#it tries so hard to not be problematic that it ruins itself and ends up just being bland

[jasontoddenthusiastt]

BFTC isn’t really a case of terrible characterization for Jason so much as it was a terrible case of victim blaming. Like yeah, some of the things Jason did were a bit extreme compared to his “better” appearances, but that’s nothing new and pretty much true of many stories that aren’t utrh or lost days. The bad parts are are also definitely exaggerated by fans.

The story isn’t centered on Jason. Of course every other character’s description of Jason would be knee-jerk dismissive and misunderstanding, since (again) the intention was to make Jason out to be the cartoony bad guy villain. But if you look past the layers of grime they added, the bare bones of his characterization are not entirely incorrect. It’s a biased story in which their intended criticisms of Jason’s morals often fell short, so to compensate they deliberately cranked up his motivations to be more extreme and unrealistic (but one which, nonetheless got Jason’s overall thoughts and goals relatively consistent with stories that portrayed him accurately).

Yes, him shooting Damian was out of character, but granted we’re all in agreement that it was a true case of “bad writing decision”, I don’t think it’s hard to look past. The only other bit people probably complain about (which felt iffy at worst) was him being “a bit enthusiastic” at times in trying to convince Dick to become another lethal Batman (you can just as easily say Jason wouldn’t have been personally invested enough to have acted in the way he did). I don’t care though because he was probably doing it for shits and giggles, and it was funny watching him push their buttons on his spare time while being excellent at his job. Same old ‘none of them deny that he’s effective, they just can’t get behind the killing’ conflict.

Looking past the fact that Jason still had a valid point, the “he’s the bad guy” plot falls apart for other obvious reasons, which happen in the 3rd issue. It’s kind of hard to focus on how much of a bitch Jason’s being when the other characters are written in an infinitely more problematic way (which ends up happening in most “hate Jason” stories). Not only did they heavily imply Jason is a victim of SA, but the way Dick/the batfamily treats Jason about this is �� horrible. Arguing that this was a case of character assassination for Bruce and Dick would be more realistic than using this story to claim Jason is a Bad Person™.

Even though Bruce does have a bad track record with his perspective on victims of SA.

Hey. Maybe listen to the living person begging you to turn it off.

Geez. I wonder why he never felt safe enough to confide in Bruce or any of the rest of them. Implying that enduring what he did made him “broken beyond repair”, that he needs to be “fixed”, and saying verbatim, “you are my greatest failure”, not “I failed you greatly”. Then deciding on behalf of Jason that a bunch of people who weren’t involved in what happened to him should all know about this so they can decide what should be done. And everyone agrees with this garbage. Unbelievable.

Aka, any sort of healing he may have tried to accomplish was ruined by you lot. When exactly am I supposed to see that Jason was evil all along.

The story collapses in on itself in the third issue because where Dick is supposed to be at his prime within the arc, he just sort of rambles about how Jason was a shitty victim and then awkwardly shifts to talking about personal growth and coming to accept his own heroic destiny.

I do resent this, but not because “Jason sucks here”. Jason’s “bad portrayal” pales in comparison to the problematic mindsets given to the other characters (namely Dick) which were framed as good-natured intentions and “tough love”. As for people who describe this as “vilifying Jason to prop up Dick” … I don’t really know what to make of that.

[opbackgrounds]

So if kinda of a long question and I will really appreciate if to hear your take on this , I started watching and reading one piece not that long ago and robin became my fevorite character in the series , because her story and character is so interesting and complex and I do believe that him the final saga she will be one of the most important characters in it, but then I remember that she started as a villain and was working with crocodile to destroy an entire kingdom and she didn’t seem to have a problem with it ,and that was forgiven easily and was not brought up again in the plot, and now I have a problem with liking because it’s hard for me to know that she didn’t care about letting innocent people get hurt despite she has experienced in the past and I feel like until i will not see a redemption arc or at least for her that ties directly with what she did in alabsta , or at least an apology for what she did there to vivi once she will meet her again , I will have a hard time to like and relate to her character again. I know that you also like robin and that she is also your favorite character in the series and that you understand her character better then I ever will , so my point is how does that not bother you to like her character even though what she did in alabsta and that ? Because I dont want that bother me as well because now every time that I see her in the anime or in the manga I am reminded that she Helped to almost ruining a peaceful kingdom and and harming a lot of Innocent people and she didn’t care about it, i know that because of her past she didn’t care about the world but that still bother’s me.

Well, mostly it’s because Alabasta isn’t a real place and the people who suffered don’t exist. There’s nothing wrong with liking a character whose done bad things and don’t regret it —some of my favorite characters in all of fiction are absolute shitbags with no redeeming qualities. Fiction exists as a safe place to engage with scenarios that would be unpleasant or taboo in real life, and to me how the story handles those kinds of subjects is much more important than fretting whether or not they’re problematic or bad in the first place. I wouldn’t like it if the narrative pretended that Robin did nothing wrong, but the story itself does not care. Maybe someday if Vivi reunites with the crew we might get something between her and Robin, but not even she the princess whose country was nearly ruined by Robin’s actions is upset that she’s traveling with the crew. One Piece is not a series that concerns itself with right and wrong. They’re pirates. It literally does not matter.

But for the sake of argument, let’s take a minute to think about what might have driven Robin to that place to begin with. Because she did try to lead a normal life as a kid, even after getting her bounty. And every time she tried, the people around her tried to have her arrested or killed because they were too afraid or too tempted by the price on her head. She had no choice but to turn to a life of of crime, and that life led her to Crocodile.

Why should someone who had been mistreated their entire life give a flying fuck about the lives of people who would kill her if given half a chance? Because, sure, maybe if Robin ended up at King Cobra’s doorstep as a kid he might have protected her, but probably not. Just like his citizens would have turned over an eight year old to the marines to be executed. It’s simple, bloody arithmetic: kill or be killed. After twenty years, no wonder Robin stopped caring about the people she was hurting to achieve her goals. The entire world literally wanted her dead.

Instead of getting into the morality of what someone in those desperate circumstances might do, One Piece is a story about how you can grow past that with the help of people who truly care about you. That’s just as important as any good vs evil story out there, because there are a lot of people like Robin in the world who deserve just as much empathy and kindness even if they’ve done terrible things in their past.

Even if none of that was true and Robin was just sort of an asshole who didn’t mind the fact that she nearly destroyed a country, it doesn’t matter. She’d probably still be my favorite because I latched onto her as a kid like a baby duck and declared her mine. Sometimes that’s all there is to it, and that’s okay. Bad people can be interesting characters. Maybe I wouldn’t want to go out to get lunch, but reading about them is fun, and at the end of the day reading *should* be fun.

[jiangwanyinscatmom]

[1/?] Sorry for venting. I just saw some bad takes that gave me a lot of feelings. Personally, JC stresses me out every time he comes on screen, but I don't mind it when JC fans say fan-typical things like how they like JC because he wears purple, or is grumpy, or they think he's hot, or that they ship x*ch*ng because the cql actors have nice jawlines. They're harmless, fun takes, and while I don't agree with some of them, I see where they're coming from

Hello there anon, vent away as that is what my blog is open for as I love/hate on Jiang Cheng as he is in the plot, as well as all of my beef with what has been done to him for the EN side of the fanbase! I am more than fine listening and engaging with the unsavory "unpopular" discussions of his canon behavior and this goes for anyone of course that needs an open play area. I'll try to engage with what you have sent point by point as succinctly as I can.

[2/?] (some of these are obviously crack, and I am a fan of a few problematic faves). But then there are stans that just have to put other characters down to make JC look good. Like, I think some fans take their freedom of interpretation for granted because most of these takes aren't even labeled 'headcanon,' 'ooc,' or 'crack' anymore. Stans feel that their interpretations are valid, and while they are, valid =/= canon, and they're treating these takes as canon, which becomes popular fanon.

I enjoy Jiang Cheng for what he is, however as I had said it took me another reread to get to my stance of him being the negative mirror to Lan Wangji's positive and my comfort with that for the story once I realized what purpose he served. He is only insofar tragic in regards to his circumstances, but it does not absolve him for what he is at his core (no pun, but I can make a very nice metaphor that even with a piece of Wei Wuxian in him he is still forever unable and unwilling to stand by him equally all while stagnating where as Lan Wangji is able to flourish, grow and mature with nothing of import left from Wei Wuxian in a technical sense). As for ships, I am a little dirty Xicheng whore for fun and can say there is a sense of entertainment for me making it work with two people where one is wildly ignorant and the other wildly rabid. But that is outside of what is established as canon in the work and I always try to keep the two strictly separate due to the skew fanon perpetuates.

3/?] And now, it's not clear what part of the fanon references canon JC or the canon events of mdzs. JC is an asshole; I don't like him as a person, but I do think that he's a complex character motivated by many issues (sup, YeeZY), which makes him fascinating to explore. Unfortunately, erasing his culpability also removes his agency. JC should be allowed to be an asshole character who makes his own decisions even if they're the wrong ones. He has made his own tragedy by constantly casting Wei Wuxian as the villain of his life.

Now thanks to you I will be using YeeZY to forever and now to acknowledge Madam Yu (this is your fault for the new tag). From a standing from storytelling I agree that he is complex in the Jianghu for MDZS. Where in the usual political intrigue of Wuxia, he would be the mustache twirling villain that is outright unforgivable in narration, it is by favor of Wei Wuxian's narration that has an early steeping of empathy for him. And he is not meant to be seen as ultimately sympathetic, the work builds up his hate against Wei Wuxian who tries to rationalize it all several times until he is finally unable to. Jiang Cheng is the antithesis to Lan Wangji and the false bait to get attached to in Wei Wuxian's first life. I will make the note their meeting in Yiling is lukewarm between both as they exchange nothing really in terms of conversation and all pleasantries are left in terms of Jiang Yanli for Wei Wuxian. By this point Wei Wuxian has already switched his yearnings of platonically wanting a part of Jiang Cheng's life, to subconscious romantic inclinations about Lan Wangji and the perceived loss of being in the other's life.

The very point of Jiang Cheng as the deconstruction, is that he has no passion in life despite his apparent exploits because he put a shadow to hang over himself as an excuse to say others think he is not good enough. He has no deeper motivations than pure selfishness by the end of the work and is pure frivolity that he has built up losing the meaning of his sect as a tradition. He had his agency (more than anyone I might add in the work due to his social position) that he used to build his reputation as a passive rich sect leader that has little to do with civilian problems.

4/?] And I think a JC, somehow, that realizes that he did something wrong and is working hard to change for the better and gain self-actualization to become that UWU best jiujiu the stans want him to be, who is ready to talk (not yell at) with WWX, apologize to him, and create a better, healthier relationship with him is a much more powerful reconciliation and happy ending than 'everyone is wrong and mean and they all apologize to JC, which magically gets rid of all his issues'.

He is forced out of culpability in reconciliation because simply put, his audience do not like the reality that relationships fray and dissolve with no further resolution other than we as adults both need to move on for safety and good health. It is not acceptable in real life and fiction is allowed to place that also in it's thematic relationships. He has a small, small spark of recognition at the end of the main story, however he himself seems to choose to ignore it, as change is hard and he has never taken to that well as was foreshadowed with his dogs and the idea of sharing a space with Wei Wuxian. To write this is an awful lot of work into his psyche which is not a nice place, he is a terrible being and downplaying that to make a sugar sweet person does not work instantaneously. He is the one responsible for the entire fallout with Wei Wuxian and he hysterically realizes that even as he tries to continue to blame Wei Wuxian.

The issue that I have with his current stan culture, is that they already view him as something he is not. They play at bicycle with all of the other protagonists that have positive traits that they strip as they see fit; Good affirming loving to children adult Lan Wangji, Self-sacrificing ultimately did it all for love and care Wei Wuxian, Hard exterior but softened to who they consider an annoyance Wen Qing, Loyal as partners in their exploits on the field and always have each others back Wen Ning. They even take Jin Guangyao's persona of playing damsel and using that as a positive to soften up Jiang Cheng into something he has never been for anyone for ships.

[5/5] Also, making WWX/WN/LWJ apologize just makes them look better than JC. Like, stans supposedly love JC, so they ahouldn't be lazy and work hard to give him actual character development. Again, I'm sorry for spamming your ask. It just really baffles me about where they get these 'hot' takes (All I'm going to say is that JC was ungrateful, and WN had a reason verbally dismantle him).

They see this, but, they will spin it in any way to excuse Jiang Cheng due to the story itself showing that he was in the wrong to everyone he flung accusations at and his hate. No one but him is at fault for his spite as he had gotten his revenge on the ones that had ruined Lotus Pier and killed his parents. His own resentment pitted him against good and well meaning people that he refused to help as he mimicked his mother's words about raising their heads higher out of goodness instead of keeping low and staying self-centered. There is the underlying criticism of taking individual arrogance as self-care at the cost of others. Each point that Wen Ning makes is exactly what Jiang Cheng himself knows as he hated Wei Wuxian for being something he could not be or even wanted to be. Jiang Cheng wants kindness but does not understand that kindness to others needs to be selfless and accept the hurt that can come with that in life. He encompasses the fall from the path of buddhist lifestyle, "The Three Poisons" to Wangxian's "Without Envy" at the stories end.

[6/5] P.S. I'm not saying I want reconciliation fics, but I just feel that if stans want JC to have a happy ending, then I think that he should actively work for it. I think it would be interesting to see what force of nature would push him through a character development because throwing a therapist at him would result in a murder.

"I'm not saying I want reconciliation fics, but I just feel that if stans want JC to have a happy ending, then I think that he should actively work for it."

They do not think he has to work for it, they say his tragedy is enough, while heaping accusations against Wei Wuxian and saying his own are not enough to absolve him. Something Wei Wuxian has never denied and told all present they are allowed to forever hate him for what he had done in the past, but that they need to find a way to live in a life that is always moving on. He learned that grudges do nothing once they are absolved and it leaves you with hate with nothing else to do with it once that object is gone. In terms of reconciliation, I do not ever think that either want anything other than a distant peaceful out of each other's life set up. Jiang Cheng does not need Wei Wuxian in his life to be satisfied and never has since he used him as the handicap to hide behind to stay angry and miserable. Being without that fallback opens the world far more for him to change than him ever interacting like an old friend with Wei Wuxian ever again, if he ever had the guts to do that.

[egelantier]

Tian Guan Ci Fu

where is it and what is it

it’s a chinese webnovel by mxtx, the same author who did untamed; it exists as a webnovel, finished and kindly translated here, the manhwa, the donghua (animated adaptation) happening right now, and there’s a live action adaptation in plans, directed by the same guy who did untamed. the donghua is gorgeous, the adaptation i’m unsure about but prepared to be hopeful, the manhwa seems to be very pretty. but all the adaptations only cover the very beginning of the novel for now, so i went ahead and read the novel, and i have no regrets. it helps that the translation is very good - not without awkward translatorese, but it has consistent and engaging flow and style, and it’s also pretty good at conveying mxtx’s humor without awkwardness. it reads pretty well.

what’s it about?

the world is split into two parts: mortals and various ghosts and demons and entities share the land, while ‘heaven officials’, aka gods, live in the heavenly kingdom in the sky. pretty much anybody can become a god if they do something really heroic or memorable and/or cultivate (meditation, training, virtuous behavior) really hard. when above, the gods rule their domains and fulfill their believers’ wishes; they work sort of like pratchettian gods, dependent on their followers’ beliefs and getting influenced by them. heavens are strictly hierarchical, with their own economy and pecking order, and the gods aren’t particularly sinless or benevolent; mostly it’s a question of scale.

our hero, xie lian, is a prince of a prosperous kingdom who’s been on a fast track to ascension for most of his very short life; he’s talented, he’s virtuous, he’s kind, he’s strong, and his only peculiar flaw is (somehow naive, but well-meaning) obsession with equality and value of human lives and so on. he becomes a god, unexpectedly, at seventeen, after slaying one especially dangerous god, and rises in heaven at the peak of his faith, influence and happiness.

…and then he finds out about drought and incipient trouble in his own kingdom, and, being a young and righteous god too close to his mortality, eschews heavens and returns to save everybody. it, to put it lightly, does not go well. at all. in fact, it goes catastrophically wrong, and, having lost everything, xie lian ascends again, only to get into a fight with the heavenly emperor, and get banished again, this time for good. he roams the mortal lands for next eight hundred of very lonely, luckless and hard years, technically immortal but not invincible, with his powers and his luck stripped away, and leans to make do, eking out a living as a scrap collector. his temples are desecrated, his name is forgotten, his kingdom is long gone, and - well. so it goes.

so it goes! until one day, to everybody’s great surprise, he ascends once again: a humble, gentle, immune to embarrassment, unflappable man, an embarrassment to heavens, a 'laughingstock of three realms’ who just wants to be left well enough alone. he’s Tired.

instead of rest, he gets sent to investigate a dangerous ghost stealing brides who pass through its mountain, and there, during the course of the interrogation, has his first (he thinks) meeting with a terrifying, old-powerful and vengeful ghost king named hua cheng, who likes to terrorize heavens from time to time. but said ghost king seems to be very benevolent and very interested in helping xie lian, and xie lian is pretty instantly smitten… with knowing what’s the cause of such interest.

…and meanwhile, in the beginning, there'was an unlucky boy, born under the worst stars, whom xie lian saved from falling once, while still mortal, and promptly lost track of. a lot of things happened to this boy, who wanted to be the most devoted worshipper to xie lian the god of the sword and the flower. as one does, you know.

that’s the beginning! from there on: investigations, heavenly secrets, old friends and enemies and acquaintances, thematic parallels, old tragedies, more pining than you can shake a stick at, grand acts of love.

is it good?

it’s very, very good. it’s the first fantasy cnovel i read (aside from the hilarious one about a guy traveling back in his own timeline and becoming a sugar baby to a mafia boss, which was in a very different league), so i don’t know which things are baseline and which things are unique, but it had a very solid foundation: ambitious multilevel, multi-timeline plot coming together in the end both events- and emotions-wise, beautifully iddy main relationship, maybe multifaceted characters who change and grow and clash together in fun ways, a clear and heartfelt understanding of its own core themes.

it’s also, unexpectedly, very funny, in this visual, slapsticky, begs-to-be-adapted way - i found myself laughing out loud over it a lot of times, and it possesses this gift of swerve between understated but earnest emotions and all-out jokes that i associate with… a bit of prattchett and a bit of gintama, honestly. take it as you will.

(oh my god the mecha. i will laugh over this one until i die.)

it also made me cry several times; granted, it’s not like it’s this time, but those were very heartfelt tears.

and the main duo?

first let me say that xie lian was lifted out, wholesale, out of my deepest character preferences. he fell really, really far, and did some bad things, and some very horrible things were done to him, and by the time we meet him he went through everything and achieved this effortless kind of traumatized, humble, accepting, wryly self-deprecating, utterly competent chill that makes a character incredibly appealing to me. he’s kind, and he’s sweet, and he’s gotten any possible embarrassment at least a couple of centuries ago, and he kinda made peace with himself and kinda didn’t. i love him.

and, thankfully for me, hua cheng, the ghost king, loves him a whole damn lot, a ridiculous amount, an epic, over-the-lifetimes, life-shattering amount, and he’s a terrifying presence to everybody else and a shy, protective, sweet dork to xie lian, and every time they’re together on page my entire heart is just. it’s AMAZING. he’s a great combination of playing the obsessive protective yandere stalker-lover trope straight and putting it on its head, by making hua cheng not just revere but respect xie lian, in all his good and bad decisions.

they are just so - good for each other, holy shit. they get each other so well. they’re the best ever power team. i love them.

(the rest of canon is various character reenacting “really? in front of my salad?” meme at them. it’s hysterical, and it’s the best. everybody teams up to tell xie lian that his boyfriend is Problematic way, way before xie lian clues into the fact that he does have a boyfriend, and he’s having none of it. i love it.)

and the themes?

okay, so. roughly half of this novel is ridiculous iddy pining, and a fourth of it is various tropes (off the top of my head: soulbond, sex pollen, body switch, de-age, various shades of identity porn… crossdressing…) played very shamelessly. but it also really benefits from having an overarching set of ethical questions, and while it deals with them a bit shounen-style, it still deals with them, and it makes the whole text fresh, and sweet, and bold.

is it possible to save everybody? should you try to save everybody? if you lack the powers to back your convictions, does it make you complicit? when is it possible to stop the cycle of suffering, what can you do if you want to but can’t? if you tried and people you failed turned on you, whose fault it is, where does the blame stop?

Detailed spoilers begin from here, and i would REALLY advise to stay unspoiled, because the domino reveals are very fun

i loved the various ways the novel sets all those pieces up and then overturns them and then returns to them. xie lian wanted to save everybody and it was arrogant naivete of an untried, untested, privileged young man who never had a real challenge before; his presence made things escalate quicker, and yet everybody around him pretended it was his attempt to make things better that ruined everything, and not a combination of factors outside of his control. and yet he accepts the blame, because it dovetails with his shame at not having enough powers to back his intent up; and yet his triumph over bai wuxian is that he doesn’t, after all, renege on his initial drive to help people.

my most favorite part of this novel is that its turning point, the lynchpin of the whole novel, the moment that keeps xie lian’s soul and safety intact, is not his personal purity and drive; it’s not even hua cheng’s devotion and sacrificial love. it’s just a moment of little, grudging, human kindness from a little, petty, rude man whom the history will sweep away soon. the bamboo hat in the rain. the rest of the plot keeps twisting and turning and coming back to itself, but this? this was unquestionably, beautifully clear, and i loved it. it’s never about the gods, it’s all down to - fallen human is human, ascended human is human, and human is not some state, virtuous or sinful, you get stuck with - it’s a multitude of choices, and there’s never a final one.

and incoherent spoilery screaming for people who read it already

oh my god i had SO MUCH FUN. i’ve been flailing on meme for days, because somebody just finished reading there too, and i’m still bursting with ALL THE FEELS. ruoye origins oh my god! that hat! jin wu’s backstory and ultimate end! e-ming’s praise kink! pei ming’s little shippery 'hoho’! hua cheng’s horribly handwritten stick and poke tattoo of xie lian’s name! the lanteeeeeeeeeeeeerns. feng xin and mu qing on the bridge, making up with each other and with xie lian! hua cheng trying to explain to xie lian that his habit of using himself as bait and pincushion at any given moment is deeply emotionally upsetting to him, and succeeding! banyue’s learning from xie lian to be a truly horrible cook! the entire deal with shi qingxuan and he xuan and the wind fan in the end. THE CAVE. THE GIANT MECHA. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa and aaaaaaaaaaaaa and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa and i am beset, beset by feelings. come scream with me.

