#it sucks that most people do not have the money to invest in owning art. that does not mean it should be cheaper

[235uranium]

it's so wild to me when ppl complain about fancy non-essentials not being dirt cheap. bro the hand poured ttrpg dice aren't personally responsible for capitalism

[prikarin]

Regarding Killer Trait Updates

Hello, everyone!

It's been a good minute since my last Killer Trait update, hasn't it?

A lot of people have been asking me about Killer Trait updates and when the full-game will be released so, after a lot of thought, I decided to make this post.

Here's the thing: my Patreon hasn't been doing well. It hasn't been doing well for several months now. While the decline started after Where Winter Crows Go's release in November of last year, it's gotten progressively worse from February 2024 onwards. And because of this I'm going to have to pause my billing for my current patrons from August onwards—at least until I have something new to post.

It'd be a lie if I said this didn't affect me, I'm only human after all, but I'm also well aware that Patreon is a tough thing to maintain in a way that's consistent and interesting.

Unfortunately, since I live in Argentina, my only real way to get funds for my games is through Patreon, donations on Ko-Fi and sales and donations on Itchio. While it definitely helps that I hire some people from Argentina for certain art related things (so I pay them in Argentine Pesos), most of the people I commission are from overseas, so it's always a must to be able to pay them in USD.

And that's the issue: since I don't have that much money anymore and I can't commission people as often... this inevitably delays my progress on both Killer Trait and Potion Pleasing (DEMO out now!) indefinitely. It's sucks for me too, but it's the reality: making games costs money.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Killer Trait will have re-designs for most of the characters (not counting Carl because his design was originally my own) since the ones in the DEMO were stock sprites I bought from an artist, not my own designs. And I want these characters to be 100% my own, which is why I decided to have them re-designed. I've talked about this in the past in more detail when I decided to have Crowe re-designed, you can find that post HERE.

Of course, for these new character sheets (with the exception of Oz's, which has already been finished) and the new sprites, I need game funds in order to commission the artist. Even after the sprites are done, there are a couple of backgrounds—the characters' rooms—that I'd like to have originally made (especially since the ones I bought from Minikle are very limiting and don't really fit with the characters' personalities). And this doesn't even account for CGs, which I'll probably have to postpone for a while because the sprites and the backgrounds are way more important.

Some might be thinking "What about Where Winter Crows Go?". While I was lucky that WWCG's first demo was so well received, I still spent a whole lot of money from my own pocket to make it. I bought a lot of assets and, when I got a few donations, I commissioned a few artists to help me. WWCG was NEVER a game made with only free resources.

Making the art book for WWCG was a way I found to get a little of that investment back, but I'm well aware that I'll never get all the money that I spent back. And that's okay! To this day, I don't regret having invested my money to make WWCG because it gave me a lot of experience, perspective and made me learn a lot.

Be that as it may, however, I can't realistically make the rest of my games free. As I mentioned before, game development is expensive in both money AND time. Without funds, it's a given that things are going to be delayed.

So... where does that leave things?

Well, after pondering on it for a while, I came to the conclusion that I'm not really ready for a crowdfunding campaign right now. Those are extremely hard and ALSO cost money to advertise well and make sure everything's in order. So... the temporary solution I arrived at is setting goals on Ko-Fi! 

How would this work? Basically, I would set a monetary goal of the amount of money needed for a certain asset in a certain game that needs to be made. For example: sprites & character sheets in Killer Trait. Once that goal is met, I'll commission the person in question so they can start working on it! After that, I'll set the next goal and so on 💪

I'm thinking of setting the first Ko-Fi goal once August starts. And from there... I'll see how it goes! If things don't go well, I'm also considering making Where Winter Crows Go paid for a while—don't worry, I would make an announcement first—because I honestly have no more ways of getting game funds for Killer Trait and Potion Pleasing and, as mentioned before, making games is really expensive (and I'm only one person).

Thank you so much for reading until the end and I hope you have an amazing day!

[missanthropicprinciple]

Pacific Rim and Newmann: A 10 Year Retrospective.

Strictly speaking, I’ve only been a fan for 9 years. I was at the dentist when the film was released. I never went to see it in theatres even though I was interested. I’d seen the clip they showed on Leno when Charlie Day was on to promote the film, the bit where Hermann and Newt bicker while Idris Elba, Charlie Hunnam, and Rinko Kikuchi look on. By the end of the year I saw people posting about it on Tumblr and I became increasingly intrigued. By the summer of 2014 I was shipping Newt and Hermann hard, getting sucked into very naughty fanfiction. 

That August I bought the DVD and then watched it into the early hours. The scene with Otachi’s baby blew my mind at 4am.

(gif from neillblomkamp)

I didn’t know then that it would change my life. I spend a lot of money on kaiju and a couple jaegers from NECA, books, clothing merch, stickers, doujinshi, zines, and several prints that adorned my apartment walls for years. I wrote a large volume of fanfiction, sometimes in a notebook at work. Other than academic work it was the most I’d written in years. I even created fan art which I had hardly done before that. I was so invested as a person and a writer.

Even more impactful was how it changed my social life. I made friends who sadly did not remain so. I miss those people, I truly do. And I feel very badly about how things either ended abruptly or faded away, regardless of it that was my fault or another’s, or simply life. The people have gone and the ghost of my love for them remains.

But the friends I have stayed close to changed my life more. I never thought I would gain a sister out of it. I met my best friend in October 2014 online through the fandom and as the years went by we became very close, closer than we are to our own families. I’m going to see her in person for the third time this summer. And of course I made so many other friends and mutuals who have been so kind and patient with me all these years, talented writers and artists, and very good people. I love them all.

And of course the sheer fun that came out of being in this fandom. The fact that we all mass-halucinated a lab couch, thereby proving the concept of the hivemind. The wonderful, unhinged conversations we’ve all had and the laughter we shared. Not to mention cosplaying as Hermann when I went to see the Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters exhibit.

The scene where Hermann says they’re going to drift together is STILL my alarm every morning after all these years.

I certainly love Newton and Hermann. They’re a part of me in many ways. Expressions of who I am. I never stray too far away from them. Even now after so much has happened in my life, they continue to be a comfort and conjure up so many fond memories and always will.

[silveraura]

Join the party campaign 2 ending spoilers

(I know it's been out for a while, but I'm also behind, so the spoiler warning is just in case)

Alright yesterday I finally finished listening to JTP campaign 2 and it made me tear up. So a little context to my day: I had just been hit with a rent increase and me and my housemate realised our basic rent is higher than we thought (and now even higher), so we won't be getting any rent allowence from the government after my birthday like we thought. Basically, it was a huge dissapointment and made me want to cry about capitalism.

So then I go do other stuff and start listening to the final bits of the finale episode. (Insert obligatory "what the fuck Eric?", but like, lovingly, because it was so good). Multitool makes the ultimate sacrifice, and asks for people to be able to do what they want without having to worry about earning enough to live. I feel a lump in my throat. That's a beautiful wish if I ever heard one, and my god do I want to not worry about rent rn.

Eric plays a scene between two people in a grocery store. It's so simple, yet it makes me wish to live in that world so much. The symbolism of the stretched out hand makes me tear up. I have so many things I want to do and a big source of worry and stress is money. I'm not even doing bad, I'm fine. If necessary I could even lean on my parents, that would just be complicated. It's just that every soul in my body wants to reject capitalism. I don't understand the economy (and barely want to) and investing. I have student debt and the safest way to get myself out of that after my studies is to keep working in this field, even if I am currently much more motivated about my dreams of writing books and doing art than my studies.

I know some people are gonna read this and think I'm acting like a child, and I should suck it up. It's not that bad, I don't have much to complain about. And they're right, in a way. I live in a world where I can escape to others, like the worlds of Join the Party, and honestly it helps me cope. But every now and then these fantasy worlds become so idealistically reachable but realistically fantastical that it hurts. It's not an insane farfetched idea to have universal basic income. But it feels terrifying to hope to transform the current systems of the world so much to allow for something so nice, because most things don't promise we're heading in that direction. As a gen z young adult I can barely dream of owning a house in the future, because our current housing market would have to annihilate itself will I ever get the chance to buy anything that permanent at all.

Anyway, long post, many thoughts, some tears. The conclusion is that I love Join the Party and they make me keep wishing for a better world. I'm not a pessimistic person, just some days the world hits me in the face and makes me cry a little. Those days I dream of hugging January, questioning doctor Morrow about physics, asking Val for advice about being queer and fashion and a bunch of things, nerding out with Milo, petting Tuna and Pizza, sharing oldest sibling struggle stories with Aggie, and much more. And maybe some people who read this feel the same.

[petefromarma]

thank you this is a safe space for communist fall out boy fans. i love em but hate them and thats okay. i do wish they were better. i think one reason why people act like that in the fandom is they spent a lot of time associating with it and spending money and making it part of their identity which i am guilty of and still do, its almost an attack on them. to rethink what they consume. i think a lot of people just dont want to ever think of letting them go. and i get it it can suck. ofc i am not saying people should let go of them entirely or whatever but realize your faves may not be as progressive as you think they are and to acknowledge that flaw. i think one thing that sort of helped me “grow apart” from fall out boy is deadass making ocs. sure they don’t have a whole fandom or actual media but its honestly helped me a lot with just being able to put in my creative energy into something else besides fob. i still like to dabble in the fob fandom but its nice to have something else beyond fall out boy and sort of a “safety net” if things truly go south if fob gets actually “canceled” if they do something that i truly can’t really be all fandomy over if that makes sense hahaha

i think you're probably right tbh re fans feeling guilty abt spending money on them; a fair amount of western activism revolves around consumerism, which makes sense for a capitalistic society but like i really do wish these people would just get real and own up to the fact that their enjoyment of fob has nothing to do with their politics for better or for worse and if they actually believed that it did they would stop spending money on concert tickets and stop spending money on merch, not as a form of boycott or anything like that (imo most forms of western modern day boycott are ineffective in terms of constituting material change bc they focus on conglomerates; we should boycott bc it is the right thing to do to not pay in to companies that are supporting genocide, not bc we are expecting large scale change to come of it) but because it would be in line with the ideological/moral boundaries they have set for themselves

imo engaging with art/celebrity in a capitalistic society is a net neutral, for the most part; simply saying this among the most radical of accelerationist twitter grifters would get my head chopped off for paying attention to a band instead of the glorious revolution that's supposedly forming amongst russian soldiers doing genocide in the donbas or whatever but unless leftists want to actually get serious about global suffrage then idk what to say lol people are going to look to art as a coping mechanism and continue to pay in to these systems bc it helps them survive mentally/emotionally. now that being said that's why i think it's hypocritical and grotesque to participate in faux outrage against a band that you like by doing pretend activism bc none of these people actually give a shit that fob do business with/are friends with zionists, they just want to look good in front of their friends for caring about the right thing at the right time. if their disgust was genuine they would quietly drop them and move on but they're more invested in their own comfort than doing what they perceive as being right. so i guess to clarify i don't think spending money on and paying attention to a band with milquetoast lib politics is inherently materially harmful; what i do believe is actively harmful to the cause you claim to serve is when you put on a performance for a few days because the band you like fucked up in a way that can't be ignored and then never talk about it again and go back to pretending that pw is a radical leftist and not a run of the mill democrat. like if you're just going to stop talking about it eventually don't even bother bringing it up in the first place lol

i support you tho i do think OCs are a good idea esp if you want to pull away from engaging with IP tbh and i think just a good thing for enhancing your writing/creativity in general

[mollieblue]

Hey #labour, you should hire me to talk at you about how to actually fix Britain:

Terfs are the enemy, Trans folx are the people.

Small businesses need support on the ground level in order to foster amazing communities.

Invest in education to the point teachers are as paid well as their private peers or dare I say as well as an MP. I would say that if an MP describes their role as being vital, integral and essential to running the country, who receives a handsome tax paid salary with expenses paid with the public purse, why is it that other public sector roles are paid relatively below minimum wage? This applies to all public sector workers; civil servants, NHS staff, and teachers of all stripes. They are just as vital, integral, and essential to running the country, if not more so, than the openly profiteering geezers in Westminster.

Why is it that the rule makers are more important than those ensuring that the rules work? Those holding up society and holding it together are so sorely underpaid in this country that they are giving their lives to you at pittance so you can be okay. The NHS is a wonderful thing, and it breaks my heart that we don't fully fund it. The same goes for education, social services, community organisations, and libraries. These currently literally keep people existing at the bare minimum, but when fully funded and staffed, they transform lives for the better.

Equal pay for Equal work 》 Equal pay for Equal Importance. Ignore the 'we can't pay them the hundreds of thousands that MPs get' elephant in the room. I want you instead to imagine a world in which all public sector workers are paid the exact same amount regardless of hierarchy or public aspect they interact with. I'm no expert, but I reckon £86,584, the basic annual salary for a UK MP in 2023, would be an absolute god send to a junior doctor on roughly £38k. My partner practically works at minimum wage for 50 hours when you account for the marking, the planning, the organisation of your entire schedule to an impromptu meeting with angry parents and worrying about ofsted. It has worn them down, mostly because we can't have a social life, spending money on the theatre, in shops, on things that make us happy and human. We can't save, and we can't afford nice things. That fucking sucks. It wears a person out and throws them out of the system that's holding up the world.

Everyone I know is feeling like the above, regardless if they're private or public, freelance or salaried. One solution to help is basic universal income. Give everyone over 16 £500 & everyone over 18 £1000 each month for a year and see how awesome it would be in a year's time. I already know how much good that would do to me and everyone I know.

So pay everyone £12,000 a year and then pay all public sector workers the base salary of £86,000 rising in step with inflation. If the private sector can, in theory, pay whatever wages it wants, having a guarantee that your basics are paid will eliminate sooooo much stress. Rich folx can donate theirs, college kids can do interesting work at college because £500 buys a lot of art supplies and travel to museums, exhibitions, and events. Youth would have means to explore the nation before university or set up in an apprenticeship. Our elderly can use it to afford end of life care provisions or enrich their retirement or hell, just keep the lights on. Working folx would undoubtedly benefit the most and would probably like their jobs much more if they know things are covered.

To foot the bill, impose a commons tax on all privately owned land that fairly compensates the commons, ie, the UK public, back.

Make the North part of your game plan, rather than a foot note.

On a serious note; nationalise the railway system and expand the network. It is hell going east to west here, up to 3 hours to go 50 miles west and just 3 to get to London from Selby in North Yorkshire. How is this acceptable?

