that have often bit him, and he loves your tongue for obvious reasons. And your tits because this is Nikki Sixx we’re talking about— did you really think he wouldn’t?

Nikki is a pretty vain guy (more than Tommy, but less than Vince), so he loves looking at himself almost as much as he loves looking at you. His favorite part of himself would be a solid tie between his hair and, well, his dick. His hair because he puts so much time and effort into it in order to make it look good, plus the ladies love it. His dick because, again, this is Nikki we’re talking about,,,,,,, plus the ladies also love it.

C = Cum (Anything to do with cum basically… I’m a disgusting person)

Nikki is a possessive, jealous little shit, and he sees cumming on or in you sort of like marking his territory. Cumming in you is always a wonderful experience for him, but also seeing his cum on your skin satisfies that possessive instinct within him— even better if it stains your lingerie.

D = Dirty Secret (Pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

Nikki (along with Tommy) is the king of sleaze. He has done and seen some fucked up sexual shit; and even you don’t know all of his secrets. But something he has told you is that when he was heavy into devil worship and witchcraft, he did in fact have ritual sex, and it was hot.

E = Experience (How experienced are they? Do they know what they’re doing?)

King Nikki is a very experienced, very talented individual. While he hasn’t always cared about a woman’s pleasure (like say, Mick), he’s always been good at it without really trying. The man is a natural at giving pleasure, even when he’s not trying to.

F = Favourite Position (This goes without saying. Will probably include a visual)

Nikki’s position of choice is a little something like this, but move one of the hands to your throat because he is into choking and the only person who can tell me different is the bass daddy himself. He’s a fan of this because he does not have to do the work if he doesn’t want to, but he has the option to. This also gives easy access to the tits and throat and he can also more easily play with your clit in this position, if he so desires. Nikki also tends to bite your shoulders in this position, and he bites HARD. So be prepared for that.

G = Goofy (Are they more serious in the moment, or are they humorous, etc)

As previously stated, Nikki is an intense, all consuming lover. This especially applies to sex; when he’s fucking you, he wants to be the only thing on your mind. When y’all are getting down, your train of thought needs to be all Nikki, all the time.

H = Hair (How well groomed are they, does the carpet match the drapes, etc.)

Not quite natural; Sixx keeps everything pretty well groomed. Naturally, the carpet does not match the drapes, as he dyes his hair black and is naturally a dirty blonde or light brown. That said, he is not above using hair dye in certain other areas. So yes, the carpet does match the drapes— he makes sure it does.

I = Intimacy (How are they during the moment, romantic aspect…)

Sex and sensuality comes naturally to Nikki; romance does not. But when he wants to, when he tries, he can be damn romantic, even if it’s usually not totally perfect. He’s not really a champagne and roses type of romantic, he’s more of a would-kill-and-die-for-you kind of romantic.

J = Jack Off (Masturbation headcanon)

Nikki is a little turned on a lot of the time, and while he prefers not to get himself off, sometimes he has no choice (you caught him doing it once when he was getting ready for the day, and in reply he said “You ever tried to fit a hard cock in leather pants? Shit is a pain in the ass. You gotta do what you gotta do.”). Nikki doesn’t usually do it for pleasure or because he just really wants to, it’s usually out of necessity, and therefore usually pretty rushed with not a lot of thought to it.

K = Kink (One or more of their kinks)

Ohhhhhh boy. Oh boy. If you think Nikki isn’t a kinky bastard, you’re out of your damn mind. This boy has SO MANY kinks, the more intense ones including breath play, blood play, and bondage; maybe a little bit of leather now and then. And Nikki is a top who is dominant as fuck (but sometimes it’s sexy to see his girl take control).

L = Location (Favourite places to do the do)

He prefers the bedroom because it’s private and within the confines of his room he can do whatever fucked up shit his heart desires, and also because he does not need anybody else gazing upon you when you’re in a state of pleasure such as that which he gives you. That is for him to see, and him alone. But also, he has made a point to fuck you on every piece of furniture in the house, and has tried to fuck you in every venue you’ve been with him at. Like I said, the man likes to mark his territory.

M = Motivation (What turns them on, gets them going)

Nikki gets jealous so easily. If he even thinks a guy is looking at you with lust in his eyes, he will prove right there in the middle of the bar that you are his and no one else’s (and there would be some mind blowing angry sex when the two of you got home). Sixx is also kind of into pain, so if you really want him right fucking now, even if he’s busy, all it takes is biting his lip a little hard when you kiss him, raking your nails down his back, or pulling his hair a little bit, and he melts.

N = NO (Something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Nikki doesn’t share. There have only been two known exceptions to this, but other than that, he does not like another guy or girl to come to bed with the two of you. Other than that, almost anything is on the table, aside from bodily excretions other than cum, blood, and saliva.

