#it's not the disability though that makes me say as much - it is fully the fact that he is SO STUBBORN! SO STUBBORN!!!!

[brionnnne]

note that i will only ever call mithrun "stupid" jokingly. by "stupid", i only mean "frustrating behavior that i am immensely familar with". seeing him do something that makes me groan aloud, closing my eyes, sighing "stupid (affectionate, mournful)". like when he fucking... his dumbass "i don't want to [use the bathroom] right now, so it's fine." oughh. i know you! i know you! that's not how that works!!! and he's smart!!! he's so smart... but god, god... he's kind of an absent professor. he's kind of a cloudcuckoolander. i love him dearly. he gets called a dummy, a little idiot, and i flick his forehead, a little bonk of hard-heads, like "try again, idiot. that's not how bodies work." and "ooh, 'that's not going to work'. yes it is. shut up, stoopid. stubborn little man, my god." rolling my eyes forever.

[anyoldfandom]

The problem with starting to think about the Pack more is the fact that now I want to grab Skalamander the same way I grabbed Bobo like. My house now. I want to use your character potential.

[moonsidesong]

i think its kinda funny that ibis paint is regarded as the Broke Artist App or whatever (as opposed to more mainstream programs like csp or procreate) because its free and because of how popular it is with phone + finger artists while im jusg sitting here having used ibis for a cool eight years on purpose.

like i have an ipad and an apple pencil and all theyre very nice and i absolutely could move to a more powerful program i have the resources to do so but my change averse brain has decided they like it here a lot and im not leaving

[notjustjavierpena]

Happy Birthday, Joel

Series Masterpost | Main Masterpost | Support a disabled creator

A/N: Happy outbreak day— I mean, happy birthday to Joel Miller!

Summary: You have snuck out to have birthday-morning-sex with Joel. 

Pairing: Joel Miller x Reader/You (No y/n)

Tags: +18 smut, they are so in love, birthday sex, morning sex, Daddy kink, dry humping, orgasm denial, cowgirl, dirty talk, blowjob, come swallowing 

Word count: 2.9k

Link to this work on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59232835

Happy Birthday, Joel

A window in the bedroom has been cracked. The fresh autumn wind seeps into the room each time it blows over the house, changing the air to something that doesn’t smell like hazy sleep but forces Joel to be awake with you. None of you feel cold though because you are sitting comfortably in Joel’s lap on his wide bed. He has his back against the headboard and a dazed look on his face, bare-chested, beautiful, and propped up against a pillow because you have woken him up like this. 

His calloused hands are on your thighs that are on each side of his body, kneading the flesh gently while murmuring about nothing in the soft pitch that he only has saved for you. He talks quietly and groggily about the weather, the work he has to do on his porch come autumn, but mostly about how good you look on top of him right now, too good to be real, and makes you giggle when he jokes about this being a dream. 

You lean forward to let him feel the softness of the wooly fabric of your oversized sweater brush against his chest, resulting in it slipping off your shoulder. You threw it on just before you tiptoed out of the door, didn’t even bother with pants because you were going straight to the car that no one told you that you could borrow. The sleeves drape past your wrists, tickling his neck and cheek as you touch his jawline. 

“Happy birthday,” you say with an affectionate smile, scratching his scruffy beard with your fingertips. 

“You’re gonna get yourself into trouble, sweetheart,” his voice is laced with sleep, his hands moving slightly on your thighs as if he is deciding how to touch you. You have heat building in your belly, desire making its way through your veins. He chooses to reach up to grip the neck of your sweater, “Sneakin’ over here like this.”

“I’ll be kind enough not to ask how old you are now,” you add to earn a low chuckle, not wanting to entertain the disastrous what-ifs that roam around in his head. Joel yanks at the neck of the sweater, exposing your already bare shoulder even further. He connects his mouth to your impossibly soft skin there, his beard scratching you lightly as he trails his mouth up a path on your shoulder. He kisses every inch he can get to without undressing you fully. 

“Good girl,” he teases back at you, nosing along your neck with his voice vibrating against you, “Don’t needa remind me that I’m old.” 

“You’re not old. You’re perfect,” you cradle his head in your hands, threading your fingers through his salt-and-pepper curls and sighing towards the ceiling. He might think that this - you - is a bad idea but the way his lips feel on your body, the way he puts his whole being into touching you and kissing you like he is starving for you, tells you one thing: Joel Miller cannot stop wanting you. No matter the consequences, no matter the guilt, and no matter how much he tries to convince himself otherwise. 

“Joel,” his name falls from your mouth like a plea, breathless and light as you grip him tightly, “You don’t know what you do to me.” 

“You’re stealin’ my line,” he gives you one last kiss on the column of your neck and smiles up at you. His hands go down your body again, giving you time to suck in a deep breath. However, it’s doomed to not last and your breath hitches in your throat as he slips his palms up under your sweater. His warm fingers skim over the small of your back and up the curve of your spine.

When he lifts your sweater up and off your body, you do not protest even if you are completely bare underneath it. His gaze is on yours with adoration for a moment of not wavering once before he takes the opportunity to look down at your exposed chest. 

Your nipples have hardened at the slight chill, your arms squeezing your breasts together a little with how you still rest your hands on his neck and shoulders.  He places a palm just above your belly button and runs it up your body, skimming it over your breast to make you tremble in his arms. He lets his hand descend again, this time with a knuckle brushing over your nipple. You visibly shiver, chewing on your bottom lip as he worships you silently. 

“Is my doll cold?” He drawls, voice thick like honey, and your thoughts start to blur at the nickname. 

“No, Daddy,” you tell him and it’s the truth; you are burning from the inside out at how much your heartbeat is racing nowhere in your chest, having moved south long ago to soak your panties through to his boxers.

“By the way, you weren’t right,” he brushes your jaw when his free hand reaches for your chin to pull you towards his mouth. His thumb dances over your bottom lip, “I know exactly what I’m doin’ to ya, babygirl.”

You give the finger a gentle kiss, parting your lips to allow him to feel your tongue if he wants but when he doesn’t move, you slip out your tongue just a peek to teasingly lick his thumb as an imitation of how well you suck his cock. He smirks at that, letting his thumb go inside the heat of your mouth. He presses down on your tongue as if to test you, whispering how good you are for him as he does it. 

Underneath you, his cock has gone from half-soft to fully hard in mere seconds, pressing insistently against your core. He might think he is old but this part of him shows no proof of that. You dare move your hips back and forth once, dragging your wet underwear over the length of his erection. 

He groans alongside you but your sound is obscene in comparison, escaping around his digit in your mouth. The friction against your cunt is delicious, so much so that the fabric between your thighs has started to cling to you. 

“Give Daddy some sugar. It’s his birthday,” he commands with his hips bucking up, not being able to help how his body craves you first thing in the morning. His thumb slips from your mouth, dragging a string of spit down your chin in its wake. He curls both hands firmly around your waist again, pulling you flush against him so he can move you deliberately on his dick and watch your tits bounce. 

He guides you slowly over his thick length with ragged breathing, staring at the quick rise and fall of your chest when your clit gets the attention it desperately needs. You grip his shoulders and arch your back at the way pleasure rips through you, and though your cunt might feel empty, you feel everything start to build already just behind your clit. 

“That’s it, look at you, this my birthday present? Jeeesus, you look amazin’, look at those tits,” he praises breathlessly, throbbing against the damp fabric that separates the two of you. He dares grip your hips even harder, his fingers digging into the plump skin of your ass, and pull you down harder on him. 

Your moans grow in volume, your eyes fluttering closed as heat racks up your spine from the small of your back when tension starts to build. It pulls the coil tighter and tighter inside of you and causes you to whimper, the noise making Joel’s cock twitch underneath you. 

“Tell me, baby,” he groans and you dread the command that might come because you can’t think right now. One of his hands slips up your back to make sure you don’t fall off of him. Your clit is pulsing on the edge of release, knowing that it doesn’t need much more before you’ll explode, “Tell me when you’re ‘bout to come, okay?”

You hate him for it but still nod anyway, unable to speak for a moment, your breath only consisting of tiny gasps as you ride the edge of your impending orgasm. Still, with your eyes squeezed shut, you manage to speak just a few, barely incomprehensible words, “I’m gonna— I’m so close, Daddy.”

But before you can finish, before that final moment where your brain shuts off to feel your cunt spasm, Joel has halted your movements by holding your hips still. You whimper, trying to keep going because the pleasure is still there just out of reach, but his grip is unyielding and his disapproving tone is condescending. 

“Stop, not yet. We do it Daddy’s way on his birthday,” he commands and nearly ignores the tears forming at the corners of your eyes, “Not until I’m inside of ya, baby.”

You whine in response, knowing that he is right. It’ll be much better with him buried in your pussy but your mind is so clouded and delirious with the need for release that it is nearly painful how he is holding your orgasm hostage by gripping your hips like he is. 

“Please,” you say with a tear slipping from your eye.

“Don’t cry, baby, I’m goin’ to let go now,” he replies, rubbing soothing circles with his thumbs and leaning up to peck your lips, “But I need ya to be patient. I can’t have my good girl act so bad just for her pussy to feel good.” 

His hands move swiftly to drag his boxers down, settling the waistband just beneath his balls to cut down on the time he’ll be without touching his special girl. The anticipation drives you crazy, a desperate moan leaving you as your hips start to twitch on their own accord. You let out a little moan, brows furrowed as you search for any type of friction. 

“Nooo, just a few more seconds, sweetheart,” he says and drags the word out in the same tone he would use with a puppy causing trouble. He digs his fingers underneath the front of your wet panties to pull them to the side, exposing your swollen pussy to the air in the room. You look down with him, watching how he positions the head of his cock between your folds. 

“Lift yourself up a little— that’s it,” he guides you, shuddering underneath you as you greedily sink down on his length. You should probably have gone slower, a feeble noise escaping your open mouth as you suddenly feel so full of him. There’s a mixture of relief and regret in you as it stings a little to have your soft walls stretched by him, the sensation enough for you to nearly drive you over the edge instantly. 

You exhale shakily, gripping around his cock tightly when you are seated in his lap. Your hands slide up to cup his cheeks, framing his face while you kiss him on the mouth after getting used to him inside of you. There’s only slight movement, a gasp here and there, a twitch of Joel’s cock inside of your wet cunt. 

You move a little to find that your clit brushes against his pelvis, and while capturing his mouth in a searing and desperate first proper kiss of today, you start moving your hips instinctively. Hearing the low, guttural moan that tumbles from Joel’s mouth in response is enough to spur you on. 

You feel his hands move up your back and around your front to cup your breasts, his thumbs brushing over your hardened nipples while you ride him as if your life depended on it. He says your name in a half-chuckle and half-moan, tries urging you to slow down, but you are lost in the way he feels when he fucks you. 

“I love you,” he decides to say instead of something close to a scolding, pulling you out of your trance. You stare down into his eyes that are glazed over with desire, whimpering at the head of his cock brushing that little spot inside of you that has you hurtling towards your orgasm. 

“I love you too, Daddy,” you say softly, blinking down at him. He grabs your arms as they rest on his shoulders, pulling them from their place so he can entwine your fingers on both hands. 

“No-no, no Daddy,” he says with a ragged breath, glancing briefly down at where you are connected and angling his hips to make it easier for you to grind against him. Your moans climb in pitch and he places your hands on his chest, “Just Joel right now. C’mon, lemme hear you say it.”

