#indicating two because I got the idea from a tumblr post

[liv45no]

*everyone standing around the broken coffee maker*

Remus: so. who broke it? I'm not mad, I just wanna know.

Everyone:

Lily: ...I did. I broke it.

Remus: no. no you didn't. Pads?

Sirius: don’t look at me. Look at James.

James: what?! I didn't break it.

Sirius: huh, that's weird. How'd you even know it was broken?

James: because it's sitting right in front of us and it's broken.

Sirius: suspicious.

James: no, it's not!

Marlene: if it matters, probably not, but Reg was the last one to use it.

Regulus: liar! I don't even drink that crap!

Marlene: oh really? Then what were you doing by the coffee cart earlier?

Regulus: I use the wooden stirrers to push back my cuticles. Everyone knows that, Marlene!

Lily: okay, let's not fight. I broke it. Let me pay for it, Remus.

Remus: no! Who broke it!?

Everyone:

Peter: Remus... Mary’s been awfully quiet.

Mary: rEALLY?!

*everyone starts arguing*

Remus, on the couch: I broke it. I burned my hand so I punched it.

Remus: I predict 10 minutes from now they'll be at each other's throats with warpaint on their faces and a pig head on a stick.

Remus: :)

Remus: good. It was getting a little chummy around here.

[matenrou-fan]

~Intoxication~

Me: oh I just will take a day off from Tumblr! *writing the biggest fic I ever made.*

Anyways this idea was in my mind for a pretty long time but I was kinda indecisive to start this work. Feel more nervous than when I posted another pretty dirty fic as this time it's much harsher. So please read tags carefully.

Intoxication of love.. or of lust? Diavolo didn't know himself what exactly was outweighed in his chest, but there's something he knows for sure - he'll make you his today.

femreader, possessive!Diavolo, delusional!Diavolo, aphrodisiac, oral (receiving), fingering (receiving), dirty talk, crempie, drugging, dumbification, non-con, slut shaming, Master/slave undertones;; 3914 words;; Please contact me if you think I forgot to add something!

NSFW UNDER THE CUT

;MINORS DNI;

Just another evening in Demon Lord's Castle.. Well, at least from your point of view, as everything was so casual, casual as it was a few days ago, and a week ago, and a month ago. There's no fear or thrilling excitement that tickles in your chest when you visit such a luxurious place for the first few times. And of course you stop seeing Lord Diavolo as someone authoritative and powerful, more like a good friend who you don't mind to tease sometimes.

But that's what he's needed, that's what he expected to see - a zero suspicion or careful attention from you. And that is what would help him to put his plan into practice.

"Mm, s/o, you're here! I was waiting for you." - With a usual big smile he got closer, flung out his arms in a lavish gesture.

All speeches are well prepared. All his actions, every movement is well prepared. Not too perfect to evoke a feeling of falseness, but without any wild surprises, keeping your guard down.

Today he's more collected than before his official meetings or important events. Why? Because losing his status or just getting a little confused on scene is not bothering his heart as much as thoughts about losing you on a strange path of your relationship with demons around. Moving closer to one demon brother, than to another, like a little brat that just plays on crossroads but never stepping too far away in one certain direction. And moreover, never looking in his way, stepping on Diavolo's side only when you're too bored and have no right mood with these seven jerks. You just know how to play with their hearts, and today there would be a punishment. Don't want to get closer on your own? Be ready that sooner or later there will be a strong arm that just finally drags you to one of the ways. And the young Lord is willing to make you fall into his ground. To his feet.

"Sorry that I didn't text you back sooner.. Was a little bit busy." - your soft smile is adorable, but he notices how the corners of your lips twitch a little before lifting up. Oh, busy? You always have this 'guilty smile', that's what he called it, when getting late in RAD or in his Castle, or somewhere else, just because you were having fun with someone else, not because you're busy. Foolish and so air headed outside, Diavolo actually carefully remembered all pieces of information about you, all these small differences in your reactions..

"Ah, it's okay! I'm ready to forgive you, but only if you would tell me what happened.." - no indication of envy or anger, only this slight flirt that he always did, which always makes you think you're in charge and can tease him a little.

"Oh, nothing too serious. You know, just Mammon again is-"

Listening to your voice while you two sit at the table, Diavolo truly listens to all this nonsense, showing his usual reaction - laugh and just a little bit of jealousy about you all having such a good time in House of Lamentation. But it's just a piece of his attention, when inside his thoughts were far away from all these demons, as he concentrated on a cup of herbal tea in your arm. Almost full without a few sips, maybe he should shut your mouth a little and tell you something too so you would pay more attention to your drink? Effect would last pretty long yet his patience is otherwise.

♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡

"Really? I never knew that.." - you mumble, smiling weakly as you look at your almost empty cup. It was such a pretty long day, that's why you suddenly start feeling kinda strange? Something like drowsiness, but at the same time like a second wind too.. Like if you didn't sleep for a few days and all your motions get so slow but suddenly a new wave of energy hits your body.. But not in some fresh way, as these goosebumps on your skin make you heated up. It's like it hits not your whole insides, but only the lower part…? The more you try to describe your own feelings, the more confused you get. Such a mix of thoughts in your head makes you dizzy.

Oh. oh. And of course Diavolo quickly noticed that. Who, as if not your generous, kind and cheerful friend who invited you to visit him today, will help you now?

"S/o, is everything alright?" - the itch to add some slight mockery in his tone was almost irresistible, but that's too early for something like that. There's plenty of time for him to have some fun with vengeance for all days that you ignored him..

"No, I think I just don't sleep that well tonight.." - a small trembling sigh escapes your lips, as you rub your temple in circle motions. But thoughts keep fading away in the middle of sentences, how can you even explain to him properly this strange sudden fatigue?

"Hm, maybe we should have a little walk around my Castle? It always helps me feel a little bit more fresh.."

Diavolo's right, as it helps you too sometimes, especially when you just want to clear your head, like right now.

But today the corridors of his residence were more like a labyrinth, and even familiar places were so far away and strange for you. Necessity of carrying on a conversation did not divert you from this nagging waves of pain, and the cheerful, unstoppable bubbling of the young Lord just turns your mind into a complete mush. Where were your thoughts, and where was his one, that he pushed in your mind with this chirping..? Your weak whining was the only response to his question that you didn't even understand. Perfect.

"S/o..?" - Snaps of fingers were so close to your nose but you didn't even react that well, only shrugging a little. You lazily turned to face Diavolo, but not for scolding him for such boorish behavior, your minds didn't even produce a thought about this being disrespectful or just strange. You turn just because he attracted your attention in this way, that's it, and Diavolo loves how quickly you get so obedient. What else can he try then?

"You hear me? Are you alright?" - This time there's undisguised mockery, yet you didn't get mad, once again. And even when he steps closer and squeezes your waist with his hands, in a pretty firm grip on purpose, you only furrow your brows and mumble:

"Dia.. Wha.." - Without that much resistance. The way you place your hands on his shoulders even can be called like some romantical move, only slight attempts of pushing tells him that you're not really understand what's going on. Maybe even not like it or hate it, in the very depth of your minds, where his drug didn't reach for now? But it just turns him more.

That's it. You ARE weak now. The kindness and compassion have left, leaving you with a cold, dominant demon - one who is in control.

Throwing away this obligation of controlling his wishes, he drops his hands on your hips and moves you closer to himself with one quick, harsh pull. Warmth of your body was intoxicating, almost a Siren's call but in physical form. He even can feel slight movements of fingers that were now sandwiched between your and his chest. Honey, are you still trying to push him away?

"Dia.. It's wrong.." - And there's a Siren's call itself. Weak call that shows just how dizzy you are, how far away from reality.. A call to destroy your minds completely.

His hands squeezed your ass, pushing you closer and higher, on the same level to his face. Already on weak legs, all you can do to scoot up is just lean to Diavolo's body, letting him manhandle you now.

Somewhere through this fog in your brains you hear your own scream that beg to fight, to push him away. Somewhere through this wild burn in your body you feel some kind of fear and disgust, that telling you this is not a right way to do the thing, that something is wrong.. But these smacks of a little desperation were too weak to make a breach in the wall of thick, strange arouse that start arising in your bosom from such close contact with another body. Moreover, every minor thought faded away under pressure of Diavolo's lips.

It's more like he tries to devour you than kiss, pushing his tongue inside your mouth without warning as soon as you just gasp from his tight grasp on your ass. Rolls his tongue over and around your own, pushing it as deeply into your narrow mouth as he can, Diavolo didn't pay any attention to a new way of struggling from your side. Or maybe he feels every small push, enjoying it?

Tickles of the tip of his tongue on your palate sends waves of goosebumps directly in your minds, making your whole body hummed in response. And small vibrations of your moans titillate both you and him, boiling your already heated up minds.

Even a loud thud of the door behind you didn't bother you that much, and only when Diavolo pulled away himself, throwing on the mattress, did you wake up. Just a little, only able to realize you're in another room, with a big soft bed underneath you.

It's actually his bedroom that you visited oh so many times yet never leave your scent on his pillows or sheets, sitting only on the same couch every time. But right now whatever sense you got left in your brains wasn't enough to remember that, or even to panic from the fact you got dragged here and didn't even notice this. Everything was concentrated on Diavolo, who's towering over you, and on this burning feeling in your chest that makes it hard to breathe.

"You look so much better like this, darling." - It’s like a lover’s whisper but there’s a cruel, depraved edge to it that chills the heart. It’s almost like the whisper of a predator that knows its prey is helpless and won’t escape no matter how much it struggles. - "So much better with me, than with anyone else.."

The moment you weakly open your mouth to mumble some nonsense he gobbles you up again, no less but even more hungrily than before. Even Diavolo himself didn't know his appetite for you was so wild, but now, when he finally unleashes his true intentions, that doesn't matter. He can do anything he wants with you, and as long as he wants..

Every touch and kiss lewding you in some dirty, twisted way. Trails of his hands on your body were like burning sharp knives, like electrical discharges that increased this unbearable heat. Fragile whine in his mouth was the only retort you were capable of, but for Diavolo it sounds like some needy beg rather than a strong protest. You're not asking to leave you alone, you're asking to reduce this dizzying temperature in your insides.

Ripping and throwing away all your clothes sounds like a good help, isn't it? Your arms falling slack on sheets, too powerless to resist his actions, so pretty soon the only thing that hid your body from his sharp gaze was your underwear.

Just for a moment Diavolo pulled away to admire this new view that he imagined in his dreams for so long - round chest heaves with your deep, unsteady breaths, and your stomach rises and falls with each. Smoothest of your skin was on a higher level than any expensive, luxury fabric he ever was able to touch. And this scent.. No one of all incubus or succubus can compare with this throbbing seduction of your smell. But doesn't this mean he's the victim here, acting under the charm of your beauty?

"It's all your fault, s/o.." - leaning closer, he groans in your ear. Maybe you don't really understand what he's talking about, as every small brush of his skin on your naked one interrupts any incipient thoughts, but it doesn't mean he has no right to tell all these things that are stored up in the depth of his soul. - "Everything could have been different if you wouldn't be like that, playing and fucking around with everyone.."

He grabs your chin to make look up at him - eyes have taken on a distant look, and your lips are trembling, trying to breathe more.. Yes, you definitely almost don't understand him, only sligh shine of confusion and fear in your eyes through a fog of lust can be seen. But it's better like this, cause now you at least don't resist his action.

Long, wet path of kisses on your body, as if Diavolo tries to mark every small part of your skin with his lips. The closer he moves to your trembling hips, the more sloppy his movements get, and when he finally stops right in front of your waistband, heavily breathing, his kisses are more reminiscent of some hungry impatient licks. Hot unsteady breath makes you whimper again and you look at him with half-lidded eyes, confused with his action. Your body is being flooded with a mix of unreal arouse and some creeping fear. Maybe this drug was good enough to turn your brains and body into a complete mess, but something in your guts keeps screaming to stop this.

"Dia.. Don't.. S-stop.."

"Don't stop? Of course, my darling.." - a low growl as his lips are within a breath of distance from your clit.