[i-need-entertainment]

Mother-in-Law

Character: Adriah Thomas x reader I recommend listening to Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You by Frankie Valli (you will see why~)

(ALSO, idk if it is *Tomas* or *Thomas* but the fandom wiki thingy said ‘Thomas’ was the proper English translation so I went with that ;)

Warnings: Problematic/overbearing mother-in-law, mean words said by mother-in-law, reader having self doubt/being pressured, angst but then fluff.

I hope this is okay Anon! I took a different approach with this one. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR REQUESTING HIM! You made me so so happy to have chosen ~Thomas~ because I am in love with him. Also, thank you very much for requesting!! :)

It’s been 4 months since you had officially become Mrs. Adriah Thomas. And in all honesty, things were going pretty well! Your wedding had gone very smoothly; Inunaki had been the best man, Meian and Barnes cried, and having the MSBY four™ as the other groomsmen is always guaranteed to be…interesting. All in all, life was going pretty great! There was just one problem. One everlasting thorn in your side. Your mother-in-law. 

She had never been a big fan of yours and you can’t exactly say you loved her either. When you and Adriah had been dating she had been nothing but callous towards you. No one was good enough for her son, and she made sure you knew that. You did everything you could to be liked by her, I mean you were a good girlfriend, and now you were a good wife! You made her son very happy and you took good care of him. But it didn’t matter, because at the end of the day you married her precious son, and you could never be good enough in her eyes. Tonight would be a dreaded date. It was the second Tuesday of the month, meaning you and Adriah had his parents over for dinner. Adriah wasn’t stupid, he knew you and his mom didn’t get along, and he completely understood! I mean, having been raised by her he knew first hand how…difficult…she could be. But, she was still his mom who he loved very much. To try and avoid future conflicts, you guys had talked it through (communication is key!) and come to a compromise. You would do your best to get along with his mom, but if she was still being difficult you guys would let it go and keep trying. Currently the two of you were cooking dinner together in the kitchen, which was something the two of you often did. You were sautéing some vegetables when you felt two strong arms wrap tightly around you, you then felt Adriah’s head touch itself into your neck. He continued to sing the song the two of you had playing in the back ground; “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” by Frankie Valli. You smiled and sung along with him; it had been your wedding song after all. The vegetables were done cooking so you turned off the burner and moved the pan to the side, Adriah quickly but carefully spun you towards him, putting one arm around your waist and the other delicately holding your hand. You laughed as you put your other hand on the arm that was holding your waist. (Yes, typically it would be around his neck, but the man is 6’7. I’m 5’9 and I’m not sure I could reach his neck!!) “Are you thinking about tonight again?” You looked up at your husband before you laid your head on his chest, “I just- I want to get along with her, I do! But she makes it so difficult. I just, I don’t know what to do anymore.” He smiled as he leaned down, putting his forehead against yours as you both continued to sway to the song. “There’s not really anything we can do…just try and keep the peace.” When the song finished the two of you got back to work on dinner. You had just finished when the doorbell rang. “Honey can you get the door? I can finish up in here.” Adriah nodded, gave you a quick kiss and went to unlock the door letting in his parents. They came in and greeted their son, his dad giving him a strong hug and his mother practically smothering him. His dad came into the kitchen and greeted you; he had always been very nice to you. (it was clear which of his parents Adriah took after..) While his mother passed by, gave you a fake smile and very enthusiastically said hello. “Dinner will be ready in about five minutes, so you guys can go ahead and sit at the table if you’d like.” They nodded and headed into the dining room. Just about 5 minutes later dinner was ready and you took it into the dining room. 15 minutes had gone by, 15 peaceful minutes, “So, Y/n, are you still working?” 15 whole minutes. But she just HAD to ruin it. You put on a smile, albeit forced, and nodded. You and Adriah met at work; the MSBY Black Jackals. You worked as the Exercise Physiologist for MSBY (an Exercise Physiologist is like a physical therapist *but with less schooling* combined with an athletic trainer, they’re really cool and I might do this as a career…) which just so happens to be how you met Adriah. This had been one of the many conflicts you had had with your mother-in-law. She thought you should stay home and be a house wife…since Adriah already made quite a bit of money being a professional player, and a very good one at that. “I am, yes.” She hummed, sounding less than impressed as per usual. “So, when are the two of you going to have your first child?” You choked on your food as Adriah’s dad handed you some water, “Mom! We’ve been married for 4 months!” She raised an eye brow at her son. “And…? You both are quite old already. By the time I was your age I was done having you and your siblings.” You held your tongue. You and Adriah were 27, and to some it may seem like you had waited a long time to get married, when in reality it had only been 3 years. You guys had gotten married when you both felt ready, and while you both wanted children and a family, you wanted to wait at least a year until you more seriously thought about it!! “You know, you’re not getting any younger Y/n, your body is on a clock after all. If you wait too long to have children, you won’t be able to have them at all, then what kind of wife would you be?” The table went silent. She tended to have that effect on occasions like this one. You stood up, “Please excuse me, I’m not feeling well.” And walked into yours and Adriah’s bedroom, shutting the door before you sat on the edge of the bed, tears finally breaking free and rolling down your cheeks. If there was one thing you disliked the most about your mother-in-law was the fact that she always managed to find the things that hurt; and then exploit them, even if you never said them out loud. One of the things you had been stressing over is exactly what she had brought up, ‘Am I a good wife…?’ You did your best to be the best spouse you could, you always made sure you communicated your feelings and listened when Adriah communicated his, you did your best to spend personal time with him as well as giving each other space and the list goes on. Yet whenever she comes, you always felt like you were never good enough. ‘What kind of wife can’t even get along with her husband’s mother?!’ You tried not to doubt, you did! But it was so hard when she was constantly reminding you of your “downfalls” even if there wasn’t a problem with how you were doing things! You loved and cared for her son, what more could she want?! *Knock knock* A knock at the door disrupted you from your thoughts. “Y/n…? It’s Adriah, can I come in?” You wiped your tears the best you could, took a deep breath and spoke a small, ‘yeah’. He opened the door and gave you a soft smile, walking over to kneel in front of you. “Dad took mom home, he sent his best regards.” You laughed a little, “He’s so sweet, I wonder where you got that from.” He lightly chuckled as he used his fingers to wipe the tears from your face, his usual smile turning into a frown. “…You’re not a bad wife.” You nodded, “You’re my best friend, and I couldn’t be happier to spend the rest of my life with you.” You nodded. “Y/n,” You looked up from the floor into your husband’s beautiful dark eyes. He got up from the floor and sat beside you on the bed, turning just enough so he could pull you to sit in his lap, strong arms holding you securely to his chest as his heartbeat soothed you. The two of you sat in silence for a while, enjoying the comfort you both got from being in the other’s embrace. “…I’m sorry….I’m sorry for doubting…I’m sorry for ruining tonight…” Adriah smiled as he shook his head, pulling away slightly so he could look you in the eyes. “Why? You have nothing to be sorry for. It’s okay to be upset; especially after that just don’t hide it from me, then I can’t help you. And you definitely didn’t ruin dinner, it was long gone before you walked out.” You laughed, snuggling further into your tall husband. “You’re just too good to be true~ Can’t take my eyes off of you~” He started to sing the song again as you giggled, him wrapping his arms around you even tighter as he began to sway the two of you. “NO I’m trying to be sad, you’re not helping!” You joked as he laughed, standing up as he started dancing around the room, you desperately trying to catch up. “You’d be like heaven to touch,” He paused to give you a big kiss on the cheek, “I wanna hold you so much” You smiled as you finally managed to match his pace, deciding to sing along, “At long last, love has arrived, and I thank God I’m alive,” You pulled away from his embrace to look him in the eyes, him giving the back of your hand a kiss as he continued to hold it. So yes, you had a pretty terrible mother-in-law, and no you don’t know when that will change. But until it does you know your wonderful, adorable, loving husband will always be there for you. “You’re just too good to be true~ Can’t take my eyes off of you~”

[satashiiwrites]

Posting this a bit early as I’ve got a very long shift scheduled for actual Wednesday itself.  Still on a semi-writing hiatus due to schedule problems. 

From: Ch5 Buck POV, Family, Familia, ‘Ohana

Fandom: 911, H50, SWAT

Pairings: Buddie, McDanno, implied pre-Hondo/Deacon

Other tags: Navy Seal Evan “Buck” Buckley, Crossover AU, post 911 lawsuit drama

Warnings: first draft

Returning to the office, Buck was shuffled off to the locker room for his second shower of the day with Steve’s extra set of clothes—which was really just a gym bag—although luckily there was more than just a pair of board shorts in there as Steve told him “We end up in the ocean more than you’d think,” with a wry grin.  The cargo pants were tight in the thigh but actually loose at the waist and the seal t-shirt was old and faded, soft with use.  He also had a bit of ankle showing but nobody’s boots were big enough to borrow so he was walking around the office in Steve’s flip flops—or slippahs as Kono called them. 

It was weird wearing someone else’s clothes.  Buck had felt like it was crossing a line to wear Steve’s extra set of boxer briefs so he was going commando but nobody needed to know that but him although he was pretty sure Danny had guessed it given he commented, “I see you’re not ruining those pants with underwear lines,” which had made them both blush beet red when Danny had realized what he’d said while distracted by the latest case that had been brought up on the monitor. 

Kono had almost died of laughter at the both of them but she mercifully didn’t tease Buck further. 

While Buck had been gone, the team had caught a string of assaults that HPD was asking for assistance with.  This was code for the last shopkeeper that was targeted was a known political fundraiser for the governor’s party and had asked why there had been no progress. The others had just returned from following up on grabbing the evidence and logs from HPD when Danny and Buck had arrived with lunch so they were sitting around the monitor going through everything as a group first. 

“So given that they’re targeting shops and businesses all in this area….” Kono trailed off, giving a significant look at first Chin and then Steve, she slumped further in her chair that she was all twisted up on with her feet resting barefoot on the wooden desk support as she  raised her shrimp plate higher as if to hide behind it.

“It could be the yakuza,” Steve said finally after nobody else spoke. “Has Adam—“

“No.” Kono was firm, waving with her chopsticks as she shook her head. “No Steve.”

Steve swallowed the bite of food he’d taken, not looking away from Kono.  “You know I have to ask,” he said apologetically. 

Kono stabbed at her fried rice, avoiding meeting Steve’s gaze. “I know,” she bit out. 

He was missing something obvious. “Who’s Adam?” Buck asked tentatively. 

The rest of the team exchanged a set of looks but Kono just waggled her left hand, light catching on the ring on her ring finger as she sighed. “Adam’s my husband…. He’s,” she bit her lip, eyes clouded. “His family is yakuza—his father was Oyabun.”

“Oi ya bun? Yakuza—I know that’s Japanese… gangsters?” Buck was very confused. 

“Right,” Danny’s voice was artificially light as he moved white rice around on his plate.  “Oyabun think of it like the head boss of the the gang.”

Buck tried not to stare at Kono. “So he’s like a mafia prince?”

“Kinda,” Kono allowed, obviously uncomfortable but willing to explain.  She was still just looking at her food, shoulders hunched protectively as she jabbed her chopsticks into a mound of rice. “He—Adam struggled a lot but he’s gotten away from that.  It’s just hard when he still has family that… well we don’t really speak with them if we can help it.”

“Ah,” Buck shoveled food into his mouth rather than say something else that could upset Kono further. It was obvious that if she’d married Adam they’d had a lot of trouble.  Buck could just imagine being a cop and marrying a mafia prince had been problematic and Kono had likely had a lot of uncomfortable scrutiny.  The whole bank heist disaster thing that had happened before Bobby was suspended had been hugely uncomfortable. Buck had not really appreciated how the police had torn apart everything in his apartment and the interrogation had made his head spin.  He could cringe in sympathy for what Kono had gone through. 

“Anyways,” Danny tried to pull them back to focus. “So we have a string of assaults all on business owners in Waikiki in an area where there’s been issues in the past with protection rackets. Is there anyone else we can talk to—see if there’s been issues recently?”

There was an awkward silence. It occurred to Buck that Kamekona might…. He’d gotten the impression that the big man had maybe not always been on the right side of the law given the stories he’d been telling Buck. However the string of robberies of the food trucks… that was at the far end of Waikiki right?  “Would Kamekona know?” Buck asked aloud. “I mean… he owns his business. Surely he’d know if there was a protection racket going on?  Right?”

Danny and Steve both cocked their heads—Steve towards Danny and Danny towards Steve. It was like they were mirror images of each other it was so in sync. “That’s a good point,” Steve said aloud. 

“Also… not to be obvious here but the string of robberies at the food trucks…. Could they be related?”  Buck got that high end businesses weren’t the same but the guy he’d tackled earlier had been handed off to HPD.  They hadn’t interrogated him. 

“They’re really not the same…” Danny trailed off, face scrunching up.  “We’d have to find a link.”

“Do you think we should be questioning the guy I tackled?” Buck asked, chasing a bit of teriyaki coated chicken around his own dish.

Steve beamed at him, pleased.  The little cock of his head as he nodded towards Buck with a smug and prideful smile was aimed at Danny who just rolled his eyes. 

“You just want to—“ Danny began, an air of long suffering patience surrounding him. 

“It’d be good practice,” Steve interrupted Danny.  

Rubbing his forehead, Danny’s blue eyes were still calculating as they landed on Buck’s.  “Kid’s first interrogation.  No way this can’t go wrong.”

“That’s the spirit Danno,” Chin chimed in, the barest hint of an entertained smile crossing the Asian man’s face as his eyes crinkled. 

Danny sighed and waved his agreement before wagging one finger right under Steve’s nose making him go crosseyed as he followed the motion. “You’ll help him.  Teach him.  No dangling the suspect over a ledge or throwing them in a shark cage,” he instructed Steve.

“Yes Danno,” Steve dully agreed, biting his lip to try and hide a smile. 

Amused, Buck just watched the two of them have a mini-argument that was seemingly about teaching him how to interrogate a suspect but there was a secondary, non-verbal discussion going on that he couldn’t quite read.  There was a lot of affection there as well as gruff amusement and they obviously cared a lot about each other.  Going over what Danny had said, his mind stuttered a bit on one of the parts of the instructions. “Wait—did you actually put someone in a shark cage?”

[tynblackthorn]

We need to talk about “History 2: Crossing the Line”

If you call yourself a BL’s lover and you haven’t watched this drama, you need to stop everything that you are doing like- imediatly.

I’m a fan of taiwanese and chinese BL’s storys, specifically the “HIStory” saga, and Crossing the Line” is probably the first overall Bl’s I’ve watched in my life, and I’m going to tell you some reasons, among the several ones existent, of why you need to watch it...

1. Xia Yu Hao

This boy... Well, this boy is one of the best things that happened to me. The way that he’s portrayed is unique. You can really feel the pureness and the truth on his feeling about Qiu Zi Xuan’s character. Honestly, the way he looks Zach’s character is so beautiful that I cried everytime I’ve watched this. Fandy’s acting skills really show up on this. You can really enjoy his path into self-discovery, not only about his sexuality — which there’s no problem at all into the whole drama —, but also about his feelings for ZiXuan. Also the way that the bad boy turns into the cutess lovely and passionate baby... It just gives me joy

2. Qiu Zi Xuan

I’ve loved Qiu Zi Xuan at first sight. Not only because he is very (i mean VERY) good looking, but also because his closed personality just gave me vibes that he would be a very misterious and hard-to-read character, which I personally like a lot. He cares about Xia Yu Hao since the first eye contact (information given by the own director but, once you’ve rewatched this, you can see how this is actually pretty accurate), and the way that he celebrates every single Xia Yu Hao’s accomplishments really shows how he cares, even though he doesn’t really know why.

3. Side couples

I feel controversial about these two, honestly. I mean, they’re siblings (non-related by blood), but I feel a little weird about it. I’m not gonna say they’re problematic, I just tried to watch it ignoring the previous relationship involved. Honestly, if you feel the same way, this plot doesn’t affect much in XYH and QZX plot, so you can really just don’t watch those scenes. But I have to admit that they’re very cute together and I wish that they had a kiss scene.

4. Self-discovery

There’s a lot of interesting moments in this show, specifically into XYH’s POV that shows the self discovery and self awarness journey of XYH about his feelings. Some of they are very relatable, some of them are just good to see. The way he looks at QZX almost with like an idolization of his figure is purely cute and awesome. And then the way that he tries to make sure that QZX is okay 100% of the time and trying to know him more and spend more time with him is just a pure way to treat M/M relationship without the whole “I’m in love with a boy” drama.

5. Watch it like a straight drama

As I said previously, there’s no real drama of “being in love with a guy” thing. So, honestly, is just a story about two pearsons loving each other in high school with relatable, and simple problems. And that’s why I needed it so much. You see, XYH is aware that M/M is a tabu, obviously, but he doesnt care that he is disciverying that he loves one. He even ask QZX if this would be a problem to him. We see a lot of prejudice and homphobic attitudes into BL dramas, a lot of them portrayed by the main character itself, and I get that this is part of thw plot and life, but this just don’t gives us the feeling that everything is going to end up tragically.

6. Pureness

XYH and QZX relationship is pure. There’s no other word to describe. There’s a good exploration of sexuality, and the desire but without having to appeal to bed and intimous scenes. I’m not against it (and honestly I would love to see them getting their private moments) but the acting and the scripting is so good that they don’t need those moments so you can tell that they are in love with each other and that they desire each other. It’s more clear into XYH perspective, but it’s also notable into QZX’s POV.

Final considerations (like i’m writing and article or something)

I really love these two, in a way that I can’t really describe. Everyone should watch this, because it’s pure, light and beautiful. I’ve never felt this way about any TV show before (western or eastern) in my life. It’s just beautiful to see and follow XYH and QZX relationships whith theirselves and with each other.

I really wish there would be a sequel, and I’ve seen some things about it on tumblr, but I honestly gave up about it (but I would love if it was true). The thing is, I really think that the ideal would be more screen time in the original season, to show more of them, not a sequel with new plots and problems. I would like to see what happens after the last scene, and they having happy times together, secured with their feelings, and the relationship between the two main couples.

But I honestly i would be sattisfied with just Zach Lu and Fandy Fan acting together even if it’s a hate relationship because I need just more of them together.

So in conclusion, thanks HIStory 2 Crossing The Line for ruinning my life I loved it please do more!!!!!

I also made a FMV of this TV show so, if you are interesses, pls check it out and make sure to leave your opinion!

[irandomblogfulb]

FATE: What happens when you get a bunch of middle aged white guys to adapt a cartoon for girls

Well, I just went through 6 hours of fate and I have a lot of opinions on it. Yeah, this is going to be long (slightly under 3k words) so putting it under read more and obvious spoilers.

PSA before delving right in:

1) Yes, I will be comparing to the original. Any comparisons are not through rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. There are parts here and there that I genuinely think were done better in the cartoon on a writing standpoint.

2) This is purely my opinion and overall negative. Don't like it? Don't read. I'm all up for discussion but I don't want another person crying to me about how I “ruined” their experience of the show.

3) If you like Fate then good for you. This isn’t me bashing people who like it. 

I've spit it up into sub sections just for my own convince.

1. The problem with the 'I'm not like other girls' trope

This pertains to the entire Bloom-Sky-Stella love triangle. I wasn't as pressed about it compared to other winxers (and I loved Stella's and Brandon's relationship on my rewatch). In fact, I was okay with it. But then I sat down and watched the show and there's a lot of underlying problems with the love triangle. Particularly pitting Bloom and Stella against each other for Sky's affection.

Now this part of the love triangle I already didn't like. Correct me if I'm wrong, since I dropped the OG Winx after season 5 but the Winx while they did have their conflicts and arguments, never fought over a boy. I really appreciated that from the cartoon so seeing that live action would fall into that trap – I was mildly annoyed at that. Then it hit me. It's Bloom and Stella.

The seemingly ordinary girl vs the pristine princess of Solaria. If the title didn't give it away, you should get the point by now. Others have already called it by now but the "I'm not like other girl's" trope in itself, while seemingly feminist is actually misogynist. Saying the more masculine type of girl is better than the feminine is inherently misogynist. Stella, the prime princess, girly and feminine, is villainized by the love triangle. Sky's and Stella's relationship is toxic and Stella's overt co-dependence and jealousy are already big fat red signs - but Sky's and Bloom's relationship is built on how she's "different". Bloom isn't like Stella, she's "real".

2. Am I supposed to like Riven?

As the title puts it, wtf am I supposed to feel about Riven. Is he supposed to be a good guy? Do I root for him? Is he morally ambiguous? Because holy shit compared to OG!Riven, this guy is diabolical and much much worse! OG!Riven is an asshole and he teams up with the trix but his arc was very simple and easy to understand. He joins the bad guys, distances himself from the good guys, the trix betray his ass, he self-reflects in the dungeon - escapes and redeems himself. Net!Riven is so bad to the point where you can't redeem him and the writers don't even try. Freddie Thorp is good in his role. (however, he definitely doesn't pass for a 17-year-old. He's 26 and it shows) and he actually makes the cringe dialogue work. But he's way too diabolical and downright predatory. The scene where he forces Dane to gulp down his spiked drink - it’s worse seeing it than reading it. That grossed me out more than the gore.

What makes it worse, nobody properly calls him out. Beatrix kinda does on his homophobia – “Homophobic bashing by GIF” - and Sky does chastise him, but they still tolerate him. It is kinda funny in a way Sky has a whole ass arc about how he's enabling Stella's problematic behaviour by still dating her after she blinded her friend but doesn't realize he's doing the same for Riven.

The only person that really puts her foot down with Riven is Terra and nobody takes her seriously about anything she says.

Everyone is very laissez-faire around him and that's not how you respond to your friend being problematic. (Hey, kinda like the other girls sans Aisha are with Bloom!) Everyone surrounding Riven is so disgusting and the notion of him supposedly being a good guy is very hard to buy into. His whole relationship with Dane has a section of it’s own because there’s just a lot to unpack.

3. Stella I am so sorry

I'm also in the majority hating how they've tarnished Stella. Basically, they turned her into the stereotypical rich bully with mommy issues.

I get that Stella has an abusive mom but that’s no excuse to be a total bitch to her roommates. And no, her roommates shouldn't accept her back with open arms. And she doesn't even redeem herself - the girls just accept her back after her mom pulls her from Alfea.

