#it's like it all just died. i am no longer even a writer
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flowerpotmage · 1 year ago
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how i feel every time i open my google docs to try and work on anything at all and it just Won't Happen
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nyxshadowhawk · 5 months ago
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A Retrospective on Harry Potter
Why did I like it in the first place? What about it worked? Where do I go from here?
I have decided to give up Harry Potter.
J.K. Rowling’s reputation now stinks to high heaven. At this point, she is quite indefensible. And even if that weren’t the case, she is not someone that I would want to associate with anyway. Meanwhile, the internet has not only turned against her, but against Harry Potter itself. An innocent question on Reddit, about which Hogwarts Houses the ATLA characters would be in, got downvoted to oblivion. Innumerable Tumblr threads insist that fantasy fans should get into literally anything else (suggestions include Discworld, Earthsea, The Wheel of Time, and Percy Jackson). And now that Harry Potter is no longer a sacred cow, there has been a recent slew of video essays that rip it to shreds, attacking it for its poor worldbuilding, unoriginality, and the problematic ideas baked into the original books (like the whole SPEW thing), etc. Those criticisms always existed, but now they’re getting thrown into the limelight.
It pains me to see such an ignoble downfall of Harry Potter’s reputation. If Rowling had just kept her damn mouth shut, Harry Potter would have aged gracefully, becoming a beloved children’s classic. I'd still plan to introduce it to my own kids one day (after Rowling dies and the dust settles). It’s not surprising that not all aspects of it have aged well, since it’s been more than twenty years since its original publishing date, and everything starts to show its age after that long. I acknowledge that most of the criticisms of the series that I’ve seen lately are valid, and I’ve read plenty of better books. And yet, when I return to the books themselves, even with the knowledge of who JKR really is inside my head, I still really enjoy reading them! There’s still a lot about them that I think works!
None of the other things I’ve read have had as collossal of an impact upon my identity, my values, and my own writing as Harry Potter. It’s hard to move on from it, not just because it’s something I enjoy, but because I have to literally extract my identity from it. I don’t know who I’d be without Harry Potter. I don’t know what my work would look like without Harry Potter. I don’t know how to carry it with me as just another piece of media that I like, as opposed to a filter for who I am as a person. So, with all that in mind, I have to ask myself why I liked Harry Potter so much in the first place. If I’m going to move on from it, then I have to be able to define and isolate the things about it that I want to keep with me. Something about it obviously worked, on a massive scale. So what was it?
It’s not the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is objectively quite terrible, especially in comparison to that of other fantasy writers who knew what they were doing. At best, it’s inconsistent and poorly thought-out, and at worst it’s insensitive or even racist. Is it the characters? The characters are, in my opinion, one of the stronger parts of the story. But I felt very called-out by one of the many online commentators, who said that anyone who identifies with Harry is too cowardly to write self-insert fic. (I do not remember who said it or even which site it was on, but I distinctly remember the phrase, “Reject Harry Potter, embrace Y/N.”) The reason why people get so invested in Harry Potter’s characters is because they’re easy to project upon, and it’s possible that my love of Harry comes more from over a decade’s worth of projection than anything else. The incessant arguments over characters like Snape, Dumbledore, and James Potter ultimately stem from the fact that these characters do not always come across the way Rowling wanted them to. As for the writing itself, it’s decent, but not spectacular. Harry Potter is something of a sandbox world, with less substance than it appears to have and a crapton of missed opportunities, making it ripe for fanfic. For more than ten years, I’ve been doing precisely that — using Harry Potter as a jumping-off point to fill in the gaps and develop my own ideas, some of which became my original projects.
So what does Harry Potter actually have that sets it apart? Why are people so desperate to be part of Harry Potter’s world if the worldbuilding is bad? What, specifically, is so compelling about it? I think that there’s one answer, one thing that is at the center of Potter-mania, and that has been the underlying drive of my love of it for the past decade and a half: the vibe.
Harry Potter’s vibe is immaculate.
You know what I mean, right? It’s not actually a product of any specific trope, but rather a series of aesthetic elements: The wizarding school in a grand castle, with its pointed windows and torches and suits of armor, ghosts and talking portraits and moving staircases, its Great Hall with floating candles and a ceiling that looks like the night sky, its hundreds of magically-concealed secret doorways. Dumbledore’s Office, behind the gryphon statue, with armillary spheres in every single shot. Deliberate archaisms that evoke the Middle Ages without going as far as a Ren Faire: characters wearing heavy robes, writing with quills and ink on parchment instead of paper, drinking from goblets, decorating with tapestries. Owls, cats, toads. Cauldrons simmering in a dungeon laboratory. Shelves piled with dusty tomes, scrolls, glass vials, crystal balls, hourglasses. Magical candy shaped like insects and amphibians. A library with a restricted section. A forbidden forest full of unicorns and werewolves. That is the Vibe.
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There are five armillary spheres just in this shot. They are unequivocally the most Wizard of tabletop decor.
There’s more to it than just the aesthetic, though. The vibe is present in something that writers call soft worldbuilding.
There’s a phrase that writers use to describe magic systems, coined by Brandon Sanderson: hard magic and soft magic. Sanderson’s first law of magic is, “An author’s ability to solve problems with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.” A hard magic system has clearly-defined rules — you know where magic comes from, how it works and under which conditions, how the characters can use it, and what its limitations are. Examples of really good hard magic systems include Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist. If the audience doesn’t understand the conditions under which magic can work, then using magic to get out of any kind of scrape risks feeling like the writer pulled something out of their ass. It begs the question, “Well, if they could do that, then why didn’t they do that before?”
You may come away from that thinking that having clearly-defined rules is always better worldbuilding than not having them, but this isn’t the case. Soft magic isn’t fully explained to the audience, but that doesn’t matter, because it isn’t trying to solve problems — its purpose is to be evocative. Soft magic enhances the atmosphere of a world by creating a sense of wonder. If your everyman protagonist is constantly running into cool magical shit that they don’t understand, then the world feels like it teems with magic, magic that is greater and more powerful than they know, leaving lots of secrets to uncover. Harry Potter, at least in the early books, excels at this. The soft magic in Harry Potter is what got me hooked, and I think it’s what a lot of other people liked about it, too.
The essence of soft magic is best summed up by this scene in the fourth film, in which Harry enters the Weasleys’ tiny tent at the Quidditch World Cup, only to find that it’s much bigger on the inside. His reaction is to smile and say, “I love magic.”
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That’s it. That’s the essence of it. You don’t need to know the exact spell that makes the tent bigger on the inside. You don’t need to know how Dumbledore can make the food appear on the table with a flick of a wand, or how he can make a bunch of poofy sleeping bags appear with another flick. You don’t need to know how and why the portraits or wizard cards move. You don’t need to know how wizards can appear and disappear on a whim, or what the Deluminator is, or where the Sword of Gryffindor came from. You don’t need to know how the Room of Requirement works. Knowing these things defeats the purpose. It kills the vibe, that vibe being that there is a large and wondrous magical world around you that will always have more to discover.
One of the best “soft magic” moments in the books comes early in Philosopher’s Stone, when Harry is trying to navigate Hogwarts for the first time:
There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could walk. —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 8
Many of these details don’t come back later in the series, which is a shame, because this one paragraph is super evocative! It establishes Hogwarts as an inherently magical place, in which the very architecture doesn’t conform to normal rules. Hogwarts seems like it would be exciting to explore (assuming you weren’t late for class), and it gets even better when you learn about all the secret rooms and passages. The games capitalized on this by building all the secret rooms behind bookcases, mirrors, illusory walls, etc. into the game world, and rewarding you for finding them. The utter fascination that produces is hard to overstate.
Another one of the most evocative moments in the first book is when Harry sees Diagon Alley for the first time, after passing through the magically sealed brick wall (the mechanics of which, again, are never explained). This is your first proper glimpse at the wizarding world and what it has to offer:
Harry wished he had about eight more eyes. He turned his head in every direction as they walked up the street, trying to look at everything at once: the shops, the things outside them, the people doing their shopping. A plump woman outside an Apothecary was shaking her head as they passed, saying, “Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they're mad....” A low, soft hooting came from a dark shop with a sign saying Eeylops Owl Emporium — Tawny, Screech, Barn, Brown, and Snowy. Several boys of about Harry's age had their noses pressed against a window with broomsticks in it. "Look," Harry heard one of them say, "the new Nimbus Two Thousand — fastest ever —" There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels' eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon.... —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 5
What works so well here is the magical weirdness of wizardishness juxtaposed against normalcy. Eeylops Owl Emporium is just a pet shop to wizards. A woman makes a very mundane complaint about the price of goods, but the goods happen to be dragon liver. Broomsticks are treated like cars. All of these small moments contribute to the feeling of the wizarding world being alive, inhabited, and also magical. It gets you to ask the question of what your life would be like if you were a wizard. What do wizards wear? What do they eat? What do they haggle over and complain about? What do they do for fun?
In Book 3, Harry enjoys Diagon Alley for a few weeks when he suddenly has free time, and we get to experience the wizarding world in a state of “normalcy,” when he isn’t trying to save the world. He gets free ice creams from Florean Fortescue, gazes longingly at the Firebolt, and engages with delightfully weird people. He’s a wizard, living a (briefly) normal wizard life among other wizards in wizard-land. And that is fun. It’s so fun, that people want that experience for themselves, enough for there to be several theme parks and other immersive experiences dedicated to recreating the world of Harry Potter.
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One of the greatest things about Universal was its phenomenal attention to detail. You can hear Moaning Myrtle’s voice in the women’s bathroom, and only the women’s bathroom. The walls of the Three Broomsticks have shadows of a broom sweeping by itself and an owl flying projected against the wall, so convincingly that you’ll do a double take when you see it. Knockturn Alley is down a little secret tunnel off of the main street, and that’s where you have to go to buy Dark Arts-themed stuff. It’s really well done.
Another thing that contributes to the vibe, in my opinion, is that the wizarding world is slightly macabre. They eat candy shaped like frogs, flies, mice, and so forth, and they have gross-tasting jellybeans. In the film’s version of the Diagon Alley sequence above, there’s a random shot of a pet bat available for purchase. In the third film, when Harry is practicing the Patronus Charm with Lupin, the candles are shaped like human spines. In the first book, this is Petunia’s description of Lily’s behavior after she became a witch:
Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that-that school, and came home every holiday with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats. I was the only one who saw her for what she was — a freak! —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 4
I remember reading this for the first time, and it just kind of made intuitive sense to me. I suppose it fits into the “eye of newt and toe of frog” association between magical people and gross things, but somehow it works. Unfortunately, this is retconned later with the knowledge that wizards can’t use magic outside school, but before that limitation gets imposed, the idea of Lily amusing herself by turning teacups into rats seems like an inherently witchy thing to do.
That association between magic and the macabre shows up elsewhere, as well. In The Owl House, Luz’s interest in gross things is one of the things that marks her as a “weirdo” in the real world. When she goes to the magical world of the Boiling Isles, weird and gross stuff is absolutely everywhere. That world’s vibe leans more towards the macabre than the whimsical, but it works because you sort of expect the gross stuff to exist alongside the concept of witches, and that they would be an intrinsic part of the world they inhabit. You don’t question it, because it’s part of the vibe.
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(The Owl House is one of the few things I’ve encountered that has a similar vibe to Harry Potter, but it’s still not the same vibe. In fact, The Owl House outright mocks the expectation that magical worlds be whimsical, and directly mocks Harry Potter more than once. The overall vibe is much closer to Gravity Falls.)
The Harry Potter films utilize a lot of similar soft worldbuilding with the background details, especially in the early films that were still brightly-colored and whimsical. For example, the scene in Flourish and Blotts in the second film has impossibly-stacked piles of books and old-timey looking signs describing their subjects, which include things like “Celestial Studies” and “Unicorns.” When Harry arrives in the Burrow in the same film, one of the first things he sees is dishes washing themselves and knitting needles working by themselves, taking completely mundane things and instantly establishing them as magical. In that Patronus scene with Harry and Lupin, the spine-candles and a bunch of random orbs (and the obligatory giant armillary sphere) float around in the background. One small detail that I personally appreciate is the designs on the walls above the teacher’s table in the Great Hall, which are from an alchemical manuscript called the Ripley Scroll:
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It’s all these little things that add up to produce The Vibe.
Obviously, much of the vibe is expressed very well in John Williams’ score for the first three Harry Potter films. The mystical minor key of the main theme, the tinkly glockenspiel, the strings, the rising and falling notes that mimic the fluttering of an owl, the flight of a broomstick, or the waving of a wand. That initial shot of the castle across the lake as the orchestra swells, as the children arrive at their wizarding school:
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If you grew up with Harry Potter, just looking at this image gives you The Vibe. The nostalgia hit is definitely part of it, but The Vibe was already there, back when you were a child and you didn’t have nostalgia yet.
In my opinion, only Williams’ score captures this vibe — the later films, though their scores are very good, do not. But the soundtrack of the first two video games, by Jeremy Soule (the same person who did Skyrim) absolutely nails it. This, right here, is Harry Potter’s vibe, condensed and distilled:
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This is why I feel invalidated by the common advice “just read another book.” I have read other books. I’ve read plenty of other books, many of which are wonderfully written and have left an impact on me. But there’s still only one Harry Potter. To date, there’s only other book that has filled me with a similarly intense longing for a fictional place, and that is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. That book deliberately prioritized atmosphere over everything else in the story, and actually lampshades this in-universe. The Night Circus has a plot and it has characters, but it’s not about its plot or characters. It’s about the setting and its atmosphere. It swallows you up and transports you to a fictional place that is so evocative and so magical that you just have to be part of it or you’ll die. And even then, The Night Circus has a different kind of vibe from Harry Potter. In this particular capacity, there’s nothing else like Harry Potter.
The thing is, I don’t think Rowling was being as deliberate as Erin Morgenstern. (In fact, given many of Rowling’s recent statements, I question how many of her creative choices were deliberated at all.) She was throwing random magical stuff into the background without thinking too hard about it, which works when you’re writing a kids’ story, but stops working when you try to age it up. Actually, scratch that — soft worldbuilding is definitely not just for kids! The Lord of the Rings has a soft magic system, for crying out loud, and Tolkien is the original archmage of worldbuilding. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that prioritizing atmosphere over meticulousness is bad worldbuilding. That is a valid way to worldbuild! Not everything needs to be clearly explained, not everything needs to make sense. The problem is that Harry Potter doesn’t balance it well. Certain things do have to be explained in order for the magic to play an active role in the story (and the setting of a magic school lends itself to that kind of explanation), but no rules are ever established for the kinds of magic that need rules. When you begin thinking about the rules, you’re no longer just enjoying the magic for what it is. At worst, you begin running up against the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
It wasn’t actually the “aging up” of the story that did it in, per se, but rather, the introduction of realism. The early books were heavily stylized, and the later books were less so. A heavily stylized story can more easily maintain the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. That’s why, for example, you don’t ask why the characters are singing in a musical — you just sort of accept the story’s outlandish internal logic, and the inherent melodrama of it doesn’t take you out of the story. Stylized stories are more concerned with being emotionally consistent over being logically consistent. The later Harry Potter books changed their emotional tone, but without changing the worldbuilding style to compensate.
