#if only someone who was more articulate wrote it...

[philmonjohn]

A Call to the Children of the Global South: The System That Made My Father Disown Me

I didn’t write this living testimony for virality. I wrote it because silence almost killed me. Because truth, even when ignored by algorithms, remembers how to survive. If this resonated with you — even quietly — share it with someone else who’s still trying to name their Fracture. That’s how we outlive the system. - Philmon John, May 2025

THE FRACTURE Several months ago, when I, a South-Asian American man, turned 35, my father disowned me.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t cry. He simply stopped calling me his son.

My father is a Brown, MAGA-aligned conservative Christian pastor, born in Kerala, India, and now living in the United States. His rejection wasn’t provoked by any breach of trust or familial responsibility, but by my coming out as queer and bisexual — and by my deliberate move away from a version of Christianity shaped more by colonial rule than compassion.

I became blasphemy made flesh.

My mother and sister, equally immersed in religious conservatism, followed suit. Most of my extended family — conservative Indian Christians — responded with quiet complicity. I became an exile in my own lineage, cast out from a network that once celebrated me as the Mootha Makkan, the Malayalam term for “eldest son”.

This break didn’t occur in isolation. It was the culmination of years of internal questioning and ideological transformation.

I was raised with warmth and structure, but also under the weight of rigid theology. My parents cycled through different churches in pursuit of doctrinal purity. In that environment, my queerness had no safe harbor. It had to be hidden, managed, controlled — forced into secrecy.

Literal, cherry-popping closets.

Even my childhood discipline was carved straight from scripture — “spare the rod, spoil the child” was not metaphor but mandate. I was hit for defiance, for curiosity, for emotional honesty. Control was synonymous with love. The theology: obedience over empathy. Is it sad I would rather now have had a beating from my father, than his silence?

I would’ve taken the rod — at least it acknowledged me.

Instead, Daddy looks through me.

THE INHERITANCE And I obeyed. For a time, I rose through the ranks of the church. I led worship. I played guitar in the worship band. I wasn’t just a believer — I was a builder of belief, a conductor of chorus, a jester of jubilee and Sunday morning joy — all while masking a private ache I could not yet articulate.

In the last five years, I began methodically deconstructing the ideological scaffolding I had inherited. I examined the mechanisms of theology, patriarchy, and colonial imposition — and the specific burdens placed upon firstborn sons of immigrant families. Who defines our roles? Who benefits from our silence? Why is this happening to me?

These questions consistently pointed toward the dominant global structure: wealthy white patriarchal supremacy. Rooted in European imperialism and sustained by centuries of religious and cultural colonization, this system fractures not only societies but the deeply intimate architecture of family.

What my family experienced is not unlike what the United States of America continues to experience — a slow, painful reckoning with a foundational ideology of white, heteronormative, Christian patriarchal dominance.

My family comes from Kerala, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. But the Christianity I inherited was not indigenous. It was filtered through the moral codes of Portuguese priests and British missionaries and the discipline of Victorian culture. Christ was not presented as a radical Middle Eastern teacher but as a sanitized figure — pale, passive, and Western.

In this theology, Christ is symbolic. Paul is the system. Doctrine exists to reinforce patriarchy, to police desire, to ensure control. When I embraced a theology rooted in love, empathy, and justice — the ethics I believe Jesus actually lived — I was met not with discussion, but dismissal.

To my family, my identity wasn’t authenticity. It was apostasy.

THE RECKONING In 2020, the ground shifted.

I turned the triple decade — 30 — as the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.

Remote work slowed life down, and I had space to think deeply.

That year, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others triggered a national and personal reckoning.

I turned to K-LOVE, the Christian radio station I grew up with, hoping to hear words of solidarity, truth, or even mourning. Instead, there was silence. No mention of racial justice. No prayers for the dead. Just songs about personal salvation, void of historical context or social responsibility.

As Geraldine Heng argues in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, race was not merely a modern invention void of scientific basis — it was already taking shape in medieval Europe, where Christianity was used to sanctify, encode, and sell racial hierarchies as divine order and social technology.

As Ademọ́la, also known as Ogbeni Demola, once said: “The white man built his heaven on your land and pointed yours to the sky.” That brain-powered perceptive clarity — distilled in a single line — stays with me every day.

With professional routines interrupted and spiritual ties frayed, I immersed myself in scholarship. I entered what I now see as a period of epistemic reconstruction. I read widely — revolutionaries, poets, sociologists, historians, mathematicians, theologians, cultural critics, and the unflinching truth-tellers who name what empire tries to erase.

I first turned to the voices who now live only in memory: Bhagat Singh, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Vine Deloria Jr. Each carried the weight of revolution, tenderness, and truth — from anti-colonial struggle to queer theory to Indigenous reclamation.

I then reached for the veteran thought leaders still shaping the world, starting with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Shashi Tharoor, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Susan Visvanathan, Geraldine Heng, George Gheverghese Joseph, J. Sakai, Vijay Prashad, Vilna Bashi Treitler, Claire Jean Kim, and Arundhati Roy — voices who dismantle the illusions of empire through history, mathematics, linguistics, and racial theory.

In the present, I absorbed insights from a new generation of public intellectuals and cultural critics: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jared Yates Sexton, Cathy Park Hong, Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Heather McGhee, Mehdi Hasan, Adrienne Keene, Keri Leigh Merritt, Vincent Bevins, Sarah Kendzior, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, Wajahat Ali, W. Kamau Bell, Mary Trump, & John Oliver. Together, they form a constellation of clarity — thinkers who gave me language for grief, strategy for resistance, and above all, a framework for empathy rooted in history, not abstraction.

I also turned to the thinkers shaping today’s cultural and political discourse. I dreamt of the world blueprinted by Bhaskar Sunkara in his revolutionary The Socialist Manifesto and plunged into Jacobin’s blistering critiques of capitalism. The Atlantic’s longform journalism kept me tethered to a truth-seeking tradition. The Guardian stood out for its global scale and reach, offering progressive, longform storytelling that speaks to both local injustices and systemic inequalities across the world. And Roman Krznaric’s Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It helped crystallize my core belief:

Be a good human. Practice empathy.

That’s the playbook, America. Practice empathy. Do that — and teach accurate, critically reflective history — and we have the chance to truly become the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.

And this empathy must extend to all — especially to trans people. In India, the Hijra community — trans and intersex folk who have existed visibly for thousands of years — embody a sacred third gender long before the West had language for it. But they are not alone. Across the colonized world, the empire erased a sacred third space: the Muxe of Zapotec culture, the Bakla of the Philippines, the Fa’afafine of Samoa, the Two-Spirit nations of Turtle Island, the Māhū of Hawaiʻi, the Sworn Virgins of the Balkans — each of these communities held space outside Western gender binaries, rooted in care, ceremony, and spirit. Some align with what we today call trans or intersex, while others exist entirely outside Western definitions. Colonization reframed them as deviants.

And still, we must remember this: trans people are not new. Our respect for them must be as ancient as their existence.

THE RESISTANCE As I examined the dynamics of coloniality, racial capitalism, and Western empire, I realized just how deeply imperial power had shaped my family, our values, and our spiritual language. The empire didn’t just occupy land — it rewrote moral codes. It restructured the family.

I learned how Irish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, and Albanian immigrants were initially excluded from whiteness in America. Over time, many adopted and embraced whiteness as strategic economic and social protection — and in doing so, embraced anti-Blackness and patriarchal hierarchies to maintain their newfound status. Today, many European-hyphenated Americans defend systems that once excluded them.

And over time, some Asian-Americans have followed the very same racial template.

At 33 — the age Jesus is believed to have died — I laid my childhood faith to rest. In its place rose something rooted in clarity, not doctrine.

I didn’t walk away from religion into cynicism or nihilism. I stepped into a humanist, justice-centered worldview. A system grounded in reason, evidence, and above all, empathy. A belief in people over dogma. In community over conformity.

I didn’t lose faith. I redefined it.

I left the pasture of institutional faith, not for chaos, but for an ethical wilderness — a space lacking divine command but filled with moral clarity. A place built on personal responsibility and universal dignity.

This is where I stand today.

To those with similar histories: if your roots trace back to Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, Oceania, or to Indigenous and marginalized communities within the Global North — you are a Child of the Global South. Even in the Global North, your experience carries the weight of displaced geography, the quiet grief of colonial trauma, and a genealogy forged by the system of empire. Your pain is political. Your silence is inherited. You are not invisible. They buried you without a funeral. They mourned not your death, but your deviation from design. However, we are not dead. We are just no longer theirs.

White supremacy endures by fracturing us. It manufactures tensions between communities of color by design — placing Asian businesses in Black communities without infrastructure and opportunities for BIPOC folk to share and benefit from the economic engine. Central to this strategy is the model minority myth, crafted during the Cold War to present Asian-Americans as obedient, self-reliant, and successful — not to celebrate them, but to invalidate Black resistance and justify structural racism. It’s a myth that fosters anti-Blackness in Asian communities and xenophobia in Black ones, while shielding white supremacy from critique. These divisions are not cultural accidents; they’re colonial blueprints.

And these blueprints stretch across oceans and continents and time.

In colonial South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi — still shaped by British racial hierarchies — distanced Indians from Black Africans, calling them “kaffirs” and demanding separate facilities. In Uganda, the British installed South Asians as a merchant middle class between colonizers and native Africans, breeding distrust. When Idi Amin expelled 80,000 Asians in 1972, it was a violent backlash to a racial hierarchy seeded by empire. These fractures — between Black and Asian, colonized and sub-colonized — are the legacy of white patriarchal supremacy.

Divide, distract, and dominate.

We must resist being weaponized against each other.

Every Asian-American must read Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. Every high schooler in America must read and discuss Jared Yates Sexton.

Study the systems. Name them. Disarm them.

Because unless we become and remain united, the status quo — one that serves wealthy cisgender, heterosexual, white Christian men — will remain intact.

This is A Call to the Children of the Global South. And An Invitation to the Children of the Global North: Stop the infighting. Study and interrogate the systems. Reject the design.

To those in media, publishing, and the arts: postcolonial narratives are not cultural sidebars. They are central to national healing. They preserve memory, restore dignity, and confront whitewashed histories.

If you want work that matters — support art that pushes past trauma into structural critique.

Greenlight truth. Platform memory. Choose courage over comfort.

Postcolonial stories should be the norm — not niche art.

Jordan Peele’s Get Out was a cinematic breakthrough — razor-sharp and genre-defying — in its exposure of white supremacy’s quiet machinery: liberal smiles, performative allyship, and the pacification of dissent through assimilation. The Sunken Place is not just a metaphor for silenced Black consciousness — it’s the empire’s preferred position for the marginalized: visible, exploited, but unheard.