O = Oral (Preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc)

Nikki is very balanced in this area; he enjoys giving and receiving equally. Of course he will never say no to a blowjob, but he will also never say no to giving head. And when he gives, he is very talented and picks up very easily on what you want.

P = Pace (Are they fast and rough? Slow and sensual? etc.)

The vast majority of the time, the sex is rough as fuck. The pace varies; if he wants to tease or really wants to take his time, he’ll go slow, but also half the time he just wants to get down to business and goes hard and fast.

Q = Quickie (Their opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often, etc.)

Nikki is not a fan of quickies, but he’s not totally against them. He prefers to have the time to do whatever he wants with his lover, but sometimes he just really needs you, so quickies do happen but they are few and far between.

R = Risk (Are they game to experiment, do they take risks, etc.)

Nikki will try anything once and will take risks regularly. He would probably be down to fuck on the ledge of a forty story building, to be honest.

S = Stamina (How many rounds can they go for, how long do they last…)

The stamina is strong in this one. At the best of times, sex is an all night event for Nikki with multiple long lived rounds. He will go until he (or you) physically can’t anymore.

T = Toy (Do they own toys? Do they use them? On a partner or themselves?)

I firmly believe that Nikki has a nice little collection. Not a whole room filled to the brim with toys, but maybe a nicely stocked bedside drawer with all the essentials (vibrators, a few plugs, bondage materials, a knife, etc.).

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

Nikki Sixx is the biggest tease in the world. If he had a little more self control, he would probably keep you on the edge for a week straight just for the hell of it. Sex is like a box of chocolates with Nikki; you never know what you’re gonna get.

V = Volume (How loud they are, what sounds they make)

Nikki is relatively loud. Just as he wants to know he’s the only thing on your mind, he wants to convey the same sentiment to you. He tends to give a lot of low groans, raspy moans, and lays the dirty talk on thick.

W = Wild Card (Get a random headcanon for the character of your choice)

The one time Nikki shared you with another guy, it was with Tommy, because who better to share with than the man who was the yin to his yang? The coke to his whiskey? You were shocked at how fluidly they moved together and around one another, never getting in each other’s way. They cooperated with each other so flawlessly and knew what the other needed and wanted automatically. You even had to ask Nikki later that night if he had a thing with Tommy, to which he replied: “Babe, you’re the love of my life, but Tommy’s my soulmate.”

X = X-Ray (Let’s see what’s going on in those pants, picture or words)

I would first like to state that Nikki is a grower, not a shower, and there is not a damn thing wrong with that. But when fully hard, he is definitely a sight to behold. Very well endowed; maybe an inch or so above average and thick as fuck. God damn.

Y = Yearning (How high is their sex drive?)

Again, Nikki is a little turned on a lot of the time; the only time he isn’t down to get down is when he’s super busy or too high to function. But even then, it doesn’t take much for his resolve to break and have him bending you over the nearest piece of furniture.

Z = ZZZ (… how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

If it’s been a long night, Nikki will fall asleep within a few minutes. If it was only a couple rounds, he might stay up for a couple more hours and work on lyrics or finish his bottle of whiskey or chain smoke for the hell of it.

#hoo boy #im sorry i really went in on this #nikki sixx #nikki #bass daddy #a-z

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lothirielswan · 5 years ago

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Writing Introverted Individuals: Guide and Sources

Hi Awesome Adventurers! So I’ve had to write about a few introverts on my journey through writing so far, and I’m sure you can find a butt ton of stuff like this, but I wanted to make this easier for you guys and offer up some things that I’ve found. Scroll down to see insightful videos, characters, tips, and more!

First off, here is a list of well-known characters in fiction that are incredibly introverted to study (no, there are no spoilers listed with character descriptions):

Ron Swanson — from Parks and Rec. Ron is definitely very far down the spectrum and could be considered the “stereotypical introvert.” Ron Swanson avoids and nearly despises any social conduct with people, yet he does it in a comical way. If you are writing an incredibly antisocial introvert with zero respect for other life forms, I’d look into Mr. Swanson (bonus: you get to watch Chris Pratt, our lovable extrovert, at the same time!).

Loki — from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The star of Tumblr. I’m sure all of you are familiar with him, and the best thing about watching Loki is seeing his introverted nature compared to the biggest extrovert in the nine realms: Thor. This gives us both sides of the spectrum, and it’s a great thing to watch when you’re trying to differentiate the traits of extroverts and introverts. Loki proves that introverts can be funny and witty, but most accurately shows the con of being the introvert: constantly feeling neglected/left out of things.

Everyone from the cast of The Big Bang Theory, besides Penny — well, not quite, but this show has tons of introverts and is one of the best sources to watch. One thing to keep in mind from this is that The Big Bang Theory is focused on a group of close friends—introverts have social circles, too. Introverts can be loud and boisterous around people they know well (the show has multiple examples of this). However, when these introverted individuals are put in a more crowded setting, some get social anxiety, some can’t talk to women, and some find it exhausting. This show is a landmine for studying introverts, and I extremely recommend it for this topic.

