#im not sure whether or not this meme is long since dead and people dont think its funny anymore......

[daily-dose-of-bucket]

Day 164: DON'T CALL KANNA KIZUCHI AT 3 AM (GONE WRONG)(SUPERNATURAL)(SHE HAS WHAT UNDER HER BUCKET???)

666 followers special (it's no longer 666 but it was for a little bit)

[macklives]

session 92 end (bye 413...)

this session was so long but so fucking hectic what the fuck

im going to try and slim it down to its bare essentials rather than go on a full rant because im pretty sure i want to make a post later on about vriska’s characterisation (not anything about me liking her/disliking her, just an analyse on her life really, so it wont be too bias because thats not the point of an analysis. i also want to do one on aradia, been meaning to for a while... hmm... damn i havent done much analogies lately, and i THINK the last long post on a character i made was about davesprite??? so its been a fucking while. that being said, ill leave a lot of details out for this end of session notes so i dont just repeat myself later on. rather will keep to plot points here and then make character points in another)

alright

first we had a page or two where aradia confided in nepeta about her being dead which means nepeta is the only one to know this revelation. im pretty sure aradia confided because there was no other way around it, since nepeta was her server player, so it was inevitable. either way, aradia still put her trust in nep, which means, if you think about it, nobody else knows and nobody else ever will. and considering aradia asked nep to keep it a secret, it probably wont get explored by others until MAYBE later on, whenever its plot relevant, so everyone will be in the dark about it for a while which ill have to remember for future dialogue and scenes with aradia in them

then we met vriska

which, yes, is a meme. i may not have been on a lot of fandom platforms, but you cant escape some of the stuff that goes around the internet. even if you dont know undertale, im pretty sure you know of sans. or komaeda if you have/havent seen danganronpa. its just.. the memes, ya know? ive heard from many sources of the “vriska did nothing wrong” quote (even through mbmbam which??? WHAT) but since i didnt even know what it meant, i never explored it so then i never knew it was a homestuck thing. imagine my surprise...... i think even at the time, i wouldnt have known what homestuck was either honestly so it wouldnt even matter. i only recently learned about the fandom.... uhh, maybe half a year ago??? yeah, august, so my knowledge was slim but vriska is a thing ive heard before, which still shocks me

goddammit

anyways back to her

so her intro was something, we pretty much found out she likes DnD (a FANATIC in fact) and feeds her lusus the flesh of living trolls. which is fucked up. but i wont get too much into detail about that until i make a post about her life on alternia and the consequences of such. or maybe just alternia in general...?? or *both* heheheh but i feel i need more information before i go off on a tangent about that

then we met??? white text dude?? who is a major asshole but an asshole with insults that hURted, to think i felt bad for VRISKA when that happened. woah.

i said before, but... karkat, he cant really hit deep because his insults are just HIM and his way to express himself. like some people find it natural to just go “FUCK YOU” to show emphasis on a point, and thats just karkats way. he may do it so aggressively that it takes you a second to realize what he said, but usually i dont take anything to heart whenever he spurts out some insults. ive progressed to the point where whatever he says, is just “karkat” and not him trying to be actively mean. rather, its now funny whenever he does say anything SOMEWHAT creative, dude has an imagination that goes on for miles

but vriska?? she IS trying to be a bully, you can tell. but i feel theres something much more to that. like shes trying to prove herself and her “blueblooded” demeanours or whatever the hierarchy is. she doesnt want to show emotions so she makes herself a barrier by being mean is what i can gather from her conversation with kanaya. im pretty sure youre not supposed to understand her until its pointed out and rather see her as an “antagonist” at first, but yeah, her insults are more pitiful than anything and i also cant take her too seriously. i may not like her as a person but her character is interesting because you cant always have the goodie two shoes as the protags. it doesnt diversify the characterisation so i like vriska as someone who makes the plot work and it becomes more interesting since you have someone that makes it harder for the main crew to progress. a happy-go-lucky adventure with no trouble and no turnabouts would be boring in a way. so having a character like vriska, or like this new white text guy, it makes you stop for a second and realize oh shit okay, here’s where shit CAN go wrong and WHY. and i do especially like it when these bastards of characters somehow have more depth than being the “bastard characters”. kinda humanizes them in a way. doesnt mean you have to LIKE them continuously, but theyre humans (trolls whatever) in the end and every person has their own story whether its for better or for worse

for example, i like her being placed into the story, along with white text, by how its all leading to this “accident” and is slowly showing us hints on what happened, but in the end, it wont be until later that we know the full story. even if it was in the past, it apparently is very vital to the plot and shapes how the characters act in the future, so important aspects like that are to look out for. and usually they only occur when theres been some trouble within friend dynamics. so without these bastard of characters, plot wouldnt grow AS strong and i often keep that in mind when i explore a story.

anyways, I HAD A POINT TO THIS: so vriska and karkat are characters who are yes, mean, but it seems to be their personality, and the way they either show emotions and convey feelings (karkat) or make a barrier so they DONT show emotions to produce vulnerability (vriska), white text guy seems to mostly be out to be an asshole. he told vriska she was useless to sum it up but im not too sure if this is one of those “first dialogue” to mould out a bias opinion before we even get to the character themselves, but judging by how vriska and karkat played out, he surely means something bad and i dont know how to explain it. but i cannot base anything off from one piece of dialogue. i dont even know what else to call him other than white text guy so...... ill just leave that out for now, until we finally get his introduction

though, i do wish to mention, and will expand on, im not wrong when i say karkat and vriska are similar but in different context. sorry if youre favourite is karkat and you dont like vriska, or vice versa, but uhhhh their introductions are so similar its uncanny and the way they’re portrayed is the same except one is more on crack about the meddling, while the other is angry about the meddling. similar to how it was with karkat, we were introduced to vriska talking with someone we knew (tavros) whom she obviously didnt like, so obviously, from her point of view, she wanted to be menacing. like how karkat was menacing to jade because she wouldnt listen to his point... he got angry, so he lashed out. but us, the readers, didnt know that. we thought “oh god its this asshole” until we made it further in the story and started to warm up to karkat. it may not be the same with vriska, she may be a bully regardless, but you cannot tell me we moulded a bias towards her character as we did when we first read karkat. theyre both truly mean to other people, maybe both for different reasons, but i do want to point out the similarities and not leave that out. im pretty sure andrew basically gave us a conversation that formed our opinion of a character right off the bat rather than go into depth of WHY they did it, and how they are naturally without the conditions of the game. which, you can also see with vriska when she conversed with kanaya. andrew started off with a character who only appears to speak once, and makes you judge them from first appearance alone, without any explanation as to why they said what they said and how they are with other characters, let says. so you assume they were simply a rude character. now look how karkat turned out. so im guessing in homestuck, the first impression should never be the opinion you stick with until MAYBE 5 more conversations with that character (each one different)

OKAY done with the vriska introduction, now to slutquius

yes, hes kinda weird, i have stated that many times. i have no idea what to say about him other than he likes porn, he likes centaur dick which just so happens to be his lusus as well and if that isnt a red flag idk what is

he also likes his lusus milk, right from the udders of his guardian

fun times, fun times

my opinion of equius kinda.. differs. which i should really put in place the “dont judge by first impression” rule, because at first i thought he was rude with, then i thought he was hhh okay, because i understood why he was being so protective over nepeta and her team placement, since the people she was going to play with WERE dangerous. but if you think about it, both sides will probably put you in danger. it just depends on which ones you confide in more to protect your back rather than those which would cause trouble on purpose, in my HONEST opinion. so equius was a little overdramatic on that part, but i got what he meant. he was on the blue team and he didnt want to leave nepeta alone without him on the red. but then this session happened. and he went back to being weird again because of the whole porn thing, especially being so open about it like dude chill youre 13. but the thing is, then i felt bad for him because hes basically touch starved. to say that he could break anything he touches, i doubt people would go up to him for hugs. in fear they would be crushed to death by a simple hug. so im guessing hes rather lonely and doesnt really know how to interact because of this. so i felt sad that he had to live a life where he needs to be careful of everything he touches so it doesnt break randomly. see? poor dude. but then things got weird. and im pretty sure hes a masochist. so my opinion on equius is a fucking cosine graph

which brings us to the final point:

gamzee and equius’ conversation

i dont even know.....like.........gamzee was unaware that equius was using him for his own power play roleplay, right? gamzee knew it was a roleplay but it had had some.. idk.... obvious sexual implications? and i bet gamzee didnt really know that? he thought they were only venting out through a simple roleplay and trying to get closer because he originally thought equius hated him, considering equius flat out said “i hate you” and gamzee went “you tell me everyday and im okay with that” so.. gamzee probably wanted only to get closer to equius so he helped out his little problem which.. thats so sweet but i feel bad he was coerced into something he didnt get, especially since he was innocent enough to go along without knowing equius’ true gain

anyways, equius was getting off with the hierarchy thing. considering he’s “lower” than gamzee, and gamzee is surprisingly ...high on the spectrum??? so equius wanted gamzee to boss him around, because it felt only natural to him since he’s the “inferior one” and gamzee is The Big Man. like i get that, but it was written in a way that was so uncomfortable, that i wish i didnt. equius is just a weird character... hes not BAD per say, but hes... hes something alright

but im really liking gamzee. the two things which struck me in that one conversation, was the “i dont get why we should dictate people by the colour of their blood, i just see people as people” piece of dialogue and “i cant go around pleasing just everything so its alright if you hate me”

thats... so good, idk. i really liked that. i also really liked when kanaya said “youre dangerous but dangerous people are needed and are important because it shapes you” like <33 my fucking heart

god homestuck may be a tad on the weird side with some of its characters but it surely knows how to create great lines of dialogue

and that concludes the long 4 hour session i did, hope you all enjoyed it

with that, i rest

[plainvanillapotato]

the 100 diaries S3 E3

quarantine diaries: june 25 2020

season 3 episode 3: “Ye Who Enter Here”

based on this title imma just assume that this episode is gonna be hell aka Dante’s inferno

this dynamic between lexa and clarke is very beauty and the beast vibez with how clarke is give lexa ‘i wont see you’

“I can do both (hate lexa and herself) ” clarke said. We love a multi-tasker

“I want your people to become my people” ..”join me” Is lexa proposing a political marriage with clarke????

wow clarke used bellamy’s “kill me” line

clarke also said “Go float yourself”....let these kids say FUCK

Ice queen!! love matriarchy!

Yesssss Lexa you kick that guy off the ledge. this is what i like to see but also that could have really killed one of your people down below 

chill kane its just a med kit. but also watch they need a med kit but kane is like noooo 

i still dont like this relationship between bellamy and this girl bc who is she??  the writers really didnt put any effort into making me like her. Did you tell her how you injured your leg bellamy? Did you tell her that you got it trying to save clarke??

“There was no room at the inn” did pike just quote the Bible??

but also this reminded me of this office scene

look at the prince his fancy new clothes. lol when hes said “what you really want” my mind immediately when to spice girls

Humpy dumpy sat on a wall. side note How did bellamy sense that Octavia was sitting up there like people dont naturally turn back toward the door they just went threw but i guess bellamy can just sense octavia’s vibez

aww look at bellamy being a supportive brother to octavia

Echo???? damn is my bellamy and echo ship still on??

Who is this assassin?? Highkey dramatic with that unwrapping of his weapons.

waht? Raven can crack the code now? since when? since fucking when?

Ugh again with this girl. its not like i dont ship her and bellamy cuz it looks like she makes bellamy happy but wtf the writers didnt build up the relationship at all so it just feels false to me

While on the topic of boos what ever happened to millers boyfriend?? Like they talked about it and now...what where is he?

i find it kinda funny how this grounder assassin has like primal weapons but has this kinda modern, cheap ass watch that you can buy at target or one that you would get at mcdonald’s. it could have been such a meme if the assassin pulled out this relic instead

lowkey this grounder marketplace looks like star wars land in disneyland

Free food?! and kane gives her a patch but what good is that patch?? 

“Its up to the people.” we love a democracy except when majority of the population are idiots aka everyone on the ark

"aden is ready” so like do these people just base the next leader’s  readiness to rule on if they’re good enough fighters?? I guess that makes sense considering how majority of the population seem to be warriors. Lexa also mentioned something about a conclave..wtf is a conclave? 

look at lexa defending clarke against this baldy. damn she’s simping hard for clarke and its so obvious and yet baldy just suggested that she kill clarke.

also i cant help but laugh at the fact that when people finally meet wannheda they just see clarke. and ok sure she may do some badass stuff but come on dont tell me she doesnt look like a cinnamon roll

wait so what does bellamy’s girlfriend actually do? like is she an engineer or what??

yikes more neck deaths

“I’m not leaving my blade” neither would i octavia. also im curious on whether the grounders added the drawing of the gun when the space people came down with their guns because it seems like the space people are the only ones with guns that they would interact with (bc of the grounder lore surrounding guns and that they didnt seem buddy buddy with the mountain men)

ok clarke you pull that knife on lexa. but look at the intense eye contact damn. also that was such a dramatic knife drop. i gotta say that the background music during this was definitely a choice

also clarke can you please remove these ugly ass red hair extensions?

13th clan. huh? i dont like this. mostly because i dont like the world building and i just prefer bellamy and the rest of the spacers doing ‘whatever the hell they want’

ngl i thought that singer was clarke for a second. And i was like woah clarke can really sing?! but atlas it wasnt her. you know this made me think of all the other shows where they have that one musical episode...oh god i hope they do a musical scene later in the show. i would die happy. also did lexa really just hire a singer for this event?? 

How long is this assassin prepping like he’s been doing this seen the beginning of the episode?? who is his father, mother, brother, kin?? 

“how many floors”..”All of them” bitch if this mission were up to me everyone would be dead. but luckily its up to bellamy who always come thru

“Bear our mark.” when abby told kane that he should be chancellor it was more like i dont want to be marked so you should do it. jk also that’s not an honor that is a branding. and dont hate me but MARK-us because marcus kane. lol i dont care if you hate me that joke was for me. 

Yes bellamy you crash whatever this event is but also how the hell did climb up so fast! 

Are you kidding me echo? that two timing bitch ugh just when i rooting for her and bellamy she pulls this shit. 

the assassin is at Mount weather?! ugh. 

aww look at sinclair giving raven a pep talk

Oooo i called it Gina is dead. but the assassin really when for the abomin and not the neck..interesting choice. Why is this this assassin so much smarter than gina like he knew about that secret compartment and he had the codes also he got a tattoo with the codes. That’s some commitment!

you go sinclair. aww poor raven wabbling as fast as she can with that leg brace.this assassin must not be that good of an assassin if Sinclair can fight him off

Ofc they destroy mount weather. raven and sinclair were yeeted in that explosion

That stare that bellamy gave to Lexa and then that look between bellamy and clarke. ooo the tension is real

Also does bellamy know that this girlfriend just died or??? but i guess thats something that shouldnt be found out via radio

Who did Clarke’s makeup and hair or did she do it herself?? cuz it was definitely a bold choice. also the following image is not to mock clarke its just the most curse makeup image that ive seen and i love to share it with others

lexa bowing down to clarke...ship???

Is that Emerson??! bitch

[tarmairons]

re: that last hp ask i got

i know i said i wouldn’t be cross-posting my bellamort/dark au/riddle fam headcanons from twitter but i’ve decided to post a lengthy updated masterpost here after all so ENJOY bon apetit 

1. see the thing is that 90% of my hcs can’t be described with words bc they’re just.. feelings.. aesthetics.. vibes.. vague scenarios that make me feel some sort of way… the dark au has a certain Feel and i just stick a bunch of domestic concepts in there and shake it all up and that’s it shshsh

2. disclaimer: im like 75% sure my self indulgent ramblings won’t make sense so sorry about that

3. i was fully serious that one time i said on twitter that voldemort’s no.1 priority after taking over the wizarding world was doing sth about his snace (snake face) so yeah. first things first he’s not as fugly in the dark au. as mentioned previously he just looks like mr. ralph and probably wears ornate haute couture power suits

4. the public doesn’t actually know who the augurey is for YEARS… they know whoever it is is voldemort’s second in command and sure there’s rumors that he has an heir but nobody knows it’s delphi. this way she doesn’t have to be reclusive and hide away, she just lives her life, studies and trains, masters the art of dark magic, hangs around town etc, and no one suspects anything bc who would think this tiny super friendly innocent looking girl is the dark lord’s kid — her identity isn’t revealed until she’s deemed Ready to publicly take up her position. and when she is revealed it’s a Big Moment bc she’s a drama queen and lives for attention

5. delphi is taller than bellatrix

6. speaking of bellatrix. she’s presumed dead after the battle of hogwarts which turns out to be a cool bonus for the dark side. any leftover resistance? she’ll take care of that and they’ll never see her coming. tbh this seems a lot cooler in my head bc movie bellatrix would not be stealthy enough to stay hidden for years she would probs trip over something and accidentally commit arson within a few days. but yeah sneaky assassin sounds sexy. plus to be super honest i imagine bella is a teensy bit more collected than in the films... no shade at helena y’all know i would die for her but there are in fact things i would change about her bella. so yeah for a while the only people who know she’s alive aside from her immediate family are probs rod and the malfoys

7. hm so. the malfoys…. much to think about. narcissa did lie to voldemort’s face during the battle so logically he should have killed her the moment he realized she knew harry was alive all along. but this is a soft dark au so let’s pretend bellatrix was like hey dude don’t kill my sister maybe and voldemort was like k. i mean no harm done, harry potter is properly dead in this universe after all

8. but seriously tho. the only reason voldemort didn’t yeet narcissa into a wall was for bella’s sake. he’s nice like that, he probably promised her at one point that he wouldn’t violently murder her family. peak romance

9. delphi is surprisingly close with both her parents although with voldemort it’s more of a mentor-student relationship than a parent-child one bc he’s Like That. growing up it was always bella who insisted they treat delphi more like a child and less like a weapon and voldemort wasn’t always happy about that bc he’s emotionally constipated and also never had a childhood. also he’s, like, evil. so yes, reminding voldemort that delphi was her daughter too sometimes got bella in trouble bc we all know of voldemort’s superiority issues. but no bella didn’t stop insisting that delphi deserved an actual childhood and in the end they compromised like functional adults and delphi turned out pretty well for someone raised by 2 of the most terrifying people alive

10. but yeah that’s not to say voldemort and kid delphi never had soft moments. they did. he even picked her up every once in a while. everyone was surprised, bella most of all. she probably cried in the bathroom later bc the softness overwhelmed her. i’m not sure if i mean that in a sarcastic shitpost kind of way or if she was really moved to tears. y’all decide for yourselves

11. delphi looks very very much like bella but she has tom riddley eyes.. so dark they’re nearly black. and soulless. maybe they even flash red when she’s enraged. and she has very aristocratic very controlled tom riddley mannerisms. it’s not until you piss her off and she goes off the rails that the bella side of her personality kicks in

12. delphi gets along really well with the malfoys (except lucius. she thinks he’s pathetic and likes to tease him. in a friendly way but it’s still harsh. she gets that from her mom) esp scorp. scorp thinks this makes him cool at school bc he gets to fist bump the augurey and not get murdered for it

13. speaking of hogwarts. umbridge is scared shitless of delphi and it’s always a school-wide spectacle when the augurey drops by unexpectedly on official business and umbridge starts stuttering and quivering. scorp sometimes makes a point to approach umbridge and delphi when they’re talking and act all chummy-chummy with his cousin just to make himself look powerful and Cool in front of umbridge and the other students

14. i still don’t know whether voldemort would call delphi ‘delphini’ or just ‘delphi’… i imagine he’s a strict stick-up-his-ass kinda father but who knows. he does call bellatrix ‘bella’ but that’s different i guess

15. but THEN AGAIN he does have a gigantic soft spot for delphi too. maybe he slips up every so often and calls her delphi. i’m literally making this shit up as i go along i’m just smashing my mf keyboard and occasionally glancing at my messy hcs notebook. I TOLD YALL i don’t have solid hcs i just have VIBES and AESTHETICS. the only way you’ll get specific hcs out of me is if you ask very specific questions

16. weirdest brotp is delphi and rodolphus. nobody knows where that came from but they get along so well and it confuses everybody

17. we been knew that bella is batshit crazy and criminally insane or whatever but against all odds she is a surprisingly good mother. she’s always been soft for family (narcissa etc) so it makes sense that she would legit die for delphi. they have this super casual bantery relationship YALL GET ME bella is so proud of delphi she’s literally that “my little baby off to destroy people” meme!!! honestly mother-daughter relationships are my goddamn weakness i would die for the two of them

18. delphi has a gf (underdeveloped oc time!) who, for the longest time, doesn’t know who she is dating bc delphi is obviously not allowed to say. she finds out the truth eventually and she is properly freaked out for a very very long time. and since all of these hcs are stupidly soft we’re just gonna keep making them softer: the gf is terrified of delphi’s parents at first (obvs) but they’re both extremely fond of her (well, bella is, voldemort probs doesn’t care all that much about who delphi is dating so long as she’s not of subpar blood status or secretly spying for the opposition ya know. as long as delphi trusts her he does too)

19. no but really voldemort trusts delphi and bella implicitly. with delphi it’s bc he raised her and he trusts her to be loyal bc she knows no other way, she was meant to be an extension of his power etc. but with bella it’s something he learns over time, to trust her judgement bc despite her many many flaws she’s very perceptive and usually right

20. voldemort probably makes more horcruxes. still haven’t decided how this ties in with the fact that he’s now safely immortal again and neither delphi nor bella are. who knows maybe they all do the do and split their souls. much to think about. feel free to send ur thots and ideas my way

21. ya know im basic and always on my bellamort bs and therefore: as the years go by voldemort warms up to bella. not that he wasn’t already extremely fond of her before but he kicks it up a notch. i mean, he’s already taken over the world so it’s high time to start experimenting with other wilder things like Feelings. 80/90 years old isn’t too late to experience Love or whatever. might as well wake up one day and realize you’re completely and utterly in love with the woman you’ve spent the last 50+ years with whew. LIKE to be fair bella knows him better than anyone — they understand each other, they’re familiar with each other’s likes, dislikes, mannerisms, nervous tics etc etc. let’s be real it freaked voldemort out at first, being vulnerable to any degree (not that he let it show) but it just became so easy to tell her things that it became a natural thing to do. and obvs he trusts her to keep everything between them and never judge him for anything so that’s sweet

22. y’all keep asking me for domestic hcs but what can i possibly say?? imagine literally any domestic scenario ever and just think bellamort and i’ve probably imagined that same scenario before. except its sexier bc the world is dark and evil and they live in a dark gloomy super fancy manor. so we have these 2 goths right but they’re in love but in that casual familiar way YALL GET ME and sometimes they even drink coffee together in the mornings or like. do that thing where Person A returns from work late at night and its dark and raining and Person B is already home just chilling and they don’t even have to talk they just go about their nighttime routine but it’s soft and familiar and COMFORTABLE. i clearly dont have enough softness in my life i just. love domestic scenarios bye

23. i forgot everything else i wanted to write bc i got distracted by domesticity. im also thinking about how voldemort absolutely despises the thought of any pda but he’ll take bella by the wrist in public every so often when he wants to get her attention, or like. put his hand on her back. small things but oh so soft

24. hhhh okay i have a LOT to say about the power fam’s fashion choices but it’s hard to explain without pictures. i have a wholeass ppt presentation but i’m not about to upload 20+ slides to tumblr. but i seriously was not kidding when i said voldemort wears fancy suits and yes i have references. meanwhile delphi is a fan of feathers but mostly goes with lowkey military-style outfits.. she’s practical yet ostentatious. bella sticks to a conservative yet undeniably sexy selection of evil looking dresses.. i should make all of these into pinterest boards hmm

25. controversial opinion but i think delphi knows she and voldemort are half bloods. so does bella but that’s a whole other story, she been knew. anyhow yeah delphi was told the truth bc it was better for her to find out from the source rather than hear rumors from the opposition and begin to distrust the foundations of voldemort’s whole empire and voldemort himself

26. i used to absolutely hate fics where bella would eventually call voldemort by his name but now im like FUCK THAT we don’t do guilty pleasures anymore we just stan ridiculous things and that’s that. one day voldemort had a Thought (shocking, i know) and was like. Hm so we have a wholeass child and we’re basically married maybe bella shouldn’t have to call me My Lord for the rest of her life. BUT ONLY IN PRIVATE. THATS BETWEEN THE TWO OF THEM it’s nobody’s business. It Is Nobody’s Business

27. speaking of marriage. bella and rod got divorced a few years after the battle. it was just a formality tho let’s be real. they remained very close friends tho!!!!!!!! i think that’s an unpopular opinion among bellamort stans but i genuinely believe bella and rod were always close the way best friends or family are ya know. rod really loves bella but as long as she’s happy he’s happy even if it means her fucking the dark lord on the reg or whatever

28. going back to #6 — when the public finally finds out that bella’s alive they obviously start to wonder about her and voldemort and connect the dots re: delphi etc but nobody ever gets any concrete answers bc there’s never any public pda.. any sort of affection is limited to when it’s just the two of them. and obviously it’s not like voldemort gossips about his private life in tabloid interviews or whatnot. ALSO the whole Bella Is Alive reveal isn’t nearly as dramatic as delphi’s big moment.. it’s more discreet and insidious in that way it implies that she was there hiding in plain sight all along. and if the ministry can keep sth this big a secret, what else are they hiding.. ah classic intimidation tactics of an authoritarian regime

29. i dont think this is ever stated in the CC but in terms of politics and bureaucracy i imagine voldemort has a fancy office in the ministry and spends 99% of his time there and rarely spends any time out and about. he’s almost never seen by anyone, rarely attends events etc. delphi’s the one who handles the day to day shit in the wizarding world. she’s like.. the public relations manager.. between the public and voldemort

30. bella is of similar status within the ministry but that’s just bc people are scared shitless of her. she doesn’t actually hold any political power and she most certainly does not want to, that is not her area of expertise at all

31. delphi is dangerously powerful and i think that’s really sexy of her

32. re: #21 it’s like. as voldemort warms up to bella, she in turn chillaxes a bit with the whole blind devotion thing and becomes bolder with him like. she’ll outright question his decisions or tell him what he should do, make judgement calls etc. and it becomes a regular thing.. turns into this casual companionship ya feel.. i won’t say they become equals bc that’s just unrealistic but he certainly stops treating her like his inferior. he recognizes her value and i daresay her authority and stops treating her like shit all the time Wow Romance Is Alive!! (this sounds like some sort of “douche fuckboi changes for his poor mistreated love interest” schtick but it’s really not that bc they’re both monstrous people who do not deserve any pity so jot that down. they’re horrible and they deserve each other and they eventually do make it work and i am so so happy for them)

33. it is never outright stated that voldemort can’t love. jkr has said that he doesn’t understand love and that it’s just symbolism!!! that he’s the child of a loveless union and grew up without knowing love!!! BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN HE PHYSICALLY CANNOT LOVE thanks for coming 2 my ted talk. i wasn’t aware of this until a few months ago and i was thrilled to find out my soft hcs are not entirely ooc after all

34. THE POINT IS. THEY ARE A SEMI-FUNCTIONAL FAMILY and i just really love soft domestic scenarios so sorry jkr but the dark au is the only canon now and it belongs to me. everybody has feelings and everything is soft. i’d like to pitch an idea for a kuwtk style reality show but it’s these 3 sociopaths under one roof navigating family life and wizarding world politics

35. to finish i’d like to apologize for downplaying the fact that all 3 of the people i woobified in this post are psychotic murderers and tyrants etc

—— i’ll be updating this if/when i remember anything i forgot AND ALSO send me ur thoughts and comments and constructive criticism etc pls pls pls 

—— follow me on twitter and also curiouscat bc i get a scary amount of q’s about voldemort’s sex life thank you and goodbye

edits:

36. in this household we stan dark haired delphi. no i will not be taking any criticism regarding this particular fact

37. bella and voldemort never get married. obviously, because that’s a disgustingly romantic and pointless thing to do. it’s sentimental and unnecessary (well, voldemort thinks so, bella might just disagree but she’s not about to force his hand) BUT that’s not to say they’re not basically an old married couple anyway. AND as much as voldemort thinks love is weakness or whatever he knows this, that they’re about as close as two people can get. SO if he just so happens to gift her a ring.. well it’s a purely symbolic gesture but the implication is definitely there

38. it’s the horcrux ring. he trusts her that much. m y  h e a r t

[l0vey-d0vey-moved]

Whichever questions you want with you and Lance for the ask meme? Y’all are too precious ^_^ ~your-local-Kogane

@your-local-kogane you’ve given me TOO MUCH FUCKING LIBERTY. enjoy a longass post answering almost every. single. question on both of those ask memes asjakf,, anyways since this will be long, i will put this under a read more!!

also i skipped some bc i didnt want to keep repeating answers so yea. ,,,,oh man this was long o3o

“send me a ship and i’ll tell you..”

Who said “I love you” first: oh man. us pining after eachother was a fucking mess aksjdkafskfsa,,, i feel like i would say it late at night, then ramble and ramble on how i messed up and i’d almost have an anxiety attack (oops) but lance!! loves!! me!! too!!! huzzah!!!!!

Who would have the other’s picture as their phone background: lance would. i really feel like whenever i’m gone he will miss having me curled up into his side and just open his phone and immediately be like “oh shit it’s sienna,,,, i lof them” and end up staring at his phone until someone (maybe pidge) knocks him outta that

Who leaves notes written in fog on the bathroom mirror: lance would do this. he always leaves little reminders such as: you’re beautiful, i love you, etc etc and i love it but stop dirtying the mirror goddammit!! 

Who buys the other cheesy gifts: oh man,,, lance definitely. he’s so darn cute and often just buys me (legitimately whenever he can) little trinkets and they are so cute!!

Who initiated the first kiss: i also feel like lance would!! i am waaaay too awkward to intiate affection, unless it’s like hand-holding, hugging or cuddling. it was so sweet bc he just cut me off and said “could i kiss you?”  !!! i love it when people do that bc you’re being sweet, cute, and respecting your s/os boundaries at the same time!!!

Who kisses the other awake in the morning: again, lance would. i am really tired in the mornings and never really wake up that fast, so its an efficient way to get me excited for the day!!!

Who starts tickle fights: oh man. lance. fucking little shit!!!

Who asks who if they can join the other in the shower: fucking LANCE (only for shits n giggles. he knows my boundaries :3c)

Who surprises the other in the middle of the day at work with lunch: ohhhh this is easy. i so would!!! i’m a concerned s/o and i have had experiences with people not eating lunch so i always wanna make sure he eats!!

Who was nervous and shy on the first date: i think both of us were nervous, but me. i’m the most nervous person lance has probably ever met. 

Who kills/takes out the spiders: oh man. like i said in another post, we are both terrified of spiders, but lance, being my “knight in shining armor”, would kill the spider. 

Who loudly proclaims their love when they’re drunk: if lance ever gets drunk (which is extremely unlikely), lance would.

“otp questions!”

1: Who spends almost all their money on the other?: lance does without a doubt. he always wants to spoil me but im like no!!! keep your money please!!! (he never does.)

2: Who sleeps in the other’s lap?: ME WITHOUT A DOUBT!!! i love affection so much and i’m always sleeby and lance loves affection so,,, win-win!! 

3: Who walks around the house half-naked and who yells at them to put on some clothes?: uhhh lance probably would tbh,, walks around without a shirt on and he. Knows. it flusters me every time ;w; // if i do it at all, it’s with one of lance’s sweatshirts (hes a Lanky Boi) and some short shorts and sit closer to lance (if thats even possible) and i unintentionally fluster him (tbh i love it

4: Which one tells the other not to stay up all night and which one stays up all night anyway?: i would tell him to not stay up, but he does anyways. (damnit lance)

5: Which one tries to make food for the other but burns it all by accident and which one tells them that it’s okay and makes them both cookies?: i would burn everything and cry about it while lance would tell me its okay and help me bake!!

6: Which one reads OTP prompts and says “Oh that’s us!” and which one goes “Eh, not really”?: tbh i think both of us would go like “that’s!! so!! us!!!”

7: Which one constantly wears the other’s clothes?: ME. i always wear something of lances, whether it be a bracelet, a necklace, a sweatshirt, or a hat. i always want something of his to keep with me :3c // he dies when i wear his signature jacket btw

8: Which one spends all day running errands and which one says “You remembered [thing], right?”: i forget easily, so i would run errands all day and lance would remind me and i wouldve forgotten it and been like “DAMNIT”

9: Which one drives the car and which one gives them directions?: lance drives. i am better at directions, so i give directions. 

10: Which one does the posing while the other one draws?: I LOVE DRAWING OK??? lance totally fuckin’ poses while i draw him

11: If they were about to rob a museum, which one does backflips through lasers and which one is strolling behind with a bag of chips?: lance backflips while i just stroll behind, watching and eating some candy.

14: Which one keeps accidentally using the other’s last name instead of their own?: tbh lance would introduce me as mx mcclain and everytime he does that i fucking implode

16: Which one gives the other their jacket?: lance does. even though i say “really? are you sure? i can just-” i secretly Really Want It and he knows. he offers me the jacket pretty much every chance he can get. 

17: Who keeps getting threatened by the other’s overprotective older sibling?: tbh veronica seems pretty chill about lance and his love life, but my sister,,,, oh boi,, lance would get the talk by my mom, dad, and sister. i’m a sensitive person and if anyone were to break my heart they’d be dead where they’d be standing tbh, even if my friends only knew about it.

24: Which one gives the other a piggyback ride when they’re tired?: lance gives me a piggyback ride. honestly i love piggyback rides and lance is 10/10 great at giving them

29: Which one holds the umbrella over both of them when it rains?: LANCE!!! tall motherfuckin bean is also a caring motherfuckin bean. he makes Damn Sure i dont get drenched or dont get cold

[werewolfwilds]

i redid an ask meme that i had originally done ~3 years ago to see the comparison so for archiving purposes im putting it in a lil journal entry here ! i wanna start doing small journal entries again it was fun when i did that

new answers bolded

1) what images do you have set for your desktop/cell phone wallpapers?

my desktop bg is literally just…. a collage of kageyama manga screencaps a h a,,,, and my cellphone bg are drawings some gay drew me like 74724 years ago :v // my desktop rn is actually a background from one of the dmmd routes LMFAO..... idk which one it is but i’ve always liked those bg pics!! my cell lock screen is p5 art and my bg is leopika

2) have you ever had a crush on a teacher?

nooooope // nah

3) what was your last text message?

my phone is dead so i wouldnt be able to tell you lmfao i dont even remember // it was a gif from kelly lol

4) what do you see yourself doing in 10 years?

hopefully working a job i enjoy and making costumes and being happy!! // god i have no idea and it freaks me out... hopefully working,,

5) if you could be anywhere else right now, where would you be?

hoommee ((or at katsucon tbh)) // at the beach with friends maybe

6) what was your coolest halloween costume?

a white cat probably lmao // i dont think ive ever had a particularly exciting halloween costume but one year i was sharpay from high school musical and i think i peaked then tbh

7) what was your favorite 90s show?

uhhhh….. i didnt really… start watching tv until like… the 2000′s so i really cant tell you man lol // spongebob started in 1999 does that coUNT,

8) who was your last kiss?

(answer redacted) // :/ someone should kiss me so i can change this answer lmao

9) have you ever been stood up?

nope //  nah

10) favorite ice cream flavor?

vanilla w/ vanilla oreos ok u need to underst a n d // this hasn’t changed i haven’t had this particular ice cream in a long time but i still stand by it

11) have you been to las vegas?

nahh // nope

12) your favorite pair of shoes?

idk i have these black ones i wear everywhere lol // i have a pair of white sneakers that i refuse to stop wearing now

13) honestly, have you ever cheated on your significant other?

i wouldnt even consider it. // no bc i’m not a piece of shit lmao?

14) what is your favorite fruit?

hmmm…. pineapple orrr…. strawberries but only if they’re the really good kind like they have to be perfect // pineapple!!

15) have you talked to anyone on tumblr that you could see yourself  dating/having sex with? if possible?

….. ye s��� yes. // in the past apparently so but thinking about it now nah lol

16) are you into hookups? short or long term relationships?

hookups arent my thing eh i prefer long term relationships altho i cant really say ive been in a “long” term relationship pffff // i don’t think hookups will ever be my thing, emotionally long term relationships are what i’m here for but i’m also a Very Impulsive Person so i cant tell you if this will stay a fact :’)

17) do you smoke? if so, what?

nope dont wanna // no thanks

18) what do you do to get over your anger?

usually talk to people or shout into word // i have to vent about it to someone probably a thousand times even months or years after it happens tbh

19) do you believe in god?

nahh // nah

20) does the person you’re in love with know it?

i aint in love with anyone rn so no? // i’m not in love with anyone.

21) favorite position?

………….. for w hat………. // oh honey lmfao... N/A

22) what’s your horoscope sign?

virgo/ox ovob // Virgo/sun, Aries/moon, Libra/rising and Cancer/midheaven

23) your fears?

literally everything i already named a few so ill name some others… ghh anything in… the ocean or lakes and stuff frightens me and i really dont know why bu tlike…. fish and crabs and jellyfish and seaweed cuz it’s evil and stu f f basically anything that’s not a mammal or turtles or penguins…. lo l im a baby // uncertainty is a big fear of mine and also people being mad at me lmao... as far as physical fears though i have debilitating fears of almost all insects/arachnids and lobsters/shrimp/crawfish :^)))))

24) how many pets do you have? what kind?

two cats and a dog!! // one cat one dog

25) what never fails to turn you on?

i dunno,,/////// // lol neck biting/kissing oof

26) your idea of a perfect first date?

im okay with mostly anything i just really like spending time with the person ; v ; // i’ve never really had an answer for this? thinking about dates has always made me so anxious for whatever reason but i’ll be happy to just spend time with them doing whatever honestly, i’m a super indecisive person aha

27) what is something most people don’t know about you?

i dont really know tbh lmfao // i’ve considered in the past looking into mental conditions (anxiety/bpd/etc) to see if i might have one or two but i never want to say anything about it because i don’t want to self-diagnose anything.

