#it's rather listing stuff than analyzing

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Solitaire - Chapter 1

overanalyzing/-interpreting and probably pointing out the obvious... just random notes and thoughts (ca. 2100 words in the form of bulletpoints)

counting got fucked up, imma fix it later, sorry if it's confusing to read -> should be fixed now

Solitaire, a fictional story with Tori (Victoria Spring) as homodiegetic narrator

Pride and Prejudice Quotes introduce us to the tone of Tori’s story

→ we know that Tori rather identifies with mr Darcy, so lets see what we find about Mr Darcy that might tell us something about Tori before we even get to know her:

Quote 1:

‘And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.’

‘And yours’, he replied with a smile, ‘is willfully to misunderstand them.’

→ we learn about Mr Darcy that he allegedly tends to hate everybody and that he assumes willful misunderstanding one sides of the other party

(PART 1) Quote 2:

Elizabeth Bennet: Do you dance, Mr Darcy?

Mr Darcy: Not if I can help it.

→ without having a specific pace as instance in mind, it definitely sounds like something Tori would word for word answer to a question as the one given

• Getting to know Tori, before she ‘officially’ introduces herself to the reader (p.3f)

she perceives the majority of people in school as almost dead, including herself (p.3)

→ creating the picture of a crowd that allegedly shares a tragic similarity

2. she observes her steady numbness opposed to the socially anticipated numbness as reaction to the contrast of a phase of event (here: Christmas) and the eventless phase after (p.3)

→ differentiating herself from the crowd

3. Becky says that Tori looks like she wants to kill herself (p.3) to what Tori responds with ‘It’s funny because it’s true’ (p.4); Tori describes Becky’s reaction as her looking some more without really looking (p.4)

→ Tori feels perceived by Becky, but not seen

4. Tori says she and Becky are laughing about something that isn't funny (p.4)

→ Tori’s inauthenticity

5. Becky realizes Tori’s apathy and moves away while Tori leans into her own arms and falls half asleep (p.4)

→ Becky not taking action but physically bringing some distance between Tori and her, while Tori stabilizes herself by her own strength, escaping into a state of being half asleep but also halfway remaining in reality

6. Tori’s focus on appearance and her insecurity about her own

→ changes in peoples’ appearance like in hair and makeup that make herself feel ‘inadequate’ to which she ‘deflates’ into a chair a.k.a. makes herself smaller and hides away (p.4)

Tori’s ‘official’ introduction to the reader (p.4f)

‘My name is Victoria Spring’

→ she starts off with her full name

2.she makes up a lot of stuff in her head

→ focus on reality in form of her interior world

3. likes to see, and blog, and is going to die someday

→ listing the obvious fact of dying right beside other mundane activities emphasizes the priority of that topic in her daily life

4. Rebecca Ellen as only real friend and therefore probably best friend (p.4); Tori categorizes her as a ‘popular girls’ due to being recognized and therefore popular because she has long purple hair (p.4); Tori differentiates between being known by name and known personally (p.4)

→ Tori categorizing people even her friends

→ Tori challenges the significance of being popular and its lack of guaranteeing depth and significance

→ Question: Since when are people popular in school when they have recognizable purple hair? In my experience teenagers with colored hair are the one’s being likely to be bullied by the popular ones 🙄

5. Evelyn Foley categorizes as ‘alternative’ due to her appearance (p.5)

6. Tori questions if Becky actually likes Evelyn and she believes people only pretend to like each other (p. 5)

→ does Tori think that, because she only pretends/ feels like she pretends?;

→ is Tori worried that people only pretend to like her (believes that she is so unlikable, people must pretend)?

7. Tori does not participate in Becky and Evelyn’s conversation and only reacts to them when she ‘deduces’ she’s supposed to (p.5); she feels ‘pressured’ to contribute something to the conversation (p.5); she expresses her disinterest in the current discussed topic (p.5) and believes she ruined the conversations, so she leaves

→ Tori doesn't connect naturally with people, even when she considers one of them her friends and rather feels pressured to react in certain way than feeling invited to share herself authentically

→ without Becky and Evelyn even saying anything nor showing any reaction regarding Tori impacting the conversation immensely negatively, Tori’s insecurity of not meeting expectations causes her to escape the situation right away

8. Tori says she sometimes hates people what must be bad for her mental health (p.5)

→ does she include herself in that statement like she did in the beginning (p.3)?

→ self-awareness

→ awareness of mental health (I’m just adding that, because when I was her age ‘mental health’ was not a term that was used too often yet nor truly cared about/ talked about, so in my reality it is somewhat remarkable that Tori observes herself and immediately evaluates whether her thoughts could be detrimental to her health, that she immediately makes that connection; I also wonder if that’s caused by being confronted with mental health due to Charlie being such a big part of her life)

9. Tori focuses on ‘social hierarchy’ in school (p.5)

→ categorizing her social environment

10. ‘shoot me in the face’ (p.5)

→ another self-detrimental joke/ phrase

→ radical way of thinking and agains with the worst outcome for herself in mind

11. Tori not feeling pretty in school uniform (p.6)

→ insecurity about her appearance

the plot commences or Tori in action

Tori sees and follows post-it (p.6)

→ she observes and takes action

2.other people don’t see post it; ‘…or they don’t care. I can relate to that.’ (p.6)

→ people oblivious; Tori differentiated from people

→ Tori can relate to the general sense of not caring, however in this case she does care contrary to her words; at least she cares enough to register the post-it and actively follow it

3. doing stuff that other people don't seem to care about makes Tori feel like she is doing something important (p.7); ‘mainly because no one else is doing it’ (p.7)

→ differentiating herself from others

→ paying attention to things that seemingly don't get attention (Is that an interior wish of hers as she feels like not truly being payed attention to?)

