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comicteaparty · 5 years ago

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April 20th-April 26th, 2020 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from April 20th, 2020 to April 26th, 2020. The chat focused on Only In Your Dreams! by Tuyetnhi Pham.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

Comic Tea Party

BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on Only In Your Dreams! by Tuyetnhi Pham~! (http://oiydcomic.com/)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace until April 26th, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Discussions are freeform, but we do offer discussion prompts in the pins for those who’d like to have them. Additionally, remember that while constructive criticism is allowed, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic! Whether you finish the comic or can only read a few pages, everyone is welcome to join and chat with us!

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 1

1. What did you like about the beginning of the comic?

2. What has been your favorite moment in the comic (so far)?

3. Who is your favorite character?

4. Which characters do like seeing interact the most?

5. What is something you like about the art? If you have a favorite illustration, please share it!

6. What is a theme you like that the comic explores?

7. What do you like about the comic’s story or overall related content?

8. Overall, what do you think the comic’s strengths are?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

5. I like how distinctive the character designs are! The mcs are both very unique and recognizable

8. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but it also explores some real neat concepts

the story is full of personality

carcarchu

the comic's not loading for me shakes fist at wifi, gonna try again tomorrow but i just wanted to say the look of the site is really cute!

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

Got the chance to read it So here are some of my thoughts: 1. I like the romantic atmosphere that the comic starts off with warm colours and it gives a vacation ad sensation? 2. My favourite moment is in the pink strange dream world, the colours contrast to the reality of Cara. 4. Fave moment: When that mystery guy shows up and he had corny lines like a romantic parody. It seem so fantastical. 5. I like the colour palette choice of brown tones, shades of pinks. 6. I think the theme is about expectations (it's not clear atm), how Cara is distancing from real relationships and prefer to indulge. 7: I like how the creator shows Cara looking scared of confronting things. It sets an interesting tone of uncertainty. Is she hiding something?(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I'm super curious about the situation of Cara not remembering her past dreams with Richie, and how that ties into the theme.

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

1. I like how I don’t know what to expect. I also like how the premise is relateable; the idea that you are scared of imperfection making you have high standards in life hit close. 2) Every single time we’re treated to....Tuyetnhi’s lovely use of expression. Also the end part of episode 2, because that’s when I realized it’s going to get dark. 3) A tie between Ana and Richie. Ana because she makes me laugh with her blunt assertions (which...aren’t wrong) and Richie because he’s so flamboyant and extra. I love how much personality they all have. 4) Hands down Richie and Cara. They have a really hilarious dynamic going on. 6) The idea that people seek perfection through their dreams instead of facing reality. Also I really liked how it tackles society’s fixation on everyone to find someone....maybe Cara doesn’t need that and needs to focus on herself first? 7) That I won’t know what to expect. I came into this thinking it was going to be a classic romcom, and then I get hit with implicit horror and trippyness. I have a feeling Tuyetnhi is hinting at some darker aspects of the story we have yet to see. 8) Good lord the expressions. They really do the story justice and make me turn the page every time. Also the colours are beautiful.(edited)

(Whoops sorry keiiii)

7) two moments actually!

The fact that their wide eyed sweaty expressions matched made me laugh really hard

And also Cara’s quick acceptance of the situation was so unexpected and hilarious I took a double take. Also props to the colour dissonance; that looks like meme material right there!

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

yeah. I want to make it clear that Cara is like "This is really not my day." lol

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

Well....you portrayed that sentiment perfectly

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

Omg yes the wide eyed expressions were also making me laugh! Well that was an expression I didn't expect coming into the story(edited)

I was wondering if that was suppose to be serious or humorous?

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

both LOL

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

I see the horror you got going there Tuyetnhi Reminds me of...I dunno Jojo?

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

well............ yes and no lol

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

But I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen

Although...if we’re going by the silhouette....is she scared of herself?

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I like that sense of not knowing what's happening? :)(edited)

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

that will be coming up in Ch. 3 soon

so please wait till then thank u lol

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

So far it's tough to choose a fave character right now since I feel the story has just started its first segment. I would like to wait until more content is shown before I can make a firm choice? (I'm analytical, I like to go over OCs flaws and strengths once I know more about them)(edited)

I'm curious to learn about her ex crush, since we only get a glimpse of how Cara precieve him. But what is Dean really like? *Drum rolls(edited)

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

you got.... good questions

it will be rewarded.... later on LOL

mariah (rainy day dreams)

1. What did you like about the beginning of the comic? I really liked the colors and island vibe. And this was even before Animal Crossing came out and I started hardcore living that island life I just love a good, soft pink to purple gradient generally speaking so the opening of the story was like falling into a comfy brain pillow for me. 2-4 I'm just gonna answer these ones kind of all together because they thoughts on then are all kind of threaded together into one big thought. After having read through the archive I really liked the scene with Ana and Cara. When I first read it I was like "dang, she's giving Cara such a hard time," but after having read the scenes where Cara just refused to admit to Richie she doesn't know what's going on I really retroactively appreciated Ana's willingness to call Cara on her bullshit XD I think it's a really good foil trait to have for a protagonist who seems dead set on avoiding confrontation even though it seems like doing so is most likely just gonna come back to bite her later. I imagine we aren't going to see Ana for a while though unless Cara is able to use her Phone A Friend card in the dream realm XD I am also looking forward to seeing more of the Cara doppelganger and how she and Cara interact with each other going forward. That feels like an exciting and drama filled mystery

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

1. What did you like about the beginning of the comic? I also love the atmosphere. The color choices are just so beautiful. 2. What has been your favorite moment in the comic (so far)? Ana pointing out Cara's BS hahahaha. 3. Who is your favorite character? Definitely Ana. She's so down-to-earth from what I can tell, someone I'd want to be friends with. 4. Which characters do like seeing interact the most? Probably Ana and Cara. I like to see good friendships depicted, especially in a romance. 5. What is something you like about the art? If you have a favorite illustration, please share it! In general, everything is so soft and pretty. I also really appreciate the fact that all the characters have larger noses. If I had a favorite panel, it would be at the beginning, the sunset beach waves. 6. What is a theme you like that the comic explores? So far, I'm not sure about themes, but I like the talk about the pressure parents give to their children to get married. 7. What do you like about the comic’s story or overall related content? There's a lot of mystery, so I'm looking forward to learning about Cara's dreams, Richie, and the key. 8. Overall, what do you think the comic’s strengths are? The visuals are really nice. I can't stop gushing about the color choices and the pretty atmosphere.(edited)

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

The way Cronaj sums up their thoughts on OiYD, I'm agreeing with the statement on Ana and Cara! Esp friendship part

Deo101 [Millennium]

I'll answer the questions hopefully later this week, but this song reminded me of the comic!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4z5ecLCvSQ(edited)

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

@Deo101 [Millennium] damn that’s a good song

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

Oooo

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

He's definitely hot and extra

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

lmao

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

My joke idea is that Cara is secretly in a reality show starring Richie and her and the bonds they play out is meant for a live broadcast. But she's clearly not agreeing to this(edited)

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

oh god. i don't think that's good for Cara's mental state lmao

Feather J. Fern

Also I have to say, I do love how the first cover is literally Cara being the meme of "Oh no he's hot"

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

fjdkalfdjdklfj

Feather J. Fern

Also I finally started it, while a bit late, I have to relate to Cara being an accountant.

Also I think my favourite panel is "Welp that worked"

Also I have to appreciate picking a pink that doesn't grate on the eyes.

https://gyazo.com/71fe22ea6ac2ebf6b3d85531c66bf8ed Another really good panel

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

I enjoyed making that one LOL

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

that face is one of my favourites not gonna lie

Feather J. Fern

I really like the surrealness of the story, can't wait to see what happens next

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

same! I feel like something is about to happen

I'm also wondering how Richie would react to the real world

like....the ex. And her parents.

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

soon™️

Feather J. Fern

More like everyone reacting to Richie XD

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

Yeah pretty much

Like can Richie handle the world?

More like

Can the world handle RICHIE

RebelVampire

I like that the beginning really contrasts the dream and Cara's reality pretty quickly. I kind of feel it catches that feeling of coming out of a dream to face reality which kind of sucks, and also plays into the themes of dream vs. reality and expectation vs. reality. It's very easy to idealize things, whether as a route of escapism or just because it sounds appealing. But the reality of things generally is always different, and I like that we're seeing this full force in the comic through Cara's perspective. And the contrasts between the two really enhance those topics. My favorite moment in the comic so far is probably when Cara meets what I assume is Dean. Cause I really loved that both parties were kind of at fault, and I also liked how quickly that convo devolved into a grumpfest, because that felt very realistic. My favorite character right now is definitely Richie, because he is ridiculous and sympathetic at the same time. I adore his exaggerated personality, while at the same time feel sorry for him since for him the memories are clearly there and like...I would not want to be in the shoes of someone where the person they loved no longer remembered them. As for character interacting the most, Cara and Richie because that entire premise of one person remembering and the other not makes for a really tense and awkward situation. It's hard to tell where it's going to go. What I like about the art is the palettes of color chosen, since there's some beautiful scenery as well as fantastic contrasts when needed to make certain moments pop (like dream vs. reality).

As for the story content, what I actually like the most is that Cara is a flawed protagonist. I've read a lot of stories where the protagonist is always 100% right in the relationship and is just eternally the victim because society pressure. But Cara has a lot more going on, since she's clearly been at fault in some interactions, and while we can sympathize with people pressuring her into relationships, she also maybe takes it too far by being avoidant of basically every relationship. However, since she has these traits, I'm more invested into her personal dilemmas since she'll actually make mistakes when dealing with stuff. Which I think this is the overall strength of the comic. Cara is just a damn good protagonist who is easily likeable but isn't perfect and whose imperfections are not just brushed off so easily.

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

;_; .... thank you.

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

I love the story so far! When I first started, I figured it would be some sort of awkward story where Richie comes into the real world and he has to figure out how to, like, act natural, and hilarity ensues. But holy cow, Cara losing her memories, and the slide into somewhat of a horror angle - it's not something I expected (though admittedly I could have read the synopsis lol), but it's definitely something I like!(edited)

Comic Tea Party

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 2

9. Do you think the people around Cara were right to try and pressure her into a relationship? Overall, what do you think the comic has to say about relationships and the themes regarding relationship pressure?

10. Is what Cara experiencing dream or reality, and where is the line between them in this case? Additionally, why do you think her dreams have the potential to become reality as opposed to other people? Also, what is the overall message underlying these themes?

11. Is Richie really just a dream Cara dreamt up, or is there something more to him? If he somehow makes it to Cara’s world, do you think he’ll be able to adjust to that reality? Also, can he win Cara over?

12. What do you think the Cara imposter is about, and what does this have to do with the entire situation? Do you think Cara will eventually remember her dreams? Lastly, what do you think Cara has in store for her as the story continues?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

9. I personally don’t think it was great of the people in Cara’s life to pressure her like that. Sure, they mean well, but it’s most likely bringing Cara’s self esteem down by a lot. I have a feeling that her dreams/reality colliding together is partially motivated by that; the pressure of pleasing society has made her....subconsciously take drastic measures?

10. I’m actually not sure! Maybe there’s a supernatural explanation to it, or it could all just be a dream. Dreams have a way of showing a person’s innermost desires or fears, so maybe Cara’s desires and fears are coming alive in response to external stress factors. So perhaps she opened a portal of sorts between the realms in some way (there’s a key!!!!).

11. Oh I’m thinking they might end up together. But the realist inside me thinks...perhaps what Cara needs isn’t romantic love, but more independent love and being able to love herself. What DOES worry me, however, is the fact that Richie seems...a bit desperate for Cara to like him. Is there a condition to his love after all? If so, that means that it’s possible he’s forced in some way to love her or make her love him. And that’s not really conducive to romance, is it?

12. Ah...the thing that makes me mystified the most. Cara seems to have a negative view of herself, since she told her to get out in the end of chapter two. However, Cara #2 seems to be pretty helpful; knocking on the door to tell her to get out of the house (which Richie has her in), so in a way letting her out. While our Cara seems to dislike her a lot, I think the key to the story would be our Cara needing to accept this double Cara to be really free. Maybe she will, maybe she won’t! But from what I can see from the story and like I’ve said earlier...maybe Cara needs to be able to find love within herself. Love for that Cara double, and enough love to become independent and not bend to society’s overwhelming pressure for outside romance. I hope she finds that as the story comes along, and know that it’s okay to not be ready for love.

As for Richie...hmm. He’s dealing with an amnesiac heroine, and adjusting to the real world. I’m sure it’s going to lead to some hilarious hijinks, but hopefully he can manage! He seems up to the task

RebelVampire

I think whether people were right to pressure Cara is a tricky gray area. On the one hand, no, they were wrong. Nobody should be forced into a relationship. But on the other hand, if you know a person is actively self-sabotaging, isn't it more correct to speak up? So to me this is maybe a situation of good intentions with bad execution. However, I do think overall the comic does say pressuring people into relationships sucks and plz don't do that cause that's how you make ppl run further away. I think it's both, because a dream is reality in a sense. I think many of us have had dreams that caused real emotional affects, whether negative or positive. So the line between them is merely the fact effects are limited. Cara have may have just found a way to cross that line and make a dream a tangible thing that has more consequences. As for why her dreams, I don't know. Maybe she's just super good at dreaming. I do think as the overall message though is that dreams are good but not when we get lost in them, because then we idealize and reject "reality" in ways that aren't healthy. I do think Richie is primarily something Cara dreamt up, but kind of not maybe. Like sure maybe Cara is idea creator, but something else was involved in making the physical reality of that idea. As for Richie adjusting to Cara's world, I'm sure it will be laughably hilarious. I do think he can sort of win Cara over, at least in the sense of being friends. Cause how can you hate Richie? I'm taking a shot in the dark and saying Cara imposter is the embodiment of Cara's missing memories but since they're just memories, all they can do is imitate. As for Cara remembering, I feel like it will be yes but I kind of want it to be no. I like the idea of them having to reform a relationship entire from scratch.

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

Oo good impressions! I wish I have more to say but it would affect the story LOL. Enjoyed reading everyone's theories tho!

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

Ok my turn, let's see what my head theories are: 9: I felt the same annoyance as Cara but it's a mixed feeling, Even though, people shouldn't pressure a lady on her love life, she also has a problem with being in relationships. Or I remember one quote from the story was how she 'ditched her dates by rushing to the bathroom.' although I don't know her circumstance, I do know she has issues to settle too. Relationship pressure is real, especially as a young person grows older. 10. From the comic visuals, it feels much like it's her escapism dream. The only clue I got, is that her holding a literal 'key' connecting both worlds, is evidence that both world could collide. So far, we haven't seen other people's dreams, or whether this is an unusual occurrence in the world? It seems to be a message about idealistic relationships. Since Cara seem to turn away real ones, it manifested? 11. I'm curious about Richie's character too. He seems like a powerful imagination, enough to sway the lead, so he's more than a simple figment. I wonder if his submissive, flirtatious (?) personality was build in him. He doesn't seem to have a 'life' outside his dream house, or so far. 12. I'm not sure whether the 'Other Cara' might be trying to help her or is that.. actually a shadow side? I don't want to say too much, but it's interesting to see where the story goes.(edited)

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

Oh! You make a good point about Richie; I never thought about that! Do you think maybe he's simply a part of Cara and eventually gains his own sentience/personality?

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

Hehe I like analyzing dreams :3 In dream theory, I feel he could be? I was more skeptical whether he should be treated as a real character or something else.(edited)

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

man this does make me want to look up dream psychology

i have a feeling...Tuyetnhi is using some theories from that

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

Hmmmm dream psychology you say?

I guess you can say there's some elements of that, but it's not a major chunk of it if that makes sense lol

Comic Tea Party

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 3

13. What are you most looking forward to seeing in regards to the comic?

14. Any final words of encouragement for the comic?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

13. Maintaining the will power to finish OIYD! so I can see it as its end lmao. As a passion project but also something that I want to invest in when I have the time, I hope ya'll looking forward in reading Ch. 3 very soon lol.

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

13. I really want to see how both Cara and Richie will develop as characters. Whether Cara will figure out for herself what being both independent means....and whether she does want a relationship for herself and not for other people. Likewise with Richie, I want to see if he'll be able to be his own person...and whether he's real or not. I have a lot of questions that I want to be answered, and I can't wait to keep reading.

14. Tuyetnhi, good luck on the webcomic. It's hard to start one and even harder to pull off a good one, and I know yours is a good one. I really look forward to reading more from you. You're amazing (edited)

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

thank you

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

13. I'm interested in learning more about Cara's conflicts, why she is hesitant about having a real relationship vs her dream one? I love the unexpected dark twist that the story seems to be going. 14. I want to say, no pressure and take your time to complete the chapter. Just know you have my support and willing to read when it is ready. Good luck

RebelVampire

I'm looking forward to more Richie being Richie. Because he is an adorable person. And also because I'm waiting for some 'reality' culture shock. My final words are that this comic has a strong themes game going on and an intriguing premise, so it'll be fun to see where the comic is in a few more chapters since I'm pretty sure we're in for a wild ride.

Comic Tea Party

BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about Only In Your Dreams! this week! Please also give a special thank you to Tuyetnhi Pham for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked Only In Your Dreams!, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: http://oiydcomic.com/

Tuyetnhi’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/oiydcomic

Tuyetnhi’s Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/tuyetnhip

Tuyetnhi’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tuyetnhip

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #book club #bookclub #webcomic bookclub #webcomic book club #comic tea party #ctp #only in your dreams #only in your dreams!#tuyetnhi pham

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laughingpinecone · 4 years ago

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I am laughingpineapple on AO3

It’s a long list of character combos so the specific requests aren’t overly detailed, please draw at will from my general likes and general fandom likes in addition or as an alternative to any of those!

All requests are art or fic - for art, the stuff I like is the kind that depicts the characters doing something. I’ll always be happier with a very simple drawing of two characters walking together or sharing a cup of coffee than with an ambitious composition that looks like an Avengers poster. I also enjoy seeing them wear different clothes, getting a feel of what their fashion sense is like beyond their canon outfit(s).

Likes: worldbuilding, slice of life (especially if the event the fic focuses on is made up but canon-specific), missing moments, 5+1 and similar formats, bonding and emotional support/intimacy, physical intimacy, lingering touches, loyalty, casefic, surrealism, magical realism, established relationships, future fic, hurt/comfort or just comfort from the ample canon hurt, throwing characters into non-canon environments, banter, functional relationships between dysfunctional individuals, unexplained mysteries, bittersweet moods, journal/epistolary fic, dreams and memories and identities, canon-adjacent tropey plots, outsider POV, UST, resolved UST, exploration of secondary bits of canon, leaning on the uniqueness of the canon setting/mood, found families, characters reuniting after a long and/or harrowing time, friends-to-lovers, road trips, maps, mutual pining, cuddling, wintry moods, the feeling of flannel and other fabrics, ridiculous concepts played straight, sensory details, sickfic, places being haunted, people being haunted, the mystery of the woods, small hopes in bleak worlds, electricity, places that don’t quite add up, mismatched memories, caves and deep places, distant city lights at night, emphasis on non-human traits of non-human characters (gen-wise, but also a hearty yes xeno for applicable ships)

Cool with: any tense, any pov, any rating, plotty, not plotty, IF, nerdy canon references, unrequested characters popping up

DNW: non-canonical rape, non-canonical children, focus on children, unrequested ships (background established canon couples are okay, mentions of parents are okay), canon retellings, consent issues

Dark Souls

I’m only familiar with the first game+DLC! It’s probably relevant to mention that I think that linking the fire is kind of a dumbass move and Gwyn is an ass, but on the other hand Kaathe has his own agenda and there’s no winning move in this world, or at least no obvious one. Feel free to deviate from anyone’s canon endings, to make things happen that’ll stave off their hollowing. I am interested in any of these people meeting and possibly striking up a friendship, and also in exploring Lordran’s temporal/dimensional fuckery, where it’s possible to meet people who have been gone for ages…

Group: Solaire of Astora & Siegmeyer of Catarina: so much fanart of Sun Bro & Onion Bro being bros, so little fic. And yet, the potential! How’d they bounce off each other, what about the fact that Siegmeyer is apparently a proper Catarina knight after all while Solaire just painted his self-made insignia and left, what would Sieg think of Solaire’s quest?

Group: Alvina the Cat & Sieglinde of Catarina: dunno, kitty. I love them both and I want everyone cool to go on adventure with each other. What’s left for Alvina now that Sif is gone, Artorias’ grave desecrated? For her part, did Sieglinde, you know, (mimics Ash Lake)?

Ghost Trick

I am very interested in various characters finding about the erased timeline, but not getting their memories back, and having to live with being told about what they did but never remembering it. Exploring the ghost lore is great. All what-ifs welcome (what if they managed an acceptable happy ending but didn’t reset the timeline, what if a different party went back to the past and kept their memories, what if Alma’s ghost stuck around…) Also open to AUs here, especially for generic fantasy or sci-fi settings or the Final Fantasy ones I prompted last Yuletide.

For the non-canon sides of Jowd/Alma/Cabanela, please no infidelity? I’d be good with either setting the fic during the game timeline or some what-if thereof when the other spouse is dead or unavailable, or simply keeping them offscreen and not mentioning them (eg Alma/Cabanela beach day, Jowd/Cabanela precinct shenanigans)

For Jowd in general, I do love my big boy and enjoy milking that size difference for all it’s worth. In gen contexts too, it’s neat. him big.

Group: Jowd & Yomiel: I’d love to read about the intimate understanding that comes from their shared memories and the horrors they’ve mutually forgiven (and a penchant for morbidity they’ve gained from such horrors probably). Cat dads things welcome.

Group: Alma/Jowd/Cabanela: maybe once Alma and Jowd have figured out he’s smitten and that they do in fact reciprocate... they tease him to death, slowly and deliberately? Is it even a Jowd romance if there’s not an exhausting amount of teasing involved, I ask?

Group: Alma/Jowd & Cabanela: Cabs’ life is wild; his best friends’ home is a safe haven...

Group: Emma & Pigeon Man: Emma’s unsuspected beta reader...

Group: Alma/Cabanela: (taps mic) legs. And fashion!

Group: Cabanela/Jowd: a recent tumblr post made a convincing argument for Cabs liking to be in charge (the argument is just pointing at Cabanela, honestly). Jowd is... agreeable, by his own admission. But is it that simple?

Kentucky Route Zero

I love the ending and I’d love to see its themes and setting explored. I’m all for exploration of any of the game’s themes and for including any staples from adjacent genres - wanna go full-on American Gothic? Dip into surrealism? Take a leaf from Twin Peaks with tulpa / split narratives to explore the characters’ issues? I love AUs so that’s an option too. Or of course there’s Xanadu at the height of its glory, an infinite what-ifs generator. Were the requested characters part of it, what were their digital counterparts up to? A Xanadu narrative would be great! I’d also love to hear about any new spot along the Zero or the Echo river, or an expansion of some place that’s only mentioned by Will in HATATE or only gets a few paragraphs of text. Mostly, I just love all these characters so much and I’m going through the tagset’s options like a hyperactive cat. Any fragment of their lives will make me happy.

Group: Shannon Márquez & Conway & Conway's Dog: does Shannon get to see them after the ending? Even for a moment?

Group: Lula Chamberlain/Joseph Wheattree/Donald: so Lula went back to Mexico. Joseph is pensive. Did the events of the night shake up Donald, or what will it take?

Group: Junebug & Lula Chamberlain: artists! Outspoken... artists... with a complicated personality. Put them in the same room and...?

Group: Junebug & Johnny: where’s the strangest place they played in, and what did Johnny find there?

Group: Conway & Johnny & Junebug (Kentucky Route Zero): their story is about finding individuality, his is about succumbing and losing it. Would any of them pick up on this mid-Act IV? Or just... talking about limbs and stuff?

Group: Cate & Will & Shannon Márquez (Kentucky Route Zero): a few months later, Shannon finds herself on the Mucky Mammoth again...

Group: Carrington & Weaver Márquez & Shannon Márquez (Kentucky Route Zero): maybe the cousins were trying to bond or reminisce or whatever and Carrington dive-bombed into the conversation, but in the end it was an enriching experience... of sorts?

Group: Carrington & Lula Chamberlain (Kentucky Route Zero): I don’t usually look for college shenanigans but this may be the exception? Or Art Opinions?

Group: Carrington & Clara (Kentucky Route Zero): would she even... get a word in? Maybe with the right topic?

Group: Carrington & Cate & Will (Kentucky Route Zero): Mammoth life! ...what does theater have to say about mushrooms again?

Group: Shannon Marquez & Weaver Marquez (Kentucky Route Zero): at the end of it all, Weaver was waiting. After this end, they can stand side by side again...

Group: Emily & Ben & Bob (Kentucky Route Zero): so what does it mean, like, poetically, that they were temporally displaced and Act I is in their future from Act V? Is it possible they were not aware of it?

Mutazione

The island, the sense of community, newcomers joining the community, gardens and music... I love the mood of this little game. Got ideas for some part of the island we haven’t seen? What stories do they tell each other about Moon Dragon and the first days of the new life it brought? The plants encyclopaedia was great - do Yoké’s archives hide some other cool tome? Please, if Graubert is mentioned, I would much prefer a sympathetic portrayal - he’s got his issues but I felt that the game was much harder on him than anyone else.