A system that offers the illusion of inclusion, weaponizing identity as control.

Ken Levine’s BioShock Infinite exposed white supremacy through a dystopian, fictional but historically grounded lens - depicting the religious justification of Black enslavement, Indigenous erasure, and genocidal nationalism in a floating, evangelical empire.

David Simon’s The Wire exposed the institutional decay of law enforcement, education, and the legal system - revealing how systemic failure, not individual morality, drives urban collapse.

Jesse Armstrong’s Succession traced the architecture of empire through family - showing how media empires weaponize racism, propaganda, and manufactured outrage to generate profit and secure generational wealth.

Ava DuVernay's Origin unearths caste and race as twin blueprints of white supremacy - linking Dalit oppression in India to the subjugation of Black Americans. Adapted from Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, it dismantles the myth of isolated injustice, revealing a global system meticulously engineered to rank human worth - and the radical act of naming the system.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — a revelatory, critically and commercially successful film about Afro-Asian resistance in 1930s Mississippi — exposes the hunger for speculative narratives grounded in historical truth.

Across the Spider-Verse gave us Pavitr Prabhakar - a Brown superhero who wasn't nerdy or celibate, as Western media typically portrayed the South-Asian man, but cool, smart, athletic, with great hair, in love, and proudly anti-colonial. He called out the British for stealing and keeping Indian artifacts… in a Spider-Man movie. That moment was history reclaimed.

A glitch in the wealthy white patriarchal matrix.

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man is a visceral fable of vengeance and resistance, where the brutality of caste, corruption, and religious nationalism collide. Amid this chaos, the film uplifts the Hijra community who stand not only as victims, but as warriors against systemic violence. Their alliance reframes queerness not as deviance, but as defiance — ultimately confronting the machinery of empire with what it fears most: a system-breaking empathy it cannot contain.

The vitriolic backlash from white male gamers and fandoms isn’t about quality — it’s about losing default status in stories. Everyone else has had to empathize with majority white male protagonists for decades. Diverse representation in media isn’t a threat to art — it’s a threat to white supremacy. It’s not just a mirror held up to the globe — it’s a refusal to let one worldview define it.

Hollywood, gaming studios, and the gatekeepers of entertainment — if you want to reclaim artistic integrity and still make money doing it, we need art that remembers, resists, and reclaims — stories that name the machine and short-circuit its lies. The world is ready. So am I.

Today, efforts like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society are not merely policy shops — they are ideological engines: built to roll back civil rights, impose authoritarian values, and erase uncomfortable truths. They represent a hyper-concentrated form of white supremacy, rooted in unresolved Civil War grievances and the failures of Reconstruction.

Miraculously, or perhaps, blessed with intellectual curiosity and natural empathy, through all of this, my wife — a compassionate, steadfast partner and a Christian woman — has remained by my side. She has witnessed my transformation with both love and complexity. While our bond is rooted in deep respect and shared values, our spiritual landscapes have diverged. Her faith brings her solace; mine has evolved into something more secular, grounded in justice and humanism. We’ve navigated that tension with care — proof that love can stretch across differing beliefs, even as the echoes of religious conditioning still ripple through our lives.

I am proud of her increasing intellectual curiosity and her willingness to accept me for who I am now, even if I wasn’t ready to accept myself when we met.

But our marriage has defied the splintering that white supremacy specifically creates: hyper-capitalist, hyper-individualistic, fractured families and societies.

As Children of the Global South — descendants of peoples who survived enslavement, colonization, and erasure — we carry within us the urgent need for stories that do not turn away from history, but confront it with unflinching truth.

In the pain of losing my family, I found a deeper purpose: to tell this story — and my own — any way I can. A sudden rush of empathy, pity, and love struck me: My parents’ and sister’s rejection was not theirs alone — it was a lingering Fracture left by colonization and global exploitation, tearing apart families across generations. As Children of the Global South, we still carry those wounds.

Make no mistake: white supremacy leaves wounds — because it is the system. And unless it is dismantled, both the Global South and North — and their collective Children — will remain trapped in a dance choreographed by empire — built to divide, exploit, and erase. Any vision of democracy, in America, will remain a fragile illusion — if not an outright mythology — built on a conceptually false foundation: white supremacy itself.

A cruel, heartbreaking legacy of erasure — passed down through empire — indoctrinating God-fearing Brown fathers to erase their godless, queer Brown sons. Preaching shame as scripture. Teaching silence as survival.

I reject that inheritance.

Empathy as praxis is how we reject that inheritance. In a world engineered to divide, it rebuilds connection, disarms supremacy, and charts a path forward. If humanity is to survive — let alone heal — empathy must become our collective discipline.

And perhaps what cut even deeper for my father — beyond my queerness — was that I no longer validated his role as a pastor. In stepping away from the faith he had built his life upon, I wasn’t just rejecting a belief system. I was, in his eyes, nullifying his life’s work. For a man shaped by empire, ordained by colonial Christianity, and burdened with the role of moral gatekeeper, my departure from his manufactured worldview may have landed as personal failure. But it wasn’t. It was never about wanting to hurt him. I love my father. I love my mother. I love my sister. It was never about them — it was about the system that taught them love was conditional, acceptance required obedience, and dissent unforgivable. That kind of pain is real — but its source is systemic. I still want to be Mootha Makkan — not by obedience, but by truth. By love without condition. Not through erasure, but by living fully in the open. Not in their image, but in mine.

Yet, and yes, I also carry the wound — but I also carry the will to heal it.

THE CALL I believe in empathy. I believe in memory. I believe the Children of the Global South are not broken. We are not rejected. We are awakening.

Children of the Global North: join us. We are not your enemies. We are your present and future collaborators, business & creative partners, lovers, and kin. We are building something new — something ancient yet reawakened, a pursuit of empathy, and a reckoning with history that refuses to forget.

If this story resonated with you, kindly share it, spread the word and please comment. I’d love to hear from you. Your voice, your memory, your Fracture — it matters here.

You are not alone. All are welcome.

Thank you so, so much for your time in reading my story.

You can also email me directly: vinesvenus at protonmail.com I'll be writing more on Medium as well: https://medium.com/@vinesvenus/a-call-to-the-children-of-the-global-south-the-system-that-made-my-father-disown-me-fecad6c0b862

[aestherin]

I CAN SEE YOU

track 05: late

NOTE: update bc lenten break started ^^ how are y'alll 👀

It was not a hidden truth to you that your good friend Venti, more known by his penname 'Barbatos', had his way with words. If he didn't, how else would he have had the long list of critically acclaimed works penned under his name? However, there was a first for everything.

You now jokingly doubted whether he actually wrote those poems. You mean — how could someone so articulate and flowery fail to do Inazuma justice?!

Yes, Venti did hype the place up. Yes, he did describe it in positive light. Yes, he was convincing enough to make you extend your stay (for a considerable amount of time at that). But you never imagined Inazuma would be this majestic.

After just a step onto Inazuman ground, freshly fallen petals of varying purples graced your feet. Cold, fragrant breeze embraced you immediately, a stark difference from the warm and gentle winds of your homeland.

Wow. You really left home.

Did you ask permission and tell your parents that there won't be anyone home in your apartment for a long while? No.

Did you care?

Well, actually, yes. It was your first time to go out of town after all. And it is a secret trip, no less. You could not help thinking about the repercussions of your actions, but you forced yourself to, for once, live in the moment and cast those worries aside for later.

Was this how your classmates felt when they used to sneak out past their curfews during high school?

"Your room number is 0616. Here is your key card. Enjoy your stay!" The hotel receptionist flashed a smile, to which you were trained to only respond with a small nod and a slight curve of lips.

A small yet clean room welcomed you. The furnishings, though evidently luxurious, was not to your liking, however. It reminded you of home your family house, where everything was excessively lavish all due to your family's vanity and pretentiousness. No matter. Who expects a hotel room to make you feel at home anyway?

Besides, you were planning to search for a temporary rental space after your very very important meeting tomorrow. If luck permits, you may not even be staying for so long in this stuck-up room.

The only thing you have to do for today is rest well and early in order to be in your best state during tomorrow's meeting.

What the heck is happening?!

Trying to keep yourself seem sane and professional as you converse with a few select officers and staff of Narukami Entertainment when, in fact, you were internally freaking out was not how you envisioned this meeting to be.

You really thought you'd do fairly well.

Constant exposure to pretentious men in suits, masked ladies of high society, and those pretenders claiming to be 'art connoisseurs' your whole life has provided you with ample confidence that you can handle today's affairs flawlessly.

Or at the very least, decently.

Well that was before you saw your favorite singer-songwriter's manager in the same meeting room.

"Here, we prepared a contract." Scaramouche's manager slid a folder across the table. "Go through it first. Feel free to tell us if you wish to change anything, or if you find anything disagreeable."

"Thank you."

You started to go through the contract, meticulously going through each and every clause, assessing each and every word — until one stopped you in your tracks.

'Scaramouche.'

Oh fuck.

Your jests were really just that. Just jests. Not even you believed that it would actually turn real. The state of your mind right now was the exact opposite of what you are projecting, seemingly composed as you were signing the papers.

'Archons, what country did I save in my past life that I get to work with my favorite artist in this life?'

'Will Scaramouche be here?'

'Holy, if I work with him, does that mean I get a spoiler about his next album because I get to make a cover? Can I hear sample songs? Can I know the tracklist? Can I get a signed alb—'

"Okay, so are we all good for today then?" His manager asked as he retrieved the documents.

Oh. So I won't be seeing him.

Maybe they don't really allow their artists to just meet anyone. Understandable, especially since Scaramouche is insanely famous. Maybe you'd never even get to interact with him for the whole duration of the project.

Nevertheless, your heart still leaped at the thought of contributing to his upcoming album.

"Yeah." You flashed a smile. "I think I'm good —"

"Sorry I'm late."

I CAN SEE YOU — scara x reader smau

prev . masterlist . next

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[muxshwriting]

compelling

Feud-Rautha Harkonnen x reader

summary: Feyd can no longer live with only a portion of his wife and strives to find who she truly is || word count: 948 || masterlist

once again, I have been peer pressured (someone very politely requested) and I am being forced (I wrote this in a peak of artistic inspiration) to publish a third part to voiceless and articulate. Enjoy!

REQUESTED: I've read all your Feyd stories and I love them! Would you please consider doing a continuation of "Articulate" where Feyd is so desperate to win over his wife that he asks her new friends for advice? Thank you.

Ever since you’d postponed your day with him, Feyd had been unable to think of anything else. He couldn’t imagine what else you spent your days doing, what was more important to you than him. As he began craving your presence, he noticed just how much time you spent out of your chambers, elsewhere.

