#it's just that most people always talk about “diversity” yet almost never interact with anything with slightly more melanin than usual

[weird-gay-disaster]

I'd probably be more okay with being in LGBTQA+ places online if they weren't so predominantly white. And the only thing white people have ever done for me is annoy me.

[myafterlifeisbetterthenyours]

Can you do Stolas with an imp and the imp falling for Stolas but hiding it, Stolas eventually finding out and confessing he felt the same? With Stolas being *ahem* himself per say

Stolas with Imp S/O

Youd worked all over Hell, in many occupations. From cooking to cleaning and a wide variety of maintenance.

And with your extensive experience in so many fields, it wasnt difficult to get a job serving in the prestigious Goetia Palace.

You got used to your duties quickly, thoroughly cleaning the east wing when lord Stolas walked by.

Now you'd only had a brief interaction with the owl Demon during your time at the palace, but by all rights he seemed a decent fellow, at least by Demonic Overlord standards.

However, as he passed by he was confronted by his wife. His wife, Lady Stella, went off on him, demanding to know if he'd prepared for a gathering later that day.

You knew about the gathering, and it was very clear Stolas had not prepared for it.

You watched as the owl sputtered and tripped over his words as he desperately tried to explain to his wife why he hadn't prepared for it.

You don't really know why you did it, most Imps would give an arm and a leg to see a noble being given a thrashing by there wives.

But Stolas didn't deserve such a thing, so you stepped forwards, apologising on his behalf.

Telling her you were still new to the job and he was helping you with an urgent matter and that's why he was unable to prepare for the gathering.

Stella stared at you for a long moment and just when you thought she'd say something, she smacked you clean across the face.

Between Stella's inherent strength and your small size, the smack sent you into the nearest wall.

Stella told you coldly to never distract her husband again, and NEVER address her in such an insolent manner ever again.

Stolas was indignant, yelling at her that that was completely unnecessary. Getting her to out of the room he rushed to your side, ensuring you were alright.

Asking if you were alright, you told him It hurt like Hell, but you'd gone through worse. You had a chuckle before the owl thanked you for stepping in like that, asking why you'd do such a thing.

You told him up front, he was probably the best boss you'd had and you couldn't just watch him be chewed out like that.

After that incident, you found yourself with a day off. Although it was explained by a scheduling issue, you always thought of it as a thank you, from Stolas.

After that, however, Stolas seemed to keep you close, personally asking you to attend to tasks he was unable to, and over time you grew to be his go to Imp when he needed something important done.

You quickly made yourself indispensable to the Prince, using your diverse skill set you could handle just about anything he threw your way.

You would organise his day to day, tell him when and were something important was happening, you were basically his personal assistant and as such you were basically attached at the hip, doing everything and anything to support your Prince.

You spent the majority of your waking hours with the Stolas, and much to your growing dread, you found yourself falling for the Prince.

I mean he didn't make it easy on you. The fucking owl seemed to go out of his way to be as adorable as possible, acting like a big child. And it didn't help that he was genuinely kind to you, caring for you as more than just an asset. He treated you like a respected being.

And getting such attention from a noble, was... intoxicating.

A touch, a smile. The Owls harmonious laughter at some stupid joke you made, it was borderline addictive.

But as much as you may... crave~ his attention, you could never reveal these feelings.

You may be his favourite Imp, but you were an Imp none the less. You were so far beneath him there was no chance you could even hope to gain his attention.

And as much as that tore you up inside, you accepted that. Deciding instead to channel that affection in a way that would best serve your prince.

Stolas was quite fond of you.

He was so used to people only helping him in return for something, But you were different. You served him while asking for nothing in return.

His colder, aristocratic side would say you were just doing your duty, just serving like a good little Imp should.

But he could tell. You went above and beyond serving him, helping him in every endeavour he faced.

Over time, he noticed you becoming more affectionate, being more open and light hearted, treating him more like a friend than a Prince, like everyone else did. Something the Owl found intoxicating in its own right.

Of course he had his Owlet for unconditional love and affection, but your affectionate had this strange affect on him. You were kind to him, asking nothing in return, and that made him all fuzzy inside.

But just as he came to enjoy your affection, feeling like he had something to make the cold and cut throat reality of nobility bearable, you pulled back. You became more formal, like all the others in his life that served him.

And while at first he had hoped it was just a temporary hiccup, it quickly got to a point stolas couldn't take it anymore.

The owl ended up using every trick he could think of to figure out just why you'd pulled back.

It was somewhat underhanded, but one night, after you'd said goodnight, Stolas used his Grimoire and observed your unconcious mind. But he never would have expected what he saw.

He got a full view of how you viewed him.

He didn't know if he should be flattered or shocked, as in your eyes he was on parr with a diety.

He was this being of pure mercy and kindness, so far above you, you held your feelings back because you believed there was no way you could get close to him.

Your dream slowly morphed to reveal how terrified you were of admitting it, an all consuming fear that such information would destroy the relationship you held as the most important thing in your life.

Stolas was in shock.

Afterwards he spent the whole night thinking about you.

He couldnt deny he had strong feelings towards you.

After all, you'd always gone above and beyond for him, you were his most trusted and beloved servant, and... he liked to think of you as his friend.

But now that he knew your dedication was fuelled by love, it gave him a whole new perspective to your behaviour.

The way you smiled at him.

The way you laughed at his jokes.

The way you stuck close to him, the way you got defensive on his behalf, so much so you'd started fights with other staff members whom had disrespected him.

All these actions had once seemed so innocent, seemingly coming from your deep sense of loyalty and commitment.

But now, he knew they came from a place of love and devotion.

He spent the whole night thinking it over, pacing his office, deep in thought.

But no matter how hard he thought about it, he always reached the same conclusion.

He loved you.

He knew it was crazy. After all, he had a family. He had a loving- er... Well, he had a wife.

He had a beautiful daughter, and yet here he was, having unknowingly fallen for an Imp.

He went over it a hundred times and every time he thought about it he simply couldn't deny his feelings for you.

You were kind, loving and selfless. Youd always seemed to put his needs above your own And for Stolas, whom had never know selfless love. He realised it was all hed ever wanted.

Now Stolas had to decide what to do with this information.

Unfortunately Stolas couldn't keep a secret from you to save his life, you could simply read him to well.

And it wouldn't take long for him to crack, finding it impossible to keep such a major secret from you.

He'd get you somewhere private, using the excuse of business to get you alone.

Once he was confident you wouldn't be interrupted, he'd basically pin you to a wall, the owl hesitating for a moment before telling you, he knew.

You tried to play it off, telling him you didn't know what he was talking about.

Only for Stolas to snap at you, telling you, you knew exactly what he was talking about.

He leaned in close, whispering he knew you loved him.

You tried to stay composed, but internally you were freaking. Doing your best to keep calm and play it off.

The problem was Stolas was so close, you could smell his morning coffee and he was staring right at you, not giving you any time to calm down and think of a clever excuse.

But you couldn't. You couldn't lie to his face.

So you confessed, you confessed to loving him. You confessed you loved him more than anything, more then you knew how to handle. So you hid it from him.

There was a long silence.

You expected him to drop you, throw you to the side and tell you to get out of his sight, or maybe just kill you then and there.

But he didn't, instead he... he kissed you.

He planted a deep passionate kiss right on the lips, and... and you just couldn't help but return it. You wrapped your smaller arms around his neck, giving him your all.

Breaking the kiss, Stolas cupped your cheek and you were left stunned once again, when he told you... He loved you too.

You were so happy you were almost in tears, holding Stolas so close you almost feared you'd snap him in half, the two of you sharing a moment of joy and warmth.

You pressed your forheads and for the first time in both your lives you held someone you knew loved you for you close.

You held each other close for a long while, Stolas pressing you against his chest. Leaning back, you just smiled at each other.

It was a warm little smile, a smile you gave to someone you cared for deeply.

Scratching your neck, you asked him "What comes next?"

A devious little smile crossed his lips as he stared down at you, a predatory glow to his crimson gaze.

He carried you briskly to the nearest bedroom, carrying you to the bed he dropped you, pressing you against the bed.

Sliding his hands up your shirt, he purred down at you, "After all you've done for me, I think it's only fair..." He licked his lips, "I return the favour."

He stripped you down slowly, trailing kisses across your body.

You spent the night together, wrapped in throws of passion, Stolas doing his very best to bring you as much pleasure as possible.

You went at it long into the night, you pouring all the love and affection you'd repressed for so long.

There being one particular moment where the owl lost his mind when you flipped him over, pinning him down and took control.

You went at it until you collapsed in each other's embrace.

The next morning was like a whole new reality for you two. You held each other close and just relished the new found love you had for each other.

Your relationship would continue in secret, the both of you desperate to keep this new flame alive. Your position as his right hand Imp enabling you to stay close and be with him in private without raising any suspicion.

The two of you had frequent little 'rendezvous', where ever, when ever you wanted too without much issue.

Stolas' favourite was having a quick romp in the car on the way home from a meeting.

As amazing as your romance would be, there would always be a risk hanging over, something you were always cautious of. Although your concerns were dismissed by Stolas and you really found it hard to stay focused around him.

But as perfext as your relationship was, it would all come crashing down when you were discovered by Stella.

Now Stella's reaction could vary drastically depending on the nature of there marriage.

If Stella genuinely loved Stolas, she'd likely loose her shit.

Going off on Stolas while also likely try to kill you.

The family would be divided much like with Blitzø, although this time you would actually be there to support Stolas emotionally, not to mention you'd likely have a decent chance of getting along with Octavia.

But If there union was, say, more business than personal. Well... terms could be reached.

She'd still likely freak out, but Stolas could temper her fury before it could get out of hand.

They could reach an accord, you and him could be together so long as your relationship never sees the light of day.

After that, your relationship went up a notch, Stolas not having to hold back like before, he would basically go feral with you, spending every available second wrapped in a passionate embrace with you.

[meichenxi]

Hey! I hope you feel better soon

We haven't had a good long linguistics rant from you in a while!! How about you tell us about your favourite lingustical feature or occurrence in a language? Something like a weird grammatical feature or how a language changed

If this doesn't trigger any rant you have stored feel free to educate on any topic you can spontaneously think of, I'd love to hear it :D

ALRIGHT KARO, let's go!! This is a continuation of the other ask I answered recently, and is the second part in a series about linguistic complexity. I suggest you check that one out first for this to properly make sense! (I don't know how to link but uh. it's the post behind this on my blog)

Summary of previous points: the complexity of a language has nothing to do with the 'complexity' of the people that speak it; complexity is really bloody hard to measure; some linguists in an attempt to be not racist argue that 'all languages are equally complex', but this doesn't really seem to be the case, and also still equates cognitive ability with complexity of language which is just...not how things work; arguing languages have different amounts of complexity has literally nothing to do with the cognitive abilities of those who speak it.

Ok. Chinese.

Normally when we look at complexity we like to look at things like number of verb classes, noun classes, and so on. But Chinese doesn't really do any of this.

So what do Chinese and languages like Chinese do that is so challenging to the equicomplexity hypothesis, the idea that all languages are equally complex? I’ll start by talking about some of the common properties of isolating languages - and these properties are often actually used as examples of why these languages are as complex, just in different ways. Oh Melissa, I hear you ask in wide-eyed admiration/curiousity. What are they? By isolating languages, I mean languages that tend to have monosyllabic words, little to no conjugation, particles instead of verb or noun endings, and so on: so languages like Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai and many others in East and South East Asia.

Here’s a list of funky things in isolating languages that may or may not make a language more complex than linguists don't really know what to do with:

Classifiers

Chengyu and 4-word expressions

Verb reduplication, serialisation and resultative verbs

'Lexical verbosity' = complex compounding and word forming strategies

Pragmatics

Syntax

I'll talk about the first two briefly, but I don't have space for all. For clarity of signposting my argument: many linguists use these as explanations of why languages like Chinese are as complex, but I'm going to demonstrate afterwards why the situation is a bit more complicated than that. You could even say it's...complex.

1) Classifiers

You know about classifiers in Chinese, but what you may be interested to learn is that almost all isolating languages in South East Asia use them, and many in fact borrow from each other. The tonal, isolating languages in South East Asia have historically had a lot of contact through intense trade and migration, and as such share a lot of properties. Some classifiers just have to go with the noun: 一只狗，一条河 etc. First of all, if we're defining complexity as 'the added stuff you have to remember when you learn it' (my professors hate me), it's clear that these are added complexity in exactly the same way gender is. Why is it X, and not Y? Well, you can give vague answers ('it's sort of...ribbony' or 'it's kinda...flat'), but more often than not you choose the classifier based on the vibe. Which is something you just have to remember.

Secondly, many classifiers actually have the added ability to modify the type of noun they're describing. These are familiar too in languages like English: a herd of cattle versus a head of cattle. So we have 一枝花 which is a flower but on a stem ('a stem of flower'), but also 一朵花 which is a flower but without the stem (think like...'a blob of flower'). Similarly with clouds - you could have a 一朵云 'blob of cloud' (like a nice, fluffy cloud in a children's book), but you could also have 一片云 which is like a huge, straight flat cloud like the sea...and so on. These 'measure words' do more than measure: they add additional information that the noun itself does not give.

Already we're beginning to see the outline of the problem. Grammatical complexity is...well, grammatical. We count the stuff which languages require you to express, not the optional stuff - and that's grammar. The difference between better and best is clearly grammatical, as is go and went. But what about between 'a blob of cloud' versus 'a plain of cloud'? Is that grammatical? Well, maybe: you do have to include a measure word when you say there's one of it, and in many Chinese languages that are not Mandarin you have to include them every single time you use a possessive: my pair of shoes, my blob of flower etc. But you don't always have to include one specific classifier - there are multiple options, all of which are grammatical. So should we include classifiers as part of the grammar? Or part of the vocabulary (the 'lexicon')?

Err. Next?

2) Chengyu and 4-character expressions + 4) Lexical verbosity

This might seem a bit weird: these are obviously parts of the vocab! What's weirder, though, is that many isolating languages have chengyu, not just Chinese. And if you don't use them, many native speakers surveys suggest you don't sound native. This links to point number 4, which is lexical verbosity. 'Lexical verbosity' means a language has the ability to express things creativity, in many different manners, all of which may have a slightly different nuance. The kind of thing you love to read and analyse and hate to translate.

But it is important. If we look at the systems that make up the grand total of a language, vocabulary is obviously one of them: a language with 1 million root forms is clearly more 'complex', if all else is exactly the same, than a language with 500,000. Without even getting into the whole debacle about 'what even is a word', a language that has multiple registers (dialect, regional, literary, official etc) that all interact is always going to be more complex than one that doesn't, just because there's more of it. More rules, more words, more stuff.

Similarly, something that is the backbone of modern Chinese 'grammar' and yet you may never have thought of as such is is compound words. We don't tend to traditionally teach this as grammar, and I don't have time to give a masterclass on it now, but let me assure you that compounding - across the world's language - is hugely varied. Some languages let you make anything a compound; some only allow noun+noun compounds (so no 'blackbird', as black is an adjective); some only allow head+head compound (so no 'sabretooth', because a sabretooth is a type of tiger, not tooth); some only allow compounds one way ('ring finger' but not 'finger ring': though English does allow the other way around in some other words), and so on.

You'll have heard time and time again that 'Chinese is an isolating language, and isolating languages like monosyllabic words'. Well. Sort of. You will also have noticed yourself that actually most modern Chinese words are disyllabic: 学习，工作，休息，吃饭 and so on. This is radically different to Classical Chinese, where the majority were genuinely one syllable. But many Chinese speakers still have access to the words in the compounds, and so they can be manipulated on a character-by-character basis: most adults will be able to look at 学习 and understand that 学 and 习 both exist as separate words: 开学，学生，复习，练习 and so on.

I'm going to sort of have to ask you to take my word on it as I don't have time to prove how unique it is, but the ability that Chinese has to turn literally anything into a compound is staggering. It's insane. It's...oh god I'm tearing up slightly it's just a LOT guys ok. It's a lot. There are 20000000 synonyms for anything you could ever want, all with slightly different nuances, because unlike many other languages, Chinese allows compounds where the two bits of the compound mean, largely speaking, very similar things. So yes, you have compounds like 开学 which is the shortened version of 开始学习, or ones with an object like 吃饭 or 睡觉, but you also have compounds like 工作 where both 工 and 作 kind of...mean 'to work'...and 休息 where both 休 and 息 mean 'to rest'...and so on. So you can have 感 and 情 and 爱 and 心 but also 感情 and 情感 and 爱情 and 情爱 and 心情 and 心爱 and 爱心 and so on, and they all mean different things. And don't even get me started on resultative verbs: 学到，学会，学好，学完， and so on...

What is all of this, if not complex? It's not grammatical - except that the process of compound forming, that allows for so many different compounds, is grammatical. We can't make the difference between学会，学好 and 学完 anywhere near as easily in English, and in Chinese you do sort of have to add the end bit. So...do we count this under complexity? And if not, we should probably count it elsewhere? Because it's kind of insane. And learners have to use it, much like the example I gave of English prepositions, and it takes them a bloody long time. But then where?

Ok. I haven't had a chance to talk about everything, but you get the picture: there are things in Chinese that, unlike European languages, do not neatly fit into the 'grammar' versus 'vocabulary' boxes we have built for ourselves, because as a language it just works very differently to the ones we've used as models. (Though some of the problems, in fact, are similar: German is also very adept at compounding.) But as interesting as that difference is, the goal of typology as a sub-discipline of linguistics is to talk about and research the types of linguistic diversity around the world, so we can't stop there by acknowledging our models don't fit. We have to go further. We have to stop, and think: What does this mean for the models that we have built?

This is where we get into theoretically rather boggy ground. We weren't before?? No, like marsh of the dead boggy. Linguists don't know it...they go round, for miles and miles and miles....

Because unfortunately there isn't a clear answer. If we dismiss these things as 'lexical' and therefore irrelevant to the grammar, that is a) ignoring their grammatical function, b) ignoring the fact that the lexicon is also a system that needs to be learnt, and has often very clear rules on word-building that are also 'grammatical', and c) essentially playing a game of theoretical pass-the-parcel. It's your problem, not mine: it's in the lexicon, not the grammar. Blah blah blah. Because whoever's problem it is, we still have to account for this complexity somehow when we want to compare literally any languages that are substantially different at all.

On the other side of things, however, if we argue that 'Chinese is as complex as Abkhaz, because it makes up for a lack of complexity in Y by all this complexity in X' (and therefore all languages = equally complex), this ignores the fact that compounding and irregular verbs belong to two very different systems. The kind of mistake you make when you use the wrong classifier intuitively seems to be on another level of 'wrongness' to the kind where you conjugate a verb in the wrong way. One is 'wrong'. The other is just 'not what we say'. It's the same as the use of prepositions in English: some are obviously wrong (I don't sleep 'at my bed') but some are just weird, and for many there are multiple options ('at the weekend', 'on the weekend'). Is saying 'I am on the town' the same level of wrongness as saying 'I goed to the shops'? Intuitively we might want to say the second is a 'worse' mistake. In which case, what are they exactly? They're both 'grammar', but totally different systems. And where do you draw the line?

Here's the thing about the equicomplexity argument. As established, it stems from a nice ideological background that nevertheless conflates cognition and linguistic complexity. Once you realise that no, the two are completely separate, you're under no theoretical or ideological compulsion to have languages be equally complex at all. Why should they be at all? Some languages just have more stuff in them: some have loads of vowels, and loads of consonants, and some have loads of grammar. Others have less. They all do basically the same job. Why is that a big deal?

Where the argument comes into its biggest problem, though, is that if a language like Chinese is already as complex as a language like Abkhaz...what happens when we meet Classical Chinese?

Classical Chinese. An eldritch behemoth lurking with tendrils of grass-style calligraphy belching perfect prose just behind the horizon.

Let's look at Modern Chinese for a moment. It has some particles: six or so, depending on how you count them. You could include these as being critical to the grammar, and they are.

A common dictionary of Classical Chinese particles lists 694.

To be fair, a lot of these survive as verbs, nouns and so on. Classical Chinese was very verb-schmerb when it came to functional categories, and most nouns can be verbs, and vice versa. It's all just about the vibe. But still. Six hundred and ninety four.

Some of these are optional - they're the nice 'omggg' equivalent of the modern tone particles at the end of a sentence. Some of them are smushed versions of two different particles, like 啦. Some of these, however, really do seem to have very grammatical features. Of these 694, 17 are listed as meaning ‘subsequent to and later than X’, and 8 indicate imposition of a stress upon the word they precede or follow. Some are syntactic: there are, for instance, 8 different particles solely for the purpose of fronting information: 'the man saw he'. That is very much a grammatical role, in every sense of the word.

The copula system ('to be') is also huuuuuuugely complex. I could write a whole other post about this, but I'll just say for now that the copula in Classical Chinese could be specific to degrees of logical preciseness that would make the biggest Lojban-loving computer programmer weep into his Star Trek blanket. As in, the system of positive copulas distinguishes between 6 different polar-positive copulas (A is B), 2 insistent positive (A is B), 19 restricted positive (A is only B), and 15 of common inclusion (A is like B). Some other copulas can make such distinctions as ‘A becomes or acts as B’, ‘A would be B’, ‘may A not be B?’ and so on. Copulas may also be used in a sort of causal way (not 'casual'), creating very specific relationships like ‘A does not merely because of B’ or ‘A is not Y such that B is X’.

WHEW. And all we have in modern Chinese is 是。

I think we can see that this is a little more complex. So saying 'Modern Chinese is as complex as Abkhaz, just in a different way' leaves no space for Classical Chinese to be even more complex...so....where does that leave us?

Uhhhhhh. Errrrrr.

(Don't worry, that's basically where the entire linguistics community is at too.)

The thing is, all these weird and wacky things that Classical Chinese is able to do are all optional. This is where the problem is. Our understanding of complexity, if you hark back to my last post so many moons ago, is that it's the description of what a language requires you to do. We equate that with grammar because in most of the languages we're familiar with, you can't just pick and choose whether to conjugate a verb or use a tense. If you are talking in third person, the verb has to change. It just...does. You can't not do it if you feel like it. There's not such thing as 'poetic license' - except in languages like Classical Chinese, well. There sort of is.

The problem both modern Chinese and Classical Chinese shows us to a different extent is that some languages are capable of highly grammatical things, but with a degree of optionality we would not expect. Classical Chinese can accurately stipulate to the Nth degree what, exactly, the grammatical relationship between two agents are in a way that is undoubtedly and even aggressively logical. But...it doesn't have to. As anybody who has tried anything with Classical Chinese knows, reading things without context is an absolute fucking nightmare. As a language it has the ability to also say something like 臣臣 which in context means 'when a minister acts as a minister'...but literally just means...minister minister. Go figure. It doesn't have to do any of these myriad complex things it's capable of at all.

So...what does this mean? What does all of this mean, for the question of whether all languages are equally complex?

Whilst I agree that the situation with Classical Chinese is fully batshit insane, the fact is most isolating languages are more like Modern Chinese: they don't do all of this stuff. And whilst classifiers and compounds are challenging, they're not quite the same as the strict binary correct/incorrect of many systems. I'm also just not convinced that languages need to be equally complex. However.

HOWEVER. In this essay/rant/lecture (?), I've raised more questions than I've answered. That's deliberate. I both think that a) the type of complexity Chinese shows is not 'enough' to work as a 'trade off' compared to languages like Abkhaz, and b) that this 'grammatical verbosity' and optionality of grammatical structures is something we don't know how to deal with at all. These are two beliefs that can co-exist. Classical Chinese especially is a huge challenge to current understandings of complexity, whichever side of the equicomplexity argument you stand on.

Because where do you place optionality in all of this? Choice? If a certain structure can express something grammatical, but you don't have to include it - is that more complex, or less so? Where do we rank optional features in our understanding of grammar? It's a totally new dimension, and adds a richness to our understanding that we simply wouldn't have got if we hadn't looked at isolating languages. This, right here, is the point of typology: to inform theory, and challenge it.