Invest in working class politicians to bring the reality of Britain back into government. Without our views or experiences on the table, why are we surprised when the Tories fuck us over again? If you want true, enthusiastic support from the British people, do not talk at us as if we're irresponsible children and actually engage with the very liberal and progressive discussions we have daily. Especially people under 40 - the older generation that pulled us out of the EU will be gone soon - you need to court and actually help out.

[peopleplacesthingsideas]

What art form is your favorite to do? Photography, drawing, poetry, making music…-What do you like about them?

i just wrote like a 5 paragraph response to this but tumblr decided to delete it so let's just write it out again i guess! basically this is a HARD ASS QUESTION but lets break it down

i think that the appeal to me with poetry is that im already kind of okay at writing and so when i have really really complex ideas in my head i can use it as a medium to articulate them in more detail than i could otherwise. you can just make up ideas out of words! how awesome is that! but i do grow tired of my own voice and style so that sucks.

i am really bad at drawing most of the time so it can be stressful to try to make something artistically valuable in that way. i do enjoy trying really hard to practice it but it takes a lot of brain power for little or uncertain reward so it's hard to make myself do it. i do really want to get better at it though

photography is very cool. i would consider myself to be a very very capable photographer, i think that the only thing really separating me from pros is the investment in the gear. the thing with photography though is that at least how i experience it its more of a reactive thing, i.e. you are trying to stylistically capture what's around you especially while exploring or living life or going somewhere. i would love to get to practice some more studio environment stuff though where i have more minute control over the shots, especially if i had some models i was really close with to work with. id also love to apply my lighting expertise in that area. for me photography is an invitation to try and see the world around you in a beautiful way.

3D rendering is similar to photography in that it can create photorealistic environments and scenes, but it is different in that you are not limited to things that you could achieve in real world setups like you are with photography. you can create things that are limited only by your imagination and they will have a resolution far beyond anything that anyone could ever draw or paint, but there are limitations. you have to have a vision beforehand, you have to create every element of the environment yourself and so you have to have your own vision and be able to accurately represent your vision in the software in detail, which can be difficult depending on what you are doing. I think it's very cool and that it can create some very interesting pieces, and I want to do more of it, but my licenses have expired and so I'm not able to do any of it at the moment until i get the money to renew them. I also have forced myself to learn it enough that I can usually create some basic scene out of an idea i have, this is not always the case but it does give me the ability to come up with things and ideate them and make them into something beautiful without too much work or struggle.

I am very bad at making music by myself. any time that I somehow am graced with some sort of musical vision I immediately try to record it, but I struggle to make much more than small snippets. I am able to add on to other people's ideas that they have started, but it is very difficult for me to make the basic structure of music in the first place. it's similar to drawing in the sense that it will make me very frustrated if I try to do it for too long and express an idea that I have that I don't have the skills to articulate.

that's it!

also graffiti is fun to mess around with lol

[mostlyinthemorning]

Self-indulgent thoughts about selling your hobby for money:

I want to talk about the monetization of hobbies, and specifically artistic hobbies, for a second. Every time I post pics of one of my handmade books, I get questions about whether I would sell them or take commissions. Which is a wonderful compliment - there is nothing better than hearing someone say that they like something you’ve made so much that they want to own it for themselves. 

But here’s the thing.

For years, I had a side-hustle selling stained glass on Etsy. I was good at it; I sold a lot of it, but eventually it got to the point where all the creativity got sucked out of it and I didn’t enjoy it anymore. And now I haven’t cut any glass in over 3 years. 

Not that artists who want to sell their work shouldn’t do so, although most of them aren’t being paid anywhere close to what their work is worth. Let’s take my little books as an example. On average, each one probably involves an average of 30 hours worth of work. At minimum wage (which is $15/hr where I am), that would be $450, just in labour costs. To get a price that comes close to what I value my time at, you can easily double it. Maybe you’re a person who’s willing to spend $900 on a small handmade book (and if you are, please DM me and I’ll reconsider my intention to sell), but it’s just not a feasible price to sell something.

The minute you create anything with any skill, there’s an immediate pressure to monetize it. It’s as though the only way to have any worth as a creator is to put a price tag on your work. If you can’t sell it, it has no value. If you’re not making money, then you’re a fool. There’s this notion that if we invest time and energy into something, even something that brings us personal satisfaction, that we’d better be getting paid, because otherwise what’s the point?

So why do it, if I’m not going to sell it? In short, because it makes me happy. I want to make things because it’s fun and satisfying and joyful - concepts that the world at large doesn’t consider as ‘enough’ of a reason to create art. I think this is why so many people look down on fanfic, because there’s no possibility of selling your work. When you write fanfic, it’s for your own enjoyment and the free enjoyment of others and that’s all it can ever be. And there’s a beauty in that - the innate desire to create with no hope of a monetary return.

There’s another side to this as well, which is that I think this drive to monetize the things we do for fun keeps a lot of people from trying things in the first place. How many times have I heard someone say that they could never be good at drawing or cross-stitch or underwater basket weaving as if they’re required to achieve a sale-worthy standard rather than enjoying the process of creating something for themselves? It’s a lot. A lot of times. 

All of which is to say that I’m not interested in commissions, because commissions feel like work and work takes the joy out of my creativity and when it comes down to it, I’m here for a good time, not a financially lucrative time. And wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all created things for the love of making them, instead of for a financial reward?

So, get excited. Try something new, and make art (whatever that may be) that makes you happy.

[brattata]

Hi I wanted to send in my info for a Genshin impact matchup. I chose B, I, L from the fluff alphabet. I’m over 18. My pronouns are she/her and I prefer men for my matchups. Thank you! ❤️

Personality: INTJ 3w4. I tend to act very arrogant and cocky as a defense mechanism. I don't like being vulnerable with people because it's not their job to worry about my problems. I come across very calm and collected and people rely on me for advice but not a very trusting person so I don’t really let myself depend on anyone. People have said I’m a lot more charismatic than I think I am. I'm really analytical and am good at finding loopholes and working around problems under pressure. I'm not good with emotional support and can come across a little cold because of that. I'm not that expressive (outwardly at least because I'm actually really emotional I just hide it well) and have a hard time relaxing or enjoying things because I've been conditioned to always consider how it will look on mine and my family's reputation. I'm a perfectionist and hold myself to very high standards. I appear very confident but it’s like a “I feel like I’m the worst so I act like I’m the best” situation. Because I’m not very expressive with my emotions and most people’s first impression of me is they find me intimidating and think I look mean. My intelligence is my favorite thing about myself (while I know I’m good looking I absolutely hate when that’s the only thing people compliment because it feels like empty words) because it’s undeniable and I know no matter what I can think my way out of anything. I look intimidating but I'm actually just socially awkward and suck at small talk (because it seems kind of pointless to me). I also have a short temper but there's only certain specific people that can get me to actually lose my patience and explode. I constantly chase perfection for myself and try to be the most idealized version of myself. My love language is giving gifts but I'm not sure what my love language to receive is. Some negative traits are I try to handle everything alone, I have a big ego, and and I can be kind of mean. If I’m really invested in a competition all bets are off and I will literally do whatever I have to do to win because I believe things don’t just happen within the bounds of the rules. As for dating I’ve notice I tend to get bored very quickly and once I do I completely lose interest in the person so whoever I’m with needs to be interesting enough for me to never feel bored or stuck in the relationship. (Some characters I really relate to are Chevalier Michel, Vanitas, Mikey and Ran Haitani (Tokyo revengers), Oikawa, and Kaguya Shinomiya.

Hobbies/Likes: I love fashion and I've been a model since I was 14, I used to do pageants as a kid, I make my own music and music is probably the thing I love the most. It's really what I use to process the world so music is definitely the way to my heart. I can't play any instruments but I can sing and do digital music production. (I've always wanted to be in a rock band) I'm a good artist but I don't like doing it on a deadline (I took an AP art class back in high school and didn't draw for 2 years after it cuz I hated being forced to draw. It's like when something you like becomes a chore) I've gotten back into drawing recently tho. I've also been doing martial arts since I was 7 + fencing. I'm good at chess and poker and made money from playing/betting on games when I was younger. I also love reading.

In order for me to like or fall in love with someone I first have to actually have a certain level of respect for them which must be earned. In the “get to know" stage I subtly test the person a lot to see how they react or respond to certain things. It's like a test they don't know his happening but that will determine if our relationship is gonna go further. And they will probably need to be persistent enough if they reciprocate my feelings to deal with the fact that it’s gonna take me a while to open up to them or trust them enough to get into a relationship and I might try to push them away several times (I’m just being realistic about what I do ik it’s bad😭). I also like people who challenge me and inspire me to be even better but not when they overstep and belittle me with their challenges. I also want to see effort and thoughtfulness from the person like for dates I don’t care if it’s super fancy or not I just want to see that they really put thought into the it and what I’d like. Same goes with gifts or any gestures really. And they also have to have a few screws loose and be crazy enough to go along with all my plans and trust that I’m smart enough to get us through unscathed. All this said I’m always the dominant one in my life and I don’t want to be the dominant one in the relationship I’m tired of taking care of everyone I want to be taken care of. I also despise the word mommy do not ever call me that

Dislikes/Dealbreakers: Misogyny (when people especially men undermine my intelligence and experience and end up making a mistake I warned them about only to listen when another man repeats the same thing l've been saying since the beginning), big egos with nothing to back it up, people who can't keep up with me (I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with someone whose hand I have to hold all the time. They need to be on the same level/wavelength as me and not drag me down), being a coward and not standing up for your own beliefs/motives, people that are way too nice (whoever I end up with has to have a mean streak because it shows they are able to take action when needed), being self absorbed and not considering the consequences of your actions. I absolutely hate being called spoiled or entitled or a princess (usually this happens because people are jealous), I may have expensive taste but that doesn’t give anyone the right to discredit the amount of work I put into myself and everything I do. People who talk big about what they’re going to do and never follow up with it. People who have a moral superiority complex that think they're better than me for not wanting to break rules to get what they want. People who can't take responsibility for what they do (Everything I do is on purpose so even if it's a bad thing I'll admit to it because whatever happens as a result is no one's problem but my own). Although I will say there's sometimes an exception to these things depending on the person and situation. Personality wise I do not usually get along with ESFPS and INTPS. (I don’t want to be matched with Itto. He’s so funny but I don’t think I could ever date him.)

Extra Stuff: I’m a Gemini Sun, Scorpio Moon, Virgo Rising and Cancer Venus. If I was in genshin (this is just based on quizzes I took) I’d probably be an electro polearm.

Welcome, and thanks for joining my event!

I thought a lot about this one. 🤔 Initially I was leaning towards Kaeya, and I do think you’d have chemistry. He would enjoy the challenge of trying to fluster get to know you, and you’d never be bored with him. But I think he’d give up a little too easily - and I also personally see him as a secret lonely softie who would want to be doted on a little more than you’re into. Instead, imo the best match for you is…

Kamisato Ayato!

He looks so cool in this GIF

You have a lot in common in terms of your values, background, and personality traits, which helps you understand each other very well but may also lead to some challenges. I don’t see this being a super warm and fuzzy relationship, but it’s one with a strong foundation of mutual admiration and respect. Ayato can, and will, and loves to take care of you, but he also very much appreciates that you can handle yourself too (he’s overworked as it is 😭). He’s probably the Genshin guy who most understands the pressure of family reputation and obligations, and he’ll never view you as spoiled. He doesn’t have a mean streak per se, but he definitely has a sly/mischievous streak, and though his approach is usually subtle he’s not afraid to do what it takes to get things done. Also, as a Raiden/Xingqiu main, I just love that Electro/Hydro synergy, you know? 👌

B is for Beauty

Your poised and confident demeanor is what first attracted him to you. You're like frost on Mount Yougou - beautiful, elegant, and serene, but cold and distant at the same time. He's not easily intimidated, rather he thinks your carefully controlled persona is a testament to your mental fortitude. As he gets to know you more, he really comes to admire your observational skills and out-of-the-box thinking, and to appreciate the little moments of vulnerability you let him see from time to time.

I is for Inspiration

I think Ayato could help soften some of your edges a little bit, if you're open to that. Like you he's very calculating and charismatic, but he also has some of the smalltalk and schmoozing skills you lack, and he has a knack for winning without making others feel like losers. On the other hand, I think Ayato would find being around you very refreshing. Sometimes it's nice to spend time with someone straightforward and to the point who doesn't want or need anything from him other than companionship.

L is for Love Confession

In his (very limited) downtime, one thing Ayato enjoys is playing games with you. He has a lot of fun playing chess with you, and even more fun teaching you shogi. He's really amused (but not surprised) how quickly you pick it up. The first time you force him into a resignation he says, "Clever play, my love," and then just kind of keeps playing like he didn't say anything, leaving the next move up to you. If you express interest too, then I think his next step would probably be a formal proposal. I don't see him as the type for casual dating - if he's making time in his life for you, it's because he wants and expects you to have a future together.

Thanks again for participating, and for your follow. Hope you enjoyed the matchup! 🥰

[sith-lords-consort]

I Loved You Once Ch 1

Pairing: Kylo Ren/Ben Solo X OC

Summary: Queen Jaycari of planet Amatia sits alone on her throne, unopposed in her rule of a planet rich with natural resources. Of course, with the resistance nearly snuffed out by the new Supreme Leader, Kylo Ren, a faceless madman with an endless pile of bodies left in his wake, not swearing allegiance to the First Order is becoming a more and more dangerous hill to die on. Most of her advisors suggest she either forge an alliance with the First Order or the Rebellion through marriage. She had no intentions of doing so, as her heart is still owned by the man her parents had arranged her to marry as a toddler, Ben Solo.

(Not canon compliant at all, the OC is much shorter than Ben/Kylo, her figure and appearance aren't really mentioned much but it is written with the assumption that she is thin, short, and white. Again, she is an OC, not a reader insert. Rating subject to change.)

MINORS (UNDER 18) DO NOT INTERACT

Warnings: Arranged marriage, mentions of death of a parent, politics

Sitting on the throne once occupied by my father still felt so unnerving to me. Even after five years of ruling Amatia, part of me still felt out of place on the stone chair. It forces me to keep my back straight, to look down on anyone in court addressing me, other than my mother who sat in her own throne, one intended for the co-ruler. During my father’s reign, she had been queen. Nearly equal to my father, his voice was the only one that would ever rise above hers. Now, during my reign, she was the Queen-Mother. Her voice was not one of decision making, but of advising and guiding. Many voices rang over hers. The dukes, lords, military officials all saw fit to interrupt her now.