Group: Yoké & Karoo: I love the friendship between Yoké and Nonno and filtering it through Karoo feels even cooler to me. When did the big spooky bird first visit, did Yoké know or perceive what was going on?

Group: Yoké & Claire: book club book club book club!

Group: Spike/Claire: they’re so cute! Dinner at Mori’s? Swimming together?

Group: Nonno & Spike: I love Nonno’s role in the community and Spike’s role in the community, and they’re the two people who landed there and decided to stay. Could they bond over this?

Group: Dennis & Nonno: Important Tree Health Business!

Group: Bopek & Jell-A: Jell-A is the absolute coolest and Bopek grew on me a lot. Their friendship is adorable! What could they do together? As a side note, Jell-A’s place has the tightest interior decor in the whole game. How’d that happen, and does Bopek get a flair for vintage shapes and volumes in his weaving?

Group: Mori & Nonno & Yoké: FRIENDS. Friends for a long time, through so much pain. An evening together while The Youths (tm) are at Spike’s bar?

Yoké: catch-all Yoké request because he’s my fave! Doing Yoké things, being a big nerd, caring for books and plants and stuff

Pyre

The burning found family feelings, the revolutionary passion, the tension between topside social constraints and the kind of freedom allowed by the Downside! Thoughts about finding oneself at the end of an age, as everything crumbles down to form something new. I love all the themes, the solemnity, the heart of this game. I adore everyone in that Blackwagon+Dalbert+Celeste, so if you want to add a Nightwing or two to any prompt, please do! I also love all the Scribes and find Erisa a compelling tragic figure. Out of the other triumvirates, I’m “love to hate them” for Manley, Brighton, Udmildhe and Deluge and would not like to see them featured in sympathetic roles. My main interest usually lies in post-canon exploration when applicable, but I’m also into various adventures during canon. Pick a location or a place outside the map and see what happens? As for the ending variables, I’d ask for a peaceful revolution and Oralech alive, but no preferences for who’s up and who’s down, pick whatever works best for any given plot bunny.

Group: Tariq & Soliam: what were Tariq and Celeste like in their earliest days? Were they made or summoned from some sort of preexisting star consciousness? They’re wildly different scenarios! I’m good with either. Does Soliam then see Tariq as a child of sorts, someone he made, or something greater than himself? Did he mean to do that, to have these two immortals around? What does Tariq learn from the First Scribe?

Group: Tariq & Dalbert Oldheart: Any excuse for Tariq to hang out with the Fates for a little while, and treasure and be treasured by dear Dalbert...

Group: Oralech & Vagabond Girl: after all is said and done, Oralech’s view of the Scribes is probably... understandably... dire. So of course I want to see him talk it out with ae!

Group: Celeste & Ignarius: look, listen, if the various triumvirates just camped out near their respective Scribe’s place during the Nightwings’ years-long absence (not the only possible explanation for how you find them all neatly lined up before the first lib rite, but an explanation nonetheless, I think. just let me have my crack), that means Iggy was Celeste’s neighbor for a long time. Neighborly hijinks please?

Group: Bertrude/Pamitha: Pam returning from her travels, again and again, and finding a home in Bertrude’s lab, finding an understanding there... Bertrude’s attitude being thorny in a way that’s just what Pam needs to allow herself to open up... also: snake kisses.

Group: Volfred Sandalwood/Oralech: waking up and remembering that the mourning that’s set deep in your roots is for someone who never died, waking up and remembering that the bitterness that consumed you had made up a betrayal that never was, finding each other through these crumbling walls...

Molten Milithe: that’s the pov for a love letter to the Downside, right? And/or which Scribe did she bond with the most? Or the least for that matter?

Volfred Sandalwood: catch-all Volf’n’anyone request. I want to see our tree interact with any friend and foe you might fancy! Arguing for his beliefs, being a history professor through and through, finding himself in a tight spot and getting unexpected help, verbally tearing Brighton a new one if they ever cross each other’s path again...

group: Volfred Sandalwood/Tariq | The Lone Minstrel: Volfred’s zodiac sign is Cancer and Cancer is ruled by the Moon, so there’s that. I love how they both hold the other in the highest esteem, especially on Tariq’s part since he’s the immortal Herald of the Scribes and Volfred is, all in all, a history teacher, but listen to him and you’d think the roles were inverted. I love my nonviolent canon but could anything happen to either of them that may require a rescue, and/or some good old-fashioned h/c? What’s something that could make Tariq of all people lose it? How’s life 100 years on?

Shenmue

This game cares for the little things. I’d love to see fanworks that try to out-slice-of-life canon...

Group: Qiu Hsu & Xianzi Bei: cormorant kung fu adventure! Do they hang out sometimes?

Group: Hazuki Ryo & Shenhua Ling: any moment, discussion, small adventure from their travels together! I love their bond! For all its waifufication of Shenhua, S3 really sold me on their friendship and a shared brand of dorkiness. Alternatively, sometimes I remember that they’d be 50ish in the present day - how and where do you picture them?

The Silver Case

I‘m all for the surrealism, big things being introduced and never picked up again, Rashomon’ing it up with six explanations for the same thing where no single one can be true, people dying and then popping up again like nbd... maybe the thing I like the most is characters transcending their humanity and looming over the dystopian world like ominous avatars. Correctness’ first ending had me swooning, that kind of mood is unparalleled. I have played TSC, FSR and 25W so far and have vague memories of K7. I’m aware of the “everything’s connected” readings but that’s not my main interest in these games. For FSR-focused requests, I see Lospass as a real island but also a metaphysical place of transformation first and foremost, where strange things happen that don’t make sense elsewhere.

Group: Toriko Kusabi & Remy Fawzil: What’s Toriko up to when she’s not chasing Chris? I think it could be fun to throw her at Remy and see the island from their point of view!

Group: Tokio Morishima & Edo Macalister: since Tokio stayed at the Flower Sun and Rain... I’m interested in peculiar happenings on Lospass that are not centered on Sumio...

Group: Tetsugorou Kusabi/Sumio Kodai: Tetsu picked one hell of a crush, huh! What’s it like in the aftermath of the games, when Sumio is Like That? How does Tetsu grapple with Parade? Is Tetsu an anchor of sorts for Correctness Sumio, who seems (at best) to be existing on a slightly different plane of existence at any given time and could disappear if you blink too hard?

Group: Tetsugorou Kusabi & Shinko Kuroyanagi: I’m joining the “let these two be foulmouthed friends” masses - who’d be more fed up with the other’s nonsense, and in which ways would they be an unstoppable team?

Group: Shinkai Tsuki & Tetsugorou Kusabi: Both of them end their stories in the shadows one way or another, and defending their protégé may have had a hand in their misfortune one way or another. What kind of understanding could they reach? What IS Tsuki up to anyway?

Group: Christina & Catherine: anthro Catherine, as per the Placebo bonus chapter Yami, was unexpectedly charming. What was Chris before reaching Lospass, and did he also have a chat with her on the plane or on the island?

#letter

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hot-tae-with-suga · 6 years ago

Text

This Looks Bad || 2

Summary: Taehyung and I were just horsing around, but someone took a picture, and now everyone thinks I’m cheating on my boyfriend Namjoon with one of his best friends. Which I’m not, because I don’t (let myself) think of Tae that way. And neither does Namjoon. Right?

Reader (1st person unnamed femme OC)/Namjoon/Taehyung

Idol AU

36.2K total || Rated M || Part 1 | Part 3 (final) | AO3 || Masterlist

Genre: fluff / smut / angst with happy ending || Warnings: Misunderstandings, Failure to Communicate, Bisexual characters, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Threesome, Smut

Originally Posted 2019-03-27

Thank you so so so much to my editor S, and my wonderful betas from the JAG discord (L, V, and D)

27 Days P.I. (2 days post sleepover)

The morning after the impromptu sleepover had been rushed, both boys needing to get back to the dorms before taking off for their scheduled events that day, so I’d stayed quiet about what I’d heard them talking about. I’d given Namjoon a kiss goodbye, and waved to Tae who was hesitant to give me a hug even after having spent the night cuddled up with me like a koala.

I’d wondered if it was the last time I’d see them.

I waited all day for a text or a call from Namjoon telling me that we were over, wondering the whole time where we had gone wrong. I’d thought we were back to a good place, but he really seemed to think there was something between Tae and I, or at least the potential for something between us, and he was talking about me not being his girl anymore.

Every time I took a break from my work, which was more often that I really should have, I read back over our conversations from the last few weeks, trying to pinpoint when he’d lost interest in me. The earlier conversations were more painful, remembering how distant we’d been. The simple exchanges of “hey, you busy?” followed by “yeah, let me call you later” when I knew that no call had come made me wonder if I’d pinpointed the start of our prolonged break up. But things had become better in more recent exchanges, we were both obviously more engaged and actually talking about our days in multiple word sentences. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where we were going wrong, unless Namjoon had been making one last ditch effort to save the relationship, but had ultimately decided it wasn’t worth saving.

I was more than a little surprised when Namjoon called me the next morning, saying that since my visit the week before had gone unnoticed, management was cool with my coming over again. This time instead of stopping at the dorm, I went straight to his studio, where he told me he’d been working until mid-afternoon. I wore my hat, mask, and dark glasses, but I didn’t bother with any evasive maneuvers on my trip this time. I told myself it was because I was confident I wouldn’t be noticed going into the large office building, but deep down I thought it would be the last time, so it wouldn’t really matter if I got spotted. The whole world already seemed to think that Namjoon had dumped me, I was just waiting for him to actually do it.

I knocked on the door to the studio, but punched in the code and walked in a moment later, assuming Namjoon would have his headphones on and wouldn’t hear me. Instead I was surprised to find Hoseok and Taehyung on the beige couch, Namjoon sitting in his chair to talk with them. Sweatpants and oversized t shirts were the uniform of the day, and both Hobi and Tae had headbands on; all of them looked a bit tired so I assumed they’d just finished up with dance practice.

The door had been an effective sound barrier, the music they were listening to suddenly washed over me. I recognized the beat as one Namjoon had played for us the week previous, but now there was a melody soaring over it, making it sound more complete.

All three guys looked up as I walked in, and Hoseok jumped up to give me a quick hug. “Hey, Hobi,” I greeted him with as much cheerfulness as I could manage. “Sorry if I’m interrupting, I thought Namjoon would be on his own.” Obviously Hobi didn’t know what was about to happen, he’d always been a terrible liar and I’d have seen it on his face.

“No no, we’ve been expecting you,” Hoseok brushed off my apology. He stepped back to let Joon give me a hug as well.

“Hey, babe,” he murmured. He sat in Hobi’s now-empty spot on the couch and pulled me down to sit in his lap. Hoseok shrugged and dropped into Namjoon’s chair, spinning slowly as he relaxed.

The song playing came to an end and looped back to the beginning again, but Hobi reached around and hit the keyboard, pausing it. “It sounds good,” I commented. I got a nod of thanks, but their discussion picked back up, talking about the theme of the comeback and how all the new songs were shaping up. I tried to relax in Namjoon’s hold, but I was still on edge, knowing that as soon as they were done talking and we were alone, I’d become a single woman. Maybe. I was pretty sure, anyway.

Taehyung seemed to notice how I was pulling at the sleeves of my shirt, the hems nearly destroyed by my fidgeting. He reached over and grabbed my hand, stilling it. I looked up and met his eyes, his expressive eyebrows pulled together in a silent question, asking if I was okay. I drew my lips tight, a sad approximation of a smile, and his frown deepened.

“Anyway, I’m meeting Jin-hyung to practice some more,” Hoseok wa saying, standing up. “I’ll see you guys later.” With that, he was gone. I stared at the closed door, not yet wanting to be alone with these two men in particular.

None of us moved, and I stared off into space until Tae squeezed the hand he still held. “Noona, are you okay?” he asked sweetly, and I felt my chest contract.

“Babe?” Namjoon asked when I didn’t answer Taehyung right away, twisting us both so that he could see my face. Tears welled up, but I sniffled and managed to blink them away before they fell.

“I-” I started, choking on the words. “I just- My anxiety is really bad today.” Not a lie, then, but not the whole truth.

“Has the date been set for your defense?” Joon questioned. “When is it, I can see if my schedule is free. I’d like to be there for you.”

Hearing the empty promise of a future event he had no actual plans to attend pulled a sob from me, shaking my whole body enough that Namjoon could feel it, holding me as close as he was.

“Oh babe, don’t cry! It’ll be okay, you’ll do great. You’re the smartest person I know, you know that? And you know your shit backwards and forwards,” he tried to comfort me, but I just shook my head at his words.

Taehyung, who was still holding my hand, reached to grab the other as well. “I am sure you will blow them away,” he said earnestly. I pulled my hands from his, wiping the backs of them across my cheeks where I felt a couple of tears falling.

“I think we need to get her mind off of it,” Namjoon suggested to Taehyung. “You up for, uh, helping out?” I watched Tae nod, an odd flush creeping over his soft cheeks.

I sniffled again, shaking my head. “No, I’ll be okay,” I lied. Neither of them seemed to heed me, both standing up and gathering their coats before pulling me with them. We took a car back to the dorm, finding the place empty of other members.

“Come on, lets just go watch something in our room,” Namjoon suggested, pulling me and Tae along with him. I’d resigned myself to this fate, of drifting along after him until he finally cut me loose.

They turned on a variety show on one of their laptops, setting it at the foot of Namjoon’s bed while the three of us settled near the head. I looked at the screen but wasn’t paying much attention, and Namjoon kept sending me glances when I didn’t laugh at the big jokes. At the second break for commercials, he crawled over and shut the computer, moving it to his bedside table.

He sat back down facing me, and asked Taehyung, “You up for plan B? This obviously isn’t cheering her up enough.”

Tae nodded, and before I could ask what ‘Plan B’ was, Joon was leaning into me, his mouth hot on mine and his body pressing me backwards. I was too shocked to do anything, even when my back hit Taehyung. I reached one arm behind me to brace myself, not wanting to fall into the other man.

I wasn’t even kissing Namjoon back yet when he pulled his mouth away, but stayed close, smiling at me fondly, and I felt my heart swell. Then he leaned over me awkwardly, over my shoulder, and kissed Taehyung.

I tried not to stare, but they were literally kissing right in front of my face. It was odd, seeing the mouth I was so accustomed to kissing, that tongue that appeared in my dreams, pressed against someone else. Someone with a sharp jawline, with a larger nose, with faint stubble above his lip, with lips that parted easily and quickly as I watched. The two mens’ mouths slid over each other fluidly, so much smoother and less awkward than the kiss Namjoon and I had just shared.

My heart sank again, my chest tightening. As hot as it was, as beautiful as they may have been together, I was so confused and still feeling heartbroken.

“So, what…?” I asked, almost sorry to see them break apart as soon as they heard me. “You guys were going to, what, let me watch you make out to distract me?” I was pulling at straws, but I couldn’t think of one logical reason they’d be doing this.

Namjoon smiled at me again. “Not exactly what we had planned, but if that’s what will get your mind off of things, we can do that for you,” he offered. “However, I had been thinking that it’s your turn to kiss our Taehyungie.”

I started to wonder if I was suffering from some kind of brain damage, considering how often my brain ceased to function when my boyfriend spoke in the last month or so. I looked back over my shoulder, trying to see if Taehyung was hearing this insanity as well, but he was smiling at me, that boxy grin splitting his face. He somehow looked excited.

“You want me? To kiss Taehyung?” I repeated, both asking for clarification and explanation. My head felt like it was on a swivel, looking from one face to the other and back again.

Namjoon nodded. “I mean, what’s hotter than two hot people kissing, right?” he argued. “And I think that between the two of us, we can keep your mind off of whatever is making you anxious.”

I was still in shock, still processing and trying to figure out what was going on when Namjoon leaned toward me again, cupping my cheek in one large hand, and kissed me again. His lips were soft this time, no tongue seeking entry into my mouth, just a simple press of his lips against mine. As he pulled away, the hand on my cheek turned my face, and when I opened my eyes again, Taehyung was there.

“You want this, Tae-ah?” I asked quietly, never breaking our gaze. He nodded slowly, licking his lips.

Neither of us breathed for a moment, our eyes locked on each other, until from my peripheral I saw hands reach out and suddenly our faces were being pushed closer together.

Our initial clash was painful due to outside forces, lips getting caught between two sets of teeth and noses smooshing into each other. I pulled back on instinct, fighting against Namjoon’s hand on the back of my head. Turning, I glared at him. “This isn’t some punishment on a variety show, Joon,” I scolded. I turned back to Taehyung and saw his face fall, as though he thought I didn’t want to me kissing him. I could admit to myself that I did want to, since Namjoon had requested it, after all.

Rather than chew Namjoon out for his clumsy and heavy handed attempts at moving us along, I raised my hand to the back of Tae’s neck and pulled him toward me again, this time much more gently. I could feel him pause for a moment, in shock, maybe, before he opened his mouth to mine.

At first Taehyung was hesitant, only daring to slide his tongue into my mouth once I had swept mine through his. As the kiss continued, and it did continue for what felt like ages, he grew bolder, shifting us so that he was above me and pressed me down and back against Namjoon in a echo of what Joon had done earlier. I let myself get lost in the sensations, it had been a long time since I’d kissed anyone other than Namjoon, and it was one hell of a first kiss. His lips were thinner than Joon’s, tongue less dexterous perhaps, but he liked to bite and nibble at my lips, which sent shivers of arousal down to my core.

I felt Namjoon behind me, sliding his arms around my waist and resting his hands there while he kissed the back of my neck, then he began to slide his hands lower to fumble with the buttons at the fly of my jeans. I reached down to still his hand, trying to tell him without words that he was moving too fast. He stopped fiddling with the buttons, instead gathering the hem of my shirt and guiding it up my torso. Not quite as slow as I had been aiming for, but it was better than my pants coming off.

After he pulled my shirt off my arms, Namjoon backed away, and Taehyung slipped his arms around my now bare waist, twisting us both until I was lying beneath him on the bed. He laid hot kisses all over, from my mouth, to my collarbones, to that sensitive spot behind my ear. The whole time he couldn’t stop talking between kisses, telling me how beautiful I was and how long he had wanted to touch and kiss me.

I let myself start to enjoy the feelings he was eliciting in me, kissing him back and running my hands into his hair. My mouth left a darkening bruise against the honey coloured skin of his neck, and he moaned, his voice low, and I practically felt the vibrations in my chest. He pulled away from me only long enough to tear his own shirt over his head before returning his mouth to my body. I looked for Namjoon, finding him sitting not far from us, palming his cock through his pants and smiling fondly.

Seeing Namjoon’s hardness made me curious, so I rolled my body against Taehyung’s, and sure enough he was also sporting an impressive erection. He moaned when my hip rubbed against it, and let himself relax a bit and press me more firmly in to the mattress. His hand slid up to cup my breast, thumb flicking across the nipple that was already stiffened under the lace of my bra. I arched against him again to urge him to continue, my breath coming hard, and my hand was drawn toward the waist of his pants. I was pulling open the fly of his trousers and swallowing a groan when my thoughts caught up with me.

Suddenly, my throat constricted and my stomach rolled, the panic of the situation finally breaking through the haze of lust. I wasn’t really going to have sex with my boyfriend’s roommate/close friend/former lover while said boyfriend watched, was I? My mind was racing, and obviously Tae could feel how I stiffened up because he pulled back and looked at my face.

“Noona?” he asked softly, his voice full of concern, and it almost broke me.

“I-” My voice broke, unable to find the words I needed to reassure him, my breath coming too fast. Taehyung lifted himself off of me, freeing me of his weight pinning me to the bed. I ran my hands through my hair, anxiously pushing it out of my face before covering my burning face with my palms.

“Are you okay, babe?” Namjoon asked softly from beside us. He leaned over so I could see his eyes, actually looking like he was concerned for me, as he brushed a rogue strand of hair from my face. “We can slow down, or even stop, if this is too much for you.”

“What-” I started to ask, then sat up and tried again, still feeling breathless. “What exactly are we stopping, Joon? What is going on?”

Namjoon sighed, tilting his head to look at both Taehyung and I, both of us shirtless, flushed, and still breathing harder than normal, though not for the same reason. “I just- I know you two like each other, and I wanted, I still want, for you to be happy, to be happy together, like you want.” He leaned forward and kissed me softly, and the tear welled up in my eyes again.

He wanted me to be happy, maybe, but happy with Taehyung instead of with him. His words from the other night as well as some things he’d said a week previously suddenly made sense in my mind.

Namjoon was done with me, that much was clear. Like he said, I was his girl for now, but it didn’t have to stay that way, and for some reason he thought the best way to get rid of me was to...was to pass me on to his friend? Like I was some kind of toy that he was done playing with, so now I was hand-me-downs to his little brother?

I pushed Taehyung back, getting him out of my way as I scrambled off the bed, my face burning with shame. I spotted the bright fabric of my shirt near the end of the bed and grabbed it before I ran out of the room.

Rushing down the hall, I fumbled with the thin piece of clothing, trying to turn it right side out. I heard footsteps behind me, but I wasn’t sure who was chasing after me and didn’t really care at the moment, not wanting to face either of them.

The tears still filling my eyes, plus the temporary blindness of pulling my shirt over my head as I stepped into the living room area, meant I missed the fact that there were now other people in the dorm. A couple of the guys, I didn’t really look to see which ones, stood in the kitchen and another was on the couch, watching me storm past them and kick off my slippers, searching for where I’d put my shoes when we’d arrived.

“Babe,” Namjoon spoke just before I felt his hand grab my arm. “Babe, come on, talk to me. Tell me what’s really wrong, please?” I ignored him, still searching for my things in the disorder of the entryway. “Look, it was too fast, I’m sorry, I get it, please just talk to me.”

I twisted, pulling my arm out of his grasp. Trying to keep my voice down, to keep our conversation from reaching the others, I hissed, “Fuck you, Kim Namjoon. You don’t get to do that to me and then pretend not to know what’s wrong.”

He shook his head, his eyes widened and his jaw dropped. “I don’t- Babe, I honestly don’t know what’s wrong, unless you tell me. I know things got really intense in there, it could be any of a million things.”

I finally looked up at him, noting the honest confusion on his face. He didn’t realize I’d figured out what he was doing, what he had planned for me. “You need to grow some fucking balls. For someone who is supposed to be so good with words, you should be able to tell me that you’re tired of me, and be honest with me, instead of trying to hand me down to one of your members like I am some kind of toy you don’t want to play with anymore.” He had the audacity to look shocked, and it only fueled me. “You think you’re being kind, or something, but getting Tae to fuck me because you don’t want to anymore is just...ugh.”

My hands were balled into fists at my sides and it took everything in me not to start wailing and beating his chest. He made me so mad, and I felt so betrayed, I couldn’t look at him anymore. I turned around again, finally spotting my shoes sticking out from under the small shelf that held everyone’s slippers. Shoving my feet into them, I felt the angry tears finally start to fall down my face. I hated crying, hated that any strong emotion could bring me to the point of tears, and I was overwhelmed by a mixture of strong emotions as I looked back toward Namjoon, still standing between me and the rest of the dorm.

Taehyung stood behind him now, still shirtless, pants still undone, but holding my purse and phone in his hands. I must have brought them into their room but obviously forgot to grab them when I stormed out.

I stepped closer, reaching past Namjoon for Tae to hand me my things. “Babe, you’ve got it all wrong,” Namjoon was trying to convince me, but I shut him out. Taehyung passed me my purse and phone, and I slipped the latter into my pocket. “Baby, please, don’t go,” Tae gave me that look, where he pressed his lips together and the corners of his mouth turned up but it wasn’t a smile. That look the meant ‘I get it, I wish there was something I could do, I’m sorry’ all at once. His sad eyes met mine briefly before I spun back around and walked out the door.

30 Days P.I. (3 days after aborted threesome)

I felt my phone buzz somewhere under me, but couldn’t be bothered to find it in the mess of blankets I was cocooned in. I’d spent the 60 or so hours previous wallowing, going over everything that had happened, and feeling sorry for myself.

My best friend in the city (who wasn’t an idol), Lee Ji Soo, had come by to bring me ice cream and hold my hand for a while, but she has other things to do, and it’s not like I could be completely honest about what had happened. She’d politely respected my privacy after the whole scandal had broken, knowing that even though I was publically dating a member of Bangtan, I still couldn’t talk about details. Ji Soo’s keen mind and sharp intuition had put two and two together when I called her up, sobbing into the phone and asking why he didn’t want me anymore, though, so she’d rushed to be by my side. The text was probably from her, checking to make sure I hadn’t literally drowned in my own tears.

The buzzing came again, not the short one to remind me that I had a new message, but the longer one, accompanied by the annoying chirp of my messaging app that meant I had another new text. I’d muted both Namjoon and Tae, not even opening their chats, I just wasn’t ready to deal with them yet.

Grumbling to myself, I levered my top half off the bed and pawed through the folds of the fuzziest blanket I owned until I spotted the offending piece of technology. Collapsing back into my nest, I checked the screen to see who was impatient enough to message me twice in the span of two minutes.