What do we do with this sort of complexity at all?

I don't know. And I don't think many professional linguists do either.

- meichenxi out

[tchallasbabymama]

Troubled Waters Chapter Four

Hey, yall! Here’s the next chapter of Nia and T’Challa’s journey. I’m super proud of this one (I’m proud of all my work, but still.) With the help of @wordsfromthelivingghost being a bomb ass beta reader, I think this is some of my best work yet. And I’m only gonna get better!

Check out my masterlist to read my other stories (and catch up on this one if you’re new here.) I love when y’all talk to me and share my work so others can discover it, so hit those comment and reblog buttons. Also, be sure to let me know if you want to be tagged in anything. Enjoy!😘

Word count: 8,894

CW: A little blood and cutting but NOT for self-harm reasons. If it bothers you, skip the second half of the scene at Kokou’s temple.

Nia pressed her cheek to the window, careful not to smudge the thin line of white clay painted down the center of her face. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth hung slightly open as she watched Wakanda zoom by from hundreds of feet in the air. She had always loved seeing what the world looked like from above, but it had been years since she last got to enjoy the view. When she was young, Amare would carry her in his arms as he flew high above the ground to give her a taste of what she so desperately wanted: to feel the wind beneath her nonexistent wings.

T’Challa half-watched Nia from his seat off to the side of the cabin as he flipped through news articles on his kimoyo beads. As they flew over a statue of Bast in her full panther form, he could tell the bright blue light radiating from the tunnel beneath the goddess intrigued her. Her head tilted slightly to the left, and he turned off his beads right as she turned around with a question on her lips.

“That’s Mt. Bashenga,” T’Challa answered prematurely as he stood and made his way over to the window, looking out at his kingdom as Okoye steered the Royal Talon over the Mining province.

“Why’s it glowing?”

“Vibranium.”

“Ohhh.” Nia thought back to the human history books she read as a child that told their story of the founding of Wakanda. Obviously, they had censored the part about aziza, but she still found their revisionist history fascinating. “That’s where the meteorite landed, right?”

T’Challa nodded, impressed by her knowledge.

“Ubaba always said vibranium was ‘the humans’ magic’,” she whispered just loud enough for him to hear.

T’Challa was mildly shocked. He had never considered it that way, but he supposed it was sort of otherworldly what they were able to do with the substance. In comparison to other humans, anyway.

Okoye kept her focus on flying the ship, but T’Challa couldn’t help but spot the slight glow that emanated from Nia’s skin while she ogled the scenery. The king reflected on the description of aziza he had read the day before and remembered that it mentioned their luminous skin. He had noticed that even when she was standoffish towards him, she seemed to radiate light from the inside out, but seeing her literally light up in excitement brought him joy.

When Birnin Zana came into view, Nia’s eyes curiously trailed along the tributaries that moseyed through the metropolis and she was reminded of the magic realm’s big city, Birnin Umlingo. She smiled fondly at how similar they were despite the fact that Birnin Zana was so much bigger. It was nestled between rolling hills and sharp cliffsides, and she was pleasantly surprised to see all the lush greenery dispersed throughout the city. There were small parks everywhere and most of the roofs were topped with well-kept gardens. The skyscrapers and apartment buildings stretched to the sky like the trees that lined the streets, but Nia was almost blinded when the sun bounced off of an impressive structure in the middle of the city. Two almost conical, shining towers spiraled up from an ancient foundation that swirled around the base like the flowing tributary that surrounded most of it like a moat. The towers were connected by a long bridge about a third of the way up and despite her amazement, Nia couldn’t help but wonder why they had to build two towers instead of just one.

“Bast, is that the palace?” She pointed up ahead.

T’Challa smirked proudly. He never tired of seeing the dual vibranium spires that towered over even the tallest skyscrapers throughout the city.

“It is,” he said proudly.

“It’s so big,” she whispered, then turned to look at him. “Does it ever feel empty?”

He furrowed his brows, making a little crease appear between them that Nia found endearing. “How do you mean?”

“Well, it’s just you and your family that live there, right?”

The king nodded.

“Then why do you need so much space? And why two instead of just one? It seems so unnecessary.”

Okoye bit the inside of her lip to keep from snickering at Nia’s sincere inquiries. She wasn’t too keen on Nia and wasn’t quite sure why she was there, but she had worked for T’Challa long enough to know he didn’t like people questioning him.

“I don’t- it’s not just...look.” He pointed back out the window to distract her, and Nia whipped her head around to watch their descent to the landing pad in front of the palace.

The three of them exited the Talon, but instead of entering T’Challa’s gratuitously large home, they made a left and walked through the palace gates and into the bustling streets of Birnin Zana. Nia had been to the big city before when she was young, but it seemed like it had exploded over the last couple of decades. It had always been a busy hub of commerce for the Merchant tribe, but business owners from the other tribes had moved there in droves over the past few years to get a piece of the pie.

The three of them passed through the financial district with ease. Nia kept her neck craned to look up at the tall banks, corporate offices, and massive parking garages filled with hovercars. In the distance, she saw an arena and she wondered what took place there. Did they have many concerts? Sporting events? She made a mental note to ask about that later and continued to take in her surroundings. The maglev trains zooming by high above the street caught her attention, and her eyes widened. She had never been on a train before.

They eventually made it to Three Step Town, the cultural hub of the city and Nia looked on in awe at the various businesses that surrounded them. Once again, she was reminded of Birnin Umlingo as she looked around at the diversity that surrounded her. Most of the older folks were dressed in the traditional clothing of their tribes, but the younger Wakandans seemed to prefer a more modern look. They really were a spectacle. Some people had brightly colored manes and shining vibranium tattoos that decorated their skin, and the sight had Nia’s wheels turning. She had never really experimented much with her look, but they were giving her the inspiration to try something different.

Just as Nia began to ponder what body modification would look good on her, she felt someone grab her and yank her to the side of the street. She began to protest right as a streetcar full of people rolled by. Nia turned to thank her savior, smiling sheepishly when she realized it was Okoye.

“Watch where you’re going,” the general warned harshly and let go of Nia’s arm. The two of them joined T’Challa as he spoke to a snaggletoothed young boy who had proudly shown him the Black Panther action figure that he carried everywhere. The boy’s parents thanked the king for being so polite before they said goodbye and went on their way. Nia’s heart warmed a little at seeing T’Challa be so kind to them. He could have easily ignored the family or had Okoye intervene, but he seemed to enjoy interacting with his people. As the three of them continued on their journey, a small smile pushed up the corners of Nia’s mouth knowing he wasn’t as arrogant as she assumed.

Nia was almost overwhelmed by the many shops they passed by. She could buy anything she wanted: jewelry, instruments, furniture, hats. It seemed like they had everything. However, she came to a halt when they walked by a store with colorful, hand-woven baskets hanging out front. The old lady that ran the shop noticed Nia staring and came forward to help her pick one out, but paused when she saw that the king was standing beside her. She saluted him fondly and turned to face his companion.

“Excuse me, how much for this one?” Nia asked the shopkeep as her fingers ran over the intricate patterns along the sides of a mid-sized sweetgrass basket.

“For you it is free,” the older woman said through a bright smile that crinkled her eyes. Before Nia could protest, she had already taken it down and pushed it into her arms.

“Are you sure? I can pay-”

“Just tell people where you got it,” the woman winked before going back inside to help a customer that was ready to check out.

Nia couldn’t believe how kind the woman had been to give her the gift, but her amazement was cut short by T’Challa leaning in close and ruining the moment.

“Just one of the perks of traveling with the king,” he teased.

Nia rolled her eyes and stepped away from him, continuing down the street with her basket swinging in the crook of her elbow. She had been so caught up in her surroundings that she hadn’t noticed the stares from passersby and began to get a little self-conscious. A few people even snapped a picture or two of the king and his elusive friend, some of which would surely end up on gossip blogs by the end of the day.

Her nervousness was short-lived and quickly got replaced with longing when they turned the corner and walked right through the food district. Not only did the colorful produce stands call to her, but the smells of curries and grilled meats continuously pulled her attention from left to right. However, when a deliciously sweet aroma tickled her nose, she stopped dead in the middle of the road.

“Where is that coming from?” Nia sniffed the air and veered off the main street as she followed the scent to a man that was serving up deep-fried sweet plantain on a stick, drizzled with chocolate. T’Challa kept a close eye on Nia but stayed back and let her wander up to the dessert cart alone. He watched as she engaged the man in conversation and saw her come alive when she tasted the sample he provided her. A small smile crept up the king’s face, but his amusement was cut short by Okoye clearing her throat next to him.

“My king,” she started, and he turned slightly in her direction, nodding for her to continue as he kept his eyes on Nia. “If I may...what exactly is her purpose here with us?”

“Nia is a devotee of Bast, and I believe she may be helpful in our attempts to understand what has happened to her,” he stated matter-of-factly.

Okoye sensed his unwillingness to go further into detail and grew quiet again as Nia damn near skipped back over to them with her hands full.

“Here you go,” Nia sang as she held out two of the desserts for them to take. “He saw I was with the king and gave me three for free!”

Neither of them was hungry, but they just couldn’t say no to her big, childlike eyes.

“Thank you,” T’Challa waved to the man behind the counter and took a bite of the dessert, eyes rolling back in ecstasy. “Mmm”

“See? It’s amazing,” Nia said with a mouth full of plantain. Even Okoye had to agree.

The three of them ate their midmorning snack as they strolled through the streets, eventually making their way to a much quieter section on the outskirts of the busy city center. Just as Nia finished licking the last bit of chocolate from the wooden stick, she came face to face with an ancient-looking stone building that didn’t quite fit the vibe of the modern neighborhood. Her eyes zeroed in on the large statue at the entrance. It was a being with the body of a man and the head of an ibis holding a scroll in one hand and a staff in the other.

“Welcome to the flagship branch of the Wakandan Public Library,” T’Challa said proudly.

While Nia loved a good library, she was a little confused about why they were there. “I thought we were going to a temple.”

T’Challa wiggled his eyebrows as he stepped past her, climbing the steps with Okoye in tow, “This is the temple.”

Nia’s curiosity got the best of her, and she followed behind the king and his general. They threw their sticks away in the trash cans outside of the doors that swished open as they approached. Nia hadn’t expected the building to have such modern technologies based on the look of it, but she surmised the library would have a few more surprises up its sleeves.

“Kumkani wam!”

All three of their heads turned towards the woman behind the large marble desk as she scrambled to salute the king, dropping the small stack of books from her arms. T’Challa quickly rounded the desk and smiled at her as he crouched down to pick the books off of the floor. Before she could stoop down to help him, he had already placed them neatly on the desk.

“T-thank you, my king,” the woman stammered and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. Never in her life had she imagined she would be so close to royalty, much less her biggest crush. “What can I do for you?”

“Well…” he started, trailing off to get her name.

“Fatima, sir.”

“What a beautiful name,” he flirted innocently and leaned on the cool marble as Nia and Okoye both fought their eyes from rolling to the ceiling. Okoye was used to his flirtatious manner making women swoon at his feet, but it still irked her to no end. They had a job to do, and he was wasting time. Nia, however, felt the tiniest tinge of something deep in her gut as she watched him make eyes at the beautiful librarian. She waved it off as annoyance since she still wasn’t the king’s biggest fan. Adding “womanizer” to her list of reasons not to like him certainly tipped the scales further away from him, balancing out his actions from earlier.

Fatima giggled as she struggled to make eye contact with the handsome king, “Thank you, your highness.”

“Please, call me T’Challa,” he implored, resting his hand over his heart and flashing his irresistible smile.

“Oh, no. I couldn’t do that-”

“I insist.”

Okoye cleared her throat, and T’Challa’s eyes reluctantly shot in her direction.

“Anyway, Fatima, we were wondering if Abdu is in today,” T’Challa continued as he straightened up and stood to his full height, making Fatima swoon even more in his presence. Her eyes wandered down to his chest, but she snapped out of it and attempted to look him in the eye. Her knees nearly buckled under the intensity of his gaze, but she stood firm.

“Y-yes, he is, my ki-”

T’Challa reprimanded her with a simple raise of his right eyebrow, and she quickly corrected herself.

“I mean, T’Challa,” Fatima giggled once more. “I’ll go get him for you.”

“Thank you, Fatima,” he smiled down at her, watching as she walked away with a pep in her step and her hips twitching just a little more than usual.

Fatima disappeared behind a green velvet curtain, and when they were sure she was out of earshot, Nia and Okoye both turned to look at the king. They wore matching expressions of disapproval, but, for some reason, it stung to see on Nia’s face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her.

“Must you flirt with every woman you see?” Okoye butted in, clearly exasperated by his antics.

Nia’s eyebrows jumped as a teasing smirk settled on her lips. “Oh, so this is a common occurrence?”

“You wouldn’t believe how many-”

“General,” T’Challa warned, and Okoye stopped talking.

Nia tried to contain a laugh, but it came out more like a snort than she intended. Just as T’Challa opened his mouth to make fun of her, Fatima appeared from behind the curtain with a heavy-set man with tortoiseshell glasses just a few steps behind her.

“T’Challa, my boy! Oh, excuse me, my king.” The man bowed sarcastically and crossed his arms in a salute. T’Challa waved him off with a smile and a click of his tongue, and the two men embraced each other. Nia had noticed T’Challa wasn’t really one to demand formalities, but the man’s familiarity with the king intrigued her.

“Abdu, how have you been?”

It had been several months since T’Challa last visited the library. Abdu had worked and worshipped there for decades and had watched the king grow into the man before him. Some of T’Challa’s fondest childhood memories consisted of him spending hours curled up in the stacks, flipping through whatever book caught his eye that day. Abdu would bring him story after story for him to get lost in, and the older man never tired of T’Challa’s curiosity. No matter how many questions he threw at him.

“Getting old, but I can’t complain,” the much shorter man said as they pulled apart. He looked around T’Challa and noticed his company. “Okoye, a pleasure to see you as always.”

“You as well, Abdu,” she smiled.

“And who might this lovely creature be?” Abdu asked as his gaze fell on Nia. She bristled at his choice of words but said nothing. Even as a child, she had always been sensitive to the word “creature” and felt it offensive to refer to non-humans as such. She knew he had no idea about her bloodline, though, and since he meant no harm she simply ignored the terminology.

“Nia Olu, sir,” she introduced herself with a nod of her head, and he returned the gesture.

“Ah, a beautiful name for a beautiful woman. And what is it that you do, Nia Olu?”

“I am a healer and a devotee of Bast.”

“A devotee, huh? Well, I think we will get along nicely,” he smiled warmly at her before turning back to the king. “What can I do for you all today?”

“Well, actually, Nia is a big part of why we’re here,” T’Challa began. “It seems Bast has gone missing. Neither of us has been able to contact her as of late.”

“Are you a priestess?” Abdu asked Nia, confused as to why a simple devotee would be partnered with the king for such a task. Okoye felt vindicated by his questioning but stayed quiet.

“No, sir.”

“Then, I must say, I’m a little confused on how you would have a direct connection to her-”

“She is highly favored in the goddess’ eyes,” T’Challa cut in, hoping his vague answer would be enough to dissuade Abdu from asking too many questions. He knew it wouldn’t be easy to hide anything from a priest of the god of wisdom, but he also knew he couldn’t give away Nia’s full identity. “We were wondering if maybe you could see if Thoth knows where she is or why she isn’t answering.”

Abdu could tell there was something else to the story, but decided not to press the subject. He figured that if the king felt it was important enough to keep from him, then he had to trust his judgment.

The priest nodded and motioned for the three of them to follow him. T’Challa winked at Fatima before falling in step with Abdu, and once again, Nia’s and Okoye’s eyes struggled to remain straight ahead as they followed behind the two men.

Nia couldn’t help but stare in awe at the rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves they passed as they walked through the centuries-old library. She imagined herself spending hours combing through the texts and soaking up whatever knowledge held, just like she did with the many books Amare provided her with as a child. Her daydreaming was cut short when they passed through the children’s section, and she noticed a display of picture books, one of which caught her eye. There, on the cover, was a colorful illustration of an aziza sitting in a tree, watching over a group of children as they played in the grass below him.

Before she knew it, Nia had grabbed the book and started flipping through the pages, scanning the words and pictures for any sign of historical truth. She found none, but her hope didn’t die out. Maybe, just maybe the library held onto more of the past than the Wakandans realized. She knew magical creatures were relegated to folktales, but she began to wonder how many of those tales were historically accurate, if any. She hadn’t noticed that the others had stopped and were watching her tear through the book like it held the secrets to the universe.

“You like that one? It’s a fairly new release. Very popular with the children,” Abdu said, but his words fell on deaf ears.

“Nia?” the king called out to her.

She jumped and dropped the book, but T’Challa caught it before it could hit the ground.

“Yeah? Sorry, I just…” Nia trailed off, unsure of what to say. All three of them looked at her curiously, but when T’Challa’s eyes graced the cover, he understood why she had been called to it. “Are there many stories like this?”

“Of aziza?” Abdu asked for clarification, and Nia nodded. “Sure! Kids love fantastical creatures. You know, some of them even swear up and down that they’ve seen them in real life.”

T’Challa and Nia shared a quick glance as he set the book back where she found it. Of course, Okoye caught their quick exchange.

“Such wild imaginations,” Nia murmured, and the group continued on their trek. She was quiet for a moment as she tried to figure out the best way to word her next question when she decided to just go for it. “Abdu, is there any mention of, um, species that are no longer around in any of these books?”

T’Challa looked at her knowingly out of the corner of his eye. He knew what she was getting at, and he was curious about Abdu’s answer. After seeing Nia’s book the day before, his mind had begun to wonder about ancient Wakandan texts. She had told him that they coexisted long ago, so there had to be some evidence hidden deep in the bowels of the library. If there was proof anywhere, it was here.

“Of course!” Abdu said excitedly and pointed to the far left wall. “Species naturally go extinct all the time. If that interests you, check out our history section over there.”

Nia and T’Challa both cataloged that information for later and started mentally planning their next visits.

The deeper they traveled into the vast library, a tingling grew in Nia’s stomach. There was great power there, and she could feel it. The tingling intensified as they arrived at a large door with an image of Thoth that had been hand-carved by artisans long ago.

“We’ll take it from here, Okoye,” T’Challa ordered, and the general nodded before standing at attention with her back to the door. Then, his eyes fell to Nia. “Ready?”

“I think…”

“That’ll serve you well here,” Abdu joked as he pushed open the heavy door.

Nia wasn’t quite sure what she was expecting to see, but a winding staircase certainly wasn’t on her list of possibilities. The three of them quietly descended the steps, and all that could be heard was the sounds of their sandals connecting with the stone as they went. After what seemed like forever, Abdu came to a halt at another large door and turned to face his visitors.

“You must enter with pure intentions and a cool head, or he will not answer. Understood?”

Nia and T’Challa answered in unison.

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course.”

“Good,” Abdu smiled at them and reached for the handle, pushing it open and revealing what looked to be a private study. The lamps along the stone walls lit up when they entered, and Nia was once again amazed at how the ancient seemed to flawlessly combine with the modern. As she looked around, she noticed that instead of books, there were scrolls stacked neatly on the shelves. A high-backed chair sat behind a large wooden desk with several scrolls strewn about it, and in the center of the room, there was a stone lectern that looked like it had been there since the dawn of time. Colorful pillows surrounded it on the floor, and next to it stood another statue of Thoth. This time, his hands were out and he was holding a staff that resembled the one from the statue out front, except this one was made of gold. This one was real, and it made the hairs on the back of Nia’s neck stand at attention.

Abdu made his way over to the closest shelf and grabbed a scroll from the top of the stack. He then crossed the room again and stood behind the lectern. When he unrolled the scroll, Nia and T’Challa were both surprised to find that it was blank. They watched with bated breath as he produced a shiny gold pen from his pocket and removed the staff from the statue’s arms.

“You two, come sit down,” Abdu said to them, pointing to the floor pillows.

They obeyed his order, and each grabbed a pillow. T’Challa sat cross-legged while Nia carefully placed her new basket on the floor and tucked her feet under her. They waited patiently while Abdu mumbled a prayer under his breath. Despite T’Challa’s enhanced hearing, he could barely make out what Abdu was saying, but the more he spoke, the colder the room became. The priest continued his prayers for several minutes until the staff began to glow with blinding orange light and his mouth snapped shut tight. A soft breeze blew through the room as his eyes glowed the same color as the staff, and the pen in his left hand started to frantically scribble words onto the formerly blank scroll. His hand moved faster than humanly possible, and Nia recognized what was happening as a possession. She bowed her head in the god’s presence and nudged T’Challa in his side to do the same. He followed suit, but neither of their eyes left Abdu, too curious to look away.

It seemed like forever had come and gone as the two sat in silence, watching in awe while Abdu filled the scroll as he channeled Thoth. The only sound that filled the air was the fast-moving pen on the papyrus and a faint humming from the staff, but suddenly, it all stopped. The staff’s light waned, and Abdu blinked his eyes back to their normal shade of hazel. He carefully placed the staff back in the statue’s hands and read over the words he had been given from his god. A frown appeared on the priest’s face, and Nia made eye contact with T’Challa. Neither one felt good news was coming.

“Well,” Abdu broke the tense silence, “to sum it up, it seems Thoth hasn’t seen or heard from Bast in several weeks. He says that’s very unlike her, as I’m sure you know, T’Challa.”

The king nodded. “Is there anything else? Did he say where she might be?”

“Oh, he said plenty, but not about your question. He can be quite long-winded at times,” Abdu murmured as he scanned the text once more to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. He then looked down at his two visitors with an apology in his eyes. “I wish I could’ve been of more help.”

T’Challa stood from his seated position and reached a hand out to Nia. She swatted it away and stood on her own, straightening out her long, flowing skirt before sending Abdu a warm smile. “Thank you for trying.”

“It was a pleasure, my dear.”

“So,” Nia turned to the king, “where to next?”

--------

The smile never left Okoye’s face as she landed the Talon in an open field and proudly led them to their next destination. They had traveled to Okoye’s hometown in the Mining province, and she nodded at her former neighbors as they waved to get her attention. It wasn’t often that she could return to Birnin Djata, but since she was on duty, she had to remain professional.

The town was much smaller than Birnin Zana, and the walk to the temple was much shorter this time around. A few moderately-sized dwellings lined the road to the temple, and Nia could see the town square in the distance. They passed groups of miners boarding and exiting the trains that took them to and from work, and Nia couldn’t help but wonder what all that vibranium looked like up close.

When they arrived at the temple, Nia was pleasantly surprised that this one actually looked like a place of worship. The wall that surrounded it looked as old as time, but the vibranium door in the center had to be no more than a hundred years old. A strange sound echoed from inside, and although Nia thought she recognized it, she was confused on why it was coming from a temple of all places.

“Is something wrong? What’s going on in there?” she asked with concern, making Okoye’s smile expand and her eyes light up.

“Sparring.”

Nia’s confusion grew, and she turned to T’Challa for clarification.

“Kokou is the god of war. Fighters often train here, and many of his followers go on to become great warriors. Including Okoye,” he explained.

“Ohhh, ok.”

Okoye led them up the temple’s steps, and Nia’s attention was drawn to the rows of fire that lined the walkway. As the party of three got closer to the doors, they slowly parted to grant them access. Loud shouts and grunts came from the right, and Okoye led them down the hallway, directly towards the noise.

Nia watched excitedly as the warriors-in-training sparred with one another. Fists connected with flesh, spears sliced through the air, and fighters seemed to glide across the padded floor. She recognized some of the fighting styles and thought back to her younger days when Amare took it upon himself to teach her some of the combat skills he had to learn for his days as a secret operative. Even though she was a healer, Nia sure was scrappy and could hold her own. It had been a while, though, and she was sure she had forgotten her training over the years.

