#it'll first and foremost be for people who have

[iwaasfairy]

Can you do some degenerate father kaiser hcs...fem reader if possible

🙏🏻

maybe i would (i do wanna write more bllk) but ,,, i'd appreciate it if you read my (and other writers') rules before asking, because i don't do headcanons and i always write fem readers,,,

and like i answered an ask just earlier,, i'm backed up on writing with kinktober

[ckret2]

Bill hates it when people mention Euclydia. Everyone thinks it's because he doesn't want to hear his home's real name; it's actually the opposite.

Here, have some fic. The naming of Euclydia (among other things), the birth of the Nightmare Realm, and the Axolotl planting the seeds of a trillion-year-long plan to keep Bill from the death penalty.

This is the 🎉FINAL PART🎉 of a 9-part plot about the Axolotl in the aftermath of the Euclidean Massacre. If you wanna read the others (or look at the art), here's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight.

####

With the immediate crisis averted and the triangle, for the moment, not attempting to invade and/or demolish the multiverse, most of the god militia pulled back. A group remained stationed near the unstable border between dimensions to watch the triangle; but the less powerful gods could trickle back in to get back to their own work, first and foremost the construction workers doing emergency repairs to reformat and stabilize the neighboring dimensions.

The Axolotl—who, he suspected, would have been arrested himself for interfering if they weren't still focused on the triangle—wove through the crowd until he found the Time Giant; and then swam angrily up to her and demanded, "You used me as a distraction?"

She turned a stone-hard look on him. "That was the agreement."

"No! The agreement was that I'd try to talk him down! We'd only resort to distracting him if I couldn't get through to him!"

"Ya didn't get through to him." The Time Giant nodded at the Axolotl's burned side. "Look at you. Your leg's off."

He looked down at his missing foreleg. He'd been so distracted by the near end of the multiverse, he'd barely noticed the pain. "It's just a flesh wound," he insisted. "I'm an axolotl, it'll grow back!"

She shook her head.

"I would have gotten through to him! You saw me talk him down after an entire army threatened him!" the Axolotl said. "What if I had succeeded, and when we left my tank he found out you already wrote him off?! You never gave me a chance—"

"We did give you a chance," she said testily, "and I saw that you weren't gonna succeed." She hooked a thumb over her belt and tapped a finger on her time tape; the stylized symbol of the Time Giants glowed on the side, an unsubtle reminder that she knew what was coming far better than he did. "So I did my damn job."

So she'd sent him in already knowing that he would fail. The Axolotl was speechless for a second. "But—you couldn't know—I got so close, if I'd had just one more try to talk to him..."

"If I'd let you, I'm sure you woulda kept trying until the end of time," she said. "You seem like a good guy, Ax—but you can't save everyone." She pushed past him to get to work. "There's first aid near where Dimension 2 Gamma was. Get those burns looked at."

"They're fine."

She was wrong. He could save everyone. Because he wouldn't stop until he did.

####

"You're replacing it?" the triangle asked petulantly.

"I'm not talking to you," VENDOR said, turned away from the triangle. "You had your chance at diplomacy and you blew it." The crablike cop was holding up a clipboard with some paperwork for VENDOR to review, and didn't look pleased to have been temporarily reduced to a secretary.

"I'm just asking a question!"

"We're not speaking."

At the top of his lungs—which was, it turned out, very loud and very shrill—the triangle said in the direction of the reporters, "Oh wow, that's a crazy thing to say about Lady Morgenstern! And talk about obscene! She'd be furious if she could hear that—!"

"Shhhhh!" VENDOR rounded angrily on the triangle. "You don't even know who she is!"

"I know her name and I'm not afraid to use it," the triangle said. "You're really replacing my dimension?"

"If I can be left alone long enough to finish signing the authorization paperwork," VENDOR muttered. "The construction crew's already out here and waiting, so if you don't mind..."

"It just seems pretty tacky, replacing a universe just like that." The triangle spoke like dimension he was talking about was just a pawn to be used in a trivial argument about etiquette, rather than everyone and everything he'd ever known. "No memorial or anything? Yeesh."

"So hold a memorial for it," VENDOR said. "We don't have any choice, we have to repair all the fallen walls to keep reality stable. If you'd let us into your hovel to sweep up what's left of your old dimension, it could have at least been incorporated into the new one."

The triangle half reached for his hat, stopped himself, and curled his hand into a fist and thrust it down at his side. "Over my dead body," he said. "Which I'm pretty sure got incinerated! So that means never!"

"You're pretty sure?" VENDOR asked archly.

"It... I had more important stuff to take care of, okay? I'm a busy guy!"

"I'm sure," VENDOR said. "Well, it's too late for any cleanup operations anyway. Enjoy rotting away in your landfill."

"Wow, that's how you talk to a refugee from the biggest disaster ever?" The triangle laughed. "Hey, bet the muckrakers over there would love to hear how sympathetic you are to the—what'd you say I am—the 'last surviving soul from my dimension'—?"

"Let's find somewhere quieter to work," VENDOR said to the cop.

He looked relieved "You got it."

As VENDOR and THEIR impromptu secretary moved away from Dimension Zero, the triangle shouted after THEM, "Hey! How do I vote for Municipalitron!"

Volcanoes on several of VENDOR's planets erupted. THEY whipped around to face the triangle. "You don't! You aren't in my district!"

"Well, whose district am I in? This Morgenstern creep you keep bringing up?" the triangle asked. "How's voting work, do you toss a ballot across the border and I toss it back—?"

"You're not in anyone's district! If you were, you'd have been arrested already!"

The triangle stared in dumb shock. "Wait, so I don't get to vote for which of you idiots I have to deal with?" He hollered at VENDOR's retreating back, "That's fascism!"

Fuming, VENDOR passed the Axolotl muttering under THEIR breath about showing the triangle fascism; then stopped, abruptly turned to face him, and snapped, "You."

"You," the Axolotl agreed.

"You're an optimistic fool."

Yes, well, he knew that already. He'd been voted Most Adorably Idealistic in his law school yearbook for a reason. "I don't think I like you, either."

"No one does." THEIR camera whirred irritably as they looked the Axolotl up and down. "What are you doing here, anyway? I assumed you'd been sent to figure out who's liable for this whole mess—but no, you only handle afterlife cases, don't you? Who sent you?"

The Axolotl was silent.

Furiously, VENDOR said, "Are you serious?! We could have avoided half this mess if it weren't for you!"

"If it weren't for me, he'd have knocked down the multiverse before anyone realized he's setting the fires," the Axolotl snapped. "And if you had figured that much out, you'd have gotten your cops killed before anyone realized he's a god."

"The professionals here to handle the situation could have figured it out faster if you weren't derailing their investigations," VENDOR snarled. "And arguing about jurisdiction! We could have arrested that that little troublemaker the moment we figured out just what he's done—"

"Right after you arrested that kid with the spray can who didn't have anything to do with this?"

THEY growled in frustration. "Forget it! I hope you're happy with your genocidal pal over there—you seem about as concerned with public safety as he is." THEY stormed off, the cop with THEIR paperwork chasing after THEM.

The Axolotl watched VENDOR go; then turned to look ruefully toward Dimension Zero.

When the triangle caught his gaze, he formed a heart with his fingers over his top point and called out, gleefully singsong, "Genocide paaals!"

It wasn't exactly the reaction he'd hoped for.

####

The Axolotl was attempting to distract himself from scratching his itchy leg while it regrew by eavesdropping on the triangle. It seemed like the triangle was entertaining himself by darting around the border of Dimension Zero to start arguments with anybody he happened to recognize (except the Axolotl, whom he seemed to be trying to ignore outside of throwing a few odd quips at him.) At the moment, the triangle and the Time Giant were hollering at each other about her decision to reinforce the second dimensions by making them splinter into multiple timelines.

"So you're really willing to sacrifice zillions of lives by letting me incinerate all their parallel timelines?" The triangle laughed in disbelief. "And everyone here thinks I'm the killer! That's not a good look for you, buddy!"

She glanced up from a table full of paperwork to give him a totally neutral look. "You're the one who's willing to incinerate them. You could not do that."

"When I do it, it's justified."

The Axolotl was distracted from the argument as the storm cloud with the apoc agents gloomily blew past him. It was talking into a walkie-talkie as it went: "Yeah, I know he's a nut. But he's a nut that can't throw fireballs outside the border of his dimension, and I've got to finish this report before we can get outta here." He sighed at whatever the walkie-talkie said in response, and said, "Yeah. We'll rendezvous after I have his testimony." It let its tornado suck the walkie-talkie back in and drifted to the Time Giant. "Mind if I steal your conversation partner for a minute? ATTF business."

She grabbed a binder to try to shield her papers from the worst of the storm's rain. "Please. Take him."

"Thanks." It floated closer to Dimension Zero and raised its voice to bark, "Hey! Magister Mentium!"

The triangle looked over mistrustfully. "What?" As he'd talked to the Time Giant, he'd been playing with the fabric of reality, creating a circle out of raw... stuff. The Axolotl couldn't tell what the stuff was, but it looked like it was some sort of animal tissue, except far too uncannily homogeneous to be natural, disturbing in its uniformity. Like a slice of baloney. When he saw who'd called out to him, he rolled his eye and turned his attention to extruding the circle into a baloney cylinder. "Heeey, Officer Fun Police! Here to rain on my parade again?"

"Rain jokes aren't as funny as you think they are," it said. "No, this is Apocalyptic Threat Task Force business."

The triangle's eye narrowed. "What business? Are you gonna complain about my renovations again?"

"No. If you're not about to knock reality down, I don't care what you do anymore," the cloud said. "It's not my business to punish anybody for previous apocalypses, I just want to prevent future ones. Answer a few questions for our incident report and I'll be out of your life." There was an implicit and you'll be out of mine in its tone.

"All right," the triangle said dubiously. "Fffine. Then we're on the same side. I'm not fond of apocalypses either."

It paused like it wanted to argue with that claim, but said, "Good enough for me." It pulled out the soggy notepad it had been using all day, flipped through it, couldn't find a free page, and with a sigh pulled out a tape recorder instead. "You're from Dimension 2 Delta, right?"

"If you say so," the triangle said, lifting his hands in a shrug. "You guys are the ones who named my dimension."

"Uh-huh." Under its breath, the cloud muttered, "Not exactly a name, but... If you're from 2Δ, that makes you the only direct witness to how your universe was destroyed."

The triangle paused. "Mm."

"Can you explain what happened, exactly?" When the triangle didn't respond, the cloud added, "I'm not gonna arrest you for it. If we want to have a chance of stopping something like this from happening in the future, we need to know what happened here."

"Uhhh, yyyeah. Suuure," the triangle said.  It wasn't clear exactly how Dimension Zero rearranged, but the view of the eternal dance party simply vanished. There was no sign of the millions of shapes. The music had fallen near silent, just a constant distant low thumping noise, like your heartbeat in your ears; quiet enough that it couldn't drown out the whispery hiss leaking out of Dimension Zero. "It's not like I have anything to hide." Whatever he was about to say, it seemed like he wanted to hide it from his party prisoners, at least.

A bolt of lightning shot through the storm's recorder, turning it on. "You said you were an active participant in the end of the world, right?"

"Hey, what's that supposed to mean?" He eyed the recorder suspiciously. "What is this, some trick to try to get a confession out of me?"

"Again, I'm not a cop. And you already confessed in front of a thousand reporters," the storm said. "If you were involved, you've got a different perspective than some guy ten superclusters away who only witnessed it, that's the only reason it matters."

"Oh," the triangle said. "Then—yeah, I was there for the whole thing. Start to finish."

"Great," the storm said gruffly. "Then could you explain in your own words what happened when the universe ended and, to the best of your knowledge, what caused it."

"Oh. Yeah. Right. The cause," the triangle said. "It... it was a—monster."

"I thought you said you—"

"It was a monster," the triangle said, more confidently now.

The cloud hesitated. "All right," it said. "Tell me what happened."

The triangle took a deep breath. "Okay. So. It uh—started with the third dimension."

"The monster came from the third dimension?"

"No, we were going to the third dimension. But we needed—"

The hissing background static exploded into a roar.

The void filled with the staticky screams of countless dead voices, pleading for mercy, pleading for it to stop. Death rattles, howls of agony, wails of terror. Most of the crowd of gods outside Dimension Zero fell silent, turning to stare at the disembodied hysterical shrieks.

One voice, strained with pain, rose above the cacophony, crackling, "Emergency services! We need medical assistance! Ambulances, or—please—I don't know what happened—it's like everyone's internal organs spontaneously ruptured, there's—there's hundreds of people here! Some of them are missing parts of their body, they just—disappeared! I'm hurt too, I don't know what it is—I can feel it inside me—"

A second voice replied, "We can't send assistance. Everyone's bleeding, the whole city's dying! We can't help you!"

Whatever the triangle said was lost beneath the roar. He didn't even seem to notice it. His eye was filled with static. The word "blood" was just barely audible. The word "mandibles."

Another voice, trying to sound professional, trying to sound authoritative, but trembling with fear, "This is an emergency announcement! This announcement will not repeat! The fire can transmit over radio waves and sound waves! Turn off all radios and TVs! Turn off all radios and TVs and destroy any wireless phones and pagers! Do NOT listen to the screams! Again, the fire is transmitting over radio waves, this message will not repeat, destroy your radio and warn your neighbors!"

The Axolotl saw images flash in the triangle's eye, too fast for him to mentally process one before another ten had gone by: a plane like infinitely thin glass with tiny delicate shapes painted on its surface shattering in a rolling wave; a bleeding body reduced to shards and then the shards reduced to chips and then chips reduced to dust; fire spitting and crackling into every crack split in existence; a light shaped like a triangle. (Was that the light that had blinded the Oracle's seer?)

Another voice gasping, "It's doing something to the gravity, I-I don't understand—we don't even have the equipment to read... it's like gravity's turned in a direction that doesn't exist! Does anyone know how to stop it?! Our universe is tearing ap—" and the words were cut off with a scream; and the scream was cut off with a sudden silence that was swallowed whole by the other voices.

The triangle had peeled open, shining golden panels stretching out like petals, his mandibles unhinged and curling around his eye in a ring of teeth, like a blooming carnivorous flower, sun-soaked and mesmerizing. God, he was so bright. He shot light in every direction like an explosion that never ended. Like a star trapped in the moment of supernova.

Another voice, shaking with rage, "Did you hear that, you monster?! I told you we weren't ready yet! Why didn't you listen?! I can see the destruction from here—the sky's on fire, everything is burning. How could this happen?! YOU killed them all—" and the rage cracked, revealing the fear and grief just barely hidden underneath, "Remember us. If you're the only one left, you have to remember us. Please—"

The static snapped off; the triangle's body snapped back into place; his eye snapped back into focus; "—and then they appointed me their god," he said cheerfully, "and here we are!"

And with only a couple more dying cries of pain and pleas for help, the voices fell back to their constant background whisper.

The storm cloud had started sleeting.

The Axolotl had stopped breathing. Just the sound of the carnage was enough to make him sick.

But the triangle sounded perfectly at ease—more than he had before he'd answered the cloud's question. "So is that all you needed?" He'd resumed playing with the cylinder of meat he'd been constructing—extruding it further, and then, dissatisfied with the results, collapsing it back into a circle.

His hands were trembling as he messed with the cylinder. There was a tightness around his eye.

"What..." The storm cloud let out a low rumble of thunder, ahem, "what... did you say about blood? I didn't catch it."

The triangle blinked blankly at the storm. "I didn't say anything about blood."

It paused.  "All right, then—what about the other voices? Who were they?"

"What voices?"

The storm stared at the triangle, baffled sunbeam fixed on him; then swung the sunbeam over to the Axolotl. "You heard—?"

So his eavesdropping had been noticed. He nodded. Oh, he heard, all right.

The triangle glanced between them. "I think you guys are hearing voices," he said. "The only one talking here is me."

He said it like he meant it. The Axolotl was sure he did. Had he not heard the voices?

"Never mind, forget it," the cloud said uneasily. "You said someone... Who appointed you their god?"

"Uhhh..." the triangle tilted to the side as he tried to think. "Pretty much all my people? Yeah. It was everyone!"

"Your people? From your universe?"

"Yup!"

"They didn't appoint you their god," the cloud said. "They're all dead."

The triangle scoffed. "I don't know what you're talking about. They're all in here with me!"