In addition to the more mature themes and darker tone, Harry Potter introduced more realism as it went, but Rowling did not have the worldbuilding chops to pull this off. There’s the basic magic system stuff: When you begin thinking about it too hard, something like a Time-Turner stops being a fun magical device, and starts threatening to break the entire story. Then there’s the characters: Dumbledore leaving Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep in the first book is an age-old fairy tale trope that goes unquestioned, but with the introduction of realism in the later books, it suddenly becomes abandonment of a child to an abusive family. The exaggerated stereotypes of characters like the Dursleys become tone-deaf. The fun school rivalry of the House system is suddenly lacking in nuance. And then there’s the shift in tone: The wizarding world that we were introduced to as a marvellous place is revealed to be dystopian. You start thinking about how impractical things like owl messengers are, you start wondering if Slytherin is being unjustly punished, the bad history appears glaringly obvious, the quaint archaisms become dangerously regressive. Oh, and the grand feasts are made through slave labor! The wizarding world suddenly feels small and backward instead of grand and marvellous. J.K. Rowling’s bigotry throws it all into an even harsher light.
This is why I’ve always preferred the early books and films to the later ones. There’s a lot of things I like about the later ones, but they’re not as stylized — they don’t have The Vibe. Thinking about things too hard is just a necessary condition of adulthood, but it’s still possible to tell a dark, mature story that is highly stylized. I really think JKR could have better pulled off that shift if she was a more competent worldbuilder. But it is painfully obvious that she did not think things through, and probably didn’t understand why she had to. In her defense, she did not know that her story would end up being one of the most scrutinized of all time. As it stands, her strength in worldbuilding was in the softer, smaller, deliberately unexplained moments of magic that were there just to provide atmosphere. And there were less and less of those as the books went along.
Pretty much all the Harry Potter-related content released since the last film — including Cursed Child, Fantastic Beasts, Hogwarts Mystery, Hogwarts Legacy, Magic Awakened, and that short-lived Pokemon Go thing — have been unsuccessful attempts at recreating The Vibe. In fact, the only piece of supplemental Potter content that I think had that Vibe down pat was the original Pottermore, back when it was more of an interactive game. And of course that got axed. That was right around the time things started going downhill.
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Some of the art from Pottermore’s original Sorting quiz.
So what now? Well, that’s the question.
I think I can safely say that The Vibe was the reason I liked Harry Potter. It’s the thing I still like the most about it. I’ve spent years chasing it, like an elusive Patronus through a dark wood. If I can capture and distill that Vibe, and use drops of it in my own work, then perhaps I won’t need Harry Potter anymore.
I'm gonna write the story that I wish Harry Potter was, and when I'm a famous author, I won't become a bigot. I'll see you on the other side.
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juniperhillpatient · 3 months ago
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I have talked about this a lot before but it’s on my mind & also it’s something that really should be discussed more in Buffy fandom -
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People are constantly talking about how Spike defies all the rules Buffy was taught about demons & vampires & rightfully so. A vampire falling in love with a slayer & fighting for his soul for her is such a romantic notion & I do love it but the nuance of Spike’s arc is even more interesting than that! He does love Buffy but not only that he befriends the Scoobies too. He brings flowers for Joyce after she dies. He helps prove that Tara is not a demon when her family tries to gaslight her & isolate her. He becomes a pseudo big brother to Dawn.
And yet none of that is even what I’m here to talk about! Spike IS a hero & he does have a long spanning redemption arc before the soul (& we’re NOT here to talk about Seeing Red right now, as usual that topic is too expansive & requires its own post) that should be acknowledged & his character is rightfully praised but he is NOT the only exception to vampires having nuance & it drives me crazy that we act like he is. The Judge isn’t just talking to Spike when he says this:
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“You TWO.” He’s talking about Drusilla too! He says that they share affection & jealousy. That Angelus in his total sociopathic lack of human emotion is the odd one here.
Then you have things like this -
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Conversations with Dead People has Buffy sharing a very long & deep conversation with an old acquaintance turned vampire. And it’s far from the only example in universe of a vampire retaining some sense of camaraderie with people from their life!
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That’s right this entire rant has been a lead up to talk about my best girly Harmony Kendall. You’ve fallen for my ruse if you’ve read this far muahaha! Admittedly Harmony’s strongest moments are mostly unfortunately on Angel but even in season four of Buffy when she dates Spike she is clearly intended at times to be sympathetic. Season 4 is also interesting because we see a lot interactions between various gangs of vampires like Harmony’s so-called minions & even Sundays gang where they’re very much evil but also sharing in living (existing?) space & acting like bickering roommates or siblings. Like creatures with bonds & personalities & intricacies.
The point I’m trying to make is that the show never truly wants to grapple with the existence of Spike in all his nuance but it’s also not just about him! In general there is so much to grapple with in the idea that vampires can change & be redeemed & I’m not saying I’m anti scary evil vampires I’m just saying the universe gave us these hints of nuance & then the characters never grappled with it & that’s lame. For Buffy killing things that have a shot at redemption however small would be a major emotional blow if she ever addressed it! Especially in her season 5 “am I just a killer 🥺” arc. Let’s deal with the implications!
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Let’s deal with Xander’s trauma about killing Jessie & just how much it would/should hurt for him to see Spike increasingly choose good & work with the Scoobies. I would LOVE to know Xander’s reaction to Harmony’s arc on Angel or Cordelia befriending her & letting her go ina world where the writing acknowledges that he drove a stake through his best friends heart!
It’s just that the writers accidentally complicated their own lore & then totally refused to ever let their characters address what the cracks in the stories they tell themselves mean. Giles says that a vampire is no longer the person but instead the thing that killed them. What’s scarier: the idea that your loved one was killed & something wears their face like a mask OR much more insane (to me) the idea that your loved one came back very wrong but it’s still them? Your brother eats people now but he still remembers how you like your eggs & can quote every episode of the cartoon you watched as kids. Your mom murdered that woman from the PTA who always talked too much in cold blood but she still remembers the recipe for your favorite pancakes. The show wanted scary vampires but it got so caught up in never addressing the infinitely more complex & scarier vampires it accidentally created & sticking to the more simplistic initial idea that it did both the characters & lore very dirty. And I’ll never shut up about it!!!
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theragethatisdesire · 1 year ago
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much ado about nothing chapter 7 - plug!eren x reader - 18+!!!
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DISCLAIMER: this post contains MATURE CONTENT that is intended only for those over 18. minors and ageless blogs, please do not read below the cut.
okay so i guess the responses i got on my "i have writer's block wahhh" post worked because GUESS WHAT I FINISHED THIS MORNING. this chapter!!! i have been aching to share this (even when it was half-done), i literally cannot wait any longer. this is an eren pov chapter so you guys already know it's going to be fun. lots going on, and please don't hate me for the end, i promise there's a master plan in place!!! i hope you guys enjoy :-)
specific cws: smut, rough sex, use of names (both endearing and derogatory so take that as you will), drinking, swearing, i want to give eren a giant hug
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“Love sought is good; but given unsought, is better.” - Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (Act III, Scene 1)
Eren has no excuse for any of it. No excuse for stepping in, for throwing Floch against the bar. He knows you, knows you have enough experience with awful men to know how to handle yourself. He just couldn’t help himself.
And now he’s gone and acted out again without thinking. The cold winter air sobers him up, brings Eren back to himself, and when he looks down at you, all cute and furious with him, the heat in Eren’s veins dies. A pregnant pause stretches between you both, you with your arms crossed and glaring up at him, and Eren, surely with hearts in his eyes, looking down at you, something apologetic beginning to write its way into his features.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
Well, so much for that. The venom in your voice reignites Eren’s temper, fans the flames back into a full-blown inferno.
“My problem?” Eren growls, stepping closer to you. “What the fuck is your problem? I was just getting that prick out of your face. I’d think I deserve a thank you more than anything.”
“It wasn’t your place,” you huff.
“My place?” Eren nearly shouts, exasperated. “You’re the one who wanted to be friends so badly, was I supposed to just sit back and watch while he drooled all over you? Give me a fucking break.”
“That’s not– ugh, you’re really fucking frustrating, you know that Eren?”
It’s like watching all the ghosts of his past jump out at him through your teeth; Eren flinches, feels his fury rushing in his ears like a tidal wave.
“I’m–? Fine, fine, yeah, I’m the frustrating one. Definitely not you, throwing a goddamn temper tantrum over the stupidest shit imaginable, makes perfect sense. Really putting that smart little head to use, aren’t you?”
“Oh? ‘My girl’?” As soon as the words hit him, plunging through his chest like daggers, Eren’s blood runs cold. So you had caught his little slip-up. “What the fuck was that, then?”
Eren stutters, words caught in his throat at the worst possible moment. “Y-you know, like my girl, like you’re my friend or whatever.”
“Uh-huh,” you eye him disbelievingly, “you may as well have hiked your leg up and pissed on me in front of him. Am I supposed to be your fucking property or something because we had sex? Is that it?”
“What? No, I–” you’re faster than him, cutting him off.
“Don’t you already have your hands full with your ex?”
That crosses a line, pushes your fight into an entirely new territory. Eren’s eyes narrow. “Are you really bringing up Breeze right now? Like she…Jesus, like she even fucking matters?”
He watches the way you flinch when he says her name, the way your eyes widen, something he hadn’t expected out of you after with your little snide comments today. Interesting.
“She doesn’t matter to me, but I know she matters to you. As your friend, I’m just letting you know it sounds like a bad idea.”
“What’s a bad idea?”
“Getting back together with her,” you say, like it should be obvious.
It hits Eren like a truck; so that’s what’s gotten into you? You think he’s getting back together with Breeze, as if you didn’t text your ex that you were “totally in love with” on that godforsaken night at Paradise? Eren can still hear the slur of your words in that maddeningly confusing voicemail.
“Even if I was getting back with Breeze,” Eren snorts at the very idea, “which I’m not–”
“Oh yeah?” you counter, stepping forward to nearly touch your chin to his chest with how severely your head’s tilted up at him, “never took you for a liar, Eren.”
“A liar? When did I fucking–”
“Sasha saw you two at 104 the other day. You’re not fucking slick, you know.” Eren hates that tone in your voice, smug and wounded all at once. He wants to tear his own hair out.
“Oh, so you just know everything, don’t you?” Eren’s voice is shaking under his efforts to keep it at a low volume, keep you with him outside of your little bar and just make you listen to him. He watches your posture change ever so slightly, a shoulder turning towards him. “I was telling her to leave me the fuck alone.”
“Over coffee?” Your voice is still clipped, snarky. “Sure, Eren.”
Eren tries to keep himself in line, but his temper gets the better of him yet again, shooting out sharp and lethal. “Isn’t it a little hypocritical of you to avoid me over that, when it’s really you that’s getting back with your ex?”
Your eyes shoot open, and you spin on your heel to fully face him. “What?”
“You think I didn’t listen to your little voicemail?” Eren seethes, the full-bodied ugliness of his anger warping his face into a scowl. You don’t deserve the brunt of his temper, he knows you don’t, but he’s failing at every turn to reign himself in.
“You can’t throw that in my fucking face, I don’t even remember it,” you cut him off, eyes narrowed into little slits.
Eren freezes in place. The world around him seems to slow; the only thing tethering him to this plane is the way you’re looking up at him, furious and beautiful in the buzzing neons of Scout’s. He knew you’d been drunk, but not that drunk.
Hey, Eren– fuck, Stor, leave me alone! I’m just gonna talk to him really fast! Sorry, Historia’s all over me because I did something bad. I– I texted my ex, Luke. I never told you about him because he’s like, the worst, you’d hate him. But the funny thing is, I don’t even think I care? Maybe I do because I really was like, totally in love with him. Maybe he’ll text me back and we’ll fall in love again. But…I don’t know, Eren. I think about you all the time. I think I…I think I like you. Not like a friend, more than that. Wait, fuck, can I delete this? Just…I don’t know. Call me tomorrow or something. I want to talk about it before I can go down the black hole of Luke all over again. I know it’s not what you expected, and maybe you don’t feel the same, but…maybe we can just– shit, Historia, don’t hang up the–!
“Whatever I said was bullshit, I didn’t mean a word of it. I’m not getting back with my ex, or whatever else I came up with while I was blacked out.”
Your present-tense voice, affirmative and clear, snaps him out of his daze. I didn’t mean it. Every word of that voicemail that Eren knows so well, has basically memorized after listening to it day in and day out, trying to analyze every little drunken intonation of your voice– it was bullshit. Eren steels his jaw, musters up all the willpower he can dredge up in his body.
“You didn’t mean it,” his voice sounds alien as it leaves his mouth, distant.
“Yeah, exactly,” you’re mean, you’re so mean, not even stopping to acknowledge the sinkhole ripping open in Eren’s chest, “so before you rip me a new one, make sure that you’re not thinking about where you’d rather be right now.”
So you’re not just mean, you’re oblivious, it seems. For some reason, even through the shattering, crushing feeling erupting beneath Eren’s hoodie, it infuriates him. You just don’t see it, don’t see him. You didn’t mean a word you’d said to him in that damned voicemail, so he can’t tell you necessarily. It crosses his mind that maybe he can show you; the last dying ember of Eren’s rational line of thought sparks and spits at the idea in protest, but eventually chokes out, slowly dying in the tidal wave of emotion that takes him over.
“Oh, I don’t have anywhere else I’d rather be,” Eren's voice starts low and venomous, but it escalates with each passing word, “trust me, I showed up just aching to get into it with you. Just dying to have you rip me apart for something that I didn’t even fucking do!”
Not even a lie, honestly.
“You’re such an– ugh!” You shriek, digging the heels of your hands into your eyes.
“A what? Say it.”
“An asshole!”
“Is that what I am?” Eren’s backing you up against the bricks, making good use of his height to tower over you. Some sick part of him relishes in the way that, while your eyes remain blazing furiously enough to send a weaker man to his knees, your height difference forces you to cower under him. “An asshole?”
“Yeah,” you counter, glaring up at him defiantly, “you’re a fucking asshole, Eren.”
His proximity to you is making him dizzy and a little unhinged, and through the drinks and his anger and the mere inches between your heaving chests, Eren feels his blood start to run hot in an entirely different way. The leash he holds on his own temper, his own throat-closing desire, is dragging along the floor as he backs you fully against the wall, and Eren’s too wound up to bring himself to care. 
“That’s not what you were calling me when I had my head between your legs, now is it?”
That shakes you, makes your jaw drop a little. Eren’s vaguely aware of your fingers twitching and clenching at your side, inwardly braces himself for a slap to the face. “Well, you weren’t acting like an asshole then.” 
Eren smirks, leans into his own cruelty. “What, you jealous that you haven’t been getting all of my attention? Is that what’s got you acting all mean?”
“Cut it out, Eren.” Your eyes are telling him you’re still mad at him, furious even, but Eren doesn’t miss the way the rise and fall of your chest grows ever so slightly more frantic, the way your tongue darts out anxiously to wet your lips.
“Or what?” Eren leans down, boxing you in with one arm on either side of your head.
“I– we’re not doing this.”
“Doing what?” He widens his eyes innocently. “What am I doing?”
