#ill also probably update the others at some point since some of their information has also updated!!

[clipso]

Fourth and final main character for my dating sim ^^ (once again, picrew by potatolord, template by @slashesotron)

[an-aura-about-you]

so who wants a friggin' life update?? under the cut because I imagine it's gonna get long and it's gonna touch on topics of hospitalization and contemplating a parent's illness and mortality.

so as if me having to go back to the office wasn't enough, I got word from my sibling that our mother went to the doctor back on like Tuesday and the doctor was like, "ok you need to go to the ER, we're calling the hospital to let them know." so she goes to the ER and she's got pneumonia. this is on top of her myriad COPD issues, but this apparently got a bit weird because she was hella confused and barely eating or drinking anything. (I have been informed this last bit matches her current dietary habits fairly well.)

and the thing about the confusion is this episode lasted over 24 hours and was severe to the point that she couldn't recognize my sibling at all. our mother's sisters checked in on all this, and both of them are registered nurses, and according to them they don't think the hospital was taking her condition seriously.

this is the same hospital that was hella dismissive about my sibling's fibromyalgia, so at this point the entire family's dunking on them.

but like, as soon as she was lucid again, the doctor was like, "ok, we're discharging her!" one of my aunts was insisting on doing some testing now based on some other symptoms she saw, but the doctor was like, "we wanna wait to let the pneumonia clear up first." and I'm over here like, "??? Shouldn't This Have Been Done During The Confusion Episode? Am I Missing Something?"

anyway, she's back at home and the advice the doctors gave her going forward is stop smoking weed and see a neurologist. which at this point is just farcical. she's been smoking pot since she was in high school and has made it clear she's not going to stop now, and she's also apparently pitching a fit about not wanting to see the neurologist my aunt recommended.

(I find it kind of funny and kind of said that this same aunt is pretty hung up on the notion of me eventually reconciling with my mother. the last time I saw her, she was trying to talk my mother up to me with zero prompting on the matter. I have no idea if she's aware of all the times my mother has apparently shit talked about her to my sibling. like, stand-up sibling behavior on my aunt's part, I guess, but she's wasting her time not because I'm not gonna come around but because my mother doesn't seem to care about her sister at all.)

but the really funny part about this whole tragicomedy is that, even if my mother is set on smoking weed and watching cable tv until she dies, she's probably not going to get either soon. we're all aware of the strikes by now, but on top of that pretty much all her regular sources of weed are gonna be cut off. marijuana is legal for medical purposes here but not for recreational use, and her medical marijuana card is about to expire. BUT with this most recent episode and official medical records firmly stating that she's not to smoke weed, it's doubtful that her doctor's gonna let her renew her card. she's cut ties with her most consistent drug dealer because he's apparently somehow out-asshole'd her. I know some other family members enjoy pot, but I have no idea who if any of them would be willing to regularly supply her with weed.

honestly, I'd say this whole thing ended on a fairly tedious note if I thought it was actually over. I'm still wondering what the fuck was up with that confusion episode. I'm pretty fucking angry about the confusion, about how her mind just gave her a clean slate for a while. word is she was extremely pleasant and agreeable in her confusion, and I'm like how dare you forget the hurt you caused. how dare you be vulnerable and unaware of the abuses you committed and, according to the family members I still speak to, continue to commit. how dare you put me in the position where I have to be the bigger person about this.

that particular thing puts me in mind of The Magnus Archives, specifically the episode The Kind Mother. that episode struck a chord with me well before this bullshit became a regular part of my life. I ended up briefly discussing the episode with my sibling because we were talking about listening to some of TMA this weekend, and they agree this episode will probably mess us both up.

and I bitch like I'm not already doing the simplest solution about this matter, which is continuing not to see or talk to her. and between this and her own bitching/reluctance about continuing to see doctors, I get the disgusting shiver of agreement that I'm not the only one who thinks things might be better if she finishes what seems like this prolonged process of dying. it seems like everybody's misery will be over when it happens. my sibling, gods love her, still has some kind of affection for our mother and doesn't know what to do with themself with all of this. Dad hasn't said much about this matter, and come to think of it I haven't seen him in person since this began, though we've spoken on the phone. and I don't even know how I'm gonna feel. the anger was kind of a surprise. not much of one. we're talking like the Fry meme: "I'm shocked! Shocked! ...well, not that shocked."

[p1nkp0nkk]

for the ask game : 🎻 VIOLIN — does your oc play any instruments? what is their skill level (beginner/intermediate/advanced/virtuoso/etc)? 💯 HUNDRED POINTS SYMBOL — share three random facts about your oc that others may not know.

🔺 RED TRIANGLE POINTED UP — does your oc know how to use any weapons?

🐉 DRAGON — what is your oc's favorite mythical creature?

☕️ HOT BEVERAGE — does your oc prefer coffee, tea, hot chocolate, milk, water, or some other drink? how do they like to take this drink (ex. coffee with milk, hot chocolate with whipped cream, a specific kind of tea, etc)?

🤓 SMILING FACE WITH GLASSES — is your oc chatty or quiet? are they at ease in social situations, or are they more shy?

all. for any ocs and stuff

🎻i think. if pink tried she could learn to play the piano really quickly. dexter can probably play the ukulele and the piano and maybe a guitar if he tried really hard. i think. mime can play the violin but i forgot if im making that up or if thats an actual thing. therapy can probably play the piano maybe. pianos are cool.

💯pink is. not human whatsoever. or atleast not mostly (ryan is her cousin ryan is human). she just has human skin because??? good question. idk bro. dexter is. a partial shapeshifter but in a lame way. sometimes he wears his ears and tails like a furry and sometimes he can actually merge into them and take on partial animal features. also his 'dad' (in quotations caus he sucks and i hate him) has purple skin because he is a dark elf. its a recessive gene so. dexter didn't get it. therapy was. a model child and was always on stage n stuff and actually is really fucked up from it(severe social anxiety; heavily neglected; a lot of other stuff) also adding this one on even though its. an extra one. dartrix, one of dexters middle names, comes from a pokemon

🔺before i. actually answer this i thought id say pinks species went through evolution specifically to build weapons into her wings and tails because they did not know how to defend themselves. pink has like. massive spikes out of her wings and her tail. and has super sharp claws that could kill someone

okay. um. dexter is really fucking traumatized and can work just about any weapon; or make things that weren't a weapon in the first place into a weapon. he's partially good with blades.

AA definitely does not know how to work a weapon at all but if you gave her a gun she would. figure it out really quickly and probably accidentally shoot herself in the leg. but then she'd probably retain that information and then know how to work it just incase (will probably fuck up again though because their. whole thing is bad luck)

Trixie. is like. a mad scientist. she could probably work a weapon and also infuse skin burning acid into it and then look deep into the burned acid molecules of your flesh and figure out how to make it as awful as possible. for science of course(he is crazy and insane)

🐉this is. an interesting question because a lot of my ocs are made up animals. me personally i really. like demons and anything with wings.

pink probably likes griffins or. maybe unicorns if she's feeling corny.

dexter likes skinwalkers(if that counts)(sea serpents and kappa if not maybe)

Pip(AA) probably likes dragons and unicorns caus pip is lame as hell.

Tisini(Trixie) likes. centaurs but not because they're cool but because she desperately wants to know the genetics behind them

i. dont know its kinda difficult to answer since a large majority of my ocs are mythical creatures lmao. also i thought id add in even if seraphim wasnt an incubus he would probably still have incubi and demons as his favourite

☕i think ive. answered this before. i dont remember ill probably edit and come back with this if i did(update i. did not)

uhhhh pink likes both but prefers cold drinks probably. pink works in a coffee shop she makes a lot of. hot drinks so probably a bit ironic probably. dexter likes cold drinks, it depends for me i like both but it just. depends how i feel. i think i generally prefer cold. pip likes scorching hot or freezing cold no inbetween there is something different wrong with. it.

🤓BATTERY ACID(AA/pip) is. so fucking annoying they'll make you want to rip your ears off. they are so incredibly social its sickening. pink has social anxiety and is bad at hiding it but shes still really nice and actually does enjoy talking like. 60% of the time. seraphim is flirtatious so hes chatty unless you. dont want to fuck him. but even outside of that hes actually pretty social and hes pretty nice. hes really confident and hes aware of it. antrigus is really. really chatty. trigz has social anxiety but attempts to be outgoing so. kinda both. asmodeus(seraphim is. dating this guy btw) is kinda awkward but hes still kinda confident so its kinda a weird mix but he tries his best. hes fairly nice. alex is also a chatterbox but they'll. shut up if you dont speak to them enough unlike the other guys. dexter will kill you if you talk to him.

also. editing this later i usually put my asks tag in the front but i. put the wrong tag so i had to add it at the end lmao

this is. really long oh my god

i fucked up seraphims oc tag I'm crying i also have to. add it at the end(hes an. incubus not a succubus)(the. second asmodeus tag will make less sense now unless you read from bottom to top but its fine)

[writing-class-projects]

Documentaries Are the Only Reason We Are Alive Today

Humans have been documenting things since the start of their existence. Though, they likely didn’t realize it. A man dusting an image of his hand on a cave wall was probably done to simply claim it as his own. However, this is still a document, as it showed others who would see it later that he was once there. You could even call it an “artistic representation of actuality”, as John Greirson defines it. That’s just one of the first instances of human documentation. We would go on to make so much more, from the first documentations of danger, time, recipes, and language, to more modern things like Twitter.

The documentation of what could possibly kill you may be one of the most important developments of all humankind. I mean, certainly not many of us would be alive without it. If I didn’t know any better I’d eat loads of mistletoe berries, especially with the fear of starvation guiding me. It also looks delicious, but that’s besides the point. The point is, if someone hadn’t documented their findings of mistletoe being entirely poisonous, many would have fallen ill to it, or many similar plants. This is likely where a lot of the earliest documents started. The earliest humans would see others die from eating/drinking certain things, and avoid it themselves by taking note of the area/plant with some sort of sign. Perhaps a collection of oddly shaped sticks. As in ancient times, they didn’t always have written language that everyone could understand. Spoken word, sure, but writing didn’t come for a while. At least not on paper, and not with words. So, they used markings. These served as documentation of danger, a water source, a food source, or the way home. Everything essential for survival. It’s communication without directly speaking to another person, which is needed in order to survive for a long time.

Regardless of the type of document; the idea of information being recorded, archived, and shared is by far one of the most essential steps in how humans have evolved from ancient times. The ability to learn and retain information and to pass it on from generation to generation is truly what sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. From sticks on the ground to indicate danger to the formation of language and verbal communication, documentation has come a long way and has kept the human race alive and moving forward so that we can be here today, eating our McDonald’s and sitting on our soft beds, reading a Tumblr post about documentaries. Beginning with the first forms of writing, information such as maps, pictograms and cave paintings have helped people understand each other and the world they lived in. Furthermore the sharing of information and the formation of language gave humans the ability to learn, invent, and explore ideas that had been untouched until then. This would go on to inspire more thought and provide the building blocks to the modern world. As a friend of mine said, the only thing he thought may be more important than documentation would be, “the ability to obtain substance and maintain bodily functions”. Although a majority of the documents from the past no longer exist today, from what remains it’s easy to see the key role they played in the survival and development of the human race. Even now, documents protect us without us even realizing it. Our GPS location is updated and documented all the time on our cell phones. Without that, people may not know where we are when we need them to. Documents were able to keep our ancestors alive and are one of the key reasons we’re here today. They acted as markings and told time, they were shared and used to create a better understanding of the world. Without documents humans wouldn’t be here.

[the-final-sif]

Some updates regarding the Dream situation on twitter, in effort to keep people on here informed.

The accuser in question, Amanda, went on a bit of a spree of activity on twitter and tik tok. This included a lot of very ill advised things including doxxing herself, tweeting at Keemstar to cover the situation (later retracted after I think she was told that Keemstar was not someone she wanted to get involved), and making a lot of tweets that brought up some more questions about what her claims specifically were and what evidence she had. An account that she confirmed to be her BF showed up and provided some further information that has made some of the prior claims confusing.

Finally, it seemed that someone offered her good advice. She stated that she didn't have any physical evidence of what took place, and that she was going to the police/to consult a lawyer about what to do. She's been largely silent on twitter since that occurred, her tik tok has deactivated, although it is unclear if she took it down or if it got mass reported or something. Her boyfriend's account on twitter has also deactivated.

In looking through her prior tik toks, someone found a previous video she posted in 2021 showing off dms on instagram that she claimed were from Dream. The dms are partially censored, but when lined up with the current dms claimed, they appear to match up. Importantly, between the two periods, at least three of her messages to Dream were deleted if both videos are assumed to be true. A transcript of the conversations was complied here on reddit, including markings for deleted messages:

The entire conversation was rather dry, sporadic, and doesn't have much to it other than her asking him for advice on becoming a streamer, and finally the snapchat. It's important to note, that despite what some people have said, Dream said he believes the instagram dms to be real, he did not make any statement about the snapchat dms being real, fake, or somewhere in the middle.

Since then, there was some weirdness with a bunch of other accounts making unverified claims, that I am personally choosing to ignore until any of them provide literally any evidence.