Respect was currency on Amatia, and my mother, an unmarried adult, has none. As a widower on this planet, she was expected to retire from her duties, and find joy in raising grandchildren, or maybe breeding hunting dogs, or art maybe.

I let my fingers trace over one of the blossoms carved into the stone chair as Lord Emert carried on about adjusting the taxes on traders importing goods to the planet. As much as I agreed that the government should be investing more money into its own citizens trades rather than lining the pockets of richer planets, Amatia did not have near enough factories making the kind of machinery it’s military required. Not the kind of household goods it’s wealthier population was all too eager to toss around their credits to get. If I had to hear one more Lady of the Court brag about the Corellian crystal chandelier her husband purchased for her, I were going to outlaw them out of spite.

“Lord Emert.” I finally interjected. “You know I agree with your principle, as I often do, but unless you have an actual plan that’s not going to collapse our economy, I’m not keen to sit through a lecture on political economics. Save it for the university students, please.”

Lord Emert practically deflated. Honestly, for a twenty year old Lord, he could be a lot more insufferable than he was. He could shirk all of his royal duties in pursuit of wealth, sex, and booze like most royalty his age. At least he was trying to help his people, even if he did come off as a know it all.

I sat through a few more debates from my court until it was an appropriate time to retire for the evening. My mother joined me for dinner on the balcony attached to the royal family’s suite, chatting to me about upcoming holidays and festivals. I nodded along, mostly tuning her out in favor of eating quickly.

“You could find a good husband there.” She finished.

I sucked in a breath quickly, food not yet chewed hitting the back of my neck and causing a coughing fit. “What?!”

She gave me a knowing look. “I thought that might get your attention. Honestly, Jaycari, I taught you better than this.”

I sighed, pushing my plate away and leaving the table. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Dear, the nobles aren’t going to let you remain single for much longer.” Mother whispered. “They’ve given you some leeway because of your father’s death, but-”

“Goodnight.” I say, leaving the room and nearly sprinting to my room to lock the door behind me. I felt like a child again, rushing away from my mother’s lecture. Of course, the last time I did that, I had a friend to run off to. A boy who I knew understood everything about how I felt, the pressure of a lineage that felt too great to ever hope to grow into.

I took off my crown, tossing it on my nightstand and ridding myself of my boots and outer robes. I sat on my windowsill, looking out into the star filled sky, then down towards the river that flowed past the castle my family had lived in for more generations than I could count. I followed it with my eyes to the tree line I could remember sprinting to, a boy my age hot on my heels. He was thin and lanky, awkward in his movements as he was growing so fast he hadn’t yet learned how tall he was.

That awkward, lanky boy that was supposed to be mine.

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“You’re so slow, Solo!” I jeered, jumping from one rock to the other, barely keeping myself from falling into the river with how quickly I moved across it. At fourteen, I was quick to tease, quicker still to gloat. “By the time you catch up to me, I’ll be halfway across the galaxy.”

My foot finally fell on a rock much too slippery to grip, and I went tumbling towards the water, “Ah!”

An invisible pressure close in on my sides, keeping me from crashing into the rushing river below, moving me ever so carefully to the other bank and depositing me onto soft sand.

“What was that about being too slow?” Ben asked coyly as he made his own way across. At sixteen, Ben was not quick to tease, and hardly ever gloated. Unless it came to me.

I blushed as he stood beside me, the moonlight reflecting off his inky black hair. It had a way of clashing with his dark brown eyes, a way that made them look like a deep well. One I could fall into and have no hope of ever crawling out of. No desire to, either.

“Magic doesn’t count as being fast.” I sassed, turning on my heel and walking into the woods with Ben right behind me.

“It’s not magic, it’s the force.” Ben said.

“Is it science?” I prodded. “No? Then it’s magic, it’s really quite simple.”

Ben sighed, “Are you ever going to stop talking about the force like that?”

His tone made me stop walking as we both hit the edge of the cleaning I had been leading him to. “Huh?”

“You’re always so dismissive of it.” Ben explained, crossing his arms and leaning against a tree. “When others dismiss it, I don’t really care, because… well, because they’re no one to me, but you…”

He trailed off, leaving what we both knew unsaid. Me and Ben were not no one to each other. We never had been, and never would be. Something our mothers had decided for the both of us shortly after my birth. Both princesses with fathers on the senate, both with a knack for debate and politics, and both with ties to the rebellion, the two girls had been instant friends. Even when life called Leia to serve in the rebellion openly, and called your own mother to be a secret supporter, funneling supplies to them under the guise of peace missions to random settlements, they stayed best friends.

And then my mother introduced me, a cute two year old girl to Ben, a four year old boy that would make me giggle like mad whenever he would wave his toy starships around, making blasting noises with his mouth, telling me all about the Millennium Falcon and how he was going to be the best pilot in the world. None of which I really understood, but it entertained me at least. Both of our mothers had worked out an arrangement, using me and Ben as bargaining chips.

It could have been worse. I could have been promised to someone with no sense of duty towards the position they were born into. Or someone too naïve to function, like Lord Emert. The arrangement had been only verbal at first, starting with two lifelong friends joking about their children growing up to marry each other. To unite their families formally. That eventually changed when my midichlorian count came back from Coruscant. Showing that I was in fact, force sensitive. Barely. Had I been born in a different time, the Jedi would have asked to have me, but not been overly disappointed if my parents said no.

Then the arrangement became legal. Signed by Leia and my mother, sealed with my families house seal. It wasn’t… quite binding. Not in the ways it would have been merely a generation or two ago. I might not be able to outwardly refuse the arrangement, but Ben could. Ben was a Jedi in training, and had nothing to lose if he simply refused to marry me and never came back to Amatia.

“I’m sorry.” It was spoken quietly, but sincerely. “I know the force is important to you, and part of me wants to understand it but…”

When I couldn’t bring myself to finish, Ben uncrossed his arms, stepping forward to pat your back awkwardly. “I know.”

Ben was free to refuse the marriage when he became an adult. Ben was free to stay with Luke Skywalker on Yavin-4 and train to be a Jedi one day. Ben was free to jump on the Millennium Falcon with his father every couple of weeks and get his kicks on a smuggling run.

I had no such privileges. As the only child my parents would ever have, my life was planned out totally. Studying etiquette, economics, military tactics, and the history of not only my planet but the galaxy at large. Every activity in my life was selected for me to groom me into the best future monarch I could be.

I looked up at Ben, giving him a sad smile. “It’s okay. You make it better.”

I took him by the hand, leading him into the clearing and to the entrance of a deceivingly small looking cave. “This is it.”

“I can feel it.” Ben said, turning to me, “Can you feel it too?”

“No.” I admitted.

Ben tightened his grip on my hand, leading me into the cave, “It’s okay, I’ll show you.”

Into the impossible darkness I went, Ben taking out his lightsaber to light the way. The twists and turns seemed to last forever, but whenever the fear of getting lost got to be too much, Ben would give my hand a small squeeze, or tug my arm gently to get me closer to him.

Finally, the tunnel opened up to reveal a cavern with large crystal formations of deep blues, greens, purples, yellows, even some deeper orange colors. Ben turned his lightsaber off as the crystals gave plenty of light. “Here, let me help you.”

He turned me so I was facing the crystals with my back pressed to his chest, both of his hands coming up to rest on either side of my temples. “Take a deep breath, and try to purge any strong emotion from your mind, Try to just be at peace. And… there.”

Even before he was finished talking, I had felt it. The Kyber crystals around me seemed to speak without actually forming words. They just… felt alive somehow. In fact, everything seemed alive somehow. The rocks beneath my feet, the stone walls of the cave, and even Ben felt a light brighter than usual. Ben wasn’t just a person of flesh and bone I could touch, but an energy that I could feel. One I could maybe nudge at with my own energy a little and-

A voice entered my mind, one decidedly not my own, but a familiar voice. Ben’s voice. ‘Hello there.’

My eyes opened and I turned around, looking right into those endless pits of emotion I had managed to catch a glimpse of. “Ben… that was… that was amazing. Thank you.”

“I can show you more.” He said softly, his hands timidly finding my waist, cautiously pulling me closer to him. “More ways to feel the force. I can show you how to use it too. If you want.”

That was the moment I knew that this boy, this beautiful, smart, strong, passionate and charming boy was a complete idiot. I chuckled, causing Ben to look at me in confusion.

Deciding not to keep Ben in the dark, I rose up on my tiptoes, glad Ben’s growth spurt hadn’t progressed too much for me to reach him somewhat. My lips touched his and I could swear I felt his brain physically stop working as I did. I could practically feel his thoughts stop and then start up again three times faster than before, like he was trying to catch up on the time lost when he froze up.

I pulled away, grinning up at my perfect, beautiful, goofball of a boy.

Ben grinned, a big toothy grin that stretched across his cheeks wish were blushing just enough for me to see. “Oh.”

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I let myself come out of that memory, one of my fondest of Ben. I had others, many more kisses after that, stolen away from the watchful eyes of my parents. Even ones where Ben begged his father to let me come along on the Millennium Falcon, and we spent most of the trip hiding away in the cargo bay. We needn’t have bothered being so secretive. Han Solo wasn’t one to helicopter parent his son, or try and rain on his parade.

I let myself remember playing chess with Chewie and winning, despite Ben begging me to throw the match. Chewie’s temper tantrum afterwards still made me laugh when I thought of it.

I could still remember Ben’s insistence on opening every door for me, guiding me into every seat I took and even insisting on buckling me up when the ship was taking off or landing. Both our mother’s had thought it was adorable, but Han thought it was a bit much. “Crik, Ben, you gonna tie her shoes for her, too?”

Ben just cocked that lopsided grin of his. “If she asks me to.”

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I officially pulled myself out of my memories, trudging over to my bed and removing the rest of my clothing before sliding in beneath my covers. One last thought I had made me reach into the drawer of my nightstand, pulling out an old holo-com preloaded with a few messages. I had upgraded to newer models when this one got old, but I had kept it around, solely for the messages Ben had sent me years ago.

I turned it on, setting my holo-mail-box to auto play the dozen or so messages Ben had left.

Ben’s face, blue and slightly distorted from his shaky camerawork came into focus. He had been so young then, around fourteen. “Hey, Jay! Me, Dad and Chewie just left Corellia, and we mostly stopped there for medical equipment, but the warehouse had some sweet older blasters too! We couldn’t take them, but I took some recordings of Chewie shooting one and the recoil is so awful! Anyway, once the smuggling run is done, Dad says he might take me and swing by Amatia so I can- uh, we can see you!”

I drifted off to the sound of Ben’s voice, changing as adulthood crept up on him more and more, cracking so often in some videos I still felt bad for him. Puberty had hit Ben like a bus, finally letting him fill out his long arms and legs with enough muscle to look less like a twig and more like a man. His voice deepened to such a low octave it had caused me to jump out of my skin when he finally came to visit after ten months of absence when he was seventeen.

I listened to him through his teenage years, listened to him gain confidence and talk more openly with me about his training, his plans, his doubts. Especially his doubts about Luke.

Finally, I reached the last recording.

“Hey, Jay, I know you’re sleeping right now, but I just wanted to leave you a message. It feels like it’s been so long since I called you, but… it was only last week, wasn’t it? It feels like time passes by a lot slower when you’re not with me. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about things and… well, Master Skywalker has always told me to prevent my feelings towards you from guiding my decisions. He says that will keep me from falling to the dark, and that I need to learn from my grandfather’s mistakes but… I don’t want to do that anymore. There’s this friend of mine, and he’s been telling me that if I really want to do something, I should just do it. That if I want you… I should have all of you. And you should have all of me, and… and that’s the advice I’m taking. I know we never set a hard date for the wedding, or even really decided we would do it but… but I want to now. I want it to be soon. I’m done constantly juggling between what I think I owe the galaxy, owe my family, and what I want with you. When you get this, can you call? I don’t care what time it is, I want to hear what you think, what you want. I’ve been rambling for a while, so I’m gonna head to bed. I love you, Jay.”

The com link turned off, all of the blue light it had been casting disappearing and plunging my room into darkness. Much like my world had been when I had called Ben the next morning to try and tell him through tears of joy that I was ready to marry him, that I loved him too, only to get no reception. Hours later, I was informed that the temple had burned to the ground, and that there were no survivors.

I rolled over in bed, letting a few silent tears fall onto my pillow. Ben Solo had been weeks, maybe days away from officially being my husband when the galaxy had seen fit to rip him away from me. Sure, years had passed, but no added time had helped the pain fade away. I couldn’t even begin to imagine anyone else in the role Ben was supposed to fill for me. The seat intended to be occupied by my spouse would continue to be held by my mother, until she didn’t want it. And from then on, it would be empty. No pearl-clutching nobles would shame me into any marriage for the sake of tradition.

Master List

[thedreadvampy]

Ok like I'm sorry for all the Elias discourse but stepping off from OGlias for a moment I legit saw someone saying it was a mischaracterisation to assume Jonah Magnus was himself a rich white dude which

uh

Let's leave aside for the moment that Jonah Magnus not being wealthy and privileged utterly sucks the meaning of of a lot of what the podcast has to say about class and exploration because hey, that's a matter of interpretation

What do we know about Jonah Magnus (from all statements mentioning his original incarnation)?

1816: Interacts as at least an equal with Albrecht von Closen, who has at least one family estate and an aristocratic pedigree and thus could be expected to be at least middle class if not wealthy. This is relevant because Georgian class was very stratified and cross-class mixing heavily discouraged, 1816 is probably fairly early in Magnus' career, and Albrecht doesn't address him as one would a social inferior.

1818: Established the Magnus Institute, apparently without external funding partners because he's the only one ever mentioned in connection with its organisation and his friends talk about it as his own project; it certainly isn't associated with an existing university or academy as far as we can tell.