“You know exactly what you’re doing,” you hiss, but if you ask Eren, it sounds an awful lot like a moan is lodged in your throat, like your words are lacking the conviction that you’re trying to muster. He pushes himself in closer to you, noses mere inches apart, a wicked grin splitting his face.
“Is it working?”
Eren’s lips meet yours at the same moment that his hand whips out to catch your arm where you’re swinging it up to slap him. A broken little whimper leaves your mouth, spills into his, as your arm slackens in his grip. Eren feels your free hand fist into the hair at the nape of his neck, lets a groan fly out into nonexistent space between your lips. He’s been driving himself crazy thinking about this moment, the next time he’d get to feel your mouth on his again if it ever even happened, what you taste like, the little noises you make. The moment that’s been keeping him up at night is finally here, inflating his wounded ego like a balloon, and it feels fucking good.
You bite a little too hard into his bottom lip, the tangy, copper taste of Eren’s blood leaking into the kiss, making it clear that this doesn’t mean everything has settled between you both, but for the time being, Eren doesn’t care. All he cares about is the way your plush thighs feel wrapped around his waist, how easily he can scoop you up and pin you against the wall, the little moan that slips from your lips when he presses the length of his body entirely into you.
He doesn’t take his time, doesn’t savor the moment like he’ll surely wish he did tomorrow; Eren devours you, running a hand up your bare leg and under the hem of your skirt, grabbing a handful of your ass, squeezing at your hips.
“Bet you’re wet under this short little skirt, aren’t you?” Eren huffs into your mouth, sucking on your tongue.
“Fuck you,” you spit, squeezing your thighs tighter around his hips.
“Is that what you want?” Eren whispers, dizzy and drunker on you than the three Jameson shots he’d knocked back at the bar.
“I–”
“Been thinking about it?” Eren can’t stop himself, trying desperately to keep his lips on yours through the spill of words from his mouth. “Maybe that’s why you’ve been so mean to me, grinding all up on me in that club, teasing me, then running off. Just wanted a little love, didn’t you?”
“That depends,” you pant, moving your face to kiss up his neck, leave little nips in your wake. Eren groans deep in his chest, pushing against you even more insistently.
“On?”
“How bad you really want it,” you bite into his earlobe, steal another shaky groan from him.
Eren’s not a submissive guy, not by any means, but the thrill your words send running through his veins just about makes him drop you.
“Want me to beg?” Eren growls, shoving into you and biting deep at the junction of your neck and shoulder. “I’d only ever beg for you, baby.”
“Is that what you’re going to do? Beg for me when you’ve got another girl waiting for you?” Your anger has fizzled into a bitter sarcasm that goes straight between Eren’s legs and knocks him right in the ego all at once, tongue tracing the shell of his ear.
“Fuck– you’re my girl, my favorite girl, did you forget?” Eren grabs your face, forces your head back against the brick so you can look at him, eyes blown wide with lust and glossed over, mouth open in a desperate pant. “Told you the first time, you’re the best I’ve ever had. Didn’t think I was just fucking around, did you? It’s just you, only you.”
“Could have fooled me,” you dig your teeth into the thumb Eren’s worked between your lips, making him suck in a sharp ouch between his lips, “sure don’t feel like your favorite girl.”
“Sounds like I need to fix that, then,” Eren lets a hand trail down between the little space he’s leaned back to create between your bodies, finds his way to the damp fabric of your panties, “oh, who’s the liar now?”
“Don’t– fuck,” your eyes roll back in your head when he starts pressing into where he knows your clit is, rubbing insistent circles over the cloth just to elicit that reaction from you, rip the control right out of your pretty little hands. Eren chuckles down at you, dark and dangerous, amused at how quickly you melt for him.
“Thought we weren’t doing this?” He parrots your words from earlier, nosing at your neck. “Thought I was an asshole?”
“You are,” you grit out through a clenched jaw, but Eren notices the little forward push of your hips, notices that you’re trying to hold yourself back from rubbing yourself into his palm.
“And that gets you wet,” Eren counters, grinding the heel of his palm up into your clit and wrenching a little gasp from you, “bet you liked watching me in there, bet you would have loved watching me kick his ass for you.”
Eren pauses, waits to hear if you’ve got anything to say for yourself, but you’re already half-gone, rolling your hips against the steady rocking of his hand and whining in your throat. He smiles– god, you really are his favorite.
“Say it,” Eren growls into your skin, slipping a finger past the fabric of your panties to slide it into you, not the whole thing, but just a knuckle, just enough to make you shudder in his arms, “tell me you need me, want to hear you say what this perfect pussy’s already telling me. C’mon baby.”
Just as your mouth opens, either to answer him or snark at him, Eren can’t be sure, a cat-call from across the street snaps both of you out of your haze, your eyes flying wide. You shove at him, wriggling in his arms until Eren mercifully drops you to your feet, reaches down to right your rumpled little skirt for you. You glower up at him, look him up and down, and just when Eren’s about to bullshit some excuse to run home, fuck into his hand with your name on his lips, you surprise him.
“I mean, after all that, the least you can do is walk me home.”
The necessary steps of Eren closing your tabs, walking into the whipping winter wind, walking through the streets silently with Eren side-eyeing you as you storm along, arms crossed petulantly, commence. They go by in a blur; Eren’s not even sure he should be doing this right now with the lack of blood flow to his head. You don’t make eye contact, and if Eren had any more conscious thought at the moment, he would think you’re already regretting this before it happens, but he can’t bring himself to care, not yet.
He’ll kick himself for this as soon as the sun rises, but for now? The only thing he’s worried about lies wet and pulsing for him under the hem of your skirt.
The moment you’ve gotten the door open, Eren’s got you shoved up against the wall again, letting his hands find their way under your skirt and grabbing at your ass with a quiet groan.
“Historia?” he questions, nipping at your earlobe just because he can.
“Ymir’s,” you pant, pushing him off of you and practically storming to your bedroom. It hits Eren that for all the time you’ve spent together, he’s never actually seen your bedroom. He thinks that maybe he’ll do a little investigating of his own once he’s fucked all the fight out of you.
Safely behind the door of your bedroom, Eren wastes no time in yanking his shirt over his head, reaching for yours only to find that you’ve already rid yourself of the cute little sweater he had been admiring from down the bar back at Scout’s. You’ve got a pretty lace number underneath, one that Eren almost doesn’t want to take from you, but he reaches behind you and unclips it. Eren plans on taking and taking and taking everything you’ll give him, just for tonight, because the sinking feeling in his chest is telling him to do it while he can; a girl like you never sticks around a guy like him for long, and he’s already done himself the favor of ruining most of the potential your relationship had anyway.
“Eren– oh,” the broken whimper that leaves your lips snaps him out of his thoughts, reminds him that he’s got one of your breasts in his palm and the other nipple between his teeth. Eren wraps his free hand around your back, pressing his splayed fingers between your shoulder blades to arch you closer to him until he’s so full of you he can hardly breathe.
He’s going to keep taking from you, take until he drowns in it.
“Feel good? Missed me?” Eren’s words come out a little garbled around the flesh in his mouth, but you get the message all the same, managing a sarcastic eye roll through your arousal. You decline to answer him, but Eren can read your body, so he digs his teeth in harshly to the little swell of fat on the underside of your breast, sucks a bruise in to cut that eye roll of yours right in half. Eren smirks when your eyes flutter closed, a reluctant hand coming up to thread through his hair. “Thought so.”
“Can you just–fuck–get on with it?”
“Uh-uh,” Eren straightens back to his full height, backs you onto the bed until your knees catch and you fall onto your back, glaring up at him defiantly. “Gotta get you ready for me, right? I’m sure you remember.”
He eats up the doubt that flickers across your face, the memory of the first time you’d taken him all over your expression. Eren reaches beneath your skirt, pulls your panties down your legs delicately, rubs his hands along your thigh-high stockings with an appreciative swear under his breath.
“There’s a zipper on the back,” you wiggle a bit to try and reach the fasten of your skirt, but Eren slaps a firm hand onto your hip, pins you back onto the bed.
“Think I’m letting you take this off? After you were teasing me with it all night?” Eren says, stretching his body over yours, taking full advantage of his size to cage you in.
“I wasn’t teasing,” you huff, “these are just my clothes.”
“Anything you wear is teasing,” Eren brings his fingers to your core, swipes through the wetness gathered there, “especially when you look like this.”
You open your mouth to retort, but your jaw goes slack when Eren rolls over your clit softly, rubbing little circles into it at the perfect speed, the perfect pressure. He’s not interested in teasing you too much, he wants to feel you break on him as many times as you’ll grant him the pleasure. Once your little gasps have begun to swell into quiet moans, Eren ventures down, pushes his middle finger into you, all the way to the hitch. Eren answers your widened eyes and your little gasp with a sharp hiss between his teeth, marveling at the way your walls cling to his finger, sucking him in when he slides out and back in again.
“Just like the first time,” Eren murmurs, leaning down to take your collarbone between his teeth, “are you always this tight?”
“I– I don’t– more, please.”
Eren smiles around the mouthful of your skin he has, feeling his heart swell at how cute and airy your words come out, how clear it is to him, even if it’s only for this precious moment, that you’re just as desperate for him as he is for you. He grants your wish, working a second finger in beside the first, curling them cruelly against that spot in your walls that he knows gets your heart racing.
“Eren,” you keen, arching off the bed and tossing your head to the side.
“So tight baby,” Eren says in awe, pulling his head to watch as your cunt leaves little white streaks on his fingers, “so warm, can’t fucking wait to get my cock in you.”
“P-please,” you sputter, hooded eyes sparkling at the mention of it. Eren thinks wildly that he might be falling in love with the little unshed tears that prick your eyes when you start to get close, the little broken pleas you give him.
“You gotta cum for me first.” Eren works his fingers faster, can feel the fluttering of your cunt around his fingers. He realizes how worked up he must have gotten you outside of Scout’s, how you’re so wet it’s dripping down your soft skin onto the sheets, and you haven’t even cum yet.
“I’m– I just want you to fuck me,” you say, whiny and pitiful.
“I will,” Eren coos, “missed this messy little cunt so much, I promise I’ll fuck you, just give me one first. Gotta make it fit, right?”
“Mhm,” you whimper, hips bucking up towards him. Eren watches, drinks the sight of you in: skirt pulled up around your waist, legs spread wide open for him, slick spread all over the inside of your thighs, bottom lip tucked so tightly between your teeth he worries you might draw blood. He commits the sight to memory, his pretty little student all strung out and begging for his cock, begging him to make you cum. If he remembers right, if he curls his fingers just a little more harshly–
“Eren–” your head shoots up suddenly, eyes flying wide open, fists tightening in the sheets.
“Right there?” Eren grins, sharp and half-crazed, raising his eyebrows at the reaction the new angle has brought out of you.
“Right– oh, oh my god, I–”
“Give it to me,” Eren urges, working his fingers even faster, “come on, baby, show me how much you missed me.”
With a cry, you twist and thrash under him, cumming almost violently. Eren drinks it down, leans down to press a kiss against your open mouth, pins your body to the bed so you can’t run from the vicious waves of pleasure wracking your body. 
“There’s my girl,” he mutters, licking against your tongue, “such a good, good girl for me.”
When your orgasm finally starts to ebb, Eren doesn’t let up, not entirely; he keeps his fingers working in a slow drag through your walls, appreciating the way your muscles twitch and the way you feebly shove at his wrist.
“Eren…” you trail off weakly, fingers finally locking harshly around his hand and pulling him from you, “too much.”
“Thought you wanted me to ‘get on with it’?” Eren snorts, finally obliging your earlier request and sliding your skirt over your legs, tracing his fingers up and down your thighs once you’re fully bare and beautiful underneath him, taking mental snapshots of every inch of smooth skin that he’s lucky enough to have under his touch.
“I do,” you say, eyeing him with a glint of annoyance in your eye. It just makes Eren smile bigger; you’re so cute when you’re mad.
“Whatever you want, baby,” Eren says, situating his hands under your arms and practically throwing you up against the pillows at the head of your bed. You widen your legs so he can crawl in between them, kissing his way up your torso in a self-indulgent, tender way.
“Do we, um…” you start to question him, and Eren’s close enough to your face now that he can feel your cheeks warm. He sits up a little, arches a questioning brow down at you.
“What?”
“Do we need to use a condom?”
Eren frowns, confused. “I mean, after last time, I thought you were on birth control.”
“I am,” you confirm, nodding slowly, some odd emotion flickering over your features that could be anger, could be heartbreak, “but I don’t know if, like–”
“I haven’t been with anyone else,” Eren catches your meaning, feeling his heart thud heavy and loud in his chest, “not since…”
“Oh,” you exhale quietly, nodding, “okay.”
“You?”
“Uh, no,” your voice is so low Eren almost doesn’t hear you, but he watches your head slowly lull side to side in confirmation, “no one else.”
Eren can’t excuse the rush of relief that courses through him, the swell of happiness to learn that no one’s gotten to see you like this since the last time he had. It goes straight to his cock, hard and drooling between his legs. Before he can get too wrapped up in the emotional side of things, Eren leans in hard to the horrible, possessive thoughts that have constricted him, laying himself over you and taking his cock in his hand, swiping it through the mess between your legs.
“Good.” He even surprises himself with that, looking down on you with dark eyes, eyes that promise ruin.
“Please,” you give him one more breathless plea, Eren swears you know too well how to snap his composure clean in half.
He pushes himself in, choking on a moan at how tight you are, vicelike and suffocating around him. A broken groan flies from your lips, your fingers tighten their grip on his biceps until Eren’s sure you’re going to break the skin, but he’s beyond caring. His mind wipes completely blank, save for the hot, wet heat that’s enveloping him, beckoning him to snap his hips forward viciously and be done with it. With what little self-restraint he can muster up, Eren flicks his eyes up to yours.
“So…it’s so–” another whimper cuts you off, and Eren can feel your thighs twitch on either side of his hips.
“Too much?” Eren manages to reign himself in, back out another inch or so.
“No,” you wrap a leg around his waist, shove him further into you and wrench a deep, guttural groan from his chest, “feels good, keep going.”
“Careful what you wish for,” Eren breathes, trying to retain any semblance of control over this situation, give you that dominant dirty talk that he knows gets you off instead of turning into a whimpering, moaning mess at the feel of you clenching around him. He bottoms out, feeling himself fuck all the way up into your tummy, head falling down onto your shoulder.
Eren manages to keep his pace slow and gentle, rolling his hips into yours like he’s making love to you, not saying goodbye. Little satisfied sounds are slipping out of your mouth, but Eren can see a flicker of consciousness in your eyes; you’re not drooling for him, out of your mind with want, not like the first time. He frowns.
“What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re…I don’t know, you seem like you’re somewhere else,” Eren hates having to admit that he notices, that he even cares, and the unsteady creak of his voice reflects that, just making him hate himself even more. You don’t seem to notice his vulnerability or, if you do, you aren’t affected by it. You simply raise an eyebrow at him.
“I mean…it’s good,” you say, eyes flitting around the room, like you can’t quite admit whatever you’re going to say while looking him straight in the eyes, “but I want you to fuck me.”
“I am fucking you.” Eren’s frown deepens into a scowl of annoyance. What, is he not good enough for you now?
“Well, literally speaking yes, you are fucking me. But,” a nervous giggle slips from your teeth, riling the anger starting to bubble under his skin again, “I’ve heard a lot of rumors about you.”