And this is also another issue with the writing were the characters suddenly just change their opinions on a whim. Suddenly Stella likes the winx, suddenly Terra misses Stella even though having that girl literally gives her anxiety. Suddenly Aisha's on Bloom's side in the end.

This isn't me simping for the cartoon out of nostalgia. I was mostly okay with the idea of Stella and Sky hooking up. But Looking at it from a creative standpoint - looking at the source material, and the many paths you can take this character, the best thing Brian Young and co. can think of for her was turning her into the stereotypical rich bully that we've seen time and time again? No deconstruction no meta take, it's played out exactly how you’d expect it.

Again, this isn't me simping for the show. Purely from a creative standpoint Stella was such a major let down. There's so much to the character and Brian Young took the easiest, saturated path.

4. That one scene with Bloom's parents

You know the one. Mike unhinges Bloom's bedroom doors and Vanessa cusses out and insults her child like a petty teen bully. Forgetting how utterly cringey that scene was, you can't have her mom go batshit insane on her child, then act like she's this loving parent that cares so deeply about her daughter. Screw that! Vanessa deserved those 3rd degree burns! She invaded her daughter's privacy. Bloom didn't even do anything wrong!

I can't buy into this narrative of Vanessa and Mike being loving parents when they do something like that. Seriously who thought that was okay?

5. Pity Parties for everyone.

I already discussed this in Stella’s section but I don’t like the “it’s okay for me be a shitty person because my life sucks :)” narrative Fate tries to pull. They did it with Stella, Bloom, Riven.

What I liked about the first season of Winx Club is Bloom’s arc and her character as a whole. Because while she went through shit, from the Trix, to finding out she was adopted, her existential crisis, not feeling like she belonged, losing the dragon flame, she went through a lot. She didn’t throw a pity party. She didn’t whine, bitch and complain. She allowed herself to feel upset, took it as it is and tried to make lemonade out of lemons. And I respect that.

Net!Bloom is agrevating. She does some dumb, reckless stuff but it’s excused because she’s the protagonist? She let the war criminal out, the school gets taken over by the bad guys because of Bloom. Faragonda fucking dies because she let the war criminal out! The burned ones attacked the school because she let the war criminal out!!! But no, Aisha’s villainized for calling Bloom out because Bloom’s existential crisis is more important then anything else.

Getting to Sky, he isn’t as bad as the others. He doesn’t become a shitty person because of his problems. (Though lowkey flirting with Bloom while he hooks up with Stella is uh not good.) But he does come across incredibly whiny. Because of the cringey dialogue and the unnecessary swearing  I can’t take his speech on opening up to Bloom seriously. I laughed throughout the whole thing and Bloom leaving his unconscious body there was the icing on the cake.

One of the few characters that deserved a pity party is Terra. She’s very much like OG!Bloom in a way. She is bullied by Dane and Riven, has body insecurities, anxiety, nobody listens to her and at most only tolerates her. Despite all the crap that is thrown her way she still reminds humble, kind, and respectful. And she is one of the few characters that deserves more support than what she got out of the season.

5. Bloom, Aisha, Tokenism and their awful relationship

I’m going to be upfront, their relationship sucks. The core of their dynamic is what Aisha can do for Bloom. It’s very one-sided. Bloom only goes to Aisha to help solve her problems, which Aisha gladly does – but when Aisha disagrees with Bloom or says something Bloom doesn’t like, Bloom suddenly goes off and Aisha’s made to be the bad guy. Even though she’s right? And Aisha has her own problems as well, shown to also struggle with her powers. But nope, that’s pushed to the back burner because Bloom needs help.

I am all for creative freedom. I can stomach Stella x actual Sky. I can stomach turning Stella into a rich mean girl. I can stomach the dark academia aesthetic but what Brian Young and co. did to Aisha is just plain racist. Screw the “it’s an adaptation” excuse. Turning this character who had a rich storyline and was a princess into a white girl’s magical negro who fixes all her problems is racist and by definition tokenism. And by whitewashing the other two characters of color, making Aisha the only poc in the group – that’s the worst thing you can do to her.

And frankly we need more black princesses on screen.

6. Dane and the homophobia of the show

Towards the show’s climax it’s revealed Dane is helping Beatrix because she accepts he’s “different”. Not only does this go back to my pity party rant but like bruh,

1)      Beatrix never really did anything for Dane? She hung out and smoked with him a bit, but that’s all. You’re telling me Terra wouldn’t accept Dane? Beatrix never helped him and he never really opened up to her about his struggles.

2)      Nobody else, not even background characters bully or harass Dane for being “different”. It’s only Riven, the guy he’s crushing on. The whole falling in love with the bad boy/abuser trope is bad in a hetero relationship and that still stands for a gay one. And I know damn well if Dane was a woman half of the shit Riven did to Dane wouldn’t slide.

It makes no sense for Dane to side with the bad guys when Riven’s the one bullying him and Beatrix is complacent in the bullying. Oh, and having your second black* character who’s also lgbt+/potentially questioning be a villain? Not good.

I’m all for gay and poly rep, but not like this. If Stella and Sky’s toxic relationship is going to be called out for what it is, why not Dane’s?

*Idk if Theo Graham is light-skinned black or biracial so I’ll just refer to him as black.

7. The plot

It’s very predictable. Personally, wasn’t fond of the ‘twist of a twist of a twist’ style of writing. The story tries to be nuanced and deep but it’s not. Common sense is treated like a big revelation. Not trusting the war criminal you barely know isn’t as big of a take that the writers try to make it out to be.

8.  Everything else

·       Beatrix is fine. No Icy but did like the gothic bookworm aesthetic.

·       Sam is just there to be Musa’s love interest and provide some dumb drama between Musa and Terra. I thought they’d go the Edward/Bella root – Musa’s drawn to Sam because she can’t sense his emotions for some reason. Nope, they just get together for the obligatory make out sessions. Don’t care much for the relationship or the character.

·       Since the powers are all elemental shouldn’t there be classes purely for an elemental? Classes purely for fire fairies, etc?

·       Musa’s powers are confusing. If she has no control over them and they are “always on”, shouldn’t her eyes constantly be glowing purple?  Very wishy washy. Sometimes they overwhelm her and other times she has complete control. Her character is just there for plot stuff.

·       Terra is one of the better characters but can’t enjoy her knowing about the whitewashing. Why can’t we have a plus sized character just exist and not have body issues?

·       Sky doesn’t feel like a prince. Characters treat him like his dad is a war hero and not the King of Eraklyon. There was a point where I thought I misheard and thought his dad was just a war hero and not a king.

·       Why try to justify Rosalind’s war crime if she’s going to be the big bad anyways?

·       The way the characters treat death/act around death is very weird. Musa and Terra see a pile of dead bodies and they’re unreasonable calm. Especially Bloom an “ordinary teenage girl from earth”, reacts very nonchalant when death and war crimes are brought up. Doesn’t help the show tries to push this “they’re kids fighting a war” narrative.

·       Can’t buy into the girls’ friendship. The Aisha/Bloom dynamic is centred on what Aisha can do for Bloom. Bloom only cares about herself and only goes to her friends to help with her problems. Most of Musa’s and Terra’s interaction centre around Sam. Stella didn’t care for the girls until her mom showed up and pulled a 180. The girls were quick to turn on Aisha when she sided with the adults.

·       I have no problem with technology existing but why do they have Instagram, Tiktok and Tumblr? The otherworld is a completely separated from Earth, why do they have the same technology?  

9. Brian Young, what do you mean by mature?

I grew up on the 4kids dub before transitioning to the Nick dub for season 4 and 5 then dropping the cartoon for good. So naturally on my rewatch of the cartoon I decided to go watch the RAI dub since I heard it’s more accurate and 4Kids are infamous for their horrid localisations straying too much to the source material. Upon finishing season 1 and currently watching season 2, a few things took me by surprise. For one, the cartoon is surprisingly dark. The schools are at war with the Trix and their army of Darkness, Sky almost dies in Season 2, Riven almost dies and the Trix thinks he suicided, it’s heavily implied in Season 2 Darkar murdered some of the pixies, the paedophilic undertones of Bloom and Avalon’s relationship, the list goes on.

When the interview with Brian Young came out, he said Fate would be a mature take on the cartoon. And I wondered, what did he meant by mature? Was he going to delve deeper into the darker aspects of the show, or did he mean he was going to have the girls swear and have sex? Watching Fate, I found my answer.

If you take out the gore, swearing, drug and alcohol usage from the live action, the maturity is on par with the RAI dub. The difference is in the presentation. This is what sucks about the mentality surrounding live action remakes. Because the OG!Winx was colourful with glittery transformations , was super girly and overall had a positive upbeat tone (not forgetting 2D animated) - it can’t be taken seriously. You have to strip all that, the colour, the kindness, the femininity in order to be deemed mature.

10. Wrapping up

I went into Fate expecting the worst and honestly, it wasn’t that bad. There were things I liked about it. The show looks pretty, and I did like what they were trying to do with Sky’s arc. The actors did what they could with the material. Freddie Thorp made the cringe dialogue work and Abigail Cowen proves she can carry a show as the lead.

Fate is your generic, YA, dark academia show. It follows all the tropes of the YA genre to a T. If that’s your niche, then you’ll love Fate and I’m not bashing anyone who liked it.

For me, as a creative, it doesn’t capitalise on the strengths of the source material. I’m not asking for Winx Club again, as I’ve reiterated, I’m all for creative freedom. But Brian Young, Iginio Straffi, whoever worked on this – they could’ve created something new, innovative, something that stood out from the hordes of other YA shows. They had good material in their hands! But what I got -  I’ve seen before, and I’ve seen it done better. That’s a major disappointment.

As a winx club fan, don’t bother watching this. It’s a very diluted version of the Winx. In trying to capture the interest of the adult fans who grew up with the franchise – Iginio showed how out of touch he is if he thinks this is what they wanted.

[la-luna-es-hermosa]

Squirt (Kai x Reader)

※ Title: Squirt

※ Businessman!AU || Businessman!Jongin || Rich people AU!

※ One-shot || Genre: Smut || Just plain smut || Squirting

※ Paring: Kai x Reader

※ Summary: When (Y/N) turned 21, Jongin, her boyfriend wanted to explore deeper into their relationship.

※ Warning(s): Age Gap

※ Word Count: 2,278

※ Note: I’m sorry I wasn’t able to keep my promise. I just didn’t have any motivation on what to write since I am also arranging my writing commissions, I hope you can check it out! I’m just gathering interest as of right now since I have not arranged my PayPal yet (probably it will be open as soon as next year starts)

※ Main Masterlist || Commissions 

Just right after her 21st birthday, (Y/N) and Jongin went on a hotel suite. Being her long time lover. Their relationship is quite secretive. Of course, Jongin has a name to maintain, as a CEO of a real estate company, he would never let anyone know their relationship and ruin his reputation. Their age gap alone is problematic, what more if they know Jongin’s into BDSM? They’ve been having connections since she was 18. (Y/N) being the daughter of one of his business partners, his main contractor, Robert.

Laying on her eyes was something Jongin never thought. When he saw the girl with Robert. Coming from school and sitting in the field office working hard on her school works, he immediately fell hard on her. He even frequented her country, (Country) to just see her. He fell madly in love with her. But, just like him, she fell hard on him too. But she stops herself. Seeing him remove his safety hat, his forehead was dripping with sweat, damn! That is where she fell really hard for him.

But as a CEO, Jongin was pressured by his parents to get married. 

“Jongin, baby, please get married already. Your father did not die and give this company to you if you’re just going to make it your life.” His mom said in dismay.

“But who am I going to marry?” Jongin asked. He already has someone in mind, but he doesn’t want to get married to (Y/N), yet, we mean, he can’t.

“The daughters of our business partners. There are a lot of them. Jennie and Seungyeon are really pretty.” His mother responded to him. Both women are his type, but it ain’t it.

“No. If I’m going to marry someone, I’d like that someone to be someone I want to be with forever. I want (Y/N).” When those words came out of Jongin’s mouth, his mother was shocked.

“Sweetie, no. (Y/N), she’s too young for you. Please understand that.” His mom thought of a reply. He can’t marry (Y/N) that is what his mom knows for sure.

Agreeing on a daddy-babygirl kind of relationship is intense in itself, but they never did the deed. Jongin felt bad about fucking her. - Right timing. Right after they arrive on the beautiful island of Amanpulo, Jongin will execute his other intentions. It was a night beautifully planned. Jongin has been waiting four goddamn years to execute all of this. He will surely devour the woman in front of him.

While Jongin was carrying her, - bridal style, of course, she knows it already. She knows what will happen. Jongin finally arrived at the suite’s huge bedroom, he just kicked the door open. He dropped her in the Narra wood desk. Her hands are holding on the table, scared of what is happening next. The impatient man started undoing the lace that tied the beautiful long gown together. The dress was insanely beautiful. - it was in a lavender purple, with white pearls decorated around the long beautiful train. Though admiring the beauty of the dress, Jongin wants her out of that dress. - instantly.

When the lace was done being undone, the dress instantly fell on the brown carpeted floor. But Jongin was in for a treat. The beautiful dress soon revealed the lingerie. - The oh-so cliche lingerie girls wear on the night of their lives, she was extremely waiting for it. (Y/N), herself was skeptical about wearing it. Thinking it was too risky, it was her friend Rose who suggested she wear the lingerie. 

After seeing the beautiful black lace corset, hugging her curves just right, paired with matching black lace thongs and black lace stockings, Jongin’s eyes and erection were in for a treat tonight. His ever-growing member stood still, having the tight feeling in his black pants. He can’t stand it. He’s so impatient… he wants to ram his not-so-little Jongin on her little pussy.

He unbuckled his black belt immediately. Then he unzipped his pants. - Barely removing it. His hard member immediately stood up. The man didn’t wear underwear, a stupid decision on his part. His member was around 8 inches long, fat and veiny, dripping with precum. Then, he grabbed something from his pocket. - A small tube of lube. “Daddy’s gotta lube up or else I can't fit it.” He had a bigger smirk in him as he started putting lube on his hard cock.

“Why can’t you have sex with me without lube? I’m wet enough daddy, am I? I want it inside of me too, not just you.” The debutant asked him. In a very seducing voice. Where did she fucking learn that from? He asked himself. Maybe from watching porn? He continued his doubts. But hot damn! She really wants him just as much as he wanted him. From the beginning, Jongin knew she’s only stopping herself from doing that.

“Sorry baby girl, but daddy’s impatient.” Before the girl could even tell him she’s a virgin, Jongin set aside her panties. He did not even have the patience to remove it. He needs a quick release. - right here, right now. It earned a high pitched moan. He flipped her over, seeing his beautiful girl. He finally inserted his very hard cock on her wet pink folds. (Y/N) is excited and scared at the same time.

(Y/N) was quick to expect pain from Jongin. Looking that he’s already so horny and his eyes are filled with lust, she closed her eyes quickly. He saw what she was doing. So he decided to carefully insert the huge cock in her. Inch by inch. He did put the lube, just for some lubrication, though she’s really wet already. “Baby girl, please don’t worry, I won’t hurt you… and damn you’re right…” Jongin affectionately said. 

Kissing her pinkish lips. It was a soft kiss, as soft as cotton candy, but the kiss was mostly tongue, she can taste the Lechon and Lechon sauce from Jongin’s mouth. He was finished drilling his cock on her tight little pussy, earning a moan from the younger woman. He started it at a devilishly slow pace. “Daddy please faster! Let’s move to the bed…” She grabbed his back that was still heavily clothed. Unlike before she doesn’t feel the sharp pain anymore.

Jongin was quick to follow, cause he’s so fucking horny, also it turns him on when she begs on him. The guy carried the woman again but to the bed this time. Her legs spread wide. Then, thrusting, he went from 1 to 100, devilishly slow to devilishly fast. She was panting from the pleasure she’s receiving. She arched her back, ‘cause holy fuck if someone can give you as good of a sex Mr. Kim Jongin can, you will arch your back no matter what. “Fuck Jongin, fuck! Daddy oh my God!” She moaned loudly, then, she could feel a knot forming on her stomach. All from this intense pleasure of course.

Jongin did not hesitate to make her cum. The girl deserves it. Since this horny bastard is still not going to cum any minute now. Even when (Y/N), his little girl - correction his wife, already spat out her sticky come and is currently riding her orgasm, the horny fuck still fucks her real good. “Daddy, I'm too sensitive!” She moaned at him as she tried to remove his coat from him. 

While still roughly thrusting into her pussy, damn! This guy has God-level stamina, he proceeded to get his hands from her back and tear his own shirt. Out of more raging impatience, he tore her panties apart too. He kicked his own pants and now he is completely naked. He started thrusting harder than ever, earning a moan from (Y/N) who was writhing with sensitivity. “Daddy, ah! Fuck, please Jongin faster”

The young lady is about to release her own come as well. “Damn I waited so long to touch you… I’ve waited three damn years to touch you” The man exclaimed. He really waited that long to actually have sex with her. - He punishes her by butt spanking, but never sex. When he’s needy, he always asks her for oral sex. When she’s the one needy, he fingers her, but never inserts his gigantic length in her.

“Fuck! You felt so good, it was all worth it!” Jongin moaned louder as the young girl digs her sharp painted nails in his back, whimpering and silently moaning his name like a mantra. Encouraging Jongin to just slam his length on her a bit harder as his pace was getting quite slow.

His cock buried deep into her slit even more. But as much as the two don’t want the fun to stop, Jongin ends up cumming on her little pussy. It also timed in with the young woman’s release, coating his monster cock “Baby…” He hugged her tightly as he flipped their positions. (Y/N) is now on top of him, his back on the comfortable mattress. With his skillful hands, he started removing the corset from her body. Unhooking it one by one, earning a moan from the young one.

“Am I really too young for you?” She asked him. She was blushing way redder than any tomatoes. Of course, she would ask that, with their unbearable age gap of 10 years. He was distracted when he saw her small boobs pop from the restraints of the corset. It was small, yes, but Jongin likes it enough. As much as he likes sexy ladies, he does not really go for the tits. He’s an ass guy. Everyone knows that for sure.

“No… baby girl, you’re just right.” Jongin kissed her boobs and started sucking on them. Just like that, he can earn a moan from her. Everything he does turns this horny bitch on. Then, he drifted on her neck, sucking it in. Since her beautifully curled hair was getting out of the way, she grabs a conveniently placed black hair tie on the Narra wood nightstand.

When her hair was sloppily tied, Jongin began planting butterfly kisses on her collarbone. Earning a moan from the little girl. He found her sensitive spot and left a hickey on the area. “Round 2?” Jongin asked, smirking, he was turned on yet again when he saw his cum dripping all over her. It was dripping all over her little pussy, Jongin was fine with it, her pussy had sparse pubic hair over it, but nothing is different. - He saw her grow in every aspect.

“Oh my God, really…” She smirked at him as she got on the other side of the bed. She grabbed one of the white pillows, laying her head on it. Then, she lifted her ass up, laying her head on the pillow, looking into Jongin’s eyes. She wanted Jongin to fuck her doggy style this time.

Jongin was immediate to respond. He stood on his knees and got on her ass. “Baby girl, wanna film ya?” He asked her in a very seducing voice, slapping her. If (Y/N) can seduce, definitely Jongin sounds like he’s a sex God or something with his seducing abilities. He’s absolutely charming indeed. That is the reason why she fell in love with him.

She immediately responded to him, smirking, “Sure daddy”, Jongin immediately grabbed his phone from the nightstand and opened his camera app. His member was showing as well as (Y/N)’s ass, which he slapped. When the video started rolling, she was moaning loudly as he thrust his member yet again in her hole. He can never get enough of her. It gained, even more, moans from the young lady.

"Daddy… Please… I'm near." The young girl begged. He thrust harder as he started rubbing her clit with his calloused fingers. She started gripping onto the bedsheet as she arched her back. Jongin growled as he could feel her g-spot. He moved his phone on the nightstand, the camera still rolling in front of them.

Her velvety pink walls clenching at every thrust he makes. "(Y/N), you're so tight… please know that I love you!" He told her as he got his cock out of her tight hole and entered his three big fingers in her little hole. He went on her back, the said fingers snaked on her hole. He started roughly thrusting his fingers back and forth on her.

Legs spread as wide as ever, (Y/N) arched her back and gripped on the silky bedsheet. Arching her back so sexily in front of the beast that is devouring her. Her eyes rolled above with so much pleasure he is giving to her. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I think I am in heaven!" Her soft yet fragile voice said. His fingers had thrust enough and just as expected, watery substance started to leak out of her pussy. It was like an explosion."Fuck! You cum so well!" Jongin expressed.

Then, he moved out. He walked in front of her as his tongue went on her pussy to leak her cum clean. "Daddy is so good with his tongue, isn't he? Ah..." (Y/N) teasingly said with a moan as her fingers ran through his silky black hair. His hands opening her legs wide. - Showing her milky thighs. When he finished licking all of her cum clean, "You're so delicious." Jongin said as he licked his fingers in front of her.

Right after he cleaned his fingers, "Are you ready?" He suddenly asked her. "Yes." She firmly answered, panting heavily on the bed. She can feel her body shaking with all the action they did.

"Let's continue, this time, privately," Jongin said with a smirk

[electronicdelusionstarlight]

We need to talk about Project AHO

Project AHO is a DLC sized quest mod for Skyrim. It has 6500+ endorsement, and almost 118K unique downloads, and promises to add a hidden Telvanni settlement, 40+ new locations, 20+ fully voiced NPCs, new perks, new weapons, a new house, all dwemer or telvanni themed, and a non linear main quest with more than 12 side quests added in.

It's also, to use a particularly abused word as of late, fucking problematic.

The Mod Page doesn't mention many details about the mod, but it sure loves to point out how complex and varied the NPCs AI is, almost like real people with real moralities and real routines.

Anyway, Due to probably a bug (Mod is not supposed to not start till level 15) and the fact the abandoned prison is close to the place where you can trigger the mod, I barelly started a new Skyrim game and gotten Kaidan as we got out of prison together, before I was REMINDED FORCIBLY just why I couldn't stand this mod in the first place back in 2018.

So, small nitpick first: the game (should) suggest you at level 15 to free your followers before going to Mixwater Mill since they may cause bugs if they are mixed in the mod. This is bad for roleplaying reason since why would you logically decide to go there alone (want to buy some wood for your new house and you want to surprise them, so they wait you home?), but I would get beyond it if the rest of the Mod hadn't been... about that.