“I love you, Joel,” you give him a hazy smile and rest your forehead against his.

“Good girl,” he whispers and then grabs your hips again. He starts to move beneath you, slow and steady in contrast to your youthful need of going hard and fast, his hips rolling smoothly and with no urgency. You struggle with it at first but he growls at you, holding you tighter than before and it feels like you might bruise if you disobey him. He guides you, controls you, steering you as you ride his leaking cock while your clit gets just the right amount of pressure. 

“Joel,” you gasp, starting a sentence but barely knowing where to go with it at the feel of him filling you up over and over.

“My perfect girl,” he replies. You make him groan when you drag your fingertips through the hairs on his chest, scratching desperately as the tension between your legs starts building again. 

It’s not long before you are teetering on the edge again, whining so loudly that people might be able to hear you through the window. Joel is right behind you, panting as the muscles of his strong thighs strain to make him pound up into you. 

You hold on for dear life, crying out his name as everything becomes too much, and your orgasm tears through you without mercy. Each ripple of pleasure has you feeling delirious, drunk on the feeling of getting pounded through the intoxicating spasms around his generous size and he fucks you all the way through your aftershocks. But even as it fades, he doesn’t stop moving in his quest for his own release, doesn’t want to stop before he has had his fill. He keeps the pleasure in your body burning as he continues spearing you repeatedly and it becomes hard for you to figure out where your orgasm begins or ends. 

You don’t know when you’ve started giggling in post-orgasmic bliss between feeble whimpers, bouncing in his lap as every nerve in your body is on fire, but you eventually start babbling ridiculously between gasps, “I can’t— Joel, I— Let me suck you off.”

Joel curses at your suggestion, his hips faltering for just a moment before he finds the willpower to stop his thrusts completely, “You’re gonna kill me, baby.”

“I would never,” you say sweetly, making sure that your words drip from your lips like honey. You push down on his chest to slide off of him, a noise leaving you as his cock slips from your dripping, used pussy. You move shakily down between his legs, pulling the covers a little to the side to make room, “Especially not on Daddy’s birthday.”

You can see how close he is by the blush on his chest, how much he is holding back, and you decide not to waste any time. You wrap your hand around the base of his soaked cock and lower your head enough to place a wet kiss on the head, looking up at him through your lashes. 

“Fuck,” he groans when you take him fully into your mouth afterward, bobbing your head with a hum and hollowing your cheeks. He is a treat, tasting sweet of you and slightly bitter of his own precome, “That’s it, princess, you fuckin’ know how to suck Daddy’s cock.”

You moan around him as a way of confirming the truth of that statement. Then you hear his head bump against the wall, the picture above the bed moving from side to side, and suddenly, hands are in your hair to guide you up and down on his length. Your eyes flutter closed and you try to focus on the taste and feel of him on your tongue. Your hand moves to cup his balls, your mouth stretching around him and moving downward until he hits the back of your mouth. 

“I’m gonna come,” he pants, his lower belly jumping with each ragged breath. You prepare for the moment he lets go, opening your eyes again to look at his stunning face when he gives it to you. His hand tightens in your hair, “You want Daddy’s load, huh? Wanna— oh shit, you wanna swallow it up?”

You hum. With a deep, guttural groan of relief, Joel comes in your mouth and his hips twitch while he does it. He spills on your tongue in thick, hot, and salty ropes of white, throbbing obscenely while you swallow down what doesn’t mix with your spit and spills down your chin. 

You keep him in your mouth until he has stopped shuddering from his orgasm, eventually pulling off of him with a wet pop. You rest your head against his hip, staring up at him lovingly, “Happy birthday, Joel Miller.”

“You little minx,” he chuckles, running a hand over his hair as he tries to catch his breath, “You had that planned from the beginning, didn’t you?”

And maybe you did.

.

.

If you would like to follow my writing then go follow @notjustjavierpena-fics and turn on notifications 💖❤️

[wheneverfeasible]

Because I’m terrible and the plots won’t leave me alone, I’ve now got an idea based on this post about a demon who feasts on pain and suffering being a medical practitioner for the chronically and terminally ill and the patients fully loving it. And then my brain rot had to say “make it Steddie” because I’ve lost all control of my life.

—

cw: terminal illness, minor and major character death (with a happy ending tho)

But imagine it. Eddie is a demon, a low ranking one at that originally. He gets a job at a medical facility for the chronically/terminally ill. Over time at the happy and consensual feasting he really does become one of the strongest demons because he’s constantly fed to the brim and he even has human worshippers, not that they’re traditional worshippers.

No, his followers are little old senior citizens who slip him butterscotch candies and other sweets they’re not supposed to have, which technically count as offerings. They thank him for his work, because he does actually take care of their bodies as well and even listens to their life stories, which count as praise and worship. They love and are devoted to him and they bring in their friends and family who are suffering too and Eddie’s accidental cult grows.

One day, things change. A young man, an anomaly in his youth, is brought in by parents who no longer wish to be burdened by their disabled son. Steve just shrugs it off and moves in with a smile, seemingly fine with being abandoned by his parents because he dared to be anything other than perfectly healthy.

He puts around the facility in his terry cloth robe and slippers on some days, others he dresses up in polos and slacks or even jeans when he’s feeling more casual, and always with a smile on his face. He makes those around him smile and laugh too, and his cheeks get pinched and he’s slipped candies too and he listens to others’ stories and he seems happy and content.

But Eddie feeds on his pain and suffering all the same, knows that behind that smile is a young boy who was told he probably wouldn’t live to see 30, who listens to the older folks knowing he would never get to live a life like that. Eddie knows that sometimes Steve cries himself to sleep at night.

Over time, Eddie and Steve grow closer. Steve hadn’t believed that Eddie was a demon at first, had thought it all just a joke, until one night Mr. Wozniak was laying in his bed, and Steve hadn’t meant to overhear, but he was passing by and the door was cracked open.

“Will I go to Hell now?” Mr. Wozniak was asking, but he seems peaceful all the same, like the thought wasn’t the terrifying ordeal so many people thought it was.

“No, sweetheart,” Eddie was saying, but his voice sounds a little off, huskier, like…like brimstone sat in his throat. “I’ve never claimed your soul. It’s still your own. Go find Irena. She’s been waiting for you for too long.”

Irena, Steve knew from speaking with Mr. Wozniak, was his young wife who had died decades earlier.

“Will I get to see you again?”

Eddie’s long fingers reach out, his nails long and sharp, dark in a way that was not nail polish. He lightly and gently strokes the papery skin of Mr. Wozniak’s cheek. “You will be at peace. You will find the afterlife is so much more than this Good-vs-Evil rhetoric so popular in this plane of existence. Go in peace, my child, and should you wish it, perhaps one day we might meet again.”

Mr. Wozniak smiles at that, and he closes his eyes with a softly whispered, “Irena, I’m coming…”

A moment later, he was gone.

Steve watches as Eddie seems to grow smaller, appear more normal, and though he knows he should be terrified, he isn’t. Instead he continues on his way, letting the knowledge of more percolate in his brain, though by the next morning when news of Mr. Wozniak’s passing spreads and Eddie assures everyone that he passed away peacefully and in no pain, Steve knows Eddie speaks the truth and he realizes that nothing has changed. Eddie is still Eddie.

They continue to grow closer. He spends more time with Eddie, lets Eddie in fully on how much he hurts, and tells the demon that he wished things had been different and that they could have met under better circumstances.

Eddie tells him that he never enjoyed the taste of regret. It was far too bitter.

They fall in love, encouraged by their friends in the facility new and old, who don’t seem to care that he is a mortal with a short life expectancy and Eddie is an immortal demon lord. What is all that in the face of true love?

And then it happens, and Steve is the one lying in bed, knowing his time has come. He smiles up at Eddie and decides not to regret any of it, not wanting their final moments to be flavored with bitterness.

“Stevie,” Eddie whispers mournfully, and he’s beautiful. It’s not his full true form, but his eyes are a dark blood red, his teeth elongated into sharp fangs, and his pale skin veined with reds and blacks. Horns curl out from his curly hair.

“You said once that I get to be with my loved ones after this,” Steve says, still smiling, and he reaches up to cup Eddie’s jaw with a weakened hand. Eddie nods against him, and Steve wonders if all demons can cry, or if it’s just his. “Then take my soul, darling. It already belongs to you.”

Eddie flinches back, like Steve knew he would, because souls are not little things. Eddie had explained before, after everything, that he didn’t even actually deal in souls, that that wasn’t the sort of demon he was. Steve had asked if he could, on a technicality, and Eddie had paused because saying yes, any demon could, but souls were priceless. When you gave one up to a demon, you gave up everything. You would be theirs until the end of days. Eddie had said he wasn’t that sort of demon.

“Baby, no,” Eddie breathes now, shaking his head gently enough not to dislodge Steve’s hand. “You would be—”

“Yours,” Steve interrupts. “But I already am. You already own my heart. I now willingly give you my soul. All you have to do is accept it.”

And Eddie protests, at first, because Steve is giving him complete control over him for eternity. Steve gives it freely with open arms, and in the end, Eddie can do nothing but accept it. He tells Steve that he doesn’t know if demons have souls or not, but his belongs to Steve just as assuredly as his own heart does.

Steve’s final mortal breath is gifted into Eddie’s crimson mouth, full of peace and love and the understanding that this thing between them will always beat eternal.

It turns out that, whether it was still unknown if all demons had souls, Eddie was the sort that does.

And it also turns out that, when you’re gifted a demon lord’s soul, you become a demon too.

Eddie’s cult ends soon after, disbanded into non-existence. In its place, however, rises a new one that worships not just one demon caretaker, but two as Eddie is soon joined by another with floppy brown hair and sparkling brown eyes that for once smiles without hidden pain. They take care of their charges, gently coax them into eternal rest when it’s their time, and together prove that true love is forever.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Help Save the World of TTRPGs and Their Creators.

Okay I’m being a little dramatic, but at the same time I’m pretty serious. This is a call to action, and the livelihoods of myself and lots of other people, many of them (like myself) disabled, are depending on it. This is a post about why, what you can do about it, and (perhaps least often answered) how.

This post is actually an accompaniment to another discussion by someone else. If you don’t want to listen to a 90-minute in-depth discussion of much of what I’m about to tell you, you can just keep reading. Otherwise, click here or here and listen to this either before or after you read this post. (They’re the same thing, just different sources.)

If you have ever made or reblogged posts urging people to switch from Google Chrome to Firefox, you should be willing to at least give a try to other TTRPGs besides D&D5e for much the same principle reasons. I’m not telling you you have to hate D&D5e, and I’m not telling you you have to quit D&D5e, I’m just asking you to try some other games. If you don’t like them, and you really want to go back to D&D5e, then go back to D&D5e. But how can you really know you won’t like other games if you have literally never tried them? This post is a post about why and how to try them. If you’re thinking right now that you don’t want to try them, I urge you to look below to see if any of your reasons for not wanting to try them are covered there. Because the monopoly that WotC’s D&D5e has on TTRPGs as a whole is bad for me as a game designer, and it’s bad for you as a game player. It’s even bad for you if you like D&D5e. A fuller discussion of the why and how this is the case can be found in the links above, but it isn’t fully necessary for understanding this post, it’ll just give you a better perspective on it.