He approached you one evening when you were getting ready for bed. “Y/N?” He stopped calling you ‘Wife’ when he noticed the subtle flinch that accompanied its use. “Where do you spend your days? You always return with such happiness.” He meant nothing by it, a simple observation that you always glowed a little brighter afterwards.

You hesitated before answering, hearing horror stories of what Feyd has done to servants. “I- My handmaiden and some of the other maids, they spend their days teaching me things about our house, about Geidi Prime. I enjoy their company.” You admitted.

Feyd frowned. “Your handmaiden? You’ve been hiding away with your handmaiden all this time?”

“Do not speak of her with such disdain! She is my friend. You will do her no harm or I will never forgive you.”

“What?”

You mistook his confusion for insult. “You heard me-“

“You misunderstand, my love.” That title was a new one. “I am simply surprised. I worried you had filled your time with another lover. That I would not be so kind towards.”

The endearment that slipped from his lips did not escape unnoticed by you and you felt your heart fluttering slightly within your chest. The careless and childish hopes from the beginning on your marriage had the nerve to peek their heads towards daylight and it took all your might to push them back down. He was just a possessive man, claiming what was already his. He could not love you, not the way you wanted him to.

“Oh. No! I would never- I would never take a lover Feyd. I am not a traitor.”

“I- I was not trying to imply-“ It was the first time you had ever heard Feyd be uncertain in anything, stumbling over his words.

He reached out to you and you let him slip your hand into his. His body was mere inches from yours as he stood silently, staring down at you.

“I’m sorry.” It was a murmur of an apology you never thought he was even capable of. “Please tell your handmaiden… thank you from me, for taking care of you.”

Your eyes soften as you take a small step so you’re truly in each other’s space. “I shall pass along your message. Goodnight husband.” There’s a softness behind your words that Feyd hasn’t heard in a while and he’s very grateful for its return.

In the days following your discussion, you and Feyd had minimised some of the distance between you, but not all. There was space Feyd couldn’t cross alone, no matter how much he wanted to. He needed help, aid from someone who knew you far better than he did.

Reluctantly, Feyd made his way down to the servants quarters. He stops silently outside the door, suddenly nervous to enter.

He knocked and your handmaiden opened the door, paling at the sight of the Na-Baron. “My Lord Feyd.” She bowed before him, slipping out into the hallway. “How can I assist you?” Despite your assurance that your husband would never hurt her, your handmaiden still had fear when stood in front of Feyd.

Feyd seemed unsure of himself now that he was stood in front of someone about to ask for their help. “I wish to help my wife.”

“Is the Na-Baroness unwell?”

“She is fine.” Feyd said shortly. “But our marriage…” He does not wish to continue and your handmaiden knows it.

Slyly, she looks him up and down with a knowing look. “It’s called love. She feels it too.”

“She-“ Feyd stopped himself. “She loves me?”

“And you love her. She’s just hesitant to give you all of herself.”

He took a moment to breathe, his head spinning from the realisation that his wife loved him. “I love her…”

“Then tell her that.” Your handmaiden pressed. “Tell her she is loved.”

Heeding your handmaiden’s words, Feyd approached the evening much differently than he normally would. He greeted you as he entered your chambers, a small smile across his face as he offered to help you change and you, surprised, allowed him to.

He couldn’t stop the giddy feeling his heart had when you leant into him as he pulled the pins from your hair. You let yourself lean in, praying that life had finally dealt you the perfect hand.

Beyond either os your notices, you handmaiden had slipped into your chambers, aiming to help you get ready for the evening. But upon seeing your gentle embrace with Feyd, a knowing smile spread across her lips and she turned on her heel to slip back out again. Her shoe brushed against the floor for just a second and you glanced up at her.

Silently, a conversation passes. A frown, a smile, a nod. A look towards Feyd, a glance you made in his direction. He’s aware of all that is going but blissfully choosing to ignore it, his eyes almost slipping shut as he runs his hand down your back and letting it settle at your waist.

No words are exchanged as the evening progresses, but the light touches continue and you never find yourself out of Feyd’s space for more than a second. It isn’t until you’re in bed and wrapped in his arms that you speak.

“Goodnight my love.”

Feyd smiles against you and murmurs the same sentiment back, finally slipping into sleep.

[elizaleclerc]

hi! hope you're having a good day, could i request charles dating a reader who doesnt have friends? or just feels lonely in general.. it can be shy if you're not comfortable writing that! just some comfort🥹🥹 thank you!

false god 💋

"and i can't talk to you when you're like this. staring out the window like i'm not your favorite town"

summary: gf!reader and charles get into an argument after ferrari underperforms again.

song: false god by taylor swift

author's note: wrote this bc i had that song stuck in my head oops. no warnings really- just a bit of manipulation if u squint a little. (ALSO HI IM BACK <3)

word count: 2.2k

They all warned you about times like these. The girlfriends of the other drivers looked at you with wary eyes. Most of them vowed to never date a Ferrari driver, but your connection with Charles was unlike any other that you had before. Never date a driver in red because they love that team more than they’ll ever love you, you’d been told before. You always responded with nervous smiles and shaky laughs, hoping that in reality the other girls you had come to know were just playing some sick joke. Like this was all some sort of initiation into the clique that was girlfriends of F1 drivers. 

None of their words felt true when you were next to Charles, his hands on your waist or your head cradled into his neck. Nothing had actually felt more right. You brushed off the warnings from the other girls and chose to focus on the love between you and Charles. You never brought any of this up to him, completely unwilling to cause any unnecessary drama between the close knit group you found yourself in. All of these people have known each other for years, and you were the latest addition. 

In July, with three race weekends back to back, Ferrari’s dominant streak would be tested. Red Bull and McLaren were powering ahead with upgrades and race pace, and it appeared that the powerful scarlet team was falling behind. 

You noticed the tension in Charles’s face after a bad qualifying pace or another bad race result. The boundaries were being stretched. You observed how Charles would brush away your hand at dinner or neglect to kiss you goodnight before bed. The last two weeks had been hell for you, and in the back of your mind you wondered if there was some truth in what the girls had said months ago. Maybe these Ferrari men are just too much to handle after all.   

Before the third and final race of the triple header, Carmen, girlfriend of Mercedes driver George Russel, pulled you aside to have a chat. “I know things have been hard for you and Charles.” 

You furrowed your brows, “What?” You laughed nervously. You hadn’t mentioned anything about the tensions between you and Charles recently. The only way Carmen and the other girls would have found out is if Charles was feeling the same way and he told them himself. 

“Not that I’ve heard anything, just- you know. Ferrari has been falling behind, everyone can see it. And I know Charles cares for you, but that man has loved Ferrari since he could walk. When they don’t do well- when he doesn’t do well- he’s bound to take that out on the people around him.” Carmen easily articulated her explanation, which made your mind swirl even more as the small smile finally fell from your face. 

You sighed, becoming flustered with the whole situation, and the warm sun beaming down caused a sheen across your forehead. “I just don’t know what to do.” You were unsure if Carmen was someone you could fully trust, as you hadn’t exactly made any super close friendships with them. The past couple of months, your whole focus has been Charles. 

“Just know that it isn’t your fault. Before I dated George I dated a Ferrari driver. Their passion for the team and the intensity in their competitiveness makes them unlike any of the others.” She paused for a moment before she continued, “What you have to do is really try to read his emotions and find that balance of giving him space and being there to comfort him. Stand by him when he needs it, and back off if it seems too tense.” 

“That sounds kinda hard,” You broke into a small smile, overwhelmed with the new information you had gained. 

Carmen grabbed your hand, “It’ll be okay. If I do know one thing, it’s that Charles is falling for you. Through thick and thin, I think you guys can make it.” 

A small wave of relief washed over you, “Thanks, Carmen.” As long as someone had faith in your abilities to handle Charles, you didn’t feel so alone. 

~

As most of the fans expected, the Austrian Grand Prix did not go well for Ferrari. Your heart sank when Charles finished outside of the points for the third weekend in a row. It would greatly hinder his ability to fight for the championship. He needed nothing short of a miracle to come back now. 

You knew Charles had been dealing with the press for the last couple of hours, and you didn’t meet back up in the paddock with him until it was time for the two of you to leave to go back to Monaco for the next week. 

You sat in the passenger seat of his car as he drove in silence for a few minutes, navigating his way out of the paddock. Once the two of you had made it onto the main road, you decided to read where his head was at. 

“I’m sorry my love,” you comforted him and grabbed his free hand, giving it a light squeeze. He sneaked his hand out from your grasp, resting it on the steering wheel. You couldn’t help but feel your stomach sink. 

“It’s just ridiculous, we can’t seem to get anything together.” He huffed in frustration, and you wondered if he even realized he had pushed your hand away. 

“Despite the strategy issues, I thought you had a really good drive today.” Maybe a compliment would help? 

He scoffed, “I could’ve been better. I made too many mistakes, regardless of how scrambled our strategy was.” 

You weren’t sure how to respond. You thought it was best for him to ruminate and think things out the rest of the way home. You had the rest of the drive to the airport, and then the whole plane ride to see if he was feeling any better. When you had to speak, you avoided any mention or talk about the race, or more specifically Charles’s performance. 

On the plane, you flew back with Lando and Oscar. Oscar had a fabulous race, and almost won it all. Lando on the other hand fought with Max the whole race and ended up with a DNF. So the plane ride was full of mixed conversation and feelings. Oscar was proud of his win and complimented the McLaren strategy, while Lando aired out his grievances for Max’s intense competitiveness. Charles chimed in regularly to tell them they should consider themselves lucky to not have to deal with the Ferrari pitwall. 

Still, you stayed silent, letting the three of them talk things through. You sat next to Charles in your seat but kept to yourself, trying to read your book but really you were listening to the conversation around you. Not once did Charles take your hand or give you a small peck on your cheek. As it appeared to Lando and Oscar, you and Charles didn’t even look like a couple at all. 

You began to feel that aching pang of loneliness that you were so familiar with before you had met Charles. The feeling of having no one to speak to in a crowded room. You hated to appear shy and reserved, but didn’t want to push yourself to be outgoing. You had been dating Charles long enough that he knew one of your love languages was physical touch. You loved nothing more than small moments of affection, but in the past few weeks it seemed like he wanted nothing to do with you. 

~

Charles opened the door to his apartment in Monaco, the moonlight being the only thing that shone on the furniture and pictures hanging on the walls. He languidly flicked on a couple of lamps, adorning the living room with a warm glow.

“You’ve been quiet.” He stated plainly, moving to the kitchen to fix himself a glass of water.

You took a moment to respond, “Well there’s not really much for me to say.” 