To my surprise, Jung Hoseok’s name topped the first alert. If it had been one of the other members, Jimin or Jungkook, I might have ignored them, assuming they would either be curious as to what happened or acting as an agent of the offending parties. Hoseok rarely texted me though, so I unlocked the phone and opened the app. Before today, our entire message history consisted of “Hey, we’re gonna be late and Namjoon forgot to charge his phone” and “I’ve asked everyone else, do you have any idea what Joonie wants for his birthday?”

Now, though, the two most recent messages on the screen said:

Hoseok: Monie is an idiot, but not the kind of idiot you think

Hoseok: Please talk to him, I swear that he can explain if you just talk to him

Hoseok and I might not be super close, but he’d always looked out for me, and I couldn’t imagine he’d be initiating this conversation unless it was genuine. I sighed and dropped my phone back onto my pillow.

I’d pretty much cried myself out by that point, but I will still so...tired. I was physically exhausted from all the wailing and sobbing, and mentally exhausted from, well, everything else. It had been a very very long month, and what Namjoon had done had been the cherry on top.

I wasn’t ready to talk to him today, not quite yet. But I picked the phone back up and texted Hobi that I’d talk to Joon in a few days.

32 Days P.I. (5 days after aborted threesome)

True to my word, two days later I opened my my messaging app and clicked on Namjoon’s name. The little bubble told me there were more than fifty unread messages, but I didn’t bother scrolling up to read them.

If you want to call, I’ll answer

I thought I’d have to wait a while, maybe I assumed he’d be busy with something, but less than two minutes later my phone was vibrating. I’d silenced the special ringtone I’d set for him when he was calling incessantly, and all I had wanted to do was throw the phone against the wall every time I heard it.

I swiped across the screen to answer the call, and hit the speaker button, but suddenly I couldn’t think of what to say.

“Babe?” Namjoon asked softly after a couple moments of silence. “You there?”

“Ye-” I started, but choked on the words, my throat constricting painfully upon hearing his voice again. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yeah, I’m here.”

I appreciated the speaker function making me able to move the phone away from my ear at the sudden rush of noise when Namjoon sighed directly into his phone’s mic. “Oh god, babe, it’s so good to hear your voice.” His words tumbled out of his mouth as if they’d been caged and only just set free.

I was struck dumb once again, unable to think of what to say. Could I admit that as angry and sad as I was, I had missed his voice as well?

When I didn’t say anything, he continued, “I’ve been on edge ever since Hoseok told me you’d replied to him. I’m so sorry, I fucked up so bad, I know that. Will you let me explain?”

I sighed. “Sure, Joon-ah. You want to talk now or is there a better-?”

“In person, please,” he begged, cutting me off. “I need to see you, please, this will be easier face-to-face.”

I thought I was showing a lot of maturity by not immediately scoffing at him. “Okay. Not at the dorm, though,” I requested. “I can meet you at your studio I guess-” Then I remembered cuddling between him and Tae on that couch just before the whole thing started. “You know what, maybe you could come here instead? It’s a bit of a mess, but…”

“Let me take you out,” Namjoon cut in. “My treat. We can go out to lunch, or grab dinner later if you’re too busy right now.”

My brain froze. “You want to go out? Like, in public?” Did he assume that if we were in public, I wouldn’t make a scene?

I couldn’t see him, of course, but I was pretty sure Namjoon was nodding from the rustling noises I heard. “Yeah, it’s been too long since we went out.”

I hesitated, unsure if he was really thinking things through or just saying what he thought I wanted to hear. “Yeah, for a good reason, Namjoon. Maybe we should just do this on the phone after all.”

“No, come on, babe,” he whined. “We can go to that Japanese place you like, with the great teriyaki.”

“Namjoon, people will see us if we’re out together. Reporters will see us,” I reminded him. “Your managers aren’t going to give you permission to be seen in public with me, not at this point. Keeping me on lock down seems to have been working,” I tried to appeal, hoping he would remember his loyalty to the group and their image. “Are you really going to spoil all that for a girl you’re trying to break up with?”

“No!” Namjoon said sharply. “I’m not breaking up with you! I don’t want to break up, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. You’ll have to dump me if this is over, because I never want to leave you.” His voice softened, adding, “I want you to see that you are more important to me than anything, even a scandal or getting in trouble with management.”

“How-” I choked again, finding I still had tears left in me to cry. “I don’t get it.” How could he say these things, I was so confused. Had I really gotten it all wrong?

“Babe, I was never trying to pass you off, or whatever it was that you thought,” he tried to explain. “You’re too important to me, too precious. I never want to let you go. When I said I wanted to be with you forever, I meant it.”

Gathering my courage, I finally asked about the words that had convinced me that he was tired of me. “Then why tell Taehyung I was your girl for now, but it wouldn’t always be that way?”

“I never-” he started, letting out a huge sigh. “I really am the biggest idiot in the world, aren’t I?” he asked rhetorically. Another deep breath which was then blown straight into the mic, making me move the phone away again from the sudden rush of noise. I set the phone down so I would stop fiddling with it. “I wasn’t trying to say that you wouldn’t always be my girl. I was trying to imply that maybe you wouldn’t be only my girl.”

My mind, my breathing, both ground to a halt, trying to figure out what he was saying. “What?”

“I don’t want to end our relationship, I was just trying to...adjust it,” he said cautiously. When I was unable to answer, he continued, “Can we just talk about this at lunch? It’s the kind of thing that’s better to talk about in person.”

“Uh-” I hesitated, still unsure. “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

“Great, I’ll call ahead and get us a private room,” he said. “Meet you there in twenty minutes?”

***

“Why was I even worried about meeting in public if we’re arriving separately and getting a private room?” I grumbled to myself. “We could have tried to do this weeks ago.” I ignored the looks I earned from the other pedestrians waiting at the crosswalk, who must have wondered what was wrong with me. The restaurant Namjoon had named was on the next block, a family run place I’d wandered into years ago and discovered had the best teriyaki. Stepping through the door, I realized the hostess was new and therefore wouldn’t recognize me as Namjoon’s regular eating companion.

“Yeah, hi, I’m meeting someone,” I replied after she had greeted me.

She nodded and looked at the screen next to her. “Name?” she asked politely.

“Umm…” I didn’t know what name Namjoon would have given for the reservation. “He probably called like, half an hour ago? He booked a private room,” I tried.

The hostess gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me. “I’m sorry, miss, if you don’t know who you’re meeting, I can’t show you to a table. We are fully booked. I can put you on the list, but it will be about 20 minutes.”

I sighed, rolling my eyes in my head at Namjoon for forgetting to tell me this small detail. “I dunno, maybe Koya? Ryan?” I listed a couple of names he’d used before, but saw no recognition in her eyes. “He wouldn’t have used it, but his name is Kim Namjoon.”

One of the servers I recognized, the chef/owner’s daughter, stepped up just as the hostess’s eyes widened. “Right this way, miss,” the server said with a gesture for me to follow, leaving the hostess looking a bit shocked and looking me up and down. I felt my face flush at the blatant appraisal as I followed the server to a staircase leading to the lower level of the restaurant, a hallway lined with sliding rice paper partitions, and through one she opened for me.

Namjoon sat at the table, his long legs crossed on the thin cushion, his all black attire striking against the pale soft colours of the decor. A small pot of tea and two ceramic cups already graced the table. He stood up when I entered, stepping forward as if to hug me but hesitating and dropping them back to his sides.

“Hey,” I greeted, setting my purse down and sitting on a cushion on the other side of the table from him. “Sorry, I’m a bit late.”

“No no, you’re fine,” Namjoon assured me. “It was kind of last minute, anyway.” He sat back down and poured a measure of tea into the empty cup, sliding it over to me. We sat in awkward silence for a few moments, neither of us ready to talk about what needed to be said, before he asked, “So, how is the thesis defense going?”

I huffed into my cup as I took a sip of the slightly bitter tea. “Haven’t really been working on it for the last few days,” I admitted. I looked around for a menu, but saw none. “Have you already ordered?” Yes, it was a weak and blatant attempt to change the subject. No, I wasn’t proud.

Namjoon nodded in answer to my question. “I ordered your usual for you, I hope you don’t mind,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically timid.

“Yeah, thanks,” I tried to assure him, but it came out sounding more sarcastic than I had meant. “So, yeah, you wanted to talk?” I volleyed, trying to start the conversation I’d come all this way to have.

Namjoon nodded. “Yeah, but maybe let’s wait until after the food gets here? I don’t want to be interrupted.”

I nodded. The silence hung heavy between us.

“So, uh, how are the members?” I asked lamely.

“Good, they’re good,” he told me. “A little concerned after what happened, but once I kind of explained what happened, they were the ones who made me see what a fool I’ve been.”

“I didn’t mean-” I started. “I meant like, how was the album and rehearsals. I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was asking about how they reacted.”

Namjoon chucked ruefully. “Yeah, but figuring stuff out has kind of been a big part of the last few days. They saw my girlfriend, who they all love, running out of my room half dressed and almost crying, being chased by me and my - also half-naked - roommate. And then she starts saying stuff about me trying to give her to him, so it’s understandable that they’d be concerned. Mostly about your safety.”

I flushed at the memory, knowing now what the real situation had been. “I still don’t know what’s going on,” I muttered.

Namjoon sighed. “I know, babe, I’m trying to figure out the best way to tell you-” He cut off as the partition slid open and two servers entered, carrying a collection of small plates and dishes. By unspoken agreement we waited until all of the items had been deposited and we were alone to begin eating.

Conversation was slow to resume, though, due to our enjoyment of the food in front of us. We moved in concert, arranging dishes closer to the person who enjoyed it more, carefully dividing the mutual favourites evenly between our plates, and depositing disliked ingredients on the other’s. Habits born of long practice in the years we’d been eating together were hard to break even with the tension hanging between us.

Once our initial hunger had been sated in silence, I looked at Namjoon pointedly, waiting for him to begin once again with his explanation of exactly what had been miscommunicated to leave our relationship in such a precarious situation.

“Look, how about you tell me why you thought I was trying to give you to Taehyung, and I’ll fill in what you don’t know,” he suggested, obviously unsure of where to start. I took a deep breath and began speaking.

I explained about how I’d been so happy after we’d made up, that I hadn’t even really considered why he’d teased Tae so much, and then brought him along to my place, and invited him into our bed even after the scandal that had plagued our lives. About how I’d overheard him talking to Tae that night, telling the younger man his suspicions about romantic feelings between him and I, and about how my heart broke when he said that I was his girl, but it “didn’t have to be that way”.

Namjoon interrupted me there. “Aw, babe, that’s not what I meant at all!”

“Do you want me to tell you what I was thinking, or not?”

“Sorry, you’re right. Go ahead.”

I told him of the pit of despair I’d wallowed in, about how I’d tried over and over again to figure out what went wrong and why he’d leave me after all we’d been through. I explained why I’d been so despondent when I’d arrived at the studio to visit him, thinking I was about to get dumped. When I got to the part about my confusion when he was encouraging me to be physical with Taehyung, he interrupted again.

“So you thought I was trying to set you up with your next boyfriend, before we were even over?”

“Well, Namjoon, you’d asked more than once if I was going to hook up with him after we broke up, it wasn’t that much of a stretch.”

He grabbed by hand across the table, squeezing it and pulling it closer. “I’m sorry, babe. I really, really shouldn’t have tried to spring a surprise threesome on you.”

“A surprise threesome? That was the goal?” I was incredulous.

Namjoon shrugged. “I’ve been thinking...I was trying to set it up for, uh...” he mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.

“You were trying to set up…” I prompted.

“I was playing with the idea of inviting Taehyung into our relationship,” he finally said in a rush. I froze, the chopsticks I’d been holding dropping out of my grip and clattering to the table. When I said nothing, he asked, “So, that probably wasn’t the best way to go about things.”

“Ya think?!” I said quickly. I watched his face fall and immediately regretted my hasty words; he was obviously trying really hard to explain, and was well aware of how he’d messed up. “Sorry, that was harsher than I meant. I just mean, why didn’t you come to me? I knew you had a past with Taehyung, it wouldn’t have been a shock if you told me there were lingering feelings there. Hell, you literally invited him to at least watch us hook up more than once.”

Namjoon sighed. “Yeah, but you and he always brushed it off as me being a generalized perv, not an intentional move on him. I figured if I actually encouraged the two of you directly, things might finally go somewhere.”

It was my turn to sigh. I could see how it all made some sort of sense in his head, but he still never thought to actually discuss his plans with either of us-

“Did you talk about this with Taehyung?” I asked, pulling my hand from his as the thought occurred to me. “Like, before it happened?”

“Um-” Namjoon flushed. “I mean, we had already talked about how he liked you, and I might have floated the idea of a threesome at some point…”

“That’s how he knew what was coming, when you kissed him,” I realized. My food was forgotten, I just sat with my hands folded in my lap as I contemplated the situation. “So you talked to him about whatever your plan was, about bringing him into our relationship, before you talked to me? The other person actually in said relationship?”

“No!” Namjoon answered quickly. “Not the part about being with us, like, long term. Just...just the idea of joining us in bed.”

“At least you talked to someone,” I muttered.

He frowned at that. “Hey, I am not the only one who didn’t talk,” he pointed out. “You were making a lot of assumptions without talking to me at all, too.”

“And what would have happened, if I was right, Joon-ah?” I asked. “It was my worst nightmare come true!” I looked down to my hands, twisted together just below the table. “At least if I didn’t say anything, I could hope you’d change your mind.”

I didn’t notice he had moved until he knelt next to me, and his arm slid around my shoulder. “For two people who are supposed to be pretty smart, we kind of missed the mark.” He spoke into my hair, his lips pressed against my head. “Please, just tell me I haven’t fucked this up beyond repair?”

Twisting into him, I slid my arms around his waist. “I was planning on staying with you until the moment you left me, even when I thought you were going to dump me,” I pointed out. “Now that we both understand better, I think we might be able to get through this.”

“Thank god,” he breathed, then cupped my chin to turn me to face him, and kissed me gently. I returned his kiss, keeping it light and sweet, a relieved kiss more than anything. He pulled back, kissing me again on the forehead. “I swear, I’ll talk to you about any crazy relationship ideas from now on.”

I giggled, almost giddy. “I appreciate it,” I admitted. He pulled me closer, awkwardly dragging me into his lap.

“I just can’t get the image of you out of my head, right before you ran out of the room. You looked so betrayed, so heartbroken.” Namjoon just held me tight in his arms, as if he was afraid to let me go. “Which makes sense, I guess. You were. And I hate that I made you feel that way.”

“I never want to hurt you like that, ever again,” he continued. “I’ll talk to Taehyungie, I mean I’m sure he’s not expecting us to approach him again after what happened, but I’ll try to explain what happened. Getting better at communicating has to start somewhere, right?” The way he said it, with this sense of finality, made me stop and think.

“Joonie?” I asked softly. “Is it- Was it cause I’m not enough? Is there just something you’ll always be missing that will hang over us forever?”

“Oh babe, no, never,” Namjoon was quick to reassure me, somehow squeezing me even tighter. “You are always enough, more than enough for me, I swear.” I smiled weakly, trying to believe him. He continued, “This was just my incredibly selfish reaction to a very specific situation I built up in my head. Now that I realize how off-base I was, the temptation is gone.”

I wasn’t sure I could believe that entirely. It’s not like Taehyung was going anywhere, for either of us, because I realized that he was going to be a temptation for us both. He was going to be Namjoon’s fellow group member, his dongsaeng, for the foreseeable future at least, and as long as I was with Joon, he’d be there too.

As much as I had recoiled at the idea of Namjoon foisting me off on Taehyung, those feelings the situation had made me face remained. Was is really so out of the question that Namjoon and I be involved with him?

I wasn’t sure, couldn’t make any guarantees, but I knew I couldn’t write off the idea entirely.

“I’m not saying that I’m for sure in…” I said after a few moments. “But...let’s not rule it out quite yet, either?”

“Rule what out?” Namjoon asked, clearly confused. Then his eyes widened, his whole body tensing around me. “You mean, lets not rule Taehyung out?”

I nodded. “I’m still not sure, but I just think its something I need to consider. And I’d need to talk to Tae, have a serious discussion with him.”

“Yeah, sure, let me know and we can come over-”

“Alone, Namjoon,” I interrupted him. “Tae and I need to discuss things without you over our shoulders, with those excited hopeful puppy-dog eyes of yours. We need to decide if this is what we want, and that we wouldn’t just be doing it to make you happy because we love you.”

He relaxed again, but kept me close. “Okay, okay, that makes sense,” he admitted. “Just, I want you to know that I love you either way. And I am going to be with you, no matter if its with Tae or the two of us.”

I hummed in agreement and turned to kiss him again. Just then, our server slid the partition open and peeked inside, clearing her throat. “All finished?” she asked politely.

I slipped out of Namjoon’s lap and back onto my own cushion. Namjoon helped hand the empty plates to the server and quietly asked for the bill. Once that was paid, by him despite my objections, he pulled out his phone and started typing a message.

“Calling for a car?” I asked.

Namjoon shook his head. “No, just apologizing to Sejin-ssi,” he answered.

“What did you do to Sejin?” I couldn’t imagine what he’d managed to do to his manager in the time we’d been eating lunch.

“Nothing yet,” he said cryptically. “Are you headed back home or to school? Can I walk you? We can stop for boba on the way.”

I hesitated. “Is that a good idea?” I gathered my purse and straightened my clothes. “Photographers have stopped following me everywhere, but you never know…”

Namjoon slid both his large hands around my waist and looked down at me with a fond smile. “You’re worth the risk.”

33 Days P.I. (1 day after second make up)

My phone was buzzing, and once again I was surprised by the name on the screen when I picked it up. Thankfully I was alone in the office at school, so I could answer the FaceTime call from Jin, assuming it must be an accident or an emergency since we didn't usually call each other, let alone use video calling.

Jin's face appeared briefly on screen, only long enough for me to see the smirk on his face and a couple of other familiar faces behind him before the camera switched to show me what he was seeing.

I recognized one of the numerous conference rooms at the Big Hit offices, where a trio of management types sat at one end of the room with Namjoon facing them, in heated conversation. I knew from the view of Jin that at least some of the other members were in the room as well, watching the fireworks.

"How did they find you, Namjoon?" one of the managers asked, annoyance and anger battling for dominance in his tone.

"I don't know," my boyfriend replied, obviously not for the first time. Even through the small screen I could sense his apathy, his complete disregard for their concerns. "It's a free city, someone must have spotted me when I had my mask down."

"You're lucky my contact at Dispatch gave me a heads up," said another manager, obviously from the PR team. "Otherwise those pictures would be everywhere by now."

"So let them be everywhere!" Namjoon shot back. "I wasn't doing anything wrong, I was walking my girlfriend back to her apartment after we had lunch together. Our relationship is public! What's the big deal?"

"Don't play with us, young man," the third man chimed in. I didn't recognize him, so he was probably higher up on the corporate ladder than I usually associated with. "We have a strategy in place to deal with the scandal with your little girlfriend, remember?"

"Yeah, well, your strategy almost cost me the woman I love," Namjoon retorted. "So I say we try a new strategy, where we get to live our fucking lives and don't kowtow to what other people think."

I nearly dropped the phone, fumbling it a bit and missing the response to Namjoon's uncharacteristic outburst. His words must have shocked the older men as much as it did me, to see my normally respectful boyfriend snap at them like that.

"They only assumed we'd broken up because we were never allowed to say any different," Namjoon was arguing again. "Not our fault that they all drew the wrong conclusion."

"Yes," PR manager said. "But we can't just ignore the original scandal."

The first manager had been quiet so far, but he finally spoke up again. "So, instead of hiding like something is wrong, put them on centre stage." When the other managers looked confused, he continued, "Like how we had Namjoon and Taehyung spending lots of time together in front of cameras, to show there were no issues between them. Just add the girl into the picture, let the story be about how they are all still friends."

"That works for me," Namjoon agreed. "Suits me perfectly, in fact."

Jin flipped the camera to I could see his handsome face again, his eyebrows raised so high they disappeared into his fringe and his mouth formed a little 'o'. I laughed at his expression, as quietly as I could to avoid letting anybody else know I was on the phone.

"Seokjin?" someone called from the other side of the room, and suddenly our call cut off as Jin hung up in a panic.

A couple minutes later I got a text from him.

Jin: I'm just so proud, I've raised our leader so well.

35 Days P.I. (3 Days Post Makeup)

I re-read the email on my screen three times before I texted Namjoon.

Me: Defense date is set for next Wednesday, 2:30 pm

His response was quick, like they had been all week, as though he kept his phone in his hand and un-silenced at all times.

Joonie <3: That soon??? They don't give you a lot of notice, do they?

I smiled at my phone, shaking my head at his concern

Me: We've known it would be next week for a while, just not the day and time

I realized he might be upset over the late notice for another reason.

Me: You don't have to come, you know, if you have something scheduled

Me: Audiences aren't very common at these things, unless they're in the same field

I saw the three little dots that indicated he was typing something.

Joonie <3 : I'll figure it out. Wanna be there for you

Joonie <3 : Do you think Tae could come along as well? He was talking about wanting to go to support you...

I'd spent the majority of the three days previous worrying over the decision looming over me. The question of whether to give adding Taehyung to our relationship a try was not something I took lightly.

I couldn't deny that there was something more between us than friendship, at least on my part. I'd always ignored the attraction, the little crush, in favour of our amazing friendship and in deference to the relationship I was trying to make work with one of the nation's biggest idols. I'd attributed the fact that Tae and I were closer and more cuddly than I was with the others to his personality meshing with mine so well, on a platonic level.

I'd challenged myself to be honest, and having had days to think it over, I was ready to admit that I could see myself forming a relationship with Taehyung. What still remained to be seen was a) if he felt the same way and b) how the resulting relationship between us would fit in with the relationships we each had with Namjoon.

Me: I think he and I need to have a talk first

Me: Any gaps in your schedule in the next couple days?

Joonie <3 : We've got a photoshoot this afternoon

Joonie <3 : I can arrange for Tae to be done first, he can come meet you after that?

Me: Great

Me: How late will he be, do you think?

Me: Will I need to feed him?

Me: Oh god, what do I wear???

Me: I don't want to look like I asked him over to bang

Me: But I don't want to look like a nun either, if we're discussing a potential relationship

Me: Namjoon, help me!

The three little dots had been hanging at the bottom of the screen for the entirety of my rant, but he failed to send me any messages until I became desperate.

Joonie <3 : Babe. just wear whatever, he won't care

Joonie <3 : Pls don't bang him, tho

Joonie <3 : Not yet

Joonie <3 : I wanna be there for that

***

Somehow, after my initial freak out, I was feeling calm by the time Namjoon texted to let me know Taehyung was finished at the shoot and was on his way to me. I wasn't sure if my nerves were actually settling down or if I'd just fried them to the point of numbness, but I was thankful for the sense of calm I felt when Tae buzzed to be let in. He looked devastatingly handsome, his hair and makeup still styled from the photos he'd been taking, even in his own linen pants and loose maroon shirt. I felt out of place in my own home, in my jeans and one of Namjoon's giant shirts.

"Hey," I greeted him when he made his way to my door. I was still feeling shy, even if I was more calm, as I stepped aside and gestured for him to come in.

He smiled his adorable square smile at me and I melted a little. "Hey, noona. It's, uh- It's good to see you."

"Likewise, Taehyung-ah," I returned, but found myself at a loss for what to say next. "I wasn't sure if you'd gotten a chance to eat, but I have some ramyun or something if you want? Shit, you're in the middle of photo shoots, you probably don't want the extra salt to make you puffy. Ummm...I could always order something in?" The nerves I thought had settled were racing again, making me ramble as I paced around the small living room, looking for something to do with my hands.

Taehyung reached out and wrapped his long fingers around my wrist as I moved past him for the second time. "I'm fine, noona. I promise I had something to eat. They do feed us on shoots, you know."

"Right," I sighed. "Can I get you something to drink, at least? Water, tea...?" He just nodded, so I filled a couple of water glasses and brought them back to the living room, where he'd made himself comfortable on my couch.

"So..." I started, taking a sip of my water to wet my suddenly dry mouth. "this is weird, right? This feels weird. Maybe we should have had Namjoon here, he would know what to say."

Taehyung nodded. "I've never had to, like, formally interview for a relationship before," he joked. "First dates aren't quite so straightforward. And after that, things just always fell into place, or worked their way out organically." My lips tightened into a line, which must have concerned him because he reached over and took both my hands in his. "But it's worth it! I think so, anyway, right? I mean, a poly triad relationship is going to go a little different than what we're used to, by definition."

It was my turn to nod. "Okay then." I took another deep breath. "I guess we have some things to discuss. Can I- I mean, is it okay if I ask you some questions first?" He nodded, and let go of my hands to lean back into the corner of my couch, spreading his arms wide as if to show what an open book he was trying to be. It was an unconscious move, but it showed how incredibly confident he was, which was distressingly attractive when I was trying to be more logical about things. The move also served to remind me that while he could look small at times, Taehyung was quite simply larger than me, and I blushed hard.

"I guess the most important question is, do you want this? Do you want to, like become a triad, or whatever, with Namjoon and me?" I looked him in the eyes as I asked, needing to see his response as much as hear it.

"Yes." Tae held my gaze, as though he knew how much I needed it.

"And do you want me?" I hated how softly the question came out, as though I had lost the confidence and bravado I'd been feeling. Which wasn't inaccurate, but I didn't like showing my vulnerability.

Again, a firm: "Yes."