28) what makes you feel the happiest?

nice weather and nice conversations w/ best people u//v//u // nice weather and hanging out with people who are fun and easy to talk to

29) what store do you shop at most often?

does….. arda wigs count or… // does arda wigs still count bc mood lmao but truthfully now it’s probably target

30) how do you feel about oral? giving and/or receiving?

kkdkjsfkjkjfj??fsfj/// go for i t??? i have no problems with i t??? i dont think ill ever be willing to put a dick in my mouth though // these random sexual questions thrown in here are something aren’t they lmao. not going to disclose much but i will stand by the fact that i will not put a dick in my mouth lo l

31) do you believe in karma?

sometimes ye // i believe that people will eventually get what’s coming to them but i don’t believe in karma as a solid concept if that makes sense? like i don’t think it’s guaranteed

32) are you single?

yup yup // yeah it’s been wild lmao

33) do you think flowers or candy are a better way to apologize?

i think being sincere is the best way to apologize– if you truly mean it the person will know. you dont need to buy your forgiveness. // the best way to apologize is just to apologize sincerely and change your behavior if it’s applicable.

34) are you a good swimmer?

ehh??? im ok i guess– i took swimming lessons as a kid but i havent done legit swimming ever since then lmao,, ive always been best at the backstroke tho yea // i mean i have the ability to swim but i’m not olympic-worthy or anything lmao

35) coffee or tea?

ehhh im not big on either tbh // chocolate milk and you can fight me

36) online shopping or shopping in person?

depends what your shopping for i guess?? online is more relaxed i guess // online probably because shopping in person Gives Me Anxiety

37) would you rather be older or younger than your current age?

ehhh im happy where i am tbh // older

38) cats or dogs?

do not make me choose // cats and dogs* there i fixed it for you

39) are you a competitive person?

ahaa,,,,, oh god yeah,, // OOF yeah

40) do you believe in aliens?

i believe there’s life on other planets somewhere?? so i guess?? // i believe in aliens in the sense that there’s no way we are the only living life forms in the universe but not in the science-fiction way you feel me

41) do you like dancing?

i do but i suck at it lmao // i do but i: A- suck, and B- have no stamina

42) what kind of music to you listen to?

nearly everything tbh // i’m not picky when it comes to music but imma be real w u. almost all of the music on my phone is kpop. seventeen is my favorite group along with astro, and i also enjoy super junior, shinee, red velvet, etc among so many others,,, im pretty wide spread !

43) what is your favorite cartoon character?

i will never be able to pick just one // i’ll literally never be able to answer this

44) where are you from?

philadelphia uvu // philly!

45) eat at home or eat out?

hmmm at home. // at home

46) how much more social are you when you’re drunk?

i never plan on being drunk tyvm // i’ve never consumed alcohol in my life and to be Quite Fucking Honest i want nothing to do with it

47) what was the last thing you bought for yourself?

bracelets ! ; u ; // uh... excluding food and music... earrings i think

48) why do you think your followers follow you?

uhhhhhhh lmfao i have no idea i think… a good amount are for my cosplays at least?? or id like to think so lmfao but i really dont know pfft // my followers have just accumulated and hung around over the years... i know i gained a good amount from my snk days as arlert-the-troops and then through my haikyuu phase, whether it was for my cosplay or other posts that i made... whenever someone follows me now im not entirely sure what its for but i appreciate everyone who’s stuck around!

49) how many hours do you sleep at night?

it’s never regular man // 6-9 (lol) hours is pretty normal for me

50) what worries you most about the future?

everything tbh // the future as a concept worries me lol

[carterashofficial]

Thanks, Aearyn

@aearyn was so unbelievably kind to tag me for this 

rules: answer these 85 questions and tag 20 people (ahaha no i wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy this took forever)

— what was your last…

1. drink: water. from the fridge. there might’ve been a dog hair in it because Scout and Abbey show their love through shedding. I didn’t care.  2. phone call: my old internship asking why I never got my w-2 form 3. text message: a coupon from World Market, if that counts. If not, i texted myself a spoiler for the kotfe fic so i don’t forget 4. song you listened to: Champion by Carrie Underwood b/c i love it and I NEED THE POSITIVITY   5. time you cried: UH... writing the kotfe fic. But i wasn’t actually crying. it was more like “im tearing up at this one scene b/c its breaking my heart”. Actual crying? been... so long i can’t remember.

— have you ever…

6. dated someone twice: ahahahhahahahahahaha.... ahahahhaha..... ahahahhahahahaha despite my best intentions, i’ve never dated anyone. I’ve been trying to change that. I want romance in my life. 7. kissed someone and regretted it: That would imply i’ve had my first kiss, and im 22 years old and still haven’t had it. APHRODITE WHY AM I SINGLE. I’M READY TO MINGLE 8. been cheated on: see above. Can’t be cheated on if you’ve never HAD A DATE 9. lost someone special: i would rather not consider this question, but Domino, Jewel, and my Grandma (all were very, very sudden and hit me like a bag of bricks).  10. been depressed: ha ha ha apparently i’ve had depression since i was 15. I was officially diagnoses in January of 2017 and have been on medication since. ahahaha  11. gotten drunk and thrown up: no I can barely get drunk even when i try, let alone enough for a damn hangover. Seriously. I can drink like Carmadda and not get drunk.

— fave colours

12. soft eggshell green 13. the blue at the edge of the horizon 14. metallic  anything

— in the last year have you…

15. made new friends: ........yes? i think? 16. fallen out of love: ahahahahaha no b/c i’ve never been in love (in the romantic sense and that’s how im taking this) 17. laughed until you cried: always 18. found out someone was talking about you: in the worst of ways 19. met someone who changed you: yes 20. found out who your friends are: oooooh yes 21. kissed someone on your facebook friends list: never been kisses

— general

22. how many of your facebook friends do you know irl: all? how else do people find you on there? 23. do you have any pets: many. Scout, Abbey, the neon tetras (named the Heralds of Zildrog), my various shrimp, and Corypheus and Valkorian the golden inca snails  24. do you want to change your name: no, but i used to 25. what did you do for your last birthday: went bowling 26. what time did you wake up today: i woke up 3 times, once to Bug getting ready for school, then my mom asking if i opened the vitamins, then... i think 9 was when i finally crawled out 27. what were you doing at midnight last night: playing swtor or looking up some fresh and funky memes 28. what is something you can’t wait for: finished the next kotfe fic chapter and breaking everyone’s hearts. Or the next major expansion of SWTOR. I NEED ANOTHER CINEMATIC TRAILER LIKE GODDAMN 30. what are you listening to right now: nothing my house is silent and in the far, far distance, sometimes i can hear cars on the toll road 31. have you ever talked to a person named tom: i have an uncle named Tom. I have spoken with him. So Yes. 32. something that’s getting on your nerves: socialization. I can only take so much around others. If I was a Sim i’d have the lonely trait. 33. most visited website: Tumblr or my school’s student login page 34. hair colour: blonde/brown im really smack in-between and i just dye it lighter to make it blonde enough for me to be blonde 35. long or short hair: long. so long. down to my butt long                                   36. do you have a crush on someone: not sure. i like him, he’s funny and thinks im funny, and teases me back, but im shit at reading signs and far too much a coward to ask him out. I’m not sure. I had a major crush in high school that resulted in me falling in love with a guy but we never offically dated and then he crushed my heart. Long story. So i try to avoid crushes lest i break my heart again. 37. what do you like about yourself: bitch im fabulous 38. want any piercings: i got 3 in the lobes of each ear and cartilage in the left. If i get any more I think my mom would have a heart attack 39. blood type: ??????? no idea. I know my sister is O 40. nicknames: Milky (only drank milk as a kid, but this nickname has sorta phased away). Other nicknames give away my real name. But I do respond to my sister’s name. 41. relationship status: single and ready to flamingle 42. sign: Aquarius 43. pronouns: she/her 44. fave tv show: i literally can’t pick one b/c ive watched nearly every cop show on Netflix, including some that aren’t in english. All the cooking competitions i can find on Netflix and youtube, and im running out of TV to watch when i do art. Halp. 45. tattoos: Zero because my fatal fear is needles. 46. right or left handed: Left. left left left seriously i can.... maybe dip a french fry in ketchup with my right but that’s it 47: ever had surgery: wisdom teeth removed count? 48. piercings: 7 total in the ears and nothing else. 49. sport: I watch baseball and hockey (SPEAKING OF WHICH, GO DUCKS!). Used to play softball and some soccer. 50. vacation: if i can graduate a quarter early I want to go visit my family in florida and michigan 51. trainers: is... this british for shoes? i wear berkenstocks. only berkenstocks. because crocs are so comfortable but people judge. I also have hella wide feet where ever ‘wide’ shoes are too narrow. I can get by in Vans or my old old Nikes that i hardly ever wear

— more general

52. eating: whether or not if ketchup should go on it, ketchup is going on it. Unless if it’s breakfast food or desert. Breakfast food is my favorite and i could happily live off it it. 53. drinking: water, tea, juice, milk, Mike’s black cherry hard lemonade, monster energy drinks, RC Cola.... i drink a variety of things. Mostly water and tea. 54. i’m about to watch: i dont know I’VE RAN OUT OF THINGS TO WATCH ON NETFLIX 55. waiting for: myself to go out on a date and/or meet The Guy 56. want: many things. 57. get married: One day. 58. career: ssssssssttttttttttuuuuuuuuuudddddddeeeeeeennnnnnntttttttt

— which is better

59. hugs or kisses: i want both but maybe not from the same people. 60. lips or eyes: depends what each are doing tbh 61. shorter or taller: taller b/c im short and can’t reach the top shelf 62. older or younger: older but at this point im 22 and a lot of my classmates are 21 so like.... my generation. 63. nice arms or stomach: arms 64. hookup or relationships: relationships 65. troublemaker or hesitant: depends. like really depends. I’ll probalby go with troublemaker b/c they tend to be funny and on-the-spot and im a planner.

— have you ever

66. kissed a stranger: never kissed anyone..... ha ha ha 67. drank hard liquor: so yes. 68. turned someone down: ahahahhahahahaahaha haha ha. Actually yes I got asked to homecoming my senior year by this one dude who still gives me the creeps jsut tihnking about him. I politely said no. 69. sex on first date: never been on a date, never kissed anyone. Never ‘done the deed’. Would not do on the first date. 70: broken someone’s heart: uh my mom’s when I told her I had Depression and wanted to kill myself all throughout sophomore year highschool 71. had your heart broken: oh. Yes. 72. been arrested: no 73. cried when someone died: more like wailed loud enough that half the dorm floor heard 74. fallen for a friend: *side-eyes my sister* yeeees

— do you believe in

75. yourself: it varies over what. 76. miracles: I mean.... to an extent.  77. love at first sight: no 78. santa claus: I AM 22 YEARS OLD of course 79. angels: its complicated. my mom found a dead rat in our old house’s garage when i was 4-ish and all i remember crying for the dead rat when my dad tossed it in the garbage. My mom explained that an angel had already taken the rat’s soul to heaven. What did I picture the angel as? A carrot, wearing a tie, with mickey mouse-esque white gloves carrying a rat dramatically. This still haunts me.

— misc

80. eye colour: blue enough that you might drown in the ocean 81. best friend’s name: @athenascrown 82. favourite movie: if you think I can pick only one you’ve got another thing coming. but.... any star wars movie. If i had to pick one, Empire Strikes Back or Phantom Menace or The Last Jedi.... or Rogue One.... or Revenge of the Sith... 83. favourite actor: The guy who played the stormtrooper who hits his head on the door in Ep 4 84. favourite cartoon: the old Ducktales was a childhood favorite 85. favourite teacher’s name: I don’t want to put her name out here but she was my art teacher all through high school and she is one of the kindest souls ive ever met and if it wasn’t for her, i wouldn’t have gotten back into art

because this post took 5ever im not tagging anyone but if you want to do it, just say I tagged you and I’ll say i did

[themalhambird]

Richard/Aumerle for the "send me a ship" meme :D

Who s physically stronger?Aumerle. Richard is faster though.

Who is more likely to break a bone?Between the “fight me” reaction to everything and a certain amount of natural clumsiness, Aumerle.

Who knows best what to say to upset the other?Aumerle, actually. If Richard says something horrible to Aumerle he’s more likely to be lashing out because he’s upset with someone else, so it wont have been specifically calculated to hurt. Wheras Aumerle knows all of Richard’s weaknesses and insecurities and could shatter him with a single sentence. He wont though.

Who is more likely to hurt the other?Richard- see aforementioned lashing out. One one level Aumerle accepts Richard isnt mad at him and doesnt mean it, but that doesnt always mean he can shrug off what’s said.

Who is emotionally stronger.?Richard breaks down more quickly, but finds it easier to pull himself together and mask his distress even if he doesnt move past it. Aumerle can cope with more but once he snaps it takes a while to pick up the peices.

Who is more likely to apologize first after an argument?Richard. Mainly because Richard is more likely to have started it and Aumerle is very firm about not apologizing when it’s Richard who’s in the wrong. He’s perfected the art of giving the king of England the cold shoulder without breaching ettiquette- vanishing behind a wall of formality is will normally win him an apology within 48 hours.

Who treats who’s wounds more often?That’s what the royal physician is for. Richard hovers more though- Aumerle will stay out of the way while the doctor’s working unless asked to do otherwise.

Who is in constant need of comfort?Richard. He tries not to dump it all on Aumerle, but there’s only so many people he feels he can be open and honest and vulnerable with and….Aumerle is pretty much all of them. He might find Isabelle if he’s just generally sad or tired and hope for a distraction, and he has Carlisle for more spiritual matters, but apart from that it’s only Edward- which can be pretty draining on Aumerle at times.

Who gets more jealous?Richard, actually. Aumerle is prety much resigned to the face that loving Richard means sharing him; Richard, oth, makes it very clear that Aumerle is HIS and York’s suggestion that maybe its really time for Edward to marry is not welcome through the power of the Plantagenet Glare. (Though if Edward did happen to fall in love with someone else, Richard would support him fully)

Who’s more likely to walk out on the other?Etttiquette prevents Aumerle leaving without permission, and Richard will never relinquish his right to be in whichever room of his palace he pleases to be in so he wouldnt leave because of an argument. He might order Aumerle out, whether Ned obeys or tells him to call the guards to drag him out depends on whetger he thinks Richard is more likely to calm down or get worse if left tk his own devices.

Who will propose?In canon-era they cant marry so the question’s mute, though Richard probably slios a ring on Aumerle’s finger one night while they’re lying in bed together in a sort of symbolic gesture

In a modern au where Richard and Anne never met, Edward proposes, quite possibly at a completely random moment where he was watching Richard do something adorable like Swear Vengence Upon The Heads Of His Enemies, think “I’m going to marry that idiot” and say “marry me” almost at once. If Richard had lost Anne, though, Ned would be a lot more cautious about proposing so it would probably be left to Richard accidentally introducing Edward as his husband because that’s how he’s come to see him, having a complete freak out when he realises what he’s done including a guilt trip about being disloyal to Anne’s memory and probably ends with Edward holding Richard while they come to an agreement that they will get married, but they’ll hold off on even thinking about planning any arrangements until Richard is ready and proposes properly.

Who has the most difficult parents?That’s another

one which depends on au- in canon Richard's parents are dead and even if they weren't, Edmund Duke of Execute My Son For Treason He's Probably A Bastard Anyway wpuld have them beat. In everyone lives and Richard keeps adopting random kids au oth, I can see Edward being more difficult because he loves his son, is painfully aware Gaunt and Gloucester would happily trample on him to get to power ( Richard's relationship with his older brother the prince of wales is a little strained) and can remember all to well what happened to his grandfather. So he'd probabky attempt to split them up, at least until Joan swats him over the head and tells him to leave them alone, they're sweet together, and York points out that Sending Aumerle away will be seen as confirmation of the affair which could make matters worse.Who initiates hand holding in public?The King of England does not hold hands, and Aumerle needs his free in case he needs to tear a glove off and fling it in someone's face. Aumerle will sometimes give Richard's arm a light touch meaning calm the fuck down you moron.Who comes up for the other all the time?They both move heaven and earth for each other, as far as they're able. Richard is aware he's not the easiest lover and tries to make up for it by granting any request Edward might make of him.Who gets more sad? Richard, especially on dates conjected with Anne-her death, of course, but also her funeral, her birthday, and their anniversary. Other times depression just kicks in for no obvious reason. Aumerle is very firm on those days- Richard had to get out of bed, break his fast, and go for a walk I the gardens if the weather's good, or o the battlements if its not. If he doesnt feel up to anything more than that, they can go back to bed, but generally Richard carries on with the day once he's been made to start it.Who' better at cheering the other up?Aumerle. Richard panics when Aumerle's upset and fumbles around trying to work out what to do, not realising that all Aumerle wants is to be held by him and have a sympathetic ear. He's learning, though- once Aumerle tells him thats the best thing he can do he does it, and he prioritizes it over everything else.Who's the one who playfully slaps the other for silly jokes.Neither. Richard used to roll his eyes and threaten Aumerle with banishment for assulting his ears, but stopped when he exiled Bolingbroke for real.Who is more streetwise/wise Neither, they're both useless. Next?Who's the shyest?Aumerle. It isnt too obvious, but he gets very nervous at social events and he replays every interaction in his head a million times, over analysing it and convincing himself he messed up. Richard takes care to murmer some variation of "youre doing really well im so proud of you" to him at some point during the evening, and has a standing arrangement with Bolingbroke that Henry will keep an eye on Ned and go rescue him if he needs to- its been in place ever since Ned first came to court and Henry actually sticks to it even more rigidly now its become clear that his cousins' bedsharing is no longer platonic. the way henry sees it The only person allowed to be mean to his baby cousin is him.Who boasts about the other more?...they dont actually tend to boast about each other? Defend each other to the death if the occasion arises, sure, but Richard would rather they be an open secret than open knowledge, it seems...safer, after how badly things went wrong with Robert, who Richard would enthuse about to anybody who would listen.Who sits in who's lap.Richard sits on Aumerle's. Its not the easiest of manouvers because Richard's ridiculously long limbs get in the way, but if he's feeling particularly tired he'll climb on to Aumerle's lap and nestle his head beneath Aumerle's chin in the hopes of getting his hair stroked.Ll

[hoetron]

okay christ i got tagged in htis massive tag game by @mothable but i love a good ol challenge lets do this buckfucks

RULES: ANSWER THESE 88, THEN TAG SOME PEOPLE

BASICS:

a. NAME AND PRONOUNS: Rae, she/her

b. AGE (and birthday!): 13, Aug 28th :3c im a fucking fetus ny’all

c. SEXUALITY: am i bi? am i lesbian? am i just craving existential death 24/7? i dont fucking know a thing my guy

d. GENDER: cis female hooooh

e. COUNTRY: AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE OI OI OI

f. FAVORITE AESTHETIC: pastel colours and really nice fashion i guess..??? (also smoking is kind of aesthetic eyes emoji eyes emoji)

TRIGGERS/MENTAL ILLNESSES: i’m not actually sure :x

THE LAST:

1. DRINK: salt water hah normal water is for the WEAK (dont drink salt water please im begging y

2. PHONE CALL: my brother asking what kind of pizza i wanted

3. TEXT MESSAGE: “:3c” im such a fufcking furry...fuckck,,,,

4. SONG YOU LISTENED TO: Daydream warriors by Aquors listen nyall im reconnecting with my hidden buried weebass side of me okay im crying

5. THE TIME YOU CRIED: i dont actually remember? probably like last year unless you count me having tears from laughing too hard as cryng then thats yesterday during the meme aka now called lightning mcqueen server

HAVE YOU:

6. DATED SOMEONE TWICE: nahh

7. KISSED SOMEONE AND REGRETTED IT: dont think ive ever kissed someone thats not my family before im #Pure

8. BEEN CHEATED ON: nope lmao

9. LOST SOMEONE SPECIAL: my grandfather i guess? but he died when i was really young so at that time i didnt really undersyand the feeling of loss and mourn so ksdjfk but we had some goodass memories together

10. BEEN DEPRESSED: they ask you how you are and you just have to say that you’re fine when you’re not really fine but you just cant get into it because they would never understa

11. GOTTEN DRUNK AND THROWN UP: im severely underaged please

TOP 3 FAVORITE COLORS

12. red

13. yellow

14. either black or lavendar,,

IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU:

15. MADE NEW FRIENDS: yis

16. FALLEN OUT OF LOVE: ya,,

17. LAUGHED UNTIL YOU CRIED: okay im known as the most giggly person in class i laugh so easily that i easily have tears over everything

18. FOUND OUT SOMEONE WAS TALKING ABOUT YOU: nahh dont think i wanna know if its like in a bad way :x

19. MET SOMEONE WHO CHANGED YOU: aw y e s

20. FOUND OUT WHO YOUR FRIENDS ARE: ya :,) (Thanks em, lily, mae and imogen for making this year truly greater than last year and for being the best friends i could ever ask for)

21. KISSED SOMEONE ON YOUR FACEBOOK LIST: facebook is dead to me

GENERAL

22. HOW MANY OF YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS DO YOU KNOW IN REAL LIFE: serious facebook is dead to me i roasted above the flames of negligence (also because i have like two facebook accounts one using my pesonal email and the other using my more general email , the one using my more general email keeps recommending to me my OWN personal account and its personally so hilarious)

23. DO YOU HAVE ANY PETS: a cat called lucky! (i love him even though im p sure he hates me)

24. DO YOU WANT TO CHANGE YOUR NAME: i guess my irl name uhhh im 50-50 with it? but granted on the internet i waaay prefer using the name Rae over my irl one because its short and simple and nice-

25. WHAT DID YOU DO FOR YOU LAST BIRTHDAY: just want to a chinese resturant with my fam and my uncle because we’re simple that way and like. back then i didnt had that much friends so uh l m a o (but vidhi gave me a nerf gun so that was Really Cool and i love her)

26. WHAT TIME DID YOU WAKE UP TODAY: 9 oclocK BECAUSE A HOUSING AGENT WAS COMING OVER (but then i fell back to sleep and woke up at 12 so lmao)

27. WHAT WERE YOU DOING AT MIDNIGHT LAST NIGHT: watching a video on why ‘anime art isnt technically allowed in art school’ because i was just curious and then drawing 

28. NAME SOMETHING YOU CAN’T WAIT FOR: VOLTRON LEGENDARY FUCKNG DEFENDERS SEASON 3 SHIT BABES IM REA LLY FUCKING PREPARED AND NEAR END OF MONTH AVCON BECAUSE EYES EMOJI

29. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SAW YOUR MOM: an hour ago lmao shes like just outside my room 

30. WHAT IS ONE THING YOU WISH YOU COULD CHANGE IN YOUR LIFE: sighs my shyness and social anxiety and awkwardness (all three of those are counted in a pack right? the pack of “socially inept” people)

31. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW: daydream warriors... by aquors..... (listen im RECONNECTING with my weeb side like said above im actually weeping)

32. HAVE YOU EVER TALKED TO A PERSON NAMED TOM: uh idk mate

33. SOMETHING THAT IS GETTING ON YOUR NERVES: i havent brushed my teeth yet but im lazy to move my legs lmao

LOST QUESTIONS

34. MOLE(S): um quite a lot like a few small ones on my arm and like one on my face below my right eye and theres one underneath my boob i think lmao tmi and the rest i cant be bothered to find

35. MARK(S): a kind of burnt scar mark on my left shoulder from like 6/7 years ago when i got too close to someone smoking and their cigarette burnt me oh and a scar on my knee from the time i fell off my bike while playing bike catching in the neighbourhood with a couple of other friends like 4 years ago?

36. CHILDHOOD DREAM: vet (now im eh about that tho im probably just going to pursue some art career)

37. HAIR COLOR: brown eyy

38. LONG OR SHORT HAIR: long

39. DO YOU HAVE A CRUSH ON SOMEONE: yeah. hopefully its dying down now especially since the person is straight (its hard when she sits next to you in class and you guys are sort of friends now and u somehow feel really satisfied when you make her laugh :,) shit )

40. WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF: im generally kind with people regardless of whether or not i dont like them or i dont know them well or i know them i guess? (at least in my group of friends im probably the most willing to socialise with others) and uhhhh i guess i can make people laugh? im a huge fucking loser meme nyall

41. PIERCINGS: none and personally dont really want to 

42. BLOODTYPE: shit  i think it was either a B or an O i cant remember (i think its B tho)

43. NICKNAME(S): maggie, migi, bela, bob, bobbo

44. RELATIONSHIP STATUS: single pringle 

45. ZODIAC: virgo

46. PRONOUNS: she/her (lmao yay for repeated question)

47. FAVORITE TV SHOW: fuckngin,,, voltron,,, (probably going to stay my favourite for a long while tho)

48. TATTOOS: none atm (unless you count waterbase tattos then yes stick all the water based tattos on me) but like when im Much Older maybe? just a really small tattoo tho not anything big that covers an entire limb

49. RIGHT OR LEFT HAND: right

50. SURGERY: had a surgery on my foot forgot which side when i was in kindergarten because the skin was *censored for tmi* and yah stitching up your skin fucking hurt babes

51. HAIR DYED A DIFFERENT COLOR: nahhh i dont think id dye my hair tho who knows

52. SPORT: im probably going to retake up basketball again eyes emoji eyes emoji

53. VACATION: ooMMF nothing planned so far

54. PAIR OF TRAINERS: like uhhh what kind of sneakers?? just normal canvas sneakers i guess????? im, what.

MORE GENERAL

55. EATING: OXYGEn

56. DRINKING: IN OXYGEN

57. I’M ABOUT TO: complete this fucking 88  questions then chat on discord and scroll tumblr and tell myself “hey finish up your art!” but then 5 hours later im still scrolling tumblr. oh and im watching wonder woman later so :3c

58. WAITING FOR: nothing atm i guess?

59. WANT: my family’s financial situation to be solved and so that money isnt going to be a huge bother anymore...

60. GET MARRIED: sounds nice but probably only marriage idk the idea of kids doesnt really sound v appealing atm

61. CAREER: artist! (i wanna either work in a game development team or an animation studio eyes emoji ) 

62. HUGS OR KISSES: HUGS

63. LIPS OR EYES: lips erally nice to draw really nice to look at

64. SHORTER OR TALLER: buhhh im short so i guess taller would be nice (tall people have such nice legs too im frankly a little jealous)

65. OLDER OR YOUNGER: what is this in regards to

66. NICE ARMS OR NICE STOMACH: arms so that dO YOU SEE THESE GUNS

67. SENSITIVE OR LOUD: shrug emoji idk man

68. HOOK UP OR RELATIONSHIP: relationship

69. TROUBLEMAKER OR HESITANT: troublemaker pardnyars in crime amirite

HAVE YOUR EVER:

70. KISSED A STRANGER: no

71. DRANK HARD LIQUOR: nope 

72. LOST GLASSES/CONTACT LENSES: yeah p sure i had to go through a whole day of school half blind once without my glasses

73. TURNED SOMEONE DOWN: nah..

74. SEX ON THE FIRST DATE: nO IM 1 3 

75. BROKEN SOMEONE’S HEART: dont think so?

76. HAD YOUR HEART BROKEN: nah babes

77. BEEN ARRESTED: nah

78. CRIED WHEN SOMEONE DIED: somehow when someone dies i decide to laugh instead of breaking down in tears i guess laugh away the pain?

79. FALLEN FOR A FRIEND: ...shit its a bad idea babes dont do it

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:

80. YOURSELF: shrug emoji

81. MIRACLES: sometimes? sometimes no?

82. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT: even bigger shrug emoji

83. SANTA CLAUS: nah lmao listen i caught my father and mother wheeling in bicycles for my sister and i when i was like what 8? usually i just played along because hey i was a child

84. KISS ON THE FIRST DATE: ehh depends i guess

85. ANGELS: not really lmao

OTHER

86. CURRENT BEST FRIENDS NAME(S): Emily, Mae Shuen and Lily

87. EYECOLOR: dark brown?

88. FAVORITE MOVIE: this changes all the time

only tagging uhhh @pluminkdot (KASJD I FORGOT IF YOU HAD A MAIN REBLOG ACC IM SORRY RACH), @jaspereffect , @blabrabs / @spaceboomerang (it isnt letting me tag ur main boomers skldfjksd) and uh im too lazy for the rest

[elliotthezubat]

DEATH CITY DAYS CHAPTER 99

from witches, to memory recovering missions, mentorships, and exorcist exams

 Sakuya: "You going back to check out the fashion show tonight?"

naho: yeah, just in the audience this time, though.

Sakuya: "Still, should give you some ideas for future fashion choices."

naho: *nods*

Sakuya: "Who do you think has the best chance of winning it?"

-elsewhere-

Kunikida: *reviewing more world news* "..."

yosano: more ability user suicides?

Kunikida: "Unfortunately..."

yosano: *examines the article* 'elderly ability user found dead in flint, michigan. seems to have died from his own plant based ability'

Kunikida: "How is this even happening...An ability user who can turn abilities against people?"

yosano: it's possible.

Kunikida: "We'll need another set of eyes on this..." *looking through electronic contacts*

-elsewhere-

Saria: "Hello, everyone." *waves*

hibiki: hey saria.

lukas: hello.

Saria: *sits* "Any plans after school?"

hibiki: i was gonna listen to some new cds at the mall later.

Saria: "Oh, anything new out?"

hibiki: probably.

Saria: "I could use more stationery...Lukas, want to go?"

lukas: um, i-i guess?

Saria: ^\\\^; "Great...We can even get something sweet for an early dessert!"

lukas: that would be nice.

Saria: "Excellent! It's a date."

lukas: o////o um. d-d-date? .///.;;;

Saria: ^w^ "... ... ...!!!" .\\\\. "...Figure of speech." ^\\\^;

lukas: r-right, right, n-not that i'd be opposed to it by any means, i've never actually had that kind of relationship before and WHY AM I TALKING RIGHT NOW.

Saria: ^\\\\^ "Ha ha...Awkward...Um...I'll see you at the mall!" *opens her bagged lunch, takes the sandwich out of the bag--pushes the sandwich away, starts chewing on the bag*

hibiki: oh jeez. it's almost as bad as looking through my old DA page. *cringe*

preston: lawd help them.

Yafeu: "I KNOW--PLASTIC BAGS HAVE NO NUTRIENTS!"

-elsewhere-

Meme: *bows* "Thank you for meeting with me, Lord Death."

lord death: any time, kiddo. want some scones? they're fresh from this morning. ^^

mio: *nom*

Meme: "I'm okay...Sir, I wanted to ask about our earlier mission..."

lord death: ask away. ^^

Meme: "...Have you punished the two witches, Fani and Liluye?"

lord death: they have been dealt with. liluye is inprisoned, and fani is currently in holding.

Meme: "...There's a difference?"

lord death: more or less, yes.

-he explains the situation-

Meme: "I see...Is Fani recovering through this major change?"

lord death: i was about to have someone check on her now.

Meme: "May I join?"

lord death: if you wish to.

mio: i'll go with.

Meme: "Thank you..."

-elsewhere-

Akutagawa: *cough cough*

hirotsu: *taking his temperature*

Akutagawa: =~= *shivers*

hirotsu: well, the medicine has been helping take the fever down a bit.

Akutagawa: "Small miracle...Thank you."

-elsewhere-

Tool: *sitting under the rain*

mana: need anything out here?

Tool: *shakes his head* "No, thank you. Just enjoying the weather."

mana: ok, let us know if you need anything, ok?

Tool: *thumbs up, leans his head back, letting rain come down*

-elsewhere-

Sid: "Today's gym activity on account of rain is dodgeball."

Asher: "...Good. I can get hit first and exit the game early."

Zeke: "WOOT!"

axel: sweet!

Kanin: ^^; "Let's not go crazy out there--"

Yafeu: *THROWS A BALL AT DUNCAN'S FACE*

Sid: "Not yet! Yafeu, do 50 pushups as punishment!"

Yafeu: "..." *whispers* "Worth it..."

Duncan: X_X

Sid: "Saria, Izumi, you're team captains."

izumi: *nods*

lukas: may i be excused for the rest of my life?

Saria: "O-Okay..." *looks at the line up*

Sid: "Do you have a doctor's note for that?"

lukas:....does a note from my music teacher count? QwQ;;;

Sid: -_- "Get in line, or do 100 pushups."

lukas: Q___Q;;;

izumi: ok, hibiki?

hibiki: cool.

Saria: "Lukas." ^^

lukas: *shuffles over*

izumi: ok, asher's next.

Asher: =~= "Traitor." *walks over*

Saria: "Amelia?"

amelia: *nods and follows*

Zeke: *waving his hand* "Oh! Oh! Me!"

izumi: zeke.

Zeke: "WOOT!" *runs over*

Saria: "Genny."

genny: *gulps*

axel: OwO

izumi:...zeke

axel: AW YEEEAH!

Zeke: TwT *hugs his bro* "Same team!"

axel: whut whut!

Saria: "Preston."

preston: ^^

izumi: ok then, lei-lei

lei-lei: *nods*

Saria: "Kazue--"

Kazue: "Zzz..." *somehow already behind Saria*

Saria: ._.;

izumi: ok, let's see *checks who else is left*

Kanin: OwO;

Duncan: x_X

izumi: ...kanin.

Yafeu: "I'VE DONE 500 PUSH-UPS, SIR!"

Sid: "That...Th-That's too many...Just sit..."

Sid: "The balls are set. At the whistle, run for them and toss. On your marks..."

genny: oh jeez im gonna die.

Kanin: ._.; *drags Duncan to the starting line*

Asher: "I will never forgive you for picking me, Izumi. I could've just pretended I had appendicitis..."

Sid: "Get set..."

Zeke: "Woo, woo, woo!"

lukas: please have mercy-

Saria: "Steady..."

Sid: *blows the whistle*

hibiki: *already throwing*

genny: *tries to flee* *SCREAMS*

Saria: "!!! Genny! That's the wrong way--"

Zeke: *tosses a ball at Amelia*

amelia: *dodging*

Kanin: *dragging Duncan, as he tosses ball after ball*

Asher: "..." *steps into the path of a ball--*

izumi: *steps in and gets face-ball'd* OW!

Asher: *catches her* "..." =_=; "I said that--...Oh, nevermind." *guides her to the 'out' box*

Kazue: *curled up with a ball* "Zzz..." *yet rolling along the floor, dodging all attacks*

axel: how is he even surviving?

Zeke: "I don't know--just keep throwing--"

Kanin: *using Duncan as a shield*

Duncan: "Ow, ow, ow, ow--"

lukas: >~<;;

Asher: "Um..." *picks up a ball* "This is for Izumi..." *throws--hard*

lukas: *gets owned. as his shirt and pants fly off him*

Asher: "...Whoops."

Saria: "..." *nosebleed...faints*

genny: oh no! captain down!

Sid: "...Huh. I didn't even see the ball hit Saria. Naigus, did her nose break?"

nygus: she seems to be fine?

Saria: "Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma--"

-elsewhere-

Bon: "...Hey, Izumo? Pass the botany book to me."

izumo: *slides it over, not looking at him*

Bon: "Thanks." *takes it* "..." ("She seems focused...")

izumo: ....

Bon: "..." *clears his throat* "How's studying?"

izumo: *grunt*

Bon: -_-# "...Good talk." *goes back to writing*

-elsewhere-

Dabi: *staring at a Nomu in suspended animation* "...Freaky."

twice: *pokes the glass* ooooooh. cool.

Tomura: "Don't poke the glass--and focus. I said I'm programming it to follow your instructions..."

twice: what about these ones?

Tomura: "They aren't finished--they need to go through tutorials first."

banshee: works in progress, basically.

twice: i see, i see. oh, and how's compress' 'date' going? wink wonk.

Tomura: "...Still grinding away at that."

Dabi: -_- "Great--one who talks in video game speak, another who's a schizo."

banshee: well, we're in no position to be picky about our coworkers.

Tomura: "The Vanguard needs to be ready for what comes next--so learn to get along if you want this to run smoothly."

banshee: *she nods* after all, we have the same goal here; crush UA once and for all...

Dabi: *nods*

Tomura: "..." *smiles* "As long as you're focused on the goal, that's good..."

banshee: now if you excuse me, i'm going to have a quick drink. *walks off* (it's going to be ok....i'll make them pay for what happened to you...)

-elsewhere, at a fancy restaurant, a spiderish looking young woman is waiting for someone-

spider lady: ....*nervous*

*a man walks in, waves to the maitre d'*

Man: "Hello. I had a reservation. Someone may be waiting for me..."

spider lady: oh! you're here! atsuhiro, yes?

Atsuhiro: "Indeed." *takes her hand* "A pleasure."

spider lady: ^^ hehe~ please, call me Kuroko.

Atsuhiro: " 'Kuroko'...Lovely." *takes a seat* "I am sorry for my lateness. I hope I didn't leave you waiting too long."

kuroko: oh, not at all. ^^ im really happy you came here tonight.

Atsuhiro: *smiles* "As am I. How has your day been?"

kuroko: it's been busy, you know how realty can be haha.