→ shows her trait of not leaving things (or people) alone by themself (Charlie)

→ she cares, she seeks out moments of significance

4. she’s rather paying attention to the game Solitaire than to the IT class (p.8)

→ solitaire = alone, isolated

→ again, paying attention to what others don't

→ literally involving with what’s alone, while being alone doing so; isolating herself from her surrounding by seeking out what’s isolate; bonding over isolation

→ she also evaluates that playing Solitaire does more for her intelligence than paying attention to the IT lesson (p.8) → being alone appears to be more beneficial to her

5. Michael enters the room and verbally registers the room first (p.8)

6. Tori thinks that he registers her only after he scanned the inanimate parts of the room (p.9)

7. Tori judges Michael’s appearance (p.9)

8. Michael ‘absorbs’ Tori’s face (p.9)

→ not just ‘looking’ or ‘seeing’, he literally takes her in from her perspective

9. ‘his eyes flare up’ + ‘I swear to Got they double in size’

→ most animated way Tori has described something yet

→ (I love the eye flaming up phrase so much!)

10. ‘leaps towards me like a pouncing lion’ (p.9)

→ comparison

→ wildness, strength

→ movement towards her (contrary to the last described encounter in which Becky, her allegedly best friend physically moves away from her)

11. ’ fiercely enough that I stumble backward in fear that he might crush me completely’ (p.9)

→ it is possible that Michael actually moves in such exaggerated manner, but it might also be such a drastic contrast to Tori that she uses such strong wordings to describe him due to not being used that people react so strongly to her

→ the unfamiliarity of Michaels demeanor overwhelms Tori

12. ‘he leans forward’; ‘face only centimeters away from mine’ (p.9)

→ Michael leans into Tori’s presence

13. Tori sees herself in Michael’s glasses

→ she sees herself first when she’s forced to look at him closely

14. ‘He grins violently’ (p.9)

→ I just love that sentence, okay. Michael just has such a strong presence, especially in a place like school that Tori keeps describing as ‘dull’ (p.6). So many contrasts that crystallize characteristics.

15. ‘’Victoria Spring’, he cries’ + big arms thrown in the air movement (p.9)

→ he celebrates that he found her

16. Tori stay quiet and ‘has a headache’ (p.9)

→ contrast to Michael’s reaction; her lack of reaction

→ overwhelm?, confusion?; hating people?

17. Tori finds her picture awful (p.10)

→ insecure about her appearance

18. ‘It’s like I don’t even have a face’ (p.10 )

→ lack of identity, significance?; hidden away

19. ‘Michael steps back a little’ but only to give her back her personal space (p.10)

→ he moves away, but remains as close as possible without irrupting Tori’s comfort unnecessarily

20. Michael’s ‘insane smile’ (p.10)

→ Tori describing/ judging his appearance (she’s so obsessed with his smile, haha)

21. ‘Everything lit up like it’s on fire’; ‘He notices me looking too’; ‘’It’s like it’s pulling you out, isn't it?’’ (p.11)

→ the foreshadowing, hehe

→ he notices her actions/ immersion/ interest and reacts to it by directly talking to her

22. ‘You are definitely Tori Spring, aren’t you’. ‘This should be a question, but he says it like he’s already known for a long time’ (p.12)

→ he does know her from when he showed her around at school last year; Tori doesn't know that they already met yet

→ without knowing, she intuitively interprets his words correctly; he knows she’s Victoria Spring, he recognizes her and has known about her for a long time

23. contrast of interest level regarding the solitaire case/ mystery (p.12)

Tori calling the day ‘pointless’ (p.13)

→ Tori lost interest I the post-it and blog the second Michael joined the moment; she already stated that she finds significant in moments no one but her is involved in and with Micheal now being another person paying attention to the post-it, Tori’s attention isn't the solely presence anymore ergo she looses interest and a feeling of significance

24. Tori feels deeply for Michael’s sudden sadness (p.13)

→ she can’t but care

25. Tori doesn't know what to do (p.13)

→ the post-it task lost significance due to Michael ruining her solidarity, but now Michael she is alone with him and the only one who is paying attention to him, therefore his sudden reaction forces her to go through a sudden shift as well, him bringing a sense of significance

→ Tori’s apathy and confusion collide with the rollercoaster of the situation

26. ‘You don’t say anything you mean’ (p.15)

→ Michael doesn't know Tori yet sees through her

27. Tori describes her laugh as a ‘pathetic sort of expulsion of air’ (p.15)

→ emphasis of her insecurity by choice of words connoting a neutral thing such as a chuckle or laugh

28. ‘Who are you, Victoria Spring?’ (p.15) - ‘I am nothing’ (p.15)

→ we just got an introduction by Tori beyond only her name and now she states she does not know how to answer that question beyond listing her name

→ insecurity, low self-worth

→ also, the fact that she thinks so deeply about how she could possibly answer that question by a stranger, just to realize how she does not feel like being anything/ anyone more worthy than ‘nothing’, instead of not caring and walking away, well, proves that she does care; she listens and thinks and doesn't find an answer that she evaluates as satisfying

29. she doesn't know at on point Michael hands her the post-it before he vanishes;

‘This is probably how it starts’

→ with a moment of significance (her own definition of significance in moments of seemingly being the only one paying attention and taking action)

→ with being seen and looked at and talked with (encounter with Michael)

→ by taking action as one’s own decision (following post-it)

→ by being recognizes (by Micheal)

→ by an unfamiliar encounter in an otherwise familiar and dull place

→ by being confronted with oneself (seeing herself in his glasses; being asked who she is)

Analepsis

Tori became form leader by getting volunteered ‘mostly because no one else wanted to do so’ (p.9f)

→ taking action when others don’t

2. Tori’s hair cut story (p.14f)

→ her inner tumult and its exterior display

[icewindandboringhorror]

Other Misc. Rambling Thoughts on the topic:

(~ !!!!!!!!! if you're just reblogging this post for the Poll section, please reblog the original post without this addition* lol. ~)

(*not that there's anything super personal or weird about the addition, just that it's meant to be kind of casual Side Commentary, not really part of the Main Point Of The Poll, so it would feel kind of weird for it to be emphasized by being included in reblogs unless the reblogs were explicitly about the side commentary, etc..... if that makes sense.. ANYWAY!)