"As more than an obligation you have to put up with in order to be with the person you really want?"

Taehyung looked confused, taking a few extra seconds to process what I'd said. Once he had, he shook his head vigorously. "You think I'm just putting up with, like, a bonus partner cause I want to be with Namjoon-hyung? No, if anything, he's the bonus partner, not you." He slapped his hand over his mouth, looking as shocked at his own words as I felt. "I don't mean it like that! I just mean, if hyung hadn't made it clear from the moment he introduced you that he as interested in you, I'd have asked you out in a second. You can ask Jimin, I whined at him the whole time hyung was doubting himself before making a move. Heck, I even asked him to give you my number if he couldn't grow some balls. Then you guys were dating, and we became friends, and I had to keep my feelings platonic because you were my hyung's girlfriend."

He paused again before continuing. "Don't think I don't want to be with hyung, though. The relationship between us has been like this for years, like friends with benefits who know they couldn't be anything more than that. At the time, anyway. Earlier in our career we couldn't risk being together together for real, because we were too busy and too vulnerable to a scandal ruining us entirely. At least, that's what we told ourselves." Tae reached out and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear, like some cheesy lead in a drama. "Now I think maybe we were just waiting for you. You make the two of us...make sense. Like you were our missing piece."

I was too stunned to speak for a moment. Namjoon and I hadn't discussed how deep his relationship with Taehyung had been, what he wanted it to become, but Tae had just laid it all out there on the table. It made a kid of sense, really, that rather than a purely sex-based hook-up, their relationship has been more like taking what they could get because of outside circumstances. Joon was a sexual creature, I knew that very well, but I'd never suspected that he'd have been the type to have a fuck buddy. Hook-ups, one night stands, sure; living the idol life didn't make it easy to sustain a relationship, especially when it had to remain a secret. But in addition to being a horny bastard, Namjoon was also one of the most romantic people I knew: an ongoing relationship based purely on sex just wasn't his style.

"I...wow," was all I could come up with. I hadn't even processed the fact that Taehyung had maintained some kind of crush on me over the last couple years. "That's a lot to consider."

"What about you?" Taehyung turned the questions on me, before I was really ready. "Do you want this?" I nodded, but he didn't move on, so I gave him the verbal response he needed. "And do you want me?" he continued, echoing my own questions. Again, I nodded and have my ascent. "As more than a means to keep your boyfriend happy?" I noticed how his mouth tightened around the question, though he was able to keep his voice level. This was the question he was really worried about.

"Yes, Taehyung," I assured him. "The other night, I freaked out on you, I know. But it was for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with you or what we were doing, directly. It was a case of miscommunication and my overactive brain."

"Yeah, Joon-hyung explained what you'd thought was going on," he told me. "I swear, I thought the two of you had discussed things, I thought it was something you'd agreed on already. If I'd known-"

"You did nothing wrong, Tae-ah," I said, scooting closer and putting my hand on his knee. "Believe me, I wanted to be there, wanted to be with you like that, it was just that I started to think it meant something else and I freaked out. I mean, Joon and I had talked about it, in a kind of abstract way, but that was before I thought he was planning on breaking up with me and fixing me up with you at the same time." I massaged his leg just above his knee, feeling the strong muscle of his thigh twitch under my hand. "If I just wanted to keep Namjoon happy but didn't want you myself, I'd have suggested opening our relationship, not inviting you into it. Believe me, I really really like the idea of the three of us together."

Tae reached for the hand on his leg and picked it up, interlacing our fingers and bringing it up to his mouth to kiss softly. "I really really like the idea of the three of us together, too," he confessed.

"So, does this mean..." Even knowing where we stood, it still took me a bit to find the words. "Are we doing this? The three of us are dating each other?" Taehyung nodded. "Should we call Namjoon and tell him, then?"

Tae looked like he needed to consider it for a minute. "Normally I'd say yes, but he's practically been turning my ass numb with the constant texts, probably asking for updates." He fished his phone out of his back pocket, the lock screen filled with alerts of new messages from 'Leader-hyung', the phone buzzing twice more even as he placed it on the table.

I laughed. "I put him on silent when I buzzed you up," I admitted, pointing to where my phone sat on the kitchen counter. "I think we can let him stew for a little while longer, though."

"Good, then we can gossip about him," Tae said with that boxy grin of his. He hadn't let go of my hand, and reached out for the other, turning me and pulling me across his lap. It was a position we'd shared many times before, with my thighs across his and one of his arms around my back and the other over my knees. Somehow it felt more intimate now, I was more aware of the heat of his body where it pressed against mine, the way his fingers gripped the softness of my waist and the other drew patterns on my knee.

How had I not realized how many non-platonic feelings for Taehyung I'd been ignoring? I'd been avoiding my body's response to him for so long that now that I allowed myself to feel, it was overwhelming.

I laughed. "Um, I don't know, what do you want to know about him?"

"What's he like as a boyfriend?" Tae prompted.

I thought for a moment. "He's sweet, but you probably could have guessed that. He makes a bigger deal over hundred days and anniversaries than I do. He gets my opinion on what photos to include in his Kim Daily updates, if I wasn't the one to take them in the first place. He goes to sleep cuddling, but then by morning he's sprawled over as much of the bed as he can. Some days when he's feeling needy he will literally kiss me every 2 minutes. If he says he's coming over after he's done for the day, he means it, even if its only for like 2 hours because practice runs late." Taehyung smiled at my words, seeming to recognize some of the habits I named. "He can't cook, but he knows my favourite orders at every place we've eaten at more than twice. He cancels plans a lot for work stuff, but insists on making them up to me."

"That probably won't really get better when there's two of us," Tae admitted softly.

"I know," I said wryly. "I knew what I was getting into when I started dating an idol. It's rough but I'm used to it. Umm, lets see. Oh! He writes me letters when you're on tour. Sometimes he mails them, but more often he takes pictures of them and sends those because he can't get to a post box or figures he'll beat it home. He’ll talk my ear off about any new book he find interesting. And he actually listens when I rant about statistics and claims he finds it interesting."

"I hope I'll be a good enough boyfriend for you to compete with all of that," Taehyung admitted, his eyes trained on the far end of the couch.

I reached up and cupped his cheek, turning his face back toward me. "First, its not a competition. Second, friend-Tae has so many amazing qualities, I am sure boyfriend-Tae will be equally as amazing," I said softly. "I wasn't trying to tell you what a great boyfriend Namjoon is for me, I'm letting you know what a great boyfriend he'll be for you, too."

"I guess you don't really need me to fill you in on what he's like as a fuck buddy, do you?" Taehyung joked, trying to lighten the suddenly somber mood.

I flushed. "I mean, I know what he's like in bed with me, but I don't know what he's like with you." Tae watched the way my eyes looked everywhere but at his face, and I saw him grin out of the corner of my eye.

He laughed. "Joonie wasn't kidding when he said you liked thinking about the two of us together, was he?" Taehyung asked, teasing me unfairly. "What do you want to know, noona?"

I blushed further at the way he said the honorific. Stammering, I got out, "Well, I mean, I don't want to pry or be a creep, but, uh, I had kind of wondered who, uh..."

"You want to know who topped?" he guessed with a raised eyebrow. When I nodded guiltily, he smiled. "While I feel like I should be giving you a lecture about fetishizing same sex relationships, I'll admit you have a valid reason for wanting to know."

I watched him as he leaned forward to grab his glass and have a sip of water, waiting ever so patiently for him to spill the tea on a situation I'd been actively wondering about for weeks now. Apparently I didn't look as patient as I had hoped, because he nearly spit out his water and laughed when he looked back at my face. "Would you like some water, too, honey? You're looking a little thirsty."

Not finding his teasing amusing in the least, I smacked his arm lightly. "Aish, you're so rough, noona!" he complained. "To answer your question, most of our...encounters were of the manual and oral variety. Kind of hard to find the time and privacy for anal with our schedules."

"Uh huh, you said most..." I prompted, no longer feeling shame at my interest after his teasing.

"We've each done both," Taehyung confessed. "He's a little more, uh...suited for the role of top, personality wise. But he, uh...he told me my dick was too good to waste the opportunity?" It was Tae's turn to blush now, and I giggled at his embarrassment.

I clapped with delight. "Well, I suppose that answers some questions about what I have to expect in bed with you!" I joked. Tae leaned to hide his face in my neck, but I could see the smile on his face before he hid it. He might be embarrassed, but he was a little proud, too.

Previous (Part 1) || Next (Part 3)

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scienceoftheidiot · 5 years ago

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Rules: Answer 21 questions and then tag 21 people you want to get to know better.

@shutterbug-12 thanks for tagging me !

Nickname: people here call me Science (the gall !!! I don’t call myself that though lol) or Pikku/Pikku-Piru. I was called Lef by a few in high school and this is how I sign my art. Though my first name doesn’t lend itself to nicknames so IRL I only have 1 which is “Hippo”, that I don’t use that much nowadays either. But the friend who calls me that is always very quick to send me pictures of hippopotamuses and it never fails to make me smile.

Zodiac: Ravenclaw

Height: 5′2′‘

Last movie I saw: Cinema : Endgame At home : uh... I don’t know ? I think Avatar. But we mostly watch documentaries (or series, we’re into Good Omens this week ;) )

Last thing I googled: "fermentation alcoolique” (alcohol fermentation) not because I don’t know what it is but because I was writing a lesson where I explained what it was and Word just decided it didn’t know the word “alcoolique”. WTF WORD

Favorite Musician: Do I have to chose ??? I will always have a soft spot for the Green Day guys, even if I haven’t listen to their last albums. They seem like good humans.

Song stuck in my head: Right now none and for once I’ll keep it that way thanks (this week the Good Omens theme which is extremely hard to get rid of so please don’t make me think about it)

Other Blogs: Art blog : @dr-fancy-pants Vulture culture blog (relatively slow) : @capreolum-simulacrum

Do I get asks?: Lately I get a relatively nice number of ask that appear in my timeline but don’t appear in my inbox. So I see them but can’t answer... Thanks and I’ll try to fix this. They must be there. But please ask me anything anytime, I am always so happy to see I got one

Blogs following: ... 546 blogs. Most of them are deactivated though, I should clean that up.

Amount of sleep: I need 9h a night but usually get around 7-8 at best. I sleep a lot but managing to actually fall asleep is another matter (I am better at it now, but my childhood was a nightmare for me and my parents).

Lucky number: no luck only statistics

What am I wearing: Black t-shirt & jeans

Dream Job: one that pays well, is diverse, allows me to share my interest in stuff and doesn’t force me to be at a desk 50h/week The dream part being totally unrealisable in my branch, I really want to try and be a teacher, because what better to share my interest in science ?

Dream trip: I want to go back to Finland. I would love to visit Japan. Other than that I would love to visit my family in New Caledonia. I love them, but it’s usually them who come, and it’s way too expensive for me to go :/

Favorite food: ALL. THE. FOOD. Except raw tomatos.

Play an instrument: I used to play guitar (I’m a punk. I play like a punk. Don’t ask me more), I recorded as a bass player even if I hadn’t really played it before, I can also play harmonica. But I haven’t in years so now I just sing.

Languages: I’m French so, French, also English pretty well (I know I don’t count as one but to my fellow french people I just say I’m bilingual which saves a lot of time and fuss)(french people know that if you start pronouncing English the right way in a conversation with only French speakers, you will be the butt of the joke for the next year or so. So we actually CONSCIOUSLY downplay our English in front of other french, it’s crazy. And dumb. And why we speak so bad English). I understand Spanish and Italian and can make myself understood (in Spanish mostly, I am supposed to be actually speaking it after all). I have a toddler’s lever in Finnish.

Favorite songs: Don’t make me chose. This changes every fucking day.

Random Fact: I can whistle pretty well (as in music, not loud piercing whistle), and actually non stop for as long as you want. That’s because my Dad taught me this song when I was very small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArpCjjE72Wg

- no he doesn’t know what it means he doesn’t speak English but loves Pete Seeger’s music anyway XD I know what it means though and I can still whistle it ;)

Describe yourself as aesthetic things: Heavy boots, army green and beige clothes, river banks, mud, bones and feathers, cool rocks, piles of blankets on a sofa under a ray of sun, fingers covered in paint/small cuts/burns, the smell of india ink/cut grass/rain on a hot soil, 1960s comic books and sci fi short stories. Constant anxiety white noise at the back of your head.

I don’t want to tag anyone but please steal this and tag me so I can read it !!

#tag #tagged

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phantomrose96 · 7 years ago

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Souls Follow After

Half an hour late--here’s my Christmas Truce fic for @bloodblossomtea, who requested something based on an old fic of mine, Minds Follow!

So, here’s the companion piece to Minds Follow: Souls Follow After

The death of Daniel Fenton had been called a lot of things.

“Tragic” ranked among the most common, near-tied with “heroic” and “untimely” and “heart-breaking.” Every new media account blended the themes, calling Daniel soft-spoken and meek and kind, unpopular and unnoticed and bullied, culminating into a sacrifice all the more tragic, all the more heroic, all the more heart-breaking when he gave his life for the sake of his classmates.

Vlad Masters had stopped listening to the media accounts.

He saw it differently, in a light the papers and newscasters and forums didn’t capture.

It had been a betrayal.

Daniel had cut their game short.

He’d thrown his life away with no regard for what it meant to those around him, no thought spared for how many of Vlad’s plans came crumbling down, long-term intentions and near-solidified future snipped short.

Vlad raged, and Vlad grieved. He mourned for his son who’d died, his child in everything but blood, and he destroyed his lab in an outpouring of rage for the manner in which Daniel had gone out. It had been that one most irritating trait, that one so distinctly un-Vlad-like quality that Vlad so despised, that Daniel so reveled in—that self-sacrifice for others. It had been as though Daniel’s final words were “I’m nothing like you Vlad,” and as though he had died before Vlad could offer so much as a single word in rebuttal.

Vlad called in with his condolences to Maddie, as any politician and any bachelor would, but he did not expect anything to come of this. That family of him, Maddie, and Daniel no longer existed, and that resentment of his spilled over to Maddie. She’d raised her son to be like this. She shared the blame.

Vlad did not attend the funeral. It was the right choice. He wouldn’t have wanted to be present when Danny turned up anyway.

Because unlike everyone else, Vlad Masters was not interested in giving Danny a second chance. When his ghost form appeared at his own funeral, disoriented but still so charmingly Danny, everyone had been so quick to forgive. Joyful, tearful, thankful relief greeted him from a gathering of loved ones and admirers who had believed him truly dead. Vlad alone wasn’t so quick to forgive.

He’d considered it. In the mangled twist of emotions gripping his heart, sipping wine in a living room so far away and removed from Amity Park, he thought about revoking his grudge. Maybe he would still pursue what had been rightfully his. That family and that half-ghost—…whole-ghost son. But the more Vlad considered it, the more he seethed against the pieces that Daniel had irrevocably tainted.

Daniel had thrown away his half-ghost identity, that single uniting tether between him and Vlad, setting them apart as the two isolated individuals who could ever hope to understand each other. Daniel had revoked that. And he’d imprinted himself on society as that thing Vlad so despised—a “hero.” The childish kind. The comic book kind. The kind that threw their life away for high school nobodies, useless sniveling pathetic teenagers who’d only ever mocked him.

And, perhaps the thing that Vlad detested the most about the whole situation—Daniel was now holding all the cards. He made this clear to Vlad with an irritatingly smug phone call a few days prior, because now Danny’s identity was common knowledge, and so now Vlad’s identity was held hostage. Danny offered to keep Vlad’s identity secret under the condition that 1) Vlad stayed away from Amity Park. 2) Vlad no longer targeted his dad. 3) Vlad forked over $10,000 to Danny, for the hell of it.

The $10,000 was nothing. It was the blow against his pride that stopped the words in Vlad’s throat. He hated it all, but more than anything, he hated being held by the neck.

So he did what made most sense. He moved on.

Vlad wouldn’t say he lost. That wasn’t in his vocabulary. Instead, Daniel just wasn’t worth his time anymore. He was an idiot, a traitor, a fool, and worst of all a ghost. Not a half ghost. Just a ghost, a ball of proto-plasm, a construct of filthy spiritual energy. He had no claim to his humanity anymore, so he had no claim to Vlad’s interest.

Vlad buried himself in projects far more important. Vlad’s networking through the ghost zone expanded. Plans to successfully acquire Pariah Dark’s powers formed from the ether. His A.I.s advanced, a Maddie who understood him intimately, and now a Daniel who would never betray him. They’d rule at his side, timeless and ageless, important features since Vlad intended to procure the immortality that came with the Crown of Fire.

Money bought power, and experts, and silence. His laboratory evolved into a labyrinth of cutting-edge breakthroughs and ghost weaponry the likes of which no one had seen, the likes of which Maddie and Jack Fenton could only dream of. As the years passed, the contact that Jack made with Vlad slowed to a trickle, and stopped all-together. Vlad left all of Jack’s messages unopened and unread. He wanted nothing more to do with the Fentons, as he understood finally the truth of the matter: they had only held him back. He never needed Daniel, dead now. Nor Maddie, dead to him now. Nor Jack, who was simply not worth the energy to make dead.

The A.I.s developed. They understood him. They valued him. They called him “Dear” and “Dad.” The Maddie A.I. occupied the bed with him at night, gentle light and soft buzzing warming the room. The Daniel A.I. Vlad altered over time. He removed the most Jack-like features from the boy’s face—that wide nose and flat jaw, those blue eyes, that idiotic stubbornness—telltale in the crease of his brow and quirk of the eyebrow. Vlad took them away. He swapped them for features recognizable in himself.

They were Maddie and Daniel Masters. Ten years on, the name “Fenton” hardly crossed Vlad’s mind.

…

When the phone rang, it was a number instantly recognizable. It was embedded in Vlad’s memory from years back.

On a whim, Vlad answered.

“Hello.”

“Vlad?’

Vlad trailed his hand along the arm of his recliner, sweeping around it and sitting down, legs crossed, leaning into the phone. “Oh if it isn’t Maddie Fenton. What a pleasant surprise hasn’t it been ages? How are you? To what do I owe this distinct pleasure, my old flame?”

A beat of silence followed.

“Hi Vlad… Yeah it’s um. It’s been a while. I’m fine. But it’s um, it’s Danny…”

Vlad investigated his manicured nails. There was such an organic nuance to Maddie Fenton’s voice, something he hadn’t quite perfected in Maddie Masters. It was almost nostalgic to hear that again, so…lacking in adoration for him. He’d train the Maddie A.I. on this voice recording. Maybe he could barter to get Daniel on the line as well.

“Oh how is the young lad? Last I saw him he was only a teenager. When, ten years back? How time flies. Has he married that little goth friend of his yet?”

“…No, Vlad. Danny’s not—It’s um… it’s more complicated than that.”

Vlad bounced his foot. That was right, Maddie used to over-enunciate the first syllable of her words, pitching up. He’d tweak Maddie Masters’s speech program to incorporate it.

“Complicated how, my darling?”

“It’s something about his ghost form… He’s been acting strange. Slowly. For a while Jack and I thought he was maybe um, just coping with losing his friends to college.”

“Has he attended college?”

“No.”

Vlad faltered at this, jaw tensing. His foot stilled, and an old tinge of anger licked just beneath his ribcage.

“I see. He’s given up all aspirations of the future to stay home and play hero. Typical of him. It’s rather cute.”

“Yes but… no, Vlad. God um… I thought Jack told you.”

“Jack?” Vlad eased. The Fentons weren’t his problem anymore. He’d answered the phone out of simple nostalgia. Vlad kicked the recliner footrest up. “I haven’t heard from old Jacky in years. How is he?”

“Jack… No he’s messaged you. He—it—never mind. Danny. Something’s off with him—been off with him. Ghost theory. Well it—he—sorry, Vlad. I thought you knew most of this from Jack.”

“Knew what?”

“I’ll—” Through the phone, Vlad heard the sound of a door shutting. “I’ll start over. Danny’s not been himself. Slowly. Since the incident. He can’t leave the town, and he’s been…” Static crackled through. “Jack and I have theories. It would be easier to explain in person. Samples and tests. But, explanations don’t fix anything. We’re at a loss. You’re the only other expert who maybe. I know you don’t owe us any favors, but if you could just—somewhere in your soul find it to… We still live in the same house Vlad. We aren’t going anywhere. If you could come by, and maybe just, see if you can find something we can’t.”

Vlad pursed his lips. He’d been growing rather bored lately, and Wisconsin winter had been growing cold.

“Ooh, sorry Maddie Dear. I’m quite the busy man these days. It’s just not feasible.”

“I’ll have dinner with you.” The phoneline crackled again, the shifting of hands. “I talked it over with Jack. I know what sort of man you are Vlad. I still am your friend Vlad… even if I don’t trust all of the person you’ve grown into.”

Vlad let a smile pass over his lips. “You’re assuming that I haven’t moved on from you.”

“Vlad, please…? For Danny, if not for me.”

Vlad stood, and stretched, and mulled the offer over in his head. He quirked an eyebrow, and nodded only to himself as he realized, if nothing else, it was a perfect opportunity to record Maddie’s mannerisms in person. And his A.I. deserved only the best training data.

“Alright Maddie. I’ll see what works with my schedule, and I’ll let you know.”

…

Jack had grayed. Maddie herself was not far behind. Vlad eyed her thinning hair and bag-creased eyes with a twinge of smugness. Maddie Masters retained her youth.

“Hey there, V-man, safe trip…? Um, do you still go by V-man?”

Vlad set his suitcase down, and he shook Jack’s outstretched hand. “I never went by V-man.”

“Oh, haha.” Jack looked away after a moment, hand moving to the back of his neck. He was just as hefty as he’d been ten years back, orange-clad and aging. His small eyes were watery, veined with crows feet. Laugh lines ridged through his cheeks, set above peppery stubble. He’d lost something. His buoyant energy had vanished. “Been a while, yeah? Um, y’know I’ve sent some messages to ya here and there. They must’ve gotten lost in your spam filter, huh?”

“Oh, must have.”

Vlad broke off conversation, and he stepped over the Fenton threshold to Maddie, who he pulled into an all-consuming hug. He let it linger, smelling her scent, tracing the contours of her back. As much as he preferred his Maddie A.I., he had not yet figured out scent and touch. Future models, he planned, would have a physical body.

Finally, Maddie pushed away.

“It’s nice to see you Vlad… Thanks for finding the time to come out here.”

“Oh it’s all my pleasure,” Vlad answered, his eyes roving over Maddie, drinking her in. She’d aged too, once-smooth skin scrunching with wrinkles, cheeks more pallid, more sallow than the rosy ones he’d fallen in love with. Her eyes were tired, and Vlad was so glad that Maddie Masters was eternally pleased to see him.

Vlad broke away from her. “Now, I was thinking Italian for dinner. Or, if you would prefer, an upscale Hibachi restaurant. Money is no object, my dear.”

Maddie studied him, eyes wide, words chosen carefully. “Danny. He’s in the basement.

“Oh right, the little badger. It’s such a shame to hear he’s been feeling off.”

“I sent you a document,” Maddie continued. She stepped closer to the basement, eyes lingering behind on Vlad, as if pleading him to follow. “It’s all of what Jack and I have theorized so far. Experimental procedures and results. Have you read it yet?”

Vlad waved her off. “My apologies. I haven’t found the time. I am very busy these days. I’m sure you can get me up to speed.” He followed, arms folded behind his back, attention set on the basement. Maddie walked next to him, visibly tense.

“He hasn’t left the basement in a few days now,” Maddie continued.

“I think he’ll change his tune when he sees me.”

Maddie remained silent. She set a hand to the basement door, easing it open cautiously. Vlad paused behind her, stealing glances. She’d lost weight, instantly obvious in comparison to the Maddie A.I., who’d been a flawless duplicate of Maddie Fenton ten years back. Vlad pondered absently on how much Daniel may or may not have changed. Certainly something mental had changed—it was what he’d been called in for. But the state of Daniel Fenton had no bearing on Daniel Masters, so it mattered to Vlad little.

Vlad followed Maddie down the creaking stairs, and ten years’ worth of petty, vengeful thoughts filtered through his mind. It may have been his last chance to make Daniel owe up to the grief he brought into Vlad’s life.

The lights were off, the portal open. Vlad blinked as he noticed the gleam, starkly emerald and blindingly bright, swirling through darkness, casting a swath of light that sent shadows dancing across the wall. Someone small stood just in front of the blaze—floated, rather. Tail flickering listlessly, gloves trailing worn patterns into the dusty portal edge, eyes hypnotized in the gleam.

Maddie folded her arms in against her stomach, taking a step back as Vlad overtook her, a twisting discomfort swamping through his mind.

“Daniel? Haven’t aged much my boy, have you?”

Vlad paused. Danny did not move. His tail flicked, his hands traced, his eyes remained consumed in the brightness before him.

“Daniel.”

No response. Vlad pressed forward. He stood beside Danny, right hand raised to shield his eyes from the brightness of the portal. His brow furrowed, investigating the glassy nothing that seemed to exist behind Danny’s eyes.

He turned to Maddie. “Certain ghosts possess hypnotic powers. He could potentially—”

Maddie shook her head, resigned. “Jack and I ruled that out already. It’s not hypnosis. This was gradual…”

Heavy footsteps creaked down the first few stairs. Vlad glanced, finding Jack hovering just as the door to the stairwell.