One other account, someone called Bee, has very recently claimed to have gone to school with Amanda. They were able to post a yearbook page that appears to be of Amanda, including her full name (something she had already posted). They stated that Amanda had lied in the past about having sexual dms from Dream at their school, including creating fakes to show people. Bee said they don't know if the current instagram dms are real or not, but after they recognized Amanda, they wanted to put forward that she had done something similar like this in the past. Bee has not been able to/cannot prove that Amanda said these things, other than word of mouth, but they do appear to at least have a yearbook that contains Amanda's photo and name.

On Dream's side of things, he has made no further statements on the matter since his twitlonger. Assuming he has gotten in contact with lawyers, he's likely going to be silent about anything to do with this until such time as a court case is filed or his lawyers advise him otherwise. I would expect that to take awhile, particularly if dms have been deleted or removed.

As of this time, we have no statements from lawyers, and it will probably be awhile until we get those from either side.

I am personally still waiting for legal action until I cast any sort of judgement on this situation. The allegations could be true, or they could be false. Lawyers will be better suited to sort this situation out, and it does appear both sides have thankfully gotten lawyers involved. Nothing has been proven as of this point, and it will likely be awhile before we know anything as a matter of fact.

[virtues-end]

FAQ

◈ Will we ever learn about the MCs past?

Indeed you will. Details about the MCs past will unfold gradually throughout the story.

◈ Does the MC age/is the MC immortal?

The MC has not physically aged since undergoing the ritual of binding ~7 years ago. As a result of that ritual, they are also effectively immortal. Canonically, the MC is somewhere between their late 20s and mid 30s.

◈ Why doesn't the MC just run away?

The MC will suffer severe (physical) consequences should they stray too far apart from their Keeper, becoming violently ill (potentially to the point of unconsciousness) if the distance becomes too great.

◈ Why doesn't the MC just kill Shea?

The magical seal on the MCs body prevents them from attacking their Keeper with the intent to kill. Also, I would not have a story if I let the MC act as a deranged murderhobo all of the time (a little murdering is okay, though).

◈ How do you pronounce Shea?

Feel free to pronounce it however you wish. I personally pronounce it as [ʃeɪ].

◈ Can the main character be trans?

Yes. You'll also be able to choose whether they've transitioned or not. It's something that might also come up later, in talks with other characters. For intimate scenes, the first time you engage in one you will be asked to 'set' your character's top and bottom parts.

◈ Who are the ROs?

Virtue's End has four relationship options: Shea, Penrose, Elexis, and Idris. You can read more information about them in this post. If you'd like to see my sketches of them, you can do so here.

◈ How tall are the ROs?

I've kept it deliberately vague in-game for immersive purposes but Shea is 192 cm (6'3"), Penrose is 198 cm (6'6"), Elexis is 176 cm (5'9"), and Idris is 169 cm (5'7").

◈ Are there any poly relationships in the game?

I'd like there to be, though it'll probably be complicated. Coding/writing-wise, but also... all of these people are not okay. Some of them hate each other's guts, or at the very least strongly dislike each other. And I don't want to force a loving relationship where there is none, so it would be toxic as hell. We'll see.

◈ Are any of the ROs trans?

Male Penrose is a trans man, and female Elexis is a trans woman. In addition, both Shea and Elexis can be set to nonbinary. All of the characters have set top and bottom parts that you will not be able to change.

◈ Are there any mystery or secret ROs?

At the moment, I've decided to limit the (full) relationship options to Shea, Penrose, Elexis, and Idris. However, the player might occasionally have the opportunity to engage in a fling/hook-up with a minor character.

If you're familiar with the old version of Virtue's End and are wondering about the ROs that were cut (namely Sutton, Eiri, Guinn, and Sinclair), some of them might still make an appearance, though they won't be full ROs. I've also chosen to 'merge' a few of them with the existing companions.

◈ Do you answer 'RO reacts’ kind of asks?

As these types of asks require a lot of energy to respond to, I generally do not answer them. However, I might make an exception if it’s a particularly interesting concept or prompt.

◈ Are you still working on the game?

Yes, I am! Although the game was on hiatus for a while, I've since resumed working on it, and am currently working on chapter two. Fair warning, I'm a slow writer, but I'm steadily chipping away at it. :-)

◈ Is there a Virtue's End discord server?

No. There used be, but I deleted it due to a variety of reasons (hiatus, inactivity, social anxiety, etc). And I'm currently not really interested in running a new one.

◈ Do you have a Patreon/Ko-Fi?

I do. I have a Patreon, where I post early access to game updates and sketches and progress updates, that sort of thing. Please note, however, that it doesn't offer very many Patreon 'exclusives' such as short stories/snippets/things like that. All game updates will be released publicly eventually, so please don't feel like you need to pay for them. I'd be extremely grateful for any support you could give me, however. I also have a Ko-Fi, though it serves as more of a tip jar.

◈ When was the game last updated?

The public version of the game was last updated on October the 15th 2024. The Patreon version currently offers no additional content.

◈ What's the current word count of the game?

The public version is a little over 76k words (excl. code). The Patreon demo currently has no additional content.

◈ Do you have an update schedule?

Sort of? My goal is to release an update roughly every 1-2 months. The length of these updates may vary, depending on how much time I've had to work on them and other (real life) factors. The Patreon version receives more frequent, 'incomplete' updates, whilst I generally try to update the public demo when I have something a little more substantial/finished.

◈ Is the old version of the game still playable?

Yep! The previous version of the game remains up on Dashingdon. Please note, however, that it will no longer receive updates.

◈ Do you accept nsfw asks?

Yes, I do, but it depends on the contents of the ask whether I feel comfortable answering it or not. Fair warning, messages that solely consist of people being horny about characters will most likely be received with a chuckle but will otherwise remain unanswered.

Any NSFW or suggestive asks will be clearly marked as mature and tagged with ‘nsfve’. Explicit content will always be hidden under a cut.

◈ Where is your awesome icon from?

It's a terrific tattoo design by artist Naomi Butterfield!

[timidloner]

if you end up reading SVSSS, tell me if you liked it and thank you for the good wishes btw <3 ill survive long enough to see my MC getting crush by joren's arms hopefully i have to. EVEN MORE AFTER the tunic idea... tiddies are also my weakness, we shall suffer together. ahaha;; winning at what cost

on another note, this makes wonder would he realize the horny anguish of the MC (and perhaps use against them) or would he miss it because technically you did clarify he is quite emotionally aware of MC's likings towards others (with the jealousy) but it hits differents when its towards yourself if that makes sense cause you spoke about how he'd react to rejection but what about attraction huehuehue (for science i need to know especially after what you said about the nickname: i will malewife him)- rambling

Sure!! Though I'll probably go around to check it out after the November update, I plan to take a week off after uploading Chapter 1, so that will be the perfect time to catch up on some hobbies.

Ahh, university. I'm actually starting college in January, so soon I'll understand your pain :((, kinda excited though! And yes, I'm gonna deliver some good action with his chest. We stay winning, Rambling! I'm feeding us for free, don't die!

Now, going back to Joren...

He may not have the emotional intelligence required to deal correctly with his feelings and traumas, but he's very observant and, in the past, he was good at recognizing social clues. But it's been a while since he was around people, not to mention he no longer cares about social rules.

There are things he experienced himself (like people being attracted to him), and there are others that he learned from looking at people interacting in his free time (during his past).

I don't remember if I said this, but his view of intimacy is linked to roughness. He wasn't the only person who served as a sword for that particular noble house, there were others like him. This was his "social circle" to say it somehow, and sparring and fights usually lend to sex. And it helped him to know what a person attracted to him looked like.

The other things (loving gazes, tender touches, and all that) were something he could see sometimes around him. He knows what a person in love is supposed to look like. And he's going to know at some point if MC has feelings for Lena/Aiken, since he's always paying close attention to them.

And yeah! He's going to know if MC is attracted to him!! But it'll take more than just a heated glance, they have to be more obvious than that.

Also, he's very neutral about his body image. He knows some people find him scary. And there are others who don't care, his past sexual partners were just as scarred as him. So, his body is just that, a body. No shame or pride whatsoever about that.

But if MC found him attractive, he wouldn't hesitate to use that information to his advantage. Is MC visiting? Suddenly he needs more wood, and of course, he's chopping the logs without a tunic.

Ah, MC is carrying something to the Temple? He can help them. And no, he isn't flexing his biceps. But they totally should go swimming later with him. Or he can show them some cool tricks with his sword, no shirt, but it's because of the heat, nothing more.

And so forth.

I think he'd enjoy teasing them like that, it's proof that they like him in some way... But soon, the teasing would escalate if MC doesn't put an end to it, and he'll become more aggressive in his pursuit until he crosses all boundaries and they end up fucking.

[possiblyimbiassed]

The lying liars who lie

Years and years late to the party, I’ve finally gotten my hands on all the DVDs of BBC Sherlock, and I thought it would be fun to watch the extra material carefully, one piece after another, and also listen to at least some of the show makers’ commentary of the episodes. But at this point, after S4 where DVDs seemed to be a constant lying device in general, I tend to look at them with a bit more suspicious eyes...

I still love the show of course, but now that I’ve taken this deep dive into all the special features, I find them a truly hard thing to try to wrap my head around. Even this long after the fact, I’m amazed by the amount of shameless, self-congratulatory BS in the DVDs, where the people involved can’t have enough of complimenting each other and their show, while they skillfully avoid to discuss anything actually meaningful about the plot line. ;) For example, Moffat claims in the S2 DVD that “In fact, you’ll never see a more obsessively authentic version of Sherlock Holmes than this one”. But if we follow their light-hearted commentary, which basically takes the show at face value, I’d call that not just hyperbole, but an outright lie. If you want to see the ‘authentic’ stories from ACD’s work in this show, you’ll definitely need to go much deeper into the subtext and meta levels - neither of which are mentioned on these DVDs of course. Here’s my own (rather subjective) ‘review’ of the whole thing, trying to pinpoint why I view most of the commentary of the show from its own makers as an advanced art of deception. 

(My musings under the cut)

Series 1 - a wealth of extra material

First of all - as many of you probably knew already - the whole of the Unaired Pilot is added to the DVD of S1. In the extra material about the making of the series, they (Sue Vertue, Mofftiss and others) talk about what things they changed between the Pilot and ASiP, claiming that many changes were necessary improvements once they knew that they had a whole series and a lot more time at their disposal. 

Which I can perfectly understand and agree with in general. But I think what’s missing in their discussions is more interesting than what’s actually there (”Mind the gap” ;) ). Things that I would expect from the show makers when they go to the trouble of comparing the pilot version with the aired product. There’s not a word, for example, about the fact that they added both Mycroft and Moriarty to the story in ASiP - two characters who later turn out to play major roles and appear in almost every other episode until the end of TFP. Or about the choice that one of the screenwriters would play Mycroft. 

Neither do they discuss why they chose to relocate the place where Sherlock was challenged by the cabbie from 221B to Roland Kerr’s School of Further Education. Instead they focus on the details, like for example the new design of the interior of 221B.

Not to mention the fact that almost every scene in the Pilot is mirrored in ASiP (as pointed out long ago by @kateis-cakeis X), but at Angelo’s in the Pilot Sherlock follows the events with the cabbie while looking in an actual mirror. I even noticed that in the Pilot the cabbie is offering Sherlock dark-coloured bottles with the pills in them, while in ASiP those bottles are transparent, as if the cabbie is offering Sherlock to play Black or White in the chess game that he is simulating. What’s with all these mirrors, though? Not a word on the DVD... ;)

Now, even though these rather remarkable choices are neglected together with a great bunch of minor ones, I still think that the most interesting fact about all this is that they actually included the whole pilot version within this DVD, which is sold by the franchise. Why even do this, when it raises far more questions than it answers? The only logical reason I can come up with is that they’re laying out a track of little hints that anyone with a deep enough interest in the show to actually buy the DVDs can try to follow. And it seems to me that lying by omission is one of the first steps in the long line of cryptic and misleading author comments on this show. But at the same time, they clearly want the fans to have access to it all, even the abandoned version.

Moving on to Series 2, time for bigger lies 

In the extra material of this DVD Benedict himself describes how his character "faces one of his deadliest enemies in the shape of Love, and it comes in the form of Irene Adler, who is this extraordinary dominatrix [insert here a bunch of superlatives regarding Adler]...”. And then we see how Adler whips Sherlock with a riding crop (without any kind of consent, I have to add) while he’s lying on the floor, and we have Lara Pulver telling us how it was to have a go at Benedict on set. So Holmes whips dead bodies and Adler whips living; seems like a match made in hell! :))

Gatiss claims, grinning with his whole face, that “they’re clearly, absolutely made for each other”. OK, so I think we can see Sherlock being intellectually impressed by Adler, and even trying to protect her from Mycroft, and we can see John acting jealously. We can also see her being dressed and styled as a perfect, female mirror of Sherlock. But I’m still at a loss what all this has to do with love on Sherlock’s part? Especially since he’s not even responding in any fashion to her various attempts at seducing him. 

And there’s more: Paul McGuigan, the director of ASiB, claims that the scene where Sherlock has a conversation with Adler inside his Mind Palace about the crime case with the car that backfires "is a part of a kind of love story, if you like...” No, I don’t. Maybe it’s just me, but if their aim really was to convey to their audience a love story between Sherlock and The Woman, I think they failed miserably. All I see is a guy ’mansplaining’ to a clever woman how to use her brain, while she’s trying to flirt with him by expressing her admiration (to no avail, though) and make deductions at the same time. Nothing new under the sun, really. John did the same thing repeatedly in ASiP (without making own deductions) and got far more attention from Sherlock, but I’ve never heard any of the show makers call that ”a love story”. But by ’lie-splaining’ the scene with Irene to the audience, they try to manipulate us all to see it as such...