He presses his whole face to your cunt, drowning into warm wetness and intoxicating scent. Thin fabric of your panties was more like a tease for you when he started licking your folds right through panties. Like some poor, starving for months puppy, he pounced upon your pussy like it was a sacred dish.

His big hands moved from your waist to your thighs, spreading them apart as you kept squeezing them together and bothering his fun. One warning bite on your inner thigh before he pulled down your underwear with his teeth.

For a moment your and his eyes meet each other, as if he gives you another warning to not keep being a brat even in such a state and just gives him what he wants.

But his visage started to warp, along with this stern look - you break. Moaning, you toss your head back and lift your hips, begging to continue. All last hopes and screams leave your mind, nagging, painful ache that was waiting for release, win.

"That's it. What a fucking good girl you can be.."

Leaving your legs apart, he moved his hand to open your labia. Small throbbing clit, and this clenching around nothing hole.. His own dick twitch, so hard and hot in his pants, but Diavolo can wait just a little bit more to play all his fantasies.

Nimble fingers up against a bundle of nerves, then upwards, enjoying every millimeter. Such a small thing and such a light stroke, yet your whole body hummed in response. Slowly moving up and down, then in circular movements, Diavolo remembered every reaction, every gasp and whimper along with sudden shrugs of your shoulders or legs.. Do you not love like this, and prefer like that? He'll keep that in mind for the future, when you wake from drugs just to see him ready to repeat everything.

His fingers get lower, playing between folds, soaking in your juices while he presses his mouth to your clit. Just a small kiss, as he squeezes a sensitive spot with his lips, but your voice immediately gets higher, hips lift even more, as if you try to find more friction. What a cute reaction.. Opening his mouth and sucking your clit in, at the same time pushing it with his tongue, he didn't move his eyes from your face even for a second, devouring every slight twitch of your brows or lips. The way you start whining more, the way your needy cunt clenches more every time his fingers pressed around your entrance… In Diavolo's mind it means only one thing - there's no way you're enjoying this only because of befuddling drugs, you're enjoying it because you're just a little obedient slave that waited to be taken in some harsh and rough way. And Diavolo doesn't mind to show who's your master now.

Even when he pushes his finger in, without any warnings, you didn't pried him off, but moved further, letting him sink inside you and he quickly added another finger. Are you so loosened up because of an aphrodisiac he also added to this tea, or is it just a normal reaction of your body when somebody is being so irreverent with you? Thoughts about you always being like this just for him, only for him, always ready to feel him inside you and being so obediently silent with your disagreements but so loud with your sinful moans.. It's starting to be unbearable for him too, so his fingers quickly get in pretty fast pace, stretching your walls.

"You liked it, didn't you? You liked being such a fucking slut.." - Diavolo groans, tickling your clit with a low husky breath. Weak gasp from your lips didn't sound like a good response, so he disdainfully squeezed your tensed nerves between his teeth, just a little, but enough to draw more pleasant to his ears high pitched whine from your chest. - "Keep showing me how you like that.."

Like if your body is drawn to follow the orders of the young Lord, you immediately moan again, but this time from a strong aggressive hit of his fingers inside you cunt. Your surroundings began to swim with every thrust, as your hips jut upwards in one rhythm with his hand. Pulsation in your core reaches its peak, making you shudder in agony of enthralling pleasure, before you cum.

Such a strong wave that it is almost painful, like some piercing discharge. Your muscles feel more relaxed yet your insides are not revealed but filled even more with some dirty coercion to ache and beg for another release, and then for another and another.. Like you never would be satisfied, feeling this yearning that is amplified with drugs in your body again and again. And Diavolo knows that, ready to use you, who's now at his disposal, till blackness would crowd in on your vision and you would fall into deep narcotic sleep… Or maybe even after that?

Low groan thundered on the whole room when his now exposed dick twitch from cold air. Diavolo leans closer and grope your waist, almost buries you under his weight when his flushed head glides down your folds and presses to your clenching cunt, mixing his precum with your juices. Your hips wiggled a bit to grind back to his cock and he can't help but smirk, enjoying the way you completely forget about your arrogant behavior and get so obedient.. so needy to his dick. Now he just needs to make sure to pound you so good that you will be like that even without any aphrodisiac.

Pushing himself deep inside your wet cunt, he froze for a moment. Not to make you get used to his pretty thick length, but to give himself some time to overcome his strong goosebumps from your tightness. It feels much better than he ever can imagine, than he ever can make himself feel with the calloused seal of his own hand.. Almost if he's the one who's being corrupted here, not you.

He starts to slide back his cock out of your pussy and then to slide in with more force, just to experience this tickle on the back of his head once more. There's no way he can be gentle even in the beginning, when you lewding him like that with these pathetic whines. You wrap your legs around his wait yourself, you just BEG to be fucked, not crying to stop. Even your grasp on his shoulders is just the way to show your desire and these scratches from your nails on his skin is just a passion, he knows for sure.

Hovering over you like a predator over his prey, he just starts thrusting in some aggressive speed, stretching your walls with such force it's turning your minds into havoc. More marks on your body - kisses, hickeys, scratches - he will make sure there's no place that he didn't touch with his lips or didn't grope with his hands.

But the main act that will reinforce his point of owning you is only in the future, but his dick already starts grinding from thoughts about filling your pussy with his cum again and again. And even if you would be too full to take more with this greedy cunt, there's another holes in your body he would be glad to fulfill to the very end.

"You were waiting for it, didn't you? Whining my name like a little bitch in heat." - he whispered right in your ear but even such close contact didn't help to get his words into your empty head. Your mouth moved on its own, calling him in desperate moans as you didn't know yourself if you actually started begging for more or still resisting his wild urges.. But did it actually matter at such a moment? As there is no escape from the suffocating delight of unravel underneath him.

Your pussy starts to spasm, ready for another breakneck orgasm. And you feel his dick grinding against your walls in response, spreading soaking precum inside you. Grasp on your waist was strong enough to break a bone, but Diavolo moved one arm to hold your chin in the same firm grip and make you look up at him. He just wants to see how your eyes would be darkened by another wave of pleasure, how you would look when he finally made you completely his.. Rough sloppy kiss before he slammed his dick fully inside you, shooting hot sperm in your cervix. Tightening around the base of his dick, your cunt was almost milking him, sucking every drop with wild pulsations.

Some sort of sore starts nagging in your body and you collapse on the bed, mewling for some break. But only a few seconds was enough to catch a breath to a demon, as he started moving again even in a more aggressive way, slapping your hips with his own. None of your whines never would be considered as asking to stop, Diavolo just doesn't hear any painful undertones on your voice, just some luring possession that resonates with his delusional mind.

His dick was stiff again, hitting your sensitive spot with swollen glans with every thrust. Hitting your whole body with new waves that turn you more and more into some dumb, empty doll for his wishes and desires.

Diavolo will make sure to turn you into some obedient cock slave through some good punishment for all this time he was the one who's missed you. Now it's his time to be in charge and make you beg, and yearn, and cry for him.. to make you addicted to his love.. or lust?

[kuwdora]

Witcher Recs - Villains & Bad Guys Edition, part 1

Please enjoy these 23 fic recs featuring Emhyr, Dijkstra, Radovid, Vilgefortz, and the Wild Hunt. I tried to indicate what witcher canon is predominant but sometimes people blend the canons. I'm a voracious reader when my brain lets me read, and I read so many different things. I have many tastes! I haven't done a witcher recs post since 2022 and I have 18 billion more recs in the pipeline that I had collected since like 2021.

With any luck and squeeful motivation I'll share more villain recs in the future.

These recs feature mostly rarepairs. I'm still experimenting with formatting these recs on tumblr, let me know what y'all think on that front. Hope you enjoy the fic!

This got pretty long so I'm putting it under a cut.

Emhyr

Prickly Urchin by @seventfics. Game canon. Dijkstra/Emhyr. 2200w. Pre-relationship and tagged ‘Shady Rich Parties with Questionable Ends.’ Based the prompt ‘cursed’ and Dijkstra meets a prickly Duny. Few people still alive can say they've met the emperor before his ascension to the Nilfgaardian throne. A young Count Sigismund Dijkstra is one of them. It's just that neither of them knew.

A great little AU/missing scene, tackles the premise of these two meeting shortly after the Law of Surprise in a great way.

the sweetest flower by @witch-and-her-witcher. Ambigious canon. Emhyr/Yennefer. 700w. Explicit. Oral sex, cunnilingus, power dynamics. Satisfaction comes when Emhyr relinquishes power.

The way Cee opened up my brain with this ficlet made me gorge myself on everything in the Emhyr/Yen tag after I first read this. The possibilities of this pairing, whew. This ficlet sdlfjasldfkjasldfkjasl.

Quills by @bittydragon. Game canon. Emhyr/Geralt. 7500w. Teen. PTSD, Flashbacks, nonsexual touch. Emhyr can feel the quills and claws growing from underneath his skin again. It’s only a matter of time before they burst out—so it’s lucky that a witcher has ended up in his rooms.

There’s so much great Emhyr/Geralt fic out there, and I’m such a fan of this one because of Geralt managing to soothe Emhyr during an anxiety attack.

Animal Symbiosis by @seventfics. Game canon. Emhyr/Dandelion. 3400w. Teen. Soul bond, Fake/pretend relationship. An emperor and a bard accidentally tie their souls together.

I can’t get enough of where sevent’s ideas take me. This pairing sounds wild on the surface and it is but I am so fucking compelled by the dynamic, esp when it’s been an accidental bonding.

Wild Hunt

Schneeweißblind by jo_writes_fic. Game canon. Emhyr/Eredin. 2200w. Explicit. Temperature play, political sex, unsafe sex. Pre-TW3. Eredin’s been coming to Emhyr’s temporary court in Vizima for several months now, about once a fortnight. At first it was to weasel information out of Emhyr, to try and find Cirilla, but the elf quickly learned that Emhyr knew less than the king of the wild hunt himself about his daughter’s whereabouts. And once he realized that, their meetings turned into the pretence of a tentative political alliance to cover up the carnal truth of what really happens when Eredin deigns to visit. Ice magic and masochist Emhyr.

My brain whited out from how brilliant this fic is and I think it changed my brain for the hornier.

Plaything by @eatingcroutons. Game canon. Geralt/Wild Hunt. 100 words. Explicit. Rape. Voyeurism. Eredin and his Riders enjoy making use of Geralt in their down time.

😈😈😈

Outplayed by zemyr. Game canon. Geralt/Wild Hunt. 100 words. Explicit. Rape, size difference. Remix of crou’s Plaything.

🔥🔥🔥 This drabble lives rent free in my brain.

Commander’s Discretion by @witch-and-her-witcher. Game canon. Eredin/Geralt. 100 words. Explicit. Anal fingering. Eredin has a soft spot for pretty, lethal things under his possession.

😳 Cee still making me go wild with this drabble.

Radovid

Spymasters and secrets by @dancingwiththefae. Show canon. Radovid. Radovid/Dijkstra. 3400w. Explicit. BDSM, daddy kink, impact play. Radovid always pushed and pushed Dijkstra. Sometimes he needed to be put in his place.

Faye serving up a heaping mess of with this messy messy Radovid with Dijkstra. I could have put this in the Dijkstra section but ahhhh I wanted it here with the Radovid fic. 🔥

Villains Aren’t Born, They’re Made by ALJordan. Game canon. Radovid/OC, Radovid & Philippa. Mother/son relationship. A storm counts omens as Radovid hunts Philippa Eilhart to stand trial for treason.

The worldbuilding with the OC and vibes and characterizations in this fic are outstanding.

The Shade of Your Eyes by @kuwdora. Game canon Radovid & Philippa. Post game, canon AU. Body horror, existentialism, magical theory as torture. He remembers the weight of the crown that used to sit upon his head but he doesn’t remember his own name. Anger and resentment curdles because he cannot recall his mother’s face or the last food he ate before he died but he knows the source his ire. It originates from the woman who chortles when she sits at the table. Her laugh stokes the rage in his disembodied soul.

Philippa tortures Radovid’s soul. Radovid POV. I couldn’t help but play around with the darkfic idea for Phil getting some revenge.

Don't worry I have a whole other stack of Philippa fic to rec later.