It's neat to read the written descriptions that people are mentioning in the tags, since it's almost like I can see or conceptualize the idea as well, but it's just.. I'm not SEEING it.

Like for example: I can imagine a vase, it's a muted mint green and slightly translucent, elaborate golden birds sprawled down the side in streaks of thin rough watery paint, the base material shimmers gently in the light, there's a small chip where it's cracked on the handle, etc, etc. .. But as I'm thinking about this I see literally nothing.

It seems like perhaps some people can visualize an object first, and THEN describe what they see. But I sort of work backwards. I am building the object in my mind, I can never see it, but it's a collection of concepts. Rather than visualizing all details as a whole at once, I am adding each detail one by one, building onto the IDEA of the thing.

The vase doesn't have a crack on the handle because I just automatically visualized a vase with a crack. It was more that I cognitively understand the concept of a vase, what they tend to be made out of, how they tend to look and feel, the properties they have. So based purely on that knowledge, I can imagine "a chip is something that a vase could have, it would look this way and behave this way" - more like... I'm constructing a bullet point Fact List about the object rather than seeing it.

So if you tell me to imagine an object, I can, in a way, imagine that object in great detail, but it's just.. I'm not SEEING those details, more just knowing it's qualities in a purely conceptual way. Sometimes in the tags when people are like "yeah I can see the skin of the apple, texture, little dots on the surface" it's like… I can imagine that too, I can know it's there, but just with no visual attached.

I guess rather than SEEING something and going ''ah. I know what this looks like because I have seen it''. I more just skip that visual step entirely and go ''I know what this looks like, I just randomly have a list of information about the concept in my mind.'' etc. Maybe similar to how sometimes in dreams, even though a house may look completely different and be in an entirely fake 'dreamlike' environment, you just somehow KNOW intuitively that it's meant to be your childhood home or something. Even when it looks nothing like it in reality. There's a built-in base knowledge of the properties or information of some things within a dreaming mind, etc.

--

This also makes me wonder about like.. how storytelling and myth is so important to cultures all across time. Or how this could tie also into concepts of religion.. etc. etc. If so many people really can kind of conjure these vivid images in their mind, then maybe that's part of why certain things are so meaningful to them? Like a "religious experience" being something you can actually really SEE/feel/lingering with you in your head, rather than just abstract words on a page, detached purely theoretical ideas, etc... hmmm

.

Plus also just for average emotional stuff too, even outside of broader cultural conceptual attachments..

Like, I don't think there's a direct 1 to 1 link (obviously not all people with mental illnesses that significantly reduce their emotional or expressive capacity also MUST have aphantasia or vice versa), but it's interesting as someone who DOES also have a much more lessened emotional range/pretty flat affect/etc. etc. to think like.. Maybe I WOULD be more emotional, in a way, if I could have these vivid experiences..?

Perhaps memories would hold deeper significance if they could really stay with me vividly. Or storytelling would evoke more of a deep emotional reaction to me if I could really picture and feel the things that are going on. If things were more TANGIBLE in my brain, rather than always merely conceptual highly abstracted ideas.

Kind of like, it's probably easier to get over the death of a pet or something, if after not seeing them for an hour you already don't remember what they looked like (beyond just a vague fact list of traits), and you have no vivid memories or mental reminders of them (beyond just factual information stores). COGNTIVIELY you can appreciate the idea of their absence, of course, you still miss them, but there's just no remaining visceral sensory ties. A very "out of sight, out of mind" sort of thing in terms of attachments, memories, emotions, etc. Maybe certain things are easier to "get over", when you're not having constant mental sensory reminders that occasionally rekindle your feelings about the event or etc.??

(like for example, maybe someone could remain angry about an argument longer if they could vividly replay it in their head over and over again. VS just like.. 'Yes I can factually recall the fact I had an argument, and I do have knowledge stored about what precisely was said, but any sort of sensory data such as sights/smells/feelings, etc. from the actual moment of the event are long gone and can never be conjured again in my mind." etc.)

Which again, I think lessened emotional permanence and image permanence in the mind are NOT inherently linked, can all be caused by different things for different people. And, since I can't visualize anything in my head, maybe I'm misunderstanding how it happens and the effect it may have on stuff like remembering things you miss or replaying arguments, etc. etc. But it's still a little interesting to think about, if they could influence each other to some degree.... :0c --

Lastly, It's also weird because I'm actually pretty good at estimating distance and spaces? I can quickly assemble furniture without an instruction manual, pretty easily have a concept of how much space a chair may take up in a room, how two mechanical parts might fit together - BUT, I am literally not actually visualizing anything. I cannot see 3D objects in my mind at ALL. It's like.. just based on the pure List Of Facts About Things Which I Have Observed.. I can intuitively go "oh this works like this/this is this size" just because.. I know it's that size. I don't have to see anything to know..?

But then on the other hand, I'm terrible at directions without a map (I guess because a 3d outdoor environment has WAY more complexity than like.. "Will this square fit into another square?"etc. lol ).

BUT, I also draw/sculpt/etc. entirely without references, and seem to do mostly okay at that..? Like.. I can't even remember the last time I actually used a reference or looked at anything whilst drawing. It's all muscle memory, and me just adjusting as I go until something "looks right" on paper, I never have a set image in my head (or external reference) before hand.. Hrmm....