Charles turned from the fridge to face you, and looked at your face, seeming to analyze the tone of your words. After he took a sip of his water he asked, “Are you alright?”  

You laugh nervously, “I’ve been better.” 

He furrowed his brows, “What’s the matter?” 

“Cmon, Charles. You can’t be serious.” You knew you were treading dangerous waters, but this conversation was long overdue, and after the exhausting plane ride you felt yourself boiling over. 

He looked back at you expectantly, not knowing what you were getting at. 

“You haven’t noticed the way things have changed between us in the last three weeks? You haven’t noticed that when Ferrari starts struggling you push me aside?” Your voice was steady, but it shook slightly in a mix of nerves and frustration. In all the times you’ve let Charles air out his frustrations, you’ve held all of yours in. 

His lips parted and you knew he was shocked but mostly confused. All of your questions were rhetorical, of course he hadn’t noticed. “You never hold my hand, you’ve stopped introducing me to your friends. I feel like the past few weeks I’ve only been someone for you to fuck to let your anger out.” You were really letting it out now, the words flowing out of you like they could no longer be contained. 

“That’s not true.” He persisted, walking out from behind the counter into the living room where you stood. 

Tears pricked up in your eyes, “It doesn’t matter if it isn’t true, it’s what I feel.” You brought your hand to rest on your chest.

“Listen, you know I’m happy with what we have, I don’t want to change anything about it. But you know my career is important too. My loyalty to this team is important.” He tried to explain himself, but you ruffled your fingers through your hair in exasperation. 

“I fucking knew it, they were right.” You mumbled to yourself, now pacing. 

“Who was right?” Charles pressed. 

“The other girls!” You raised your voice, “As soon as we got together and you were bringing me around the paddock, they warned me. They told me to never date a Ferrari driver. That you’ll always love that damn team more than you’ll love me. They said it so. many. times. And then Carmen told me yesterday that she knew we’ve been having problems and that the more Ferrari struggled the worse you would get.” 

Tears fell down your cheeks as you continued, “I’ve tried, I’ve tried so hard. I’ve said all the right things, held your hand when you’re mad, tried to compliment you to make you feel better about yourself. None of that worked, you would still barely look at me.” Your breathing was heavy and your voice had become raspy with tears. 

Charles moved closer to you, grabbing your trembling hands, “Come on, breathe my love.” You took a deep breath as he moved one of his hands to wipe away your tears. “I’ve never said anything to the other girls about us, I don’t know why they said those things to you.” 

“But- the way you’ve been acting-” you sniffled, looking into his eyes that were filled with such care. You hadn’t seen that look in what felt like forever.

“I know, it’s been tough for me lately. I’ll take full responsibility for not treating you properly. You didn’t deserve any of that.” He gave your hand a slight squeeze, waiting a few moments before speaking again. “I do love this team, and I will push to be the best driver I can possibly be, but…” he swallowed, “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t falling for you. You are becoming more and more important to me by the minute, and I’d quit racing today if you asked me to.” 

You let out a dry laugh, “You don’t mean that.” 

“Every word.” 

You were quiet, just looking in his eyes. You could tell he really did mean it. This thing between you and Charles was becoming more serious as the days passed. You knew that you were falling for him too, which is what made these past few weeks all the more confusing. 

“If I could give you any more assurance, it’s that racing- this career- will never ever be a priority over you.” He leaned in to place a light kiss on your temple. 

“I just hate to see you struggling like you have been. I like it when you’re all happy.” You curled your lips into a small smile, and he grinned back. 

He shook his head slowly, “Trust me, I know.” You wrapped your arms around his neck, resting your head on his chest. His lips kissed the top of your head, and everything felt right in the world again. 

You pulled away, locking eyes with him. “It gets lonely sometimes, in the paddock. I feel like I’ve failed to make any genuine friends.” 

He planted another kiss on your forehead, “Well, you could always keep to yourself. Be above any drama and gossip. You’d surely be the coolest one there. Then, when it’s all said and done, we have each other.” 

You giggled into his kiss on your lips. Maybe you could eventually trust the other girls eventually, but their cold welcome to you was definitely unappreciated. But you had Charles, and more importantly, you trusted Charles. And you knew that bond wasn’t going away anytime soon.

[httpskuzuu]

I'll stick around if you will

Fyodor x Reader

idk english

summary: a morning with Fyodor

tw: none, only softness and happiness

When Fyodor wakes up, he is alone. But as he turns his gaze to your empty side of the bed, an uneasiness claws at his chest. The warmth of your side still lingers, an ephemeral trace that his tired hand senses as it glides over the sheets. Sleep suddenly leaves him. With a clear purpose, he gets up to look for you.

The window is frozen, as is the rest of the house. He has always loved the cold. It felt like an old friend, ingrained in him since birth. It was his home: the crunch of the frozen ground beneath his feet, the breath condensing like little sighs stolen from the air. He likes the way the snow covers the meadow and the trees, the way everything looks covered and shiny when he leaves home. 

His feet step on the dark planks until he reaches the kitchen. He sees your figure, half hunched over the wooden counter, illuminated by the dim morning light. Next to you is a metal bowl still with a large spoon in it. He stares at you for a few seconds, admiring you. How you move so naturally while still focused on your recipe, so relaxed that he smiles. A smile that barely grazes his lips but lights up everything inside him. How can he not smile when he has you?

He approaches you without making a sound that disturbs you, a natural thing for him. His arms wrap around your waist, pulling you close to him and embracing the warmth you give off. Your body, so warm under his hands, was the promise of something more than cold: a home he never knew he could belong to.

When you say his name, it's like the song of an angel just arrived on earth. He appreciates your beautiful smile after kissing the back of your neck.

“What are you doing?” his accent clings to the words more than usual. You grab one of his hands delicately, almost as if it would break if you tighten your grip a little more. Fyodor finds it funny, watching you treat him like he's made of glass, a porcelain doll you're terrified he'll fall.

“I'm going to make you the best breakfast.” Your smile lights up your face, the room and the world. At least that's how Fyodor sees it. You make his cold body warm and he can't even complain; because some nights, when he holds you close but still can't sleep, he thinks about how he'd rather have your warmth than the cold he's always loved.

For someone who had always found comfort in the cold, your warmth was disconcerting, like a flame that doesn't burn but doesn't let off either.

Your hand separates from his to put it on a notebook. You bought it some time ago for its design, with a cover full of flowers with warm, yellow colors, not even the white was pure, like the snow he is used to. The flowers are harmoniously distributed among leaves and stems, making perfect patterns. In the center, there is a box with small ornaments in the corners, where you wrote <<Fedya's Recipes>>. A burning sensation sticks to his chest when he remembers the time you showed it to him. You told him in your charming voice, that you wanted to learn how to cook Russian foods, from his childhood, the ones that reminded him of his parents and lost childhood. All from a childhood he thought he had forgotten.

Now, the notebook is full, its pages covered with your careful annotations, sometimes messy, torn straight from the corners of his memory. A few words get stuck in his throat, more than words, it was like a torrent of emotions that before he met you, he had not felt. He would like to express all the appreciation and love he has for you, to tell you that you are perfect, that he needs you as much as air, but his lips, so used to silence, barely manage to articulate anything.

As he listens to the melody you hum softly, Fyodor allows himself to be vulnerable, for you. He leans into you, letting the words escape in a heartfelt whisper:

“Я люблю тебя.” He closes his eyes, noticing how the cold has disappeared from the room. “Я хочу остаться в этом моменте, с тобой, навсегда.”

Я люблю тебя: I love you.

Я хочу остаться в этом моменте, с тобой, навсегда: I want to stay in this moment, with you, forever.

[dioslesbianwife]

I love how you wrote the bucciarati gang with the Jessica rabbit partner so much😭you write away the best things I can't stop reading your work🤍

Can I please request the same but with la squadra them falling for a femme fatale who is also in the mafia and is highly respected by most of the other gangs and then they meet her and then they understand why she gets respect not only because her beauty but her personality .

How whoud they react to a loyal partner like that (I also think the Jessica rabbit partner has a stand called why don't you do right)

i’m happy you liked it! thank you for requesting and i hope you enjoy <333

Risotto Nero

The moment Risotto hears your name in the same breath as his own, he's skeptical. Respect is earned in blood, not lipstick.

Then he meets you. You enter a room like it was made for your quiet, dangerous elegance, with eyes that weigh and dismiss fools without a word.

You remind him of a sharpened stiletto hidden in silk: beautiful, but made for killing.

Risotto is not the type to fall, but he does respect. you speak to him like an equal, like someone who's seen the worst and came out steel-forged.

When he learns about Why Don't You Do Right, he smirks. “Fitting,” he says. “Though you don’t even need it to make people obey.”

A woman who doesn't just survive in the mafia but thrives? Loyal, cold where needed, with a sense of justice hidden beneath the brutality?

You’re not just someone he’d kill for. He’d die for you too.

Ghiaccio

At first, he hates the idea of you. “Ughhh, another idiot with a reputation.”

Then you speak. And he goes dead silent.

You’re intelligent. Eerily calm. The kind of calm that pisses him off because he wants to argue, but you’re too composed, too articulate, and way too sexy when you’re right.

You never mock him when he rants. you listen and correct him only when necessary. He pretends to hate it. He loves it.

When you fight, you’re efficient. Brutal when needed. Elegant always.

After a mission together, he stares at your bloodstained heels and says, “Okay. Fine. You’re cool. Whatever.”

You smirk and kiss his cheek. He turns bright red.

Ghiaccio is terrible with affection, but he worships you. A loyal partner who isn’t afraid to call him out? Unfair.

Prosciutto

Respect is everything to him. So when he hears about your status, he’s intrigued.

The moment he sees you, he’s reminded of opera heroines: graceful, doomed, but deadly.

You speak with the gravitas of someone twice your age. your eyes see through everyone.

He falls not just for your looks, but your composure. The way you command a room with a glance.

When you fight together, you protect Pesci without hesitation. That earns his loyalty fast.

Prosciutto has been hardened by life, but he believes in loyalty and you prove it tenfold.

He confides in you, trusts your word above others. He calls you Signora playfully.

One night, he tells you, “I hope we die old. Not because I fear death, but because I want more time with you.”

Illuso

He underestimates you. Of course he does. Pretty face, soft smile, elegant little strut? Please.

Then you tears through three guards while sipping wine.

He’s speechless.

You’re a painting he could stare at for hours.

Your Stand impresses him. “Why Don’t You Do Right?”? That’s hot. It’s manipulative, seductive, sharp. Just like you.

He’s almost reverent with you. He wants to be seen on your arm. Wants everyone to know: you picked him.