Dijkstra

You Seem To Enjoy The Feeling by galactic_roses. Game canon. Dijkstra/Gaunter. 2800w. Explicit. Dijkstra has made a deal with a merchant of sorts in exchange for something he values above all else: information. However, the price he has to pay is not quite what he was expecting, and now he has to face the consequences of his words. Sharing a body, smut, body horror, some more tags,

My favorite tag from the author: dijkstra is an adult he can enter into a sus contract with a sort of demon man if he wants to. This is like the most galaxy brained rare pair idea and can’t stop thinking about it when I consider rare pairs that changed my brain.

Diagram: Master’s Weapon Repair Kit by butt_muncher_seven. Game canon. Dijkstra/Geralt. D/s, PWP, 2500w. Djikstra knew men the way Geralt knew monsters; how to kill them, how to hunt them, what their motivations were, what they were going to do next. And in Geralt he saw a man about to do something incredibly rash and self-destructive. A normal man would've gone home, drunk himself stupid and got in a fist fight with the nearest person he could beat. Maybe he'd recover, maybe he'd burn his life down around him, because the chaos of such upheaval was worse than the certainty of reprisals, of consequences. It was the kind of thing a skilled spymaster knew how to counteract proactively. For a less valuable player he had less personal means of redress, but for Geralt… Geralt required a personal touch.

This Dijkstra fic is my everything and I fling the link to anyone I can because it’s so fucking good.

Hostages by @limerental. Isengrim/Dijkstra. Book canon. 26k. Mature. Rescue missions, fairy tale elements. When Isengrim Faoiltiarna's commando is taken captive by the Aen Elle, Sigismund Dijkstra must play unlikely hero in order to come to his rescue.

Lim’s written so much great Isengrim/Dijkstra that I want to rec it all but if you are a fan of some plot and amazing storytelling, hostages is a great gateway. Click to see Dijkstra’s feelings for Isengrim as he mounts a rescue for his old elven husband.

He Comes With Gifts by @bittylildragon. Game canon. Dijkstra/Geralt. 4800w. Explicit. Slice of Life, King Dijkstra, snarky Geralt, PTSD and more. A little slice of life with King Dijkstra and his sometimes-resident witcher boyfriend.

I live for bratty snarky Geralt and Dijkstra putting him in his place. It’s fucking delicious and hot.

Bath by GilliganGoodfellow. Dijkstra and Bart. 1200w. Mature. Fluff and humor, slice of life. Dijkstra gets a relatively good idea of how his evening is going to go when, while descending into the basement to check on his troll, he slips on the ladder.

I can’t help but love anything with Bart and Dijkstra and this is so cute and lovely.

Bloody little beast by @gleaming_silence. Game canon. 100 words. Gen. Domestic Gruff. Dijkstra with a kitten. Even after Geralt broke his other leg, daily life goes on for Sigi Reuven and Novigrad’s underworld never sleeps.

This fic was written for me so I love it. Cutest drabble for a Novigrad crime lord.

Degradation for degradation by @limerental. Book canon. 1700w. Explicit. Geralt/Dijkstra. Humiliation, facials. Over a decade later, Dijkstra finally has the opportunity to repay the humiliation Geralt subjected him to in the wake of the Thanned coup. He doesn't expect both of them to like it so much.

I can’t get enough of this Geralt and Dijkstra dynamic. Eating it up with a spoon and always wanting more.

Vilgefortz

The Need For Love, Revolting by ptork66. Show canon. Rience/Vilgefortz. 2200w. Explicit. Dubcon, posessive sex, choking, drugging, bdsm. Vilgefortz wants to consume Rience like Rience’s fire consumes the air.

🔥🔥🔥 Fucked up fic for a fucked up pairing. All the kuwdos from me.

the mirror man by seasofglass. Show canon. Rience/Vilgefortz, 12,000w. Mature. Canon divergence, d/s, manipulation. When a mysterious benefactor frees Rience from prison after the fall of Cintra, he decides to play along in his dangerous game and try to further gain Vilgefortz' favor. Little did he know that playing with fire was the fastest way to also get burned by it.

This is a messy intense look at Rience getting swept up in Vilgefortz’ plans. The shaving scene drives me up the wall in the best way. I love me posessive fuckedupness in this pairing.

Yours, lock and key by zemyr. Ambiguous canon. 100w. Explicit. Rience/Vilgefortz. Master/Servant, magical sex toys. prompt: possessiveness kink deluxe while fucking.

Zemyr’s fic melts my brain in the best way, and the drabbles are 100 words of hotness.

Staves by @sassaffrassa. Show canon. Geralt/Vilgefortz. 100w. Explicit. Object insertion. inappropriate use of vilgefortz's magical staff.

😈 This drabble gets me cackling.

Ouroboros by @kuwdora. Show/book canon blend. Geralt/Vilgefortz. 20,000w. Explicit. Show/book canon blending, fanon continental art history, illusions, sexual fantasy, dubcon, masturbation, d/s, body worship. Geralt turns Vilgefortz proposition down at Thanedd. Vilgefortz makes a Geralt painting and masturbates to it and it spirals into an elaborate sexual fantasy.

Okay this is the fic that ate my brain while writing it last summer. It has layers of book and show references, literary inversions and way too many metaphors.

You know that tumblr post "you're so obsessed with imagery and symbolism, you stupid homo"? That's this me with this fic, lmao.

So come for 20k of Vilgefortz wanking to the Geralt fantasy in his head. Warning that the fic seemed to have driven the 8 people who managed to read and finish it and sounded insane after reading so take it with a horny grain of salt.

Previously on Kuwdora's Witcher Recs:

Istredd Recs

❤️❤️❤️

[jennapancake]

Love Made Me Crazy pt. 2

Part 2 of 2

Luke Castellan x Aphrodite!Reader

Summary: Luke would do anything to win you back and I mean anything.

Warnings: Use of y/n, Dark Luke?, pet names, pining, not proof-read, indications of kidnapping.

A/n: Thank you for the support I got on the first part. This did not come out how I wanted it to but I'm still decently happy with it. I've been enjoying the chance to finally post on Tumblr after being scared to the last 5 months so thank you all for reading!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Luke Castellan was not one to give up on the girl of his dreams and that was blatantly obvious at this point.

It had been a week. A week since I broke Luke Castellans heart and a week since I did everything in my power to avoid the boy at all costs. But my efforts proved futile.

For the last week, Luke has done everything in his power to get my attention. He's gone from tracking me down to every place I could possibly be to try to talk, to giving my siblings and friends letters and gifts in order to reach me.

Even one night pulling a cliché movie trick and standing outside of my cabin with a boombox on his shoulder. In the rain. Yelling love proclamations. It was two in the morning.

But still I prevailed at ignoring him and fighting off the worst heartbreak of my entire life.

Because eventually Luke stopped pining after me. Or at least I thought he had until, Luke Castellan decided the end of our relationship wasn't it for him.

The cute letters and gifts, the constant tracking me down just to try to sweet talk me into getting back together changed and so drastically I didn't even see it coming.

Eventually I would notice the boy following me everywhere and I mean everywhere and yes that was normal for Luke after the breakup but the look in his eyes was something different than usual. It was dark and I couldn't tell if the boy wanted to kill me or kiss me. If I wasn't trying my best to stay away before I definitely was now.

But once again my efforts were futile.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Luke's POV from the night of the breakup.

"Y/n!" I called, chasing after the girl as she ran away from me in tears. "Y/n please!" But my yelling and chasing was no use, she had reached her cabin.

My heart crumbled at the loss of her. I just don't understand. What did I do wrong? We were doing so good. Maybe I didn't give her enough attention because of counselor duties?

That's the only possible solution I could come up with. I'll prove to her I can give her the attention she deserves and we'll get back together. 𝑰 𝒘𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒆 𝒉𝒆𝒓.

So for the next week, Luke Castellan planned the most adorable ideas he could come up with to give you attention.

Writing love notes until his hands were sore, sneaking out of camp late at night just to go find you gifts, and memorizing your schedule just so he could walk you places and try to talk to you about the situation at hand.

But no matter what Luke did you still avoided him. You still acted as if you were strangers and nothing like the lovers you had been for so long before.

He couldn't understand.

He wouldn't accept it.

"Why? Why won't she even look at me" He yelled, pacing around the forest. "I'm doing everything in my power to win her back and she can't even acknowledge me?!" The tears filled his eyes as the anger rose inside of him.

"Were meant to be she can't just throw that- away" The boy yelled once more, throwing a punch at a poor tree nearby. "She needs to know she can't throw that away." The look on Luke's face was menacing. Not the Luke you knew before and I doubt he ever would be again.

For the next three days Luke planned and plotted. New ideas forming in Luke's head of all the reasons you didn't want him. All the reasons he couldn't allow you to leave. You said you'd love him forever. He decided he'd give you a few days of your peace before his plans came to play.

The boy started small, following you everywhere. No one would touch you, anyone near you would be...let's say dealt with. No more boys will be around his girl, that's for sure.

Next step was leaving you more gifts, except these were different. They ranged from pictures of you that you didn't know were taken and signed with creepy notes from the boy. "𝙔𝙤𝙪'𝙧𝙚 𝙨𝙤 𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙘𝙧𝙮. 𝘿𝙤𝙣'𝙩 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙧𝙮 𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡, 𝙄'𝙡𝙡 𝙖𝙡𝙬𝙖𝙮𝙨 𝙗𝙚 𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙣 𝙖𝙛𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮𝙤𝙣𝙚 𝙚𝙡𝙨𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙜𝙤𝙣𝙚." It was a photo of you crying the night before in the woods behind your cabin and while the note might have been cute at some point, to you it felt quite ominous and creepy.

The last straw was when you woke up from your much needed beauty sleep to the sound of your window opening. Just as you opened your eyes you saw the dark curly hair of the boy you loved, ominously staring at you. Yet before you could scream the boy lunged at you, a hand covering your mouth as he shook his head, raising his other hands to his lips in a shushing motion.

"Be quiet for me, love. Wouldn't want me to have to take out your whole cabin now would we?" The smirk that displayed itself on Luke's features at the thought of destroying your siblings was enough for you to comply.

"Good girl." He whispered, removing his hand from your mouth and placing it gently on your cheek. "Now darling let's go somewhere more private. Where we can finally get the chance to....discuss somethings." The pause in his sentence only drew fear in you. Something you had been feeling more lately in his presence instead of the safety you once felt.

Yet you complied and followed the boy out of your cabin and through the woods. Even if you wanted to run you can't, the boys arm was possessively wrapped around your shoulders, forcing you to continue your steps.

Once you reached a clearing the boy let up and took a few steps away, his back facing you. "You know, darling, if you wanted me to give you attention all you had to do was ask. You didn't have to start something like this." The tone of Luke's voice was dark, it sent a shiver down your spine or maybe the shiver was from the cold air hitting your bare arms. Not having time or the courage to grab a jacket on your way out of your cabin.

"Luke I-" You started only for Luke to cut you off. "I just don't understand, sweetheart. You know I love you. I've loved you since the moment I stepped into camp and yet you do this to me. You break my heart without an answer. After were finally together." He scoffed "and then you act as if we weren't even friends the next day. You wouldn't even acknowledge me....YOU WOULDN'T EVEN LOOK AT ME." Luke shouted as he turned around, pointing at his chest, tears in his eyes prominent in the moonlight.

"Luke I'm sorry-" Luke shook his head "No, sweetheart. You don't get to be sorry after this. You're going to have to make it right." The boy continued to take long strides closer to you. "You're going to have to come back to me. You're going to see were meant to be together whether you like it or not."

"Luke I can't be with you-" and once more the boy cut you off before you can explain your mother's rules. Although now you wonder if your mother's tragedy will be the one to kill you or if Luke will. "You have no choice, y/n."

"Please Luke just listen to me." I said quickly, backing up as the boy stepped closer to me, long quick strides and the most evil look adorning those eyes of the boy I once 𝒍𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒅.

But it didn't matter anymore because he was no longer the Luke I fell in love with. He was crazy. That was my lost thought as I turned to run only to be pulled back and my vision to fade, Luke's voice being the last thing I heard.