That being said, here's the meat of the issue:

If you reach the Mill after level 15, possibly with no follower, a Orc will approach you. Exiting his dialogue will only trigger the end of the scene early, he's essential, and whatever you do, whatever happens, whatever you say to him about his quest, what happens next is unavoidable.

He starts to hype you up with Trinimac and Daggerfall lore, which got me pretty excited at first when I played the mod for the first time, since, again, they only mentioned this being about a Hidden Telvanni settlement built over a Dwemer Ruin in the rift, so I thought the mod was going to be about the Boethia - Triminac Vore and Scat party that gave us the Dunmer and the Orcs, at least tangentially, so I go for the excited, eager to help dialogue route with him as he talks about epic quests and shit, except after we reach the last line, he goes something like "actually, this was all a diversion for having my mates sneak behind you and knock you out."

You are knocked out. No one can help you, you can do nothing to stop it, you can't even fight or talk or teleport your way out of it. It's scripted and it's unavoidable.

Next thing you know, you wake up in a cramped cell in prisoners rags, a mind control amulet at your neck, and 4 other prisoners.

Which is when the slave auction starts.

Project AHO is a mod about slavery. Is a mod about the Last Dragonborn, away from their loved ones, is tricked, ambushed and captured by a secret settlement of Telvanni wizards, before getting sold at a fucking slave auction.

And then, after all is said and done, after you’ve literally getting enslaved by Neloth 2.0, forced to fulfill tasks for him as the game, very pointedly, tries to make you empathize with this FUCKING SLAVERS via side quests (Oh, the daughter of the local hunter wants to travel the world and have adventures, and you can have a nice and friendly pint of beer with the fucking SLAVE CATCHER that captured you, and you meet another slave who didn’t get his tongue cut out, unlike most of the other ones in the bloody place, how nice, how fucking human of them), the game has the fucking AUDACITY to have the fucking leader of the settlement free you (not out of anything, but because your master is doing shady shit on the side and has kicked you out of his mansion after the last task), and then go, after you understandably ask why the FUCK shouldn’t you burn the place to the ground: “Oh, but slavery is such an important and integral part of our culture and economy, we dunmer will never change and will always have slaves so why should you bother, you are free now!”

This mod. In a escapist fucking game such as Skyrim. Is bad. Is REALLY bad.

Even putting aside the obvious lore reasons (Morrowind abolished slavery 200+ years ago under House Hlaalu, and even if they lynched them for it they are STILL not having slavery today), or the whole “Ah, the empire and the thalmor and the stormcloak know about this and they support us behind the scenes, in fact some of them partecipated at the auction you were on, there is a prosperous slave trade all over Tamriel!” bullshit, the whole thing is:

1) IN POOR FUCKING TASTE.

2) SERIOUSLY, WHO THE FUCK WANTS TO PLAY THIS? SLAVE SIMULATOR FOR HALF THE QUEST MOD, GO DO MINDLESS FETCH QUESTS FOR YOU MASTER, YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO DO ANYTHING BY YOURSELF, YOU HAVE TO CLEAN THE CELL OF ANOTHER SLAVE THAT COULDN’T SURVIVE HIS EXPERIMENTS, THIS IS FUCKING BAD.

3) THE FUCKING... MIND CONTROL AMULET ROBBING YOU OF ANY AGENCY? YOU CANNOT KILL NOR ATTACK NOR DO ANYTHING TILL YOU REMOVE IT AND YOU CAN’T REMOVE IT TILL HALF THE GAME SO WHAT WAS PRESENTED AS A “NON LINEAR MAIN QUEST” IS ACTUALLY A RAILROADED BULLSHIT TOWARD A MAJOR CHOICE BETWEEN RAZING THE SETTLEMENT TO THE GROUND WITH A SPACESHIP OR LETTING THE SETTLEMENT BE (YOU KNOW, CLASSIC BETHESDA MORAL DILEMMA, EXCEPT THE SETTLEMENT IS FILLED WITH SLAVERS AND SLAVES)

Which is sad because the aesthetic and some of the shit added to this are pretty cool overall, there is a “Dwemer Chess Board” thing that is missing some pieces that you can collect through the settlement and after you get them all and place them on the board you get a perk on team fighting, which would be a nice thing to have in a mod if it wasn’t for, again, the FUCKING SLAVERY!

Like, fuck, just imagine the slave auction:

Scripted scene, you can’t do anything, you are marched with the other slaves to a stage, the orc guy is the auction master, he sells:

1) The first slave, a vampire, to your future master.

2) Then an argonian young woman (”Plucked fresh from the windhelm docks” they say, and they sell her to some noble dude as his “new handmaiden,” which is SO FUCKING CREEPY ON SO MANY LEVELS LIKE... Even if you put aside the prospect of knowing her from the docks both in and out of universe (There is a potential Argonian spouse at the windhelm docks after all), this is bad? SO SO FUCKING BAD? BY ALL POSSIBLE ANGLES?)

3) Then they can’t sell a 50 year old argonian dude so they go “remove lot number 3 from the auction blog) and they gut him right in front of me??? By then going “he’ll make a good purse” because HOLY FUCK?????

4) Then you get sold in a auction battle between Neloth 2.0 but shittier and the local blacksmith, both locals (this, again, after mentioning that if you get sold to a local they’ll cut your tongue out), and you then get sold to Neloth 2.0 but shittier...

You can’t fucking stop any of this. You can’t do a “destroy the dark brotherhood” questline, you can’t prevent the kidnapping, even if you go out the city, some dumb magic will stop you from revealing its location to the competent authorities, who, again, are actually in cahoots with the slavers, so it’s not like they’d help!

And the mod clearly tries to make you, again, empathize and understand the fucking SLAVERS and their fucking position as SLAVERS like some BULLSHIT because fucking CENTRISM or some shit and REALLY?

So... to end this shit: Project AHO? Is some sort of weird, borderline feticistic mod about dunmers still being slavers and fucking rolling with it. It breaks canon and lore (after presenting itself as a mod that explores and faithfully depicts the lore), has a very railroady main quest after, again, mentioning its non linear path, and, agAIN, TRIES REALLY HARD TO MAKE YOU EMPATHIZE WITH THOSE BASTARDS.

So, I give it a 2 BB8s out of 10 for the dumb star wars reference companion, if you want to play it be fucking warned by its content.

[cuntess-carmilla]

Update: I stopped taking psychiatric medication because they turned out to have only ever been of “help” because I have POTS/dysautonomia and one made my blood pressure rise (Wellbutrin) while the other kept it from going up too high (Lamotrigine).

Now that I’m taking meds that are for what I ACTUALLY do have (POTS/dysautonomia) not only do I not need the psychiatric meds, but they were throwing off everything else. I hate psychiatry so much. Can’t believe I turned out to be one of those people who had their physical illness mistreated as You’re Crazy for years haha. :) With that out of the way...

Some Many of my Opinions™ on psychiatry, as a psychiatrized person myself who does take medication, but hates the institutions of psychiatry and psychology, and thinks a large chunk of it is white pseudo-science:

A good amount of the issues that the psychiatric institution addresses ARE absolutely real and, as a society, people who’re afflicted by them should by all means receive help and support so they can live happier lives. I experience many of them and take medication to help myself, I obviously don’t think the difficult experiences people seek help for are made up.

At the same time, psychiatry and psychology as disciplines ARE made up (like every other discipline), making them not infallible or objective, AND they were built on eugenics, patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalist exploitation.

Those very real issues addressed by psychology/psychiatry aren’t actual literal pathologies. They don’t need to be literal tangible sicknesses in order to matter or be deserving of help and compassion. Your literal brain as a bodily organ is not physically “ill”, at least in most cases. It doesn’t need to be for your problems associated with an “ill mind” to be real and to matter. Remember, these disciplines were created at a time in history in which (white, male) doctors and theorists were obsessed with turning everything into a material, scientifically tangible subject that could be objectively measured with numbers and shit, hopefully medicalized or otherwise turned into “hard science”. That’s where ethnography came from. It’s called positivism, which is extremely dehumanizing, white supremacist and capitalist.

Psychology should be largely considered as much more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as objective science, which is how most people perceive it to be. It’s mostly pure theory about emotions, thoughts, cognition, relationships and subjective experiences + perceptions -- which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on itself. It not being hard science doesn’t immediately delegitimize it. Get rid of the white capitalist idea that only (western, white) science and “objectivity” are real or of value. Actually, holding psychology to the standards of hard science turns it into pseudo-science, so... Yeah. I genuinely think we’d get so much further As A Society™ regarding psychology's potential to aid people who’re suffering if we treated it as more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as some objective scientific truth.

Psychiatrists often are super ignorant of the actual way the medications they prescribe work or affect patients lmao. I had that almost ruin a whole semester at college because a shrink prescribed me meds that in combination she should’ve known would fuck me up. Not that much is known about how the human brain truly works compared to other human organs, you can’t expect psychiatric meds to be well tried and true. The research on psychiatric pharmacy is very lacking + biased in favor of pathologizing and controlling psychiatrized people, besides attempting to make the most profit under capitalism like any other capitalist industry, so of course they’re gonna prescribe you shit. Plus, like doctors of every other field, many psychiatrists arrogantly disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients, who’re the ones taking those meds.

Psychologists/therapists, just like psychiatrists, also disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients.

There’s such a strong element of power imbalance in how psychiatry and psychology function. The more a patient knows formal information about anything related to psychology/psychiatry, the more the shrink can get upset, distrustful and dismissive of them, saying they’re faking it, or telling them “not to do their jobs” when they so often do said jobs like shit anyway lmao no matter how thorough the research and understanding of the patient is.

Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses are just as made up as any other human construct (such as language, race, gender, etc). They’re not tangible realities as if shrinks had ran into a previously unknown objective fact of nature. In the realm of psychology, someone takes a bunch of traits and behaviors that by their observation they consider to be interconnected with one another, put them in the same bag, stick a label to said bag, and ask other psychologists if they agree with the bag being a thing. These considerations are heavily influenced by sociocultural bias. You can’t tell me it isn’t true that they’re made up and very subjective when “diagnoses” such as drapetomania, hysteria, homosexuality, gender identity disorder, etc, have been seriously considered at least by part of the psychiatric establishment of their times as legitimate mental disorders. Hell, some still consider being gay or trans to be mental disorders. Don’t get me started on "Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, that shit’s just evil.

A lot of the ideas spread by the psychiatric-psychological institution are legit pseudo-science that researches try time and time again to prove and end up coming with nothing, or they end up tweaking their own research or conclusions to maintain the established consensus that just so turns out to be very convenient to the people who make and sell psychiatric meds.

Many of the traits, emotions, thoughts, perceptions and behaviors that are pathologized by psychiatry and psychology aren’t inherently harmful. If they don’t make the patient or others suffer by their very nature (as opposed to like, homophobic parents “suffering” because their child is gay or a gay person suffering because of homophobia) then there’s no need to alter them. “Correcting” them is a measure of social control that crushes individuality and only attempts to mold people into obedient ~productive~ servants of capitalism. Much of psychiatric medical treatment (not just the diagnoses and therapies themselves) focuses on turning the patient into less of a social “burden”, than on their actual happiness. That’s why you have ADHD and autistic kids being given meds that turn them into zombies and that's been considered a good thing for DECADES. Like, why does the stimming of an autistic person or an “unusual” attachment to stuffed animals as an autistic adult have to be corrected? WHOMST does that harm? Nobody! But it makes allistics uncomfortable because allistics are fucking stupid and can’t mind their God damned business to save their lives like normal people do.

Even non-pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatrized conditions are or can be turned into measures of social control. 

Maybe CBT wasn’t meant to be a tool to control people and shit, but it can be misused as such SO easily! It can go from being therapy to help individuals process inner pain and redirect harmful behaviors in positive ways, to being turned into training someone to react, feel and process abuse and oppression in ways that are convenient to the status quo. 

Don’t get me fucking started on ABA as an inherently oppressive, abusive “treatment” for a psychiatrized condition that does nothing to actually better the lives of autistic people, instead punishing autistic traits, teaching autistic people to painfully repress said traits and ignore their needs, and seeking to appease allistics by prioritizing their convenience and subjective comfort.

Behaviors, emotions, perceptions or traits that on a man or white person would be considered a non-issue or given much more compassionate/less stigmatized diagnoses, are pathologized or given much more stigmatized diagnoses when it comes to female or racialized patients, which reaffirms psychiatry and psychology as subjective tools of social control.

While many of the traits, emotions, perceptions and behaviors of what are considered personality disorders are painful, harmful and real (and thus should be helped, with consent, not hammered down), literal personalities aren’t “ill”. They’re personalities. Pathologizing or medicalizing a fucking personality on itself is ridiculous. It is possible to address those problematic traits/behaviors/etc without saying that a fucking personality is “ill”. So much for “you’re not your disorder”.

What shrinks will deem as hallucinations or delusions can be subjective, and it definitely can be deemed as such out of white-centric cultural bias. Plenty of non-white cultures have considered different perceptions of reality as valid and worthy of respect for centuries, at times related to their sense of spirituality. Not to mention how psychiatry has deemed the real anxieties of oppressed people that they’re being followed, spied on, plotted against and all that, as hallucinations or delusions in order to discredit them.

Many patients are given medication to try to alleviate traits/behaviors/emotions that come from circumstance (poverty, ongoing abuse, trauma, oppression...) instead of addressing the root problems. While I 100% understand using medication as a palliative measure because, bitch, you can’t always fix those problems and you still have a life to live (the same way I take clotiazepam when the insensitivity of the allistics around me causes me sensory overload), this puts the burden of the person’s situation on their own body, as if their body was the essential source of a suffering that comes from outside forces they’re not responsible or in control of. This should ideally be addressed through material change in realities that can be individual (removing the person from an abusive situation, giving economic aid, giving proper treatment to an untreated chronic illness) or social (abolishing white supremacy, the patriarchy, capitalism, etc).

So many times when palliative medical treatments for suffering that comes from circumstances don’t work (BECAUSE THE PATIENT IS STILL TRAPPED IN SAID CIRCUMSTANCES, HELLO?) it’s blamed on a supposed defect of the patient’s body/brain rather than, like... You can give me as many anti-depressants as you want but I’m still gonna be miserable if I’m being abused or suffering from unending physical chronic pain lol. And then, instead of at least having the decency of recognizing the real source of the problem if your shrink can’t realistically fix it, they keep trying more and more different meds on you like you’re a fucking lab rat, keeping on blaming a made up defect you were “born” with. Imagine what that does to a person’s self-image! At least when I loathe my body for the chronic pain, chronic fatigue and more that my chronic illnesses give me, it IS actually true that it’s my body that has a defect that can’t be cured. Why convince a person in suffering due to anything, but especially when it’s due to outside conditions out of their control and your job is fucking supposed to be to help them be happier, that their pain refuses to respond to treatment because their BRAIN is so terribly defective? I don’t wish the hatred I hold for my objectively shitty body on anyone, and causing that to someone when it’s not even true...? Incredible.

Lots of genuine difficulties associated with psychiatric diagnoses are much better helped through accessibility and material considerations, or at least through teaching the patient pragmatic methods to better deal with those, than through pills. But guess what solution shrinks usually give you. Hint: it’s easier for them and they can charge you for it monthly.

Society™ medicalized emotions, bro... WE MEDICALIZED FEELINGS!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!

[marvelous-imagining]

Wrong

Hey, everyone! I realized after posting this on my Wattpad account that I completely forgot to post it here on Tumblr as well and I think you guys have the right to read this too if you so please.

Basically, to put it as short as I can, I still see people liking this series and it makes me feel bad that I never finished it. I still won’t, so don’t get your hopes up. Also, sorry about that as well... But I explained in my Farewell post why I won’t be writing here anymore. Nothing about that will change. But I can share what I had planned for Wrong specifically. Writing all this down kind of gave me an odd sense of closure since I did feel a bit bad for never finishing it when I had some things planned. I had some key plot points along with the ending somewhat figured out and wanted to share them with those who might be interested to know how it all could have ended. I hope it’s not too disappointing, haha.

But anyway, without further ado, here we go...

(the rest is pretty much copy-pasted from Wattpad)

So, we left off with Chris's POV in Part 12. We saw Reina, she seems to be an ok person, right? Well I had a lot planned for Reina.

1. She's controlling. Throughout the story I wanted to bring that out more. She's asking (more demanding) Chris to shave, she would have had a lot to say about the way he dresses, the amount of exercise he does (too much but he does it to destress especially if reader isn't around to help him with that ayoooo), just wants to control him in every way possible, even with the smallest of things

2. She's after that perfect suburban married couple life who will have a couple of kids who will go to great schools and grow up very prim and proper. She never got that calm family life, her parents weren't the happiest and she was an only child. Growing up in her household was a bit rough for her and her relationship with her parents still affects her. She also works in her father's company because she was practically forced to. She can't escape her family in that way so she tries to recreate her fantasies of a perfect life with Chris to no avail.

3. There's a point in time she starts getting more and more interested in sex with Chris. He's not really feeling it because it all feels so forced and also he can't stop thinking about the whole situation with the reader. He's torn between his affair and wanting to make things work with his wife because he has once convinced himself that he wants the same things as Reina. He's also scared of divorcing her because he has once swore to love her and be with her forever and they were in love. truly. not anymore though. but anyway, so they become more sexually active in the relationship. chris might cut ties with reader during this time once again only to realize he has tasted that forbidden fruit that is the reader and now cannot be satisfied with his wife anymore. sexually or emotionally. he needs more of that forbidden fruit. sin tastes and feels so amazing although it's so wrong.

4. Reina gets pregnant. And at this point Chris and Y/N are back at it again, affair going strong. The news really shock Chris, the pregnancy wasn't planned. Chris had begun to lean more towards the decision to divorce once again but this whole pregnancy throws him off. He has a little one on the way now. So he meets with Y/N not too long after and breaks the news. Y/N can see he's distraught, maybe even felt it from the way he acted in bed because of course problems in this story would be attempted to be fixed by sex because we love that problematic way of dealing with emotions, don't we? nobody ever said this wouldn't be problematic. so obviously both are torn, they don't want to leave the other but.... chris has to think about his family.... and the whole thing with them being in a professor/student relationship

5. after some time it comes to light that the kid is actually not chris's but a coworker of Reina's who she had been cheating on Chris with for years. (hence the sudden desperation for sex that followed afterwards to prevent chris from getting suspicious) Reina married Chris to please her parents pretty much, their fathers were business partners, planning on using each other for profit and all that business stuff for having their families intertwine like that. Reina never really wanted to marry chris, they did have their time in love and everything but this coworker of hers was actually her one true love from her younger years. he married someone too but the two kept seeing each other nearly every day, the feelings never went away, they ended up caving many many many times. and yeah, chris is not the biological father. obviously this will cause a huge fight. they will eventually separate, and a divorce will happen. 100%. and reina will find out about chris and y/n... and though she is bitter this college girl stole chris's heart who she wants to blame the whole problem on, she decides to stay quiet about the whole thing. she knows she's wronged chris and she has no business trying to ruin his career or cause him more pain. she knows she's done awful things, she can't really take it out on him. she will probably threaten them with the knowledge at first but decide against it, even show them she won't say anything. she still is not fond of y/n. she also ends up with the father of her child. they are growing a family together now.

Now..... timelines will be a bit mixed up here, so this next thing would have come before the whole pregnancy thing.