“Why are we talking about this while I am literally inside of you?”
“Because I want you to fuck me,” you raise your eyebrows meaningfully, canting your hips up towards him. It clicks– as much as Eren wants to show you what he feels because he can’t tell you, fucking you like an animal, as he’s prone to do, is what you want. Eren’s been so wrapped up in trying to relish whatever time he may have left with you before you inevitably cast him off to the side again, he’s not been paying attention.
“You want me to fuck you, huh?” Eren thrusts forward a little harsher, a little more pointedly. Your eyes roll back, a slow, indulgent smile spreading across your face.
“I want you to fuck me like I know you can,” Eren feels your arms wrap around his neck, pulling his ear to your lips, “unless that last time was all luck. Surely all those rumors aren’t false, are they?”
Eren knows you’re trying to get under his skin, to bite at him through the haze of the heavy air weighing down on both of you, to rekindle that anger that you had brought out of him outside of the bar. What is he going to do with you, incorrigible little thing that you are? If Eren Jaeger was a better man, he would stop this all right now, force you both to talk through the sharp, spiky things that hang in the balance between you two.
But Eren Jaeger is not a better man, he’s only a man, broken and needy and tucked into his favorite place on earth, with the girl of his dreams below him urging him to fuck her brains out. Is he really to blame?
Eren rips himself out of your grasp, standing tall and menacing on his knees over you.
“I’ll fuck you,” Eren grits out through a clenched jaw, grabbing you by the back of your thighs and shoving your knees towards your head, “but you better be ready to put your money where your mouth is.”
“Yeah? Well– oh,” a sharp, shrill cry of your own making cuts your voice off when Eren snaps his hips forward, brutal and unforgiving into the wet heat of your cunt. He doesn’t stop there, immediately pulling out and snapping forward again, hitting somewhere deep inside of you that, based on your face, he knows no man has ever been able to reach. He smirks, all cocky and cruel, setting a harsh pace that’s got you clawing at the sheets.
“What? Is it too much?” Eren whines down at you condescendingly, eating up the way you’re already whimpering and moaning. He can see tears glistening at the corners of your eyes, threatening to fall.
“No, no,” your voice is broken, breathless, “it’s– fuck, it’s so good, Eren–”
“Is this what you wanted?” Eren growls down at you, locking one strong hand around your throat. “Wanted me to fuck you like the little slut you are?”
“Yes!” Your admission comes out in a choked, watery cry, the tears in your eyes finally beginning to run down your temples. Even if it wasn’t written all over your face, Eren can feel how much you like it; your pussy is fluttering, pulsing around him, begging him to keep going. He drives his hips forward like a man starved, a man whose life depends on fucking you until you can’t walk straight for a week.
“Who knew?” Eren muses to himself, wiping the tears from your face. “Who knew my pretty girl was so filthy?”
“I, I–Eren,” you moan wantonly, thighs shaking under his firm grip. Eren should hold himself back, knows that you’re going to be so sore in the morning, but a sick part of him is glad for it. Let you walk around campus with the throbbing ache of him inside of you, maybe he’ll fuck you so hard that little twinge in your belly when you sit down never goes away.
“Say it,” Eren urges, squeezing your windpipe, “tell me how much you love it, tell me how bad this pussy missed me.”
“I–” you choke out around his iron grip on your neck, “I m-missed you, I love it w-when you fuck me–”
“Fuck you like a whore?”
“Fuck me like a w-whore,” you wheeze out, face reddening with shame. Eren loves it, wants to kiss the blush off your cheeks and swallow it whole.
“That’s right, baby,” Eren releases your throat, watches the way you heave and gasp as the air flows back into your lungs, only to be punched out by the force of his thrusts, “you love my cock, don’t you?”
“Yes, I– oh my god, Eren, I–”
“What?” Eren sneers, smirking wickedly down at you, “is my smart girl already so fucked out she can’t talk?”
“No, I– I just– fuck!” You’re so loud for him, if he knew that fucking you within an inch of your life would get him this, Eren never would have bothered playing nice in the first place.
“‘ve barely even started,” Eren laughs, mean and sharp, “and you’re already fucked so dumb you can’t even think. Think you can cum for me, just like this?”
He doesn’t even have to ask; he can feel the way your cunt’s starting to tighten around him so harshly that it nearly pushes him out. He’s bullying his way back into you on every thrust, forcing you to open up for him, to take what he has to give. Inwardly, Eren hopes to god you do cum soon; he’s not going to last, not with you spread out beneath him crying and wailing his name. Eren doesn’t think he can hold out much longer without filling you up, watching his cum seep out of you.
“Eren, Eren, Eren–” your nonsensical babbling has started to take the shape of his name, Eren can feel his ego swelling and swelling to the point of bursting. There’s a tone of warning in your moans; the onslaught of an orgasm is threatening to pull you under.
“Don’t you dare hold out on me,” Eren slaps your thigh hard, the tacky, wet sound of it echoing through the room, somehow finds the wherewithal to piston his hips even faster, “want to feel it, feel you cum on me.”
“I’m going to, I’m going– oh Eren–”
Eren practically snarls, leaning over to spit in your open, waiting mouth. “What are you waiting for? Don’t you–fuck–want your pretty cunt stuffed full of me? I’ll give you yours, just gotta cum for me and give me what’s fucking mine. Go on–”
Eren’s rambling is cut short by the loud, raspy sob you let out, clenching down around him so hard it almost hurts, drawing a loud, long hiss from him. He looks down past your quivering thighs, sees the frothy white that’s streaking his cock, and he’s done for. He grants you a few more sloppy thrusts, and then with one final snap of his hips, he stills, holding himself as deep inside as he can manage, pumping you full of him.
Before he can stop himself, Eren’s crashing into you, bringing your lips to his in a messy, frantic kiss, open-mouthed and teeth clacking together. He can feel your body shaking violently underneath him, rocking with wave after wave of post-orgasm bliss, but he can’t seem to break himself from you, collapsed and clutching onto your smaller frame like it’s the only thing tethering him to this earth.
“Eren,” you finally say weakly, voice muffled as you smack at his shoulder, “you’re heavy.”
“Sorry,” he grunts, rolling off of you reluctantly. Your crumpled, naked form is still there, still so tempting and soft and warm. Your eyes are shut, so you don’t see Eren’s tentative hand reach for your hip, just wanting to rub a thumb comfortingly over the bone there, before he pulls back, second-guessing himself. A few pregnant beats pass by, Eren biting his tongue and holding his breath as he waits for you to make the first move, to direct him into how to speak to you after what’s just happened.
“I need to shower,” you finally say, words coming out in a breathless admission.
“Yeah,” Eren answers lamely, sitting up and looking around your room. There’s postcards from almost every country imaginable, tacked above your desk and fluttering in the breeze from your heating system. The desk itself is a wreck, dozens of papers and books scattered around in seemingly no order. Eren notices a little stuffed teddy bear tossed onto the floor and picks it up with a smile, placing it back against your pillows.
“Are you…”
“Am I…?” Eren looks at you, hoping that his pleading gaze isn’t too horribly obvious.
“I think Historia will kill me if she sees you leaving in the morning.” As soon as the words leave your mouth, Eren swears he can see something like regret fly over your face, and you turn your back to him instantly, scrounging around on the ground..
“I don’t know,” Eren wheezes through his shellshock, trying to force out a nonchalant chuckle that only sounds strangled and tense, “she’s pretty short. I don’t know how she could manage it.”
“You’d be surprised,” you slip a bathrobe over your shoulders and grant him a mirthless smile that doesn’t quite reach your eyes.
Eren dresses in the heavy silence that’s fallen over the room, pulling his shirt over his head and having to inwardly brace himself to face you. Eren’s comfortable with himself, probably knows a little too well that he’s an attractive guy, but he feels completely naked even fully clothed when he turns around to see you, standing all cozy and fucked out and sleepy in your fuzzy robe.
“So…” Eren trails off, wanting to smack his own face for speaking first.
“Have a good night, I guess,” you look up at him and then quickly away, chewing nervously on your bottom lip. Eren steels himself, lets every bit of courage he can find in his body rise to his mouth, forcing it to move.
“Are we, you know, good?”
“Good?”
“We said a lot of things to each other back there,” Eren can’t meet your gaze, can practically feel his face burning as he scratches anxiously at the back of his head. When he forces himself to look at you, there’s something odd and unreadable in your eyes. Are you sad? No, you’re smiling. Well, sort of smiling– it looks contrived, not real. But you’re not angry, not entirely.
“Yeah, I’m good if you are.” That stupid, insincere smile is still twisting your features. 
Eren doesn’t like the look of dishonesty on you, but he’s fought enough for tonight. He’s sad, spent, and tired, and he figures it’s hopeless anyway.
“Okay, good,” he makes his way to your bedroom door, fingers twitching for the feel of your skin under his, eyes damn near watering, “I’ll talk to you soon.”
“See ya.”
And with that, Eren’s left alone in the cold of your apartment hallway, alone and sickened by the feelings of satisfaction and longing swirling in his chest.
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binsito · 1 year ago
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I loved your idea of hannie with his nail tech crush.. yk what i think though? OBVIOUSLY the nailtech kinda knows abt this little crush of his. She doesnt know how severe it is but she does notice the way he blushes slightly when she compliments his hands, or the way his eyes sparkle when she finally giggles at one of his jokes. Also who am i kidding the nail tech obviously ALSO finds hannie v v cute and v v hot bc,,,, he's hannie??? He's charming and handsome and he keeps his fingernails clean soooo maybe the next time he comes around, and she is feeling a little frustrated bc her own hands aren't enough fun for her.. she'll hint at wanting his fingers inside of her? Maybe she'll be kinda distracted and shy this tine or maybe she's bold and just straight up teases him by saying things that could be considered dirty but also might just be his pervy mind interpreting the wrong thing. Aaa idk i'm not a writer but yourw giving my head THOUGHTS
OHHHH MYGOD. thank god you left this ask bc i was dying to write more for this JASHDJA
warning: fingering, hand worshipping, swearing, slight perv!han jisung, lmk if i missed anything but it's pretty tame
wc: 914
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hannie has to act normal.
hannie has to be cool.
hannie has to act like he doesn't go home after every appointment and edges his cock thinking about how nice it would be to have your lips wrapped around his tip.
so when he walks into the salon, straight into your suite and takes a seat at your chair - he makes a mental promise to himself that:
he. will. not. get. hard.
he won't get hard if you hold his hands, it's all part of your job.
he won't get hard if you smooth lotion on him, it's just a courtesy.
he won't get hard if you compliment his nails, they're only pretty because you made them pretty.
"hannie do you even put your fingers to use?"
what?
"you come here so often and yet they're rarely chipped or overgrown. you must not lift a finger." you smile.
oh.
he felt so stupid, of course he read into it in such a dumb, perverted way.
"you must take good care of yourself hm?"
fuck.
why couldn't he be normal? why couldn't he just have nice, clean thoughts? why was he getting hard? why couldn't he just keep his promise?
"your hands are always soft. i wish i had nice fingers like you. they're long and pretty.."
he clears his throat and laughs awkwardly. he was being such a loser.
"oh yeah.. they're definitely long, alright.. hah.." he says
who the fuck says that?
he literally wanted the ground to eat him up.
"yeah, they are. longer than mine." you giggle as you work on his polish.
"yeah.. way longer.."
and why he kept going? only god knows, but he definitely noticed your face flushing (and was he crazy or were you pressing your legs tightly together under the table?)
hannie doesn't think he's ever seen you this quiet, this concentrated on his hands before. after the conversation died out, there was no other topic to bounce off of. and normally han jisung would just start talking about random shit, would tell you your hair looked pretty or that he noticed your subtle eye makeup and that it looked nice.
but not now.
not today.
"hannie have you ever had problems reaching things with your fingers? i-it could just be because mine aren't as long as yours but.. you know they're never quite enough to reach."
"oh uh.. n-no but do you need help reaching something? i could help.."
"could you really? that's so sweet of you, hannie.." your smile could melt him into a puddle. you smile at him so sweetly, just for him and han jisung can't really handle that well.
"so what is it you need help with? something too high up or-"
"well.. i just can't seem to cum. doing your nails frustrates me so much. they look so nice so why can't i have them inside of me?" you pout at him.
the wind feels like it was knocked out of him. he thanks god that you have your own little suite and no one else was around to hear that.
"f-fuck, are you serious? holy shit, why didn't you say something sooner?"
"well because i'm a little shy and because i wanted to finish doing your set first, of course..
you really mean it though? will you actually help me?"
"yes.. fuck, yes i'll help you."
his eagerness was cute. unluckily for him, he still had to wait for you to cure his gel polish. his leg bouncing impatiently as you gave him a look to quit it.
he smiled shyly and let out a nervous chuckle as he tried to contain himself. once you were done, he damn near jumped out of his chair towards you. you put some of your supplies away and walked past him to lock the door. as soon as he felt the coast was clear and no one would walk in, he grabbed you - kissing you deeply and pressing you against his lean body.
it was an intense kiss, full of want and desire but you welcomed it because you had been feeling the same way. you pulled away slightly to grab his wrist, bringing it up towards your mouth so you could take two of his freshly manicured fingers in between your lips.
you made sure to get them nice and wet, saliva connecting them to the tip of your tongue when you pulled them out.
han jisung felt weak.
he found himself pressing you against the nearest wall, your pants long forgotten as he pumped his fingers inside you, finally leaving you fuller than your fingers ever could.
the pads of his fingers massaged your gummy spot and curled against it making your knees buckle. it was all too perfect and better than you could ever imagine. you knew the orgasm he was going to pull from you was going to be intense. you felt it bubbling up already and he hadn't even been touching you for long.
but when he brings his other hand forward to rub at your clit and you look down to catch a peek of his baby blue nails, you lose yourself to him and feel yourself cream around his fingers. clenching your cunt tightly against them, not wanting him to ever pull out.
however when he does pull out, he makes sure to have you watch as he sucks your essence off his fingers. rolling his eyes back at the taste and humming in satisfaction.
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please refrain from reposting, modifying, translating, copying or stealing my work. - © binsito
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kuroppiii · 5 months ago
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     little mermaid ᵕ̈           boyfie!kuroo tetsurō x gn reader ˎˊ˗
⋮⋮ ˒ ₍ᐢ..ᐢ₎ 𖥻 ⿻ : "not even the ocean could ⋮⋮  rip me away from you. i'm not going ⋮⋮ anywhere. what am i? sea foam?"
📋 content         ♡ # 𝘧𝘭𝘶𝘧𝘧 🐮         ♡ # 𝘥𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘣𝘭𝘦 🥛         ♡ # ~800 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴
🧸 directory  ‹ ✩  like what you read ? check out more of my blog !  •ᴗ•
💬 kuroppiii ─ “ i ' m in the summer mood thanks to @lcvemiyuki 's account xx . hot writer summer !!! ( not proofread !! ) ”
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you turn to the next page of your book. you try your best from letting the sand that's stuck to your sunscreen-ed arm deposit little grains into the nooks and crannies of the novel's binding, but it's hard considering your lounging on your towel stomach-first. the seagulls circling above you and the shade of your beach umbrella mock you as you inevitably fail to do so. you try to lean forward and gently blow the sand off the neatly-printed letters when–
"stop moving babe!" your boyfriend of 6'2" whines like a child. "you're going to ruin art. my art."
and with that, you feel more sand getting dumped on the back of your legs and the light patting of hands to shape it around your body. kuroo was currently trying to give you a mermaid tail.