"Don't blame me, love made me crazy."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[theapangea]

Two First Dates - Part 1

Chapter Title: The Set Up

Pairing/Characters: Steve Harrington x Reader, Eddie Munson x Reader

Word Count: 2205

Summary: After hearing about your date with Eddie Munson, Steve decides to finally ask you out. 

Warning: None.

A/N: A series I wrote a while ago but finally moving it over to Tumblr! Enjoy my loves!

*Also posted on AO3: theapangea*

Part 2 | Part 3

Masterlist <3

Today was weirdly peaceful. Normally, Fridays are busy but today seemed oddly quiet. There were no last minute dads getting off of work trying to figure out which children’s movie to rent or a couple wondering what movie would be good background noise for their make out session. 

The day mostly consisted of you and Steve doing your job’s mundane duties. To be honest, it was a little tense between the two of you lately. Nothing in particular stuck out in your mind, but it seemed like Steve didn’t want to talk to you at all. You would notice that his eyes would linger just a bit too long and he would avoid any and all situations that involved talking to you. Something was bugging him and you just decided to leave it at that. 

You spent most of the day rewinding tapes, stocking, and ignoring Steve. He seems to always spend his days the same, trying to get a date. He hasn’t been all that lucky since high school and sometimes you kind of felt bad for him. He would go out with any girl who happened to say yes to his boyish charm yet come in the next day complaining about their horrible date and her horrible kissing.

You didn’t want to hear about Steve's excuse for a dating life. Not because it wasn’t funny as hell to see him struggle to keep a girlfriend, but because you were somewhat jealous of the other girls he would give his attention to. You wouldn’t dare to ever say this outloud, but Steve was definitely someone you have a major crush on. 

If you are a girl from Hawkins, you have had a crush on Steve Harrington at some point in your life. Your crush just seemed to never dissipate. 

“You’re really going on a date with Eddie Munson?” Steve basically shouted from behind the counter, pulling you from your mindless thoughts.

You look over the rack of movies in front of you, your hands automatically fixing them as you respond, “What…” you pause for a brief moment, “how did you hear about that?”

“Robin.” He chuckled. He couldn’t believe that you would go on a date with that loser willingly.

“It’s none of your business Steve.” You groan while putting another tape onto the shelf. It was true though, you were going on a date with Eddie Munson tonight but you didn’t want Steve’s opinion about the matter.

“It is when you’re going out with that freak.” He cringes at the thought of you and Eddie Munson actually going on a date. You groan in frustration at his comment. Vowing now to never listen to Steve Harrington ever again. 

You put a couple more tapes on the shelf. You could feel his presence next to you before he states, “I didn’t even think he was your type.” It was almost like he was intentionally trying to stand too close. 

“What exactly do you think my type is Steve?” You questioned. 

Steve instantly stands up a little straighter, pulling his vest down a bit. Clearly indicating that he was your type. Where would he even get that idea? You never said anything to anybody about your crush on Steve. Do you think he knows? Do you think he is playing with you to make you confess that you are in love with him?

“You wish,” you scoff at his inaudible comment and push past him. To be honest, you wished you could build up the courage to tell Steve how you really felt. This whole love-hate friendship thing that has been going on for the past couple of months has been torture. You loved the teasing and the way he would wear that cocky smile after a snarky remark made you want to kiss him even more. But you never got the feeling that he felt the same way.

“Come on, go out with me tonight.” He follows closely behind. His request sends shivers down your spine. The words you always wanted to hear were now being spoken yet at the worst possible time in your life. Fuck Steve Harrington for always having the worst timing. 

“You can’t just now ask me on a date because you know I am going out with Eddie.” You turn around to face hime, pointing out his obvious intentions. “Also, you should ask me out because you want to not because it’s to stop me from dating Eddie.” You add, your eyes meeting his and suddenly his presence feels extremely close.

You can see he was examining your face. Examining what you were actually thinking and wanting to take all of you in. You were standing so close that you could see the same razor scars that lined his chin. You could see the slight emptiness in his eyes and the pressure of growing up too fast. 

Your mind racing with all the things you wanted to say to him but never got the chance. Let’s face it, you were so small compared to what he had to offer. You turn back around before he could read too much further into the obvious expression on your face. Your safety behind the counter and computer couldn’t have come quicker. The soft clicking sound of your fingertips typing away filled the small store. 

Steve huffs, his forearms resting on top of the counter, “Y/N, I do want too. Plus you will have way more fun with me anyways.” He adds, his puppy dog eyes tearing a piece of your heart away as you try to stay mad but can’t.

You could feel yourself giggling at his remark. Damn Steve. He had this way of getting under your skin yet also being able to get himself on your good side. He could talk himself into and out of any situation, especially with you. He knew he had you wrapped around his finger, but instead of actually asking you out on a date he would do anything to stop you from going on them. 

He wasn’t as confident as he wanted the world to view him as. He was lonely and heartbroken. Never fully recovering from dating Nancy Wheeler and never fully recovered from all the rejection since. He went from King Steve of Hawkins High to some unknown dude in the video store. How pathetic, his father always told him. 

But he liked it there, he liked hanging out with Robin…and you. Even though he would never confess actually wanting to hang out with you to your face. You were the reason he wasn’t lonely during the week while Robin was at school. You were the person who laughed at his jokes even if they weren’t that funny. Steve couldn’t believe that he was finally able to ask you out, the only bad part was that you were going on a date with Eddie first. Good job, Steve.

You stop typing for a moment and meet his gaze. His mind was trying to find the right words, any words to save himself.

“Eddie and I have a lot in common, which is why I said yes. Plus he had the guts to actually ask me out.” You confess, your words stinging more than you intended. But you were right, if Steve would have actually asked you out any other time than you would be more than willing to go with him. Hell, he was the one putting you in this situation.

“Fine.” Steve groans, his forehead now resting on the counter. You finally thought that you had won, that he was finally going to leave you alone. You go back to the computer screen, inputting the number on the tape cover.

“But we are going out tomorrow.” He demands. His confidence finally finding its voice. 

You giggle again. How could he be so demanding all the time? How could he just keep asking after you basically said no? “I’m not sure if I’m free.” You pretend to think about his offer when in reality you couldn’t believe that Steve Harrington continued to keep asking you out on a date. You almost had to pinch yourself, really hoping this was not some sort of dream. 

“I know you aren’t.” He wasn’t appeased by the joke, “I am picking you up at 5 tomorrow.” 

“Isn’t that a little early for dinner?” A puzzled look landing on your face.

“5 in the morning, duh.” He clarifies. The smile that formed on his face was unlike any other. You were now this big prize that he has won and he was happy to be able to show you off. The fact that he was finally able to go on a real date with you was amazing and nerve-wrecking.

“Morning?” You repeat as he walks away without another word. Why 5 in the morning? Why in the world would Steve want to even get up that early on a Saturday? You wondered what kind of plans he could possibly have at 5 in the morning. 

It was a little awkward for the rest of your shift together. Steve seemed oddly pleased with himself after your little interaction and you seemed completely torn between these two dates. You didn’t know what to do. On one hand, you were going on a date with someone who has actually made it clear that he wanted to date you. And on the other hand, you are going to go on a date with the literal man of your dreams. 

In a way, you felt guilty. You felt guilty because it felt like you were dragging Eddie into this situation. You knew in your heart that Steve was the one, but you weren’t completely sure if Steve really felt the same way. He could just really not want you to date Eddie and would do anything to stop it. 

Eddie has been asking you out nonstop since sophomore year of high school and Steve never gave you a second look in high school. Steve was one of your best friends and Eddie was someone you lost touch with after graduation.

You couldn’t make a decision between the two of them. How could you? How could you pick between them? You never thought in your small town life that two very attractive men would try and date you around the same time. 

The neverending thoughts of the next 24 hours and your next two dates made the rest of the day go by quickly. You had barely spoken five words to Steve since he asked you out. You were speechless. Absolutely speechless. 

When the clock struck 6pm and it was finally time to go home. You couldn’t help but to try and high tail it out the door without so much as a goodbye to your coworker. Coworker, that’s all he was. He wasn’t your knight in shining armor like you wanted him to be. He was a coworker that you see often and there's nothing much to it. You tried to remind yourself but it just wasn’t working. 

“You still want a ride home?” Steve calls while locking the doors and before you are out of earshot.

You stop before your feet leave the short sidewalk. Contemplating if you still need the ride home. In reality, you do, that was the reason you asked in the first place. But after today and your mind going thousands of miles per an hour, the last place you wanted to be is stuck in a metal box with Steve.

You turn on your heels, knowing that if he drove you home it would give you more time to get ready for your date with Eddie. “Sure” You huff.

“Don’t act so sad.” He opens the car door for you. 

Most of the car ride was silent to say the least. Awkward, yes. Uncomfortable, yes. But you liked driving with Steve. He’s given you a ride home a couple of times and he’s always so talkative. But today was different, he seemed quiet and distant. The radio hummed lowly but the silence was too much to bear. 

“You can still go out tonight with me instead.” He finally breaks the tension, before putting the car in park in front of your house.

You continue to look forward. You could feel his eyes burning a whole into your head, trying to figure out what is going on in your brain. 

“Steve, drop it.” You look over at him, his sight almost taking your breath away, “Besides what if I like Eddie more and just don’t want to go on the date with you tomorrow?” You snark.

“That wouldn’t happen.” Steve rebuttals, knowing damn well that he is right. 

The breathy chuckle escapes your lips as you just cannot believe this day. It was so far away from what you expected that you almost don’t believe you are alive right now. You got out of the car not saying another word. The loud bang of the car door echoing for miles.

“Hey,” He shouts, leaning forward over the passenger seat, “I can’t wait for our date tomorrow.”

You try to conceal the smile that has formed. Damn this day, damn the date, and damn Steve Harrington.

~~

Hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think!! <3

[gunbun]

this post is about the cultural concerns regarding ffxiv: dawntrail

Hi doods. Activism has brushed up against fandom YET AGAIN but this time it punches me straight in the heritage and this time I wanna talk about it.

I'm a non-status Qalipu Mik'maq, for the record. An Indigenous American, if thou wilt.

I discuss some pretty heavy shit below the cut. I pray it persists across all devices. Please advise if you want me to tag this as something, or block the tags I have used. I do not need anyone to spread this on my behalf, I do not need anyone's defense. I just have some thoughts and I want to think them.

So it's been less than 24 hours since Dawntrail was announced and we got the Keynote.

We're going to Fantasy The Americas! Before Industrialization!

Many people went "oh hell yeah, that's Brazil, this is gonna be great! We don't usually see this!"

On Twitter especially, many MORE people lost their goddamn minds, citing CBU3's prior wobbles with depicting foreign/indigenous persons.

And of course, the White Community Leaders are out in force performing pre-emptive outrage or even asking people to quit FFXIV in light of this announcement.

I'm here to ask folks not to do that.

What follows is my tweet-thread about it.

"It is perfectly okay to be waiting and seeing how Tural is going to be portrayed in Dawntrail. It's okay to have a concern.

It is NOT okay to come out preemptively swinging and performing outrage.

Because blood quanta are their own touchy subject I usually don't bring this up, but I am the class of indigenous person what represents "what's left".

And I fucking tell you now I don't need the opinions of Concerned White People.

I do not need Concerned White People telling me what colonialism is.

I do not need Concerned White People telling me to be mad.

I do need Concerned White People to realise that the above two actions are microaggressive as fuuuuck.

"but Jai, aren't you White?"

colonialism and genocide comes in many forms. this includes forcing indigenous persons to assimilate or be killed.

also stuff like reinforcing the idea that being indigenous is shameful so that when their descendants find out, they deny it."

Thus ended my tweet thread. There's one more tweet linking to qalipu.ca.

So I want to write more about this on Tumblr.

I really want to make sure that folks take a hard look at what they're concerned about and why.

Like… a lot of White Concern about the use of indigenous motifs in Dawntrail is itself a brand of anti-indigenous racism.

Thinking that the MSQ is going to automatically be about the Scions starting a colonialism in Tural? That's a pretty gross thing to say in the same breath y'all complain about Always Fantasy Europe.