So the thing between Y/N and Chris continues, they have many talks about stopping, maybe at this point they would have just agreed on a break or sth and they actually end up meeting in a company party. because surprise surprise, Y/N's mother is actually working in Reina's father's company. She works above Reina, so she's her senior/superior. They don't really work together that much but they are acquainted and friendly. Y/N and Chris will both be there for the party and it will be very uncomfortable. A conversation about Y/N studying in the same college that Chris works at comes up and there'll will be a lot of comments from both Y/N's parents and Reina that hit very different when you know about the affair. like "I hope our daughter hasn't been troubling you." and "Well, I hope in return my husband has been treating you well."

on top of all of that y/n might be struck with some jealousy and actually tease chris in very sneaky ways. maybe there's some finger foods she's eating in seductive ways, maybe she's flirting with some interns and sending glances at chris to make sure he's watching. she's taking the risks and it's making her all the more excited. this relationship is very exciting, thrilling for both of them.

chris will walk up to y/n and her parents and ask for permission to talk to y/n about certain school stuff that he "has been meaning to talk to her about but haven't had the time". and now that reina is mingling, he found the right timing to snatch you away. he's also apologizing for the inconvenience.

turns out y/n's dad is actually quite fond of chris, saying how nice of a man he is and senses nothing iffy in his behavior.

they may or may not have a little fun in a public bathroom and create rumors that reach reina's ears that she brings up to chris later on. nobody spilled the beans on who those two were, they weren't fully seen.

she will realize through her jealousy that she actually wants something more with chris but him being married and all is what complicates things. he, after cheating on his wife with y/n in the company party of his father-in-law's, realizes just how risky this whole affair is, but realizes he has no intentions to stop. he want's y/n real bad. he's in deep, just like she is.

so there are connections. small world, isn't it?

but anyway, to the finishing line of his story.

chris divorces his wife. he meets with y/n again after a while of not being in contact, after thinking some things through. they love each other deeply but they've both been through so much during their affair as have other people around them. chris has gone through a divorce, he had been preparing for a child that ended up not being his in the end, he's battled with not taking control of his life and following his long forgotten dreams. all throughout this story, he would have been writing a story himself about the whole thing. a little romanticized, dramatized (though the story in itself is already filled with drama) but most importantly he's gotten his inspiration back, y/n woke something in him that got him writing again. she had become his muse, someone who nearly possessed his mind... obviously the whole connection between these two is problematic and.... toxic in a way??? like i think we can all agree this isn't the healthiest of relationships. there's a lot of back and forth, hot and cold, breakups and makeups, the fact that it's frowned upon/illegal due to chris being y/n's professor, chris cheating on his wife with her which she is just enabling.... also this situation has not helped her education at all and in turn made things a but worse... it's messy and causing a lot of distress for both parties. they end up separating as well. it will be hard for both of them. chris will do most of the talking, explaining how this is not the right time for them to start a proper relationship after everything they've both gone through. he's explaining her how she needs to focus on her studies, he doesn't want to sabotage her future and he needs to give his dreams a shot once more. he's moving away after the semester ends, he's starting off new and he hopes she will do the same. obviously the whole night will be emotional, romantic yet sad... there's a lot of pain but also a lot of love for each other. and they end up separating, not contacting each other again.

years go by and finally y/n graduates. she finds out that there is a book signing event from none other than chris. he's finally published a book and it has brought quite a lot of attention. it's nothing too big for now but a spike in sales and popularity has been talked about. she's brought back to her time with him and can't help but feel proud that he's finally doing something he's wanted to do for a long time. he's written a book that will become successful. though romanticized in some parts still a very raw story about love, family, career and affairs (maybe even midlife-crisis) that doesn't sugarcoat things. obviously characters, the setting and much else have been changed to not reveal too much of what happened in real life. i'm thinking even occupations of the characters would be changed, it won't be a professor/student relationship but still an almost boss/employee one... or maybe better described as senior/junior... idk didn't think that far..... but anyway...

she's very happy for him but also curious to how the book turned out, curious to know what was going on inside his mind when they had their affair. she gets the book, curiosity becoming too much for her to bear.

so she reads the book. probably won't be too fond of some of the things written but recognizes the beautifully written raw emotions and feelings and feels the depth of them. she sheds many tears while reading the book, realizing how deeply he truly loved her. her heart clenches at the memory of him, of everything they went through. she realizes she still holds him dear to her heart. and she has nothing romantic going on for her right now, she's wondering how his situation is. based on what she read she is hopeful he still feels the same somewhat. i mean, it's been years and he book is being published only just now... she's trying to make sense of why he would still be interested.... but without thinking about it much further, she decides to go to the event, ask for her book to be signed.

she's nervous obviously, waiting until the last of the people have gotten their books signed. just as chris is wrapping up and starting to leave, y/n walks up to him and nicely asks for him to do one more signature. he immediately recognizes her voice. though it's been years, his writing has kept it alive. every time he described her voice, he could hear it in his head. you had stayed to haunt him even after all this time.

the two will catch up, fidgeting awkwardly. it's been years, jumping right into each other's embrace would be quite weird and awkward for them. they still kind of want to do that... but anyway they keep it all civil and everything but end up agreeing to meeting up for dinner or something. they will be going for dinner and on the drive be talking and catching up but during the ride their plans change. though both of them wanted to take it slow and be careful, they just cannot wait. they go up to either one of their apartments or a hotel room one of them is staying at (didn't think where this event would be held) and just go at it. it'll be passionate, emotional... they will take their time, make sure to show each other how they truly feel when they've never really been experts at communicating verbally, but no need to worry, they'll learn in time.

it will end with them sharing their want to take things slow but throwing that out of the window. they finally have the chance to be together, they want to get right on it. jokes will be made about moving fast, even a quick vegas wedding might be brought up only to be challenged with a "ok, maybe take things just a liiiiiitle bit slower"

but yeah so in the end they do end up together. that's what i had planned for the story. i hope you liked it, i'm sorry if you didn't. i know how bothersome it can be to have a story you like be left completely unfinished with no closure but i hope you find some closure in this if that's what you were missing. i know it's not written in the best way possible, but it gives you the gist of how the story would end if i finished it. if you have any questions, let me know and i'll see if i can answer them.

i'm sorry for those of you who wanted this story to be continued. that sadly won't be happening from me. if any of you want to give this story a go, to put your own little twists into it, you have my permission. just remember if you decide to continue the story, or you're inspired to write something based on any of my stories, remember to give credit when credit is due. and with all of that said do what you want with this permission.

again, i hope this brought some closure to those who were seeking it. thank you for reading and voting for Wrong. It is a shame I can't quite put it into story form anymore. But I feel like even I got some closure from sharing what I had in store for you guys. Now I can let it rest with no remorse.

[accio-kitty-malfoy]

New Fic

So, I got inspiration and started writing. It doesn’t have a title yet and the first chapter is relatively short, but I think I like the direction it’s taking itself in.

Please give me honest feedback. If I have written anything that you deem problematic please let me know and give me ways I can change it to improve it.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24633025/chapters/59514043

Rain pattered against the window. The sun had been blazing for two weeks without reprieve and everyone and The Burrow had been begging for even a small amount of rain or cool air. Mr Weasley was worried that his carrots, potatoes and rhubarb were going to shrivel up and his crop would be ruined, despite the watering charms he had put on them (he insisted that natural water was always better). Mrs Weasley was fretting about the heat ruining the cake she’d been painstakingly making for Ron and Hermione’s wedding and she swore that she was certain she’d seen one of the chickens faint. Hermione’s lists were practically disintegrating when touched and Ron had managed to get the worst sunburn Harry had ever seen. Ginny had been trying to practice for the Holyhead Harpies try-outs, but the ground had become hard and uncooperative and her hand were covered in blisters. Explosions and swearing could be heard frequently from the shed that George had built to start re-working on the Wheezes’ products, but he was adamant that the heat was making the magic temperamental. Harry helped everyone where he could, and it kept him busy.

 He was helping Ginny train when the rain came. He felt one drop at first, then another, and another. Then there was a torrential downpour and both him and Ginny stood where them were, shocked. The ground soon turned slippery with sludge and they both took the rare opportunity to let their inner child take over and they began pushing each other into the mud. When their sides ached from laughing and Ginny’s hair was brown from the mud, they went back inside. Harry had gratefully accepted a cup of tea and small plate of biscuits off Molly after a quick shower and Ginny had gone for a long soak in the bath that Harry had put on to run.

 The last few years had been hard. The war had ended, and they’d all grieved in their own ways. Molly had tried to keep everyone as close to her as possible. She had cried for days when Fleur and Bill had moved back to the cottage; believing that they were abandoning her. After a while she began to understand that they needed their space to heal and to try and be a married couple again. Ron and Hermione decided to stay at the Burrow under the condition that when they were married, they would move out. They’d been planning and building a small bungalow not far from The Burrow. Hermione and Ron had done the planning (Ron had drawn it all out) and they’d had help with the building from Dean and Seamus who had formed a construction business, gotten married to one another and adopted an ex racing Greyhound called Noodle. Neville had designed and planted a garden and small orchard.

 Charlie had stayed at The Burrow for the first year, then he’d gone back to Romania to begin rebuilding the Dragon Sanctuary. It had taken George the previous three years to heal enough to begin working on the Wheezes’ products again. He’d been dating Angelina for a year and he split his time between The Burrow and her flat in London. Harry had graciously accepted Molly’s offer to live with them at The Burrow. Technically he was the owner of both Grimmauld place and Godric’s Hollow, but he just didn’t have the drive to fix either of them up or face the memories that they held. Ginny and Harry had tried being a couple again for a while after the war, but they came to the realisation that they just weren’t right for one another. They loved each other, but they were not in love. Ginny devoted her time and passion to Quidditch, and she was better than Harry could ever have hoped to have been.

 The rain slowed steadily as Harry finished his cup of tea, nestled in the reading nook by the bay windows in the front room. He flicked his eyes to the door as Hermione walked into the room. She let him know that Molly was putting the food out on the table for dinner, then went to find everyone else. Ron was already in the kitchen, helping Molly set the table. He’d grown very fond of cooking after leaving Hogwarts and it was something that he loved doing alongside his mother. They’d made a pea and mint soup with fresh bread and pavlova with home grown berries for after. The family emerged from where they’d been working and relaxing and filed into the kitchen. They’d finally extended it using plans that Ron had drawn up the summer before. It made it much easier to fit everyone in and gave Molly more space to cook. It also had a magically enhanced pantry that kept each item of food in the specific conditions it needed to be in. The table and benches extended or shrunk depending on how many people needed to sit on it and spills magically disappeared. It was also fire resistant, which came in handy when Dean and Seamus stayed with them for a couple of months while their house was being finished.

 Ginny was the last person to enter the kitchen. She was wearing A tank top and shorts; her muscles twisting and tensing as she moved. Her waist length red hair was scraped back into a messy bun that flopped as she plopped herself down onto the bench next to Harry.

“Thanks for the muscle potion in the bath, my shoulders were killing me” She smiled at him before hungrily tearing off a chunk of bread and dunking it into the bright green soup. Harry smiled back and followed suit. The conversation flowed easily between the family. Ron and Hermione updated Molly about the finalisations of the wedding that was going to be held in three days’ time. Fleur and Bill were expected the next day and other guests would be arriving in the days after. Charlie was arriving late that evening due to an appointment he had that day. Arthur was thrilled that his garden had had a good watering and George was telling him about the breakthrough he’d had with a few of his products that day.

 After dinner Harry made himself another tea and went and sat outside. He was happy. He was at peace. But he knew that he would have to do something soon. He was growing bored of his nice existence. He knew he would have to get a job at some point and decide where he wanted to live. He had the choice of two inherited houses, or he could easily afford a flat, or even get Ron to draw up some plans for Dean and Seamus to build him a house. It was something to consider in the future. He knew that he couldn’t live off his inheritance and Molly’s kindness his whole life. He sighed and leaned back, cradling his tea between his hands. Ginny’s voice came from behind a nearby tree.

“You going to drink that, Potter, or just cradle it until it goes cold like you usually do?” She smirked and sat next to him. “Harry?” He looked up into her face. She looked apprehensive and took a deep breath. “I need you to do me a favour.”

“Sure, Gin, what is it?” His brow furrowed slightly, concern edging in.

“First I need to tell you something.” She sucked in another breath as if to steady the words that she was just about to say. “I’m not a girl. Harry, I think I’m non-binary. Or gender fluid. I haven’t quite figured it out yet.” Ginny dropped their eyes downwards and swallowed.

“Okay Gin,” Harry replied, “So what’s the favour?”

“I want you to cut my hair short. You’ve cut everyone’s hair in this house and it always looks awesome. Even Hermione’s, and you know she’s very particular about her hair, especially after the hairdresser that ‘specialised in black people’s hair’ messed it up so bad. I never thought she’d let anyone touch it ever again.”

“’Course I will Gin. How do you want it? We can have so much fun with it!” Harry could feel the excitement tingling at him.

“I’ll sleep on it. I want something edgy and awesome. Maybe some kind of quiff.” And they said that, they laid their head on Harry’s shoulder, contemplating different hair styles. He wrapped his arm around their waist and sipped at his tea. It was cold.

[smythesm]

You and I Were Fireworks- Fourth of July Weekend, 2020.

Para: - You and I Were Fireworks

Rating: PG.

Pairing: Seblaine.

When: Fourth of July Weekend, 2020

Location: Smythe Family Lake house, Ohio.

Notes: Sebastian and Blaine get a much needed escape from Massachusetts for some Summer fun. Sebastian’s favorite time of the year.

Warnings: A nice little calm before the oncoming storm. ;)

Sebastian's POV:

Sebastian’s family owned a lake house a few hours away from Westerville. He grew up going to the lake at least twice every summer (if he were in the states, of course.) and his father regularly went on fishing trips with his brothers there (Sebastian was never interested. He tried fishing once when he was 9 and almost threw up when he saw the worms.) Over the years, The Smythe’s had celebrated the 4th of July at the lake house off and on. It was always a giant bash filled with Sparkler burnt fingertips and ice cold lemonade. This year, Sabine decided to make a weekend out of it since the 4th happened to fall on a Saturday. She had invited Sebastian and Blaine and other random family members most of which he couldn’t care less about (none of the Aunts would be there, they were going on a ‘Wine Weekend’ Thank GOD.) . 

What he did care about was fireworks, the smell of charcoal in the air, the sun soaking into his skin, and his feet floating in cold water. Seb loved Independence day though it didn’t really have anything to do with patriotism. It had to do with summer, melted popsicles, grilled hamburgers with heaps of charred cheese, campfires and gooey marshmallows, the scent of heat soaked asphalt mixed with sunscreen. He was a child of summer, his skin glowed when the sun touched it and he didn’t have to wear much clothing if he didn’t want to because it was always hot. No sweatshirts, or blankets, or socks. The 4th of July as the most sun drenched, sticky summer day of the year and Sebastian loved that feeling. 

 He was excited for Blaine to see the property. The house basically floated on the water, had an open bay where they kept the boat, a dock, and a spacious wrap around porch. The house was surrounded by trees and yellow flowers in the front that complemented its grey color. The lake itself  was basically the backyard and seemed to stretch on forever. It was everything that his boyfriend loved. Sebastian even surprised the other man with some new amber colored jars so that he could collect lake water and sand when the others weren’t around. 

Blaine and Sebastian drove to Ohio with Enjolras. They took turns driving, stopped for lots of snacks and to let Ras walk around, and they only bickered over the blue tooth once. Blaine sang almost every song that played and even talked Seb into singing a little bit. Blaine had kept Ras calm with his vibes and the pup sat in the back seat calmly and happily looking out the window as other cars and buildings and green grassy fields flew by. 

It was a successful trip and they arrived in the evening in time for dinner on Friday night. It looked like Wick and Luke, Sebastian’s most un problematic Uncle and little cousin were there along with other random cousins and family friends of Thomas. Sebastian never felt much appreciation for his family, except for his mother. But, since meeting Blaine, he had a newfound gratitude for some of them. His boyfriend loved Wick and Luke and he liked to attend social events, since he didn’t really do anything besides magical  business or arguing with his own father. Which wasn’t very different for Seb (minus the magic) but, at least he had his mother and his Uncle Wick and Luke.

Blaine’s POV:

Sabine inviting Sebastian and himself to Ohio couldn’t have come at a better time for Blaine, it was also the cause of a rather emotional argument. Tensions had already been  rising between him and his father at LeFay and Blaine’s anxieties and fears were beginning to catch up to him. He hated the bickering and the knowing, frustrated looks Will Anderson threw at him every time he mentioned that he had some sort of gig or that he wouldn’t be back for the night for some reason or another. He hated it even more when Will threw Sebastian, without saying his boyfriends name, back into his face. He could still hear the echoes of his father’s voice when he told him he wouldn’t be home much this weekend. 

You must really think I’m stupid, Blaine. I know where you go. I know who you’re seeing and I know what he is. Blaine had given him a firm head shake and an even firmer proclamation that he didn’t know what the hell Will was talking about. Blaine’s hands had shook, and his voice grew thick when he’d spoken, but he stood his ground. For his part,  Will had thrown his hands up, yelled a few more things about Blaine’s life being worth more than some silly fling and then, and this still surprised Blaine, his father’s words cut off like he didn’t have any steam left in him and he looked for a moment like his face might break into tears before turning away from Blaine and waving a dismissive hand at him. Mumbling for him to just be safe. Blaine quietly promised he’d check in to keep himself from getting into trouble again and left the room. As Blaine packed for the trip, he had to wonder if Will knew that, even though it was supposed to be impossible, Sebastian was his Fate. His soul mate. That he was so much more than a fling. 

Blaine tried his best not to ponder too hard about this or else it would eat him up the whole weekend and that was the last thing he needed. He needed to calm down and relax, he needed to not think about LeFay or his father’s haunted face as he spoke about Sebastian and Blaine. He needed to focus on this trip, and being away and spending time with people that didn’t make him feel like he was an awful person for being in love. It made him feel selfish and guilty because he could still see that look in his dads eye and it reminded him just a bit of when his mom died but… he pushed it away and replaced his worries with an easy, warm smile and embrace for Sabine, a firm handshake accompanied by a clap on the shoulder for Thomas, open laughter for Wick and Luke and a wide eyed wonder over the enchanting slice of nature that was the Smythe family lake house. He made a promise to himself to tell Seb about his worries and the argument with his dad later, but for now he needed this peace. Besides, he had a few new lovely jars that needed to be filled and he didn’t want to tarnish their trip and Seb’s gift with a melancholy memory. 

The dinner had gone by fast, the night ending with drinks for the adults by the fire, Sebastian had even relaxed enough and rested his head on Blaine’s shoulder, and there were sparklers for the younger ones. There was an openness among the family that seemed to be missing from the two Thanksgivings Blaine had spent with the Smythe’s and he wondered if it might have to do with the absences of the infamous Aunts. The night ended slowly and they fell asleep in a room with open windows, and lake breeze reminding him of their first trip to the island together. They fell asleep wrapped around each other with Ras snuggled at their feet and he could feel that Freya, sneakily, was nearby keeping watch. 

The next morning brought fresh fruits and rich coffee for breakfast and a warm Summer breeze rustling through full green trees sending ripples throughout the massive lake. The gentle sway of their boat, warmed by Sebastian’s favored sun almost lulling Blaine to sleep as he lay on his stomach on the boats deck, his head propped up on his left hand, his right hand idly connecting the dots of Sebastian's star dusted freckles, his leg hooked just so over Seb to keep them close. It was just the two of them out there, everyone else felt a million miles away for just a moment and Blaine could have stayed this way forever. It was so close to perfect. He could hear the splashes of water as Ras and seven year old Luke, Wick and few of the other cousins played near the shore. It brought Blaine back to a soothing reality and he gave a little laugh and a lazy smile as he sent little magical splashes of lake water towards the shore, making it seem as if the water were chasing Luke and Ras and the rest. He probably shouldn't have been doing it, but the delighted giggles from the boy and the barks from Ras made Blaine happy and not much could ruin this moment.

He could feel Sebastian's green gaze and he turned his head, his smile still lazing around on his face. “What?” He laughed, leaning in to nuzzle at Seb’s shoulder. “Mm, you don’t suppose your mom would let me cook breakfast for everyone tomorrow, do you?”

Sebastian's POV:

Sebastian had all of his favorite things in one place; summer, his favorite holiday, and Blaine. The moment felt perfect; the sun beating down onto his skin, the boat gently swaying, the scent of algae and coconut from the sunscreen Sabine kept in the boat. It was Blaine’s strong fingertips tracing over his skin, the sound of his youngest cousin and his dog barking, Blaine humming and laughing a little himself. He lifted his head up and noticed Blaine gently moving his hand back and forth. Sebastian sat up a little more to look back at the shore where it seemed tiny waves were chasing a glee filled Luke around as Enjolras playfully bit and stomped on the waves. He slid his black RayBan sunglasses down the slope of his nose to look over at his boyfriend. “You better be careful,B. Luke’s gonna be on to you.” Sebastian smiled a lazy smile, calmed by the sun’s rays and lulled by the lake’s rhythm.  He stretched out his long legs, wiggled his toes, and turned his face up towards the sky. “I think she’d love that. Though, she might insist on helping out. You really wanna cook for all these people?”  Seb let his eyes rake over the other man’s muscular body. They were both starting to tan already. Sebastian sighed a happy, dazed sigh. “Of course you do.” He reached out and poked Blaine’s ribs gently. “You’re sweet. We should probably head back. We have the crab boil and Wick’s fireworks tonight.” 

Sebastian and Blaine chased Luke and Ras around in the water for a little bit before heading in to take showers, get distracted by each other in said showers, only to change into new swim trunks and tank tops. Sabine had caterers come in to make a crab boil for the family. She had picnic tables set up, filled with buttery crab legs, corn on the cob, and red potatoes. There were cold beers for the adults and even a sno-cone machine set up by said caterers for the kids. Sebastian would be damned, though, if he didn’t get his hands on a cherry sno-cone. They ate too much and laughed and drank until it was dark enough for the fireworks to begin.

He and Blaine helped set off a few small fireworks at the beginning of Wick’s display. Sebastian stooping low to light the little fuse on whatever weird firework his uncle had picked out, only to take off running with Blaine so that nothing sparked on them. The three of them laughing and jumping around like they were all teenagers again. Sebastian had gotten a spark on his grey Sperrys and danced around like a crazed duck, his adrenaline spiked, laughing so hard after that his sides hurt. 

 The two of them found themselves on a blanket in the warm green grass, looking up at the colorful explosions in the sky. Sebastian felt a little tipsy from the adrenaline of setting off fireworks and the crisp beers and the scent of lake breeze trapped in Blaine’s curls. His younger cousins and family friend’s children ran around with sparklers and Ras was asleep at Sabine’s feet as she lounged in an Adirondack chair. “You keeping him calm?” Seb pointed at the sleepy pup.

Blaine’s POV:

Blaine had to fight to keep from smiling too big and he gave a shrug in regards to Seb’s statement, his grin a little mischievous. “Ah well, he’s seven. Sometimes kids need something to believe in. This isn’t the first time I’ve given Luke a little glimpse though, remember?” He asked, his hand resting on Seb’s sun kissed thigh as his boyfriends shifted positions so he could watch the activities on the shore. He thought back to the Thanksgiving he’d met Luke, the five year old had seemed fascinated with Blaine from the get go as if he were someone akin to Santa Claus. Sometimes human kids just knew when a person had magic whether they showed it off or not. The memory of making the curtains dance was a fond one for Blaine and he’d put it on the shelf along with this boat and the pup biting at his magical little waves and the kid chasing them.   “Besides, he’ll forget all about it as he gets older. Kind of like most kids do with Santa Claus and so on.” All children grow up and sadly most of them didn’t take their imaginations with them into adulthood. Blaine just wanted to bring a little bit of happiness into a world that was sometimes incredibly dark. 

He thought for a moment, taking a visual headcount of all the people he’d have to cook for and nodded to Seb. A sheepish smile creeping over his face at Seb’s sighing of course you do. “Yeah, I want to. Everyone here has been so welcoming, especially your mom. I suppose I don’t actually have a say on whether she helps me or not. It’s her kitchen after all. I just want to do something nice. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed but food is one way that I show appreciation.” He laughed, a little thrill shooting though his body when Seb poked him, the gesture tickling him. His cheeks flaring up in a blush at being called sweet. He nodded, and moved to sit in the proper seat so Seb could steer them back with a silly,  “Aye, Captain.” and a wink.

The holiday went on in a blur of Luke and Enjolras running around in circles from the two of them. Wick tipping a couple of the younger kids into the Summer warmed lake water. Ras whined when he could follow Sebastian and Blaine back into the bathroom while they shared a shower that somehow turned more intimate than intended with mouths and skin touching skin. Blaine’s cheeks were red when they emerged back at the gathering a short time later and not from the sun. He sipped on a beer during dinner, hoping the lot would think it was just from the drink and the sun. And they laughed at each other’s Sno-Cone stained mouths. Seb’s cherry red and tempting and Blaine’s an unnatural shade of blue as he happily ate the sticky sweet cotton candy flavor he’d chosen. The smell of fireworks and sunscreen and lake water filled the air and Blaine couldn't stop laughing at his boyfriend for all of his hopping about, the laughter pouring out of him as Seb squeaked and giggled like a teen as his shoe was singed. And for just this moment, remember why he’d been so upset before coming here. 