Atsuhiro: "Interesting, I'm sure. Any new places you are showing?" *glances at the menu*

kuroko: well, there are some new homes that just opened up for residents, though it's a bit tricky for me to get customers sometimes, since arachnophobia is sadly a common fear. *sigh*

Atsuhiro: *sighs* "Some people...They are so narrowminded."

kuroko: *sighs* sometimes, i wish i could have been born with a different quirk, one that didnt terrify people. most men i meet dont even want to give me a chance, since i'm a black widow spider, and you know what they do....

Atsuhiro: "I do...but I also know no one is a slave to some idea like 'instinct.'"

kuroko: right! even if i look like this, i'm still a human!

Atsuhiro: "Exactly! And I think we should enjoy that fact. We lack proper drinks, but I think this calls for a toast." *holds up glass of water*

kuroko: right. to a lovely evening.

Atsuhiro: *smiles, as they clink glasses*

-elsewhere-

sayaka: *looking at the mission board, humming*

Harvar: "Hm. Anything good?"

sayaka: hmm, there's the ripper murders in hoozuki, disappearances in daidaiyama city, a whole lot of stuff.

Harvar: "Given how serious these are, could get at least one soul out of them..."

sayaka: probably.

Harvar: "Well, I'm going to take something--it'll get Ox busy."

sayaka: that's good. but which to take...eenie meanie miney you! *points* hoozuki it is!

Harvar: "Good for you. How many have to go?'

sayaka: not sure yet.

-elsewhere-

Guard: *standing in front of the DWMA overnight room*

fani: .....

Guard: *to another one* "She's been quiet..."

fani:....

{young fani: mama....papa.....*weeping over two bodies*}

{*a twig snaps*}

{fani: !!! *looks behind her*}

{*it looks to be an older person in a cloak*}

{fani: *shaking*}

{*looks at the bodies, comes closer*}

{fani:....who....are you?}

{???: "...I'm so sorry..."}

{fani: huh?}

{???: *closes the eyes of the two bodies*}

{fani: ....}

{???: "..." *looks at Fani*}

{fani: *tears and snot are dribbling down her face*}

{???: "..." *removes a handkerchief, pats her face*}

{fani: mama....papa...t-they...}

{???: "Yes. They are gone." *pats her shoulder* "And you're not."}

{fani: *whimpers*}

{???: "...Come. We have to get you away. No telling whether they will come for you next."}

fani:......

Guard 1: "..." *reviews schedule* "She's not due for another meal yet."

fani:.....(lady liluye....please be ok...)

-elsewhere-

Asher: "How's the ice working?"

izumi: fine.

Asher: "...Sorry."

Saria: @_@

izumi: hey, it's all good....sorry for making you worry ^^;

Asher: "...I wasn't. Much."

izumi: ^^;

Zeke: *rubbing a bruised arm* "It was so rad!"

hibiki: *nods*

Kanin: "Amelia, Genny? Feel better?"

amelia: i'm fine.

genny:..s-same....my dominant arm wasnt injured...

Kanin: "That's a relief...I hope we don't play something like this again in a long time."

Duncan: *censored for injuries*

axel: since we're all here, why not do some more learning about ourselves?

Zeke: "Convenient!" ^w^

Kanin: "??? Like what?"

amelia: i'll....sit this one out...

Asher: "..."

Zeke: "Where's everyone from?"

izumi: japan. same as my mother.

hibiki: i'm from new york city.

genny: ...death child, here.

Asher: "Ditto."

preston: mah family resahids in geogia

Yafeu: "BRAZIL!"

Kanin: >_>; "Kind of all over..."

lukas: im from switzerland, myself.

lei-lei: chinese, but raised in california.

Saria: "Oregon."

Duncan: *woozy* "Edmonton..."

axel: sweet!

Zeke: "And we're from Michigan! Okay, Izumi, your turn to ask!"

izumi: um, ok. hmm... do you have any pets?

Asher: "No."

Saria: "Goldfish--been alive 10 years!"

genny: i've always wanted a parakeet, but i dont have one yet.

preston: does the fahmily ranch count?

lei-lei: my brother has two bearded dragon lizards; julius and nero.

Kanin: *shakes his head 'no'*

Duncan: "What, afraid you'll eat them--"

lei-lei: *CHOP* be nice.

Kazue: *smacks Duncan with a sign that reads 'Cricket'*

hibiki: i do have a cat back home named lily.

Zeke: "We have a Rusty."

axel: he's a good doggo.

Saria: "D'aw!"

Yafeu: "WE USED TO LEAVE FOOD OUT FOR STRAYS AND PIGEONS!"

-elsewhere-

*there is only darkness*

-...-

???: *puts on a cloak, then a mask*

-...-

???: "We...are orphans. Who is our one parent?"

????: ....

???: "The Sun is our parent, our god, our salvation. We are not fit for its divine light. We are God's instruments to enact Their divine will."

girl: ....

???: "We are one. We are not individuals. We are united, our differences erased because the shadows wipe them away."

girl:.....

???: "In the name of God, Ratomu."

girl: ratomu.

???: *nods, turns, falling back into the shadows*

girl:....

Grunt 112: "..." *exhales, hunched over*

girl:....*returning to her quarters*

-elsewhere-

Meme: "..."

mio: *following*

Meme: *sighs* "Okay..."

mio: here it is.

Meme: "...Do I knock or...?"

mio: ...*looks at the guard*

Guard: "...Excuse me?" *calls into the room* "You have visitors."

fani: .....

Meme: "Miss Fani?"

fani: !!! y-you!

Meme: ^^; "Meme..."

fani:... w-why are you here? 7_7

Meme: "We were concerned...Are you being treated well? ...As well as can be expected?"

fani:....just leave me alone....

Meme: "..." *nods* "Okay...We'll visit tomorrow..."

fani:....

mio:....hey.....thank you....for saving her....

fani:...*bites her lip*

Meme: *looks at Mio* *sad smile*

fani:....dont ask me why i did it.....i dont know why...

Meme: "Because you don't like to see people die."

fani: !!!! h-how can you know that about me?!

Meme: "Just a feeling. Most people who heal tend to really hate seeing dying. Lord Death has a few healers, surprisingly enough..."

fani:....*wipes her eyes* w-whatever, do-doesnt change the fact that humans and witches cant get along!

Meme: "Well, we are? We're talking. We have witches as students here. Witches as residents. Witches who help the city, have saved the world...We know witches as a whole aren't an enemy."

fani: ......

mio: maybe we could show her? after all, death city is a city of second chances.

Meme: "Yes! We could! We--" *tries to open the door--then remembers it's locked* OwO;

mio: -_-;

Meme: ^^; "We'll need Lord Death's permission, then?"

-elsewhere-

Aizawa: *looks up* "...What...did you build again?"

mei: it's a massage chair! ^^

Aizawa: "...'Kay. Have you tested it?"

mei: in a few minutes, yes.

Aizawa: *yawns* "Good...My back has been killing me." *he's curled up in an awful position in his sleeping bag*

mei: in you go!

Aizawa: ._.

*sticks the landing*

Aizawa: "..." =_=

mei: here we go!

-the chair starts spinning-

Aizawa: O_O

mei: wait, wrong button.

-the back rubbing parts start working. but the chair is still spinning-

Aizawa: *a groan of "Aaaaah" is heard through the spinning*

mei: you're doing great, sir!

Aizawa: "Why is it spiiiiiiiiiiiinning?"

mei: it was a test function! in case spinning massages ever become a thing.

Aizawa: "Wheeeeeeeeeeen would that ever-r-r-r-r-r-r happen?"

mei: who knows! perhaps this is the start of a new trend!

Aizawa: "Stop the spiiiiiiiiiin, or I'm failing you."

mei: *presses the stop button*

Aizawa: *flies out of the seat--and shoots his scarves out through the sleeping bag opening to swing around and land safely on a couch* "...Thank you."

present mic: me next! me next!!

mei: with the spin cycle?

present mic: AW YOU KNOW IT!

mei: let it rip!

Aizawa: =_=;

present mic: WOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

-elsewhere-

sylvia: .~.;;;

Kyoka: "Rice is always a good choice." *puts a bowl of rice onto her own tray*

sylvia: r-rice please...

Lunch Rush: *thumbs up*

Kyoka: "..." *takes a parfait*

-elsewhere-

Monster: *ROAR*

girl: *panting* d-darn, this monster's a lot stronger than i thought it would be.

Monster: *knocks down a light post, taking it like a club to smash buildings*

girl: *yelps*

-footsteps running up-

Monster: *lifts the light post, ready to bring it down--*

-SLASH-

Monster: *sharp inhale, before stumbling down*

girl 2: *slices it in half with a flaming sword*

girl: ah! t-thank you very much!

girl 2:....no problem.

girl: *changes back to normal*

girl 2:...you're a magical girl, yes?

girl: i am, and you?

girl 2:....can i see your soul gem for a moment?

girl: um....ok?

girl 2: *examines it* .......*glint* .....what's your name?

girl: oh, my names is Lucia Hikaru.

girl 2: i see.....you know lucia, you should learn how to spot fakes.

lucia: what do you mean?

girl 2: good bye.

-SLICE-

lucia: *collapses, dead on the ground, her soul gem shattering*

girl 2:.....

-elsewhere-

Crona: "..." *holds her hand*

mami: *nods* thank you....

Crona: *nods* "We can stay as long as you want..."

mami: i know.......hey mom and dad. it's me again....

-...-

mami: i'm doing the best i can, and i think about you both every day.

Crona: "..." *looks at the markers*

mami: i really miss you both so much...but i've got people here to be with me, so i'm not alone. and i'm thankful for that.

Crona: *sad smile*

mami: .......well, i should be going now....love you guys.

Crona: *small hand squeeze*

mami: *sniff* *small smile*

Crona: *wipes her tears*

-elsewhere-

Konro: "Sir, if you please, the owner wants you to leave."

Priest: *picks at his ramen* "We're not causing any problems~"

owner: you've been rude to several customers...

Priest: "You call these 'customers.' Interesting. When they lack divine protection?"

owner: sir, im going to have to ask you to leave now.

Priest: "..." *nods to the other priests*

Priest 2: *grumbles, 'accidentally' knocks over bowl*

customer: hey!

Priest 2: "Clean up this mess, trash."

customer: why you- *THROWS A PUNCH*

Priest 2: *dodges, grabs the arm*

customer: !!!

*GRAB*

Priest 2: "???"

Konro: *squeezes*

Priest 2: "AH!"

Konro: "Get. Out."

owner: ...

Priest 2: "?!" *swings a fist--*

Konro: *looks at the Owner* "My apologies...." *throws Priest 2--through the door...knocking it down*

owner: *jumps back*

yukiko: yikes! what the hell?!

Priest 2: X~X

Priest: "Filthy dog!" *pulls back a hand*

yukiko: *grabs his arm and flips him onto his back*

Priest: X_X

Konro: *small cough* "T-Thanks..."

yukiko: any time, captain. ^^ long time no see, eh?

Konro: "Indeed. How were your travels?" *drags one Priest*

yukiko: they were pretty crazy. *streeetch* lots changed since i've been here, last.

Konro: "You don't know the half of it..." *dumps the priests into a wagon* "You see Beni and Kirei?"

yukiko: yeah, old man miyagi told me when i got in, im super happy for them. ^^

Kondo: >w< "It's such good news!" *dumps the priests at the town entrance*

yukiko: it is. *glares at the priests* c'mon! off with the lot of ya! damn vermin!

Priest: "YOU WHO DO NOT PRAY TO THE SUN ARE DAMNED!"

Priest 2: X_X

yukiko: ahhh, come off it! *walking away*

Priest: "..." *drags Priest 2 away*

Konro: "Hungry?"

yukiko: sure.

-elsewhere-

Tezca: *tied up by his ankles, hanging from the ceiling* "Okay, students, each of you take a bat. Enrique! Set the timer! After 1 minute, you rush at me. But don't be surprised if I have already escaped by then! HA HA HA HA!"

naho: ._.;

Sakuya: "..." *shrugs, takes a bat*

*47 seconds, 46 seconds...*

lilac: Q_Q;;;;;

Tezca: *struggling to reach the knot* OwO; "Um..." *groans* "EH! EH!"

student: is this even ethical?

Student 2: "What is it to teach us? Survival techniques? Battle strategies?"

Student 3: "THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE HOME EC!"

*Bell dings*

Tezca: O_O; "Oh, f--"

-elsewhere-

Master: "Stormy days mean slower work..." *sets down glass, pours a drink into it*

miranda: good news, i got the music player fixed.

Master: *smiles* "Thank you. Anything you want to put on?"

miranda: maybe some old school stuff. *smiles*

Master: "Make it so." *starts prepping a meal*

miranda: you got it. ^^

-elsewhere-

Amaimon: *sets down two shot glasses* "You've grown up so fast. Let's have a drink."

stocking: indeed uncle. indeed. -it's capri sun in the glasses-

kirika: oiiiii, kid! you know where dad is?

Kid: "Still at the Academy."

kirika: ok cool, brb.

Kid: "..." *returns to his book and notes*

Amaimon: "So when are you going to retire?"

stocking: not for a long while, i just started a while back. ^^;

Amaimon: "Are you investing? I have a business proposal--"

stocking: oh boy.

Amaimon: "Hardware tools. In multiple flavors."

-elsewhere-

Spirit: "Wow, that's a bit of a bruise..."

izumi: it'll heal, dad.

Spirit: "Well, I'll leave your mom to be the expert on this. Anything you want for dinner tonight?"

izumi: homemade pizza?

Spirit: "Just need to pick up some cheese on the way home."

-elsewhere-

lena: *sleeping*

Gas Mask Doctor: *checking the map*

-they havent made it to new york yet-

Gas Mask: "Nuts..." *looks at the road*

lena: mmn...

Gas Mask: *grabs a blanket*

lena: ....

Gas Mask: *tucks it over her*

lena: *she seems content*

Gas Mask: *noisy exhale*

lena: ?? doctor?

Gas Mask: "Sorry. Breathing problems."

lena: ....

-elsewhere-

Kazue: "..." *watching from a light pole*

-seems quiet today-

Kazue: *checks windows*

???: "Give it up! Hand it over!"

Kazue: "?!"

???: as if!

Kazue: "..." *fades into shadows*

???: *clutches their throat* "Do it! Or you're dead!"

???: MOOOOM!

Kazue: *taps their shoulder*

???: "What the--"

Kazue: *tiny head chop*

???: "..." *coughs blood, passes out*

???: O_O;;;; *drops the TV remote*

Kazue: "..." *holds up a sign* <Hello.>

???: who the heck are you?! you just knocked my brother out!

Kazue: "..." <They weren't trying to kill you?>

???: i mean, he's kind of a dick, but it was a figure of speech, fam!

Kazue: "..." <Oh. My bad. He should wake up in a bit.> *picks up the brother's hand, lets go--it drops like a rock* "..." <Could I use your bathroom? I've been holding it for 2 hours.>

???: uh.....sure? i guess?

Kazue: >~< <THANK YOU!> *runs for the bathroom*

Bro: @~@ "Wh-Why did the Foot Ninja attack?"

-elsewhere-

Meme: "..."

mio: maybe we could ask kim to help?

Meme: *nods* "Yes...I think it would do Fani good."

mio: yeah, it would make sense, right?

Meme: "Right--I just hope she doesn't charge too much." ^^;

-elsewhere-

Hibana: "Good work up there."

girl: thank you ma'am! >///<;

Hibana: "Have a safe walk home--we'll see you for the next round tomorrow."

Girl 2: -^-;

-elsewhere-

Tezca: *mangled on a couch* "Owie..."

kirara: and you thought this was a good idea how?

Tezca: "Well--" *winces as he shifts* "--if you want to show authority in the classroom, you need to be awesome! The kicker is that it's not the 18th smack with a bat that hurts--it's the 19th one..."

kirara: -_-;;;;

Tezca: ^^; "I think the bruising has gone down..." *lifts his mask*

kirara: ....

Tezca: *he's pretty banged up* "Am I still pretty?"

kirara: just dashing. -.-;

Tezca: "D'aw, thankie~" *smiles--a tooth looks missing*

-elsewhere-

sonia: ....*looking out the window*

*trees as far as can be seen*

sonia:.....*closing her eyes*

{-a rabbit is running from her as she follows it-}

{sonia: wait! where are you going?}

{*it sounds like an echo, with each of the rabbit's hops*}

{sonia: *following until she reaches a door* ??}

{*will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you enter?*}

{sonia:....*reaching her hand out*}

{*the door opens slightly*}

-THUMP-

sonia: *snaps awake* ow.

*knock knock*

Chuuya: "Sonia?"

sonia: c-come in. ^^;

Chuuya: *enters* "What's wrong?"

sonia: just tired. *rubs her eyes*

Chuuya: "Want some milk?"

sonia: *nod nod*

Chuuya: "Okay. Be right back..."

-elsewhere-

Magaki: *looking at the horizon* "..."

naho: hey magakin! time to head home now.

Magaki: *adjusts sunglasses* "Yes. How did it go?"

naho: weird lessons today.

Magaki: "Oh?" *walks with her* "Like a fighting demonstration?"

naho: sooorta? ^^;

Magaki: "I think I understand. Did you learn anything useful for future combat?"

naho: maybe. *shrug* so what's all new with the club peeps?

Magaki: "It's informative. I knew about some of the specimens they are investigating, but there are new approaches I had not considered."

naho: oh that's cool.

Magaki: *nods* "It'll help with figuring out what to do with this." *pulls out a jar from their backpack--it looks to be a multi-eyed creature, its mouth sucking on the edges of the glass*

naho: ._.;;;;; where did you find that?

Magaki: "I read one of the books aloud and this thing popped up. I caught it in the jar the raccoon was licking strawberry jam out of. I have named the specimen 'Ignatius.'"

Iggy: *STILL SUCKING ON THE GLASS*

naho: how cute. ^^;;

Magaki: *nods* "I hope Tsubaki will not mind. I remember Black Star complaining about the fox who visited as a pet."

naho: ... >w>;;; yeeeeeah.....

Magaki: "Well, it's not a fox--so it likely won't mark its territory or try to steal things. I don't know what it'll eat, but I'm sure that won't be a problem."

naho: hehehe, yeaaaah. ^^;;;

Magaki: *returns Iggy to their backpack* "Have you your tickets for the fashion show finals this weekend?"

naho: yep! ^^ lav's gonna be in the finals!

Magaki: *small smile* "That's good. Has she chosen her attire?"

-elsewhere-

Poe: Q_Q "It's okay, Karl--the creature is gone..." *holding him, stroking his back*

karl: *shaking*

Poe: "Rowena, the next time your club meets, please put in safeguards." >~< "I don't even want to think what would happen if I sucked something like that into a book..."

rowena: *muttering with excitement about the night and what happened* OWO

Poe: "Rowena! I'm serious!" T~T

rowena: oh, right. sorry. i just got excited is all. ^^;

Poe: "How did you even do that..."

-elsewhere-

Kafka: *muttering* "Stupid Dazai, embarrassing people, making a mockery..." *mutter mutter*

hans: party get you down?

Kafka: >_<# "How dare he embarrass Etta!"

hans: *inhales* oh for the love of- when are you just going to tell her?

Kafka: "..." >^>; "I have no idea what you're talking about..."

hans: well what if someone beats you to the punch, what then?

Kafka: "... ..." Q_Q "...Sh-She'd probably be better off..." T^T

hans: kafka... *pats his back*

Kafka: "...What the hell would I say? 'Hi, I like you. Also, I'm a roach'?"

hans: hmmm, could use work.

Kafka: "...Hypothetically, what should I do?"

hans: hmmm... i got it!

Kafka: OWO "Yes?"

hans: *whispers*

Kafka: "... ... ...Would it work?"

hans: hopefully. ^^

-morning-

Damon: "..." *taps on the piano keys*

Wes: *smiles, watching*

soul: you got it, little man!

Damon: ^^; "I'm not good like you..."

soul: hey, practice makes perfect.

Wes: *picks up the violin, tunes* "I agree..."

Damon: "D-Dad? Could you play something?"

soul: ok. *playing*

becky: ^^

Wes: *nods his head before joining in on the melody*

becky: *smiles*

Damon: *shiny eyes*

Wes: *recedes, letting Soul's music lead*

soul: *still playing*

Damon: *captivated, leaning forward to listen*

becky: *listening*

Wes: *backs up Soul slightly as the song reaches crescendo*

becky: *claps*

Damon: "It was so good!"

soul: ^^

Wes: "Thanks...I think your father sounded great."

becky: way to go, dad!

Damon: *nod nod*

-elsewhere-

banshee: *asleep* nnh...*hugging someone* it's ok.....

Mustard: *yawns* "..." *opens his eyes* "..." >_> "...?!!!" O\\\\O

-squish-

banshee: zz....big sister will....take care of you.....zzz....

Mustard: *silent screaming*

-at breakfast-

himiko: *putting lots of ketchup on her omurice* ^^~

twice: goooooood morning party people!

Dabi: =_= "Be quiet..."

banshee: *drinking coffee*

Mustard: *head down on the table* .\\\\\\.

banshee: may i ask you something? ^^# *whispers* you'd best erase that incident from your memory if you wish to keep living.

Mustard: Q\\\\\\\\Q *whimpers*

twice: ??? so how'd the date go, compress?

Compress: "A gentleman doesn't tell~"

tomura: urgh....

Compress: "Oh? Something troubling you, sir?"

tomura: im gonna eat in my room.

Compress: "Very well. Enjoy!"

Dabi: *grunts*

Mustard: "Maaaaa..."

kurome: ~? are you ok?

Mustard: "SOFT!"

banshee:.....^^#

Mustard: "..." *tosses plate away, runs*

twice: ????

-elsewhere-

Asher: *grabs a Pop Tart, shoves their books into their bookbag*

mrs blythe: *asleep on the couch*

Asher: "..." *sneaks to the door...*

mrs blythe: *snort snore* .....

Asher: "!!! ..."

-elsewhere-

Gin: *pours tea*

higuchi: *streeeeetch*

Gin: *sets down two cups* "Rested?"

higuchi: yeah. *hugs from behind, resting her head on gin's shoulder* *kiss*

Gin: "Mmm~" *smooch*

higuchi: hehe~ *nuzzle* is ryu doing better this morning?

Gin: "Much, physically, anyway. He'll be up and about."

higuchi: ah.

-elsewhere-

Meme: "She might be a bit shy..."

mio: *nods*

Kim: "Yeah, yeah, I know what that's like..." *knocks*

fani: .....

Kim: "Yo. You in there?"

fani: where else would i be?

Kim: "...Well, if it were me, I'd transform into something cute and trick the guards to let me out. What's your animal?"

fani:.......a squirrel...

Kim: "Huh. So, small enough to fit through windows...Let me guess--they put anti-magic bars on them, huh?"

fani: *nods*

Kim: "That sucks...What kind of magic do you have?"

fani: .....plant magic and bit of healing magic...

Kim: "Oh, hey, I do healing, too!"

fani: really?

Kim: *nods* "Been using it since I got here...Well, when I didn't tell people I was a witch..."

fani: so you hid it.....

Kim: "Yeah, as long as I could..."

fani: oh.....*she frowns*

Kim: "I take it you weren't exactly parading around saying 'I'm a witch,' either."

fani: 7_7 f-for a while, i wasnt....

Kim: "??? So, what were you up to?"

fani: lady liluye created the chimeras as revenge for what the people of salem- for what humanity has done to witch kind for years! how they hunt us like monsters!

Kim: "..." *nods* "Yeah...They have."

fani: why should we keep letting them hurt us?!

Kim: "...Why did you stay if they were hurting you?"

fani: ?? what do you mean?

Kim: "Why not, well...come here?"

fani: ....after my parents died, lady liluye took me in...she's the only home i knew for so long...

Kim: "And she agreed with you that humans needed to be hurt..."

fani:....*nods* more that i agreed with her....

Kim: *nods* "i hear ya...Humans have a lot to answer for."

fani: .....

Kim: "But they aren't _all_ terrible."

fani: and how do you know that?

Kim: "...Because I met a few good ones. One really great one." *smiles*

fani: ........

Kim: "I kept my identity hidden...then some jerk saw me using my healing magic on a dog."

fani: oh?

Kim: "Yep...She promised to keep my secret if I worked with her."

fani: and then?

Kim: "We got hitched, Baby 1 is on the way."

fani: WAIT SERIOUSLY?!?! O_O

Kim: *smirks* "Nah. But we are dating and living together now."

fani: oh, hahaha. ^^; *ahem* ._.;

Kim: "Yeah...If I didn't meet Jackie, I wouldn't feel as comfortable being out here. I'm not saying I don't still deal with anti-witch jerks--but I'm not alone."

fani: .....

Kim: "Death City attracts a lot of us misfits, looking for somewhere to belong..."

fani:....can i even find a home here?

Kim: "Depends--do you want to?"

fani: .......i dont know.....

Kim: "Well, we have a lovely witch community here."

fani: oh?

Kim: *nods* "It's quaint, makes you realize you're not alone."

fani: ......i guess i'll humor you and see for myself once im out of here...

Kim: ^^ "Glad to hear it. You can treat me and Jackie to lunch."

fani: i dont have any money! D8>

Kim: "..." *gets up, walks away--*

fani: ...

Meme: *grabs Kim by the ear* "No."

Kim: "OW!" >_<

mio: *sweatdrop*

-elsewhere-

Justin: *reading a newspaper--headline "Villain attacks increase for 5th consecutive month"* "..."

oriko: *resting*

Justin: *sighs, folds the paper, checks the tea* "Any snacks?"

oriko: let me check.

-elsewhere-

lord death: you want to visit your old hometown with oriko?

kirika: *nods* it might help trigger some of her lost memories...

Yumi: "Anything you wish to bring with you?"

kirika:....*sigh* i _guess_ i'll bring the priest along... 7_7

Yumi: "???" ("Justin is a 'thing' now?") "Would you like me to speak with him?"

kirika: sure, why not.

lord death: i figured, given your rather brash opinion of mr law, you would want to avoid a chaperone.

kirika: oh trust me, i'm fucking pissed that i'm even asking. -_-# but oriko trusts him, so...bleh.

Yumi: ^^; "That's very mature of you..."

kirika:.....*sigh* i guess so....

Yumi: "I'll help you pack."

-elsewhere-

Belkia: *screaming* "GET IT AWAY FROM ME!"

Magaki: *holding the jar* "I told you not to open it!"

-elsewhere-

Jordan: =///=

erina: *sleeping on his lap*

Jordan: *strokes her head*

Tanizaki: *waiting outside* "..."

erina: nnh....

Jordan: *light hum*

erina: ......

Jordan: "Hey..."

erina: ...thanks for coming over....

Jordan: ^^ "Any time...as long as I'm not at work. Or unless I can sneak out without Mr. F firing me."

erina: ^^;

Jordan: "I made sure to have someone cover for me...Anything I can bring later this afternoon?"

-elsewhere-

yuuji: *taps his pencil on the desk*

Aizawa: "Bored, much?"

yuuji: *shrug* eh, dont have any plans for the week, so...

Aizawa: "Hmm. I could give you more homework--"

yuuji: even though i'm in the general courses?

Aizawa: "It's either that or I have you do some community activities. Anything that'll help you."

yuuji: *shrugs* either one i guess...

Aizawa: "Then help me with some supplies..." *shows a list* "I stuck preparing a meal after some of the students and faculty finish a building project."

yuuji: sounds good.

-elsewhere-

Walter: "Wait, you've danced before, right?"

Kafka: >_>;;;

Tachihara: "..." *snort* "Oh, this is just sad..."

leroux: i could give you instructions if you wish!

Kafka: "O-Okay? But won't I need a dance partner?"

leroux: *hands him a mannequin* i have a few spares. ^^

Walter: OwO "Oh! We can use that later for cosplay modeling!"

Kafka: ._.; "..." *holds the mannequin's hands* "Like this?"

leroux: *adjusting kafka's hand placement* there you go. *puts on a record*

Kafka: "Now what?"

-a slow waltz tune plays-

leroux: *picks up the christine doll* like so. *dancing with the doll*

Kafka: .__.; *tries to match the movements--and steps on 'her' toes* "Oh! Sorry..." ("Wait--it's just a mannequin...")

leroux: try to put your arms up a little more.

Kafka: "Like this?"

leroux: there you go.

Kafka: ^^;;; *keeps moving--*

Tachihara: "Watch those hands, buddy--she'd slap you in real life."

Kafka: O_O;

leroux: ^^;

hirotsu: speaking from experience, are we?

Tachihara: O_O "Y-Yes! No!" *shakes his head* "I don't know the right answer--STOP PLAYING MIND GAMES ON ME, OLD MAN!"

hirotsu: *just gives him a look*

Walter: *pat pat*

gin: rip, tachihara. and his dignity.

-elsewhere-

Patty: "Oh! Those seeds are growing well!"

Takeru: ^^;

-elsewhere-

Kazue: *seated at their chair...they are actually awake* O_O;;;;;;;

lukas: are you alright?

Kazue: <Is it breaking and entering still a crime here?>

lukas: >->;;

Kazue: "..." <Don't turn me over to the police. I can't go back.>

lukas: O_O;;;

-elsewhere-

Jacqueline: "How did the talk go?"

kim: went pretty well i think.

Meme: "..."

Jacqueline: *sets down tea* "What's she like?"

kim: stubborn. -_-;

Jacqueline: "Oh...Well, if anyone can help, I'm sure it's you." ^^;

kim: =3=

Jacqueline: *pat pat*

Meme: "I really appreciated it, Kim." ^^

kim: any time. now about that payment-

Meme: "..." *runs*

kim: D8<

mio: -_-;;

Jacqueline: =_=; "...Sometimes a good job done is its own reward."

-elsewhere-

Kid: *checking a map of Tombstone* "..."

stocking: whats up? *hugs his neck from behind the couch*

Kid: =w= "Not too much. Just following up from the previous mission..."

stocking: ah.

Kid: "I was hoping to call in to see whether they had any clues...You're here for the day?"

stocking: yeah.

Kid: *smiles* "Any work?" *rubs her hand*

stocking: later this evening. i'll be at a meeting to discuss the exorcist exams...

Kid: "Oh, those are coming up?"

stocking: yeah...

Kid: "I hope it works out well. Who else is procturing?"

-elsewhere-

Chuuya: *adjusts his tie*

-silence-

Chuuya: *sits down* "Hello." *smiles weakly*

-at the other end of the table is rain's photo-

Chuuya: "Y-You look nice...As always...” ^^; "I...hope the meal is good. I remembered y-you liked...red velvet. It's dessert...” *shaking* "I-I'm sorry--I'm getting ahead of myself. We have dinner first, right..." *sets down two plates* "..." *sets down the plate--and ends up spilling the glass of water* "!!!" *reaches down to wipe it...then falls to his knees*

*a drop falls onto the puddle of water*

Chuuya: *smiling widely...and crying so much*

-i want to see you again i want to see you again i want to see you again i want to see you i want to see you i want to see you-

Chuuya: *shakes* *holds his head* "Please...come back. Please!"

sonia: papa?

Chuuya: "..." *slowly turns*

sonia: .....*she looks at him, with a vacant look of concern*

Chuuya: "..." *rubs his eyes* "I-I'm sorry. Just cleaning."

sonia: *walks over to him.....and wordlessly hugs him*

Chuuya: "..." *mindlessly holds onto her*

sonia: *head pats* ......

Chuuya: *crying* "R-Rain..."

sonia: ........

Chuuya: "...Sonia, I'm sorry."

sonia:.....do you want to rest now?

Chuuya: *whimpers*

sonia:.....you get some sleep, papa. i'll clean up.

Chuuya: "Th-Thank you...I'm sorry..."

sonia: it's ok.

-elsewhere-

Asher: "Where to, meister?"

izumi: alright, our next class is wiiiith, dr stein.

Asher: "..." *turns on their heel, starts walking away*

izumi: *grabs the back of their hoodie and drags them behind her*

Asher: "If I die because of him, I'm haunting you..."

izumi: ^^;

Stein: "Hello."

izumi: hi dr stein.

Asher: "Sir..."

Stein: "Let's begin today's exercises." *he's set out meditation pillows*

-elsewhere-

Thorne: "They look well..."

shiemi: *nods*

Thorne: *looks where they planted Rose's seeds* "..."

shiemi: they're growing very nicely.

Thorne: *nods* "...I'm scared."

shiemi: ??

Thorne: "What will they produce..."

shiemi:...*pats his back*

Thorne: *sniffs*

-elsewhere-

Mephisto: *holding his nose, while dumping the diaper* >~<

shion: baba.

Mephisto: "Okay..." *picks up the newly diapered Shion* "How's that?"

shion: ah! ^o^

Mephisto: "Good! Ready for a feeding?"

-elsewhere-

Tachihara: *cleaning up the kitchen* "Jeez, what happened here anyway..."

sonia: ....

Walter: *putting food away in the fridge* "Looks like a good meal...Oh! Red velvet!"

Motojiro: "..." *pats Sonia's shoulder*

sonia:...*nod*

Motojiro: *sad smile* "Did you eat, Sonia?"

sonia: a little bit...not from here...

Motojiro: *nods* "Maybe a glass of water would be good?"

-elsewhere-

Gopher: "Oh...So, you're going out of town?"

kirika: for a little while.

Gopher: QwQ "Th-That's good..."

kirika: *head pats* hey, you'll survive a few days without me.

Gopher: TwT *soft purrs* "R-Right..."

kirika: if you were really that weak, you'd be dead already. so you're stronger than you think, you little weirdo.

Gopher: QWQ "...Thank you!" *bows--falling down, his face landing on the floor*

kirika: *sweatdrop*

-elsewhere-

Wes: *rubs Ghost Dog's belly*

ghost dog: ^u^

Wes: "Good puppy--good puppy!" ^^

-elsewhere-

kyouko: i'm home.

Fujimoto: "Welcome back! How'd it go?"

kyouko: busy as usual

???: oh, hey kyouko.

kyouko: !! oh, yuma!

yuma: ^^

kyouko: you're so grown up now, it's shocking.

yuma: yeah. ^^; i thought i'd come over for a little bit before heading out.

Mifune: "A busy mission..."

kyouko: you're going on missions already?

yuma: *nods*

Mifune: "She'll be supervised, of course." *reassuring pat*

yuma: yeah, miss mikuni, miss kure, and mr law will be going with me.

kyouko: neat, but try to be careful around that kirika girl, ok?

Mifune: ^^;

Momo sakura: *picks a dandelion* ^^

angela: *making flower crowns*

Mifune: "Now we just have to finish your packing."

-elsewhere-

Blair: *checks a print-out of patients* "This one--'Panda'? He's still in a coma."

shinra: i see...thank you very much.

Blair: "...I'm sorry. A friend of yours?"

shinra: s-sort of...

Blair: "Would you like to see him?"

shinra: if it's not any trouble-

Blair: "Not at all--visiting hours are still in place." *walks with him* "No one has been to visit him..."

shinra:.......

*inside the room, Panda is in a medical-induced coma...his burnt skin is bandaged*

shinra: ......hey panda, it's me, shinra.

Panda: "..." *breathing valves pump oxygen through his mask*

shinra:...i'm sorry. i wasnt able to save you when you needed it, but i swear i'll make up for it.... we'll bring inka and sasori back, i promise.

Blair: "..."

Panda: "..." *vitals are stable*

shinra:...get well soon... *stands up*

Blair: *small smile* "I can call with any updates.."

shinra: thank you.

-elsewhere-

Stein: "That'll be all for today. Your homework is to practice this meditation once a day to get in touch with your souls."

Asher: "Zzz..."

izumi: .... ^^;

Saria: *stretches* "I hope it helps..."

Zeke: "It's really hard when you had too much soda, yo."

-elsewhere-

Kepuri: *gets into the driver's seat* "Okay, just a short trip from the office, and we're back home!"

Yohei: "...I want a different carpool."

Assi: O_O;

-elsewhere-

Spirit: *drops wedding invitations into the mailbox* =w= "It took a long time narrowing it down...but it's done. ..." *collapses in front of the mailbox*

Hyde: *in a postal worker outfit* "..." *nudges Spirit*

-elsewhere-

Inka: *singed, hair on fire* -_-;

Haumea: "That'll be all~" *departs*

sasori:....*pours water onto inka's head*

Inka: T_T "Thank you...Now get me a towel."

-elsewhere-

Kanin: *looking at magazines at the convenience store* "Oh, this looks promising..." *picks up a manga*

-seems to be a collection of 4 komas of 'Laka and Daisy'-

sayaka: oh my gosh, i love that comic! those doggies are so silly ^^

Kanin: OwO;;; "...Ha?" *opens the manga*

-elsewhere-

Chuuya: "Zzz..."

mito: *sleeping on the pillow next to him*

Chuuya: *muttering, tossing*

mito: *streeeeetch*

Chuuya: *groans* "Rain...No..."

mito: *nuzzles against him*

Chuuya: *breathes a bit more calmly...whimpers*

mito: *purrs*

Chuuya: *hugs Mito*

mito: =w=

Chuuya: *strokes Mito, crying to calm down*

-elsewhere-

Justin: *packing*

oriko: *looking out the window*

Justin: "How do you feel about this mission?"

oriko: im...nervous.

Justin: *nods* "Understandably. You won't be alone, though--you'll have support."

oriko: i know, but...what if i remember something painful?

Justin: "...You can't know that you will, so that may be a bridge to cross only if you come to it."

oriko:.....right....