"You mean the mortals from the other universes?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," the triangle repeated, a little slower, warningly. "They're all from my universe."

For a moment, the cloud just stared at him, at a loss. It glanced again toward the Axolotl. The Axolotl had nothing to offer it.

"Is that everything?" The triangle tried to keep his voice peppy, but there was an edge of exhaustion that hadn't been there earlier. (Yeah, him and everyone else here.)

"I guess that wraps up that part of the questionnaire," the cloud muttered uneasily, trying to recover its professional tone. "Just a couple more questions. I need your name. For the report."

Dimension Zero's hissing background static rose again: "The murderer... The name of the murderer... is—"

"NOBODY ASKED YOU!" The triangle turned and chucked the cylinder he'd been working on into the Dream Realm. He grumbled under his breath, created another circle, and started stretching it out again.

The triangle could hear the voices. Then why hadn't he been able to hear them earlier? Unless he had been able to hear them—and he just... couldn't remember that he'd heard them?

Even if the Axolotl hadn't known about the incomparable trauma the triangle had survived/caused, it would be pretty obvious by now that something was going terribly wrong inside his head. Contradictory stories about his own reality, memories he refused to remember, facts he simply set aside as not relevant. Was he refusing to face them, or was he unable?

From their conversation in the Axolotl's tank, he thought the triangle understood more than he was willing to admit. But the Axolotl might be the only one who knew that.

And that was beginning to give the Axolotl an idea.

"Just—put me down as the Magister Mentium, okay?" the triangle told the cloud. "Everyone'll know who you're talking about."

"If you say so," said the cloud. "What was your universe's name?"

"Its name?" The triangle glanced up from his new cylinder and gave the cloud a perplexed look. "You asked already. You said it's Dimension 2 Delta."

"That's its serial number. Every dimension's assigned one at its Big Bang. But it's standard to let a dimension's own residents choose its name. It makes it more personal." The cloud sounded as though it had memorized this explanation. The Axolotl wondered how many times it had had to take statements from a destroyed dimension's grieving survivors. He hoped it usually got to give this spiel to witnesses of a narrowly averted apocalypse. "Typically the first explorers to leave their dimension get to name it; but the only person ever known to leave 2Δ is... you."

"Oh," he said. "Right."

"So, what did your people name your universe?"

He stared at the storm like it was stupid. "We called it... the universe?"

"Everyone calls their universe The Universe," the cloud said. "Followed by The World, The Dimension, Reality, and Home. They're all taken, come up with something else."

"Seriously? You're making me name my whole universe and now you're telling me how to name it?"

"They're not my rules," the cloud said. "If you don't have a native name, we usually name a dimension after the first known explorer to leave it. Was that you?"

The triangle was quiet for an uncomfortably long moment. His gaze twitched away; and for a moment the Axolotl thought he saw another image flash in his eye: a triangle floating in space, eerily serene, dead. His voice was small when he said, "No."

Surprised lightning quietly flashed in the storm's cloud. "Oh. Do you know the name of the first?"

"Of course I do. He's my..." He stopped himself. He said, too evenly, "His name is Euclid."

Obviously, the triangle wasn't speaking a language that can be spoken with human mouths or written with human symbols. "Euclid" is a stand-in word for an unpronounceable name; trying to say the name without the right anatomy—without even the right laws of physics and sound waves—would only mangle it.

But the rest of the multiverse didn't have the right physics or anatomy either. "Euclid," the cloud repeated, mangling it. The triangle winced. "Fine. How's Euclydia sound?"

"It sounds stupid," the triangle said.

"Well, it's your dimension. Do you have a better suggestion?"

"I..." The triangle floundered helplessly. "That... Okay hold on, I've had a very long..." He floundered again as he tried to figure exactly what kind of time span he'd been having a long one of.

"If you want me to come back later..." said the cloud, who very obviously did not want to have to come back later.

"I don't knowww, gimme a second," the triangle whined. "I've never thought about a universe having a name! It's—it's fine. Euclydia's fine."

"If you're sure—?"

"Of course I'm sure," the triangle snapped. "Euclydia. Yeah. Great. Fine."

"All right." The cloud zapped its tape recorder, turning it off. "Thanks for your time."

As it started to hover off, the triangle said, "Hold on! I answered your questions, you owe me some."

The eye of the storm reluctantly swung back toward the triangle. "What?"

He held up the shape he'd been extruding. "What do you call this... 3D circle thing?"

The sunbeam swept over it. "A cylinder?"

The triangle pointed toward VENDOR, who was out at the edge of the crowd answering the questions of some reporters who'd caught THEM attempting to slink away from the scene. "And what are the 3D circle things Coin Slot over there is hauling around?"

It glanced at VENDOR's stock of planets. "Spheres."

The triangle shook his cylinder. "Well, what am I doing wrong, then!"

"I don't know, math's not my thing," the cloud said. "Try rotating it."

The triangle waited until the cloud had moved on; then created another circle, extruded it again, but curled the extrusion around into a circle. He ended up with a shape like a donut. He said, quietly, "Oo-oo-ooh." He sounded impressed.

The Axolotl swam up alongside the storm cloud as it left. "So. Find out what you wanted to know?"

The cloud laughed ruefully.

That was what he thought. "Are the interviews you've been taking classified?"

"No, our reports are open to the public. Anyone can request copies. The database is a nightmare to navigate, though."

"Let me know who to contact for the records on this incident. Especially the witness testimonies."

"I take it you're also planning to go through that noise we just heard with a fine-tooth comb?"

"That's hardly the start of it."

If the Axolotl had been convinced of anything during all his conversations with the triangle today, it was that the triangle could barely begin to grasp just what it was he'd done to his dimension and all the dimensions around it—and he did a very poor job of communicating what he did grasp.

And if the Axolotl could prove that—if he could build a convincing argument that the triangle hadn't understood what he'd done, psychologically couldn't understand, that even now he only had the fuzziest comprehension of what he was involved in...

Someday, that triangle's sins would catch up to him. Someday, he would be in the hands of the gods of death and justice, and they would have to decide what fate his actions had earned. And when that day came, it would be the Axolotl's job to ensure that the triangle didn't end up damned or erased from existence.

As it was now, that triangle didn't stand a chance in the multiverse of being found innocent. But there was more than one way to avoid a "guilty" verdict.

By the time the triangle stood before a judge, the Axolotl would make sure that the right laws were in place for him to do what he wanted to do.

####

Where there had been swarms of firefighters earlier, now the scene swarmed with construction workers, working on the emergency genesis of over half a dozen replacement universes—carefully, so that the big bangs didn't do any further damage to an already unstable situation; but quickly. Already every destroyed one-dimensional universe had been replaced. Several half-burned dimensions had been supplanted with oddly-shaped undersized universes that met at the older universes' burned edges; jagged 1D dimensions sealed the gaps between these dimensions like a line of solder between two panes of stained glass.

By now, the flat planes and edges surrounded the zeroth dimension like the sleek shifting surfaces of an infinity-sided die; all except for one last missing wall in the middle of the damage.

Dimension 2 Delta. "Euclydia."

The construction workers were already setting up the scaffolding and equipment to set off another big bang.

As the Axolotl looked at the copious warning signs around the construction site—"DANGER! COSMIC EXPLOSIVES" "GENESIS IN PROGRESS"—the specialized equipment, the veritable army of workers, the mountain of papers the Time Giant had been reviewing earlier to ensure that everything was up to code and nothing would go wrong... he couldn't help but think of the triangle holding the seed of a big bang in his bare glowing hand, threatening to set it off right there. The Axolotl had known it was foolish, but seeing all the workers' preparations put just how reckless it was into perspective. Like a toddler holding a stick of TNT over a campfire.

He spotted the Time Giant among the workers, flickering back and forth across the scene as she tried to literally be multiple places at the same time. When she settled down for a moment over a worktable to double check a pile of blueprints and forms and calculations and even more paperwork, she caught sight of the Axolotl passing by, and tipped her chin up at him in greeting.

He paused, then nodded back to her. No hard feelings. He was just following his principles; and she was just doing her job. They'd each found their own way to help hold up the multiverse.

"Hey," she called out, and gestured for him to come over. As he did, she said, "Your leg's healing nicely."

He glanced down at it. His new toes were stubby, but at least they were back. "I don't like being uneven." He'd take a few more days on his tail. "I'll probably pay for it tomorrow, though." When he finally got home, he'd have to see if he could cancel his morning appointments.

"Reckon we'll all be feeling this tomorrow." She tilted her head toward Dimension Zero. "I've got a message for the god of DIY over there. I think you're the only one he likes—you mind carrying it over?"

####

It wasn't hard to find the triangle; he was leaning against the membrane around the zeroth dimension, moodily staring out at the third. He seemed to be gazing past all the gods, unfazed by their hubbub. The Axolotl tried to see what he was looking at, and didn't spot anything of note. As far as he could tell, the triangle might as well just be stargazing.

Along with the police tape and the ATTF barrier and the long-forgotten cordons to hold off the reporters, there was now an additional grid of orange cones set up blocking anyone from getting too close to the destroyed wall and the construction site. The Axolotl glanced around to make sure no one was paying attention before he slipped past the cones and swam up to the triangle.

When he approached, the triangle was muttering under his breath: "Stupid, now it sounds like an STD. I should've named it something cooler. Like... Triangletopia. Or the Party Plane. Or Margaritaville—I bet no one's ever used that one before..."

"Magister," the Axolotl said.

The triangle's eye snapped to him. "Hey, look at that! The pompous psycho is back! If you're even thinking about sticking me back in your 'office'—"

The Axolotl held up his forelegs appeasingly. "I'm not." He wasn't even crossing the threshold into the triangle's turf. "This is the last time I'll speak to you today."

"Finally, some good news," the triangle grumbled. "What do you w—ha! Ah-haha! I caught myself, that one didn't count."

The Axolotl decided not to count it. "The Time Giant wanted you to know they're about to set off the big bang where Dimension 2 Delta used to be. You probably don't want to be too close to the wall when it goes up."

The triangle's expression darkened; but he just said, "All right. Fine. Have fun. Not my problem! Just keep the construction noises down."

That was all he'd been sent to tell the triangle; but he added, "If you ever want to leave your dream realm, this is your last chance."

The triangle groaned. "This again? Listen, frills, I already told you I'm not interested! And you don't have the right to drag me out, this is my sovereign god territory—"

"I'm not threatening to," the Axolotl said gently. "I just—wanted to make sure you know. If you change your mind later, you physically won't be able to leave."

That gave the triangle pause. "I... don't see why not."

"For something to pass from one dimension to another, it needs a large enough hole to pass through," the Axolotl said. "For a person carrying the mass and energy of an entire universe to cross from one dimension to another... they need a hole the size of a universe. The missing wall where 2Δ was is the size your universe used to be. And now... it's the only exit big enough for you to pass through. Do you understand?"

The triangle stared at him silently. There was that hard, heavy look in his eye. It was awful to see. He did understand.

"If you don't come now..."

"We came up with a way to fit my entire universe into this one," the triangle said. "If I ever want to leave, we'll invent a way to get it back out."

"Your universe didn't fit in without incinerating it."

The triangle tapped the side of his hat with a finger; somewhere inside it was the speck that used to be his universe—the seed of a big bang. "It's travel-sized now. The next time will be easier."

For the first time since seeing the awful ruin of Dimension 2 Delta, the Axolotl forced himself to turn his fearful gaze chronologically forward. He squinted toward the hazy, far-flung future; and then he gave the triangle, in the present, a sorrowful look. "No, it won't," he said. "But I'll do what I can for you."

The triangle stared sullenly at him, unmoved by the offer. "I don't see what you're getting out of helping me. Everyone else is dying to send me to ghost jail or however things work around here."

"Isn't it enough to help you just because you exist and that makes you worth it?"

"If you ever, ever say something like that again, I'll kill you. I will find a way."

He wasn't particularly surprised. But that was truly what the Axolotl believed—and believed strongly enough to guide everything else he did. 

The things this triangle had done were too ghastly for even an ancient, experienced god to fully wrap his head around. Without exaggeration, he might have done the worst thing anyone anywhere in the multiverse had ever done.

But.

But if the Axolotl could prove that he, the worst person ever, was worth giving a second chance—that he could change, that he could show remorse for what he'd done, that he could be a force for good in the multiverse... then he would have proven that everyone, no matter what, was worth it.

The Axolotl had been voted Most Adorably Idealistic, but he'd never been called soft. His ideals were harder than diamond and sharper than obsidian. He hadn't decided to protect the triangle in spite of the impact that might have on the multiverse; he was protecting him because of the impact it could have. 

The Axolotl was a god of justice, of monsters, of second chances, and through his actions he could shape what justice meant throughout the multiverse as if he were sculpting clay; and he thought a small, sharp little equilateral triangle would make a perfect sculpting tool.

"In truth, I just don't believe in punishment. Not even for you." The Axolotl lay a forefoot on Dimension Zero's bubble. "But I don't see why you trust me." Because it was clear the triangle did. He'd trusted the Axolotl to judge the character of the other gods. He'd kept looking toward him like he was trying to gauge his own situation based on the Axolotl's reaction to it. He'd admitted the truth about the remains of his universe and his plans for it. It seemed like the Axolotl was the only one the triangle trusted in all this mess.

The triangle thought that over; then said, "You seem like a grade-A sucker."

He laughed. "I'll try to live up to your opinion of me." He had a guess what kind of people this triangle thought were suckers. The charitable; the caring. The people who didn't think that seeing the worth in everyone was a kind of illness.

"You should know, I intend to legally register my tank as a purgatory. I'll probably submit my application before the end of the week. If you claim it as your afterlife, you'll be transferred to my tank for holding while awaiting trial to decide your final afterlife."

"Ugh, now it all makes sense: you're starting a cult! I don't wanna join your cult, frills—I've got my own."

"But you do want to go straight to your lawyer's office if you're about to go on trial for your sins," the Axolotl said pointedly. "I don't intend to house anyone in my tank permanently. It will just be a transfer place for clients preparing for trial or figuring out where they want to go next—another afterlife, reincarnation... You're already technically dead; you can request at any time to come to my tank, and you'll be there."

"Sounds great for your other clients! But I'm not planning to go on trial and I don't want to be in an afterlife," the triangle said testily. "I'm pretty sure we've been over this!"

"I know you don't. I wish you didn't have to face it. But when you have no choice," the Axolotl said. "When you need it. When your time comes to burn like your people—" (the triangle flinched) "—call me. I'll offer you a second chance at any time."

"Low blow," the triangle muttered. "Don't put yourself out on my account. I'll be fine by myself."

"I'm sure." The Axolotl suspected he'd be putting himself out on the triangle's account for a long time. "What's your name? Your real name."

The background hiss of cosmic noise roared louder. The echoes of billions of erased ghosts said, "THE NAME OF THE MURDERER IS—"

With a flinch, the triangle cranked the distant dance music louder so it spilled cacophonously out of Dimension Zero again. It was too late, though. The Axolotl had heard the triangle's real name.

He pretended he hadn't. He waited.

The triangle didn't answer for a long moment. "You probably wouldn't be able to pronounce it."

"Maybe not." He'd seen how the triangle had winced hearing the cloud try to pronounce the name of some other shape. "I still want to know who you are."

He wrestled with his words; then finally gave up and asked his question. "What... is this place? We're not in the third dimension. When I—freed my dimension, I expected to go up; but we went... down. I didn't know there was a down." He confessed his ignorance in a near whisper, almost drowned out by his own music.

"You're in Dimension Zero." But that wasn't right. Dimension Zero was—should be—a point, and it's impossible to be "in" a point. A point simply is. "You are Dimension Zero."

The triangle said, "Then call me King Zero."

The Axolotl considered that. "Yes," he said. "I think that is your name."

Someone shouted, "Clear the way!" One worker at the construction site was looking directly at the Axolotl. "That means you! Unless you wanna be boiled frog legs!"

"I'm not a frog," the Axolotl muttered; but, he turned one last time to newly-crowned King Zero, said, "Call me," then hastily swam to the safe side of the orange cone barricade.

"Five, four, three..."

The Axolotl watched the triangle—and the triangle watched him—until the detonation. The big bang went off in a flash of light bright enough it would have incinerated anyone in the vicinity had it not been contained to a flat plane.

When the Axolotl looked away from the light, the afterimage of a triangle was burned into the center of his vision.

Dimension Zero was sealed off from the rest of reality—locking its king in for the next trillion years.