He found himself relaxed on their blanket, following Seb’s line of sight to where Ras and Sabine sat close by.  Red, white, blue and a tangle of other colors crashing overhead, lighting up the sky as he slipped his hand into Seb’s, giving his boyfriend a squeeze to reassure him. “Yes.” Blaine had made it his mission to make sure Ras didn’t get too nervous with all the fireworks. He’d been sending out a pleasant wave of energy to Seb’s companion all night long. Blaine turned his head and pressed a kiss to Seb’s shoulder before pulling back to smile up at him. The taller man tasted like the sun that he loved so damn much and Blaine was quiet for a moment as he basked in his glow. “Yeah, I have and well, Frey’s here also. She’s been hiding and watching him since we got here. I think the water and the fire are making her nervous.” He chuckled lowly, scooting a little closer to Seb. “She’s been watching all of us actually, I think. She knows a few of your favorite people are here so she feels obligated to keep us all safe. But, between you and me I think she’s mostly ere for Ras as well as your mom.” He paused, his thumb running over Seb’s knuckle gently. “Speaking of your mom- she’s gonna let me cook!” He laughed again, warmly. “She’s insisting on helping, so you were right about that. But, I get to cook. So, I guess I’ll be getting up a couple hours early tomorrow.” He leaned up and kissed Seb’s jaw. “Try not to miss me too much.”

He thought back to when he’d approached Sabine about doing breakfast, somewhere between dinner and Sno-Cones. She squeezed his hands comfortingly, her pretty face lighting up in a smile and a little eye roll that was reminiscent of Sebastian’s as she said of course you want to help. And of course you can. It pleased Blaine so much and again he struggled to remember what he’d been so worried about. But, he supposed that was the point. “Hey.” He mumbled and nudged Seb’s shoulder in an attempt to get him to look away from the colorful sky. “I love you so much, you know? In case I haven’t told you today.” He smiled fully,a little goofy, his face open and worry lines gone for the moment. “I’m sorry, it’s all just so romantic right now I just can’t help myself.”

Sebastian’s POV:

Sebastian nodded. “Thanks for doing that. He usually has to stay inside anytime there are fireworks.” He chuckled and shook his head because of course Freya was at the lake. “She’s magical, though. She’d be fine, right?” Sebastian looked at the lingering smoke in the night sky. “I mean, it is probably for the best that she stays hidden. Luke might try to take her home and how would we get out of that one?” He laughed a little to himself, picturing seven year old hands clutching the massive white fluff of Blaine’s familiar. Sebastian could imagine her bitchy face perfectly. He caught Blaine’s hand in his, “I’m glad. You’ll have fun together, I’m sure. She’s not the best cook but she tries. Not that I’m one to talk.” Sebastian smiled and looked down into Blaine’s warm eyes, they were practically sparkling with excitement. “You know I’ll be sleeping in.”

He looked back up after a loud ‘boom!’ sounded above them, the night sky filled with green and gold bursts of light. Sebastian looked back at the other man when he felt the nudge. He smiled, “I love you so much back.” Seb couldn’t help but chuckle and roll his eyes playfully. “That is one of the most you things you’ve ever said. Today was pretty great. Thanks for coming with me.” 

Seb leaned in and gave Blaine a kiss as a big red firework exploded above them, painting their skin in a faint scarlet glow. “We should probably head inside soon since you have to get up early. Ras will probably stay out here with my mom. He loves her and doesn’t get to see her often.” He stood up and held his hand out to help the other man up. They walked over and said goodnight to Sabine, Sebastian gave her a kiss on the cheek and ruffled his pup’s shaggy fur. He felt the only kind of tired that you feel after a long day of sun and water. The kind of tired where skin has summer heat trapped inside and your bones feel water logged. Seb knew that he was going to fall asleep fast and soundly. 

He had hardly stirred when Blaine left for the kitchen with a kiss but the smell of bacon definitely brought him out of his heavy slumber. Sebastian’s stomach growled and he could hear the din of dishes, the click of paws on tile, and his mother’s laughter float from the kitchen. He ran a hand over his sleepy eyes and stretched his limbs, threw on his tank top and green trunks from the night before and headed towards the welcoming sounds and smells. Sebastian walked in to see his boyfriend and mother finishing up the impressive spread, laughing and talking like old friends. Wick was working on pouring himself some coffee and nudged his own cup towards Sebastian. He took it with a grateful smile. Luke was sleepily nursing a bowl of watermelon. The rest of the family and guests were still asleep.  “Smells  great in here.” Seb’s voice was low and sleepy, he was sure his hair was still a mess. “Can I steal some of that bacon before Ras gets it all.”

Blaine’s POV:

After bidding Sabine and the pup and a few of the other adults a goodnight (the kids had fallen asleep in a haze of fireworks and excitement) Blaine let Sebastian lead him up the stairs and the two of them fell asleep hard, their energetic, sun soaked weekend catching up to them. Blaine’s arms wrapped tightly around Sebastian. He hardly even stirred when not even an hour later the door opened and an equally sleepy Ras padded in and fell asleep at their feet again. Blaine jerked awake once sometime around four in the morning, his subconscious telling him he was forgetting something. He pulled himself from Seb, and grudgingly popped himself back into his LeFay room to check in, making sure the magic in the school knew that he was around before he let himself go back to Sebastian’s arms for the night. The next thing he knew he was being quietly nudged awake by a bright eyed, fresh faced Sabine Smythe, already dressed and ready to conquer the day. She left the room so he could get ready and he couldn’t help but smile to himself as he got dressed and made his way down to the vast, open kitchen. 

A familiar tug pulled at his heart as he thought back to all the times his own mother would wake him up so they could cook for his dad. And while he knew that Sabine wasn’t his mother it still lifted his heart knowing that she was there for him with the gentle way she showed him around the kitchen and  the warm way she spoke to him. Plus, it made him happy knowing how much she loved Sebastian and seemed to be fond of Blaine himself. It meant a great deal to him and he hoped his smile and gratitude showed it. She’d even let him show her how to make the pancakes so that they’d be extra fluffy and she showed him how to brew a better pot of coffee, which was saying something as Blaine prided himself on his coffee and tea skills. Blaine had given Luke a bowl of watermelon to tide him over while they cooked. Both him and Sabine laughing as the kid all but fell asleep into his bowl. He smiled shyly up at his boyfriend as he heard his familiar sleep raspy voice coming down the stairs. He piled a generous amount of bacon on a plate for Sebastian and slid the plate over to him. He even managed to sneak Enjolras a piece.

“Good morning!” He greeted, and pressed an almost shy kiss to Seb’s lips as a hello. His cheeks were a little red knowing they had an audience, but Sabine’s energy seemed pleased, and Luke just huffed like children did when adults did adult things and Wick was too busy sucking down his coffee to even seem to notice. Slowly, one by one, the rest of the group arrived all of them seemingly impressed by the spread the two of them had prepared.  Even Thomas Smythe, who rarely seemed impressed unless you presented him with a two hundred year old bottle of wine, was impressed. Giving Blaine a nod and a half smile over his morning paper. They ate, and talked and laughed for the next hour, the Sunday morning going just as smoothly as the rest of the weekend had and Blaine found himself not wanting to leave just yet. Alas, the two of them had a twelve hour drive ahead of them and if they wanted to be back before midnight they needed to leave soon. It wasn’t practical to magic travel with Ras in tow so a long drive it was. After their meal Blaine and Sebastian both helped leave the kitchen in the condition it was in when they arrived and went off to pack up.

They said their goodbyes, hugging Sabine and promising they’d be back around soon. A handshake for Thomas and Wick, and nods of farewell to the rest. Blaine had a breif talk with Luke about Star Wars and Harry Potter that Seb even joined in with where he could and they promised they’d see him on Thanksgiving this year. And maybe, yeah, maybe Ras could come. By eleven that morning they were off and on their way home. Ras was already snoring lightly in the back seat with Blaine’s help. Promises of Freya waiting for him when he got home lulling him. Though Blaine knew that Ras knew she had been nearby the whole time.

Somewhere around the six hour mark, after stopping for dinner, Blaine managed to let himself think about his dad and their disheartening conversation on Friday night. He reached for Seb’s hand before he started the car back up to finish their drive and quietly told him all about what had happened. Telling him that he didn’t want to tell him before because he didn’t want to ruin the weekend with his worries. His boyfriend had listened intently, a little frown on his face before cupping Blaine’s face and kissing him gently and telling him that he understood, and that he was there for him and made Blaine promise not to keep his worries to himself anymore in the future. It wasn’t going to ruin things, if anything Seb could make Blaine feel better about it if he’d let him. Blaine had promised and they finished the drive in a flourish of loud music and bad gas station coffee. The clock reading 12:06 am when they finally let themselves into Seb’s apartment. Ras bound over to Freya and licked her face like he hadn’t seen her in weeks. She then gave both Blaine and Seb a sniff before settling down on the couch with a sleeping Ras, apparently she was tired from the weekend too. Blaine and Seb managed to pull their luggage into the bedroom before sharing a quick, exhausted shower to wash the traveling away. The two of them fell into bed exhausted, eyes already closing, arms pulling each other close and their mouths pressing together in a sleepy kiss that promised something more tomorrow night.

/fin.

[meeedeee]

Cancel Culture: The Internet Eating Itself RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

As social media platforms enter their collective adolescence – Facebook is fifteen, YouTube fourteen, Twitter thirteen, tumblr twelve – I find myself thinking about how little we really understand their cultural implications, both ongoing and for the future. At this point, the idea that being online is completely optional in modern world ought to be absurd, and yet multiple friends, having spoken to their therapists about the impact of digital abuse on their mental health, were told straight up to just stop using the internet. Even if this was a viable option for some, the idea that we can neatly sidestep the problem of bad behaviour in any non-utilitarian sphere by telling those impacted to simply quit is baffling at best and a tacit form of victim-blaming at worst. The internet might be a liminal space, but object permanence still applies to what happens here: the trolls don’t vanish if we close our eyes, and if we vanquish one digital hydra-domain for Toxicity Crimes without caring to fathom the whys and hows of what went wrong, we merely ensure that three more will spring up in its place.

Is the internet a private space, a government space or a public space? Yes.

Is it corporate, communal or unaffiliated? Yes.

Is it truly global or bound by local legal jurisdictions? Yes.

Does the internet reflect our culture or create it? Yes.

Is what people say on the internet reflective of their true beliefs, or is it a constant shell-game of digital personas, marketing ploys, intrusive thoughts, growth-in-progress, personal speculation and fictional exploration? Yes.

The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature. Human interaction cannot be usefully monitored using an algorithm, but our current conception of What The Internet Is has been engineered specifically to shortcut existing forms of human oversight, the better to maximise both accessibility (good to neutral) and profits (neutral to bad). Uber and Lyft are cheaper, frequently more convenient alternatives to a traditional taxi service, for instance, but that’s because the apps themselves are functionally predicated on the removal of meaningful customer service and worker protections that were hard-won elsewhere. Sites like tumblr are free to use, but the lack of revenue generated by those users means that, past a certain point, profits can only hope to outstrip expenses by selling access to those users and/or their account data, which means in turn that paying to effectively monitor their content creation becomes vastly less important than monetising it.

Small wonder, then, that individual users of social media platforms have learned to place a high premium on their ability to curate what they see, how they see it, and who sees them in turn. When I first started blogging, the largely unwritten rule of the blogsphere was that, while particular webforums dedicated to specific topics could have rules about content and conduct, blogs and their comment pages should be kept Free. Monitoring comments was viewed as a sign of narrow-minded fearfulness: even if a participant was aggressive or abusive, the enlightened path was to let them speak, because anything else was Censorship. This position held out for a good long while, until the collective frustration of everyone who’d been graphically threatened with rape, torture and death, bombarded with slurs, exhausted by sealioning or simply fed up with nitpicking and bad faith arguments finally boiled over.

Particularly in progressive circles, the relief people felt at being told that actually, we were under no moral obligation to let assholes grandstand in the comments or repeatedly explain basic concepts to only theoretically invested strangers was overwhelming. Instead, you could simply delete them, or block them, or maybe even mock them, if the offence or initial point of ignorance seemed silly enough. But as with the previous system, this one-size-fits-all approach soon developed a downside. Thanks to the burnout so many of us felt after literal years of trying to treat patiently with trolls playing Devil’s Advocate, liberal internet culture shifted sharply towards immediate shows of anger, derision and flippancy to anyone who asked a 101 question, or who didn’t use the right language, or who did anything other than immediately agree with whatever position was explained to them, however simply.

I don’t exempt myself from this criticism, but knowing why I was so goddamn tired doesn’t change my conviction that, cumulatively, the end result did more harm than good. Without wanting to sidetrack into a lengthy dissertation on digital activism in the post-aughties decade, it seems evident in hindsight that the then-fledgling alliance between trolls, MRAs, PUAs, Redditors and 4channers to deliberately exhaust left-wing goodwill via sealioning and bad faith arguments was only the first part of a two-pronged attack. The second part, when the left had lost all patience with explaining its own beliefs and was snappily telling anyone who asked about feminism, racism or anything else to just fucking Google it, was to swoop in and persuade the rebuffed party that we were all irrational, screeching harridans who didn’t want to answer because we knew our answers were bad, and why not consider reading Roosh V instead?

The fallout of this period, I would argue, is still ongoing. In an ideal world, drawing a link between online culture wars about ownership of SFF and geekdom and the rise of far-right fascist, xenophobic extremism should be a bow so long that not even Odysseus himself could draw it. But this world, as we’ve all had frequent cause to notice, is far from ideal at the best of times – which these are not – and yet another featurebug of the internet is the fluid interpermeability of its various spaces. We talk, for instance – as I am talking here – about social media as a discreet concept, as though platforms like Twitter or Facebook are functionally separate from the other sites to which their users link; as though there is no relationship between or bleed-through from the viral Facebook post screencapped and shared on BuzzFeed, which is then linked and commented upon on Reddit, which thread is then linked to on Twitter, where an entirely new conversation emerges and subsequently spawns an article in The Huffington Post, which is shared again on Facebook and the replies to that shared on tumblr, and so on like some grizzly perpetual mention machine.

But I digress. The point here is that internet culture is best understood as a pattern of ripples, each new iteration a reaction to the previous one, spreading out until it dissipates and a new shape takes its place. Having learned that slamming the virtual door in everyone’s face was a bad idea, the online left tried establishing a better, calmer means of communication; the flipside was a sudden increase in tone-policing, conversations in which presentation was vaunted over substance and where, once again, particular groups were singled out as needing to conform to the comfort-levels of others. Overlapping with this was the move towards discussing things as being problematic, rather than using more fixed and strident language to decry particular faults – an attempt to acknowledge the inherent fallibility of human works while still allowing for criticism. A sensible goal, surely, but once again, attempting to apply the dictum universally proved a double-edged sword: if everything is problematic, then how to distinguish grave offences from trifling ones? How can anyone enjoy anything if we’re always expected to thumb the rosary of its failings first?

When everything is problematic and everyone has the right to say so, being online as any sort of creator or celebrity is like being nibbled to death by ducks. The well-meaning promise of various organisations, public figures or storytellers to take criticism on board – to listen to the fanbase and do right by their desires – was always going to stumble over the problem of differing tastes. No group is a hivemind: what one person considers bad representation or in poor taste, another might find enlightening, while yet a third party is more concerned with something else entirely. Even in cases with a clear majority opinion, it’s physically impossible to please everyone and a type of folly to try, but that has yet to stop the collective internet from demanding it be so. Out of this comes a new type of ironic frustration: having once rejoiced in being allowed to simply block trolls or timewasters, we now cast judgement on those who block us in turn, viewing them, as we once were viewed, as being fearful of criticism.

Are we creating echo chambers by curating what we see online, or are we acting in pragmatic acknowledgement of the fact that we neither have time to read everything nor an obligation to see all perspectives as equally valid? Yes.

Even if we did have the time and ability to wade through everything, is the signal-to-noise ratio of truth to lies on the internet beyond our individual ability to successfully measure, such that outsourcing some of our judgement to trusted sources is fundamentally necessary, or should we be expected to think critically about everything we encounter, even if it’s only intended as entertainment? Yes.

If something or someone online acts in a way that’s antithetical to our values, are we allowed to tune them out thereafter, knowing full well that there’s a nearly infinite supply of as-yet undisappointing content and content-creators waiting to take their place, or are we obliged to acknowledge that Doing A Bad doesn’t necessarily ruin a person forever? Yes.

And thus we come to cancel culture, the current – but by no means final – culmination of previous internet discourse waves. In this iteration, burnout at critical engagement dovetails with a new emphasis on collective content curation courtesies (try saying that six times fast), but ends up hamstrung once again by differences in taste. Or, to put it another way: someone fucks up and it’s the last straw for us personally, so we try to remove them from our timelines altogether – but unless our friends and mutuals, who we still want to engage with, are convinced to do likewise, then we haven’t really removed them at all, such that we’re now potentially willing to make failure to cancel on demand itself a cancellable offence.

Which brings us right back around to the problem of how the modern internet is fundamentally structured – which is to say, the way in which it’s overwhelmingly meant to rely on individual curation instead of collective moderation. Because the one thing each successive mode of social media discourse has in common with its predecessors is a central, and currently unanswerable question: what universal code of conduct exists that I, an individual on the internet, can adhere to – and expect others to adhere to – while we communicate across multiple different platforms?

In the real world, we understand about social behavioural norms: even if we don’t talk about them in those terms, we broadly recognise them when we see them. Of course, we also understand that those norms can vary from place to place and context to context, but as we can only ever be in one physical place at a time, it’s comparatively easy to adjust as appropriate.

But the internet, as stated, is a liminal space: it’s real and virtual, myriad and singular, private and public all at once. It confuses our sense of which rules might apply under which circumstances, jumbles the normal behavioural cues by obscuring the identity of our interlocutors, and even though we don’t acknowledge it nearly as often as we should, written communication – like spoken communication – is a skill that not everyone has, just as tone, whether spoken or written, isn’t always received (or executed, for that matter) in the way it was intended. And when it comes to politics, in which the internet and its doings now plays no small role, there’s the continual frustration that comes from observing, with more and more frequency, how many literal, real-world crimes and abuses go without punishment, and how that lack of consequences contributes in turn to the fostering of abuse and hostility towards vulnerable groups online.

This is what comes of occupying a transitional period in history: one in which laws are changed and proposed to reflect our changing awareness of the world, but where habit, custom, ignorance, bias and malice still routinely combine, both institutionally and more generally, to see those laws enacted only in part, or tokenistically, or not at all. To take one of the most egregious and well-publicised instances that ultimately presaged the #MeToo movement, the laughably meagre sentence handed down to Brock Turner, who was caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman, combined with the emphasis placed by both the judge and much of the media coverage on his swimming talents and family standing as a means of exonerating him, made it very clear that sexual violence against women is frequently held to be less important than the perceived ‘bright futures’ of its perpetrators.

Knowing this, then – knowing that the story was spread, discussed and argued about on social media, along with thousands of other, similar accounts; knowing that, even in this context, some people still freely spoke up in defence of rapists and issued misogynistic threats against their female interlocutors – is it any wonder that, in the absence of consistent legal justice in such cases, the internet tried, and is still trying, to fill the gap? Is it any wonder, when instances of racist police brutality are constantly filmed and posted online, only for the perpetrators to receive no discipline, that we lose patience for anyone who wants to debate the semantics of when, exactly, extrajudicial murder is “acceptable”?

We cannot control the brutality of the world from the safety of our keyboards, but when it exhausts or threatens us, we can at least click a button to mute its seeming adherents. We don’t always have the energy to decry the same person we’ve already argued against a thousand times before, but when a friend unthinkingly puts them back on our timeline for some new reason, we can tell them that person is cancelled and hope they take the hint not to do it again. Never mind that there is far too often no subtlety, no sense of scale or proportion to how the collective, viral internet reacts in each instance, until all outrage is rendered flat and the outside observer could be forgiven for worrying what’s gone wrong with us all, that using a homophobic trope in a TV show is thought to merit the same online response as an actual hate crime. So long as the war is waged with words alone, there’s only a finite number of outcomes that boycotting, blocking, blacklisting, cancelling, complaining and critiquing can achieve, and while some of those outcomes in particular are well worth fighting for, so many words are poured towards so many attempts that it’s easy to feel numbed to the process; or, conversely, easy to think that one response fits all contexts.

I’m tired of cancel culture, just as I was dully tired of everything that preceded it and will doubtless grow tired of everything that comes after it in turn, until our fundamental sense of what the internet is and how it should be managed finally changes. Like it or not, the internet both is and is of the world, and that is too much for any one person to sensibly try and curate at an individual level. Where nothing is moderated for us, everything must be moderated by us; and wherever people form communities, those communities will grow cultures, which will develop rules and customs that spill over into neighbouring communities, both digitally and offline, with mixed and ever-changing results. Cancel culture is particularly tricky in this regard, as the ease with which we block someone online can seldom be replicated offline, which makes it all the more intoxicating a power to wield when possible: we can’t do anything about the awful coworker who rants at us in the breakroom, but by God, we can block every person who reminds us of them on Twitter.

The thing about participating in internet discourse is, it’s like playing Civilisation in real-time, only it’s not a game and the world keeps progressing even when you log off. Things change so fast on the internet – memes, etiquette, slang, dominant opinions – and yet the changes spread so organically and so fast that we frequently adapt without keeping conscious track of when and why they shifted. Social media is like the Hotel California: we can check out any time we like, but we can never meaningfully leave – not when world leaders are still threatening nuclear war on Twitter, or when Facebook is using friendly memes to test facial recognition software, or when corporate accounts are creating multi-staffed humansonas to engage with artists on tumblr, or when YouTube algorithms are accidentally-on-purpose steering kids towards white nationalist propaganda because it makes them more money.

Of course we try and curate our time online into something finite, comprehensible, familiar, safe: the alternative is to embrace the near-infinite, incomprehensible, alien, dangerous gallimaufry of our fractured global mindscape. Of course we want to try and be critical, rational, moral in our convictions and choices; it’s just that we’re also tired and scared and everyone who wants to argue with us about anything can, even if they’re wrong and angry and also our relative, or else a complete stranger, and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and enjoy a thing without thinking about it, or give yourself some respite, or exercise a tiny bit of autonomy in the only way you can.