A bell rang on the other side of the training room, and all of the fighting ceased. Okoye bowed her head in deference as a tall, muscular older woman in red emerged from an observation room and smiled softly in her direction.

“My king,” the woman saluted T’Challa, making all of the fighters whip their heads around and salute him as well. The woman crossed the floor as her trainees stood at attention, and grabbed Okoye’s hands in hers. “Okoye, my dear, it has been too long.”

“Priestess Yaa, how good to see you.”

“And my king, welcome to the Temple of Kokou.”

“Thank you, priestess.”

“What brings you here?” she asked before shooting a sly glance at Okoye. “You never come visit anymore, so I know it must be important.”

“My apologies for keeping her from you,” T’Challa interjected.

“None needed. I knew when Okoye became general that she would have little time for us anymore,” Yaa waved him off and smiled proudly at Okoye before her eyes fell to Nia. “And who is this?”

“Nia Olu,” she respectfully bowed her head.

“And you are a fighter too, no?”

“Um, not exactly. My father taught me how to fight when I was young, but I am a healer and a devotee of Bast.”

This was the first T’Challa had heard of her knowledge of combat, and he wondered what else he didn’t know about her.

“I’m sure it’s still in there somewhere. You have a warrior’s spirit.”

Nia was surprised by the priestess’ comment but thanked her nonetheless.

“Priestess Yaa, we have a problem that you might be able to help us solve,” the king stated.

Yaa nodded and called to her class, “Keep sparring. I’ll be back.”

The room came alive again, and Nia couldn’t help but watch the dozens of bodies moving about with powerful grace as they fought.

Yaa gestured for them to follow her, and she led them around a corner to get away from all the noise. “How can I help you, my king?”

“Bast is missing, and we would like to ask Kokou if he knows where she is,” he cut straight to the point, and Yaa appreciated his brevity.

She gestured again, and the four of them relocated to the other side of the temple. They entered a large, empty room with nothing except a wall of ancient weapons and a huge, raging fire pit in the center.

“This eternal flame was gifted to us by Kokou many millennia ago as a way of contacting him,” Yaa narrated. “In order for him to answer, you will each have to give a sacrifice.”

“I didn’t bring anything to-”

“Blood, dear. You sacrifice blood. He is the god of war, after all,” Yaa chuckled as she glided over to the wall of weapons. Her fingers danced along the flat side of the blade of a vibranium dagger with a red and gold hilt before wrapping her hand firmly around the grip and removing it from its position. Yaa tested the weight of it in her hand as she rejoined the group. Without warning, she sliced her palm open and allowed her blood to drip into the flame. The priestess noticed the look of horror on Nia’s face and attempted to quell her fears. “Don’t worry; you’ll only need a drop or two.”

Okoye was first to step up, pressing the dagger’s tip into her hand and drawing a small amount of blood. She handed the dagger to T’Challa as she made a fist and let her blood droplets fall into the fire pit. The king did the same before passing the dagger to Nia. She looked at it apprehensively, but T’Challa continued to hold it out for her to take.

“Go on, dear,” Yaa urged. “We will heal you up after.”

Nia and T’Challa locked eyes as they were both reminded of the night they became reacquainted with one another. T’Challa’s wound would quickly heal on its own, but she wouldn’t be able to use her powers to heal herself in Yaa’s and Okoye’s presence. She took a deep breath and tried to ignore the feeling of her palm stinging with the memory of alcohol pads. T’Challa knew where her mind had wandered to and took her formerly injured hand in his as he ran his thumb over her palm.

“It won’t be as bad as last time,” he whispered so only Nia could hear him. “Just a little cut, ok?”

Nia’s mouth dried up, and her eyes traveled to Okoye and Yaa. The priestess seemed intrigued by his tenderness towards her, but the irritation on Okoye’s face was clear as day. Nia remembered that he was a serial charmer and removed her hand from his. She reached for the dagger and quickly pricked her finger, squeezing a couple of droplets into the flame.

Yaa set the dagger aside to be cleaned and watched as the flames grew in intensity. All four of them stepped back when the fire surged towards the sky and took the vague shape of a man.

“Kokou,” Yaa fell to her knees, and the others followed her lead. “Thank you for answering our call.”

“Where is the fight?” his voice boomed around the expansive room as what looked to be his head swiveled from side to side taking in the four who summoned him. He had no eyes, but Nia felt his gaze land on her and linger for a moment too long.

“There is no fight this time, but we have an inquiry,” Yaa said as she stood.

“Very well,” Kokou’s voice rang out again, and the flames whipped in T’Challa’s direction. “What is so important that the king requires my assistance? Have you not a god of your own?”

T’Challa looked to Yaa for reassurance as he began to stand, and she nodded for him to continue. “Yes, I do, but she is missing.”

“Missing?! What do you mean missing?”

“She has not spoken to me in weeks, and Thoth has not seen or heard from her either.”

Kokou turned back to Nia. “And you have not heard from her?”

“No, sir,” Nia stood tall as she answered him.

“I am surprised she has not spoken to you of all...people,” he said with a mischievous lilt in his voice. Nia stilled as she realized that he knew what she was. She slyly made eye contact with T’Challa, and though his expression was unreadable, she knew he had to have heard it, too.

“You know, blood can tell you a lot about a person...or being,” Kokou began to pace around the large fire pit. “Who they are, what their lineage is...you, Nia, are very special. But I am sure you know that already, don’t you?”

Nia ignored the confused stares from Yaa and Okoye and stared straight into where she assumed Kokou’s eyes to be. “Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

“Kokou-”

“Patience, your highness,” the god chastised T’Challa, “I was getting to it. I just had to take a little detour first since you brought me such an interesting young lady. Now, to answer your question: sorry to disappoint, but no. I do not know where Bast is. I wish I did, though; she is an excellent sparring partner.”

Nia and T’Challa both deflated a little bit. They had hoped for a better answer than that.

“Thank you, Kokou,” T’Challa spoke with his head bowed to the god. The others did the same, and just as quickly as he had appeared, Kokou was gone.

--------

“Third time’s the charm,” T’Challa mumbled as he held the intricate iron gate open. Nia and Okoye walked through, and the general was blown away by the beauty before them. The botanical gardens sat on a protected stretch of land on the border between the Mining and River provinces, but people from all over the country traveled there to witness its splendor.

Nia, however, was no stranger to the gardens. She made sure to visit a few times a year just to sit and commune with the diverse group of plants, but she never knew it doubled as a place of worship. She liked that the gardens were never full of people, and depending on how deep she veered off the main walkways, she could avoid the public altogether. Except for the delightful presence of one of the attendants, Nia always managed to find solitude and serenity among the plants of the botanical gardens.

“Has this always been Mujaji’s temple?” she asked as the three of them followed the long, winding path that led to the greenhouses in the back of the gardens.

“As far as I’m aware. Why?”

“It’s just that I’ve been here before, and I never knew. I always felt like there was...something here, but I just assumed I was feeling the energy from all of the plants.”

“You can do that?” Okoye asked, and she caught another shared glance between Nia and the king. They had been doing that all day, and she was growing tired of it.

Nia opened her mouth to try to fix her slip-up, but she was saved when a young woman about her age emerged from behind a mango tree and recognized her colorful headwrap.

“Nia?”

“Sukutai!”

Nia ran over to her, and the women embraced. A smile crept up T’Challa’s cheeks at seeing Nia’s faint glow again, but, unfortunately, it seemed that Okoye might have seen it as well. The king ignored her pointed stares and continued to watch Nia and the woman from afar.

“What are you doing here? It’s been months since I saw you last!” Sukutai playfully scolded her before leaning in like she had a secret to tell. “You have to see the new fire lily blooms; I know they’re your favorite.”

“They are,” Nia chuckled, “but I’m here on business today.”

“Business?”

Nia gestured behind her, and Sukutai’s eyes widened in shock as she finally noticed T’Challa and Okoye standing in the distance.

“My apologies, my king,” she quickly saluted him, but he waved her off.

“None needed. Any friend of Nia’s is a friend of mine.”

Sukutai’s eyebrows almost reached her hairline as she turned back to Nia. “I know we don’t know each other very well, but how come you never told me you knew the king?”

“He’s new,” Nia shrugged nonchalantly.

Sukutai shook her head fondly at her friend as T’Challa and Okoye came to stand next to her.

“What brings you to my humble garden, your highness?”

“I would say this is anything but humble, priestess,” he chuckled. This time it was Nia’s turn to be surprised.

“Priestess?!”

“Yeah, I don’t like to advertise it,” Sukutai shrugged.

“Well, I guess we both have our secrets,” Nia teased, making her friend giggle.

“I guess we do.”

“Sukutai, we are here because we need to speak with Mujaji. Bast is missing and-”

“You need to see if he knows where she is.”

“Yes,” T’Challa nodded.

“Right this way,” Sukutai said as she stuck her elbow out for Nia. She wrapped her arm around it, and the two of them took off, chatting about the flora they passed on the way.

Sukutai led them to the back of the botanical gardens towards the greenhouses. There were several smaller ones scattered around that were about the size of Nia’s home, but the very last greenhouse was huge. It stood about two stories tall and expanded across an acre of land.

“How did I miss this?” Nia wondered aloud.

“You weren’t looking for it,” Sukutai winked. “Too distracted by the pretty flowers, as usual.”

“You should really pay more attention to your surroundings, Nia,” T’Challa teased, and she narrowed her eyes at him. Despite the fact that she was still very hesitant to trust Nia, Okoye had to stifle a chuckle at her attitude. It was refreshing for her to see a woman that seemed to be immune to his charms.

The four of them entered the greenhouse, and Nia was amazed at what she saw. Instead of beautiful flowers and lush trees and bushes, there were rows and rows of crops.

“I knew you had some fruit trees, but I didn’t know you grew other foods here, too,” she said with her mouth wide open.

“We have to. Who do you think taught us how to work the land?”

Nia nodded as she soaked up Sukutai’s words. It had never occurred to her that the humans had to learn agriculture from somewhere...or someone. She wondered if aziza had learned from him, too, and if so, why hadn’t she heard about it? Were their history books incomplete, too? Nia’s train of thought was cut short as they arrived at the center of the greenhouse. There was a large patch of soil surrounded by an old stone wall no more than two feet tall. A small plaque near the opening caught the visitors’ eyes, and they crowded around to read it.

“The first garden?” Nia gasped, and her eyes traveled to the rich soil.

Sukutai smiled proudly, “That’s right. This is where Wakandans first learned how to grow sorghum. Mujaji’s magic still inhabits the land, and he allows us to speak to him through it.”

“How does it work?” T’Challa asked, equally in awe of the plot of land that allowed his people to prosper. Yes, they had vibranium, but what use would that be without the ability to feed themselves? Had they remained hunter-gatherers, they never would have gotten to where they are today.

“I’ll show you,” Sukutai said as she untied her shoes. “Nia, would you like to help?”

“M-me?”

“Yes, you, silly. You have the heart and hands of a gardener.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“First thing’s first, shoes off,” Sukutai instructed, and Nia slid out of her sandals. “Now, you see those jars full of seeds over there?”

Sukutai gestured behind them, and they all turned around to follow her line of vision.

“Yes,” Nia’s voice shook as she spoke.

“Don’t worry about what each one is. Just go pick whichever one calls to you.”

Nia nodded and padded her way over to the table covered in glass jars. She felt the power radiating from each one, but she felt compelled to pick up a small jar full of green coffee beans. Her hand instinctively reached out to touch it, but she pulled back and looked to the priestess for permission.

“Go ahead, take one,” Sukutai urged, and Nia carefully screwed the top off. She reached in and grabbed one of the beans, and walked back over to Sukutai.

“Ok, how does this work?”

“We start with a yes or no question. Let’s try ‘Do you know where Bast is?’ and go from there, ok?”

“Ok.”

“Follow me.”

Sukutai stepped onto the sacred land, and Nia did the same. The ground seemed to vibrate, and Nia’s face lit up. The slight glow returned to her skin, and this time Okoye was sure in what her eyes beheld. She quickly turned towards T’Challa, who looked at her out of the corner of his eye but kept quiet. He shifted his weight away from her nervously and continued to watch Nia and Sukutai work.

“You feel it too, huh?” Sukutai asked with a sly smile on her face.

“It feels...it feels like my feet are buzzing.”

Sukutai’s head cocked to the side, and her eyes narrowed as she tried to understand exactly what was happening. Nia obviously wasn’t a priestess of Mujaji, yet his magic spoke to her in some way. That wasn’t normal, and neither was the faint highlight that appeared on her skin.

“Yeah, it does,” she agreed and shook the suspicions out of her head. She knelt to the ground, and Nia followed suit. “Hold the seed in your hands, close to your face- yes, just like that. Now, close your eyes and let it feel your energy. When you are ready, speak to it. Ask your question.”

Nia shut her eyes and focused on the feeling of the seed in her hands. She pictured it growing big and strong, and after a few moments, her mouth was filled with the taste of coffee. It was ready. She brought it closer to her lips and whispered, “Do you know where Bast is?”

When she peeled her eyes open, she saw a huge grin on Sukutai’s face.

“You’re a natural.”

“Thanks,” Nia giggled. “What now?”

“Now you plant it.”

“Anywhere?”

“Wherever you choose.”

Nia studied the ground around her and turned a little to the left. She held the seed in her left hand as she made a small mound in the dirt with her right. She gave the seed one last glance before pushing it into the soil.

“No water?” she asked.

Sukutai shook her head with a mischievous smile, “No need.”

“Ok...so now we wait?”

“It won’t take long. Usually about-” Sukutai’s eyes widened. “Look!”

Four sets of eyes trained on the tiny green sprout that pushed up from the ground.

“It’s never happened that fast before.”

The sprout turned into a seedling, and the seedling matured right before their eyes. Just as hope began to fill the air, it left, and the coffee plant shriveled up. The leaves turned brown, then a murky black before decomposing entirely. Everyone’s shoulders slumped in defeat, and silence descended upon the group. Without even asking, they all knew it was a resounding “no.”

--------

The silence was thick on the ride back to Nia’s. Okoye flew the Talon with a million questions running through her mind, all of which seemed to come back to Nia. Who is she? What is she?

Nia left her position by the window, no longer interested in the ground below, and met T’Challa by his sand table. She watched for a moment as the molecules dispersed and recollected themselves in the shapes of the temples they just visited and the gods they just contacted. He chewed on his lip as he tried to put the pieces together, but there just wasn’t enough information.

“T’Challa?” Nia spoke softly to keep Okoye from hearing.

“Hm?” he grunted without looking up.

“What if the problem isn't in this realm?”

The king tore his eyes away from the table, and the sand fell flat.

“You are suggesting we go to the magic realm?”

“Again with the ‘we,’” she sighed. “No, I’m suggesting I go to the magic realm.”

He stared at her blankly for a moment before calling out to Okoye, “General?”

“Yes, my king?”

“You will travel back to the palace alone-”

“No-” Nia tried to stop him.

“I will be staying with Nia a little while longer. I will call when I need you.”

“Yes, my king.”

Nia dragged her hand down her face, then immediately looked down and noticed the clay that had transferred to her palm. She pinched the bridge of her nose and groaned in frustration, both at the king and at her careless mistake.

“T’Challa, I just said-”

“I know what you said,” he snipped, “but this is my kingdom, and I need to know what’s going on.”

“But-”

“I’m going with you, and that’s final.” He turned away and joined Okoye in the cockpit.

Nia sat off to the side and pouted the rest of the way home. When they arrived, Okoye reluctantly left the king behind and flew off to the palace.

“She could’ve just stayed outside, you know,” Nia fussed as they entered her home. “Now she definitely knows something is up.”

He rolled his eyes, “She knew something was up the moment you started glowing.”

Nia froze and mentally kicked herself for not using the glamor spell her ubaba had taught her. She was in such a rush that morning that it completely slipped her mind. The smug look on T’Challa’s face made her want to slap him, so she stormed down the hall to her bathroom to fix her facepaint. As soon as she finished, Nia heard the king make a strange noise and looked out to see what he had done. A laugh erupted from her belly as she watched the king stand on the couch to get away from Sego. He glared at her, but his eyes promptly fell back on the python that was too close for comfort.

“Call off your snake!”

“Python,” she giggled. “Sego, stop messing with him, please.”

Sego turned her way, and Nia could see the playful look in his eyes. He thoroughly enjoyed messing with the king. T’Challa climbed down from the couch and let out a calming breath as Sego slithered away to the kitchen.

“So the mighty Black Panther is scared of pythons, huh?” she mocked him as she leaned against the doorframe.

“Not scared...I just don’t like them.”

“Mhm. If it makes you feel any better, he’s not fully a python. He’s a shifter.”

“Meaning…”

“Meaning sometimes he’s in his human form, sometimes he’s in his python form.”

T’Challa thought about it for a moment. “Actually, that does make me feel better. Thanks.”

Nia smirked and rolled her eyes.

“So,” T’Challa cleared his throat, “what now?”

“First, we go see my ubaba, then the queen.”

“Ok...how do we, you know, get there?”

“It’s easy,” she bragged as she walked over to him. “Give me your hand, and I’ll show you.”

Nia reached out to him, and when their hands connected, an image of the two of them sharing a feverish kiss popped into her mind. She gasped and pulled back as though she had touched a hot stove.

“What is it?!”

“N-nothing, I just,” she had to think of something quick. “My headwrap. I take it off when I go to the magic realm...to, uh, let my ears breathe, you know?”

“Um, ok.”

Nia hurried from the room and left T’Challa standing there, confused about what just happened. He knew she was lying despite the fact that her excuse had some semblance of truth to it. Thanks to the heart-shaped herb, T’Challa could hear her heartbeat, and something had caused her heart to almost beat out of her chest. His suspicions didn’t last for long, though, because when she came back from her room, his jaw dropped. Of course, he had noticed her beauty the first time, well the second time, he laid eyes on her, but as she came down the hallway fluffing her coils out into an afro that framed her face like an obsidian halo, he felt a knot form in his chest.

“Ready?” she asked, obviously over whatever had been bothering her.

“Yeah,” T’Challa cleared his throat. He was suddenly parched. “Ready.”

“Ok.” She grabbed his hands again, but this time there was no vision. Nia sighed in relief and looked him dead in his eyes as the atmosphere around them began to thicken. “Be cool. Don’t embarrass me.”

Next Chapter

Taglist: @maddeningmayhem, @theblulife, @motheroffae, @love-mesome-me, @toni9, @bribrisback, @dersha89, @impremenior, @ljstraightnochaser, @love--life--passion, @yourstrulybrii

[northern-passage]

My brief two cents as a butch lesbian (complicated gender identity, have considered going on T before for some physical changes) reader: I feel like making Lea's gender the only RO who's randomized almost discourages players from experiencing their different variations. This is just me, personally, but I prefer to set up the kind of variations and scenarios I'm experiencing in an IF, and a randomized RO would actually discourage me from replaying to experience their other facets (because I have no idea if my *next* playthrough is going to be any different than my first one, since it's out of my control). I really personally identify with F!Lea and NB!Lea's gender identity because it aligns a lot with my own as a gnc person (and enjoy exploring their romance/friendship routes), but I enjoy exploring the friendship and rivalry routes with M!Lea as well. Personally, unfortunately, I think weird cishets are always going to be weird, and I think it's unfair that despite including such important representation in your game, for some reason people are over-analyzing everything you do in terms of it. My personal advice is to not worry too much about making it perfect, because it doesn't exist and unfortunately there will always be some readers who don't interact with a work in good faith and ultimately you can't do anything about it- that's their problem, not yours.

Then again- you're the author! I don't intend to over step any boundaries or come off as impolite, or tell you what to do. I'd still happily play NP if Lea was randomized, I just might not play the game the same way. Wanted to throw in my two cents as a fellow reader, that's all. I know you stated you wanted most of this to be off-anon, but a lot of this is information I'm not comfortable sharing in connection with my main blog (as certain people follow me there who I haven't told about a lot of these things yet). As such, feel free to delete/ignore this as you see fit.

yeah, i totally understand that! while it would prevent people from abusing the gender selection mechanic, it would also discourage gay readers, too, which i don't want to happen.

i'm really glad you identify with lea, too, that means a lot! i also really like having an f!ro who is gnc, which is something i really want to see more of in IF, and i'm really glad you've been able to connect with her, as well as the nb!version.

i do think, even with the down side of gender selection, at the moment it's one of the best ways to include more people in the community, and encourage more people to join and start reading. like, a short time ago, you would hardly ever have any f!ro options at all - maybe one. or you would be locked as a man with only f!ro options, or, on the other hand, there would be no mlm options and you would be locked playing as a woman. and there were definitely no nb options. while i think it's important to keep the implications in mind, i think gender selection for ROs has allowed a lot more diversity in the genre, even if the more mainstream games still focus on the cishet romances. and from the writer/dev side, like, for me personally, i would never be able to handle more than four ROs. but i still want to have options for everyone, you know? so at the moment it's a place to meet halfway. and i think as more lgbt writers come into the community, there will be a lot more care and thought put into this kind of thing.

and yeah... weird cishets are always going to be weird LOL. that's really all there is to that. like i said, i have made my peace with it 🙏

i don't mind people analyzing my content, and again, i do really like talking about this stuff. i don't ever expect my game to be perfect, and i know not everyone will relate to my characters or their relationship with gender, because like i said... it's Such a complex thing, and no one trans experience is exactly the same. so i think it's good to have this conversation and hear what everyone has to say!

so thank you for sharing, and no worries about being on anon, i understand ❤️

[gayfrenchtoast]

Okay fine we're doing this. I havent read the books and I'm probably not going to I've only seen the movies so I'm sorry if anything I say is contradictory or has already been stated.

So! Descendants 3 was kinda shit and I dont like it but especially because of the ending because everybody was like "oh yeah island is open and we're all happy with no worries or implications about free villains or people being spiteful about being imprisoned for years!" In fact if anything they joked about those things.

The island is basically its own culture, I can't say how long it's been around, long enough for some almost adult kids to be about and to develop a kind of community.

The Isle is a place of poverty, people are dirty and on the street, eveyone steals from each other and most people don't put much effort into appearance upkeep (personal or of the sourounding area) not because of laziness or being "evil" but because they clearly don't have time or luxury to do such things or possibly even the clean water. Does the Isle have clean water?? How to they get electricity??? Someone tell me!

Another thing that I've noticed is easy to see but is not much explicitly said is the unique style of those on the Isle. As previously stated they don't have much but those who have the most "power" and such on the Isle are the best example of this As they have the most colourful outfits. However these outfits are often made out of patches and ripped things put together, even salvaged things like nets and chains as we can see on thing like Uma and Harry's outfits in D3 they make the best of what they've got and they do fantastic because their outfits are intricate and detailed and just tell you everything you need to know about them. Which is why it's a damn s h a m e when the original VK's ajust their style to be more like Auradon's. That's not an improvement! Be proud of where you came from!! It's like they forgot what it was like being on the Isle in D3!

Moving on, here's something that was touched on in D2 but not enough. Equality. On the Isle there is basically equal opportunity as in saying everything is shit and nome cares what gender and presumably what sexuality you are as long as you can work. Sexism is shown to be almost casual in aurodon from the looks of it, Chad makes sexist comments and litterally none else says anything or seems to see anything wrong with it except Jay who caves to pressure from peers and expectations. He does redeem himself because he's from the isle and he knows you shouldn't give a shit about anyone's gender or anything. If they can do something and ask to be included you give them that opportunity. The sexism is also implied in the way that the rule book has men written specifically in the first place and that it has taken until then for anyone but boys to be allowed on any kind of sports team. We never see it! It seems to be the hetronormative veiw where the boys do sport and girls do cheerleeding and other genders? What other genders? Never heard of that? BAD AURADON!! I bet there's so many trans folk on the island just living their lives, thinking Aurodon is the better place and not knowing that it's a cis het filled nightmare.