In all the direct commentary of this episode, where Steven, Mark, Sue, Benedict and Lara are present, I get the impression that every time they even touch on the relationship between Sherlock and John, they hurry to add the term “friendship” or “man love” or similar words in case they forgot them at first, avoiding even the tiniest possibility that there could be anything more going on between them. They even explain that when Irene calls them “a couple” she does not mean anything romantic. This whole approach feels almost paranoic in the midst of all the laid-back jokes and light-hearted talk about the filming. It’s as if a sort of restrictive, heteronormative filter or blanket is being constantly applied, to teach the audience the ‘no homo’ lesson of it all. And the more I listen to this, the more tiresome it becomes.

In the commentary Moffat does reveal an interesting detail, though: that the ‘Flight of the Dead’ in ASiB was inspired by a cut out scene in the Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service. To me this is just one more reason to question the ‘authentic’ quality of this scene, as opposed to possibly taking place in Sherlock’s Mind Palace. But I digress... 

Listening to the commentary in general, it’s like it’s aimed to distract the attention from what’s going on at the screen rather than highlight it and try to explain their intentions. They do mention that Irene didn’t actually ‘beat’ Sherlock in the end of ASiB, but there’s no explanation of this obvious deviation from canon, where Adler does indeed fool Holmes, taking advantage of his prejudices.

The rest of the extra material of S2 is mostly about technical stuff, special effects and such, and also about filming techniques and Benedict’s delivery of fast deductions. But the part I really do love is the one where Andrew Scott talks about how much he enjoyed playing the scene where Moriarty dances before breaking into the Crown Jewels. That’s one of my favorite scenes of he whole show. :) Also, the takeaway message from this DVD is Moffat’s words at the end: 

“These are still the formative years of Sherlock Holmes, and the most important thing about this series is not that it’s updated; it’s the fact that those two men are still young and they’re still at the beginning of what they don’t yet know is gonna be a lifelong partnership”. 

And then comes Series 3... 

...and its extra material, with the most blatant attempts at deception so far, I believe. At this point Sherlock is called a “psychopath” by both the show’s characters, John’s blog, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as if it were true, which is a big deviation from ACD canon. That simply doesn’t happen there; while Holmes is sometimes described as eccentric, no one in the books is ever claiming that Sherlock Holmes has some kind of mental illness leaning towards cruelty and egotism - not even his enemies say this about him. In the show, however, they begin in ASiP with making him torture a dying man for information (something that is not included in the Pilot). And in S3, where they avoid discussing the reason why they turned Mary Morstan into a ruthless assassin, this major shift is glossed over by the fact that in the same episode (HLV) they also turn Sherlock into a murderer, who cold-bloodedly blows the brains out of a blackmailer for threatening to make said assassin’s crimes public. 

But without ever getting into the “why” of it all, the cast and crew seem overly happy and smiling describing these rather morbid choices as something positive; “fantastic”, "fresh and new” and "amazing” are their choice of words. Benedict claims that Mary, who has literally shot and almost killed Sherlock in HLV, is now "a new best friend of Sherlock’s”. Amanda claims that Mary “is protecting John” when she shoots Sherlock in the chest. Now they’re both psychopaths, and poor little John is forced to stomach them both because he’s addicted to danger. In Amanda’s words, Mary also “kind of gets in between the two of them, but she wants them to be together as well”.  Which is a load of BS considering that Mary tries to kill the protagonist of the story.

Lars Mikkelsen thinks it’s “such a good script” because “you’re mislead as an audience”. But he never gets the chance to expand on what the misleading actually contains, because then Mofftiss cut in to express how much they love playing with “what ifs”. As if this whole mega-budget project of a show were just a big experimental playground without any actual story to tell. 

Benedict repeats his line from HLV that Magnussen “preys on people who are different” and Moffat also says he “exploits people who are different”. Which is really confusing, considering what we can see Magnussen actually do in the show. Lady Smallwood and John Garvie are two well-established, powerful governmental politicians whom Magnussen blackmails by finding their respective pressure points. In Garvie’s case his pressure point seems to be alcohol problems in his past, but according to media he’s later arrested on charges of corruption. Lady Smallwood is blackmailed on the basis of her husband having sent compromising letters to a minor many years ago, in spite of later claiming that he thought she was older and stopped when he found out the truth. And then Magnussen is blackmailing an assassin who recently threatened to execute him but shot Sherlock Holmes instead, in order to try to get at Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, another powerful governmental figure. 

But what does media seeking out dirt on certain people in power and their families have to do with “people who are different”? Despicable as the method may be, isn’t this unfortunately how political power play usually works in our society? Or are TPTB somehow a repressed minority group now? Unless this whole “people who are different” accusation is actually about something entirely different, something that none of the show makers even cares to mention... ;)

In these DVDs, none of the involved persons is ever discussing the change of roles with regards to canon, though, or the (lack of) logics in this turn of events, or even a hint about the narrative motivation behind them. It’s all about the great Drama, the extraordinary visual effects and the aim to endlessly “surprise the audience”. Which is fine by me to a certain extent, but when this is all that’s being said, it feels extremely superficial, as if the audience is merely seen as a bunch of consumers that have to be triggered more and more by horror, special effects and cliff hangers to be able to appreciate the show. (“Warm paste” indeed, like Gatiss has later criticized some viewers of wanting...) While the "why”; the idea behind this surrealistic adaptation, made by self-proclaimed fanboys of ACD, is not even touched upon. Around this, the silence is total and therefore totally confusing.

Maybe I shouldn’t even go into Series 4...

...but why not, since I’ve already started? :) 

First of all, there’s a lot of extra material on this DVD and I particularly love the parts about the music and composing and Arwel Wyn Jones’ work with the design and build-up of John’s and Mary’s flat and the interior of 221B. Those bits are truly enjoyable. What I could live without, though, is the leading commentary that kind of instructs us, the audience, how we should interpret the show. 

Benedict is on it again on this DVD, telling us that in TST they picked up where they left off in S3 and “It’s a very happy unit of three people that then become four.” Why does he feel the need to make this statement, considering how S3 ended? Actually, if there’s anything I totally fail to see in S4, it’s happiness. The banter between the three  of them may seem entertaining for a while, but who could have a relaxed, warm relationship with someone who tried and almost succeeded to kill you less than a year ago? Without any sign of remorse? Now there’s a dark tone of discomfort and mean jokes that feels forced and not even a bit happy to me. 

But Martin tells us how excited John and Mary are about starting a family and Amanda mentions how much they’re looking forward to the baby. Again and again it’s repeated, as though trying to rub it in: “they’re in a good place, they’re a loving, married couple”. Yeah, right - a child that (judging by TSoT) wasn’t at all planned and now with an assassin for a mother... Twice we see the new parents complain that their daughter has the mark of Satan on her forehead and debate which horror movie she’s from. The clichéd hypocrisy of it all is sickening, and I’m willing to bet that it’s really meant to be. ;) 

But Gatiss chimes in, deciding for us all that the christening of Rosie is “a funny scene” and “they’re enjoying each other, enjoying being on adventures as a three”.

An interesting detail is that Gatiss also tells us that the working name of this episode was “The Adventure of the Melting power Ranger”. So this little blue guy was that important? :) And - even more interesting - is when he says: “Cake is now the code for violent death”. So how should we interpret Sherlock, John and Molly going out to have cake in TLD then, on Sherlock’s (supposed) birthday? 

These might be jokes, though, but when they tell us that Sue cries every time she sees Mary’s death I strongly believe they must be joking. How could anyone feel truly moved by this overly sentimental long monologue where far more efforts are put into reacting to Mary’s speech than saving her life? And John’s mooing like a cow, is that also moving? :)

One thing Martin says about TLD that actually disgusts me is regarding the morgue scene where John assaults Sherlock and Sherlock lets it happen: “From there, really, their relationship can only sort of rebuild, that’s the absolute worst it can get”. As if outright physical abuse would be something that makes you want to rebuild a relationship? Wow - just wow... How far can they go with this crap?

Anyway, when we finally arrive at the absurdity of TFP and Sherlock’s ‘secret sister’, everything is of course discussed as if she actually does exist on the given premises, and everything she does is ‘real’, no matter how impossible it would be in real life. The abandonment of any attempt to have the story line make logical sense is skillfully covered up by more distraction with fascinating technicalities of the film making process. This is where Gatiss makes his now almost classic statement that after Sherlock and John jump out of the window at 221B when a grenade explodes there, it’s just “Boop! And they’re fine.” 

Of course there’s no serious attempt at explaining this logically. Except perhaps Gatiss claiming that they both landed on Speedy’s awning - whatever good that would do to them, since the awning is leaning downwards, but never mind... But we never even saw that happen, did we? A great deal of time is then dedicated to show all the precautions to have Martin and Ben jumping safely at low level onto a madras supported by empty cardboard boxes.

Sian Brooke did say something interesting about Sherrinford, however, that got me thinking. She said that Eurus “wants revenge for the years and years that she has been held captive” there, isolated, and that in TFP the Holmes children are now “lab rats” and “it’s an experiment”. On a meta level, I think we can indeed see this episode - and maybe the whole show - as a kind of experiment, but maybe we, the audience, are also lab rats? Since Sherrinford is slightly shaped like a film camera (not commented in the extra material, of course), it leads my thought to all the adaptations through the years and years where Holmes and Watson have not been allowed to be together. A whole century when Sherlock Holmes has been held captive, restricted by the very same sort of heteronormative filter that all this extra material imposes; it’s like Sherrinford, isn’t it? Which gives all the more meaning to Moriarty’s arrival to the island, accompanied by Freddy Mercury’s “I want to break free”...

I think I’ll let the final words in this little exposé come from Mark Gatiss in The Writers’ Chat (my bolding):

“Moriarty is a fascinating thing in that in our sea of ongoing lies, one thing we’ve genuinely been completely consistent about is telling people he’s dead. But no-one believes it! And it’s a rather brilliant thing.”  Again - self-congratulatory statements. But instead of providing some actual evidence of the death of this character, who has kept popping up in almost every episode since his supposed demise, they think that the more a confirmed liar repeats something, the truer it gets? And the more we’re supposed to believe them? Well, all we can do is wait and see. :)

Tagging some people who might be interested: 

@raggedyblue​ @ebaeschnbliah​ @sarahthecoat​ @gosherlocked​ @lukessense​ @sagestreet​ @thepersianslipper​

My earlier meta on a similar topic (X)

[garne--tt]

x japan iceberg explained;

before i start, i probably didnt explain something right and if u want to correct me or add something, feel free and even dm me about it! + i will add trigger warnings for possible triggering content in this post

1.

formed in 1982 - x was formed in 1982 after toshis and yoshikis previous band disbanded

X --> X JAPAN - they changed their name from X to X JAPAN in 1992 in order to distinguish themselves from the american punk rock band X 

Saw IV - a horror movie from 2007, x japan did a theme song I.V. for the movie, it was their first song released since 1998

new album - an new x japan album that was supposed to be released lots of times over the 10+years but still (to this day) wasnt released

coachella 2018 - x japan performed at coachella 2018, many fans are saying how the sound was bad (usually blaming it on the sound production team?? or whatever its called) and apparently sugizo and yoshiki were seen arguing with the sound production team

we are x - a 2016 documentary about x japan (or rather yoshiki, because apparently it was mainly focusing on him)

psychidelic violence crime of visual shock - a slogan, mainly seen on the blue blood album cover, the term visual kei was derived from the slogan yoshiki, toshi, hide, pata, taiji - the most known lineup, from 1987 to 1992

2. tw// suicide mention

violet uk - one of unfinished yoshikis projects, started in 2002, didnt even debut but was supposed to in 2012

V2 - unit of yoshiki and tetsuya komuro, was active in 1992, they released one single and did one concert

ra:in - patas band, active since 2002, members are - pata, michiaki, die (also former member of spread beaver), ryu

noise/dynamite - toshis and yoshikis first band, formed in 1977 as dynamite, then they changed the name to noise, noise disbanded in 1982

s.k.i.n. - superband (group) of yoshiki, gackt, miyavi and sugizo, their only activity was in 2007 and it was live, they announced more activities but they were stopped

xfreaks - an international xjapan fan forum created in 2006

dope headz - band that had heath and pata as members, active from 2000 to 2003

hide with spread beaver - hides live band, other members were kiyoshi, k.a.z, hiroshi watanabe, satoshi miyawaki, d.i.e, i.n.a

zilch - supergroup formed by hide in 1996, other members were ray mcveigh,paul raven, joey castillo and i.n.a

lynx - one of heaths band, active from 2004-?, the vocalist for this band was issay from der zibet

yokosuka saver tiger - hides former band, he was member from 1981 to 1986 sugizo - luna sea guitarist, he joined x japan in 2008

hides death - hide committed suicide in 1998 (he hanged himself) update: this is what authorities said and what is official

3. tw// suicide

taijis death - in 2011 taiji was flying from japan to saipan, on the flight he got into fight with his manager (or flight attendant?), he was arrested after they landed in saipan and then he hanged himself with bedsheet in his cell

x japan translations - an site that had xjapan translations (like toshis book etc...), the site was active and up until 2018

taijis departure from X - taiji left X in 1992, but we dont know the exact reason why he left

toshi was in cult - toshi was member of cult known as home of heart from the late 90s (1998?)