"how much longer is this gonna take, tetsu?" you struggle to say without giggling through your words. you hear him return your laughter, and although you can't turn around to see it, you can picture his smile and the way his eyes crease at the corners as he does so. you hear his steps in the sand as he comes up to join you and your book.
"it's almost done," he announces before nosing at the side of your face and leaving loving kisses from your temple to your slightly-sunburnt shoulder. you feel the ocean water still remnant in his hair from the swim you two shared earlier.
"you said that about 20 minutes ago if i recall correctly," you tease, trying your best to dodge his sea salty kisses.
"i told you to stop moving! oh, i'm gonna have to start all over again at this rate," he complains with the most dramatic sigh any one person has ever mustered, making you laugh more. "and how do you know it's already been 20 minutes, anyway? i haven't seen you check your phone at all, you've had your nose stuck in that book."
"well can see from the shadow of the sunscreen," you start through your fit of giggles, but as you start your defense kuroo starts to shift so he's right in front of you–face-to-face with you and leaning on his side. maybe it's heatstroke, but you swear you can see a twinkle in your boyfriends eyes, like the way the ocean shimmers in the midday sunlight. "and y'know if the egyptians, if they can use their sun dials to, to tell the passage of time, then... then..."
your laughter dies down and sound of your voice trails off. a subtle smile graces kuroo's lips, and you start to feel small by how devoutly he's admiring you.
you two share a peaceful moment, a lull where it's just you two and the sound of waves crashing against the shore nearby.
"i should bury you in sand more often," he suddenly blurts out, interrupting the silence.
you start laughing again, "why on earth would you say that?"
kuroo shakes his head and places his hand to the side of our smiling cheek, "because that way i know you won't go away. i like having you here, with me."
"i could never leave you, tetsu. even when i get my legs back. not even the ocean could rip me away from you. i'm not going anywhere. what am i? sea foam?" you lightheartedly joke. kuroo hums in response, and you feel the pad of his thumb start to caress your cheekbone.
suddenly you realize how close you two were, you can almost feel his lips on yours and the feeling makes your eyes flutter shut. at last, you feel his soft and tender (and a little sandy) kiss as his hand comes down to take your hand away from your book and into his own.
you depart and it's like you're in a daze. you have to take a deep breath of seaside air and rest your head down on your arm as you and kuroo smile at each other like the two lovestruck idiots you are.
then he goes to brush off the sand from his swim trunks and sit up, "alright babe, what do you say to some sea shells to decorate your marvelous tail–the one you definitely love and will stay still for because yours truly is making it?"
you reach out and grab a fistful of sand and launch it at his torso, which he lets out a pitchy yelp at in response.
"whatever you want mr. artiste, as long as i can get my legs back soon so we can go out and swim again," you say as you shift to continue your book.
kuroo gives you a wink, "anything for my little mermaid."
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yukimomodivorce · 4 months ago
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The Ghosts in IDOLiSH7 are a Literary Device, Mostly
(an essay by me)
People are always asking me, "Robin, what the fuck is up with those ghosts in IDOLiSH7? How come this otherwise completely non-supernatural universe randomly has these two ghosts that show up and then never get acknowledged again? Is it just canon that ghosts exist and only Riku and Momo can see them?" and I am always telling them that I have an analysis about this I just haven't written it yet. But that ends today, as do all of these very pressing concerns about the i7 Ghosts™, because here I am, finally writing the analysis. This essay will have two sections, the first on the training camp ghost from part 3/third beat, and the second on the Re:vale house ghost from Yuki's third chapter of Re:member. So, spoilers for all of part 3/third beat in both sections, Re:member in section 2, and there's one extremely minor spoiler for part 4 in section 1 but it's honestly so predictable I don't think it even counts. Also, I'll reiterate this once we get to it, but just a warning that section 2 will contain discussions of depression, suicide and suicidal ideation, and a brief mention of self-harm, so please stop reading after section 1 if you don't want to see any of that! Another less important disclaimer about section 2 is that I am going to spend an entirely unecessary amount of time talking about Yuki. I am normal about Yuki. Okay. Without further ado, let's watch my spiral into ghost analogy insanity unfold!
Game translations: @seigyokus Re:member translations: @ takara_time (+ scans and editing by @ waitamomoment) Rabbit chat translations: @osakaso5
Section 1: The Training Camp Ghost
This first point applies to both ghosts, but I wanna start by noting that I think superstitions and beliefs like this are more common in Japan than a lot of other places, so yeah it is entirely possible that ghosts are just a canon and accepted thing in Idolish7's universe and this isn't really that strange of a detail for the series to include. However, I don't have any real background knowledge about if ghosts are normal in non-supernatural anime/etc. and I am not committing to that kind of research, so we'll have to leave the specifics of the ghost canonicity issue to someone else. But regardless of how canon they are, I think we've established well enough by now that the i7 writers don't put much of anything in the series without reason (re:vale band name you will always be famous. to me), and that definitely applies here as well - both of our ghosts are doing a LOT of potential symbolic work in their brief appearances, and that's what we'll be unpacking today, starting with the TCG.
The infamous TCG (training camp ghost) of Atami needs no introduction, but I'll give her one anyway. During the filming of the Friends Day special, upon following the shopping group home, she offers her services to Riku (inexplicably the only person capable of communicating with her) for the evening entertainment group's test of courage, terrorises several cast members throughout the day, and finally brings us Soma Saito's incredible cover of Dis One before probably being sent back to idol fan purgatory forever. Who is she? Where did she come from? I have several theories.
1.1: The TCG is the audience
While the 'ghosts are real in i7' possibility is there, I think it's also important to note in this case that the whole training camp is very explicitly being filmed for TV, and the biggest vibe I get from this episode of the anime is that the ghost is a part of the show, and we're seeing that show through the eyes of its in-universe audience. This happens pretty often in i7 (for example, when we see the groups talk to their fans during concerts), and generally the line between the real fans and the fictional ones can get pretty blurred (which deserves its own much longer analysis but I Am Not Writing All That), so everything with the in-universe audience here kind of naturally extends to us as the real audience. The TCG would probably be easy enough to manufacture with special effects as long as Riku and the driver guy were in on it, and it would make sense for the Friends Day producers to include it to keep things entertaining and be a stand-in for their viewers/fans of the idol groups - the ghost is specifically a female fan of male idols (Zero), and a lot of her interactions with the cast would qualify as self-insert material (e.g. Tenn singing for her and Riku looking directly into the camera to smile at her). And speaking of Tenn and Riku,
1.2 The TCG is Nanase twins angst
I think this connection is fairly obvious in their exchange here. You could make a case for the ghost representing either one of the twins. Like Riku, she's being pushed away by Tenn before she's ready to leave, told that it's necessary and for the best that they stay separated - after all, they live in different worlds. Like Tenn, she's leaving despite Riku's protests and part of her not really wanting to go at first, because she believes it's for the best that they stay separated - after all, they live in different worlds.
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There's also the association with ghosts of being ignored/invisible, and Riku being the only person able to see or talk to her. Maybe it's because he's the only one who's able to reach her. Maybe he can see her because he understands her on some level - she was torn away from life like he was torn away from his brother, and she's now practically invisible to everyone else around her, like Riku probably feels to Tenn (and arguably the rest of his family in some ways). Maybe he wants her to feel seen, and he can make Tenn acknowledge her in the way he wants to be acknowledged by him. I might actually be going somewhere with this so bear with me for a second.
1.3: The TCG is monster Riku foreshadowing
So my first thought when I watched the Nanase twin angst portion of this episode was 'well obviously the ghost isn't real and Riku is just using it to talk to Tenn indirectly' because they are always having indirect conversations like this and it makes me insane, and I do still think that's the idea here, just not quite in the sense that Riku is making things up. Going back to the whole 'ghost is a stand-in for the audience' thing, and assuming that she's saying the things that Riku wants to say and Tenn is telling her the things he wants to tell Riku, then we could say that rather than Riku purposefully having the ghost speak for him, this is an extension of the monster effect. I guess in this scenario the TCG is a real ghost (and a figurative representation of the audience), and Riku is having the same effect on her that Iori says he has on everyone else. He unknowingly projects his desire to connect with his brother onto her, and she tries to help him. Really, the only times we see her after she follows the shopping group to their cabin are when she's helping Riku, with the test of courage and then with speaking to Tenn. This gets convoluted so I kinda doubt it's intentional? But it's fun to think about.
1.4: The TCG is the friends we made along the way
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Riku spells this out a bit more explicitly in the game here, but the TCG represents the each of the groups in the series in a couple different ways. I guess one way you could interpret this is that the ghost is meant to be there to emphasise how extraordinary it is that they're all together, but I don't think that really holds up considering how often they end up working with each other throughout the series anyway. What's important here is the idea of the ghost itself, something that can be present and felt even when it isn't physically or actually there. Again, the ghost is the audience - a constant influence for better and for worse on these idols even when they aren't watching, even in their personal lives; and vice versa, the ghost is the idols being able to reach their fans without ever actually knowing them. More relevant to what Riku says, the ghost is the groups to each other - friends, mentors, rivals, pushing them forward even when they aren't standing side by side. You could even say the ghost is ZOOL, friends who aren't here right now but will be someday. Re:vale and Idolish7 as groups don't especially fit the ghost description, but they have their fair share of ghosts - Banri, Haruki, Tenn, Aya, Sougo's uncle. Zero. The list goes on, for Trigger and ZOOL as well, but I think the most important way the ghost analogy applies to this section of the story is with Trigger. Because during the imminent Arc Where Trigger Gets Cancelled™, despite leaving their agency and disappearing almost entirely from the public eye, they're still very much there to their fans and to their friends. So. I kinda forgot what I was saying but to sum it all up the ghost here represents everything that stays with you even when it's far away or after it's gone from your life. Mikanseinabokura and all that. And now that I mention it-
Section 2: The Re:vale House Ghost
Once again, a warning that this section has a brief mention of self-harm, as well as in-depth discussions of depression, suicide and suicidal ideation (which I'm gonna be talking about pretty bluntly the entire time), so please don't proceed unless you're comfortable with all of that!
Like most things in Re:member, the RHG (Re:vale house ghost) makes me insane. Today I am going to attempt to form coherent thoughts about it and it is unlikely that I'll succeed, but try to bear with me. Though it isn't around for as long as the TCG, we have a little more info about the RHG - it's the ghost that haunts the shitty apartment Yuki and Momo live in together in their early days as Re:vale. Supposedly. All it actually does is slam the door of one kitchen cabinet and I don't think that this is definitive evidence of paranormal activity because most houses are just like that. It's all a little bit vague, but according to Re:vale, their house is definitely haunted by the ghost of someone who died in the kitchen, because when they move in there is a mysterious black stain on their kitchen floor. Momo introduces himself to the floor stain while Yuki stares at him in awe and blushes and shoujo filter flowers appear in his eyes. God I hate them. I think the RHG is just a figment of their collective imagination or maybe they're having one of those shared delusions or something. But that's really besides the point because this ghost exists for one very specific thematic purpose: the RHG is Yuki.
And on that note, let's go back and talk about Yuki for a few minutes (potentially hours) before we get to our actual analysis of the ghost scene. Mostly because I just wanna talk about him, but also because I do understand why some people think the 'Momo starts talking to ghosts' part of Re:member is kinda weird and random, and I think at least some of this is important to go over before we unpack it.
A consensus has already been established among Yuki scholars that our subject has autism (Kei et al. 2024). Today, I would like to propose an additional diagnosis: Yuki has depression.
2.1: "I lost my dreams, friends, and passion as well."
So, Yuki pretty clearly gets depressed when Ban leaves him. He loses interest in everything he used to care about, gives up on his dreams, blames himself for Ban's injury and disappearance, he's constantly sad, tired and irritable, and he lashes out at Momo (and Kujou, though there are some other pretty strong reasons for that one) and presumably everyone else he knows (I doubt he had a particularly good relationship with anyone else in the first place, but still).
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He's grieving here, and it would make sense for him to react this way because of that fact alone. But I really don't think that's all there is to it, because he exhibits these symptoms (among others) long before Ban leaves him. He can't get out of bed in the mornings, he rarely leaves the house if he can avoid it, he has days where he can't eat or sleep, he's underweight and always tired and generally known to lack energy and be slow (or 'lazy') and in some cases listless and despondent. Ban even says that he wouldn't put it past Yuki to start slitting his wrists. And it's subtle, but there's one more really big one that really never goes away for him, even after he finds Ban.
2.2: "I don't need anyone to love me."
I'll get straight to the point. Yuki hates himself. Maybe only a little bit, maybe only sometimes, but it's there. Especially when he struggles with composing - he even says it himself in part 1 of his birthday photobook rabbit chat, almost immediately after saying that it made him want to kill himself but we'll get back to that part.
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But it's really everywhere on what seems to be a mostly subconscious level for him, if you know how to look, even from the very beginning:
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On paper, this line is just his frustration with being judged by anything other than his music, because it's something he cares a lot about and puts a lot of work into and he wants that to be acknowledged. But I think that if you take it in conjunction with some of the other things he tends to say, there's a little bit more to it.
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I dont need anyone to love me. Yuki's songs are worthy of love. Yuki is not. There is nothing valuable about Yuki other than his songs, he has nothing else that deserves any sort of praise, and without them, he's just a useless burden with nothing to offer. He doesn't need anyone to love him - he doesn't understand why anyone would. And Momo does, and he's a good person, and Yuki doesn't deserve that when there's nothing he can actually do for him. And when that starts to change and he starts getting better at showing kindness to others and being there for Momo, he doesn't see it as learning to better express his feelings, he sees is as learning to feel affection and be a good person, because he believes that he is inherently not. As far as he can tell, Yuki is just naturally a bad person and a bad partner who isn't kind and isn't capable of love or compassion, not unless he tries to be. He knows, because he's heard it god knows how many times - even Chiba Shizuo blatantly tells him that neither of them can become good people - and maybe things are different now, but on some basic level it'll always be who he is.
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Ok breaking character for a second, imagine you show up to your acting side gig and on the first day Keanu Reeves comes up to you and gives you $300 cash and then later he indirectly tells you that you're a nasty lonely egotistical failure. Now imagine you're Yuki and you have no fucking clue who Keanu Reeves is. He also shows you pictures of his top secret illegitimate son after talking to you for like 10 minutes and you have to lie to him about being straight. I think this is objectively the funniest situation to be in ever. Chiba Shizuo and Yamato both probably have depression also, but I'm not gonna spend any time on it, because every three months a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in Northern Queensland. I forgot what I was talking about. Anyway
2.3: Hey remember that one time Yuki just straight up tried to kill himself
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Yeah, that one. As far as I know this is really never addressed or acknowledged again, so we're just gonna take the page-long gag from Re:member at face value and say that after Ban's disappearance, Yuki (almost) attempted suicide, and the only reason he didn't go through with it is because he couldn't find anywhere to hang the noose. And like, yeah you could say it's just because he thought Ban might have killed himself and he's always been the kind of hopeless romantic to be waxing poetic about how "I can't live without you," but at the same time, he had no apparent reason to believe this (even if Ban did have suicidal tendencies I doubt Yuki would've really known), and he was planning to go through with it (I know it's probably just for comedic effect but he left a will. He left a will. He's, like, 20, and surely not the kind of person who would just have something like that in order already). This is also emphatically not the last time or the only reason he thinks about it.