AND.. I used to say that I had a photographic memory when I was younger, which I know NOW is not true (I always thought it was just an expression, not that people could literally see things in a photographic way). But what I was describing is, I do often associate information with imagery, just... without imagery....

Like "Oh, I know that I took my medicine earlier today because I have a distinct memory, a snapshot of a moment in time, of me rattling the pill bottle in my hands as I looked up at a stop sign while in the back seat of a car". When I say this, I can't ACTUALLY see/feel/hear a pill bottle, or vividly picture a stop sign, but it's more just a factual recall, of. Even though I don't see these things, I know they happened, the information of them happening (me hearing a sound and also looking at a stop sign at the same time) has been stored in my brain as a memory, a collection of linked facts. --

As for other senses, I cannot taste or feel anything in my head AT ALL.. wild that some people mention that. I mean, again, I can have a purely factual recall as if reading a textbook, knowing the information of 'X item typically has X texture, therefore I can imagine what it may be like to feel it' or 'X usually has this taste' etc. - but I can never actually experience those senses in any capacity in my mind alone. I would say audio is my strongest mental sense (maybe a 2.5 or 3 (if it were translated onto the above scale where 1 is most vivid and 5 is nothing)), then visual (4.5 at most, usually 5), and then taste and smell and such are just complete 5, absolutely nothing, I didn't even know people could experience taste or feeling just in their mind alone.. lol...

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

-

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

[vxsellie]

⋆ ˚｡⋆౨ৎ˚. GHOSTS OF SACRILEGE !

synopsis. fbi agent!ellie williams x nun!reader ; it's truly no shock that the entirety of west virginia is emerged by trepidation, considering hundreds of residents have gone missing within the past three months. as a form of consolation for those fearful, an esteemed fbi agent is sent to investigate. what she finds, however, is more than she could ever have expected.

notes. this piece is part of the mythologica challenge! i tried my absolute hardest to do the theme justice bc of how good it is. also pls note that every town mentioned is real & i did a decent amount of research on each one, but that doesn't at all mean that it's entirely accurate. i've been to some of the places, but not all also ! this is my first time ever writing detailed smut so i literally know none of the correct words to use or how to describe what's happening & it might turn out being literal dog shit,, if that's the case i apologize!

warnings. religious horror, an attempt at writing smut, angst, plot twists, horrible world building, major character death x2, possessive / obsessive romance, descriptive gore, blood, satanic rituals, human sacrifice, blood, oral (r! receiving), brief mentions of abuse & assault, murder as a metaphor, past animal death, long exposition i'm sorry, and - last but most important - the sweet release of desecrating salvation.

wc. 9.5k+

𝓝aught but unease filled the tiny town of bluefeild as yet another missing person is found to be reported in the newspaper. the sun begins to peer over the horizon, long shadows cast against the sidewalk that newsboys toss the papers from. they ride their bikes down the concrete with a fervor that should be rare. but it’s been rather common in bluefeild as of late. every since december. ever since the incidents first began.

nobody in town can be seen outside without a frantic expression and a fast pace. fear fuels their every step as they scurry outside to retrieve the news before burrowing back into the safety of their homes, hungry eyes skimming the article in search of who’s gone missing this time.

ellie hadn't expected much when traveling here. a small town of worrisome locals, a serial kidnapper hiding in plain sight. y'know, the usual for cases like these.

but something about this case stands out to her. there's a certain weight in her chest as each day passes without answers. in the beginning, she'd asked around town, hoping to find some common denominator among everyone's weariness. but there's nothing. the residents are closed off, thick boots and even thicker country drawls quick to kick the agent off their rotting porch at first glance. she's been here for a while now, not a single clue made evident. no loose ends, no muddy footprints, no witnesses. it's like these people just disappear into thin air.

ellie sits in her idled car, eyes scanning today's newspaper for slips of information. she can't help the way her interest piques, slowly going mad with lack of elucidation. she runs a hand through her hair, shoulders weighed with fatigue and dwindling hope.

see, over two-hundred people have gone missing in the past three months ⎯ which is a big deal in and of itself, but even more so considering bluefeild's population is well under five thousand.

her windows fog as rain patters gently against the steel of her vehicle, the whether cold and dreary in comparison to her car's heated temperature. she supposes it fits the mood, though, doesn't it?

after twenty minutes of analyzing each and every word given, ellie groans and stuffs the newspaper into her glove box, slamming it shut. evidently, the paper provided nothing of use to her. it has a picture of the man missing, his name inscribed under the image, and a few words of grief are quoted to have been said by the families. but that's it.

as of this morning, jason casey has been added to the long list of missing persons. and not a soul could say why nor how.

ellie pulls her phone from her coat pocket, clicking on her bosses contact before wedging it between her ear and shoulder. she listens to it ring as she puts her car into gear, pulling out of the parking space she'd been occupying. it's not like anyone here would dare to use their cars anyhow. most shops and businesses have been temporarily closed, owners fearing the possibility of suffering the same fate as those prior.

"ellie?" joel's voice comes through the tiny speakers, papers rustling in the background of the call as he speaks. "what're you callin' me for? i thought you were on the bluefeild case."

"there's nothin' to go off of." she tells him. one hand is rested on the wheel whilst the other holds her phone.

"you're our best investigator, williams, i'm sure you'll find somethin'." he says offhandedly, continuing to shuffle through whatever papers are of more interest to him than his alleged best employee.

she rolls her eyes at his dismissive tone. "hundreds are missing, joel. without a trace or a sign left behind. they're likely dead, if i were to guess. i don't— what the hell good does that do?"

"find the bodies." he says easily. "their corpses might point to their killer."