####

When the triangle said his name was "King Zero," of course, he wasn't speaking English. English wouldn't exist for a long time. The name King Zero is simply a convenient translation.

The English word "zero" comes from the French zéro. Zéro comes from Italian zefiro. Zefiro comes from Medieval Latin zephirum. And zephirum comes from the Arabic صِفْر—ṣifr.

####

Centuries ago, in the dream of a naive, trusting human, the human asked in Arabic, "What should I call you?" And King Zero responded, "Call me Ṣifr."

And years later, a dreaming human asked in Medieval Latin, "What should I call you, o muse of mathematics?" And of the two Latin words descended from his current Arabic nickname, Ṣifr responded with the one he thought was closer: "Call me Cifra."

A dreaming human asked in Old French, "What's your name?" And he replied, "My name's Cyffre."

Speaking Middle English, he told a dreaming human, "My name's Siphre."

And in Modern English, he told Edward Bishop Bishop, "The name's Cipher. But you can call me Bill."

In a year's time, and two years before his death from sleep deprivation, Edward would write Flatworld, a book about a 2D shape and his Muse journeying up to the highest dimensions; and also all the way down, below the spaces and planes and lines, to the self-absorbed King Zero, buried in the point-sized zeroth dimension, who thought a whole universe was contained inside him.

####

(It's FINISHED. 🎉🎉🎉

Hi y'all, if you just joined us for this Axolotl plot arc, usually this is a post-canon human Bill fic. I took a break from the main plot for one week to post a one-chapter flashback and then it was nine chapters. This bitch is 50k words. It's a novel unto itself.

Anyway if you only showed up for this story about the Ax, it only exists in service of a much longer story; so if you enjoyed this check out the rest of the fic. This is technically chapter 69 (lol). (If human Bill isn't usually your thing, I've been told that this is The Human Bill Fic For People Who Don't Like Human Bills because Bill is clearly very much a triangle unhappily trapped in a human body, rather than just chill with being human—so you might wanna give it a shot.)

And for the regulars who are already reading the whole fic: OH MY GOD IT'S FINALLY FINISHED, WE'RE FREE, WE CAN RETURN TO THE PRESENT. Listen I love the Ax and his bizarre but unbending morality, but guys. Guys. I miss Mabel so much.

Pre-warning that I may end up needing to skip a chapter or two before the end of the year, because work's piling a LOTTA extra work on me this month and I might just flat out not have time to edit & do art. I'm up at 3 a.m. editing & queueing this post and I was up til 3 a.m. another night doing the art because I HAVE NOT HAD TIME this week to do it any earlier. I did this because I love y'all.

No that's a lie, I did this because I want to FINISH this DANG ARC. That's my birthday gift to me.

Anyway lemme know what y'all think!! 💕)

[just-a-creep-babe]

Are your requests still open? I'm not sure about your time zone so I hope it's ok if I ask how would you think relationships with the creeps would be realistically? Like how would Jeff, Masky, Ej, and Ben act if they were real and actually interested enough to date someone? I was just interested in your interpretation since I really enjoy how you write them! ✨

I feel like I’ve maybe gone over a few of these points before but I can’t remember for certain 😬

Either way, I hope none of these were too repetitive!! And tysm!! 🥰🫶

Requests are closed but commissions are open!

Masterlist: x

Jeff the Killer

It’s no secret this guy’s crazy egotistical

So as soon as he sees someone he’s interested in, it's like he just needs to have them

They’re an ego boost; a prized trophy that further proves he’s better than everyone else

He almost doesn’t see them as a full person, but more of a commodity

Really, it doesn’t matter whether or not they want the relationship—as far as he’s concerned, he knows what’s best for them

And, coincidentally, what's best for them is him

He's a super controlling partner

Literally the embodiment of your body, my choice

Part of him expects his s/o to pliantly conform themselves to his every whim and desire

But the other part secretly thinks it’s super hot when they talk back to him

He's always liked the feisty ones, and it gives him the perfect excuse to put them back in their place~

In terms of emotional intimacy, his partner really shouldn't expect much

Jeff mentally blocks all of that kind of stuff out, and he thinks people who are open about it are weak

At best, he'll ignore his partner's efforts to connect with him on a deeper level

And at worst, he'll belittle them and use their vulnerabilities against them as a manipulation tactic

So it's overall best to keep some amount of emotional distance from him, in all honesty

The plus side to dating Jeff is that he's super protective

To the point of it being suffocating, so it isn't all that much of a positive, but I digress

Since he sees his partner as his possession, and since he's very protective of his things, he'll be damn sure nothing bad happens to them

And everyone better damn well know that they're off-limits or he will remind them by carving it into their skin

At the end of the day, Jeff primarily wants sex, first and foremost

And secondly, he wants someone that'll inflate his ego; either by being a pretty piece of eye candy by his side or by constantly gushing over him and blowing smoke up his ass

Deep down, he does want someone to care for him—someone he could love and trust, and who would protect him as much as he'll protect them—but he's way too emotionally damaged to even admit he wants that

He definitely doesn't make it easy to love him

BEN Drowned

Honestly, a relationship with him would be relatively chill

All he really wants is someone to fuck and hang out and game with

He does have a dark side, which manifests as possessive/obsessive behaviors and manipulative tendencies, and a good dose of neediness to top it all off

But it's to be expected

And, really, if his s/o just behaves and gives him all of their love and attention, then it's not like they have anything to worry about, anyway

As long as they game with him every night for at least 3 hours, have sex with him a minimum of 4 times a week, answer his texts within 10 minutes, and never spend more time with someone else, then everything's fine

He's prone to spying on them through their devices, especially if they don't do the above-mentioned things to his liking

And he'll use anything in his arsenal to ensure that they stay wrapped around his little finger

Like I said, super needy and manipulative

He'll fuck with their self-esteem, their worldview, their perception of the people around them until they can't imagine living without him

He'll become their world; he wants their life to revolve around him and him only

And if things don't go his way, it'll only get worse

Much worse

He's not above eliminating anyone he's jealous of, or even isolating his partner until they don't have a choice but to accept him back into their lives

He will fully turn psycho if he, for whatever reason, thinks that he might be losing his partner

But until that time comes, until the relationship reaches that point, it'll all be smooth sailing

He's smart enough to know just the right amount to push things to keep the relationship afloat for as long as possible

Which, despite being one of the chillest partners on a surface level, quickly makes him one of the most dangerous ones when things go south

He'll stop at nothing to keep the person he likes

And his partner will never be any the wiser of the darkness that lurks behind his easy-going intentions

They better hope they never reach the tipping point that reveals his true nature

Eyeless Jack

He's actually the chillest creep to be in a relationship with

Unlike the others, Jack firmly clings to those remaining scraps of humanity within him

If he hadn't been transformed, he'd be a perfectly fine and well-adjusted member of society

So a relationship with him would be like, well, any other relationship with a normal person

He has his emotional hangups here and there, and he isn't perfect; he struggles with communicating his feelings and intentions, and he can close himself off when he's following down

But that's par for the course as far as relationship difficulties go

The biggest issue that'll come up that probably doesn't have a Buzzfeed article to help you out is dealing with his demonic side

But even then, he's gotten fairly good at controlling himself, so it'll never be too disruptive—as long as his partner keeps an open mind about the whole thing

He'll be more possessive, and he'll get jealous more easily, but he'll never lash out at his partner because of it

If anything, if he smells someone on his partner, he'll just want to scent them—so all he needs is some physical contact to reassure him

He can get insecure about his nature from time to time, but again, a bit of reassurance goes a long way

Honestly, the most dangerous thing about dating Jack is probably his urge to mark his partner

Marking a human has a few... complications, to say the least

He's naturally bound to get more possessive and much more sexually needy, which could lead him to injure his partner

But, you know, that's just part of the risks that come with dating a demon hybrid

A relationship with Jack has its ups and downs, which honestly might get more intense than a regular human relationship, but even then, a lot of humans are far crazier than Jack, even despite his nature

Even though he deals with some pretty powerful entities, he'll make sure his s/o is safe at all times—no one will ever be able to hurt them

And even though he's a cannibal, he'd probably be too protective of them to take a nibble out of them

Like, sure, he'd love to taste them—and he'd be willing to bet they taste divine—but even if they'd be open to trying it, he wouldn't want to risk it

Overall? 10/10, can not recommend dating this man enough

Masky

Masky's very hot and cold in a relationship

The stress of work combined with the physical and mental strain of being in Slender's proximity all the time does not make things easy for him

He's prone to lashing out, closing himself off, abusing whatever substance he can get his hands on, and generally spiraling out of control

Which does not make it easy for his s/o

Since Slender took an interest in him when he was still fairly young, he's almost always had symptoms of the Slender Sickness, so he's not super experienced with long-term relationships

Meaning that alongside dealing with his mood swings, his partner will also have to guide him through the ups and downs of dating

Which is just a whole extra set of difficulties his s/o will have to face

Being in a relationship with Masky really isn't easy

But the thing is, when things are good with him, they're really good

It's like he only knows how to operate on extremes; his lows are incredibly low and his highs are intoxicatingly high

When he's on a high, he'll make his partner feel like they're on top of the world

Nothing can get in the way of pleasing his partner; not time or money or even the boundaries of the law

He'll shower them with attention and affection, he'll take them on once-in-a-lifetime experiences—he'll make them feel truly heard and loved

Their connection will be like none other; he'll make them feel like they've conquered the world together

But when he's on a down, honestly, his partner might just be better off ignoring him until he gets better again

Which could take weeks or even months

But ultimately the distance will likely be better than being around him when he's going through it

Because although he isn't proud of it, he may get violent and even abusive without necessarily meaning to

And once he snaps himself out of it, he'll be upset to the point where it'll make him spiral even lower

And once he's over it, he'll be right back to gift and love-bombing them all over again because it's his way of apologizing and making sure he won't lose them

As great as things could be with him, and as addictive as he might get, his partner should keep some kind of distance from him—for their own sake

[thankskenpenders]

Sonic x ...DC Comics?!

We have our reveal of what our new Sonic comic crossover will be, and it's... not what I expected! We're getting a five-issue comic series mashing up Sonic with the DC Comics universe written by Ian Flynn, plus a slew of merch to go with it.

To be honest, I don't know how to feel about this? I don't feel the hype.

Okay, for one, cards on the table: I have more attachment to Marvel's cast of characters than DC's. Sue me. But it's not like I don't also like DC's heroes! I grew up watching the Batman movies and the Justice League cartoons and Adam West's Batman and whatnot. I loved Teen Titans so much as a kid that I was Robin one year for Halloween. DC's cool! People have been comparing Sonic to the Flash for years! So... why does this collab make me feel nothing?

Well, for one, it might be that I would prefer a series like this to be about Sonic and friends meeting the Justice League, as opposed to them being the Justice League. To me, personally, that just seems a little more interesting. Seeing how those characters play off of each other. People have been asking "who would win in a race, Sonic or the Flash?" for years, so that was kinda the thing I was latching onto as the impetus for this crossover. And yes, in the interview they tease the possibility of the actual characters meeting, but they're marketing it primarily via these mashup characters with Sonic and co. cosplaying as the Justice League, so I have to assume that's the main focus of the story.

But I'm also just sitting here like... why DC? Why is this the highest priority crossover to do with Sonic? It seems so arbitrary. Just mashing two random popular franchises together. It doesn't feel like something that resonates so heavily with Sonic that we just NEED this crossover to exist. The DC universe isn't something that has much of a thematic connection with Sonic. Like, you look at the TMNT x Naruto crossover, and THAT feels inspired. That's something you never would've thought would happen, but the second it's announced it seems so obvious, and the sick cover art sells the idea that it's gonna be something fun. (Hell, speaking of TMNT, that feels like a crossover that would've made way more sense to me. No, the single panel of the Archie comics they appeared in doesn't count.)

When the Sonic X DC thing is announced with a series of stock vectors of the Sonic cast cosplaying as the Justice League and the news that there will be a ton of merch for this, well. It just makes it seem like this is first and foremost a collab designed to generate new Funko Pops.

I don't know. I'm sure that whatever the actual story looks like, Ian will do his damnedest to make the comic fun. It'll probably be pretty decent. He's the perfect writer for this assignment. It's just not the crossover I would've requested. Maybe I'm just being a hater here. I know a lot of people are excited, with speculation about what other Sonic characters could take the roles of DC characters. Maybe showing something from the actual comic would've been a better sell. But, well, that's how I feel about it based on the announcement!

[morbethgames]

New Update Is Out!

First and foremost, new update is out! It's kind of a small one, but it's a scene with Hawks where they are debriefing the PC on the case. Lots of variation in those 10k or so words, so you'll probably only see about 2k of it per playthrough.

Well everybody, I had been taking a bit of time. Admittedly, and a bit… embarrassingly… coding like, 30 different variations of Lance's happy-fun-time burnt me out. But, it gave me time to really think about things for the game and scenes that should be in there and where their place in the story is. As well as a scene or two I could probably cut so the game doesn't take another year. It's all about that balance of whether or not you can say a scene happened, versus which scenes need to be shown happening. Maybe it can be added in later, but right now, the priority is definitely the time skip scenes and the main story.

But one thing that is refreshing, and a little scary, is seeing the fact that the first scene for chapter 5 is now set up in the game to start being written in. Chapter 5. The final chapter of the game. It's been 3 years. Now, it's gonna be another few months (few as in upper few) until it's finished because Chapter 5 is going to be the chapter with the most variations yet. Multiple TBI's to code. Multiple endings. Multiple paths. It's gonna be a huge chapter. But I'm gonna be starting it (in between finishing up the time skip scenes of course). It's absolutely wild to think about.

There are gonna be some scenes in the final game that aren't going to be in the demo, so the incentive to purchase the game is still gonna be there, but as of right now, the plan is to fully beta test this game. Including the ending. Because what's important to me is making sure I get it right, and in order to do that, I need people to help test it. Whether or not I'll do that publicly through to the ending here or not is yet to be seen. I may ask a couple people to beta test it in private. I'm honestly not sure yet. Maybe it'll be a patreon thing; who knows?

What I do know is this game has been, and will be until it's finished, a great lesson. I have a habit of starting things and not finishing them. Obviously I wasn't gonna say that before because then people wouldn't be invested in the game. But I think it's quite obvious at this point that I'm absolutely going to finish this project, and that is a huge accomplishment for me. It's proof that I can do something like this and see it through to the end.

But yeah, thanks everyone for continuing to come back and check out the game. Now that the current version of the demo is finished, I'll be posting a bit more on Patreon as well. Snippets and whatnot. I figured since I released the little mini-extra scenes game on there I could take another week or two to focus on finishing this up.

As always, stay brilliant.

-Vi

🛡️Patreon | Forum Page | Demo Link🛡️

[maxwell-grant]

The Penguin: Episode 8 "Great or Little Thing" Series Finale Breakdown

So first and foremost I need to give a shout-out to everyone who's been following this with me and helped me week after week process and articulate this show, this brilliant Penguin Braintrust without which I would be incredibly lost on how to even begin breaking this thing down this way: @davidmann95, @wil4x, @book--wyrm and my friend Lucas who is not on Tumblr.

And so we're here at last, in the end of the show. This took forever. I need a goddamn break. This isn't enough and will never be enough but it'll have to do. So let's get to the episode that has had the world joining hands in the unanimous urge to see the absolute shit kicked out of Oswald, and has made the character at last earn this:

(Episode 1) (Episode 2) (Episode 3) (Episode 4) (Episode 5) (Episode 6) (Episode 7)

So who would have guessed that cartoon dirtbag Rex Calabrese was still gonna turn out to be less of a cartoon dirtbag than Oz the moment we stop seeing him through Oz's eyes. Still a terrible person by every metric, but terrible in the same way a lot of Sopranos characters are terrible: this is, at the end of the day, a job, and you can talk to them, you can sit at a table to get down to business with them, and you probably know people in your life like them, and maybe you can even count of them to get real and even help you when the chips are down, even if it doesn't mitigate everything else that they are or do. At the very end, he was neither the benevolent god-king that Oz saw him as, nor was he the absurd dirtbag gangster we had him pegged as - there was never anything exceptional about Rex Calabrese, he's just a real criminal. Maybe the realest in the show.

I said in the last post that Francis burned with hate at everyone in the world except the person who most ruined her life and haha WOW was I wrong, because it turns she's known the entire goddamn time, and quite possibly no one has ever hated him more than Francis.