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I told you we'd get back to the photobook chat! I think there's also a lot you can infer from all the times he says he'd probably be dead by now without Momo and he wouldn't be able to handle losing him, what with the whole "when you jump, you'd better take me with you" thing. But regardless, this really isn't just that one time that Yuki tried to kill himself. It's suicidal ideation, and it's something he consistently struggles with especially in the few months after Ban leaves him. It even comes up in how he sees the 'paranormal activity' his new apartment:
2.4: "It seemed as though someone had hung themselves there."
Yeah it's the ghost I'm finally gonna talk about the ghost. I'm done with my Yuki has depression rant we can talk about why the ghost is Yuki now. I guess it might be more accurate to say that the ghost is Yuki's depression/suicidal thoughts/Banri trauma/whatever, but either way I think it represents him and he might also be semi-consciously projecting onto it, and I'm gonna go through line-by-line and try to explain my interpretation.
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I think if you want to there's definitely room to take the 'usual paranormal activity' super literally and say that Yuki was having outbursts and slamming doors at the time (which would also match up with him being startled by it). I think it's also important to note that this is happening around the time he mentions feeling suicidal and not being able to compose in the photobook chat, but the main thing here is that second line. Even though Momo is always so nice to him, he can't stop himself from getting mad and being difficult and depressed, and he can't return that kindness - he can't even be useful to him.
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I've already mentioned how I think Yuki's conclusion about the stain here plays into his suicidal ideation, but let's look at it a little more thematically. It's the way that even though it's glossed over earlier in the manga, Yuki's suicide attempt and everything that accompanied it still follows him, and it hangs (lol) heavy in their house like a ghost. To Yuki, it's startling and eerie - it scares him, and he's expecting it to scare Momo once he sees that side of him too. And it probably does scare him a little, and he hesitates, but he doesn't scream. Again, there's room to interpret this more literally as Momo finding out about his attempt/ideation/depression, or just as him inevitably seeing how he gets on his worse days, but either way the outcome is the same. Momo is starting to know Yuki as a person instead of an idol, flaws and probable mental illness and all, and his first reaction isn't to shy away or start to hate him or want to leave. It's an introduction. He makes it clear that they'll both be staying here from now on, that he's willing to live with the 'darker' sides of Yuki, and to help him do the same. Another point on this that's up to interpretation (because let's be real they're probably never gonna deal with this stuff explicitly in canon), you could see the whole ghost thing as neither of them really being able/wanting to accept that Yuki's symptoms are actually a part of him (and this is veering completely into fanfic territory but now I'm just imagining both of them silently agreeing to blame the things Yuki does on bad days on the ghost) but we've had enough angst for one day.
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Everything else lines up well enough with the ghost and Yuki, but it's really his reaction here that sells the whole thing for me. It's a simple gesture, but just by Momo greeting him, being by his side, waiting for him when he comes home, that constant reminder of all his darkest thoughts becomes just another mark on the floorboards. It's not gone, and it probably never will be. But at least now, he doesn't have to face it alone. And it doesn't look so scary anymore.
2.5: "Now I know joy, and the meaning of a smile."
I must confess that I lied to all of you earlier. I'm actually not done with my Yuki rant and also there's a good reason I've been ignoring all the parts of Re:member where he isn't being self-deprecating or trying to kill himself. The end of the ghost scene is only the beginning of the end of this analysis, and the end of this analysis is pretty much just me having a meltdown about Yuki. Also I'm running out of space for images so we're doing some of the quotes like this instead.
After losing Ban, I lost my dreams, friends, and passion as well. I could only feel a sting as the wind passed through an empty, gaping hole in my chest. But I breathed as best as I could, and he tried to clear the dirt out of that hole, filling it with his earnest words instead.
Yuki still exhibits a lot of symptoms of depression all the way through the series, like the low energy and the trouble eating and sleeping, and [redacted part 5 spoilers] makes me think there's definitely some sort of connection between his writers' block and his depressive episodes. He still mentions feeling guilty towards Banri in second beat, the suicidal ideation doesn't really come up explicitly but he kinda hints at it on a few occassions, and he's very adament that he was a bad person and still isn't really a good one. But it's like. I don't really know how to put this, but I guess it's not his default state anymore like it was right after Ban left (and possibly before that, too). For the most part, he really does get better, and these things become less intense and fewer and farther between. He would probably say that it's all thanks to Momo, and it is, but he also very much does it of his own volition. Momo refuses so desperately to give up on him, and because of that he makes that choice to keep going by restarting Re:vale with him.
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Yuki allows himself to let someone else in and start to love again - his partner, his music, his life. Even while he's thinking that he's just a burden to those around him, he doesn't resign himself to his fate like he might have done in the past. He's determined to become a better person, someone who can be a source of strength for Momo just like he was for him. And in the end, he does, but it's not just that. Now he knows joy. Now he can genuinely smile. And now,
I want to hear them scream my name. The voices that called out had annoyed me in the past. But now, I'll smile, together with Momo, who'll be by my side.
Going back to what I said about some of Yuki's subconscious self-hatred coming through in the way he wants people to look at his music and not at him, I. Cannot finish a sentence. Do NOT think about Yuki learning to love himself and see himself as worthy of love because Momo loved him just that much in a way that he could accept. BAD IDEA. Okay. So. It's Ban's advice and Momo's fan letter that get Yuki to accept that his fans do genuinely love his music in the first place, and I think it's here that it really starts to turn into him accepting the idea that they love other things about him too? Or that he really starts to want it and be happy about it instead of just accepting it? Whatever. I give up. I don't even like Re:vale anyway
That day, I would play the guitar I'd almost thrown at Kujou, because I now knew the power of a song that could not be silenced. I would dry my tears, open the door, and say, "I'm home."
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pacificwaternymph · 7 months ago
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Aaaaand everyone give it up for WASTED POTENTIAL
Season finale spoilers under the cut
Okay. I'll be honest. The finale was... not what I was hoping for.
I tried so hard to remain optimistic. I truly believed they could pull it all together and everything was going to have a satisfying conclusion. But I guess that's my fault. I set my expectations too high.
Is this about Tech? Primarily, yes. Yes it was. I am so disappointed. And you can make fun of me all you want but I genuinely believed, with all my heart, that CX-2 was Tech.
BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK ELSE WAS THERE SO MUCH EMPHASIS ON HIM
There was so much to suggest that CX-2 was somebody we knew. We spent so much time on him, suffered through so many completely unnecessary, in hindsight, close up shots and random pieces of episodes that focus on him, only for him to get javelined through the middle in the span of half a second.
It feels like the writers were just making fun of the viewers, at this point. Haha, can you believe they actually thought?
Yes, we did think! Did you?
Tech's death was so... unconvincing. They didn't even try. Not only was his life "cut short" in the midst of his character development, said death was caused by falling, without any other kind of injury, while we watch him disappear into the clouds. And then we see no body and only have his broken goggles as "evidence" of his death. What the hell else were we supposed to assume?
That's not even bringing up that Tech gets maybe three mentions all throughout the entire season. The show never touches on how the death of one of their squadmates, people they have known since birth, affects the batch. Not once do they ever say out loud that Tech is dead until the fucking finale.
This isn't just me reading too closely between the lines. This is genuinely bad writing. It's loading chekhov's gun and then refusing to shoot it.
Even if CX-2 wasn't Tech, or even somebody we knew, the way he is treated suggests that he was supposed to be important. He was supposed to be be relevant. And now, he's neither!
Furthermore, where fuck was everybody? Where was Rex with the reinforcements to storm the base? Where was Wolffe deciding he didn't want anything to do with the Empire anymore? Where was Cody? Where was Phee in all of this?
Where was Cid? So we're just... not going to get any kind of closure for that? We spend two entire seasons with her, then she just betrays them and we never see her again? Even if they didn't redeem her, that feels like pretty damn bold move.
The Zillo beast does... barely anything. Really? It just breaks out and moves away from the biggest source of energy it will ever find after causing the slightest amount of property damage to two rooms, and storms off into the woods, and that's all we get? Seriously?
And then once we get to the time jump... Echo's gone. Again. Either still off with Rex, if he hasn't gone into hiding yet, or died off screen. Neither is a good nor satisfying ending for his character. But I guess shouldn't be surprised by that. When have the writers ever cared about Echo?
The biggest problem with the whole thing is that it didn't feel like a finale. It felt like a normal episode, just slightly longer. The Bad Batch returned to Pabu, because I guess there are no consequences from the Batch being discovered there before and the empire decided that they were just going to... leave it alone, and everything returns to the status quo. That's not what a finale does, Dave.
Maybe I'm being too harsh. There were parts that I enjoyed. I'm glad Hunter, Wrecker, and Crosshair got their happy endings. Seeing Omega all grown up really did something to my heart. But overall I am just so frustrated.
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celebrimborsapron · 3 days ago
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I love Arondir because when he tells Galadriel that Adar took everything from him he's not just talking about Bronwyn- he's definitely also talking about Theo and the little family the 3 of them were building.
Like I just imagine how much he enjoyed the short time they were all in Pelagir before it became clear that Bronwyn was getting worse instead of better. He was finally free of his duty to the elves, and he no longer had to hide his relationship with Bronwyn from anyone. He knew obviously that they were mortal, but he also knew that life can be short for anyone during a war and any time is better than none. So he's happy.
But then Bronwyn started to get sicker and sicker and died and Theo got angry with him and he had no place anymore. No duty, no family, just revenge. And he doesn't even get his big revenge moment because Adar kicks his ass in 2 seconds and leaves him for dead. But he (somehow*) survives and keeps fighting and suddenly he's fighting alongside the High King and Galadriel and all these famous elves. And he just rolls with it because what else can he do?
*I know the show runners said that the wound wasn't supposed to be mortal and all but it looks like Adar stabs him in the heart. Looked pretty mortal to me. I am endlessly curious what happened here. I bet there was a scene showing him surviving that got cut for time and they were like its okay, they'll figure out he's alive when they see him alive.
(Also his fighting style is so smooth and there's no wasted movement. Such a badass. I love that the writers gave him the sad tree-chopping moment and the ent encounter. Arondir is peak Silvan Elf.)
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sunnysideaeggs · 5 months ago
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some criticisms i have of episode 2. read the tags first please.
disclaimer: i am a targtowers’ stan first and foremost. that means: aegon, helaena, aemond and daeron. they’re my favorite characters. that’s where my ‘loyalty’ stands. everyone else (including alicent) comes after.
helaena’s grief should’ve been a bigger point in the episode. this is HER episode and aegon’s (i’m not complaining about him but her screentime was so low). everyone else, rhaenyra, alicent, yada yada is secondary.
alicent can light up candles for her enemy’s son but can’t even attend the funeral of her grandson 🙄 she doesn’t cry, curse the blacks, want to bathe in the blood of jaehaerys’ killers, or can even bring herself to say his name.
i love aegon’s performance. i love all of his grief manifested in rage and anger. he cries but he will kick everyone later. tom go get your emmy.
girl your daughter just lost a son and you want to talk about you fucking your bodyguard. i’m tired of her. helaena is with all right of ignoring her.
once upon a time there was a boy that loved horses 😭 jaehaerys my dear
a larys/aegon scene is all i could wish for. the cold mastery of secrets and torture combined with the unstoppable wrath of a wounded man. i need more of them.
i like how the funeral seems, by all accounts, normal but by helaena’s viewpoint everything is too much. the people claim for her showing support but it’s all noise. the carriage showing her little boy so that people know who to blame but it only reminds her more of what happened. he even looks like he’s sleeping.
tbh this scene shows how rhaenyra doesn’t fucking care about helaena and her children. the first thought she had when she heard of the news wasn’t to have compassion or empathy, but to do damage control and worry about her reputation.
lmao i don’t have a clue what daemon’s intentions and rationality is. he only cares about looking mighty and dangerous to other people even when he does dumb shit, then justifies it. he lives only for other people’s opinions but then everyone hates his ass lol. dilffailure.
also he’s the embodiment of living for a dick measuring contest he ends up losing. all of daemon’s behavior can be attributed to erectile dysfunction.
how the writers found time for an oc prostitute having a mommy kink scene with aemond but didn’t have more time for a longer scene with helaena and literally anyone is beyond me.
aemond talking about his regret for luke but not about the death of his nephew 💀 luke died like three years ago condal pls get over it. aemond would care more about jaehaerys than poor little luke.
some much needed baela character development. i love characters that are like the female version of their dad but then also fucking hate their dad lol
i liked the tidbits of the dragonseeds during the episode. i’d like some nettles too :) but i guess the only female and canonically black character is a little too much for this show amirite :)
of course daemon would never be able to bend to anyone he considers inferior, much less rhaenyra, who under any other circumstance would be seen as ‘lesser than him’. it reminds him of his failures. i’m glad we’re on the same page.
aegon never had a chance right? aegon was literally raised by hightowers in love with targaryens. he never would’ve been able to surpass viserys and rhaenyra in otto and alicent’s eyes. nothing he did could’ve changed that.
otto’s little laugh cost him a job lol. i’m sad we didn’t get his cats.
the focus on rhaenyra in the arryk/erryk fight is too much for me. once again, leave secondary characters have their moments instead of shoving r or a down my throat please. this is their especial moment, their last moment. rhaenyra being all 😨🧍🏼‍♀️ between their shots does nothing for the scene.
otto’s realization of his life’s work being flushed down the drain is so touching and painful in a way to me. he’s like tywin if he lived long enough to see cersei and tommen fuck everything up.
‘i have sinned’ ‘i do not wish to hear of it’ that’s peak cersei and tywin from that one scene when she confessed the incest.
daeron exists? yay. and once again i’m fucking tired of alicent not reacting to mention of daeron, not comforting helaena, bashing aemond, ignoring aegon. where’s the love for her children?
the scene of otto putting resting his face on his hands? chills. it should’ve lingered there. showcase otto’s regret? grief? idk. pity it just lasted half a second because we needed to see alicent once more.
from now on, alicent is cancelled for me. i don’t care anymore about her. any parent that leaves their child in distress to go fuck can eat shit. i gave that treatment to daemon in laena’s funeral and i’m giving it to her.
we have more sex scenes of alicent than we have of daemon and aegon combined. yet she’s the pious queen and they’re the lechers. condal please write accordingly.
how do i watch a show when i don’t care for the two main characters, because they’re cardboard cuts of women who don’t do anything? i don’t know.
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periwinklekryptonite · 8 months ago
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hey hi how does travis parallel common feminine tropes? i need to hear from the travis expert
Okay, so the "Problem" is that there's a preface and conclusion that's, like, way longer than just my bit about Travis's funny little parodies and then genuine relationship with femininity. While answering this ask, I realized just how big it is and I don't want to unload all of it here because I am just. Too tired all of the time to have all of it done in one swipe, and my attempt to do so ended up frustrating me more than anything LMAO
I write this with the promise that I'll expand on it and actually get to the meat of your question. I have a lot of it written, already!