Vlad ignored him, fixing his attention back on Danny. “So it’s something to do with his ghost core then?”

Danny’s eyes sparked, shoulders dropping, head perking. He twisted to face Vlad, a single, sudden, jerking movement. “Ghost?”

Vlad stared. The spark in Danny’s eyes seemed to be little more than an echo, glassy glazed and empty, like a recording. Like a reflection. Like a memory, rather than a person in and of himself.

“Is that what you’re doing Daniel? You’re hunting ghosts?”

“Where?” Danny asked, firecracker-like excitement. His tail flicked, and he floated closer to Vlad, until mere inches separated them. Vlad stepped back. Danny’s breath froze over.

It was as though the gun fired. Danny pounced, throwing himself against the portal with the fervor of an animal at feeding time. His gloves skimmed the swirling surface, tracing ripples through the portal as his aura flared like fire around him.

“Show yourself!” Danny shouted. “How’s about an ectoblast that fires off at mach 3? If the blast doesn’t wreck you, the shockwave will!”

“That’s all he responds to,” Maddie said quietly. “Ghost.” She moved beside Vlad, putting a hand out to rest on Danny’s shoulder. The boy studied it quizzically, rolling his shoulder to free himself. Maddie let her hand drop without resistance. “We think it’s—”

“An obsession.”

“…Yeah,” Maddie conceded.

Vlad rubbed his forehead a moment, thoughts sober. His smug giddiness drained away, replaced with something dense in his chest. “Why though?”

Maddie leaned a shoulder against the portal. “We have… a couple theories. It’s maybe a flaw in…what he is. That ghost-human hybrid… It made something about him unstable.”

Vlad chewed his lip, feeling out a twinge of power beneath his palm. “No. I don’t believe that theory. What else?”

“…A ghost sickness, perhaps…”

Vlad shook his head.

“No.” He offered no further elaboration. The Fentons were not entitled to his research.

Maddie’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Jack doesn’t like this theory, but I’m—it’s what I’m most convinced of.” She moved forward again, and trailed her hand along Danny’s cheek. He’d calmed down once more, only hazily aware of his surroundings, eyes fixated on the portal. “I think it’s… maybe that Danny wasn’t meant to come back. And it was this obsession that brought him back. He died saving people. It’s what his ghost half knows to do. Fight the ghosts. Save the town.”

Maddie lowered her hand to Danny’s shoulder once more, turning him to face her. He turned, but he did not look at her. His eyes saw through her. Scanning. Eternally searching. She leaned in and kissed his forehead, lingering against him, eyes shut to forget.

When she leaned back, she continued. “It was his obsession that came back, that’s his ghostly fuel, and the rest of him just came along, the parts that were supposed to be dead. We didn’t notice. We didn’t do anything. Those pieces can’t live in the human world. …And they rotted away. And they left behind just what a ghost is… just an echo.”

Vlad backed away.

“Something doesn’t make sense. So many ghosts still have their identity. This is different.”

“If Mads is right, then… it’s our fault,” Jack answered, easing down a few more steps. “He had other things keeping his spirit alive, back when he was in school and had his friends and his sister. He had a job even, once. But those things… Danny graduated, and his friends went to college, and he just kinda… He lost those other things that mighta been keeping him healthy… Danny can’t leave—it’s this radius—some kind of barrier that keeps him a certain distance from the portal. And it just kept shrinking. It—we were trying to make it easy on him. He was losing so much. So when he doubled-down on ghost-hunting… I was excited. We let him… We let him just… boil down to an obsession…”

Vlad hesitated. “Maddie, Jack, would you two kindly leave the basement for a few minutes? I’d like to speak to Daniel.”

“Why?” Maddie asked.

“Just something I would like to test.”

“What, though?”

“Do you want my help or not?”

“Yes but—”

“Then leave. I won’t harm him. It’ll be quick.”

Reluctantly, Maddie backed away. She retreated to the steps, climbing until Jack set a heavy hand to her shoulder and guided her out. Vlad heard the door click shut behind him.

“Now then.” Vlad squared his feet, breathing deep, allowing a sudden lash of power to envelop his body. It swept over him, chilling, invigorating, sparking like electricity. Aura swamped him, skin turning pale sickly blue, eyes red, fangs glistening, cape sweeping out behind him. Vlad rolled his shoulders, and he cracked his neck.

“Ghost.”

Danny turned with an instantaneous flicker. His eyes were consumed in fire, deliriously giddy and yet hardly present. He fired off a blast that Vlad absorbed into his shield.

“Daniel, we’re going to have a little chat about this.”

Danny lunged, firing off round after round of ectoblast. Vlad dodged and blocked with ease, spinning and catching Danny by the neck. The boy choked, sputtered somewhat, and then squirmed under Vlad’s grip. Vlad turned, and slammed him against the portal edge.

“Listen, Daniel. It’s Vlad. Vlad Masters. Vlad Plasmius. If there’s an ounce of the real you left in this shell you’ll recognize that name. Tell me you recognize the name!”

Danny’s struggling eased. He stared back instead, eyes filmy and neon. He blinked, brows twisting in pained concentration, his face just as young and boyish as the last day Vlad had seen him a decade before.

Danny set a hand against Vlad’s chokehold, inquisitive, stressed, the tiniest spark of thoughts trying to form behind glazed nothing.

Then Danny squeezed, and Vlad’s fingers cracked, and Vlad howled, dropping Daniel to the floor.

“Thought you had me, didn’t you ghost? How’s about an ectoblast that fires off at mach 3? If the blast doesn’t wreck you, the shockwave will!”

“Daniel, stop.” Vlad closed in. “It’s bad enough you died. It’s bad enough you betrayed me. It’s absolutely unacceptable that you tarnish your own dignity in this way. Is this how you’d like me to remember you, oh Hero of Amity Park? Like this?”

Danny raised his hand. Green energy gathered in his palm. “Hey ghost, how’s about an ectoblast that fires off at mach 3?”

Vlad snarled, and then he screamed, and he let off a single shot of violet energy that struck Danny dead center. The boy flew back, cracking against the lab wall. And the rage welling in Vlad’s chest—the anger of betrayal, of loss, of grief, of insult to the boy he’d once called his son—all vanished in a sudden new ice front. Some other all-consuming feeling that climbed his throat and snuffed the fire in his chest.

After having given up so many years ago, he realized with a jolt that, perhaps, he was staring at his own future after all. Not the one with Daniel dressed in a tailored tuxedo, and Maddie in a ballgown by his side, as guests made of the world’s most affluential people flocked to the Masters’ mansion for Vlad and Maddie’s engagement party.

This was a different future, one of empty feral eyes and one-liners, repeated on record, until all identity had sapped away. Vlad stared at Danny’s bruised ghost form, and he understood instantly. Daniel’s transition to full ghosthood hadn’t been a measure to separate himself to Vlad. Rather, Daniel had just gone ahead first. He died and found the future that, someday, may be the fate awaiting Vlad. Empty eyes and repeated one-liners about, what exactly? His A.I.s? Maddie? Danny himself?

Vlad gave one last look at the green nothing staring back at him. And then the lab door burst open. And Vlad vanished through the wall.

…

Maddie had reached out to Vlad three more times since then. The first time had been the very same day, leaving a heart-felt apology for whatever had provoked Danny to attack Vlad like that, and begging that he not give up on helping. There was still hope. She was still available for dinner.

The next time she called came a decade later, the day that Maddie’s sister died. Maddie left a message, rambling and incoherent, broken mutterings seeking reassurance. She’d been leaning on her sister for support all these years, and breast cancer had taken her away. She had no one left to tell the things that hurt Jack too much to hear about. Danny hadn’t spoken in years. Jazz almost never called home. Maddie had these dreams, recurring nightmares, that she went to the basement and found Jazz there too, empty eyes on the portal, gone. She wanted to shut the portal down. She wanted nothing more to do with it. She was afraid that Danny might vanish all together if she did that.

She left this all in a message. Vlad did not pick up.

The third phone call came after seven more years. She was calling because Jack had died, peacefully, in his sleep. He felt no pain. He did not suffer. It was just her now, her and Danny, in the house. And Maddie could not sleep at night. Not without Jack’s snoring beside her, not without his warmth. Not with the sound of the portal humming through the night. And then she trailed off, silent, voicemail recording nothing but the shallow sound of her breath. Vlad had not answered. Maddie put the phone down.

Perhaps she did it because she had no one to stop her. Maddie pulled the RV out of the garage, and she kicked the engine to life, and she drove. It took two days, hardly sleeping, hardly stopping, just the nav and the hum of the engine around her. It was easier not to think like this, easier to believe none of it had happened.

When Maddie pulled up to the Masters’ mansion, she took out the key she’d stuffed in her pocket, a decades-old relic, given to her back when Vlad still craved her company—“if she should so ever get tired of that bumbling fool she married.”

Maddie let herself in, and the mansion was dark. She flicked on light after light, calling out Vlad’s name, scanning the walls with wary eyes. A thin layer of dust coated the windows, the book shelves, the sills, the light switches that Maddie flicked. Looming granite archways felt hollow, abandoned, like the dark catacombs of a cave, untouched. The living room was icily cold, a window left cracked, water damage staining down the length of wall beneath it. The wind blew, and the window howled. Maddie kept on.

She came to the library, and she pulled out dusty book after dusty book. She knew Vlad Masters well enough to know he had a lab hidden away somewhere—that an empty house did not necessarily mean he was not in it. And she knew Vlad Masters well enough to know he would hide it away in the most grandiose way possible.

One of the statues clicked under her touch, cold and copper-headed, and the nearby wall opened up to a stairwell below.

Maddie followed it, shivering with the temperature drop. Her breath curled in front of her, crystalized. She hunched her shoulders in and braced herself. Marble stairs carried her footsteps with resounding echoes, clacking forward, consumed in the dark nothing ahead of her.

At the bottom, the floor leveled out, and another few steps brought her around the corner, where everything she expected met her eye. Crackling equipment stretched floor to ceiling, strung up with wires and flashing warning colors. The air turned sharp and citrusy, poorly ventilated. Maddie walked, heels clacking, carrying her through rooms of lab tables lined with beakers whose contents had solidified to the bottom, incubation tubes large enough to house humans and lit from the inside, monitors flickering with jagged static images. The citrus smell turned to rot as she came upon the last room.

“Vlad?”

Maddie looked around her, peering through darkness.

“Vlad?” her own voice echoed back.

Maddie spun, and found herself staring into her reflection. Though it wasn’t her reflection exactly—it was a younger Maddie, eyes bright and untroubled, hair curled, jumpsuit unzipped just a fraction down the front. This reflection batted her eyes. “Are you ready to snuggle, Vlad?”

Maddie let out a strangled gasp and kicked back. She knocked against a table, and grabbed it to steady herself.

“Dad?”

When Maddie turned, it was as though chains had tightened around her heart. Danny watched her from the other side of the room—her Danny—human Danny—his hair dark and his head quirked, blinking quizzically. “Are you home yet, Dad? I was hoping you could show me how to use my powers.”

“Do you like them?”

Maddie gave a third startle, ducking forward and clutching at her chest with a pained gasp. She looked up, eyes wide, certain she’d grown too old for surprises like these.

She squinted, recognition bubbling beneath the fear. It was a familiar form, glistening fangs, pallid blue skin, piercing red eyes.

“It’s you! The Wisconsin Ghost. You’re still here?”

“Please. Call me Plasmius.”

“Are you home yet, Dad? I was hoping you could show me how to use my powers.”

Maddie pushed herself away from the table. “You’re still around.”

“Indeed I am. Does that surprise you?” the ghost asked. He quirked an eyebrow and stepped closer. A fiery acid-green crown sat atop his head, casting a light ghoulish and sickly across his face.

Maddie didn’t answer. It wasn’t worth dwelling on anymore.

“I’m looking for Vlad.”

“Vlad dear, I baked you a pie. Let’s cuddle up.”

Maddie flinched, but managed to ignore her own voice. Another side-long glance revealed that her look alike flickered and wavered, her form cold blue and transparent. The fake Maddie smiled, and it was a look full of love.

“Why are you looking for Vlad?” Plasmius answered. He inspected his manicured nails, a ring as bright as his crown nestled on one finger.

“I don’t have anyone else to turn to anymore,” Maddie answered. She watched the Danny hologram from the corner of her eye. There was emotion in his eyes. It twisted Maddie’s heart to recognize it.

“Maybe consider making a few new friends then. Vlad isn’t really around much to be your emotional shoulder to cry on.”

“Where is he?”

“Preoccupied, at the moment. He’s absolutely crushed with work.”

“Dad, are you home yet?”

Maddie shut her eyes. She breathed deep. Jack. Oh god, Jack…

Her nose curled, on the air, something rotten drifted. Under different circumstances, Maddie might have fought away the thought that crossed her mind. Lately though, she’d been dealing with enough grief to believe it.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Maddie looked up, inspecting the emotionless nothing in the Wisconsin Ghost’s eyes. “…Did you kill him?”

“Oh… in a sense, I suppose.” The ghost shrugged, and he flashed a fanged smile. He jerked his head toward the corner of the lab. “A nasty accident, but for the best I might say. Don’t dig too far through the fallen machinery over there, you might not like what you find rotting beneath.”

Maddie shivered. She didn’t let it show on her face.

“Are you saying it was a lab accident?”

“I’m afraid so. I’d almost be embarrassed—crushed to death beneath some poorly-anchored machinery.”

“And why are you here?”

Plasmius’s face split into an awful grin. He reveled in the moment. “Did you really think young Daniel was the only half-ghost among us?”

Maddie’s heart pounded, pieces clicking. Icy dread washed through her core, shriveling up a part of her that she thought had been too wrung-out to feel anymore. She gripped a hand to the table, and lowered herself slowly.

“…God.” It was a name she’d heard him shout to the portal, time and time again. Plasmius. Images of the 20 year reunion party flashed through her mind. Incidents of Phantom and Plasmius gripped in battle. This cruel, twisted, awful creature, from a world made of cruel and twisted and awful creatures. The last man she had come to for help. “I really have no one then…? Is that really you Vlad?”

“I’m sorry to say it is.” He swept his hand across his body, dark under the sparse lighting, lit by the flaming crown on his head. “In the not-quite-flesh.”

“Are you going to go in the same way too?” Maddie asked quietly. She glanced around the lab, fizzled and dying and abandoned equipment.

“Hey Dad, do you have some time to play football later?”

“The same was as Daniel? No, dear Maddie, I will not.” Vlad gestured behind him, capturing the distant shimmer of a portal tucked away in the very back end of the lab. “I’m only here for a brief visit. My alarm system tripped so I figured it would only be polite of me to come say hello to you after all these years. And to pass along my gratitude.”

Maddie stared at him, losing the will to properly care. Whatever happened to him, or to her at this point, it hardly mattered, not with the way everything had slipped away around her. She fixed her eyes on the Danny hologram once more. He waved. Maddie did not wave back.

“Visiting Daniel was a bit of a wake up call, my dear. I ran some choice experiments after that visit, and your theory was spot on. Daniel gave into his obsession, trying to exist in the human world as a ghost, and he let the rest of himself rot away.”

Maddie glanced to him. Vlad spread his arms wide, cape billowing out. The crown threw shadows against the wall.

“When I woke up from my accident, just a ghost form torn out of a body that had been crushed unrecognizable beneath a two-ton monitor—well, I knew what I needed to do.” He stepped forward, pausing just in front of Maddie and crouching to her level. Vlad gave a fanged smile and tilted his head. “I did exactly what could have saved young Daniel.”

Maddie’s head jerked up. The thought sent something writhing through her, a discomfort like suffocating guilt. “We could have saved him?”

“Most assuredly. It worked for me.” Vlad stood again. “I cut all ties with my obsession.” And he turned, and walked a path over shattered remnants of equipment and fizzling cable. “I cut all ties with you.”

“Were you…really that obsessed with me…?”

“I was consumed with you,” Vlad answered, spinning back, lashing out, his form towering and ghastly to behold. He reeled himself in, and smiled once more. “With you and Daniel both, with the family we would made. My desperation drove me to make a family of my own.”

“How’s about that pie, dear?”

Maddie locked eyes with herself, an expression untroubled, frozen, echoing someone she might have been. Maddie breathed out, her breath in crystals.

“But, I did what had to be done. I stopped caring. These A.I.s? They’ve been frozen here for fifteen years. So has this whole lab. They’re nothing to me—they don’t think, they don’t feel, they’re heartless, empty worthless. I don’t care for them. And I don’t care for you. And I don’t care for Daniel rotting in your lab. I don’t care for anyone really but myself. I’ve beaten my obsession. I get to live my afterlife on my own terms.”

“…You’re a monster,” Maddie whispered in response.

“No.” Vlad retreated, his feet beating a path toward the portal at the far end of the room. He turned once more, eyes locked on Maddie, and he tapped a single finger against the crown on his head. “I’m the king of monsters.”

He vanished, whisked from sight into the swirling matrix of the portal, and it closed down behind him. It threw the lab into utter darkness, pricked only by the glimmering hollow light of the A.I.’s left behind in the lab.

“Hey Mom, when Dad gets home, can we all watch a movie as a family?”

Maddie sunk low to the ground. She crumpled forward, and buried her head in her arms.

“Yes Daniel, your father would love that.”

Maddie did not move. She hardly breathed, because she refused to cry again so soon. She steeled herself, and lost herself to the dark nothing around her.

“Good. I miss him.”

#Danny Phantom #dp fanfiction #bloodblossomtea #dark fic #dp #christmas truce 2017

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lhugbereth · 7 years ago

Text

Promptio on Ice Part 18

Ignoct’s First Date

So yeah, back by popular demand, more of Ignis and Noctis being absolute dorks, now in public! @goramidiot and @fandolover Thanks for these prompts, I tried to incorporate your ideas as much as possible ;)

Noct thinks a lot about Iggy’s ass under the cut! v v v

- Every time Prompto steps foot in Noct’s place, he feels overwhelmed. It’s less an apartment and more of a penthouse, located on the forty-seventh floor of the Caelum Residences (owned by his father, of course) and overlooking the bustle of the city. His bedroom alone is larger than Prompto’s entire apartment. Too big even with the three of them in it - Gladio lounging on the king-sized bed, Noctis standing in front of the mirror, and Prompto digging through his (well-stocked) closet for something to wear on his date with Ignis.

- “Are you even sure it’s really a date?” Gladio jokes from behind the pages of a hockey magazine he found on Noct’s shelf. His dark-haired friend shoots him a glare.

- “Well, yeah. I mean, obviously.” Noct tugs off the shirt he’s wearing and tosses it into the rapidly growing discard pile behind him. “Like, he gave me his number and everything.”

- “Your dad got his number for you when he was drunk,” Gladio retorts. “Maybe Iggy’s just being nice ‘cause he feels sorry for you.”

- “Aww, don’t be mean, Gladdy, Noct’s super nervous already,” Prompto says as he reemerges from the closet with an armful of new outfits. Noct shoots him a glare, too.

- “Am not! I’m just…. I want it to be perfect. I want him to really like me.”

- Gladio flashes Prompto a secret grin, and the blonde barely manages to contain himself as he pats Noctis on the back and hands him a suit jacket. “You’re hard not to like, buddy. Just smile a lot and he won’t be able to resist.” Falling quiet in thought for a moment, Noct shrugs on the jacket and adjusts it in the front. He turns, checks the side view, the back, musses his hair and practices his smile.

- “Hey, Specs,” he says, then straightens his posture and tries again. “Hi, Iggy. Um. Ignis.”

- “Iggy is better.”

- “Hey, Iggy. You look….really nice this evening.”

- “Tell him you like his ass,” Gladio chips in without looking up.

- “How the hell did you ever manage to get a date?” Noct says, glaring again.

- “I told Prom I like his ass.”

- Prompto snorts. “I probably would have slept with you faster if you had.” He turns back to Noct, who’s rolling his eyes hard enough to make Ignis proud. “Gladio’s got a point, though. Be honest, guys love that.”

- “Is Iggy really the kind of guy who wants to be checked out?” Noct’s voice is flat, disbelieving. Something tells him that too much honesty might just earn him a one-way ticket to ForeverAloneVillle. Like, for instance, if Iggy knew how many times Noct had jacked off to the thought of that sharp tongue massaging his balls, or how that lean body would look arching off the mattress, he would probably label him a pervert and never speak to him again.

- Apparently, Gladio disagrees. “How should we know what he’s into? Maybe he’s one of those dirty librarian types, y’know? Frigid on the outside, but a firecracker in the bedroom.”

- “So…,” Noct says, turning to him while Prom finishes styling his hair. “You’re saying there’s a chance?”

- “I’m saying you should go prepared. Never hurts.”

- At his side, Prompto offers a grin. “Yeah. Maybe you’ll get lucky, buddy.”

- Maybe in my dreams, Noct thinks to himself. With more confidence, he says, “Guess it’s worth a shot.”

- Ignis is already waiting for him when he arrives at the theater. Until now, Noct has only ever seen Ignis in two modes: his gym attire, or the formal suit he wore to the Gala. Tonight, then, is the first time Ignis has ever looked relaxed - underneath his dark coat, he’s wearing a light-colored buttonup and grey trousers. Combined with a pair of bright red sneakers, Iggy’s balancing a fine line between classy and casual. Noct simply thinks he looks stunning.

- “Ah, perfect timing.” Ignis smiles when he notices Noctis approaching. He steps back from the movie poster he’s been admiring to give his date the once-over. “You look nice this evening.”

- Shit, that was my line! Now he’s gotta think fast. “Hey, Specs. U-um, Iggy. Thanks, you look...hot. GREAT. You look great!” Shit, shit shit!

- An indulgent smile. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve already purchased our tickets.” Ignis withdrew two slips from his shirt pocket and handed one to Noct. It was surprisingly warm between his fingers. “Prompto told me you’re a fan of the Hunters’ Creed series, so I thought you might like to see the newest film.”

- “Yeah, definitely!” Forget the fact that Noct had already seen it (three times, actually, two of which had been with Prom), it was still easily one of his favorites. And knowing the ending would give him more time to focus his attention on Iggy - which was, in all honesty, probably Prompto’s plan anyway.

- But as they walk together into the theater (deciding that yes, one shared popcorn between them will be just fine), Noct has forgotten one crucial piece of information about the movie. It isn’t until they’re in their seats, smiling and laughing as they pass the popcorn between them, that he notices all the other young couples sitting around them. And then he remembers. And he curses Prompto because now he understands the real reason he suggested this show - the sex scene.

- It’s steamy, controversially so, and while Noct all but tuned it out the first three times (he was far more interested in the plot, thank you very much), he knows that will be impossible with Ignis sitting right next to him, completely unaware. So as the movie starts and the lights dim, he clutches the popcorn in his lap and swallows hard.

- “Y-y’know, Igs,” he starts in a hushed tone. “If there’s another movie you’d rather see….”

- But Ignis doesn’t hear him. The theme music is playing, and the scene opens with a car chase. By the looks of things, Iggy is already engrossed in the action - while Noct can only sink further in his seat and plot out how he’s going to get Prompto back for this.

- The movie moves fast, every bit the edge-of-your-seat blockbuster the posters promised, and halfway through even Noct can’t help but get into it. The Hunter confronts the demon overlord, he’s got him on the ropes, and Noct is so excited the bucket of popcorn is shaking in his lap. When the overlord transforms into a beast, Noct (even though he knew it was coming) nearly jumps out of his seat. Quick thinking by Ignis keeps the popcorn from flying all over the theater - but now it means his hand is positioned right between Noct’s legs just as That Scene starts up.

- There’s no preamble. Iggy lets out an audible gasp, and Noct feels his face heat up about a hundred degrees. It’s noisy, it’s wild, it’s why small children were banned from the screening. All around them in the theater, couples are exchanging heated looks.

- Iggy’s hand twitches in the popcorn, his wrist edging closer to Noct’s thigh.

- Noct is torn between wanting to run out of the room or climb into Ignis’ lap.

- When he forces himself to glance over, Ignis isn’t watching him, but rather staring at the blatant pornography on the screen with his eyes wide. Every time the woman on screen moans, his throat bobs a little and Noctis feels like he could ruin the inside of his jeans on the spot. Feeling bold (and too turned on to think better of it), Noctis rocks up every so slightly with his hips, rubbing against the tempting friction of Iggy’s wrist and startling the man right out of his trance. Ignis gasps, retracts his hand on instinct, and in the process knocks the popcorn onto the floor with a loud thunk.

- The rest of the theater turns to glare at them. But neither of them care. Laughing off their embarrassment, they drop to the floor and work together to scoop up the spill. The scene is over long before they settle back in their seats, and they enjoy the rest of the movie with their sticky fingers brushing together atop the armrest.

- “Well, what did you think?” Noct asks as they step outside into the cold evening air. It’s snowing again, and Ignis has his arm around Noctis’ shoulders in lieu of him wearing a proper coat.

- “Hm. Not terrible, but perhaps not worth ‘two thumbs way up.’ I’d give it a thumb and a half.”

- Noct snorts - snorts! - and turns a little closer against Iggy’s side. “Harsh critic. I’d love to know what kind of movies make it to the top of your list.”

- “The classics, mostly. I could show you, if you’d like.” He stops walking, bringing them to a halt just outside the parking garage. Green eyes go soft behind his lenses. “After all, the night is still young. And I did promise you dinner.”