If you’re a D&D5e player, I’m sure at some point or another, you’ve been told “play a different game”, and it must get frustrating without the context of why and how. This post is here to give you the why and how.

[The following paragraph has been edited because the original wording made it sound like we think all weird TTRPGs suck.]

Before that though, one more thing to get out of the way. I'm going to level with you. There’s a lot of weird games out there.

You are gonna see a lot of weird TTRPGs when you take the plunge. Many of them try to completely reinvent what a TTRPG even is, and some fail spectacularly, others really do even up doing something very interesting even if they don't end up being what a core TTRPG player wants. But not every indie RPG is a Bladefish, lots and lots of them are more 'traditional' and will feel very familiar to you, I promise. (And you might even find that you like the weird experimental bladefish type ones, these are usually ideal for one-session plays when your usual group can't play your usual game for any reason.)

You're also going to probably see a lot of very bad games, and man have I got some stories of very bad games, but for now I'm just saying to make sure you read the reviews, or go through curators (several of which will be listed below), before you buy.

Now that that is out of the way, I’m going to go down a list of concerns you may have for why not, and then explain the how.

“I don’t want to learn a whole new set of rules after I already spent so much time learning D&D5e.”

Learning a new set of rules is not going to be as hard as you think. Most other TTRPGs aren’t like that. D&D5e is far on the high end of the scale for TTRPGs being hard and time-consuming to learn and play. If you’ve only played D&D5e, it might trick you into thinking that learning any TTRPG is an overwhelmingly time-consuming task, but this is really mostly a D&D5e problem, not a TTRPG problem as a whole.

“D&D5e has all of these extra online tools to help you play it.”

So what? People have been playing TTRPGs without the help of computers for 50 years. To play a well-designed TTRPG you won’t need a computer. Yes, even if you're bad at math. There are some TTRPGs out there that barely even use math.

“I’m too invested in the narrative and characters of my group’s current ongoing D&D5e campaign to switch to something else.”

There are other games, with better design made by better people for less money, that are the same kind of game as D&D5e, that your current characters, lore, and plot will fit right into and do it better. And no, it's not just Pathfinder, there's others.

“I can’t afford to play another TTRPG.”

You probably can. If you’ve only played D&D5e, you might have been made to think that TTRPGs are a very expensive hobby. They aren’t. D&D5e is actually uniquely expensive, costing more than 3x more than the next most expensive TTRPG I can think of right now. Even on the more expensive end, other TTRPG books will cost you no more than $60, most will cost you less than $20, and a whole lot of them are just free. If you somehow still can’t afford another TTRPG, come to the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book club mentioned below, nominate the game, and if it wins the vote we will straight up buy it for you.

(By the way, if you had any of the above concerns about trying other games besides D&D5e, that really makes it sound like you are in a textbook abusive relationship with D&D5e. This is how abusers control their partners, and how empires control their citizens, by teaching you to think that nothing could ever get any better, and even though they treat you bad, the Other will treat you even worse.)

“If I don’t play D&D5e, which TTRPG should I play?”

That’s a pretty limited question to be asking, because there will be no one TTRPG for everything. And no, D&D5e is not the one TTRPG for everything, Hasbro’s marketing team is just lying to you. (Pathfinder and PbtA are not the one system for everything either!) Do you only play one video game or only watch one movie or only read one book? When you finish watching an action movie like Mad Max, and then you want to watch a horror movie, do you just rewind Mad Max and watch it over again but this time you act scared the whole time? No, you watch a different movie. I’m asking you to give the artistic medium of TTRPGs the same respect you would give movies.

“I want to play something besides D&D5e, but my friends won’t play anything else!”

I have several answers to this.

Try showing them this post.

If that doesn’t work: Make them. Put your foot down. This works especially well if you are the DM. Tell them you won’t run another session of D&D5e until they agree to give what you want to do at least one try instead of always doing only what they want to do. This is, like, playing 101. We learned this in kindergarten. If your friend really wants to play something else, you should give their game a try, or you’re not really being a very good friend.

If that doesn’t work, find another group. This doesn’t even mean that you have to leave your existing group. A good place to start would be the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club which will be mentioned and linked below. You can also go to the subreddit of any game you’re interested in and probably meet people there who have the same problem you do and want to put together a group to play something other than D&D5e. You might get along great with these people, you might not, but you won’t know until you try. Just make sure to have a robust “session zero” so everyone is on the same page. This is a good practice for any group but it is especially important for a group made of players you’ve just met.

“I only watch actual plays.”

Then watch actual plays of games that aren’t D&D5e. These podcasts struggle for the same reasons that indie RPGs struggle, because of the brand recognition and brand loyalty D&D5e has, despite their merit. I don’t watch actual plays, or else I would be able to list more of them. So, anyone who does watch actual plays, please help me out by commenting on this post with some non-D&D5e actual plays you like. And please do me a favor and don’t list actual plays that only play one non-D&D5e system, list ones that go through a variety of systems. The first one I can think of is Tiny Table.

“I can just homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e.”

Even though I want to, I’m not going to try and argue that you can’t actually homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e. Instead, I’m going to ask you why you’re buying two $50 rulebooks just to throw away half the pages. In most other good RPGs, you don’t need to change the rules to make them fun, they’re fun right out the box.

“But homebrewing D&D5e into any kind of game is fun! You can homebrew anything out of D&D5e!”

Firstly, I promise that this is not unique to D&D5e. Secondly, then you would probably have more fun homebrewing a system that gives you a better starting point for reaching your goal. Also, what if I told you that there are entire RPG systems out there that are made just for this? There are RPG systems that were designed for the purpose of being a toolbox and set of materials for you to work with to make exactly the game you want to make. Some examples are GURPS, Savage Worlds, Basic RolePlaying, Caltrop Core, and (as much as I loathe it) PbtA.

“I’m not supporting WotC’s monopoly because I pirate all the D&D5e books.”

Then you’re still not supporting the smaller developers that this monopoly is crushing, either.

Now, here’s the how. Because I promise you, there’s not just one, but probably a dozen other RPGs out there that will scratch your exact itch.

Here’s how to find them. This won’t be a comprehensive list because I’ve already been typing this for like 3 hours already. Those reading this, please go ahead and comment more to help fill out the list.

First, I’m gonna plug one of my own major projects, because it’s my post. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club. It’s a discord server that treats playing TTRPGs like a book club, with the goal of introducing members to a wide variety of games other than D&D5e. RPGs are nominated by members, then we hold a vote to decide what to read and play for a short campaign, then we repeat. There is no financial, time, or schedule investment required to join this book club, I promise it is very schedule-friendly, because we assign people to different groups based of schedule compatibility. You don’t have to play each campaign, or any campaign, you can just read along and participate in discussion that way. And if you can’t afford to buy the rulebook we’re going to be reading, we will make sure you get a PDF of it for free. That is how committed we are to getting non-D&D5e RPGs into people’s hands. Here is an invite link.

Next, there are quite a few tumblr blogs you can follow to get recommendations shown to you frequently.

@indierpgnewsletter

@indie-ttrpg-of-the-day

@theresattrpgforthat

@haveyouplayedthisttrpg

@indiepressrevolution

Plenty of podcasts, journalists, and youtubers out there do in-depth discussions of different systems regularly, a couple I can think of off the top of my head are:

Storyteller Conclave (I’m actually going to be interviewed live on this show on April 10th!)

Seth Skorkowsky

Questing Beast

The Gaming Table

Rascal News

Lastly, you can just go looking. Browse r/rpg, drivethrurpg.com, indie press revolution, and itch.io.

Now, if you really want to support me and my team specifically Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, our debut TTRPG, is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.

[theuntoldstorythatneedsawriter]

More then enough 🦽

Mapi León x reader x Ingrid Engen

warning : disability 🕶🦻

Summary :

Being a wheelchair user, you're afraid your girlfriends will love you less.

The sun dipped low over the horizon, casting a golden glow over the pitch. The girls had just finished their training session, and Mapi and Ingrid stood by the sidelines, both laughing and chatting as they packed up their gear. The atmosphere around them was warm and light, hearted, despite the hard work they’d put in. But their eyes constantly flickered over to the stands, where you sat, watching with your usual gentle smile.

You had been in their life for a while now, ever since you met Mapi at a charity event she attended a few months ago. You were disabled, using a wheelchair after a car accident left you unable to walk, but that never stopped you from living fully, embracing every moment with joy and a sense of adventure. Mapi had been drawn to that strength in you, the way you approached life with so much heart despite everything you'd gone through.

The three of you had clicked almost immediately. Mapi's fierce energy, Ingrid's calm, soothing nature, and your own witty humor and zest for life had created the perfect dynamic. Mapi was fiery and protective, always making sure you felt included and cared for, while Ingrid’s gentleness brought a comforting peace, like a calming wave that soothed all your worries.

Today, as you waited for them to finish their session, you couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious. Though you tried not to let your disability affect your confidence, there were days when you wondered if you were enough for them. Two incredible athletes, constantly moving and living in ways you could no longer do.

As you looked down at your hands, lost in thought, Mapi’s voice pulled you from your reverie.

- Holà, cariño, what are you thinking about?

You glanced up, finding both Mapi and Ingrid now standing in front of you, their eyes full of concern. Mapi knelt down to be at your eye level, while Ingrid took her place beside you, gently resting a hand on your shoulder. You hesitated before answering, biting your lip.

- Just… wondering if you guys ever feel like you’re missing out, being with me. You’re always on the go, always so active, and I—well, I can’t do the things you do.

Mapi's brows furrowed, and her hands found yours, gripping them tightly.

- Don’t say that. You’re never a burden, cariño. We don’t want you to be anyone else. We love you exactly as you are.

Ingrid nodded, her voice soft but firm.

- It’s true. We’ve never thought about what we’re missing because you’re everything we need. You bring so much light into our lives.

Tears welled in your eyes, but you blinked them away, laughing softly.

- You two are too much. I don’t deserve you.

Mapi shook her head, a playful smirk on her lips.

- Nonsense. You deserve everything. And you’ve got us, so you must be doing something right.

Ingrid smiled, leaning in to press a soft kiss to your temple.

- We’re a team, remember? We’re in this together.

You let out a breath, the weight on your chest lifting slightly. With them by your side, things always seemed brighter, and you never felt alone. You didn’t need to be anyone else but yourself, they loved you for who you were.

As the three of you sat there, the cool breeze brushing against your skin, Mapi suddenly jumped to her feet with a mischievous grin.

- Alright, enough of this sappy stuff. How about a game?

You looked at her, confused.

- A game? What kind of game?

She pointed to a nearby soccer ball.

- We’re gonna play a little football.

Your eyes widened.

- I can’t play football, Mapi.

- Why not?

She challenged, already grabbing the ball.

- We’ll modify the rules. You will be a goalie so you can stay in your chair, and Ingrid and I will try to score. First one to five wins.

You couldn’t help but laugh at her stubbornness. You rolled your eyes playfully.

- You are impossible.

Mapi kicked the ball gently toward you.

- Come on, love, show us what you’ve got.

And so, the three of you played. It wasn’t about skill or competition. It was about fun, about laughter, about being together. You quickly realized that it didn’t matter that you were in a wheelchair. Mapi and Ingrid didn’t care about what you couldn’t do. They only cared about spending time with you, making memories, and showing you just how much they adored you.