Okay no I'm headcannoning now, if their are now a bunch of Isle kids at auradon prep they find it fucking aweful the way all these preppy royals are treating them and make the first LGBT club in Auradon. There is lots of pushback and they get bullied a fuck ton for making themselves the most prominent queer folk in the school until a fight breaks out and the club demand that they should be treated better, taking all the evidence to fairy godmother who is very hesitant because COME ON she's never been that great she is biased to Auradon kids and if putting away those in the Isle is brought up she is all on it, she is jelly spined about doing anything against the royal kids. So the kids are like "Fine, if you won't help us we'll take this to the King himself!" Well mainly the queer mom's of the group (you know the ones I'm talking about) who lead the others and protect the anxious queers as they storm to Ben at his fucking locker and demand an audience because they are being harassed and bullied and none is doing anything. Ben had no idea there was even a LGBT club (too busy ig) and is gassed there is one for a moment before he's like "wait people are harassing you?" So Bisexual King Ben gets his lovely Bi wife and they start coming to club meetings and investing in the pins and stuff the club makes. Most club members are pleased but the queer mom's are apprehensive that this will help until some assholes come to the club to do their usual bullying only to find King and Queen Beast themselves siting there with rainbow bracelets and bi pins and all trying to have a nice old time eating their fucking cupcakes what the fuck are yall doing? The bullying dies down quick once they realise it ain't gonna fly, the other OG VK's that hear about this become members and very protective over their queer children. Did I mention Dizzy and Ceila are a part of the club? They're girlfriend's. Celia is one of the queer moms. Harry becomes one of the biggest protectors over the group as the pan dad. He's been going around snogging everyone and anyone wholl snog him everyone already knew he was queer they just didn't have the balls to try and bully him over it as much as they bullied the lil club members. But now Harry can often be seen in jackets and shit with pan and general queer patches and pins and running around with his gay children yelling "MOVE WE'RE GAY!!" He totally calls them his queer crew. Anyway as a result lots of queer royals start coming out of the woodwork, obvs Lonnie is one of them, and the club eventually serves to bring members of Auradon and the Isle close together.

Where was I? Yada yada auradon expects girls to be pretty princesses and boys to be brave knights or dashing princes. It's shit and should stop being portrayed as good. Moving on!

Food! One of the things we'll established in all movies is that the food of the Isle is shit compared to food of Auradon. The Isle has no fresh fruit which likely means its almost impossible for things to grow there which is fair because again there doesn't seem to be much fresh water and there are always clouds overhead so no sun. Maybe there is some people trying really hard to grow stuff but the general attitude of the Isle seems to be "there is no time for that" and fruits are forgotten so much that the VK's litterally don't knownwhat they are when they come across them. That and anything containing sugar. Actually it's mention by Dizzy and Celia that they enjoy the fact that the cake dosent have dirt or flies so basically food there is terrible. We don't see much food on the Isle but what we do see seems to be beans, eggs, chips and shellfish. Basically protine and carbs that can be easily stored and produced. To be fair beans are kidna good for you but they're likely a sign that if they get any imports from the mainland it is canned stuff. Prison food. There's probably some chef villain that is trying their best to make good food out of the shit but honestly the Isle dwellers should be angry that they've been deprived of good food for so long not happy they're finally been given decency.

Moving on, music! Auradon dosent have nearly as many musical numbers it seems, the Isle songs have a distinct style, to them, the villains that basically "founded" the place were masters of the dramatic songs (with backup or solo) so banging music is basically ingrained in the music's culture, even for battle as we see with the fight between Mal and Uma in D3. Meanwhile Auradon seems to have mainly romance and "I want" songs. Even Audrey's villain song is basically an I want song.

Okay let's talk about the Villains. We've established that the VK's are not inherently bad. However not all of them can be totally good and there are legit OG Villains just kinda chillin on the Isle. They've obviously lost quite a bit of their power, motivation and sanity (isolation will do that to ya as they lost everything and the VKs know no different) but deadass? They were bad guys. You can try to rehabilitate them sure but you've basically just let them free roam, they could make a runner and you wouldn't get the chance. They were also shitty patents which is brushed over/joked about in the interaction between Carlos and...man I feel bad I forgot her name deadass their relationship seemed to come out of nowhere in the second film she didn't seem interested in them at all and friendzoned them multiple times I'm pretty sure Disney did that becaue queer kids were relating to Carlos and headcanoning them as queer (which they deffinatly are) but deadass their mom is an attempted animal murderer and has hurt her child as we can see from how they're afraid of her and her rhetoric and yet it's "haha I'm afraid to meet your ma!" "Me too cus im a dog! Lol!" Fuuuuck offfffff

I think I'm running out of thoughts so here's a last one for now; with the magical barrier down a bunch of magical Villains kids should be coming out for the woodwork. We know Mal has magic basically stored in her so it's is possible, she technically doesn't need the spellbook to do magic it is just inherent to her. So with the diverse range of people from the isle there are deffinatly magic folk in there. Actually if we're following Disney movie law I saw something mentioning Jay being half Genie and yeah! He should be half Genie! Jafar got turned into a Genie he's probably only human because of the barrier! Oh also Ben should be able to go beast on command as long as he had a better beast form than he did in the movies. And give him back the beard and fangs like fuck you he looked so much better

Okay I'm done for now

[knickynoo]

Do you have any thoughts on Marty and his self esteem issues? In most of the trilogy, I feel like Marty ranges from experience a lot of insecurity at best, to like a considerable amount of self loathing at worst, (like pls Marty, Doc getting struck by lighting was not your fault? You’re not Thor?) . And there’s the whole chicken thing, so I was curious if you had any thoughts on where it stems from, how it’s affected him etc etc? Okay lmao that’s it, have a great day !!

Hello! Do I have thoughts?? Yes. I do.

So, one of the things I like so much about Marty as a character is that...he's kind of an enigma of sorts? Like. Here's this kid who skateboards, rocks that denim jacket and the cool sunglasses, plays guitar, has a pretty girlfriend, etc. You take all of that, and it should reflect a really confident, popular person. I mean, with all the stereotypical "cool guy" attributes considered, Marty should have Ferris Bueller-level confidence and charm. He should be strutting around, smooth-talking everyone, laughing in the face of danger, and possessing unshakeable self-esteem. But he does/has none of those things because, as we all know, Marty is A Mess (affectionate). And yeah, a lot of it seems to stem from self-esteem issues, which we do see sprinkled throughout the trilogy. Where's it all coming from? Well, a lot of places, most likely...

• FAMILY: Probably the biggest factor. Though I'm sure George and Lorraine were sincerely in love for a while at the beginning of their relationship/marriage, I think it's fair to assume that any real spark between them had pretty much fizzled out by the time Marty came along or when he was a young kid. Take a loveless relationship between a meek, subservient man and a woman who drinks away her feelings, factor in a 17-year-old boy who's probably never had any real semblance of parental stability in his house, and it's highly likely that kid is going to have some issues. It's really difficult to believe in yourself & feel secure when the norm is having parents who are wrapped up in their own worlds/rarely interact with each other, seeing your father get emotionally (& physically!) pushed around by his supervisor, and watching your mom cling to alcohol and sink into depression.

• Plus, there are the separate relationships George and Lorraine have with Marty. Granted, we don't see much of it, but what we see at dinner is probably a good example of a typical interaction. George is quick to steer Marty away from any situation where he may face rejection or hardship. And yeah, he may think he's protecting his son, but this strategy is actually pretty harmful. I can imagine that any time Marty is feeling nervous or let down, and goes to his father seeking encouragement, he's only left with the impression that it's better not to take any risks at all because he might fail anyway. Instead of being built up, any potential self-worth is being chipped away at by George.

And as far as Lorraine is concerned, I get the impression that she's (more often than not) critical and judgemental of Marty. She's not shy about airing her strong dislike for Jennifer, during which Marty stays completely silent and unresponsive. Perhaps Marty's general default around his mom is silence, due to him having learned a long while back that he's better off keeping his mouth shut. I can see Lorraine lecturing Marty often, picking apart every little flaw she may see in him (friends, grades, attitude, etc.), especially when she's had too many drinks and especially when you consider that Marty is probably her most "difficult" child. Sad as it may sound, I can't picture Marty walking away from very many interactions with his mother feeling good about himself.

• GENERAL ANXIETY/NEURODIVERGENCY: Marty is an easily flustered, anxious guy. And whether that stems from his home environment or genetics (I mean, look at George), I don't know. But he definitely seems to be a sort of nervous, hesitant kid, particularly in the first movie. I also, like most of the fandom, headcanon Marty as having ADHD. And like...if that's the case for him, it certainly isn't helping at all with the self-esteem stuff. He's written off as a slacker at school, told he'll never amount to anything, and probably struggles a lot to keep up in his classes and survive in an environment that almost definitely doesn't offer any form of support or accommodations. That would be a big blow to his self-worth as well.

People with ADHD also tend to be very critical of themselves, worry about what others think of them, and have a hard time with rejection. Hence, the one rejection at the audition followed by, I'm just a big, stupid failure and I'll never ever be good enough. My world is crumbling, I should just give up everything forever =(((

(What do you mean those weren't his exact words??)

• BONUS: Marty might also face a decent amount of social isolation/teasing due to his friendship with Doc, which would take a toll on confidence too. Also, I just...don't think that Marty has many friends??

When you take all the above factors, Marty's self-esteem issues make a lot of sense and, if not for Doc, would probably run a lot deeper than what we see in the trilogy. ALSO!

• Marty blaming himself for Doc getting hit by lightning in the DeLorean: I've seen a few people comment on this and how they think it's ridiculous that Marty felt guilty but...it's always made a lot of sense to me, actually. No, Marty didn't cause the lightning, but he did set off the chain of events that led to Doc being there at that moment. If he'd had the inner strength/self-control to walk away from Biff outside of the dance, he could have just joined Doc on the roof with the almanac and they'd have been on their merry way. And even if Biff had continued to challenge him, or even followed him, Marty likely could have created a diversion or gotten an adult at the dance to help and still made it up to the roof before the worst of the storm hit. But because he couldn't stand being called a chicken, he ended up taking a door to the face, had the book stolen back, and had to go on that little side adventure to retrieve it, which led to Doc needing to save him. So yeah, I'm actually team Marty on this one. His choice did lead to Doc being catapulted into the Old West, lol. I'd have been consumed with guilt too.

• The Chicken Thing: I'm not going to go into too much detail (HA!) because this is already ridiculously long, but I will say that I don't go by the more popular headcanon that says Marty's sudden inability to handle being challenged is due to the updated timeline taking effect and "altering" him. Essentially, that Marty growing up with a confident, successful father made him have higher expectations put on him, and so he was always striving to prove he could live up to them.

I actually don't think any ripples from the new timeline catch up to Marty yet during the course of the trilogy. (I tend to headcanon that as happening gradually in the coming weeks and months after he gets home). Instead, I think that Marty's inclination towards becoming feral at the words "chicken", "yellow", etc. is because of his life in his original timeline. Growing up with a jellyfish for a father, it makes sense that Marty would want to distance himself as much as possible from being associated with weakness. He'd want to prove himself that much more because everyone around him would probably think he's just like his cowardly old man.

And though I know it's not really possible (because they weren't planning on a 2nd or 3rd movie), I think a case can be made that there's a glimpse of the "chicken thing" in the first movie, in the scene of Marty and Lorraine in the car at the dance. I mean, he gets all upset and tells her not to drink, but then she calls him a square, uses the classic peer-pressure tactic of, everyone's doing it, and he caves instantly and takes a swig. Could be because he doesn't want to be thought of as a square, or could be because he's desperate to calm his nerves a bit. Either way, Marty doesn't seem to fare too well when challenged or put under pressure, so I lump this scene in as a "chicken" moment.

I...need to stop. I set out to write a quick response to this. Like, a paragraph or two. But this question activated Hyperfocus Mode, and I blinked and now it's 2 hours after I started and I have AN ESSAY.

Thanks for the ask! *goes to lie down*

[talkfantasytome]

Going to delete ask posts that directly linked other people's posts, based on this feedback and suggestion (which I thoroughly appreciate!), as I'm not trying to point fingers at anyone or directly tell a specific person they're wrong. I'll repost the general content, with a summary of what was asked, starting with this post.

Anon Ask: Some people are saying that SJM has confirmed Vassien by saying that she'd like to do retellings of firebird legends, swan lake, and Vasilisa the Beautiful, using some shots of her comments. What are your thoughts on this? And the time on facebook that Sarah said E\ain and Lucien have a lot of "tension, growth, and healing to be found (together)".

The most important thing to consider here is timeline. Both of the twitter shown were made in April of 2015. The first one is, honestly, fairly irrelevant. First of all, she's just saying fairy tales she might like to retell. And, for the record, she has also said she'd like to do a retelling of The Little Mermaid, yet often people disregard that as an argument for Gwynriel. So, either her comments on what she'd like to do a retelling of matter, or they don't.

And, if they're saying that those comments are foreshadowing a Vassa + Lucien book, then clearly The Little Mermaid comments are foreshadowing a Gwynriel book. And then...where's E\ain's?

E\ain is getting a book, so which fairy tale gets the short straw?

Or, maybe, the story won't be exactly like the fairy tale.

I do think that both of those comments are important, but Sarah said she wants to do a retelling.

That could literally mean anything. All that tells us is that she will take themes and ideas from the story. I'm not saying Vassa won't be important in a later book, but Sarah can retell the story any way. She could have Vassa betray E\ain, get Koschei to transfer the curse over to the middle Archeron, and now E\ain is the swan on the lake (cause, come on, E\ain's def. a bit swan-like), and Lucien has to rescue her. Or, maybe Jurian is the one that rescues Vassa while Lucien and E\ain deal with Koschei?

There are so many options in a retelling that to say SJM telling us she wants to do a retelling of these stories is a clear sign that Vassa + Lucien are endgame is, honestly, not a very critical analysis.

I'm going to address this tweet next:

This twitter exchange happed April 30, 2015. ACOMAF was published in May of 2016. This post can not be used as foreshadowing of Vassa + Lucien, because it happened before we found out E\ain and Lucien are mates. That "at some point further down the road" literally means "any time after book 1".

People keep using this tweet and presenting it as if Sarah's response came recently. They're spreading misinformation - it may not be purposeful, they may not have seen or noticed the date, but this twitter exchange can't be used as proof that Lucien's person has to be someone other than E\ain, because when it was made we did not know about the Lucien and E\ain possibility.

That doesn't mean it definitely is talking about E\ain, but my point is that this is not proof of Vassa + Lucien, of someone else + Lucien, because of when it was posted.

As for other comments on retellings Sarah would like to do - it's the same argument as the first one. Sarah said she wants to do a retelling of the firebird and swan like. We all know this. It's not new information. People who are saying Vassa + Lucien won't happen aren't ignorant of this fact. We're well aware, and we're also well aware of every other thing Sarah has said, mentioned, foreshadowed, and we're tying it all together. Focusing solely on stories Sarah has mentioned she'd like to retell - not confirmed she will retell - and ignoring everything else doesn't provide a solid analysis. You have to weave how those stories would fit into the grander scheme, and look at the other surrounding factors as well.

And, again, we need to remember that Sarah can do whatever the hell she wants in terms of the story and how she chooses to retell a fairy tale. I mean, how often is Little Red Riding Hood turned into a werewolf story? And sometimes even Red is the wolf?

Writers use fairy tales as a base, a foundation, but then they make it their own. No writer is going to tell the fairy tale exactly how it first was. They're going to adjust it...a lot...to make it their own story.

I'd also like to point out that both times she mentions Vasilisa, she says "Vasilisa the Beautiful". The first time she also said 'the Brave', but the second, solely 'Beautiful'. Vassa is beautiful, of course, but one of E\ain's defining characteristics is her beauty. Even in ACOSF it was again mentioned, discussed, about how her beauty made others hate her.

Could Vassa be Vasilisa...of course. However, I think people are a bit blinded by the similarities in names. Remember, Vasilisa the Beautiful wasn't the firebird - those are different stories. And, honestly, after doing a bit of research into the tale, I'm starting to get more and more sure of the thought that the character who would portray Vasilisa is E\ain.

I think I'm going to do a post on it...

In the later comment on retellings she'd like to do - which we know came after the first as the first came out in August 2015 and that story she's telling was given after the second set of books was confirmed - I also find it interesting that she said Vasilisa the Beautiful (specifically) and Swan Lake, subbing out the firebird.

Why would she do that? Perhaps because she's already brought in the firebird pieces she planned to bring in. We already know that retelling, and how it's come to play. Vassa is a firebird by the curse.

I'm not saying it couldn't end in a Swan Lake thing, as that is what the curse reminds me of. But, personally, I think the fact that she's saying Swan Lake now is also symbolic of something more, possibly another character getting trapped by Koschei.

As for the other piece you asked about, I don't have much to say about it, because it feels like the closest we'll come to an elucien confirmation.

That was also posted a while ago, back when ACOMAF came out. So, it's not like this is recent information Sarah is providing us. However, we know that Sarah can sometimes end up choosing endgame based on gut and things that just hit her. Cassian and Nesta - literally didn't know about them until she wrote them on the same page and was like "oh shit". So Sarah saying that she and Lucien didn't see E\ain coming...I'm sorry, but that feels almost more telling than even the next part of the sentence - where she says they have growing and healing to do together.

That's so huge. And we haven't seen that yet. We've only really seen the tension.

Sarah said this back when ACOMAF came out. And it was around writing or publishing ACOWAR that she got the okay for the second set of books (I think?). Which means she was likely thinking about the longer-term stories before that. Which would explain why we didn't get that growth and healing in ACOWAR.

Instead, she left them in a spot where it seemed like a possibility, and then for the later books has just added more tension. But that journey is still there. She's had it planned for so long. And yes, maybe she could change her mind, but we only know of two cases where she did just that:

Az and Mor

Nesta and Lucien

For Az and Mor it was because she decided to make Mor bisexual and unable to be in an emotional relationship with a male. This was due to complaints over diversity. It's the closest Sarah's probably come to 'fanservice' - except, admittedly, this is so not fanservice. Fanservice is doing something like, say, having Voldemort and Bellatrix have a secret love child despite the fact that Voldy never once came off as having any form of romantic or sexual feelings for her or anyone, ever. (Seriously, that guy was asexual and that is a hill I'll die on.)

Adjusting a character due to legitimate complaints and concerns on diversity, not just fanservice. It's more a full on social service, really, to try and provide that representation better. Yes, it wasn't done in the best way, but she did make an attempt.

The second one - Nesta and Lucien. That was her general plan, until she put Nesta and Cassian on page together. Then it all went out the window. Just like all of Nesta's thoughts when she saw Cassian. Just like Cassian's entire brain when he saw Nesta. 👀

And we get it, because we see it too.

So, while Sarah could have changed her mind about E\ain and Lucien, the only reasons she'd do that don't yet apply. She's already made a change for the diversity complaints, and I don't see her doing that with these two. As for finding out they actually belong with someone else when she sees them on page - well, that hasn't happened yet. She made the E\ain + Lucien decision after we see E\ain and Azriel interact, so clearly Az is not that for E\ain. And we've seen Lucien and Vassa on page together. There's nothing there except Lucien being pained about her curse - which, yeah, she's his friend. How often is one IC member described as looking pained for another? Or thinks about how much it hurt them to see their friend hurt?

But we know what it looks like when the chemistry is so undeniable it will adjust Sarah's plans. And if you're not sure - go back and read all the Nessian scenes in ACOMAF. And then see the one scene where Lucien and Vassa are on page together - I think you'll find there's another male there that, with Vassa, rings closer to the Nessian home.

There was no on page chemistry between Vassa and Lucien, and certainly not enough to change Sarah's mind. Which would also mean E\ain already wasn't meant for Az, which is likely why no one arguing for Vassa + Lucien seems to care as much about that, because most people who ship them are already dead set on E\ain + Azriel.

So, there you have it, my point of view/rant on those two pieces. But it's always important to look at the context of a post, and especially the "source material" people use to provide proof. It's why I tend to stick to the text where I can, and only use SJM statements that don't have an expiration date to their importance. SJM saying something about how she loves happily ever afters, for example, no expiration date. SJM telling us in 2015 that there is someone special for Lucien down the road - an expiration date after the first sign of a possible love interest for Lucien. Once E\ain was declared to be his mate, that statement became irrelevant, because regardless of whether it will be E\ain or not, you can no longer state that it's clearly hinting at someone else, since E\ain is a love interest for Lucien.

[written-on-the-trees]

Do You Believe In Love At First, Or Should I Pass By Again? - Machine Gun Kelly Fan Fiction

Word Count: 2675 words

Warnings: None

Summary: Colson meets a woman in a venue bar who doesn't know who he is, and bad pick-up lines ensue.

Where else can you find this: Ao3 | Wattpad

Colson sat at the bar, staring into his drink.

   He was feeling...maudlin. It was one of Dom's weird British words, but even without the man beside him, Colson felt it was appropriate, being in London and all.

 And because he was fucking miserable.

 Maybe it was just because he'd had a bit too much to drink, hadn't smoked, and had now drunk way too much for it to be a good idea to start now, but he felt like shit. He was on his own for once, and even though it was by his own decision, the empty feeling of being alone in a crowded place was starting to creep in. At first it had been fine, when he'd been riding high on the adrenaline of just being on stage, but an hour that adrenaline was starting to fade and he was starting to regret sending everyone on to party without him.

 He was debating going to catch up with them versus just going back to the house they were staying at, when a short woman dressed in black sauntered up next to him. Goth chicks weren't usually his type, but she had enough of a figure to grab his attention. He turned in his seat to flirt with her, but to Colson's surprise she ignored him completely, flagging down the bar tender and ordering a drink without giving him a second glance.

   Well, clearly she wasn't here to see me tonight.

   Normally, he would've let it go...but tonight he needed a distraction, and charming someone who seemed indifferent to him seemed like the perfect diversion.

 Obviously, it didn't hurt that the woman was good looking as fuck. Five foot something of curves poured into torn fishnets, a black leather mini-skirt, and a ripped black denim jacket over a white t-shirt with an interesting crying angel in a lightning bolt design on the front. She flicked straight, silky black hair over her shoulder after she ordered, revealing deep purple lips bisected by a shining silver ring that Colson instantly wanted to bite at, and heavily made up eyes that finally looked over at him. Her grey eyes slid over him, taking him in, and obviously finding him wanting if the vague curl of her lip was anything to go by

 He probably shouldn't find that hot, but...he did.

   "Can I help you?" she asked, her accent making her words seem all the more insulting...and Colson was still into it.

 "Yeah, I was just wondering if your name was Google?" he smirked: "Because you're everything I've been searching for."

 Grey eyes rolled heavenwards, a sigh escaping purple lips: "Really?"

 Colson grinned: "I've got other lines, if you didn't like that one."

 "Maybe I just don't like you."

   The words were bitchy as fuck, so much so Colson actually winced...but it was still kind of hot, and he laughed even as he was wincing.

 He wasn't usually into this mean girl shit, especially not when it was directed at him, but...apparently he really was a bit fucked up tonight. It probably would've been sensible to examine why that might be, but Colson wasn't feeling up to any kind of introspection right now. It seemed like a lot more fun to just try and get her to be mean to him again.

 If he got lucky, she might keep it up all night.

   "That's okay; I grow on people. I'm like mould."

 That, at least, seemed to get an amused snort out of the woman, even if her expression was still a little guarded: "Your words, mate."

 "Yeah? Speaking of words: are you a dictionary? 'Cause you’re adding meaning to my life."

 Now the woman groaned, but the sound was playful, and there was a small smile tugging at the corner of her lips, the guarded look melting away: "You need to stop."

 "But I'm having so much fun." Colson grinned: "Pick-up lines are great. Try using one back, you'll see."

 "I don't know. For some reason, I have been feeling a little off today..." she pulled a thoughtful expression, before suddenly smirking: "...but then you came along, and you definitely turned me on."

 Colson burst out laughing, before taking another sip of his drink: "Nice. You got game, English, but I'm not sure you're up to my level yet."