1824: not a lot of additional information, except that again Magnus' friends are all moving in wealthy, upper class circles

1831: In a position to hire professionals for Millbank under good terms. We learn more about Albrecht, he's definitely painted as wealthy old money, which continues to speak to this association

1841: reasonably close friends with Sampson Kempthorne, workhouse designer, who expresses the expectation of Magnus agreeing with him about workhouses and the treatment of the poor through work. At this time, Magnus is living in an Edinburgh townhouse, by which I'm guessing we're talking about one of the New Town Georgian 4-floors-plus-servant's-quarters which that name implies. Those aren't mansions, but they weren't where a clerk or shopkeeper would live - they were built for ship owners, lawyers, doctors, the upper-middle and upper classes, and as the name townhouse implies they were generally occupied as one of several estates, with the usual occupants being likely to also have a country place.

Beyond specific statement letters, Magnus largely crops up via his association with his wee gang, all of whom are wealthy upper-middle or aristocracy (Smirke, Rayner, Lukas)

He has the resources and social clout to devote his time to pursuing what is, effectively, a hobby; his interest in the supernatural doesn't bring in much income and, conversely, often costs him to chase up. He doesn't appear to have a full-time job at any point; he works on Millbank with Smirke but he doesn't appear on the records, meaning this is unlikely to be a paid management role. His friends refer to his supernatural work as a hobby or interest, not a job, and make it clear that at least by the 1830s-40s this is his whole life (he's "rattling around with his books and letters") - ergo he does not have a need to support himself beyond that.

He had the resources and funds to, by himself and for his own purposes, not only shape the building of Millbank but also to set up an independent academic institution which is still running 200 years later

Like, is it explicit that he's a rich white man? Not per se. Would all of this information make sense if he wasn't? I suppose it's possible but it's a reach, and one that I'm not sure why you as a writer would make without making pretty clear. To be able to move comfortably in moneyed Georgian circles without being born to money, and to be able to do the things Magnus does without having substantial disposable income - that would be exceptional, and would surely merit some sort of comment.

(I've talked about the race politics of Georgian Britain as relates to Jonah Magnus before, but just to sum up: in a time before the abolition of the slave trade and during massive colonial expansion into Asia, being a British man of wealth and not being white was pretty unusual. We can see this in the description of Rayner; he's very specifically described as Black, but also his Blackness is notable to a contemporary narrator. so again, not impossible for Jonah to be a person of colour, but definitely unexpected and it would be an interesting choice to write that unremarked)

just by way of historical context, as I say, class was very structured and immobile in Georgian Britain for the most part. It was also, as I understand it, much more discrete. Whereas now, the lines between working class, middle class and upper class are pretty fuzzy, in the 1800s they were a lot more clear-cut - the working class worked for little money, had little to no education past basic literacy and numeracy, and the entire household would work; the newly developing middle class made a living through highly-skilled jobs (artists, doctors, lawyers, clerks, shopkeepers, factory owners, shop owners and pub landlords, for example) and would have enough disposable income to buy property; and the upper class/gentry may work (but only appropriate to their station; academia, law or the church, largely, and of course a lot of them in the 1810s made bank from Caribbean plantations and their imports) but substantially they lived off the profits of investments, ownership and estate management, built off heritable wealth. 

There’s a big range of middle class though, although it was a small segment of society. At the bottom end, you have your grocers, pub landlords, shopkeepers, clerks and so on - they probably own their homes and business and have money to buy things outright rather than renting. At the top end, we have some really pretty substantial wealth - we’re talking multiple houses and estates, large-scale business concerns, tens of permanent staff, and only one person in the family needing to work. The difference between upper middle and aristocracy isn’t necessarily in quality of life, aside from blood it’s really just a question of whether the majority of your income comes from work or from investment and property management. So for example, Smirke is upper middle, but very wealthy - he has a career in a high-profile trade, he’s notable and welcome in high society, but ultimately his wealth is dependent on him continuing to get work. Von Closen may have more or less material wealth than Smirke, but his money is old money and he does not work; he’s very much a gentleman of the upper crust. Particularly with Industrial Revolution and the profit that the slave trade and the expansion of the Empire were bringing in for traders, the middle class was abruptly getting a lot richer in at the start of the 19th century and if anything class was getting a lot more discrete - urbanisation and industrialisation meant the poor were getting poorer (and less able to exist outside a monetary economy) and the working rich were getting a lot richer (until of course after a couple of hundred years the upper middle class almost eclipsed the idle class as the Rich and Powerful)

So the gentry/nobles/old money/upper class were the only class whose wealth wasn’t to a high degree reliant on them working, and so honestly being a Georgian gentleman was stultifyingly boring. That’s why so many comedies of manners crop up from the lower end of the upper class - you have to find something to keep you busy and social politicking is something. But it also meant a lot of gentlemen scholars - men with time on their hands and nothing they desperately needed to be doing, who got really into eccentric hobbies and niche interests (like social engineering, or art theory, or the occult, or unpicking weirdly specific theological concepts, or a bit earlier experimenting with light and lenses, or a bit later investigating the origins of species, or getting super into a specific aspect of the classics). The idle rich weren’t the only ones doing academia or research, but they had the time, money and resources to devote to really deep dives into things without much financial use.

So my personal take is that, given that by 1818 Jonah Magnus had the capital, the social heft and the time to found and run an independent academic institution focused on his relatively niche interests, and to do so with enough resourcing that it still runs 200 years later, the safest bet is that he was born a gentleman. At the very least, all the people he socialises with are securely upper-middle or gentry; he has a visible disdain for the poor; he owned substantial personal property by at least middle age (the Edinburgh townhouse); he had the social clout to get involved behind the scenes in a major social architecture project - it seems like the lowest this could possibly place him is mid-to-upper middle class at birth (he could have made that much money from working and lucky investments, but to get into a position where by middle age you can afford to become the Idle Rich, spending all your money and time on an obsessive personal interest, you would need to have started off with at least the capital and clout to get a high-level education and/or make significant business investments (say, buy a series of factories or build a shipping empire). You could make a case that he could work his way up from being born to a middling-middle-class family - maybe a country vicar or a shopkeeper - but friends can I show you some numbers I googled?

In the 1810s, being mid- or upper middle class (fourth or above) meant you were richer than 94.5% of the civilian population. Upper middle and above (like literally every person we know of who had social ties to Magnus except maybe the architects)? Literally top 1%. (well. 1.25%).

The middle class in Georgian Britain was the elite. They weren’t the elite of the elite, but they had money, land, property, staff, clout and privilege. You can’t project the class politics of 2021 onto 1818 (that is, in fact, why pure Marxism still requires an updated reading, bc in even the last 150 years the specific distribution and attributes of class and wealth has changed substantially (although the same people do stay at the top and bottom)). 

I think our perceptions are altered by the worries and perspectives of popular contemporary authors. For example, Austen characters often bemoan their lack of wealth, and are firmly Middle Class, and compared to the upper middle and the gentry they are living frugally and on a budget, but with “cottages” that are often six- or seven bedroom houses with several parlours and one or two servants, plus a town house, and with only one breadwinner per family and enough invested wealth to live entirely off the interest (that’s what the incomes of these characters are), they are living in a degree of wealth that would be unthinkable to 95% of their contemporaries, and it would be fair to assess them as rich by modern standards.

You can argue that Jonah Magnus wasn’t aristocracy. You cannot argue realistically that he wasn’t rich. Not only does that make no thematic or character sense (again, that’s a matter of interpretation, but it seems to me to be Pretty Key to his character that he’s an examination of inborn privilege) but it also makes no contextual historical sense.

[whitecap-bay]

Edit: Stop telling people what they should or should not like! (I'm looking at you FinnRey AND Reylo shippers!)

I wanted to come here to address something that really boils my anger and has been pissing me off for a few days. Over the last couple of days I have seen an increase in negative comments towards Reylo and people who ship Reylo. The hashtag Kylo is currently trending on Twitter and there are a lot of people actively making nasty tweets about Reylo in general and especially towards people who create art about it or who ship it. I have had 2 people this last week comment on my Reylo art post about how toxic the ship is (which is a narrative a lot of FinnRey shippers cling to when trying to justify why we shouldn't ship them). Edit: the person below is not a FinnRey shipper, it's just what they commented on my art.

I am not here to argue why me and other people ship Reylo, because I have a feeling FinnRey shippers will roll their eyes and not listen anyway. Edit: But I am here to showcase how their behaviour can be shitty when actively sending hate towards Reylo shippers. (Sending hate towards anyone is shitty in every situation and Reylos sending hate towards POC is extremely disgusting)

First of all I want to say that I am a new Star Wars fan. I have been a Star Wars denier my entire life simply because I was traumatized by Anakin burning in lava after which is reached a point where i thought I was cooler for having never watched these movies. The only reason I decided to give Star Wars a try in the first place is because I kept seeing Reylo posts on my Tumblr feed. I became really invested in their story even without ever knowing it. Which is why the first Star Wars movies I ever watched fully were the Disney sequels.

Second I want to say that telling people what they shouldn't like is a really shitty thing to do. Life is fucking miserable. It sucks ass. Especially now during a pandemic where people are even more depressed. And guess what, people like to use different media to escape this shitty reality. This is especially true for people who turn to: writing fanfiction, reading fanfiction, making fan art, fan edits (photos or videos), you name it. These are small things that brings joy to people. They don't do it for money. They'll probably get a few likes and a few comments. They spend hours creating that art for such a little price, just because it brings them joy. And what do you do? You go to these posts and tell them "you can't like this, your ship sucks, mine is better". How dare you? Do you hear yourself?

You have become the very thing you swore to destroy!

Edit: You're toxic when you shit on people and the things they enjoy. You're not God, you don't hold the absolute truth. You're not Palpatine, you're not here trying to convert people to your side. Stop trying to tell people what they should or shouldn't like. It's shitty behavior!

Third, I want to remind people that Star Wars is a work of fiction. Guess what, in fiction you're allowed to sympathize with the villain. Motivation is the very thing that drives villains. They are fascinating and complex characters. They all have a story about why they turned to the dark side. Even with all the shit they did, we still love them as characters. We still pity them, feel sorry for them. When Vader died I felt bad for him. I didn't want him to die. I wanted him to live out his days with his children. Ben/Kylo is the spitting image of Darth Vader. In fact, most people complain about the lack of creativity, and how it's a recycled idea. So what is the difference? Why do people accept Darth Vader and not Kylo Ren?

Edit: In the end, people need to stop shitting on people's parades because they have different views that doesn't align with their own. We're allowed to ship who we want. We're allowed to have different interpretations of a work of fiction. It's such a benign/harmless thing to be pissed about. A fucking fictional story that brings people joy in different ways. You don't have to like it. Focus on your own ship, one that brings you joy. Make your own fan art and edits. Stop making people feel bad about what they like. These movies are already hated enough, and there's only a handful of people who love them and it makes them happy. Why do we have to ruin that over a ship war? Enjoy what you enjoy. Have respectful debates and communicate. Please listen to each other! Understand each other's biases and why we think the way we think.

Per the request of some people, I erased the FinnRey tag.

[boxoftheskyking]

Pick Up Every Piece, Part Five

In which we have a scene at the bar

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

--

Early November 2000

When Jiang Cheng comes to the bar on his own, he lets Wei Ying watch his back. Which is to say, he sits at the bar and doesn’t spend the whole time half-turned to keep an eye on the door. When Jin Zixuan joins them, he hangs by the corner of the bar by the weird old poker machine that hasn’t worked in years, and he mostly avoids eye contact.

“Hey Zixuan,” Wei Ying says, grinning. “How’s your cousin?”

“Hm?” He’s so polite, always, in a snobby kind of way. Like he knows he’s better than you, but he’s far too well-bred to admit it. Wei Ying sometimes wonders if he got that from his mother. Wei Ying has never really spoken to Mrs. Jin outside of an awkward few minutes at the wedding, but what he knows of the rest of the family is far more in the “knows they’re better than you and will tell you to your face” camp.

“Your cousin, you know.” He winks at Jiang Cheng. “It’s the liiiiiife of the Jin!”

Jiang Cheng joins in, “What’s going down in Lanling—”

“Cut it out!” Zixuan reaches out like he’s going to cover Jiang Cheng’s mouth, but he doesn’t. 

“It’s catchy!” Jiang Cheng giggles. It’s a gratifying sight.

“That show should be outlawed,” Zixuan says darkly.

“It’s genius,” Wei Ying argues, drinking in the two of them there, together. “Nie Huaisang is a visionary.”

“I’m going to have him imprisoned. He’s a curse.”

“He’s a genius. It’s a totally new art form.”

Jiang Cheng snorts. “Art form. It’s boring. I like seeing Jin Zixun humiliated as much as anyone, but it’s just rich people sitting around being stupid and rich.”

“It’s reality, but also pure escapism. It’s brilliant.”

“It’s a threat to national security,” Zixuan says. Wei Ying cackles.

Jiang Cheng makes a face. “There’s no story! There’s no, like, script.”

“There is a story! It’s all how Huaisang edits it.” Wei Ying hasn’t actually talked to Nie Huaisang in years, so he’s not that personally invested, but he can’t resist the chance to disagree with both Jiang Cheng and Jin Zixuan at the same time.

Zixuan slides his glass over for a refill. “Zixun is never going to get a real job. He has no skills, he can’t do anything useful, so he sits around and has cameras follow him? It’s a disgrace.”

“It’s the most watched show in the country. I watch it every week.”

Jiang Cheng intercepts Zixuan’s glass to steal a sip. “That’s because you also don’t have a real job.”

“Serve yourself then, asshole.”

“We don’t watch reality TV, we work. We’re civil servants.”

“I’ve written six columns on The Life of Jin, I’ll have you know. So it is my job. And I’m more of a civil servant than you, I barely make any money.” It earns him a pair of eyerolls, but they won’t insult the paper to his face. Not anymore. “I can’t believe they made you both work today.” It’s the wrong thing to say, and Wei Ying covers his wince to fill a row of pints.

“Yeah, well.” Zixuan scratches the back of his neck. He keeps his hair a bit long, like Jiang Cheng does, but on him it feels like a memorial. “Five years. I guess I can’t keep getting time off forever.”

Jiang Cheng is drumming his fingers on the bar, looking away.

“Five years to the day, though,” Wei Ying offers. He leans in, almost wanting to touch . . . something, then twirls away to ring someone up. He feels like a bird, a swallow, dipping and soaring and coming in close for a moment before getting scared back up to a tree top.

When he comes back the tension has receded.

“Dad wants me to move over to the business side of things,” Zixuan is saying.

“Leave intelligence?” Jiang Cheng’s brow furrows, clearly already imagining following his brother-in-law over to the corporate hellhole of Jin Industries.