-elsewhere-

sasa: ...........*blows air horn* wakey waaaakeeeeey

tsukasa: FUCKINGJEEGUSWHATTHEHELL?!?!

tsukuyo: !?!?!?!?! O_O;;

Demongo: *yawns* "Five mo-mo-more minutes, my ma-ma-master..."

tsukasa: WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT FOR?!

sasa: get up, you shits, it's moving day.

tsukuyo: m-moving day?

sasa: yes! start packing!

tsukasa: um... ._.;; *blink blink*

Demongo: "..." -_-; "Yes, because I have soooooo much to move."

sasa: NO ONE ASKED YOUR OPINION! D8<

tsukuyo: and we're leaving because?

sasa: this shithole town's gone stale for my personal taste. i need a change of scenery.

tsukasa: and you drag us into helping you?

tsukuyo: a new town does mean new magical girls, which could mean new recruits.

tsukasa: hmmm, good point, good point.

Demongo: "..." *stomach growl* ^\\\\^; "Ready to help pack!"

tsukuyo: and where are we going?

sasa: shirase town.

-morning-

shibusawa: ..........*sigh* (another humdrum day, another humdrum birthday, another humdrum year....)

Nox: "??? Is something troubling you?"

shibusawa: just the usual problems.

lux: well, lady miyuri made this for you. *hands them a clay dragon*

shibusawa: how thoughtful. let me place this with the rest...

lux: =3=

shibusawa:....i suppose i'll visit the child later today.

Nox: "Very good." *pours tea*

shibusawa: hopefully soon, dostoyevsky will call up and we can begin the show proper...

-elsewhere-

Zeke: *thumbing through news* "Oh, bro--missing person report."

axel: *looks*

Zeke: "Looks like she had a quirk--spider."

axel: neat.

Zeke: "They have the contact info for any details...You see any spider quirk people around?"

axel: not that i know. *shrug*

-elsewhere-

Bon: "Yo." *sets down a muffin*

izumo:...is this a peace offering or something?

Bon: "..." *nods* *sits across from her*

Rin: *waves at Stocking* "Yo, teach!"

stocking: good morning, everyone.

Shima: "Hello, ma'am~ How are you this fine day?"

stocking: -_-; now as you know, the exorcist exams are coming up soon

Rin: "What'll be on the exam?"

-elsewhere-

kirika: *in the backseat of the car, looking out the window*

Justin: *smiles* "You got it." *tunes to the station*

kirika: *nods her head along to the tune*

Justin: *looks at Oriko*

oriko: ^^

yuma: *snoozing*

Justin: "We'll pull over in an hour for something to eat. Any preferences for meals?"

kirika: i dunno.

Justin: "Maybe some sandwiches and salads?"

-elsewhere-

Meme: *knock knock* "Hello?"

fani: what?

Meme: "Hi...How are you this morning?"

fani:....fine, i guess....

Meme: *knock knock* "Hello?"

fani: what?

Meme: "Hi...How are you this morning?"

fani:....fine, i guess....

Meme: "Have you had breakfast yet?"

fani:...what's it to _you_?

Meme: "!!! I-I just want to help--"

fani:......for the record, no, i havent.

Meme: "..." *holds up a tray* "I think I can help with that." ^^;

fani: ?? i-is that....cinnamon toast?

Meme: *nods* "Made it myself."

fani:..............................*noms*

Meme: ^^ "I hope it's decent. You looked hungry."

fani: *still eating, shiny eyes*

Meme: "That's good...Need more syrup?"

-elsewhere-

Kanin: *fiddling with a phone* "Hmm..." *his contact list is empty* "..."

genny:....um....did you.....want to exchange numbers?

Kanin: "Wh-What? Oh, sure!" ^^ "What's yours? I'll text you..."

-one number exchange later-

Kanin: "Yay! Thanks, Genny! I was a little shy to ask..."

genny: n-no problem. ./////.

lei-lei: why dont i share my number too? ^^

Kanin: "Thanks! That'll be great. I appreciate it..."

lei-lei: what are friends, for, right? ^w^

Duncan: "And how about I share my number? Of course, my new model of phone may be too advanced for--"

Kanin: "Amelia? How about you?"

Duncan: D : <

amelia: oh, i dont have a phone.

Kanin: "Oh...Sorry."

amelia: it's fine.

Kanin: "...Want to borrow mine for some gaming?"

amelia: is that alright with you?

Kanin: "Sure! I got Tetris...I haven't downloaded others for it..."

-elsewhere-

Rin: Q_Q "...I'm going to fail..."

shiemi: then you got to study hard then,

izumo: they'll seriously kill you if you dont.

Bon: "Yeah, not just sit at home doing nothing."

Rin: "I study plenty! ...It just doesn't stick." >3>;

izumo: -_-;

Shima: "How 'bout a study session to make things better?" *puts arms around Shiemi and Izumo* "What'd you say?"

izumo: *PUNCH*

shiemi: that sounds like a great plan!

Rin: "Oh, I can make some snacks!"

Bon: "Yeah, and we'll go through notes." *stamps Shima's head*

izumo: rin, focus.

Rin: "R-Right...Focus!" *opens a book* "...Where to start?"

-elsewhere-

Kafka: *breathing heavily* "Okay...I _can't_ do this." *walks away*

bessy: ~?

Kafka: "This was a dumb idea. Like anyone would be interested--I'm just a disgusting bug, after all..."

bessy: whatcha doin~?

Kafka: "...Adult things." *glances into the hallway outside Etta's room*

-no one there-

bessy: like taxes?

Kafka: -^- "Good...G-Good..."

etta: *right behind kafka* hi franzy ^^

Kafka: "N-No, nothing like that. You wouldn't understand--" O_O "..." *squeaky voice* "H-Hello..."

etta: whatcha dooooin~?

Kafka: O_O "...Not standing here."

etta: oh?

Kafka: .__. "... ... ...Are you busy?"

etta: not right now, why?

Kafka: "...Can coffee get us?"

etta: how about tea?

Kafka: OWO "...Sure."

etta: ok then ^^

-elsewhere-

Yafeu: "MORNING, MRS. THOMPSON-EVANS!"

liz: morning, students. ^^

Zeke: "What're we up to today? Weapons practice? Demonstrations? Target practice?"

liz: we'll be doing some target practice to start off with.

Asher: "In here? Isn't that a little dangerous?"

liz: we'll be doing it outside.

Yafeu: "WOO!"

Saria: ^^ "Good thing the weather's decent."

-elsewhere-

Shotaro: *slowly climbs down on spider-silk, upside, looking over Mana's shoulder* "Good book?"

mana: *nods*

Shotaro: "What is it? Does it have action? Kissy stuff? Footnotes?"

mana: just a book that bryn recommended to me.

Shotaro: "Ah, so action!" ^w^ *falls down, sits next to her* "That was nice of her."

mana: *she smiles and nods*

Shotaro: "Now that you got to try some new fighting moves, what's your next tournament?"

mana: sometime in july.

Shotaro: "..." *pokes her arm* "Need more muscle there..."

mana: i've been training! >3<

Shotaro: "Maybe a different diet?" *keeps poking her arm*

mana: -_-;

-elsewhere-

Konro: *looking up, holding a watch* "...Yeah, still not coming down..."

fang-hua: must be a new record by now...

Konro: "I think so...I hope she didn't get stuck in the atmosphere."

*sounds like a loud whoosh above...*

fang-hua: ah-

*BOOM!*

fang-hua: O_O;

*there's a giant crater*

Konro: "..." *stops the watch* "...Um...N-New record..."

Tsukiyo: *pops out of the wreckage* "...Ha! Told you!" *bounces out, lands in front of Fang-Hua* "Impressed?")

-elsewhere-

Akutagawa: *aims...fires Rashomon*

-nice hit-

naoya: nice shot, akuta!

Akutagawa: "I seem to be back to normal..."

naoya: *smiles* glad to hear. ^^

Akutagawa: *small smile* "Now to practice lifting..." *grabs a table with Rashomon*

-elsewhere-

Yumi: *standing next to Liz* "How's their aim?"

Zeke: *holding kunai* "Hah!" *tosses at the target--missing* OwO;

Asher: "...Well, it's not baseball..." *picks up a tonfa, knocks balls at the target, nailing each one*

Yafeu: -_-; *aiming a tiny water gun at the target* "...THIS FEELS INSULTING."

liz: going well so far.

Yumi: "It should be a good lesson for them--to understand what their meisters go through trying to handle them."

Saria: "Hee-ya!" *tries to crack the whip--and it doesn't really do anything* ._.;

liz: *nods*

Zeke: "Bro, I think these things are defective..."

axel: *throws one...right in duncan's butt* ._.; oops.

Duncan: -____-# "..." *tugs the kunai out* "..." *spray of blood leaves his sphincter* "..." *collapses*

Kazue: *sleeping*

Yumi: "..." *points at Kazue* "Are they even a weapon?"

liz: i....dont even know.

Zeke: O_O; "...Bro, I think you're going to prison for that."

axel: Q_Q;;;;

Asher: "It's the DWMA--this kind of brawling is fine. Probably."

Saria: ^^; "It's in the guidebook..."

-elsewhere-

Dabi: "--and he has Polaroids of all the bratty superhero kids. What a weird obsession. And he keeps stacking playing cards into houses--"

tomura: you know i can hear you, right?

Dabi: "...It's still weird. You just going to play with photos, or are we doing something?"

tomura: give it time...

Dabi: *groans* "Better keep your troops in line, then--they seem distracted or kind of lazy."

tomura:.... alright, how about you do some surveillance?

Dabi: "...Fine." *grabs his hoodie* "Where, exactly?"

tomura: *slides a photo* this place.

Dabi: *looks*

-seems to be a museum of sorts-

-elsewhere-

Bon: *seated on a banister, looking down the atrium to a floor below*

izumo: huh, i didnt know there was a balcony here.

Bon: *puts a slip of paper away* "Yeah...Scoping out the assembly below."

izumo: hmm...out of curiosity, you arent thinking of backing out...are you?

Bon: "WHAT THE HELL--NO! I HAVE A RESOLVE AS MIGHTY AS MOUNTAINS!"

izumo: just making sure....but i get how you feel. you've lost people, goals, and you feel alone and helpless...

Bon: "..." *keeps his eyes on the assembly* "So, you're thinking of backing out?"

izumo: hmph, of course not. i dont have anything else to do....i think, in a fucked up way, losing everything liberated me.......

Bon: "...You've changed."

izumo: oh?

Bon: "Yeah. You're better like this now."

izumo: *blushing* A-AND JUST WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN, HUH?! >////<#

Bon: O_O; "IT-IT WAS A COMPLIMENT? YOU KNOW..."

Rin: "Oh, hey! There's the married couple--"

izumo: SHUT UP OKUMURA!!!! >/////<###

stocking: i think 'couple in denial' is more fitting.

izumo: DONT ENCOURAGE HIM!!!!

Bon: "ALL OF YOU ASSHOLES, SHUT UP, AND LISTEN TO THE ASSEMBLY DOWN THERE!"

stocking: ...if you excuse me. *jumps off the balcony, using her wings to float down*

Rin: "...Dude, I don't think you should call your teacher an asshole."

*An announcer is on stage*

Audience 1: "Where the devil is he..."

audience member 2: he'll show up in some over the top way, i just know it.

gilda: ^^;

Announcer: "Everyone, quiet, please! Um..." *flips through notecards* "Presenting the headmaster, Sir Pheles!"

-cricket noises-

Announcer: "..." ._.;

stocking: *takes out pet container* dad, that's your queue. *opens it*

*a doggie walks out of the pet container, onto the stage*

Audience 2: "D'aw, look at the puppy!"

stocking: ^^;

*the dog gets on stage--then POOF*

seiya: oh!

Mephisto: "Guten morgen! Mephisto Pheles, timely, as always~"

stocking: *listening*

Mephisto: "Obviously, demonic activities have intensified. Even apparitions are increasing in the school. Therefore, I have authorized deploying this Patrol Squad. But we also have an increased request for exorcists--which is like the hell that is a waitlist to get into your favorite idol concert--but it's reservation only! And you don't have the money! And you need a babysitter! And the car isn't running! So you're stuck taking the bus to work, next to the annoying passenger who insists on telling you about their kidney stones--"

stocking: DAD! FOCUS.

Mephisto: "..." *ahem* *holds up microphone, lets go, so it now floats in the air* "Therefore, HQ has ordered us to increase the number of exorcists ASAP! We will ally with exorcist organizations not currently part of the Order of Knights. Next, we have moved up the date for the next Exorcist Certification Exam."

Audience 3: "Huh?!"

Audience 4: "So there's less time to study?!"

Audience 5: "What happened to the puppy?!"

seiya: so when will the exam be, sir?

Mephisto: "September."

izumo: that soon?

Rin: "I guess the Illuminati convinced him to get more exorcists?"

izumo:....*glances at shima*

Rin: "..."

Bon: *glare*

Shima: "H-Hey! I'm not involved in that!"

stocking:....??

-something peers through the grate-

stocking: ?!

Audience 6: "Why are there more demons?"

Audience 7: "Is internal affairs still investigating?"

Audience 8: "What did you do with the puppy?!"

Audience 9: "What if the new exorcists suck?"

Mephisto: "Relax...The Vatican sent someone here specifically to work with the newbies--"

*BOOM*

stocking: !!!

*it's a colony of hobgoblins, exploding from the gate*

Mephisto: "...Gee, how timely~ Oh, Lewin? Clean up, please."

lewin: you got it boss man!

stocking: i'll cover you!

lewin: why thank you. ^^ let's go, furfur!

stocking: *slashing*

Bon: "?! Furfur? That's pretty high-class..."

Rin: "He's going to summon a furry?"

izumo: -_-;

Shima: "Maybe it's the dog?"

*ZAP!*

*SPLURT! SLASH!*

Mephisto: *wearing sunglasses, smiles*

*a beast of electricity obliterates the hobgoblins*

izumo: woah!

Bon: "?!!!"

lewin: *phew* *waves* hello.

Mephisto: "Everyone, please say hello to one of the Pillars of the Arc Knights, the Master of Lightning, Lewin Light!"

lewin: yo ^^

Mephisto: "Let's hope our students learn from all you have to share with them..." *glances up at the balcony--smirks*

-later-

stocking: *knocks* dad? you in?

Mephisto: *cough*

stocking: dad? are you alright??

Mephisto: *waves a hand* "Spl-Splendid!" *smiles*

stocking: .....*takes a seat* may i ask something?

Mephisto: "Of course."

stocking: do you think i could get exorcist tutoring?

Mephisto: "Oh? I imagine so...What prompts this idea?"

stocking: after today's meeting, i realize that i still dont know much about exorcism. and me being a student teacher, i should probably know more about this.

Mephisto: "That makes sense. Very well. We can check the schedule for available tutors."

stocking: thanks dad. *smiles*

Mephisto: "It'll be a lot of work--and I know you can do it."

stocking: *nods* i'll do my best, cause i do want to prove i have what it takes and that i know what i'm doing.

Mephisto: "And helping to save the world isn't too bad either~"

stocking: yeah. ^^

Mephisto: "While you tutor, keep an eye on the students--make sure they are studying."

stocking: noted.

-elsewhere-

Akitaru: *sighs* "So, no signs what the First is doing...or the Church."

iris: ....

Akitaru: "For now, we see how they respond. It's not long before they react to the report..."

-elsewhere-

Burns: *looking at fire reports...seem to be years old*

dia: sir?

Burns: *looks up* "Yes?"

dia: how's the investigation?

Burns: "Hitting walls...The night of one fire took a lot of my attention, so I'm looking over clues again from the same day."

-that evening-

kirika: *snoozing*

Justin: *pulls in*

kirika: *yaaaawn*

Justin: "We're here." *looks outside*

kirika: ah? *looks outside* ......

oriko: oh.

Justin: "We'll check in." *hands bags*

bellhop: follow me, please.

oriko: *looking around*

kirika: .....

-from the rooftops, a figure watches them-

???: .......

-elsewhere-

Kid: *walks into the mansion*

stocking: *laying on the couch* welcome home.

Kid: *smiles* "Hello, love." *smooch*

stocking: *smooch* ^///^ how was work today?

Kid: "A bit confusing--many missions to track." *sits with her*

stocking: ah.

Kid: "How was teaching?"

-she explains what all happened-

Kid: "Oh...Any tutor you're considering?"

stocking: someone with experience preferably, like shura or lewin. anyone but triple A batteries >XP

Kid: "Heh...No kidding. Shura is good with a sword..."

stocking: *smiles*

Kid: "You look excited at the prospect."

stocking: yeah...

Kid: "And it'll help you as a teacher..."

stocking: *nods*

Kid: *holds her hand*

stocking:....i overheard some of the other teachers talking about me. they were saying the only reason i got this job was because dad's the boss....

Kid: *frowns* "And you already know that's untrue."

stocking: *nods* i know, i know... and i'll prove them wrong... sorry, went a bit on a rant there.

Kid: "It's understandable...You'll prove yourself."

stocking: yeah. *hugs* thanks kid.

Kid: *pat pat* "Any time..."

stocking: mm~ u////u

Kid: ^\\\^ *holds her*

stocking: if you arent too tired, can we watch a movie and cuddle and maybe you can squeeze my butt?

Kid: ^\\\\^; "Yes, yes, and..." *pats her lower back*

stocking: ah~<3 u///u

Kid: *grabs a blanket, tucks it over them, takes the remote...* "Any viewing preference?" *rests a hand on her knee*

-elsewhere-

Mori: *huddled in bed*

miura: ...

Mori: "..." *looks up suddenly* "!!!"

miura: sir?

Mori: "...S-Sorry...Thought I...Nevermind."

miura: is something on your mind?

Mori: "...The usual."

miura: would you feel better talking about it, sir?

Mori: "...I'm broken."

miura: *listening*

Mori: "I lost...Elise...Childhood..."

miura:.......

Mori: "I-I just see that connection...Without her, I'm just this...failed adult."

miura:.....would you like a hug, sir?

Mori: "..."

miura:.......*holding him, like a mother would their child*

Mori: *whimpers*

miura:.....

Mori: "Ma..."

miura: *humming*

Mori: *closes his eyes, holding onto Miura*

-elsewhere-

Kyoka: *looking at her phone* "..."

sylvia: *asleep*

Kyoka: "..." *sets down her phone, lies down in bed*

-early morning-

mrs mamiya: erika, sweetie, time to wake up!

Erika: *yawns* "..." *gets out of bed*

mrs mamiya: *cooking pancakes*

Erika: "...Morning, Mom." *sits at the table*

mr mamiya: you want eggs with your pancakes?

Erika: "...Sure."

mr mamiya: ^^

Erika: "..." >_>; "I'll take the train today..."

mr mamiya: you have a good day at school today.

Erika: "Yeah, okay..."

-elsewhere-

tsukasa: *panting* are we....there yet?

sasa: weeeee're heeeeeeere~<3

Demongo: "Yay--*yawn*"

tsukuyo: so this is shirase town?

sasa: yup! and i've already got the address for my new residence!

Demongo: "Is it cozy~?"

sasa: it will be!

-elsewhere-

kirika: *snoring*

Justin: *already awake in his room, reading*

oriko: *waking up* *yaaawn* hmm?

*smells like food in the hallway...*

oriko: *steps outside*

yuma: *yaaaawn*

*looks like a decent set of foods on trays*

yuma: ooh, yummy!

oriko: ^^

kirika: *sniff sniff* hullo? =.=~*

Justin: "???" *steps outside* "Huh..."

oriko: oh, that wasnt you?

Justin: *shakes his head* "Room service must include it in the hotel price? At least, I hope--I do not want to charge to the DWMA expense account..."

kirika: *examining food*

Justin: *uncovers one plate, revealing pancakes* "Oh."

kirika:.......

oriko: oh, they look lovely. ^^

Justin: ^^; *takes the maple syrup, pours some on* "We'll dine, then get ready for today's schedule."

oriko: thanks for the food. ^^

kirika:...yeah....

-elsewhere-

izumo: is it me or is class more cramped today?

Student 1: "I can't see the board!"

Shima: "I don't see a problem with it~" =w=

Rin: "It's why they call it...a cram school!" ^^

izumo:....... -_-#

konekomaru: well, mr lewin is teaching today.

Lewin: "Okay, let's start! Who can tell me what's on the board?" *he's drawn some symbols*

rui: are they runes?

Lewin: "Yep!"

Rin: ._.; "...I thought runes were more complicated..."

rui: it depends on what kind of runes you're using.

Lewin: "And since y'all don't know how much time you'll have in the combat, you need to simplify."

shiemi: that does make sense...

Lewin: "Let me show you how it's done--" *starts writing a long formula on the board* "It's all about identifying the extraneous components, determining whether the component is there for grammatical sense, or can be substituted for a shorter phrase--" *starts listing two columns of words* "These are the equivalent sets of words, categorized by element then prioritized by effectiveness and finally alphabetized to stay organized--"

Student 2: O_O;;; "..." *inches out of their seat*

stocking: ._.;;

Lewin: "--make sure to carry over the power of this prepositional phrase over to the adjective in order to condense the work, remove the extra stroke lines I have modeled on Runes 1, 4, and 18, then try to slur your words over this phrase since, really, 'M' and 'N' noises sound similar enough--"

Rin: @~@ "Wh-Wha?"

-one long lecture later-

Lewin: "There!" *turns around* "...Huh?"

-only a handful of students remain-

sayuri satou: tch- what babies...

rui: *taking notes*

stocking: i think....i need to lay down....

Shima: "You scared them all away, teach! I didn't even get the hot ones' digits!" *he has multiple face-slap handprints on his face*

izumo: *PUNCHES SHIMA*

Rin: "...WAIT! I just realized! It's a PlayStation controller!"

Lewin: "CORRECT!"

shiemi: ....eh? owo;

stocking: seriously?

Lewin: "Hey, you can find perfection and simplicity in even the least obvious spots. Kinda like how little man here simplifies his life with that puppet thing."

nemu: *through the puppet* DONT PATRONIZE ME, HOBO MAN! DX<

Lewin: "Ha ha ha! See? So let's all get along with our demon friends!"

stocking:...*small smile*

Rin: "If only it felt that easy..."

izumo: he has a point. we cant fight demons without borrowing their power.

shiemi: and there's nice demons in the world too, like nee and rin.

stocking: hey, i'm here too, you know. =3=

Lewin: "...Wait, who are you again?"

stocking: *sweatdrop*

Rin: -_-; "Stocking. Teacher. She's here to learn from you. You know her dad. Your friend Triple A is a dick to her."

Lewin: "...OH! You're Pheles's kid?"

stocking: the older one, yes. it's a pleasure to be working with you, sir.

Lewin: "Then you're just who I need! And some of you others--I need you to do something really, super-duper important!"

shiemi: *nods*

izumo: what is it?

Lewin: *smiles*

-later-

Lewin: "Here it is! Get going!"

stocking: ._.;;;;

sayuri satou: nice place.

rui: makes sense the queen of stink would like it here.

Rin: "Ugh! It smells like death!"

Bon: "..."

stocking: *gives rin a look*

Rin: ._.; "...Sorry."

Lewin: "So, I didn't get a chance to unpack my valuables...I kinda just threw it wherever."

*there's a sock on the floor...crawling...*

izumo: .____.;;;;

Bon: "Sir? Could you do something about the smell?"

sayuri satou: i dont have a problem with it.

stocking: oh god, kid would have a heart attack if he saw this...

Lewin: *takes out a lighter--and sylphs pop up*

shiemi: oh!

Lewin: "I'll make you a bonfire later if you help, okay?"

rui: aww, they're so cute!

Shima: "??? You're going to fire bon?"

Rin: "You're going to light Bon on fire?"

Bon: *slams their heads together*

izumo: i was about to do that myself. thank you bon.

Bon: >_>; "...Yeah, sure..."

*the sylphs move all through, cleaning all the air*

Rin: *deep inhale, head bruised* "Ah! So clean!"

Shima: X_X

Bon: O_O "He...He didn't go through formal procedures...H-How..."

stocking: arent sylphs air affiliated??

Lewin: "Bingo! And since fire needs air, they get along like...fire and air."

stocking: ah.

Lewin: "??? ...Wait, are you also Pheles's kids?"

rui: oh, we're cram school students, not the same class, but we're still here. my name's rui belladonna!

Sayuri satou:......sayuri satou.....hi...

konekomaru: .....i actually forgot that we're not the only cram school students.

izumo: to be fair, we dont usually see them often.

Rin: "I mean, there are so many people around school..."

Lewin: "Really should keep track of that...Heh heh...Oh, Krillin..." *flips a page*

Rin: *puts a book on the shelf--whose cover pops open, smacking Shima in the face*

Shima: *down* X_X

sylph: *giggles*

Rin: "Hey, cool it! You can play later!"

sylph 2: *noms on izumo's finger*

izumo: OW! jeez, that hurts!

-several sylphs are making a nest in shiemi's hair-

shiemi: um... a little help? .-.;

Lewin: "Man...As Sonic used to say, that's just no good...Well, time to exorcise."

stocking: you're just gonna kill them?

Lewin: "This is not the kind of thing that can be forgiven..."

Bon: ("Jeez, hardcore. But there's no fatal verse for elementals like sylphs--")

Lewin: " 'Mortem.'"

-fwoom-

stocking: woah!

Bon: "!!!" ("An original fatal verse...in just one word!")

Lewin: "Well, guess I'm setting a bad example lecturing y'all about 'borrowing demons' powers so easily,' huh? Ha ha ha..."

izumo: (he makes it look so easy!)

Lewin: "So, let me review names...Stocking Pheles, teacher. Shiemi Moriyama, the one who stopped the plant monsters at the festival. Izumo Kamiki, polka-brows--"

izumo: D8<

Lewin: "Sayuri Satou, 'Queen of Stink'--"

sayuri satou: *nods*

Lewin: "And you're the King of Troublemakers, Rin O!"

Rin: -3- "Rude..."

Lewin: "And you're genius Ryuuji Suguro, right?"

Bon: .\\\\. " 'Genius'?"

konekomaru: well, you do have good memorization with death verses and sutras.

Lewin: "Yeah, my memorization is poor..." *looks at Konekomaru* "...Neko-Kitten?"

konekomaru: konekomaru, ^^;

Lewin: "Ah, right..."

Bon: "S-Sir, that's too much...I'm not a genius. I'm useless...like in the fight back home--"

Lewin: "Horsefeathers. You're plenty useful. You got what it takes to be a great exorcist."

Bon: "...But that's just it...I don't have any reason to _be_ an exorcist anymore..."

izumo: ??

Bon: "Satan tore my family apart...I wanted to bring them back together...That's taking too long. My dad is moving on, our shrine isn't just me...Everyone has their own path...I don't--I don't know what to do!"

izumo: ......

Lewin: "...So, what, you need 'ambition' just to take a dump?"

Bon: O\\\\o; >\\\\< "What?! N-No! Ambition is necessary to push you forward!"

Lewin: "..."

Bon: "Didn't you have a reason to become an exorcist?!"

Lewin: "..." *nods* "A demon slaughtered my whole family when I was a kid."

stocking: !!!!...mr lewin....

Bon: "I-I'm sorry...So, that's why you're an exorcist."

Lewin: *shakes his head* "Nah. I'm just pulling your leg."

stocking: ?!

Bon: "...What."

Lewin: "I grew up in Texas. Pop, Ma, old bro, old sister. They're all fine."

Bon: "..." -_-###

konekomaru: THAT'S NOT SOMETHING THAT'S OK TO JOKE ABOUT!! D8<

Lewin: "Wow, sore spot. Sorry about that. But seriously...Well, you know folks like Charisma Justice? All Might? Heroes...I wanted to fight like that, for justice--"

izumo: are you just bluffing again?

Lewin: "BINGO, HUMAN LIE-DETECTER!" ^^

stocking: -_-# JUST BE HONEST WITH US.

Lewin: "...I mean, I don't have any grand ambition or motivation or goal." *taps his manga* "I'm not the shonen hero of this story, you know. There's no dark backstory, no enemy, no quest for vengeance. I just like being alive in this world."

stocking: .......

*CRASH*

Lewin: "???"

Bon: *is on his hands and knees*

konekomaru: um-

Bon: "Lightning! Please! Accept me as your student!"

izumo: ._.;;

Lewin: -w- "Huh...Falling faster than Yamcha--"

Rin: "What the H you doing, Bon?!"

izumo: have you snapped?!

stocking: *sweatdrop* (maybe i should ask shura to tutor me...)

-elsewhere-

Dabi: *hoodie pulled up, looking at the museum*

himiko: ooooooh!

Dabi: "Shh."

himiko: *nods*

Dabi: *walks up the stairs inside*

himiko: *following*

Dabi: *looking down the hall while removing his wallet*

himiko: *whispers* so what're we looking for?

Dabi: "We'll know it when we see it. It should be in the back..." *walks to ticket booth* "Yo. 2."

-elsewhere-

Motojiro: "Ah, there you are..."

sonia: hello mr kajii.

Motojiro: "How's the book report coming along?"

sonia: pretty good. i was helping Q with his as well.

Q: *waves*

Motojiro: "What's your book, Q?"

Q: *holding it up; seems to be a psychological horror*

Motojiro: OwO "...Is there any recommended age for that book?"

Q: *shrug*

Motojiro: "..." *shrug* "Well, can't be any worse than reality...Where did the other kids go..."

sonia: listening to mr leroux play.

Motojiro: "Ah, how nice!" *walks to the piano room*

leroux: *playing piano as the other kids listen*

Jakob: "Ooo..."

wilhelm: ^^

Tom: *leans in, listening intently*

bessy: ^^

Walter: *sitting with the kids* ^w^

leo: *smiles*

Motojiro: *sits with Leo* "..."

leo: *rubs her stomach*

Motojiro: "..." <M-May I...> *his hand hovers over hers*

leo: *leans into him, smiling* u////u

Motojiro: ^\\\\^ *puts an arm around her shoulder*

-elsewhere-

Justin: "Where should we begin? Perhaps somewhere that reminds you of something..."

kirika: maybe the school?

Justin: "Very well--we can take this bus..."

oriko: *nods*

Justin: *points* "There's the stop...Anything we're missing?" *looks at the others*

yuma: i dont think so.

Justin: *looking at the buildings* "..."

-elsewhere-

Kid: *frantically folding clothes*

liz: you alright?

Kid: OwO;;; "You ever feel there is something really wrong in the world? I think I can I feel that--so I'm trying to off-set it..."

liz: ._.; um....ok then.

Kid: "Hee hee...J-Just need to fold this--" *rips a shirt* QWQ;;;;;

liz: ._.;

-elsewhere-

Iida: *picks up a bag of take-out*

ochako: ^^

eijiro: aw yeah!

Iida: "Off we go! Oh, but please, procure napkins!"

ochako: you got it!

momo: ^^;

Izuku: *checks his bag* "Looks like all's here...Where to?"

jirou: first stop is the picnic area, then we'll head to the cave of trials.

Denki: " 'Trials'?"

jirou: it's sort of a nickname. it's a dark cave in the wooded area that's often used for tests of courage.

Tokoyami: "!!! ..."

mina: oooh, neato!

Izuku: ^^; "Should be entertaining, I guess..."

Iida: "A way to inure ourselves against fear!"

-elsewhere-

kirika: *looking around*

Justin: "Rather quiet..."

kirika: looks like school aint open today...im gonna check the roofs for anything. *magical girl mode and uses her claws to parkour up a wall*

Justin: "Be careful! Mind the walls!"

kirika: yeah, yeah. =3=; *mumbling*

*doesn't look like anything is going on--*

*FWOOM*

kirika: ?!?!? WHAT THE FUCK?!

*it looks like a shield surrounding a fast-moving person, crossing perpendicular to Kirika's path*

kirika: the hell?

*the shielded being slows down, ducking, rolling, turning around--and holding an axe*

kirika: !!!! *blocking with claws*

???: "Neat trick. What are you? An onyx scorpion witch?"

kirika: eh? 'the fuck're you?

???: "A magical girl. And, what, you kiss your mother with that mouth?"

kirika: is that right? well as it happens i am to, but why should _you_ care, and who do you think you are, neighborhood watch or some shit?

???: "You could say that--a monster hunt. My turf. So get out of my way--"

kirika: boring! i dont have time to go playing around with little brats like you, so if you excuse me, i have shit to do today-

???: *grab* "You just call me a 'brat,' you stuck-up bitch?!"

kirika: look, im not in the mood for bullshit, so if you would just piss on off with your little wraith hunt, then we'll be all good, k?

???: "..." *FWOOM*

*a bubble encases Kirika*

kirika: ?!?!?!

???: "How about you stay there, and I'll come back to free you...I hope you don't need the bathroom for a bit."

kirika: you little shit! D8<

???: *waves* "Toodles~" *turns--and bumps into--*

Justin: "??? Um...Hi?"

???: *falls back* "?!"

kirika: oi, priest, get me out of here! >3<#

Justin: "Oh, okay!" *shows off guillotine* "Stand still--"

kirika: ._.;

???: "!!!! WOW!" *grabs Justin's arm* "Look how sharp it is!"

Justin: ._.;

kirika: um....

???: "How do you do that?!"

Justin: "I-I'm a Death Scythe--"

???: "No way! ...So why are you with this dorky mantis?"

kirika: =_=; the hell're you calling dorky?

???: "You, mantis. Just go clean you pinchers for a bit--" *grabs Justin's arm, shiny eyes* "Do you like punk?! You totally look like some hardcore metal killing machine!"

Justin: .____.;;;; *mouthing to Kirika: "HELP ME"*

kirika: *kicks the girl in the back of the knee*

???: "OW! What the hell, bitch?!"

kirika: listen brat, you're really beginning to grate on my nerves.

???: -_-# "Then don't get in the way of my mission, you stuck-up short-tempered shit!"

Justin: -_-;

kirika: YOU WANNA FUCKIN' GO?!

Justin: *grabs both of them, covering their mouths, sounding deathly serious* "Do I have to wash out your mouths with soap...?" ^^#

kirika: 0-0

-justin's phone goes off-

???: Q_Q

Justin: *lets go of Kirika, checks*

yuma: [gett o the bridge! D8>]

Justin: "!!! Kirika, to the bridge!" *takes off*

*he's still holding onto ???*

???: "?!!!"

-at the bridge canal, oriko has pulled someone onto dry land. she is soaked and panting-

yuma: D8> ohmygoshohmygoshohmygoooosh!

???: *cough cough*

kirika: what the heck's going on here?

yuma: wewerelookingaroundwhenisawagirlabouttojumpoffthebridgeandthenshejumpedandorikowentafterherandbroughtherbacktotheshoreandidontknowwhattodo *INHAAAAALES*

???: *shudder* "Wh-Why..."

kirika: ??.....!!!!!!!! *her eyes widen in shock*

???: "...K-Kirika? ...Oh, I'm in the bad place..."

kirika: erika?! what the hell!?!

oriko: oh, she's a friend of yours?

kirika: 'was'....until she decided to stab me in the fucking back...

Erika: -_-# "Nice to see you too..."

Justin: *pulls up in the van* "Had to find where we parked..."

yuma: ._.;;;

kirika: the hell you doing, taking a dive off the bridge?!

Erika: "None of your business..." *tries to get up--*

kirika: ...did ya lose your shoes in the river?

Erika: "..." >\\\\>;;; *curls her legs under her*

kirika: what, cat got your to-

oriko: they're on the bridge,

kirika: .......

Erika: *small whimper*

kirika:.....*sighs* you want food or somethin'?

Erika: *staring at a bowl of ramen* "..."

kirika: jeez, how many years has it even been?

Erika: *shrug*

oriko:....so, what happened to you miss erika?

Erika: "Wh-What do you mean? N-Nothing happened..."

kirika: so you just tried to kill yourself for shits and giggles then?

Erika: "Shut up...It's none of your business..."

Justin: "Your family must be worried. Have you a mother? A father--"

Erika: "No!"

kirika: ....oh right, your pops left....

Erika: "Shut up..."

kirika: to be honest, you got off easy.

Erika: "..."

kirika: ......do you want to die?

Erika: "...I'm miserable..."

oriko: *listening*

Erika: "...Some stranger moves in, now I'm supposed to call him 'Dad'..."

yuma: is he mean to you?

Erika: "...I mean, no...He's just not my dad..."

kirika: why should _that_ be a problem? i mean, i have a new adoptive family, and i'm pretty happy about it.

Erika: "Because I'm useless! Because if I wasn't, my dad wouldn't have left! Because if I wasn't, my mom wouldn't hate me for--for not calling this stranger 'dad'!"

kirika: .....im gonna ask again. do you _want_ to die?

Erika: "Y-Yes..." *covers her face*

kirika: then go die.

yuma: miss kirika! D8<

kirika: what it's survival of the fittest! if she doesnt have any will to live, she's gonna die, simple as that.

Erika: *shaking...* *picks up the ramen--and throws it at Kirika*

kirika: *dodges* what, did i hit a nerve?

Erika: *holding her head, whimpering* "I'm scared..."

kirika: *glares and grabs her by the collar* if you want to die, then die! but if you're so scared of dying, then live with everything you've got!

Erika: *looks frightened*

kirika: you know, you're kinda lucky....my birth father was scum, he made my life a living hell, all because i was born. there's lots of people who dont even _have_ families! *her hands are shaking*

oriko: kirika.....

Erika: "I-I'm sorry..."

kirika: *lets her go*.........sorry, i just....got a bit upset there....guess i went out of line, huh?

Erika: "I'm sorry...I'm sorry..."

kirika:.....*awkward hug* jeez, if you want to cry, then go ahead, better to just let it out then keeping it bottled up....