Most people in the show who hate Oz do so because he's a destructive bastard who craps on their lives directly, or because he's a lying sneaky fuck who does nothing while their lives are ruined, and Francis has had to deal with both longer than anyone else. I can't possibly count every single way this wildly recontextualizes every single interaction, every moment, everything that Francis has shown us and done since the first episode, because I'd have to recap EVERY scene and line of dialogue she has and we still have so much else to get through.

Why was Francis was so effectively able to withhold affection and hold his feet to the fire and give him that bottomless pit of yearning in his stomach that's driven him to move mountains in pursuit of it? Because Francis wouldn't have loved him even if he gave her the entire world at age 12. She never had any affection or love left for him. Oz was always chasing nothing.

And all along it was Rex who shaped the entire course of Oswald's life, as well as prefiguring his dynamic with Victor, with a single conversation. Oswald spend his childhood wanting for Rex Calabrese to notice and like him and be his friend, and he has no idea how much Rex actually affected his life.

That fateful night at Monroe's was never the feel-good story about his Ma summoning the willpower to live by dancing away the grief, and it was never even just the night of the eternal promise that Oz thinks back to, it was a fucking trap to kill Oz. Nothing he has in his life is real, nothing he says is true, he has never not lived in complete total delusion.

The sheer disgust in Deirdre O'Connell's face at the "I do too". How much of her personality we completely understand was born from this absolute resentment she's nursed for decades towards Oz.

And this rotten little turd comes at her with a perfect speech that hits her every insecurity and bitterness and spite and situation and convinces her to give him another chance. The nature versus nurture thing again - Oswald was shaped by hardship, by decades of hard work and neglect, by the total absence of his mother's love while in turn being forced to live in stunted childhood dedicating himself to always taking care of her, and maybe what we're seeing here is heavily distorted by Francis's POV - or maybe he was always a little monster, because this guy talking to her is The Penguin, the same guy doing the same things in the same way, either way it doesn't matter. Again, born fucking ready.

So now we see our three major supporting characters - Sofia, Victor and Francis - all of them have shown that they had a chance to walk away from Oz, to not let him ruin their lives further. All of them could have left Oswald behind, and all of them should have left Oswald behind, but they had to come back and justify the choice to do so, they had to get satisfaction, it couldn't have been for nothing. Victor had his car and a girlfriend in a bus waiting for him, Sofia had a jet to take her to Italy, and Francis had Rex Calabrese ready and waiting to put him down without a word. All of them had a chance to get out of the show and never look back, but like Oz, they had to rectify and overcorrect for an insult.

Sofia can't walk away from Gotham without punishing Oz for turning her in, for killing Alberto and further lying to her, she can't accept that this man, this embodiment of Carmine's legacy and hold over her, is still out there unpunished getting away with what he's done. Victor can't walk away from Gotham knowing that his parents did everything right and still died for nothing, that every hurtful thing Oz said was right, he can't let "They don't give out awards for dying in the projects" be the last word in his and their lives. And Francis can't walk away from Oz, who killed her two sons and keeps lying about it, who ruined her life and now keeps promising he will take care of her and acting like everything will be fine, she can't let this pass even if she can't kill him either, and so she'll make him give her the world and die trying.

The tragedy of what happened is what hurt/broke them - the added insult of what Oz said or did is what they just can't live with. It can't be for nothing.

Goddamnit it, it was really just too telegraphed for it to not happen the way it did.

I fucking knew it the moment the episode started and we got the grungy boss orchestral take on the funny Penguin chords that we were in for some calamitous shit.

We see at first that, in spite of seemingly failing, Vic has graduated to the point he can give his own speeches, gain his own allies, run his own cons - he's not just Oz's proxy, but will manage to convince the others to become such as well, and he's coming at this from a place of complete sincere belief in everything that Oz says, all of the man of the people rhetoric he will so thoroughly pervert and then sell to the people actually responsible for everything he told Victor he was fighting against.

Zeke walks up to him nearly crying about how Sofia blew it all up and Vic instantly asks back where's Oz - not because he doesn't care about Crown Point, but he's already processed it and has already learned with Oz how to just barrel forward regardless, now it's time to get to work. Victor who so readily throws himself into rescuing Oz again and again. Victor who's lost everything - he doesn't have his family, he doesn't have Graciela, he doesn't have the other mobs backing him up, and right now he doesn't even have Crown Point anymore, all he has is Oz.

The man in red who reads the Law Gave him three weeks of life, Three little weeks in which to heal His soul of his soul's strife, And cleanse from every blot of blood The hand that held the knife - The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Sofia dressed in two thematically appropriate outfits - the red scarf echoing both the first outfit we see her in, back to covering her neck but in control of her own collar, and the outfit we see her the farthest back in time with at the start of Episode 4, and with her final crimson fur coat outfit accompanying her final greatest triumph and ultimate defeat in the show. Not only that, but in this episode she also gets to perform characteristically appropriate stylized torture - holding a family intervention and therapy session with mafioso torture tactics to try and wrench the truth out of her victimizer, enacting calculated sadistic yet righteous justice via psychological breakdown, and ultimately allowing the woman he victimized and wronged to take her killshot at him.

See, it's not just that Sofia Gigante is a Batman Villain, or that she's well passed the threshold of supervillain. Cristin Milioti doesn't play Sofia like she's a new character, which she basically is, and she isn't just playing a tortured gangster lady protagonist dipping into camp villain territory, which she also is - she plays Sofia Gigante like she's been a Batman Rogues headliner for decades now stepping into the spotlight once again, like she's the dark modern revamp of someone Adam West would have thought and she's just always been around showing up in stuff along with The Penguin, like she's only not fighting or teaming up with Two-Face in this because he's not here yet. It is crucially important that Sofia passes every standard of Batman Villain imaginable with flying colors, in part because it helps to reinforce that The Penguin is a monster all his own.

Even here, with as much power as she's ever possibly held over him, reduced him to a whimpering begging mess to be killed off in a second, she is so shocked at the sheer brazen selfishness and delusion and level of bullshit on display, that even now he won't break character and think about his actions and admit to what he's done not even to save his own mother from mutilation, that she just loses the script entirely. Her entire show of power collapses and she physically recoils from sheer disgust at just how low Oswald is, at just how much he lacks the ability to even suffer for what he's done. Realizing that there is simply not enough of a soul in this filthy beast to even torture, and that however much she hates Oswald for ruining her life, someone had a prior claim all along.

Eve - Sofia - Francis in the end united in, however much they may dislike each other, however different their circumstances may be, there is nothing they could possibly do to each other that would be worse than what Oswald has done to all of them, joined in silent agreement that their rage ultimately belongs in a bullet fired at Oz's head and that they deserve their kill shot at this man.

"I had enough to give, Oswald".

This really is gonna be the high point of Francis's life from this point on.

Aw man, I liked Sofia's scruffy dirtbag detective, I wanted him to stick around as one of the reocurring characters like the movie cops

Oh Victor, sweet kind Victor, you couldn't possibly ask for anything worse in the entire world.

Oz feebly already beginning to lie and spin his new version of the events, that Sofia stabbed him and fucked up with Ma, and here comes Victor with the reversal of their dynamic, seeing this guy who's been brought low by the oppressive force looming over his life that he must defeat (because all that Victor knows about Sofia at this point is that she used to be Oz's boss and is now out to kill them, that she is scary as hell, and regardless of whether or not she was the Hangman, she just bombed his fucking neighborhood) and reaching out to him with a speech about solidarity and dignity and self-worth and picking yourself up by your fucking bootstraps to save the day. And Oz responds by coaching him on how to be a better bullshitter. Because to Oz, he knows the playbook by heart, but Victor meant it all.

Victor rebuilds Oz from basically nothing by providing him with the validation that he so desperately always craved and never got, saying all the things he always wanted to hear, poised so they can finish this together, poised to give him not only the army he asked for, but a full-blown revolution, and he never once asks for anything in return. Just, goddamnit this isn't hurting any less.

"She, sh-she'll never look at me again, all right?....unless I get this done. Got a promise to keep." Maybe the one and only time his mask ever fully cracks. For a second. He rebuilds it right back up and gets to work, but it cracked. He knows what he's doing, up until the moment he doesn't. It's that simple.

A lot of what drives Oz is acceptance, and a lot of what drives him is his desire to be accepted in worlds that have been declared, by how they run themselves and by the people that inhabit these worlds, as worlds that he was never going to be included in. And one of those worlds is the hierarchy and the hoi polloi of the political realm and the power within the political realm because he understands that all politics are corrupt essentially, and the damage that he could do then in being part of a political infrastructure of Gotham interests him. I thought it would be nice if, in that time jump, he had been invited to maybe a gala or two, you know what I mean? It'd be awkward. He'd be slurping out of the fucking teacup, there'd be stains on the table, he wouldn't really fit in, but he’d fucking love being there. - Colin Farrell

Mirroring the scene in Episode 01 where he adjusts himself next to the car, scuffing himself up to look like the sleazy funnyman the Falcones keep around for kicks, now he's dressing up as much as he can and asking Victor for input, because he truly values what the kid thinks and, goddamnit.

"C'mahn, I don't bite", pfft yeah, not in this movie universe anyway. And to the same guy you did the nose-gushing-blood bit to, even.

Minutes inside of City Hall and he already parks his ass right on Bella Real's seat - not as any kind of intentional slight against her, it's just naturally where he goes to, even before the scene ends and we see his new plans start to come to fruition.

Guy who takes offense at Viti calling Sofia a psycho and then goes up to Councilman Hady talking about the unhinged loony bin broad who went "full psycho" that he's handing to him on a platter, pointedly calling her Falcone.

At first I thought it was funny that Sal Maroni was getting blamed here for Bliss and the underground lab, but then I remembered that he was actually the one who introduced Drops to Gotham and the whole epidemic that became, so if anything it is an extremely easy part of the story to sell, even without his body being down there and all.

"You're gonna have some trouble, Oz" - pointedly smiling and calling him Oz instead of Oswald as he had up to this point, because by that point he's already a crony and already willing to work with this guy handing him all these miracles.

"You wanna be welcome? You gotta look, clean" Yes Father Pal, I Shall Become A Capitalist Caricature

You can see in the walk around, in his look at Bella Real and the mayor's office high up above and the steps, how little Ozzie's gears turn once again and rebuild his life after losing the streets and everything that happened with Ma - This is the next nest, this is the next throne, this is next schmuck I gotta cozy up to, this is the next boss looking down on me that I gotta destroy, there's the reward waiting for me if I do. This is the one that matters, I did everything in the shit and now I'm gonna get me sum goddamn respeck, Feh Ma of course.

And before all of this we see Sofia's next move, showing the ways in which she is good at this, the ways in which she truly is something outside of the worldview of what these gangsters are used to, and why she is going to lose. "Because I can". She is good at commanding a room and promising rewards beyond the wildest dreams of these street crimelords because she can offer everything they want and lose nothing she cares about for it, she will hand them everything and dip because she can, and she is going to lose because she can lose. Because she still thinks there is an end in sight for her, she thinks she will get to walk away from this universe and go meet a happy ending at a cafe in Florence.

It's not just that Sofia was born into privilege and never really lived in Gotham and could just hop onto a plane out of here anytime, it's also that she has room in her life for introspection, self-awareness, consideration towards others, and all those things that come easier when you're "born full", and not when you're the starving hustler for whom leaving the city was never an option even if he had all the money in the world, the hungry animal who wants this, wants everything, harder than anyone has ever wanted anything. The guy who has no room for anything else in his brain other than a perpetual bullshit generator set to a 24/7 chorus of "I GOTTA WIIIIIIN"

Another element to her that I really love is, she's good at this. She knows she's good at this, she was supposed to take over the family. She may not know the ins and outs of the game as it currently stands, but she is good at this. Some of it is, I think that's the only world she knows, and some of it is there's something in there, that's always been there, and she believes it is rightfully hers. There's an element of, "I need to have made it worth it for something", and if that means power, then okay. - Cristin Milioti

There’s a level for both of them that they enjoy each other’s suffering, and that sort of leads to Sofia’s downfall. If she didn’t need to see Oz suffer she might have been free. And she really gets in her own way in that regard and largely because Oz is this crutch that she just cannot let go of. - Lauren LeFranc

And here we get to the end of season 1 of HBO's The Sofia Show, the bittersweet in hindsight but extremely cathartic torching of the set as a last hard-earned spiritual victory by our hard-done-by lady protagonist. All of her family is dead, the city is out for her blood, she gathered all the remaining criminals for One Last Job with everything on the line, and she is having a very fun time with her montage destroying her home and family name beyond recovery. She is going to finish her character arc, get to finally kill her former comedy sidekick turned mortal nemesis, and hop on a plane to The White Lotus resort straight away into greener (if only marginally less fucked up) genre territory away from this ugly nightmare city. Alas, this is not The Sofia Show, and it's time for her theme suite to catch up to her once again and tell us of how very badly this is all going to go for her.

And she can't even be that shocked, when the high of burning it all down goes away, when she sees that old Ozzie Cobb wriggled his way out of this jam regardless and is now coming at her with a speech, she can't even react to it. Deep down she knows how the rest of the night is going to go. She may not have expected Arkham outright, but she was braced for a loathsome fate.

It rules so much they give him a big fat fight the power speech with a bloody revolution montage, and we can only sit there aghast with Sofia at the sheer audacity of him to act like this, like a man of the people, thinking he truly has the right to be talking like this and to her of all people.

And now we see how Oz won the gang war, and the next domino to fall on the downfall of Gotham City, and the first effect of his own rise to power: like The Riddler, he has toppled the order of things and he has turned people into extensions of himself, Victor being the first and the one who gave him this revolution, of all the little mini Penguins out there devouring the social structure of Gotham crime forever. You kill the boss, you become the boss now. Everyone can bleed and everyone can be killed and everyone must be killed in the quest to the top, no handrails or codes, they wouldn't invite him and so he crashed. After he unified the criminal underdogs, Victor rallied the underdogs beneath the underdogs, and now the streets are a jungle where there will never be an end to the wars over who gets to be atop the food chain, because they are all fighting to see who gets to be the next Penguin.

For decades people have written Oswald Cobblepot as a creep and a sleaze and an incel who hurts/kills women for rejecting him, or who is chronically insecure about them and I can very confidently say nobody ever did anything half as horrible and half as truthful and half as meaningful as LeFranc did here. We see the other reason why it was so imperative to her that Oswald not be a misogynist, and it has nothing to do with just making him more likeable or sympathetic or honorable. We get in this episode the pay off to the thoughtline: okay, he's actually a gangster who respects women, he does not act like every other prestige drama gangster who ever lived, we are going to center women in this show and he will treat them with respect - now let's watch how he HORRIBLY screws them over in the name of this respectful gentleman persona he lives by, let's watch how he betrays them in the ways that matter most, how he even makes them wish they were dead without personally ever lifting a finger to harm them, let's do some grown-up feminist commentary in Batman for a change and highlight the ways in which men profit from belittling and oppressing and destroying women even when they're pointedly not misogynistic and even self-professed genuine allies to them.

And so it is that the only Falcone mobster who isn't misogynistic towards Sofia is the one who screws her the most horribly. He will murder every man he comes across, he will murder every man he could have been and every man who is even marginally better than him in any way, he will push all of his brothers out of the nest and not tolerate any other big shot in town bigger than him and not even the only man, the only person, in town who loves him will be spared. But he is a gentleman, so he leaves the women alive (well, except for Nadia Maroni, but she was a rival big shot and worse, his boss for a day or two, so she obviously had to go eventually).

I thought about his greatest fear, and it made a lot of sense to me that his greatest fear would be that love is transactional. That if he does not achieve a level of power and give Francis certain types of things that he’s promised her she might not love him. And that informs every relationship he has on the show It was always important to me, and this was always part of my initial pitch, that if Oz was to achieve a level of power—and that is something that was not up for discussion, that was my job that I was tasked with for the season—that he has to lose something emotionally. It can’t come without a cost. - Lauren LeFranc

"the crooked politics that have allowed wealthy elites like Sofia Falcone to wreak havoc". Oz has weaponized the status quo against her so throughly that she is going away under the exact same image that she did it the first time, as a privileged serial killer and Falcone. She doesn't even get to have her new name anymore, and the rest of Gotham does not see her as the new and strange and horrific new threat that she embodied in Oz's life - she is going away as just another upper-class monster like her dad.