“Yeah. He keeps talking about the CEO gig, as if I’m qualified.”

“No offense,” Wei Ying says, “but your dad has never been big on qualified.”

“What about Guangyao?” Jiang Cheng asks.

“He’s not the face Dad wants for the company. I don’t know, it’s like during the war, he’s staying back in his lab and his back office, tinkering with stuff. Dad wants a stupid— A face. You know, dynasty bullshit.”

“Like those propaganda posters.” Wei Ying grins at him. “That noble profile. I had one on my bedroom wall.”

“Don’t be creepy.” Jiang Cheng goes to smack him, but he ducks away. “You did not.”

“It wasn’t propaganda.” Zixuan sighs, having lost this argument before.

“It was good propaganda,” Jiang Cheng argues.

Wei Ying keeps his thoughts to himself, for once. He doesn’t comment on Jin Guangyao, either, though he could. A drunk girl yells at him from the other side of the bar, which helps.

“But like—” Zixuan takes a long gulp, spinning his fingers in frustration, looking for the words. “This is what I trained for. I joined the army at eighteen. I was in the army when it was just prison security and diplomatic escorts. My degree is decoration, and he knows that. It’s an art piece on the office wall, it doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know how I’m supposed to just become this business guy. It’s like— He doesn’t actually know me, who I am, what I’m good at. He just expects me to work wherever he plugs me in, to just be the best at whatever he thinks I should be the best at. I’m already the best at something. Right? I’m too old to be the best at something else.”

Wei Ying shrugs in sympathy. “Welcome to your thirties, eh?”

Jiang Cheng drains his glass, his third already. “He wants you to be a liquid.”

“What?”

“He thinks you’re a liquid. Your dad. Fit the shape of your container.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m not a fucking liquid.”

Jiang Cheng points at him. “That’s right. You’re not a fucking liquid.”

“I’m a solid.”

“You’re solid as shit, man.” Jiang Cheng pounds on Zixuan’s chest, and he winces slightly.

It’s nine o’clock, so Wei Ying decides he gets to pour himself a whiskey. He puts an orange slice in it, for vitamins.

Jin Zixuan looks into his own glass, thoughtfully. “Although, I mean. What’s a liquid without a container? Just a puddle, right?”

“Or a river,” Jiang Cheng says. They pause to contemplate rivers.

“What kind of liquid would you be?” Wei Ying asks, watching the gold of his liquor swirl around the melting ice cubes and the orange peel.

Zixuan huffs a laugh. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Vegetable soup,” Wei Ying says, then winces again.

“Soup,” Jiang Cheng agrees, quietly.

“Yeah,” Zixuan says. “Soup.”

They stare down into their glasses, drink.

“That reminds me,” Zixuan says, rallying after a long moment and pulling his fancy silver business card holder out of his breast pocket. “I got a new number.”

He hands Wei Ying a classy white card. It’s not his government one, just his phone number and his new email. Of course Jin Zixuan would have a personal business card, printed up by a printing company somewhere.

“Did you get rid of the old phone?” Wei Ying asks, carefully. Jiang Cheng looks between them, also careful, saying nothing.

“No, I just had to— I moved it to the basement. I can’t keep . . . The answering machine is still hooked up to the old one. I’ll still wipe the tape, so you can call—”

“Thanks.” We don’t talk about it. Let’s keep not talking about it. Wei Ying rinses a glass that’s already clean.

“If you want. It’s not a problem. I just can’t keep—”

“Yeah.” He wipes the glass, too quickly, the damp microfiber squeaks a little.

“A-Ling gets confused. He hears you say her name, you say ‘Jiejie,’ and he—”

“Yeah, I get it, no problem.” Wei Ying rinses the glass again.

“You can call me, though.” Jin Zixuan is looking at him, which he rarely actually does right in the face, horribly earnest. “You know that. You can call the new number and talk to him, or to me.”

“I know. I will.” He probably won’t. He looks over at Jiang Cheng, who’s chewing on his lip. Yanli would scold him for that, say that’s why it keeps chapping, worse now that it’s getting colder. He doesn’t leave her messages, Wei Ying doesn’t think. He doesn’t need crutches like that, he straps the anger onto himself like steel braces and gets on with things, limping.

Wei Ying would like to be angry, especially today on the five year anniversary. Five full years without her. That would be a comfort, such a relief, to be angry. But he doesn’t get to be angry when Jiang Cheng is around.

Jiang Cheng clears his throat. “I can’t believe your dad allows Zixun to do that show.”

Zixuan draws himself up, sucking in a breath like he’s coming out of water. “He must get something from it. Like some kind of PR or something.”

Wei Ying goes into the back and carries out a case of wine and a case of cider, loads them into the cooler. It takes a while, he has to pull things out so the warm bottles go in the back. He can vaguely hear his brothers insulting Jin Zixun and the state of modern television, keeping it light. He stares at the label on a bottle of cider—it’s an apple with a face, one of those unnerving cartoon faces where all the teeth are the same size and shape. No one’s teeth look like that.

He shuts the cooler and returns.

“If Zixun looks like a fool,” Wei Ying says thoughtfully, interrupting them like he’s supposed to, “then he’s mostly harmless. He’s a goofball. It must be useful for the great and powerful Jin to have a goofball side. It makes you look less, I don’t know . . .” He could say a lot of things. He could say things like tyrannical or despotic or calculating or morally questionable. He doesn’t say any of it, just waves his hands around.

Zixuan looks like he hears the words anyway, and as usual, he stares out across the bar. “He’s a sacrifice, I suppose. Zixun. He’s always been the spare.”

“Do you think he knows he’s being played?” Jiang Cheng asks. “Would he keep doing it if he knew?”

“My dad,” Zixuan says slowly. “Doesn’t play Go. Metaphorically speaking. Not like A-Yao does. But he does play poker. Zixun—” he spins the glass between his hands. “Zixun plays hopscotch. Badly.”

Wei Ying snorts, and it feels nice.

“I guess I don’t like the show so much anymore,” he says, pouting.

“Good,” Jiang Cheng reaches out and flicks his ear. Wei Ying lets him.

“Why does everything have to be nefarious?” Wei Ying whines, meaning reality TV but also Jiang Cheng and his mean fingers “Can’t we have something that’s just dumb? Aren’t we there, as a country, where we can just have stupid shit that’s stupid and doesn’t mean anything?”

“You mean besides you, and also your face?” Jiang Cheng asks. Zixuan sighs at them in a judgmental way.

Wei Ying taps his chin. “Although, there’s a column there. The insidious political machinations of so-called reality.” He hits the button to roll out some receipt paper and makes a few notes.

“I just don’t get why he does it,” Jiang Cheng muses. “He has to know he looks bad. Right? Like, he has to.” As if everyone is as pathologically obsessed with their public appearance as you are, which is something Wei Ying does not say. “It’s not like he needs the money.”

As always, that’s its own flavor of uncomfortable. Zixuan makes more money than Jiang Cheng, and has a trust fund on top of it. He keeps trying to make it up by buying expensive presents and starting a tab wherever they go, but Jiang Cheng won’t take it. He used to, back when Zixuan was just their shitty rich brother-in-law, or Yanli’s shitty rich boyfriend. He used to call it “Yanli’s dowry” when he’d leave his birthday dinner with a new stereo or a nice watch. Now that they’re friends, though, he gets pissed off. He’ll get mad if Zixuan buys him a hardcover instead of a paperback, now that they’re friends. He’s a complicated man. So is Zixuan, in his way.

That’s probably why they get along so well, and why Wei Ying is always a half a step off of their weird masculine choreography. Wei Ying fancies himself a complicated man, but it’s different. He’s in control in a way they don’t seem to be, not of his life but of his face and his voice and his sentence structure. It makes him a good reporter.

They, on the other hand, have always been good soldiers.

Wei Ying had cried when Jiang Cheng enlisted, mid-’93. 

“You watch too many war movies,” he’d said, looking down at this lap, twisting his hands together, face hot and heart racing. “It won’t be like that, A-Cheng, there’s not any glory in it, it’ll just be horrible—”

“It’s the right thing to do.” Jiang Cheng had been stubborn as always, chin jutting out. “Wen Chao’s last attack—I can’t just sit here.”

Yanli hadn’t cried at all, she’d just looked between them, silent.

“Why don’t you come too?”Jian Cheng had asked him, eyes like a six-year-old. “You’d be good at it. We could do it together.”

“No, I gotta— Someone’s gotta report on all your heroics, right?” Wei Ying had been sweating, panicked, chills running down his arms, blowing his nose again and again. “Maybe I’ll get an assignment so I can follow you around and sing about your adventures. Like something out of those ancient poems, right?”

He’d been wrong about his role in the war, but more right than he’d be able to guess about ancient poetry. Because cultivation was real. Magic was real, and his brother was somehow mixed up in it.

He got drunk with Yanli the week after the first cultivator battle. The first battle with the new cultivator corps. Zixuan, Jiang Cheng, Lan Zhan, Mianmian, and the others.

“You husband is a wizard,” Wei Ying had said, slurring.

“Your brother is a wizard.” Yanli had flicked a sunflower seed into his lap. 

That was her secret: when Yanli got drunk she could go through two bags of sunflower seeds by herself. She got the cheap ones from the gas station on the corner and split them with her teeth, scattering shells everywhere like a little disaster zone. She’d clean up all the evidence in the morning, before anyone woke up. She was almost never hungover. 

Wei Ying loved that about her, the evidence she left, her secret messiness. He’d catch a stray shell in the corner, behind a potted plant or caught in the fringe of an area rug, and he’d get so rocked with love—violent, breathless love for her—that his vision would go spotty. 

Or maybe that’s just how he remembers it, now that she’s gone.

“Actually, he’s your brother too,” Wei Ying had said at the time, poking her nose. “Your husband and your brother are both wizards. So what does that make you?”

“Well, there’s Lan Zhan. You’re blushing, see, you’re blushing. And Mianmian. They’re your—”

“Friends.”

“Yeah, but you kissed both of them.”

Wei Ying had stuck out his tongue at her, or done something equally childish.

She’d cracked a sunflower seed and popped it into her mouth. “We could be wizards if we wanted to.”

“Oh, yeah, definitely”

“We just aren’t.”

“We’re busy.”

“We are busy people.”

Wei Ying is shaken out of the memory by a pint glass slamming down on the bar, just missing Jiang Cheng’s elbow. It’s Li Wangcheng, youngest son of his usual source, Li Riseung.

“Fill ‘er up, asshole,” Li Wangcheng says, listing into his buddies on either side. Jiang Cheng and Jin Zixuan are both looking at him with equally disdainful nose wrinkles. “Chop chop.”

Wei Ying sighs. “Sorry, Wangcheng, you’re cut off. I already over-served you, and I promised your dad and your brother I wouldn’t.”

“Fuck you.”

“Your liver can’t take it. Here, have some water and go sit down.”

“Fuck you, Wei Ying. Fuck you.” He’s pushing off his friends, leaning over the bar with his tobacco-stained teeth and his mix-of-alcohol breath.

“Yeah, yeah,” Wei Ying moves away, wiping down the counter, and Wangcheng follows.

“I’ll fucking kill you. You watch your back, bitch, I’ll fucking find you, and I’ll kill you.”

Wei Ying puts up his hands. “Okay, man, take it easy.”

“I know where you live. I know where you park your bike. Your stupid little fucking— Your stupid bike.”

His two biggest friends start pulling at his elbow, pulling him away. He shakes them off.

“Don’t think I won’t. Don’t think I won’t find you, motherfucker.”

Jiang Cheng is off his stool, now, and Zixuan is moving around behind him, coming in to engage. Wei Ying waves them off, desperately. Wen Ning is leaving his spot by the door.

“When you leave tonight, you better—”

“The fuck did you say?” Jiang Cheng is up in his face, now, and Wei Ying has to come out from behind the bar. He hates leaving the bar, it’s his comfortable place to be.

“Leave it. A-Cheng, A-Xuan, leave it, leave it.” He gets himself between them all, holding his brother back. Wen Ning has a good hold on Wangcheng’s shoulders.

“Fuck you.” That sprays a bit in his face, the plosive. “Everything was fine before you came here. Yiling was fine before you came here, and then everything went to shit.”

“That’s not—” Jiang Cheng tries to butt in, but Wei Ying sticks an elbow in his gut.

“I said, leave it.”

“Fucking worthless,” Wangcheng spits at him, and Wen Ning and his friends haul him back towards the door. “Fucking demon. You’re a fucking demon, Wei Ying! Fucking cursed!”

Wen Ning throws them out, and the silence following is awkward, no one looking at each other. Wei Ying wipes his face, straightens Jiang Cheng’s shirt collar, and goes back to work. There’s a short woman standing there, frozen, holding out her empty glass. He gets her another gin and cranberry, pleased that he remembered, and she gives him a pitying kind of smile. He hides his hands down by his sides, but he knows she’s seen them. Everyone can see them; he doesn’t cover them.

“Holy shit,” Jiang Cheng says, still staring back at the door.

“Yeah. Never mind.” Wei Ying readjusts his t-shirt.

“Never mind? That was a death threat. For what, cutting him off?”

“Forget about it.”

“For cutting him off? What the fuck?”

“A-Cheng, forget it.”

“I’m not gonna forget it, that guy knows where you live.”

“It’s fine, it happens. Leave it. Please? Leave it.”

Jiang Cheng sits down. Zixuan says nothing, looking between Jaing Cheng and the door.

“Does it happen a lot?” Jiang Cheng is interrogating, intelligence-mode.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Wei Ying, does it happen a lot?”

“I mean, a bit. Okay?”

“For cutting—?”

“It’s not about cutting him off. It’s not about that. It’s not about me. Calm down.”

“Sure sounded like it’s about you. ‘Demon,’ really—”

“If it wasn’t me it would be someone else. Wen Ning. His friends. His dad.” Wei Ying chops more limes than he needs to, calmed by the sharpness of the knife. “He’s dying. Actually dying, everyone knows it. His liver is shot. He’s been laid off for months, and he can’t pay for any more treatment. His dad’s broke, mom died in the war. He’s lashing out.”

“But that’s not your—”

“You can’t swing at the clouds forever. Right? He’s not the only one. People feel good here, they feel comfortable here, and so they can hit someone here if they need to. You get beaten down and beaten down for year after year, eventually you have to fight back. Right? Otherwise what are you?” What am I? he doesn’t ask.