Erika: *can't make a noise, as tears pour down*

kirika:.....*sighs and hugs her*

Erika: *holds onto her, sobbing*

kirika:....sorry for getting all pissy with you just now...you didnt deserve that after today....

Erika: "I keep screwing everything up..."

oriko: it's going to be alright. *pats her back*

Erika: *sobs*

-elsewhere-

sasa: here it is~ home sweet home~ *picking the lock*

tsukasa: ._.; um-

sasa: grandpa! i'm here!

-the only resident is a very elderly man, who seems to have cataracts-

tsukuyo: *covers her mouth*

Elderly Man: "!!! Wh-Who's there?!"

sasa: shhh, it's just me, grandpa. i'm just gonna get your medicine now, ok? *putting on gloves*

Elderly Man: "Help! Help!" *tries to swing a cane--*

tsukasa: *dodge*

sasa: *pulling a syringe from her bag* shhh, its ok, grandpa. i've got your medicine now, so just take a deep breath ok?

Elderly Man: "Get back! Get--"

sasa: *jabs the needle into his neck, injecting air into his bloodstream* theeere we go~ [[sasa is fucking horrible and horrifying]]

tsukuyo: !!!!!!!!!!!

tsukasa: !!!!!!

Demongo: OwO;

Elderly Man: *gasps, swinging his arm trying to hold his chest--before collapsing*

sasa: there! now that the former resident has been dealt with, we can move in proper~

tsukasa: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!

sasa: a lot of things really, but that's neither here nor there.

Demongo: "What do we do with the body?"

sasa: see if there's a furnace around, meanwhile i'm gonna check for the old dude's papers.

Demongo: "...Oh..."

tsukasa: i wanna go home now....

Demongo: *sympathetic murmur*

sasa: booo you babies. =3=

tsukasa: YOU JUST MURDERED AND OLD MAN!

sasa: and you two are high ranking members of the wings of magius _how_?

tsukuyo: and how are you even an associate?!

sasa: i'm just paying back a debt to them.

Demongo: "..." *stomach growl*

sasa: you know how the magical girl system works, right? in exchange for a wish, the selected person recieves a soul gem that amplifies the soul's wavelength, allowing them to tap into hidden powers within them. most 'official' contracts are with the DWMA and its branches, but not all magical girls are DWMA affiliated. some others find alternate sources, that have not fully mastered the technique. instead of amplifying the soul's wavelength, instead, these illegal contractors have their souls removed from them, effectively making them liches.

Demongo: "Uh huh..."

tsukuya: and a soul gem eventually wears out of magic after a while, so it must be cleaned with either grief cubes from general monsters such as kishin eggs, or grief seeds dropped from wraiths.

sasa: bingo! say, do you wonder where wraiths come from?

tsukasa:....

sasa: when an official magical girl's soul gem gets cloudy, they just lose their magical girl form until the soul gem is cleansed. however! when it happens to an illegal contractor....*smirk*

tsukasa:......!!!!!!!!

sasa: ....i'm actually an illegal contractor myself. but the magius offered me a choice; become a monster, or be saved; i think my choice was quite clear~ dont you think~

Demongo: ._.; "Hard to tell..."

sasa: _you're_ one to talk.

tsukuyo: i'd prefer you not insult him.

tsukasa: yeah, that's my job.

Demongo: -3- "I get no love..."

sasa: do you want to know how i was saved?

tsukuyo: the power of doppel, right?

sasa: ding ding ding! she got it again! two for two! the power of 'doppel' is basically a weaponization of a magical girl's wraith, or her 'other self' of sorts. with this power, we could easily become demigods!

Demongo: ._.;;; *steps back*

sasa:....welp, if you wish to go back to kamihama, go ahead, i've got unpacking to do.

tsukasa: *already fleeing*

Demongo: O_O;

-elsewhere-

Shura: *pouring a drink*

-knocks-

Shura: "???" *gets up, opens the door* "Oh, hey!"

stocking: hey, hope you dont mind me dropping in. ^^

Shura: "Not at all! Pull up a chair. Want a drink?"

stocking: i'm good. *sits down*

Shura: "Done for the day? Or did Lewin assign more chores?"

stocking: done for today, luckily, so now i can get started with tutoring!

Shura: "Nice. Where did you want to start?"

stocking: how about the basics to start off?

Shura: "Sure. Can I see your blade?"

stocking: ok. *transforms her socks into swords*

Shura: *takes one* "This is still a technique I don't quite understand...You never had any weaknesses to these? Like, do they break easily?"

stocking: i've actually never thought about it. for all i know, they've just been a part of me, in a way.

Shura: "Does that mean non-angels can't use them?"

stocking: *shrug* i've never tested it myself, so...

Shura: "..." *takes off her jacket* "Let's test it..."

stocking: ._.; um... ok then... *backs up*

Shura: *summons her sword* "Come at me."

stocking: um, ok then? *takes a stance*

Shura: "..." *lunges forward*

stocking: !!! *blocking*

Shura: *grabs another sword, swings*

stocking: !!!

-CRASH-

stocking: urk- ow...

Shura: *still standing* "Well, they didn't shatter..."

stocking: *getting up* good to hear. hopefully i can say the same for my ribs, jeez...

Shura: ^^; "Sorry--I went a little forceful there. I'm not perfect with two swords, so I may have over-done it..."

stocking: *looks at the couch*

Couch: "..." *splits in two, collapsing*

Shura: D:

-thumps from below-

mrs momoi: keep it down up there! DX<

Shura: "??? Jeez, what's it to you..." *stamps her foot onto the floor*

mrs momoi: i'm going to call the landlord if you dont stop!

stocking: *sweatdrop* maybe next time we should take the sparring outside.

Shura: -_-# "Yeah...Could avoid another trip to consignment that way...Meh, needed a new couch anyway."

-elsewhere-

Tetsutetsu: "LOOK WHO I FOUND!" *holding Bakugo in a headlock* "COMMENCE MALL TRIP!"

Bakugo: "LET GO OF ME, YOU JERK!"

itsuka: *blinks*

reiko: oh my.

kinoko: dude, that's rad.

Tetsutetsu: "I STILL NEED SOME SUNSCREEN AND OTHER CAMPING SUPPLIES! AND HE'S GOING TO HELP!" *squeezes* "RIGHT?!"

Bakugo: Q_< "OW! F-Fine! Whatever!"

itsuka: ^^;

Bakugo: =_=; "Your classmates are weird, Itsuka."

itsuka: maybe, but they're good people. most of them are at least.

Bakugo: "??? Who do you--"

Monoma: *pops up out of a potted plant* "AH-HA! The rude hothead doesn't want to go on a date! He is a bad boyfr--"

-SLAPS MONOMA AGAINST A WALL-

itsuka: sorry, there was a fly.

Bakugo: "..." *holds her hand* >\\\\<

itsuka: ^^

Tetsutetsu: *already has giant sunglasses on* "SHOPKEEP! CAN THESE WITHSTAND A G-FORCE OF 28 OR HIGHER?!"

-elsewhere-

Magaki: "Sit."

Iggy: *sits* O_O_O_O_O_O_O

Magaki: *smiles, holds out a strawberry*

Iggy: *nom*

Belkia: *covered in bandages* ^^; "Good...Maybe it'll stop biting..."

-elsewhere-

Justin: *pulls up to a house*

Erika: "..."

oriko: is this your stop?

Erika: "..." *nods*

kirika:....hey, erika?

Erika: "Y-Yeah?"

kirika: do you.... 7-7; want to exchange phone numbers?

Erika: "!!! ..." >_>; "Y-Yeah, sure..."

-one number exchange later-

Erika: "..." *small smile* "Th-Thanks--"

*someone is approaching behind Kirika*

kirika: it's all goo-....

*FWOOM*

kirika: !!!!! YOU AGAIN?!

???: *pant pant* "I found--I found..." *inhales* "Jeez, I'm winded...Y'ALL WERE RUNNING EVERYWHERE SO I COULDN'T KEEP UP--WHAT THE F?!"

Erika: ._.;

kirika: WHO EVEN THE FUCK ARE YOU?!

???: *deep inhale...pose* "I'm...Magical Girl Komaki Asako! ..." *collapses*

kirika: ....... *siiiigh* jeez.... *looking through komaki's pockets for her phone*

Komaki: *sleeptalk* "I just need some orange slices...Low blood sugar..."

Justin: ._.;;; "I am so sorry for this."

Erika: "..." *small laugh*

kirika: let's see, ah, here we go... *dials 'mom'*

*phone clicks*

???: "Hey, Komaki."

kirika: hey, your kid is asleep on a park bench here. just thought you should know that.

???: "W-What?!"

-kirika explains the situation-

Mom: "Oh no! I'm on my way, baby!"

kirika: *hangs up* and now we wait.

Komaki: =w= "Zzz..."

kirika:....most benches i've slept on havent always been so comfortable.

Erika: "..." *looks down*

kirika: ....*pap pap*

Erika: *sniff* "I-I'm sorry, Kirika..."

kirika: hey, it's all good, no use crying over spilled milk, y'know?

Erika: "..." *nods*

kirika: *small smile*

Justin: ^^; "Eventful day..."

kirika: yeah, cant wait to get back to the hotel, i'm beat as shit.

Justin: "We'll continue the search tomorrow. For now, we can do some reading--"

Komaki: *yawns, opens her eyes, looks at Oriko*

oriko: *smiles at her* ^^

Komaki: "...Have we *yawn* met?"

oriko: i dont believe so. ^^;

Komaki: "...'Kay..." *yawns*

Justin: "..."

yuma: *looking around*

Erika: "...There's...a lot to see around town, if you're new..."

kirika: im curious to see how much has changed since last i've been here. is 'pan-fuwa' bakery still open?

Erika: *nods* "Y-Yes. Still tasty." ^^;

kirika: *sigh of relief* oh that's good to hear.

yuma: why dont you tell her about death city?

Erika: ^^;;; "...'Death'?"

kirika: oh yeah, the home of the DWMA? i've got quite a few stories, some im not sure you'd believe me if i told you.

Erika: "Wow...Th-That's surprising. Isn't it scary? I mean, it's the Grim Reaper..."

kirika: nah, dad's pretty chill actually.

Erika: ^^;;;; "...What?"

kirika:.....*sighs* i got a lot of explaining to do, huh?

yuma: *sweatdrop*

-elsewhere-

Asher: *knocks the last ball in the batting cage* "..." *pulls the tickets off*

izumi: ^^

Asher: "Okay--what'll be this time?"

izumi: hmm.

Asher: "..." *looks at an action figure*

izumi: do you want that one?

Asher: "...I mean, maybe..."

izumi: then you should go for it. ^^

Asher: "...'Kay." *points* "That one, please." *hands over the tickets*

-elsewhere-

Bon: "..." *smacks his forehead*

konekomaru: are you alright?

Bon: "I acted like an idiot--I got on my hands and knees--WHO DOES THAT?!"

konekomaru:....... >->

Bon: "See?! You don't even have an answer for that...Stupid, stupid--" *smacks his forehead*

konekomaru: hey, it's alright. ^^;

Shima: "Right--it's not the dumbest thing you've done. Like, look at your hair--"

Bon: *headlock*

-elsewhere-

Fitzgerald: *peeling an apple*

mary: *snoozing*

Fitzgerald: *slices it, sets it out*

Toby: *sniff sniff*

-elsewhere-

Mifune: "..."

angela: *practicing in a mirror* ok....green! *her hair goes green* yes! now....purple! *purple hair* woohoo!

Mifune: *smiles* "Excellent magic."

angela: ^^

Mifune: "That should prove useful..." *looks at her eyes* "Did those change?"

angela: oh? oh yeah, i guess they did. ^^

Mifune: "Neat...I guess you got more to practice now."

-elsewhere-

Burns: *exits the Holy See* "..." *pinches the bridge of his nose* "How annoying..."

dia: how did it go?

Burns: "It was annoying...These neophyte priests causing trouble is bad enough--but the Church is now more suspicious of Benimaru."

dia: hmmm...

Burns: *looks back at the entrance* "..." *turns* "Let's get back to the First. I want to take care of something."

dia: *following*

-elsewhere-

Vulcan: *sets down the wrench* "This one's ready, too..." *gestures to a motorcycle*

karin: nice!

Vulcan: "Not sure how useful it is when responding to fires, though...Still thinking up the gadgets."

karin: mind if i take it for a test run?

Vulcan: *tosses her the keys* "Have at it."

karin: thanks. *putting on a helmet and goggles*

Vulcan: *waves*

-elsewhere-

Asako: *stares at the phone, and a photo of her family* "..."

goldie: *resting on a pet bed next to her*

Asako: *turns away from the phone, strokes Goldie's back*

-elsewhere-

Benimaru: *sets down another book on a stack, picks up another one*

kirei: *asleep next to him*

Benimaru: "..." *puts the book away, lies down...holds her*

kirei: mmm....

Benimaru: *smiles lightly*

-but outside, someone is watching in the shadows-

Mantis: "..." *licks his hand*

???: "So I said 'If he tossed a soda can at you, I hope it was a 'soft drink'!" Get it?!"

Mantis: *slinks back more into the shadows as ??? approaches*

???: that was so lame =_=

Mantis: -_-; *groans*

??? 1: "?! Who's there?!"

Mantis: O_O;

???: *goes to look*

Mantis: *jumps behind trash cans* O_O ("CRAP CRAP CRAP--")

fang-hua: ....

Tsukiyo: "..." *kicks down a can*

fang-hua: !!

Mantis: *stuck in the can* O_O;

Tsukiyo: "..." *smirks, cracks her knuckles* "Hey, cutie~"

fang-hua: !!!

Mantis: O_O; "I-I wasn't doing--"

Tsukiyo: "Oh, I know what you're doing--you're peeping on Beni-hottie!"

Mantis: ._.; "...What?"

fang-hua: *facepalms*

Mantis: "...I must be goin--"

Tsukiyo: *mallet BONK*

Mantis: x_x

fang-hua: *cuffs him*

Tsukiyo: ^w^ "Patrol success! ..." *peeks into the window of Benimaru and Kirei's room--*

Benimaru: *at the window, death glare*

Tsukiyo: OwO

Benimaru: *two-finger eye poke*

Tsukiyo: "AAAAAAAH!" X~X

-elsewhere-

Poe: *places a bookmark, lies down*

karl: *plops up onto the couch beside him*

Poe: ^^ *pet pet*

-elsewhere-

Kid: T_T *lying in bed*

stocking: i'm home!

Kid: *waves, not getting up, staring at the ceiling* "Hello, my symmetrical goddess..." *groans*

stocking: you ok? *sits next to him*

Kid: "Today was very unsymmetrical..." *points at a ripped shirt*

stocking: aww *pats his head* want me to fix it up for you?

Kid: *nod nod, whimper*

stocking: *getting the sewing kit and begins making adjustments, including mirrored stitches on the other side*

Kid: TwT "Thank you..."

stocking: any time. ^^

Kid: "How was your symmetrical day?"

stocking: it was busy. ^^;

Kid: *nods* *finally sits up* "!!! You're bruised..."

-she explains what all happened-

Kid: ._.; "...Why would Shura do sparing inside an apartment?"

stocking: i guess it was spur of the moment, but she did agree to take it outside from here on out.

Kid: "I'm glad you're training." *smiles*

stocking: *nods* yeah.

Kid: "I'm sure you'll be busy--but it will be worth it."

-elsewhere-

kirika: *staring at the ceiling* .......

Justin: *exits the bathroom* "...Miss Kirika?"

kirika: hnn?

Justin: "You seem troubled. Is it your friend?"

kirika: just thinking i guess.....about everything....

Justin: *sits* "You have a lot to consider..."

kirika: yeah....but i feel kind of better....like a weight's been lifted, y'know?

Justin: *nods* "Sometimes rebuilding friendships does that."

kirika: i guess....heh...it doesnt even feel real....being back here after so long....

Justin: "A lot is coming back to you..."

kirika: yeah, and hopefully stuff comes back for oriko too......but im kind of scared.....

Justin: "???"

kirika: if she remembers what happend then....how will she react?

Justin: *nods* "But you'll be by her side when she remembers..."

kirika:...*nods* right.

Justin: "She does seem uneasy...but I think she's dedicated to finding the truth."

kirika:.....i guess....

Justin: "...Where is she?"

kirika: she's asleep already.

Justin: *nods* "I guess we all need sleep now."

kirika: i guess.....

Justin: "Well, I'm turning in. Tomorrow, we'll continue to explore the city."

kirika: yeah.... night.

-elsewhere-

Daisy: *asleep--her head on Eckleberg's lap*

eckleburg: ._.;;;

Daisy: "Mmmm~" *yawns..." *swings her hand, knocking over an empty beer bottle*

eckleburg: *sweats* (MOTHER HELP WHAT DO I DO?!)

Daisy: *clutches his waist* *sleep-talk* "Don't go...Not again..."

eckleburg: ??

Daisy: *hugs, whimpering* "You...never come back..."

eckleburg: .......

Daisy: *shakes awake* "Bl-Blaine!" *leaps up--and stares at Eckleburg* "..."

eckleburg: are you alright?

Daisy: "..." *frowns* "Fine." *lets go of him...then holds her head*

eckleburg: maybe you should lay down...?

Daisy: *sniff, rubbing her eyes*

eckleburg: daisy?

Daisy: "What?!"

eckleburg: !! ....

Daisy: "..." *covers her face*

eckleburg:.....*awkward hug*

Daisy: "..." *buries her face in his shoulder* "Goddamn it..."

eckleburg: .....do you want to talk about it?

Daisy: "...It doesn't matter."

eckleburg: why do you say that?

Daisy: "...He's dead anyway."

eckleburg: !!!!! daisy....

Daisy: *rubs her eyes* "...I grew up with him. He joined the Army. He went on a mission. He died. Th-The end..."

eckleburg:...*pats her back*

Daisy: "..." *holds onto him*

eckleburg: *hugs her*

Daisy: *sniffs* "Y-Yeah...H-He wasn't like you. Not so nerdy..." >\\\\>;

eckleburg: ^^; what was he like?

Daisy: "...Grungy. Romantic. Wrote really bad songs."

eckleburg: ah...

Daisy: "...Heh...He wrote this awful song--sounded like razors on guitar strings..."

eckleburg ^^;

Daisy: "..." *holds onto him* "Sorry. Didn't mean to insult you as a 'nerd.' ...I mean, you are, just didn't mean it as an insult."

eckleburg: it's fine, im used to it.

Daisy: "...Can I just...stay like this for a bit." *sniff*

eckleburg: of course...

Daisy: "..." *nuzzle*

eckleburg: ..... ./////.;;;

Daisy: -\\\\-; "Don't read too much into this, Teej..."

eckleburg: *voice squeaking* wouldnt dream of it. *sweats*

Daisy: "..." *small smile, closes her eyes* "..." *snore*

-morning-

Tsukiyo: *lying in bed--her eyes bandaged* *holds up her hands* "I can't see a thing! I'm blind!!!" >_<

Mantis: *tied to a chair* -_-;

fang-hua: your eyes are fine, tsukiyo. ^-^;

Tsukiyo: "Fang-Hua, is that you?! Let me check--" *reaches, grabbing something* "...Yep! That's you!" ^w^

fang-hua: ow! that's my braid! >A<;;

Tsukiyo: >3< "This sucks--I can't even cop a feel correctly!"

Benimaru: "Quiet, before I tape your mouth."

Tsukiyo: >x<

Mantis: -_-; "If you're done--you do realize I could just slice these off if I wanted to at any time--but my benefactor told me not to fight y'all."

fang-hua: *rubbing her head where the braid was pulled* benefactor?

Mantis: "Someone who doesn't have much love for the Sun Church, either."

fang-hua:.....*looks at benimaru*

Benimaru: "We are not interested in starting a fight...We just want to worship here in peace."

Mantis: *smirks* "How nice. I'm sure those jackass priests feel the same. Oh, wait--they think you're a bunch of animalistic hairy-ticks."

fang-hua: .....

Benimaru: "...I'm sorry--you think they called us 'ticks'? Not 'heretics'?"

Mantis: "??? What, would bald ticks be better?"

Tsukiyo: "Let me mallet him!" *reaches out her hands, grabbing a broom--and starts smacking it against Benimaru's head*

Benimaru: "..." *continues talking while smacked* "What does your benefactor propose?"

Mantis: "To work with you! Don't you want to show those Church-goers what you're made of? You're the God of Destruction, right?!"

Benimaru: "Does your benefactor know where you are?"

Mantis: "Yep!"

Benimaru: "Good. He can talk to me when he comes pick you up." *moves to exit*

Mantis: D : <

fang-hua: c-commander—

Benimaru: *continues outside*

fang-hua: *following him* sir! are you sure this is a good idea?

Tsukiyo: "You showed him, Commander!" *grabs a 'hand'--really, Mantis's* "...Why are you clammy?"

Mantis: -_-# "Just kill me now."

Benimaru: "What would you propose, Kohana?"

fang-hua: maybe talk to the 8th? or even the 5th?

Benimaru: "No--I am not bringing them in on this. The Church decided to pick this fight--and frankly, the Eighth is too chummy with them for me to think they'll be reasonable on this. I heard they brought in more nuns."

fang-hua: .......

Benimaru: "...Post guards on him. I have to get back home..."

fang-hua: understood....

Benimaru: *nods, turns, walks away*

-elsewhere-

Komaki: =_= *grumbles*

koito: komaki! it's time to get up!

Komaki: *grumbles* "Yeah, I'm up already..."

koito: you've got school soon. also, dad told me to ask how you want your eggs, sunny side up, scrambled, or omelette?

Komaki: *sticks her tongue out* "Sunny side makes me want to vomit..."

koito: so scrambled or omelette?

Komaki: "Grr...Scrambled." *buries her head back under the pillow*

koito: *calling down the stairs* she said she wanted scrambled!

Mr. Asako: *calling up* "On it!"

-knocks-

Komaki: *groans* "It's open..."

-downstairs, the front door opens-

Akira: ^^; "H-Hello..."

mrs asako: hey akira. ^^

Akira: "Hello, ma'am. Is Komaki up?"

mrs asako: almost.

*thumps are heard coming down the stairs--as Komaki falls, still wrapped in her blanket*

koito: ._.;

Komaki: "...Yo, Akira."

Akira: ._.; "...Hello?"

-later, after breakfast and komaki changing into her uniform-

miyuki: *waiting by the school gates* ...

Akira: "Hurry, Komaki!"

Komaki: -_-;

miyuki: *waving to them*

Akira: "Good morning, Miyuki!"

miyuki: ^^ i heard there was going to be a new student in our class.

Komaki: *yawns* "Huh...Where they from?"

miyuki: im not sure yet. ^^;

Akira: "We'll only know by getting to class on time." *smiles*

Komaki: -_-;

miyuki: *chuckle* so how was your patrol last night?

Komaki: "Tch...Got into a tussle with some punk. I showed her who was boss, though." *proud face*

miyuki: *sigh* honestly.

Akira: "I suppose talking things out wasn't an option?"

Komaki: "We talked--WITH FISTS!" *playful jabs*

miyuki: *sweatdrop*

Komaki: "Of course, I went easy on her--didn't want to embarrass her in front of her friends..." *sniff*

miyuki: komaki?

Komaki: *rubs her nose* "Just caught a cold, probably..." *sets down her bag and sits at her desk*

teacher: morning everyone. ^^

Akira: "Good morning!"

teacher: now, we have a new student who will be joining us today, so try and make her feel welcome, alright?

Komaki: "..."

-a girl walks in-

???: hello, my name is Sasa Yuuki. i hope we can all get along~! ^^

Komaki: "..."

-elsewhere-

Zeke: *flipping through his textbook* "Last-minute prep..."

Asher: -_-;

izumi: *writing notes*

Sid: "Your test will be one part written and one part out-in-the-field practice."

hibiki: *nods*

Kanin: *gulps*

Sid: "The written portion is the end of next week. Your out-in-the-field testing will be over that weekend. You'll be assigned to a DWMA graduate or an EAT student to supervise your behavior on patrol, in practice combat, and in public outreach."

Duncan: *feet on the desk, leaning back* "Easy..."

genny: ._.;

Yafeu: "..." *knocks Duncan's feet away--causing him to THUMP onto the floor*

Sid: "Be sure to study hard." *passes out packets* "These study guides outline only a fraction of what may be on the test. And keep up on your sleep and eating so you're prepared for weekend work."

Saria: *flips through* "Not a lot covered given all we've done so far--so, must be surprises on this test..."

lukas: it's likely.

*DING DONG, DONG DEAD*

Sid: "Well, that'll be it for today. We'll start some practice exercises before your test tomorrow. Dismissed."

-in the hall-

Asher: "What a pain...We have to memorize all of this?" *holds up half the textbook*

lukas: that would be the concept of 'studying'.

Asher: -_-# "Droll."

Zeke: "Soooooooo...Who do you think will be our mentors?"

axel: maybe we'll get kilik lunge!

Zeke: "Oh, righteous!" *imitating punches*

Saria: "Hmm...I don't know many whip weapons. Maybe one of the ALT students has one..."

izumi: *nods, sad smile*

Asher: "..." *looks down*

Duncan: "I hope it isn't some failure of a student..." *has a lump on the back of his head*

lei-lei: why are you always such a prick, huh?

Duncan: >_<# "I AM NOT A PRICK--I AM A CAPABLE WEAPON WITH INFINITE POTENTIAL!"

Kazue: *sign* <Easy to have potential--when you have nothing yet to show for yourself.>

axel: ooooooh.

Duncan: "Philistines!" *walks--and trips down the stairs*

Kanin: ._.;

-elsewhere-

"Zach": *bringing in a bag of supplies*

hachi: *nomming an apple* you know, my grandpa's a hollywood director.

"Zach": "Huh...Is that the truth?"

hachi: never met him. *nom nom*

"Zach": "What'd he direct?"

hachi: *shrug*

"Zach": "...Huh." -_-; "Where's the others?"

-elsewhere-

DWMA Bodyguard: "Okay--this all checks out." *returns paperwork* "I'm releasing her for the day." *opens the overnight room door*

Meme: ^^

fani: ......

Meme: "Hello, Fani! Ready to take a walk?"

fani:...*grunt*

Meme: ^^; "Want something to eat first? We could try the commissary..."

fani:...i guess....

Meme: "Great!" *leads the way up the stairs* "Do you like nut muffins?"

fani:....*small nod*

mio: ^^

Meme: *opens the door to the upstairs* "It'll be a few steps to the left..."

fani: ...

*the hallway is crowded, students milling about*

fani: ._.;;;

*no one seems to notice them as they walk*

fani: ._.;;;;

mio: it's cool, i'm not the biggest fan of crowds either.

Meme: "Here--this way." *leads them through an opening in the hall to the commissary...light shines through the windows, and the smell of various foods passes through*

fani: woah....

Meme: *grabs 3 trays, hands them out* "Pick whatever you'd like."

fani: ._.;;; there's so much. no way i can afford all this!

Meme: "Just pick what you can eat! Lord Death is covering this meal..."

fani: ......

Meme: *picks out mac and cheese*

-elsewhere-

[biwikrie]

everything that’s going wrong in my life because i am bitter

the move

ok so i recently moved from japan back to the US and everything is so jacked up here and far apart. i mean sure, i kinda like it here, but since i know no one and am unable to actually go anywhere, i cant really do anything. not to mention that im not accustomed to anything in the US and everyone just expects me to know things and relate when i’ve literally been in the US for like two-ish maybe months after 5 years in JAPAN. hhhh stressful. also, i don’t have anything from my room in japan. it’s not even packed up. so i’m going to be sleeping on an air mattress until at least december. 

school

when i say that my school is small, i mean too small. we have a 2300+ student body, but a main hallway that only accommodates 1500-ish people. it’s almost impossible to walk to my classes and just as difficult to find a seat during lunch. also, i’m apparently ahead of my grade level in most things, so i’m fully just breezing through this year and cant change my classes because i couldn’t get the summer work for honors, and can’t take english and history classes for 11th graders. so my student transcript is going to be shit because i went from honors world history and literature to regular 10th grade world history and english. plus, i’m always the first to finish the tests and shit in my alg2 class, while sitting in the back because im too terrified of the giants that are 11th graders to sit anywhere else. i can’t really talk with anybody in most of my classes because they assume i’m a freshman and are just weirded out that such a small kid is in their class. 

friends / lack thereof

boy oh boy. the other reason i cant find a seat during lunch is because its divided into 3 different periods. i have third (last) lunch, which is also right after my alg2 class, which is full of 11th graders. so my tiny self is walking down the hall to the cafeteria surrounded by these tall 11th graders with no way of talking to them. so i just kinda sit “alone” at the peanut allergy table (when i say alone, i mean that im surrounded by upperclassmen as i try to take up as little space as possible while reading my book. 

let’s also talk about how all but one friend from japan probably forgot about me. so, shout out to paul for sticking to his promise of sending me a snap of him sending an “encouragement snap” using his mickey mouse voice. but because of the time difference, i can’t really speak in the group chat, and since they all live near each other and see each other everyday at school, they don’t really need to ever use the group chat. i have absolutely no one to vent to, and the only thing i can really talk about is bad stuff. so fuck me. 

i get 12000 crushes a day

SPEAKING OF FUCK ME: i, at 8:38 pm on thursday, august 31st, 2017, have 6 crushes. time to elaborate i guess. 

joseph/joey is in my chemistry class and my world history class. he’s pretty funny and i think i remember him from way back when i first lived in florida. he has this really interesting voice and laugh, and his hair has this little swoosh that goes straight up. only problem is that he kind of reminds me of yosuke and i can’t stand having him [joey] standing/sitting to my left.

dylan is in my art class. we talked for maybe two minutes on the first day and we still see each other everyday, but don’t talk. he got moved to a different table. he has a really deep voice that i absolutely love listening to. me and him occasionally look at each other when we’re confused by what the teacher is saying and have a little laugh. he’s only taking art because he needs a fine art to graduate. we dont talk, but we have this kind of unspoken agreement to do this dumb fake smile thing when we first see each other (but my gotdamn crush on him makes me go from fake smiling to blushing like an idiot). sometimes in class, i’ll catch him looking at me, and i don’t know if its my obnoxious teenage girl brain, but i think he might want to talk to me?? but oh my god he’s really pretty. like model status pretty. 

dj is also in my art class, but he also rides my bus. i know for a fact that he doesn’t like me. he doesn’t even know me. but he has bushy eyebrows and purple-ish curly hair. and oh my god when he laughs its amazing. i look at him too much. 

guy in my alg2 class that i dont know the name of is... in my algebra 2 class. i’ve never offically spoken to him, but his did hold the door open for me once and was super polite. he doesn’t play sports but he’s large. like, 6 foot large. he also has his hair up in a bun everyday. and today during the tst he undid the bun, and his hair goes a little bit past his shoulders and it looks to silky. deep voice.

liam is in my english 10 class. at least i know he’s in my grade right? and holy heck does he look so nice. he has blond-ish red hair and brown eyes?? and he literally could care less about school. he’s like a bad boy but super chill?? i used to sit directly across the room from him and i would sometimes look in his direction and see him looking at my group’s table? whether it be because he knew the people at my table, or was just completely blanking out, or because im a new student and hhhhh, i’ll never know because we had to change tables. now i sit with my back to him so idk if he’s even in the class anymore. 

anthony is in my world history class and is friends with joey. i had a crush on anthony before joey, but after a while anthony just seemed kind of dumb, but i still kind of like him? he goes out of his way to bring me into conversation and is funny in a dumb way. i dont even know. reminds me not to kill myself. he looks like he’s good at hugging. 

time in general

so i’ve recently been hit with this like wave of sadness where everything suck sand maybe that’s why i wrote this, but i have nothing to look forward to each day other than getting back to my “bed” after school. i just want it to be summer again becuase either 1) i can learn to drive, 2) anthony and joey and alec and austin can maybe want to hang out or something and i can finally have friends 3) i can screw up my sleeping schedule to talk to my bros in japan 4) i’ll have my stuff 5) i can start making real friends in junior year because at least i might know some people during lunch. i just want everything to fix itself because i have no way of fixing it. 

i kinda want to die

and not in the angsty teen way. actually, maybe in the angsty teen way. i just dont think that i have anything to provide to the world and i’ve already experienced all the world has to offer? i mean, obviously i haven’t, but in a “nothing else really will matter” kind of way. is that nihilistic? i just want to skip to the part of my life where i can just experience love?? thats sappy as shit, but i want to find someone that i can really love and experience the thing that humans experience and just know that im not alone in the universe? maybe its me and my obsession with soulmate au’s, but i really want to find someone where everything just clicks from the first moment and i can just be myself and be fully accepted and be truly vulnerable and free with someone that i absolutely care about and love? but i know im not mentally prepared to be in a relationship of any kind and that’s a problem after being removed from the only people i could talk to. so i’m forced to bottle things up and just try to push away bad thoughts to prevent myself from just crying in the middle of class. sometimes i get the thought of the time i wrote a suicide note. sometimes i think about who of my classmates would notice that i never showed up to school again. sometimes i think of when my brother and dad would find me dead and what their reactions would be. but hey! “i want to die” i so #relatable right !!!

i just want to say that the only people that i’ve met that maybe genuinely cared if i actually killed myself were my biology teacher mr francis and anthony. i remember the look on mr francis’s face when i said that i didn’t know if i wanted to be alive, while my classmates just laughed because of the whole “i want to die” meme culture we have. i appreciate that he didn’t tell anyone, but that might not have been the best in the long run. of course, that’s not his fault. he probably knew that i would just lie to the counselor. but i wish mr francis could see me now. completely broken and looking like i never want to wake up. last week in history class, my group was all joking about wanting to die, and i think anthony saw it on my face. he saw the quiet build up of tears as i thought of what these people i call my somewhat friends would think or how they would react if they realized i never showed back up to school. or if my teacher announced that i had killed myself. or as i thought of my suicide note that i wrote a month and a half ago. and he probably said the last words i expected to hear from one of my classmates, especially after only knowing me for a few days. “you know, if you were to kill yourself, i’d get really sad” it’s dumb, i know. but it’s suck with me. he barely even knows me, but we were launched into this conversation about how we would truly feel if someone close to us died. like imagine coming to school and noticing that the person that sits next to you, who normally never skipped a single day of school, now hasn’t shown up in a week. imagine trying to find their face during lunch, only to figure out that they aren’t even breathing anymore. imagine having to continue with our day, with your life, not truly knowing what happened, or knowing if you can help, or if you could’ve helped to prevent such a thing from happening. imagine seeing someone you’ve seen everyday just disappear without a trace, just to disappear without anyone knowing that they were even there. (deh anyone?) 

[adambstingus]

The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Its the most fucking ridiculous story, isnt it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria. Last summer in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was working as a club rep. I mean, it was fucking 8am, he told an Australian website soon afterwards, and the last fucking club had closed, and we thought, We can still go dolphin watching. Well blag our way on to a fucking boat and go dolphin watching.

But when the boat sailed so far that Cyprus disappeared from view, Ellis explained, they started to worry. Why are we so far from land? they asked the crew. Were fucking miles away and weve got no fucking wifi. Something, Ellis said, had been lost in translation; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the resorts party pilgrims had gone terribly awry. The crew wasnt taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval base in the city of Tartus, on Syrias Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was, nonetheless, a story that had legs. Hungover lads boat trip boob lands them in Syria, wahey-ed the Mirror; British holidaymakers board party boat in Ayia Napa and end up in war-torn SYRIA, guffawed the Express. If you saw these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon landing; interrogation at the hands of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a hot meal, a quick tour of the area, and a good nights sleep, spots on the next fishing vessel headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the boat in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Reflecting on the whole thing five months later, Ellis, a 26-year-old with a business degree and a marketing masters, couldnt totally wrap his head around it. I think I found 35 stories about us, he told me. I read about myself in the Hawaiian Express, do you know what I mean? (Notwithstanding that there doesnt appear to be any such newspaper, yes, I definitely do.)

What made it really weird to see the media pile in with such unstinting enthusiasm was that the story was total cobblers. I could not believe how gullible they were, Ellis said, a top note of glee still in his voice. We were just having a laugh! It was banter!

Lads: this is the age of banter. Its long been somewhat about the banter, but over the last few years, it has come to seem that its all about the banter an unabashedly bumptious attitude that took up a position on the outskirts of the culture in the early 90s and has been larging its way towards the centre ever since. There are hundreds of banter groups on Facebook, from Banter Britain (no memes insinuating child abuse/dead babies!!!) to Wanker Banter 18+ (Have a laugh and keep it sick) to the Premier League Banter Page (The only rule: keep it banter). You can buy an I banter mug on Amazon for 9, or an Archbishop of Banterbury T-shirt for 9.99.

There are now four branches of a restaurant called Scoff & Banter. When things were going badly at Chelsea FC under Jos Mourinho, it was reported the team had banned all banter in an attempt to focus their minds, and that terminology appeared in the newspapers, as if you would know exactly what it meant. Someone has created a banter map of London using a keyword search on the flatshare website SpareRoom, showing exactly where people are looking for a roommate with good banter (Clapham tends to feature prominently). When a 26-year-old man from Leeds posed for a selfie with a bemused aeroplane hijacker, Vice declared it the high-water mark of banter.

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

If you are younger than about 35, you are likely to hear the term all the time. Either you have banter (if you are funny and can take a joke) or you dont (if you arent and cannot). The mainstream, in summary, is now drunk and asleep on the sofa, and banter is delightedly drawing a penis on its forehead.