You’re loyal in the way most men don't get to experience, intimate, protective, undeniably his.

He tries to match your class, cleans up his act a bit. Still cocky, but respectful.

Pesci

He’s intimidated as hell at first. You’re so...cool. Too cool.

You treat him gently though, like a little brother, at first. That’s what wins him.

You teach him better aim, give advice, praise him when he shows improvement.

He falls in love hard and fast. You’re the first person outside of Prosciutto to believe in him.

When you uses your Stand on an enemy, he watches like a kid seeing fireworks. “W-Wow… you’re incredible…”

You assure him that you value his heart, not just his power. He starts carrying himself with more pride.

Pesci is fiercely loyal, and now he has two people he’d burn the world for.

He never fully believes he deserves you, but he tries. Every day.

Formaggio

“So you're the lady everyone keeps crying about? Can’t be that serious.”

And then you pull a knife from your heel, smile sweetly, and casually threaten a man twice your size.

“Okay. Maybe I get it now.”

He loves your sass. Loves your wit. you teases him just enough, and he adores it.

Her Stand is sexy and powerful and terrifying. He jokes, “I’d do right by you even without the Stand, baby.”

He starts showing off around you, wanting to impress you or make you laugh.

You humor him. Flirt back. Then, on a rainy night, you kiss him mid-mission and say, “Don’t die stupidly, alright?”

He’s hooked. Completely.

He becomes protective, jealous even, but hides it under jokes.

Melone

He’s fascinated before even meeting you. Researches you. Memorizes your file.

You show up in leather gloves and heels, deadly grace in motion. “You must be Melone.”

“I am,” he says, but he’s flustered. You’re smarter than he expected. More charming.

He flirts, of course, but realizes you doesn’t fall for surface-level antics. He steps up.

Your loyalty, your professionalism, your way of handling men twice your size? He takes notes.

You’re sensual without trying, always in control. He obsesses over your voice, the way you say his name.

He calls your his perfect genetic blend, and you’d think he’s joking, but he’s dead serious.

If you ever want children (or an heir to the underworld), he volunteers instantly.

[rodolfoparras]

Oh gosh, hi hello howdy. I’ve always quietly lurked on your blog because it makes me so fucking feral but I’m too nervous about saying anything. But!! I’m being brave, saying hello, and idk bringing a little treat too I suppose

idk what specifically got me hooked onto this idea, but it was def something you wrote that was scream worthy but but all it did was make me imagine:

Price just being this perfect soldier, perfect leader, gruff and hard around the edges because he has to be in his line of work. Sharp voice, stern face, no-nonsense and all authority. Then reader comes around. Price is all bark and bite, but oh with reader—something shakes loose in his chest.

It doesn’t come up in the field. It doesn’t come up on base either. It’s some little dinky bar where the team has holed up in after a rough mission to celebrate a safe return and lick their wounds in relative, drunken peace. And it starts with just the brush of your arm against Price’s neck. It was an accident. You reached for something over his shoulder, Ghost handing you another drink or you swatting at a laughing Soap, and it was really just the loose fabric of your sleeve against Price’s skin.

Price has spent so long being alpha alpha alpha. It’s what’s expected of a military man, what’s expected of a captain and leader. But something about the touch against the back of his neck—of you touching his neck, holding him, collaring him. It’s lucky the lights are low enough no one notices the flush spreading across his face and the music is too loud to hear that soft little whimper.

Anywayyyy love the blog hehe <3

Hello sugar cube!! I’m so glad you popped in pls know y’all are genuinely always welcome here I can understand feeling nervous but believe me I absolutely love talking to y’all! 🥹🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻

Also before I say anything else I just have to say you articulate yourself in such a beautiful way I absolutely love the way you write sugar🧎🏻‍♂️

Second of all I’ve always loved the thought of price giving up control

Imagine price who’s always been forced to take charge and make decisions, always been captain or lieutenant, someone important before he’s been a mere soldier, always carrying so much responsibilities on his shoulders

When you came around he hadn’t expected to start a relationship with you it kind of just happened much like he just happened to give up control to you

Price would always be up on his feet before anyone else, preparing coffee and making sure him and his team have everything they need for their mission, but now he’s woken up by the smell of coffee and met with the sight of your smiling face holding out a cup for him .

He takes it gracefully, sipping on it contentedly, feeling himself become more and more alert as the caffeine enters his system.

He’s just about to say how he needs to prepare for the upcoming mission when you abruptly cut him off with a kiss, ever so carful not to tip the cup of warm liquid on him.

He happily accepts your kiss, a contented sigh escaping his lips and it’s your smile that finally breaks the kiss.

“I’ve already prepared everything,” you say, smile still painted on your face.

He only manages a surprised “oh” in response, brows raising high at your words before he bashfully thanks you for what you’ve done.

Once he’s done with his coffee you put his mug down on the night stand before you take his hand and pull him out of the bed, playfully tugging him over to the bathroom where you’re quick to start up a shower for him.

He mumbles something under his breath probably something along the lines of how he’s a grown man and can take care of himself and doesn’t need you to prepare showers for him but he secretly loves it

As soon as he steps foot in the shower, you’re hot on his tail, pouring shower gel into your hands, and soaping them up before burying your fingers into his hair.

A groan escapes his lips, eyes fluttering shut as he leans into the wonderful feeling.

Maybe you’re going over the mission with him or maybe you’re just humming some tune or maybe you’re trailing kisses down his neck while massaging his tense shoulders

Ether way he absolutely loves it feels like he’s in heaven because of it and of course the sweet thing gets so worked up, all hot and bothered from having someone pampering him this much, cock all hard and weeping between his thighs and there’s no way you’ll have him this tense before a mission so of course you sneak your hand between his legs and gently pumping his length

He’s clawing at your arm, head lolling back onto your shoulder as groans and whimpers escape him.

It doesn’t take much before the sweet thing is inching closer to his release, head burying into your neck and begging you to let him finish and who are you to deny him?

You quickly dry him up and help him dress before you ready yourself for the mission.

Youre checking your weapons and gear going over whatever you’ll need before taking the liberty to check his stuff and he’s all red in the face muttering curses under his breath but he absolutely loves everything you do for him and the rest of tf141 knows it as they stand there quietly chuckling in the background

Well out on the field you’re hot on his heal, your form towering over him, chest flushed to his back, hand on him to keep him in close vicinity while moving quietly

And if a bullet happens to graze him you’re lashing out at whoever wasn’t properly covering him getting all up in their face and cursing them out so much that Price has to pull you back by the waist while trying to suppress the smile tugging at his lips

And on your way back home you’re checking up on him constantly, even sitting next to him in the helicopter, thighs flush with his, arm around him, letting him lean his body onto yours, and checking every once a while on the injury he’s got

And of course when you’re back home you got him sprawled out on the bed, head buried between his legs, making him cum over and over, til there’s nothing but pathetic spurts of cum coming from him.

As he lay there, sated and fucked out, Price realizes he’s finally let someone else have control for once.

[zsakuva]

I'm sure this has been asked, but I had found your stuff recently and absolutely love how the different characters are with each being just as charming as the next. My question is what is the thought/writing process? I am wanting to be better at defining my ocs and characters without falling into the same trope and behaviors the characters have exhibit. Obviously there are different methods for different people, but I'll like to know a little bit of the process for you. Do you have any tips to make the voices distinct and consistent through out a piece of writing?

Thank you!

For me, because I have a proclivity for world-building (meaning I am absolutely obsessed and must know the lore before I do anything), I like to understand the path a character has chosen. Their past experiences and upbringing have a dramatic impact on how they shape their own life, and that informs me of how a character acts, talks, and how they both see and react to the world around them.

I'll use Isaac Rhoades as a brief example (I wrote brief but this is not brief at all, my bad xD).

From the beginning, Isaac was written with a sealed heart and a cold personality. He's an articulate and smart man, a workaholic, but he lives in solitude.

I always ask myself how and why a character is who they are, and what decisions they made/experiences they've had to bring them to this point.

For Isaac, his background paints quite the picture:

Born to loving parents, and his grandfather is a successful private investigator — The early part of his childhood nurtured love and care. His mother in particular showed him what it meant to love unconditionally.

His parents are murdered because of his grandfather's choice — Isaac was taught that even the people you love can hurt you, and that nowhere is a safe space.

Learning under his grandfather — Because of his vast portfolio and cases, Isaac is taught more about the workings of the world, and how to stay cautious. There was no space for fun or games; his only objective was expanding his knowledge in many subjects that his grandfather deemed worthy.

Getting stabbed by the maid — This reinforced the thought of a perpetual threat and the need to stay vigilant. It instilled paranoia in him to trust no one.

University in England and Andrew — Here, he remembers the love of his childhood, but also the threat of losing someone else because of his own decisions, taught by his grandfather.

Learning the reason of his grandfather's decision — Isaac was taught that there is always more to one person, for better or worse, as taught by the maid. Due to this and what he's learnt thus far, Isaac decides to seclude himself so he's never forced to make that kind of choice.

Succeeding his grandfather — Being a private investigator opened his eyes to humanity's extremes: the lengths they would go for their own desires at the detriment of others, and the yearning others had to better the world. His work reminds him of his life experiences, and these beliefs constantly clash.

Isaac is distant and cold at first because his life taught him not to trust anyone—even the unassuming—and he doesn't want to let anyone in; they could either betray him, or he could lose them. And yet, despite that, his mother's teachings managed to peek through when he saw Pickle in the alley, alluding to his true nature. Through Isaac's story, his internal struggle begins to rear: desperately wanting to feel love again, but knowing the cost if he does give in and the inevitable choice he might have to make if he opens his heart again.

Isaac is articulate and smart because of his grandfather's teachings. One can assume he stayed in that house for the rest of his teenage years until he left for university, so the only person he really interacted with was his grandfather. Because of this, he's factual, precise, and seldom makes jokes because mostly every conversation had been connected to work in some form. Small talk is a waste of time, and he doesn't indulge others unless there's a reason for it. He's meticulous with when to speak and when to listen.

Isaac is a workaholic because that is what his life has been shaped to be, also likely influenced by his grandfather. He has money, but continues to work. Why? Perhaps it's because he'd be without purpose otherwise. Or is it because he feels it's his duty to continue in his grandfather's footsteps and find the one thing that matters in the ocean of bullshit?

All of this shapes who Isaac is. It wouldn't make sense for him to have the same disposition as Andrew. Though they are similar in ways (articulation, education, work addiction), they take different forms and stem from the unique experiences they've lived. Where Andrew can engage in small talk (he had a freer childhood, a rebellious and fun twin brother, and more public school education/social interactions), Isaac can't. And though they both carry the weight of their own regrets alone, Andrew chooses to live with what he has, but Isaac chooses to endlessly bear the weight of the world and live up to his grandfather's bravery.