The preface is easy: what's up with Travis and his relationship with gender?
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Travis is trying to present as a very masculine, powerful character. It's an easy defense mechanism when he's alone in a crowded room. The thing many people fail to consider is that he doesn't know any of these people, and he probably dislikes most (if not all) of them on principal. The girls have a bond that existed in the before times, and Travis doesn't. He's an outsider. He's trying to grasp for some semblance of control by playing a sort of parody of the stoic, macho man... and it doesn't work.
Because of how he does this, a lot of people into the show are not into Travis. He's one of the only characters that are overtly and loudly misogynistic. It makes sense that people don't want to look past that when he acts so nasty. This means many write him off as exactly what Travis wants people to think he is.
Kevin Alves says it best in his Boys by Girls interview. I suggest reading the whole thing, it says a lot of what I'm saying and more.
So, even though he's pushing this masculine agenda when he's in the wreck with all the girls, my assumption in him has always been that he's never been the most big or the most masculine of guys at school. This is him really trying to pretend to be someone that he is not, this is not him.
This dramatized, fictional version of him is how he thinks he'll find a place within the group. The alternative is getting Coach Ben-ed and slowly being ousted from the group. Sitting in the back room and rotting in complete solitude just seems like a downer.
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(Here he is looking sad for emphasis)
Travis was never the top dog. The girls do not take him seriously when he acts like this, and he probably wasn't taken very seriously in school. His insecurities lead to a lot of failures in his relationship with Javi and Nat, and no relationship with anyone else. If it continued any further than it did, he would've died for this. Like with Jackie, he'd be frozen out.
What Travis learns, and we learn as well, is that to be part of the in-group, you must also be a part of the dominant culture in the cabin and Wilderness itself. For Travis to be a part of the Yellowjackets, Travis must also be one of the girls.
Travis's story, the link between season 1 and season 2, is one of transition.
Some interpret this as a social transition, but I believe it to be literal.
The surviving group is not "the Yellowjackets and also Travis." By the end of season 2, (actually by the end of Qui,) Travis is indistinguishable from the rest. He's eaten Jackie with them, he's given blood to Shauna, he's taken blood from Lottie, he has led the group in their second act of cannibalism. Travis is a Yellowjacket.
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Credit where credit is due:
@monstrousgourmandizingcats really helped me grind out these ideas and has a lot of cool YJ takes in general, and most of the screenies were given to me by @nicothecowboy.
Now, for YJ Fic Writer's Weekend I should hopefully have the part of this that you asked about ready. Until then, I have some interviews, and I cannot recommend the PaleyFest panel more. It has a lot about Travis in S2 and his relationship with Nat and Lottie.
youtube
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angstics · 23 days ago
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I’m kinda a new fan had some questions. Are any of the members religious? I saw Gerard say god spoke in his head or something (I hear alot of Christians say this)
Regarding that whole thing does he hallucinate? I don’t mean to be rude I’m just wondering if he’s kinda schizophrenic. I really don’t mean to be rude.
Were they on drugs during the creation of black parade? Did they do drugs during the creative process at all? (Sorry to be weird)
Did Gerard write comics before the band? Was he successful? Did he actually work at CNN? Did he want to join military after 9/11 (I’ve heard him say he wanted to join in a tweet) ? Is there any pic of his art portfolio during college?
Did Mikey go to college?
hi! these arent weird questions. you just want to know what everyone else knows. im gonna answer your questions as best as i can from my own recollection. anyone can add if im wrong or forgot something. disclaimer, of course, there's a lot the public doesnt know so ill just be regurgitating What Is Known, and where you might have gotten these ideas. below the cut ->
"Are any of the members religious?"
the ways grew up catholic. Gerard has talked about his relationship with religion a few times. Most substantially this twitlonger in 2013 (from this tweet). i dont know if we know his Current Status. i feel like he talked about it in this 2019 podcast maybe. he def talks about his and his wife's relationship to "witchcraft" in there. In the second nj 2022 show he referred to bury me in black as a song from back in the "catholic days". whatever that means
frank used to go to catholic school. i think he no longer identifies with catholicism. i dont think we know what ray or mikey practice.
"I saw Gerard say god spoke in his head or something (I hear alot of Christians say this)"
he probably did say that, i just cant remember when. what i do remember is that he often talked about "hearing voices" (2014) and "being touched by god" (2007), particularly relating it to joan of arc.
"Regarding that whole thing does he hallucinate? I don’t mean to be rude I’m just wondering if he’s kinda schizophrenic."
so, he's never talked about any specific mental illnesses. he's only ever talked about symptoms. on purpose! there's this infamous tweet of his, "Labels: my therapist and I don't use them. I am chemically imbalanced, so I take medication to help with that. In fact-" "I don't use labels for anything. Using labels only gives others the leverage needed to categorize you or use you as a political tool." (2016 1, 2)
he talked about depression & mania. he's talked about "hearing voices" around the break up period, 2013-15. some attribute the paramour mansion hauntings to mental illness. it's vague
"Were they on drugs during the creation of black parade? Did they do drugs during the creative process at all?"
frank and gerard talked about doing drugs during the recording of three cheers in 2003 (2011, good discussion "After our grandmother died..." on). gerard went sober second half of 2004 and the band has talked about being sober around him in support. so i dont think they did any drugs while making black parade (which was when they were touring 2005 & in 2006). i think they've even said they smoked a lot of cigs because they couldnt do drugs.
frank has talked about his drug dependence during the black parade tour 2007-08 ish. mikey went sober around the break up. i dont think ray did drugs (in the last source, ray said, "I had no idea any of that stuff [drug use] was going on [in 2003]. I was so naïve.")
drinking & weed & cigs not withstanding
"Did Gerard write comics before the band? Was he successful?"
afaik gerard only worked on three published comics before umbrella academy in 2007.
1993 (age 16): "On Raven's Wings" (writer, 2 issues)
1998 (21): DC's "The Big Book of the Weird Wild West" (pencils & inks, page in 1 issue)
2000 (23): "Foot Soldiers" (writer, back up story in 1 issue)
"Did he actually work at CNN?"
he interred for CN (cartoon network) & pitched a cartoon to them that wasnt accepted.
"Did he want to join military after 9/11 (I’ve heard him say he wanted to join in a tweet)?
just the one time, he talked about considering joining the military at 23, which wouldve been 2000 (2014). he never talked about joining the army after 9/11
"Is there any pic of his art portfolio during college?"
i dont think there's photos of his portfolio anywhere. but there are photos of his college artwork. collected here and here.
"Did Mikey go to college?"
he did for a short bit! dropped out. only gerard & ray have degrees. i dont have any sources for the following info so im just going to give you want i remember. I THINK: mikey went to college to meet people to get in a band, met frank there, dropped out before mcr started, and worked for eyeball records.
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arc-misadventures · 5 months ago
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hey, you are a popular Rwby stuff writer who has written many stories, so I want to ask you how from a reader to a writer, why do several people like to write that after Pyrrha, Jaune is no longer considered worthy of someone's love? more? that doesn't make any sense and I find it silly and pointless (Yes, I know we're talking about Fanfiction), Jaune Basically he only knew Pyrrha's feelings for 5 minutes before he died and for some reason that means that he suddenly considers her her love of her life and that she can't love anyone else, which seems really silly, even though Jaune had previously shown no romantic interest in her, it just doesn't make sense to me, just because Jaune found out that Pyrrha loved him. Does it mean that he can't love anyone else? I don't know, it seems very strange
I apologize if the question is stupid
I doubt that I am that popular of a writer, but to answer your question.
First off, Jaune was well aware of how, Pyrrha felt for him before that kiss. Most people like to act as if he was aware that, Pyrrha had feelings for him by the, Beacon Dance, at least he became aware of them. And, you can’t look to the part where he was trying to comfort her, and placed his hand on hers that he wasn’t aware of how she felt for him, and was testing the waters so to say the least.
If given more time, Jaune, and Pyrrha would have probably started dating. In a ‘No Fall AU’ i could see the pair start dating after the festival.
Now, as for the idea of, Jaune isn’t deserving of anyone’s love. Well, I like to see it as, Jaune is scared to fall in love again.
Take it as such, Jaune finally clued in that, Pyrrha has feelings for him, and he has feelings for her. The duo want to explore the possibility of a relationship. But, before that relationship has a chance to bloom it tragically ends.
No one forgets their first crush, I’ve learned techniques to forget my first crush, and it is a bitch to deal with. So, do you honestly think, Jaune can just move on from his first crush when she was murdered on a day that lead to the destruction of of, Beacon Academy, and then the realization that, Ozpin fed ideas to, Pyrrha’s head that lead to her death?
Does it sound like it’s an easy task to just, ‘move on?’
And, the cherry on top of it all, is that their first kiss as well as their last. Can you imagine the pain of such a kiss; A lovers kiss filled with the painful regret of a farewell?
In my opinion, Jaune doesn’t feel that he is undeserving of love. Jaune is scared to love again, because his first love was so short, and so painful that it haunted him for a long time afterwards.
Least that’s my opinion. Does that answer your question?
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emmaiooo · 9 days ago
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to love me better, than all the others do. (prelude)
- prelude.
      words -  2k
    {fem reader}
[writers note: hey so…! this was written in literal two parts of like style idk like everything from till the almost bottom is very rushed and non descriptive! also i felt like a silly woman and decided to write brain rot for y’all gen z! (i’m a gen z i cannot be talking). this fanfic is driving me crazy because i am no longer obsessed with jjk anymore since the ending happened...i'm still mad my king died bro.]
•❅───✧❅✦❅✧───❅•
y/n l/n, born in a well off family, was cursed ever since she was born. unknown to her, she has killed two of her classmates because of her uncontrollable anger. to everyone, she was sweet and kind and so..so lovable. of course, everyone has to have secrets right? 
“sensei, i sense someone with a really strong cursed energy.” gojo said to the phone, peering at you talking with your friends. “i think she might be the cause of the unknown deaths in this school.” gojo sighed, watching you intensely. “hey, who is that handsome guy? omg y/n he’s looking at you so intensely!” your friends whispered, giggling happily. “nah, that’s just creepy. look at those blue ass eyes..” you remarked. “alright, you know what to do.” yaga said through the phone. “yup! got it.” gojo smiled as he approached you. “oh shitt he’s coming towards us! hurry do i look good?” your friend asked. “ugh, always that one whore friend, i wish she would just shut the fuck up.” you thought. suddenly, her mouth was closed shut, grabbing onto you trying to speak and ask for help. you laugh, “what's wrong? can’t speak?” everyone else laughed along with you, not even thinking twice about how her mouth was shut suddenly. “how the hell are those friends feeling scared or weirded out? it’s like someone is hypnotizing them..” gojo thought. 
“hey ladies, what are y’all shopping for?” gojo said, giving you and your friends a smirk. your friend who had her mouth closed desperately reached for him, trying to tell him something. “don’t mind her, she’s just such an attention seeker.” you said, smiling at him. all of a sudden, gojo felt his concern for her slowly fade away. “is this girl a snake and fangs user? how is she using this? i’m pretty sure this curse technique is inherited. shit. i’m fucked, i guess i’ll just knock her out.” gojo quickly lunges in, giving you a nice good punch to knock you out. 
you awoke in a room covered in talismans, as you regained your sight, you saw a man who looked visibly upset, crossing his arms. “sorry pretty, messed up your face a lil.” gojo said, whispering into your ear. you immediately looked at him, moving back a few inches to realize you were tied up. “get the fuck away from me you scummy old hermit!” you shouted, trying to get out of the restraints. “i said get back!” you screamed, wondering why your “magic” didn’t work. “nuh uh girly pop, that doesn’t work here!” gojo said, wiggling his fingers “no” at you. you looked around, seeing all those talismans filling the room. “that is enough gojo. we have a criminal here.” yaga said sternly. “criminal? the hell? what did i do?” you said, glaring at yaga. “you killed two students and manipulated everyone else around you with your curse technique. you will have a secret execution.” yaga said, his arms still crossed. “wait- please no.” execution? even in court they’ll probably give you like 10 years in prisoon. “i have so much to live for! i-i can help people with my power or some shit, i don’t even know what my power is and how powerful it is and how it can harm people! please just let me live-” you got cut off my gojo. “yeah sensei, she could study at jujutsu high and help me defeat curses! it’s gonna be so fun! and she can meet my friends, suguru and ieiri!” gojo smiled, pleading yaga with his eyes. “it is not that simple gojo.” yaga sighed, looking at you. “do you want to help people?” he asked you. “uh…yes! if my power can help people. i’m sorry i used it for bad! i didn’t know them dying was my fault, i just thought i had insane luck and god on my side..” you pleaded. “see, that is a wonderful response! now loosen the restraints and let me tour her!” gojo was excited, smiling big. “i..her help would be great..ok. y/n l/n, from now on you will train at jujutsu high and only use your power for good, or else we will get this..guy” he looked at gojo, “to kill you..” you looked confused, “how the hell is this oldie going to kill me? literally, he should be at the elderly hospital.” gojo gasped, “how dare you!” 
-at jujutsu high.
“is that the new girl? she’s hot, like...bitchy hot.” shoko said, looking at you up and down. “she’s the one i convinced sensei to go here.” gojo said, pointing at you. as you turned around to look at the trio, one black haired boy caught your eye. he had a slight smile and small eyes but so seductive. hell, gojo is hot but this dude’s aura is even hotter! you walked up to them and introduced yourself. “y/n l/n, nice to meet you both.” you smiled as you shook geto’s and shoko’s hand. you looked up at the black haired boy and you both locked eyes at each other. gojo, however, ruined the moment with his high pitched voice. “THIS IS GETO SUGURU AND SHOKO IEIRI!!!” he screamed, pointing at them. you stood there awkwardly, giving a little sigh. “i think you fucking broke my ear drums.” you said, smacking gojo in the arm. “ack! see, she’s mean…” gojo whined and acted like he was extremely hurt. “that makes me like her even more, let me show you to your dorm y/n.” shoko took you by your hand and walked toward the dorm. “so what do you think about her suguru?” gojo asked geto, nudging him on his arm. “she’s interesting.” he said, smiling softly and made his way to his dorm as gojo followed suit.
“so how’s life here treating you regina george?” shoko questioned. that nickname was a little shocking to you, even though you knew you kinda acted like a mean girl. “it’s okay, i’m getting used to being on time. i used to use my technique to make my teacher think i’m not late and not write me up.” you replied to her. shoko laughed, “now that’s something i’ve never heard of.” you chuckled as you look up at the sky, it has been a few months since you have arrived. you got a lot more close with gojo these days. he has been hanging around your dorm room and asking you to fight with him. you haven’t spoken to geto much, it was just small greets and good mornings, although you wish to speak to him more. “Y/N!!” gojo shouted as he ran up to you and geto trailing behind. “eww who is this weirdo calling my name i don’t know him.” you turned around and made a face of disgust as you put your hand in front of you. “cmon y/n, i’m your bestie westie! i bought you ice cream!” gojo shoved a bag of popsicles and ice cream at your face. “okay thanks…didn’t have to shove it in my face though.” you rolled your eyes as you gave one to shoko. “oopsies poopsie!” gojo shrugged with his tongue sticking out. “you guys play too much…” geto sighed as he shook his head. you laughed along with gojo and shoko, slapping gojo in the process. “oww!” gojo shouted.
during your second year of jujutsu high, things started to get busy. there was new first years and they were really fun to mess around with, but now you are always caught up with missions. somehow, gojo roped his way into making you his girlfriend, which you never expected. your first date was at an ice cream shop. 