As banter has risen, it has expanded. Long a word used to describe submerged expressions of fraternal love, it is now also a word used to excuse uninhibited displays of masculine bravado. Today, it is segregated by class, seized on by brands, picked over by psychologists, and deplored by cultural critics; it is dominant, hotly contested and only hazily understood.

And so, whether he intends it to or not, Ellis use of the term raises some questions. Is he throwing his lot in with the most pervasive branch of the blokeish mainstream, a sanitised and benevolent hilarity that stretches from lad-dad panel shows to your mates zinger about your terrible haircut? Or is he lining up with the misogynist imitators of the Bullingdon club, a sprinkling of racists, and, as we shall see, an actual murderer purveyors of a malicious and insidious masculinity that insists on its indivisible authority and calls you a slut if you object?

Ellis isnt preoccupied by these questions, but for what its worth, he does say that he and his friends never had the slightest intention of going to Syria. We werent really trying to fool anyone, he told me, although Im not sure thats entirely consistent with the facts. We were out for a stroll, and we came across this area that looked really run down, we thought it looked like Syria. So we put it on the club reps [Facebook] page that thats where we were. And everyone started liking it. And then one of the people who contacted us was from LADBible which is like the Bible, but for LADS so we said, well have a mess around here. Well tell a completely ridiculous story, see if the media believes it. See if we can become LADBible famous.

It did, they could. Eventually, the truth came out, not thanks to any especially determined investigative journalism, but because Ellis cheerily admitted on Facebook that his tale of magnificent idiocy was a fiction. Hahaha what a prank, he wrote, with some justification.

The confession only brought another cycle of attention. Publications that had picked up the story in the first place resurfaced it with new headlines to reflect the audacity of the invention; social media users adduced it as evidence for their views of young men, or the media, or both. The Russian embassys Twitter account called it a telling example of how many Syria (and Russia) stories are made up by UK papers, which was great geopolitical banter. The attention entertained Ellis, but he says it wasnt the point. We just thought it was funny, he said. People are too serious. I keep being told to grow up, but I still want to have a good time. Ive had the jobs, Ive got the education. But when Im off work, I want to escape.

Ellis is an enthusiast and an optimist. He is, he told me late last year, desperate to take every opportunity, just to say yes to everything I can. We were on a night out in Manchester with his friends Tyson, John and Chris. In the course of the evening, the following things found their way into my beer: fingers; salt; vinegar; mayonnaise; a chip; saliva; a 10 note; and, I hazily remember being told after the fact, at least two shots of vodka.

Everyones got a thing in the group, Ellis said, as we walked from one bar to the next. One guy, hes not even that ugly, we say he looks like a Peperami. Tysons got this mole on his face, its like a Coco Pop, so youve got a Coco Pop on your face. I looked like Harry Potter when I was a kid, so they call me Potter, thats my nickname. Every single one of us has something. So you youve got Chinese eyes. Youre Chinese.

For the record, I didnt think this was OK, but coming after such a harmless litany, it didnt seem malicious enough to confront. Of course, tacit endorsement is what makes such offensive epithets a commonplace, and so it troubles me that it made me feel mysteriously welcome, just as it had when John punched me lightly in the balls when I arrived. There was no doubting Elliss sincerity: as he spoke, the sheer daft beauty of male friendship seemed to amaze him, almost to the point of physical pain. We just take the piss out of each other, and thats how we show our love, he said. So many group chats on the phone, and you just take the piss until they cry. And its like, when youre really killing them, you go, Ill stop if you want, because you know they cant say yes, so you just keep going. Then we arrived at the next bar, where I was made to drink something called a Zombie.

Early in the evening, before any of this had undermined my ability to take useful notes, Ellis broke off from talking as we walked down the street and sidled into a window display at Next Home, where he Tracey Emined a carefully made bed by climbing into it and rolling around. Everyone cracked up. Give the world a laugh, Ellis tends to think, and the world will smile back at you. Jump on a boat, and youll end up somewhere great; make the boat up, and youll get there faster. Its all about having fun, its all about the banter, he said, after hed rejoined us outside. Banter is about making the world a more exciting place.

If nobody can agree on what banter is, thats hardly a new problem. The first usage of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from noted Restoration lad Thomas dUrfey, also known for his hit song The Fart, in a satirical 1677 play called Madam Fickle. Banter him, banter him, Toby, a character called Zechiel urges, which may be the first time that someone called Toby was so instructed, but certainly wasnt the last.

The OED also notes early attempts at a definition by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. (Swift mentions a banter upon transubstantiation, in which a cork is turned into a horse, and fair enough, turning a cork into a horse would be classic banter.) Both are a little disgusted by the word, and neither unearths much of an origin story: by their accounts, banter is so coarse that it emerged, fully formed and without antecedent, out of the mouths of oafs.

As it turns out, though, the OED is not at present fully able to handle the banter. According to Eleanor Maier, an associate editor on the dictionary, a search of earlier English texts reveals that a number of previous examples are missing from the dictionarys definition, which was first drafted in 1885 including a quote from a 1657 translation of Don Quixote. (After examining the history, Maier told me that she would be adding banter to the list of entries that are up for review.)

dougie stew (@DougieStew)

Welcome to London #BagelGate pic.twitter.com/KcJoz0ycZU

February 26, 2017

In recent years, banter has barged into our lives at a remarkable clip. Googles Ngram Viewer, a tool that assesses (with some limitations) the frequency with which a term appears in a large database of written sources, finds that banter popped up about twice as often in 2008, the most recent year covered, as it did in 1980.

But banter plugged away for a long time before it became an overnight success. In the 19th century, it often denoted a kind of formal sparring. Even as the term evolved over the 20th, it continued to seem a little prim. In the House of Commons in 1936, Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour prime minister who had returned in a new seat after losing his old one, was subjected to a good deal of banter Dear old Granny MacDonald!, among other witticisms.In 1981, a Guardian report that chess champion Anatoly Karpov and his handlers had successfully protested at his challenger Viktor Korchnois constant cross-board talk ran under the unlikely headline: Chess banter banned.

Such stories do little to prepare us for what banter has become. Consider the viral video that became known as #bagelgate earlier this year. In the recording, a minor scuffle broke out on the 00.54 train from Kings Cross to Huntingdon, and then for no obviously related reason a woman who had a large bag of bagels decided to put one on the head of the guy sitting in front of her, and then another after he took it off and threw it out of the window, and another and another, and then everyone in the carriage started chanting hes got a bagel on his head, and eventually the slightly spoddy victim who is me when I was 13 and someone filled my pencil case with Mr Kipling apple pies (squashed, oozing) because I was fat lost it and screamed Get the fuck out of my face!, and then another fight broke out on the platform, and then the police got on to the train, and every single person fell into not-me-guv silence: this is not Granny MacDonalds banter any more.

If it is hard to understand how these activities can fall under the same umbrella, it should be noted that a phenomenon may predate our choice of term to describe it its just that the act of definition makes it more visible, and perhaps more likely to be imitated. At some point, though, banter became the name for what British men already regarded as their natural tone of voice. There is a very deeply embedded folk culture in the UK of public ribaldry, extreme sarcasm, facetiousness in other words, of laddishness, says Tony Thorne, a linguist and cultural historian. What you might think of as banter now is rooted in that tradition.

That tradition first lashed itself to banters mast in the early 1990s, and controversy soon followed. In June 1992, a Guardian story headlined Police fire sex banter officer, about the dismissal of a sergeant for sexual harassment, recorded an early skirmish in the modern banter wars, and an important new layer to its meaning in the wild: The move is seen as part of the Metropolitan polices desire to reassure women officers that what has previously been tolerated as banter is no longer acceptable. Two years later, the lads mags arrived.

The first edition of Loaded magazine appeared in May 1994, with a picture of Gary Oldman on the front smoking a dog-end, under a banner that declared him a super lad. What fresh lunacy is this? the editors note read. Loaded is a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters Loaded is for the man who believes he can do anything, if only he wasnt hungover.

If banter dismays you, James Brown, the magazines first editor, is quite an easy bogeyman. As he acknowledges himself, he created a title that defined a genre. Loaded was swiftly recognised as a foundational text for a resurgent and ebullient masculinity that had been searching for public expression. While it was always overtly horny, the magazine was initially more interested in a forlorn, slackjawed and self-ironising appreciation of A-listers (one reversible poster had Cindy Crawford on one side and a steam train on the other) than the grot-plus-football formula that successors and imitators like Maxim, Zoo and Nuts milked to destruction. But it also flirted with something murkier.

To its critics, Loaded and its imitators aimed to sanitise a certain hooliganistic worldview with a strategic disclaimer. Banter emerges as this relentless gloss of irony over everything, said Bethan Benwell, senior lecturer in language and linguistics at the University of Stirling and the author of several papers on mens magazines. The constant excusing of sexist or homophobic sentiments with this wink that says you dont really mean it. Benwell pointed to Loadeds emblematic strapline: For men who should know better.

Brown denies that his magazine invented banter. Instead, he says, it captured a zeitgeist that the media had previously failed to acknowledge; the folk culture that Tony Thorne refers to, brought out into the open. Before Browns intervention, GQ had run John Major and Michael Heseltine as cover stars, for Gods sake. I took the interests and the outlook of the young men that I knew, and I put them in a magazine, Brown said. Im not responsible for the tone of the later entrants to the market. We were criticised because we fancied women, not because we belittled them.

The thing about Loaded was that the way we wrote reflected the way we were with our mates, he went on. Theres definitely a thing that exists in the male outlook: you take the piss out of the people you like, and you ignore the people you dont.

Accept this as your starting point, and objections become exhausting to sustain: what youre objecting to is an act of affection. Of course, this is what makes it insidious. Because Browns account rests on the intention behind the magazine, and Benwells on the effect it had, they are impossible to reconcile. Its a very difficult thing to resist or challenge without looking like the stereotypical humourless feminist, said Benwell. But by laughing, you become complicit.

Loaded gave this new kind of banter escape velocity, and it began to colonise other worlds. On BBC2, for example, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were staking out their own territory with Fantasy Football League, a mixture of sketches and celebrity chat that managed to be enthusiastic and satirical at the same time, and reached its peak when the pair became national icons, thanks to their Euro 96 anthem, Three Lions. While a long-running joke about the Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lees pineapple haircut seems flatly racist in retrospect Baddiel did an impression of him in blackface by and large, the tone was milder and more conventional than the magazines were: this was the sensibility of the university graduate slumming it before embarking on grown-up life.

Baddiel implied that laddism could easily occupy a spectrum from ogling to literature, drawing a line to Nick Hornbys memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, Fever Pitch. Hornby once said to me that all this stuff you know, fantasy football and his book is men talking about things that they like and for a while in the mid-80s they werent allowed to, he said in 1995. Ive always liked football and Ive always liked naked women, and its easier to talk about that now than it was eight years ago. Those comments reflect a kind of sneer at its critics that you could often detect in Fantasy Football League, even as its hosts protested that they were just having a laugh though Baddiel himself denies that view. Twenty years on, he, like Brown, is at pains to draw a line between the approach that he and Skinner popularised, and the forms that came later. I guess me and Frank did specialise in banter, he said in an email. In a time before it was known as bantz.

Over the next 10 years, two things happened that ushered in the age of banter. (You might call it mature banter, except that its also the opposite.) First, instead of just being a thing that happened, it became a thing that people talked about. Then, as it became a more tangible cultural product, everyone started trying to make money out of it. The watershed moment, the forms equivalent to Dylan going electric, was the invention of Dave.

Like most good ideas, it looks simple enough in retrospect. Before Dave was Dave, it was UKTV Gold 2. The predecessor channels audience share was 0.761%, and no one could tell who on earth it was supposed to be for. But we had the content, says Steve North, the channels brand manager in 2007 and content of a particular kind that the existing name did very little to communicate: Have I Got News for You, They Think Its All Over, Top Gear. Viewers said they loved the repartee, the humour. It reminded them of spending time with their funniest friends.

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

The target audience was highly specific. It was men married or in relationships, maybe with young children, not going to the pub as much as they used to, says Andy Bryant, managing director of Red Bee, the agency brought in to work on the rebrand. And they missed that camaraderie.

Their purpose thus fixed, North started to run brainstorming sessions at which people would shout out suggestions for the name. One of the ones we collected was Dave, he says. We thought, great, but we cant call it that. But then we thought, Its a surrogate friend. If the audience really sees it as that, if they see it as genuinely providing the banter, maybe we can really give it a name.

They put their hunch through its paces. The market research company YouGov was commissioned to test Dave alongside a bunch of other names (Matthew and Kevin were also on the shortlist), but nothing else had the same everyman resonance. For us, Dave is a sensibility, a place, an emotion, a feeling, said North, his tone thoughtful, almost gnomic. Everyone has their own sense of who Dave is, thats the important thing. Its hard to find anyone who doesnt know someone called Dave.

Now the channel had a brand, it needed a slogan. Lots of people claim they played a part in the naming, says Bryant. But it was just as important to encapsulate what the channel was all about. And at some point someone, I dont know who, wrote it on a board: The home of witty banter. The rebrand added 8m new viewers in six months; Dave saw a 71% increase in its target audience of affluent young men.

Conceived by the first generation of senior professionals to have grown up with banter as an unremarkable part of their demographics cultural mix, the channel crystallised a change, and accelerated it. In 2006, The Ricky Gervais Show, in which Gervais and Stephen Merchant relentlessly poked fun at their in-house idiot savant Karl Pilkington, became the most popular podcast of all time. In 2007, the year of Daves rebrand, Top Gears ratings shot from below 5m to a record high of 8m. The following year, QI moved from BBC4 to BBC2. (A tie-in book published the same year, QI: Advanced Banter, sold more than 125,000 copies.)

North saw the kind of fraternal teasing that was being monetised by his channel, and the panel shows that were its lifeblood, as fundamentally benign. The key thing is that its two-way, he said. Its about two people riffing off each other.

But like his 20th-century forebears, he can see that something ugly has evolved, and he wants to keep his brand well away from it. Bants, he said with distaste. That thing of cover for dubious behaviour we hate and despise it massively. When we launched, it was about fun, being light-hearted, maybe pushing each other without being disrespectful. When people talk about Ive had a go at that person, great banter no, thats just nasty.

By the turn of the decade,as other branding agencies mimicked the success of Dave, banter was everywhere, a folk tradition that had acquired a peculiar sort of respectability. The men who celebrated it werent just lads in the pub any more: they had spending power and establishment allies on their side. But they were, by the same token, more visible to critics. Aggression from an underdog can be overlooked; aggression from the establishment is serious enough to become a matter of public concern.

Take Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Sky Sports brand-defining football presenters, who got themselves up to their necks in some extremely bad banter in 2011. Keys blamed dark forces, but everyone else blamed him and Gray for being misogynists. We knew this because there was footage.

The firestorm, as Keys called it, centred on claims that the two men had said and done heinously sexist things off-air. Most memorable, at least for its phrase-making, was the clip in which Keys eagerly asked his fellow pundit Jamie Redknapp if hed smashed it it being a woman and asserted that he could often be found hanging out the back of it.

Gray went quickly. In the days before he followed, Keys burned hot with injustice in a series of mea-sorta-culpas, particularly focused on the tape in which he expressed his derision at the idea that a woman, Sian Massey-Ellis, could be an assistant referee in the Premier League.

It was just banter, he said. Or, more exactly, just a bit of banter, as he said Massey-Ellis had assured him she understood in a later telephone conversation in which, he added, much banter passed between us. She and I enjoyed some banter, he protested. It was lads-mag banter, he insisted. It was stone-age banter, he admitted. We liked to have banter, he explained. Richard Keys was sorry if you were offended, but also, it wasnt his fault if you didnt get it. It was just banter, for goodness sake!

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Keys insistence that his mistake was simply a failure to move with the times was nothing new: banter has always seemed to carry a longing for the past, for an imagined era before male friendship was so cramped by the tiresome obligations of feminist scrutiny. But while his underlying views were painfully dated, his conception of banter was entirely modern: a sly expansion of the words meaning, and a self-conscious contention that it provided an impregnable defence.

The Keys variation understood banter, first, as a catch-all means of denying responsibility if anyone was hurt; and, second, as a means of reinforcing a bond between two people by being cruel about a third. The comparison wouldnt please a couple of alphas like Keys and Gray, but both strategies brought it closer to a style of communication with classically feminine associations: gossip. Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch (lol) Professor in Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that the two modes of interaction follow basically the same structure. People gossip as a trust game, she said. You tell someone your unsayable private secret, and it bonds you closer together. Theyre supposed to reciprocate with a confidence of their own. Well, banter works in the same way now. You say something outrageous, and you see if the other person dares to top your remark.

The trust game in banter was traditionally supposed to be: do you trust me when I say were friends in spite of the mean things Im saying about you? But now theres a second version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean things Im saying about other people? I think originally it was a harmless thing, said Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an archive of male group conversation, mostly recorded by her students, that goes back to the 1980s. But then it started to be used as an excuse when men were caught out engaging in forms of it that werent so harmless.

It comes down to context and intent, says the comedian Bridget Christie. The gentler form of banter is still knocking around, she suggested, but now it exists alongside something darker: I found The Inbetweeners adolescent banter hilarious, because it was equal and unthreatening. But there is obviously a world of difference between a group of teenage boys benignly taking the piss out of each other, and a bigot being racist or misogynist and trying to pass it off as a joke.

Trace the rise of banter, and you will find that it corresponds to the rise of political correctness or, anyway, to the backlash against political correctness gone mad. That phrase and just banter mirror each other perfectly: one denoting a priggish culture that is deemed to have overreached, the other a laid-back culture that is deemed to have been unfairly reined in. Ironically enough, just banter does exactly what it accuses political correctness of, seeking to close down discussion by telling you that meaning is settled by category rather than content. Political correctness asserts that a racist joke is primarily racist, whereas banter asserts that a racist joke is primarily a joke. In the past, the men who used it rarely had to define it, or to explain themselves to anybody else. Today, in contrast, it is named all the time. The biggest change isnt the banter itself, says Bethan Benwell. Its the explicit use of the word as a disclaimer.

By sheer repetition and by its use as an unanswerable defence, banter has turned from an abstraction into a vast and calcified description of actions as well as words: gone from a way of talking to a way of life, a style that accidentally became a worldview. He bantered you, people sometimes say: you always used to banter with your mates, but now it often sounds like something you do to them. Once it was directionless, inconclusive chatter with wit as the engine that drove it, said the comedian Russell Kane. Now, if I trip you up, thats banter.

You might think the humiliation suffered by Keys and Gray would have made banter less appealing as a get-out, but not a bit of it. Banter, increasingly, seems like the first refuge of the inexcusable. In 2014, Malky Mackay, who had been fired as manager of Cardiff City Football Club a year earlier, was caught having sent texts that referred to Chinese people eating dogs, black people being criminals, Jewish people being avaricious, and gay people being snakes all of which were initially optimistically defended by the League Managers Association as letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text message banter. The comedian Dapper Laughs, whose real name is Daniel OReilly, established himself as banters rat king, with his very own ITV2 show, and then lost it after he suggested that an audience member at one of his gigs was gagging for a rape. A man was convicted of murder after he crushed his friend against a wall with a Jeep Cherokee after an argument over badger-baiting, a course of action that he said had been intended as banter. Another slashed the throat of someone he had met in a pub and described the incident as a moment of banter after 14 or 15 pints. Both are now in prison.

By any sane measure,banter was falling into disrepute, as often a disguise for malice as a word for the ribaldry of lads on the lash. Still it did not go away: instead, the worst of it has mutated again, asserting its authority in public and saving its creepiest tendencies for the shadows or, at least, for the company of five, or 10, or 20 of your closest mates.

At the London School of Economics, it started with a leaflet. Each year at the universitys freshers fair, LSE Rugby Football Club distributed a banterous primer on rugby culture. In October 2014, says the then-president of the student union, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a student came to her in tears with a copy in her hand. The leaflet talked about trollops, slags, crumpet, mingers, and the desirability of misogyny; there were passing references to the horrors of homosexual humiliation and outright homosexual debauchery. Anyone charmed by all this was invited to sign up for the club and join the banter list, entitling them to participate in the exchange of chappish email conversation.

To anyone with a passing knowledge of university laddism, it was hard to imagine a more ordinary iteration. Still, after the unreconstructed chappishness of the leaflet came to light, the club knew it had a problem. It issued a collective apology acknowledging that we have a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter, and promised to organise a workshop. But there was reason to be sceptical about the depth of that commitment.

When Buckley-Irvine and her colleagues published a report on the incident, they noted a string of others, including an antisemitic assault on a university ski trip to Val dIsere in 2011. And there were other indiscretions it didnt mention. According to two people who were present, one club dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane ended with a stripper having bottles thrown at her when, already intimidated, she refused to take her clothes off. She hid in the toilet, and had to be escorted out by a member of staff as the team vandalised the restaurant.

Photograph: Alamy

According to five people who were either members of the rugby club or closely associated with it, one notorious senior member was widely thought to be responsible for the leaflet. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) But when they came to defend themselves to the student union, members of the club fell back on one of the most revered pillars of laddism: all for one, one for all. Theyd clearly worked out a line, says Nona Buckley-Irvine. No one individual was responsible. They were sorry. It was just banter. Thats what they all said.

The accountancy firm KPMG, which sponsored the universitys wider Athletics Union, decided that banter was not an especially helpful brand association, and withdrew funding worth 22,000. The students union decided to disband the club for the academic year. The decision moved some observers to disgust. It was a gross overreaction, a former team member told me. We were the best-behaved team when it came to actually playing rugby but they banned that bit and they couldnt ban any of the rest.

Others took a less measured tone. I had old members emailing me and calling me a fascist, says Buckley-Irvine. Asking me if I didnt understand that it was just banter. Rugby players chanted abuse at her on nights out, she told me. They shoulder-barged her, and called her a cunt.

These kinds of interactions would tend to take place on Wednesdays, also known as sports night, at a bar in Leicester Square. Sports night was the apotheosis of the rugby clubs bleak solidarity. In deference to what you might call the wingers-before-mingers code, for instance, members of the club who were expected to dress in suits werent allowed to speak to women before 9pm. So they would just shout abuse instead, one female former student, who Ill call Anna, remembered. One chant, she said, went, Nine nos and a yes is a yes. At the time, Anna thought that it was all a joke. People would say, Its just banter all the time. After everything. Absolutely everything, she said, sitting in a cafe in south London. If you were meeting someone new, saying they had good banter, that was a pretty high compliment. Whereas if you dont go along with that stuff, its seen as, you cant take the chat, you cant take the banter. And its not seen as having a stance against it. Its seen as not being able to keep up.

After the rugby club was disbanded, nothing much changed in sports night social life. Many members of the club still went on the same nights out; they just colonised other teams. They still addressed girls as Sarah 2 or Sarah 8 depending on how attractive they considered them out of 10; they still had shouted conversations about their sex lives in front of the women they had slept with but refused to acknowledge.

That culture was not confined to Wednesday nights. Anna remembers a guy who took her picture as she slept, naked, in the bed they were sharing, and circulated it to another non-university sports team via WhatsApp. She wasnt meant to see it on his phone.

Ask anyone well-informed where banter resides now, and theyll give the same answer: WhatsApp groups and email threads, the safe spaces of the lad class. What youd get out of those WhatsApp threads, its another world of drama, one former member of the football club said. The details of girls bodies that youd read, a few funny jibes, that was the limit for me. But when it moved on to, like, really, really bad stuff, always about sex it was too much. Those threads are the source of everything.

If the threads were an outlet, they were by no means the limit. Banter, by common consent, wasnt confined to mocking each other: it was about action. If you dressed up for a night out, one female student remembered, it was just kind of status quo that you could have your arse grabbed. It was just like, Oh, that was kind of weird, but OK, thatll happen. Like everyone else willing to speak about it, her view of that culture was perplexingly nuanced, sometimes contradictory. It sounds scary, she said, but that being said, some of my best nights were there, and like it was fun. But then she said: What was defined as serious just got so pushed. I think for someone to lodge a complaint they would have to be actually hurt.

Anna remembers lots of sketchy incidents. She recalls nights when her choices faded into a blur, and she wondered if she had really been in control. But at the time, I would never call it out, she said. And then, youre all living in halls together, and the next day, its like: What did you do last night? Thats hilarious. Thats banter.

When Anna thinks about the behaviour of some of the men she knew at university, she finds it hard to pin down exactly what she thinks of them. Theres one in particular who sticks in her mind. On a Wednesday night, he was a banter guy, she said. He was a Wednesday animal. But the rest of the time, he was my friend.

Controversial though all this was at the time, no one seems to think that it will have cost the perpetrators much. Ive tried so hard to leave all that behind, said the former member of the football team. But those guys theyre all going on to run banks, or the country, or whatever. The senior rugby man who many held responsible, by the way, has landed on his feet. Today, he has a job at KPMG.

In 2017, every new instance of banter is immediately spotted and put through the journalistic wringer. (Vices Joel Golby, who wrote the definitive text on the bagel thing, has made a career from his exquisite close readings of the form.) But when each new absolute legend emerges, we dont usually have the context to make the essential judgment: do the proponents tend towards the harmless warmth of Ellis and his mates, or the frank hostility of the LSE rugby boys? Is their love of irony straightforward, or a mask for something else?

As Richard Keys and Dapper Laughs and their cohorts have polluted the idea of banter, the commercial entities that endorsed its rise have become uneasy with the label. They wanted it to go viral; they hadnt expected it to go postal. Dave, for example, has dropped the home of witty banter slogan. Its not about classic male humour any more, its a little bit smarter, says UKTVs Steve North. We definitely say it less than we used to.

<source media=“(min-wid

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/02/the-age-of-banter/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/163730951422

[samanthasroberts]

The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Its the most fucking ridiculous story, isnt it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria. Last summer in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was working as a club rep. I mean, it was fucking 8am, he told an Australian website soon afterwards, and the last fucking club had closed, and we thought, We can still go dolphin watching. Well blag our way on to a fucking boat and go dolphin watching.

But when the boat sailed so far that Cyprus disappeared from view, Ellis explained, they started to worry. Why are we so far from land? they asked the crew. Were fucking miles away and weve got no fucking wifi. Something, Ellis said, had been lost in translation; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the resorts party pilgrims had gone terribly awry. The crew wasnt taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval base in the city of Tartus, on Syrias Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was, nonetheless, a story that had legs. Hungover lads boat trip boob lands them in Syria, wahey-ed the Mirror; British holidaymakers board party boat in Ayia Napa and end up in war-torn SYRIA, guffawed the Express. If you saw these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon landing; interrogation at the hands of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a hot meal, a quick tour of the area, and a good nights sleep, spots on the next fishing vessel headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the boat in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Reflecting on the whole thing five months later, Ellis, a 26-year-old with a business degree and a marketing masters, couldnt totally wrap his head around it. I think I found 35 stories about us, he told me. I read about myself in the Hawaiian Express, do you know what I mean? (Notwithstanding that there doesnt appear to be any such newspaper, yes, I definitely do.)

What made it really weird to see the media pile in with such unstinting enthusiasm was that the story was total cobblers. I could not believe how gullible they were, Ellis said, a top note of glee still in his voice. We were just having a laugh! It was banter!

Lads: this is the age of banter. Its long been somewhat about the banter, but over the last few years, it has come to seem that its all about the banter an unabashedly bumptious attitude that took up a position on the outskirts of the culture in the early 90s and has been larging its way towards the centre ever since. There are hundreds of banter groups on Facebook, from Banter Britain (no memes insinuating child abuse/dead babies!!!) to Wanker Banter 18+ (Have a laugh and keep it sick) to the Premier League Banter Page (The only rule: keep it banter). You can buy an I banter mug on Amazon for 9, or an Archbishop of Banterbury T-shirt for 9.99.

There are now four branches of a restaurant called Scoff & Banter. When things were going badly at Chelsea FC under Jos Mourinho, it was reported the team had banned all banter in an attempt to focus their minds, and that terminology appeared in the newspapers, as if you would know exactly what it meant. Someone has created a banter map of London using a keyword search on the flatshare website SpareRoom, showing exactly where people are looking for a roommate with good banter (Clapham tends to feature prominently). When a 26-year-old man from Leeds posed for a selfie with a bemused aeroplane hijacker, Vice declared it the high-water mark of banter.

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

If you are younger than about 35, you are likely to hear the term all the time. Either you have banter (if you are funny and can take a joke) or you dont (if you arent and cannot). The mainstream, in summary, is now drunk and asleep on the sofa, and banter is delightedly drawing a penis on its forehead.

As banter has risen, it has expanded. Long a word used to describe submerged expressions of fraternal love, it is now also a word used to excuse uninhibited displays of masculine bravado. Today, it is segregated by class, seized on by brands, picked over by psychologists, and deplored by cultural critics; it is dominant, hotly contested and only hazily understood.

And so, whether he intends it to or not, Ellis use of the term raises some questions. Is he throwing his lot in with the most pervasive branch of the blokeish mainstream, a sanitised and benevolent hilarity that stretches from lad-dad panel shows to your mates zinger about your terrible haircut? Or is he lining up with the misogynist imitators of the Bullingdon club, a sprinkling of racists, and, as we shall see, an actual murderer purveyors of a malicious and insidious masculinity that insists on its indivisible authority and calls you a slut if you object?

Ellis isnt preoccupied by these questions, but for what its worth, he does say that he and his friends never had the slightest intention of going to Syria. We werent really trying to fool anyone, he told me, although Im not sure thats entirely consistent with the facts. We were out for a stroll, and we came across this area that looked really run down, we thought it looked like Syria. So we put it on the club reps [Facebook] page that thats where we were. And everyone started liking it. And then one of the people who contacted us was from LADBible which is like the Bible, but for LADS so we said, well have a mess around here. Well tell a completely ridiculous story, see if the media believes it. See if we can become LADBible famous.

It did, they could. Eventually, the truth came out, not thanks to any especially determined investigative journalism, but because Ellis cheerily admitted on Facebook that his tale of magnificent idiocy was a fiction. Hahaha what a prank, he wrote, with some justification.

The confession only brought another cycle of attention. Publications that had picked up the story in the first place resurfaced it with new headlines to reflect the audacity of the invention; social media users adduced it as evidence for their views of young men, or the media, or both. The Russian embassys Twitter account called it a telling example of how many Syria (and Russia) stories are made up by UK papers, which was great geopolitical banter. The attention entertained Ellis, but he says it wasnt the point. We just thought it was funny, he said. People are too serious. I keep being told to grow up, but I still want to have a good time. Ive had the jobs, Ive got the education. But when Im off work, I want to escape.

Ellis is an enthusiast and an optimist. He is, he told me late last year, desperate to take every opportunity, just to say yes to everything I can. We were on a night out in Manchester with his friends Tyson, John and Chris. In the course of the evening, the following things found their way into my beer: fingers; salt; vinegar; mayonnaise; a chip; saliva; a 10 note; and, I hazily remember being told after the fact, at least two shots of vodka.

Everyones got a thing in the group, Ellis said, as we walked from one bar to the next. One guy, hes not even that ugly, we say he looks like a Peperami. Tysons got this mole on his face, its like a Coco Pop, so youve got a Coco Pop on your face. I looked like Harry Potter when I was a kid, so they call me Potter, thats my nickname. Every single one of us has something. So you youve got Chinese eyes. Youre Chinese.

For the record, I didnt think this was OK, but coming after such a harmless litany, it didnt seem malicious enough to confront. Of course, tacit endorsement is what makes such offensive epithets a commonplace, and so it troubles me that it made me feel mysteriously welcome, just as it had when John punched me lightly in the balls when I arrived. There was no doubting Elliss sincerity: as he spoke, the sheer daft beauty of male friendship seemed to amaze him, almost to the point of physical pain. We just take the piss out of each other, and thats how we show our love, he said. So many group chats on the phone, and you just take the piss until they cry. And its like, when youre really killing them, you go, Ill stop if you want, because you know they cant say yes, so you just keep going. Then we arrived at the next bar, where I was made to drink something called a Zombie.

Early in the evening, before any of this had undermined my ability to take useful notes, Ellis broke off from talking as we walked down the street and sidled into a window display at Next Home, where he Tracey Emined a carefully made bed by climbing into it and rolling around. Everyone cracked up. Give the world a laugh, Ellis tends to think, and the world will smile back at you. Jump on a boat, and youll end up somewhere great; make the boat up, and youll get there faster. Its all about having fun, its all about the banter, he said, after hed rejoined us outside. Banter is about making the world a more exciting place.

If nobody can agree on what banter is, thats hardly a new problem. The first usage of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from noted Restoration lad Thomas dUrfey, also known for his hit song The Fart, in a satirical 1677 play called Madam Fickle. Banter him, banter him, Toby, a character called Zechiel urges, which may be the first time that someone called Toby was so instructed, but certainly wasnt the last.

The OED also notes early attempts at a definition by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. (Swift mentions a banter upon transubstantiation, in which a cork is turned into a horse, and fair enough, turning a cork into a horse would be classic banter.) Both are a little disgusted by the word, and neither unearths much of an origin story: by their accounts, banter is so coarse that it emerged, fully formed and without antecedent, out of the mouths of oafs.

As it turns out, though, the OED is not at present fully able to handle the banter. According to Eleanor Maier, an associate editor on the dictionary, a search of earlier English texts reveals that a number of previous examples are missing from the dictionarys definition, which was first drafted in 1885 including a quote from a 1657 translation of Don Quixote. (After examining the history, Maier told me that she would be adding banter to the list of entries that are up for review.)

dougie stew (@DougieStew)

Welcome to London #BagelGate pic.twitter.com/KcJoz0ycZU

February 26, 2017

In recent years, banter has barged into our lives at a remarkable clip. Googles Ngram Viewer, a tool that assesses (with some limitations) the frequency with which a term appears in a large database of written sources, finds that banter popped up about twice as often in 2008, the most recent year covered, as it did in 1980.

But banter plugged away for a long time before it became an overnight success. In the 19th century, it often denoted a kind of formal sparring. Even as the term evolved over the 20th, it continued to seem a little prim. In the House of Commons in 1936, Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour prime minister who had returned in a new seat after losing his old one, was subjected to a good deal of banter Dear old Granny MacDonald!, among other witticisms.In 1981, a Guardian report that chess champion Anatoly Karpov and his handlers had successfully protested at his challenger Viktor Korchnois constant cross-board talk ran under the unlikely headline: Chess banter banned.

Such stories do little to prepare us for what banter has become. Consider the viral video that became known as #bagelgate earlier this year. In the recording, a minor scuffle broke out on the 00.54 train from Kings Cross to Huntingdon, and then for no obviously related reason a woman who had a large bag of bagels decided to put one on the head of the guy sitting in front of her, and then another after he took it off and threw it out of the window, and another and another, and then everyone in the carriage started chanting hes got a bagel on his head, and eventually the slightly spoddy victim who is me when I was 13 and someone filled my pencil case with Mr Kipling apple pies (squashed, oozing) because I was fat lost it and screamed Get the fuck out of my face!, and then another fight broke out on the platform, and then the police got on to the train, and every single person fell into not-me-guv silence: this is not Granny MacDonalds banter any more.

If it is hard to understand how these activities can fall under the same umbrella, it should be noted that a phenomenon may predate our choice of term to describe it its just that the act of definition makes it more visible, and perhaps more likely to be imitated. At some point, though, banter became the name for what British men already regarded as their natural tone of voice. There is a very deeply embedded folk culture in the UK of public ribaldry, extreme sarcasm, facetiousness in other words, of laddishness, says Tony Thorne, a linguist and cultural historian. What you might think of as banter now is rooted in that tradition.

That tradition first lashed itself to banters mast in the early 1990s, and controversy soon followed. In June 1992, a Guardian story headlined Police fire sex banter officer, about the dismissal of a sergeant for sexual harassment, recorded an early skirmish in the modern banter wars, and an important new layer to its meaning in the wild: The move is seen as part of the Metropolitan polices desire to reassure women officers that what has previously been tolerated as banter is no longer acceptable. Two years later, the lads mags arrived.

The first edition of Loaded magazine appeared in May 1994, with a picture of Gary Oldman on the front smoking a dog-end, under a banner that declared him a super lad. What fresh lunacy is this? the editors note read. Loaded is a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters Loaded is for the man who believes he can do anything, if only he wasnt hungover.

If banter dismays you, James Brown, the magazines first editor, is quite an easy bogeyman. As he acknowledges himself, he created a title that defined a genre. Loaded was swiftly recognised as a foundational text for a resurgent and ebullient masculinity that had been searching for public expression. While it was always overtly horny, the magazine was initially more interested in a forlorn, slackjawed and self-ironising appreciation of A-listers (one reversible poster had Cindy Crawford on one side and a steam train on the other) than the grot-plus-football formula that successors and imitators like Maxim, Zoo and Nuts milked to destruction. But it also flirted with something murkier.

To its critics, Loaded and its imitators aimed to sanitise a certain hooliganistic worldview with a strategic disclaimer. Banter emerges as this relentless gloss of irony over everything, said Bethan Benwell, senior lecturer in language and linguistics at the University of Stirling and the author of several papers on mens magazines. The constant excusing of sexist or homophobic sentiments with this wink that says you dont really mean it. Benwell pointed to Loadeds emblematic strapline: For men who should know better.

Brown denies that his magazine invented banter. Instead, he says, it captured a zeitgeist that the media had previously failed to acknowledge; the folk culture that Tony Thorne refers to, brought out into the open. Before Browns intervention, GQ had run John Major and Michael Heseltine as cover stars, for Gods sake. I took the interests and the outlook of the young men that I knew, and I put them in a magazine, Brown said. Im not responsible for the tone of the later entrants to the market. We were criticised because we fancied women, not because we belittled them.