"no shit." ellie scoffs. "the issue isn't what to do next, it's how the fuck i'm supposed to do it. this has been goin' on for months and no bodies have turned up. where am i even supposed to look? like i said, there ain't a damn thing left behind."

she coasts down the streets of bluefeild, using this time to feel the layout of it and examine what she's working with. she's been here for a while now, but the town remains a mystery to her. and, from what she's seen, it's a bit of a mystery to everyone else as well.

she notices that many of the homes are old and shabby, paint flaking and wood rotting. in the yards, however, almost every resident has some form of a religious symbol. a cross, a statue of mary, a flag for something biblical. anything to show their faith.

to each their own, i guess. she thinks to herself with a shrug before turning her attention elsewhere.

the streets are empty, as expected. a few street lights are on, the yellow illumination flicking with worn age. even on the two-lane roads, there's not a car in sight. she narrows her eyes at this, a shiver tracing up her spine at the disturbing vastness.

"well," joel says, "search the papers some more."

"i've done that a thousand fuckin' times." ellie groans, eyes still scanning her surroundings with intent of committing it all to memory. just in case. "there's nothin' there. it's just all information on the missing people, half-assed sympathy for the victim's family, and a picture of 'em."

joel sighs, the sound of tapping resonating through the phone. ellie recognizes the sound, having worked for joel long enough to know that he always taps a pencil against his desk when he's thinking. it's a good sign, she thinks. it means he's at least giving her predicament some thought.

she's been in bluefeild for eight days now, spending her time interrogating random residents for informations; spending her nights rereading the stupid fucking newspapers. naught good has been of ramification.

the repetition of it all is driving her insane, especially considering none of her efforts have yet to pay off in any sort of way. she'd hoped that when the next person showed up missing, something would present itself. a clue would rear its ugly head at her and she'd grab it by the throat with fervor. but no. jason casey went missing and all heads remain hidden. so, after an hour of battling with her pride, she decided to make the call to joel and admit her being stuck.

"okay." he says, shuffling a bit as he finally gives ellie his full attention. "okay, pull over for a second, i'm gonna need you to do somethin' for me."

she instantly obliges, pulling off to the nearest backroad. gravel crunches under her tires as she drives along the thin path wedged between two decrepit buildings. the alley is small and a bit sketchy, but that's exactly what she needs. ellie puts her car in park, windows translucent in their heavily fogged blanket.

"how many newspapers do you have on you?" joel asks when he hears her car go into idle.

"um," she reaches over and opens her glove box, watching as yellowed papers fall from the newly opened door. they flutter to the floor and atop the passenger's seat. she hums, amused at the sight of her obsession making a tangible image in her head. "a lot."

"okay, good. perfect." joel mutters, the clacking of a keyboard sounding through the tiny speaker. "the first person who went missing was carl andrews. he was thirty-seven. his wife claims he was supposed to have been walking home from work but never showed up for dinner."

ellie scrambles through her messy stack of newspapers, searching for carl's report. she finally finds it, the paper dated to have been written near the beginning of december. she straightens out the wrinkles, examining his picture.

"looks like your average middle age man." ellie mutters, taking in his scruffy beard and wrinkled skin. "he was a carpenter. had two kids, both boys."

"yes, i have the paper pulled up on my computer." joel says. "but it doesn't show his address or nothin'. this shitty website only has half of the damn document."

ellie skims through the words, searching for the street or neighborhood he'd lived in. when she turns up empty-handed she groans, now well familiar with the feeling of disappointment regarding this case. "nope. no home address." she says with an evidently annoyed tone.

"what about his workplace?" joel asks. "if he'd been walkin' home, his work must be close enough for him to do so."

"oh shit," she mutters. she'd studied his article for hours — studied all of them — and she hadn't even thought to look there. her hands clutch the paper as she searches with a hungered gaze. her eyes widen at the address listed on the paper. "yes it's on fifth street."

more typing is heard through the phone, "says here that,, there's a neighborhood right by there. a few blocks down from the carpenters' building. must've been where he lived."

"perfect." ellie grins, adrenaline rushing through her.

oh, she feels on top of the world right now.

"okay, now i want you to look for addresses in all the other papers." joel says, flipping a switch in his tone — off to being ellie's friend and on to being her boss. a familiar change, but an unpleasant one nonetheless. "check 'n see if there's a link between where they'd been last spotted."

"okay."

ellie sets carl's paper aside and grabs another random one. she reads the heading briefly, recognizing it to be the article on bryan turner who'd gone missing in the middle of january. he'd allegedly been walking his dog and never returned to his apartment, according to his elderly female neighbor.

the address is actually listed this time. not his exact apartment number, but the building. ellie can't help the smile that tugs at her mouth again as she grabs a random notepad and scribbles both addresses onto the paper, reminding herself to compare their proximity when she gets back to her hotel later tonight.

"you're a goddan genius, joel." ellie mutters as she sets bryan's paper atop carl's and grabs another. sam cortez. late december.

"thanks, kid." joel chuckles into the phone. ellie has it set aside, call set to speaker as she flips through papers and continues to write down addresses into her notes. her movements are frantic and hurried, adrenaline refusing to wind down from its newly heightened state. joel speaks again, regaining her attention. "uh, sorry t' tell you this but i've gotta go. it's almost midnight and i've been at the building since ten o'clock this mornin'."

"yeah yeah, whatever." ellie replies off-handedly. "thanks for your help, old man. i think i can take it from here now, though. go get your beauty rest."

"promise to call me in the mornin'?" he asks. "i wanna hear what y' find."

"yes, i promise." she laughs. "i'll call you as soon as i wake up."