- Dinner...at Iggy’s place?! Noct had been expecting a restaurant, maybe someplace with fancy wines and too many other people. He would have managed for the sake of his date, of course, but if he was hearing this correctly…. “You mean, at your place? Just the two of us?”

- Gods, why does his voice choose the worst times to crack?!

- Ignis merely smiles, almost as if he finds it...endearing? “If you’d like, yes. Not to brag, but I’ve been known to make a wicked stir-fry.”

- Stir-fry. That sounds like it has vegetables in it. Noct weighs the pros and cons - Con: a meal that isn’t deep fried and covered in cheese. Pro: The chance to spend more time with Specs. He finds that it isn’t a difficult choice at all.

- “I’m in,” he grins, and Ignis squeezes his shoulder. “Where’d you park I’ll follow you.”

- “Oh, I came by bus,” he admits. “Never saw the point in owning a vehicle in this city, not with such a convenient public transportation system.”

- Somehow, Noctis manages not to laugh. Ignis is a total hippie, and yeah, it’s cute, but now he’s terrified his dinner is going to be full of healthy, organic things. “We can take my car again,” he says, practically dragging Ignis after him into the parking lot, completely oblivious to the look of terror painted on his date’s face.

- They make it in one piece. Again, Iggy is convinced it’s a miracle, and decides a glass of wine each is the only way to ease the tension of the ride out of his shoulders. Leading Noctis into the kitchen, he directs him to a stool at the island counter and fishes out two glasses from the cabinet.

- “Nice place you got here,” Noct comments as his eyes scan the pristine room. A large dark sofa on a white rug in the living room, bookshelves lining the wall in place of a television, some exercise equipment neatly folded in the corner. It looks like something straight out of an interior design catalog. “Really clean.”

- “Yes, well. I’m not home that often, between my own lessons at the gym and coaching Prompto. Mostly to cook and to sleep - the bedroom is quite a mess, I’m afraid.”

- Please show me. Noct clears his throat. “I’m sure it isn’t that bad.”

- The challenge is palpable. Ignis watches him closely as he fills each glass with chardonnay, something tugging at the corners of his mouth - but whatever he’s thinking he keeps to himself. “Dinner will be just a moment. If you need the powder room, it’s around the corner.” And then he’s tugging on an apron and setting ingredients (as Noct feared, mostly veggies) out in preparation. While he cooks, they chat about nothing in particular - Prompto’s upcoming schedule, the kinds of classes Iggy teaches during the week (youth athletics for the most part), and Noct’s hobbies which include video games, comic books, and long naps.

- By the time they’ve both polished off their wine, the stir-fry is almost ready and Ignis is back in front of Noctis to set out the dishes.

- “Hey, Iggy, can I ask you something?”

- He smiles. “Of course, anything.”

- Deep breath. You can do this. “Are you seeing anyone?”

- Ignis stops. Above the counter, a plate hovers in mid-air where his hand has frozen in place, and his eyes are locked on Noct, curious, questioning. It’s not the reaction Noct was hoping for and he immediately stumbles for a recovery.

- “Sorry, that was dumb, forget it, um, what I meant was -- “

- “It depends.” Over his glasses his eyes are intense. Noct squirms in his seat, his heart racing.

- “O-on?”

- “Whether you’re interested or not.”

- Floored. No other word can describe the way Noct’s breath suddenly leaves him gaping and gasping with his knuckles white around the edge of the counter. For his part, Ignis interprets the stunned silence as he pleases, and goes back to serving up dinner as if nothing had happened. The steaming food (yes, vegetables and all) in front of Noct is a welcome distraction, and he stuffs the first forkful into his mouth as if it could prevent him from saying anything worse.

- Luckily for him, Ignis is an amazing cook. The first bite has him forgetting all about his embarrassment, and he digs in with enough gusto to make the front page of the tabloids - ‘Picky Caelum Son Eats Broccoli and Enjoys it!’

- His enthusiasm earns a chuckle from the seat to his right. “I’m flattered you enjoy the meal, Noct, but please remember to chew properly.”

- “Mff fhfmm.” He pauses, swallows noisily, and tries again. “You’re perfect!”

- He means to say ‘it’s’ - really, he does. His words are apparently intent on betraying him at every turn tonight, but this time the damage is done too quickly to take it back.

- Ignis blinks. Lays down his fork. Picks up a napkin and politely dabs at his mouth. Meanwhile, Noct’s heart thuds in his chest and he reaches for his (second) glass of wine. Knocks it back in one swift move. Then they’re both moving.

- Iggy’s lips are as warm and soft as Noct had imagined. Better, even, as they slide over his own in a kiss they both feel was long overdue. One or both of them surges forward, Noct’s hands tugging at Iggy’s shirt while deft fingers card through his black hair. They’re both breathless, but neither knows how to stop now that they’ve finally opened the floodgates.

- Eventually, cheeks a healthy pink, Ignis draws back just far enough to slip off his glasses. They’d been bumped askew on his nose, and are probably smudged up something fierce, yet Noct doesn’t have the presence of mind to apologize. On the contrary, he finds himself unable to look away from the powerful pull of Iggy’s unveiled eyes, piercing and beautiful and perfect and if he let’s out a little whine in his desperation, well, who can blame him?

- Those eyes soften in a smile. “Noctis. I hope I’m not being too forward, but would you like to -- “

- “I brought condoms.”

- “Oh, thank the gods.”

- When he tugs Noctis up (meals abandoned for now), the younger man goes more than willingly. Backwards, he steers them both down the hall, alternating between heated kisses and pausing to strip off another layer of unnecessary clothing between them. It’s hard, of course, with the way Noct’s arms are wrapped so tightly around him, or the way his hips are grinding against his thigh, but Ignis has always been good at multitasking. Noct doesn’t even bother to comment on the unsurprising tidiness of Iggy’s bedroom - he’s too focused on the bed itself, and on getting both of them naked and in it.

- They stop for a moment when Iggy’s calves hit the mattress. Green eyes meet dark blues and there’s a question there. Noct swallows. Gasps when Ignis reaches down to palm him through the front of his boxers. “Y-you…want me to…?”

- “I do.”

- “Okay.”

- He watches in awe as Ignis strips off the last of his clothing and lays back onto the bed. His long legs fall open, he smiles and beckons Noctis to join him.

- Noct, for all his effort to restrain himself that evening, literally pounces at the invitation.

[Bonus]

- Then entire apartment is quiet when Noct wakes up sometime later to the blinking of his phone screen on the floor. He groans inwardly, tries to ignore it and curl up deeper in Iggy’s arms, but the little blue light is damn persistent. Reluctantly, he disentangles himself from Spec’s still-sleeping form and scoops the phone up as fast as he can.

- There are over twenty unread texts, most of which are from Prompto (surprise, surprise) but also a few from Gladio, too. As he settles back under the sheets, he checks the ones from Prom first. Lots of ‘How’s it going, buddy?!?! Enjoy the moooovie??’ and enough emojis to make a teenage girl’s eyes burn.

- Noct smirks and replies with a simple thumbs up and a wink.

- Gladio’s messages are less predictible. He sent several texts to check in, to make sure Noct was safe and made it home (either his own or Iggy’s in one piece). He also mentioned leaving something special in Noct’s wallet. Which, Noct recalls, is in his jacket which is still somewhere in Ignis’ hallway. Whatever the surprise is, it’ll have to wait until morning.

- Noct chucks his phone to the foot of the bed, yawns, and snuggles up once again in now-familiar arms.

- In the morning, while Iggy whips up some eggs and toast and hums to himself, Noct comes out of the shower feeling incredibly refreshed. He greets Ignis with a grin and a kiss (well, a few kisses, actually, until Iggy has to shoo him away lest the eggs burn). His jacket has thoughtfully been laid out across the back of the sofa, and he digs around in his pockets for his wallet, curious but also worried about whatever he’s going to find inside.

- Surprisingly, it isn’t anything incriminating. Just a folded piece of paper, with a message scribbled on it in Gladio’s messy handwriting. ‘Don’t forget to be honest’ it reads - and Noct can’t help but laugh out loud.

- “What is it?” Ignis leans over the island counter, a plate of breakfast in one hand and a carton of orange juice in the other. Noct smiles and carries the note over to him.

- “Just a little advice for our date last night.”

- “Oh? Well, I’d say things went swimmingly even without it. But out of curiosity….”

- “I think Gladio wants me to tell you how much I like your ass.”

- Iggy smirks and, without missing a beat, says, “I hope you don’t mind me holding it against you.”

- Yeah. Noct is most definitely in love.

#promptio on ice #promptio #ignoct #hockey player/figure skater au #gymnast ignis #thirsty af noctis #leads to an interesting date #you know noct is in love if he eats his veggies to make iggy happy #ffxv #ffxv au #final fantasy xv #myfic

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grumpysweetheart · 7 years ago

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#me talking #liveblogging #(i guess?)#nsp cover album 2

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theycallme-tunathot · 7 years ago

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Ahhhhhhh I started cheese in the trap (from your mention with habaek) and it's got all my favorites in one drama!!!!! Have any more recommendations?

As far as Kdramas go, I’m still super new and finding shows to watch. Here is a rundown of some amazing ones that I’ve found.

I’m omitting some, just because I feel like everyone talks about them and they’re so popular you might’ve heard of them or seen them. Shows like Goblin: the Lonely and Great God, Strongwoman Do Bong Soon, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bokjoo, Coffee Prince. If you haven’t watched any of these, they are definitely worth watching.

Age of Youth (Hello My Twenties)

So many good things to say about this show. Mainly, it deals with five girls who live in a shared home. I know that I can pinpoint all these characters in my own life and I even was able to say “Wow, I’m her!” Super funny, moments of genuine tears and over all so much fun. The penis party episode is probably the best.

Descendants of the Sun

I typically don’t watch military-related anything. It’s a theme that’s so overused in American cinema that I’m really over it. BUT, this is about Korean military and the first ten minutes sold it. Idk, this was seriously the biggest surprise for me and I was pleased to go from one episode to the next.

Scarlet Heart: Ryeo

Besides having an insanely attractive cast, Baekhyun and IU are just...amazing. Simply put, this was the third drama I ever watched and I remember staying up until 5 a.m. watching this show every weekend. And I don’t binge watch anything. But I binged this. This drama is so good that my mother couldn’t sleep one night and she came out to the living room while I was watching it and she stayed up with me until 5 a.m. just to watch with me. Soon, she got addicted and the rest is history. It has such beautifully fleshed out characters, Baekhyun was amazing which led me to doing research on him and finding out he was in EXO. Also, my baby Ji Soo is in this and he kills every scene he’s in. Best scene by far is the water ritual.

The Heirs

I debated adding this since it’s such a popular drama, BUT I’ve watched my mom watch this show in its entirety at least six times since we first started it back in May. Also, I just really love the cast. They make their characters so lovable. Even with a dick character like Youngdo, Kim Woobin does so much with him and it’s just...touching. Also, there’s a song in here by Homme called “Love is the Moment” and let me tell you...heartstrings will be pulled.

Legend of the Blue Sea

Alright, another Lee Minho show, but my mom, sister and I are huge fans of him. This show was a surprise because I was almost certain this would be a bit too cartoonish for me, but it’s so interesting. It deals with a guy who scams to make a living and a mermaid crossing paths. This holds my second favorite female leads. I also really enjoyed exploring Lee Minho’s character background. AND THE TWISTS! Oh my god the twists. BONUS: Park Jinyoung of GOT7 is in this and you get to see him get kissed and be surprised about it, cry and get into a fight. Over all, an enjoyable watch.

She was Pretty

So let’s talk about this drama. While the first six episodes are painful to get through mainly because I found it so hard to sympathize with the leading woman (she’s so loud and incompetent and I really understood why almost everyone was annoyed with her), it pays off to be patient with this show. Not to mention, this has Siwon of Super Junior in it as well as beautiful man Park Seojoon. The lead actress, Hwang Jungeum, redeems herself really well and helps tell a very relatable story about how insecurities can be a crippling thing.

Hwarang

Now, in no way am I saying anyone should watch a drama just because the cast is handsome or good-looking or anything like that. BUT rarely does a cast look this fucking good? It’s almost angering at times. Not only do we have the beautiful Choi Minho from SHINee, but V from BTS is in this as well as Park Seojoon and the man my mom will marry me off to eventually, Park Hyungsik (he played CEO Ahn in Strongwoman Do Bong Soon). The cast is just too good looking not to at least stop and think about a little watch right? Anyway, it’s got a really interesting plot with pretty interesting characters, the only problem is the show focuses too much on the least interesting characters Dog-Bird and the sister of his dead friend, Aro. That, and the plot kind of drags in the middle and there are frustrating roadblocks (at least in my opinion) where it’s obvious and almost natural to give the king-in-hiding a shot to show his leadership skills and kind of shine in really subtle ways but instead, they use it as a chance to bolster Dog-Bird and remind you how good he is at practically everything. The ending might be worth the frustration, but these handsome faces DEFINITELY make following this show to the bitter end worth it, in my opinion.

Fight My Way

Okay, so this has to be my third-favorite drama I’ve seen thus far. It’s got so much heart and I’m surprised it ran on Korean television, to be honest. It challenges a lot of the messages and lessons that Koreans are taught and encouraged to follow if they want to lead happy, productive lives. It almost felt more American with some of the messages of following dreams and not caring what others think. Some of the situations the characters are found in are INCREDIBLY TOO REAL. There’s a scene in particular where Dongman (played by Park Seojoon...yes another drama with him) is being cursed and yelled at in the middle of a Seoul street in broad daylight by his boss. He’s saying all kinds of berating things to him while people just passed. When Aera, the leading woman, catches a woman stealing and is made to do something HUMILIATING just because the woman she caught is a high-roller customer. I’ve SEEN these kinds of situations happen in my own life. Don’t sleep on this drama. Also, the most romantic scene I think I’ve ever seen in a kdrama is what’s happening in the gif above. Like, I cried myself when he promised to hide her while she cried. As a girl who hates to cry, even when alone in her room, this is probably the most caring thing any guy can do for me. I also found myself in love with the storyline for Juman and Seoulhui, the two other leading characters in this.

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chromsai · 7 years ago

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Top 5 Arc V Moments.

OKay so this is very over due as hell I’m sorry like sincerely apologizing here. I don’t really have an excuse since I’ve known my definite favorite moments for a while, I just felt I had to… emotionally prepare myself to write all this out. And well

(it’s fucking June now…) as you can see it takes me a just a bit to become emotionally prepared for anything Arc V, especially so when it comes to deciding on JUST 5 Arc V moments but alright. Here they are:

5. Episodes 69 & 99 (tie): Melt My Heart

Yeah, I know I’m starting this list off with a tie just to emphasize how hard this is for me. Well anyway…

I’m choosing both of these episodes as a tie because my favorite thing about them both is, you guessed it!, fruitshipping.

Fruitshipping is, of course, my favorite pairing from Arc V (honestly, it’s my favorite in all of YGO in general by like… a really, REALLY long shot) and I’ve already talked about why episode 69 is my favorite fruitshipping moment from the entire show (tl;dr: it’s what made me go from casually shipping it to full blown “I WILL DROWN WITH THIS SHIP WITHOUT REGRET”) but the reason why I’m placing it tied to episode 99 in this list is of course because

this. Amazingly touching reunion. And although, yes it was short lived, nothing takes away how satisfying everything about this scene is, imo at least. Maybe you ship this, maybe you don’t. Either way, I’m not sure you can’t deny how heartwarming it is that Yuya isn’t holding back his feelings here. Okay, perhaps he is maybe slightly (goddamnit Yuya cONFESS ALREADY DAMNIT U DENSE BOY). Even the entire present cast finds it hella endearing:

Shingo’s satisfied look of approval pretty much confirms he ships it.Gongenzaka is beyond happy to see his best friends reunited, as they should be.Sora probably going thru the biggest sugar high of his entire goddamn life from how sweet this reunion is.

Look. At. Reira’s. Smile. Damn shoulda just shown baby Reira/Zarc a pic of fruitshipping… but then maybe Arc V would have ended 5 episodes sooner…Tsukikage, the cool stoic ninja, has been shipping this from the shadows but this scene was too perfect he dgaf about hiding it anymore.

Jack & Crow transcending shows just to show their approval of this ship.

Fruitshipping is all according to Reiji’s keikaku, and Shun seems glad he was awake to see this.

Not to mention my favorite part of this moment:

I get this is YGO and who knows if we’ll ever get an on-screen kiss but… the amount of time they stared directly into each other’s eyes without even blinking once, like… I know I wasn’t the only one who thought they were actually gonna kiss there for a moment… it’s symbolic of something, ya feel?

sweartogodithoughttheyreallywereandasiwatchediwasscreaming

This moment was too pure, too good, too heartwarming………

Anyways,,,

4. Episodes 31+32: A True ‘Entame’ Duel

Again, this is a moment I’ve talked about as being one of my favorite Yuya moments recently.

There’s a lot I can add about why I love this duel (for example:

giving Shingo some character development as well as demonstrating that he actually really is a skilled duelist and a true entertainer in his own way, not just a follower or an imitator

Yuya using this duel to challenge himself and push himself to reaching for his father’s level of Entame Dueling which is his dream

the cliffhangers they left us off with at the end of ep 31, the one that happened at the beginning of 32 with Yuya diving into the collapsing castle (which, Idk about anyone else, but that legit got me anxious AF too cuz how unpredictable the duels in this show are sometimes) and of course the other one towards the end of the duel as he made his ‘destiny draw’ while calling for the audience to cheer him on, etc.

but what really makes this duel the textbook example of what makes Entame Duels so fun to watch is the flawless call and response (aka back & forths) between Shingo and Yuya and their absolute dedication to keeping the flow of their entertainment as intense and unpredictable (even for themselves) as possible.

Also, as far as YGO goes, there is always going to be moments where the protagonist has to rely on a ‘destiny draw’, but the way it was implemented in this show (pretty much always like this moment) was a really creative way that fits into the world and story-telling of the show extremely comfortably but also adding to the anticipation since both we AND the actual in-universe audience are expecting something BIG.

Another rewatch bonus here: the stark contrast between Yuya’s Entame Dueling vs Zarc’s vengeful, overpowering dueling- this duel is the prime example of everything that Zarc strived to achieve as an entertainer but was unfortunately ultimately swayed away from despite his true intentions.

Last note for this moment: this duel was will always hold a special place in my heart for happening at a time when I really needed it. It was a nice reminder to not be afraid to Take A Step Forward With Courage.

(Side note: this episode was also immediately followed by, without a doubt, the best written duel in Arc V: Shun vs. Sora, so that just added to this moment in retrospect due to the contrast between dueling for smiles & entertainment vs dueling for war & vengeance, which was brilliant considering these 2 duels perfectly showcase the 2 sides of of the single coin that is Arc V and its overall themes, so you could say that, yeah, MCS arc was fucking good.)

3. Episode 1 + 2: A Solid Intro that AWED

Alright, so I’m very aware that not everyone shares my opinion on this, but again this is a list based on my experience and perspective of Arc V so lol anyway,

Episode. 1.

I’ve told this story plenty of times before, I think, but I’ve left some details out. After watching + finishing Zxl (as it was airing, mind you) I was left feeling kinda… mostly… “meh” about YGO as a whole. The last few episodes of it, though, we got this a few times:

And I was kinda… also “meh” about it. *cries writing that*pastsaiyoufool Tbqh with you, my only reaction to him at first was “he’s riding a hippo while playing card games… does he even know what it means to be a YGO protag? Where is YGO going…” but it was also “eh, it’s YGO. Nothing’s changed probably.” Then, a certain someone was confirmed as “main rival” for Arc V and I was motivated to watch. “It’ll probably be just okay but I’m watching for Hosoyan,” I told myself, fucking clueless as fucking hell. “Plus this is the first time I get to watch a YGO RIGHT as it airs RIGHT from the start.”

So episode 1 finally came around and this happened

within the first… not even 2 mins in. And part of me was “ok” and the other part of me was nothatwasntcutethatwasnOTCUTEATALL*denial* (I am a known tsundere when it comes to the things I end up loving the most [see: Chrom, Shun, Zarc, etc.]). Then the next thing that caught my attention was:

. By now, I was internally being even more aggressively tsundere because Fuck that was cute… but he’s ridiculous! Dressing up like a clown?! NNNNO. though on the outside I just kept watching with a straight face like okay okay it’s the first episode, he’s allowed. I’m very dense too just like him.

My first impression of the duel was actually that it was rather okay & somewhat interesting for the most part and that the action cards seemed fun but oh boy a new gimmick but I continued watching, cuz again, I wanted to give it a chance.

My expectations, going into the show, were “this is just gonna be another silly, happy-go-lucky kinda theme, eh I already got thru Zxl so why not?” + no real expectations at all.

And then,

this happened:

My first reaction: oH MY GOD LOOK AT THOSE EYESSS!!! (little did I know this was the beginning of my being zarctrash… yuuup… since episode. fcking. 1.)

I don’t know exactly why, at the time, and I don’t know about the rest of you but this was basically me right after:

Then the next episode continues the duel, Yuya wins, and again, I’m like

And to top that off, they give us this too:

First of all, that ending screencap of Yuya looking at the screen confidently right after he Pendulum summons for the first time and leaves everyone (including me) in shock… I’m sorry but, to me, THAT’S how you end a first episode. The animation. The soundtrack. The pacing and writing. Yuya’s sudden and mysterious (at the time) complete change of demeanor, along with the mystery of the Pendulum itself, is what left me in absolute awe, especially so seeing that even Yuya himself was not expecting it. It was all perfect. Then going on to the next episode and learning that Yuya suddenly had no idea what had just happened or where he even was… that got me hooked instantly.

But the ending to that first episode… haha… I started watching this show for Reiji Akaba and suddenly forgot he existed right after this moment happened. When he finally made his dramatic, opening double-doors + scarf flowing in the wind (in his office somehow?) debut, I was like “Oh sHIT there he is! Right… I was gonna watch this show for him… right…” Barely an episode in and I had completely forgotten why I was even watching anymore. I didn’t care. I just wanted to watch more. (And thankfully Reiji Akaba ended up also exceeding my expectations of his character like by a lot.)

I’ve seen this episode way too many times to count. I enjoy it thoroughly each and every time. But I honestly just really wish I could relive seeing it for the very first time. It was… such an incredible experience. To me, this is the best first episode of any YGO. I went in expecting nothing or even less than that and instead, fortunately, got everything I didn’t even know I ever wanted.

2. Episode 135: The Perfect Episode

I. Am an angst. Hoe.

Part of the reason why I enjoyed this show so much was because it gave me so much well-written angst that hit all the tropes I enjoy so much and then some.

This episode was and then some.

First of all, let me just address the fact that the duel between Yuri and Yuya was hyped and anticipated for 2 fucking years ever since Yuri was first revealed. Don’t lie, our first thought when we saw Yuri was “So WHEN are they gonna duel??!?”

For 2. Entire. Years. This duel was hyped up, and I’ll even dare to say it was more anticipated than even the Yuri vs Yugo duel, honestly. Even up to the last minute. I can’t tell you the amount of polls and discussions I saw debating who would win the duel because not only was the duel hyped, after seeing the first half, (in keeping with the surprise nature of the show) the result was still pretty damn unpredictable (a lot of those polls I mentioned were split almost evenly half the time).

Then it finally happened.

And it delivered. My god did it deliver.

But alright, I know I titled this “The Perfect Episode” but yeah there was some flaws in the duel writing (Yuya, my boy, you forgot your monsters have Pendulum effects?, Yuri I get you were losing your shit too and just wanted to hitotsu ni but you also forgot to use your dragons’ effects or just didn’t bother, etc.) buuuut I’m going to call this off as somewhat realistic in the fact that when you’re feeling you’re going insane and panicking you just might not be able to think entirely straight and might miss a few card effects or so.

But besides that.

The animation for this episode, directed by Ebina, and the sound direction as well was spot fucking on. And the script throughout was…

Oh my god. The script throughout this episode…

Let’s just say, during the span of less than 24 minutes I

cried

and cried

and died cried.

A lot.

just getting those screenshots hurt… beyond words…

Major shout out to Kensho Ono for this scene in particular because. wow.

(Side note 1: just in general, I thank the gods every day for casting Ono Ken as Yuya because I cannot think of anyone better to voice him ever. He left his own personal mark on Yuya’s character [Yuya’s “Ladies & Gentlemen!” was his own added touch and was not originally in the script, gods bless 🙌] + on the YGO series as a whole.

Side note 2: This is more of a personal one with regards to this scene in particular…I say often that I relate to Yuya a lot and let me just say that watching this scene was incredibly hard to watch through tears especially the first time around because, as someone who went through a terrible depressive episode that lasted months in 2014-2015, it just… reminded me… of that exact feeling… and I felt so. goddamn. horrible for Yuya… he never deserved that. Ever. This episode broke me so bad for a good while…)

Of course, I think the thing we all anticipated the most was… Zarc. We knew for certain that he would revive by the end of the duel. “How?” was the main question. Most speculation lead to the theory that Yuri would forcefully merge with Yuya despite losing, but that didn’t happen. Instead,

Zarc did it himself. Of course.