Zixuan clears his throat, still not looking at him. “What’s the use of fighting you? You’re not—”

Wei Ying laughs at him, mean. “What’s he gonna do, fight your dad? The whole fucking government? Who can he hit? After a while, you have to hit something or you’ll go mad. You have to make contact. Right?” He chops another lime. “You have to have an effect on something. You have to hit someone and see the bruise, or yell at someone and see them flinch. Otherwise it’s like you don’t exist at all. You’re already dead.”

“Wei Ying,” Zixuan says it, which is a surprise. He almost never says his name.

“Somewhere like this, somewhere like Yiling, all you can reach is the guy next to you. Once they put the crabs in the bucket, they put the lid on.”

The chatter in the bar is back, which is nice since there’s an awkward silence between the three of them. Wei Ying puts the chopped limes into the cooler and washes the cutting board, washes the knife. He replaces a drink at the other end of the bar earlier than he normally would—the guy is only halfway through, but he nods a thanks.

“What about—” Zixuan starts, hesitant. “Wei Ying, what about police?”

“Ha!” Wei Ying snaps it at him, not a laugh, not at all. “Don’t you— You don’t come here, into my bar, talking about police.”

“I didn’t come in talking about police, I’m just saying—”

“No cops in Yiling.” He shuts a cooler with his heel, a satisfying slam. “Cops are military, and the military hates Yiling.”

Zixuan bristles. “No, we don’t.”

He always does this. It’s one of the things Wei Ying can’t process about him, and one of the reasons they’ve never been close and probably never will be. It’s always “we.” The Jins, the government, the military. Wei Ying can like him if he doesn’t see Jin Guangshan, if he doesn’t see Jin Guangyao, if he doesn’t see the war when he looks at him. But then he comes in with the “we.”

It’s probably sad, actually, how long he’s been a soldier. How much of him is wrapped up in being his dad’s perfect soldier.

Wei Ying bites his tongue, takes a breath. “Of course you do. Everyone in charge hates Yiling.”

“I don’t hate Yiling.” Zixuan is getting stubborn. He looks like A-Ling, almost a pout. “It’s where you live, and you’re my family.”

Wei Ying blinks at him. “I don’t know how to talk to you when you get like this.”

“Like what?”

“Sincere. All, you know—” he waves an empty bottle around in Zixuan’s face. “Sincere.”

The pout becomes more of a pout. “I’m always sincere.

“Yeah, that’s why we don’t talk.”

Jiang Cheng leans across the bar and snags the rail whiskey bottle to top off his own glass.

“I can beat you up later, if you like,” Zixuan offers.

“Yeah.” Wei Ying doesn’t want to smile, but he does anyway. “Maybe.”

The silence isn’t awkward this time. Wei Ying takes the whiskey bottle back from Jiang Cheng and makes a show of wiping it off with the bleach rag. Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes.

After a while, Jiang Cheng asks, “Is there something happening here this month? For the five years? Like a memorial or something?” He’s looking away, all careful again.

“Is Lanling doing something?” They look at Zixuan, only slightly accusing on Wei Ying’s part.

“No. I mean December 3 there will be a whole . . . Armistice anniversary.”

“But nothing for Sunshot. Nothing for the massacre I mean,” Wei Ying says.

“I mean, not specifically.” Zixuan licks his lips. “I’m sure it’ll be mentioned.”

“Nothing here, though?” Jiang Cheng asks again.

“Trust me, people around here aren’t the ones that need reminding what you’re— what Lanling is capable of.” 

“That’s not fair,” Zixuan says.

Wei Ying looks down at his hands, the mottled brown of them. Flies, flies and dirt and flies and chemicals and flies. “Don’t talk about fair. Not about this.”

Zixuan opens his mouth, but Jiang Cheng shakes his head, violently.

“A-Cheng, it’s not—”

“Stop it.” Jiang Cheng is glaring at him now, the kind of look Wei Ying gets all the time, but Zixuan doesn’t see so much. It makes him stop.

Wei Ying goes to the back and grabs the broom. Jiang Cheng reaches over for the gin bottle and tops off Zixuan’s glass. Wei Ying pretends he doesn’t see it and starts at the far end of the bar. It’s getting slower, people heading out for the night to more exciting places.

A song comes on, something from his college days. He remembers recording it onto a cassette tape from the radio, keeping it in his backpack. Lan Zhan didn’t really like it, but he let Wei Ying play it all the time on his cheap little dorm room stereo.

Wei Ying sings along under his breath as he sweeps. “And if I lied, would you forgive me. Whoa-oh-oh. Fit to be tied, but you still live with me. Oh, whoa-oh-oh.”

“This song,” Zixuan says, smiling a little. “We used to— We used to fight a lot. A-Li and I. Stupid stuff. I was late for dinner. My mom would get so overbearing and we’d fight about that. Her mom would— Well, you know. We’d fight about that. Baby stuff. We didn’t know what to do about baby stuff, so she bought out the whole section of the book store and said we’d divide and conquer. But every book was different, so we’d argue. Dr. Po says this. Well, Dr. Wen says that. She could be so— You’re all so stubborn. Stupid stuff. And we’d be so pissed off we stopped speaking to each other. But I bought her this CD once, not for a birthday or anything, just because. She loved them from way back. And she’d put it on, and we’d dance, and we wouldn’t be mad anymore.”

“Yeah,” Jiang Cheng said, clearing his throat. “She liked that sappy shit.”

“Do you play it for A-Ling?” Wei Ying asks.

Zixuan shakes his head. “It makes me sad to hear it. I spend most of my time trying not to be sad around A-Ling.”

Jiang Cheng moves like he’s going to touch him, his arm, his shoulder. He aborts the move and grabs his glass instead, slides it over to tap against Zixuan’s. 

“You’re doing good,” he says.

Zixuan looks down, blinking seriously.

“You are,” Wei Ying agrees. “You’re doing good. And you know it pains me to say it.”

Zixuan gives him an echo of a laugh.

“A-Ling is lucky.”

“He’d be luckier if his uncles would visit. Both of them.”

“Yeah,” Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying say in unison.

“You want me to change the song?” Wei Ying asks.

“No, leave it. It’s good. It’s a nice song.”

An old woman leans on the bar—she’s familiar but Wei Ying can’t remember her name. “Hey, hey, Wei Ying!”

“Yeah, auntie?” he smiles charmingly at her.

“You know my daughter’s coming home soon. December 21.”

“Cheers to that!” he gives her a half-salute.

“I’ll set you up, once she’s home. Just you wait, she’s the prettiest, even now.”

“I’m sure she is.”

“She makes that jumpsuit look like runway fashion. Still has her figure, even with the prison food.”

“Can’t wait,” Wei Ying says politely.

“December 21,” the old woman waves her finger at him and heads for the door. 

“Invite me to the wedding,” Jiang Cheng teases.

“December 21,” Wei Ying rolls it around in his mouth. “The Wens are coming home.”

Zixuan straightens up. “Really?”

“That’s what we’re celebrating. We don’t celebrate the Massacre, but innocent people coming home? That’s worth it.”

“Innocent is—”

“Zixuan, think about where you are.”

Zixuan nods.

All of the Wens who’d been scooped up post-Sunshot, post-war, those related to rebels or in the wrong place at the wrong time, they’d all been sentenced to five years in prison. “Just to be safe.” The majority came from Yiling, Dafan, other small towns in the West. People who couldn’t afford to run to Lanling, to Gusu, somewhere safe during the worst of the fighting. People who wouldn’t turn their backs on brothers and aunts and cousins in Nightless City. 

But five years have almost passed, and the Wens are coming home.

“It’ll be weird, won’t it?” Jiang Cheng asks, diplomatic in his insensitivity.

“A hundred and forty-three people,” Wei Ying says. “At least, that’s how many went in. I’m sure a couple fucked up inside, got their sentences extended.”

“But still.”

“But still,” he agrees.

“Are you going to do something for it? In December?” Jiang Cheng asks him.

“Dunno. I should stock up though, shouldn’t I? I’ll make a note.”

Later, after Jiang Cheng and Zixuan leave for Jiang Cheng’s Yiling sublet—a two bedroom so Zixuan doesn’t have to get his own place in town—Wei Ying sweeps up while Wen Ning flips chairs up on the tables.  

“Have you ever gotten over something?” Wei Ying asks him.

“Like what?” Wen Ning stops working and looks at him. He always does that—Wei Ying has always wondered if he had hearing loss as a kid. If he’s talking to you, he always has to stop whatever he’s doing and look at you right in the face.

“I don’t know. But have you ever stood there a second and realized you were over something? Or through something. You know, on the other side?”

Wen Ning thinks for a while, and Wei Ying sweeps around his feet. “School, I guess.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

“What about you?”

Wei Ying leans down with the dust pan. “I don’t think I’ve ever come out the other side of anything. I think maybe if you stay in something long enough you adapt. Grow gills or whatever, so you can breathe. So you can survive when the world turns unlivable around you. And maybe you aren’t living at all, maybe you’re a stone, or you’re a dead fish with rotten eyes, washed up on the bank of a river that dried up years and years ago.” 

Wen Ning still looks at him, eyebrows furrowed, but he doesn’t ask Wei Ying to make sense. It’s what Wei Ying appreciates the most about him. 

“So maybe you’re dead, or maybe you’re evolving. Like, maybe that’s just what the world is now, and what you would have previously defined as dead, what you’d look at ten years ago and say that’s a dead thing, maybe that’s just what life looks like now. Evolution.” 

Wen Ning nods and picks up a chair. “I think . . . I might be remembering wrong, but I think evolution takes a long time. Like many generations. So maybe you should look at the kids.”

“The kids?” 

“Yeah, see if the kids have gills. Or whatever. Whatever you said.”

Wei Ying leans his chin on his broom and watches Wen Ning go table by table, strong and methodical. He sets the chairs so gently on the tabletops that it doesn’t make any noise. He flips them with complete control and lines up the seats.

“Maybe,” Wei Ying says. He goes back behind the bar and turns up the music. There’s work to do before heading home

[dappersheep]

Food Fantasy: An Analysis on what killed a Golden Goose (1/3)

So first things first, disclaimers! I do not claim nor pretend to know every nook and cranny, ins and outs of the history of FooFan's conception, existence and uncertain future. I do not own the game nor its characters, only the opinions and thoughts stated hereon out.

This was born to vent out my frustrations with how a game like this was abused poorly by its own developer and publisher instead of being nurtured to become its full potential that could have overshadowed and remained better than the likes of Tencent's Tales of Food --I could dream, but it honestly had the potential to be.

Out of respect for the main tag, I personally will not be tagging this post and the following two with the main tag. If you want to tag it yourself with it, that's your choice. Only followers of my blog will see this.

This analysis is divided into three parts: Funtoy, Elex, and the Community. It starts under the cut. Well let's get started.

Funtoy

Ah yes, the creator. The developer. You'd think that with their sudden rise to fame during their global launch, they'd have used the massive profits they earned within the first quarter of 2018 to improve certain things about the game and then trickled it down as quickly as possible towards Global, right? Yeah, I thought so too.

After playing the game since launch, I've seen and experienced way too many things that just hammer in the fact that this is one of the most unfair gacha I've played in years. Some reasons being the following:

(Note: These are experiences ONLY on Global's version, it may also apply to CN being the original server)

⦁ The game's gacha model is aimed towards maximum predation on its players. F2p are forced to either spend some money (and thus tempt them to keep spending after getting a taste of it), or risk not even getting a good ascension of the unit to be useful at all. Paying for the event packs also doesn't guarantee that you would be able to secure a spot in the ranks. In fact, if you can't comprehend how the battle mechanics work, you could even de-rank. Fun way to burn that 800$, huh? At least you have the skin from rebates.

⦁ A little less known thing and probably theoretical at worst, the long joked about spaghetti coding of the game along with an outdated spine technology for the sprites could very well be the reason why a 2D game like this experiences the shittiest lags. Also how easy it is to hack this game with the right know-how.

⦁ Speaking of bad gameplay mechanics, did you know you could spend over fifty Mirrors and not get that final enhancement from +9 to +10 simply because there's absolutely no tangible safety net before +10?

⦁ If you're F2P, this game is terrible in giving you resources to stockpile. Because Funtoy certainly doesn't have a lot of weekly/monthly or even friendly events wherein you can get resources without spending another kind of resource. The Hawthorne event's rewards are lackluster at best, Bingo is severely limited in what it gives, and Recall also doesn't give much for a big event that only happens (supposedly) every 6 months. Did I also mention that daily resource rewards also kinda suck compared to how much you burn in just one event?

⦁ Monthly subs are a scam. Yes, you heard that right. My point of comparison here is Arknights. A monthly in AK allows you to have enough to 10-pull after 30 days, on top of a bit of stamina to help you. In FooFan? You have two monthly subs that do different things and even then, you won't have enough to 10-pull by the end of 30 days, nor is the stamina you get enough to even stockpile and ease the pressure of your need to save for the Gates or that stamina event that suddenly popped up.

⦁ A conga line of 'Must procure this unit at a high ascension to do well in the following events!'. You missed the first Pizza event? Missed the first Turkey event? God forbid, you weren't able to 5* your Beer on his debut? Well sorry, that 5* Black Tea of yours isn't gonna do squat to give you good damage. No, your 2* B-52 also isn't going to do much of anything with his lackluster damage capabilities. If you want a chance to get those event URs again, you have to wait for their pool with laughably limited pulls... and a bloated price to even pull.

⦁ The events starting after the first iteration of Turkey event get even more paywalled. As far as I remember, by the time Minestrone rolled around, an F2P with ample crystal resources can only get 2* at best. 3* and above are paywalled.

⦁ The game has incompetent balancing. The devs themselves likely have little experience in gameplay design and balancing, especially for a game with a growing roster of characters . A prime example of them launching a character not knowing it would pretty much unbalance the game? Look no further than Beer. The guy had to have a couple of nerfs done to him because he was just too meta. You know what's sadder? Before the 'switch' to Brave meta, almost all meta units was built to benefit off the Beer meta.

⦁ Artifacts. Do I even have to explain how the introduction of such a game feature so early into the lifespan of this game essentially fucked over the balance even more? Not to mention, all the more reason you'd be crying with the Gates of Trials demanding so much out of your stamina and crystal resources. F2Ps are again, the ones that suffer in this part. What's their reason? Profit, of course.