Calling "cultural appropriation" when everyday items are displayed and depicted in the manner in which they were/are used (gulal, curry)? Way to exoticise foreign and indigenous cultures by thinking that everything they make, wear, use, or eat is something of Deep Cultural Significance that Cannot Ever Be Shared With Outsiders. Saris and salwar kameez are just as culturally significant as skirts and slacks. Moccasins are just shoes.

And moreover, getting preemptively Concerned when thus far THERE IS LITERALLY NO NEED TO BE CONCERNED is actually kind of beyond the pale. I haven't seen many indigenous folks and/or folks from South America being anything but pleased that this time The Americas gets a cool pastiche like Europe, Asia, and India have gotten in the past. There's an undercurrent of "oh no, I hope it's not bad stereotypes" which is ABSOLUTELY OKAY. Reblog and retweet what THOSE people are saying. Do not add commentary.

Preemptively saying "you're worried" about your South American/Indigenous friends with zero indication that they're bothered? Come the actual fuck on. We are not a monolithic group that you can "be concerned" for to get a pat on the back later as a Good Person. Do not Perform the I'm A Good Person And The Worst Thing You Could Do is CALL Me A Racist dance.

Don't "get ahead of the discourse". Not every conversation needs your fucking input. Shut your mouth.

What is and isn't an Offensive Portrayal of Indigenous Americans is a lot more nuanced than most people who like to perform outrage make it out to be.

We can and will speak up for ourselves. Share our words and our concerns if you must. Do not go and distill our words and turn us into the monolith you hide behind to perpetuate white saviourism and neocolonialism.

We aren't a monolith of poor uneducated people who don't understand what the europeans did that need to be uwu protected.

[soleminisanction]

Can you lay out what the problems were with TimSteph relationship (in canon terms)? On both sides. Because I’d like to have something I can point to in reference when people get mad when I say the relationship seemed unhealthy

You'll excuse me if I stick to summary instead of citations, otherwise it'd be way too much for Tumblr; I go into more detail on a lot of these in some of my other posts.

From Tim's side, most of the problems stem from or tie back into a... I almost want to say power dynamic, but I don't think that's entirely right because it's not that he "has power" over Steph, he's not her boss or her superior officer or anything. But he does have legitimacy, experience and acceptance within the sphere of masked superheroes that Steph very much does not (or at least, not while they're romantically involved), and that leaves their relationship imbalanced.

Tim and Steph are both pointedly aware of this, and Tim sometimes holds that over her head, particularly when it's brought up that he knows her secret identity (having figured it out after their first meeting) but she doesn't know his for the longest time. He is also sometimes condescending as a result, though what counts as "condescending" is very much up to interpretation -- like, I don't count him ordering her around while they're on patrol together as "condescending" because he is legitimately the one who knows what he's doing and she is the untrained amateur. That to me is like claiming it's "condescending" for an EMT to order around some rando with basic first aid training when trying to save someone's life.

Then there's the complication with Tim's need to keep secrets and compartmentalize his civilian life away from his superhero one. The rule about Batman forbidding the secret ID sharing was added after Zero Hour to up the drama a bit, but the core of the issue was originally all Tim. He had a psychological need to keep the two parts of his life separate, and that required keeping big secrets about his true identity and forced him to keep Steph at arm's length. He knew everything about her, but she knew basically nothing about him, and that's not a recipe for a healthy relationship.

Though, to be fair, Tim himself was very aware of this, which is why, right at the beginning of their relationship, he laid all of that out for her in explicit terms and made it clear that he thought the two of them getting together was a bad idea for that reason. And Steph told him that she was okay with that and wanted to try anyway, explicitly agreeing to allow him the boundary of keeping his identity.

Which is why it's such a problem that she goes back on that and starts going behind his back to uncover his secret identity for herself, in plain violation of the boundary she agreed to. Like, that's the thing that makes it actually bad for me -- if she wasn't involved with him and didn't know the penalty he'd suffer for breaking the rule, it'd be one thing, but the fact that she not only knew but made a verbal agreement to respect her boyfriend's wishes and went back on it, that's the thing that makes it a relationship deal-breaker for me. Especially because once she finally does find out, her reaction is to mock him, so delighted that she's getting one over on him that she's completely oblivious to the near-panic attack he's having as a result; that doesn't indicate that she cares much about his feelings or well-being.

This isn't the first or the last time that Steph will make a verbal agreement that she has no intention of keeping, either -- that's what got her fired from Robin. Tim might keep secrets and have to lie about his activities as a result, but Steph is actively deceitful, you can't trust her word, she'll tell you what you want to hear, do whatever she wants anyway, and then be offended when you try to hold her to the terms of the agreement she knowingly made.

And she assumes that the people around her, including Tim, are going to be the same way, which means that she's also intensely jealous. If Tim so much as mentions that he knows another girl, Steph immediately assumes that he's cheating on her and lashes out in a rage, refusing to talk it out with him and focusing instead on getting revenge on him -- she does this at least twice.

Steph is also very willing to hurt Tim (and other people, but Tim gets the brunt of it) to get what she wants. She wants Batman's approval and attention, so when she comes back from faking her death and he (in the midst of outside manipulation in the lead-up to Final Crisis) tells her to test Tim first by stalking him, then by hiring an assassin to attack him, and then by working with one of his arch-nemeses to challenge him, she goes along with it without a second thought.

And then she refuses to apologize or even acknowledge responsibility for any of it, blaming other people (mostly Batman) and acting like she didn't have a choice or any agency, in spite of half her characterization being built around telling Batman to go fuck himself. More often than not, she bullies Tim into apologizing to her for being upset about the thing that hurt him in the first place.

Also: Steph hits her boyfriends. She has dated two men and has been shown hitting them both, not in the acceptable context of training or a superhero throw-down, but because they made her angry and she wanted to shut them up. Sometimes it's played as a joke, sometimes for drama, sometimes it's an Empowering Feminist Moment, but it's always bullshit because it's never portrayed as a bad thing.

There's also a subjective argument to be made that she is emotionally abusive, using insults disguised as mean-spirited "jokes" to cut down her partner's self-esteem and bully him into doing what she wants. In a similarly subjective space, it's very easy to argue that their relationship began with a good 50 issues of Robin full of Steph sexually harassing Tim, forcing kisses, physical affection and pick-up lines on him even while he repeatedly asked her to stop.

Tim did "start it" by kissing her, once, while deprived of oxygen, in thanks for saving him from suffocation, but for a long while after, every time she tried something like that, he would ask her to stop.... and she wouldn't, laughing off his protests and insisting that he wanted it in a very, "your mouth says no but your body says yes" rape culture kinda way. Which then brings us back around to the lack of respect she has for Tim's boundaries, which is really the heart of the problem on her part of the relationship.

---

TL;DR -- From Tim's side, the issue is mostly that he has a status over her that he wants to maintain that keeps their relationship unbalanced. From Steph's, the issues stem from a lack of respect for her partner's boundaries, which extends to some controlling and arguably abusive tendencies.

And that's not even getting into the very subjective interpretation that Tim might not even be attracted to Steph at all, he just feels compelled to have a girlfriend so he doesn't have to confront how deep in the closet he is and thus gives in after she makes it clear she won't take no for an answer. But like I said, that one's super subjective and up to interpretation.

[megabuild]

genuinely very sorry if this is unwelcome discourse but i was just thinking about the discussions about secret life and wild life feeling so vastly different from the other series (due to the gimmicks and all) and how much of the fanbase has expressed discontent with it and it all makes me wonder what kind of decisionmaking happened in the planning and the background — i say this specifically bc it’s all been making me wonder if the shift to more ~gimmicks instead of player interacrions as a means to move the “plot” forward was something that was a strategy consciously and actively decided on? like it makes me wonder if grian/the other ccs/whoever were feeling like it was getting harder to maintain viewer momentum in a medium like the life series because of knowing just how much of an emphasis the audience places on mundane words and conversation if that makes sense. even if /we/ know the fandom would never get tired of overanalyzing that stuff. like i wonder if the shift to gimmicks was intended to provide a crutch of sorts to give the ccs more of something to work with to make content, instead of consistently feeling like they’re trying to squeeze interesting and dramatic content out of being on a minecraft server with their friends, which i feel like could be an understandable worry after so many seasons of the same? does any of this make sense im mostly just pondering aloud, do you have any thoughts? obviously everything in the world can be infinitely nuanced and i don’t necessarily agree w the logic if that is the case but idkkkkk i hope the ccs are truly just having fun with their friends if nothing else

not unwelcome at all, and i agree with a lot of what you've said but i do think you're falling into the same trap a lot of people discussing this series do, which is that you have put the focus entirely on the fandom space you (and i) engage with, when in actual fact, that's only a small section of the people the ccs are trying to please. the gimmickification of recent seasons could be in part a response to fandom's interpretation of events (because we know some CCs feels the need to deal with this- see sos amp's "lore ban" and the resulting backlash) but i think it's far more likely an attempt at dealing with youtube's push for content-heavy videos.

this also sort of ties into the idea of "so much of the fanbase" disliking yesterday's session, which i'm guilty of falling into the trap of too, as i said my dash was very divided. but any one of our dashes isn't a great indicator of what the majority are feeling, just like hate posts on reddit or children misunderstanding roleplay in youtube comments aren't. i follow around 700 accounts on here- say even half of those are life series fans, and a further half of that expressed discontent with wild life. that's around 200 people. if you look at the most popular posts in the tag and the amount of followers some tags have, there's about 10k people on tumblr who are fans of the series (likely more, but that's the best i can estimate). the subreddit has 30k+ members. grian's first episode this season got two million views. the criticism coming from some parts of the fandom here is definitely worthwhile and much of it is well founded but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be reflective of the vast majority of watchers- and again, many of these watchers don't actually care that much about story, roleplay, or game "fairness", and will just be watching casually as entertainment.

[tgmsunmontue]

What to write weekend...?

Friday afternoon again, start of my weekend (although, I schedule this post, so I am usually still working when this appears). I've got my usual adulthood stuff happening over on main. It's nowhere near as interesting or fun as deciding what fics people would like me to dedicate some words towards them this weekend.

NUMBERS:

Online and Anonymous - 7/16 Hangster who are anonymous Grindr buddies for YEARS. (Tumblr post)

Sagas of Solitude 5/? - IceMav with side Hangster AU - angsty Nepo!Baby

CURRENT LETTERS:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K... Bingo #1, Bingo #2

A) Where do I know you from? There are too many Jakes and Bradleys for Jake and Bradley to be dealing with. (Tumblr idea unspooling here...)

B) Bradshaw Twins - Hangster (Tumblr post)

C) To wake, perchance to dream - Jake wakes up in the future, gets a glimpse of what their life could be and then wakes up back right before being called back to Top Gun for the special detachment (e.g. TGM). (Tumblr post and the beginning of the fic)

D) Together or not at all... (SEQUEL) - Hangster - years after Javy/Nat get together they think their best friends (Hangman and Rooster) could maybe try dating each other. It'll either end in disaster or not.

E) Cyclone/Maverick - Cyclone is struggling to deal with being attracted to the most annoying person he's ever met. Why does he like him so much?

F) Hangster twins - quick-fic with version two from here: (Tumblr post)

G) Celebrity Chef Bradley

H) Getting to know you from the beginning - an Ice/Mav epistolary fic where Jake and Bradley matchmake them, not realising exactly who it is they've matched together.

I) Life is too short to waste time matching socks... 3/? The peach and eggplant socks as an anonymous gift as an incredibly unsubtle hint that someone would like to fuck them. (tumblr idea unspooling here...)

J) Barista Jake who cannot spell Bradley's name. (HERE)

K) Caring, Keeping and Collecting Transformers - A Guide - Transformers cross-over for help me yeagrave is 110% to blame for me adding this... (related to this post) (Prologue)

BINGO #1 - Hangster Ranch AU

BINGO #2 - IceMav Florist/Undercover Agent AU

You pick 1-3 of the above and either:

reply

Message

Send an ask (Anon is on)

with the letters/Numbers of the fic/s you wish would hurry up and get finished/posted already. (Yes, you can pick the same one three times - some of these fics are that close to getting parts/chapters finished that would be enough to tip them over, you also don't have to pick more than one).