"okay good. don't overwork yourself either, you need to⎯"

"goodbye, joel!" she says, grabbing her phone and hanging up on him before she has to listen to him reprimand her for lack of rest. he's one to talk, too, seeing as he'd just admitted to having been at the building all damn day.

she sighs, deciding to put a pin in her address search and get back to her hotel to finish working in the comfort of a bed.

she sets her papers into two neat piles in the passenger's seat ⎯ one for those she'd already gone through and one for those she hasn't yet gotten to. then, she puts her key into the ignition and pulls out of the little road.

as she drives down the street, she examines her surroundings once again. still as impoverished as before.

she passes a small farm house, eyes drawn to the old lady sitting on the porch. she's rocking back and forth rather ominously, making direct eye contact with ellie through the windshield. slowly, the woman nods her head toward where a large cross is staked into the soil of her front yard. ellie looks away, a sudden uneasiness washing over her as she presses harder on the gas.

she reaches her hotel a few minutes later, stuffing her papers under each arm before entering the building and heading toward the elevator. by the time she reaches her room, she practically rips her heavy leather jacket off, the yellow 'fbi' label bright and bold against the black material as she tosses it onto her bed. she sits cross-legged in the center of her room, laying out all the newspapers in front of her.

she continues to sort through them all, eyebrows furrowing as she comes to realize that all the victims are men.

she hurriedly flips through the documents, certain she must he wrong. but she's not. they're all male. ellie writes this down on her notepad, handwriting rushed and nigh unintelligible. despite the sloppiness, she circles it, sure it'll prove to be of importance later on.

by the time ellie finishes going through what feels like hundreds of papers, she decides that's enough for her to be able to find a pattern if there is one. the digital clock atop the nightstand reads 2am, flashing bright red numbers at her. she ignores it, too high off the thrill of finally finding something in this priorly monotonous case.

she pulls her laptop from her bag and flips it open atop her crossed legs, quick to pull up a map and type in the coordinates of each address. they appear random at first, completely fucking unrelated to one another. a pang of dread hits ellie in the chest, worried this will have all been for naught.

but then she zooms out.

each dot for each address glows blue. when zoomed out, it forms something. ellie squints, tilting her head at the incoherent image she struggles to make out. seeing as many of the papers weren't analyzed, the picture is only half-complete.

but then it clicks. a pentacle. and at the very center of the shape, a church.

ellie's mind goes back to the old woman on the porch. the way she'd nodded to her cross. the way almost every family in bluefeild is outwardly religious. she can't believe she hadn't seen it sooner.

this isn't just some case where she can stare at newspapers and hope something pops up. it's an intricately weaved web of murders.

her chest heaves as her eyes dart across the screen, unable to believe it. she finds herself tapping her men against the floor, drumming it just as joel does. she curses herself, tossing the pen across the room as her mind reels. it lands in front of the door, ballpoint pointed toward the exit. ellie takes this as a sign from the universe. despite not having ever been a religious person, she can't help the pang of hope in her chest.

deciding to indulge the pen's sign, ellie writes the church's address into her notepad, shuts her laptop, pulls her jacket back on, then heads for the door. she steps over the pen on her way out.

𝓢he stares up at the church, checking to make sure she's absolutely certain she's in the right place. when she's proven to be correct, she stuffs her notepad into her pocket and walks toward the building.

ellie doubts anybody is inside due to the time, but she wants to search the place regardless.

the church is old, creaky wooden exterior painted in uneven shades of white. the roof is brown and dilapidated with wear. atop it, a large cross is seen standing tall, its tip pointed up at the starry sky. ellie wades through the overgrown grass, her breath coming out in white clouds. it's fucking freezing out here.

when she reaches the building, ellie cups her hands around her eyes before peeking through the windows. the glass is dusty and cracked in some places. she can't seem to see through it, transparency made opaque from lack of maintenance.

she leans back and wipes a hand across the dust, forming a wide arc to peer through. inside, the church looks brand new. wooden pews line the space, a long aisle between each formed column. the floor is white tile, cleaned to be spotless. she tilts her head, struggling to look toward the pulpit. it appears to be⎯

"what're you doing?"

ellie jumps, her head slamming against the top of the window frame. she ignores the ache and whips around to face the owner of the voice. a nun.

you stand behind her with a raised brow, your entire body covered by black and white robes. ellie blinks, something about you making her stomach lurch. she's instantly put on edge, shameless in the way she examines your features.

your brow is knit in distaste for the trespassing girl. your eyes are sharp and steady as you pin your gaze onto hers. your hands are clasped behind your back, formal and almost robotic. or at least, that's how ellie sees you.

ellie reaches under her jacket and pulls out her badge. "fbi."

"there's no fbi in bluefeild." you point out, voice steady and melodic. ellie's lips part at the sound but she shows no other form of sway. you eye her badge, ellie williams. noted to be a top agent in her line of work. your eyes narrow. "where exactly are you from?"

"richmond." she responds, eyes never leaving yours as she places her badge back into the interior pocket in her leather jacket.

you tilt your head, inquiring. "virginia?"

"yes." she confirms.

you hum, noting the four hour drive she's sure to have taken in order to get here. you looks out across the grass, seeing her car still running as it's parked on the side of the road, yellow headlights acting as a beacon against the dark night.

"it's late, miss williams." you tell her, turning back to her to find that ellie's eyes have yet to leave your face.

she analyzes each expression you make, contorting every detail to memory ⎯ from the way your eyes flick across her features to the way your shoulders shift slightly after having been standing in one position for so long. she memorizes you, allowing your very being to sink into her mind. for the case, of course. you're a suspect, after all. she needs to learn you and feel you out in order to get a proper read on whether you're innocent in all this. that's why she stares at you. that's why her pupils are blown and her lips are parted again. totally.

"do you want to come inside?" you offer, raising a brow at her strange, yet obvious sense of interest in you. "it's freezing out here and i happen to have just brewed some tea."

her eyes dart to the shabby church behind her. judging by the exterior of the building, imagining the place having ac and working electricity is shocking. but judging by what she'd seen of the inside, she's tempted to take you up on your offer. for the case.