It’s human nature to want to be the most amount of right for the least amount of effort, but unthinkingly taking our moral cues from internet culture the same way we’re accustomed to doing in offline contexts doesn’t work: digital culture shifts too fast and too asymmetrically to be relied on moment to moment as anything like a universal touchstone. Either you end up preaching to the choir, or you run a high risk of aggravation, not necessarily due to any fundamental ideological divide, but because your interlocutor is leaning on a different, false-universal jargon overlying alternate 101 and 201 concepts to the ones you’re using, and modern social media platforms – in what is perhaps the greatest irony of all – are uniquely poorly suited to coherent debate.

Purity wars in fandom, arguments about diversity in narrative and whether its proponents have crossed the line from criticism into bullying: these types of arguments are cyclical now, dying out and rekindling with each new wave of discourse. We might not yet be in a position to stop it, but I have some hope that being aware of it can mitigate the worst of the damage, if only because I’m loathe to watch yet another fandom steadily talk itself into hating its own core media for the sake of literal argument.

For all its flaws – and with all its potential – the internet is here to stay. Here’s hoping we figure out how to fix it before its ugliest aspects make us give up on ourselves.

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[artificialqueens]

Merry Christmas-ish (Trixya) - Remeny

This was for the Christmas Fic Exchange but I thought I’d share here too. Thank you to Eevee, Missy and Care for betaing and encouragement. TW Major Character Death, Recreational Drug use, Hospitals

Katya’s hand had gone slack in Trixie’s but he was too afraid to pull his hand away with the fear of waking him. He rarely got much rest which was something he desperately needed. Trixie studied the angular lines of his face, his already pronounced cheekbones and jaw were now almost razor sharp in his gauntness. He grimaced in his sleep and tightened his grip on Trixie’s hand, making him glad he had not pulled away.

The dishes and laundry could wait but time to spend with Katya was ticking down at far too alarming a rate: his lips were blue constantly now, even with the steady supply of Oxygen flowing and a hospital bed had been unceremoniously plunked in the middle of the living room when it became too difficult for him to climb the stairs of their LA condo. At least it was a wider one generally meant for bariatric patients so they could both curl up together.

The apartment was a flood of colour, since both Hallowe'en and Christmas decorations vied for your attention. It was October 29th but they had decorated for Christmas early at Kat’s insistence. “Trix, I don’t want to miss what could be my last Christmas.”

“You’re not going to die Bri, they’ll call, and a heart will come.” Trixie reassured, but he was no longer sure if he was saying it for Katya or if he even believed it or it was just by muscle memory at this point.  Katya secretly hated when Trixie said this because he felt like it was setting Trixie up for the inevitable crash but he never said so. One of them had to hold on to hope and Trixie had enough hope for the both of them.

Dark thoughts milled about in Katya’s manic brain and he no longer had the frenetic energy he used to use to distract himself so he now often found himself brooding. “I broke the traditions. I ruined my family. I destroyed my friends and it’s entirely all my fault that they have to go through this. Trixie is entirely too good for me, he was right to run away from me, he would be better off if I had never called him for help.”

It had all happened right after Drag Race had been taped but not released yet. The cheque had cleared and Brian suddenly had money at his disposal. He had been racked with anxiety at how the editors would portray him. He worried that the fans would hate his constant nervous energy or make fun of his penchant for problematic patterns and quirky clothes.

He and Trixie had gotten close during the show. Well as close as two people could get when you were either being constantly monitored or had a camera in your face anyway. They talked every day after the taping, Trix seemed to sense that Katya was struggling and encouraged him to get out and always reminded him to eat and take his meds but he did it in such a caring way that it was endearing not overbearing.

As the date of the cast announcement loomed, Katya got more anxious and then depressed. When Trixie was away for a week, he slept too much and ate too little and didn’t take his meds. He didn’t know how he was going to make it through all the premiere and cast reveal parties. He felt the familiar itch of burning desire for just a little pick me up. Then he happened upon a man he knew when he was using and he thought he could just do it this once, he was in control now. He had a handle on it - on everything - he just needed a break.

He was wrong, of course. He didn’t just fall off the wagon, got dragged along a gravel road for a few miles. He started with coke, and that first line  was like coming home. He got so much done, he cleaned his apartment and cranked out a few new outfits for premieres, mostly cat suits because they would be easy to pack and were easy to move and dance in.

Katya hated sneaking around when Trixie got back and they started their daily routine of video chatting, his using had quickly escalated back to meth and he hated that itching paranoia that would settle in his chest at the thought that Trixie was going to find out. Or worse, Fame. He started wearing his sunglasses inside when they chatted so Trixie couldn’t see how blown out his eyes were, and he covered by saying he was having a hard time with migraines.

Trixie always asked, “hey, how’s your head?”

“I dunno, ask Fame.” Katya would joke and then scream-laugh. That joke would never get old to him and it obviously didn’t in some little part of Trixie’s heart because he always set the joke up and let out a little giggle while he shook his head.  Trixie would always sober, brows furrowed and pull his bottom lip between his teeth, “no seriously though, did you go to the doctor yet?”

“No, I’m sure it’s just stress and once they release the cast list and start the show and I find out if people love me or hate me, things will go back to normal.”

“Oh please! They are going to love you! I’m the loser with the polarizing makeup people love to hate who went home early, then came back and got booted again. I’m the one who couldn’t out lipsync Pearl and her fucking robot zombie smash dance moves.”

Katya snorted, “True.”

The cast announcement parties came in like a whirlwind, blowing Katya and Trixie apart so they were often not even on the same continent. Katya knew things would change once the episode of her breaking down with Fame or any of the other times he talked about his past with addictions aired.

Right then, he was always being offered a little something at the back of clubs or in the bathrooms. He felt his chest tighten with panic that people were going to stop offering or worse, that they would tell. He tried to make connections with local dealers at cities that had several drag bars since he knew he could be booked for a few days in one spot.

Smoking became too conspicuous, he couldn’t sneak out to the back alleyways at busy bars like he used to behind Jacques when he was relatively unknown, even locally. He would smoke a rock before leaving the hotel but after he did his makeup as his hands shook with adrenaline for the first 30 minutes or so which he always wrote off to others as nerves. But he didn’t get nervous, that was the thing, performing was like a drug in and of itself but now that he had a steady supply coursing through his veins, the shine was wearing off of it.

Katya would stay at the venue as long as possible but coming down from meth was like running out of batteries, he would sometimes come to a dead stand still in the hotel lobby for a good five minutes trying to remember his room number or sometimes to even decipher it from the key card envelope. Sometimes he was paused long enough that a worried hotel employee would come over to make sure he was ok.

But the pain was the worst part, always. He managed to make the joke he was the sweatiest woman in show business so no one questioned him when he would start sweating so hard that it was like having a constantly sprinkling rain cloud over his head, but when it started to feel like his joints were being filled up with gravel and it hurt to even breathe, he had to bail.

That and the fact that meth smoke, well the good stuff, smelled like a mixture of cat piss and hospitals made it hard to hide, people always complimented him on his perfume since he was paranoid someone was going to pick up the scent. So he did something he always vowed not to do, even in his most blottoed days when he was chasing a high that seemed to take more and more drugs to achieve, he started injecting. He’d secret away in the bathroom or lock the dressing room door if he was alone, it wasn’t as complicated as a lot of injectables, you didn’t have to heat it up since that could destroy it. He just carried a bottle of water with him which no one would question and hid his needles in a old eyeshadow pallet case, one of the magnetic ones so it had enough room for his needles and a tourniquet, which he stuffed down deep in his makeup bag.

He generally wore long sleeved catsuits so he didn’t have to worry if he DID end up bruising himself in his haste or because of the tremors. The first few times the high was so much more intense and he fumbled the needle and always had to try a few times to get a vein, now it had been a few months and he easily knew where to slide the needle in. Pulling back the syringe to find blood and know he was in a vein and his pain would soon be alleviated was a rush itself.

A few nights before the finale, he and Trixie were reunited and they admitted their feelings for each other. Katya’s heart was hammering in his chest with the paranoia that Trix was going to find out what he’d been doing. He was so consumed with anxiety that when Trixie tried to give him a blowjob, he couldn’t get it up. He apologized a thousand times but it made a mortified Trixie self conscious that since he admitted his affection first, that Katya was just too nice to turn him down. But that thought was wiped out of his brain along with any other thought when Katya put his magical mouth and hands to work to show just how sorry he was.

Later, Katya woke up covered in sweat and shaking, worried that his every move was going to wake up Trixie who was snuggled up against him. His breath was coming in tight little gasps, so he tried to hold it while he slipped off the bed, crawling across the floor and to the bathroom, dragging his drag bag with him, which felt like it was 5 times as heavy as it was a few hours ago as his muscles screamed at him. He managed to get in a bump and headed back to bed, now wide awake and heart thundering in his ears at the audacity he had to feel miserable while he had literally everything he could ever want.

He had an amazing fanbase he didn’t deserve, the worst was the people that would come up and tell him their sobriety story or that Katya had inspired them to get help. He couldn’t even look those people in the eye, he was so filled with shame but not enough to stop.

He had the ability to travel and make more money in one booking than he did in a month pre-dragrace. Now he “got the boy” but would he stay if he knew what a deplorable human being he really was? Probably not.

Then after the finale, Katya was tired and desperate and felt like he was going to fucking die, he got careless and forgot to lock the door to the bathroom. Him and Trix were just sharing a room and he still didn’t know to this day why but Trixie decided to walk in without knocking. Maybe it was because he’d seen him naked so it wasn’t a big deal, but Katya was currently sitting on the toilet with his head down, drug paraphernalia peppered along the room in his haste, a syringe still clutched in his balled up fist.

“Hey, sorry, I forgot to get my…” Trixie trailed off, turning completely white, still holding on to the doorknob with white knuckles. His eyes were wide with shock and his mouth flopped open, the pleasant warm buzz from a few post-show drinks that he had been feeling vanished as his blood ran cold.

“Brian, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll stop. Please, I need help.” Katya broke then, breaking down into sobs where no sound would come out. Trixie’s arms itched to reach out and hold him but his heart was breaking and his brain was telling him to run far, far away. So he did.

“Damn you Bri!” He said in a whisper as his own tears fell. The broken whisper was like a slap in the face to Katya, who would have much prefered him to yell and scream and rail at him as opposed to the quiet disappointment and heartache that was thrown at him.

“Brian, pl..please st…stay!” Katya sobbed as Trixie took a step back and then another. He felt like someone was disemboweling him with a rusty spoon until he was hollow and dead inside. Trixie hesitated in the doorway before grabbing his wallet and walking out. Katya slid to the floor as he screamed after him until his voice was hoarse and security came to check if everything was ok after receiving several complaints from fellow patrons. When there was a knock on the door, Katya stumbled over himself in his haste to answer it, hoping beyond hope that it was Trixie. He felt even more hollow when he saw it wasn’t.

Trixie came back to the room early the next morning after a sleepless night to find Katya and all his stuff gone. A shakily written apology was penned across the hotel stationary. Trixie wondered where he was and how long this had been going on.

Then Katya went missing, he just dropped off the face of the planet. Trixie had to field angry phone calls from Katya’s manager for missed gigs. They all assumed that Katya was with him playing hookie while he was on vacation or that he knew where he was.

Trixie didn’t sleep more than 30 minutes at a time or eat anything for five hellish days of waiting with his phone clutched in his hand.

Trixie started scouring the local hospitals and rehabs after the first 12 hours of calling him constantly and getting no response and with a sinking stomach about the third day in, he started looking at the obituaries for Boston and area online. Trixie hoped that Katya had checked himself in somewhere and just wasn’t allowed his phone but you would think he would have gotten SOMEONE to call him to let him know that Katya was okay.

The call came in at 4:07 on the start of the 6th day, Trixie had just nodded off for a moment when the blaring of his phone ringing at full volume startled him awake.

At the beginning, there was only laboured breathing on the other end of the line from a number he didn’t recognise.  "Who is this? I need to keep this line open so if you are just some pervert, hang the fuck up!“

He almost hung up when Katya breathed in a voice that sounded gravelly from misuse, "Trix?”

“Bri? Ohmigod! Where are you? Are you okay.”

“Need help,” he sputtered weakly.

“What do you need?” Trixie was already standing with his keys, stalking towards the door, heart beating so frantically it was like a small caged animal trying to fight it’s way out of his chest. “Do you need me to pick you up?”

Katya made an unhh sound that Trixie took as a confirmation, “Where are you?”

There was a rustling of material and a few loud bangs and an abrasive and out of it sounding girl came on the phone, “What d'ya want?”

“Uh can I get the address so I can pick up Brian?”

“Who’s Brian?”

Trixie heard Katya sleepily say “me.”

“Oh yeah, you should pick him up, he’s not looking so great.” She said bluntly, Trixie wondered how high a person would have to be to have no filter like that.

“Okay then I need the damn address!” Trixie barked, trying to get the girl to focus as he yanked open his car door.

“You’re not a narc, are you?”

“No! I’m not!!”

“Really? That’s exactly what a narc would say. Brian,” there was a rustle of fabric and Katya moaned, “BRIAN!” She screamed at him. “Is your friend a narc? BRIAN! BRIAN! Well, I’m gonna have to trust you aren’t a narc, he fell asleep and I tried shaking him but it didn’t help.”

She let out a little giggle that set Trixie’s hair on end and he was just about to lose it on her when she rattled off the address to a part of town he didn’t know. He looked around frantically but only found a lipstick so he wrote the street number and name across his arm.

“Thanks, I’ll be there as fast as I can, try to wake him up. I drive a silver jeep and my name is Brian too.”

She laughed, “well that’s funny! I can’t wake him up, I tried shaking him but he’s dead to the world. Did I tell you that? Ask for Ace. Lock your door.” There was a click.

Trixie’s hands shook as he put the address into his phone’s GPS, and even though he didn’t know the area he was going to but it said it was 30 minutes away. Trixie sped as quickly as he dared, it was a warm day but he couldn’t get warm so he turned on the heat. The words “dead to the world” and “he doesn’t look so great” chased each other around his head like overactive dogs. He slammed his hands into the wheel and cursed when traffic came to a dead stop. By this point, he was sobbing with worry and frustration and getting weird looks, which he didn’t give a single fuck about. He put his head in his hands for a moment before a lady took pity on him and let him cross over to the offramp. He didn’t stop, he just drove in what he thought was the general direction while his phone seemed to take forever to reroute.

Trixie tried to mentally prepare himself for what he was about to walk in on. He knew he was getting close, the buildings becoming more shabby then downright abandoned, windows boarded up or broken. Half clothed, dirty, shoeless kids wandering around.

He pulled up to the house, making sure to lock his doors. He basically ran up the hill to the door, adrenaline making his knock much more forceful than necessary, the door creaked open. He peeked in but saw no one, his panic level was rising.

“Hello?” He yelled tentatively into the house, taking a step inside and giving his eyes a second to adjust to the dimness. “Hello?” He took a step further in. The walls were filthy with the stains of tobacco and Lord-knows-what-else and Brian’s stomach jolted at what looked like splatters of blood halfway up the wall. He continued along, stopping every two steps to yell out. There was shuffling but he didn’t see anyone. He was just about to announce himself again when he heard a click behind him and turned to find a wiry white guy pointing a handgun at him. He momentarily forgot how to speak.

“Who the fuck are you?” The guy barked, shifting from foot to foot while his eyes darted around. “Are you a cop?”

Trixie slowly raised his hands out and cleared his throat, he felt like all moisture in his mouth had evaporated. “I’m not a cop.”

The guy jostled the gun and snapped, “that’s what a cop would say.”

“Listen, I’m looking for Ace. Maybe I’m in the wrong place?”

“Oh you know Ace!” The guy exclaimed, returning his gun to the waistband of his stained grey track pants. “Sorry man, shit!” He ran a hand through his unkempt hair, “Shit! Shit! Fuck! Don’t tell her I pulled a gun on you! I’m Sam. C'Mon.”

The house was like a beehive, there were nooks and crannies all along the way to wherever Sam was leading him, every once in a while they would pass by a person laying on a dilapidated couch, or a mattress in the middle of the floor. Trixie’s heart would stop until he realised it wasn’t Katya. He felt bad for them but quickly kept up with Sam.

Trixie was not as prepared for finding him as he hoped, it felt like a dropkick to the gut. He was sprawled out on his side on another dirty mattress that was covered in a threadbare sheet, a dark haired skinny girl laying beside him whom Sammy skirted around warily.

Katya was practically convulsing, he was shaking so hard, he was a pale grey and covered in sweat. He was completely naked aside from a pair of brown stained tighty-whitey underwear. He had soiled himself and his face was inches from a puddle of vomit. He had bruises up his legs and angry red lines Trixie assumed were track marks going up his arms. He looked like he’d lost at least 20 pounds in the past 5 days.

Trixie crouched down, putting a hand on Kat’s clammy shoulder. If he thought his heart was breaking when he walked in on him using, it was now ground to dust. “Bri?” He shook his shoulder slightly and said it louder. Katya didn’t move, he let out a little moan, he was barely breathing in short, shallow little gasps with far to much time in between. He leaned right into Bri’s ear and yelled his name, he didn’t care if he woke up Ace. Let Sam be afraid of her.

She stirred at the jostling of the bed. “What the fuck is with the earthquake?” She opened one eye and sprang to sitting up so fast that Trixie fell backwards in surprise but quickly scrambled back up. “Hi Ace, I’m Brian, here to pick up this Brian, remember we spoke on the phone? How long has he been like this?”

“Oh yeah hi! I dunno, the past day or two.” She said with a shrug.

Trixie pulled his phone out of his back pocket, “he needs an ambulance.”

Ace shared an alarmed look with Sam, who was behind him and he felt the cold metal of the gun against his neck, making his skin crawl, “sorry man, I can’t let you do that. They’ll bring the police.” Sam apologized.

Trixie held up his hands and phone slowly, “take it,” he breathed, “keep it, please just let me take him away with me.”

Sam took it but grumbled indignantly, “I don’t want your fucking phone man, I ain’t no thief! I’ll give it back to you at the door.”

The cold metal was removed from the base of his neck but the goosebumps remained, now that he knew his head wasn’t going to be blown off, he tried to rouse Katya one last time with no luck.

The first time he tried to pick up Katya, he didn’t get very far. He was like handling a cold, shaking wet fish. Katya was not heavy in general but Trixie struggled with the dead weight and trying not to drop him. He managed to finally pick him up bridal style and moved as fast as he could after Sam. He had to stop twice to lean against the wall and readjust Bri’s weight to get a better grip. His head flopped back sickly, letting out a crack at one point that made Trixie wince. He tried to move side to side til his head was no longer flopped straight back. Katya didn’t stir at all, Trixie wasn’t even sure he was breathing at this point but he couldn’t do anything about it until they were out and away from the house. Sam stuck his head out the door and looked around, letting Trixie eek out past him, he tucked Trixie’s phone in his denim shirt pocket. “Take care man, hope he’s ok.” Trixie got a few steps out of the door when Sam slammed it behind him, making him jump and almost drop his precious cargo. He heard the click of the door being locked and then Ace’s shrill voice screaming for Sam.

Trixie scrambled down the little dirt hill at the front of the house, he tried to adjust Katya to open the car door but he couldn’t even get his keys out so he had to lay Katya down while he yanked open the door.

Katya was still shaking so hard, Trixie wasn’t even sure that he wasn’t having a seizure. Katya was stirring up so much dirt, he was covered in a layer of brown in the time it took for Trixie to unlock and open the door. He reclined the passenger seat all the way and picked up Kat again, dumping him onto the seat just as he was about to lose his grip and drop him. He leaned his ear onto Kat’s chest, he was still breathing but barely, his heart sounded like it was skipping beats and it was way too fast. By force of habit, he reached over to buckle the shaking man’s seatbelt. At least it might keep him from falling off the seat.

Trixie swiped angrily at his eyes as he quickly ran to the other side of the car, pulling out his phone to locate the closest hospital with an actual emergency room and not just a walk in clinic. It was almost 20 minutes away! Trixie’s hand shook as he tried to jam the key in the ignition, he ended up driving towards the hospital. Katya scared the shit out of him about three minutes in when he muttered one word, “Trixie.”

“I’m here Bri, I’m here!” Trixie sobbed and reached a hand over to smooth back Katya’s sweaty hair when he was at a red light, he held Kat’s hand and continued to talk to him as he frantically tried to figure out if he should keep driving to the hospital or stop for help. “I’m sorry I left you alone Bri. I should have stayed.” Kat let out a wet little gurgle and then his chest stopped rising. Trixie was getting hysterical, “DON’T YOU DO THIS TO ME BRIAN McCOOK!”

He was never so excited to see a fire station than he was right now, he was never as excited to see ANYTHING before. He screeched up to a halt right in front of the doors, sprinting in to the open garage door and screaming his head off. “HELP! HELP!”

4 people came running, “hey, what do you need? Are you hurt?” The guy that reached the hysterically sobbing and doubled over Trixie first asked, Trixie gestured to his vehicle and panted, “boyfriend, front seat. Save him!” They ran ahead of him as he struggled to catch up. By the time he reached the other side, they had somehow found a blanket and laid Katya out on the ground, people were running from everywhere with big red first aid bags, a fire woman was screaming to dispatch through a 2 way radio that they needed a bus STAT.

A guy had straddled Katya and was pounding on his chest while another held a mask up to his face, squeezing the bulb attached. Trixie sank to his knees and prayed, actually prayed, out loud. Begged, “please don’t take him away from me! Please!!”

The firewoman trotted over, sinking down beside him. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“Um…uh….he was sober and then he fell off the wagon. I walked in on him 5 days ago, he was injecting something into himself, oh God I left him all alone, I ran away! Please don’t let him die on me. I left him alone! Why did I do that? Please don’t let him die.” Trixie was holding onto her sleeve like a child begging for a cookie before dinner.

“We’re doing everything we can sir, an ambulance is on the way.” She said to him and then yelled, “GET SOME NARCAN IN HIM!”

“You mean right now?” A young guy asked.

“No, McIntyre, tomorrow! OF COURSE I MEAN RIGHT NOW!” She screamed, the young guy shot back a curt “yes chief!” and started rifling through one of the first aid kits. The young guy that the captain had snapped at injected something into Katya’s arm while another buzzed around like a hummingbird, searching for a vein but not finding one.

The woman put a hand on Trixie’s back, he could hear the faint sound of a siren in the background. “Gimme your keys sir, I’ll park your car so you can leave it here and go in the ambulance. You shouldn’t drive right now anyway. Take a few deep breaths.”