1997 - the year x japan disbanded

yoshiki and queen elizabeth incident - in 2019 during royal windsor cup yoshikis scarf accidentally landed on queen elizabeth

yoshiki knows everyone - (not everyone ofc) but he met a lot of celebrities, politicians (barrack obama, johnny depp, prince phillip, bts etc,,)

art of life - a 29 minute song released released in 1993, it was was recorded only in english, the theme of the song are yoshikis suicidal tendencies, art of life was meant to be released in the jealousy album (1991)

yoshikis father - yoshikis father committed suicide when yoshiki was 10 years old

taijis cut off joint on finger - taiji when he was kid, showed his hand into a factory machine (his family owned factory) and cut off his first joint on his finger

yoshikis health problems - yoshiki has tons of health problem since he was child (asthma, he was always sick and spent most of the time in hospitals etc,,) and suffers from many of health problems even now

4.

toshis healing music - toshis music he made during the home of heart era

kaori moritani & masaya - kaori moritani is toshis ex wife, they met in around 1993 when they played in rock opera hamlet, they got married in 1997 and divorced in 2010, she introduced him to masaya (and got him, or rather manipulated him, into home of heart) 

masaya -  real name tōru kurabuchi - musician and leader of home of heart

-more about home of heart and the whole situation here: https://bloodydesertrose.tumblr.com/post/96662764536/support-toshi-dont-buy-or-listen-to-any-of-his-songs

debut in usa - x japan was supposed to debut in usa in the 90s (and even changed their name because of it, x-->xjapan)

extasy record - label formed by yoshiki in 1986, the first release under extasy records was x orgasm ep, the label had bands like xjapan, luna sea, glay, zi:kill tokyo yankees and more

yoshiki paid for taijis new teeth - after hides funeral yoshiki noticed that taijis some teeth were missing or chipped, so he handed him around 2 million yen (around 18 497 usd) to get his teeth fixed

l.o.x. - punk rock supergroup, yoshiki was drummer in this band, they also used to be named masami & l.o.x (masami was their vocalist), masami collapsed and fell into coma in 1989 and died in 1992 due to pneumonia in coma, l.o.x released one album with different vocalist (one of them which was toshi and yoshiki went by the alias shiratori rei here on the album) in 1990, l.o.x. released one song in 2002 in memory of masami

standing sex promotional shot & single cover - the promotional shot & single cover basically shows yoshiki nude (with his intimate parts covered of course + this wasnt the only time yoshiki has done something like this) 

rose & blood -indies of x- - an unofficial album with demos and unreleased x songs

unreleased & old songs - there are a lot unreleased songs + unreleased old songs or just old songs that dont get played anymore

5.

rosenfeld - crows in black - blue blood has similar guitar riff (i dont know how to say it) to this song (crows in black / b was firstly recorded on demo in 1986)

former members - x japan has big amount of former members - 11 former members (excluding taiji and hide from this)

terry - a former member of x, he was one of the original members (being a member from 1982 to 1985), terry died in 2002 in car accident

yoshiki got sued by hides brother - yoshiki got sued by headwax (hides company which hides brother owns) for using hides photos, apparently they had a contract but it expired and yoshiki still used hides photos even though the contract expired

x japan condoms - they were released in 1993 with the intent to help increase awareness and prevent the spread of AIDS. the reason why they probably did this is that toshis fan died at the age of 19 due to AIDS (toshi even dedicated a song to him - passion of love and became a active member and sponsor of association of struggle against AIDS)

heath cow story - when heath joined xjapan they celebrated it by drinking and then driving 2 hours to cow farm, then they drove to aquarium but it was already closed

heath leaving x japan - in 2009 there was a rumor that heath would leave x japan, apparently this was caused due to heaths contract problems (?) dementia - taijis former band, he was member from 1984 to 1985 and went under the name ray

pata was roadie for x - before joining x in 1987, he was roadie for x (or the member hally) around the time in 1986 (1985?)

6.

pink spider was a suicide note - this one is a rumor/theory that is circulating around, fans analysed the lyrics and came to conclusion that its suicide note

x stayed at different hotels than other bands - when x was on tour with other bands they were staying at different hotels than other bands, because one time (on tour with other bands and in hotel) hide got into drunk fight with juichi morishige (lead vocalist of ziggy) and sprayed the entire hotel lounge with fire extinguisher

taiji was homeless - taiji was homeless for around 2 years (1996-1998), due to financial issues + he got divorced at this time

heaths myspace account - there was heath myspace account, but it wasnt him, it was someone pretending to be him

weekend pv theory - (i dont know if i should have put this here to be honest) a theory that x members chose what their death would be in weekend pv (yoshiki - suicide, hide - suicide in drunken rage??, taiji - murder, pata - alcohol poisoning, toshi doesnt die in the pv)

7.

hide vocaloid - hides unreleased song co gal got finished via vocaloid (using his voice samples from various songs of his)

yoshiki lead singer - before toshi was chosen to be the lead vocalist for x, yoshiki was the vocalist (there is also a recording of stab me in the back with mostly yoshiki on vocals!)

hide and marilyn manson meet up story - im gonna just attach a screenshot of the story

taiji was murdered - taiji committed suicide in 2011 in his cell on saipan, but there are some things that point to the possibility that he was murdered (his manager insisted on cremating his body and got cremated without autopsy, money got transfered on his account, information missing from the internet?? etc,,) 

juns tape - demo tape recorded in 1986 by at the time X guitarist jun, tape contains instrumental recordings of unreleased songs right now, only way, tune up and one unnamed song.

ill kill you single cover - cover of 1985 X single ill kill you, it contains photos of victims of the vietnam war

feel me tonight - demo tape from 1985/1986, it contains songs feel me tonight and stab me in the back (all of them are under one minute here) sung by their at the time guitarist hally (apparently there aslo should be yoshiki version of it, but i dont know how much we can trust metal archives)

8. tw// eating disorder mention

yoshiki hired someone to kill taiji - this one is a rumor!!!, yoshiki was supposed to get/hire yakuza to kill taiji hide had an eating disorder - this one is unconfirmed!!! hide  suffered from bulimia (yoshiki walked on him purging - and this story was also apparently told by yoshiki???)

[hpowellsmith]

So @nellplays wrote some very good commentary about trigger/content warnings and I recommend reading if you want to learn more. [Also if you've got a romance reality show hole in your life, you've probably seen it already but I very much recommend @bodycountgame ]

I don't have a lot to add to the meat of the discussion (while I understand warnings can't cover every possibility I think they're useful for people when choosing whether they want to engage with media; for instance there are some hard no's for me and knowing that something includes them helps me make an informed choice; there is potential for them not be sufficiently clear, or misread, as in the Boyfriend Dungeon situation recently, but that's not a reason not to use them)... but after that immense parenthetical I thought I'd share some approaches I've used for interactive media in particular.

I try to be mindful about what might unexpectedly trip people up in my work; I do my best to include what I can in the content notes, and, in more recent Royal Affairs updates, I've added the ability to toggle some content on/off while playing without narrative consequences. Note the "try", and "do my best" - by no means am I perfect!

Under the cut are some more specific examples of how I include content notes in my current and recent work. TW: mention of fictional panic attacks, stress, burnout, alcohol.

You can find content notes in Crème de la Crème and Royal Affairs in the stats page. Crème de la Crème's notes are fairly broad and nonspecific, but I have been doing things a bit differently in Royal Affairs.

At the moment there is a point where a character in Royal Affairs has a panic attack. A player may find it difficult to interact with, for whatever reason, and can toggle a more detailed description on or off. If it's toggled on and in the moment they don't feel comfortable interacting with it, they can express that and the scene "zooms out" to move past a detailed description. There aren't narrative consequences for doing this, unlike for example being rude to a character, where the character would get annoyed. I don't want to have an in-character punishment for a player's preference or needs!

In Love Island the Game: The Boat Party, I wrote a scene where one of the characters talks about feeling overcome with stress and burnout. If a player feels uncomfortable about directly engaging with this, they can take a breather from the conversation, which is resolved between the character and her other companions. Since Love Island Season 2, sensitive content, often around discussions of mental illness, was opt in so players could decide whether they felt happy to engage. (I don't know whether that approach will continue in whatever future content comes out after the inhouse layoffs and contract terminations of creatives and sensitivity readers. I hope it will.)

A less narrative approach is the gate I've put in for mentions of alcohol in Royal Affairs. It's not load-bearing in terms of plot and is currently really only there for flavour, so it's a choice that's easy for players to toggle on and off whatever their preference. In Crème de la Crème there are more scenes where it's important, so I kept it to the MC having the option to have a blanket "no alcohol" at the beginning, but it does appear onscreen no matter what. If I was making those decisions now I'd likely do it more like Royal Affairs.

Anyway, this is really just to demonstrate that there are a lot of ways of handling sensitive content in a thoughtful way. Like I say, I'm not perfect but this is the kind of thing I like to do in my own work.

[madlymiho]

Hellooo, 👋🏼 thank you for randomly selecting me, haha. :D May I request an Ace scenario, where he and fem! Reader are just having a chaotic snowball fight and then later, after getting just so tired out, go in for a nice warm bath together and perhaps leads to some nsfw in the end? It’s up to you, to how soft or rough it can be, because either one would be just as interesting. Hopefully this is the right amount of detail— and please take your time! 🥰 thank you so much again!! 🤍🥺☺️

Hello there! 🥰🙈 it sounds like a nice idea! I don't know what's the matter with those snowball fights but it all put you in a naughty mood! 😈😈

I'm on it! 😋

Winter Event #3

Words: 1740

Warning: NSFW content - foreplays - edging

Informations: fem! reader

Warm Up

It’s freezing but you won’t certainly let you guard down! You feel the coldness bites the tip of your fingers, as you begin to gather more snow, cupping and pressing your hands together to create the perfect round shape, soft but strong enough to gently harm your victim. You let loose a profound sigh, focused, as you stand back up and target your enemy. You don’t even have time to properly throw it that you receive a large snowball right on your nose in a loud splash, earning another gasp from you, as you both laugh and growl because you don’t know how to react anymore.

“Hey that’s bullshit!” You hiss as you wipe the melting snow from your features. “You can’t use your power to pulse yourself in the air, Ace! You’re cheating!”

You hear his bright and happy laugh echoing in the valley, as he’s floating a few meters above the ground, watching you with his playful dark eyes, and raising an eyebrow.

“I messaged the Corporation of Snowball Fights, and they haven’t updated the rules regarding the use of devil fruit powers!” He raises his index, giving you a lecture, as you definitely feel the everlasting teasing tone.

You cross your arms impatiently around your chest, steam coming out of your lips.

“Well did you ask the Corporation of Bullshit about your attitude?!”

You definitely see the mischief gleaming in the back of his eyes, as Ace decides to mess around with you a little bit more, rushing on you and throwing you into the soft pile of snow behind you, covering your face with the white powder. You scream and fight back, wiggling your legs and arms as you feel the snow entering your clothes, touching your bare skin as you chirp that it’s enough! What a damn kid, this one! You laugh brightly, but you feel so tired now, and frozen, and you really wish to come inside the ship and get warm before your stupid boyfriend would eventually kill you with all that snow sneaking inside of your supposedly warm coat. You kiss him to ring the truce, your cold lips immediately reacting to the natural warmness of his body; and you feel it increasing slightly, as the snowflakes around your bodies are going back to their liquid form.

“I’m too cold to stay here…” You mumble against his lips, and close your eyes, appreciating the warmth sensation emanating from his body. “I need to warm up.”

He flushes slightly, his dark eyes locked on your features as eventually open your eyelids to see the flames suddenly surrounding his shoulders.

“Not like that!” You protest, even if there’s a big smile plastered on your lips. “Last time you burnt my favorite sweatshirt, I demand to have a bath, anything, but not your dangerous flames on my body!”

He rolls his eyes and helps you get back on your feet flushing you right away against his chest as he devours the crook of your neck.

“Are you really complaining?” He mumbles against your skin, peppering the area with the softest smooshes, as you wonder for a bit if you won’t be the one making the snow melt around you right now. “Last time, I clearly remember that you wanted me to try that thing on you…”

The soft purr of his voice is enough to put you in a second state, a very needy one, but as you definitely believe you shouldn’t stay outside one more second, you eventually find the courage to push on his chest to silently ask him to step back. He kisses the tip of your nose as an answer, and then tugs a strand of your hair behind your ear.

“Fine, let’s go have a bath.” He offers after a moment, squeezing your frozen fingers between his warm hands.