SO. With that being said, a suggestion I can give is to constantly remind yourself who your character is with every decision they make. Is it true to them? Does it make sense for them? But remember, humans are also notoriously contradictive, and one is not the same as another. We experience and react to the same conditions in completely different ways; who you are and what you've been through can determine the outcome.

I hope this has helped in some form of way!

Again I apologise for this monstrous post have fun writing aaaaa-

[otp-after-dark]

"But I think that conversation will be about the earlier parts of the show, as opposed to the end where it turned into just another 'gritty, violent drama' about how violence begets violence and oppression begets oppression … with 'nod, nod, wink, wink', girlboss approaches to protest."

Reading this breakdown of The Handmaid’s Tale’s fall from grace really hit me — not just because it’s true, but because it articulates something a lot of us longtime viewers have felt for years. The show didn’t just lose steam.

It lost vision.

What made Season 1 (and parts of 2–4) so powerful wasn’t just the aesthetic — the stark visuals, the haunting music, the brilliant performances — it was the emotional and political focus. It was about women's rage, bodily autonomy, power, and desire. About what it means to be reduced, to survive, and to reclaim yourself in the middle of a machine built to erase you. It was about resistance — not just externally, but internally.

Then the show outpaced the source material, and instead of evolving, it spiraled. It stopped being a visceral warning and started looping through trauma for trauma’s sake. It became emotionally incoherent, punishing the very woman it once centered — flattening June into a one-note mother figure while elevating characters like Serena into pseudo-victims.

It forgot its own thesis.

One of the most disappointing aspects of the final seasons — and Moss’s own commentary — is the insistence that June’s entire arc is about fighting for her children and the generations to come. As if her power, her survival, her choices, and her rage only have value when they're tied to motherhood. That’s not what Atwood wrote, and it’s not what made the character revolutionary. June wasn’t just a mother — she was a woman. A sexual, angry, complicated, resilient, autonomous woman. To frame her story solely around motherhood is not only reductive, it sends a damaging message in today’s climate — especially to women who don’t have children, or who define themselves by something other than parenting.

We’re living in a time when women’s bodies and choices are under attack. Now more than ever, we need stories that affirm a woman’s worth outside of the roles society assigns her — not ones that collapse her identity into being someone’s mother.

And that’s exactly why June and Nick mattered so much. This was never just about “shipping.” Their relationship sat at the very heart of the story’s most radical ideas — about choice, about love outside the law, about desire as rebellion. June didn’t go to Nick because she was his wife or his handmaid. She went to him because she chose to. Because he saw her when she had nothing left to give. Because she found safety in his arms when the world wanted to break her. That’s not fluff — that’s the point. It was a relationship built on autonomy, mutual trust, and a refusal to play by the rules of a violent, patriarchal system. And it’s just one reason why what they did to Nick’s character in the final seasons felt like such a betrayal. They erased one of the most powerful expressions of June’s personhood and turned him into a footnote in her own story.

The article’s mention of "shallow feminism" is spot on. When a Taylor Swift remix becomes the soundtrack to what’s supposed to be a revolutionary moment, we’ve officially left the radical feminist terrain Atwood mapped out and entered a kind of aesthetic protest cosplay. And yes, the real-world events — Trump’s reelection, Roe’s overturning — made the show's descent even harder to stomach. Because in the face of all that, this is what you’re going to say?

There are pieces of this show I’ll always love. Season 1 will always be gold. And thankfully, we still have Atwood’s original words, powerful performances, and fan works that remember what this story was really about.

But damn. What a fall.

[iniquitousyearning]

ignore me for a second because this is literally just going to be insistent nonsensical rambling but what i really crave more than anything else currently is a story dissecting tom riddles one fundamental flaw; his inexperience/inability to feel selfless, genuine love.

i have, for the most part, written my tom very removed from canon but i just feel like a story surrounding this could be so beautiful if articulated right. i think of how i wrote mattheo in beg for me—he was so reluctant to let himself feel love because along with it came fear; fear of abandonment fear of vulnerability fear of what it could mean to have something worth losing. tom’s fear would be tenfold.

i don’t know if i’m crazy but i just need that angst from him right now. i love self assured emotionally detached composed tom riddle but a tom riddle who finds himself enamoured with you to the point he’s wishing he never met you because he misses the man he was before you—the restrained man with nothing to lose—yes, the thought of that does something to me.

not to mention i’ve been listening to sleep token nonstop and if these lyrics don’t fit tom then idk:

“I’m not here to be the saviour you long for, only the one you don’t.”

i love this line and i feel as though this would be something tom says to you as you’re attempting to push him away. such a prose fits him so well because he’d be trying to tell you that he may not be the hero in your story but his presence is still significant in its own right. he’s never claimed to be the good guy but that you could gain something from him you may not realize yet.

“I’ll take a pound of your flesh before you take a piece of my paystub.”

a threat spat through a clenched jaw and hunger blown pupils. uttered from the lips of a lying man who knows he’d never lay a finger on you and would kill anyone who dared to try. he’s still in denial of his feelings, you’re in denial of yours. the two of you so alike you’re destined to butt heads.

“Turn me into your mannequin and I’ll turn you into my puppet queen.”

tom often presents himself as someone willing to be molded to gain trust. it’s different with you because you know this. you’ve accepted it. you need eachother—you feed off eachother—you’d be a fool to ignore it. he uses you for one thing and you use him for another. you can’t fall victim to his tricks if you know that’s all they are. surface value. mutual manipulation.

alright i will stop rambling. i’d love to write this but i don’t think i could ever do him justice.

[olderthannetfic]

The yaelokre thing is reminding me of something I did when I was about seven or eight years old.

I had a bunch of toy horses and had invented extensive lore for them. It was a sprawling fantasy world, and each toy horse was a specific character in that world with specific relations to the other horses. These weren't just random toys I'd pick up when I was bored, the box of horses was an ongoing creative endevour that I had poured a lot of time and effort into (there were convoluted family trees drawn on graph paper and an in-universe newspaper I wrote with coloured pencils and handed out to my parents and siblings).

Anyway, one time a neighbour girl came over and played with the horses, which I was OK with in theory (and not sharing one's toys was some sort of high crime in my mom's book), but the neughbour girl made the pink princess pony be a bratty child instead of the adult diplomat character I'd developed her has.

I pitched a fit.

Absolute screaming meltdown. I could not tolerate someone taking my creation and doing it wrong. It genuinely hurt me to see my creation misused and twisted in that way, and the only way I had to express that was to scream at the neighbour girl for playing with a plastic toy wrong.

The difference between me and Yaelokre is that I was eight years old and Yaelokre is old enough to use twitter. And Yaelokre had the option to not post their characters on the internet, while I, because of my mom's rules, did not have the option of not sharing my horse characters with the neighbour girl.

So I undestand how Yaelorke feels and I sympathize with them, but I'm also going "dude, you had a choice here and you brought this on yourself".

--

(Anon who threw a fit at age 8 because someone played with a toy horsie wrong) I remember trying to explain to my mom, through the tears and the meltdown and an eight year old's grasp of things, that my horse characters were personal and meaningful and having someone "ruin" the story like that felt like a violation. And mom just got mad at me for being selfish and refusing to share my toys "It's just a toy horse, she didn't break it or anything". But I wasn't upset about the neighbour girl waving around a piece of plastic wrong, it wasn't the toy horse I was upset about, it was something iddy that I had created, and what upset me was my perception that I was being ignored and my thoughts and feelings were being misused, not the plastic horse. Yaelokre can probably understand and articulate their own feelings better than I could when I was eight, but they also seem to be feeling the exact same way, so if any of you are going to try to confront them about this, just know that laughing at them or getting mad at them will probably make things worse and make them feel even more trampled and violated than the fanworks existing in the first place, and will not make them go "oh well, it's just fiction, I'll learn to live with it". Because it probably isn't just fiction to them, it's an expression of their id.

I hate it when adults don't grasp this about kids' stuff. It's so common.

The more yaelokre keeps at this, the more they're going to find out the hard way how the internet treats people who regulate their emotions like a small child.

[puckingeccedentesiast]

Cool Continuations

Quinn x Reader!oc

Word Count: 900 words!

Authorial Note: Part two of ‘Concrete Impressions.’ This is also a part of Cookie’ Universe! Thank you for the overwhelming amount of support on this au so far 🥺🫶🏼. NOTE THAT THIS IS ALSO A NORMAL QUINN FIC, IT IS A READER INSERT THAT ALIGNS WITH MY AU.

Warnings: Mentions of War in a classroom context.

‘The Vietnam War, started on the first of November, 1955…’ Quinn rested his chin on his balled-up fist. The bottom, bony part of his elbow was turning red and beginning to ache from how much weight he was resting on it. He wasn’t paying attention to the lecture at all. Normally, he only paid attention if it was dire or if he had an exam fast approaching. But today was different. He glanced periodically over at Cookie, paying attention to someone else entirely.

Quinn was hunched over, day-dreaming himself silly over the idea of being her prince charming. He imagined teaching her to skate, maybe even getting her to come to one of his games, wearing his jersey...

“What was that date again?” Y/N sighed, looking pensively at her iPad notes. Quinn’s heart jumped—he wanted to answer her, just to see her smile. He quickly Googled it, then read her the answer. In doing this, he learned he could be the one to make her smile, something he had already decided was his favorite thing. He pretended to absorb all the professor’s information like a sponge, even jotting down a few notes when she did.

Soon, he was noticing even more details about her, things he couldn’t help but find adorable. She was so particular about her academics; her notes were methodically typed and organized. She used both a physical calendar and an online one, and had a habit of thinking out loud. During a small writing task, she mumbled to herself, like a human articulation machine. She would say a word, then scrunch up her face, muttering something about there being a better one. He found himself smiling whenever she did this, realizing he didn’t just like seeing the joy on her face when she found the right word—he loved it.

‘Homework is due by 9 p.m. on Friday… dismissed!’

Quinn watched as she wrote this down in her physical planner: left side, third row down. He barely knew her, but he already felt himself sliding from curiosity to borderline obsession. He wanted to know every little thing that made Cookie unique, down to the tiniest detail. "What are you doing for the rest of the afternoon, Cookie?”

He watched as Y/N meticulously packed her notebook and iPad into her bag, slinging it back onto her shoulder. She adjusted her hair, tucking it over her ear. “I’m heading back to my dorm to have a pretty tame night. I’ll probably finish homework for this class, as well as my work for bio! It’s Tuesday though, so I’ll be ordering Indian and watching Gilmore Girls!”