The triumph that Oswald has fought his entire life for, the Big One that he's scraped and fought and hoped his entire life would happen and he'd get to show his Ma at the end, the thing that he's going to throw a party for at this moment, is just a politician on tv saying things that Oswald claims he told him to say.

All of our 3 major supporting characters will thus reach the high point of their lives, on the moment before it is ripped away and they are destroyed forever. Francis gets to finally spit all of her hatred back to Oz and take her revenge on him, and her babies appear before her alive and unharmed. Sofia gets to burn down her father and his legacy once and for all, and is on her way to kill her nemesis and finally be free of it all. Victor succeeds in helping Oz win, they have revolutionized the gangs and defeated the big bad Falcone and he's done right by his new family what he couldn't do with his old one.

And of course, Oswald finally wins - he is the last man standing, he's defeated his greatest enemy, he is the big shot of Gotham and his victory is, so he claims, right there on the tv for his Ma to see, he can finally get what he's always wanted now - and then he doesn't, and then his soul crumbles, before he finishes the job by murdering his heart.

Oz didn’t need to do that, like it wasn’t actually necessary. In that moment, Victor did not betray him. He did nothing wrong. In fact, the thing that he did “wrong” in Oz’s eyes is that he loves him and that he cares about him and Oz actually cares about Victor. I think by the end Oz sees that as a really big problem because he loves his mother so deeply and Sofia took advantage of that love, and then it became sort of a weakness in his eyes. Victor saw him at his most vulnerable and for Oz to achieve the power that he thinks he needs, he can’t have that level of humanity. He can’t have that heart with him anymore. So he stifles his own heart. He kills it. - Lauren LeFranc

When he said to Vic in the sewer, “They'll tell stories about us one day, kid,” he meant it. At that stage, he actually saw that he could rise and Vic could come with him. It's only when the vulnerability and the shock of his mother being taken from him, and the place of vulnerability and danger that puts him in, that he realizes there's no more love, there's no more affection, there's no one else I'm going to have in my life that can lead me to such vulnerability as my mother has led me to or as this kid could potentially lead me to. - Colin Farrell

He's not relishing being horrible. When he realizes, "Oh God, Victor makes me vulnerable. I can't have that shit anymore." The way that Lauren wrote it, and the way Colin played, there's such sadness under the horror. You're like, oh my God, how fucked up do you have to be that the one person who you feel you have any connection with now, you have to snuff out because it makes you weak. What happened to you? - Matt Reeves

"You think she forgives me?" Once again, the mask cracks. Only around Victor. Only because of Victor. And he can't have that again.

And thus we get to the final parallel between our 3 side characters - that in the end, all they did was serve Oz's own rise to power, and hand him the world in exchange for their lives. All they were to him were additional steps in the ladder that began with his brothers. Francis gave him his life, his drive, his motivation and eternal justification, the insatiable pit in his gut driving him to do this forever. Sofia got him his promotion to Falcone lackey, and then she got him another promotion by handing him the tools with which he could become an underground boss and rally them, and then she got him another promotion by handing him the keys to his political career on a silver platter. And Victor saved his life, more than once. He helped him, provided the justification he has craved for a lifetime, rebuilt him, gave him his revolution, gave him the streets, and showed him the last thing he needed to kill to make it to the top.

Wow man let me tell my good friend, The Family Butcherer, who butchers every family he gets his hands on whether a crime family or a literal one, how much I think of him as family.

"They don't give out awards for dying in the projects"

Just like with Squid, Vic's emotional intelligence dooms him. He sees this man whom is like family to him brought to his lowest point, crushed beyond measure, in what he assumes was just a phenomenally terrible stroke of fate and not something he had any blame whatsoever for, and reaches out to pat him in the back, emotionally reassure him that it wasn't all for nothing, that his family would surely be proud of him, and that there's things to look forward to.

Vic threw away his chance to walk away into the sunset with Graciela and he just had to come back to save Oz (AND Sofia, the one who'd bomb his neighborhood) from the Maronis, the least of all possible evils in his life and his city and who never even noticed him. Victor only narrowly missed out in 2 situations that Oz would have absolutely left him to die in, so there just had to be a third where he'd die in the absolute worst way possible. Not with Sofia's gunshot to the head, not bombed to rubble along with his neighborhood, no, Mr. Carmine 2 had to make it as painful and intimate as possible.

Vic the only Number Two in town who couldn't kill his boss and in fact never even considered doing so, and so he dies - there is just no room for him anymore, not in Oz's life, nor in the new Gotham that the two built together.

LEFRANC: "You see Oz become this next level monster, I remember the take too. Jennifer and I look at each other, Colin transforms his face in this really remarkable way, that I don't think any of us fully anticipated could be achieved in that way." - The Penguin Podcast Episode 8

I knew that the general sentiment was that, by the end, they kind of wanted to, in a way, kill the Oz that we met in the film. I felt that there was a sense of creative responsibility that leaned towards, “We cannot have this man as a likable character,” which is hard I think they wanted that in the earth by the end of the eight hours. They wanted that RIP. That's gone. I hated that scene. I really did. I was fucking so pissed off. It felt in performing it as — guess what? — you would like it to feel in viewing it. It felt gross, it felt cruel, it felt absolutely insane, and it felt like Oz was reaching a point of no return. - Colin Farrell

So the day after I watched this episode, my friend Lucas messaged me in the afternoon sending me audio messages, "Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! He stole his identity, he didn't even die with his fucking name! They'll never find him! Fuck, goddamnit!" "ELE MORREU COMO INDIGENTE, PORRA" and, yeah. Yeah. That gets to the heart of it.

If Vic was just a guy taking his money, if Vic was purely transactional, if he was just another Link, he'd have made it. Oz wouldn't have given a shit about him, Oz would have died on the sidewalk when the Maronis hit at minimum. All this piece of shit wants is love, and when he gets it, when it's finally non-transactional, from the ONLY person in the entire show who loved him, he has to kill it, he doesn't know how to deal with it, he has to smother his heart.

He has to become Carmine Falcone 2, strangling the poor and vulnerable of Gotham while pinning all of his crimes on Sofia.

Vic just wanted his family back, man. He just wanted a family again, to at least show his family that they didn't die for nothing. The thing that Oz spits in his face as he dies. It wasn't for nothin.

This show has so many dozen little variations of Penguin getting his heart broken and retaliating cruelly, but this one hurts the most partially because it has no basis whatsoever on any pre-existing insult or cruelty, there was nothing that warranted this, and you still get why Oz felt that he had to do it. The lowest, weakest moment of his life, and he can never permit anything like it ever again.

Victor was his heart, and The Penguin remembered that his heart only exists to be broken.

Victor punctures the illusion, and he cannot have that. Everything about The Penguin hinges on that singular fact of his life: he cannot and will not break character. He cannot break character, otherwise he dies, otherwise Gotham City will eat him alive, otherwise he has done it all for nothing. That is the ultimate threat Sofia posed to him, and why his ultimate victory comes only from creating a perfect delusion and spinning everything that happened in service of it. Because all those things said at Monroe's? They weren't true - his Ma, y'know, it was just her disease acting up, that psycho did something to her, she wasn't thinkin straight, and it was really Sofia that stabbed him and did all that fucked up shit, and his Ma is really happy that she got the penthouse in the end and that he didn't put her down, look, she's crying tears of joy even, I gotta keep doing everything for her.

Everything and everyone in his life, he can spin in service of the delusion, they can all play dress-up with him forever, except Victor. Victor may not have the slightest clue as to what Oz actually did, but he's seen too much, he knows he has vulnerabilities, he knows the thing that Oz needs to bury far, far more than all the horrible things he's done. Killing Victor is maybe the one thing that he absolutely cannot in the slightest spin a decent delusion out of, that he did it for him or did it for noble reasons or anything other than out of disgusting self-serving weakness.

But who's Victor? Some kid who died in the projects and didn't even have a name? Someone with nobody left to mourn him, not even a street to get back to, nothing but a guy who's already forgot him?

That Victor Aguilar? Never heard of him

“I will never think my mother doesn't love me. She was having a bad day when she stuck that bottle in me. She was under a lot of pressure. She nearly lost her finger. She stuck a bottle in my belly. It was a bad day. She didn't get a good night's sleep the night before.” It's that kind of thing. He'll make up fucking whatever. He's already lying when he goes, and he's stitching up his belly, and Vic says, “What happened?” And he says, “Sofia, she stuck me with a bottle.” He's already beginning to bury the truth. - Colin Farrell

He needed your love, and then you didn't give it to him, and you didn't obey, and you didn't do those things that he needed, and then you mentally aren't there for him in the way that he needs, but he's got to physically keep you around because he's too weak to not do that. He can't give you the gift that he promised you in Episode Six, he's too weak of a man to do that. And so he needs to hold onto you, but under his terms. - Lauren LeFranc

There's a thing that happened on that last day that made my blood run cold, which was I felt Oz not love me anymore. I felt his coldness, and I think that Francis felt it too, and she always had so much of his attention and so much of his love. I don't even think she realized how much she had until he withdrew it. And when he withdrew it, it was utter and… slightly terrified. I was just lying in that bed, I just felt the love leave the room. It's a real thing, and it's gone, yeah, and I think Francis feels it, too. - Deirdre O'Connell

He's this man who is clawing his way to the top, and I knew he wanted power, but what what does that mean for him? That's where I started to conceive of like, he wants his mother's love, and he wants people's affection. He wants to be revered. That was like the main thrust for me of what defines power for Oz, and then by the end you realize that, when he doesn't get those things, he doesn't get his mother's acceptance, he still gets it. He makes sure he gets it. - Lauren LeFranc

So bowled over and miserable I was that I didn't even notice until later that he was wearing a version of the classic Bronze Age/Triumphant get-up.

If the pattern of his life is unjustifiably cruel retribution for slights and insults, perceived or not, by the end Francis had done it to him as well. That she never loved him and in fact always hated him more than anything and anyone else is the biggest insult of all, and so he punishes her the most cruelly, knowingly or not.

"You are who you are, and you couldn't change if you tried."

He will never stop telling Rex Calabrese stories, he will never stop bringing up his brothers and mom as a sympathy ploy, and even if he will never truly love her again, he will never stop ruining the world in her name, he will never stop, he will never stop, he will never stop.

You had to sit through 8 hours chipping away at all of his fun and charm and wacko comedy antics and motivations and all the scruples and principles that he turns out to have less and less of, until he butchers them all in the very end along with the heart of the show. Penguin burning through all of his lovable quirks and charm, everything that we loved about him in the movie, until he comes through as a black-hearted bastard of unlimited malice who will never stop growing and getting worse and putting more lives in danger. Not only as much of a lowlife backstabber as we initially assumed him to be in the movie, but far worse than what we could have imagined.

I said as much that the first episode marks the transition from The Batman to The Penguin with the titlecard, and this brings it back around. The show dies with Victor, we get Sofia's post-credits Nick Fury Tease with Selina's letter and with Selina's theme playing and a final grace note of hope for Sofia, and thus the only character in the show to end with anything resembling positive, and then we get the first scene of The Batman Part 2. showing us the horrible thing in this world that Batman will have to defeat for us.

RIP Bella Real, we all know this asshole is gonna become mayor, and he's not waiting for the next election.

Credit to @book--wyrm for pointing out one more horrible fucking thing, that at the final dance, his hands are covered in scratches, much like the hands of Carmine Falcone when he comforted Sofia.

“One of the very early things that Lauren pitched was that ending with Eve where she looks like Francis,” said Reeves. “He can’t get what he needed from his mother because she’s no longer in that state because of the dark events and what he’s done, so he recreates it in this other way with Eve, and it’s very disturbing,” said Reeves. “That was something we thought was a great idea and was so emblematic of this guy’s internal state. It’s like, even as he now seems to have gotten that first major step toward being the kingpin, you know that some part of him will never be filled. - Matt Reeves

When I read that, I was like, “Oh my god, we're going full Bates Motel here.” But again, it speaks to what has become a pathological inability to accept the world that he has played such a heavy hand in creating. As far as he's concerned, he's just doing what he needs to do to live the life of a good son. And look, his mother can't talk anymore, so he needs a surrogate. I mean, it would be kept out of the sexual realm — it wasn't about that. It was about the intimacy and the tenderness and the pride that Oz always so deeply needed to feel his mother had for him, and pride in him, that he never really got from her. The one time when he finally can say to her, can go to her bedside and say, “It's done. Everything you said that I was capable of, everything you said that I should aspire to, it's done. I am now the boss. I took it from everyone else.” And he gets nothing back. His mother's already gone. That's just too horrific for him, so he needs a surrogate. He would say to Eve, “Look, I'm grieving. I'm finding it hard to deal with the fact that my mother's alive, but she's not here. She's gone, but she's fully present at the same time, physically, but she's nowhere there. She doesn't recognize me. I don't recognize the woman she's become. Do me a favor. We used to dance together and talk at the end of the night. Would you put on her dress and just let me pretend?” But it was twisted. It was twisted, but I dug it. He needs it from his mom so much. And again, his imagination is so potent that he just cast her as that figure, that most prominent and most powerful figurehead in his life, which has always been his mother. She's got to stay alive. He's got to hear that he did well from her. He's got to hear that she's proud. Look, by the end, he's bananas, as they say in the film. Good cop, batshit cop. At the end, he's batshit. - Colin Farrell

Remember when this show had fun Dolly Parton end credits, remember when this almost looked like it was gonna be fun and light-hearted compared to the movie and The Riddler: Year One

So turns out all along they actually had something real twisted planned with the name Karlo, and the Clayface concept that evokes. Asking his prostitute girlfriend to shapeshift into his crying comatose mom in the room upstairs so he can finally get the dance with her atop the world that he craved his entire life and have her tell him how proud she is that he ruined everything forever.

It is not a good ending, but it is his happy ending. He achieved everything he wanted in the smallest possible amount and at the highest cost imaginable, and thus he burns more than ever to take more and more in the name of a satisfaction he will never, ever have. He ended his arch-nemesis, and he didn't have to kill her, that's not what a gentleman does. He got the streets, and he's poised to take political power, and there is nobody left to care about, nobody except the only person who's ever mattered. He can still keep taking care of Ma as a justification for all the shit he will do now and forever, but he doesn't actually have to take care of her anymore, he doesn't even have to love her or grovel her for validation anymore: He has a Ma who will tell him everything he wants to hear, forever.

Of course, he may not have his three dance partners anymore - his Ma is in a vegetative state, Sofia has been locked away once again, and that kid, what was his name again, ain't around. But then, he will simply move on to new ones: He didn't actually lose his first dance partner, his Ma is fine, look at her telling him how proud she is of him and everything he's done and how unstoppable he is now. And he has a new partner in City Hall who is all too eager to play along to everything he says and does, who will receive and spit back his rhetoric just as Vic did to the streets of Gotham. And if he's defeated his nemesis and dance partner, well, not for long. There's a new one waiting for him. He never wins without losing. He will never again live without his next dance partner there to hound and foil him at every turn. There will always be something in the way.

It was exciting to me, the idea that we’re going to meet Oz as a mobster, and to play him as just a man. There’s nothing fantastical about him. There’s so many people like Oz in our world who hold a lot of power, who also connect with people because they speak, on some level, the truth. They can be charming and engaging, but also really terrifying and calculated, and not necessarily doing what they say that they will do or caring for people in the way that they say that they will. It felt so timely and so important to really engage with a guy like Oz and not turn away from him, but actually turn towards him so we can start to unpack, in our own society, what makes a man like Oz so appealing, and what makes him equally appalling. - Lauren LeFranc

I think Oz has always been someone who believes that everything he’s saying in the moment is true, and he creates worlds and illusions for himself to merit his actions. He does it sometimes very briefly in impulsive moments, and then sometimes more methodically, and in the end the fact that he didn’t get from his mother what he’s always desired isn’t good enough for him. So he has to create this strange fantasy live in this delusion of his own making, and pay Eve to dress as his mother and force her to tell him he she’s proud of him. So mentally, emotionally, Oz is embracing his own delusion. I think, for the audience, I hope they more deeply understand him psychologically and realize that there is a deeply broken man inside. He is violent and problematic and and very emotional. And that’s really the man that will carry into the next film. - Lauren LeFranc

And it has to end in a total reversal of the movie ending - The Batman ends with showing there is a light in the darkness, that this tortured broken man can fix his mistakes and lead us into something better. The Penguin ends by grabbing your face and desperately yelling at you SOMEBODY FUCKING SAVE US, HE WILL ONLY GET WORSE. The Batman ends with telling us Batman can save us all, and The Penguin ends with telling us Penguin will kill every last one of us in real life if he hasn't already, if nobody stops him.