I think by the very end of the duel it was obvious but… that still didn’t stop me from spouting “no no they aren’t doing this tHEY AREN’T REALLY DOING THIS THEY CAN’T FUCKING DO THISSSS NOOOO!!!!” as he walked towards Yuri. And I knew exactly what was about to happen. And it still broke me anyway. And when Yuya’s Pendulum hit the ground

so did I.

*sniff* Fun times.

[Here is where I was gonna put some honorable mentions but the list was pretty damn long so I’m omitting it because honestly I’ll just end up listing like every single episode (besides episode 19 ofc well now y’all know my least favorite Arc V episode… wow… shocker, right?)]

1. Episode 37: Point of No Return

Welp. This is it. My favorite. Favorite. Arc V episode and moment.

The one episode I’ve seen like……. idefk how many times. I pretty much know the script by heart now. Yeah. In Japanese.

What is it about this episode? Maybe it’s the-

No! Stop we’re not there yet!

I think it’s the fact that this episode

is, imo, when shit TRULY. HITS. THE FAN.

As I titled this entry, this is literally. The Point. of No. Return.

Nothing is the same anymore after this episode. The plot is completely, entirely on autopilot from this point on.

“Destiny Starts to Move.”

This fucks with me, man. How much so? Here look:

Yeah I know this was just 5 months ago, but my god. You never know what fate has in store for you. Look at this other thing that I just found again also:

haha “lol”.

I can go on forever about the massive foreshadowing this episode is, or about how tragic it is, or both. OR. I can just… appreciate what they’ve done here.

I love Arc V because, as I said before, this show hits at like literally ALL of my favorite tropes, combines them with YGO and Arc V’s relatable AF characters, and then deconstructs those tropes immensely.

So for example, this episode alone:

A PLOT MAJOR duel NOT involving the main character/protagonist, yet still affects his life forever anyway.

“Kills” (ymmv) off a plot-important character within less than the first half of the show.

Said character STAYS that way (almost unheard of in YGO).

Said character’s dying words aka his last fucking will remains unresolved for pretty much the entire show until the very last episode. (FORESHADOWING WHAO)

You can’t. Escape. Fate. (The end result would be the same regardless of what happened this episode.) You can’t even change fate, in this situation. Not even slightly.

No. You won’t even fix your fate either. Hell, this is a trope that Yugioh usually actively avoids.

Yes, I know this episode is cruel in so many ways, and even more so in hindsight, but as I said before, I love angst. And I love deconstruction of tropes. And I love foreshadowing.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t just love this episode in hindsight. There are so many things going on

“Destiny Starts to Move” - yeah, after all of Ray’s bracelet’s struggles of keeping them away from each other, Zarc finally made his first definitive move sending Yugo here and now three of his four pieces are gathered in one spot, two of them misguidedly pissed at each other for extra hitotsu ni- dueling motivation, with not a single bracelet in sight. There’s no turning back now. Just another win-win Sunday night for Zarc.

And, oh yeah, this was Yugo’s debut. Just to emphasize the fact that their coexistence is unnatural.

Lmao no matter how you see it, their story is so damn sad fite me

Out of hindsight, though, I’ll admit that, besides Yuya, I still wasn’t entirely attached to the characters (or at least not to the extent I am today, even regarding Yuya), but this episode was, as I titled this, the point of no return for me as well. If I ever thought about quitting the show and just coming back to binge it later (which… never actually crossed my mind, I don’t think lol), this was the episode where I thought “shit… I’m definitely here forever now.” I mention the whole quitting and then binging thing cuz that’s what I pretty much eventually did with all YGOs before it, even DM, but not with this show.

Of course this episode is also where we get a hint of what’s been going on with the introduction of Yuri and Leo Akaba asking him to bring Yuzu to him, but doesn’t give enough away that it’s obvious at all. Pretty much all the mysteries gathered in this episode here quite nicely but the shock ending- Yuto dying- gave us all something even greater to ponder about… we knew when it happened that this was only the beginning…

“When the paper’s crumpled up, it can’t be perfect again…”

Honestly, I can continue talking about a bunch of other things regarding this episode for forever, but… talk about… otanoshimi wa kore kara da… so many things that came after this in the story were built upon this moment, it’s definitely one of the most important moments in this show.

And it’s my favorite moment in Arc V.

#ciphervegas #ask #reply #sai watches arc v #long post #alright so this is super long and #i'm honestly not even satisfied with what i've written here #because i love this show so much but i suck at wording my feelings accurately #also i've been kinda been working on this post in between shifts and social activities so i'm kinda like...... whatever just.... this is it.#literally #nobody cares Sai #but yeah like these are my favorite/most memorable moments from the show to me i mean #there's more #but just #i love the entire show in general #talk to me about any episode ever #i am here for arc v i am in this hell forever i love it #it's my all time fav and it's #gonna be really super hard to fucking change that #soon or otherwise #i'm not over it #i'm not gonna be over it #not any time soon #*lays dowN*#*cries* i really fucking hate wording things i can never get my feelings down right uGHHHHHH #whatever i was gonna add more to this post but like yeah #enough i have other shitposts to work on lmao #ily arc v #i honestly dont expect anyone to read thru all this rambling so lmao apologies + its okay if no one does

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comicteaparty · 4 years ago

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July 20th-July 26th, 2020 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from July 20th, 2020 to July 26th, 2020. The chat focused on Ring Spell by Artem Ficta.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

Comic Tea Party

BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on Ring Spell by Artem Ficta~! (http://ring-spell.com/)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace until July 26th, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Discussions are freeform, but we do offer discussion prompts in the pins for those who’d like to have them. Additionally, remember that while constructive criticism is allowed, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic! Whether you finish the comic or can only read a few pages, everyone is welcome to join and chat with us!

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 1

1. What did you like about the beginning of the comic?

2. What has been your favorite moment in the comic (so far)?

3. Who is your favorite character?

4. Which characters do like seeing interact the most?

5. What is something you like about the art? If you have a favorite illustration, please share it!

6. What is a theme you like that the comic explores?

7. What do you like about the comic’s story or overall related content?

8. Overall, what do you think the comic’s strengths are?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

Feather J. Fern

1. What did you like about the beginning of the comic? I like how it seems lighthearted at first, but knowing Artem it's going to drop the ball on us really soon haha.(edited)

Also I always love how the backgrounds are, they look great.

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Hahah, it's a shame I didn't get one more update up XD Thank you so much, Feather~!

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

well, the CTP is gonna run for the rest of the week...

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

I can't finish the next 8 pages by then XD

My guess is they'll be up the week after next

RebelVampire

For the beginning, I'm with Feather and I like how quickly the comic transitions from just lalala happy school to oh wait there's weird shit going on. I really like stories where the status quo is quickly ripped out from under your feet. My favorite moment in the comic so far is probably the most recent scene when we get to see Lyall's apartment and ya know, Claire starts dropping all these bombshells on us. The scene is the epitome of "Well that escalated quickly" and its just loaded with so much info to unpack. My favorite character right now is Claire. One because she seems the most sensible and mysterious, and two because I love Claire's hair so much and I'm so jealous and want such floof beautiful hair. ;3; As for characters I like see interacting the most, probably Claire and Lyall and they have some really good banter and a relationship, insofar, that's just kind of hilarious in its brutal honesty. A close second for me is Claire and Tasha as it quickly switches from happy smiles to probably most likely to have a catfight in the hallway.

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Catfight in the hallway, lolol. Makes me want to draw them dressed like cat girls XD

RebelVampire

No not that sort of catfight

probably

O_O

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

comic turns into a catgirl fetish comic

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

1. I like how the first word is Zenchav which was the title of the comic this is a hard reboot of XD 2. My favorite moment was Lyall sticking his hands up Damon's shirt XD I really like how it was drawn and it's the most Lyall thing ever to do. 3. My favorite character overall is Damon, although it's probably Lyall at this point in the story. But I like them all of course XD 4. Damon and anybody, lol. I like when I get to draw him XD 5. I've been trying out a new shading style with this since I almost exclusively just hard shaded before, so it's nice to be branching out a bit and trying some new things. The Intro page is probably my favorite atm.

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Theory: Lyall sticking his cold hands up Damon's shirt is how he drains Damon's energy, because secretly he's the witch.

mariah (rainy day dreams)

Oh no! XD that would be a twist!

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Oh snap!

mathtans

Hmmm, so we ship Claire and Tasha then?

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

I don't not ship Tasha and Claire >v>

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Drew that picture of them

RebelVampire

We should indeed all suspect Lyall. I mean no parents, lives alone, yet somehow affords everything? That's witchery.

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

How does he afford all that stuff

does he sell drugs on the side or something XD it is suspicious

mathtans

1. I'll mostly echo everyone else here in terms of the start seems pretty straightforward and makes one wonder how the teaser page fits into it all. I'll add a remark on the subtle details of world building, like you've got your digital alarm... and dude straight up has a TAIL, and it's like, no comment, that's normal too.

2. Favourite moment was probably recruiting Claire into the cosplay skit. It's like, hello new person, oh you want to associate with us? Then you need the proper accessories, and Claire's all 'Um, I'm not sure... prop weapons? Uh, okay then...' Cosplay is a force to be reckoned with. (nods)

3. Fave character... yeah, may have to echo Rebel here and go with Claire. Possibly because she's the first chapter name, and like the reader is coming into this new situation, so can get behind her trying to figure it out... but also because I'm big on the time/space bureau stuff and that sounds like a cool job to get.

Damon has a cool cane and has the mysterious ailment afflicting his cosplay though, so he's my fave guy at the moment. (Werewolf blood? Moon thing? Dunno.)

4. I honestly do like the Tasha/Claire interactions the most, because each of them seems to have something to hide, and so you're kind of wondering if and when one of them might slip up. The other girl interrupting with the paint was classic, and I felt it helped break tension. The ship picture (which I imagine won't show in the log) is kind of representative of that with the chessboard too, like they're making moves against the other (though I'm not yet convinced that one is a witch, could be a setup).

Of course, I'm very biased towards the yuri, so grain of salt for my opinions and all. And while the ship was a humour comment at first, I think I'm more into it after seeing a "catfight" could play out.

All that said, the Lyall/Damon interactions are equally good. Lyall's perversion sometimes saying the quiet part out loud.

5. I recognize the art style, have read some of the work before (under different name). Always find the hair impressive, like here you get the impression of each individual strand except that's not actually what's drawn... you can still see the neat ears, Claire having some strands that fall in front of her too. The shading is really good too, like definitely shades of grey, not just black and white.

Kind of echoing the author there, but I can see it.

I'm so bad with themes and need to charge computer, will be back later. o.o

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

I love all this input Math, thank you ;3;/

RebelVampire

@mathtans You have no idea how happy I am that someone noticed the tail that nobody seemed to comment on.

RebelVampire

What I like about the art is how clean and crisp everything is cause mmmm that sexy lineart you can just paint bucket when needed. <3 I like that the comic explores the idea of having someone you've known your entire life possibly be evil. Cause it opens up a lot of questions. Like should you doubt? Should you trust? And at which point have you hit the point of betrayal? So I'm glad we'll get to see a bit of this tackled as Lyall and Claire look for evidence. As for the overall story, I like that there's just lots of questions going on. It's a theorists dream. But I find the more mysteries a comic has, the more engaging it is. Because even when you know the answer, it's interesting everytime to see the characters reach that answer. As for the comic's strengths, see the above and the art. It's super pretty and clean to look at, has some fantastic emotive faces during the more comedic moments, and there's just lots to theorize and look forward too. ;3;

Now I will proceed to weep as someone who beta read the script and actually can't theorize cause I just know .

mathtans

Others may have noticed but not been sure what to say? (Does the tail turn into the cane?)

6. Ok, themes... could be a theme of belonging in there. Like Claire being accepted into the group, like Lyall wondering if she's only talking to him to get to Damon, that sort of thing? Then there's the idea Rebel raised of thinking you know someone but not necessarily knowing them.

Of course, there's also credibility, like maybe Claire is simply an escaped mental patient with really good hacking skills to get herself in the school and apartment. Because that's quite the tale she spins. (Though Lyall had heard of the organization? Or he's pranking her, bit hard to know for sure.)

7/8. The story's been setting up a number of things in the background, I feel. Which can be a strength, as we're learning more character items first. Though Claire's latest revelation I'm really jazzed about, because the idea of time travel (times when demons weren't supposed to be) and personification (Earth as a female entity) are right up my alley. So that's cool.

Also Lyall apparently has a strange aura to go with Tasha's strange energy? Maybe the witch is jumping bodies. Maybe we should ship Lyall/Tasha.

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Oh my gosh, loving these ideas!

I don't want to give spoilers but I think I'll answer the tail thing cause I never really meant for it to be a mystery It's just tucked into his pants when he's in public is all. That's why he's wearing the track suit for the school and not the standard school uniform, cause the pants are looser.

although it turning into the cane could have been hella cool(edited)

now I'm a little bummed I never thought of that

But the cane has other purposes

mathtans

I didn't really think it was a big mystery, and that explanation makes sense. (So I suppose it could be not normal, only normal for Damon's friends... demon prejudice otherwise?) Ok, so the cane is where he hides his stimulants to keep awake until the full moon.

Comic Tea Party

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 2

9. What are your theories about Damon’s past? Why is he concerned about when the full moon is? Additionally, what do you think was meant about Damon and Xerfonos being the same age but not being twins?

10. Do you think Claire is right that Tasha is the witch Cadence? If so, how will she prove it? If not, who else could it be? Also, what might this all have to do with Tasha’s concern about Claire being the mysterious Draco’s student?

11. What do you think Cadence ultimately wants from Damon? Why would this compel the Earth, and by extension Apus, to protect him? Also, even if the characters find Cadence, can she actually be stopped?

12. Why do you think Lyall reacted so strangely to Claire mentioning Apus, and why do you think he’s so sure Apus wouldn’t care about protecting Damon? Do you think Lyall can trust Claire even for the long term?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

mathtans

9. I mean, Damon seems to be a demon, but he's cool with being in our world, so... maybe he was born of a human/demon pairing? Or he was adopted by humans when he was a baby and simply given the same birthday as Xerfonos. I'm guessing the full moon has more significance than merely to werewolves (unless Damon needs to bite a werewolf to regain strength idk) and so it would help him.

I will say that initially the "same age" thing didn't phase me because there's more than 9 months in a year, plenty of time for having a second kid born in the same year. But now that I'm debating the adoption angle, maybe there's more to it.

They're not twins... they're TRIPLETS! Dun dun dun. Anyway.

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

they could also just not be twins due to a date technicality like one was born right before midnight and one was born right after

but yeah the adoption angle would explain a lot

mathtans

10. I don't think she's right about Tasha, or if she's right, not in the way she thinks. Because we've seen some from Tasha's perspective and she didn't seem to be the person in charge of whatever. In terms of proof, I guess she could see if Tasha would cosplay as a witch? And if the shoe fits? But yeah, maybe the witch is jumping between people like I mentioned earlier, or is not actually there yet, like APUS got the date wrong or something. Maybe Tasha's also trying to protect Damon from the witch (hence trying to give him that new name) but it's a rival organization?

I mean, technically still twins in that case, just not having the same birthday. (If Feb 29th enters into it, it gets even weirder.)

Actually, why wouldn't Claire use Damon's given name? Maybe her organization doesn't know everything it thinks it does?

Anyway, just had time for some random thoughts. Back later tonight.

mathtans

11. Cadence may just want him to keep living so that she can keep siphoning off energy. (Thus perhaps APUS wants him dead, it's not about protection?!) Or maybe Cadence wants a sweet cosplay. (Probably not.) Of course, it might be that if she's a free floating witch, she wants his body. Maybe she can't be stopped, but could be redirected?

The Earth aspect is one I haven't really been able to figure out yet. (Are pavonis a type of pasta?) But maybe there's a destiny or something that Damon needs to fulfil first.

12. Lyall could have been pranking, but maybe he knows a different organization like that... or maybe that's the name of some mystery file on his computer that he hasn't been able to open because the Cadence inside him hasn't revealed the password, oooh. I think Lyall can trust Claire (assuming she's not a raving lunatic) and she might even need him to provide better cover (she didn't seem to even know what apartment she was in)... but that's short term. Long term is another question, if she starts getting Apus directives saying to do things he wouldn't agree with.

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

This is all so interesting ;3;

Pavonis as a type of pasta, lolol

mathtans

I'm glad it's more interesting than rambly.

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Nah, I love it XD I'm afraid I'd give spoilers if I said anymore lmao

RebelVampire

My theories about Damon's past are that he's a werewolf. And that something about being a werewolf has changed how he ages compared to Xerfonos - thus why they're the same age but not twins. Granted I guess they could also just be half brothers who have a shared father who said, "Man I should knock two girls up at once." But werewolf sounds more interesting. No I think we've established Lyall is clearly the witch. He is too suspicious. Tasha probably is a super secret agent or something, hence the suspicion. Maybe Apus is into some shady shit that Tasha knows about, especially Draco, so she doesn't want them jumping in on everything. As for how proof, she won't. Cadence will reveal she's Lyall when the most damage can be caused and Claire will weep her career as a detective is through. Cadence might just think Damon is hot. Although I think Damon has a grand destiny ahead of him, and Cadence wants to interfere with that destiny while also bulking up on some of that tasty werewolf energy. Also, can Cadence be stopped? Probably. But definitely not by these chumps right now. XD Lyall reacted strangely cause that was the Cadence in him going oh shit and kind of taking over. And sure, Lyall can trust Claire to never figure out its him. Sorry Claire, you hot, but clearly aren't noticing some stuff.

mathtans

I hadn't considered the "same father different mothers" angle. O.o Maybe it was a sperm donation sort of thing though?

As to Claire, maybe Tasha will be nice enough to buy Claire ice cream and give her snuggles once she realizes the error of her ways.

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Tasha and Claire will get to snuggling at some point I'm sure XD

The same father with different mothers sounds most probable

of what's been mentioned at least

mathtans

I mean, time travel could also be involved. What with Apus.

Maybe Claire is Damon's daughter and she's trying to protect her own existence.

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Maybe Claire is Xerfonos' mother

Wait, I don't think that'd work out lmao

Daughter would be way more probable

Comic Tea Party

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 3

13. What are you most looking forward to seeing in regards to the comic?

14. Any final words of encouragement for the comic?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

I look forward to getting a bit further into the story XD it's still pretty early on atm and there's a lot of really good scenes later. I don't feel like we've really gotten to know Damon yet either

RebelVampire

I am looking forward to seeing people's theories as the story continues and pieces fall into place. It will be interesting to see the routes people take with the ideas of what the answers are going to be. My final words are just read the comic. O_O

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I didn't end up having any brain power to write responses over the week, but I really enjoyed Ring Spell. Damon and his brother are cuties, Claire seems very capable, and I can't wait to find out what Tasha's motives are. I'm real excited to see how the themes of magical marital vows come to the forefront :3

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Thank you~!

mathtans

Busy weekend was busy. Looking forward to seeing how the Apus thing fits in, like is Claire even from their time period? Will Lyall spill all the secrets? Will the ships happen? I'm so behind in all my reading but I've flagged it to check back when I can.

There was also the bit at the start implying knowing people from other lives, but the time travel possibilities make that weird. And I guess there's also the question of whether a Ring will have a Spell on it. Like, maybe the witch doesn't know she's the witch while she's wearing a ring? Or they have to get her to wear a ring? Here I am guessing again. ^^

14. To conclude, all the best with it, looks like a good setup. I do enjoy the art style too.

Also I guess congrats on being the finale CTP? Nice that you got it in there. Good initiative.

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

Thank you so much Math~!

Comic Tea Party

BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about Ring Spell this week! Please also give a special thank you to Artem Ficta for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked Ring Spell, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: http://ring-spell.com/

Artem Ficta’s Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/artemficta

Artem Ficta’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArtemFicta

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laughingpinecone · 5 years ago

Text

Chocobox 2020 letter!

I am laughingpineapple on AO3

Cool with: any tense, any pov, any rating, plotty, not plotty, IF, nerdy canon references, unrequested characters popping up

DNW: non-canonical rape, non-canonical children, focus on children, unrequested ships (background established canon couples are okay, mentions of parents are okay), canon retellings, consent issues

Ghost Trick

For Jowd in general, I do love my big boy and enjoy milking that size difference for all it’s worth. In gen contexts too, it’s neat. him big.

Alma/Jowd & Cabanela: Sleepover time! In whose house and why? What’s a Best Friend (tm) thing to do?

Alma & Cabanela: what’s a moment just for them, how are they aligned? How are they both changed by the tale of the other timeline?

Alma/Cabanela: ghost Alma joins up with Cabanela! ...and doesn’t remember the details of her murder or it’s gonna be a very short investigation, but anyway. Bittersweet ghost romance?

Alma/Cabanela/Jowd: please give me a completely smitten Cabs who spent so long pining and can’t believe it’s happening for real (even if it’s been happening for like, two months already?)

Alma/Jowd: how’d Jowd’s strength come in useful that one time?

Alma & Sissel: plot twist, she saves him. Did he misplace his body? Miscalculate some core jump?

Cabanela & Bailey: unexpected dance partners? Cabanela is harsh toward his subordinates but maybe not so much outside work?

Cabanela & Memry: extremely unconventional mentor & pupil let loose on the town like two horrible geese

Cabanela & Missile: what will get these two exhausted?

Cabanela & Jowd: all the devotion, please! Maybe coming from Jowd as well for a change

Cabanela & Pigeon Man: new timeline friendship? PM is a magnificent Cabanela wrangler, I think, reining in the whitecoat excesses...

Cabanela & Sissel: out-noiring each other, Sissel having the time of his life following Cabanela in an investigation

Cabanela/Jowd: hurried confessions outside the prison? Jowd figuring out he reciprocates right then and there or later on? How much later? What’s his favorite thing about Cabanela and vice versa?

Jowd & Emma: I don’t want to undercut her idealism and sound moral principles in doing what she did simply to take a stand against the death penalty, but did they know each other maybe? Or does Jowd reach out afterwards, curious about this woman? ...do they collab?

Jowd & Pigeon Man: I wanna see how they get along... a tiny snippet of a case? What Are Pigeons If Not Small Chickens After All?

Jowd & Yomiel & Sissel: Sissel has two dads. That’s just how it is.

Jowd & Yomiel: Postcanon bonding with total human disaster Yomiel leaning on Jowd like a cat and Jowd being also a human disaster but like more dad-shaped?

Kamila & Pigeon Man: (overriding the “focus on children” DNW) adopted uncle doubles as science mentor!

Kentucky Route Zero

(Should Act V come out between the end of nominations and reveals, I’ll be playing it immediately and I’ll probably add a few thoughts and prompts here for kicks, at the end of this section, after a spoiler warning. Obviously feel free to stick to canon up to Un Pueblo De Nada regardless.)

I’m all for exploration of any of the game’s themes and for including any staples from adjacent genres - wanna go full-on American Gothic? Dip into surrealism? Take a leaf from Twin Peaks with tulpa / split narratives to explore the characters’ issues? I generally love AUs so if you want to sidestep the inconvenience of an incomplete canon that way, be my guest! Or of course there’s Xanadu at the height of its glory, an infinite what-ifs generator. Were the requested characters part of it, what were their digital counterparts up to? A Xanadu narrative would be great! I’d also love to hear about any new spot along the Zero or the Echo river, or an expansion of some place that’s only mentioned by Will in HATATE or only gets a few paragraphs of text. Lula getting ideas for a new installation, or an article talking about her work? Donald listening to Static between stations somehow (Donald being constantly high as a kite as per this)? Joseph who went back to the surface finds himself near an entrance to the Zero somewhere? A collection of Weaver-isms? Sad surreal bureaucracy? Feel free to bring in anyone else from any part of canon.

Cate & Will: a small, chill adventure on a new island? Extensive mushroom lore?

Joseph Wheattree/Lula Chamberlain/Donald: the disaster concave love polygon in all its glorious doom... does even Xanadu contain a single hope for them? I’m fascinated by alternative developments in which they all stayed underground and explored further, sprinkled with subterranean symbolism at will

Junebug & Lula Chamberlain: something something art! Something something we live in a society, too. Idk I’m intrigued by their strong personalities and how they might clash, Junebug’s abrasiveness and Lula’s resigned bitterness

Weaver Márquez & Donald: she was down there! They are both very bizarre individuals! How’d that go!

Will & Donald: ...conversely, as far as we know Will was not down there but Will knows everyone. So how’d they get to know each other? What’s the Bureau of Secret Tourism’s take on the Hall of the Mountain King?

Pyre

The burning found family feelings, the revolutionary passion, the tension between topside social constraints and the kind of freedom allowed by the Downside! I love all the themes, the solemnity, the heart of this game. I adore everyone in that Blackwagon+Dalbert+Celeste, so if you want to add a Nightwing or two to any prompt, please do! I also love all the Scribes and find Erisa a compelling tragic figure, while out of the other triumvirates, I’m “love to hate them” for Manley, Brighton, Udmildhe and Deluge and would not like to see them featured in sympathetic roles. My main interest usually lies in post-canon exploration when applicable, but I’m also into various adventures during canon. Pick a location or a place outside the map and see what happens? As for the ending variables, I’d ask for a peaceful revolution and Oralech alive, but no preferences on who’s up or down, pick whatever works best for any given plot bunny.