"only if y' agree to answer some questions of mine." she says, deciding to set the terms and conditions early on.

your eyes narrow, "what type of questions?"

"the type i need in order to solve the case i'm workin' on." she replies, reminding herself of the large amount of missing men and boys who've disappeared in these past three months.

"mm," you hum.

you look her up and down, taking in the sight of her. it's rare to see any form of law enforcement out here. you'd lived in bluefeild all your life and never seen a cop or fbi agent outside of the television. her leather coat hangs heavy from her set shoulders. her chin is held high despite the way goosebumps trail across her skin due to the chill of the air. she's wearing baggy black pants and heavy combat boots. interesting.

"sure." you shrug. "i've nothing to hide."

"we'll see 'bout that."

her eyes rake over to where he car remains running. she leaves it, using it as a sign to you that she plans to make this quick. you understand the gesture and heed it with care, nodding as you shift around her and walk toward the entrance of the church. the large wooden doors are already unlocked as you push them open.

ellie draws her eyes across the foyer, noting the long hallway. to the left is a doorway leading to the sanctuary and chancel that she'd seen through the windows. to the right is a large door with a shiny golden handle, locked. the hall is lined with more doors, some locked whilst others are free to peer into.

you move about the space as though you'd lived here all your life. ellie supposes that might be true, actually.

you sweep down the hall before turning one of the corners down a branched passageway. ellie follows behind you, the hall illuminated by only a dim yellow light. on either side of the hall, more and more doors branch out to the side. ellie pays no mind to the building's layout anymore. instead, she finds herself more interesting in watching your habit billow behind you, your shoes clicking with each step against the tile.

eventually, you're both now in a kitchen area. ellie hasn't a clue when you'd gotten here, far too distracted by you to care much for the journey you'd taken her on.

the floor is tiled to mirror the sanctuary, counters made of marble. you flick a switch and the lights flutter on, a low hum sounding from the ceiling as the kitchen is illuminated by a yellow glow. on the counter, two cups of tea sit premade. you grab them, one in each hand.

with an amused expression, you pass one to ellie. she takes it, eyes the glass in her hand for a long moment. in the end, she decides against trusting it.

"uh," she clears her throat as she places the mug on the counter behind her, turning to you with an uneasy weariness. "you knew you'd have a guest?"

"hm?" you hum, tilting your head at her with an innocent curiosity.

"y' made two glasses." ellie points out. you continue to look at her, feigning confusion that urges her to continue her explanation. "it's just— well, i haven't seen anyone else here besides you."

"i hadn't priorly known of your arrival, if that's what you're suggesting." you inform her before taking a long sip from your mug, peering at her over the rim with an alluring twinkle to your eye. you lower it, keeping the glass poised between your hands as you lick your lips and continue. "i simply knew i wouldn't be drinking alone."

"what's that supposed to mean?" ellie inquires, those fbi instincts of hers lacing through her tone. her eyes glint with piqued interest, watching you with a steady sharpness. it weighs on your chest, heavy but enthralling.

"what i mean is," you place your mug on the counter with a light clink. "in this church, you're never alone. not really."

she raises a brow, back straightening. "someone else is here?"

"something." you correct, a smirk tugging at your lips. "a deity, spirit, ghost, demon. take your pick, miss williams. it hasn't a title just yet."

ellie has surely formed her doubts about whether or not you're mentally insane. she can't help but indulges you nonetheless. if she intends on puzzling out the mystery of the missing people, she can't outwardly state that you're crazy. so instead, she says, "are these,, things good? or are they evil?"

"mm," you shift, taking another long sip of tea. you ponder on her question while drinking, your mind deciding on exactly how much you wish to tell this governmental investigator. once your mind is made up, you place you mug back down and flash her an amused smile. "its morality varies. as i said, it doesn't much like the feel of being confined by the barbed wire of titles. plus, there's more than one. and none are a repeat of the other, each separated by individuality."

ellie bites back a scoff, trying her hardest not to just grab you by the shoulders and shake you senseless. she wants direct answers, not riddles. she hasn't the time to figure out what you're trying to get at.

"how many?" she asks. "like. are there lots of them or are they few and far between?"

your brow knits as you take a step closer. at your growing proximity, her breath hitches. you are more than just a nun, you're the embodiment of her obsession. all the care and time she'd poured into this case; you personify it.

you're a religious figure in and of yourself. something worthy of worship and praise. if you were to seen by the world as ellie sees you, historians would be studying you for eons to come. paintings and playwrights would be made in your honor, temples and statues forged in hopes that you'd bat the sculptor even a moment of your attention.

but, alas, that's not how the world works. instead, you're made to be a random nun who lives holed away in a ragged church in the middle of nowhere. perhaps the universe had been wise to hide you from the world, for fear of what your divinity would cause. a repeat of troy, no doubt. wars fought for your hand. lives lost for the pulpy beating heart caged behind your ribs.

"as many as i'd like." you tell her, face now mere inches away from her own.

your body is covered entirely by your habit, black fabrics hanging from your shoulders and arms as to keep your entire being shielded from sight. your hair is cast back and under your veil.

despite the coverage, ellie's enamor is unmoved. it's not your body or your hair that she's drawn to. it's the slope of your nose, the plush of your lips, the curve of your cheek, the arc of your brow, the color of your eyes. it's everything that makes you stand out like a brightly shining star in comparison to the dull darkness that is this church.

and stars like you ought to be admired.

"as many as—" she squeezes her eyes shut, knowing her only chance at regaining control of her head is to not face you. her mind is muddled by thoughts of you. she can't think straight. when she reopens her eyes, she could've sworn you've moved closer. "what're you sayin'? i don't—"

"don't understand?" you finish for her, tone pitched in regalement. your head tilts to the side, your noses brushing. "few people do."