And so I'll leave these last partings words to the Penguin Braintrust as we close off this series - see you all in therapy and in theaters when The Batman: Part 2 drives us all completely insane once more.

@wil4x

I don't think this Penguin is someone Batman can tolerate, I don't think Bruce can ever save Gotham's soul with a force of corruption as big as Penguin taking root in the seats of power. No amount of informant work can justify letting a monster like Penguin stay "King of Gotham". I think there's an argument to be made that Oz is a bigger threat to Batman's overall long-term mission than guys like Joker or Riddler. Those are huge immediate threats, but Penguin does a lot more long-term damage to the very soul of Gotham and its people. As long as The Penguin is on top, there's no hope, Gotham will never not be the most corrupt and nightmarish place on earth with him in charge

@book--wyrm

He will truly climb anything no loss so great it can't be flipped into an asseet A nuke Francis armed out of pain and grief and desperation and despair And poor vic Only wanting to do good And instead he saves gotham’s own typhoid mary of misery

@davidmann95

so the thing is Oz kills hope for Gotham forever in this

he's replacing the mayor who stands for hope at the end of The Batman with a corrupt comics rando built on a lie so he can install himself as the power behind the power forever Batman can't be alluded to in the slightest until the very end because it can't be until there's no lingering 'aw, I don't want my boy to get Batman'ed' it can't be until we understand truly and completely why this man proves the necessity of someone out there to stop him

The other stabs at this with Oswald, from what I’ve seen, are trying to make him low-down and dirty and vile enough to be a ‘proper’ Batman villain. But this already made him low-down and dirty and vile. And made us love him for it. This isn’t about ‘fixing him’, this is about taking him all the way to the top He’d accept no less

This is about making him operatically nightmarish enough to be a guy Batman is going to fight forever

Lucas

VENGEANCE, GET OUT RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

[rubberduckyrye]

You know I've seen quite a few people say they're wanting to make v3 rewrites lately--and as someone who is actively working on one by myself, I feel like I should give some advice. I know I'm nowhere NEAR done with Twins AU, but I've made a ridiculous amount of progress and I think these things have greatly helped me out personally

So here are my tips for making a V3 rewrite and actually making it stick/not to burn out before the first chapter!

This is important. Don't try to please everyone. You will never please everyone. Write this for yourself, and you will find an audience. People can and will hate your fic no matter what you do. Don't try to please them, they are not your target audience-- so Write this story for, first and foremost, yourself. It'll feel so much more rewarding if you do I promise.

V3's main theme is extremely muddied due to how the narrative was and how open ended the game was left, and from my own research, no one can agree on what V3 was trying to say about truth and lies, or Reality and Fiction. If you want to rewrite this story, you're going to need to narrow down what you want your rewrite to say about the themes presented.

PLAN THE EVIDENCE AND MURDERS AS THOROUGHLY AS YOU CAN. I think not knowing what I was going to do for the cases and trials really scared me for the longest time until I essentially sat myself down and fleshed out all of the cases for Twins AU. Make evidence lists, do research on how your murder cases might go, the works. It's a lot of work but I personally followed this post and also made an evidence list to help me out plot out the murders for Twins AU. This is also a great way to flesh out your protagonist as well, since you get to explore their note-taking style and what kind of language they'd use for taking notes and if they have opinions about certain things.

Write a summary of each character in the story. DR games have a big cast and V3 has an even BIGGER cast than usual, so it's good to write down summaries for all of the characters. I also suggest really studying each character too, even if you plan on changing a character to better suit your tastes (or to get rid of offensive material.... looking at you Angie) you still want to keep the core of their character intact for fans of that character.

Speaking of characters, make sure to try and remember to write each one as a human being, even if they aren't human (Kiibo for example). Develop them, give them quirks and flaws, motivations and wants and desires and dreams. Even if you hate a character, doing this much character study will help you keep them in character and keep their motivations reasonable and understandable.

If you don't have a good grasp on a character, study harder. Don't go looking for other people's interpretations or try to be a crowd pleaser. Make your own interpretation, and that interpretation becomes special to your rewrite.

If you plan on changing a character, for the love of GOD do your research first. Don't go accidentally making Angie into a worse racist caricature of Pacific Islanders Please and Thank You. Actually, just do a ton of research in subject you think might be relevant to a character or the plot--like Gonta and how ableism prevails in his story. Like how Shuichi has anxiety up the wazoo and how Maki has learned helplessness. Study and research hard.

Pace yourself--I don't think people realize how GIANT a V3 rewrite project is--remember that this game is extremely long and you cannot write this in a single month. Once all of your planning is done, write a reasonable amount for it each day. For me, I'm able to crank out 2k a day because I type absurdly fast, but most people would probably want to start at maybe 500 words a day.

If you're not having fun, step back. You might be burnt out and need a break, or maybe the scene you're writing is just not working. Take time to assess your own feelings and do what is appropriate to resolve them.

Don't feel too discouraged if you need to rewrite a whole scene--it happens to the best of us and sometimes things are just not working. It's not lost progress to retry--consider the scene you are replacing as a rough draft you need to remake. I've had to erase huge 1k chunks due to this.

Reward yourself for big accomplishments! When I finished the prologue, I threw myself and my editor ( @trans-shuichisaihara ) a pizza party, and I plan on doing something like that again, albeit probably cheaper. Reward yourself for huge milestones! Hell, I owe myself at least one treat for two chapters I've written, but tbh I've been having so much fun just writing that doing so is rewarding within itself. That doesn't mean external factors can't help, so if you finish a chapter and you're proud of it, buy yourself a treat for working so hard!

If you got a friend who likes editing/beta reading, invite them to beta read for you! They can help you find errors and typos that you might've missed. If you plan on editing your fic, I highly recommend reading your writing out loud to help you find weird sentence structures and awkward phrases. This should have the bonus of making it easier for people who use screen readers/just prefer audiobooks to enjoy your fic as well!

EDIT! Here are two more:

It's okay to be scared writing something new! Getting out of your comfort zone is going to happen with a giant story like this, and maybe you're going to flop at the best parts. That's perfectly fine!!! You can always edit it later--or even just call it "good enough" and move on! This is fanfic for fun, not a professional project you're making money off of. It's okay if things are less than ideal and incredible imperfect. An imperfect story is at least written. That's better than not writing it at all.

For the love of everything that is holy, remember that the characters should be people--and remember that their talents do not make up their entire personality. Their talents should not solely dictate what they wear, how they act, or the worst offender in this fandom--how their executions go. When writing a character Execution, think instead of what would be the worst way for that character to die--that is to say, what would bring them the most despair upon their death. DR1 and DRV3's executions all play with the despair of the blackened in each execution (with DR2 being noted to heavily miss the mark and to be the set of executions that are the most disappointing to Kodaka, from what I've been told.) So if you're stuck on writing a new Execution, try to think about what each execution from DR1 and DRV3 does to play with the despair of the blackened. What about their executions are giving them despair in their final moments? Do they at all relate to their talents, or are they completely separate from their talent? Study them, and you'll be able to use that information to write your own unique executions that are miles better than most of the fan made executions out there.

And I think that's my advice for now! Happy writing, everyone!

[aayakashii]

Helloo Aya love your content as always and I have a request if you want to do it😊

Could you write "how would the Vagastrom and Jabberwock ghouls(+jin cause he's the only one I care about from frostheim lmao😭) propose to you/mc"😩

Anyways either way I love your fics and headcanons pls never die❤️

I love when ppl say "pls never die" to someone and now I feel elated that I'm on the receiving end of that too LMAO thank you for enjoying what I write <3 and thank you for helping me get out of my writing slump holy crap 😭

Warnings: none. Just tooth-rotting fluff, I might need a shot of insulin after writing this.

proposal headcanons

Jin

It depends on you, first and foremost.

If you're introverted, he'll make sure it'll be just the two of you, in the dim light of candles, with a dinner catered entirely to you.

Gentle music will be playing in the background as you two talk, and he tries to calm down his nerves by holding your hand tightly throughout the night.

You barely feel when he slips the ring into your finger, only noticing it when a precious gemstone glints brightly as he kisses your ring finger and murmurs the question into your trembling hand.

If you're extroverted, he'll throw a party just for the occasion. Whatever theme you like, you can consider it done.

You'll have the prettiest dress, the tastiest foods, the most delicious drinks with all the people you love surrounding you, despite you not knowing what warranted such a grand celebration.

Laughter and happy conversation suddenly quiet down as Jin brings you to the center of the room and gets down on one knee and the guests swoon over your fairytale romance.

Either way you prefer will be more than perfect for him, as long as your answer to his question is "yes".

Alan

Oh, he's so nervous. Almost can't look at you in the eye for an entire week before he gets the ring ready.

However, Alan isn't the type of guy who would prepare a special event for the proposal (but if you love him, you know this would never be his type of thing).

He does, however, want privacy to say whatever he needs to, if his heart finally decides to pour out of his mouth.

So, he takes you to a small hike.

Once you two can't hear anything besides the sound of leaves crunching under your feet and birds singing, he holds your hand tightly and turns towards you.

It's quick but soft and brimming with emotion: Alan only needs to tell you, through stutters and endearing mumbles, that you mean everything to him and that he wants to spend a lifetime with you.

He doesn't even need to ask whether or not you'd marry him. You're already hugging him so tight that you vanquish all of his anxieties in a fell swoop.

His heart thumps loudly in his chest, right under your ear, and he buries his face in your hair. You stay like this for a while, grounded and almost merged into each other.

You two only let go only when he finally remembers to slip the ring in your finger.

Leo

It's a show for the ages. It's not surprising at all that Leo would plan the fanciest, flashiest, trendiest proposal.

It will all be going straight to his TikTok right away.

But you already knew that. You know all the things that come with dating Leo. You know that his online career is way too important for him. You're fine with letting millions of fans ogle at him as he winks and vlogs and dances for them.

Because they will never see what you see.

They'll never really see how Leo's eyes look brimming with tears, nor how his hands tremble a little bit as he puts a ring on your finger.

They can't hear the little crack on his voice as he rests his forehead on yours and quietly asks you to marry him.

And when he turns to the camera, internet persona covering the tender little parts of him that he only lets you see, a smug smile on his face after you said yes, you know that you're the only one who truly knows him.

You're the only one who will marry him.

Sho

You're in for a ride, quite literally.

You don't suspect anything when he invites you to ride his motorcycle with him – Bonnie is his baby and you're his favorite person, it's more than common for him to get the two of you together.

Sho, however, can barely hide his anxiety. The dark blue band in the ring box feels like it weighs a ton, tucked deep in his pockets.

You notice his uneasiness. Of course you do. Your mind races with awful thoughts, and, as you two get off Bonnie, you immediately hold his hands, begging him to please let you know if you did anything to make him upset.

Sho feels like a dumbass. He thought he was hiding his emotions well, but it was silly of him to expect that you, of all people, wouldn't see straight into him.

But it's such a pretty day, and the air feels crisp, and the sunset paints you with orange rays of sunlight, and you look prettier than ever in his eyes.

He sighs and pulls the ring box out his pocket, putting it on your hand. His face burns with embarrassment as he says the words out loud, squashing any doubt you could ever have about the strength of your relationship with him.

You say yes as tears of relief escape your eyes, and you bury your face in the crook of his neck, a small laugh bubbling out of your mouth as you feel how warm his skin is.

Haru

From the moment he saw you holding Peekaboo in your arms, Haru knew what he wanted.

He waited and waited, wondering when it could be considered socially acceptable to ask you to marry him.

Oh, if only Bahnti could make him run fast through time as well.

He tells you so once he finally decides to propose, holding the ring box he had bought right after meeting you. It was now old and muddied after all those long, agonizing months in which he kept it hidden inside his pockets.

He tells you of all the times he thought of buying other rings, one exponentially different than the other, because it was so hard not to think of you whenever he saw anything bright and pretty.

It's easy for him to see his future with you, and he promises to also make it easy for you to live with him.

He doesn't expect you to tend to his wounds nor work like he does. No, he would never even think of having you break a sweat for him.

Haru only wishes to be on the receiving end of your caring hands as well.

When you accept his proposal, you pull him onto your lap, fingers threading into his hair, and he sleeps, knowing he would wait it out all over again if it always meant you'd be his.

Towa

It doesn't take long for Towa to propose. In fact, he probably proposes every single day ever since you two got together.

But it's always light-hearted, like another way for him to say "I love you" without actually saying it.

He's given you countless rings made of flower stems, which you keep tucked safely inside a box, despite all of them withering way too soon.

When he's serious about it, however, you know.

There's not playfulness nor mirth in his eyes – just deep, infinite adoration. A seriousness on his face that shakes you to your core.

When he slips yet another ring in your finger, you notice: this one was made to look like a flower stem, but it was made of a silvery, hard band.

"This one will never wither," he says under the night sky you two had been watching. "It's a proof that I want to be with you forever".

His proposal is more of a statement than a question. You will marry him, he knows and you know as well.

And you couldn't be happier.

Ren

He hates the idea of proposals. Hates how much attention is drawn to a couple during marriage, hates the huge parties, the self-importance of couples who think the world should clap for them for just being together.

Therefore, he really doesn't expect to have marriage popping up in his mind every time he looks at you, a little into your relationship with him.

It's more of a reassurance than a romantic gesture to him.

Whenever you laugh at his jokes, spend time watching his awful horror movies, listen to his ramblings about games–

Whenever you look at him, kiss him and say his name–

Whenever you exist next to him, he wants, needs the reassurance that you won't simply go away in the blink of an eye. You won't leave him behind, back into a solitude he doesn't think he can handle anymore. Not after you.

So when he asks you after a binge of awful movies, if you'd like to spend the rest of your life with him, he does it out of desperation.

If he likes it, he needs to put a ring on it, right? Or whatever it is that someone said some time ago.

Your smile when you say you do is almost blinding. He nods and looks away, noticing his reflection on his notebook's screen seems awfully flustered.

"We'll go out to buy rings tomorrow, then." He murmurs. You lean onto his shoulder, agreeing and he sighs.

It will definitely feel good to see the proof that you're his right there, glinting on your finger.

[shimkongzlove]

Ryouhei x reader

A/N - loved windbreaker but I couldn't find many fics related to it so I decided to write one on my own . It is terribly written with a bunch of spelling mistakes and a basic plot. Read at your own risk ❌️❌️

Warning- mention of blood , violence , a bit of angst , sexual themes ( ig that's it )

You were working as an intern in the xyz hospital ( choose any name u like ) for your winter break . U loved working there , the staff was sweet and u received a good pay . But there were a lot of things which dint particularly suit your liking ,first and foremost it was situated in a rather shady area , the patients who came there during ur night shift were let's just say interesting .

Night shifts were something that u did not enjoy even hated to a certain level . They were tiring, boring and deprived you off of sleep . Yet what was important had to be done

4:30 am

A cold gush of winds welcomed u as u exited the hospital . The walk home was rather quite until u heard grunting from a nearby alley . Normally u would have ignored it but today u were feeling rather curious

U peeked into the alley way only to find a man surrounded by blood , lying on the cold floor . U stood there Debating whether to help the man or not and atlast ur heart won over ur mind .

U made your way to him cursing yourself for even stopping in the first place . Kneeling down next to him u observed his features . He was handsome no he was hot as fuck , the scar running down his face Made it 100 times better maybe it wasn't that bad of a decision to stop

While u were in your little dream land the man in question had regained his consciousness, his instinct led his hand to your wrist breaking u away from your thoughts .

The panic started to set in 'fuck he's awake man I hate my self for this ' , " who are you " said the stranger in question not letting go of your wrist which was starting to hurt " you're hurting me let go , please " ur plee fell on deff ears " I'm a doctor ur bleeding profusely if we don't sto-" ur words were cut short by the man pulling u closer "I asked who the fuck are you " he asked once again ignoring ur words . His deep voice sent shivers down ur body , ur face was just inches away frm his " si-sir I'm y/n , I can help you , your wounds look deep we have to stop the bleeding "

"I'm fine " he said letting go of your wrist " don't need help frm a complete stranger " "sir pls these wounds look serious I promise I mean no harm " as much as u hated the man's attitude u were still a doctor by profession it was your duty to help those in need

"My house is just 5 minutes away from here I can help stop ur bleeding and then we can both go our separate ways forgetting this ever happened deal " before he could argue his body gave up and he fell right into your arms

'Fuck he's heavy ' u somehow managed to drag him to your apartment . U laid his body down on your bed and started collecting all the medical supplys needed for the treatment .