 "English? Alright, America." the grey eyed girl half-smirked-half-sneered, the expression mocking but not bitchy: "And I can assure you, if you want to play that game, you're going to end up calling me 'your majesty'. Because I fucking rule."

 "That right?"

 "Yeah, America. That's right."

   Well, if that wasn't a challenge, Colson didn't know what was. And Machine Gun Kelly never backed down from a challenge. He didn't have it in him.

 Even if this woman didn't know who he was, that would just make playing this game with her all the more fun.

    Colson leaned towards English, a smile curling his lips: "Let's go, then. I’d say God Bless you, but it looks like he already did."

 "Didn't need him to; I’m always on top of things. Would you like to be one of them?"

 "You sure? You said you weren't feeling yourself today...wanna feel me instead?"

 "You wish." she laughed, throwing her head back in a way that made her lip-ring glint in the dim light of the bar and exposed the bare skin on her neck, which Colson suddenly wanted to leave hickies all over...before getting distracted by the grey eyed girl's crooked smirk: "Did you know my lips are like Skittles - if you're good, you might just get to taste the rainbow."

 "And here I thought it was the Pepsi that was making you look so-da-licious." Colson winked.

 "Oh, America, clearly your brain isn't working properly...maybe it's because you're deficient in vitamin me."

 "Speaking of vitamins, did you take your Vitamin D today, or did you need me to give you a hand?"

 "How about we play Titanic instead. You’ll be the iceberg, and I’ll go down." English winked, and Colson lost it laughing.

   She was overdoing it so much, he knew she wasn't actually flirting with him with that one.

 The others might have been questionable in terms of whether she might be interested in him, but that one was just an attempt to knock him off his game - and it had been so unexpected that it worked. From the smug little smile on her face, she knew it too.

 Colson didn't mind that he'd lost; it'd been fun going back and forth like he had, and now that she'd warmed up a bit this chick had a good energy; less bitchy, and more sarcastic. He liked it. He liked that she could match him; even if he didn't end up leaving with her tonight, he'd enjoy hanging at the bar with someone who could meet him joke for joke, or pick-up line for pick-up line, than he would fucking someone who was silent through half their interaction for whatever reason. Quiet women were never his type; he liked girls with attitude.

 And this woman had it by the fucking boatload.

 She was leaning back in her barstool, openly examining him, arms crossed over her chest and one leg thrown over the other. She was the picture of quiet confidence, all relaxed but still sitting tall. Some guys might be put off by her lack of fawning, but not Colson.

 He just leant in again with his most charming smirk firmly in place.

   "So, since you won, would you let me buy you a drink?"

 "I've got one, thanks." she held up her glass of something - vodka and soda, if Colson was guessing by the clear colour - before taking a sip: "Why don't you tell me your name instead, loser?"

 "Colson."

 "Ah, shit. I was hoping I'd recognise it." she laughed: "You look kind of familiar, but maybe I just saw you in the crowd earlier."

 He had walked through the crowd at one point...albeit in a hoodie and tucked between tWo security guards: "Maybe."

 "That is literally the least convincing 'maybe' I ever heard." English rolled her eyes playfully: "But okay, Colson. I'm Rosie."

   Rosie.

   It shouldn't have fit her, a soft name for a woman that was anything but soft, but somehow it suited her. She owned it, wore it well. Just like she wore the blood red rose and black brambles tattooed on the back of her left hand...maybe that was why the name fit her. Beautiful in a prickly kind of way.

 That certainly fit her.

 Not that he was going to say that to her. Rosie, as bitchy as she had been to begin with, didn't seem like the kind of woman to take dubious accolades like 'prickly' as compliments, no matter how nicely they were meant. Colson got the sense the bitchy remarks at the beginning of their conversation had been attempt to shut him up and leave her alone. He'd gotten past that wall pretty quickly, but he was almost certain he could get pushed back outside it pretty quickly as well.

 The more the spoke - about how he was finding London, about whether the UK or US did gigs better, about the band whose t-shirt she was wearing - the more Colson found himself liking Rosie. He'd already thought she had a good feeling about her, but the more he spoke to her the more that good feeling grew. She was a bit like Dom, in a way; less loud and energetic, but just as quick and just as unwilling to put up with anyone's shit, including Colson's. She didn't say anything, but she put out clear signs that she was not see him as someone she'd be interested in fucking tonight, and that if Colson tried to make that happen, he'd find himself alone faster than he could ask her to come back.

 Colson respected that. As gorgeous as he still thought Rosie was - and as much as he still wanted to mark up her neck to let everyone know she'd let him do it, and bite at her lip ring while making out with her - he wasn't that kind of guy that pushed for what women didn't want to give him. Usually he was the kind to accept their denial and move on, but honestly he was having a better time just talking with Rosie than he had had in a while.

 She just seemed to understand him, even when he was leaving gaps in his stories. He was just starting to tell her about Cassie, showing her his screensaver of him and his daughter together, about how frustrating it was that people didn't seem to trust him to parent his own damn kid, when a girl around Cassie's age appeared at Rosie's elbow.

   "Hey Miss Barnes, the show's over. Grace's just queuing to go to the loo but she wanted me to go get our coats?"

   Rosie turned and smiled at the kid, already fishing in her pockets for the little ticket stubs they gave out for the cloakroom here, when the kid turned to look at Colson. Her eyes widened, and she went a little pale, but when he smiled - because what the fuck else was he gonna do, glare at a thirteen year old girl who looked like she'd seen a ghost for no good reason? - she just dashed off with the stubs for the cloakroom clutched in her hand.

 He was so busted.

 Not yet, but as soon as Rosie was taking the kids home, they were going to tell her who she'd been talking to.

   "Well, it looks like I'm going to have to go." Rosie announced, tone apologetic as she shrugged in a 'what can you do?' kind of way: "Downsides of chaperoning your niece and her friends to a gig, you're on their time-table."

 "I would try and say something positive, but I struggle not giving in to one kid, let alone a bunch of them." he returned: "Maybe if you get a day that you're not on anyone else's schedule, you could give me a call? I'm in London for a few more days."

 Rosie looked surprised, but she nodded: "Sure. You want my number?"

 "I'll give you mine." Colson pulled a sharpie from the pocket of his jeans, scrawling his number on the back of one of his bar receipts: "I'd lose my head if it weren't screwed on, but my phones usually just as attached to me as my head is anyway."

   And this way, if she didn't want to talk to him again, the decision was hers and hers alone.

 Seemed fair, considering she wasn't going to know who he actually was until after he was too far away for her to turn him down to his face. Colson couldn't deny he would be pretty upset if he never heard from her again, but it would be better than him reaching out to her and her ignoring him. He had a fairly thick skin when it came to rejection - he had to, by now - but he was certain Rosie would prove an exception to that rule.

 Best to give her his number and just hope she gave him a chance to explain why he had half-lied to her.

   "Great. Speak to you soon, Colson." Rosie took the receipt and tucked it into the black purse that was slung over her shoulder.

 Colson smiled, but the expression felt a little hollow: "Speak to you soon."

   He hoped he hadn't just lied again.

           MESSAGE FROM AN UNKNOWN NUMBER

So, I might've seen you in the crowd, huh?

   Colson blinked at his phone for a few seconds, still half-asleep but for once not hungover or coming down, last night coming back to him in a sudden flash, cutting through the fog of sleep quicker than the lightning bolt on a certain t-shirt last night.

   Rosie.

   Unlocking his phone with fumbling fingers - not that he'd ever acknowledge that to anyone if they saw it - Colson rushed to respond to Rosie's text message, worrying his lower lip between his teeth as he did:

   If it helps, I did walk through the crowd at one point.

So you might of.

  As opposed to recognising you from when you were on stage?

Yeah, seems likely.

  I'm sorry?

    There were a few minutes of no response, with Colson holding onto his phone and watching the chat screen, trying not to worry about what Rosie might be thinking.

 Would she be thinking of the nicest way to let him down gently? Or maybe the harshest way to tell him to fuck off? Was she going to change now she knew he had a degree of wealth and fame? She hadn't seemed like the type...but he'd really only had one conversation with her. And that conversation had been just two people at a bar. Colson didn't think he was being egotistical when he worried him being Machine Gun Kelly could change things.

   It's fine.

I probably wouldn't have told you if I was famous, either.

 You telling me you're not a model? Damn, pretty sure I thought I recognised you from a magazine.

It must've been a museum.

Because you truly are a work of art.

 Really, mate, you wanna lose this game again?

   Colson sighed in relief.

 She was still calling him 'mate', and she was still challenging him to play dumb games with her, just like last night. Finding out who he was hadn't changed shit.

 He hadn't irreparably fucked anything up.

   I'm not hearing any comeback, flower power.

  Oh, it's fucking on now, America.

You must be a broom, because you just swept me off my feet.

   Colson grinned, racking his brain for a good response as he hauled himself out of bed and headed down towards the kitchen to make himself a coffee. He was going to need it, to keep up with Rosie.

 And he was almost unreasonably happy about that.

[missnight0wl]

Unpopular opinion: I wish dating was never introduced to HPHM.

I was always rather open about the fact that I don’t have much interest in dating content in HPHM, so you might say it’s very subjective rambling. But I think I also have some more objective arguments for that statement, so… hear me out (or don’t; I can’t tell you what to do).

Some spoilers for the Festival Fun TLSQ, the Celestial Ball TLSQ, the First Date TLSQ, the Valentine’s Day TLSQ, the All-Wizards Tournament TLSQ, and “Cooking Up Trouble” SQ.

First of all, I want to address the most obvious counterargument for my wish: “but people want dating!”. Yeah, I know. But here’s a thing. A long time ago, almost at the very beginning of the game’s existence, when we were only speculating about any love interests, people were referencing one article. The article where the creators claimed that romance is planned for the future (among other things). And if you ask me, it was their mistake. It was a mistake because it created expectations which they had to react to. The problem is that they were never ready to introduce such type of content. I mean, just look at the past events. Andre mentioned dating when he was first introduced back in Y3 (!), and he said then that most people don’t date until they’re in the fourth year. And yes, the Celestial Ball was eventually placed as Y4 Achievement, but the main story was well into Y5 already! What I take from this is that at best, they had only a rough idea for the ball when they wrote Andre’s comment in Y3 (if it took them so long to actually create the quest). And so, I have to wonder – why they even talked about dating in Y3 if they were not ready? Now, I’m not saying that nobody would ask for dating if Jam City didn’t mention it in that article, or Andre omitted that topic in Y3. There’d definitely be people still wishing for some romance. But there’d be no actual reasons to expect that. Because HPHM was created as a mystery story (even if people don’t remember about it anymore), and a mystery story doesn’t really need romance.

The second thing I’d like to point out for the sake of this discussion is that the dating quests require quite a lot of work from the devs team. Admittedly, the quality of those efforts is sometimes questionable, but still. I’m also no tech or game design expert, but here are some things which I believe make dating quests more time-consuming than most of the others:

Designing outfits. Each of the datable characters is given a new outfit (+ new outfits for MC). I also want to notice that most of those outfits are one-time-use. Well, except maybe for the bundles available to buy for real money…

Creating new locations/characters. To be fair, some of “regular” quests require those too, although the majority uses things already existing and being used in the main story.

Creating new animations: dancing, holding hands, pecks on the cheek, more (new) dancing.

Creating multiple routes for different date options – and even if it’s mostly copy-paste, it takes time nonetheless.

To be clear, creating new things for the game is not bad. My point is that basically every dating adventure required ALL of that invested in one single quest – and pretty much none of that can be reused outside of dating. In fact, they’re not even reusing those animations completely for each new date. The kiss from the Valentine’s Day was different from the recent one, the Festival had new dances added to make it more diverse in comparison to the Celestial Ball etc. And what those unique quests have to offer? One cute moment with your date, which is… kind of meaningless. I’m sorry, but dating stories are basically irrelevant in the bigger picture. I mean, yeah, they’re adorable, but that’s it. And it’s just NOT proportional to all the work put into them. Because look…

The dating quests add very little to nothing to flesh out the characters – and if they do, it has nothing to do with dating.

The Celestial Ball did a pretty great job at adding to Rowan and Ben. People often criticise MC for “forcing” them to come to the party, but the problem was clearly about them feeling not good enough to go (not necessarily about them not wanting to go), and so I really loved working on their self-confidence. Bill also grew a lot in that quest, overcoming his rejection from Emily Tyler. Andre discovered his styling talent, so he was no longer “just” a brilliant Quidditch player. Even Penny had some insecurities to face as she wanted to prove that she’s not only popular but she can also create fantastic decorations. So… couldn’t it just be a quest about FRIENDSHIP and our friends growing? The whole dating subplot felt kind of forced to me, or maybe rather detached. Not to mention that THAT was kind of a dick move to leave Rowan and Ben after using the argument:

The next quests were more oriented on dating itself, but at the same time, they’re focused less on the characters’ individual personalities. Sure, there are some differences between dates, but it’s more about distinction than adding anything new. For instance, in the Festival Fun TLSQ, every character yells out loud that you’re on a date (unless you chose to keep it a secret), MC just points out that it’s unlike them in the case of Talbott, Jae, and Chiara. Next example: I thought it’s pretty amusing that Jae writes dreadful poems with cheap rhymes, but it turns out that the note with Butterbeer could also be left by Barnaby. I know that in MY playthrough, Barnaby didn’t leave it, but I can’t see it as Jae’s characteristic, simply because it wasn’t written for his character – it was written to fit Jae and Barnaby, so it’s kinda meaningless in my eyes.

Another thing is that even if those dates added something individual, it’d be relevant only for a limited audience. Like, I’m really happy for people who wanted to date Badeea, but for me, she barely existed in this quest. It added NOTHING to her character. During the First Date quest, Tulip revealed that girls in her family are being named after flowers (her cousin is called Marigold), which is a pretty neat fact, but I wouldn’t know it if I didn’t put extra effort to see different options. And believe me, there’s a big part of the payers who don’t do it. I’m still seeing on social media people being surprised that Rowan’s gender and House are connected to MC’s.

And speaking of that already: this is why the dating options are being cut off. And honestly, it sucks, but I get it, I really do. The devs have to spend the same amount of time on a character dated by 6% of the players as on a character dated by 36% of the players. Let’s add real money to that, and let’s say that 10% of all players buy gems/energy on TLSQs. Jam City will make more money out of that 36% than out of 6% - it’s as simple as that. At the end of the day, they are a business. Would it be nice to make all players happy? Of course, but it’s easier to keep the majority happy.

The dating quests don’t really matter for the main story – and they won’t matter more in the future.

Why? Because it’d be too complicated at this point. All we’re getting (and what we’ll ever get) are subtle differences in dialogues. And you know what? Even that doesn’t matter much. For example, in Y6, there’s a scene where Talbott calls MC to the Owlery and offers his help in searching through the letters. He talks then about their friendship, and if you took him on a date, he mentions it as well. The thing is that Talbott is pretty heart-warming here in general, how he opens on us being friends:

Sure, that one additional line is pretty cute, but again, is it really a satisfying pay-off from the dating quest, considering how much was put into it? And I don’t think they even can do more because they always have to keep in mind the players who didn’t manage to finish TLSQs in time or just didn’t want to do it.

I don’t want to be only negative about dating because that’s not really my point, so here are some ideas on how to invest all of that time better (and no, it’s not just the lore and in-depth history of the Cursed Vaults because I know I’m in the minority who cares about it):

More outfits for NPCs which could be used for variety. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of seeing characters like Penny, Merula, Ben, or Talbott in their full school robes ALL THE FREAKING TIME. Ideally, I wish every character to have three outfits: full school robes, some variety of a uniform (so something like Tulip and Barnaby) used in the school but outside of classes, and something totally casual used outside of the castle.

More animations between characters like hugs, patting on the arm etc. Anything which could be used almost on a daily basis, and which would make our interactions looks more natural and less stiff. Seriously, I’ll take a supportive hug instead of a peck on the cheek ANY DAY.

More character-centric quests. So many of our friends need their own SQ: Tulip, Badeea, Liz, Diego. The rest could probably also use them to expand their characters – because those SQs do a great job at this. Like, I took Jae to the festival, and it was alright, but to be completely honest, his “Cooking Up Troubles” SQ was SO MUCH BETTER for his character. We learnt new things about Jae, we had some really cute friendship moments (like this and this)… And it was a super simple quest with only seven parts in total! It just needed to be written: no new locations, animations etc. Yet, the pay-off was just… better, more meaningful.

Another thing that could be done in those character-centric quests is more focus on the relationships between our friends because, in my opinion, this is needed as well. I want to talk here a little about the “All-Wizards Tournament” TLSQ, which I think is really underrated. This is probably because of people claiming that Jam City is reaching too much to reference the books events AND because of Rowan’s absence. And don’t get me wrong, those are valid objections. But when it comes to the characters… this TLSQ was pretty great. We saw a lot of our friends' insecurities (Barnaby, Jae, Liz), we saw their more competitive side (Andre, Badeea)… Badeea was especially interesting to me as she showed that she can be quite cunning when she somehow learnt about the first task. She also didn’t reveal that information to Merula and Ismelda because they were occupying the training dummies, but she did share with MC (meaning that you really want to have her on your side…).

It somehow made me think about the situation from Y5 when she admitted that she tricked Jae into thinking that she knows Apparition by using an Invisibility Cloak. It’s nice to know there’s more to her than meets the eye, which was also cohesive with the main story (even if we don’t see it much). The TLSQ also showed some dynamics between our friends, like Jae and Andre (which I mentioned here). And of course, I really enjoyed the ending conclusion: that some tasks can be dealt with only when you work together. Again, I’d love to see this theme being explored more because it creates such a compelling contrast between Jacob and MC. Jacob didn’t have many friends at school. We only know about Duncan and Olivia, and it’s still unclear if Olivia was an actual friend or a colleague they worked with. Not to mention that it was implied that for some time, Jacob was working all alone. Meanwhile, MC has basically the whole army at this point. It’d be interesting to see that this is one of the things which makes MC stronger than their brother.

Now, the reason why the “All-Wizards Tournament” TLSQ could focus on all of that is because we didn’t waste the time on all of “secret admires mystery”, “oh, who should I choose” etc. So, just as a thought experiment, let’s think about how the Festival Fun could improve if we’d eliminate the dating aspect. First of all, more characters could get more screen time, like Badeea, maybe Tulip… Liz? Diego (our dancer!)? Ismelda? Even Talbott didn’t have a big role unless you chose him as a date. The plot could also be more dynamic instead of a whole bunch of stalling. I’d leave the investigation with Andre because I think it’s a great addition to his character, but it’s also fucking sad that any development he’s getting is around dating. Like, the boy deserves so much better. So, let’s change that! Let’s say he asks MC for help because he’s styling some summer outfits for the upcoming festival, but one of his fabrics is missing. Perhaps it’s a bit more expensive material, so they suspect that Jae might’ve “borrowed” it to make some money. Jae, of course, is deeply insulted because he’s a smuggler and an occasional cheater, but not a thief! They argue with Andre, but eventually, they come to understanding. Then, MC remembers that Badeea wanted to experiment with painting methods, so perhaps she decided to incorporate some fabric into that. We find Badeea and Barnaby, they don’t have what we’re looking for, but there’s some action going on there, maybe including Talbott… Long story short, it turns out that Tulip needed it in preparation for Cruppies race or something. I don’t know, I’m coming up with it pretty much as I write. The point is that the time spent on talking about dating could’ve been used on something more specific, individual, which could be more meaningful in the light of the main story. And since there’d be no routes, all of that would be relevant for everyone after completing the quest. Want it to be even better? Make it a regular side quest, not time-limited.

All right, but couldn’t we just have both: characters development and dating? Of course, that’d be ideal. But as I said before, Jam City is a business and rarely any business is ideal. They’ll always prioritise a limited number of things, and since people whine about dating, we’re getting dating. And again, I’m not saying that dating is totally worthless, and I get that people find it cute and whatnot. I just believe that what dating ultimately adds to the game is not proportionate to the time and effort those quests require to be created. That it could’ve been invested better. Dating is basically stopping us from getting better content (at least in some areas). And we’re kind of asking for that…

[autisticchicc]

Unstructured Autism Rant

A/N: For COVID reasons, mask is purely metaphorical in this piece, not an actual face mask, the work scenario was something that happened pre-COVID.

Trigger Warnings: In-depth descriptions of autism-related struggles and meltdowns.

Disclaimer: This is my personal experience with autism, that is not to say that this is the experience of every person with ASD.

“Have I solved your issue today?” I ask the customer on the other end of the phone. I have; I don’t know why I’m asking this. The customer confirms I have, and I wish them goodbye, a good day, and thank you for calling the business. I don’t care if they have a good day, and I why on earth would I thank them for calling us? The entire interaction went on for far too long for my liking thanks to small talk and the customer pushing pointless information about themselves onto me. He told me he was sketching by the riverside, but why do I need to know about that? How do I respond to a piece of information that does nothing to or for me? Upon hanging up, I breathe a sigh of relief. The mask slips off my face slightly as I rub my temples.  

The relief is short-lived, as one of my co-workers comes over to my desk to talk about something. I take a deep breath and pull the mask back on properly before forcing myself to engage enthusiastically in this conversation. I don’t know this co-worker that well, I know nothing about how she talks, her personality, or her humour, only that I have a huge margin for error in this conversation. I concentrate intensely, trying desperately to make sense of her rapidly changing facial expressions and knowing when it’s my turn to talk. After interjecting at the wrong time on several occasions, I give up and just respond meekly when there’s an obvious gap. I feel embarrassed and awkward, and when she walks away, I kick myself. Why is it so hard to have a simple conversation? I’ve yet to make any friends at this job, and I don’t think I ever will at this rate.

I swivel back to face my two screens and lament the lack of a blue light filter on this software. My eyes ache, and the dog (yeah, don’t ask) on the upper level of the open plan office keeps barking. The occasional trilling of a phone irritates me more than usual as the late afternoon sun glares through the floor to ceiling windows at my photosensitive eyes. I can’t close the blinds because my co-workers love the sun, but I’m rapidly approaching a meltdown thanks to overstimulation, exhaustion, and following vague instructions all day. It feels as though every piece of sensory stimuli is stabbing at my eyes and ears. At the end of my shift I clock out and leave without saying goodbye to anyone. I don’t know them well enough to feel comfortable going out of my way to say anything in the first place.

Upon exiting the building, I cover my ears with my big headphones, the relief that washes over me is immense. All those invasive sounds are gone now, and I can listen to whatever I want. I still feel on edge, still teetering close to a meltdown, so I choose not to worsen it by listening to something that would fuel my anger. Sometimes it’s necessary, sometimes I desperately need to hear the pained screams of Pete Steele, the aggressive guitars and lyrics of Body Count. But today, I need something that isn’t going to give me the encouragement to punch the first person that triggers my rage.

For me, music is transformative and transportive. When I listen to particular songs with noise-cancelling headphones, it’s allows me to go somewhere in my imagination while my body moves to my real destination on autopilot. I decide on an uplifting song by The Knocks and Big Boi, Big Bills. It’s a song that makes me feel like a character in a movie that has just moved to a new city and is pursuing an exciting new life. To an extent that’s sort of true for me, minus the excitement and plot armour. Either way, it’s an uplifting song for me. So much so in fact, that I listen to it on repeat all the way home. If something interrupts the song, like an announcement on the tube or having to pause it, I have to restart it or it’s not the same.

When I eventually arrive home, the transformation happens. The moment my bedroom door closes, and I turn my headphones off, it begins. The outcome of this transformation can be vastly different depending on how my day went. It might be that it was a successful day socially, so I leave my phone out of sight and silently bury myself in a hobby for hours in order to recharge. It might be that the mask comes off and I begin to scream and sob, breaking anything I can to stop myself from self-injuring, burying the heels of my hands into my eyes to block any light. The transformation varies, but it is always the result of the same thing: suppressing who I am.