As the sun set, and the last goal was scored (you might have let Ingrid win, just for the look of joy on her face), the three of you collapsed onto the grass, breathless from laughter and exertion. Mapi lay beside you, her arm slung across your lap, while Ingrid rested her head on your shoulder.

- See?

Mapi said between breaths.

- Told you you could play.

You smiled, looking down at her. As the night settled around you, you realized that in their love, there was no place for doubt. With them, you were whole. You were perfect. And most importantly, you were loved just as you were.

[nathaslosthershit]

Unremarkable (LN4)

(Part 2 of the Blind Items series)

Summary: Blind Items returns again to ruin yet another happy couple's peace. This time, Lando Norris and his ‘unremarkable’ girlfriend.

“Lando, have you seen this?” his girlfriend asked, showing him the tweets. When they had soft launched, she got a small dose of what it would be like to be the WAG of Lando Norris. But even when they hadn’t known anything about her, some people still had been so mean. Now that they knew she had a ‘commoner’ job, they had started tearing her to shreds. ‘How could someone so rich and famous go for such a plain girl’ was what so many people had said. 

“Oscar showed it to me today. I am so sorry, honey, I was hoping that you wouldn’t have seen it. Those people are absolute asses, love.” He probably should have said something earlier but he knew how hard she would take it. While she had joked in the past about the differences in their jobs, especially the pay, he knew she felt insecure about it at times. 

“The thing is, I didn’t see it. Not at first. I only saw it when I heard one of my students talking about it in class today. Can you even imagine how humiliating that was for me? Hearing my own students who I have done nothing but be kind and understanding to, trying to get them to love learning, talk about how awful it is their favorite driver is dating someone as boring as a teacher.” She couldn’t stop the tears as she went on about the situation. He wouldn’t understand, he couldn’t. She knew Lando had his moments of insecurity but nothing like this. At the end of the day, he still had hundreds upon thousands of fans who loved him immensely. 

Even if he couldn’t fully understand, it still broke his heart seeing how much it hurt her. Sure, he hadn’t ever thought he would date a school teacher either, but that was mostly due to his previous lack of appreciation for school. But being with her has changed that. His girlfriend could always make things interesting. She loved to spout history facts on vacation and it always made him so deliriously happy to see how giddy she was to learn new things. 

Seeing her now though, so visibly upset made him realize this wasn’t something that could slide easily. His PR team might not love it but he wasn’t going to just sit there and let her feel terrible about herself.

“I’ll fix this, I promise.” He said quickly as he left. He shouldn’t have left her alone and crying, but he was fuming and decided he needed that anger to let his message out. 

landonorris

Liked by oscarpiastri and 153,137 others

landonorris I don’t know who this gossip page thinks they are but the last thing I will tolerate is someone hiding behind a screen telling the entire world that my girlfriend, who I love more than life itself, is ‘dull’ and ‘unremarkable’ because of her job. This is a woman who is smarter than 99% of the people I have ever interacted with, someone who spends so much of their time trying, and succeeding, to get kids to love learning. Even as someone who didn’t appreciate school as much as they should have, I would never have once thought school teachers were any of the negative things you have said. Luckily, here I am, happy with my amazing girlfriend who deserves the entire world, and I know I will spend the rest of my life trying to give it to her. 

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A few minutes later she came into the room, tears still staining her cheeks.

“Thank you Lando” she said as he motioned for her to sit on his lap. 

“I can say more if you want? I definitely think I could have cursed them out mor-” He was cut off with a kiss. The sheer force of it caused them to bump heads a little, which then caused them to break apart giggling. “I’m serious about what I said. I don’t know what I did to get someone as wonderful as you but I am not going to let some assholes on the internet make you upset over something so incredible. You should be proud of what you do and I will forever work to remind you of how amazing you are.”

“I love you, Lando” was all she replied.

“I love you more”

“Please can we not play this game you know I love-”

“Nope, la-la-la-la I can’t hear you over the sound of me loving you soooo much” He said as he covered his ears.

Such a dork, she thought.

[genericpuff]

i find it funny that one of rachel’s drawings of herself in the afterword that just went up is just fully persephone. is that something she does a lot?

Alright so I've been making it a general rule for myself to like, not harp on Rachel in any way outside of LO as much because frankly the horse is dead now and there's not much left to say outside of what can be analyzed in hindsight. I think despite everything I have to say about her and her work, she still deserves to get away from this nonsense and I don't wanna spend eternity hovering over her shoulder.

But the afterword was posted within the LO series and is clearly meant for readers of LO in the functioning of being an afterword so let's just call it fair game LOL

I will say, on the whole, it does feel very honest and sentimental and I can respect Rachel for taking the time to write out and illustrate her afterword in a way that was personal to both her and her fans. I can understand why she went at it from the angle that she did and I'm not gonna fault her for that.

But there's also something that feels deeply... disingenuous about her approach right from the starting gun. I will say, before I continue, that I'm well aware I am biased towards Rachel as a creator, and I fully acknowledge that I could very well be reading too much into things. This is just my opinion, take it with mountains of salt.

I can get looking back on your own childhood, your past self, whatever, and going "see! it all got better!" because sure! For a lot of creators like Rachel, it must be wild to look back on where they came from and there's a lot of sentimentality on expressing that through an afterword like this where she reflects on where she came from. Though she STILL didn't acknowledge her other comics outside of LO, I can understand if she wants to leave those skeletons in the closet.

But I feel like her drawing herself as a child who's being given an Eisner by her adult self and all that just feels like some gross attempt to disarm any criticism of her because "don't make fun of me, I'm just a sad lonely baby girl!"

She's not a child. Child Rachel didn't grossly misappropriate Greek myth into their own self-indulged vanity project. Child Rachel didn't claim herself a folklorist of a culture's works only to bastardize them completely. Child Rachel didn't create a hostile environment within her fanbase by bullying anyone who she perceived as a threat, sneaking into critical spaces to try and cause trouble, and writing her own clapbacks into her comic. Child Rachel didn't claim to be challenging misogyny and purity culture only to reinforce misogyny and purity culture through her own self-insert baby-virgin-gets-rescued-by-rich-tycoon power fantasy that regularly glorified abuse towards women and the lower class.

30-almost-40-year-old Rachel did though.

At best it comes across as really cringe sentimentality from a Greek-weeb (heh, greeboo) and goes to show how much Rachel inserted herself into Greek myth without ever absorbing its messages or cultural contexts, it was all about her and her feelings as a sad New Zealand girl with dyslexia who thought Persephone's story was about another sad girl being rescued from her "horrible childhood".

At worst it's an active attempt to play on people's heartstrings by drawing herself as a child who people will naturally not want to criticize. I don't want to assume she's doing it intentionally, I really don't want to leave her afterword on a bad foot, as I can definitely understand as both a creator and a person who struggled with learning disabilities in their own childhood how and why she wants to pay homage to her past and where she came from... but let's just say, as someone who's also gotten way too "lost in the sauce" concerning personal self-reflective projects, I think there's a lot to say about how this confirms that Rachel made LO entirely for herself, about herself, without any actual intention to respect the original myths, because she never truly separated them from herself when she was a child. And, in my humble opinion as someone who has Been There with the self-insert OC's and self-reflective angsty plotlines, I can fully attest to the fact that that's not fucking healthy. Even with personal projects, you NEED to learn to get your head out of the sauce, you NEED to learn to objectively separate yourself from the narrative so the story doesn't fall apart under your own hubris and ego, you NEED to learn to draw a line if you want to have any sort of identity as a human being outside of what you make for people. And that's with just normal original stories, this was a story based on Greek myth which doesn't belong to her.

And this goes for a lot of the things she's said and done in the past, so much of her own "sources" even are tethered to things that she read / watched in her childhood and only vaguely remembers, as if she never mentally left her childhood at all, which just... if the point was to highlight her past and the traumas she went through and how they contributed to her present, an Eisner isn't going to validate those experiences. And drawing attention to her past through the lens of her childhood self absolutely 100% does not absolve her of the negative effect her work has had on the modern Greek myth zeitgeist nor the things she's said and done as a 38 year old woman who should absolutely know better.

The community she entered and took from will forever remain changed by her influence and taking, in many ways not for the better. She has the privilege of walking away and never having to think about it again, with all the awards and accolades that were bought for her, the bravado that she built around being a "folklorist" with zero credentials, and the platform she was given over many other creators struggling to even be heard.

That "place" she claims to have now was built entirely on inserting herself into another culture's works and doing nothing but taking, taking, taking, while offering nothing in return but vanity and lip service. That "place" was paid for and brought to you by Webtoons.

[narrativelysignificantturtleduck]

something that makes sokka extremely adhd relatable is that he's constantly looking for his Thing, the one Thing he's good at or useful for that makes up for any failings or flaws or ways he just can't measure up to others. at the beginning of the show he defines himself by being the oldest boy in the village & best warrior, but then he gets his ass kicked by zuko and suki and sees aang's raw power and he can't exactly think fighting is his special skill anymore. but he still thinks he has to be defined by fighting ('man of the house' daddy issues) so he calls himself the guy with the boomerang bc that's turned out to be his most useful and versatile and unique weapon, the one that other people can't outclass him at (after all, it's his most successful attack in his fight with zuko). when he loses it in "avatar day" he explicitly says it's like losing a key part of his identity and the moment katara goes "hey you're good at solving mysteries" he's like "yeah! i'm a detective! that's my new thing! and gets a new set of objects to signify it ("i believe in the power of stuff"). but detective sokka doesn't last bc throughout the entire episode he and katara are pretty equally matched in detective skills and he gets his boomerang back anyway. failed experiment.

and throughout all of this, he's figured out that people find his insistance on getting them fed & his grumpy comments funny and so he begins defining himself as the meat and sarcasm guy, and when he's a tough spot in "bitter work", bargaining with the universe to get him help, he offers that up as all he's got to give. it's obviously a Joke that he immediately asks for meat after telling the universe he'll give it up but it's also pretty indicative of how much he clings to these identities. it's all he's got (he thinks), of COURSE he can't actually give it up. they stuck that boy in a hole for 22 minutes and it revealed so much about how he sees himself.

at some point (likely around "the library" when he takes initiative to come up with a fire nation invasion plan) he also becomes the plan guy, the idea guy, and the gaang find themselves looking to him for leadership. this is perhaps the closest to fully encompassing sokka that any of his "[blank] guy" labels get, since coming up with plans involves planning when and how to fight (boomerang guy) & how to get everyone fed (meat), and people not following his plans is a major source of frustration (sarcasm).

this all culminates in "sokka's master", where the show finally names the underlying insecurity driving this quest - that he's a nonbender. katara being the last waterbender meant she was in danger and that keeping her safe was top priority, and even though hakoda and kya wouldn't have played favorites sokka probably felt a little like the unfavorite child for not being special like her. he lacks an ability, and believes his life has less value bc of it. almost like somebody with a disability and internalized ableism

(interesting, one of the people who most consistently mocks sokka for being a nonbender is toph, early on. toph has a lot of internalized ableism herself, a fear of vulnerability bc she doesn't want to perceived as weak like her parents thought she was. her bending is her disability aid, the thing that allows her to be stronger than people think, so she dismisses a nonbender until she learns better.)

piandao's response to sokka's lack of self-worth is not to train him to be great at one thing, but to introduce him to a variety of different arts, show him that his value lies not in having any one skill but in his capacity to learn and grow. there's no single thing that makes him worthy. it isn't even the combination of all of them that makes him worthy. he simply is worthy.

and i don't know if this is a unique narrative in fiction or anything but it really means a lot to me that sokka doesn't have One Thing that "makes up" for him not being a bender. he's of course extremely skilled and prodigious at many things he does in the show but there's no one savant talent that "justifies" him being in the group and i feel like so many disability narratives - especially for kids - go that route and i really appreciate that atla doesn't and simply says people are valuable because they are valuable, not because of their special abilities

[pickypickypeak]

So I FINALLY got the art of wish book which is so so good and? I’m honestly a little surprised that the only things that got leaked online were the starboy and evil amaya concepts when it’s literally filled with gems? Here’s a few but first let me tell you, the art alone makes it worth it. It’s amazing

THE HAMLET! LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE HAMLET!! Apparently in an early draft Asha and her community had left Rosas and started living hidden in the forest so their wishes could be safe from Magnifico. This hidden place was called “The Hamlet” and it still exists in the final movie, though it’s just a part of Rosas and doesn’t have the original lore. I really hope this trope gets reused for a future Disney movie because it’s a really cool concept!