The thing about Loaded was that the way we wrote reflected the way we were with our mates, he went on. Theres definitely a thing that exists in the male outlook: you take the piss out of the people you like, and you ignore the people you dont.

Accept this as your starting point, and objections become exhausting to sustain: what youre objecting to is an act of affection. Of course, this is what makes it insidious. Because Browns account rests on the intention behind the magazine, and Benwells on the effect it had, they are impossible to reconcile. Its a very difficult thing to resist or challenge without looking like the stereotypical humourless feminist, said Benwell. But by laughing, you become complicit.

Loaded gave this new kind of banter escape velocity, and it began to colonise other worlds. On BBC2, for example, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were staking out their own territory with Fantasy Football League, a mixture of sketches and celebrity chat that managed to be enthusiastic and satirical at the same time, and reached its peak when the pair became national icons, thanks to their Euro 96 anthem, Three Lions. While a long-running joke about the Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lees pineapple haircut seems flatly racist in retrospect Baddiel did an impression of him in blackface by and large, the tone was milder and more conventional than the magazines were: this was the sensibility of the university graduate slumming it before embarking on grown-up life.

Baddiel implied that laddism could easily occupy a spectrum from ogling to literature, drawing a line to Nick Hornbys memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, Fever Pitch. Hornby once said to me that all this stuff you know, fantasy football and his book is men talking about things that they like and for a while in the mid-80s they werent allowed to, he said in 1995. Ive always liked football and Ive always liked naked women, and its easier to talk about that now than it was eight years ago. Those comments reflect a kind of sneer at its critics that you could often detect in Fantasy Football League, even as its hosts protested that they were just having a laugh though Baddiel himself denies that view. Twenty years on, he, like Brown, is at pains to draw a line between the approach that he and Skinner popularised, and the forms that came later. I guess me and Frank did specialise in banter, he said in an email. In a time before it was known as bantz.

Over the next 10 years, two things happened that ushered in the age of banter. (You might call it mature banter, except that its also the opposite.) First, instead of just being a thing that happened, it became a thing that people talked about. Then, as it became a more tangible cultural product, everyone started trying to make money out of it. The watershed moment, the forms equivalent to Dylan going electric, was the invention of Dave.

Like most good ideas, it looks simple enough in retrospect. Before Dave was Dave, it was UKTV Gold 2. The predecessor channels audience share was 0.761%, and no one could tell who on earth it was supposed to be for. But we had the content, says Steve North, the channels brand manager in 2007 and content of a particular kind that the existing name did very little to communicate: Have I Got News for You, They Think Its All Over, Top Gear. Viewers said they loved the repartee, the humour. It reminded them of spending time with their funniest friends.

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

The target audience was highly specific. It was men married or in relationships, maybe with young children, not going to the pub as much as they used to, says Andy Bryant, managing director of Red Bee, the agency brought in to work on the rebrand. And they missed that camaraderie.

Their purpose thus fixed, North started to run brainstorming sessions at which people would shout out suggestions for the name. One of the ones we collected was Dave, he says. We thought, great, but we cant call it that. But then we thought, Its a surrogate friend. If the audience really sees it as that, if they see it as genuinely providing the banter, maybe we can really give it a name.

They put their hunch through its paces. The market research company YouGov was commissioned to test Dave alongside a bunch of other names (Matthew and Kevin were also on the shortlist), but nothing else had the same everyman resonance. For us, Dave is a sensibility, a place, an emotion, a feeling, said North, his tone thoughtful, almost gnomic. Everyone has their own sense of who Dave is, thats the important thing. Its hard to find anyone who doesnt know someone called Dave.

Now the channel had a brand, it needed a slogan. Lots of people claim they played a part in the naming, says Bryant. But it was just as important to encapsulate what the channel was all about. And at some point someone, I dont know who, wrote it on a board: The home of witty banter. The rebrand added 8m new viewers in six months; Dave saw a 71% increase in its target audience of affluent young men.

Conceived by the first generation of senior professionals to have grown up with banter as an unremarkable part of their demographics cultural mix, the channel crystallised a change, and accelerated it. In 2006, The Ricky Gervais Show, in which Gervais and Stephen Merchant relentlessly poked fun at their in-house idiot savant Karl Pilkington, became the most popular podcast of all time. In 2007, the year of Daves rebrand, Top Gears ratings shot from below 5m to a record high of 8m. The following year, QI moved from BBC4 to BBC2. (A tie-in book published the same year, QI: Advanced Banter, sold more than 125,000 copies.)

North saw the kind of fraternal teasing that was being monetised by his channel, and the panel shows that were its lifeblood, as fundamentally benign. The key thing is that its two-way, he said. Its about two people riffing off each other.

But like his 20th-century forebears, he can see that something ugly has evolved, and he wants to keep his brand well away from it. Bants, he said with distaste. That thing of cover for dubious behaviour we hate and despise it massively. When we launched, it was about fun, being light-hearted, maybe pushing each other without being disrespectful. When people talk about Ive had a go at that person, great banter no, thats just nasty.

By the turn of the decade,as other branding agencies mimicked the success of Dave, banter was everywhere, a folk tradition that had acquired a peculiar sort of respectability. The men who celebrated it werent just lads in the pub any more: they had spending power and establishment allies on their side. But they were, by the same token, more visible to critics. Aggression from an underdog can be overlooked; aggression from the establishment is serious enough to become a matter of public concern.

Take Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Sky Sports brand-defining football presenters, who got themselves up to their necks in some extremely bad banter in 2011. Keys blamed dark forces, but everyone else blamed him and Gray for being misogynists. We knew this because there was footage.

The firestorm, as Keys called it, centred on claims that the two men had said and done heinously sexist things off-air. Most memorable, at least for its phrase-making, was the clip in which Keys eagerly asked his fellow pundit Jamie Redknapp if hed smashed it it being a woman and asserted that he could often be found hanging out the back of it.

Gray went quickly. In the days before he followed, Keys burned hot with injustice in a series of mea-sorta-culpas, particularly focused on the tape in which he expressed his derision at the idea that a woman, Sian Massey-Ellis, could be an assistant referee in the Premier League.

It was just banter, he said. Or, more exactly, just a bit of banter, as he said Massey-Ellis had assured him she understood in a later telephone conversation in which, he added, much banter passed between us. She and I enjoyed some banter, he protested. It was lads-mag banter, he insisted. It was stone-age banter, he admitted. We liked to have banter, he explained. Richard Keys was sorry if you were offended, but also, it wasnt his fault if you didnt get it. It was just banter, for goodness sake!

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Keys insistence that his mistake was simply a failure to move with the times was nothing new: banter has always seemed to carry a longing for the past, for an imagined era before male friendship was so cramped by the tiresome obligations of feminist scrutiny. But while his underlying views were painfully dated, his conception of banter was entirely modern: a sly expansion of the words meaning, and a self-conscious contention that it provided an impregnable defence.

The Keys variation understood banter, first, as a catch-all means of denying responsibility if anyone was hurt; and, second, as a means of reinforcing a bond between two people by being cruel about a third. The comparison wouldnt please a couple of alphas like Keys and Gray, but both strategies brought it closer to a style of communication with classically feminine associations: gossip. Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch (lol) Professor in Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that the two modes of interaction follow basically the same structure. People gossip as a trust game, she said. You tell someone your unsayable private secret, and it bonds you closer together. Theyre supposed to reciprocate with a confidence of their own. Well, banter works in the same way now. You say something outrageous, and you see if the other person dares to top your remark.

The trust game in banter was traditionally supposed to be: do you trust me when I say were friends in spite of the mean things Im saying about you? But now theres a second version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean things Im saying about other people? I think originally it was a harmless thing, said Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an archive of male group conversation, mostly recorded by her students, that goes back to the 1980s. But then it started to be used as an excuse when men were caught out engaging in forms of it that werent so harmless.

It comes down to context and intent, says the comedian Bridget Christie. The gentler form of banter is still knocking around, she suggested, but now it exists alongside something darker: I found The Inbetweeners adolescent banter hilarious, because it was equal and unthreatening. But there is obviously a world of difference between a group of teenage boys benignly taking the piss out of each other, and a bigot being racist or misogynist and trying to pass it off as a joke.

Trace the rise of banter, and you will find that it corresponds to the rise of political correctness or, anyway, to the backlash against political correctness gone mad. That phrase and just banter mirror each other perfectly: one denoting a priggish culture that is deemed to have overreached, the other a laid-back culture that is deemed to have been unfairly reined in. Ironically enough, just banter does exactly what it accuses political correctness of, seeking to close down discussion by telling you that meaning is settled by category rather than content. Political correctness asserts that a racist joke is primarily racist, whereas banter asserts that a racist joke is primarily a joke. In the past, the men who used it rarely had to define it, or to explain themselves to anybody else. Today, in contrast, it is named all the time. The biggest change isnt the banter itself, says Bethan Benwell. Its the explicit use of the word as a disclaimer.

By sheer repetition and by its use as an unanswerable defence, banter has turned from an abstraction into a vast and calcified description of actions as well as words: gone from a way of talking to a way of life, a style that accidentally became a worldview. He bantered you, people sometimes say: you always used to banter with your mates, but now it often sounds like something you do to them. Once it was directionless, inconclusive chatter with wit as the engine that drove it, said the comedian Russell Kane. Now, if I trip you up, thats banter.

You might think the humiliation suffered by Keys and Gray would have made banter less appealing as a get-out, but not a bit of it. Banter, increasingly, seems like the first refuge of the inexcusable. In 2014, Malky Mackay, who had been fired as manager of Cardiff City Football Club a year earlier, was caught having sent texts that referred to Chinese people eating dogs, black people being criminals, Jewish people being avaricious, and gay people being snakes all of which were initially optimistically defended by the League Managers Association as letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text message banter. The comedian Dapper Laughs, whose real name is Daniel OReilly, established himself as banters rat king, with his very own ITV2 show, and then lost it after he suggested that an audience member at one of his gigs was gagging for a rape. A man was convicted of murder after he crushed his friend against a wall with a Jeep Cherokee after an argument over badger-baiting, a course of action that he said had been intended as banter. Another slashed the throat of someone he had met in a pub and described the incident as a moment of banter after 14 or 15 pints. Both are now in prison.

By any sane measure,banter was falling into disrepute, as often a disguise for malice as a word for the ribaldry of lads on the lash. Still it did not go away: instead, the worst of it has mutated again, asserting its authority in public and saving its creepiest tendencies for the shadows or, at least, for the company of five, or 10, or 20 of your closest mates.

At the London School of Economics, it started with a leaflet. Each year at the universitys freshers fair, LSE Rugby Football Club distributed a banterous primer on rugby culture. In October 2014, says the then-president of the student union, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a student came to her in tears with a copy in her hand. The leaflet talked about trollops, slags, crumpet, mingers, and the desirability of misogyny; there were passing references to the horrors of homosexual humiliation and outright homosexual debauchery. Anyone charmed by all this was invited to sign up for the club and join the banter list, entitling them to participate in the exchange of chappish email conversation.

To anyone with a passing knowledge of university laddism, it was hard to imagine a more ordinary iteration. Still, after the unreconstructed chappishness of the leaflet came to light, the club knew it had a problem. It issued a collective apology acknowledging that we have a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter, and promised to organise a workshop. But there was reason to be sceptical about the depth of that commitment.

When Buckley-Irvine and her colleagues published a report on the incident, they noted a string of others, including an antisemitic assault on a university ski trip to Val dIsere in 2011. And there were other indiscretions it didnt mention. According to two people who were present, one club dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane ended with a stripper having bottles thrown at her when, already intimidated, she refused to take her clothes off. She hid in the toilet, and had to be escorted out by a member of staff as the team vandalised the restaurant.

Photograph: Alamy

According to five people who were either members of the rugby club or closely associated with it, one notorious senior member was widely thought to be responsible for the leaflet. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) But when they came to defend themselves to the student union, members of the club fell back on one of the most revered pillars of laddism: all for one, one for all. Theyd clearly worked out a line, says Nona Buckley-Irvine. No one individual was responsible. They were sorry. It was just banter. Thats what they all said.

The accountancy firm KPMG, which sponsored the universitys wider Athletics Union, decided that banter was not an especially helpful brand association, and withdrew funding worth 22,000. The students union decided to disband the club for the academic year. The decision moved some observers to disgust. It was a gross overreaction, a former team member told me. We were the best-behaved team when it came to actually playing rugby but they banned that bit and they couldnt ban any of the rest.

Others took a less measured tone. I had old members emailing me and calling me a fascist, says Buckley-Irvine. Asking me if I didnt understand that it was just banter. Rugby players chanted abuse at her on nights out, she told me. They shoulder-barged her, and called her a cunt.

These kinds of interactions would tend to take place on Wednesdays, also known as sports night, at a bar in Leicester Square. Sports night was the apotheosis of the rugby clubs bleak solidarity. In deference to what you might call the wingers-before-mingers code, for instance, members of the club who were expected to dress in suits werent allowed to speak to women before 9pm. So they would just shout abuse instead, one female former student, who Ill call Anna, remembered. One chant, she said, went, Nine nos and a yes is a yes. At the time, Anna thought that it was all a joke. People would say, Its just banter all the time. After everything. Absolutely everything, she said, sitting in a cafe in south London. If you were meeting someone new, saying they had good banter, that was a pretty high compliment. Whereas if you dont go along with that stuff, its seen as, you cant take the chat, you cant take the banter. And its not seen as having a stance against it. Its seen as not being able to keep up.

After the rugby club was disbanded, nothing much changed in sports night social life. Many members of the club still went on the same nights out; they just colonised other teams. They still addressed girls as Sarah 2 or Sarah 8 depending on how attractive they considered them out of 10; they still had shouted conversations about their sex lives in front of the women they had slept with but refused to acknowledge.

That culture was not confined to Wednesday nights. Anna remembers a guy who took her picture as she slept, naked, in the bed they were sharing, and circulated it to another non-university sports team via WhatsApp. She wasnt meant to see it on his phone.

Ask anyone well-informed where banter resides now, and theyll give the same answer: WhatsApp groups and email threads, the safe spaces of the lad class. What youd get out of those WhatsApp threads, its another world of drama, one former member of the football club said. The details of girls bodies that youd read, a few funny jibes, that was the limit for me. But when it moved on to, like, really, really bad stuff, always about sex it was too much. Those threads are the source of everything.

If the threads were an outlet, they were by no means the limit. Banter, by common consent, wasnt confined to mocking each other: it was about action. If you dressed up for a night out, one female student remembered, it was just kind of status quo that you could have your arse grabbed. It was just like, Oh, that was kind of weird, but OK, thatll happen. Like everyone else willing to speak about it, her view of that culture was perplexingly nuanced, sometimes contradictory. It sounds scary, she said, but that being said, some of my best nights were there, and like it was fun. But then she said: What was defined as serious just got so pushed. I think for someone to lodge a complaint they would have to be actually hurt.

Anna remembers lots of sketchy incidents. She recalls nights when her choices faded into a blur, and she wondered if she had really been in control. But at the time, I would never call it out, she said. And then, youre all living in halls together, and the next day, its like: What did you do last night? Thats hilarious. Thats banter.

When Anna thinks about the behaviour of some of the men she knew at university, she finds it hard to pin down exactly what she thinks of them. Theres one in particular who sticks in her mind. On a Wednesday night, he was a banter guy, she said. He was a Wednesday animal. But the rest of the time, he was my friend.

Controversial though all this was at the time, no one seems to think that it will have cost the perpetrators much. Ive tried so hard to leave all that behind, said the former member of the football team. But those guys theyre all going on to run banks, or the country, or whatever. The senior rugby man who many held responsible, by the way, has landed on his feet. Today, he has a job at KPMG.

In 2017, every new instance of banter is immediately spotted and put through the journalistic wringer. (Vices Joel Golby, who wrote the definitive text on the bagel thing, has made a career from his exquisite close readings of the form.) But when each new absolute legend emerges, we dont usually have the context to make the essential judgment: do the proponents tend towards the harmless warmth of Ellis and his mates, or the frank hostility of the LSE rugby boys? Is their love of irony straightforward, or a mask for something else?

As Richard Keys and Dapper Laughs and their cohorts have polluted the idea of banter, the commercial entities that endorsed its rise have become uneasy with the label. They wanted it to go viral; they hadnt expected it to go postal. Dave, for example, has dropped the home of witty banter slogan. Its not about classic male humour any more, its a little bit smarter, says UKTVs Steve North. We definitely say it less than we used to.

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Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/02/the-age-of-banter/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/the-age-of-banter/

[allofbeercom]

The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Its the most fucking ridiculous story, isnt it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria. Last summer in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was working as a club rep. I mean, it was fucking 8am, he told an Australian website soon afterwards, and the last fucking club had closed, and we thought, We can still go dolphin watching. Well blag our way on to a fucking boat and go dolphin watching.

But when the boat sailed so far that Cyprus disappeared from view, Ellis explained, they started to worry. Why are we so far from land? they asked the crew. Were fucking miles away and weve got no fucking wifi. Something, Ellis said, had been lost in translation; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the resorts party pilgrims had gone terribly awry. The crew wasnt taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval base in the city of Tartus, on Syrias Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was, nonetheless, a story that had legs. Hungover lads boat trip boob lands them in Syria, wahey-ed the Mirror; British holidaymakers board party boat in Ayia Napa and end up in war-torn SYRIA, guffawed the Express. If you saw these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon landing; interrogation at the hands of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a hot meal, a quick tour of the area, and a good nights sleep, spots on the next fishing vessel headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the boat in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Reflecting on the whole thing five months later, Ellis, a 26-year-old with a business degree and a marketing masters, couldnt totally wrap his head around it. I think I found 35 stories about us, he told me. I read about myself in the Hawaiian Express, do you know what I mean? (Notwithstanding that there doesnt appear to be any such newspaper, yes, I definitely do.)

What made it really weird to see the media pile in with such unstinting enthusiasm was that the story was total cobblers. I could not believe how gullible they were, Ellis said, a top note of glee still in his voice. We were just having a laugh! It was banter!

Lads: this is the age of banter. Its long been somewhat about the banter, but over the last few years, it has come to seem that its all about the banter an unabashedly bumptious attitude that took up a position on the outskirts of the culture in the early 90s and has been larging its way towards the centre ever since. There are hundreds of banter groups on Facebook, from Banter Britain (no memes insinuating child abuse/dead babies!!!) to Wanker Banter 18+ (Have a laugh and keep it sick) to the Premier League Banter Page (The only rule: keep it banter). You can buy an I banter mug on Amazon for 9, or an Archbishop of Banterbury T-shirt for 9.99.

There are now four branches of a restaurant called Scoff & Banter. When things were going badly at Chelsea FC under Jos Mourinho, it was reported the team had banned all banter in an attempt to focus their minds, and that terminology appeared in the newspapers, as if you would know exactly what it meant. Someone has created a banter map of London using a keyword search on the flatshare website SpareRoom, showing exactly where people are looking for a roommate with good banter (Clapham tends to feature prominently). When a 26-year-old man from Leeds posed for a selfie with a bemused aeroplane hijacker, Vice declared it the high-water mark of banter.

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

If you are younger than about 35, you are likely to hear the term all the time. Either you have banter (if you are funny and can take a joke) or you dont (if you arent and cannot). The mainstream, in summary, is now drunk and asleep on the sofa, and banter is delightedly drawing a penis on its forehead.

As banter has risen, it has expanded. Long a word used to describe submerged expressions of fraternal love, it is now also a word used to excuse uninhibited displays of masculine bravado. Today, it is segregated by class, seized on by brands, picked over by psychologists, and deplored by cultural critics; it is dominant, hotly contested and only hazily understood.

And so, whether he intends it to or not, Ellis use of the term raises some questions. Is he throwing his lot in with the most pervasive branch of the blokeish mainstream, a sanitised and benevolent hilarity that stretches from lad-dad panel shows to your mates zinger about your terrible haircut? Or is he lining up with the misogynist imitators of the Bullingdon club, a sprinkling of racists, and, as we shall see, an actual murderer purveyors of a malicious and insidious masculinity that insists on its indivisible authority and calls you a slut if you object?

Ellis isnt preoccupied by these questions, but for what its worth, he does say that he and his friends never had the slightest intention of going to Syria. We werent really trying to fool anyone, he told me, although Im not sure thats entirely consistent with the facts. We were out for a stroll, and we came across this area that looked really run down, we thought it looked like Syria. So we put it on the club reps [Facebook] page that thats where we were. And everyone started liking it. And then one of the people who contacted us was from LADBible which is like the Bible, but for LADS so we said, well have a mess around here. Well tell a completely ridiculous story, see if the media believes it. See if we can become LADBible famous.

It did, they could. Eventually, the truth came out, not thanks to any especially determined investigative journalism, but because Ellis cheerily admitted on Facebook that his tale of magnificent idiocy was a fiction. Hahaha what a prank, he wrote, with some justification.

The confession only brought another cycle of attention. Publications that had picked up the story in the first place resurfaced it with new headlines to reflect the audacity of the invention; social media users adduced it as evidence for their views of young men, or the media, or both. The Russian embassys Twitter account called it a telling example of how many Syria (and Russia) stories are made up by UK papers, which was great geopolitical banter. The attention entertained Ellis, but he says it wasnt the point. We just thought it was funny, he said. People are too serious. I keep being told to grow up, but I still want to have a good time. Ive had the jobs, Ive got the education. But when Im off work, I want to escape.

Ellis is an enthusiast and an optimist. He is, he told me late last year, desperate to take every opportunity, just to say yes to everything I can. We were on a night out in Manchester with his friends Tyson, John and Chris. In the course of the evening, the following things found their way into my beer: fingers; salt; vinegar; mayonnaise; a chip; saliva; a 10 note; and, I hazily remember being told after the fact, at least two shots of vodka.

Everyones got a thing in the group, Ellis said, as we walked from one bar to the next. One guy, hes not even that ugly, we say he looks like a Peperami. Tysons got this mole on his face, its like a Coco Pop, so youve got a Coco Pop on your face. I looked like Harry Potter when I was a kid, so they call me Potter, thats my nickname. Every single one of us has something. So you youve got Chinese eyes. Youre Chinese.

For the record, I didnt think this was OK, but coming after such a harmless litany, it didnt seem malicious enough to confront. Of course, tacit endorsement is what makes such offensive epithets a commonplace, and so it troubles me that it made me feel mysteriously welcome, just as it had when John punched me lightly in the balls when I arrived. There was no doubting Elliss sincerity: as he spoke, the sheer daft beauty of male friendship seemed to amaze him, almost to the point of physical pain. We just take the piss out of each other, and thats how we show our love, he said. So many group chats on the phone, and you just take the piss until they cry. And its like, when youre really killing them, you go, Ill stop if you want, because you know they cant say yes, so you just keep going. Then we arrived at the next bar, where I was made to drink something called a Zombie.

Early in the evening, before any of this had undermined my ability to take useful notes, Ellis broke off from talking as we walked down the street and sidled into a window display at Next Home, where he Tracey Emined a carefully made bed by climbing into it and rolling around. Everyone cracked up. Give the world a laugh, Ellis tends to think, and the world will smile back at you. Jump on a boat, and youll end up somewhere great; make the boat up, and youll get there faster. Its all about having fun, its all about the banter, he said, after hed rejoined us outside. Banter is about making the world a more exciting place.

If nobody can agree on what banter is, thats hardly a new problem. The first usage of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from noted Restoration lad Thomas dUrfey, also known for his hit song The Fart, in a satirical 1677 play called Madam Fickle. Banter him, banter him, Toby, a character called Zechiel urges, which may be the first time that someone called Toby was so instructed, but certainly wasnt the last.

The OED also notes early attempts at a definition by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. (Swift mentions a banter upon transubstantiation, in which a cork is turned into a horse, and fair enough, turning a cork into a horse would be classic banter.) Both are a little disgusted by the word, and neither unearths much of an origin story: by their accounts, banter is so coarse that it emerged, fully formed and without antecedent, out of the mouths of oafs.

As it turns out, though, the OED is not at present fully able to handle the banter. According to Eleanor Maier, an associate editor on the dictionary, a search of earlier English texts reveals that a number of previous examples are missing from the dictionarys definition, which was first drafted in 1885 including a quote from a 1657 translation of Don Quixote. (After examining the history, Maier told me that she would be adding banter to the list of entries that are up for review.)

dougie stew (@DougieStew)

Welcome to London #BagelGate pic.twitter.com/KcJoz0ycZU

February 26, 2017

In recent years, banter has barged into our lives at a remarkable clip. Googles Ngram Viewer, a tool that assesses (with some limitations) the frequency with which a term appears in a large database of written sources, finds that banter popped up about twice as often in 2008, the most recent year covered, as it did in 1980.

But banter plugged away for a long time before it became an overnight success. In the 19th century, it often denoted a kind of formal sparring. Even as the term evolved over the 20th, it continued to seem a little prim. In the House of Commons in 1936, Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour prime minister who had returned in a new seat after losing his old one, was subjected to a good deal of banter Dear old Granny MacDonald!, among other witticisms.In 1981, a Guardian report that chess champion Anatoly Karpov and his handlers had successfully protested at his challenger Viktor Korchnois constant cross-board talk ran under the unlikely headline: Chess banter banned.

Such stories do little to prepare us for what banter has become. Consider the viral video that became known as #bagelgate earlier this year. In the recording, a minor scuffle broke out on the 00.54 train from Kings Cross to Huntingdon, and then for no obviously related reason a woman who had a large bag of bagels decided to put one on the head of the guy sitting in front of her, and then another after he took it off and threw it out of the window, and another and another, and then everyone in the carriage started chanting hes got a bagel on his head, and eventually the slightly spoddy victim who is me when I was 13 and someone filled my pencil case with Mr Kipling apple pies (squashed, oozing) because I was fat lost it and screamed Get the fuck out of my face!, and then another fight broke out on the platform, and then the police got on to the train, and every single person fell into not-me-guv silence: this is not Granny MacDonalds banter any more.

If it is hard to understand how these activities can fall under the same umbrella, it should be noted that a phenomenon may predate our choice of term to describe it its just that the act of definition makes it more visible, and perhaps more likely to be imitated. At some point, though, banter became the name for what British men already regarded as their natural tone of voice. There is a very deeply embedded folk culture in the UK of public ribaldry, extreme sarcasm, facetiousness in other words, of laddishness, says Tony Thorne, a linguist and cultural historian. What you might think of as banter now is rooted in that tradition.

That tradition first lashed itself to banters mast in the early 1990s, and controversy soon followed. In June 1992, a Guardian story headlined Police fire sex banter officer, about the dismissal of a sergeant for sexual harassment, recorded an early skirmish in the modern banter wars, and an important new layer to its meaning in the wild: The move is seen as part of the Metropolitan polices desire to reassure women officers that what has previously been tolerated as banter is no longer acceptable. Two years later, the lads mags arrived.

The first edition of Loaded magazine appeared in May 1994, with a picture of Gary Oldman on the front smoking a dog-end, under a banner that declared him a super lad. What fresh lunacy is this? the editors note read. Loaded is a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters Loaded is for the man who believes he can do anything, if only he wasnt hungover.

If banter dismays you, James Brown, the magazines first editor, is quite an easy bogeyman. As he acknowledges himself, he created a title that defined a genre. Loaded was swiftly recognised as a foundational text for a resurgent and ebullient masculinity that had been searching for public expression. While it was always overtly horny, the magazine was initially more interested in a forlorn, slackjawed and self-ironising appreciation of A-listers (one reversible poster had Cindy Crawford on one side and a steam train on the other) than the grot-plus-football formula that successors and imitators like Maxim, Zoo and Nuts milked to destruction. But it also flirted with something murkier.

To its critics, Loaded and its imitators aimed to sanitise a certain hooliganistic worldview with a strategic disclaimer. Banter emerges as this relentless gloss of irony over everything, said Bethan Benwell, senior lecturer in language and linguistics at the University of Stirling and the author of several papers on mens magazines. The constant excusing of sexist or homophobic sentiments with this wink that says you dont really mean it. Benwell pointed to Loadeds emblematic strapline: For men who should know better.

Brown denies that his magazine invented banter. Instead, he says, it captured a zeitgeist that the media had previously failed to acknowledge; the folk culture that Tony Thorne refers to, brought out into the open. Before Browns intervention, GQ had run John Major and Michael Heseltine as cover stars, for Gods sake. I took the interests and the outlook of the young men that I knew, and I put them in a magazine, Brown said. Im not responsible for the tone of the later entrants to the market. We were criticised because we fancied women, not because we belittled them.

The thing about Loaded was that the way we wrote reflected the way we were with our mates, he went on. Theres definitely a thing that exists in the male outlook: you take the piss out of the people you like, and you ignore the people you dont.

Accept this as your starting point, and objections become exhausting to sustain: what youre objecting to is an act of affection. Of course, this is what makes it insidious. Because Browns account rests on the intention behind the magazine, and Benwells on the effect it had, they are impossible to reconcile. Its a very difficult thing to resist or challenge without looking like the stereotypical humourless feminist, said Benwell. But by laughing, you become complicit.

Loaded gave this new kind of banter escape velocity, and it began to colonise other worlds. On BBC2, for example, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were staking out their own territory with Fantasy Football League, a mixture of sketches and celebrity chat that managed to be enthusiastic and satirical at the same time, and reached its peak when the pair became national icons, thanks to their Euro 96 anthem, Three Lions. While a long-running joke about the Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lees pineapple haircut seems flatly racist in retrospect Baddiel did an impression of him in blackface by and large, the tone was milder and more conventional than the magazines were: this was the sensibility of the university graduate slumming it before embarking on grown-up life.

Baddiel implied that laddism could easily occupy a spectrum from ogling to literature, drawing a line to Nick Hornbys memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, Fever Pitch. Hornby once said to me that all this stuff you know, fantasy football and his book is men talking about things that they like and for a while in the mid-80s they werent allowed to, he said in 1995. Ive always liked football and Ive always liked naked women, and its easier to talk about that now than it was eight years ago. Those comments reflect a kind of sneer at its critics that you could often detect in Fantasy Football League, even as its hosts protested that they were just having a laugh though Baddiel himself denies that view. Twenty years on, he, like Brown, is at pains to draw a line between the approach that he and Skinner popularised, and the forms that came later. I guess me and Frank did specialise in banter, he said in an email. In a time before it was known as bantz.

Over the next 10 years, two things happened that ushered in the age of banter. (You might call it mature banter, except that its also the opposite.) First, instead of just being a thing that happened, it became a thing that people talked about. Then, as it became a more tangible cultural product, everyone started trying to make money out of it. The watershed moment, the forms equivalent to Dylan going electric, was the invention of Dave.

Like most good ideas, it looks simple enough in retrospect. Before Dave was Dave, it was UKTV Gold 2. The predecessor channels audience share was 0.761%, and no one could tell who on earth it was supposed to be for. But we had the content, says Steve North, the channels brand manager in 2007 and content of a particular kind that the existing name did very little to communicate: Have I Got News for You, They Think Its All Over, Top Gear. Viewers said they loved the repartee, the humour. It reminded them of spending time with their funniest friends.

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

The target audience was highly specific. It was men married or in relationships, maybe with young children, not going to the pub as much as they used to, says Andy Bryant, managing director of Red Bee, the agency brought in to work on the rebrand. And they missed that camaraderie.

Their purpose thus fixed, North started to run brainstorming sessions at which people would shout out suggestions for the name. One of the ones we collected was Dave, he says. We thought, great, but we cant call it that. But then we thought, Its a surrogate friend. If the audience really sees it as that, if they see it as genuinely providing the banter, maybe we can really give it a name.

They put their hunch through its paces. The market research company YouGov was commissioned to test Dave alongside a bunch of other names (Matthew and Kevin were also on the shortlist), but nothing else had the same everyman resonance. For us, Dave is a sensibility, a place, an emotion, a feeling, said North, his tone thoughtful, almost gnomic. Everyone has their own sense of who Dave is, thats the important thing. Its hard to find anyone who doesnt know someone called Dave.

Now the channel had a brand, it needed a slogan. Lots of people claim they played a part in the naming, says Bryant. But it was just as important to encapsulate what the channel was all about. And at some point someone, I dont know who, wrote it on a board: The home of witty banter. The rebrand added 8m new viewers in six months; Dave saw a 71% increase in its target audience of affluent young men.

Conceived by the first generation of senior professionals to have grown up with banter as an unremarkable part of their demographics cultural mix, the channel crystallised a change, and accelerated it. In 2006, The Ricky Gervais Show, in which Gervais and Stephen Merchant relentlessly poked fun at their in-house idiot savant Karl Pilkington, became the most popular podcast of all time. In 2007, the year of Daves rebrand, Top Gears ratings shot from below 5m to a record high of 8m. The following year, QI moved from BBC4 to BBC2. (A tie-in book published the same year, QI: Advanced Banter, sold more than 125,000 copies.)

North saw the kind of fraternal teasing that was being monetised by his channel, and the panel shows that were its lifeblood, as fundamentally benign. The key thing is that its two-way, he said. Its about two people riffing off each other.

But like his 20th-century forebears, he can see that something ugly has evolved, and he wants to keep his brand well away from it. Bants, he said with distaste. That thing of cover for dubious behaviour we hate and despise it massively. When we launched, it was about fun, being light-hearted, maybe pushing each other without being disrespectful. When people talk about Ive had a go at that person, great banter no, thats just nasty.

By the turn of the decade,as other branding agencies mimicked the success of Dave, banter was everywhere, a folk tradition that had acquired a peculiar sort of respectability. The men who celebrated it werent just lads in the pub any more: they had spending power and establishment allies on their side. But they were, by the same token, more visible to critics. Aggression from an underdog can be overlooked; aggression from the establishment is serious enough to become a matter of public concern.

Take Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Sky Sports brand-defining football presenters, who got themselves up to their necks in some extremely bad banter in 2011. Keys blamed dark forces, but everyone else blamed him and Gray for being misogynists. We knew this because there was footage.

The firestorm, as Keys called it, centred on claims that the two men had said and done heinously sexist things off-air. Most memorable, at least for its phrase-making, was the clip in which Keys eagerly asked his fellow pundit Jamie Redknapp if hed smashed it it being a woman and asserted that he could often be found hanging out the back of it.

Gray went quickly. In the days before he followed, Keys burned hot with injustice in a series of mea-sorta-culpas, particularly focused on the tape in which he expressed his derision at the idea that a woman, Sian Massey-Ellis, could be an assistant referee in the Premier League.

It was just banter, he said. Or, more exactly, just a bit of banter, as he said Massey-Ellis had assured him she understood in a later telephone conversation in which, he added, much banter passed between us. She and I enjoyed some banter, he protested. It was lads-mag banter, he insisted. It was stone-age banter, he admitted. We liked to have banter, he explained. Richard Keys was sorry if you were offended, but also, it wasnt his fault if you didnt get it. It was just banter, for goodness sake!

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Keys insistence that his mistake was simply a failure to move with the times was nothing new: banter has always seemed to carry a longing for the past, for an imagined era before male friendship was so cramped by the tiresome obligations of feminist scrutiny. But while his underlying views were painfully dated, his conception of banter was entirely modern: a sly expansion of the words meaning, and a self-conscious contention that it provided an impregnable defence.

The Keys variation understood banter, first, as a catch-all means of denying responsibility if anyone was hurt; and, second, as a means of reinforcing a bond between two people by being cruel about a third. The comparison wouldnt please a couple of alphas like Keys and Gray, but both strategies brought it closer to a style of communication with classically feminine associations: gossip. Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch (lol) Professor in Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that the two modes of interaction follow basically the same structure. People gossip as a trust game, she said. You tell someone your unsayable private secret, and it bonds you closer together. Theyre supposed to reciprocate with a confidence of their own. Well, banter works in the same way now. You say something outrageous, and you see if the other person dares to top your remark.

The trust game in banter was traditionally supposed to be: do you trust me when I say were friends in spite of the mean things Im saying about you? But now theres a second version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean things Im saying about other people? I think originally it was a harmless thing, said Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an archive of male group conversation, mostly recorded by her students, that goes back to the 1980s. But then it started to be used as an excuse when men were caught out engaging in forms of it that werent so harmless.

It comes down to context and intent, says the comedian Bridget Christie. The gentler form of banter is still knocking around, she suggested, but now it exists alongside something darker: I found The Inbetweeners adolescent banter hilarious, because it was equal and unthreatening. But there is obviously a world of difference between a group of teenage boys benignly taking the piss out of each other, and a bigot being racist or misogynist and trying to pass it off as a joke.

Trace the rise of banter, and you will find that it corresponds to the rise of political correctness or, anyway, to the backlash against political correctness gone mad. That phrase and just banter mirror each other perfectly: one denoting a priggish culture that is deemed to have overreached, the other a laid-back culture that is deemed to have been unfairly reined in. Ironically enough, just banter does exactly what it accuses political correctness of, seeking to close down discussion by telling you that meaning is settled by category rather than content. Political correctness asserts that a racist joke is primarily racist, whereas banter asserts that a racist joke is primarily a joke. In the past, the men who used it rarely had to define it, or to explain themselves to anybody else. Today, in contrast, it is named all the time. The biggest change isnt the banter itself, says Bethan Benwell. Its the explicit use of the word as a disclaimer.

By sheer repetition and by its use as an unanswerable defence, banter has turned from an abstraction into a vast and calcified description of actions as well as words: gone from a way of talking to a way of life, a style that accidentally became a worldview. He bantered you, people sometimes say: you always used to banter with your mates, but now it often sounds like something you do to them. Once it was directionless, inconclusive chatter with wit as the engine that drove it, said the comedian Russell Kane. Now, if I trip you up, thats banter.