Much of being autistic and being forced to operate in a society catered to neurotypical people, for me, is suppressing my natural instincts and behaviour. Even when I have a positive day socially, it’s often contingent on how well I assimilated with other neurotypical people in that particular interaction. This is frustrating because not only am I exhausted because hardly anyone accommodates for me, I am also measuring the success of my day on other peoples’ standards. Many of my interpersonal relationships also operated that way until fairly recently, I was forced to behave and communicate the way that other people expected me to rather than what felt natural to me. There is only so many places and so much time I can maintain this act for, and so I was forced to simply cut those friendships off. I am no longer willing to negotiate my needs with people that clearly don’t like me enough to respect my disorder.

The friends I keep are mindful, lovers of the eccentric, embracing that which is different and persecuted for it. Often times I find that the people closest to me also have parts of their identity that mean they must also wear a mask of sorts when moving through society, be it racist society, patriarchal society, or queerphobic society. Our arms interlink on the fringes of an abstract hierarchy, turning away from the status quo and pursuing a life in truth and diversity. One day I’d love for everyone to be able to live authentically, for discrimination, isms and phobias to fade away into the past. I don’t see it happening in my lifetime, or perhaps ever, but I hope it does eventually.

In an ideal world, I would only interact with those aforementioned friends and no one else, but as we’ve established, that is not the world we live in. The reality is, I almost never get to interact with people who accommodate for me. I deal with people touching me without permission which makes my skin crawl, forcing me to take my headphones off when I’m fending off a meltdown, managers who don’t give me the specific step-by-step instructions I need, classmates who don’t understand that I don’t talk because I’m too shy, not because I’m unfriendly, lecturers that forget I can’t operate well in group work and can’t be in classrooms with harsh, fluorescent lights… The list is endless. Even going to the shop is a struggle, because the employees have no way to know. Although Tesco’s have been considerate and ‘progressive’* enough to introduce sunflower lanyards (https://www.tesco.com/help/invisibledisability/), most stores have absolutely no assistance in place for customers with hidden disabilities. I just have to hope that they don’t speak to me and that I don’t end up getting overwhelmed and having to ask anyone for help.

In a lot of ways, this pandemic has meant that I can avoid quite a lot of the scenarios that would usually cause me stress. I no longer work (admittedly, this causes more stress than it relieves), I don’t have to attend class in person, there is little to no in-person socialising, family events are cancelled, seasonal holidays are cancelled, queuing and crowding is no longer allowed (without distancing), etc. That has all been excellent and a relief. But on the flip side, it has given rise to a whole host of new problems. I hate being on camera or speaking in online lessons, there is no way for me to remind the teacher subtly I can’t do group work, masks trigger heat-related meltdowns for me, the financial instability of being unemployed has been a huge stressor, and the lack of government support is utterly enraging. 

Overall, it’s been a huge adjustment. The job that I talked about my experience with at the beginning of this rant is long gone now, so many things have changed. I have never dealt well with change, but this year has forced me to. In some ways I suppose you could say this is a positive development, exposure therapy is best at times. I just wish it had been more on my terms and not at the hands of a viral pandemic. 

[septembersghost]

I sincerely hope you are not going to leave the spn fandom or delete your Dean posts and analyses. They are very well written, thought provoking and true, even your tags are brilliant. I enjoy reading them a lot especially because you express exactly what I feel about Dean but you do it way more efficiently and beautifully than I ever could. I'm afraid I feel there are not many fans out there who love Dean for who he is and…(part1/3)

These messages are so thoughtful and kind, and “Dean needs you” sent me over the edge a bit...I might’ve teared up.

It’s safe to say, having been in this fandom forever, and longer than most any other, I would never leave it, because I would never leave him. ♥ and don’t worry, I’m intensely, irrationally attached to my tiny corners of the internet, because I always end up pouring so much of my silly little heart into them. I’ve migrated across multiple blogs and never delete the old ones, and every single one is layered in love for Dean, as I said before - Dean is the heart of every home I’ve made online, somehow. I joke that my love for him will outlive me, but it’s also...absolutely true. The posts will stay eternally, or at least as long as Tumblr exists and hosts them.

My not knowing how much longer I’ll be here, and that weighing on my spirit, doesn’t have anything at all to do with SPN or fandom, but rather with the situation of my real life, otherwise I guarantee you’d all be stuck with me and my unabated Dean feelings indefinitely. I’m stuck with my unabated Dean feelings, having an outlet to pour them into online again has been a rare source of relief. Imagine if all of this had been pent up in my mind and my chest for the past 6-7 weeks! I shudder to think! seriously, though, as ridiculous as it may sound, the enormity of the sadness might’ve been unbearable had I not been here. I’m fairly good at sharing emotions and I’m a sensitive person, but I am not good at sharing grief, I usually close off (I know I talked about this at some point in a personal post too). this would’ve been extremely difficult to bear that way.

With that in mind, thank you so much for reading them, be they weepy posts or rambling tags (and finding any meaningful coherence or beauty in them at all), that sense of not being alone is a balm in itself, and it truly means a lot to me that anyone is here to share with/listen.

Ships..and I have an unusual, well, relationship, because they’re quite often not my focus? I’m completely of the ship-and-let-ship mindset, it’s not a judgment on anyone’s morality, as long as no one is hurting anyone else in reality people can ship whatever they want. in any given fandom, there are ships I might adore, there are ships I can take or leave, there are ships I loathe, as do we all. interpersonal character dynamics are valuable to me in diverse ways, but the sense in which I interact with them is, not better or worse, just different from a lot of fandom? and that’s on me being wired the way I am.

I was in the archives of my oldest blog over the past month, and found this post, where I’d quoted a mutual, who had written: “my definition of otp doesn’t necessarily mean romance and sex must be involved. i’m talking extreme intimacy. two people who are so deeply intertwined in such a way that they can never and will never be separated, a love that is almost unexplainable,” and I’d added, “I find I’m drawn to relationships that exist almost cosmically, in a spiritual sense, soul mates that go beyond mere romance or beyond the physical, people who are satellites and anchors for one another. Love on the whole is a grander idea to me than romance alone (though of course a LOT of the time that’s part of it, it can be body/soul, and it can simply be soul). But when two beings discover that in each other lies the other’s salvation, when connections form that can never be erased, or bonds are forged that should be impossible (and yet are immutable), when they see the beauty in one another that no one else can see - the superficial bits (gender background etc etc) disappear. It may be inexplicable, it may not always be happy (but maybe it’s rapturous); it’s necessary whether it burns eternal or only flames for a moment. And that’s true love in any sense, those are my favorite love stories.” Of course romantic couples can fit this, but friendships can fit this, family can fit this. I’m not sure why we don’t use all the different definitions of love in our interactions with stories.

SPN has spiritual connections everywhere, it’s part of what I love about the show’s use of dynamics, but fanon and I don’t align on the interpretations sometimes, and that’s fine! I hang out in my own little corner.

the problem that is occurring is the erasure of Dean as a person, from primarily two different factions of fandom (and they’ve always been guilty of it in one way or another, but S15 made it MUCH worse). shipping usually doesn’t upset me, but since the finale (or since 15x18, take your pick on which side of fandom), I have literally cried over shipping posts that have just totally obliterated him as an individual. people saying that his death was “happy” (can you hear me screaming), because he was setting Sam “free,” and that’s all he ever wanted. people saying his death was intentional, because he was suicidal over Castiel (BEYOND gross and untrue, and makes me feel sick to my stomach). and those are the extreme examples - though pervasive ones - there are a lot more insidious things going around, the constant use of the word “repression,” the fundamental misunderstandings of everything he is, of his depth, of his emotional resonance and intuitiveness/openness, of his intelligence, and people taking those misconceptions at face value. there are things I see daily that drive me out of my mind. 

some of the commentary about his sexuality and the way it’s being related to John and John’s abuse is also very unsettling to me, because it’s missing the real point of what John’s neglect and mistreatment was about. I don’t think Dean is repressed, thus I don’t think his sexuality is that complicated for him. I think he is fully aware of who he is, and has been since before we met him. there’s so much being said about him needing to come to terms with himself, and from my subjective point of view, I’m like...he’s already gone through that, he knows. the narrative has moments which objectify him so often and there are many, many layers to that and his relationship to his own physicality, and there’s an element of fandom and the way he’s being talked about which makes me uncomfortable because it feels fetishizing, much like his pain is often fetishized, and in the aftermath of his death, I can’t cope with that. (and look, I say he’s beautiful all the time too, because he IS, in myriad ways, inner and outer.)

it feels like I had to watch someone I love that much die, and some of the meta and commentary on him is trampling his grave (and he doesn’t even have a grave, don’t make me think about the pyre), it’s as though more and more pieces of him are being stolen, and all I want is to protect him, when I had no power to save him from the narrative. his traits are given to other characters, his attributes are ignored altogether. I’m not saying all of fandom does this, or all the shippers do, of course they don’t, but it’s happening far too often.

I say this while simultaneously acknowledging that I care very much about Sam and Castiel as their own individuals, and I care about other assorted characters (there are many), and I care about their dynamics with Dean, it’s not like I keep that a secret, it’s plainly evident that I care about his connections - because he is so deeply loving and associated with love, and because I love him for all those facets, how can I NOT care about the people who fill his heart. of course I do! I care the MOST about he and his brother, there’s an irony in me answering this given another massive post I wrote up for today, but it’s all foundationally framed around him for me (which is why I keep jokingly referencing - I love everybody, because I love you).

now, Sam stans and Cas stans - and to be clear, it’s fine and good that they are other people’s favorites, I have no problems with this! - would likely accuse me of doing exactly to their faves what I say they do to Dean - prioritizing him over them, possibly not seeing them the way they do, so it’s also likely I’m a hypocrite, BUT - the fallout of the ending makes it all much more acute.

there are also some really serious lines of propriety that have been crossed in regards to the actors, and people blurring lines and inappropriately involving them (and the slander that was launched a Jensen on 11/5), and that needs to END.

all that said, I understand why you’re hurt that he’s being made half a ship, and being reduced in so many ways. I hope, at some point, that tapers off, but it’s been very distressing to deal with what essentially amounts to insult on top of grievous injury. he deserves infinitely better. he deserved so much more than the narrative, he certainly deserves more from the fandom, especially when they’re claiming to care about him.

it hurts to see how one of the most complicated fictional characters has been reduced to only one of his many aspects yes, he is SO complex and multifaceted, and every aspect of him deserves to be seen and appreciated. (and cherished, but I understand not everyone cherishes him like we do.) he’s everything! he is. he’s it.

you see Dean, you get him and you love him. Your posts about him are as exquisite as him 😭  that’s legitimately the loveliest and most touching response I could ever wish to receive. hopefully it’s a comfort, and keeps him alive a little bit for you. I love him forever, and I love you for being here and treasuring him and seeing him too. I’ll be with you for as long as I can be! 

he’ll always be with me. 💗 💗 💗

[borgiin]

               “  she was her father’s daughter but she’d inherited her mother’s                   black anger. it burned through her sometimes like a chemical fire. “

{ cis woman, she/her } ❝ walk like pepper spray, like don’t fucking touch me. walk like the knife in your pocket is in your hands, like you were born with it there, because weren’t you? ❞ huh, who’s KATIE DOUGLAS? no, you’re mistaken, that’s actually VICTORIA BORGIN. she is a 21 year old PUREBLOOD witch who is a BUYER FOR BORGIN AND BURKES. she is known for being DUPLICITOUS, IRASCIBLE, RECKLESS, SHORT-FUSED, and LACKADAISICAL but also INDEPENDENT, PROTECTIVE, UNSWERVING, VALIANT, and BEGUILING, so that must be why she always reminds me of the song DEVIL LIKE ME BY RAINBOW KITTEN SURPRISE and A FLIRTATIOUS SMILE USED WITH ABANDON; PUNCHING A HOLE IN THE WALL AND COVERING IT WITH A MIRROR; COFFEE SO DARK AND BITTER IT FEELS LIKE PUNISHMENT; HEELS HELD IN YOUR HAND AS YOU WALK BAREFOOT OVER GRAVEL; SLIPPING INTO THE COOL LONELINESS OF YOUR BED AT FOUR AM. i hear she is aligned with THE DEATH EATERS, so be sure to keep an eye on her. { zoe, 22, cst, she/her }

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS:   victoria’s playlist, stats page, & pinterest board CONTENT WARNINGS:    car accidents, death of a spouse / partner, parental manipulation

one. 

nicholas borgin ii was an exceptionally smart young wizard who was unburdened by the war that had ruled his father’s youth. his father was happy for him, in a way; nicholas sr. thought his son was his most shining achievement. it was easy for him to want the best for his beautiful, clever, perfect son. it was easy to be proud that he could do better than be someone else’s follower. it was easy to be happy that he would get to do better than that. 

well, easy in theory. in practice, nothing was easy about nic deciding that he wanted to continue his education abroad once h graduated from hogwarts. there were several fine magical colleges in the united states and nic was eager to branch out from the british wizarding society he’d known all his life. he’d done all the right things up to that point; he attended all the dinners with his parents’ old friends, he’d been sorted into slytherin, made a prefect, earned the respect of all his professors. enough respect that a few of them encouraged he look to further his studies outside of hogwarts’ walls. 

nic had such a good head on his shoulders. he never once insinuated that he wouldn’t look to take over duties at the shop, one day. when he broached the subject of college in america with his parents, he was certain to assure nicholas sr. that his studying spell invention would only help the shop; after all, he said, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could sell certain members of their clientele custom charms and spells? 

it was hard for nicholas to find a reasonable excuse to quash his son’s dream. he had a bad idea about him fucking off to the united states to study, but it was unfounded, his wife assured him  —  nic knew he was the future of the borgin name and had only ever done things that helped the family. this would be no different. 

that was that. nic was a smooth talker before he was anything else; he hadn’t been lying to his parents when he gave his big speech to sell them on the idea of a magical college in america. he really did think that there would be a way to incorporate whatever he learned into the shop’s whole, like, business model. at least, he really did think he was smart enough to find a way to incorporate it. no, nic hadn’t been lying. he was a smooth talker but he rarely lied  —  he just knew how to tell the truth in such a way that it was what other people wanted to hear. 

nic wanted to go to leave the country for a little bit before he had to settle down and become old and serious, the face of the borgin name. he was smart enough that college in the united states was an option, the easiest at his disposal. it was simple as breathing to tell his family that it was what he wanted his first step to look like, when step two was coming home and doing something at borgin & burkes for the betterment of the family business. 

two. 

he hadn’t had any real ulterior motive when he left for the georgia college of magical mechanics. nic just thought he was too  —  too young to set off down the path his family wanted just yet. too young, too smart, too pretty; nic was a smooth talker, sure, and a little bit of a narcissist, but none of that was unfounded. he was a hot commodity on campus, and it took almost no time at all for him to fancy himself in love with two fellow students, and for them to fancy themselves in love with him in return. 

helen beauvais and anthony fontaine had been a package deal almost their whole lives. both the fontaines and the beauvais’ were large families of excellent pedigree with a proclivity towards mapping out their children’s lives. the families drafted up a betrothal agreement as soon as helen and anthony could toddle and they all saw how sweetly the two children played together. 

helen and anthony were, by and large, fine with this. they’d had their whole lives to be fine with it. first they were each other’s best friend and later they fell in love and neither really knew if that was nurture or nature; and they’d never know, so it was easy not to care, not when the perfect lives they’d been handed suited them well enough. they’d wanted to go to college before they got married and their families were fine with that  —   largely because all involved knew they would get married, as soon as they were done with school and ready for the rest of their lives. it was a forgone conclusion.

nic was a surprise to helen and anthony (who had always been a matched set; and never thought somebody else could match them, too), but he was a pleasant one. all three of them were equals and all three of them loved each other, dearly. they attended seminars and galas and winged-horse races together, the trio standing off to the side, untouchable; their peers’ envy was an almost palpable thing. they were the brightest things at the georgia college of magical mechanics. no one else came close. 

they were, of course, such smart and clever and forward-thinking individuals, who cared naught for blood purity. the only reason none of them ever interacted with muggles and muggleborns was obviously because they were so smart and clever and forward thinking that, of course, their circles were a little exclusive. 

nic’s parents weren’t pleased with this dalliance; it was nice that nic, at least, wasn’t sullying himself with people of impure blood, but really. the borgins wouldn’t get any heirs out of this extended diversion. fontaines and the beauvais’ weren’t exactly pleased with this wrench in their plans, either. it didn’t look great that their perfectly matched children had sought out a poly relationship. but they both decided to look the other way as long as the pair of them fulfilled their betrothal. the borgins were a little less forgiving. 

after college, nic stayed in the states  —  that’s where his partners were, and he knew his parents didn’t approve of them. it was the first time nic had ever had to take a stand, but it was a hard choice was fine with making. the shop would wait, or it wouldn’t; his father would cave, or he wouldn’t. nic was just fine with the life he’d landed himself in. 

in a short time the fontaines and beauvais’ warmed to nic, or at least seemed to: if not as their children’s partner then as a person. he’d take it. they knew of the shop and what it had done to supply the dark lord during his time in power; they figured, there were worse families to find themselves loosely allied with. 

three. 

helen and anthony got married and everyone remarked on how lucky they were to have their good friend nicholas so close to them during the celebrations. they bought a house and everyone laughed at how fun it was that they decided to let their close friend nicholas move in, too. less than a year after the wedding, the couple had a child, and everyone noted how sweet it was that their dear friend nicholas doted on the baby girl. 

everybody knew the three of them were together, that little victoria was his as much as she was theirs. everybody knew; but helen and anthony got married and polite society breathed a collective sigh of relief at finally having a legal excuse to pretend nic was nothing more than the pair’s very best friend. the younger people in their set were all quick to assure the three of them that they were happy they were happy; but their parents still made the guest lists. 

the big house they lived in saw two sets of invitations, sometimes; always one for mr. and mrs. fontaine, and another for mr. borgin when his presence was necessary. nic’s parents begged him to come home; he and helen and anthony drafted wills when they were all too young to really think of death, deciding that they were better safe than sorry when it came to their daughter’s future. 

the three of them resigned to the awkward dance they had to do to carry on with their lives in georgia; nic knew that helen and anthony didn’t want to uproot their lives, but they all talked about the possibility of relocating to nic’s wales so he could take over the shop  —  his family, he thought, might be so glad to have him back they forgave his choice of relationship. all of them were tired of being told they weren’t living their lives right, but they had time to figure out what to do with that tiredness.  

sometimes it almost felt like they were accepted; other times it was clear nic was being snubbed. he was just the easiest target for it, of the three of them; he was the only outsider. he was rarely left off society guest lists, or those hosted by their fellow gcmm alums, but the fontaine and beauvais made it clear that he had no real place at important family events. helen and anthony rebelled against this as best they could, by leaving victoria at home with her dad whenever all four of them weren’t explicitly invited. 

the three of them said their goodbyes for the evening before helen and anthony left for one such event, and the next thing nic knew, his partners were dead at the hands of some drunk muggle  —  the flashy car the trio used crushed like a tin can into a tree at the side of the road. 

it hit nic really hard. of course it did; he lost both the loves of his life in one fell swoop. he was still so young. he hadn’t had a war like his father had, to prepare him for the reality of death. 

at their funerals, helen and anthony’s families were all grieving too much to keep up the pretense of politeness he’d always gotten from them before. it was one thing to know that they didn’t approve of his relationship with their children and another to feel truly hated for having been close to them at all. nicholas was, at least, morbidly pleased they’d all thought to leave extensively detailed wills; there was no way for either the fontaine or the beauvais families to leave him out of the funeral preparations like they’d tried to leave him out of so many other things. 

it felt like he’d barely buried them before both families started making thinly veiled threats about finding a way to take victoria from him. nic was mourning, still so deeply hurt and traumatized at losing both of the people he loved, and feared that they could find a way. he packed all the things he couldn’t bear to leave in a rush, and hightailed it out of america in the dead of night, landing in entrance to his family’s home in wales before he could think of another option. his mother hugged him and her granddaughter to her chest the moment she saw them; his father tried as best he could not to say I told you so.

(his best wasn’t that hard. borgins were, at their core, stubborn assholes. nic was too hurt to mind his father’s smug righteousness.)

four. 

victoria had never known helen and anthony, not really; but she felt their impact in every little crevice of her life, like a heavy coating dust that couldn’t be swept away. her grandfather had bit his tongue on his harsher I-told-you-so’s by reminding his son that muggles were ultimately responsible for the death of the people of loved  —  whatever it took to keep him close to his family and never want to leave again. almost immediately after nic had returned with victoria, he took over his father’s duties at borgin & burkes. 

it took almost no coaxing from his father at all for nicholas to wholeheartedly give himself into borgin & burke’s mission statement, to protect the legacy of magical artefacts. nic had always thought himself too smart to fall into the trap of blood purity talk, but grief really changed him. seeing his partners’ families really turn on him fucked him up, and he never got over feeling like he’d nearly lost his daughter. the damage was done; he might have left for america as a freer-spirited borgin, a smooth talker with a devil-may-care attitude, but he returned jaded and wary. 

he was a good, devoted father to little victoria. when she was older, part of her wondered if he hadn’t thought he had to be the best dad to make up for doing the job mostly alone when he’d always expected to have two other parents to help with her. he was protective of his little girl  —  over protective, victoria thought. controlling. from the very start of her life, she was not a person to be controlled; it figured her father was the only person who ever really tried. 

she’d been born with her hands formed into fists. all three of her parents had cooed over this, when she was barely born, but the truth of it was there if any of them had cared to look: she was always ready to swing first

victoria grew up firmly under her father’s thumb. she was his miracle, his darling daughter; he looked at her and saw the ghosts of the loves of his life and wanted, fiercely, for no harm to ever come to her. it grated on victoria in a way that she kept tightly under wraps. she wasn’t ever sure if she was a product of nurture or nature. maybe any child raised by her silver-tongued, clever father would have equal mastery over lies. maybe victoria did, because he held the reigns so tightly she’d had to learn how to pretend to abide by what he wanted for her just to steal a little breathing room. 

her father hadn’t wanted to half-ass his life, not when he saw himself as the only person looking out for his daughter. he’d been fine living amongst whispers for the sake of true love when he was young and careless, but he knew now that he needed stability for his family. not just victoria, either; he needed stability for the shop, for the family legacy. 

he married valentina dolohov within a year of his triumphant return home. valya was a widow herself, looking for a little stability for her and her children now that her true love was gone. she and nic understood each other. they were a perfect match; they knew that if they wed their tragedies would stop being gossip fodder. they could fade peacefully into their adulthood, content that their spouse understood them if they didn’t love them. neither of them put much stock in love, now. 

little victoria was a flower girl; one of valya’s children was the ring bearer. everybody invited gushed about how perfect nic and valya were for each other, raved over how lovely the wedding had been. just like that, it was as if everybody forgot about the years nic had spent in america (and forgotten just how little victoria came to be). out of sight, out of mind. he and his new wife both had things they’d prefer to leave in their pasts.  

five. 

victoria didn’t, like, hate her stepmom, or anything. she’d honestly never understood why they were always the villains in fairy tales. valya might have never tried to be victoria’s mom, but victoria thought that was part of why they worked. her father was parent enough for victoria. she had a good relationship with valya, anyway  —  she might not have been victoria’s mother, but she was the only mother-figure she’d ever really had, unless she counted theo’s mom. victoria thought valya always knew when victoria was lying to her father, but she never told on her. victoria loved her for that alone; she lied to her father a lot. it was nice to have someone around who would keep that secret for her. 

feeling things was always a struggle for victoria. she was glad her stepmom never asked her to love her; that wasn’t the sort of thing victoria could feel just because she was meant to. it was frustrating to try. and she did try when she was younger, often, to feel the things she thought she was meant to. she was just bad at it, and that would never change, and she got so angry when she thought of trying so hard at something so silly. it made her want to find something to hit, or somewhere to run, or something to do. anything to do. 