Big Bertrude & Volfred Sandalwood: “people who were close in the Commonwealth find each other in the Downside” is always a gr8 thing to explore and I’d love it for them! Epistolary friendship if they end up separated?

Big Bertrude/Pamitha Theyn: sneaky, reserved kindred spirits. Their shared ending is great and I’d love to see it expanded. Bertrude’s attitude being thorny in a way that’s just what Pam needs to allow herself to open up... also: snake kisses.

Celeste | The Gate Guardian & Oralech: he let him through when the and they waited for the Nightwings... did they exchange a few words there? Or do they meet again somehow, in the Union or among the stars?

Celeste | The Gate Guardian & Sandra the Unseeing & Tariq | The Lone Minstrel: the three people who were there when the Scribes walked the earth and who have opposite opinions on the matter. I’d like to see their views clash, either when they were young or during game events

Molten Milithe & The Vagabond Girl: I imagine ae (I called her Tae but no strong feelings on this front) might have different relationships with the different Scribes, so what’s the one with the Wild Witch? What was she going through at a time when she felt her close?

Oralech & Big Bertrude: Bertrude’s protectiveness toward Volfred could be fun to explore here, both in the old Nightwings’ time and postcanon. Volfred aside, they’re a baby revolutionary and a grizzled agitator, which sounds like fun!

Oralech & Pamitha Theyn: idk I just want to throw Oralech at various Nightwings and see if he can make some friends. He and Pam look complicated enough to stand each other.

Oralech/Volfred Sandalwood: I am mainly interested in postcanon reunion, or postcanon established relationship. Getting to know each other again. Oralech figuring out that Volfred’s puffing up in formal meetings because he’s super nervous about all these responsibilities. Seeing what their dream looks like

Oralech/Volfred Sandalwood/Tariq | The Lone Minstrel: Volfred has two hands, and sometimes miracles happen twice? How do they balance each other, what’s the Oralech/Tariq side like and what’s Volfred’s perspective on it? Is Tariq a constant part of their lives or does he fade in and out?

Pamitha Theyn & Ti'zo: flying buddies! He’s a simple soul and she is very much not, but he’s also ancient and has seen heartbreak like hers over and over...

Rukey Greentail & Volfred Sandalwood: on pragmatism. I feel like these two could come to a mutual understanding in their own way.

Oralech & Sir Gilman: is there any way that this won’t end in a demonstration on how to perform a nautical knot with a wyrm?

Tariq & Ti'zo: the great gossiping duo. All the juciest skreeches. There are also a few occasions when Tariq says something about the imps while he blatantly means himself, and I’d like to know what Ti’zo thinks of this projection.

Tariq | The Lone Minstrel & Big Bertrude: he knows how to handle her, and she should know how to appreciate a slightly eldritch creation (?) of the Scribes...

Volfred Sandalwood & Hedwyn: in Oralech’s own words to Hedwyn, Volfred probably picked Hedwyn as an Oralech replacement. Does this change Hedwyn’s opinions on Volfred and the plan? Was it a conscious choice on Volfred’s part? Or how do they get along in general?

Volfred Sandalwood/Tariq | The Lone Minstrel: “both think the other is the bee’s knees and possibly out of their league” is catnip to me. I’d say it’s understandable from Volfred while Tariq is just super smitten (and struggling with his own sense of identity and desires, sure. but also smitten). So I think it’d be fun for Volfred to be somewhat out of his depth for once and try to be close to/console Tariq for whatever reason?

The Last Remnant

I’m very interested in post-game exploration, and getting a clearer feeling of any of the cities and assorted places that populate this fascinating world. I like the whole party with their characterization based on battle quotes, red bubble dialogues, and even their unique stat (‘authority’ is a natural fit for David but ‘romance’ tells me something new about Sibal!) Character interaction. Bit of worldbuilding. What’s another festival they celebrate? Do they erect something else instead of the Valeria Heart? Any fun discoveries down in Siebenbur? Where the hell IS Veyriel, anyway, do they go look for it and if so what do they find out? End of an age. Old bonds.

David Nassau & Torgal & Allan: catfight with mediator. Torgal has two h... Torgal has four hands actually and I’m very interested in his very positive relationship with David and his disastrous one with Allan. It’d be fun if these two aspects of his life came together, like a platonic V

Emmy Honeywell & Pagus: Emmy just ended up short a parental figure and the oldest and chillest of the four generals is right there?

Pagus/Maddox/Sibal: give me all the Qsiti worldbuilding, Siebenbur worldbuilding, Remnant daydreaming, shared backstory, old men reunions after the ending…

Twin Peaks

Case fic but they don’t find out jack shit, someone disappears, David Bowie was there, it’s complicated. Fragmented, shifted, mirrored identities. New Lodge spaces. The risks of staring into the void for too long. Gentle illusions. Transcendence. The moon. Static buzzing. Any title from the s3 ethereal whooshing compilation used as a prompt, actually. Twin Peaks is all about the mystery to me, the awe of mystery and unknowability and the human drive to look beyond and the risks of getting a peek, and about shared consciousness and trauma taking physical form in an uncaring world. Go wild with the ethereal whooshing! But I also love the human warmth at the heart of it all, and sometimes it’s enough to anchor these characters and let them have a nice day. A fic entirely focused on some instance of coziness against the cold chaotic background of canon would be great too.

Canon-specific DNWs: any singular Dreamer being the ‘source’ of canon, BOB (let alone Judy) being forever defeated in the finale, Judy being an active malevolent presence in the characters’ lives, clear explanations for canonical ambiguities, ‘Odessaverse’ being the reality layer, the Fireman’s House by the Sea being the White Lodge, anything that 4 hours Twin Perfect video says is the explanation of Twin Peaks

Albert Rosenfield & Constance Talbot: city mouse and country mouse? What’s their long-distance friendship like and what’s an occasion for them to meet? What’s her position in the symbolic spread of blue rose and blue rose-adjacent disasters/hopes for the future?

Audrey Horne & Diane Evans: Weird postcanon encounters? Can Diane lend a hand when Coop most certainly could not? They are hardened in different ways; we know Audrey has a precious dreaminess underneath that mess, what about Diane?

Chet Desmond & Albert Rosenfield: punchy&pacifist sounds like a recipe for disaster but their directness makes me think that they’d get along great?

Chet Desmond/Sam Stanley: reunion fic! Chet’s been AWOL for years, Sam has fallen through the cracks, how do they find each other again and why do they choose to remain off the grid? I would also like to read about them in the present day-ish, handwaving the return and reunion. Maybe they made a new life for themselves. If Sutherland were to play Sam again, Sam would be… notably more buff. What caused that change, was it traveling with Chet, what kind of person is he now? Could they be in Buenos Aires, investigating on their own whatever that shrinking box was?

Constance Talbot/Diane Evans: when the show was airing we used to joke that the various plots converging on Buckhorn were actually a race to woo the absolute jewel that is Constance. Cynthia got there first but Diane knows how to flirt! We have a whole week and a whole town...

Cynthia Knox/Tamara "Tammy" Preston: the FBI and USAF supernatural branches meet again after Douglas Milford’s times... what’s their attitude toward it (who’s the Mulder and who’s the Scully......), in what ways does their respective task force’s past inform their views, is there more hope for a new generation who saw the trauma of the past without living it firsthand? LET TAMMY KISS ALL THE GIRLS BUT THIS ONE IN PARTICULAR

Dale Cooper/Albert Rosenfield: fiery early days? Dream meetings that Albert will inevitably write off as a product of his aching subconscious? Post-finale where Albert has made his peace with Coop not being part of this world and not even deigning to greet him, except one day Coop is back - with apologies? Post-post-finale where they’re peacefully living out their days as best as they can?

Dale Cooper/Harry Truman: Harry seeing his Coop again… somewhere, somehow. Maybe he perceives him in the woods, maybe Coop isn’t all human now. Monster cuddles very welcome. Could be canon divergence but could very well be post-s3. Harry getting closure for waiting all that time in front of Glastonbury and never giving up on Coop… they can live in the woods together…

Albert Rosenfield/Harry Truman: did they tragically fall into each other’s arms in the wake of Coop’s disappearance? Did they realize they’re so good for each other, but neither of them was willing to give up their life? And/or was the wound of Coop’s disappearance too fresh for them to try to heal? Do they keep in touch throughout the years? Does Albert resign on the spot with a resounding fuck it after the s3 finale and rush to see Harry? Does he stay this time?

Dale Cooper/Albert Rosenfield/Harry Truman: basically the sum of the three sides of this triad… give them peace, given them nice things, give them so much love… Coop finding his place in the world and making up for lost time… give time to these old wounds…

Diane Evans & Albert Rosenfield: any ol’ night drinking together, or ending up in some liminal place much to Albert’s chagrin (and Diane’s as well...?)? I just love their bond and want to see more of it. At any point during their shared history and even after the finale!

Donna Hayward & Audrey Horne: the half sisters meeting again please? And finding a new balance between them, different from what it would’ve been when they were young when they never got a chance to discover it...

Gordon Cole/Phillip Jeffries: does Gordon eventually manage to throw himself into the void (that’s one way of considering a retirement plan!) and reach Phillip? What’s left inside that teapot alembic, or is he the smoke? How did Gordon even get word from Phil - in his pt17 infodump, he seems perfectly aware of the other’s status - what kind of contact have they kept? I love all the fanon I’ve seen for them, if you want to lean into it.

Harry Truman & Chet Desmond: I don’t know how, I just know that it needs to happen to see how they’d bounce off each other. Chet got the short straw with Cable and Deer Meadow in general; Harry just likes them fancy agents...

Lucy Moran & Albert Rosenfield: this. This is the ultimate recipe for disaster. How can it turn out less-than-horrible for everyone involved? Especially with young Albert?

Tamara "Tammy" Preston & Albert Rosenfield: wlw mlm solidarity? He used to be the one pulling all-nighters finding needles in haystacks, now it’s her job; is technology helping? Does she eventually get the full weight of what tulpa Diane and shooting tulpa Diane meant to him? What’s the latest Gordon gossip? What do they do for fun?

Tamara "Tammy" Preston & Dale Cooper: she roasted him for two dossiers in a row and looked characteristically unimpressed in pt17; conversely, the narrative may or may not have positioned her as ‘the new Cooper’. Idk I just want them to meet somehow and feel the passing of the torch...

Tamara "Tammy" Preston & Margaret "The Log Lady" Lanterman: the lady said in TFD she would’ve liked to meet Margaret and I operate on a strict “give Tammy what she wants” policy, details schmetails. There are places in this world and others where the passing of time is at best a vague suggestion, so.

Wally Brando & Harry Truman: Wally visiting his godfather, whom he deeply respects! Frank wasn’t quite on board with Wally’s whole thing but what does Harry think of it?

Wally Brando & Laura Palmer & Dale Cooper: I have a soft spot for Dale and Laura traveling through strange spaces, lost, slowly healing. On this background, imagine, if you will: Wally speeding by on his bike. I need this meeting…

#letter

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thedramafilesblog-blog · 8 years ago

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We’re not a blog that is dedicated to reviewing music (including Kpop), but because we absolutely adore BTS and their music, we decided to do a memo-style review of the Music Video (MV) for their Japanese Version “Blood, Sweat & Tears” (血、汗、涙 -Japanese Ver.-).

***Note: If this is your first time browsing the Drama Files, please read The Rules on how our Memo-style reviews work.***

***Note: We really wanted to analyze the Blood, Sweat, Tears Korean MV before, but we missed out on the opportunity. We thought this MV was very interesting as well, so we were really eager to share our theories about what they could possibly signify. There are definitely many theories, so we thought we’d propose ours. Our views are simply theories and purely speculative.***

Memo

Dear Reader,

There have been some questions regarding the recent release of BTS’s 血、汗、涙 -Japanese Ver.- (“BST”), particularly:

(1) Who/What does each member represent?

(2) How is the ending clip that is reminiscient of the “I Need U” MV connected to BST?

Conclusion

(1.1) J-Hope acts as a guide. J-Hope is Archangel Michael and Frau Eva from Demian.

(2) This will be answered in a subsequent Memo.

Background

Jubiemon J: I will first start by setting the background that leads to the analysis of the characters. Please bear with me! Through BST, we see two predominant influences: the Bible in particular The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Demian. The Fall of the Rebel Angels is based on the passage from the Book of Revelation. This passage highlights the confrontation between Good and Evil, before the Fall of Man. Archangel Michael forces Lucifer to leave heaven based on God’s Orders and as a result, there is the fall of other rebel angels (See here for the actual text).

The main themes in BST, as a result, are adulthood and temptation/sin. (I write it as temptation/sin because I believe they go hand in hand. Each member is tempted by something sinful.) The lyrics of BST highly emphasize temptation; the chorus is: I want more, more, more. Given this context, we can see how each member, except for J-Hope and maybe Suga, face temptation and from these struggles, they are forced to eventually grow up and mature into an adult. I will go through each character from a biblical point of view (POV) and then from the perspective based on Demian.

When the MV has a blend of neon colours, we are safe to assume that this is a time of war/temptation/animus and that we are in the internal reality.

This is after Jungkook drank the green liquid; Look at the neon vibes.

When the MV is in an everyday type of light and the setting is still in a Victorian vibe, this seems to imply that we are looking deeper within ourselves.

Jimin is trapped in this room.

When the MV is filmed with an everyday light but the setting is modern, then that is reality in a distant past.

Jin is hitting V and V is retaliating. Look at the modern kitchen and their clothes.

When the MV is filmed with a slightly brown light that gives a nostalgic vibe, then that is the present reality.

Look at this brownish tint. Mostly only Jin shows up for these type of scenes.

I also think it’s important to establish where BST chronologically fits among BTS’ MVs to understand who each member represents. I rewatched almost all of the MVs and I think the ones that are related to BST are the Korean “BST”, “I Need U”, “Run”, the BTS 화양연화 On Stage Prologue MV, and “EPILOGUE: Young Forever”. (I consider “Spring Day” another story by itself. Feel free to read our analysis of it to understand why that is so.)

The chronology of the story, in my view, is:

1. “I Need U”

2. “Run”/the BTS 화양연화 On Stage Prologue MV/Korean BST

4. “BST”

5. “EPILOGUE: Young Forever”

I think we can divide the MVs into external reality and inner reality (aka psychical reality). “I Need U”, “Run”, and the BTS 화양연화 On Stage Prologue MV focus on the external reality (The BTS 화양연화 On Stage Prologue MV does have psychical reality, but I think it’s more like a memory playback.) The other three MVs represent the psychical reality. The way they are filmed is different from the former three.

The starting point of the boys’ story would be “I Need U”. That is when we are introduced to all of the boys’ problems (eg V struggling with his broken family, J-Hope battling what’s likely a mental health problem, etc). We end this song with V killing his father to save his sister.

Next is “Run” where we see V fall back into the water, meaning that he has succumbed to darkness. He also leads the boys into mishaps and they all play pranks or do some petty crime together.

In the end, we find that Jimin is in a tub, burning a group photo of them. All of them have changed or matured and there’s no turning back now. I placed BTS 화양연화 On Stage Prologue MV with “Run” because I see the BTS 화양연화 On Stage Prologue MV as a time where V is reminiscing about the past.

Then we move into the psychical reality. We see in the Korean BST how the characters are struggling internally. Chronologically speaking, I think the Korean BST happens around the same time as “Run” and the BTS 화양연화 On Stage Prologue MV. As the boys are changing and being led by V for the external reality, the inner reality is also occurring. That’s where the Korean BST fits in. I placed BST after the Korean BST because we see Jin reminiscing about what has happened.

Finally, there is “EPILOGUE: Young Forever” where all of them have all grown up and are wishing to stay “Forever Young”. There’s a really dream-like state with this MV, so I consider it more of a psychical reality.

There is a chance that the boys have all died as a lot of fans have remarked, but in my opinion, the boys have just matured and though they wish to stay a boy, they have to become an adult. Their “youth” has died and not their actual selves. When we go through each boy, we see what they have gone through or left behind.

White ribbons are used in Korean funerals and white ribbons can also mean innocence and pureness in other cultures. At one point, the ribbon in Jungkook’s hand seems to have turned into a white feather–hope and then the white feather is shown by J-Hope’s feet along with the scattered pills.

The members will try to savour this blissful moment for as long as they can. I think this explanation matches the lyrics more like how J-Hope raps that “[he] wants to stay young forever”/”yeongwonhi sonyeonigo sipeo nan Aah”/”영원히 소년이고 싶어 난 Aah” (See credits for translation here). I think the huge irony here is that even though they want to savour youth, getting through youth is a challenge and a maze itself. That’s why they’re in this grey fenced maze that also resembles a cage. At the end of the day, you navigate through this maze and grow up, yet you also still become super nostalgic of those days. Ironic huh?

Look at this scary maze — youth.

(Side note: I quoted the romanized Hangul and Korean lyrics because I prefer to translate the phrase as “I want to stay as a young boy forever”. Though I’m not fluent in Korean, I am certain that “sonyeon” is “少年”. 少年 in Mandarin means a teenage youth or young boy (something like a boy of ages 10-16). To be honest, I feel like when the term is translated into English, it loses its beauty and what it embodies. 少年 embodies that growing up phase.)

(Just a another note: I am not an expert in Christianity. I only know references based on what I’ve learned in English Literature and Art. I also have not fully read Demian as I have a bit too much on my hands right now. However, I’ve read summaries on Cliff Notes and Coles Notes and read character analyses. Finally, I am not a psychology major, so I apologize if I’m not 100% clear with the psychological concepts. I’ve tried my best to understand them through research.)

Now that we have all the background settled. Let’s go onto who the members represent in BST beginning with J-Hope. I have decided to release this Memo into different parts.

Analysis

(1.1) J-Hope acts as a guide. J-Hope is Archangel Michael and Frau Eva from Demian.

Throughout BST, J-Hope is like a guide. We first see him sitting in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta. Pieta depicts Virgin Mary who holds onto Jesus Christ’s deceased body after his crucifixion. We are past the scene where Jin looks through the painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, with some binoculars, so we know that we are in a chaotic stage of war. Notice how when the painting is zoomed in, we only see the images of the monsters and rebel angels and the Archangel in the centre is completely black.

Jin with the binoculars (setting = reality based on how it’s filmed)

No Archangel here. Just monsters and rebel angels.

Reference to the Devil from the Korean BST.

Then the first time we see J-Hope, nearly everything is pitch black, except for him and Pieta. The neon pink/yellow light symbolizes that he is here to show the light. J-Hope has a sword in his hand; we know from a lot of stories, noble knights or Kings have to fight with a sword (ie King Arthur/Lancelot etc). Similarly, he has to fight off the bad angels.

Neon pink in BST meaning that “there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,” (Book of Revelations, 12:7)

As Archangel Michael, J-Hope chases V who is likely Lucifer from Heaven and brings about the demise of the Rebel Angels. Jimin and Jungkook are seen restraining V, the Fallen Angel. You’re probably wondering how these two can be helping J-Hope when they too have fallen into despair. I think the only reasonable way to explain it is that each member starts their story at a different time. Jimin and Jungkook were saved first or have matured enough to realize that the Fallen Angel needs to be out of Heaven.

Jimin and Jungkook are restraining V (the Fallen Angel).

Reminder that J-Hope is the one holding the sword.

I am pretty sure that this is J-Hope shooting at V because in his other outfit, he is wearing the same sweater as the one here.

After all, right after the scene above, we see J-Hope with a bow and arrow.

We never get to see who exactly is the one that aims at V. However, we see in the subsequent scene that J-Hope is the one shooting his bow and arrow. In the Bible, a bow is the doctrine of truth and good: “Jehovah’s arrows are sharp, and all His bows are bent, the hoofs of His horses are counted as rock, and His wheels as the whirlwind” (Isaiah 5:28) (See this website for more explanation). After he shoots that arrow, the doctrine of truth and good are spread to all of the boys. We see the boys hanging out with J-Hope after there’s a small clip of V being in pain.

Then we notice J-Hope pouring down some pills in a cauldron which lets the truth explode. In a way, I think it could be that J-Hope is foretelling what “may” happen, but I think it is more likely that he is telling us what “has” happened. This is because the next scene is Jin looking around in the present and after that we cut to V and Jin.

(Just a little note: When J-Hope is with the boys or in his lounge room, he is wearing a sweater that is pieced together in many parts. Half of it is black and red and the other is grey, white, and blue. I suddenly got the feeling that the red and black reminded me of Jin’s outfit throughout this whole MV. In a way J-Hope seems to embody both Good and Evil at this stage after fighting the war.)

J-Hope pouring some pills down and revealing fortunes or the past.

Based on the two filming styles, I think the V and Jin scene feels more like the past. Jin keeps hitting V and then mouths a “Sorry”. This somehow makes me feel that Jin is really enraged that V led Jin or all of them down the wrong road. After all, if we take a jog back memory lane, we will notice that V is always the one leading the group to do something. V is the only one that jumps from that high contraption in BTS 화양연화 On Stage Prologue MV.

V being the first to jump and to lead the group to elsewhere

That jumping scene is more likely a memory of the past as we first see V with bloody hands in BTS 화양연화 On Stage Prologue MV, meaning that he has already committed the murder. He keeps trying to wash off the blood but like Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, his hands are stained. Right after this short scene, the lighting in the MV changes to give off a bright yet nostalgic vibe and then there are clips of happiness. Therefore, it’s likely V’s memory of the happier times. I think this theory works because this is also a Prologue MV leading to Butterfly.

In “Run”, V is also the first one that has plunged into the water because he has sunken too deep via the murder. After his plunge, we are shown Rapmonster who dumps some sugar into his cup of coffee. This act symbolises that similarly, all the boys have subsequently fallen into darkness after V’s crime. In “I Need U”, we already know that all the boys suffer from problems. However, V is the only one who commits arguably the biggest crime out of the boys: V has murdered his father. Therefore, these all prove that V is the one that has led the boys astray.

Also, closer to the end of”I Need U”, J-Hope is the one pouring down pills. In the beginning of “I Need U”, he seems to have to rely heavily on pills as we see him with his pill cabinet. His external reality is likely dealing with a mental health issue which is why he also suffers a lot in his psychical reality. (It could be non mental health related illness as well; we don’t really know that much based on the clips.)

J-Hope pouring pills in this fire in “I Need U”

J-Hope pouring pills in this cauldron in BST

Let’s go back and contrast this “I Need U” pill pouring scene to the BST one. Somehow I keep getting reminded of the Three Witches in Macbeth. I wouldn’t say J-Hope fully embodies the Three Witches because there are three of them and J-Hope doesn’t start any of the MVs. However, I think there is a subtle inference that J-Hope may have been like Three Witches who planted the seed of temptation in Macbeth’s mind to kill King Duncan. Although this pill pouring scene is shown among all of the boys changing towards the end of the MV, there are also clips of the boys’ happy youth where they are playing with fireworks and I’m pretty sure they all gathered around a fire way before V killed his father.

V coming in to rescue his sister and ends up killing his father.

Jimin sinking to despair

Happy Jungkook at the group camp fire

Everyone playing with fireworks (in the past)

Therefore, when he pours the pills in his external reality, he is foreshadowing the darkness that will come and perhaps in a very subtle way, he has influenced V to act. However, unlike the other boys who have succumbed to darkness, J-Hope is able to break free from temptation and is the bearer of truth in the inner reality. He dumps the pills once more in BST, becomes the one that awakens from this chaos, and has to punish V, the Fallen Angel.

Now that we have established how J-Hope fits as Archangel Michael, we can see how J-Hope can also be Frau Eva who represents the anima. Anima and animus are concepts developed by Carl Jung. Anima is “the woman in men” (See here for more info). The Anima’s archetype is the mother figure. It’s quite fitting that Pieta, which shows the Virgin Mary, is right behind J-Hope. Moreover, in Demian, Demian gives a kiss from Frau Eva to Sinclair. As a result of the kiss, Sinclair who represents the conscious ego is able to combine with Demian (the self) and merge with Frau Eva (the anima). Throughout the novel, Frau Eva’s role is also to help Sinclair grow. As a result, J-Hope has helped all of the other boys mature and the boys are thrown back to the external reality.

Look behind J-Hope!

As for himself? J-Hope is left behind and gazes up to this sky that features an ominous green butterfly/pair of wings. I initially saw this as a butterfly; butterflies generally symbolize great transformation. Think of a caterpillar who changes into a butterfly. Wings gives a different meaning like freedom, independence, and in the Bible, wings are known to be spiritual truths (See here).

All of the boys have gained some form of truth and returned to the external reality which is in green. Green is associated with nature and the Earth. I’m pretty sure in BST, green here is used to represent when the characters are in the external reality.

Whenever this neon green is used, the scenes are related to the characters being in the inner reality. We first see this neon green when Rapmonster and Jungkook are sitting across from one another and Rapmonster tempts Jungkook. Notice how the neon green is on the exterior of the windows and how the Hotel is outside of this building. Jungkook was in a hotel at the beginning. The last three pictures show the ending scenes of the MV. There is V who has been punished looking up to the green sky (external reality). There is Jungkook who is going through that weird neon green/blue light to get back to the external reality. There’s Jin looking down at the vortex and stepping away from it. The green sky is all around him. He too is getting back to the external reality.

I haven’t figured out which member to analyze for the next post, so please feel free to let me know who you’d like to understand first!

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