You might think the humiliation suffered by Keys and Gray would have made banter less appealing as a get-out, but not a bit of it. Banter, increasingly, seems like the first refuge of the inexcusable. In 2014, Malky Mackay, who had been fired as manager of Cardiff City Football Club a year earlier, was caught having sent texts that referred to Chinese people eating dogs, black people being criminals, Jewish people being avaricious, and gay people being snakes all of which were initially optimistically defended by the League Managers Association as letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text message banter. The comedian Dapper Laughs, whose real name is Daniel OReilly, established himself as banters rat king, with his very own ITV2 show, and then lost it after he suggested that an audience member at one of his gigs was gagging for a rape. A man was convicted of murder after he crushed his friend against a wall with a Jeep Cherokee after an argument over badger-baiting, a course of action that he said had been intended as banter. Another slashed the throat of someone he had met in a pub and described the incident as a moment of banter after 14 or 15 pints. Both are now in prison.

By any sane measure,banter was falling into disrepute, as often a disguise for malice as a word for the ribaldry of lads on the lash. Still it did not go away: instead, the worst of it has mutated again, asserting its authority in public and saving its creepiest tendencies for the shadows or, at least, for the company of five, or 10, or 20 of your closest mates.

At the London School of Economics, it started with a leaflet. Each year at the universitys freshers fair, LSE Rugby Football Club distributed a banterous primer on rugby culture. In October 2014, says the then-president of the student union, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a student came to her in tears with a copy in her hand. The leaflet talked about trollops, slags, crumpet, mingers, and the desirability of misogyny; there were passing references to the horrors of homosexual humiliation and outright homosexual debauchery. Anyone charmed by all this was invited to sign up for the club and join the banter list, entitling them to participate in the exchange of chappish email conversation.

To anyone with a passing knowledge of university laddism, it was hard to imagine a more ordinary iteration. Still, after the unreconstructed chappishness of the leaflet came to light, the club knew it had a problem. It issued a collective apology acknowledging that we have a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter, and promised to organise a workshop. But there was reason to be sceptical about the depth of that commitment.

When Buckley-Irvine and her colleagues published a report on the incident, they noted a string of others, including an antisemitic assault on a university ski trip to Val dIsere in 2011. And there were other indiscretions it didnt mention. According to two people who were present, one club dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane ended with a stripper having bottles thrown at her when, already intimidated, she refused to take her clothes off. She hid in the toilet, and had to be escorted out by a member of staff as the team vandalised the restaurant.

Photograph: Alamy

According to five people who were either members of the rugby club or closely associated with it, one notorious senior member was widely thought to be responsible for the leaflet. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) But when they came to defend themselves to the student union, members of the club fell back on one of the most revered pillars of laddism: all for one, one for all. Theyd clearly worked out a line, says Nona Buckley-Irvine. No one individual was responsible. They were sorry. It was just banter. Thats what they all said.

The accountancy firm KPMG, which sponsored the universitys wider Athletics Union, decided that banter was not an especially helpful brand association, and withdrew funding worth 22,000. The students union decided to disband the club for the academic year. The decision moved some observers to disgust. It was a gross overreaction, a former team member told me. We were the best-behaved team when it came to actually playing rugby but they banned that bit and they couldnt ban any of the rest.

Others took a less measured tone. I had old members emailing me and calling me a fascist, says Buckley-Irvine. Asking me if I didnt understand that it was just banter. Rugby players chanted abuse at her on nights out, she told me. They shoulder-barged her, and called her a cunt.

These kinds of interactions would tend to take place on Wednesdays, also known as sports night, at a bar in Leicester Square. Sports night was the apotheosis of the rugby clubs bleak solidarity. In deference to what you might call the wingers-before-mingers code, for instance, members of the club who were expected to dress in suits werent allowed to speak to women before 9pm. So they would just shout abuse instead, one female former student, who Ill call Anna, remembered. One chant, she said, went, Nine nos and a yes is a yes. At the time, Anna thought that it was all a joke. People would say, Its just banter all the time. After everything. Absolutely everything, she said, sitting in a cafe in south London. If you were meeting someone new, saying they had good banter, that was a pretty high compliment. Whereas if you dont go along with that stuff, its seen as, you cant take the chat, you cant take the banter. And its not seen as having a stance against it. Its seen as not being able to keep up.

After the rugby club was disbanded, nothing much changed in sports night social life. Many members of the club still went on the same nights out; they just colonised other teams. They still addressed girls as Sarah 2 or Sarah 8 depending on how attractive they considered them out of 10; they still had shouted conversations about their sex lives in front of the women they had slept with but refused to acknowledge.

That culture was not confined to Wednesday nights. Anna remembers a guy who took her picture as she slept, naked, in the bed they were sharing, and circulated it to another non-university sports team via WhatsApp. She wasnt meant to see it on his phone.

Ask anyone well-informed where banter resides now, and theyll give the same answer: WhatsApp groups and email threads, the safe spaces of the lad class. What youd get out of those WhatsApp threads, its another world of drama, one former member of the football club said. The details of girls bodies that youd read, a few funny jibes, that was the limit for me. But when it moved on to, like, really, really bad stuff, always about sex it was too much. Those threads are the source of everything.

If the threads were an outlet, they were by no means the limit. Banter, by common consent, wasnt confined to mocking each other: it was about action. If you dressed up for a night out, one female student remembered, it was just kind of status quo that you could have your arse grabbed. It was just like, Oh, that was kind of weird, but OK, thatll happen. Like everyone else willing to speak about it, her view of that culture was perplexingly nuanced, sometimes contradictory. It sounds scary, she said, but that being said, some of my best nights were there, and like it was fun. But then she said: What was defined as serious just got so pushed. I think for someone to lodge a complaint they would have to be actually hurt.

Anna remembers lots of sketchy incidents. She recalls nights when her choices faded into a blur, and she wondered if she had really been in control. But at the time, I would never call it out, she said. And then, youre all living in halls together, and the next day, its like: What did you do last night? Thats hilarious. Thats banter.

When Anna thinks about the behaviour of some of the men she knew at university, she finds it hard to pin down exactly what she thinks of them. Theres one in particular who sticks in her mind. On a Wednesday night, he was a banter guy, she said. He was a Wednesday animal. But the rest of the time, he was my friend.

Controversial though all this was at the time, no one seems to think that it will have cost the perpetrators much. Ive tried so hard to leave all that behind, said the former member of the football team. But those guys theyre all going on to run banks, or the country, or whatever. The senior rugby man who many held responsible, by the way, has landed on his feet. Today, he has a job at KPMG.

In 2017, every new instance of banter is immediately spotted and put through the journalistic wringer. (Vices Joel Golby, who wrote the definitive text on the bagel thing, has made a career from his exquisite close readings of the form.) But when each new absolute legend emerges, we dont usually have the context to make the essential judgment: do the proponents tend towards the harmless warmth of Ellis and his mates, or the frank hostility of the LSE rugby boys? Is their love of irony straightforward, or a mask for something else?

As Richard Keys and Dapper Laughs and their cohorts have polluted the idea of banter, the commercial entities that endorsed its rise have become uneasy with the label. They wanted it to go viral; they hadnt expected it to go postal. Dave, for example, has dropped the home of witty banter slogan. Its not about classic male humour any more, its a little bit smarter, says UKTVs Steve North. We definitely say it less than we used to.

<source media="(min-wid

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/02/the-age-of-banter/

[caredogstips]

The age of joke

The long speak: It used to be precisely a word now it is a way of life. But is it is necessary to get down the banter bus?

Its the most fucking laughable storey, isnt it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria. Last-place summertime in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was wielding as a guild rep. I represent, it was fucking 8am, he told an Australian website soon afterwards, and the last fucking golf-club had closed, and we remembered, We can still depart dolphin watching. Well blag our mode on to a fucking craft and croak dolphin watching.

But when the boat voyaged so far that Cyprus disappeared from panorama, Ellis explained, they started to worry. Why are we so far from tract? they questioned the crew. Were fucking miles away and weve got no fucking wifi. Something, Ellis said, had been lost in rendition; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the useds party pilgrims used to go terribly awry. The gang wasnt taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval basi in the towns of Tartus, on Syrias Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was , nonetheless, a fib that had legs. Hungover lads boat errand boob territory them in Syria, wahey-ed the Mirror; British holidaymakers board defendant barge in Ayia Napa and be brought to an end in war-torn SYRIA, laughed the Express. If you envisioned these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon territory; interrogation at the mitts of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a red-hot banquet, a speedy tour of the expanse, and a good darkness sleep, spots on the next angling boat headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the craft in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Reflecting on the whole circumstance five a few months later, Ellis, a 26 -year-old with a business position and a marketing lords, couldnt altogether wrap his head around it. I ponder I experienced 35 narratives about us, he told me. I read about myself in the Hawaiian Express, do you know what I symbolize?( Notwithstanding that there is nothing to doesnt appear to be any such newspaper, yes, I emphatically do .)

What became it really weird to see the media pile in with such unstinting passion was that the storey was total cobblers. I could not belief how unsophisticated they were, Ellis said, a top memo of hilarity still in his tone. We were just having a chortle! It was banter!

Lads: this is the age of joke. Its long been somewhat about the banter, but over the last few years, it has come to seem that its all about the banter an unabashedly bumptious posture that took up a position on the outskirts of different cultures in the early 90 s and has been larging its road towards the centre ever since. “Theres” hundreds of banter groups on Facebook, from Banter Britain( no memes insinuating child abuse/ dead children !!!) to Wanker Banter 18+( Have a laugh and keep it sick) to the Premier League Banter Page( The only ruler: keep it banter ). You can buy an I banter jugs on Amazon for 9, or an Archbishop of Banterbury T-shirt for 9.99.

There are now four sprigs of a restaurant announced Scoff& Banter. When circumstances were going badly at Chelsea FC under Jos Mourinho, it was reported the team had banned all joke in an attempt to focus their subconscious, and that word appeared in the newspapers, as if you would know exactly what it entail. Person has created a banter map of London using a keyword scour on the flatshare website SpareRoom, indicating exactly where people “re looking for a” roommate with good banter( Clapham tends to facet prominently ). When a 26 -year-old man from Leeds constituted for a selfie with a baffled aeroplane hijacker, Vice swore it the high-water rating of banter.

Lewis Ellis( left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

If you are younger than about 35, you are likely to hear the expression all the time. Either you have banter( if you are funny and can take a pun) or you dont( if you arent and cannot ). The mainstream, in summary, is now drink and asleep on the sofa, and banter is delightedly drawing a penis on its forehead.

As banter has risen, it has expanded. Long a word used to describe submerged sayings of fraternal charity, it is now likewise a word allows one to excuse uninhibited exhibitions of masculine bravado. Today, it is segregated by class, seized on by brands, picked over by psychologists, and regretted by culture reviewers; it is dominant, fiercely contested and exclusively hazily understood.

And so, whether he purposes it to or not, Ellis use of the expression parent some questions. Is he shedding his pile in with the most prevalent division of the blokeish mainstream, a sanitised and gracious gaiety that elongates from lad-dad panel shows to your teammates zinger about your dreadful haircut? Or is he lining up with the misogynist impersonators of the Bullingdon club, a sprinkling of prejudiceds, and, as we shall identify, an actual murderer purveyors of a malicious and insidious masculinity that insists on its indivisible dominion and calls you a slut if you object?

Ellis isnt preoccupied by these questions, but for what its worth, he does say that he and his friends never had the slightest planned of going to Syria. We werent actually trying to clown anyone, he told me, although Im not sure thats wholly consistent with the facts of the case. We were out for a saunter, and we went across this area that gazed actually run down, we thought it was like Syria. So we apply it on the team reps[ Facebook] page that thats where we were. And everyone started liking it. And then one of the people who contacted us was from LADBible which is like the Bible, but for LADS so we pronounced, well have a mess around here. Well tell a completely ridiculous tale, see if the media believes it. Find if we can become LADBible famous.

It did, we are able to. Eventually, the truth “re coming out” , not thanks to any especially determined investigative journalism, but because Ellis cheerily admitted on Facebook that his narration of superb foolishnes was a story. Hahaha what a prank, he wrote, with some justification.

The confession simply raised another repetition of notice. Books that had picked up the legend in the first place resurfaced it with new headlines to manifest the daring of the fabrication; social media useds adduced it as evidence for their own views of young men, or the media, or both. The Russian delegation Twitter account announced it a telling illustration of how many Syria( and Russia) stories are made up by UK newspapers, which was great geopolitical banter. The courtesy entertained Ellis, but he alleges it wasnt the stage. We simply thought it was funny, he responded. People are too serious. I hinder being told to grow up, but I still want to have a good time. Ive had the jobs, Ive got the education. But when Im off production, I want to escape.

Ellis is an enthusiast and an optimist. He is, he told me late last year, hopeless to take every opportunity, simply to enunciate yes to everything I can. We were on a nighttime out in Manchester with his pals Tyson, John and Chris. In such courses of the evening, the following circumstances knew their mode into my brew: fingers; salt; vinegar; mayonnaise; a chip; saliva; a 10 greenback; and, I hazily recollect being told after the fact, at the least two shootings of vodka.

Everyones got a thought in the group, Ellis said, as we walked from one saloon to the next. One person, hes not even that ugly, we say he looks just like a Peperami. Tysons get this mole on his appearance, its like a Coco Pop, so youve got a Coco Pop on your appearance. I looked like Harry Potter when I was a kid, so they announce me Potter, thats my moniker. Every single one of us has something. So you youve gone Chinese attentions. Youre Chinese.

For the record, I didnt think this was OK, but coming after such a harmless litany, it didnt seem malicious enough to confront. Of course, tacit promotion is what shapes such offensive epithets a platitude, and so it is a matter of concern that it saw “i m feeling” mysteriously accepted, just as it had when John perforated me softly in the pellets when I arrived. There was no doubting Elliss candour: as he spoke, the sheer daft beautiful of male friendship seems to astounded him, almost to the point of physical suffering. We just take the piss out of each other, and thats how we establish our passion , he spoke. So many group converses on the phone, and you just take the piss until they cry . And its like, when youre certainly killing them, you go, Ill stop if you miss, because you know they cant say yes, so you exactly keep going. Then we arrived at the next rail, where I was made to drink something called a Zombie.

Early in the evening, before any of this had eroded my ability to take helpful notes, Ellis smashed off from talking as we moved down wall street and sidled into a window display at Next Home, where he Tracey Emined a carefully established bottom by climbing into it and reeling around. Everyone cracked up. Contribute “the worlds” a shriek, Ellis tends to think, and the world will smile back at you. Jump on a craft, and youll end up somewhere enormous; stimulate the boat up, and youll got to get faster. Its all about having fun, its all about the banter, he articulated, after hed rejoined us outside. Banter is about realise “the worlds” a more exciting place.

If nobody can agree on what joke is, thats scarcely a new difficulty. The first habit of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from memo Restoration lad Thomas dUrfey, also known for his hit hymn The Fart, in a sarcastic 1677 participate called Madam Fickle. Banter him, banter him, Toby, a character called Zechiel urges, which may be the first time that someone called Toby was so instructed, but certainly wasnt the last.

The OED also notes early attempts at a description by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson.( Speedy mentions a banter upon transubstantiation, in which a cork is turned into a horse, and fair enough, revolving a stopper into a mare “wouldve been” classic joke .) Both “re a bit” disgusted by the word, and neither unearths often of an origin narrative: by their chronicles, joke is so coarse that it rose, amply structured and without antecedent, out of the mouths of oafs.

As it is about to change, though, the OED is not at present amply able to handle the banter. According to Eleanor Maier, an associate editor on the dictionary, a research of earlier English texts reveals that a number of previous patterns are missing from the dictionarys definition, which is now being first drafted in 1885 including a quote from a 1657 rendition of Don Quixote.( After examining the history, Maier told him that she would be adding banter to the listing of introductions that are up for evaluate .)

dougie stew (@ DougieStew)

Welcome to London #BagelGate pic.twitter.com/ KcJoz0ycZU

February 26, 2017

In recent years, joke has barged into our lives at a impressive time. Googles Ngram Viewer, a implement that assesses( with some limitations) the frequency with which a period shall be published in a large database of written sources, finds that banter popped up approximately twice as often in 2008, the most recent year plowed, as it did in 1980.

But banter plugged away for a very long time before it became an overnight success. In the 19 th century, it often designated a kind of formal sparring. Even as the term progressed over the 20 th, it continued to seem a bit prissy. In the House of Commons in 1936, Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour prime minister who had recalled in a brand-new sit after losing his old one, was subjected to a great deal of banter Dear old-time Granny MacDonald !, among other witticisms.In 1981, a Guardian report that chess champion Anatoly Karpov and his handlers have succeeded in protested at his challenger Viktor Korchnois constant cross-board talk ran under the unlikely headline: Chess joke banned.

Such floors do little to prepare us for what banter has become. Consider the viral video that became known as #bagelgate earlier this year. In the recording, a minor hassle broke out on the 00.54 improve from Kings Cross to Huntingdon, and then for no plainly related rationale the status of women who had a large crate of bagels decided to put one on the heads of state of the person sitting in front of her, and then another after “hes taking” it off and hurled it out of the window, and another and another, and then everyone in the carriage started chanting hes got a bagel on his head, and eventually the slightly spoddy prey who is me when I was 13 and someone filled my pencil client with Mr Kipling apple pies( squashed, exuding) because I was fatty completely lost and hollered Get the fuck out of my appearance !, and then another campaign broke out on the programme, and then the police got on to the teach, and every single person fell into not-me-guv stillnes: this is not Granny MacDonalds joke any more.

If it is hard to understand how these activities can fall under the same umbrella, it should be noted that a phenomenon may predate our choice of expression to describe it its precisely that the act of description draws it most visible, and perhaps more likely to be imitated. At some place, though, joke became the call for what British boys already regarded as their natural tone of voice. There is a very deeply embedded folk culture in the UK of public ribaldry, extreme satire, facetiousness in other words, of laddishness, speaks Tony Thorne, a linguist and cultural historian. What you might think of as banter now is rooted in that tradition.

That tradition firstly flogged itself to banters mast in the early 1990 s, and polemic soon followed. In June 1992, a Guardian storey headlined Police fire sex banter officer, about the removal of a sergeant for sexual harassment, entered an early skirmish in the modern banter battles, and its significant brand-new bed to its meaning in the wild: The move is seen as part of the Metropolitan polices desire to reassure women officers that what has previously been tolerated as banter is greater acceptable. Two year later, the cubs mags arrived.

The first edition of Loaded magazine appeared in May 1994, with a picture of Gary Oldman on the figurehead inhaling a dog-end, under a placard that showed him a super cub. What fresh crazines is this? the editors note spoken. Loaded is a new publication dedicated to life, liberty and the endeavours of fornication, booze, football and less serious matters Loaded is for “the mens” who guesses he can do anything, if merely he wasnt hungover.

If banter chagrins you, James Brown, the magazines firstly writer, is quite an easy bogeyman. As he recognise himself, he composed a claim that defined a genre. Loaded was swiftly recognised as a foundational text for a resurgent and exuberant masculinity that had been searching for public showing. While it was always overtly horny, the publication was initially more interested in a lonesome, slackjawed and self-ironising acknowledgment of -Alisters( one reversible posting had Cindy Crawford on one side and a steam train on the other) than the grot-plus-football formula that successors and imitators like Maxim, Zoo and Nuts milked to shattering. But the committee is also flirted with something murkier.

To its pundits, Loaded and its imitators aimed to sanitise any particular hooliganistic worldview with a tactical renunciation. Banter emerges as this relentless gloss of incongruity over everything, told Bethan Benwell, elderly lecturer in speech and linguistics at the University of Stirling and the author of several newspapers on mens publications. The constant explain of sexist or homophobic feelings with this winking that says you dont really mean it. Benwell drawn attention to Loadeds emblematic strapline: For men who should know better.

Brown is denying that his periodical fabricated banter. Instead, he tells, it captured a zeitgeist that the media had previously failed to acknowledge; the kinfolk culture that Tony Thorne refers to, brought forward into the open. Before Browns intervention, GQ had extended John Major and Michael Heseltine as embrace hotshots, for Gods sake. I took the advantages and the mentality of the young men that I knew, and I give them in a publication, Brown suggested. Im not responsible for the atmosphere of the later entrants to the market. We were criticised because we fancied wives , not because we maligned them.

The thing about Loaded was that the mode we wrote manifested the way we were with our mates, he went on. Theres definitely a act that exists in the male outlook: you take the piss out of the person or persons you like, and you ignore the people you dont.

Accept this as your starting point, and dissents become exhausting to prolong: what youre objecting to is an behave of affection. Of route, “its what” stimulates it insidious. Because Browns account remainders on the intention behind the publication, and Benwells on the effect it had, they are impossible to reconcile. Its a very difficult act to withstand or objection without looking like the stereotypical humourless feminist, said Benwell. But by laughing, you are complicit.

Loaded leaved this new various kinds of banter escape velocity, and it has started to colonise other worlds. On BBC2, for example, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were staking out their own territory with Fantasy Football League, a mixture of sketches and personality chit-chat that managed to be enthusiastic and satirical at the same occasion, and reached its peak when the pair became national icons, thanks to their Euro 96 chant, Three Lions. While a long-running joke about the Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lees pineapple haircut seems flatly racist in retrospect Baddiel did an impression of him in blackface by and large, the colour was milder and more conventional than the publications were: this was the insight of colleges and universities graduate slumming it before starting on grown-up life.

Baddiel implied that laddism is likely to be dominates a range from ogling to literature, depicting a line to Nick Hornbys memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, Fever Pitch. Hornby formerly said to me that all this stuff you are familiar with, imagination football and his journal is gentlemen speak about things that they like and for a while in the mid-8 0s they werent allowed to, he said in 1995. Ive always liked football and Ive always liked naked women, and its easier to talk about that now than it was eight years ago. Those explains manifest a kind of sneer at its pundits that you could often detect in Fantasy Football League, even as its hosts protested that they were just having a laugh though Baddiel himself is denying that view. Twenty times on, he, like Brown, is at hurtings to draw a line between the approach that he and Skinner popularised, and the forms that arose afterward. I approximate me and Frank did specialise in joke, he said in an email. In a hour before it was known as bantz.

Over the next 10 times, two things happened that ushered in persons under the age of joke.( You might call it matured joke, except that its too the opposite .) First, instead of just has become a circumstance that happened, it became a situation that people talked about. Then, as it became a more tangible culture make, everyone started trying to make money out of it. The watershed instant, the forms equivalent to Dylan extending electric, was the invention of Dave.

Like most good theories, it examines simple enough in retrospect. Before Dave was Dave, it was UKTV Gold 2. The precede channels gathering share was 0.761%, and no one could tell who on globe it was supposed to be for. But we had the contents, remarks Steve North, the channels brand director in 2007 and content of a specific kind that the existing appoint did very little to communicate: Have I Got News for You, They Belief Its All Over, Top Gear. Sees said they adoration the repartee, the comedy. It reminded them of spending time with their funniest friends.

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

The target audience was highly specific. It was men marriage or in relationships, maybe with young children , not going to the inn as much as they used to, enunciates Andy Bryant, managing director of Red Bee, relevant agencies brought in to work on the rebrand. And they missed that camaraderie.

Their purpose thus fixed, North started to run brainstorming periods at which people would shout out recommendations for the call. One of the ones we compiled was Dave, he enunciates. We felt, enormous, but we cant call it that. But then we reputed, Its a replacement friend. If the audience really pictures it as that, if they see it as genuinely providing the banter, maybe we can really pay it a name.

They employed their hunch through its paces. The market research corporation YouGov was commissioned to test Dave alongside a cluster of other refers( Matthew and Kevin were also on the shortlist ), but nothing else had the same everyman resonance. For us, Dave is a sensibility, a place, an spirit, a sense, announced North, his tone astute, virtually gnomic. Everyone has their own gumption of who Dave is, thats the important thing. Its difficult to find anyone who doesnt know someone called Dave.

Now the channel had a firebrand, it needed a motto. Lots of people claim they played a part in the identify, announces Bryant. But it was just as important to encapsulate what the channel was all about. And at some part someone, I dont was well known that, wrote it on members of the board: The dwelling of funny joke. The rebrand contributed 8m brand-new spectators in six months; Dave watched a 71% increase in its target audience of affluent young men.

Conceived by the first generation of senior professionals to have grown up with joke as an unremarkable part of their demographics culture desegregate, the canal crystallised a change, and accelerated it. In 2006, The Ricky Gervais Show, in which Gervais and Stephen Merchant relentlessly poked fun at their in-house jerk savant Karl Pilkington, became the most popular podcast of all time. In 2007, its first year of Daves rebrand, Top Gears ratings shoot from below 5m to a record high-pitched of 8m. The following year, QI moved from BBC4 to BBC2.( A tie-in volume written the same year, QI: Advanced Banter, sold more than 125,000 transcripts .)

North checked the kind of fraternal pestering that was being monetised by his canal, and the panel shows that were its lifeblood, as fundamentally benign. The key happening is that its two-way, he responded. Its about two parties riffing off each other.

But like his 20 th-century forebears, he can see that something ugly has advanced, and he wants to keep his brand well away from it. Bants, he added with dislike. That circumstance of cover for dubious behaviour we detest and hate it massively. When we propelled, it was about enjoyable, being light-hearted, maybe pushing one another without being disrespectful. When people talk about Ive had a go at that person, great banter no, thats just nasty.

By the become of the decade, as other labelling bureaux simulated the success of Dave, banter was everywhere, a folk tradition that had acquired a strange kind of respectability. The all those people who celebrated it werent precisely fellows in the inn any more: they had spending ability and organisation allies on their surface. But they were, by the same token, more visible to commentators. Invasion from an underdog can be overlooked; aggressivenes from the establishment is serious enough to become a matter of public concern.

Take Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Sky Sports brand-defining football presenters, who got themselves up to their cervixes in some highly bad joke in 2011. Keys accused dark armies, but everybody else blamed him and Gray for being misogynists. We knew this because there was footage.

The firestorm, as Keys called it, centred on claims that the two men had said and done heinously sexist acts off-air. Most memorable, at the least for its phrase-making, was the time in which Keys eagerly requested his fellow pundit Jamie Redknapp if hed smashed it it being a woman and asserted that he could often be found hanging out the back of it.

Gray became promptly. In the days before he followed, Keys burned hot with sin in a series of mea-sorta-culpas, specially focused on the strip in which he conveyed his derision at the idea that the status of women, Sian Massey-Ellis, could be an aide referee in the Premier League.

It was just banter , he suggested. Or, more exactly, just a bit of joke, as he mentioned Massey-Ellis had assured him she understood in a later telephone conversation in which, he added, much joke elapsed between us. She and I enjoyed some joke, he protested. It was lads-mag joke, he contended. It was stone-age banter, he acknowledged. We liked to have banter, he explained. Richard Keys was sorry if you were offended, but likewise, it wasnt his faulting if you didnt get onto. It was just banter, for goodness sake!

Up to their necks in some particularly bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Picture: Richard Saker/ Rex

Keys insistence that his correct was simply a failure to move with the times was nothing new: banter has always seemed to carry a longing for the past, for the purposes of an guessed age before male love was so cramped by the tedious obligations of feminist scrutiny. But while his underlying deems were painfully dated, his thought of joke was only modern: a sly expansion of the words signify, and a self-conscious contention that it provided an impregnable defence.

The Keys variation understood banter, first, as a catch-all means of disavowing responsibility if someone was hurt; and, second, as a means of reinforcing a bail between two beings by being cruel about a third. The comparison wouldnt satisfy got a couple of alphas like Keys and Gray, but both strategies accompanied it closer to a style of communicating with classically feminine associations: gossip. Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch( lol) Professor in Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that the two modes of interaction follow basically the same organization. People gab as a trust competition, she alleged. You tell someone your unsayable private secret, and it bonds you closer together. Theyre supposed to do now reciprocate with a confidence of their own. Well, banter works in the same way now. You say something appalling, and you see if the other person dares to top your remark.

The trust game in joke was traditionally is expected to be: do you trust me when I read were friends in spite of the aim circumstances Im replying about you? But now theres two seconds version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean thoughts Im announcing about other parties? I repute initially it was a harmless event, enunciated Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an repository of male group conversation, predominantly entered by her students, that goes back to the 1980 s. But then it started to be used as an excuse when gentlemen were caught out fully participate in forms of it that werent so harmless.

It comes down to context and meaning, says the comedian Bridget Christie. The gentler pattern of joke is still knocking around, she suggested, but now it exists alongside something darker: I obtained The Inbetweeners youngster banter hilarious, because it was equal and unthreatening. But there is obviously a world of difference between a group of teenage boys benignly taking the piss out of each other, and a bigot being racist or misogynist and trying to pass it off as a joke.

Trace the rise of banter, and you will find that it corresponds to the rise of political correctness or, anyway, to the backlash against political correctness gone mad. That word and just joke reflect each other perfectly: one denoting a priggish culture that is deemed to have overreached, the other a laid-back culture that is deemed to have been unfairly reined in. Ironically enough, merely joke does exactly what it alleges political correctness of, seeking to close down argument by say to you that making is settled by category rather than material. Political correctness is saying that a racist prank is mainly racist, whereas banter asserts that a racist pun is mainly a pun. In the past, the men who use it rarely had to define it, or to explain themselves to anybody else. Today, in contrast, it is mentioned all the time. The biggest change isnt the banter itself, remarks Bethan Benwell. Its the explicit call of the word as a disclaimer.

By sheer repetition and by its give as an unanswerable defense, joke has altered from an abstract into a vast and calcified description of wars as well as texts: started from a lane of talking to a way of life, a form that inadvertently became a worldview. He joked you, people sometimes remark: you always used to banter with your copulates, but now it often sounds like something you do to them. Once it was directionless, inconclusive yak with wit as the engine that drove it, said the comedian Russell Kane. Now, if I errand you up, thats banter.

You might think the mortification suffers from Keys and Gray would have constituted banter less plea as a get-out, but not a bit of it. Banter, increasingly, seems like the first sanctuary of the indefensible. In 2014, Malky Mackay, who had been fired as manager of Cardiff City Football Club a year earlier, was caught having transported textbook that referred to Chinese beings devouring bird-dogs, black people being criminals, Jewish people being avaricious, and lesbian parties being snakes all of which were initially optimistically defended by the League Managers Association as letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text letter banter. The comedian Dapper Laughs, whose real identify is Daniel OReilly, established himself as jokes rat king, with his very own ITV2 display, and then completely lost after he suggested that an audience member at one of his gigs was gagging for a assault. A man was convicted of assassinate after he mashed his friend against a wall with a Jeep Cherokee after an disagreement over badger-baiting, a course of action that he added had been intended as banter. Another trounced the throat of someone he had met in a pub and described the accident as a few moments of joke after 14 or 15 pints. Both are now in prison.

By any sane quantity, joke was falling into dishonor, as often a disguise for malice as a word for the ribaldry of fellows on the lash. Still it did not go away: instead, the worst of it has mutated again, insisting its expert in public and saving its creepiest partialities for the shadows or, at the least, for the company of five, or 10, or 20 of your closest mates.

At the London School of Economics, it started with a circular. Each year at the universitys freshers fair, LSE Rugby Football Club shared a banterous primer on rugby culture. In October 2014, suggests the then-president of the student solidarity, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a student has now come to her in tears with a emulate in her hand. The brochure “was talkin about a” trollops, slags, crumpet, mingers, and the desirability of misogyny; there were legislating cites to the frights of lesbian mortification and outright lesbian gluttony. Anyone charmed by all this was invited to sign up for the team and meet the banter register, entitling them to participate in the exchange of chappish email conversation.

To anyone with a run knowledge of university laddism, it was hard to suppose a more everyday iteration. Still, after the unreconstructed chappishness of the circular has now come to sunlight, the association knew it had a problem. It questioned a collective justification admitted that we have a lot to learn about the injurious effects of joke, and promised to organise a workshop. But there are still reason to be sceptical about the magnitude of that commitment.

When Buckley-Irvine and her peers published a report on the accident, they memo a fibre of others, including an antisemitic assault on a university ski tour to Val dIsere in 2011. And there were other follies it didnt mention. According to two people who were present, one club dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane ended with a stripper having bottles thrown at her when, already intimidated, she refused to take her invests off. She obscured in the toilet, and had to be escorted out by a member of staff as the team vandalised the restaurant.

Photograph: Alamy

According to five people who were either members of the rugby society or closely associated with it, one notorious elderly member was widely thought to be responsible for the booklet.( He did not respond to requests for explain .) But when they came to defend themselves to the student uniting, members of the squad fell back on one of “the worlds largest” revered mainstays of laddism: all for one, one for all. Theyd clearly worked out a line, mentions Nona Buckley-Irvine. No private individuals was responsible. They were sorry. It was just joke. Thats what they all said.

The accountancy firm KPMG, which sponsored colleges and universities wider Athletics Union, “ve decided that” banter was not an specially helpful firebrand association, and moved funding merit 22,000. The students uniting decided to disband the golf-club for the academic year. The decision moved some commentators to disgust. It was a gross overreaction, a former unit member told me. We were the best-behaved unit when it came to actually playing rugbies but they censored that bit and they couldnt proscribe any of the rest.

Others took a less measured tint. I had old-fashioned members emailing me and calling me a tyrant, articulates Buckley-Irvine. Expecting me if I didnt understand that it was just joke. Rugby actors sung mistreat at her on nights out, she told me. They shoulder-barged her, and called her a cunt.

These kinds of interactions would tend to take place on Wednesdays, also known as boasts night, at a prohibit in Leicester Square. Sports night was the apotheosis of the rugby organizations bleak solidarity. In homage to what you might call the wingers-before-mingers code, for example, representatives from the squad who were expected to dress in dress werent allowed to speak to women before 9pm. So they would just holler abuse instead, one girl former student, who Ill call Anna, remembered. One chant, she replied, get, Nine nos and a yes is a yes. At the time, Anna thought that it was all a pun. Beings would say, Its precisely banter all the time. After everything. Absolutely everything, she spoke, sitting in a cafe in south London. If you were convening someone brand-new, saying they had good banter, that was a reasonably high congratulate. Whereas if you dont go along with that material, its seen as, you cant take the chat, you cant take the banter. And its not to be considered as having a stance against it. Its seen as not being able to keep up.

After the rugby squad was disbanded , good-for-nothing much altered in plays night social life. Many members of the club still went on the same darkness out; they are only colonised other squads. They still addressed girlfriends as Sarah 2 or Sarah 8 depending on how attractive they considered them out of 10; they are continuing had shouted speeches about their copulation lives in front of the women they had slept with but refused to acknowledge.

That culture was not confined to Wednesday nights. Anna recollects a person who took her portrait as she slept, naked, in the bunk they were sharing, and circulated it to another non-university plays crew via WhatsApp. She wasnt meant to see it on his phone.

Ask anyone well-informed where joke resides now, and theyll give the same reaction: WhatsApp groups and email yarns, the safe seats of the lad class. What youd get out of those WhatsApp threads, its a different world of drama, one former member of the football club pronounced. The details of girls people that youd read, a few amusing jibes, that was the limit for me. But where reference is moved on to, like, really, really bad trash, always about sex it was too much. Those strands are the source of everything.

If the threads were an store, they were by no means the limit. Banter, by common consent, wasnt confined to lampooning each other: it was about action. If you dressed up for a night out, one girl student remembered, “its just” kind of status quo that you could have your arse grab. It was just like, Oh, that was kind of strange, but OK, thatll happen. Like everybody else willing to speak about it, her position of that culture was perplexingly nuanced, sometimes self-contradictory. It seems spooky, she said, but that tell me anything, some of my best nighttimes were there, and like it was enjoyable. But then she enunciated: What was defined as serious just got so pushed . I envision for someone to lodge a complaint they would have to be actually hurt.

Anna recollects lots of sketchy incidents. She remembers nighttimes when her choices faded into a blur, and she wondered if she had really been in control. But at the time, I would never call it out, she remarked. And then, youre all living in vestibules together, and the next day, its like: What did you do last nighttime? Thats funny. Thats banter.

When Anna thinks about the behaviour of some of “the mens” she knew at university, she find it hard to pin down exactly what she recalls of them. Theres one in particular who sticks in her recollection. On a Wednesday night, he was a joke person, she told. He was a Wednesday animal. But the rest of the time, he was my friend.

Controversial though all this was at the time , no one seems to think that it will have expenditure the perpetrators often. Ive tried so hard to leave all that behind, said the former is part of the football crew. But those guys theyre all going on to run banks, or the two countries, or whatever. The senior rugby boy who numerous held responsible, by the way, has territory on his hoofs. Today, he has a activity at KPMG.

In 2017, every new instance of banter is immediately discerned and put through the journalistic wringer.( Immorality Joel Golby, who wrote the definitive verse on the bagel thing, has made a career from his exquisite close readings of the structure .) But when each new absolute myth rises, we dont typically have the context to shape the essential points finding: do the proponents tend towards the harmless excitement of Ellis and his copulates, or the frank hatred of the LSE rugby boys? Is their affection of irony straightforward, or a mask for something else?

As Richard Keys and Dapper Laughs and their cohorts have polluted the idea of joke, the commercial entities that endorsed its rise had now become uneasy with the label. They wanted it to go viral; they hadnt expected it to runs postal. Dave, for example, has plunged the residence of funny banter slogan. Its not about classic male mood any more, its a bit smarter, alleges UKTVs Steve North. We certainly say it less than we used to.

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