Ryouhei's pov - 'man does my head hurt ' regaing back his consciousness he started to realize that he was not in an alley fighting people but rather he was lying on a bed one that was not his , his vision was still quite blurry from the hit he had taken , realizing he could not do much in his state he layed there accepting his faith

"Oh, ur awake I was just collecting the medical supplies needed for your treatment " "where am i" he said once again ignoring u " ur at my house, I promised I won't harm u so rest assured" u said walking closer to him " I dint quite catch ur name " " ryouhei " he said In an uninterested tone " well ryouhei-san you'll need to take of your um... clothes for me to help you..." u said as blood creeped up to your cheeks

He adhered to your request without any further question . He had a well toned body with a few cuts and scratches here and there . U caught urself staring a little more then needed, face as red as a tomato "take a pic it'll last longer " were the words that broke ur train of thoughts u felt an ache between ur legs ' this is so unprofessional, but man he's so hot ' "so-sorry, ehh anyways I'll start your treatment it's gonna sting a little so try not to move that much k?"

Sitting next to him on your bed u started your treatment , u felt him shiver under your touch "why are u doing this " he asked " I'm a doctor, it's my duty to help those in need " ur words sounded sincere to him " I'm a bad guy ukw that right " " I'm just here for the intern ship , i dont know the dirty business that goes around here " u said eyes still on his wounds , somehow u dint feel scared by his declaration , his hands went to your waist pulling ur body even more closer to his , stopping ur movements " everyone here knows who I am , many are scared to even approach I could do anything to you and ppl won't even bat an eye "

"U could have harmed me the moment you woke up yet here we are , so ik u won't do anything to me , atleast that's what I'd like to believe " " tch, ur way too confident " u decided not to reply , the time after that passed by silently

After about 15 or 20 minutes u were done putting bandages on his chest, arms and shoulders there were still a few cuts and scratches on his back so u asked him to turn around . He was now laying on his back

The spots were hard to treat because of the position u both were In , the only best possible way for u to reach them was to sit on his back "ryouhei-san ...the wounds on your back are kind of hard to reach so I'll need to change my position to treat them " " do whatever u want"

So u did what u had to , your theigs were now on either side of his body ( u were wearing shorts) touching his bare back.

Ryouheis pov

He was going crazy , the feeling of your theigs deff caused him to get a hard on not only that ,since the moment he met u . He was doomed. U were so pretty ,ur skin shining in the moon light, ur sweet voice, ur scent everything about u was intoxicating he couldn't take it much longer

He turned around causing u to yelp and hold on to his shoulders for support u were now basically straddling him " ur driving me nuts " "what did I d-" before u could finish , u felt smth poking ur inner thigh "oh" " yea feel that , that's what u did , you gotta help me now babe "

The end

( this is sooo poorly written 👎 but I had to to justice to my man ryouhei , there are barely any fics about him 😭😭 lemme know if yall want a pt2 )

( ps- this is the first fic iv ever written so please go easy on me and I hope yall enjoyed it)

[kopivie]

share some hades!wrio headcanons? I'm actually SO invested i'm going to die

oh! i think i can come up with a few! it'll probably be some facts about him, and maybe some writing? (note: i'm coming back after finishing this and.. i got so carried away.)

(also as a side note, if i were to write a fic about this, i might use a lot of greek/ancient greek terms and words, so if you see something like that, please don't be alarmed.)

first and foremost, i'm definitely clinging to That One Part of wriothesley's canon lore of him abandoning the name given to him before his murder trial. canonically, he just picked up the name "wriothesley" from an obituary because he didn't want to use the one his foster parents gave him. what that name was, we will probably never know (unless it's said in his story quest, which i haven't done yet.) that said, allow me to jump into my hades!wriothesley hcs :D

"wriothesley" is a name that very few actually use. much like canon, people often refer to him as "your grace". however, he has many, many monikers; "the duke of meropide" and "king of the underworld" are just two of many.

underworld residents (or to overworlders, meropide prisoners) coined a bunch of new terms to refer to the elusive duke: aides or aidoneus (meaning "the unseen" or "the invisible one"), orcus (meaning "killer" or "the one who kills"), ditis pater/dis pater/dis (all meaning something along the lines of "rich one"), or clymenus (meaning "the illustrious" or "the revered one")

note: these are all actual names used to refer to hades in greek mythology.

no one calls him those names to his face or in his presence. those names are spoken in whisper -- saying any of those names seems to evoke a physical reaction to anyone who may have been in the fortress long enough to understand the weight behind those names.

hades!wriothesley is not a benevolent being. he is extremely objective. he seldom makes emotional decisions, which leads people to believe that at times, he has no emotions to speak of. (which isn't true, obviously.) his impartial decisions have cost many a life.

i think that because he doesn't rely on his emotions when making many decisions, that is the reason why he goes overboard when it comes to you. it's a little like shaking an unopened soda bottle for an hour and then suddenly opening the top.

wriothesley's love overflows, it gushes, it stains everything it touches. it seeps into every pore and changes you from the inside out. the problem with this, however, is that you resist this change initially.

you are receptive to his... i don't wanna call it advances, since that often has a negative connotation. wriothesley is anything but pushy and inappropriate. he's gentlemanly and chivalrous, so much so that you almost want to scream sometimes. let's call it courting — you allow him to court you, although you keep him at a distance.

why do you keep him at a distance? i... don't really know. perhaps someone can send in a suggestion. but the point is that you don't fully indulge yourself -- sometimes you do, but you become slightly distant and apologetic afterwards. wriothesley understands and is happy to be patient with you, but...

i think my suggestion for your hesitancy would be that you can feel the love that he exudes, and it scares you. you're afraid of what might happen if you allow yourself to sink too deep.

and that... that is probably why you resent him when he takes you to the fortress. that's part of the reason, anyhow. you were afraid of drowning and he literally took you to the bottom of the sea. in a metaphorical sense, he basically tied a brick to your ankles and dragged you down to his own depths against your will. you can't fight, you can't resist -- you can only endure. that is why you're angry with him.

"why do you resent me so?"

hades has the audacity to ask you such a question as you study a flower that he'd brought back from his latest visit to the overworld. you hadn't known of his departure, but when he gifted you this fresh plant, you felt something ugly and bitter stir within you. you became fixated on it, deciding to hole yourself up in your room to spend time with the only thing that gave you peace. you don't react to his question.

he stays quiet for a while, but he doesn't leave. after about five minutes, he inquires again. "please, blossom. i must know. i just wish to make you happy."

you all but slam your hand down on your desk. "happy? you want to make me happy?" you haven't raised your voice, but your tone is as icy as the vision that dangles from his clothing. "set me free. let me go home."

wriothesley is quiet again. "...will you at least look at me?"

the wetness in your eyes forces you to shake your head. "you haven't earned my gaze."

"and what must i do to earn it?"

"i've already told you."

"what else must i do?"

that gets you to turn around. "why are you so stubborn? what is preventing you from letting me go? you yourself can wander between the realms freely, but i can't?" your eyes sting with unshed tears, though the sensation doesn't last long. your frame trembles as you cry, and wriothesley cups your face to wipe the tears away. "do not touch me." you hiss at him.

wriothesley gives you a humorless smile. "you're not pushing me away."

...he's right. why aren't you pushing him away? "you haven't earned the right to touch me."

"haven't i?" hades is leaning in closer. you can smell peppermint on his breath. did he drink tea before coming? his thumb caresses your cheek. your eyes list to the side. "blossom," he calls you. "please."

you have a hard time resisting when he begs you like this. you hate how you let him get away with murder. he's trapped you here against your will, denied you of your freedom, and yet you still allow him to treat you like a deity. you allow him to do as he pleases. you don't feel threatened by him, no -- what you feel is his sincerity. his longing. his love.

you lock eyes with wriothesley. he's sharing a breath with you now. "wh-what do you want?" you ask. "you've already taken everything from me. how greedy can one man be?"

wriothesley's eyes glimmer in the lamplight. you can feel his gaze drop to your lips. his voice is noticeably deeper when he asks, "do you want to find out?"

you're not sure what you feel when he kisses you. the kiss is soft, sweet, and tastes of peppermint. his lips are warm, as is the rest of him. he licks into your mouth slowly and patiently, and you don't fight him.

because really, you've never wanted to push him away. you want to accept wriothesley for who he is, bloodied hands and all. you want him almost as bad as he wants you. and yet you just can't accept him in his entirety-- not as he is now. not when he's secretive and evasive. but his affection gives you some reprieve; his love gives you peace overwhelming, so much so that you let your own feelings shine through in moments like these.

you end the kiss first. you pull away, breathless, though you notice that he doesn't move an inch. after a brief silence, you finally speak. "you're too much for me." you murmur. "you'll be death of me."

wriothesley takes your hands in his. "for as long as i rule the underworld," he replies, "death will never find you. and that's a promise."

(also obligatory catte tag bc i need a fellow wrio lover to see this 🫡🩷 @catcze)

(p.s.: lemme know if i shouldn't tag you in this stuff, okay?)

[lovemyromance]

Why am I seeing the GAs/ELs claiming Elriels are just acting "hypocritically morally superior" when we say we want what Elain wants?

Then they go on to say "why should what Elain wants even matter?"

Um, idk it's because it's her fucking book? It's not Lucien's book. It's not Azriel's book. It's Elain's book, first and foremost. SJM has always talked about stories spotlighting strong female main characters.

Saying we want what Elain wants is not a bad thing?? If it's her book that's next, then yes. What she wants is the most important thing.

We are not SJM. We don't get to decide "what is best for her". In fact, acting like you ship Elucien because you "want what's best for her" is acting morally superior and condescending.

You are actually just assuming you know what is best for her. Especially when Elain acts like a ghost and loses her boldness around Lucien canonically right now. We don't get to just act like we know the character better than the writer herself. SJM will write what she wants. Elain will desire whomever she wants.

And I will goddamn support whoever Elain wants. Because SJM will write it so whoever Elain wants and ends up with IS THE CORRECT, BEST choice.

When Elain wanted Greyson, I wanted her to be happy and get Greyson. When he rejected her so cruelly, I was angry. I wouldn't have wanted her to end up with Greyson after that but if Elain had continued to want Greyson, I'm sure SJM would have written it so I would've rooted for that as well.

Elain now wants Azriel. That is not something Elriels made up. It is on the page. She is the one initiating every step of their late night encounter in the BC. She is the one who wants Azriel to kiss her. She is the one who gets aroused just when Azriel touches her neck.

If we want Azriel, it's because Elain wants Azriel.

That being said, if I were to open the next ACOTAR book and I see Elain is so hurt by the misunderstanding in the BC that she spends more time with Lucien (somehow...lmao) and starts to grow feelings for him ... I WOULD ALSO SUPPORT THAT!

I have said it time and time again, and so have many, many other Elriels. If Elain had wanted Lucien from the get go, we would've also supported Elucien. Hell, I did support Elucien, until I saw how uncomfortable and resentful Elain was of that bond in ACOWAR.

And honestly, I might've even been of the opinion that "eh SJM might have them makeup and it'll be her usual reluctant mates plot" IF SJM hadn't then brought in Azriel and shown me how Elain acts and behaves differently with someone she actually wants.

It is wildly different. If you cannot see that and acknowledge that, then it's your fault, not SJM's writing.

If I open up the next ACOTAR book, and Elain suddenly wants fucking Tarquin or Helion.... then I would root for Tarquin or Helion. Whether it's Azriel or Lucien or anyone else doesn't matter. What Elain wants is what SJM will write as her endgame. And true, Elain could grow to like someone else.... but right now, she likes Azriel. So right now, I am supporting Azriel.

It's not that fucking hard to understand.

Elain is an Archeron sister. The sisters are the focus of this book, SJM has said that time and time again. Yes there will likely be books beyond JUST the sisters, but not UNTIL the sisters' stories have been told.

AKA it's not gonna be Feyre, Nesta, Gwyn/Vassa/Mor/Amren, then Elain.

Elain's story does matter more than Gwyn's or Emerie's or Vassa's or Mor or Amren. I would say Feyre's matters the most, and Nesta and Elain are equal in terms of importance. That's how the series has been set up.

I don't know why people keep thinking this is Throne of Glass or CC. It's not. The setup and pattern has been made very clear. People are choosing not to see it, and then coming up with every single reason under the sun for trashing the people who read what was written and are rooting for Elriel accordingly.

[onmyyan]

Ricky Demont NSFW ABC'S

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

Extremely attentive, so much so he doesn't even notice his needs, because first and foremost in his eyes will always be to make sure you're okay, lots of petting your hair and neck, specifically his thumb rubbing against your pounding pulse point as he listens to you catch your breath, he has this almost tranquil smile on his face the entire time.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Ricky likes his hands, especially in proximity to what he can do to you, for you, with them. It's how he gets to touch you, feel you of course he loves his hands, and it be easier for him to swallow glass than pick a favorite body part on his love, but between you and me he's obsessed with your lips, kissing them, touching them, cumming all over them, he's very fond.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

The Creampie Connoisseur™ for many reasons but the main one is that possessive urge it scratches whenever he paints your insides white, nothing quite beats getting to pump you full and watching it spill out of your twitching cunt, likes to push it back inside with his pretty slender fingers. Very much the "can't waste a drop." Type.

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

Secretly very very into primal play. He's forced to handle the shop's bullshit everyday, and more often than not is the one his siblings turn to when shit hits the fan and they can't handle it themselves, he doesn't mind helping his family, but it does pile on to this tightly wound coil of anxious tension in his gut, and that kinda tension is best relieved by completely losing himself in you, in fucking you like he'll die if he doesn't, he gets to let go in ways he desperately needs, very feral in this state, until he cums the best you'll get outta him are grunts and growls of your name, his brain turns off in the best way.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

He's experienced, despite his hard outward appearance Ricky desperately craves love, and growing up with the parents he had only made this obsession with love even deeper, meaning he's dated some people who weren't the best for him, just because he's a dreadfully hopeful romantic, all that to say he knows how to fuck, particularly good with his tongue.

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

Either from behind with his hand wrapped around your throat, bonus points if it's in front of a mirror so you get to watch yourself fall apart all over him, or it's missionary, with your bodies pressed so tightly together, so intertwined nothing could come between you, he's a lot more submissive with this one, completely overwhelmed with how good you're sucking him in, lots of whines and whimpers

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

He's serious, no matter if he's on top or bottom, your pleasure is no laughing matter to him, that's not saying if you happen to get the giggles it'll bother him or anything, rather that if this happens, he's gonna take it as a challenge, and you end up cumming so much you cry, be warned this will activate the little demon in him and he's almost mean with the way he toys with your cunt, enjoying the cries and whines he's pulling from you with each pass of his tongue or roll from his hips.

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Shaves but if he grows it out he can have a happy trail

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

Intensely romantic. Heavy eye contact if his eyes aren't rolling to the back of his head, the sweetest whispers of love straight in your ear juxtaposing the way he fucks himself into you, love bites that feel tender and loving, lots of pleading for your body, for your love, he cries when he gets overwhelmed and when he subs that happens a lot.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

Does so more out of necessity. That is of course until he meets you and suddenly he's locking his door at the shop, pulling up a video from last night and going to fuckin town on himself, he bites his free hand, those pretty eyes flutter shut, and he tries desperately to whine into his flesh.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

Primal play, Impact play, Dacryphilia, Dom/Sub, Temperature play, Rope play (certified rope bunny)

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

Anywhere he can take his time with you, his office is a personal favorite because he gets to think about all the surfaces he bent you over when he gets bored at work.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

Your mind body and soul turn this man to putty, but if we want specifics, when you chew on stuff, always brings his attention to those fuckin lips of yours and oh look at that he's bricked.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

He'd never ever ever even slightly entertain the concept of sharing you with someone, in any way shape or form.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

He's another award winning munch your Honor. Wants you to yank his hair and ride his face until you can't, then do it some more, could live between your thighs, he loves when you go down on him don't get me wrong but the fucker genuinely has fun making you writhe and squirm on his tongue.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

This depends on the mood, every time you guys have sex he treats you right, the execution just changes depending if he's dominant or submissive that night. Although he seems more sensitive when he subs and towards the end you can feel him losing control of his hips, his pace going wild.