Live action Valentino??

Some Sakina dump because I love her (also meet Tomás)

Oh and you know the wishing tree in the movie? It’s based on Walt Disney’s own actual wishing tree?? Wtf???

Also there’s a whole 2 pages about Dahlia explaining how much effort and care were put into her creation as a character with a disability. They actually had consultants making sure that ANY form of representation felt authentic and positive. They did not just made the cast multi-ethnic, they actually did their research so that any culture was well portrayed, all the way to the littlest details like textures on their clothing or even each character’s way of greeting.

And about the animation not being fully 2D… Haters conveniently forget mentioning that the movie is expressly made to celebrate both the past AND future of WDAS. Then like it or not, but you can’t possibly celebrate all of Disney without CGI animation. CGI is also Disney. Tangled and Frozen and Moana became instant Disney classics. I would die for a traditional animated movie, but when you put it this way, it makes perfect sense to me that they went with hybrid style for this movie specifically. It just feels right.

Also going through these pages… you just feel the love the producers and animators put in every single reference to older classics. Animation techniques were literally inspired by actual frames from Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan. So were coloring techniques, lighting, cinematography… There was a breathing effort of paying homages to these movies with tremendous talent in them, while also creating something new. So hate on this movie as much as you want, but mind you calling it “AI-made”. It’s not. It’s made by humans.

Oh, and finally, Starboy. Well, yeah, I fell for it. People literally made it all up. There’s zero indication that he was gonna be Asha’s love interest, let alone be the one singing At All Costs instead of Magnifico. From what the book says (there’s literally two short paragraphs about him, before Star comes in) I think they didn’t even have a plot then, they were just exploring ideas and made some brainstorming sketches deciding how Star could have been. Same with evil Amaya! That one pic that leaked of her with Magnifico is all we got. There’s no indication that it was gonna be “a better movie” because there is no plot for that lol

[prismatoxic]

okay, shipping brainrot from my last post aside, i'm still thinking about the shapeshifter arc. the other sites i use don't have inline posting or do but it's clunky, so i guess i'm theorizing here. some of this may seem obvious; bear with me, i'm not trying to be patronizing, just working through things. this will probably be long.

(edit: i've since learned there's canon explanations for all of this. regrettably i don't like them. enjoy my ideas of what would be better maybe? but keep in mind i wrote this before i knew it had been explained anywhere else.)

(edit again: i've done a 180 and come fully around on the canon explanations! i have a lot of thoughts about them but this isn't the post for that. anyway i'm disabling reblogs, sorry. you can still look at this if you want)

laios reveals what he knows of shapeshifters, and that they function on memory:

no one ever really suggests in chapters 39 or 40 who thought of which fake except in the case of which ones laios must have thought of, but i want to posit who i think each one came from, and what it means narratively if i'm right. so, mostly a thought experiment/character study that i could be wrong about or that was never meant to be clearly defined in the first place. but maybe fun to think about? (i'm sure other people have done this before too, but i think it'll be fun to write up.)

from the outset, i think it's worth mentioning that chilchuck knows all three laios fakes are, in fact, fakes. two chilchucks say this, but the one on the right is the real one. senshi and marcille immediately corroborate this, though we can't tell which of them it is except that it's not any of the really obvious fakes.

what i think this suggests is that, brought to the surface, the warped perceptions of the rest of the party that chilchuck, senshi, and marcille have can be easily discerned when compared with the real thing. each of these laioses is from one of them, but they immediately figure out none of them are right with the real laios right there in the room. this is important.

as for who's who...

i think it's fair to assume that giant laios is from chilchuck. laios is the tallest member of their party, at six feet; while chilchuck sees marcille and senshi as their correct heights, laios is a giant to him, and his bulky armor doesn't help. that's why, even if this is his perception, it's glaringly obvious that it's wrong as soon as it's made physical. it's the only big one, and easily falls into the camp of "doesn't seem to know much about monsters" that the others also do.

stupid laios is, i think, from marcille. because the giant one is so likely chilchuck's and i don't think senshi sees laios as someone who stupidly wants to eat everything (even if senshi's opinion of him isn't stellar right now, "i have to eat it" wouldn't be paired with being an idiot to senshi), it tracks that marcille would be the one to remember him this way. to someone who doesn't appreciate their monster eating and otherwise thinks he's an idiot just as much as the others do, dumbly muttering about eating things seems like a reasonable portrayal of laios.

feminine laios, then, is from senshi. i think his physical perception of the other party members is the most off-base; this is likely because he's known them for the least amount of time, and his idea of what they look like is based more on their races than anything else. i think the resemblance to falin might not be intentional--someone suggested to me the other day that the dwarf perception of tall-men is probably more feminine in contrast to how Macho dwarfs are. i think that makes sense (if it ever comes up canonically, i haven't seen it yet). laios and falin do just... look like gender-swapped versions of each other, also. so if senshi sees laios as a feminine person, well... that just winds up looking like falin.

so this leaves us with only the real laios. confronted with their perceptions of him, his friends can immediately tell all three are incorrect.

moving on, we eliminate the three most obvious fakes from the rest of the party, starting with marcille:

if we take into account what i just said about senshi, i think this is his. racial stereotypes about elves being what they are, him not knowing the party as well as the other members do... she stands out, and that's why.

now this is where things start to get interesting.

the next two fakes to be eliminated aren't so blatantly incorrect that they can be struck right out at a glance, but it's not hard to notice the flaws when you look closer, and chilchucks A and B are the ones to point it out. chilchuck is naturally observant; most of his fakes seem to emulate this. (the one who addresses the fakes is A, the real one, but B is proving himself able to pick up on the things A notices. this is important.)

notably, chilchuck and senshi assume these must be laios's versions of them.

we can assume this is correct, if we want to. we can take the framing of this as being an intentional reflection of the truth.

or... or... we can look a little deeper. we can wonder if, perhaps, this isn't a reflection of laios, but a reflection of his friends and what they think of him. laios may not immediately notice the problems, but i don't think it's because he doesn't remember these details. i don't think laios sees much of anything in vague terms; he's observant in his own right, but in ways he doesn't really recognize, nor does anyone else. i think he was so focused on their faces and mannerisms that he didn't notice the bigger picture, glossing over something because so many other factors are at play.

senshi and chilchuck think laios doesn't take notice of things, but the vast majority of the shapeshifter arc is about them and marcille not trusting laios's judgement as it is, given how things went recently. is it possible there's more to their assumptions here than what the text explicitly says? i think so!

so then who do these two belong to? marcille, i think.

if we assume dumb laios is hers, then we can also assume her perceptions of the others are kind of broad and vague. she doesn't think poorly of them, necessarily (at least not in as obvious a way as she does with laios, who, i'll remind you, she's currently upset with), but she doesn't commit unimportant details to memory, like chilchuck's neck band or the damage to senshi's helmet.

we've got three more "obvious" fakes to get through, and laios offers another lore tidbit on how the shapeshifters work:

anyway, the first of the next round is marcille again, setting the stage for how these three next fakes are eliminated.

marcille changes her hairstyle all the time, so this isn't a surprise. the last one pictured here winds up being our next fake, as indicated by her grimoire:

so the fake marcille in this section is the one with the most visibly different hair texture (who even draws attention to this), and the spellbook that's woefully incompetent. i think she's from chilchuck.

he's observant, as i said before; even if he didn't commit her hair to memory, he did remember the stuff she's said about how important hair is to magic. maybe that's why the texture is so striking. more importantly, chilchuck isn't wary of magic quite the way senshi is, but he also doesn't understand it. the general tone of the low-quality grimoire also just... sounds like the way he'd frame something like that. (plus, the "how to turn back time" bit is a thing he specifically called her on when she suggested it a few chapters ago.)

so the next fake chilchuck and senshi are revealed via their tools:

i think the chubby-cheeked chilchuck with the simple lockpicks is from senshi, and i think the ordinary-looking senshi with the simple cookware is from chilchuck. the former speaks for itself--senshi sees chilchuck as a child, and knows absolutely nothing about picking locks. as for the fake senshi, chilchuck has a decent mental image of him but knows nothing about cookware.

so now we're down to the final three fakes, and there's only one person left who they could be from: laios. nobody thinks this, not even laios himself, but i want to explore the concept because i think it has extreme merit. the three remaining fakes have some key similarities between them, namely in that they're all close enough interpretations that making a distinction is difficult. they look a tiny bit different, but both the real people and their fakes make plausible cases for why they're the actual person. i want to talk about why i think laios is the one who made that so, and what that means about him.

chapter 39 ends with all his companions--real and fake--doubting his skills. seeing a pattern?

chapter 40 opens with laios determined to regain his friends' trust in him...

...while his friends (and their fakes) talk about how he's liable to like the fakes more, because they're monsters.

this is a needlessly cruel interpretation of laios, but after how things went post-falin-rescue, it's not a surprise. they see him as reckless and single-minded, more interested in the things he's weird about than in the people around him.

laios is really bad at talking about what he's thinking--not because he's hiding it, but because it doesn't occur to him that it's important. meeting the lunatic magician in the paintings is a prime example of this, but he does it a lot. they likely have no idea why he told toshiro about falin and the black magic; to them, laios was being flippant with sensitive information, not worrying about their safety. to laios? he was trying to get help. he trusted toshiro, and his perception of their friendship made him think the information would help them gain an ally who cared about falin as much as they do. he wasn't trying to put falin or marcille in danger--far from it, in fact. but he didn't tell his friends about his thought process. he didn't think it was important to share.