A few minutes later, you’re finally both sharing a bit of intimacy on the ship. A lot of the Whitebeard’s pirates are busy elsewhere, probably looting for their future Christmas gifts, as everyone is preparing the season. Thatch gave enough instructions to bring back wagons of food for the big feast, and for once, both of you have been exempted of duties. You understood it was somehow an early Christmas gift, since you have been quite depraved of any kind of intimacy in the past few weeks. Both hidden in that little warm cocoon, inside the bathroom, you both feel that desperate need to touch the other one. As the water is filling the bathtub, covering the mirrors with a cloud of steam, you’re both standing in the middle of the room. Ace is slowly undressing you, layer after layer, throwing your clothes on the floor as his mouth is attacking every single inch of your body, his skillful fingers traveling everywhere. He squeezes your hips with the gentlest gesture, his mouth nibbling your neck, his hands cupping your breasts when they are eventually free from your bra. Your next kiss is hungry, but terribly slow, enjoying that more than needed reward, tongues dancing together as you unbuckle his pants, and slide them down his thighs, grabbing his underwear in the same motion. He’s erected. You definitely understand that he wants to have more, and you’re clearly not in the mood to deny him. A soft breath escapes your lips as you roll your digits around his shaft, slowly coming up and down, as you can’t miss the shiver coming from his body. After a moment, though, he eventually put a hand over your wrist, kissing your cheek tenderly.

“Jump in the bath first. You’re trembling.” He murmurs, voice so romantic and caring that you remember how tender he can be despite his childish attitude sometimes.

You nod, your nipples so hard that they are almost hurting you, both because of the general cold atmosphere, but also your deep excitement. You carefully enter the warm water, a soft growl rolling in your throat, feeling at ease for sure. Ace doesn’t waste anymore time as well, and quickly joins you, sitting slowly while he takes place behind your back. He knows it’s a bit unfair for you, yet he has always preferred to play a bit with your emotions and your body, and clearly he wants to have the lead once more.

As soon as you’re both comfortable, you see one his hand moving from the edge of the bathtub to disappear under the ills of bubbles and soap, already looking for something to touch. He lingers his fingers on your belly, slowly, so slowly, coming up to eventually cup your right breast, his thumb rolling on your hard nipple, his mouth teasing your earlobe with the tip of his careful tongue. It feels like the water is slightly warming up, perhaps a side effect of his own body, even if Ace is quite less efficient in that kind of area; the water drains a good amount of his energy. However, it doesn’t stop him from wanting to please you, his other hand entering the dance, bolder than the other one. He presses it on your thigh, silently intimating you the order to open your legs a bit more, enough for him to slide his slender fingers up and down, always skimming the most sensitive part of your body, without truly touching it.

“Always messing around…” You sigh, eyes lidded, your head resting against his chest as you tilt it slightly, offering him more space for his mouth to explore your skin. “Whether it’d be a snowball fight or a bath, you’re always so unfair…”

“Am I not a pirate after all?” He hums, and chuckles, his voice vibrating against your ear. His hand is now pressed against your core, his index toying your sensitive lips. “I never play by the book. It’s boring to follow the rules.”

You wish to answer him, but nothing can leave your throat as you feel the sudden pressure of his thumb on your clit, and one of his fingers sliding inside of you. Your arch your back, one of your hands gripping the edge of the bathtub, the other one attacking your own breast to massage it. An invitation Ace doesn’t miss for sure, his own erection twitching behind your back.

“If you really want to play with something…” He whispers, rolling his thumb harder over your swelling clit, guiding your hand on your breast to his erect cock. “You can have fun with that.”

You nod, slowly losing the notion of time and space, eyes closed to feel everything. Fingers wrapped around his shaft, you’re jerking him at the same pace he’s fingering you, sometimes gasping when he suddenly increases his pace, or adds another finger. With his other hand, he plays with your breasts, groping them, massaging them, until he eventually slides his digits up to grip your chin and turn your head to steal a very sloppy kiss. At this point, your lips never go apart, his movements down there becoming even more intense. He doesn’t let you think about anything else but his digits playing with you so actively, as you feel his own excitement growing thanks to your ministrations. He bucks his hips from time to time, when your thumb so cockily gathers the precum oozing from his head. Each time you’re trying to push the game, each time he’s punishing you by edging you a bit more.

“Ace… Ace…” You moan as it becomes unbearable to feel him this way, your clit so swollen that you can burst at any moment. “Please, I want to come so badly…”

“Are you conceding another victory, Name?” He groans, his own cock becoming painful. Fuck he can’t control himself anymore as well. “I guess we can have a draw for once.”

Both of your movements are becoming even more passionate, the water sometimes splashing out of the bathtub, feeling the orgasm coming. Lips sealed one more time, moans swallowed in the other one’s throat, you eventually reach Nirvana, sweat and water dripping down from your faces, both of your chest raising up and down in the same erratic motion. You both slump in the bathtub, completely drained for a few seconds. He eventually chuckles, his voice weaker than before ; truly you’ll have to leave the bath soon before he would collapse.

“I guess that was a good way to warm you up.” He teases, offering you another of his everlasting playing smile.

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S5 Ep 20: Pharaoh’s Cool New Trick

Digging my way through quite a pile of commission work (funny how these things only come all at once or not at all), nearing the light at the end of the tunnel, was looking forward to some free time to catch up on my many little side projects when I was asked to take off for a weekend to do some cat-sitting to which I would NEVER say no to a cat, so like...Rip this blog I guess, we only update like once a week nowadays, but what do you do?

That’s right, play Puzzles and Dragons! The only phone game worth paying any attention to! Where they just released Pegasus on their Yugioh Collab and he looks pretty great!

So I’m just gonna take a second for some art appreciation, because the Puzzles and Dragons art team is just A++++ honestly, and yes, I did pull 13 times to get a Pegasus in my monster box, and yes, he is a completely insane team leader that is absolutely broken when paired with Yugi (the numbers are so satisfying) but...look at him. He looks so good!

(also I finally got Joey Wheeler, and so now my gatcha cravings are settled. And, don’t worry, I play this game so much that I was there during Christmas when they offered like a bajillion stones for free so I didn’t actually use real money on this.)

Now PAD also released a Weevil and Rex, and I don’t know why, and neither does the art team because they still look pretty good but in comparison to all the mains, they sure do looks like just some shorty guys in some casuals.

though I gotta admit, I want to learn how the hell this art team does swooshy effects, because man, that would make my art so much better to just have flames violently exploding out of all my art. Why am I not doing that more often? I have the technology.

anyway, I didn’t bother trying to pull them. Maybe I’ll accidentally pull them when they eventually release a Duke Devlin. (also, RIP to the fact that Roland will probably never be in Puzzles and Dragons but like...I can only send them so many polite letters covered in stickers pretending I’m some 10 year old child and writing in my broken Hiragana “Roland in PAD?”. Thems the breaks. (They also might not remember who Roland is.))

Shoutouts to the card that Weevil is holding that is censoring this nipple on the booby spider, PS.

So because this is not actually a Puzzles and Dragons blog, and it’s been ten eons since I regularly updated so I could remember episode to episode...where the hell were we?

That’s right, we’re on an island now. This show’s wonderful obsession with evil islands (and spoiler, this is one of the few Yugioh Islands that doesn’t explode at the end. Mostly because Kaiba isn’t here to do it or this place would be cinder)

(read more island stuff under the cut)

Anyway, after announcing “hey guys! Screw islands!” Yugi immediately collapses and without any warning.

Apparently the armor is a big ol parasite, which is something that Yugi is so used to at this point that he refuses to admit that this is a problem. Just normal Muto stuff, refusing to tell anyone that he has a serious illness going on underneath that giant mass of hair.

(the sailor moon vibes coming off this weird orb energy)

Sort of feels like a call back to S1 when Yugi was clearly possessed and everyone else was like “He acting weird to you?” except it’s S5 and everyone has learned to never trust Yugi when he says he’s fine and they are responding like he is about to die. Which is correct.

Outside of the cave falls this scroll that is...glowing, I guess. So they open it up and get a bunch of hieroglyphs that give them the “riddle of light” and like youknow...it’s riddle stuff.

They’re doing this riddle for “wings.” And it’s like...everyone’s monster here has a set of wings or an ability to fly. Every single monster except for I dunno, flaming swordsman? Hell, Yugi himself had two sets of wings when he fused with Dark Magician (which was weird, and I still don’t like to think about what technically was going on there.) But we have to go and get ourselves even more wings.

Weirdly, Joey turns to Tea and does something that in any other show would be completely normal. He was like “you want to stay here with Yugi, don’t you?” and it was the first time Joey has ever actually addressed the fact that Tea and Yugi are close. Uncharted territory. I was amazed at the amount of casual shipping that is happening here. It’s almost like a normal ass relationship.

So the boys decide to go off, and be boys and tackle this themselves. And they shouldn’t have, because Tea is smart for this group, and also has the only healing spell.

Like if you’re playing D+D you wouldn’t typically leave your only healer behind. Just saying.

Also like...Grandpa Muto went with them? I guess he’d have to since he’s the translator but also...kind of weird to leave your grandson dying in a cave, but maybe that’s just the Muto lifestyle.

Do not be fooled by my caps, no one has addressed the Bakura in the puzzle for 3 seasons. I’m starting to think this show will never address the Bakura in the puzzle. Which honestly, that would be hilarious if they made a big deal out of that plot point and then couldn’t use it in the end.

And speaking of plot points that kind of come out of nowhere and don’t make full sense with the continuity of the show--Joey has regressed back to the 4th grade.

Hey show? What?

So like if you love Joey, this is not the arc for you, because this arc he is reduced to a Himbo and nothing else. Straight up didn’t know what an echo is, but is very strong and pretty, I guess.

This inevitably happens with any TV show becuase different people make different parts, and I’ve brought up before that sometimes it feels like some teams only have loose post-it notes of what any character should be like at any given point (ESPECIALLY with Seto Kaiba’s timeline) but like...

...Personally I’m mot so fond of this interpretation of Joey, kind of ignores Joey’s best traits, and makes Tristan look way too smart in comparison (and like I always pinned Tristan to be the Himbo of the group, but maybe it’s because they give Tristan so little else to do?)

And like don’t get me wrong, Joey’s a dumbass a lot of the time and needs to get corrected by his pals...but...to the point he doesn’t know what an echo is? He’s a dumbass in a High School student sort of way, youknow?

Anyway, they get down to this big ravine, and they have to destroy this stone while the light passes over it. Kind of feels like a Breath of the Wild shrine quest, actually. In fact, I think Breath of the Wild recycled the shadow/sunlight pathing quest like 4 or 5 times. (I love Breath of the Wild to death but boy did they run out of ideas at the end there.)

They have to fight a glass monster and it’s kind of like...do you know the game Balls 3D? probably not, but it looked like a bunch of random shapes stuck together like a 90′s animation. They basically went to war with shapes.

Pure Himbo energy, has several pokemon, but punches for his pokemon instead of using them. A power move if I ever saw one.

Youknow that would make pokemon a lot more interesting if you could like throw out your pikachu, and then choose to just physically run up to your opponents Eevee and sock it in the jaw. Raise of hands--I know you all would love a version of pokemon like that. Let Ash Ketchum punch a Ratata.

Bro has informed me that Ash does do something like this in the anime. But I’m not talking about the anime, I’m talking about the video game. Give me the option to physically combat my rival. This is what I want, Pokemon.

They discover a way to break the monolith, and the show thinks we’re like actually 7 years old (because the show is Y7, although I forget because it deals with so many dark themes) so the show is going to hold on to this puzzle for a while...just to fill time. And it’s fine because we gotta switch over to Pharaoh anyway.

Yami has this dream again. He attempts to fuse with Dark magician to overcome the dream, but alas, he is still not strong enough.

Yugi wakes up in this murky cave while Tea is out washing out like...some rag? (he’s also still got a rag, so I guess multiple rags were required for how sweaty Yugi is.)

Yugi says “I feel like I’m a new man!” a lot in this episode, and every time he calls himself a man like he’s some sort of adult it’s very funny to me.

And then this plot lore dropped.

I mean I guess inevitably it had to happen...

But man, end of an era. It was freakin hilarious while it lasted: that Pharaoh refused to read ancient Egyptian because it’s like 2002 and he is a High Schooler living in Japan and he actually doesn’t WANT to resolve the mystery of the puzzle. Maybe the people who made this arc don’t know about how in S2 and S3, the fact Pharaoh couldn’t read Marik’s back tatt was like...a really big issue. He couldn’t read the God card, he couldn’t even read that massive tablet that read “HEY PHARAOH THIS IS LITERALLY YOU”. KAIBA had to tell him how to read the God card for him. Freakin Seto “Magic is a lie” Kaiba had to tell him how to use the God Card because Pharaoh couldn’t read it.

But like...Pharaoh finally gave in at some point after the world was devoured by the Leviathan, and before Kaiba finished building Kaibaland (which was already built in S1 but wtv)

The timelines on this show have always been a mishmash...but this one is just like...

...show are you trying to convince me that at any point in this show after season Zero, Pharaoh had any idea what he was doing? Did he sap that brain energy straight out of Joey Wheeler so he could do this?

Wow.

(secretly hoping he forgets how to read Egyptian after this arc is over and the show goes back to the other development team)

Pharaohs reasoning is that, if this is the riddle of the light.....

....then where is the riddle of darkness????????????

and when Tea was like “Pharaoh that is not even remotely logic. Omg it’s so bright outside, lets go back to gross cave.” and Pharaoh was like “Tea! You got it!” and she was like “What the hell are you talking about?”

Not gonna lie, I saw the Orichalcos green, and I got concerned.

Anyway, Yugi gets very frustrated and was like “ugh, lets go save em. They’re gonna die (again.)” and marches down there as if he didn’t pass out an hour ago.

And he fuses with Dark Magician again while everyone else (including his grandpa) was like “Yugi are you freakin kidding me? The suit freakin kills you omg! Tea you had one freakin job!”