Quinn smiled to himself gently. “Sounds like a packed evening there!”

“It will be, but it’s relaxing to me.” She quietly thanked a classmate who held the door open for them. Once they were in the corridor, Quinn lingered, desperate to absorb every second he could with her.

“Do you have anything on tonight, Quinn?”

The dazed look in his eyes dulled, and he snapped back to the moment. “I have hockey training tonight. We’ve got a game on Thursday, against BU.”

“Fun!” she said with a beaming smile, removing her heavy bag to hold it in front of her. Quinn noticed this and put two and two together—she’d been holding it too long, and it was getting heavy.

“I hope you do well in that game, Quinn!”

Quinn scratched the back of his neck, letting out a sheepish laugh as his eyes crinkled with a smile. “I was actually wondering… I know it’s sudden and short notice, but would you like to come? I could get you a ticket.”

He watched as surprise washed over her features. “You would want me to come?”

“Yeah!” What he really wanted to say was, I’d love for you to be there, but he managed, “I think it would be great if you were there!”

She smiled, a small joy-filled expression that just about melted Quinn. “I’d love to be there if it’s not too much hassle to get me a ticket?”

“Not at all! I can get you one and message it to you… I would need your phone number though!” He was trying to play his cards right. Even though he barely knew her, he knew these hours were some of the most formative and important he’d ever lived.

“Here, pass your phone—I can put it in!” Quinn placed his phone in her small, delicate hand and watched as her nimble fingers typed in her number before she handed it back carefully. “I have to go, but I’m sure I’ll see you again, Polka-dot.”

“Polka-dot?” Quinn looked down at her, bewildered. “What kind of nickname is that?”

“You’ll just have to find out!” She grinned at him, her hair waving as she turned and made her way toward the exit, her bag slung back on her shoulder. Quinn felt dazed, in awe of everything about her—her beauty, her kindness, and most of all, her effortless ability to be herself.

As she left, he realized she’d agreed to come to his game, and he had her phone number. Now, he just needed to make sure he didn’t mess this up. The next priority was securing that ticket for her, which meant that soon, all his teammates would know.

This was going to be interesting. But Quinn already knew it would be so, so worth it.

[gowerhardcastle]

Hello, I'm a fellow IF fan waiting patiently for more updates atm. I'm wondering how you find the motivation to write so much and often?

Usually for even for creative writing, the best I can do is some paragraphs, then I just zone out for the rest of the day. Then I'll check my email then I realize it's actually late evening with only the same paragraphs.

---

I have a lot of answers to this question.  Specifically ten answers.

The first, biggest answer is that the words just well up in me, and if I don’t write, I feel antsy and malcontent.  I love writing, but if I have more than a few days where I’m not writing, I feel weird.  So this is definitely a weird-me-thing than anything I would advise anyone to acquire.

Second, when I write, I get in the zone and I just write and write for six or seven hours straight, and I’m having a great time the whole time.  I think my age does help me here because I didn’t grow up with the internet, and I have no real desire to keep checking stuff while I write.  I think that’s a huge benefit. 

I think if someone asked me if I recommend that they write like me, I would say hell no.  I know I’m a weird outlier.

Third, I blast music while I write.  This does a lot for my energy.

Fourth, coffee.  Lots of it.

Fifth, I type really, really fast.  I double space after periods because I learned to type on a typewriter.

Sixth, there’s a real cost to it.  I love playing computer games, and gaming in general, and writing just consumes that time, just devastates it.  If I’m not careful, it eats my reading time, but that I won’t allow.  But you have to be ok with the trade.

Seventh, I wake up quite early, before my family wakes up, just naturally.  I creep downstairs, take my iced latte from the fridge, which I made the night before, and write for hours while the world and the house is still.  This feels like time stolen.

Eighth, I have a really hard time resisting challenges I give myself.  I always have the urge to outdo myself, to make things more interesting, complex, bigger, fuller.  I see the perfect finished product, and I just want to get there, and I have a hard time saying “no!” to myself.  Quite the contrary.

Ninth, people who let me know that my games cheered them up on a hard day.  That they laughed so hard their gut hurts in spite of being on active deployment somewhere.  

That something I said helped them realize that they wanted to write, or that they could write and someone would read it.  That one of the relationships in my game helped them realize something really important about themself.  Or someone writes and says “I think about that one line from that game all the time,” or that they practiced and learned English from a story I wrote. 

I mean...that is unbearably humbling and kind of miraculous, and my impulse hearing that is to sit down and write more and connect with more people, because writing is very, deeply, an alone thing, and it requires that you sort of sequester yourself away from life for a long time.  It’s really hard! 

So making that connection with people is *incredibly* motivating.

Tenth, and this one is hard to articulate, so bear with me.  There’s a lot of junk in the world, and a lot of things masquerading as something wholesome and real that are quite the opposite.  A lot of this stuff is online, but also just out in the world.  I can’t do much about it, but to me, people who craft real words and read real words and care about good prose are maintaining some kind of small banner of resistance about what’s valuable and worth saving.  

When I sit down to write, I think about that. 

[infiniteglitterfall]

"...All of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.

"The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel."

(The problem is also not that Jewish students didn't support Palestinians or want a free independent Palestinian state. One of the biggest problems, in fact, is that the pro-Palestinian movement consistently implies that the only way to support Palestine is by calling for the destruction of Israel.

While activists in Gaza protest Hamas, activists outside of it follow Hamas's lead: framing this as a battle between all Palestinians and the existence of Israel.

This has effectively excluded activists in Palestine from the movement to support them. Which is a neat trick. /s)

"Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows.

"They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors.

They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class.

They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with Fuck Jews.

They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish.

"At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more."

(I've added links to each of these examples. I couldn't find an incident of "fuck Jews" plastered all over dorm windows, but I did find it written on a chalkboard, left in a note by someone robbing a Jewish student, and graffitied in a music building bathroom.

That last one was at UCLA, where there was also an incident in which Students for Justice in Palestine held a public beating of a Netanyahu piñata while an organizer with a bullhorn led everyone in a chant of "beat that fucking Jew!")

"I was not merely an observer of this spectacle. I’d been serving on now–former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s anti-Semitism advisory committee, convened after the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and amid student responses to it.

"I was asked to participate because I am a Harvard alumna who wrote a book about anti-Semitism called People Love Dead Jews.

"As soon as my participation became public, I was inundated with messages from Jewish students seeking help. They approached me with their stories after having already tried many other avenues—bewildered not only by what they’d experienced, but also by how many people dismissed or denied those experiences."

Dara Horn says "the foundational big lie," in one version after another throughout the centuries, has been "that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist."

"In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism.

"Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider 'Judaism.' This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

"Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider 'Jewish,' this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable.

"If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists.

"If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists.

"If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. 'Anti-Judaism' thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice."

(This second piece is a rip-off of Brazilian artist Carlos Latuff's 2008 comic celebrating a Communist event in Brazil.

It's also a particularly excellent example of how both "Jews are capitalists" and "Jews are communists" represent the core antisemitic trope of "Jews morally corrupt society.")

"This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist."

Dara Horn's piece has some super-fun examples.

"Around 38 C.E., after rioters in Alexandria destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes and burned Jews alive, the Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Philo and the non-Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Apion both sailed to Rome for a 'debate' before Emperor Caligula about whether Jews deserved citizenship.

"Apion believed that Jews held an annual ritual in which they kidnapped a non-Jew, fattened him up, and ate him. Caligula delayed Philo’s rebuttal for five months, and then listened to him only while consulting with designers on palace decor.

"Alexandrian Jews lost their citizenship rights, though it took until 66 C.E. for 50,000 more of them to be slaughtered.

"In medieval Europe, Jews were forced into disputations with Christian priests that placed Jewish texts and traditions on public trial, resulting in Jewish books being burned and Jewish disputants exiled. Later legal trials expanded on this concept, requiring Jews to defend themselves against the absurd charge known as the blood libel, in which Jews are accused of murdering and consuming non-Jewish children—a claim that has echoes in current lies about Israelis harvesting Palestinians’ organs."

fucking exhausting is what it is

I want to share more of this essay, and talk about it more. But this is more than enough for right now. This is way more than enough.

[drabbles-mc]

Misery Management

Natalie Berzatto x Richie Jerimovich

Warnings/Tags: 18+, pre-canon, emotional hurt/comfort, smoking, language, pining

Word Count: 2.1k

A/N: i cannot articulate how often i've thought of these two and today after so long i finally sat down and wrote for them. and i already want to write more. but here we are!!! richienat hours.

Natalie was sitting on the back steps of the house, elbows digging into her thighs just above her knees as she buried her face in her hands. The sobbing had stopped almost as soon as she’d felt the brisk fall air hit her face. A little shock to the system that somehow got her breathing right back under control. The tears weren’t stopping through. Eyes shut tight, heels of her palms pressing to them, and yet somehow tears were still slipping out and trailing down her cheeks.

She heard the door open behind her, but it wasn’t enough to get her to separate her face from her palms. Footsteps caused the wooden planks beneath her to vibrate. Seconds later, she heard someone let out a small groan as they sat down next to her. It was only then that she looked up to see who it was that had come out after her. She expected to look up through her tears and find Mikey sitting next to her, but instead Richie was the one parked beside her on the step. Hardly a sliver of space between them but it was just enough to say that there was one.

Sniffling, she wiped at her face again. At this point she knew it wasn’t going to stop the tears, but at least it would clear up her vision enough so that she could get an actual look at Richie.

He looked smaller than usual, and when she thought back on it later she would wonder if he was doing that on purpose or not. His position almost mirrored hers as he sat with his forearms draped over the tops of his legs. Because of the way the steps were built, he had ot hunch over himself to sit like that. It took a couple inches off his height that he could afford to lose sitting next to someone like Natalie.

She spent longer staring at him that she should have before she realized that he was looking right at her face. The realization made her want to sit up a little straighter for some reason, more because she hadn’t noticed than the fact that he was staring. She didn’t feel like she had the energy to follow through on it, though, not when the lump in the back of her throat was making it hard to pull in a deep enough breath to steel herself.

Sitting in silence together had never been a pastime for the two of them together. Natalie was fairly certain that nothing Richie ever did involved silence, and hardly ever involved sitting unless there was a movie involved. It felt odd, different, but not bad. As with most new things, she didn’t know what to make of it at first. She was still on edge from everything that had just happened with her mother, and even on their best days it wasn’t as though she and Richie were the types to seek each other out.

His eyes still hadn’t left her face. Natalie wasn’t sure if it was the sky or her own teary vision, but they looked even more blue than usual. It was also one fo the few times that she could remember looking at him like this and not feeling like there was a sniping comment on the tip of his tongue. He almost looked a little soft—it made the slightly patchy excuse for a beard that he was trying to grow not seem so bad.