Numbers indicate fics I am consciously working on updating/completing, and likely have a completion date in mind.

Letters are fics that are often getting completed because people ask for me to work on them through things like this. (I usually do this every weekend).

Doing this keeps me on task and makes me accountable. It stops me from procrastinating and I really appreciate people providing their numbers.

THANK YOU!

I am going to make a prediction that people will want "Online and Anonymous" and "Where Do I know you from?" more than any other of the other fics...

[torchickentacos]

You’re not being annoying about ships though, your contestshipping thoughts are consistently one of my Tumblr highlights. Thank you for still being in the Pokémon anime trenches in 2k24, your honor.

Anon, I love you. I would die for you. I would do anything for you. Just for you I'm going to pledge to talk about them more often!!! You have enabled me and I will expand on my thoughts on those tags here ❤️🌹 also god djfhdkjn I don't think I can get out of the trenches 😭 I'm just stuck here lmao. I couldn't leave if I tried. May and Drew are holding me hostage, actually. He's got a knife (because May can't be trusted with sharp objects).

Anyways. referenced post:

EXPANDING MY THOUGHTS:

So, disclaimer, these are all my opinions, and while they're rooted in canon, I'm also just doing whatever I want. As I do. Also, my opinions change all the time and I have infinite versions of how I think they'd play out in a canon context, but here's the one that I'm feeling today lol.

I think that 'falling first' versus 'falling harder' really isn't an indicator of any sort of emotional inequality. I can see where 'fell harder' might indicate to some people that there's a sense of one character being down worse than the other, but honestly I always took it as 'which character gets hit in the face by it at random (harder) and which character has been living with it for years (faster)'.

Like, okay. I think that in a few years past canon, 15-16 years old (which is the absolute earliest that I can see the two of them figuring it out honestly), here's the deal: For Drew, being in love is just a fact of daily life at that point. Even in canon it seems to have been that way. Just a quiet thing that followed him around, a constant little spark. I like to think that they travel together as friends for a while, and it's, like, 'he makes breakfast, he trains his pokemon, he plans their itinerary, he's madly in love, they buy supplies for the week-' etc. It's just... there. He's aware of it and probably largely ignores it after a point. Like, it's just become a fact. He has green hair, he has green eyes, he's in love, he has a Roserade, he wears weird pants. It's a part of him- not a defining feature, but a feature nonetheless. It's not who he is, but it's part of the mosaic. He fell first and he's been on the ground waiting ever since, and he's probably kind of emo and very... Drew about it sometimes (/lh), but largely, he just lives with it.

For May, it's probably more like... okay, hear me out on this. Once, I got a large 2-inch shard of glass in the side of my foot, and I didn't notice until I saw the blood that I'd trailed on the kitchen tile. It didn't hurt. I didn't feel it. I had no idea somehow, but it was still there. It only felt like it was there once I noticed it, there was this weird psychosomatic type of thing that happened. I think for May, it's like that. It didn't come on suddenly, it was always there, she just noticed it suddenly and that's what causes the feelings to hit. It's falling hard and all at once (but also it's been there for so long). It's vertigo and disorientation as your entire view of a person shifts into where it belongs. Nothing's changed, it's always been that way, but you see it for what it is now. Everything falls into place, but it's still a hard, sudden fall. I think she lands on her feet, though.

That is what I mean when I say that I think that Drew fell first but May fell harder. Drew fell first and he knew it the entire time. I think that he was able to call it what it was pretty quickly. He recognized it and acted on it in his weird little idiosyncratic ways and just lived with it. May, however, probably doesn't realize until some random moment, some everyday occurrence, and it hits her like a truck. Ford F150. Chevrolet Silverado. Dodge ram. What other trucks do I know from country music and car commercials??? Anyways, it's this sudden, jarring, off-kilter kind of realization, I'd imagine. Just a 'wait, holy shit' kind of moment where it all falls into place.

[birgitte-on-fridays]

We need to stop fighting.

So I just joined tumblr (kind of, I've had this account for a while but I've never been active before. All that is beside the point though.) I knew tumblr was having some... issues but I really just needed to get off reddit for the sake of my own mental health.

Anyway, I got here and, pardon my language, what the fuck is happening?

I've seen posts by transfemmes accusing transmascs of being part of the mass reporting effort that got predstrogen banned. I've seen posts by transmascs accusing trasfemmes of not believing that transmascs suffer transandrophobia/transmisandry (I'm not entirely sure of the nuance in how the two terms differ.) It makes me really sad to see the community split like this, especially so soon after Nex Benedict's murder.

However, I haven't actually seen anything that would indicate that either transfemmes' or transmascs' fears about the other have any solid foundation. So why is this happening? I think I have an explanation. It's TERFs.

See, when I was first getting my bearings here on tumblr, I stumbled across a post from a TERF blog. I quickly blocked the blog, but I remember what it said well enough. As TERFs tend to do, the post infantalized transmascs and villainized transfemmes, insinuating that this recent infighting was caused by transmascs coming to some sort of realization that transfemmes are somehow tricking them into being trans. This is obviously super gross and transphobic, but more to the point, the blog was celebrating. The TERFs are happy about this conflict, which leads me to believe that they are the ones who created it in the first place.

I don't have any concrete proof for this, so feel free to call me crazy, but I'm going to walk you through my thought process:

predstrogen gets banned, TERFs see that the blame for her ban is largely being placed on them

They see an opportunity and start spreading rumors that transmascs were involved in the mass reporting of predstrogen’s account that led to her being banned from the platform

This leads to discussion among transmascs about transandrophobia

The TERFs again take advantage to make it look like transfemmes are deriding the idea of transandrophobia

The trans community becomes split, the TERFs are happy because they revel in our suffering

Now, for the sake of fairness, let’s say I’m wrong. TERFs had nothing to do with anything. There really were transmascs involved in predstrogen’s . There really were transfemmes harassing transmascs regarding transandrophobia. What does this change? Well, nothing.

These were the actions of individuals, and they are not representative of the groups they are a part of.

Okay, so this was a long post. I don’t have anything insightful to add here at the end. I’ll leave you with this message instead: be kind to each other. Understand that other people have had different experiences than you. Don’t allow yourself to close your little section of the community off from the rest because of the actions of a few individuals.

Oh, and if there are any TERFs still reading this, fuck off. You’re not welcome here.

[joys-of-everyday]

MXTX's women

Let's do ✨discourse™✨

Addendum: I checked out twitter (x now?) for the first time in ages and... um... maybe this isn't a good time for discourse. But hey, I love mxtx so I'm just going to do a Shen Yuan and pretend absolutely everything is fine.

I feel like a lot of the discourse around MXTX and sexism don't hit the mark? Things like 'there are few female characters', 'the female characters die', 'the female characters don't hold positions of power' are not indications as to whether a piece of work standing on its own is sexist. For example, you could write an entire novel about a sexless robot (which miserably fails the Bechdel test because there is only one character) and that says nothing about whether the work itself is sexist. This is an caricature of an example and of course, overall trends give a very different picture to individual works, so its not to take such works off the hook either. Similarly, including sexist troupes isn't inherently sexist, but equally arguing something is a 'critique' isn't a shield against criticism. Critique can be done badly, critique can become outdated, critique itself can be critiqued.

But equally the counterargument to this can't entirely be 'but look at x, y, and z - aren't they great female characters?'. Look, I love mxtx's women. I can write essays (plural) about mxtx's women. Many people already have. Then again, Eowyn from lotr is arguably a pretty deep character, but I would have problems if lotr was the best example of female representation we could come up with. The point being, the existence (or lack thereof) of strong female characters isn't (entirely) the point, even though it's often made out to be. Don't get me wrong, good female representation without strong female characters is... erm... hard. But if it was the crux of the argument, the discourse could be killed in three tumblr posts.

The bigger question(s) (possibly) is: What is its intent? How is that intent received?

SVSSS, MDZS, and TGCF are all extremely different pieces of work. SVSSS in particular stands out, because at its heart, it is satire. While debates around what kind of comedy is and isn't good exist independently of SVSSS, needless to say, judging satire in the same way you would say a murder mystery or a romantic fantasy is not advisable. Sha Hualing is a sexy demon lady whose clothes rip off in the middle of a battle. Why? Because that's saying something about a particular trope of a particular genre.

(Side note: I have opinions on how we shove different BLs together when they really shouldn't be under the same umbrella and how this muddies the discourse unnecessarily. I'm talking about Killing Stalking btw)

For SVSSS, if you get it, you get it (it's impossible to read without understanding this). While some loose threads exist about how female characters could have been more developed... man, do you know how much development my boy Mu Qingfang got? You're not sexist if you punch everyone (only half ironic here). (In terms of character development I also think this might be a fandom thing as well as a SVSSS thing.) But I think more relevantly, SVSSS tells you something about the way MXTX writes critique.

If you didn't notice, SVSSS is critique on two levels. First is the blatant critique of the harem genre, and the second is more subtle critique on BL, on fandoms, on webnovels, on literature. But while we get Shen Qingqiu's commentary guiding us through the first bit, this drops during the second bit. It takes Shen Qingqiu so long to realise that what he's living through is a crazy mishmash of BL tropes that the only narration you get on this is Pure Confusion. To realise Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu's early interactions is commentary on the 'dark and obsessive love' trope, you need to immediately realise that Shen Qingqiu telling you Luo Binghe is trying to kill him is just... Wrong. So (possibly, ofc I've no idea what's going on in the author's head) the intent is critique. But intent is meaningless without it being conveyed to the reader. So how are we meant to 'realise' what is going on?

Firstly, MXTX tells you. Shen Qingqiu goes: 'damn Luo Binghe isn't acting like in those weird danmei novels' and you're meant to go 'oh weird danmei novels I know about those'. Second is her very obvious use of tropes (even flagged!). 'Clothes rip/disappear in the middle of a serious situation, isn't this weird? Where have we seen that before?'. And thirdly, by introducing a sense of absurdity. Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu's relationship is presented in such an unconventional way (the master-disciple pair which generated a famous porno!) that it forces you to engage with it critically.

Okay, so what does that have to do with sexism? Take MDZS. We have a set of very tropey characters - 'the older sister', 'the scary mother', 'the strong independent woman', 'the damsel in distress'. We have explorations and subversions that go beyond tropes: Jiang Yanli's character shaped by her experiences in an abuse household, Yu Ziyuan's pride and loyalty, Wen Qing's well... everything, and Mianmian needs no explanation. We have flags to tell us we are meant to care about these issues: most obviously Mianmian experiencing gendered harassment for speaking up. All the women die! Yeah, isn't that a problem. Because it's the women sacrificing themselves, women silently taking on burdens, women chained by the circumstances of the world around them and still making choices about what is important to them (and it's often not themselves). The women aren't in positions of power/aren't shown to be as competent as the men! They're literally put down when they speak up, and don't the wives have a great time with their husbands. MDZS is critique of society. MDZS's women too are a critique of the society they (we) live in.

But not all critique is good critique! The first way that critique can fail is if it just isn't registered as critique by the reader. And this isn't always on the reader. If the author isn't clear enough on this, then they have failed to execute the intent of their work. And to this extent, I've heard enough people say that MDZS is maybe sexist as a first reaction (myself included) to think that yeah, maybe this wasn't well done. The flags are scarce. The subversions of tropes are subtle enough to be missed in it's entirety. Then again, MDZS often ends up as people's gateway piece into danmei, when it is probably better understood with more context - for me, coming back to MDZS after a big BL reading spree was exceptionally enlightening. As to whether it could have been better done in the bounds of the genre, without detracting from the banging story it was... I honestly don't know.

One way to go about it is, well... TGCF. Here everything is laid out to you to an almost bizarre degree. 'Look, isn't this a Hard Question' the narrative stops to tell you at multiple points, from Bai Wuxiang and Xie Lian's back and forths, to 'I don't know if what I did was right' speeches on a regular basis (maybe not regular but it was enough to notice). The troupes are still there but their twists are far more obvious. Xuan Ji is the 'deranged woman' who is (we are told multiple times) surprisingly normal and competent when she isn't around Pei Ming. Yushi Huang and Banyue are just obviously strong, competent, and in positions of power. Shi Qingxuan shines in all of her wonder, kindness, and unfortune. The flags are more glaring as well: Just Pei Ming's Existence, Ling Wen's whole backstory, Jian Lan's tragedy... And it probably worked? Since people seem to complain significantly less about any supposed sexism of TGCF.