she just knew that she was so bad with feelings that weren’t  ...  anger, maybe. frustration. it was the softer emotions that confused her when they came until she didn’t know what to do with them. it was easier to pretend she didn’t have them, to try and will them away. she hated feeling soft.

valya always understood that better than nic did. victoria’s father loved her so much; it was smothering. he loved his perfect daughter, the tiny, helpless girl that needed his protection. victoria had never been that girl  —  sometimes she wondered if it was doing both of them more harm than good when she pretended to be that girl for him. it was just that it was easier, so much easier, to let him think what he wanted about her so their relationship never had to be even a little complicated. maybe it was doing them more harm than good, but it was easier, too. victoria loved the easy route too much to let it go. 

when it came time for victoria to go to hogwarts, she was a hatstall. the gross looking thing sat on the head of curls valya had carefully set before victoria’s departure and couldn’t seem to get her. what else was new, right? gryffindor or slytherin, green or red. she was a little overly self concerned but lacking in any real ambition, bored with bullies; angry and prone to acting on that anger, quick to stick with the sides she chose, eleven and already tired of existence. she picked gryffindor just to speed up the whole affair, on the reasoning that gold would look better with her complexion than silver.

she wrote back home to share the news and it was true that no one was really surprised. 

six. 

when her father and valya got married, nic brought victoria to the table and valya brought kids of her own who bore the dolohov name. victoria thought that no one but her grandfather would have really blamed the couple for not wanting to add even more kids into the mix. such a pity that grandfather was always the loudest voice in any crowd; victoria might have been the shortest of all her siblings, but she was far from the youngest. 

by the time some of her younger half-siblings started writing home with news of their own hogwarts sortings, victoria’s grandfather started leaving hints that maybe victoria wasn’t the one who nic should prepare to take over the shop, one day. nic had slowly started to get a more full picture of who his daughter was  —  she still only dropped all pretenses of being nice and sweet when she was away from her father. but still, she loved physical exertion. she excelled on a broom and led the complex games she and her siblings played. she loved winning, but more than that, she adored the way her mind fell silent when her body was being forced past its limits. 

victoria was never happier than when she had bruises on her fists and legs and blood singing in her ears, and it was something her father had noticed. he’d started to think about how useful that competitive spirit would be once she was old enough. 

her grandfather, though, thought that even the most ruthless, business-minded disposition wouldn’t make up for the fact that she didn’t have a drop of borgin blood. how lucky for all of them that she wasn’t business-minded in the slightest. he wanted nic to start looking at his younger kids to take over one day. 

he wasn’t shy about sharing this fact with victoria, either; the two of them got together for tea all the time when victoria was home, so they could play wizard’s chess and discuss how she was doing at school. he told her point blank that he didn’t think she had what it took to take over the shop, and seemed to expect her to be pleased with this news. just think, victoria, he told her, now you can set your sights on  ...  professional quidditch, or something more suited to you. 

which was pretty much the nail in the coffin on whatever half-baked dreams sixteen-year-old victoria had actually had of her life after school. no fucking way was she going to let her grandfather push her out of the way and tell it was for her own good. she knew she was one of the only ones in the family who could ignore how hard he tried to impose his will. he was stubborn, but she could out stubborn him. 

the last thing she wanted was to see him pluck one of her younger siblings out of their life and into whatever mold he wanted them to fill. she’d put her ear to the door during enough of his meetings with her father and stepmom to know that the three of them knew things about the azkaban breaks. there was talk of another war, or something like it, and victoria didn’t especially want to fight but she knew as well as she knew anything that it was better her than any of her siblings. 

she might not have had borgin blood, but she was a borgin through and through. no one else was taking the fall for her. 

five. 

she still wasn’t business-minded, but she figured that she didn’t actually need to be, yet. she spent the rest of her time at school doing what she could to keep her father from trying to groom one of her younger siblings for the job or for the cause. it meant cracking a little bit of the veneer she always wore with him; he never stopped doting on her like she was a sweet, defenseless thing, but she knew that he knew better. valya seemed to be proud of her for stepping up, which made victoria feel conflicted in a way she did not want to examine much, thanks. 

victoria had always dug her feet in at the thought of assigning any of her actions innate morals. victoria dug her feet in at most things, but it was true: she didn’t like thinking that she was doing something because it was the ‘right choice.’ no one could ever convince her to do something just because it was ‘right.’ she sure as hell wasn’t going to start feeling like she was looking out for her siblings out of anything but a selfish sense of protectiveness.

yes, she was aware of the hypocrisy. but she thought she’d never needed looking after, not like they did. she’d been born ready to fight and none of them had that same fire in them, not that she could see. she didn’t especially believe in what she’d be fighting for but victoria didn’t think that mattered half as much as anything else. 

victoria had always been competitive when it came to school  —  she’d never been the one at the very top of her classes, but doing well mattered to her. doing well always mattered to her. it’s what always made teas with her grandfather so pleasant; the two of them were well matched at wizard’s chess and she was never afraid to give him a progress report on her n.e.w.t. studies. in her last years at school, she was even more determined to do well, to show him that she was the right choice  ...  that she was the only choice. 

when she got out of school she dropped quidditch like it had been a hot coal held in her hand too long. she asked valya to take her shopping and completely overhauled her wardrobe until she had more crisp, respectable items of clothing than she knew what to do with. she reported for duty at the shop and greeted every customer with her most sugared smile. it took almost nothing from her to get people to sell borgin & burke’s their priceless magical artefacts. a half hour meeting with victoria and they were ready to give her first dibs on their great aunts’ estate. 

victoria was doing so well for the shop and for her family that she never stopped to wonder if she, like, liked the life she had. that didn’t matter; she wasn’t doing any of this for herself, so what the fuck did it matter if she was happy with it? 

six. 

victoria had always needed to stay in constant motion to feel content. there was this listless, restless feeling under her skin all the time that only seemed to calm when she was working herself to the bone over a goal. her goals during school had been simple. she wanted to do well in her classes, to win quidditch matches, to have fun at parties, and to keep her father from finding out too much about her. her goals now were a little more complex; she wanted to do well at the shop, to make herself indispensable. she wanted to pull her grandfather’s focus from any of her younger siblings. she wanted to keep making valya proud of her without doing anything that made her feel too sick to her stomach. 

victoria thought about moving out, getting her own apartment, but she wasn’t quite ready to leave home yet when there was so much going on. she started letting her father dote on her, just a little, when she got back to their home in wales after a long day. she let him bring her cocoa, or smooth her hair back when she sat going over a seller’s information on the couch. she was more an adult now than she’d ever been when she hated being coddled, but it felt  —  nice, to be coddled, just a little. 

things felt less real when she sat back and let her father ramble about whatever spell he was workshopping at the moment. unreality was soothing, now. victoria at sixteen probably wouldn’t have recognized who victoria was at twenty-one, but she figured she needed to make her peace with that. she had let herself turn into this person for a good reason. 

(a selfish reason, she reminded herself; she wanted an easy life for her siblings because she was selfish.) 

people were dying. victoria knew she was doing what she had to do to keep her siblings out of this fight, as much as she could; but it hurt victoria a little to see that people were dying and know why. she didn’t want to examine why it hurt. 

she joined a muggle boxing gym and spent hours there once her work at the shop was done. she let everyone at home think she was just spending a lot of time getting drinks with old hogwarts friends. really, victoria just needed to punch something until she felt like a person again. she split her knuckles over and over again, and used healing balms and bruise removal paste to hide the evidence. 

part of her wonders if this kind of existence isn’t entirely sustainable; but that kind of introspection is soft, too soft. victoria shoved it out of her head before she could worry herself over it. it’s not anger and it’s not pride and it’s not frustration, and she really didn’t have the time for anything more complicated than those three things. it didn’t matter if it was sustainable, because victoria would sustain it anyway. she had to. 

[flyandfamousblackgirls]

6 Things Intersex Folks Need to Know About How We Perpetuate Anti-Black Racism

1. The Segregation in Our Intersex Movement Is Real

The intersex movement has been mostly white since day one. Consequently, it’s necessary to ask ourselves if we’ve inadvertently created an atmosphere that urges Black intersex people to put aside their Blackness — and the oppression linked to it — in order to focus on our collective goals.

In creating this type of environment, it appears our community hasn’t yet been able to connect the dots between Black and intersex people’s oppression — which Saifa reminded me are both rooted in state violence — and our liberation.

Black intersex folks who’ve lived in isolation and have dealt with segregation in their daily lives shouldn’t have to contend with similar experiences once they’ve finally found, and entered our community.

I’m not talking about highly visible institutionalized segregation like the Jim Crow era when Saifa’s uncle, who was also intersex, was forced to sleep outside on the porch of his hospital after a surgery.

I’m talking about the low-key, harder to detect, segregation.

The kind that just takes for granted that the majority of people in the room will always be white. The type that may have a few Black and Brown faces sprinkled here and there, but on a vanilla frosted cake. Is there a path forward?

Sean Saifa Wall, a Black trans intersex activist and collage artist based in Atlanta, reflected on this question by looking back on his time spent as the former board president of an intersex non-profit. Saifa captured why increasing representation shouldn’t be the endgame.

“I think I made the mistake of thinking we need more people of color… but what does institutionalized white supremacy do? It brings in Black or Brown faces who won’t challenge white supremacy — and that’s how white supremacy perpetuates itself. You don’t need white folks to perpetuate it, you just need folks who are invested in white supremacy.”

When I was younger and mistakenly believing that whiteness was the norm to strive towards, I ended up internalizing racist ideologies and, as a result, never fully connected on a truly deep BFF level with my Black friends. Perhaps our movement, and its longstanding quest for acceptance, has created a similar divide.

The global intersex activist network consists, to my knowledge, of less than only 5 Black intersex activists. One of them is Saifa.

2. One’s Race and Intersex Identity Overlap

Born amidst racist flames that attempted to level his neighborhood, Saifa was brought up whilst his borough, The Bronx, was attempting to rebuild itself.

“When I was younger,” Saifa recounted, “I realized I had a different body. Then, due to interactions with NYPD, I was made to know that I was different in another way as well.”

As he got older, Saifa came out as queer, intersex, and trans to a mother — and a world — who wasn’t always ready or eager to respect his intersecting identities. Regardless, his Blackness, sexuality, and intersex identity were always interwoven.

“I cannot separate my intersex identity from my Black identity,” Saifa said. And he shouldn’t have to.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid our community hasn’t figured out ways yet to allow people to show up as their whole selves.

For instance, on the international level, it’s become a known issue that intersex activists from African countries don’t get similar amounts of representation, or speaking time at gatherings. And nationally, our support group meetings rarely, if ever, have been led by Black intersex folks or had sessions dedicated solely for Black intersex community members to come together.

It’s only in the past few years that single Black folks are sitting on boards, or in staff positions of our organizations. There’s also never been, to my knowledge, any Black clinicians present at our Continuing Medical Education (CME) sessions that happen before our support group conferences each year.

Race, especially as it relates to anti-blackness, feels as though it’s at times an elephant in the room.

For me, this elephant peeped its head out when I realized it had become a tradition for one of our non-Black community members, who I love and cherish dearly, to sing Macy Gray’s “I Try” — in Gray’s uniquely raspy voice — at the annual talent show, which is supposed to provide a fun contrast to the rest of the conference.

The audience, if it’s a diverse year, might have a handful of Black folks. This year, there was only one person. I can’t imagine how isolating that experience might have been for them.

And this bring me back to the story I shared at the beginning, about the person who had Obama on a hit list.

Often, racism perpetuates itself by wearing the mask of a “joke” or “fun,” but racism is never a joke and the mask just presents one more hurdle in calling racism out.

It’s time us non-Black intersex people become more aware of our whiteness problem.

We need to keep having difficult conversations about race and oppression every step of the way.

Most importantly, we need to show up the few Black intersex people we do have in our small community, and check in with them to see if there’s anything else we could be doing to have their back.

We can challenge white supremacy in our movement just by asking Black intersex folks in our community what they need to feel safer in our collective spaces.

For our movement to be successful, it’s imperative that Black intersex folks feels they can participate as whole persons.

3. We’ve All Been Dehumanized

The list of atrocities against people of color, especially Black folks, carried out by the medical industrial complex and other agents includes: “the father of gynecology” using enslaved Black people as surgical research subjects, being disproportionately targeted by the US’s eugenic sterilization program that served as a catalyst for Nazi Germany’s and today’s “population control”policies, and the shackling of pregnant women inmates — who are disproportionately Black — in labor delivering children whom they most likely will be immediately separated from.

Likewise, intersex people have been rendered hermaphrodites and featured in freak shows, gawked at as monsters to at on TV, disproportionately put up for adoption, pumped with artificial hormones, robbed of their reproductive organs and genitalia, selectively aborted, raped, and brutally murdered.

Lynnell, a Black intersex lesbian activist, was born intersex but raised male by a single mother in a low-income household. She grew up in Chicago’s mostly Black, hypersegregated, South Side where her family — unlike mine on the North Side — was forced to deal with the effects of the city’s racist public policy and divestment responsible for the destruction of local economies, public schools and affordable housing.

Hyde Park, a pocket of wealth and whiteness on the South Side and home to the University of Chicago (UofC) Hospital, is where Lynnell’s mother took her as a child for doctor appointments.

Lynnell shared memories of that time stating, “My mom wasn’t given the tools she needed to make informed decisions.” As Lynnell grew older, she also “wasn’t taken seriously at first by [her doctors] either.”

Low-income and single mothers of color, labelled unfit by society, experience discrimination. Lynnell’s mother went to U of C seeking care, not charity, for her child. Seeing a golden opportunity, Lynnell’s doctors manipulated her mother’s financial status and turned the situation into a charity case anyway.

“They told my mom they were doing her a favor because they weren’t charging her.” In the doctor’s mind, they were participating in an equal trade with Lynnell and her mother.

To Lynnell, it was torture. “For eight years, every summer, for at least a month, I was put on different drugs, experimented on, given unnecessary procedures and manipulated.”

Exploitation of marginalized people by the MIC for their gains, especially in teaching environments, has been well-documented. Exploitation specific to Black intersex patients has yet to be researched. Lynnell’s doctors, I imagine, took one look at Lynnell’s mother and decided a poor Black woman wasn’t powerful enough stop what they had in store for Lynnell.

“I don’t know many white people that were used as guinea pigs like me,” Lynnell said.

4. Doctor’s Aren’t the Only People Attempting to Erase ‘Difference’

Intersex people are pretty familiar with secrecy, shame and stigma thanks to the pathologization of our bodies. As such, it’s important we have spaces to process our stories with each other. Yet, it’s important to note that as oppressed people, we are still capable of participating in the oppressing others.

The few times I’ve witnessed our community attempt to break down white supremacy and talk about racism, white intersex people successfully shifted the conversation, almost immediately, back to a conversation that centers them and their experience with intersex oppression.

Spaces where intersex people get together and talk are rare, so it makes sense why someone would want to relate and process, but in doing so, we are inadvertently preventing Black intersex folks in our community from expressing their unique experiences.

Saifa recounted a time when he “was trying to bring up the topics of anti-oppression, racism, etc., in the movement and people lost their damn minds. People were like, ‘we cannot hear it.’”

He also shared, “Anti-black racism showed up when I went to South Carolina on behalf of the MC case [a lawsuit involving the parents of a young Black intersex boy and his doctors] and one of the lawyers was condescending, talking down to me as the only Black person in the room. I was constantly pushing back against his patriarchy and racism.”

He continued, “I feel like people don’t care about issues related to anti-black racism in the intersex community.

“I think there’s some intersex people who really see those intersections, who really are affirming of people of color, but for the large part I feel that the level of anti-black racism awareness ranges from hostility to apathy.”

I asked if people ever seemed to care and he replied, “When funding is involved. That’s when people start to care more. Or, when a group wants some representation of diversity—but I found they wanted a Black face, but weren’t necessarily committed to issues around anti-Black racism.”

As a movement, we can’t only focus on these issues when funding dollars are at stake. That tokenizes Black folks.

Instead, we have to stitch anti-Black racism training, and education around white supremacy, into the fabric of our work together.

Saifa pointed out, “In the world, I’m confronted with anti-Blackness, and it’s par for the course, but it’s particularly more devastating when it’s from intersex people. Why? Because I think, ‘Oh, you understand.’

“Or at least I think they understand, until they say or do things that’s really racist and are unapologetic about their racism.”

5. We Need an Intersectional Analysis to Combat Racist Stereotypes

One of the white people present at Lynnell’s first intersex support group meeting recently told her that she was “afraid” of her at first, “because [Lynnell] had on leather and dark sunglasses.”

I asked Lynnell why she entered that support group meeting dressed in leather, sunglasses, and the rest of her leather daddy alter ego outfit. She responded, “Because I was the only Black intersex person there.”

Lynnell shouldn’t have to feel the need to protect herself like that in a room that was supposed to feel like home, a room where she was supposed to be able to let her guard down amongst people with similar experiences.

Unfortunately, this is the type of thing that can happen when a community doesn’t have a firm commitment to operating with an intersectional lens — one that places its most marginalized folks at the center.

Lynnell needed to protect herself at a support group, and in doing so, made a white person feel afraid, circles back to my main point.

We need to place Black intersex folks and their particular needs, struggles and desires at the front and center of our intersex activism.

If we don’t, we risk ostracizing Black intersex folks, again, within spaces meant to be a reprieve from shame and stigma.

6. Confronting White Supremacy Means Confronting Disembodiment

Disembodiment, or feeling detached from your body, often happens as a coping mechanism in response to intense trauma. Intersex activist, Mani Mitchell, once described it as feeling like a “floating head tugging around a body.”

Saifa, someone I admire for their commitment to somatic healing work, believes that white supremacy is rooted in disembodiment “because you have to be disembodied in order to not allow your self to be impacted by the inequity or suffering of others.”

Regardless, Saifa thinks it’s “imperative that white intersex activists feel their feelings regarding any shame they may have as they interrogate white supremacy and its brutal history.”

“It’s only fair that white intersex activists start to acknowledge, as much as their embodiment can hold, the shameful and disgusting emotions that come up after hearing the bitter truth and realities of Black folks and people of color.”

“Doing this work is difficult,” he acknowledged, “and it can bring up things we’d rather not have to face about ourselves.”

Still, non-Black intersex folks need to “confront those feelings and allow themselves to be impacted, then hopefully they can be motivated to action, and allow that empowerment to impact others.”

In taking Saifa’s advice, we can create positive ripple effects throughout our whole community. Doing the work to steer our movement towards becoming an intersectional, anti-racist, intersex movement is a win-win for everyone involved!

[hobbitkiller]

She-Ra, Supergirl, and Tangled: A Tale of Three Female Relationships: Part 3

*SPOILER WARNING FOR SHE-RA, SUPERGIRL, AND TANGLED: THE SERIES*

Previously on “A Tale of Three Female Relationships” AKA HobbitKiller clearly misses grad school but not enough to find secondary sources for a multi-part tublr. post (or thoroughly proofread):

In Part 2, I discussed the impact narcissistic mother figures, resentment for chosen ones, and repressing emotions has had on three female relationships in three different series: Adora and Catra from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Lena and Kara from Supergirl, and Rapunzel and Cassandra from Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure.

These posts are a deep dive into where these relationships went wrong and will eventually culminate in a discussion of what these relationships say about the portrayal of female characters and female relationships in media.

For today’s installment, I will be covering two subjects: Blond Bulldozers and I Don’t Care (I Ship It). WARNING: This one gets reallllllly long. Like, possibly multiple sittings.

PART VI: BLOND BULLDOZERS

In my first post in this series, I jokingly mentioned that one half in all three of these relationships is a superpowered blonde who saves the world.

There are of course many implications in the fact that, though all three of these shows strive for increased diversity compared to their source material (It is also interesting that these are all shows based on pre-existing franchises), the main character continues to be a fair-skinned blond woman. 

That’s mostly a matter to be discussed another day, but I do find it interesting that all of these relationships feature one blond and one not-blond. Lena and Cassandra have black hair, and Catra is...well...a cat-person. Beyond that, the blond is not only the hero, but is typically depicted as morally superior and more righteous. Kara, AKA Supergirl, was literally declared the “Paragon of Hope” in the latest CW crossover, Crisis on Infinite Earths. That title could just as easily have gone to Rapunzel whose chief characteristics are her optimism, desire to see others achieve their dreams, and belief that everyone gets a second chance no matter their criminal past and exploits (seriously, everyone in Corona--the name of the kingdom unfortunately for right now--gets one total pardon as long as they’re sorry even if the tried to kill multiple people). Adora is a little less cotton-candy that Kara or Rapunzel. She has the same moral righteousness, but actually has more of an edge to her than many of her friends due to her upbringing as a child soldier. Still, all three blondes are meant, for the most part, to be the moral center of their shows.

But, the thing is, when I look at these relationships, I can’t help but think of another popular blonde/not blonde friendship that went wrong:

Ahhh, Wicked, the prototypical female friendship story for so many of us. Wicked aims to take this classic dynamic of the morally pure blond protagonist and their dark-haired frienemy and turn it a bit on its head. Throughout the musical, Glinda is treated as pure, superior, and good because she is flattering and pretty. In reality, Glinda is often selfish and lacks the courage to stand up to people and systems she believes are wrong. Elphaba, on the other hand, is treated like an outcast because of her green skin and social awkwardness. Yet, for most of the musical, she is the one with the moral righteousness. She is labeled “wicked” by those in power for challenging them and standing up to them.

We’ll discuss Wicked more in the finale of this multi-part post.

For now, I’d like to contrast that relationship to the three being analyzed right now. None of these three shows goes as far as Wicked did to undermine this trope of the perfect blond versus the darker brunette. This makes sense as none of the three properties is seeking to deconstruct their source material or turn it on its head in the way Wicked aims to do so for the Wizard of Oz (the movie more than anything else). They seek to update and diversify certain aspects to be sure (someone heard loud and clear the criticism that there are no people of color in Tangled), but not to challenge them.

That being said, each show does try to layer in flaws in their blond protagonists approach to relationships. These flaws tend to be more subtle than those of the people around them, perhaps to protect said blondes from becoming too unlikeable, but they are clearly there.

In the last post, I talked a lot about the resentment of the non-blondes in these relationships and how that helped lead to the relationships falling apart. Those characters are also much more the aggressors in said relationships and are much more set on taking down the other party.

However, the blondes in each relationship are not without blame for it falling apart.

In the previous post, I discussed how being friends of a so-called “chosen one” or “golden child” can breed resentment. I also mentioned that raising someone as a “golden child” is its own form of abuse. It creates a level of unrealistic expectations to always be perfect and responsible. It can be the same for a “chosen one.”

Adora, Kara, and Rapunzel all feel a tremendous amount of responsibility as the “saviors” of their respective worlds. This manifests itself in a need to constantly “fix” everyone else’s problems. Adora frequently describes her need to fix whatever goes wrong in the Rebellion. Kara feels it’s her job to fix things so much that she contacted her former boss’s estranged son behind her back to try to reconnect them. Rapunzel frequently becomes involved in the personal lives of her friends for the sake of fixing their problems.

To an extent, this is a good quality. All three of our blond saviors have good hearts and don’t want to see anyone else suffer, partially because all of them have suffered their own childhood traumas from being raised as a child soldier to witnessing one’s entire planet and species destroyed to being held prisoner for 18 years.

However, as the title of this section suggests, all three of these characters tend to take a bulldozer approach to their involvement with their loved ones’ lives. This creates tension in many of their relationships, not just those discussed in these posts. Adora’s attempts to help her friend Glimmer after Glimmer becomes queen come off as controlling and as though Adora doesn’t respect Glimmer’s position of authority. Kara, in addition to the incident with her boss’s son, had also tried to control the life of another alien (and eventual boyfriend), Mon El as well as did things like break into her sister’s apartment when she was sad. Rapunzel promises to fix everyone’s problems, which leads to friends feeling betrayed when she can’t follow through. She also frequently intrudes in Cassandra’s life and plans.