Trixie couldn’t take a few deep breaths though, he felt like there was an ever tightening band squeezing his lungs. Every second that they worked on Katya felt like a small eternity.

To Trixie’s relief, Katya coughed like he’d been punched in the gut and tried to flail his fists at the guy on top of him, the guy quickly got off of him but caught his hands easily. Katya was still trying to hit the big mountain of a man, he was arching his back and screaming at the top of his lungs.

Trixie scrambled up and ran over to the group, he didn’t want to get in the way but Katya was flailing and going out of his mind.

“Bri, Bri, it’s Trix. You’re ok! You’re ok! They’re trying to help.” Trixie sobbed as the ambulance careened to a stop in the parking lot. Katya stopped flailing and Trixie let out a sigh of relief, he was coming back around. Or he thought so until the mountain of a fireman yelled, “he’s crashing again!” He resumed CPR and McIntyre once more injected something into Kat’s arm while the paramedics unloaded their gear and a gurney.

They got out a defibrillator and at the third zap they announced they had a thready pulse, sending a quiet cheer through the group. They put a still unconscious Katya on the gurney, strapping him in at the ankles, hips, waist and chest, leaving the defibrillator pads on him. The chief rattled off the situation and then handed him her card so he had the address so he could pick up his vehicle later.

“C'mon hun,” one of the paramedics pulled Trixie’s arm towards the ambulance and helped his shaking form up the giant stairs to sit against the wall. Katya crashed again on the way to the hospital, Trixie holding his breath while the paramedic worked to bring him back again. He still wasn’t back when they got to the hospital, they pointed Trixie towards the front waiting room, promising to come get him as soon as they could.

The wait was brutal, he didn’t know if Katya was even alive, one hour turned to two and he held out a sliver of hope that if Katya was dead, they would have come to tell him. He felt like he’d know.

He had never cried so much before in his life, he was either hunched in on himself or pacing the floor. An old lady in a volunteer smock came over at one point to bring him some water and tissues and sat with him for half an hour or so, whispering reassurance and empty promises while she rubbed his back which made his skin crawl. She meant well but he was relieved when she left all the same.

A young male in green scrubs finally came out, he looked around for a minute and headed towards Trixie, who stood up. “Hey I’m Dr Strand, are you the one that brought in the guy from the Fire Station on Kent?” Trixie nodded, he didn’t know if he had the ability to speak, his tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of his mouth. Why couldn’t he read this man’s facial expression? He was hoping to glean at least whether it was positive or negative.

“Walk with me?” The Dr turned and Trixie made his body follow.

“Is he…” Trixie started but faltered.

“What is his name?”

“Brian McCook.”

“Mr McCook is alive and in critical but stable condition at the moment,” Trixie let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding in, he waited for the other shoe to drop though, “The next 24 to 48 hours will be touch and go. He has a severe staph infection from an infected injection site that has attacked his heart, leading to endocarditis.”

“What do you…what can you do for that?”

“We have Mr McCook on IV antibiotics, the vegetation in his heart is concerning and normally we would get our heart surgeon in there but he just isn’t strong enough for a surgery of that magnitude right now. Plus he’s going to be physically withdrawaling from the meth and heroin in his system, we’ve pumped a lot of narcan into him, it blocks the opioid drug receptors in his brain but it’s also forcefully putting into a pretty nasty withdrawal process. We’ll keep him asleep for the next 8 hours at least and try to make him as comfortable as possible, obviously he’ll need emotional support and there are a few rehab programs we can recommend. Any questions?”

“Vegetation?”

“Masses, like tumours, of infectious and inflammatory cells and other tissues that are obviously not meant to be there. Here we are,” the Dr stopped outside of a double set of doors that read ‘INTENSIVE CARE UNIT’ in big red letters to swipe his card which allowed the doors to swing open. They stopped and sanitised their hands and then the Dr lead Trixie to the outside of Katya’s room. He was afraid to look into the room, he swayed in place and the Dr’s arm shot out to steady him.

“Are you ok? Let me walk you in Sir.”

“Just give me a second.” Trixie panted, feeling like all the air had been sucked from the room. He closed his eyes as the room spun, he felt too hot. Dr Strand clamped his hands on Trixie’s shoulders painfully as he steered him into a chair just inside the room.

“Put your head between your knees and take some deep breaths, I’m going to get something to clean up those burns.”

Burns? Trixie had no idea what he was talking about until he put his head down, he had sunk to his knees in the Fire station parking lot and hadn’t even felt the pavement burning him. Anywhere his skin touched, his knees and part of his right calf, was red and blistered. The largest of the blisters had popped to reveal what looked like hamburger meat underneath.

Trixie knew he couldn’t avoid looking at Katya forever, part of him had to to prove he was really still there. It would be better if he was alone when he did. He lifted his head and sucked in a breath, tears springing in his eyes.

Katya looked beyond weak, he looked frail. He was hooked up to a ventilator, Trixie taking some comfort in the steady rise and fall of his chest. He had a heart monitor, the beep, beep, beep of the monitor was reassuring even if it was too fast, a blood pressure cuff swallowed his whole arm. Trixie’s stomach flip-flopped at the sight of an IV coming out of the side of Katya’s neck. They had left the defibrillator pads on his chest and Trixie wondered if that was because they thought they would need them again. He still looked grey against the white flannel blanket that was pulled up on his bare chest.

Trixie stood up on wobbly legs and stood by the side of the bed, he put his hand over Katya’s heart as if to confirm he was indeed alive. “I’m sorry I left you. Please don’t leave me,” he begged, his bottom lip quivering. He picked up Katya’s hand, wincing at the dark angry red lines trailing up his arm. His other hand made its way to Katya’s sweaty forehead, pushing back his hair.

Katya still had a fine layer of brown dust on him and it was bugging Trixie, it couldn’t be comfortable and Trixie was filled with nervous energy so he went on the hunt for a basin and washcloths. He got them all together but then he was too afraid to touch Katya, too afraid that he would mess up the wires that were keeping him alive. He did wash off his scruffy face, being careful to avoid jostling the ventilator tubing that vibrated every time Katya exhaled.

Trixie was made very aware of his injuries as his nerves screamed at him when the Doctor came back to clean and bandage his burns.

Then Trixie watched and waited, tracing words into Katya’s palm. They tried to wean Katya off the medication to wake him up when his heart monitor let out a high, steady mocking whine, sending the room into a frenzy. A nurse punted a panicked Trixie into the hall just as they were jolting Katya’s heart. His back arched and then he flopped back down. Trixie stood in the hall, sobbing, realizing he couldn’t do this alone. He was going to go crazy.

He pulled out his phone, dialing with shaking hands.

“Hello?”

“Ginger.” Trixie managed to get out before completely breaking down.

“Trix? Is that you? What’s wrong baby? What’s happened?”

“Katya’s….sick. I don’t know what to do!” Trixie blubbered, letting out a wail as the Dr shocked Kat again. “He can’t die on me Ging! We just found each other.”

“DIE? Omigod! Where are you?”

“Cal… California. LA.”

“I’m in San Diego, I’ll be on the next flight out. It’s only an hour flight. What… what happened?”

“It’s his heart, there’s an infection, they have to keep resuscitating him. I’m…I’m afraid they won’t be able to get him back this time. I’m so afraid Joshua.”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry Brian. I’m on my way to the airport now, I’ll send you my flight details.”

“Ok, thanks.”

Trixie hung up and rested his head against the glass. They had managed to restart Bri’s heart, Trixie sighed in relief and got hypnotized by the squiggly line of his pulse. They let him back into the room and he sank back down into the chair by the bed.

Ginger arrived in a whirlwind of hugs and tears and comforting but empty promises. He could only stay for 24 hours but his presence was comforting.

3 days, 2 attempts and 1 more code later and they were finally able to wake Katya up. His eyes went wide as he flailed his matchstick arms and tried to pull out his breathing tube so Trixie grabbed his hands, putting his face directly above Katya’s.

“Bri, it’s ok! You’re ok! This is to help you breathe, they are just trying to help you babe.”

Katya calmed and they were able to remove the breathing tube about half an hour later and replace it with oxygen.

“You came.” Katya croaked and then hacked violently, turning blue and coughing up a pink foam. A nurse cranked up the oxygen and shoved a mask over Kat’s face. He took a few deep breaths, slid the mask off and tried to speak again.

Trixie placed the mask back on and smoothed his hand through Katya’s hair.  “Shhhh! Don’t talk. Of course I came! I looked for you for days and days. I’m so glad you called me. I was going crazy! I’m so sorry, I should have never left you!”

Katya turned over their enjoined hands and released Trixie’s, he traced the words ‘I’m sorry’ on Trixie’s palm. Tears pooled and trickled down his cheeks as Katya’s shoulders shook with sobs. Trixie wiped away the fat tears with his knuckles.

It was obvious that even though Katya had only been awake less than an hour after 3 days of unconsciousness, he was exhausted and his eyes kept fluttering shut. He’d quickly jolt himself awake, grimacing in pain and rubbing his chest.

Trixie lifted their joined hands and kissed Katya’s knuckles, “close your eyes Bri, rest.” He whispered. He started humming the tune to a song he wrote long ago and was relieved to see Katya allow himself to rest.

The next day they wheeled Katya away to surgery after a tearful goodbye, both Katya and Trixie were very aware that this could kill Katya but to do nothing could also kill him. The antibiotics were not working as well as the Doctors had hoped. The 3 hour wait was unbearable, even with the arrival of the whirlwind that is Katya’s Mum Pat at the beginning of the second hour to distract him.

Pat came and crouched in front of the chair Trixie was sitting hunched over in, “Hi, you must be Trixie? I’m Brian’s Mum Pat. What happened? They wouldn’t tell me anything, I just got back from vacation to a message from some hospital in LA saying they had my son. They didn’t tell me anyone was with him and I’ve been going crazy all flight at the thought that he spent all this time alone. Thank you for coming, Brian has told me a lot about you. He’s really quite fond of you. Where is he? Where is my son?”

“He’s in surgery. He’s got masses of infection in his heart.”

“Oh,” Pat breathed and sat hard on the floor. Trixie scrambled to his feet and pulled Pat up, the tiny woman latched on to him in a surprisingly firm hug. Trixie did his best not to squirm, he wasn’t really a “hugger”, he just wasn’t used to it. Pat was crying, her knees were wobbling so Trixie was practically holding her up, he turned slightly and sat her down in the chair. “I’m sorry!” She apologized as he pulled up another chair, she put her hand over Trixie’s, “you mean a great deal to my Brian. Are you two together?” Trixie nodded but then started sobbing. “Oh no! Why are you crying dear? It’s going to be ok, Brian is a strong boy.”

“This is all my fault.” Trixie cradled his head in his hands, he took a deep breath and told Pat the whole story. Walking in on Katya shooting up, running away, searching for days, him calling and what happened after.

Pat was silent for a long, agonizing moment then she put her hand on Trixie’s back, “it’s not your fault dear. Brian has slayed this dragon before and he will again.” She said confidently.

They both stood up as the cardiac surgeon came in and introduced herself as Dr Gilmour. “I’m afraid I have bad news.”

“Oh God,” Pat fell backwards into the chair and folded in on herself, “is my baby dead? Please oh God no!”

“No, no no! I’m so sorry. Brian did fairly well during the surgery, we came into a bit of trouble with the left ventricle. We’ve removed what vegetation we could but we will likely need to go in again in a day or two. Unfortunately, the damage is extensive so we called UNOS and got him on the list.”

“What does that mean?”

Pat pulled Trixie to sit down again beside her and he was glad she did, “honey, she’s saying Brian needs a heart transplant.”

“Oh.” He said dumbly, feeling numb and getting goosebumps all over.

“How likely is him getting a heart with his history of substance abuse?” Pat asked, looking like it was the last thing she wanted to ask.

“it definitely came up to the ethics board, I made sure they knew he had been sober for some time before this slip. I managed to get him a bed at a rehab program at a hospital here in LA. They have an excellent program for patients who may need a less rigorous and more flexible program because of medical fragility.”

Trixie’s heart sank, “how long is it?”

“Well, it doesn’t have a set time like most programs because of its unique nature. But the minimum stay is around 30 days.”

Katya ended up staying for an agonizing 3½ months while Trixie had to parade around the world, pretending everything was fine at Kat’s insistence. They had put out the story, at Pat’s insistence, that she was sick and Bri had taken a hiatus from travelling to go be with her.

It had been 10 months since he was put on the list, he was somewhere near the top since he continued to decline. Trixie remembered the call they had gotten a month ago in the middle of the night, Dr Gilmour announced that they had a heart.

Katya had joked on the way to the hospital that if Trix kept driving like an idiot, they would get in an accident and his organs would be no good to anybody. They practically floated into the hospital, Katya dancing with his oxygen tank they had named Charlie like a goof while Trixie went to the front desk to sign them in.

They knew something was up as soon as they saw Dr Gilmour’s fallen face. “I’m afraid that there was a problem with the heart. It wasn’t viable.”

The ride home was the longest and most silent 35 minutes of Trixie and Katya’s life. Katya had made Trixie go upstairs to sleep, saying he was in too much pain to have someone in bed with him. He refused to take pain medication unless he was delirious with agony. Then he permitted it since it was bad for his heart to be put through so much stress.

Trixie got halfway up the stairs when he heard Katya let out a sob. He put his head down, grabbed onto the railing, then gave it a thump with the side of his closed fist. He almost went back downstairs but knew that Kat needed to be alone. He climbed the rest of the stairs, flopping on the bed where he cried himself to sleep, still fully dressed.

Trixie felt Katya squeeze his hand, bringing him back to the present. “Hey there, you looked like you were far, far away. Where did you go Tracy?” Katya asked, smiling wistfully.

“Oh I was just strolling on the beach with my dead Dad.” Trix joked, “how was your rest?”

“It was ok, there weren’t any beaches though, nor dead Dads.”

“Bummer man.”

“So I was thinking…”

“Always a dangerous activity.”

“Oh shut up!” Katya laughed then grew serious, “we should move our Christmas up to November 5th.”

Trixie could run one of two ways with this, he could tell Katya that a heart would come or he could crack a joke. He chose the latter, “you just want your present earlier, ya big ol’ baby!”

Katya elbowed him in the shoulder. “Why do you know me so well? You’re so mean! But seriously can we?”

Trixie’s mouth hitched up on one side in a lopsided grin, “ok fine!”

He gave in just like Katya knew he would, playing perfectly into his plan.

They got the call on their special Christmas Eve, they were curled up watching a movie and eating lasagne, well more precisely Trixie was eating and Katya was pushing the food around on his plate before pushing the plate away all together and grumbling about not being hungry. He had been getting worse lately and had been hospitalized twice in the past 2 weeks.

Katy answered the phone with shaking hands, automatically putting it on speaker and setting it on his chest since he found it too taxing to hold the phone up without losing circulation in his hand.

“Brian, we have a heart for you.” Dr Gilmour announced, the excitement in her voice was almost palpable. “It’s in the air now, it’s been double and triple checked so we won’t have a problem like last time.”

“Ok, we’re on our way.” Katya said in a monotone before hanging up. He refused to get excited this time, the last time felt like his trashy heart was being crushed to smithereens.

Trixie squealed and hugged him gently before grabbing Katya’s portable oxygen tank and yanking the fully packed hospital bag out of the front closet and throwing their phones and laptop and their various cords in. It had been carefully packed for months in preparation for this moment. Trixie had found the list on Pinterest. It had the basics like toiletries, lip balm and lotion, magazines they hadn’t read yet, ear plugs and sleep mask, slippers and loose clothing. Then it had things they would have never thought of, 2 empty refillable water bottles, snacks for Trixie to stress eat while waiting, a battery powered fan for white noise since Kat couldn’t stand the beeping on his previous hospital stays and a stuffed Tenderheart Care-bear from Ginger. An adult colouring book and pencil crayons were suggested for the pre-surgery waiting jitters by a fellow heart patient whom they met on one of Kat’s hospital stays in the last 10 months.

Katya labouriously sat up in bed, switching to the shorter oxygen tubing to his portable tank, it was only 5:15pm but he was as exhausted as if it were 3am and he’d been working out for 10 days straight. He had to stop 5 times on the way to the car, breathing heavily and being supported by Trixie who had offered to carry him. He bristled and declined, it was totally emasculating to be offered to be carried like a child, even if it was by someone who loved him as much as he knew Trix loved him.

There were no jokes even though Trixie drove like a madman again. He was grinning madly, he couldn’t help it. Katya felt hope ignite in his stomach, he tried to suppress it but soon there was a small grin on his pale blue lips too.

Trixie pulled up to the front door, “wait a sec.” He ran into the hospital and returned pushing a wheelchair which he almost careened in the side of his Jeep in his haste. Katya opened his mouth to protest but closed it with a warning look from Trixie. Trixie brought him into the lobby, pressing Kat’s phone into his hand, “call your Mum while I park the car.”

Trixie rushed away, practically skipping and humming to himself. Katya looked at his phone for a minute before tucking it into his pocket. He had to make sure this was real, he couldn’t bear being any more of a disappointment to her. He was back to being numb, he had apparently successfully squashed that pesky flicker of hope.

“Hi Brian! You made it!” Dr Gilmour rushed over and hugged him, picking up his wrist to check his pulse as if by habit while she looked around. “Let’s get this show on the road, like I said the heart is in the air, should be here in 45 minutes. Where’s Firkus? You ready? How do you feel? When was the last time you ate and how much?” Her questions toppled out in her excitement, she had gotten attached to “the Brians” as she called them, she practically bounced in excitement. They were such a lovely couple and she had fought hard on behalf of Katya. He was a talented man that made a mistake and it shouldn’t cost him his life.

“He’s parking the car, one bite of lasagne about an hour ago because Firkus was giving me his puppy dog eyes and before that a boiled egg, ½ a piece of toast and ensure this morning at around 10. Haven’t had much appetite. So there’s really a heart?”

She put a hand on her cocked hip as she rolled her eyes and quipped sarcastically, “no, there’s no heart. This is all an elaborate ruse Brian.” She then did an uncanny impression of the soup guy from Seinfeld, “no heart for you!”

Katya let out a giggle, “aha! I thought so!” Trixie rushed up to them, pulling Katya’s hand into his and swinging them slightly.

“Ok Firkus is here, let’s go get you a new heart Brian!”

“One second, I just have to call my Mum.”

Trixie let out an exasperated sigh, “you didn’t believe it was really happening, did you?”

“He didn’t. Sceptical, sceptical man!” She tsked with a wink and then checked her beeping cellphone and let out a very nonDoctor-like squeal, “it’ll be here early, in 30 minutes! Let’s goooooo!” She tapped her fingers on the counter until Katya hung up with his Mum and then she grabbed the wheelchair handles and they were off.

——-

“Daddy, why do we celebrate two Christmases?” A tiny girl in a scarlet velvet gown crawled into Trixie’s lap. He chuckled at her and put his guitar down as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close.

“Well, 6 years ago and 2 years ago, miracles happened on November 4th.”

“Oh really? What?” She bounced on his knee in her excitement, this story never got old to her.

“Well 6 years ago, a man in Florida unfortunately died, but he gave the ultimate gift by signing an organ donor card. Your Papa was really, really sick.”

“It was his heart, right?” She said seriously, her brown eyes wide. She pointed one chubby finger to the center of her chest. A wide pink scar was barely visible, peeking out of the top of her dress.

“Mmhmm, exactly right Barbara.”

“So Papa got a new heart right?”

“You know that the answer is yes.”

“What happened 2 years ago?” She asked with a twinkle in her eye.

“Oh it was very exciting! We got a new houseplant! That fern over there!” He laughed at her look of indignation.

“Daddyyyy!” Barbara whined and pouted, “tell the story right!”

“Oh ok! If I must,” he sighed in mock exasperation and then continued, “your Papa was feeling sick, his new heart was being grumpy so doctor Gilmour,”

“God-mommy Olive?”

He nodded into her hair and kissed the top of her head, “Yes God-mommy Olive, do you want to tell the story?”

“Noooo! I’ll be good, I promise!” She said seriously then squealed when Katya picked her up and tossed her in the air once before putting her down between them, she climbed up and he cradled her on his lap, Trixie scooched closer and put an arm around him.

“The Christmas-ish story? Again?”

“Mmhmm.”

“So I was sick,” Katya continued, “anddoctor Olive decided I should be in the hospital for a few days for some medicine. We were at the heart institute and when I was feeling a bit better, we went for a walk around the hall and noticed a teeny little 4 year old girl.”

“Me right?”

“Yes you! You were so small.”

“You were pretty sick,” Trixie took over the story like he did every night, “we found out later that you had been in and out of the hospital a lot and we felt sad that you were all alone. We didn’t know where your Mommy and Dad were so we’d sneak in and sit with you and talk to you, sometimes I would sing to you. Then we found out that your Mommy and Dad were very young when they had you and too afraid to hurt you because they loved you so much so we snuck in in the night and stole you and ran fast!”

“Silly Daddy!! Then doctor Mark fixed up my heart and you adopted me, right?” She let out a huge yawn and snuggled in deeper, blinking up at them sleepily. She didn’t need them to nod, she knew the story and had asked to hear it millions of times. “I’m glad,” she muttered as her long-lashed eyes fluttered shut.

Katya leaned over to Trixie and gave him a kiss, “Merry Christmas-ish dear.”

“Merry Christmas-ish honey, oh honey.” Trixie said with a giggle.

Katya sighed happily and thought ‘we started new traditions and we’ve made our own family because of it’ his newish-to-him heart filled with gratefulness and relief as he looked down at Barbara adoringly, ‘I didn’t destroy anyone.’

(hope the end wasn’t to floofy)

Thanks for reading my story! I hope you liked it and it just broke your heart a tiny bit but the ending glued it back together. Whether you liked it or hated it and want me to die in a fiery plane crash, feel free to send me feedback! Please?

On a serious note, please consider becoming an Organ Donor, it can even be put on your licence (or health card in Canada) if you think your family would disagree. It really is the ultimate gift and you can’t take it with you. I, myself, am a tissue donor recipient, I am very grateful that it was an available option for my parents. (I was like 4 when we started to age 7)

Organ donation is also close to my heart as my God brother and very best friend, Jeremy, died when I was 12 while waiting for a heart. He was only 8.

I know it’s a hard decision and I know some religions prohibit it, I would just be glad if this makes at least one person think about it.

Love and Glitter and Happy Christma-Hanu-Kwanza-Yule-ica!

Remény