⦁ The nerf of resto chests. This was the primary source for people who were saving up stamina for the Gates... until Funtoy decided they were being too generous to their playerbase and dropped the stamina probability rate to 1% or less.

⦁ Terrible UI layout and design. Come on, be honest now, you've lost several thousand of your hard earned crystals buying screws in the fishing shop because you didn't notice that shiny warning in small text and a green button with the crystal image slapped on it, didn't you?

⦁ Look at all these SRs! All of them! Wow, they even outnumber the Rs by at least 80! What's that? There's more URs now too compared to Rs and Ms combined? That can't be real. But seriously, you'd think Funtoy could make some of these SRs into Rs and add them to the perm pool/shard fusion so people aren't stuck pulling Macaron or Dorayaki every time. They could have also populated the Team Up rewards with SRs instead of Rs. But you know... that won't bring them profit. Haha... haha.... Oh and I haven't even told you about the SP class...!

⦁ Lore. Yes, I'm sure by now you're aware that the in-game lore is different from the ones in the non-SP Food Soul bios, in the SP Food Soul bios that sort of ties in with the New World story (that global will never be getting btw). At this point, Funtoy handwaves the confusion away by saying, 'they're all different timelines'. Yes yes, an easy and cliche move to explain how shitty the writing direction went after a while. I don't know what happened, all I know is that lore got weird(er) when they introduced SP Rice.

⦁ They. Keep. Adding. More. Characters! They fail to see that a lot of their earlier players have imprinted on the first few waves of Food Souls and they sadly also fail to properly give some of them more story expansion... or skins. At the moment, they're shelling out so many JP-centric Food Souls because... as I see it? They're pandering to the last bastion of whales they have.

⦁ Merchandise. And I mean a variety of merchandise that isn't using the same official art every time. Like they couldn't afford to commission a couple of artists one or two times to make unique merchandise that would sell. They started too late on that train, and they even made it too hard for anyone not in CN or JP to even procure what already exists. Not to mention, they keep using the same 'popular' set of characters for their merchandise and never really expanding out to making merch for other characters.

These are all the things I can list off at the top of my head why Funtoy as a developer sucks ass. They could sweeten their words all they want, it won't change the fact that they've certainly made way too many bad decisions and found out about it too late, and now they're desperate to keep Food Fantasy alive to keep their profits coming in to make whatever that cat girl game they have and that supposedly 'side-game' FF2 they announced.

There may have been problems out of their control that I or you do not see, but one thing is for sure, they were blinded by greed for the money they were raking in on all their servers at the start, and never actually bothered to invest in more manpower in the right places to improve the game, both gameplay-wise and worldbuilding wise. It's actually saddening that this game could have been so much more with several QoLs and a more fleshed out lore, perhaps even spacing out the number of new units they keep introducing while going back to giving their old units more attention.

That's it for Funtoy. We're moving onto Elex in the next part and boy is that also a trip.

[sanchoyo]

danny phantom, season 3 episodes 3-6 thoughts!

see prev episode thoughts in this tag <3

-johnny was actually pretty civil with danny and left when he asked! thats nice. also, SKULKER?? HAD A FRAMED PICTURE OF EMBER?? oooo fuck wait had they established they were a Thing Before?? I dont think so. thats weird. its like that country boy/goth girl meme lmfao. I think i am going to choose to ignore this new info and pretend I didnt hear it. 100% unrelated to the jazz/ember fanart I already drew and posted....😳

-LADIES NIGHT EPISODE THIS IS WHAT ITS ALL ABOUT. wish it didnt really center around the guys or them being pissed at them, but. willing to bet this was written by men lol

-THEY ERASED ALL THE MEN??? meanwhile, jack and danny are fishing at. silent hill or something. im glad jack is trying to read a parenting book and making an Attempt. (theyre at lake erie, but, they made it actually eerie...thats fun)

-the girls alt outfits...cute. EMBER MADE A NEW SONG TOO!!! kinda. jazz being one of the backup singers and being AWFUL. NOOOO

-'how are we going to get kitty to blow a kiss?' 'she'll have to think there are still some males in town!' ...i dont know how to break it to you, but I dont know that a 100% het girl would wish for all men to Begone. I think. I mean im not a het or a girl so I dont really know for sure. she Is probably Bi tho. esp having the other ladies in town chanting NO MEN!!! excitedly............(then again, the kiss is to get Rid of men, so, she probably would have blown it at the ladies only if they were actively trying to attack/stop them, so...I MEAN. THE DRESSING LIKE DANNY BIT WAS SO EXTRA)

-I feel like an all female cast ep couldve been way way way way cooler than that was. like. why was it still somehow all about Men. ...anyway. (where was valerie...)

-next ep opens with the observants, and, way way more of them than I expected...existed? I mean I guess them being a council/jury of some kind is what I expected from their first appearance (bc at that time they were basically TELLING clockwork to kill danny, not asking,, so I figured they had SOME kind of authority) but. there were so many. anyway, here goes vlad! letting his own hubris go brrrr. releasing a weather ghost for political gain! #justvladthings

-okay say what you will about him (he IS an asshole) but having an umbrella with his own face on it and more prepared to share is SUPER FUNNY. and him being fanned by huge wads of money by his bodyguards. SO ineffective but so Dramatic. He UNDERSTANDS that if youre rich you need to be. you know. obnoxious and kinda eccentric about it! fuckign hate when rich people are boring about it. I would trust vlad with nothing except to not be a boring rich asshole who wears...fucking khaki or some shit. man knows his Presentation Skills. and that 'V' chair in his mayoral office. is that fucking embroidered?

-maddie get your MAN PLEEEEASSSE. IM SO EMBARRASSED FOR HER. the way jack stays simping for this man. in FRONT OF HIS WIFE!!!! ...my god its like a love triangle. jack clearly loves vlad, who loves maddie, who loves jack. jack fenton is at the very least bi, right................. this is an OBSESSION . 'THE V MAN COMETH'???? i...my god. (also, on a serious note, to have a friend THIS SUPPORTIVE...and still be SUCH A DICK TO HIM (TRYING TO KILL HIM AND STEAL HIS WIFE??) NOT COOL VLAD. JACK IS YOUR 1 AND /ONLY/ HYPE MAN. if someone loved and supported me THIS HARD...LIKE. CMON DUDE.

-STOMP the fucking GAS, JACK

-this would make a great shirt design, looks like a metal band design! we love The Maelstrom

-oh, so vlad did in fact get a mansion in amity park. and its purple! good color choice! not as flashy as a CASTLE or MURDER CABIN, but still pretty eccentric, which I appreciate.

-...vlad knows the difference between picasso and da vinci? in the ep last post where we were watching him fail at conquering every historical time ever he didnt seem to know history well enough to like. be effective...was vlad taking art history at college?? (was he an art MAJOR??? we never DID KNOW WHAT HE WENT TO SCHOOL FOR. I kinda assumed business because in the masters of time ep he was still rich without ghost powers so he had to have..known something about business or something, right...but also, art and or theater FITS HIS PERSONALITY. possibly also something science-y, I guess, but I always felt like he got roped into that, esp how pessimistic he was about the ghost portal in the flashbacks to college, like, i felt like he was just there for maddie and was uninterested/un-invested at the time...)

-THIS GHOST JUST ELECTROCUTED MADDIE (THE CAT) BITCH!! THATS MY FAVORITE MADDIE!!! vlad going after vortex and being ~shocked~ .....WHEN. WHEN WILL YOU LEARN. THAT YOUR ACTIONS. HAVE CONSEQUENCES!!!

-the way this random man with a camera sees the mayor laying in an alley covered in TRASH AND DECIDES TO TAKE A PICTURE HAHAH

*snap* this ones going in my cringe compilation!

-vlad 'if we're going to defeat vortex, we're going to have to do it together!' *immediately dips after dropping danny off in front of vortex* JKASDFHKJHJKN

-DANNY CAN DUPLICATE!!! ...he couldnt even attack with it, but he DID IT!!! INTO (4) OF HIMSELF!!! SO PROUD!!!!!!!!!!

-'THE ROLLER COASTER EMOTIONS OF A TEENAGER THREATEN MY PLANS!' ...0 self awareness of his own dramatic moodiness. incredible, how dumb this man is. its very close to circling around to endearing, if he was less of an asshole. at least its very very funny to see danny shooting him with tiny lightning bolts anytime he's even slightly irritated! vlad you should be nice to danny anyway. this is what you GET

-...making sandwiches and ice cream and playing video games with your nephew is a totally normal thing. WHY is vlad acting like this is the end of the world. if you were a GOOD UNCLE YOU WOULD ALREADY BE DOING THESE THINGS!!! bitch I make my nephew food all the time and dont forget what he does and doesnt like. if u didnt know danny didnt want tomatoes, thats on u. if u, a grown adult, are gonna piss of the 14 yr old by not letting him win, u deserve to have to pay for the arcade machines he ruins because he now has uncontrollable storm powers because YOU THREW HIM INTO A FIGHT WITH THE STORM GHOST. fuck u vlad. paypal me $400,000 while ur at it tho. (also, gamer vlad confirmed)

-VLAD CAN COOK THOUGH???! I assumed he had...people working for him that did that. I mean. billionaires usually dont do that. then again, we've only seen those vultures working for him (and I guess the dairy king was AT his old mansion, but it was never really clarified if he worked there...I think he probably just Hung Out and they Enjoyed Cheeses Together. thats what I think, I dont think a KING would be working for anyone and also the dairy king was nice <3) but then again he would be a private person and we cant have anyone accidentally finding Ghostly Things, so...still, that's hilarious. pour one out for that really cute banana split that got ruined 2 seconds later

-vlad just fucking picking danny up and THROWING HIM AT VORTEX TWICE WITHIN LIKE A MINUTE. JUST ABSOLUTELY LAUNCHING HIM. BITCH THATS MY SON BE CAREFUL!!! HES GOT ORGANS AND THINGS!!!!

-danny seeing those animal commercials and feeling sad is the biggest 2000s throwback so far. i legitimately had to change the channel or walk out of the room when those came on bc id CRY AND BE SAD ABOUT THEM FOR DAYS AFTER. fuck those commercials and fuck that IN THE ARMMMS OF AN ANGELLLL song 😭

-'vlads ego almost got the town destroyed!' yes danny thats the entire episode. the entire series anytime vlad shows up honestly. this episode was just him being really embarrassing the entire time, and, me laughing about it. 10/10 would laugh at him again

-NEXT EP WE HAVE A SHAPESHIFTING GHOST?? I've said it before but shapeshifting is the power I would want when asked those 'what superpower do you want' questions...its the Best power! this guy looks like a homestuck character. ive never read homestuck but thats the vibe

-I love every time we see tuckers family, they are by far the most functional family. and dash has a lil chihuahua!!! named pookie!!! i am crying (I've had 3 chihuahuas, so I am very biased, but...) AND HE WATCHES THE ROMANCE CHANNEL WITH POOKIE. POOKIE I WILL DIE FOR YOU YOU SWEET LITTLE BABY.

-danny can lift a bus! I shouldn't be surprised, but i am proud of my son. hes got lil kid fans. i am going to cry about this

-JAZZ KEEPS A SCRAPBOOK WITH DANNY'S LIL HEROICS AND NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS!!! we've actually seen it on her floor before, but I didnt realize it was a scrapbook!! thats sooo cute.

-...and danny has to stand there listening to his parents saying danny phantom sucks and is a 'filthy ghost' and calling him egotistical...i am once again stealing their kids!

-THIS GHOST RIPPING JAZZ'S SCRAPBOOK!!! ILL KILL YOU. SHE WORKED HARD ON THAT!!! BITCH

-yes, maddie, the one with red eyes is For Sure Actually Your Son. ignore the, red eyes... (CLEARLY she hasnt watched the other 2 eps where danny has been evil, she doesnt know red eyes= evil!!!)

-'billy fenton'.......................

-danny being stuck as phantom in his own house, no way out is a fucking NIGHTMARE. his parents pointing giant weapons against him and SHOOTING AT HIM. THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE.

-NINE INCH NAILS POSTER.

-this is the most screenshot of all time

-amorpho turning into mr. lancer because hes 'someone no one will want to be around' BUT HES WRONG, I WOULD BEFRIEND AND HANG OUT WITH MR LANCER SO FAST.

-tucker dressing as danny, now I have the full Tucker set of him being sam and also being danny. also saying 'the ghost...uh...RIPPED MY FACE OFF.' and then running. SMOOTH. NOT AT ALL CONCERNING TO ANY PARENTS.

-sam accepts the toast from jack. and then 2 seconds later is like 'why am i eating this.' THIS SHOWS HUMOR IS SO UNEXPECTED SOMETIMES ITS REALLY GOOD. and then the scene after, mr lancer running into his ghost doppelganger and being like 'YOURE GORGOUS' THEN FAINTING. I AM CRYING. AND DASH FAINTING TOO.

-sam disguising herself as danny again to help tucker run from the fentons. but leaving him shirtless in the streets. incredible. 'plEASE DOnt NOTice MY FACELessNESS I MUST LIVE IN EXILE' this episode is destroying me the humor in this show is exactly my brand of corny and cheesy

-the impromtu story made up by danny and amorpho to explain stuff to the fentons. my god they are both such bad liars. but amorpho is a good egg. wish danny wouldnt have said he didnt wanna see him in town again!! I want him to be reoccurring. not that thats gonna matter since I'm almost done with the series, but the idea of this being the Only Time We See him is :(

-NEXT EP SAYS STARRING MARK HAMILL??????!!! hello ! mr . joker....mr. star wars.... I feel like I should be. idk. taking off a hat im not wearing in respect. I shouldnt be surprised tho bc hes in a lot of cartoons as a very good voice actor, and dp has already had a lot of talented ones so I've been looking out for ones I might know, but....mr. hamill....

-sam has her own greenhouse, names all the plants, and says thank you to them (in the languages from where the plants are from) whenever she harvests from them. thats SO cute. and her lil gothy lunch box...

-and danny's lil red fuzzy lined jacket!!! ive said it before but every time the characters get alt outfits im like :D

-danny has ice powers now!!! THATS WHAT FROSTBITE MEANT. HE KNEW SOMEHOW WAY BACK THEN

-THIS SHOW NEVER LETS YOU FORGET VLAD IS A BILLIONAIRE, HUH.