And then we get the plot twist that...I mean it makes sense but it was choreographed in a confusing way.

And out of no where this guy shows up again:

So this mysterious man shows up and says “If you don’t succeed you have to live here forever” which...nice...that would probably save the world a lot of problems if Yami got locked away and took his OP puzzle with him. And then this man also says “if you do succeed you become VERY POWERFUL” and Yami was like. “...”

This whole episode had a theme to it, where Tristan and Joey were trying to prove that they could do things on their own and without Yugi’s help. And honestly...felt a little bit misplaced. Yami’s the same guy who murdered Yugi last season with the Orichalcos so like...

...I mean he is probably more reliable than Tristan who once died and turned into a robot monkey for 10ish episodes.

and then they flew into a glowing door.

Folks, this was wild to look at.

This is wild.

And at this point I closed Photoshop and thought I was done. But then I looked at my timeline on the video and was like...wait...there’s more?

and I’m really glad I kept watching because it went back to Alex, who...is apparently just still at those steps in this haunted ass Pyramid.

Now we’re watching Yugioh.

I forgot for a second when they turned Joey into a Himbo and made Pharaoh literate, but we’re back. I mean...

...look at the liner art on this adult man.

So...I posit the question...has Alex spent the last 2-3 episodes doing nothing but applying eyeliner to his face in the dark? Because he absolutely has. And honestly, the vibe of being in a spooky haunted pyramid with barely any light, just applying eyeliner down the edge of your face...that’s a Yugioh vibe, if I ever saw one.

This arc is wild. Anyway, next episode we do even more fetch quests and riddles? Just going to guess now that we probably will.

(and for those new here, this is a link so you can read them from the top. Which, since we’re in S5, means you got like...hours of Yugioh content to read through. Enjoy the rewards of my weird hobby.)

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

[jesswritesthat]

hey babe! i love your writing so much!!! so i recently watched kaguya-sama: love is war and i was wondering if you could do a headcanon of kuroo, bokuto and atsumu where their crush gets sick and they visit her and she drags them into her bed to sleep with them? you can decide how it ends. thank you so much in advance if you do end up writing this! i love you and take care of youself💞

Hello lovely! Thank you so much for this, I’ve never seen Kaguya-Sama but it sounds really cute. Also take care of yourself too and I hope these are okay! Much love 💕

Summary: Bokuto, Kuroo and Atsumu checking up on their sick crush headcanons

>>>>—————————>

Bokuto Kōtarō:

• Has felt like he's been missing something all day but couldn't quite decipher what it was until Akaashi mentions how you're off sick.

• Thats when your phone is bombarded with ‘urgent’ messages inquiring about your wellbeing to the dramatic extent of:

[ Kou: (N/N)! You haven't answered me yet, are yOu StiLl AliVe?! ]

[ (N/n): no ]

[ Kou: Aw, can I have your cool headphones then, since you won't be needing them anymore? 😁💕 ]

[ (N/n): Wow Kou, I'll haunt your dumbass at Volleyball games for that. ]

[ Kou: Even in death, your support means everything to me. ]

• Despite his nonsense he kept updated with you throughout the school day by sending memes in hopes of raising your spirits. The most peace you got was during Volleyball Club time - the Ace too invested to message you at that point.

• At the end though he calls his team for a serious discussion and they're all expecting major improvements on their gameplay ready for Nationals.

But no.

"What can I get (N/n) to make her feel better, this is crucial. I need only good ideas!"

• They all knew about his crush on you, he wasn't exactly secretive about it but you were none the wiser. Even so, Fukurōdani offered what advice they could to their friend because like him, they cared about you too.

• "Akaashi picked up your schoolwork." Bokuto says as he walks into your room, waving the papers and placing them on your side.

"And you didn't think to take notes for me?"

"Nah, I wanted to bring you good stuff."

"Fair point."

• Bokutos likely brought everything he could find once he went home and changed/showered - he's got flowers, your favourite snacks, drinks, medicine and some movies to cure your boredom. Like how much do I owe you???

He's says it's fine though, in return you have to be better by tomorrow.

That's not how it works Kou.

• You're both seated on your bed watching some shitty movie when you start getting a bit sleepy and you just want warmth.

"Can you give me a hug Kōtarō? I just need a hug, I know how weird that sounds..."

• Doesn't even think twice about it, he practically tackles you onto the covers which elicits lovely giggles from you - the potential of him getting sick too isn't even considered, he's just focused on being with you and making you feel better.

• His arms are so warm and they’re beautiful, you forgot how toned he is and you grow so comfortable in his embrace. He’s also really relaxed about it and is calm enough to ramble on normally - except when you nuzzle against him during a cold shiver. Bokuto full on freezes mid sentence, releasing a cautious breath prior to changing the subject.

• It’s obvious he’s content with you though, and surprisingly falls asleep first which makes you laugh. Kōtarō keeps a strong but delicate hold on your body and is subconsciously receptive enough to your every move. You adjusted yourself slightly which stirred him, his voice is much huskier than before due to sleep but remains concerned.

“Can’t you sleep (Y/n)? I can-“

“I’m fine, you’re keeping me warm.”

• With a nod of understanding he’s gone again and you follow shortly afterwards, the both of you unintentionally making the nap a sleepover. Which you only realise the next morning - still in his arms even if the position has changed. You take a few minutes to enjoy it.

• Miraculously doesn't get sick, his immune system must be immortal as he's brimming with energy once he gets up. His radiance is actually contagious as you feel much better in yourself too and his vibrant attitude really motivates you for the day despite being physically exhausted from beating the flu.

• "Your partner is going to be blessed if you bring them breakfast, I mean talk about amazing." You comment as he brings up a plate that he’d crafted in your kitchen, which is surprisingly decent. You suppose he must keep his body fit somehow.

"My crush will have to do for now."

"Wait I - ah, you have a crush on me?"

"Hah, didn't you know? I never tried to hide it or anything."

Kuroo Tetsurō:

• Notices your absence immediately, he's observant by nature but especially where his crush is concerned and he isn't afraid to contact you before class starts.

• "Hey (Y/n), it's Kuroo, are you running late today?"

"Hnn, I'm not gonna make it. I tried but I feel awful - Sickness: 1, (L/n): 0." Already by the grogginess in your voice he can tell you're under the weather and winces at the sound of you stifling a cough.

"Ah geez, go to bed would you? And drink plenty of water, I'll inform the teachers and everything."

"Thanks Tetsurō, I owe you one."

• Will message you at regular intervals throughout the day regarding your health with cute little reminders. You were on his mind frequently, he’s lowkey worried okay?

[ Tetsu: Drink water, and eat breakfast if you can. ]

[ (Y/n): Yeah yeah I have, go learn something. ]

[ Tetsu: Why are you replying? Shouldn't you be sleeping it off - I don't want your germs. ]

[ (Y/n): Sharing is caring. ]

[ Tetsu: Oya? It took a cold for you finally admit you care, so is it gonna take a pandemic to say you love me? 😏 ]

[ (Y/n): 🖕🏻]

• Is actually considerate enough to tell you he'll swing by after practice, and asks if you want anything from the shop so you give basics like water and tablets. Comes equipped with the extra notes he's taken from all of your shared classes and requested papers from teachers in those you don't, so you're not falling behind.

• Aside from the bare minimum you requested, he chucks your favourite snacks on your desk stating that it’s important to keep morale high too. Liar. He just wanted to do something nice for you.

• Checks your temperature despite your protests of not being a child, he only does this because it vexes you and Kuroo finds that cute. As a silent apology for teasing the Hell out of you, he’ll make you some tea and you both get lost in conversation.

• Notices you’re starting to doze off, rest you should’ve had instead of texting everyone - but ensuring everything is fine, he’s about to stealthily exit until your fingers grasp his wrist and tug him back slightly.

"Stay Tetsurō..."

"You'll likely regret that request once you wake up."

"S'ok, it's you."

• The strength you have when tugging him into bed with you catches him completely off guard and he’s actually blushing - doesn’t know what to say but knows he has to at least maintain some composure.

“So uh, never knew you wanted me this badly.”

“Ugh shut up dumbass, I can feel your rapid heartbeat from here.”

“Right...”

• Kuroo goes all shy, you’ve wrapped your arms around his waist and are comfortably leaning against his side and he absentmindedly runs his fingers soothingly up and down your arm to settle his own nerves.

• It’s peacefully silent, simply enjoying one another’s company before he hears your muffled sniffles indicating you’ve fallen asleep and a soft smile graces his lips. If you were his, then he’d definitely kiss your forehead, and lips to be honest, but the fact you aren’t leaves him with a disappointed sigh.

• You both end up taking a nap, waking up wrapped in each other’s arms and noses practically touching which startled the Captain - Kuroo literally falling off of your bed with a yelp much to your amusement. Afterwards, he departs suggesting you get more rest, get better soon and he’ll see you at school next week.

• At least that was the plan, which altered with the text exchange the following morning.

[ Kuroo: Sharing is not caring, I wanted your snacks not your sickness! ]

[ (Y/n): RIP us. 💀 ]

[ Tetsu: You owe me one remember? I've got the house to myself this weekend so would you like to suffer together? I have blankets, entertainment and food. ]

[ (Y/n): Beats sniffling alone, I'll bring the tissues and drugs. ]

• So, you went over with a trail of sneezing in your wake and ended up snuggled with Kuroo under a blanket with a variety of games gracing the TV as you skilfully passed around the tissues. Aside from being ill, spending time like this with him was perfect.

• "Sickness: 2, (L/n) and Kuroo: 0..."

"No, Kuroo: 1.”

"How so? You K.O. a sneeze or something?"

"I got to spend the day with you didn't I? That counts as a win in my book."

"Tch careful, anyone would think the Scheming Captain cares~"

"I do smartass, I care about you a lot (Y/n)..."

Miya Atsumu:

• Atsumu wasn't one to act needy in any way, the only excuse for him to contact you in regards to your absence was to do it with a remark and hope you'd elaborate.

[ Atsumu: Yo, are ya ditching me to survive English on my own? That's cold (Y/n) 😭 ]

[ (Y/n): Sorry 'Tsumu, I'm too busy dying to care rn. Have a fun missing me loser. ]

[ Atsumu: Hah you wish, you alright tho? ]

• You're good friends but he's never really expressed genuine concern about you before, not verbally anyway. You thought the final "K" after you'd told him you were gonna rest would be the end of it.

So you were beyond surprised when he rocked up to your house later that evening.

• It took everything you had not to mock him for his embarrassed stature, solely flustered by the fact you'd seen him so considerate. Admittedly you were also exhausted and probably couldn't think of a snarky reply anyway.

• "What's up? Was there homework or - ugh, or something?"

"Huh? Oh I dunno. But uh, I got 'Samu to make you some Okayu, and a Umeboshi Tea since it's good for colds and stuff."

• Totally pestered Osamu all day to help him make you something and had to do stupid favours in return but Atsumu will deny it if you ever ask.

• “I love how you don’t care what you look like when you have guests over.”

“Take your stupid backhanded compliments and shove them up your pretty litt-“ You bite back, flipping him off in the process while Atsumu remains proudly victorious.

“Nah ah, is that any way to speak to the man who brought you dinner?”

“It’s the way to speak to the man whose currently annoying me.”

“You’re welcome, this is revenge for ditching me in class gorgeous~”

• Despite how irritating he could be, Atsumu stuck around for a bit to make sure you ate everything he’d brought and taken the appropriate medication.

• “Oh yeah, I brought that movie you were talking about the other day. Figured it might pass the time a bit.”

“Thank you! I’ll give it back once I’m better - thank you so much ‘Tsumu.”

Your excitement was endearing, and he had to collect himself a bit since admiring such little quirks was out of the question - his crush was bad enough as it is.

“Wanna watch it now? I haven’t got anything to do so I can give you spoilers.”

“Sounds good - and not a word!”

• You spent the afternoon watching the film and playfully wrestling the blonde in order to shut him up whenever he made an attempt to spoil it - he would never, but provoking you was too funny.

• You settle down later on, putting on a mindless tv show for background noise before collapsing onto your bed with groan. Atsumu raising a smug brow at your exhausted state as he threw his jacket on.

• "Wanna sleep with me?" It was innocent, at least you didn’t think much of it then.

"Do I what now?" He was smirking, thankful that your panic left you oblivious to the blush crawling up his neck at the mere insinuation alone.

"Sleep wit- ohh I did not think that through! I meant sleep in my bed, next to me, to help me drift off. Maybe it's the sleepiness or medicine but I really want you Atsumu..."

"Not helping your case at all." Again he smugly responded, dropping his jacket to the floor with a sly smile.

"Stop smirking and just hug me okay? Then you can leave and tease me about this later."

• Atsumu isn't awkward about it, subduing his nerves enough to pull you into his arms as he sits up - dutifully ignoring the butterflies in his stomach due to your close proximity and the intoxicating smell of your hair.

• Atsumu becomes unintentionally soft, his fingers slowly begin to glide through your hair and he hesitates when he feels the hum of contentment you release before continuing. Your whole body just relaxes against his and he subconsciously does the same, not even realising he was this tense around you - was his body always like that in your general presence?

• As you start quietly talking about nothing and everything, he notices a weakness - you’re a lot more open when drowsy and god he wants to take advantage but knows you’ll remember the questions he asked and murder him for it when you’re able.