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

Very into them as you turn him on by breathing, so if he can get it in and make a mess of you real quick? Hell yeah.

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

Willing to try anything once, especially with you as you're his forever person and who better to try things with than them? That's his logic at least. Open minded, very much down to clown

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

3-5

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

Yes, he's a firm believer in them being friends not foes in the bedroom, especially if it's a you both can enjoy? Sign him tf up.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

He's like menace #2 of the Delmonts this mf is relentless when he wants to be, but only because he knows he's gonna give you what you're begging for.

At some point anyway >:)

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

He's very loud no matter what mood he's in, lots of grunts and growls, whimpers and whines, he doesn't hide his noises when he's with you, he doesn't feel the need to hide anything from you.

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

The kinda jealous where he'd tie his opp up and fuck you in front of them, then kill them afterwards because he can't stand the idea of someone else getting to see you like that.

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

7.7 inches curves a bit to the left, pretty tip with a big vein running along the shaft.

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

YEARNING don't feel like a big enough word for this mf, this man don't look it but he is an absolute fiend for you, certified simp, has and will drop everything to come lay it down then go back to work like he didn't just spend his lunch break bending you over your island counter.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

He loves to watch you sleep so about an hour or two after making you see stars.

[moons-of-dewclan]

I was curious how to get your clan really set off? I recently (LIKE EARLIER TODAY JFJSJFJ) started my own clangen blog but idk if it's worthy of Tumblr😭

How can I improve my art and improve my process? You're one of my BIGGEST inspirations ngl you're literally him (or her or they I'm so sorry I never caught your pronouns) but I was just curious on how to be better? If you wanna look, don't. It's like, rlly bad so.... save your eyes. Have a lovely nighttt <33

HELLOOOOO I'M NOT 100% SURE WHAT YOU MEAN BY SET OFF I'M SORRY :{ if you mean to get people reading it, i think it's vastly just luck also appealing to an audience by accident i posted my art online for 10 years (i started posting in 2010 as a wee ka- told you i'm an adult haahahueu) before anyone showed consistent interest and i valued those two or so commenters who occasionally had something to say about my stuff, so much LAKSNLKD. that entire decade i got between 2 and 30 favourites for every piece i posted- usually between 2 and 10- until around 2021 when a making a comic aANNND joining a wolf ARPG group exposed me to many kindred art-enjoyers that wanted to keep up with my goofy stories then for some reason, i posted Dewclan's first page on tumblr and it got way more engagement than any other piece of art i've ever posted SO LAKSDNLKDAS WE CANNOT PREDICT THESE THINGS.. at least i can't if you're looking for engagement, pLS AIM FOR ENGAGEMENT THAT FEELS MEANINGFUL over anything else IN MY OPINION, and it's just my opinion- part of being 'better' is, first and foremost, being able to enjoy your art alone. and then being excited with what you choose to share! even if you don't care about your quality of art, care about the story. if you don't care about the story, care about the process and just having fun. but you have to have fun in doing it, and do it for your own eyes primarily. like if you were alone in a room and creating only for yourself! because, until you happen to find others who like what you're liking, you are then when someone is interested and you get to share that excitement, even that ooone comment on something you care about is OOGHHH SUCH A NICE FEELIN. enter communities, comment on other artists' work, try to make friends! but make sure to remember, if you create with the hopes others will like it, without liking it yourself, you're going to be really broken down if someone doesn't like it FOR you :{ loving your own art is tough work but it's integral to your longterm relationship with drawing ON IMPROVING.. for me, nothing is more integral to improving than finding a way to practice that suits you (looking at live figures doesn't help me at all. i don't know why. it's insane), and having fun doing it. i can't grasp anatomy unless i break it down with shapes. SHAPES ARE EVERYTHING. study the shapes of what you want to draw. break em down by tracing simple shapes over your subject. see if the leg is the same length as the head from muzzle to neck and lock that info in. STUFF LIKE THAT on the technical side of things, it can be super helpful to dedicate half an hour or so to drawing a day- eventually it becomes a habit and you just default to 'oh i think i wanna draw' when you've got nothing else to do. more drawing, more improvement!

HONESTLY THO another important thing is not putting yourself down. i know it's a hard habit to break (i struggle with it outside of art myself!), but it doesn't do you any favours. the more you rag on yourself, the more it'll manifest as something that actually damages your art, AND your relationship with it. let it be fun- don't sabotage yourself! you can be critical of your work and still kind! little tip here, improving can take a while, but experimenting with styles can make an INSTANT shift in how you perceive your stuff. ALSOOO EXPERIMENT WITH DIFFERENT BRUSHES FOR SKETCHING AND LINING. I PROOMISE. PLS DO IT. IT'S LIKE A MAGIC TRICK. i cannNNNOT sketch with a hard brush. everything looks horrible. marker brush tho?? so smooth. full of character. lovely. binary brush sketches? suddenly i'm Anime. pencil brush?? i digidevolve back into baby ka who loved to crosshatch and do semi realism. airbrush??? i explode into atoms actually

i find for a lot of people, they don't need to improve or be 'better' at art, they need to learn to enjoy what they're capable of doing now, and improvement is a byproduct. from what i've seen through the years, unless you work to curb it the negative view of your art will stick with you no matter what 'skill level' you get to bc the calls' comin from inside the house, yknow what i mean 3: it can be a long process to learn to accept your art, and sometimes you just plain grow out of it over time! but in the meantime it can't hurt to make efforts to fight your d e m o n s

I'M SORRY I WROTE SO MUCH IK YOU DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS ALL IT ISN'T JUST TO YOU, ODESSY-CLAN BLOG RUNNER, IT'S AIMED AT ANYONE WITH ARTSY SELF DOUBTS. i hope i phrased everything kindly bc i meant it all kindly 3: i hate to see an artist doubt their work, but THERE IS NO SHAME IN IT. i want to encourage loving it regardless of any flaws tho, even though it takes time!

[fernlessbastard]

how do you think they'd react to the other getting hit on

Absolutely possessive, and they're both passive-aggresive about it. Like "ha ha yeah he is hot! I know, right? Ha ha ha and the best part is that he's all mine." type of thing

Ok so first and foremost: obviously if they get flirted with they'll immediately state they're not interested and are also in a relationship. That being said, when the other is around they let their counterpart handle the situation, cause that's just what makes it more fun

So, I'd imagine they both have a tendency to kinda like, use oversharing as a way to "gross" people out

They'll just start leaning against - or rather on - the one who's being flirted with more and more, and with just the most passive aggressive politeness they'll happily disclose some of their private life, making it clear that they are very much together

Wilbur likes to pull the "you know where his previous husband, before me, is right now? Six feet under. Or I guess at the very least that's where lies what remains of him..." with just the biggest smile ever. Quackity finds it too endearing to even bother clarifying that the guy died of a heart attack, that the 'what remains of him' refers to Quackity eating his heart, and that legally him and Wilbur aren't even married (yet). He just likes seeing Wilbur get that sparkle in his eyes, passive aggressively telling people how lucky he (Wil) is, and how unlucky they are cause he's the one dating Q and they're not

Ok tried to keep it pg13 so far cause it is a more general question, but I'll give a more nsfw elaboration in the context of like, at a club or something under the cut

While Wilbur's more so focused on making sure everyone around knows that Quackity is his and only his, Quackity more so loves to focus on reminding Wilbur about how he belongs to Q.

He'll pull Wilbur in by the waist, trace his hand over the man's lower back, play with his hair a little in a way where it curls around his fingers tightly so that all he'd need to do to pull Wilbur's hair would be to lazily gesture his hand slightly back, etc. And verbally he won't shy away from telling the person how good of a boy Wilbur is, and how obediently he listens, so on and so forth, sometimes even going a bit into detail. Basically he'll happily talk about Wilbur as though he's not there/as though he's a dog obediently sat waiting for his owner to finish talking. And Wilbur absolutely loves that. He loves Quackity being possessive, he loves the physical reminders that he belongs to him, he loves the praise, he loves that little sprinkle of dehumanisation, and everything is nicely tied with a bow of exhibitionism, humiliation of people finding out that he's "just Quackity's plaything", and also just being a general menace to people

Altogether I'd say that pretty much every time Quackity gets hit on Wilbur ends up in his lap (the second he's able to) which eventually turns into some very soft and loving sex with lots of reassurance and words of affirmation, meanwhile if it's Wilbur who gets hit on most of the time it'll be rather BDSM heavy (but still just as loving, obviously) and Wilbur's probably gonna be ending up as a happy, but extremely exhausted wreck, cuddled up to Quackity who's giving him countless little kisses and continues to tease him with little whispers

[uhbasicallyjustmilex]

i don't know what it is in the air, but in the last 24 hours i have received a few ao3 comments/asks/dms with the most unbelievably touching and detailed feedback about four walls 🥺🥺

i will reply to each individually as soon as i have the time to sit down and give them the attention they deserve, but i just wanted to quickly post this to say there genuinely aren't the words to express how much reading your words has lifted my heart today 🌟

i've been struggling a LOT with imposter syndrome and self-criticism around my writing lately, and to be totally honest, i’ve also been feeling increasingly worried that people are starting to lose interest in the fic because it does take me a bit of time to write each chapter, and also because i think the fandom generally has been a bit quieter lately which is always tough on anyone creating works for it.

i write first and foremost for the love of the story i am creating, but it can be really hard to maintain that momentum at times when writing something that is essentially novel-length, and having people engage with it can truly just bring it all to life again in those moments where you doubt everything and want to give up. i can't tell you the number of times reading someone's thoughts on a chapter has helped ground me back into the most important parts of the story, or has inspired me to develop a certain theme moving forward.

so yeah. if you are someone who has ever commented on anyone's story and shared your experience of it with them, please know how incredibly, incredibly valuable your words are. as a writer, sharing your work is scary and daunting and vulnerable - and getting to speak with people about what you are creating truly brings it to life and keeps it alive 💗

in short: thank you to literally everyone who's ever left feedback on four walls. you’re all fucking incredible and i am so so grateful 💜

(PS chapter nine is sitting at around 12,500 words and is in the final stages of editing - i'm hoping it'll be posted next weekend! 😘)

[tirfpikachu]

whats a tirf

a tirf is a trans-inclusive/nuanced radical feminist!

many of us tirfs have been harmed by both normie tra spaces and normie radfem spaces, so we want our own corner. many of us are detrans, trans, or have a lot of trans friends we cherish, and we're building a corner of the radfem community dedicated to figuring out the increasingly bothersome issues between the feminist community & the lgbt community and boosting all misogyny-affected voices.

nuancefems - radfems who are often shamed for their nuanced takes, especially but not exclusively on tra/lgbt topics - in general might agree with us on a lot of things, but tirfs are those who focus a significant part of their activism on tra-radfem relations and actively fixing all the rampant issues between the two communities. we deeply care about all misogyny-affected people, homophobia-affected people, exclusive same-sex attracted folks and all gnc people. we are against the rampant misogyny & homophobia of tra spaces, while also not believing in the typical terf rhetoric and demonization of dysphoric people & trans/nonbinary-identified gnc people. we believe that despite what mainstream lgbtq/tra spaces may have forced on us, it'll always be essential to discuss sex-based ("agab" based, anti-ofab/female) oppression, and homosexual (what you may call exclusive afab4afab & amab4amab) rights in feminism. we also believe that in our tirfy corner of radical feminism, it's important to discuss the complex experiences that trans people may have under the heteropatriarchy and support dysphoric people and try to find productive solutions to all these struggles. we also try to educate more tras on what radical feminism actually is.

for us, we use male to mean what you'd call amab or tma, but we'd call male people omab as sex is observed, not assigned, unless it was done so wrongly in intersex/dsd cases. and ofc female = afab/ofab. while trans men might be ofab, or female, they are still men in the gender category or strongly align with it due to dysphoria. even if they aren't transitioned, we as tirfs see their dysphoric experience as often being different than normie female experiences and deserving proper gendering and accommodations. the same of course goes for trans women who are omab/male yet also often transition into facing misogyny, thus very much needing feminism & deserving their voices heard as well; and even if they don't transition, they still have dysphoric gnc experiences that can have them face horrific harm, and by existing as gnc, as transfems, they are going against the patriarchy by aligning with the "lower" class. transmascs who haven't transitioned yet or never plan to are also still deviating from the path set ahead for female/ofab people as well, and the experience of dysphoria - social and/or physical - is still often very debilitating and deserving of analysis and compassion from the tirfy side of radblr.

we tirfs may talk a lot about gnc and trans topics, but we care first and foremost about misogyny-affected individuals in our radical feminism. we still deeply care about gnc, trans & detrans people as well though, and believe that hearing them out can often provides us valuable information that may help us better understand the patriarchy. we believe in tangible experience: whoever faces the blunt of gncphobia - including transmisogyny - should speak on it the loudest, and whoever is born into facing misogyny from a young age due to their female body, or who has experienced tangible misogyny in their day-to-day life, should have their voices boosted on those specific issues in tirf spaces. others should learn to be good allies. if someone is marginalized one way and not the other, they still need to put in the work and become a strong ally, not just idly stand by.

sex-based oppression is something only ofab/female people face (and intersex ppl in some cases). by this i mean misogyny from birth or even before birth, facing childhood misogyny, and misogyny related to female bodies such as genital mutilation, reproductive misogyny, medical misogyny against female people specifically, historical misogyny and its long-lasting effects on female folks, sexual abuse and slavery meant specifically towards female-bodied people, and all abuse involving the person's femaleness in ways that don't include non-intersex male people; transfems might face related misogyny if they're assumed to be female, but if it refers to female functions they do not have this is misdirected misogyny. in the same vein as how transmasc people who transition and are still feminine might face horrific transmisogyny if assumed to have a gnc male body, they usually know it is misdirected, conditional transmisogyny. it can obviously still be incredibly harmful, but in this case you are still not the intended target. and for example with abortion rights it would be highly inappropriate for transfems to center themselves in the discussion when they cannot truly face this form of misogyny.

tirfs believe that while cis/bio women and transmasc people should actively learn to be good allies to transfems, be respectful, and moderate the rampant transmisogyny in their spaces, transfems also need to learn to be good allies to us and recognize their privilege from not facing misogyny in childhood and not having female-unique issues. they also need to moderate their own spaces for the awful "cotton ceiling" rhetoric, threats and sexual violence from transfems with a penis, guilt-tripping into male/female sex especially with homosexual female/ofab people, misogynistic views of female bodies, openly agp creeps positioning themselves as transfems, and anything involving transfems who did not do the work to unlearn their omab upbringing. it's unfortunate that this even needs to be moderated, and i don't believe most transfems are like this, but it is a huge issue that is going unaddressed and it's a big reason why cis/bio women and transmasc people are flocking to radblr right now.

for those who do not agree with terf rhetoric, tirfism is carving out a space for those tras to find shelter and recover from the misogyny & homophobia they faced in tra spaces. we also take in transfems who are tired of their nuanced voices getting shut down or being called bootlickers for speaking up for female/ofab rights and being a good ally. tirfs at the end of the day want equal allyship between female people, homosexual ppl, transfems, transmascs and all gnc people, as we are all affected by the heteropatriarchy. we also want proper care for trans people and preventative measures within healthcare and in tra communities to prevent more heartbreaking detransitions, which harm not just detrans people but also add to trans stigma.

people might say we're not radfem enough for radblr, or too radfem for lgbt or queer spaces, but we're too tired of the bullshit to give up.

side note - not all tirfs are as nuanced. there have been waves in the past of self-proclaimed tirfs that were decidedly not radical, and constantly downplayed female (and homosexual) rights. my kind of radfeminism includes misogyny-affected transfems, but my fellow tirfs and i do not just want to water down radical feminism or enable people to cause more harm to female folks. as a detrans lesbian i know firsthand how much harm libfem tras can cause. tirfism is about including misogyny-affected dysphoric voices into the conversation, and exploring diverse experiences. some issues are unique to female people and homosexuals, and that's alright! some issues are also unique to transfems, to transmascs, or to all trans ppl. we want to put an end to all misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia/stigma.

that's tirfism to me, anyways!