One of the most threatening things for people like Catra, Lena, or Cassandra is to feel as though they do not have control over their lives. When you already have trust issues, feeling like someone else is trying to control you can feel like you’re being trapped. Control is particularly important to Lena. In many ways, she has the same feelings of responsibility as Kara. Like Kara, Lena, having been raised by one of the most powerful and influential families on the planet, feels a sense of responsibility to be a world leader. She feels that even more keenly in light of the villainous actions of her mother and brother--that she has to restore honor to the family name. As discussed in the previous post, this feeling in Lena manifests itself in her actions towards her friends through buying them things or trying to solve problems for them such as buying Kara’s and James’s place of work, Catco, to save it from being purchased by a scumbag.

This need to take back control of her life and legacy, to me, is why Lena reacts so drastically to discovering that Kara is Supergirl. Being mad at Kara for keeping secrets is, frankly, hypocritical on several counts. Not only does Lena keep many, many secrets from Kara throughout the show, but she is also fine with the fact that Alex, Kara’s sister, never told Lena explicitly that she was an agent of the Department of Extranormal Operations (DEO). Of course, the reason why Lena wasn’t mad at Alex is because Lena had already known who Alex was, thus giving her power and control in that relationship. Finding out that her friend had successfully hidden her identity for years and had been influencing events without Lena’s knowledge took away the control Lena felt she had over that relationship.

Cassandra also feels a keen lack of control over her life and her relationship with Rapunzel due to the fact that Rapunzel is both her monarch and direct employer. Cassandra serves Rapunzel and that is the first avenue through which they formed a relationship. Early in their relationship, Cassandra resented Rapunzel’s attempts to become friends and said the chance of a Lady in Waiting and a princess becoming friends was a million to one. Rapunzel, by nature of being “irrepressible” (as her friends call her), manages to worm her way into Cassandra’s heart to the point that Cassandra almost forgets that she and Rapunzel are not equals.

What I find interesting about both Cassandra and Lena is that they both, in some ways, considered themselves the protectors of their naive blond friends. While it’s true that Cassandra always knew her station was below Rapunzel, part of her job early on was teaching Rapunzel how to be a member of the court--what to do, when to curtsy, who was who, etc. In fact, Rapunzel had so little exposure to the outside world, Cass was partly responsibly for teaching her how to interact socially in general. There’s also the added factor that Cassandra is 4 years older than Rapunzel, which can seem like a lot at their ages. Lena, as previously discussed, saw herself as a major figure in shaping the future of the world. She went out of her way to help Kara by buying Catco and tried to protect Kara if they were ever in physical danger together.

Both of these characters suffered from an abrupt challenge to the relationship roles they previously thought they had. Cassandra in this scene and Lena when Lex tells her that Kara is Supergirl.

It’s interesting that, in that scene, Lex emphasizes the idea that Lena has been a fool. (And, fair enough, I’m pretty sure everyone who’s ever watched the show found it hard to believe that Lena never once realized her best friend was Supergirl. I mean...really, glasses?) But this idea, that she had been a fool plays right into Lena’s fear of losing control. It’s the idea that someone else was pulling strings while she was oblivious that taps right into her deepest insecurities.

Catra’s issues with feeling controlled by Adora are mostly revealed in the episode discussed last post called “Promise.” They come up again in the third season finale when Adora tries to convince Catra to come with her and leave a world that is crumbling out of existence and Catra declares that she will never  go with Adora, and that she won’t “let you win” and “would rather see the whole world end (which it’s doing BTW) than let that happen.” Catra believes the way to get control back from Adora is to “win” at any cost. 

In the end, this idea of “winning” becomes part of all three relationships. It’s no longer about working together or “us against the world” for the not-blondes who have felt crushed under the weight of their friends. Now it’s about achieving their goals in spite of the collateral damage.

And the most frustrating part is that the blondes are largely oblivious to the fact that they make their friends feel this way or that they are overstepping boundaries. They just think they’re doing the right thing because they’re “taking care of” or “fixing” the problem. They’re so concerned with taking care of or protecting their friends, that they don’t realize how patronizing and condescending that can feel.

So, even as these relationship turn so sour, why are so many people not only rooting for the friendship to return, but for our ladies to go the next level beyond?

PART VII: I DON’T CARE (I SHIP IT)

I sometimes wonder how the greatest point of contention, the biggest source of toxicity, and the most exhausting part of fandom became shipping. I have seen more nastiness among fans and toward creators and actors about shipping than just about anything else.

Shipping has a long history in fandom, though that term is relatively recent. People have been writing fan fiction about Kirk and Spock getting together since the show was on and fan fiction was written and shared at either in-person gatherings or through semi-underground fanzines. 

And, trust me, I’ve been in the trenches of a ship war. Back when Avatar: The Last Airbender was airing, I was a hardcore Zutara shipper. And, to be more honest, it made me a jerk. Part of that is just because I was a teenager at the time, and teenagers don’t always realize the potential impacts of their actions due to brain chemistry etc, etc. But still, the intensity with which I argued that my ship either would or should become canon when the creators of the show clearly preferred the other relationship embarrasses me when I look back at it.

These days, fandom shipping has gotten even more complicated and contentious.

Back when those women (and it was mostly women) were typing their Kirk/Spock fan fiction and mailing it to other fans, they knew Kirk and Spock would never actually get together on the show. That was the case for the majority of fandoms until very recently--that there was no expectations of actual canon lgbtq representation. People could claim there was deliberate subtext or coding, but very few, if any people, expected shows to actually have openly lgbtq characters.

Then, it started to actually happen. Not just in a, “the actor said they saw their character as gay” or “the creators said they coded that character as gay” way. Characters actually started being lgbt on screen in ways that weren’t demeaning or stereotypes. Major characters, too.

For me, a big moment that gave rise to the hopes of many that their lgbt ships might actually have a shot at being confirmed as canon was, funnily enough, the sequel show to Avatar: TLA, The Legend of Korra.

The above was the closest the couple got to an on-screen intimate moment, and some fans didn’t believe it was romantic until it was later confirmed by the show creators. Nickelodeon was only willing to go so far, after all. The followup comics, however, are much more explicit with the relationship and the two share multiple kisses and intimate moments.

Many fans argue that Korrasami (as the ship between Korra and Asami is called) was too subtle to be considered real representation. But a wave could certainly be felt throughout the world of animation afterword. Shows became even more bold about confirming lgbt characters or at least became less subtle in their coding. 

And suddenly, the idea that a main character’s finale pairing might be anything other than straight became a real possibility and, in some cases, an expectation.

In addition to the growing visibility of lgbt relationships in media, another change was slowly taking place within fandom. 

For much of modern fandom, the most popular ships have been male/male (mlm). Back when I was getting into fan fiction (because I love reminding people that I’m old), this was called “slash.” Slash was exclusively a term for mlm relationships. Same-sex relationships between women (wlw) were labeled “fem-slash,” and were much more rare.

Multiple people have discussed theories for why mlm was, and continues to be in many cases, the most popular type of ship. Some believe it has to do with the prevalence of straight women in fandom who might fetishize mlm relationships. While I have no doubt that’s partly true, I believe the other common argument has a great deal of merit: there were more mlm ships because male characters were more interesting and more prevalent. 

Star Trek: The Original Series had only two main female characters and neither of them was given close to the emotional depth as Spock or Kirk. Lord of the Rings, which was one of the most popular pieces of media on which to write fanfic when I was younger, has so few women the movies had to add in a boat load of new scenes for Arwen.

Recently, though, not only have more shows invested in writing dynamic, interesting female characters, but they have included multiple diverse female characters with relationships with each other and not just the men in the shows. 

So, not only do more people ship wlw ships, but more people expect to actually see those ships represented in their media. Never before has a wlw ship becoming “endgame” seemed more possible.

In many ways this is fantastic. More representation being not only more possible but more expected is absolutely necessary for our media to progress and grow. This has, however, lead to some growing tensions in communities where shipping has, in some ways, become its own form of activism, which means that there is not only people’s personal feelings and preferences for ships on the line, but people who feel that fighting for their ship to become canon is a proxy battle for their own acceptance. 

All three of these wlw ships mean a lot to the people who ship them, and all three have been met with the desire, and occasionally demand, of canon validation as well as a heady mess of coding, accusations of queer baiting, and the lingering question of which, if any, relationships might get the same, and hopefully more explicit, validation that Korrasami had.

Let’s start this deep dive into these relationships as ships with the one that has, in canon, already been resolved.

Yep, that’s definitely a Disney twirl going on there.

One of the first points often made when the validity of a mlm or wlw ship is questioned is that, if you say an m/f couple do the same thing, no one would question that it was romantic. This makes it interesting, and sets off the shipping alarm for anyone who’s a fan of wlw ships when Tangled: The Series goes out of its way to not only give Cass and Rapunzel (ship name: Cassunzel) romantic moments like the above “Disney twirl,” but also directly parallels relationship moments that occurred between Rapunzel and her canon boyfriend/future husband Eugene (AKA Flynn Rider).

Look familiar? It’s almost a shot-for-shot remake of Rapunzel and Eugene meeting for the first time. In this episode, Cassandra accidentally wipes Rapunzel’s memory to the point where Rapunzel thinks she’s still in the tower. It plays out, in part, as “What if Cassandra had found her instead of Eugene?”--something every shipper had doubtless already asked themselves at least once.

Another major moment of paralleling between the two relationships is the endings of both the movie and the series. 

Eugene dies in the end of Tangled only to be resurrected by Rapunzel’s love. Cassandra dies in the series finale of Tangled: The Series, only to be resurrected by Rapunzel’s love. And it is love, that much is very clear.

The only debate really, is whether it’s romantic or platonic love. 

Cassandra and Rapunzel never get official validation in the show or by the executive producers. The most confirmation fans get outside of the text of the show are comments made by some people who work on the show saying that they deliberately coded Cassandra as gay as they could whenever they could.

Yet, for the most part, the creators of this show are largely given a pass by Cassunzel shippers for not making their ship canon. Most understand that, as a Disney property, many hands are tied, particularly given that, due the previous establishment both form the end of Tangled and from the short Tangled Ever After that Rapunzel and Eugene do get married. The reaction seems to largely be that Disney and the show got about as close to confirming it as they could without doing so.

So let’s transition from the show that met, and in some ways, passed expectations to one that has set expectations super high: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. 

She-Ra is perhaps one of the most lgbtqia coded shows out there right now. The first season even ends with them saving the day with a rainbow.

Here is show-runner and executive producer Noelle Stevenson on queerness in her life and She-Ra:

Yet, despite these deliberate attempts to show representation and to challenge heteronormative ideas, the show has yet to show any of its primary characters or even second tier characters in queer romantic relationships. We have seen a few parents, one pair on in a photo, and their is one married couple of women, but none of these characters are prominently featured on the show.

She-Ra has set expectations incredibly high and has yet to deliver.

Even so, part of what sets She-Ra apart from the other two shows discussed here is that there are multiple queer shipping opportunities. Catra and Adora (ship name Catradora) are one of, if not the, most popular ships, but both Catra and Adora have other female characters with which they could be just as easily shipped.

On the one hand, the pressure is pretty high to establish at least one major queer ship before the end of the show. On the other hand, the pressure is much less that the ship specifically be Catradora.

The near-certainty that there will be one or more wlw ships confirmed before the end of She-Ra means, to me, that Catradora has the greatest chance to become canon.

So, there’s Cassunzel that never really had much of a chance for canon confirmation and Catradora, which has a better chance of becoming canon, but also has less pressure to become THE ship. Where does that leave Lena and Kara?

Anyone who has been in the Supergirl fandom knows that it can feel like a battleground. While all fandoms tend to have their issues, Supergirl’s can be so contentions that it, frankly, makes watching the show less fun. This doesn’t all fall on one groups shoulders, I’ve seen nastiness from many sides over different issues. However, the biggest point of contention tends to center around the potential ship of Lena and Kara (Supercorp). 

Supercorp, as a ship, is completely valid. Kara has way more chemistry with Lena than she has had with any of her male love interests, and two of those guys were played by people whom actress Melissa Benoist was actually in relationships with (though the first was an abusive dirtbag, so lack of chemistry probably makes sense there). Lena once thanked Kara by filling her entire office with flowers. There are cuddles, and Kara’s unwavering (until recently) faith in Lena’s goodness. It’s hard not to ship them.

The issue in the fandom, is not so much that people ship Supercorp (though there are increasingly more people who have issues with the ship itself, which is something I’ll address about all three of these ships in the next post) but the vehemence with which some who ship Supercorp approach whether it will be endgame.

In a way, the frustration is understandable. Supergirl is, in many ways, a show that has made a point of including LGBTQ representation. The second season featured a multiple episode story arc of Supergirl’s adoptive sister Alex Danvers (I will stan her until the end of time) realizing she was a lesbian, coming out, and eventually starting a relationship with another woman. Supergirl also made headlines for featuring the first live-action trans superhero on tv with the introduction of Dreamer in Season 4. The trans actress who plays Dreamer, Nicole Maines, has even had input on how the character is represented including a recent episode that discussed the often ignored violence targeting trans people, particularly trans women of color.

She-Ra and Supergirl have different approaches to representation. She-Ra takes place in a fantasy world and appears to take the approach that nothing about identity or sexuality should be assumed about anyone. There is no heteronormativity in Etheria, yet no major characters are in non-m/f relationships. Supergirl on the other hand, is set in a world more similar to ours which has heteronormativity, homophobia, and transphobia, which leads to the show making episodes and story-arcs specifically about those topics while also somewhat constraining the show. There are arguments to be made about the worth of both approaches and both can serve a purpose for viewers, particularly young viewers, who are searching for characters like them in media.

So, why are the people behind Supergirl so often accused of homophobia?

I mentioned in the Blond Bulldozers section that it is a bit telling that all three shows being discussed here attempt to create diversity while having the whitest, most mainstream character as the lead. There are many who would argue that the true values of the shows are represented by their main characters, and that the rest are window dressing to try to make the show look good as a form of tokenism. The point being that shows won’t really show a commitment to diversity until the main characters are just as diverse as the rest of the cast.

These are all valid arguments. 

A less valid argument is the claim that Supercorp is being deliberately baited by the creators of the show. Queer baiting is a term that seems to have a lot of subjectivity tied up with it. The general idea is that it is when creators purposefully use queer coding or other means to inspire queer shipping of characters as a means to draw in the queer community to their show but then never delivering on that potential.

In some ways, all three of these shows could be accused of queer baiting. The direct parallels in between Cassandra/Rapunzel and Eugene/Rapunzel were no accident. The coding and “anything can happen” while very little does on She-Ra is much the same. And Supergirl is trying to center a large part of the show around the relationship between Kara and Lena, a relationship they know many of the fans see as romantic.

Yet, to me, Supergirl, is actually a less guilty party, at least when it comes to Supercorp. One can, again, argue that the canon LGBT ships and characters exist to pander and draw in those audiences, but Supercorp, I believe, genuinely came out of a place of wanting Kara to have a strong female relationship with someone other than her sister, mother, or boss, and I’m sure this falling-out was in the plans fairly early on.

Has the show completely shut down the idea? No, I don’t think they would be foolish enough to do that. But I don’t believe that it rises to the level of baiting. Shows like Sherlock or movies like Pitch Perfect 3 are, to me, much more egregious examples.

Still, as I said, I can understand the frustration of Supercorp shippers, I just feel like the level of anger directed by some not just at the creatives who make the show but at other fans as well is not fully justified. (And yes, I know “not all Supercorps” and I also know other fans have been jerks. Sanvers shippers who are being asses about Kelly are just as bad.) And who knows? I’d never say never to the ship maybe becoming canon eventually after Kara and Lena work out their issues.

That being said, all three of these ships, regardless of canon status, are incredibly popular, and I want to examine more of what that is and the reason some people are wary of these ships and the potential messages they send. This leads me to our topics for our next installment:

MY WIFE IS A BITCH AND I LIKE HER SO MUCH

and

POISON PARADISE

I will try to make the next one shorter. Also, sorry for typos, I did not give this a thorough read-through. I used all my brain power just writing it.

[aro-neir-o]

Carnival of Aros: New January 2020 Roundup

You all no-doubt saw my frantic posting and reblogging of the submissions on Friday (apologies; I thought I had spread those out, but no, I did not queue things correctly).

Thank you to everyone who submitted something and also to everyone who interacted with the submissions. I very much enjoyed hosting this carnival and everyone had something interesting to say. I myself did not have the spoons to write my own piece but a lot of my thoughts and feelings were echoed in others’ pieces.

I am following the format the December Carnival of Aros host used for the roundup. There is a Short List which is an amalgamation of links to all the submissions and a Long List with commentary about what each submission covered in terms of themes or topic. The Long List is under the Read More link.

SHORT LIST

Isaac, Part One and Part Two

Briar

Annie

Maximus

Ace of Arrows

Izel

Laura

Le herbe

Sennkestra

Scoop

LONG LIST

The first post Isaac wrote covers how learning the difference between asexuality and aromanticism opened up many doors for thinking about orientation, especially how a-spec orientations interact with non-a-spec orientation. Additionally, coining the term “squish” helped explain a lot of the non-normative platonic feelings aromanticism brought with it, and so new conceptualizations were able to be shared with the whole community. The second post talks about how discovering aromanticism interacted with discovering gender for Isaac. Orientation models that work with aromanticism can be applied to gender as well, so that one’s relationship to their sex can be considered separately from one’s relationship to gender.

“I didn’t identify as aromantic immediately, and as asexual even later, but splitting what was socially tangled opened new doors to me. [...] Sharing the terminology of “squish” with other people aware of aromanticism has allowed me to express clearly my feelings and even to establish a queerplatonic relationship, though I didn’t know of the terminology yet. [...] I could realize my gender identity because I split biological sex and psychosocial gender even for identity, where they are usually grouped together.”

In their post, Briar talks about how re-closeting themself has made them approach aspects of their identity differently. They mention how the prioritization of the identities they have in their life seems to be different from most aro bloggers, and how this makes them feel distanced from the community. How many issues framed as aro-specific issues are also being taken up by alloromantic people was also something they touch upon. They also share how a poem written by their friend resonated with aro experiences, giving an in-depth analysis of each stanza.

“I’m not trying to get some sort of reassurance that I can include myself in the aro community with this. It’s more that I’ve realized that not every group or community is made up of 200% committed Ride Or Die people, even if said group is considered young and relatively smaller than more established groups. [...] When I was first trying to figure out if I was somewhere under the aro umbrella at all, I came up with a term that I felt encompassed my specific experience. It kinda, sorta has overlap with a few other terms that I’ve seen a few times (definitely not often), but I’ve honestly never felt like sharing that term would actually accomplish anything in the aro community.”

Annie submitted a beautiful piece of art that expresses feelings of happiness upon discovering the aromantic identity. How the vocabulary and conceptualizations of the aro community helped Annie craft a new self can be seen in the colourful and prideful painting. Giving back to the community and sharing these feelings of happiness and gratitude really comes through in the piece.

“I have always been kinda creative, and I really wanted do something for the aro community and for myself. I discovered I was aro a year ago, and it made me so happy to have this new label that was almost made for me.”

Maximus wrote faer post on how discovering aromanticism can help one understand romance better. Fae talks about faer experiences with compulsory romance and heteronormativity growing up, and how understanding aromanticism helped with stepping back and becoming less judgemental towards others who experience romantic attraction. Furthermore, how romance can look very different for different people opened up a whole new understanding of love for Maximus.

“Being able to situate myself in the aro identity has given me a new, and frankly better, way to address the emotions and trends of my peers. Honestly, spending years of my life assuming people were being dramatic on purpose as a way of gaining or asserting social status was not the healthiest. It hasn't been until recently that I've been able to move away from the mindset that romance is a horrible thing. It is simply a strong emotion that I don't experience. The assumption that I did experience it was always, and continues to be, the worst part.”

The post Ace of Arrows made centers on positivity and acceptance of diversity. Channeling a mutually understood frustration into positive action is one such theme covered in the post. Ace of Arrows also discusses how aromanticism as an individual preference of orientation is deeply linked to narratives normalized in Western culture - narratives that are, historically speaking, new. The post ends with some book recommendations that align with Ace of Arrows’ own journey learning about alternative relationship models.

“I often think about how “romance” and the idea of “marrying for love” are actually very recent concepts that started gaining traction in the West some time around the middle of the 20th century, and yet we act as if this is how all humans everywhere have always conducted their relationships. [...] So it follows that there have also always been people who have conducted their individual relationships in a manner that is more closely aligned to the relationships of aromantic people today than the normalised romantic narrative of society.”

Izel submitted a poem, titled “To all the aros.” The poem opens with a call to other aros who share Izel’s experiences of frustrations and rejection, and it reads as a uniting anthem against these negative feelings. Acceptance of one’s own identity and of the diversity of aromantic experiences shine through as major takeaways from this piece.

“I thought that I needed a fairytail love story in my life in order to be happy. … … But I don’t need that.Aros don’t need that, don’t we? We don’t feel romantic attraction, and that’s ok.And some of us feel some romantic attraction, and that’s ok, too. Sometimes, romance isn’t for everyone.”

In her post, Laura discusses how new doesn’t always equate with excitement and optimism. Things that are new can just as often cause us fear and nervousness. Laura discusses how Tumblr has contributed to aro activism and growth, in both positive and negative ways. Finally, Laura calls for the aro community to continue reinventing itself and continue “becoming new,” to shed the fears that come with change, and to commit to real inclusion.

“I want to see the aro community grow. I want to see it create new resources, explore issues that have never been explored before, and build a foundation for a vibrant, inclusive community that will continue well into the future. [...] I’ve been doing my best to push the aro community in new directions for the better part of two years now. However, every time I or anyone else tries something new, there are people who are afraid.” 

Herbe de provence wrote a post on how discovering aromanticism, at first, triggered feelings of denial, but then set off a chain reaction of self-reflection that ended up explaining of lot of childhood feelings. Learning about aromanticism gave Le herbe new confidence to be accepting. How accepting and curious LGBTQ+ friends increased Le herbe’s pride in the aromantic identity is also an important theme touched on in the post.

“In truth, when I learned that I was aromantic I earned so much more than just a word to describe my experience for I learned to accept a part of myself I never knew I was reppresing. [...] Many, many months after first reading the word « aromantic » this is still new for me and I sometime have to remind myself that *it is alright to be myself*. That *it is alright to love like I want*, Like I *do*.” 

Sennkestra wrote a post combining the themes of “new” and “allyship.” Being a good ally means being consistently accepting, patient, and an active listener, but it can also mean learning and growing with new ways of being a better ally every so often. Sennkestra shares anecdotes as examples of above-and-beyond allyship and also encourages others to share their own, so that allies to aros everywhere can add new and diverse actions to their repertoire. The little things can count a lot.

“Even though many of these actions are objectively somewhat small things, they show that these people have remembered my identities, taken the time to learn a bit about it, and have had the presence of mind to actively take the chance to support us when they saw an opening. And cumulatively, they all add up to a lot of support that’s made it much easier to live the lifestyle I want to live without anxiety, and given me the backing I need to continue to do active work even with audiences who might not be so supportive.”

In her post, Scoop talks about how discovering the aro community brought her new understandings and connections with people that she was missing, but it also made connecting with non-aros that much harder. Scoop also describes her struggles choosing between non-SAM and alloaro labels - both of which resonate with her but are considered completely separate microcommunities. Finally, while Scoop expresses about her excitement with involving herself in new types of activism, she also expresses her fear about being outed in these situations. What’s new isn’t always without great risk.

“One of my friends will say, every now and then, 'romance isn’t all bad' to me and I find myself taken aback every time. I know it isn’t all bad? Does she think I do? Is it bc I criticise the system? But in reality I want people to find the romance they desire. I just simply think that they deserve it in a way that is much kinder and more considerate than they often receive it. And give it. I've gotten really good at speaking aro and sometimes I'm going to need to translate that language. [...] ”