(he's autistic but we all know this. moving on)

so, we have laios's plan: the pairs cook together, while he watches for behavioral differences to discern who's who. it doesn't occur to him, or anyone else, that the people he's watching for mistakes are his own perceptions of his friends. and now we get into the meat of why i wanted to write this post.

assuming i'm correct... let's talk about laios's view of his friends, and how he challenges those perceptions.

starting with my favorite, chilchuck:

chilchuck A, of course, is in fact the real one. this is a pretty significant character moment for him too, in my opinion; we know he has difficulty expressing his emotions, and that a lot of his conflicts so far have stemmed from that. the fact that "chilchuck B asked for help with a menial task" is a gotcha moment to him is... telling. not only because it's so obvious to him, but because it's not obvious to any of his companions. he thinks they know this about him, but he's never openly expressed anything to make them think this is an issue he'd have, in addition to having sought help in the past.

his "convictions and pride and all that" seems to them like someone trying to convince them of something, not someone reminding them of facts he assumes they know.

anyway, back to laios. if we accept that chilchuck B is made from his memories, this suggests several things. first of all, chilchuck B is, despite his softer eyes and willingness to ask for help, still a fairly accurate portrayal of chilchuck. he's easily annoyed and he's observant, two traits chilchuck is known for. i think the reason chilchuck B has the kinder eyes and the more gentle disposition is because to laios, those things are indicative of someone being a good person, and he very much thinks chilchuck is a good person.

we know laios isn't especially good at reading people in general. thus, his idea of who his friends are is skewed in broad strokes, but not in the ways they think. he knows who chilchuck is, but he also associates chilchuck with his own ideas of what makes someone "good", which results in a chilchuck who's less rough around the edges. confronted with this--the real chilchuck asking him if he can tell--laios compares the two and thinks, reasonably speaking, the nicer one who trusts him has to be the friend he respects so much.

senshi and marcille also want to accept this chilchuck, likely for similar reasons. they also respect and care for him; they've seen him go through a lot. laios's ideal of him is just that, ideal. in a roundabout way, it's only their deep fondness for who chilchuck really is that makes them want to see him this way.

next up, we have marcille.

the fake, marcille A, is a radical departure from what makes chilchuck B a fake. laios notes that the real marcille is exactly the same as she always is. the reason, then, that marcille A confuses him--and the others--is that after everything they've been through, their perception of her has changed radically.

if we look back to senshi and chilchuck's marcilles, it's readily apparent when they're eliminated that both interpretations hinge on the knowledge that she performs black magic. senshi's tries to use it to prove herself; chilchuck's has a grimoire loudly proclaiming it's what she does. contrast this to marcille A: she doesn't mention black magic at all, and her grimoire looks strikingly similar to the real one.

that's because laios doesn't think her performing black magic changes anything about who she is. her doing so proved her to be just as dedicated to falin as he himself is, and the knowledge that her goals involve it doesn't faze him. (additionally, marcille has been teaching him magic, and falin had tried in the past. though his image of a grimoire is flawed to someone experienced, to anyone else it looks fine.) thus, marcille A isn't a flagrant black magic wielder; she's someone who's been fundamentally changed by what they--and falin--went through.

let's go back to chapter 27:

chilchuck and senshi are appalled, and will continue to be. while they ultimately don't prevent marcille from doing this, and care enough about both her and laios (and in chilchuck's case, falin as well) to be in tentative support, this changes their view of her in a negative way. she's dangerous now, in a way she wasn't before, but she's still marcille--goofy and a little reckless. thus, their views of her, and the illusions that result.

laios's opinion of her changes for the better.

she is, all at once, both competent and loyally dedicated. she will stop at nothing to help falin. whatever goofiness she exhibited before now is gone, replaced by the cold demeanor of someone who is doing something extremely dangerous for reasons that are inherently selfish, but ultimately too important to reject.

thus, we return to marcille A: cold, sharp, dedicated. not reckless or goofy, but methodical and haunted. she may have returned to "normal" since they left the castle town, but laios's opinion of her, and understanding of her love for falin, has been forever changed.

so faced with the real marcille--still silly, still whining, still frequently annoyed with him--he's confused, because that's deeply familiar, but it doesn't line up with what he knows about her now.

the truth, of course, is nuanced--these things are true about marcille, but only under duress; it's similar to how laios becomes a competent leader when the going gets tough. she has this within her, but it's not her default state of being. still, the shapeshifter picks up on the strongest memories laios has of her, this new interpretation of someone he thought he knew.

now then--onto senshi, the punchline of this particular joke about the differences between the copies. i still think it says a lot.

i think this one speaks for itself, though i find chilchuck's agreement interesting. senshi is the newest member of the team; little is known about him. laios happily notes that senshi "always looks cool" while chilchuck says he looks normal (and chilchuck B insults the real one). laios sees senshi this way because he thinks senshi is cool as hell, and this manifests in an idealized version of a face he's not as familiar with as he is with chilchuck and marcille.

this is clearly comedy, but it also speaks to the same desire to see the best in the rest of the party. marcille is the only one who notices likely because her opinion of senshi isn't so romanticized. chilchuck's senshi, of note, wasn't a perfect replica: we don't see much of him after the obvious fakes are hauled off, but he's a little squashed (he's the top one):

which indicates that chilchuck's visual memory of senshi is already flawed. if we compare this to giant laios and the marcille with the unique hair texture, it tells us chilchuck's attention to detail is more specific than the others'; he can remember the hole in the helmet, the importance of hair, but he doesn't quite see the bigger picture. giant laios is also surprisingly... rugged? which i imagine has to do with chilchuck's perception of him as a tall-man. (or maybe how he clearly has trouble seeing laios's face half the time, lmao...)

anyway. laios thinks senshi is super cool and chilchuck has an imperfect idea of what senshi look like as it is. (i wonder if chilchuck is some degree of faceblind? not enough to not recognize someone at all, but can't pinpoint specifics.)

and so, we arrive at the moment of truth.

so let's go over what i'm theorizing here... all the remaining fakes are illusions based on how laios sees his friends. the illusions manage to make mistakes that reveal the truth to him, but i think the reason for that harkens back to what laios said earlier... the illusions are being updated over time.

laios isn't considering any of the things that give the fakes away until this moment. if it had taken a little longer to resolve things, maybe they'd have started course-correcting, but they aren't given the chance. laios makes sure they aren't--he acts very quickly. even as he presents the three pairs with his findings, he's aware that everything will fall apart as soon as he does... and he's banking on that. while the shapeshifter illusions defend themselves from being killed, he gets right to the heart of the matter in the only way he knows how: confronting the actual monster involved.

when all's said and done, laios reveals how he figured it out:

potentially of note, all of these details happened before the red dragon fight. chilchuck fighting a mimic and revealing his history with them, senshi gushing about the dungeon's ecosystem, and marcille being attacked by the undine weren't super recent memories. when laios brought them forth in his mind, he had a delay before the shapeshifter updated its illusions.

well... except with marcille. marcille A actually didn't show her hand so easily; it was the real marcille's carelessness that proved her identity.

but what this suggests is that, when confronted with the realities of marcille versus his idealized version of her, laios had to make a choice: did it make more sense for her to have been radically changed by the revival and subsequent loss of falin, or was the presence of a marcille he knew so well proof of an illusion? she was the one who was the most different, and as such, the contrast was the same one that eliminated all three laioses at the start: with the real thing in the room, the fake became apparent.

so, to reach a conclusion: one again, laios has proven he's not as scatterbrained as his companions think, but this time he did so on a more personal level than usual. to them, he reveals that he knows their quirks enough to define them by such when they're otherwise faced with convincing copies. to us, the readers, if we accept what i've suggested here... he's revealed a lot more. he respects, admires, and idolizes his friends, all out of fondness: he wants to see them in an ideal way, whatever that means for each of them as individuals.

anyway thanks for coming to my TED talk

[cripplecharacters]

I have a character who is nonverbal, intellectually disabled, and uses an AAC device. I'm wondering how I would write down her inner thoughts and monologue? Would she think in full English sentences, in AAC symbols, or something else?

Hi asker,

I will start off by letting you know that there is no single definitive answer for this, but I still have thoughts and ideas.

So, as for the question of would she think in AAC symbols or English sentences, that really depends on your character. It could be either.

Some nonverbal people, but not all, don't think in words at all, but more in images or associations, so this could be the case of your character and might even be part of why they are nonverbal and need AAC. (Some people who aren't nonverbal also don't think in words either, but your character is, so that's what I'll focus on here!)

Your character could also think in words. They might think entirely in words, or partly. They might think in what you would think of as more 'standard' English sentences, or maybe more simplified sentences.

For example, it's common for people with ID to use simpler syntax and/or less abstract language. But language abilities are a wide range, and this can extend to AAC usage. Some people might use more complex sentences, while some might might only be able to use two words in a sentence. Some people might get the hang of pronouns, and some might not. Some people might get the hang of conjugating verbs, some might not. Some people speak more slowly or with more pauses. You have a lot of leeway in how to conceptualize your character's thoughts.

I want to add one thing: a lot of ways that people with ID people can speak are used to make fun of people. Slower speech, simple sentences, not conjugating some words, stuff like that. If you include this, you have to take care to make sure that the message you’re sending by including them is “some people just talk like this” and not “isn’t it so funny/weird/gross/weird that some people talk this way? Let’s make fun of it/focus on how weird and different (derogatory) it is”.

However, the limitations of a written medium is that at the end of the day you will in fact have to use words to write what is going on in her brain, even if she doesn't think in words.

So I would say: focus on figuring out how your character manages language, since there’s many different ways they can, and then once you decide that it might be easier to figure out exactly how to write them. Mod sasza has even more points below!

Hope this helps,

mod sparrow

Hi, I'd consider how your character learned language. If her first exposure was a symbol-based AAC device, there's a higher chance she'd think in AAC symbols than if she first communicated via sign language or anything else that's not a symbol-based AAC device.

I'm fully verbal and actually mostly think in associations and other non-language ways like pictures (though when I'm imagining things like an actual conversation, I do use language). That's why for me and a lot of other people with ID (verbal or not) it can take longer to think of what to say; you need to translate your thoughts to language first.

With your character having much more severe language disability than me, I'd guess that she either used very simple sentence construction or that you'd have to describe her thoughts in a less direct manner (associations or visuals), which will be more time-consuming to write and more cryptic to readers (which makes it realistic, communication with people with significant language problems takes longer, if mind reading was real it would apply to it too).

You should definitely consider the things mentioned by Sparrow; whether she understands pronouns, conjugation, can she differentiate similar words correctly (e.g., love/like, handsome/pretty), etc.

Depending on her level of ID, she might think "I'm hungry" as anything between "Damn, I wish I was eating a burger right now" (complete English sentence) through "Yes food" (in which "yes" means positive rather than agreeing with someone) or "Images of her home kitchen flashed through her head" (simply associating kitchen with the feeling of hunger), to "Two symbols from her board; one meaning 'me' with the second showing an empty plate, went through her mind over and over". There is a big difference between a person with mild ID who might be unable to speak because they can't coordinate their mouth to make actual words but don't struggle with grammar at all, and a person with a profound ID whose entire AAC board is "yes" and "no" (or not even that, but I wanted an example to show what could be someone's existing-but-very-limited language ability).

Obviously some of these are more clunky, some are less so. But the way a lot of nonverbal ID people communicate isn't perfectly clear and direct, and there is a lot of variety in the manner that it shows.

I also wrote this post about speech in intellectual disability that you might find useful. I hope this helps !

mod Sasza

[notjustjavierpena]

Heat

Series Masterpost | Main Masterpost | Support a disabled creator

A/N: Many many moons ago (this might be an exaggeration), I wrote a direct message to @undercoverpena about one of her text posts that sent me into a horny spiral. I loved it. You can read the text post here. At lot happened since then, and I bet you all that she must have forgotten or thought I would not finish it, but alas I return from the dead.

Summary: Javier looks so delicious doing hard work under the sun. The kids aren’t home. Heat is not just what the sun gives, it can also be a state of your body.