• Intead he attempts to protect any dignity he thinks he has left with you - jokes on him, it’s absolutely none. You guys are way past that level and he knows it.

“You better get healthy quick, not that I care but English is really borin’ on my own ya know?”

"The people you truly care about must be really lucky to have you 'Tsumu..." The mumble is enough to make him roll his eyes, but he waits until you’re asleep to reply.

"Yeah... you are..."

<——————————<<<<

[ Masterlist ]

[steropeshu]

Theory: What if Tsukasa was a good guy?

All right, first time that I’m throwing out a theory, (with the assistance of @trish-chan​!) so forgive me if I’m tripping on my words. Okay, so, theory time. (Also, to avoid confusion, I call No.7 by Hanako, and pre-death by Amane)

When I say Tsukasa was a good guy, I mean as in a good bro before he died. I think the current consensus is that Tsukasa was the one abusing Amane (theorized to be in varying degrees…), but what if he wasn’t the one behind it? What if Tsukasa ended up becoming corrupted or messed up in some way?

This ended up really really long, so the whole this is under the cut...

First, let’s focus on how they were alive. What was their relationship like? Well, we know they were close, at least. There’s this one bit in the Tanabata arc where little Amane says that Tsukasa will get violent if interrupted.

However, in the official translations it says that he’ll throw a fit. Y’know, like an excitable little kid.

It also says that he’s playing katanuki, and he LOVES katanuki, so we can assume he wouldn’t want to be interrupted. (Also, Hanako loves katanuki too!)

But other than that, we don’t really see them being brothers in the past, do we. Right…?

WRONG! Something I completely overlooked before were the volume sleeve illustrations.

Also, in this (^) illustration, I’d like to point out that the Tsukasa’s radio and Hanako’s kokeshi doll are sitting on the chest of drawers!

Something to note in these illustrations (and also the Tanabata arc) is that Amane is happy and there are no signs of bruising anywhere either. So at least as little kids, no form of abuse is present.

Also, something else I noticed:

He says that “WE believe it’s real.” Tsuchigomori said that he doesn’t have friends, and he’s obviously not referring to Tsuchigomori here. Tsukasa is the only one left he could be referring to in this “we”. They both were enthusiastic about this rock that supposedly fell from the sky, ever since they were four.

I feel like I’m grasping at straws in this part, but why would Amane include a third party unless they were important? Especially when it comes to something so sentimental to him.

Next, we have the picture from the Kamome school orientation.

Nothing here either. Just the two holding hands, and Amane is still bright-eyed. Note that they are alone. We know the Minamoto siblings live alone, but Mitsuba and Nene both have parents with them. The Yugi twins don’t. Another theory was that Amane’s parents were abusing him and they just favored Tsukasa, but this can allow us to presumably scratch that.

So that means any harm to Amane happened somewhere between here and his death. So, let’s make a time frame, hmm? We know Amane died around age 13. What age is he here…? Well we know he just entered Middle school, the first level Kamome provides for. What age…

Wow. That lines up perfectly.

This leads into the next major part of the theory.

We all know that Kamome is incredibly “haunted.” Filled to the brim with supernaturals. So, what if these two got caught up in supernatural business and things went south?

Originally this was a theory on proving Tsukasa wasn’t the one abusing Amane, but now I’m possibly considering that it was him. However, he wasn’t fully there, or something caused him to go mad.

In this part, Hanako is reciting a part of Mori Ogai’s “Takasebune”. (Credit to  @nanabansama​ for finding that out!) In the story, a man is being exiled for a crime he committed. He seems kind so the police escort is wondering what he did. Turns out, he and his little brother were orphaned when they were young. At some point after growing up and working together, his brother fell ill. He came home one day to find out that his brother tried to kill himself so he wouldn’t be a burden. The man had finished the job for his brother, essentially putting him out of his misery.

We can draw some parallels to Hanako from this.

The man has a little brother that he killed

Absence of parents, this makes it likely that Hanako and Tsukasa’s parents are dead.

The man is being punished for what he’s done and is fully accepting of what has to happen to him as a consequence. In the man’s case, being exiled, and in Hanako’s case, being mediator for human and supernatural relations.

Perhaps from this we can draw that Hanako killed Tsukasa to put him out of his misery.

(Also, something really interesting, Ogai is spelled 鴎外. 鴎 is pronounced “Ou”, however alone it is pronounced “KAMOME”! While we’re on the subject, kamome means seagull. I had no idea why the school would be named that, but I would not be surprised if this were the reason!)

@daikon-senpai​ has pointed out that we can see a reoccurring “hole” in Hanako’s stomach. There’s a high likeliness that he killed himself after killing Tsukasa.

There’s a traditional method of suicide called seppuku, where one would slit their stomach to bleed out (though they would usually have someone cut their neck for efficiency and to minimize suffering). One of the reasons one would commit seppuku were if someone committed a crime or had brought shame on themselves. Both of which would be a likely reason Amane would have killed himself, and he even still carries intense guilt now as Hanako.

[UPDATE: I had made a post about how it appears that Hanako pulls his knife out from his stomach, something absent from the anime. Some of the earlier instances can look like he’s pulling out from his gakuran, so here’s a more obvious example:

@shweshishweh​ and @spades-queen​ have additionally pointed out that in some official art Hanako is depicted with a bandage over his stomach and Tsukasa with a bandage over his heart (or a heart that is damaged, as shown in the Valentine’s Day art).

With this information, not only can we assume Hanako died from wounds on his stomach, but also that Tsukasa likely died from an injury to his heart.

END OF UPDATE]

Speaking of guilt-

It’s believed that when Hanako cries while confronting Tsukasa, he’s afraid because he’s with his abuser again. I doubt this is true at all. He hasn’t cried since the Mitsuba Arc, though he still locks up briefly.

Obviously Hanako holds a ton of guilt from what he did to Tsukasa, so of course he would freeze up when the dude comes out of no where and is like, “Long time no see!!” He’s being confronted with what he did, front and center. No amount of jokes can distract him from it. There’s no avoiding it. After Tsukasa had entered the picture for a while, Hanako stops reacting so strongly, as he’s more prepared for it. (This was pointed out to me by @trish-chan​!)

It’s also possible that Tsukasa is acting the messed-up way he was before he died, and Hanako is realizing that death really didn’t free him from it. He’s mortified at what’s happened to his brother.

Another thing she’s pointed out was that currently, Tsukasa hasn’t hurt Hanako. Not physically, at least. If he was the one hurting him then, why not now? It’s not like he’s hiding being violent in front of people. Let’s see… he turned Mitsuba into a monstrosity, nearly killed Kou, ripped out No. 3’s heart, totally would have turned Nene into a bloody pulp, killed the pufferfish into a bloody mess, and he’s finger painted with blood (who knows where that came from) among various other psychotic things.

Last thing I have here is a kind of lose connection, but worth including, nonetheless.

Only Tsukasa and No. 6 are creepy black mokke. I can’t bring myself to believe that AidaIro would do that for no reason. I wouldn’t question it if it were only Tsukasa, but now No. 6 is in the mix.

This actually made me think of possible connections that Tsukasa has to No. 6. After all, who has a giant gaping hole to the far shore and has messed with someone’s head so hard they basically tried to murder their childhood friend? Is it possible that No. 6 did something to Tsukasa, for whatever reason?

We don’t know enough about No. 6 currently to really be conclusive about this, though. Could both of them been corrupted somehow?

UPDATE ON THIS PART: Since I’ve first posted this, more chapters with No. 6, or Shinigami, have been released. While I have even more doubts that he and Tsukasa have any direct connection than before, I still think there are some shared aspects. Sumire’s seal is probably the most major revelation, now that it’s pretty much confirmed that Tsukasa is a yorishiro. If we assume Tsukasa is Hanako’s yorishiro, then that’s something in common with Sumire and Shinigami. But then wouldn’t Hanako be a black mokke?

This makes me think that that particular connection isn’t the shared aspect Tsukasa and Shinigami have. Perhaps it’s just something that hasn’t been revealed yet (or I haven’t picked up on lol). Something else interesting of note is the fact that Tsukasa has been completely absent this entire arc. His only sort-of presence is through Natsuhiko, who we still don’t know the motives of. We also don’t know how the Tsukasa+Sakura+Natsuhiko+Mitsuba quartet have been dealing with the Severance.

So, there are a lot of questions yet to be answered so I’m not dismissing this idea yet.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, in a nutshell, this theory is: Hanako and Tsukasa were good brothers, until they got caught up with supernaturals after entering Kamome. This may have caused Tsukasa to go crazy, and hurt Amane at the same time. This leads to Amane killing Tsukasa. Possibly out of self-defense or putting him out his misery. Following this, Amane kills himself. ~50 years later, present Kamome Academy. Tsukasa makes his way to the near shore and either gets corrupted or was never freed from whatever ailed him when he was alive at the school.

I’m realizing now that this would also explain this:

“Tsukasa is not himself. I know that. So I forgive it.” But we all know that Amane/Hanako is too cryptic and secretive to actually say that.

[oldsmobile-hotdogs]

Questions for crossover jatp ghosts crossover fic: I hope Julian and the sunset curve boys talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav wars that happened when they were alive + Bill Cilnton. I wonder what pat and the band would talk about considering that they would of been kids when pat died? Do you think Julie would think of Les Mis and Hamilton cos Thomas and Kitty are from about the same time period as those musicals? I hope Julie calls Fanny Mary poppins.

Anon, or "Mimi", or "Lulu", or, heck, maybe even "Carl Birtles": Update: Not Carl Birtles. Carl Birtles sent me an ask and is cool, actually.

Stop. Right now. I'd say stop while you're ahead, but you are so far away from ahead at this point it's laughable.

For everyone confused, this is that "commenter from AO3" I joked about making a 2017-esque story time video about.

A couple days ago I uploaded the first chapter of a Julie and the Phantoms/BBC Ghosts crossover fic.

You know what? I’m gonna promo it here bc it’s my callout post and I can shill if I want to: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30681704/chapters/76661471

It was generally very well received and I've had a blast interacting with readers.

Except for this.

Honestly, there's so much to get into, so I’m putting it under a cut:

This was their first correspondence (email notif bc I deleted the comment, the deletion to be explained later):

(Funnily enough, the links very much do not work on AO3, making the comment only more jarring)

I gave you *so much* benefit of the doubt when I saw this comment, and assumed that maybe you're an ESL user, just very enthusiastic to share ideas, and I pretty much said so in my reply, but know that at that point I'd already had friends- who fucking know about this, don't you dare think you're getting me alone- tell me that you were being very demanding.

Below was my reply (another email notif):

I'm gonna be honest, I think I responded really well to what I was given, and now that I'd replied, I was pretty certain the situation was dealt with. You, evidently, didn't agree, as shown by your reply to my reply:

A word of advice: when replying to someone, at least pretend like you read what they wrote.

At this point I'm left wondering two things:

What do they expect from me, if a general reply is not it?

How much more shit do they have waiting to tell me to put in my- reminder, JATP/BBC Ghosts crossover, rated T, comedic- fic?

In order to avoid finding out either, I freeze the thread on AO3. I'm liveblogging all of this on Discord.

It's then that I notice that the username on AO3 isn't clickable, so even if I wanted to block or report them I couldn't. I assume, therefore, that they've deactivated, and since them seeing their comments gone and getting angry was the only thing stopping me deleting the comments, I delete the comments.

It's also at this point I see "Mimi" never left kudos. I guess I don't deserve praise until I mention "Bill Cilnton".

There's relative calm for a short amount of time, until I get another comment:

This one is much kinder than the others and doesn't mention any specific, weird, historical events, so the extent to which I think this is "Mimi" is debatable, but bestie I'm weirded out enough that anything that even uses the enter bar unnecessarily and misses out conjunctive words like "because" and "and" is going to activate fight or flight. Update: Carl Birtles is not Mimi or Lulu. Carl was just being genuinely kind and I misinterpreted it and that's on me.

However, "Carl"'s case is not helped by the fact I can't click his account either, that AO3 offers me the ability to report it as spam, and that guess who replies to "Carl"'s comment: Update: Carl, having done nothing wrong as he has, is therefore also a victim in the situation that is being replied to by Lulu. It would seem Lulu is trying to correct??? some of Carl's commentary.

You must think I didn't get a 7 on my English Literature GCSE because you seem to underestimate my ability to compare two texts.

So clearly this is "Mimi", who has also just replied to "Carl". "Lulu" is also deactivated, and I've fallen off the end of my tether, let alone reached it, at this point so I mark it as spam. "Carl" gets to stay bc he said the idea for the crossover was good. Update: Carl also gets to continue to stay because I have it on good faith that he's a stand-up dude.

So at this point you've readily admitted through your inability to shake up your writing style to using at least one sockpuppet to convince me to talk about the "Yugoslav wars".

If "Carl Birtles" is the real(-est) of them, and "Mimi" and "Lulu" are the sockpuppets, by the way, I have questions and ideas about what you do on your free evenings and I want them neither confirmed nor answered. Update: This is slanderous and I want to apologise wholeheartedly to Carl for making assumptions about him and judging his character. Once again, he is not Mimi or Lulu. He's just a normal, cool guy.

And now you come to me, on the day of my daughter's wedding on a different platform, leave me an anon ask in the exact same format as you're so fond of, and expect any different ??

Well, yeah, then I guess I'll give you special treatment this time.