-at the ice cream shop
when you both arrived at the shop, you looked at the different types of ice cream inside the display. “can i have the biggest cone and put as much scoops as you can on it please?” gojo asked the cashier. “oh uhm...ill try.” the cashier said hesitantly. “gojo you are such a big back i feel bad for the cashier!” you said as you watch the person put one scoop over another till it gets to 5 scoops. “nuh uh, this is for my brain.” he said, grabbing the ice cream. “what flavor do you want?” he asked, taking out his BLACK CARD. “wtf. you fucking rich ass. from now on, you are gonna buy me everything.” you said , “also i want _____” gojo smiled, “of course anything for my bestie.” the cashier gave you the ice cream and went back to the cash register. after gojo paid, you both went outside of the ice cream shop and sat on the benches. “y/n…i think i like you…you are so skibidi and rizzful! please be my gyatting sigma!” 
(this did not happen i felt a little rizzy)
but in the corner of your eye, you always see geto staring at you and gojo talking. did he feel left out? no way…he was gojo’s best buddy. eveything changed when you, gojo, and geto were called into a mission to protect the star plasma vessel, riko. when you first met her, it was funny how gojo and geto were arguing with her. “hey miss, are you going to protect me too? you are very pretty.” she looked at you smiling. “yes, and i won’t be as bad as those silly dudes over there, don’t worry.” you put your hand on her shoulder, reassuring her. “okay girl that is my girlfriend there. back off!” gojo grabbed you by the shoulder and hugged you. that really hurt. gojo sometimes can’t handle how he controls his strength. one time you got a fucking fracture in your shoulder because how tight he hugged you. “okay weirdo.” you pushed him off. you weren’t prepared to see her body lying lifeless infront of you.
-after the gruesome fight and gojo’s enlightenment (forgot what it was)
“satoru?” you knocked at his dorm door. after the fight with toji, gojo has become more depressed lately, and you noticed that geto has been getting skinner and looked sad all the time. “get the fuck away y/n, don’t wanna talk to you.” he said, behind the door. “geez, just wanted to check up on you…are you okay? need a hug?” you sighed. “no, leave me alone.” he said. you left the male dorms quietly to see geto sitting there at a bench, he looked lonely. “geto? are you okay?” you sat next to him, looking at him. “i am fine y/n, you do not need to worry.” he mumbled. “no geto, what is wrong?” you persisted. “y/n, i’d appreciate it if you called me by my name.” geto said, looking at you. he didn’t want to be called by a name that belonged to monkeys. “okay…suguru. are you sure you don’t need someone to talk to? a hug?” you asked, looking up at him. “it’s just…riko’s death…” he said quietly. “it’s okay, she’s in a better place now. you hugged him, tight, and he hugged back. 
these days, gojo has gotten better and is his regular self. even though you check up on geto…i mean suguru, every few days, it seems like he hasn’t gotten any better. “suguru, you okay? you look like you lost weight.” gojo said after showing off his new tricks. “i’m fine, it’s just the summer heat.” he said. “okay…” gojo said suspiciously, going back to tell shoko to throw more things at him. stupid gojo satoru. how can he not notice his best friend is in need of him? this is just stupid. “hey suguru,” you asked him “wanna go out and get some ice cream? it can help with the heat.” you smiled at him, and gojo didn’t like that. gojo was staring dead straight at you couldn’t seem to notice. “okay, i’ll pay.” geto said as he started to walk out. you quickly caught up with him and tapping him, “nah, it’s on me don’t worry!” he looked at you and shot you a smile, “thanks y/n, really grateful.” you laughed as you followed him out the door, leaving shoko and gojo alone inside. “is it just me, or have they been very close?” gojo questioned. shoko looked at him, giving him a side eye as she sighed. “are you slow or just…really fucking stupid?” she shook her head, taking another draw out of her cigarette. “what? now you’re being a bitch too now?” gojo’s voice raised as he got angry. “i already got y/n ignoring me half the time, when we kiss i feel like shes trying to get away, then suguru acts all weird and depressed and he just won’t tell me!” he raised his hands up as he yelled. shoko pinches her nose bridge, thinking that gojo is actually stupid. maybe all that cursed energy fried his damn brain. “go figure it out yourself smartass.” she turned around as she threw away her cigarette and walked up the stairs back into the dorms. “fuck.” gojo hissed as he remembered that he and y/n also got ice cream together and wondered if they are going to the same place. he kicked a pole and yelped in pain. (stupid). 
GOD I DONT WANT TO WIRTE BRO ITS 2K WORDS AND IM ALREADY DYING WHEN I CAN RAW DOG 15K BY READING. hey so im just gonna post.
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iambicpentameterhamster · 8 months ago
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Every umbrella academy character ranked
Prior to Season 4 coming this year, thought I'd share my character rank with you for the first 3 seasons all together. (Spoilers ahead)
#33- Marcus, Jayme, Alphonso and Fei
Painfully insignificant and underdeveloped. Their only character traits being "spoiled and a bit evil" made them EXTREMELY captivating villians...
#32- Christopher
Only higher because I find the idea of someone carrying around a cube on a stick onset really funny.
#31- Sparrow Ben
Hard to watch honestly, especially in comparison to his lovely counterpart Umbrella Ben.
In general, the Sparrows were terrible and pointless characters, and clearly the writers knew this because most were killed off pretty quickly. All except for Sparrow Ben, which just meant we had to suffer watching him for even longer.
#30- Viktor
This is a controversial choice. He is tolerable in season 1, but then just becomes a moochy emo sod who is boring to watch. I don't know if it's the acting, script or both, but he’s just such a meek and flavourless character who is PARTICULARLY bad in season 3 when he jeopardises his whole family and is repeatedly selfish and has a victim complex.
#29- Luther
He caused the apocalypse in season one and you can't convince me otherwise. Got some alamaba shit going on with Allison...
There are so many reasons I hate Luther. He's a self-centred man child who couldn't care less about his siblings and their feelings, showing zero empathy to Klaus or Vanya, for example. He only shows respect and kindness when he is attracted to the person (As shown when seasons 1 and 2 he is only nice to Allison, then completely ignores her when he moves on to Sloane) or when they pose as an authority figure to him. All he does is whine and feel sorry for himself.
What's that? You lived in the apocalypse all alone for 40 years? You are addicted to drugs and lost the love of your life in a war? You have a power you can't control and a lifetime of rejection? WELL LUTHER WENT TO THE MOON
#28- Carl Cooper
Hated him as a character but he was a menacing villian which I can respect
#27- Harlan
Couldn't care less about him, only there for plot convenience and Victor's arc pretty much
#26- Sloane
An improvement from Luther's literal sibling. Further evidence that Luther will simply fall for any woman who gives a flying fuck about the moon.
Personality: attracted to Luther
#25- Pogo
Basil exposition of the first series
#24- Detective Patch
Barely remember her
#23- The Swedes
They were kind of goofy as villians but there was some good acting and they posed a real threat. Cute moments with the cats. In general, alright, but they could have easily been replaced plot wise with something more interesting.
#22- Cha Cha
Lack of character development for me. I think she deserved to be fleshed out more, I don't think it's fair that only her partner got to be a three-dimensional being. What are her motivations? Who is she underneath it all?
But overall i liked the acting and she was a good villian.
#21- That hotel worker from season 3
He's barely a character but I liked his sass so he's on the list.
#20- Reggie (Reginald Hargreeves)
He is supposed to be the main antagonist/villian of the show, yet The Handler stole his spotlight. He's a bit too stereotypically evil and asshole-ish for me, basically twiddling his moustache and stroking a cat in a dark corner the entire show. The delivery is too blunt and that doesn't help to build the tension and mystery surrounding him as much, but if he were more complicated and cryptic in his personality it would be more effective.
This is very nit picky and overall Reggie is fine. He has some hilarious moments with Klaus in season 3 and I am genuinely intrigued about the unanswered questions surrounding him.
#19- Elliott
He wasn't a particularly important or central character but I enjoyed it when he was on screen and he played his role convincingly. He was a good comic relief in some scenes, and when he died (spoiler alert) the reactions from other characters were realistic and quite impactful. I felt for him throughout, which is impressive for less significant characters and he had a lot of depth relative to the size of his role.
#18- Destiny's children
Not a singular character, but I LOVED Destiny's children. It fit Klaus's character perfectly to have a cult and led to some of the funnies moments in the series.
#17- Dave
From the very limited moments we see with this character, a lot of personality and emotion was communicated, and I feel like we got a big sense of the character. That is down to the brilliant acting from both of Dave's actors and from Robert Sheehan that really sold this character with so little screen time.
Anyway please come back to life Dave! Death doesn't look good on you!
#16- Agnes (Donut woman)
Very sweet and I wish her all the best in life.
#15- Sissy
BRILLIANTLY acted and impactful. Stole every scene between her and Vanya.
Also, she looks EXACTLY like Sheldon's mum in young sheldon...
#14- Herb and Dot
I want to put them both in my pocket and protect them from harm.
#13- Kenny's mum
Again, barely present but I love her. She's a queen. I would go to a rave with Kenny's Mum.
#12- Stan
I love Stan, and he's a big part of Diego and Lila's character development and motivations. I hope they adopt Stan and live happily ever after.
But yeah, great one-liners from Stan.
#11- Grace
Very well acted and haunting.
Top 10 *drumroll please*
#10- Harold Jenkins (Lenoard Peabody)
Again, quite a controversial placement, but I stand by my decision. The acting and delivery of Harold Jenkins as a villain is possibly the best in the whole show. I was totally convinced Lenoard was a nice guy and I was rooting for him and Vanya, until he started dropping hints and slowly revealing his true self and losing the facade and its... it's chefs kiss. So realistic. The actor deserves an award and a standing ovation.
The writers also deserve a pat on the back for this one because he has a convincing motivation and backstory, and the dialogue is DELICIOUS when it comes to Lenoard. He is a truly menacing villain without being overtly scary and powerful and dangerous.
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#9- Ray
Charismatic, gentlemanly, empathetic, loving, trusting, supportive... Ray is THE IDEAL MAN. I'm a little bit in love with Ray so I don't blame Allison.
HUGE step up from Luther, for sure.
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#8- Umbrella Ben
I would have liked to see more of his character, but I liked what I did see. He loves his siblings and shows it. He is selfless and sacrifices his own existence for Vanya, he is blunt with Klaus because he cares and wants him to improve. Of course, he and Klaus are also a hilarious duo.
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#7- Hazel
One of the most touching arcs that offers an insightful message about what life is for, and about Love. Beautifully acted, a very real and lovable character who probably resonates with many in some ways. Hazel is adorable and i miss him in later seasons.
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#6- The Handler
I LOVE THE HANDLER MORE THAN WORDS CAN EXPLAIN!!! Funny, playful, entertaining, uexpected and whimsical and yet simultaneously dark and menacing, AMAZING villian that stole EVERY SINGLE SCENE she was in. Kate Walsh was the perfect choice for the role and she played it to perfection.
A bit of trivia about the role, The Handler was originally written for a man, and when Kate Walsh got the role she insisted they didn't change the script (which, let's be honest, they would have.) She put a wonderful spin on it and it's just perfect, I wouldn't change a thing. I would 100% watch a spinoff all about the handler. Season 3 was worse than the previous two thanks to them killing her off (amongst other questionable plot choices)
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#5- Allison
Allison was the only character who knew what they were doing, and honestly, if everyone just listened to Allison, there would be no apocalypse. Her storyline losing both Claire and Ray and her powers driving her crazy with power breaks my heart but is well portrayed and impactful.
She's charismatic, clever, strong, and kind. I love Allison and I think most of us do.
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#4- Diego
He's stupid but in an endearing way, I find him to be so entertaining and funny, and the actor's face is like an open book. He's not show-stopping but his consistent presence just sets the mood and allows others to act off of him, while he really sells it with his expressions. He's like the rock of the show.
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#3- Lila
Lila. Mi amor. Mon amour. Amore mio. Meine Leibe.
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#2- Five
For several reasons:
A) He is the daddy here, Luther!!
B) That should be the only reason you need
Seriously, though, I was SUPER impressed with Aidan Gallagher and his incredible screen presence, especially at such a young age. He really embodies the character. Five is the face of the Umbrella Acadamy, and is undoubtedly the most iconic character. 10/10, two thumbs up, absolutely BRILLIANT.
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#1- Klaus
No justification necessary.
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trillscienceofficer · 7 months ago
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I've been crediting the way Chakotay dismisses B'Elanna's vision in “Barge of the Dead” mostly to the events of “The Fight” and how Chakotay was (understandably) afraid of the barrage of images from the depths of his mind, and how this fed into the fears he has about his grandfather's condition and his own predisposition to it. As a result, he is more diffident about helping other people assigning meaning to their visions, not trusting himself as he used to any longer. After rewatching “Mortal Coil” though I think Chakotay is, also understandably, very wary of validating anyone's mystical experiences (or lack thereof) surrounding death, because one such experience very nearly brought Neelix to suicide and Chakotay almost didn't realize it in time. The way B'Elanna's talks about her own vision can't not recall what Neelix went through, in Chakotay's mind; B'Elanna almost died, and now she feels like she needs to die again. Add to this the history B'Elanna has with self-harm and unnecessary risk-taking behavior from “Extreme Risk”, a history that Chakotay knows all too well, and his mind is made up. He cannot allow this to happen on his watch, especially not to B'Elanna, so he dismisses her recollection of the vision, he downplays it even if it comes across as him not accepting B'Elanna's culturally-informed perspective on her own experiences. In short, I think a mix of fear and guilt is what makes Chakotay unable to appreciate the difference between Neelix' nihilism and his loss of purpose and B'Elanna's longing for meaning and closure through ritual.
I don't think the Voyager writers thought this through as much as I am here, mind you. They likely just had Chakotay play the 'voice of reason' because they couldn't have Janeway doing it, or the parallelism between B'Elanna finding peace with (the memory of) her mother and B'Elanna's acceptance of Janeway's trust would have collapsed, making the episode less incisive. (We can also talk about how yet again the show paints Janeway as a mother figure, in my opinion the lowest-hanging fruit possible, but I digress.) That it sort of contradicts Chakotay's pre-established characterization and background was likely not a big consideration, which is unfortunate. However if we don't take the 'reset button' for granted, this behavior from Chakotay can be taken a sign of the way he changed throughout the show, even it's sort of negative character development. He's more afraid, and more rigid in his understanding of others than at the beginning of the journey, especially when it comes to B'Elanna. The years of survival on Voyager have taken a toll on him. I obviously still think he was wrong to dismiss B'Elanna and that the show needed to handle that conversation between them with a lot more care for both characters, but keeping “Mortal Coil” and “Extreme Risk” in mind definitely helps with lessening the sting of a scene that otherwise seems to come out of nowhere.
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