Pairing: Javier Peña x f!reader (no y/n)

Tags: +18 smut, clit stim, piv sex, dirty talk, breeding kink, creampie, rough sex, javi p is sweaty and you are horny

Word count: 3k

Link to this work on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/51636391

Heat

It’s a thousand degrees outside.

It’s the beginning of autumn and it’s boiling hot, so warm that one cannot fully enjoy the weather when it makes everything feel crispier. You’ll be damned if you are going to spend the sparse and sacred hours of being childfree inside your house with a pout though, because your father-in-law has the kids after a long period of him being unable to babysit.

One would think that now that your three children are in Abuelo Chucho’s hands, it would mean having a long-awaited, as well as well-deserved, date night with your husband, but Javier has decided to spend the day renovating the back porch in the heat. You haven’t rolled your eyes at him yet, but the urge has been there several times.

You sit on the porch swing, dangling your feet just above the wooden boards that are soon to be removed and replaced. There’s a glass of cold lemonade in your hand, a bee buzzing somewhere nearby. 

Javier is in the shed at the back of the garden. You can hear him move things around, occasionally letting out a swear word moments after something clatters to the floor with a loud bang. 

You sip your lemonade through its straw. The honey bee has found the bush of lavender, and you let your eyes close to listen to the sounds of late summer, the start of fall. The sun dances on your lids, sweat forms at the small of your back just above your shorts and right below your cropped t-shirt.

After a few minutes where you’ve leaned back into the backrest of the porch swing, and nearly fallen asleep, you hear Javier returning. Automatically, your eyes open at hearing him speak. 

“Hey, enjoying yourself?” He has come over to peck your lips. You allow it, holding up the glass of lemonade afterward to watch his lips close around the straw. He takes a long sip whilst his eyes are fixed on yours.

“Gotta stay hydrated if you want to work in this heat,” you note.

“Just gonna be all pretty sitting there and watching me?” He asks after swallowing, and you have to force yourself to look away from the way his Adam's Apple bobs.

“Mh-hm,” you nod without saying much, knowing you’ll break if you try to get an actual sentence out.

“Alright,” he just replies, and you swear you catch some sort of undertone in his voice. He kisses you again, lingering a second too long for you to be indifferent towards it, and then stretches again. A less collected version of you wants to undo his belt right there, but you let him go instead. Not without regret though.

And then he starts working, dragging planks across the soon-naked porch deck, and you start sweating even more at the sight. Even moreso at the grunts he elicits during his labor.

Javier is beautiful underneath the burning sun, sweat-slicked chest hair peeking out from under his grayish shirt that he has unbuttoned at the top. He rolls his sleeves up to his elbows because they cannot go up any further than that, tightening around the beginnings of his biceps and causing your head to swim when you think about those arms around you. 

You allow yourself to ogle him as he is lost in the task. The straw in your lemonade sits in your mouth, your tongue curling around it briefly before you sip to clench your thirst. There’s sweat collecting on Javier’s brow, threatening to drip down, and when it finally does slide down the side of his head, your eyes burn from refraining from blinking as you watch the beads roll down his neck and into the clavicle of it. You press your thighs together.

The gray shirt has darkened in color around his shoulders due to dampness. Whenever Javier turns his back to you, you can see the darker patch has reached his lower back too. Your tongue darts out to lick at nothing around your mouth, and you know that your husband would laugh at you if he saw it.

There’s something dirty about watching the way he brushes slick hair from his forehead. He has knelt down on the deck by now, occasionally on all fours when he reaches for something in front of himself, and when he gets really concentrated, straining his back muscles so much that the shirt starts fighting for its life, he pulls a face that nearly makes you fall off the porch swing. 

You bite your lip, choose your words but none seems to do the job so you settle for something more simple, “Javi.”

“Sí, mi amor?” Javier doesn’t look up. 

You remind yourself that he has talked about redoing the porch since his father agreed to take the kids. You won’t spoil it for him, and you know that a half-finished project with three kids is not an ideal situation for you, so you compose yourself.

“I think I need to get out of the sun for a bit, can I get you some water?” You ask instead of getting on your knees to beg - or more - and then you walk past him. 

“Sure,” he replies as you pass him, and it makes you unable to see the smirk on his face, “Water would be great. Thanks, honey.”

Inside the kitchen, you fill a glass with cold water from the refrigerator. You even get a few ice cubes from the tray in your freezer but instead of dumping them into your husband’s drink, you hold them against your chest with a sigh of relief. Something burns in the pit of your stomach, even more when you return to the porch and hand Javier the glass of water. He hasn’t gotten less enticing; shirt clinging to him, hair sticking to his forehead, a groan as he gets up from the floor.

“Should be done by tomorrow,” he says as he takes the glass from your hand, causing a bolt of electricity to shoot down your spine as your fingers brush. It’s ridiculous since both of you know that he is yours already. 

“Mm-hm,” you watch him gulp down nearly all of his drink. 

And then he does something that you might never recover from; he pours the remaining water over himself in an attempt to cool down. It wets his hair even more, and he runs his thick fingers through it to shake out the excess droplets. 

Time stands still. Your heart hammers in your chest, pulse traveling through your veins until you can feel the throbbing of each heartbeat between your legs. You press your thighs together and let out a whimper of breath. 

“Baby?” You say softly to earn a hm? It feels shameful to meet Javier’s eyes. However when you do, you notice his pupils have dilated in desire, gaze flickering down your body for the shortest time, and you choose to strike. 

You step into Javier’s personal space, hand reaching up to lie on his chest. The soft pads of your fingers rest on his skin where his buttons are undone, and you try to keep a doe-eyed look on your face as you rub his exposed skin gently.

“I was thinking,” you start, trail off.

“Yes?” He drags the word out. You can hear the smirk on his face but it feels too vulnerable to look him in the eye.

“Since we’re alone,” you continue, gaze fixated on the chest hair that is exposed in the heat, “And since there’s air conditioning inside, we could do something together.”

“Do what?” He says like someone who has figured you out. His strong hand comes up to wrap around your wrist, lifting your palm to his mouth. He kisses it. 

Your face burns with embarrassment at the fact that you can barely contain yourself in his presence. That and the fact that it is usually so easy, so why does it feel so difficult to ask for what you want? 

“You know what.”

“I need you to say it, need you to ask for it, mi vida,” he teases and places your hand on the side of his face. He releases a breath at your touch, eyes fluttering closed so you feel brave enough to look up at his face. He leans further into you and looks as ready as you to give in. 

“I need you to touch me,” your voice trembles. Javier just barely shudders at hearing your words, opening his eyes once more to reveal their darkened color. 

“Touch you where?” Javier continues his little game. He mirrors you, touches your face too, “Here?”

“No.”

His hand moves down to brush your neck, “Here then? It must be here.”

“No,” you shake your head, “Please, Javi.”

Javier’s hand slides down your front and settles on the exposed skin of your belly. It causes you to hold your breath. Then it goes down, slips past the elastic band of your shorts and into your damp underwear. You gasp as two of his fingers slide through the wetness between your legs, tips finding your pulsing clit immediately after. Thank God you have hedges around the back garden and thank God that they’re tall enough to keep prying eyes away from the scene that unfolds. 

“What about here? I hope it’s here because I don’t want to stop,” he rubs you off slowly until your legs start to shake underneath you. He works his fingers back and forth, from side to side, one on either side of your clit and something builds and builds and—

You come with a little cry and bury your face in Javier’s chest. Your hand on the side of his face falls down to his shoulder which you grip as you soak your underwear even more, thighs trapping his hand as they clamp together. As your head spins, Javier chuckles out a swear word above you. 

“Never gets old,” he adds and you start giggling. 

After a few seconds of letting you breathe, Javier cups your face and lifts your lips to his own in a kiss that tells you everything you need to know, where you’re heading, which direction. You kiss him back slowly and he licks the inside of your mouth, guides you toward the screen door that leads inside of the house. He has you, you want to say, body and soul. 

“Let me take my beautiful wife to bed,” he begs and you nod repeatedly, mumbling a soft plea. He peppers you with sweet kisses that turn more heated as you get closer to the bedroom door. He toes off his shoes on the way, leaving them forgotten in the hallway along with pieces of clothing that he sheds you and himself of. 

When you’re both naked, sticking together from the sweat that is already shining on your skin, he hoists you up and carries you to the bed effortlessly. You cling to him by wrapping your limbs around his body, and he kneels down on the bed and places you on your back - and then he doesn’t leave but instead melts into you.

“Te deseo mucho, mi amor,” he murmurs and crushes you so heavenly with his weight, connecting his lips to your throat and sucking a purple mark onto your skin. You’ll scold him for it later but right now, you simply whine. His voice vibrates against your neck, “You really thought all I was gonna do was redo the stupid porch? Not do you?”

“Could’ve fooled me,” you bite back with no real hostility, first snorting at his choice of words and then letting out a sigh as he continues tasting your salty skin, “I was ready to go insane, so please fuck me.”

“Dramatic as ever,” he teases and then holds himself up with one arm so he can reach down between your bodies. You bend your legs and let your knees fall out to the sides, breath hitching until it becomes a whimper when the head of Javier’s cock slides through your folds. 

“Please,” you say, and have never been so willing. His cockhead catches on your clit, and your moan comes out a lot louder than intended. You are just about to cover your mouth with your hand when you realize you don’t have to; you can cry and whine and scream all you want to. It makes you yearn for him in a newfound sense and makes you want to scream already. 

“Paciencia, mi amor,” he tuts but still reads your mind. He enters you a moment later, pushing inside easily from the slick that’s already smearing your inner thighs. He groans as you take him, eyes intensely focused on yours whilst stretching your pussy open in a delicious sting. Your hands find his broad shoulders instead of their usual place clamped down on your mouth. You let yourself be noisy as you adjust.

“That’s it,” he slurs, “Be noisy all you want. Good girl.”

When he pulls out and eases back in, the two of you moan in unison. He does it again but follows it up with a breathless laugh when your noises already climb in pitch. 

“I know, baby, I know,” he says soothingly as if you’ve hurt yourself.

But then he shows no mercy and speeds up. His rhythm becomes something else entirely; hard and fast, sending the eyes in your head rolling backward into your skull with a f-fuck dripping from your lips.

Everything is so different. Usually, you breathe so deeply into each other’s bodies, connecting your lips whenever the other is about to give away what the two of you are doing to the rest of the house. Your noses will bump against each other as you are impossibly close to one another, an occasional h-ah escaping your mouth or a low grunt from Javier’s, and if not even a kiss can cover up the noises, Javier’s strong hand or your own will cover your mouth as you cry through the most intense orgasms a man has ever given you.

But now. Oh God. Javier is making you sing until the house is shaking, every noise bouncing off the walls to ricochet right back to your ears. You can hear yourself sound obscene as he makes you come a second time, wanton moans falling from your slack mouth. You tremble, thighs jiggling along his sides as he drives his cock into you to prolong your pleasure. 

“There you are, Christ, you are perfect,” he praises, continues to pound your oversensitive cunt, “Let it all out, baby.”

“More,” you beg, “Don’t stop.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he grunts. 

You reach down between your legs as best as you can, already thinking of a third orgasm now that your clit is untouched. If not only to shout yourself hoarse.

Javier traps you between his arms, propping himself up on his forearms and sliding his fingers into your hair. He tugs slightly as he rolls his hips, pain erupting from your sensitive follicles and adding to your third high that is building. 