-danny's lil 'holy hibiscus!' first off the 50s batman swearing is hilarious. 2nd. my username is from the flower sanchoyo hibiscus, so, shoutout to ME this ep. hi :)

-EURGH UNDERGROWTH MAKING EVERYONE PLANT ZOMBIES. HIVEMIND PLOTS SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF ME. and this dude made the city SO overtaken so quickly like how long was danny asleep?? oh god

-evil fucked up sam! now the whole trio has gone evil at some point! the voice actress did a really, really good job with making her sound like a zombie...

-frostbite's paws are so so so big compared to danny. oh my god. i want to hug the snow dog...

-the far frozen has an advanced medical stuff!!! very cool. very smart snow dogs

-im so glad danny has a friendly ghost snow dad to explain this new power and teach him!!! this is so sweet. DANNY'S GHOST SENSE WAS A PART OF HIS ICE POWER?? OOOH. COOL. we love a training montage!!!

-danny saying if he cant defeat overgrowth, that he'd want to stay with frostbite...oh my god...do you think this is the first real supportive adult figure in his life (I am NOT counting his parents because they threaten him on the daily even if they dont realize it.) I mean mr lancer is a Teacher, but he was also nice but this is different, but this is a GHOST WHO IS WILLING TO HELP HIM with his powers and also will help him when hes injured and is so so nice and comparatively so much more mature than 90% of the adults in this show!!!! god. dad frostbite is my everything.

-the framing and lighting this episode, and all the angles...they went all OUT and it looks really really good. this is my nightmare scenario, tho. like, FUCK zombies and dead city zones and hivemind shit. and using the humans as 'nutrients for the children' i am going to THROW UP.

-MALEFICENT VIBES WITH THE HORNS AND GREEN EYES! this costume kicks so much ass. sam is now mark hamills daughter, I guess.

-danny's ice powers making his eyes blue!!! thats neat. and him going for the roots underground was SO SMART. i will not stand for danny ever thinking hes stupid, hes SO smart.

almost done with the show... :"( thats a sad thought!!!

[dannypuro]

You said your askbox was open so!! From Something Telling I am very invested in the mutual pining of Feuilly and Baz and just that individually they were like. Whispering their feels to their friends. I am parched for any details of. Them. If you are amenable. BYE <3

YOU!!! YOU UNDERSTAND!!!! YOU AND YOUR WONDERFUL ASKS AND GIANT COMMENTS UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANT PARTS OF SOMETHING TELLING ma’am i owe you my life. i adore you. and yes, without further ado... A Very Long Post about the boys.

feuilly moves into bahorel’s apartment building when he first moves to france, like, five or six years before the start of Something Telling. and he doesn’t speak a lot of french at ALL, at first, because he wasn’t expecting to move, but he got an opportunity with a gallery kind of last minute and he only had time to panic and duolingo it up a little bit. but he moves into baz’s apartment building, all the way up in the tiny attic apartment, and he doesn’t hire any movers because he’s broke, and that would be fine, except the elevator breaks sometime between when he goes out to find some furniture and when he gets said furniture delivered to outside the building. and now he has to figure out how to get this stupid second-hand couch up five flights of stairs and he doesn’t even know anyone in the country he can call for help. 

cue bahorel, coming back from the gym and all sweaty and gross. (nasty.) and he’s never seen feuilly before, but he is CERTAINLY seeing him now. 👁👁. and they have an awkward little conversation--all “hey, dude, do you, like, need a hand?” and poor feuilly desperately trying to remember his duolingo to figure out what the fuck this hot guy is saying to him. bahorel is instantly enamored--feuilly is fucking pretty, okay, and he’s funny and his accent is cute and baz just fucking knows feuilly’s smarter than him and he’s so fucking into it. just. he’s so into him.

and the thing is, baz is pretty sure feuilly’s maybe into him, too--he helps him drag the couch up the stairs, and they make conversation, and he thinks that he’s flirting, a little, and he’s definitely ogling baz up a bit. and, like, yeah, sure--he knows he’s hot, and feuilly’s smoking hot, in an overworked, tired, starving artist way, so... yeah. he’s totally gonna sleep with his brand-new hot neighbor.

only, then they start talking about why feuilly’s moving into the building--he tells baz that he’s new to paris, new to france, and he doesn’t know anybody, doesn’t even really speak french, and he moved for work but he doesn’t really know what he’ll do outside of that, and he’s just so! fucking! charming! and smart! and baz is like. right. well. 🥺, dude. 

they get up to feuilly’s apartment (and HOOOO, feuilly’s pretty strong, actually 👁👁 wow 👁👁 what a coincidence bahorel is shredded as well👁👁 maybe we can hook up and be shredded together👁👁) and set the couch down. and bahorel looks around his empty little attic apartment and takes in his nearly-empty kitchen and his one beautiful houseplant in the middle of the room, because that’s where the most light is, and he can’t just LEAVE. not when feuilly doesn’t have any friends. feuilly’s awesome, baz already knows it! he should meet baz’s awesome friends!

only, feuilly’s kind of- feuilly’s kind of leaning in, a bit, and bahorel has hooked up with enough dudes to know when someone’s putting on the moves. and he’s SO into it, and he almost just kisses him, almost hooks up with him on the couch that they just hauled up five flights of stairs together, only-

only, if feuilly’s a one-night stand, he won’t want to meet baz’s awesome friends, and he seems so lonely. so bahorel takes one for the team. and instead of leaning in to make out with the hottest dude he’s ever met, he’s just like HEY MY FRIENDS ARE HAVING A GET-TOGETHER TONIGHT WANNA COME YOU CAN MEET THEM THEY’RE SUPER NICE AND COOL. (oh, god, he really hopes feuilly wants to.)

feuilly’s a little taken aback, for obvious reasons, but- but he does want to meet bahorel’s friends, and mostly, he wants to spend some more time with bahorel, and it’s a shame that he wasn’t reading the room right when he thought baz was into him, but, well, you can’t have everything. maybe he can’t get laid by his super-hot neighbor, but hey, if he can meet some people who don’t mind that he doesn’t actually speak french yet, and if he can get to know bahorel a little better, he’ll take it.

feuilly goes to the party. jehan adores him, obviously. feuilly doesn’t, like... get what’s up with them, yet, since he didn’t watch french media growing up and therefore missed all of their child-stardom, but he likes them just fine, anyways. jehan’s like 20 and is blazed out of their mind and is having a medieval phase (one of many). feuilly is confused, but also within 90 minutes realizes that he would INSTANTLY throw hands with ANYONE if it was for jehan’s sake. so. 

jehan’s all like “go talk to grantaire! he knows all sorts of things about art! he’s working on painting me naked!” so feuilly goes to talk to the lump in the corner but like. listen. grantaire’s having a hard time. he doesn’t make an awesome first impression. not awful, just... he’s having a hard time. feuilly gets it. they become better friends a little later, mostly because bahorel keeps dragging feuilly around with him whenever he’s free. (not like feuilly minds)

but feuilly doesn’t make a move on bahorel again. because he must have misread the situation, right? otherwise they would have fucked. they’d BE fucking. too bad bahorel doesn’t like him like that. oh, well, at least they’re friends!

bahorel DOES like him like that. duh. feuilly’s awesome. but he hasn’t made a move on bahorel since that first afternoon. he’s probably just not that into bahorel, past the one-night-stand type stuff. oh, well, at least they’re friends!

life goes on. they hang out a lot. like, a LOT. they’re totally each other’s best friends. feuilly learns more french. (baz is actually super relieved when he can’t quite manage to get rid of the accent, even though he would never say so, because that would hurt feuilly’s feelings. baz tries not to act like a dick around feuilly, even though he kind of is one around other people, sometimes. he just... wants feuilly to like him.) feuilly gets absorbed into the group. he picks up another job, in addition to the work he’s doing for the gallery, and he’s making a little more money, which is good for both of them, because feuilly can afford meals that aren’t mostly rice, sometimes, and bahorel doesn’t have to spend all day every day wondering how he’s going to be able to get feuilly to let him pay for his food this time around. (if they were dating, baz thinks, if they were dating, he could take feuilly out for dinner and pay for it and pay for the wine and for the dessert, too, and feuilly wouldn’t be able to give him that look he shoots him whenever baz “accidentally” orders the wrong dish from the thai place down the road, so what if it always happens to be feuilly’s favorite, shut up, man, it’s a coincidence)

but feuilly’s making more money, so he decides to move out of his shitty attic apartment, because it kind of sucks, and it’s miniscule, and he’s an adult, damn it. he finds a new place that is marginally larger and marginally less shitty, and it’s not even that far away, just a couple blocks, and he tells baz he’ll be moving when his lease is up that year. 

bahorel just wants to beg him to move in with him, but he only has the one bedroom, and feuilly’s not his fucking boyfriend. so he helps feuilly move, because he’s a good buddy, and he gets hammered with grantaire, after, because grantaire is lonely for someone he hasn’t met yet and bahorel is terrified that feuilly isn’t going to want to hang out with him now that they aren’t neighbors anymore. 

feuilly, meanwhile, is across town at grantaire’s apartment (sans grantaire) getting blazed with jehan because he’s terrified that bahorel isn’t going to want to hang out with him now that they aren’t neighbors anymore. (jehan’s all 🥺You Are Always Welcome At My Humble Abode🥺 and feuilly’s very touched but he’s pretty sure he’s totally in love with bahorel and he’s scared and he’s also not sure that jehan even pays rent. so.)

they totally keep hanging out. obviously. (maybe a little bit less than they used to, but if baz thinks about that he’ll fucking cry.) bahorel feels a little bit like his heart is going to break, which is totally lame and which was not the plan when he agreed to help move a couch three years earlier. it’s just... there’s nobody like feuilly. there’s nobody even CLOSE to being like feuilly. and feuilly doesn’t like him. and so he spends a lot of time at grantaire’s place, and jehan finally gets their own apartment, so he’s free to cry into grantaire’s shoulder all he fucking wants.

feuilly goes on dates, sometimes. bahorel could totally treat him better than any of those dickheads. damn it.

bahorel hooks up with people, sometimes. feuilly could totally fuck him better than any of those dickheads. damn it.

and then grantaire gets a weird new roommate, or something. baz doesn’t know, fuck, nobody tells him jack shit. but he stops hearing from grantaire for a couple weeks, for the most part, and then he gets the party invite in the groupchat, and fuck, if there’s a housewarming party, he shall attend. feuilly mentions something to him about R’s new roomie being some philosopher, or something, but bahorel was kind of busy watching him fold up little origami flowers out of newspaper, so he missed all that. it’s cool, he’ll catch up.

apparently, grantaire’s roommate is from the 19th century. apparently, grantaire also has a massive fucking crush on him. huh.

when they first meet, feuilly and enjolras are kind of hilariously enamored by one another. not in a romantic way, just in a Very Intense Admiration type way. after they meet at the housewarming party, enjolras is like “I Must Find A Way To Speak With Feuilly Again, For He Is A Brilliant Mind And A Good Man” and combeferre is like... want me to invite him over? and enjy is like “No, I Must Pen Him A Letter. Yes. This Is A Good And Rational Plan.” (he spills coffee all over the letter right when he’s almost done and almost cries. ferre just invites feuilly over anyways.)

feuilly, of course, is freaking out about whether or not he can find a way to hang out with enjolras again. because! ahh!!! that’s François-Marie Enjolras, political revolutionary and philosopher!!!! feuilly’s read his essays like five times!!! what reason would he have to want to talk to feuilly? but also, like... he did want to talk to feuilly--at the party, he’d talked to feuilly for hours, and he’s so smart and a little funny and he’d listen to Feuilly go on and on about slavic history and he hadn’t looked bored once, and just- Ah!!!! and he’s trying to figure out if it would be weird if he asked enjolras if he’d want to meet over coffee when he gets combeferre’s text. (it’s something like, enjolras just composed a letter trying to ask you if you’d want to hang out with him do you want to come over before he uses up all of my printer paper? and then, also, don’t tell him i told you about the letter he’s kind of freaked about making a good impression) and feuilly’s just like. :o

and both grantaire and bahorel see enjolras and feuilly embarking on this sweet, awkward, smart person friendship and they’re like. Oh Shit. They’re In Love With Each Other. Shit. because of course feuilly would fall in love with enjolras--feuilly’s too smart for bahorel, anyways, baz has always known that, and it makes sense that he’d fall for someone who can keep up with him. and of course enjolras would fall in love with feuilly--feuilly is kind and super smart and he knows all sorts of things about modern philosophy and he’s hot, okay, and enjolras is too smart for grantaire, anyways. ugh. baz and R get hammered and cry about it together, but the shitty thing is that they can’t even be too angry, because it’s so obvious.

meanwhile, enjolras and feuilly are across town talking about their stupid crushes on their hot beefy friends. commiserating, yanno? feuilly’s all “sometimes i wish i just kissed him that first day i met him, sometimes i wish i hooked up with him at that party, maybe he would have started liking me after” and enjolras is all “why does he never wear shirts with SLEEVES, i do not know what to DO with myself!!!”

and then one day feuilly and baz are hanging out and baz is like “haha grantaire has the biggest crush on enjolras” (because he can’t keep a secret to save his life.) and feuilly’s like.... “grantaire likes enjolras?” and baz is like “uh YEAH dude. DUH” and feuilly’s like. “that can’t be right--enjolras told me grantaire doesn’t like him back” and baz is like... “bACK?” and then he’s like “WAIT ENJOLRAS DOESN’T LIKE YOU?” and feuilly is like... no?

they realize that their friends are idiots. and they try to help, really, they do--feuilly keeps suggesting that maybe, maybe, enjolras can’t know that grantaire doesn’t like him if he’s never actually asked, and he keeps pointing out things that grantaire does that nobody actually does if they’re not totally gone for somebody; bahorel is straight up just like “R bro enjolras wants to be your boy so bad” and R is like I Am Electing Not To Listen To You.

and then-

and then, they all go out to a bar together. they get hammered, etc. etc. and they’re laughing about how grantaire and enjolras are oblivious, how could they not know that they like each other, everybody keeps telling them to go for it, and then-

hold on.

hold on, because- because that’s what everybody tells bahorel about feuilly. that he should just go for it. that maybe it’s not as hopeless as he thinks. and feuilly’s just sitting there, and he’s so fucking pretty, sometimes, honestly, and bahorel loves him so much, and he’s drunk, and he can’t stand not knowing even a second longer.