Do I like it? I like elements of it. Ling Wen is honestly great.

But I love the subtlety with which MDZS weaves its themes and tbh I think some of the magic was lost there. (I love TGCF to bits for different reasons but yeah)

Does MXTX's writing of women merit discussion? Of course, everything merits discussion. Particularly MXTX's works which rely so heavily on genre tropes to craft themes. Is MXTX's work sexist? Idk, I would say no, but these things are Hard Questions.

But my feeling? My true feeling? At the very least, it is So. Much. Better. than a huge amount of work that tries to be feminist and pitifully fails.

My current pet peeve is the 'strong independent woman'. Depicting a sexist society then including a 'strong independent women' with no true appreciation of the realistic struggles she would face, as if the only barriers that we face within these societies is to stop being a loser... is worse in my books than not including any women at all. Or 'strong independent women' who turn out to be utterly pathetic and in constant need of saving. Or 'strong independent women' who have no other personality than being the 'strong independent woman'. The intent here is to come across as feminist and progressive without critically engaging in anything. It's paper thin.

Ultimately, the core theme of MDZS and TGCF isn't about women's experiences (whereas SVSSS is, I would argue, right into the nooks and crannies). Do these works explore such themes to the extent it explore privilege, conflict, and oppression? Not really. But you can't do everything - the role of an author is inherently about choosing what to prioritise. And given what it does do, I think it does some pretty neat things.

[kenzietensei]

Thoughts on sweet pool

So, I installed this game on my laptop a couple years ago, and only played about an hour into it at the time. This past week I was dogsitting and my laptop was with me, so I thought to play through the various endings of sweet pool.

I'd gotten the game because I read a tumblr post about the history of omegaverse, and I thought it would be interesting to see the origin of some of those tropes. I'm not into omegaverse, though I've read one or two fics using that setup. I'm not really into BL either, and most visual novels I've played have been otome or mystery stories. Also not a fan of gore or horror! So, uh, really not the audience for this title XD

Even so, I found the game compelling and it's been rotating in my brain the last few days since I got through the whole thing. There are a couple points in which I think my perspective might be unique so I figured I'd share. Spoilers below. If you're familiar with the plot, you'd also know what content warnings might apply here, so keep that in mind too >.>

First, I wanna go over some points I haven't really seen discussed/explicated anywhere that stuck out to me!

About the parasites:

The infodump that Kitani reads mentions markmeat, which I've seen reviews refer to as the stuff Youji passes. I'm pretty certain the fleshy bits are actually the fleshseeds and the markmeat is the 'bloodlike' pheromone which seeps out of Youji's neck.

The only people who can see this stuff is supposedly hosts. If you're a host, you'll become either Osu or Mesu. But it's unclear when that transition happens. Is it like a secondary puberty? Zenya's issues have been with him a long time, but he's also an unusual case. Tetsuo has had regenerative talent from childhood. Youji's accident was several years ago, but only very recently has he begun emitting pheromones.

There are at least two other people who can see these signs of the parasite who are unaffiliated with the cult as far as we know! There are rumors going around the school of blood and guts in the chem lab, and a separate rumor about blood and guts in the boys bathroom. Both incidents come about through a male student becoming alarmed and upset upon seeing something no one else can confirm is there. If it had been the same kid, I think the rumors would go a little differently (aka such and such has gone mad, that sort of thing) so I think its fair to say that more than one boy is effected. This indicates these boys are hosts, and also that they don't know about the biological aspects, at the absolute least.

Who are these kids? Are they children who were exposed like Zenya was? If they knew about the cult, they probably wouldn't have freaked out in public, so they're uninitiated and possibly not experiencing any symptoms (IE the way Youji was?). Receiving purebreed flesh is the only way we really see discussed for becoming a host, but then how did Tetsuo develop? Do some people just inherit this from their parents?

Speaking of inheritance, Youji's situation introduces some questions too. He seems to have been physically passed along his father's parasite during the accident... like it entered his wound and this ultimately revived/remade him. Whether Youji was going to eventually develop into a host through inheriting that in a different way, had the accident never occurred, isn't discussed. In the pool, Youji can will himself to do the same for Tetsuo - so did his parasite enter Tetsuo? Taken with the state Youji is in during that epilogue, it's pretty vague what happened. But should we take that to mean that a new parasite melding into the body of a host can revive them?

We are given a decent idea of what Osu and Mesu are. But there seem to be others involved with the cult who aren't dealing with these same symptoms. Kamiya is around high school boys every day and not driving any of them mad. Kunihito couldn't see the Sodomites until after he was shot - even though his family were long time participants in the cult. Furthermore, had either of them been Osu, wouldn't they have been interested to learn of Youji the Mesu? So, are they hosts? Interestingly, there's a moment in the school with Kunihito that makes me really wonder. Kitani interacts with his boss, who is alive (even though narration from Youji earlier seemed to indicate Kunihito had died) for the moment. Then Kitani sees a wriggler entering a wound, and it seems to be attached firmly. He rips it away and shoots it, and then next thing you know, Kunihito is dead. Was that his parasite, keeping him alive, or a new Sodomite trying to enter as a parasite and then reform Kunihito's body? Did Kitani's actions here actually doom his boss?

Can you have a host and then lose it? Might Zenya's state have been fixed by removing the inner being? As a fierce believer, it's obvious why Kunihito wouldn't have opted to do that, though. But I feel like the grand ending suggests that Tetsuo has lost this aspect of himself in the epilogue. He takes a long time to heal, after all. Perhaps in wishing they could live together as humans, Youji caused their parasites to detach?

The whole situation with Youji is so bizarre. He's perpetually weak with a lung disorder, lives barely nourishing himself, and experiences numerous intense injuries over the course of like 2 weeks while undergoing debilitating physical changes. I get why, bereft of regenerative abilities, he would die at the end of the plot.

I think the violins version of Miracles May suggests Youji succeeds in saving Tetsuo at the cost of himself. And the grand ending seems to say that in rejecting the Sodomites, in not sacrificing himself for Tetsuo, Youji does not get his wish in full - he wants to live on with Tetsuo as humans, which I think only half works (Tetsuo managed to pull through after being wounded), and Tetsuo speaks his name one last time, but I don't think Youji is truly around anymore. But I feel like Tetsuo is a human at this point. And perhaps Youji died as a human, too. I just don't get why there was an attempt to cover up his passing? Like the scandal at the academy is already pretty bad, wouldn't it make enough sense to say two students stopped into the school that day and both were accosted by the yakuza and one of them perished? It seems like it's vague just to confuse the audience.

About the characters:

Was Makoto sensitive to the pheromones just cause he happened to be? Or like was it because he was attracted to men that the pheromone could harm him like that? Because I feel like either reading is supported by the text. At what point, removed from the impact of the pheromones, would Makoto regain his sanity? He seems himself when we see him in the hospital. But in his ending, a week has passed since Youji disappeared. We can't know how long it's been since only bones remain - like at what point will the Mesu pheromones no longer be present in Makoto's system? He seems to be still outside his own control at the close of his story.

On endings, it's pointed out that purebreeds can use pheromones to control even normal people. But the degree of *control* is something I wonder about. Like, Youji's pheromones elicited control over others, chaining them to a desire beyond their own sanity. But Youji isn't the one holding the leash, so to speak. Tetsuo's scent also caused this to happen to Youji. And like, the ending where they breed & the prominence of instinct in that route suggests that this final choice is something they submit to rather than a choice they make under their own rational control. So I wonder about the purebreeds ability to control others... is it an active ability, or does it elicit an instinctual response in others?

We see the lump of flesh that Kunihito worships, and from his uncle's journal we know he was once a captivating young man. But he "gave too much of himself to his followers" and now is a weakened flesh slab... Honestly this whole bit of the journal is super suspect. It's phrased like that was a thing the purebreed did of it's own volition, but I don't think we're supposed to accept that at face value. As more of it's flesh was taken, it became weaker - so weak, that members of the organization were sufficiently outside of it's "control" to act on a revolt. Up to that point, was the cult compelled to consume the purebreed's flesh, regardless of it's wishes, due to it's outrageous pheromones? Or did the purebreed willingly give of itself but go to far and tipped the balance of control outside it's own favor? Could the cult have failed at this moment, and prevented the events of the story from ever coming to pass? It seems like there are other purebreeds elsewhere in the world, though, or have been throughout history, so I don't know that the japanese branch falling would end the Sodomites' bid to live on.

Uncle Okinaga can't explain why he tried to protect the purebreed, only that he was compelled to do so in remembering the boy's smile. In one route, Kitani encounters the newborn purebreed. Is he a slave from this point on? Will Kitani end up feeding on the purebreed? It's an uncomfortable question I was left with.

Speaking of Kitani, I feel really mixed about him. On the one hand, he is sympathetic. His shit childhood leads to him forming a traumatic bond with Kunihito. This is actually one of the most upsetting moments of the game, for me! Lol moreso than the gore, tbh. He's at his lowest moment, his body is failing, and this powerful man comes and exerts that power over him through assault. Kitani's instincts take over (he struggles to live). Kunihito says, work for me, you might as well die for a purpose... It really mirrors what happens to Youji so strongly! Like, Youji's connection to Tetsuo is in many ways just the same as this - he is overpowered by Tetsuo, and in the horror of his changing biology, Youji finds that being accepted as he is to be worth the discomforting aspects of the bond. Kitani likewise accepts the worst aspects of the Okinaga family as the price for having a place and a people to belong to. It isn't a loyalty earned through goodness or affection. In the Diving Deep ending, Kitani is said to feel aimless and purposeless without his family, and it seems like he might not care about living any longer. We see in different endings Youji submit his own life to the cost of a 'higher purpose,' whether that be procreation or saving Tetsuo. Ultimately, I don't think either of these men really formed healthy attachments to others and it is worthy of sympathy.

On the other hand! Kitani has committed himself to the Okinaga family, to the point that his support of them is more instinctual than rational choice. He knows it's abnormal, but he still goes ahead and does the eyeball thing, supports Kunihito's religious fervor, never intervenes in anything they've got going on (until the point comes where outside forces - Kamiya - threaten his family). He feels horrible about hurting women and children, but he beats a high schooler on orders from Zenya, and helps Zenya kidnap Tetsuo and Youji. Like, I think he'd already looked into Youji's background at this point, so once Zenya's done with Youji for the time being, Kitani knowingly dumps this frail, frequently hospitalized boy who has just undergone a brutal beating in the trash disposal area of the house where he lives alone with no one to care for him. That is abhorrent. Then, he helps Zenya kidnap this same boy a second time, at which point the boy is kept as a sex slave. Kitani is not in the dark about this - he is an adult and knows both Kunihito and Zenya are mentally unstable, and that these actions are not only harmful or illegal, but seriously jeopardize Youji's life. And then, the real kicker? Zenya really loved it when Kitani sewed Kristi a lil yukata to match Zenya's outfit. So, Kitani dutifully makes his new pet, Youji, an outfit as well! I'm sure seeing Zenya so happy really made it all worth it, huh Kitani?

About my feelings:

So, I played this game at a point in time where I was actively on my period lol I still am right now as a matter of fact. And although I initially started it earlier before this was part of my life, in the interim time I had bariatric surgery and have developed a different relationship to food, hunger, my biology, and the often uncomfortable bowel changes that came with it.

It's horrible, but my partner didn't flinch away from the hard truths that came with major surgery. We've had to discuss diarrhea and incontinence and foul gas. Early on, there were days I thought I would die of embarrassment, but he loved me regardless. Thankfully, the biggest problems of the early days are mostly a thing of the past, but it's not something I'm liable to ever forget. I felt so bad for Youji, going through something that altered him intrinsically like that, with no one to support him. When he takes Tetsuo's actions to be unconditional acceptance of his mortifying biology, this leads Youji to bond with the man at the expense of his own being. He becomes subsumed into this bond. Had Erika's situation been different at the time, I don't think Youji would have clung to Tetsuo's lack of repulsion as if it were love.