You circle your clit fast, barely able to contain yourself as your cunt goes off into delicious spasm. You think you might actually start crying with how intense it feels, Javier’s cock twitching inside of you whilst he moans too. He buries his face in your shoulder.

“Don’t pull out,” you gasp up at the ceiling, nails creating little crescent marks on the muscles of his broad shoulder, “Javi, oh fuck, come in me. Don’t pull out. Pleasepleaseplease.”

The comment makes Javier pull back a little, raising himself on his elbow to look down at you. His fingers are still in your hair, an occasional moan tumbles out of his mouth as he continues reaching deep inside of you, and his eyes bore into yours. He furrows his brow from being so close, barely able to speak from how ragged his breathing is.

“What—?” He grunts. Any moment now.

“Not ovulating,” you moan back at him, tightening your legs around his waist to punctuate your want, your need. You try meeting his every thrust to encourage his own high, “Please, baby. Need you to come in me.”

“Mierda, estas una chica sucia,” his hips stutter, “You love getting filled to the brim, don’t you?” 

You nod frantically. 

“Just want me to keep knocking your sweet cunt up, huh?” He moans. 

“Yes. Whole fucking football team.”

“C’mere,” he catches your mouth in a heated kiss, nodding slightly, but it turns messy as soon as he gets to orgasm. He whimpers into your mouth when he is just on the brink, and then he gasps as the first rope of come starts to fill you. You let out a big sigh against his mouth for show, taking everything he has to give you whilst he shudders in your arms. 

It takes a moment to calm down. Your arms rest beside your head and your eyes close, trying to calm your heavy breathing. Above you, Javier hisses when he pulls out of you and you can immediately feel his come dripping out of you. 

Javier kisses your exposed chest. He slides his hands up your forearms to eventually hold each of your hands, flopping down onto you again. 

“Ice water,” you say after a while of laying together like this. 

“Hm?” He squeezes your hands.

“Go get some ice water, your wife is boiling.”

“Fine,” he groans. 

When he comes back, he has also brought a towel and you spend the rest of the afternoon trailing ice cubes across your warm skin after cleaning yourself up. It’ll be easier to work in the colder evening sun anyway.

.

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[cpvnksabm]

hey RTC fandom, i wanted to talk about disability erasure in RTC, and how the fandom (and potential future productions) can do better than canon has done so far!

What is disability erasure?

Disability erasure is, basically, finding ways to avoid acknowledging or depicting disability because of how it makes people uncomfortable. One example of this, and the most common thing that pops up in discussions of RTC, is taking a character that is canonically disabled or usually depicted as disabled, and depicting them without that disability.

When this happens in general, it is a problem because it deprives disabled people of a chance to see themselves represented in media. In theatre, it also often means that an abled actor gets a role that could have gone to a disabled actor - and this is already a problem even when the character is being depicted as disabled on-stage, due to ableism in the hiring/audition process.

We already have few enough disabled characters as it is - we don't need any less. Ricky is an important character to me and to many other disabled people. That's why I, like most of the fandom, do not support the 2022 script changes that made Ricky able-bodied and replaced his physical disability with a psychological trauma.

I won't discuss the script changes much here. Many other people, including Yannick himself, have already explained it better than I can. But suffice to say I think the new script is incredibly, inherently ableist.

But that's not the only example of disability erasure in RTC.

Disability erasure doesn't just mean taking a disabled character and making them completely abled. In fact, many people have correctly pointed out that Ricky still has a disability in the new scripts, because being unable to talk due to psychological trauma is a disability. And this is true, but it doesn't change the deliberate erasure of Ricky's physical disability.

Because all disabilities are different, it's possible to erase a character's disability even without making them fully abled. If a character has one disability, and you remove it to give them another - that's still erasure! Disability rep is not all interchangeable, and it does matter what disability or broadly what type of disability a character has.

I hope most of the fandom can understand that, for example, it would be a problem to make Noel bisexual. Even though bisexuality is still part of the queer community, it's erasure to do that for Noel - because he isn't just generic queer representation, he's specifically gay! And the same sort of principle applies to Ricky, because he isn't just generic disability representation - he is specifically a person with a degenerative disease, and a mobility aid user who cannot speak.

With the canon info that we have on Ricky's disability, based on the 2016 script, here are some examples of things that might not be making him fully abled but are still erasure:

Depicting Ricky not needing mobility aids, even if he can't talk

Depicting Ricky talking out loud, even if he still needs mobility aids

Depicting Ricky being a person who cannot speak & needs mobility aids, but having this be due to two unrelated disabilities that affect his speech & legs only (for example nonverbal autism & arthritis in his legs). Ricky canonically has a rare degenerative disease that affects both his speech and his mobility; it is very likely (all but stated outright in canon) that this is a neuromuscular disease which affects his whole body.

Removing the fact that Ricky has a degenerative disease specifically, and explaining his symptoms with a disability that will stay at the same severity throughout his life, when he canonically has a degenerative disease that he outright says will lead to an early death (even if this makes you sad to think about, which is 100% valid and understandable, it is not appropriate to erase outright)

But what about in the afterlife? What if Karnak allows Ricky to remove his disability or specific parts of it?

Pretty much every production of RTC involves Ricky, upon death, gaining some abilities that he didn't have in life. In most productions he discards his mobility aids, though there are some where he keeps them during most of the musical and only throws them aside for choreography, and some where he keeps them throughout choreography. To my knowledge every production of RTC also has him talking out loud after his death. This is all pretty easily explained by some sort of afterlife magic, or by Karnak actively choosing to remove (parts of) Ricky's disability.

And I'm sorry to say that it's still erasure.

I'm not saying this because I want to file RTC away as bad rep. I love RTC, and I love Ricky! I think Ricky is extremely valuable disability representation for so many reasons, and I also think there are some things that it could have done better.

I think having Ricky as an explicitly disabled character who becomes able-bodied due to magic later on is much, much better representation than simply writing his disability out of the canon entirely. It's a different level of erasure, because it still acknowledges him as a disabled character, and still acknowledges that as part of his backstory.

But using magic as a way to remove disability is lazy. It's a quick way to avoid having to depict a character as disabled for the entire length of a musical. And that means that the disabled fans who see ourselves in Ricky, don't get to see a character depicted as disabled or using mobility aids on-stage for the whole length of the musical.

Now, I understand that whenever you're making fanworks for a flawed piece of media (and every piece of media will have some flaws), there's a balance between being canon compliant and improving on canon. I don't think fans should be instantly labeled as ableist, or canceled, for writing canon compliant fic where Ricky's disability is erased in some way in the afterlife. I don't think it carries the same harm or weight - for one, it doesn't have the same reach as actual musical productions do, and on top of that, disabled people in the RTC fandom are already aware of the flawed parts of RTC's disability rep & we tend to be prepared for this when we go into the fandom.

I do think people should consider making Ricky disabled in the afterlife in fanworks. Many other parts of canon are changed in fanworks, so this one can be too!

And more importantly than that, I think more RTC productions (on the off chance anyone involved in a production of RTC is reading this post) should work to continue depicting Ricky as disabled on-stage throughout the whole musical. As I've said before, to my knowledge, there isn't an existing production of RTC that doesn't engage in some level of disability erasure, and that's something I'd like to see change one day.

But wait, if Ricky still couldn't speak out loud in the afterlife, wouldn't that mean cutting his song?

Actually, no!

I get this response a lot when I bring up the disability erasure inherent in Ricky consistently regaining his ability to talk upon death. I understand the concern - I think it would be awful if a production simply cut SABM in order to avoid depicting Ricky talking/singing out loud, and that doing so would also be a form of erasure in the sense that it would inevitably involve minimizing Ricky's character and removing parts of what made RTC such valuable disability rep in the first place (especially so if some of ricky's speaking lines, such as his post-SABM speech, are also cut with SABM).

But the fact is that you simply don't have to cut Ricky's song for this to work. There are real people who have performed in musicals without speaking/singing out loud, and still had major roles!

One way of doing this is with an interpreter. Ricky's actor would perform SABM in sign language, and another performer would sing the song as he signs it. It's important to note that when this is done, Ricky is still the main performer and still the focus of the song, and the interpreter is just that - an interpreter.

This method has been done in musical theatre before. One example is Joshua Castille, a Deaf actor, playing Quasimodo (an originally deaf character) in the 5th Avenue Theatre production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He performs in ASL, with singer E.J Cardona acting as the voice of Quasimodo. There are some clips online if you'd like to look it up!

There's another idea that I've thought of myself, though I don't know of any examples or if it'd been done. If Ricky was depicted using an AAC device on-stage, that would mean he talks using a synthesised (text-to-speech) voice. And we already have the technology to create singing with synthesised voices - it's called Vocaloid!

Of course, real world AAC devices generally can't sing, and programming a song into a vocaloid inherently takes a lot of time - you couldn't do it on the spot. But the whole premise of a musical is people singing on the spot when they wouldn't normally be able to! In RTC specifically it's explained as Karnak's doing, but pretty much every musical involves characters perfectly singing in contexts where they couldn't have possibly memorised/rehearsed the lyrics, harmonies or choreography in advance. I don't think it's that out-there to stretch this to Ricky singing using a vocaloid-like voice in a context where he couldn't have possibly programmed it into his device in advance.

I don't think these are the only ways it can be done, either - they're just some obvious examples. I just wanted to make it clear that it is possible to depict Ricky as a nonspeaking character throughout the musical, and this wouldn't have to involve cutting his song or removing his singing roles. I'd really like to see productions start to come up with creative ways of doing this!

Conclusion/TL;DR

Disability erasure is a problem in all existing RTC productions to varying degrees, and it's a problem in the fandom as well. Disability erasure isn't just taking a disabled character and making them fully abled - many cases of disability erasure in RTC involve Ricky still having a disability, but it's still erasure if aspects of the disability he canonically has are erased.

Contrary to popular belief, Ricky's inability to speak being erased in the afterlife is not just a necessary evil of the musical genre. Nonspeaking characters can be represented in musicals, and this wouldn't have to involve cutting his song!

Thanks for reading!

[bitstitchbitch]

I think something that isn’t talked about much is that sometimes you don’t know if you truly “count” as disabled. Like, I don’t consider myself disabled, but other people with my medical conditions do consider themselves disabled, and I believe them. I fully support anyone who claims the “disabled” label, but I’m hesitant to claim it myself.

if you asked me if someone who is disabled could work full time and go to school part time I would say yes, with some difficulties, but yes.

But in the same breath, I use working full time plus part time school as an example of how I am NOT disabled. Even though those things take most of my energy. Even though my sick leave use has ramped up during the school year. Even though I can only handle two classes, when before my fibro I could have handled three or even four (it would have sucked, but I could have done it). Doing that now would cause a major flare-up. But what I can do, I do well for the most part. I do it without accommodations. It just takes careful planning to make sure I account for flare ups.

I keep joking that it took the fear of fibro flare ups to get me to stop procrastinating so much.

idk what my point is. Maybe that the line between disabled and abled is blurrier than you think? I can do almost everything I could before fibromyalgia, but now it takes more planning, and some days I simply can’t do some things and have to put them off for another day. How much limitation is limiting enough? When does inconvenience and forethought become impairment? I’ve read the disability definitions. I understand them. I just don’t understand if they apply to me.