Too many seconds had gone by with neither of them saying anything. Clearing her throat, Natalie wiped the tears off her cheeks again and said, “If you just came out here to see me crying, you can fuck off.”

He shook his head. “Don’t flatter yourself—like that’s not a show I've seen before.”

“Fuck you.” It didn’t come out as mean as she would’ve liked it to.

Like almost everything else, Richie didn’t let it faze him. “That sucked,” he said, nodding back over his shoulder at the house, “in there.”

She sniffled and nodded. “Yeah. It always sucks.”

Richie’s lips pulled down into a pensive frown. He let a meaningful pause slip by them. “Know what might make it suck less?”

Natalie rolled her eyes—she already knew where this conversation was going. “I don’t need your advice on how to deal with my mother, thank you.”

He chuckled. “Really? ‘Cause based off what I saw in there, I beg to fuckin’ differ.”

She shoved him hard enough to make him reach for the railing to catch himself. He didn’t go tumbling down the stairs, and laughing probably wasn’t the right response, but that had never stopped him before. He was nice enough to not push her back.

“Fuck off.” Her brows were pinched tight in annoyance when she said it, but he saw the smallest crack of a smile afterwards.

In the time it took Natalie to wipe what would hopefully be the last few tears off her cheeks, Richie produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Natalie rested her chin in her hand while she watched him fumble and fight against the Chicago wind to get it lit. A little bit of the worry was gone from her face. She was still frowning but there was an ease in her eyes that hadn’t been there until that moment. Just a little bit of something better than what’d been there before.

Richie’s grunt acted as a question as he tilted the pack of cigarettes towards her. Not an olive branch really, since miraculously this time he wasn’t the one who made her upset. But it was something similar. A peace offering on Donna’s behalf—something to take the edge off besides the tears.

She thought on it for a moment. Looking back and forth between the box he was holding out to her, and the lit cigarette that was hanging from his lips like it was about to blow away, she thought about it longer than she needed to given she already knew what the outcome was going to be.  Sighing, she lifted her chin from her hand and reached to grab a smoke for herself. Her motions were so fluid, delicate even, especially stacked up against the way that Richie and Mikey handled it most of the time.

Even with the cigarette in his mouth, Richie still managed to laugh and nod as he leaned in to light Natalie’s cigarette for her. “Fuck yeah,” he mumbled as he shoved his lighter back in his pocket.

He looked and sounded ridiculous enough in that moment to get Natalie to laugh too. Smoke accompanied the sound as she shook her head at him. “Shut up.”

Their laughter softened and disappeared, a relatively comfortable silence taking its place. They could hear the distant sounds of traffic, but the noise inside the house had completely died down. Donna tired herself out. It was just the two of them on the back step, tapping ash off the ends of their cigarettes and watching them get blown away in the breeze.

Richie looked over at Natalie again. She was staring down at what was left of her cigarette, but Richie could tell that her mind was somewhere else entirely. If he had to take a guess, he’d say she was not just replaying the argument that had broken out twenty minutes ago, but all the ones just like it that had unfolded over the years. They always went more or less the same way—Natalie never came out feeling like she’d won. He wasn’t even sure what winning would look like to her.

“You good over there?” he finally asked as he flicked away the butt of his cigarette.

She snapped back to it. Another quick drag bought her a little extra time as she nodded. “I’m fine.”

He ran his hands back over his head as he leaned against the railing. It left a little more space between them than there had been. “You gotta stop doing that shit to yourself, Sug.”

Her face scrunched. “Doing what?”

“I know what I say, but you’re not an idiot.”

“Wow,” she said, what little tension she’d managed to shed coming right back to her, “thanks for the ringing endorsement, Richard.”

“No, I just—I mean…you know what the fuck I mean,” he waved her off.

Her lips curled down into that pout she’d gotten so good at over the years. It used to be a guilt-trip thing—Richie had seen her use it on Mikey more times than he could count when they were real little. Now it was just muscle memory. More of a show of disappointment than a bargaining chip. Richie missed how it used to be.

“So, what? I’m the asshole because I want things to be different?”

The chuckle he let out wasn’t meant to be a mocking sound, but he could tell by the change in her expression that that was exactly how she was taking it. He tried to recover the ground he lost. “No one said that you’re an asshole.”

She nodded, snubbing her cigarette out once and for all on the bottom step. “At least I have that going for me—not an idiot, not an asshole.”

Richie cracked a small grin. “More than most people got goin’ for ‘em.”

She threw a gesture towards the house behind them. “You all always try to make me feel so stupid for wanting—”

“You’re not stupid for wanting things to be fuckin’ different. No one has ever said that.”

“Then why—”

“The stupid thing is you thinkin’ it’s actually gonna be.”

Natalie opened her mouth, a million angry words stacked one behind the other from the tip of her tongue to the base of her throat. But the longer that she looked at Richie, the more she found herself unable to say any of them. There were plenty of times, too many really, throughout the years when Richie said things because he wanted to get under her skin, wanted to hurt her a little bit. He’d learned from the best, how to lash out and make it count. Natalie had seen it and caught the brunt of it before—this wasn’t that. There was no couth, because it was still Richie, but this wasn’t his usual brand of being an asshole.

She tried to figure out how to navigate a response given that that was the case. Raking her fingers back through her hair, she sighed. “What else can I do?”

He laughed. “Not that.” She reached to try and shove him again but he stopped her this time. They were both laughing as he straight-armed her, keeping her on the complete opposite side of the steps from him. “Hey, hey. I’m just tryin’ to give you some, you know, some sage fuckin’ advice.”

“Yeah, you’re a real wealth of information.”

 “You’re coming after the wrong guy.” He pressed his hand to his chest.  “I’m just trying to keep you from being a leaky faucet for the rest of your life.”

Confusion crawled across her face as she tilted her head. “A what?”

He grinned, a little smug about it. “You know,” he trailed off as he made a crying motion with his hands.

Natalie rolled her eyes, trying to sound angry as she said, “I hate you.”

Peeling himself off the railing, he leaned in the other direction so that his shoulder bumped lightly against hers. Neither of them recoiled after the fact. “No you don’t.”

They sat there for a little while longer. Natalie stared off across the little strip of back yard that they had. If anyone was home in the neighbor’s house, it would’ve looked to them like Natalie was staring right through their back windows. When Richie looked over at her, though, he could see that she’d zoned right back out again.

Clearing his throat, he was getting ready to ask if she was ready to head back inside now that the warzone had died down. Before he could even open his mouth, though, Natalie dropped her head onto his shoulder. He craned his neck to be able to look at her face, afraid that she was going to burst into tears again and he wasn’t going to be able to reel that back in all over again. But she wasn’t crying. After a couple more seconds her eyes weren’t even open anymore.

He was fighting the urge to fidget around. If he hadn’t just polished off a cigarette a few minutes before he would’ve taken one out right then. He felt the deep sigh that Natalie let out, and he wondered if it was from exhaustion or relief.

She felt him getting twitchy. Without pulling away or opening her eyes, she said, “Give me two minutes.”

Richie heard that the even keel had returned to her voice. It was a genuine ask, one that he could’ve said no to if he really felt like being an asshole. But there’d be time for that on a different day. He settled back and dropped one hand onto Natalie’s knee. “Two minutes.”

(divider by @saradika-graphics 💞)

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[astercontrol]

Thinking about that ask I got about "dark and edgy" versus "light-hearted" Tron movies.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that part of the reason I like the original movie so much is that it's got SO much silliness, and yet also has extremely dark themes.

Not all of the dark themes are front-and-center in the story. Some of them only stand out after you've thought about it a while. But others are VERY clearly there. There's violence and gladiator battles-to-the-death. There's dictatorship and enslavement. Good guys are forced to murder senselessly for the bad guys' amusement. Friends are imprisoned together for ages talking about their hopes for when they get out and then one of them is killed just after they escape. There are villains grappling with how they've gone too far and are afraid to go farther but can't turn back now.

And yet there's also utterly absurd silliness! There's the way Crom blusters through his introduction as a compound interest program who's not made to fight in video games. There's a Bit that flies around going Yes and No and sassing Flynn as he does maybe the third-worst possible job of trying to drive a Recognizer. There's how Flynn acts before the whole adventure starts-- he is just an absolute clown and practically every single scene with him feels like a comedy.

The original TRON movie went SIGNIFICANTLY past the threshold of "this movie has so much silliness in it that it qualifies as a Silly Movie, regardless of what other deeply sad and serious stuff also happens in there."

That threshold isn't even "more than half." It's a small amount, proportionally. But silly is a powerful ingredient. It doesn't take very much to make the whole thing Distinctly Silly-Flavored.

But... that's a very fiction-centric trope.

If real life were held to this standard, real life would be far past that threshold. There is outright horror in this world. Lots and lots and lots of it. But mixed inextricably in with the horror and tragedy is more than enough silliness to make this, by fiction standards, a thoroughly silly world.

But we, as real people who are affected by the horror and tragedy as well as the silliness --- we don't judge the world by fiction standards.

And I think I'm realizing that I don't really judge fiction by those standards either.

You don't have to. I think some of the greatest writers don't. I think some of the greatest fiction of history isn't present-day-Hollywood easy to categorize as Deep Dark Edgy or Angsty Drama or Silly Light or Filthy Smutty or any box like that. I think the best of it has a big helping of each.

I wrote a fic about some of the "lightest" canon themes in that movie, like how Flynn keeps ending up in bizarrely homoerotic situations with Tron and Ram where he has absolutely no idea what's happening, and then suddenly at the end he kisses Tron's girlfriend for no clear reason, and then she kisses Tron and no one seems to care. My fic is Flynn's POV through all that nonsense and it's a serious story, about the painful emotional distance of socially navigating a world where people don't give the same signals you do, while you deeply care about respecting their boundaries even though you'll never understand them, and finally finding common ground because they, too, have known the feeling of facing someone you care about and not being able to articulate what you want.

I wrote a smut fic where that goofy compound interest program Crom loses his virginity to Ram and it turns out he has six tentacles that he uses for extra counting hands so he can go up to hexadecimal. And it's a sad angsty fic with, like, theology and philosophy and moral dilemmas about loyalty.

I wrote a fic about losing your purpose and questioning what you even are and splitting into multiple selves and being separated from someone you need to reach by a communication gap you'll never bridge, and being torn between loyalty to someone from a world you'll never understand and loyalty to someone who's basically you. And it's from the viewpoint of the fucking BIT.

There is no dark and light. There's fucking rainbows of color, everywhere.

And not many movies these days show it.