Here's exactly why I will never include anything you have told me to include:

Julian and the Phantoms discussing the Berlin Wall would be highly inappropriate for the largely fluffy, cracky tone of my fanfiction, especially given how recently the event occurred, how many Eastern Germans still experience prejudice to this day because they were born within the old borders of the DDR, and because of how nuanced this, essentially proxy war, was and how ill-informed a huge amount of the world is on the actual factors in play during this time and the Cold War in general.

Julian and the Phantoms will not discuss Yugoslavia dissolving, nor the fallout and conflict that resulted, because it was genocidal. There is nowhere I can fit Julian, pantsted, casually asking Luke “hey do you remember when the Herzegovinas were killed en masse by the Serbs?” Not gonna happen.

They won���t discuss Bill Clinton because all of them know who the current world leaders are: they don’t have amnesia, they’re ghosts. The fic is also rated T, so it would be inappropriate to make any explicit reference to “sexual relations”. None of them play saxophone.

Julie wouldn’t think of Les Mis or Hamilton because Thomas is Regency, not French Revolution, and Kitty is Georgian, not Colonial.

Julie won’t be calling Fanny Mary Poppins because she is perpetually stuck in a white dress, doesn’t wear a hat, doesn’t own an umbrella or a purse and was not the nanny or housekeeper of Button House.

The ghosts will not discuss the marvels of modern transportation or how long it would’ve taken to cross the Atlantic on dinghy because the ghosts have seen Friends. The house irl is on a flight path. They know airplanes exist. Alison and Mike pulled up in a car.

I will probably have the phantoms and Willie talk to Pat and Julian about being from the ‘80s and ‘90s. That I will actually probably do.

The Captain will not mention FD Roosevelt because, again, they all know who the current world leaders are, and I doubt he expects a ‘90s pop punk band to have any insider knowledge on the man.

It was interesting to think of the phantoms’ grandparents having been alive during WW2. I wasn’t lying. But there is nearly nothing I can do with this information.

But above all: both sets of ghosts have already adapted to modern life. Because the shows are shorter, and meant to actually be able to fit jokes in them.

If you want to see any of this, write your own damn fic. I don’t own the concept of a JATP/BBC Ghosts crossover.

What you will not do, “consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel”-nim, is hound me on multiple accounts and then change platform to hound me again. I’m absolutely not having it.

I have never received an interaction quite like this before, and I cannot help but wonder if this is because this is my first work in the Ghosts/HH/Them There/Six Idiots/Yonderland/Bill fandom: that this is where you primarily camp out.

So it’s at this point I ask the Them There/Six Idiots fandom if they have/if they know anyone who has had a run-in with this person or thinks they may have, or if anyone perhaps even knows who this is? Maybe I’m just one of many. Maybe this is a necessary fandom evil I was unaware of.

This experience has left me royally freaked out, as one might imagine, especially since my anxiety in general has been acting up due to it being exam season. I want to thank everyone who’s read my rambles on Discord and on here and even listened to them irl and offered support from the bottom of my heart.

I’ve enabled comment moderation on the fic. I will continue to write it, and I will put exactly what I, and only what I, want in it.

Believe it or not, I wanted to do literally anything else today.

Anon: Fucking Leave Me Alone.

Update: Just reiterating: Carl is not Mimi or Lulu. Carl is a cool dude and I want to sincerely apologise for having brought him into this mess, passing judgment on his character, and making him feel like he should stop practicing English online.

[everything-laito]

damn the brain be out here going BRRRRRR here’s the Laito and Cordelia Analysis (with a little bit of Karl sprinkled in) Part III

wow my fingers are freezing but my brain sure isn't! 

aaaanyways, iiiiiit’s trauma time!!! Am I a productive member of society by writing these analyses? No. Do I gain anything by writing them? Kinda, my brain gets exercised and they’re fun to research for. But if you haven’t read the first part or the second part for some reason (I recommend reading them in order), there they are. 

Once again, trigger warnings still apply; mainly about trauma, isolation, etc 

I’m gonna talk about the trauma and effects it had on Laito and to attempt to extrapolate why he is the way he is. I have a lot of examples I want to go over and stuff to talk about, so I think the trauma part is going to be split between two (or maybe three) parts. I also have a little bit to say about Karlheinz.

As always, big ass rant under the cut! 

Section 6: Neuroplasticity and Trauma

Oh???? More science vernacular??? You BET! Ok, neuroplasticity. I know I’ve talked about it on this blog. But, I seriously doubt that there is a madlad who has read all of my analyses (speaking of which, I should update the master list lmao) and I don’t expect anyone to do that LOL! Anyways, this neurological concept is the ability of neurons to adapt to certain circumstances or stimuli by creating new neurological pathways (through synapses). This basically relates to memory and learning. It’s why we don’t stay the same person as we grow and develop. It’s responsible from mindset changes to response to traumatic events. It plays a huge part in trauma, which is why “repressed memories” occur as well. 

Trauma, taken from Psychology Today, is defined as: 

...the experience of severe psychological distress following any terrible or life-threatening event. Sufferers may develop emotional disturbances such as extreme anxiety, anger, sadness, survivor’s guilt, or PTSD.

It’s a basic definition. And although I’d assume people would know what trauma is already, but knowing the lexical definition of something can be good to know before going into it. 

Obviously, Laito has trauma, there’s literally no refuting that. But, the point I’m getting at, is the reason why he is the way he is today is because of neuroplasticity. As previously stated, we are going to assume the DL vampire brain works similarly or the same as a human brain. So, because of the stress put upon the brain (Cordelia’s actions and Laito’s general upbringing in a stress filled household), Laito’s brain was rewired (neuroplasticity). This section doesn’t really have much new information, but I wanted to give a baseline since there’s many people who don’t know what neuroplasticity is.

Laito’s definitely different than what he was as a kid. He still kind of had his smarts, and might have been  but as we’ve deducted from the first part of this series, he might have been groomed. On top of that, the brain is easily moldable when you’re a child (which is why grooming makes sense for Laito’s case), and continues to snip brain cells off and form new connections. 

Section 7: Little intermission about Karlheinz 

I know I haven’t really talked about Karlheinz yet. So this will be the section that I do it in. I know this part is about Laito’s trauma, but it’s so hard to not just weave other characters into it. Nothing is stand-alone, which is why it was so hard for me to plan this out. I was debating about saving this for another analysis, but I feel like it fits. 

I referenced this in Part II, Section 5 of this analysis series. Basically, Karlheinz throws Laito into the dungeon and locks him up. Not Karlheinz personally, but he ordered someone to do it. We don’t explicitly know why, but there’s several implications. A huge one is that it was part of Karlheinz’ experiment. Before Dark Fate, I was like “wait, so did Karl find out about Laito/Cordelia? And got like jealous or was like ‘nah this shit fucked up no thanks’?” I was really scratching my head on that. But in Dark Fate, you find that Karlheinz knew about Cordelia and Laito, and even really wanted it to happen. Which is all sorts of fucked up. This really put Laito in for a loop. Here’s a scene from Dark Fate: 

Laito: That woman always, always believed in Karlheinz. Laito: She believed he married her because he loved her, wanted her. That’s why she was sure that one day... he will give his love only to her.  Laito: But she was tricked. She wasn’t loved from the start... Laito: -And I’m a victim of this unbelievable mistake... That’s how it is. Laito: I was treated as a vent for her feelings. Yui: ...Laito-kun... Laito: I’m sure he knew that something like this will happen... He is a god after all... Laito: I was hoping that... He just overlooked it up until now... Laito: But... I was naive.  Laito: I was only planned a scapegoat. 

God, when I played this, that just freaking struck me to my core. That’s so awful. Ironically... Karlheinz probably has some high level of emotional intelligence. I don’t believe he could be labeled as a sociopath, considering he has this high level understanding of pathos. He’s not god in a sense that he controls everyone individually himself. He’s so good at manipulation that he basically creates fate itself (whether you believe in it or not). He’s generally intelligent and cunning, and it also just helps with the fact that he’s immortal and can time travel. He knows cause and effect by now, and I believe Lost Eden said something about how he’s done so many different “timelines.” 

The definition of a god in a philosophical sense can be broken down into three words: omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. More wicked cool jargon! Yay! Here’s what they mean for extra clarification:

Omniscient: All knowing Omnipresent: All seeing Omnipotent: All doing

Sure Karlheinz doesn’t absolutely know everything, nor can see everything, and he definitely has limits to his power, but he has gained knowledge through living for so many years and time traveling; he has familiars which add to the whole “all seeing” part; and he has a lot of power. So basically, in the most semi-”realistic” sense, it would definitely be the closest being to any kind of god.

Karlheinz is probably the reason why Laito himself has such contempt towards religion, and the existence of a god in general. Sure, the boys are like “that shit’s made up by humans” in general, but it would make sense for Laito himself to have that specific hatred. It makes sense that these vampires would be like “oh that’s made up by humans” when they’ve been around forever and have seen multiple religions come and go. (I’m mainly talking about in DL’s lore case, not starting a religious argument; please don’t take it as such––just to clarify)

Section 8: Isolation

Originally, the previous part was going to be about Laito’s isolation being locked up. However, I went off the rails and it turned into that little intermission. This is going to be a shorter section, but I still wanted to talk about, and it will weave into the next section. 

There is no implications about how long Laito was locked up (and tortured) in the dungeon. There’s also no implications about why he was tortured. But torture and isolation puts such stress on the brain that there’s definitely going to be some kind of outcome if persisting for a good period of time. So let’s take a look at what that does to a person. 

Once again, taking this with a grain of salt. I imagine vampires don’t need to rely on social interaction as much as humans do, considering they live forever. But we don’t know. However, throwing Laito into a state of isolation implies that it would be some type of torture or harsh punishment for a vampire, which therefore implies that social interaction is a necessity for emotional function. It’s just sound, inductive logic. 

So now, as for isolation, I’m using this article as reference. It’s a pretty interesting one to read. Here’s another extensive article as well. Basically isolation can cause:

Depression/anxiety

Immune system deficiencies (basically more likely to get physically ill)

Sleep cycle changes (if put underground or with limited natural light)

Hallucinations

Paranoia

Issues with processing information and more susceptible to persuasion/manipulation

We have no clue if Laito’s experience fits all of these. Also, the second one can be crossed out because vampires in DL can’t get physically sick in the way we can. Also, unsure about the sleep cycle stuff considering they are used to being in the dark. Hallucinations and paranoia can’t be crossed off nor proven. 

Being isolated physically and mentally exhausts the mind, which is why it’s also a way of torture. Laito implies that he was tortured with physical devices, but regardless, it’s still stress on the mind. This type of stress definitely goes along with what was mentioned with neuroplasticity and trauma, which also supports the last bullet point: issues processing information and being more susceptible to persuasion/manipulation. Take this flashback from Maniac Prologue in HDB that I used in Part II section 5 (but here’s even more context):

Laito: ーー Let me go!! Let me out of here! Butler: I can’t, young lord. We’ve received strict orders from your father. I am deeply sorry, but please stay put for a while. Laito: What’s the point in having me chained up in here!? Butler: ーーI am very sorry. Laito: Hahahaha…You stupid old man! Do you think that this will make repent!? How foolish! That demon! Has his brain finally rotten from spending too much time with humans!? ー Cordelia appears Cordelia: ー Oh? Laito: …!? Have you come to save me? Cordelia: Oh dear. Ufufu…I’m sorry Laito, that isn’t it. Laito: Eh? Richter: ー Why are you here? Laito: …That’s my line. Cordelia: Okay, okay. No fighting! More importantly, Richter…Come here. Laito: …!? Cordelia: Nnn…Hey, Laito. You are a good boy. Laito: …!! Cordelia: Right, Laito? Laito: Yeah, that’s right. I’m…I’m a good boy after all.  ーー Besides, I’m the type of person who only get more aroused from this kind of thing.

Although I also use this to support the whole Stockholm syndrome point, this could also be supported with the trauma isolation also holds. His mind is being re-molded into the facade he holds. Also, note the whole “do you think this will make me repent?!” part. Just a very interesting thing. The word “repent” implies that there’s something to feel guilty about or the person knows that what they’ve done is bad. It just goes to show that Laito has some part of guilt or moral compass still in tact. 

You can also argue that this scene was when Laito just got locked up, or he’s been here for a while. Either way, he could have also been socially isolated before this too, just hanging around Cordelia like it’s implied when he was a child. Remember the whole not being in bed 9/10 times when he was a child? Yeah, controlled social isolation. We also rarely see Laito with other characters in his flashbacks. I don’t believe we see him with his brothers in any of his flashbacks from what I can recall; he’s usually with Cordelia. Just implies (to me) that he’s around her a lot. And being locked up is also a more extreme case of that, which would mold the brain even more. 

I know that was a LOT to process and read. I sure hope this still is cohesive for you all. I’m pretty bad at organizing this kind of stuff; it’s a bit difficult since it all just goes together. Which, kudos on the writers of DL, because that’s just good writing. I was going to put something about gaslighting in this part, but that might be too long, so I’m going to make that a separate part or include it in the next part. 

If you have any questions, feel free to just put it in the inbox. I’m planning on making the last part of this series answering all the Laito/Cordelia questions I’ve received, or just general questions pertaining to this analysis in general, whether it be tangential questions or clarifying questions. 

Hope you all are still enjoying this ride as much as I am!  -Corn