Tyrion Lannister — from Game of Thrones (I’ll repeat this again because I know you: NO SPOILERS). Tyrion is more social for an introvert, but it’s been shown that he likes to spend his free time in solitude. Tyrion is a very independent thinker (a big introverted trait) and is very well read. However, he jokes with people, he is gifted with words (just because introverts have a reputation for talking much does not mean that they are not witty), and is sexually active.

Hope Van Dyne (the Wasp) — from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Hope has a very direct way of thinking, and prefers getting stuff done instead of dealing with “fluff.” Hope also had a very cold, loveless background, and while introversion can be considered genetic, it’s interesting to note how the background/backstory of a character plays a role in the level of introversion.

Bruce Banner — from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (played by Mark Ruffalo). This little cinnamon roll keeps to himself, I recommend watching him onscreen and how he interacts with his Avenging coworkers (when he’s less green!). Especially in social situations, where you’ll notice that Dr. Banner is very quiet and keeps to himself.

MARINA — No, Marina, is not a fictional character; she is a singer that is very real, but she deserves a spot on this list of “introverts to watch”. I’ve listened to Marina’s songs for years, and every album shows the struggle of how introverts struggle to just be in the world. One of her most famous albums, Electra Heart, actually describes her trying to change herself to fit in with this extroverted world. If you want to know more about introverts, I suggest listening to one—and this one sounds like a goddess.

Some of you may be new to introverts, so bring over some books and blankets to wrap yourself in like a burrito as we explore/review this: what is the introvert?

Okay, there are a lot of myths associated with the Introvert that we should dispel here: NOT ALL introverts are stuck-up or shy, however, their independent nature sometimes leads people to make these assumptions. Instead of thinking of introverts as the Grumpy Cat and extroverts as the excited golden retriever, let me differentiate them a little:

The main difference between introverts and extroverts is how their bodies react differently. When people hang out with friends, it releases a “happy” drug in our body called dopamine. Introverts and extroverts react differently to this.

When extroverts hang out with friends, this releases dopamine in their body, which energizes them and makes them feel good. However, with introverts, dopamine can be overstimulating and overwhelming, making most introverts start to feel tired after hanging around people. This being said: introverts do not hate people. Interactions have a tendency to fatigue them over time. But this reaction can affect introverts’ opinion on social activities, and can discourage them. Back to sciencey terms, there is a drug that introverts experience that they cope better with than dopamine: acetylcholine. This drug is more of a “slow burn” feel to it, that is turned on when you focus on something or are doing something creating like drawing. Introverts favor this chemical reaction, hence their desire for independent activities. (You can find more about this here)

Introverts also tend to be decisive thinkers, and are at peace when in solitude. As the writer, it’s up to you to decide how sensitive your introvert is, but please, do not make the mistake of assuming your beautiful creation hates people for no reason!

I’ve written about a couple introverts by now, and I am one myself, so here are some experiences, tips, and suggestions on what introverts go through:

What I said above is true about getting overstimulated: I met a good friend of mine about a year ago, and I remember we were hanging out at a Wendy’s (this was back when I was just getting to know her), and after 1-2 hours I just started to feel tired, out of it. There wasn’t anything wrong with her, or me: over time, I could spend more time with her before that tired feeling set in again. Other introverts also experience things like this, but it may not be at the same rate.

Now you understand introverts, and that is awesome! But most people don’t. And that’s a good thing to keep in mind when you’re writing: when you have your introverted character interacting with others, depending on the other character, they may be critical of the introvert’s natural ways. One thing introverts face the most is getting talked over/interrupted when they try to speak. Be aware of your introvert’s unique presence!

Introverts are also very perceptive: they are brilliant observers, and catch more things than the average bear. This seems like something quick to dismiss, but hear me out: introverts can be as perceptive as the deaf. Another personal experience: I cannot tell you how many times I’ve spoiled shows for myself, not because people tell me outright, but because I simply browse the internet (with no intent at all whatsoever), I see pictures, I overhear little details; I start picking up little clues that don’t say it outright but it hints, and eventually I go, “crap, not again.” This is how the introvert’s mind works: it can catch the smallest things, and they’re usually smart enough to stumble onto the right conclusions (this sounds cool, but it can be a real pain in the ass).

I hope this has been helpful so far! Here are a few links I found to videos on Youtube that have some more insightful information about introverts:

8 Strengths of Introverts

The Power of Introverts: Susan Cain (TED talk)

A Day in School as an Introvert (the Struggle)

Thank you so much for reading, Awesome Adventurers! I’d love to hear what you think about introverts or if you have anything to add, and if you’d like to talk more about this, go ahead and shoot me over something! I hope this helped you out before you go write your fantastic story that will light up the world! Love, fortune and glory to you!!

#introvert #writing #writing tip #writing tips #writing guide #extrovert #about introvert

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