Further, I felt a kinship to Youji's difficulty feeding himself that was absolutely absent the first time I played any of the game. Having been through a great deal of nausea, food repulsion, and experiencing my body at it's weakest, I was just as worried about his health as before but more sympathetic to the forces at play than last time.

As for the menstrual aspect, I can totally vibe with the idea that this bodily change is a repulsive, dirty, shame-inducing experience which alienates a person from their peers and from their own body. When I'm on my period, I do feel like my body is outside of my control, and knowing it's for a function (childbirth) isn't some welcome news. Like I have to put aside myself as an individual person (mind) to deal with the realities of my form (woman) for the time being, and it's jarring and uncomfortable. In this regard, I feel the reason vs instinct system is so well supported by the story's themes!

Also, uh, as someone who has experienced painful sex, anal sex, and painful anal sex in my life, the sex scenes were pretty intense to play through. Like the agony is well written and Youji's lack of consent is ever present. When he becomes aroused, it is not treated as if that is equivalent to consent, which I especially appreciated as this is something of a problem when it comes to discussing the rape of men in particular. Even when Youji is participating in sexual interaction, the way the biological aspect has been laid out, with the pheromones and everything, makes consent not really possible. While Youji comes to feel a bond with Tetsuo, it is due to their biology moreso than a romantic connection, and this seems like something borne from the need to mate rather than driven by who they are as *people.*

I do think it's interesting that this game is so focused on biological functions. The drive to breed, which in some species does indeed come at the expense of the parents' lives, is only one thread of this theme. The need to nourish oneself is definitely very present. And then digestion and expelling waste comes into play in a highly unusual way, lol. I found the mention of the myrmecoleon to be thematically resonant and perplexing at the same time. From Kamiya's comments, each half is biologically at odds with the other. I wondered how this was meant to be taken in conjunction with the story. Like, Youji doesn't eat, but he produces this new flesh and passes it - the flesh seeds are not a product of what he takes in. And it doesn't seem like not eating is enough to kill Youji based on what we see. But Kamiya's statement that maybe one end could survive if it would reject the other is kind of weird. You can read it as saying one part can survive - either the reasonable part of the being (the human) or the instinctual aspect (the parasite). There is no fusion of the two possible, no coexistence. It makes enough sense in regards to Youji, but it's a little confusing if you try to apply it to the Osu-Mesu pairing (two halves of a whole). I kind of felt that it was saying only one of the two could have their wishes fulfilled/their needs respected. Since Youji is getting raped all the time, I thought that's what Kamiya was getting at, at first. And if you take it to the breeding stuff, it is also confusing, Kamiya! What we see of their copulation, producing a purebreed is very much a matter of fusion, so it reads at odds with the myrmecoleon bit. If you see the lion and the ant as humans and Sodomites in their separate species, that's also kinda weird. I think its meant to represent that the hosts are these third kinds of beings - both ant and lion - and that their existence is at odds with both parts of their biology. It really leaves me wondering how the hosts and purebreeds thing is supposed to accomplish anything for the Sodomites. It's not clear what they're gaining from this, though it also isn't clear that any alternative is available to them. The drive to exist is strong enough that they must attempt to continue the species, no matter what indignities it requires, I guess?

Overall, I left the game feeling very unsettled (the music is SO effective, omfg) and on edge. Hopefully having written out my thoughts will help me to move on from sweet pool!! Can't really say I'm glad I played it - I was curious about how it related to omegaverse and it was indeed fascinating to see the root of those tropes being developed - but it didn't do anything for me in that doki-doki kind of way and left me more agitated than moved by its emotional stuff. I do think it was very well written, and well conceived, and well produced. I'd love to talk about it with other people, though I doubt I'd ever play it again or be likely to recommend it.

Thanks for reading this crazy long post :3

[ihatepissvortex]

Hey, is your cat one of those werewolf cats? If so, those cats suffer from really bad cystic acne. There has been a post floating around, warning about the breed.

Pickles is some sort of lykoi. no idea what the breeder called it specifically, but the breeder was a veterinarian and seemed to be pretty sure that we were getting a healthy cat - the only reason we ended up with Pickles is because someone else bailed on adopting him.

i have all of his health papers and lineage trees and shit, his mother and all of his siblings were all fully haired. pickles himself still has a pretty full coat - especially compared to the more hairless cats that tend to get acne problems. he’s mostly thin on his paws and his face. his main problem factors we were warned about are waxy buildup around his eyes and ears where his fur is thin, and oily buildup on his claws. we wipe him pretty regularly and he gets baths often as well.

with that being said the main source of that info does seem to just be that tumblr post - a post that came out a week or two AFTER we got the cat, so there’s nothing i can do about it even if i wanted to lol. my girlfriend wanted the goofy looking cat and i didn’t really have any reason to stop her. cat breeds typically don’t suffer the downfalls that breeding dogs do - the average doodle is a genetic abomination with more to worry about than any of these “novel” cats. there are no studies indicating that this is a consistent problem inherent to the breed - the breed literally hasn’t been around long enough to draw any conclusions like that, and what defines the boundaries of this breed isn’t clear either. it’s definitely something i’ll look out for, but i’m not overly concerned about it at the moment.

[unforth]

There was some post by a 16 year old floating around Tumblr that was like "kids should never have devices, actually, if I was a parent I wouldn't give my kid anything until they were 13 or older" and I, a grown up with two children, know from experience... look. I did my best to keep my kids from screens. I really did. But like. I read on my phone. I social media on my phone. I play games on my phone. I always have my phone. And they see me with it and SURPRISE, THEY WANT ONE. THEY WANT TO USE IT. If mommy thinks it's cool and uses it that much, how could they NOT want one? So I added a comment to that post that said, "then you as an adult better be prepared to give up your own phone because when the kid sees you using it they're going to want it."

And I got multiple. m.u.l.t.i.p.l.e., hate-ridden replies impugning my parenting over this. To the point that I went in and deleted my comment because months and months later I'd still get some random teenager @ ing me for being tHe WoRsT pArEnT because. I am an actual parent. Accepting an actual reality. Of parenting during the 2020s. That if as an adult I have screen time, my kid is (SHOCK) also going to want screen time! And no I'm not going to *give up reading books* (when all the books I want to read are only available as e-books) just to try to stop my kid from screen time.

Adults are just as addicted. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, a problem or not, is open to opinion, but obviously: indicates: if a kid sees the parent using their time that way, the kid is going to want to do it too!

(and no, I don't scold my kids for screen time. I actually am always impressed how much I see them learning during their screen time! and we talk about it! and we play games WITH them! My wife and I both learned how to play Minecraft because my son is obsessed! And guess what he's learned to build amazing things and it's useful to him as spacial awareness and problem solving in so many contexts!)

(Sorry, I'm always a nudge away from writing a post about screen time myself and I'm apparently very talkative today.)

(I'm breaking this out into it's own post because I looked at the comments and notes on that other one and it's just as much teenagers going YEAH THOSE OLD PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM and I'm so fucking tired of listening to people who don't have kids tell us how we parents are going wrong when they have no idea, n.o. i.d.e.a., how hard it is to be a parent right now and how little support we're getting. I've posted about it before and I'll post about it again, if you can't offer anything other than to be YET ANOTHER PERSON screaming that parents are Doing Parenting Wrong in the umpteenth way that contradicts all the OTHER ways we get bombarded with being told we're Doing Parenting Wrong, you really need to shut the fuck up.)

[soullessjack]

so before I conk out for the night I wanna try and explain all the more complicated stuff with baby!jack and like, how exactly it is more complicated, because not only do I think my own temper tends to make me address it very accusingly and in bad-faith, but also it’s just important to know in the long run. I really hope this is actually worth it because I am sadly very used to wasting my words on people who do not want to listen and also because I’m sleepy and delaying it to make this.

•••

first and foremost, jack being autistic was not something anybody in the show was planning or intending for his character. it wasn’t something alcal had in his head to portray jack and it wasn’t something he was directed to portray. jack is very much a case of what I call accidental autism, or having autism coding; all of the traits that were meant to indicate that he’s a supernatural being wound up aligning very well with autistic traits (as is the case with many nonhuman characters like robots or aliens). then, autistic people in the fandom pointed it out and made it a popular headcanon, which was then brought up to alcal at a convention and basically confirmed/canonized from there.

i wasn’t on tumblr in 2017 (unless you count opening link tabs from other websites) so I wasn’t “there” for babyjack, but you don’t really have to be there to get it. guy is chronologically three years old but an adult in every other way because supernatural creature logic, people wonder “hey what if he was his actual age.” and it’s cute for a little bit, it’s a chance for the poor heavily traumatized guy to catch a break. you see the appeal of that sort of content. nobody’s doing it with bad intentions or even the remotest idea of jack being autistic.

but even though I wasn’t on tumblr for jacks appearance on the show, again I did have minor access to tumblr posts via Pinterest and links, so I could see the “discussions” and whatever. and let me tell you. I was thirteen years old. in eighth grade. when he showed up. and even then I noticed this .. pattern? in the fanart and the talk and all and I remember specifically thinking “yeah I get it he’s baby, but can we actually talk about him” because literally nobody as far as I could see was doing it.

that was six-almost-seven years ago. I am now 19 years old, almost two years graduated from high school, and save for a few blogs (bless u for your work folks), there is still a shocking amount of ppl who just Do Not think about jack with any sort of nuance or complexity. who don’t even engage w his character unless he’s a babyI also didn’t keep up with babyjack cuz it never appealed to me in the first place, But as i got more engrossed in the fandom i saw that it pretty much became the only content being made for jacks character. no in depth discussion or actual canon fanart or anything like that for jack unless u go to a very tiny cobwebby corner of the fandom basically.

•••

if you’re wondering how this comes back to jack being autistic, don’t worry. this is the introduction to that topic. so reiterating the first two things:

in 2017 jack is immediately clocked as precious baby smol bean must protecc material and his whole age situation + all the trauma he basically speedruns leads to au’s where he matches his chronological age. poor boy never stood a chance at being examined critically as a complex person.

(also this is not a time-lined post but it’s very important to add 2017 to gauge the span of this content and also the internet fandom culture of that era).

somewhere down the line autistic fans pick up on Jack’s traits and connect it to our own traits. hashtag autistic jack kline is real and eventually it reaches the silly actor man alcal and the long short of his answer is “representation and having that kind of connection is important so if you think he’s autistic then he’s autistic.” canon by destiel rules basically

However, the entire time that jack is being recognized as autistic and praised/appreciated as representation, people are still going strong with baby!jack content, so strong in fact that it’s insisted as actual canon by some. and I kind of get it. they’re two lil headcanon niches and aren’t gonna cross paths a whole lot. but they still do because it’s the same character and people are sort of starting to connect the dots that Hey This Is Kind Of Weird. autism gang notices that baby gang’s reasoning for Jack being a baby (besides the age) is just his autistic traits. not great! not fun! people start making tiny criticisms of it here and there.

and of course there’s people in the fandom who want to Fuck The Guy and that totally does not pour gasoline on the fire when the discourse is about whether or not the Guy In Question is a mentally stunted large child or just a really autistic teenager.

.

I can’t finish this post I’m sorry I am Not going to bed at 3am again. TLDR every criticism is ignored and the babyjack people keep doing their thang and the really really annoying ones insist it’s canon and call u a pedophile if u want to fuck the guy and just refuse to really acknowledge that they are being ableist at the point in time after he is established to be autistic and also there’s multiple points in the show that literally make it so obvious he’s an adult but no. Ignore whatever u want to pretend he’s a baby.

TLDR again accidentally autistic character creates accidental ableism that people keep double downing on and NOW the general problem is that they are doubling down.

lastly. a LOT of you really and truly need to reconsider why the only way you are willing or able to engage with an autistic teenager character is if they are an infant with absolutely no semblance of personality or development from the actual show AND being specifically depicted this way in order to create the idea of your ship or found family being domestic AND you continuously ignore criticisms of it by autistic people who are telling you it is harmful and rooted in some bad shit. you really really truly genuinely no exaggeration really need to do some thinking about why the fuck you’re doing all that. Goodnight everybody