"just tell me what y' mean." she utters, voice a whispered breath across your face in the form of a plea. "tell me without the riddles. tell me without trying to evade the truth. tell me with honesty. if you're straight forward with me, i'm sure i'll understand."

you sigh through your nose, leaning away from her. she follows you like a fish on a hook. you take a step back and she takes one forward. noticing, you hold a hand up to halt her movements and she instantly ceases, blinking at you with parted lips.

your head is downcast, palm against her chest. "you'd hate me."

"hate you?" she questions.

despite only just having met you, ellie is quite certain she'd never come to hate you. your very being is as much a wonder to her as life itself. you're a celestial beauty she cannot bear to tear her eyes from. hate is foreign when you're the context in which it's spoken.

"yes." you confirm, expression contorting into one of feigned guilt. and, had ellie not been in such blind awe of you, she'd have likely seen through your facade of deception. "i've made mistakes; plenty. i could never expect you to hear me speak of them and look past their malice."

"but i would." she whispers, taking a step nearer. she places a hand on your wrist, lowering your palm that had priorly been raised between the two of you. she looks down at where she touches you, albeit through the cloth of your gown. "i'd look past it. i'd see you as i do now regardless of what you'd done."

you shake your head, "you cannot mean that."

"i do." she brings your hand to her mouth, pressing her lips against the hills of your knuckles. she looks up at you through her lashes, her mouth remaining close to your skin as she whispers, "i do mean it."

you feel guilt settle deep within your chest, burrowing between your ribs and in the very tissue of your heart. an immoral darkness encompasses the organ ellie so desperately desires to obtain.

you'd lured people into your entrapment many times before. but something about ellie makes you feel bad for doing what you know you need to.

but it's too late now.

she's your last victim. the final sacrifice needed in order to finish what you'd started back in december. after taking her life, all will be well. all will be well. all will be well. well, well, well, well. you repeat this over and over in your mind as ellie kneels before you. she looks up at you as though you're an alter made for this. for worship.

your breath catches in your throat as you watch her sink to the tiled flooring, hands brought up to rest at your hips. her fingers fist the fabric of your habit as she speaks once more, "allow me to prove how much i mean it?"

your head is swimming, unsure on what to do. logically, you know you should stop this before it gets too far. you've already lured her in close enough to do what's needed. but, for some reason, there's a thick knot forming in your chest. as it grows, you come to realize it's not a knot at all. it's a fist. it's ellie's fist.

her eyes bore into your own, her hands remain gripping your hips. somehow, though, you feel as though they're managing to trace their way through you. they line your bones and caress your tendons before inevitably finding their way to your heart. she holds it in the palm of her figurative hands as her physical ones begin to hike up your habit, slowly pulling the cloak up from the floor.

still, despite the discernible desire in her eyes, she does nothing but wait for your response of consent.

it's inexorable, the way you give in. the slight nod of your head had been predestined from the moment you spotted her at that window; and it will continue to prove relevant until your respective faits are sealed.

to ellie, it felt as though you'd taken hours to reply despite it only having been a minute or less. but the moment you nod, she's moving eagerly. she's grabbing your hips and hoisting you up onto the counter whilst simultaneously struggling to pull up the skirts of your clothes. she's trying to do so many things at once that it's dizzying. for both parties.

you aid her, shifting atop the marble as you pull the habit up to reveal what lies beneath it.

ellie feels the world fall from beneath her knelt locale as she stares. a pair of black lace panties adorn you, the upper half of your body remaining covered by the bunched cloth of your habit. the time she takes to memorize you feels agonizing as you sit there, itching to feel her body on yours.

once she's confident that the image has been successfully engraved into her mind, she leans forward. your legs are already parted when her mouth makes contact with your clothed vulva. the wetness that soaks the material soon made into a mixture of your arousal and ellie's opened mouth.

her tongue traces light circles into your clit, a soft sigh escaping your lips as your grip on your habit begins to loosen. you toss your head back in pleasure, the sound of ellie's slurping and licking mixing with the mechanical hum of the lights.

"ohmygod," she says against you, the vibrations of her voice making your breath pick up its pace. "you're so fucking perfect."

one of your hands comes down to tangle in the auburn of her hair, tufts weaving between your shaky fingers. you tug on it, pulling a grunt form the back of ellie's throat as her scalp stings. despite her noise of pain, this only manages to make ellie more vehement in her actions.

she grabs the hem of your panties with her teeth, yanking them to the side. her eyes are shut as she licks a long strip through your wet muscle. you can’t help the way you stare down at her, watching as she puts her absolute all into making you feel good. and, as it turns out, she’s quite skilled at doing so.

ellie's mind is fogged over, mimicking the way her car's windows had been earlier. she supposes there’s no true difference there, however. the interior of her car had been warm in comparison to the cool outside air. swap the temperatures and there’s naught that varies. the warmth that you provide makes ellie feel cold in contrast, which ends in a fogged mind.

the taste of you is enough to make her lose whatever sanity remains intact. all that adrenaline that had flowed through her earlier is being poured into you.

after all, stars should be worshipped right? they should be admired from below, gawked up at. they should be mapped and studied by only the wisest of mankind. they should be doted on with a possessive sense of adoration, one only fit for something so celestial and untouchable as a star.

and that's what you are. to ellie, at least. you're a brightly shining nebula — a feathery cloud of vibrancy, visible only in the darkest of nights. only in the coldest of weathers. only in most decrepit of churches. only here, only now.

only when fate is carved in this exact way. had one thing been altered, none of this would have taken place. it was providence that brought you together. you weren't written in the stars or tethered your entire lives. in fact, the chance of your paths crossing was rather low. but, honestly, that only makes your acquaintance more deeply rooted in kismet. makes it more special.

"fuck," you pant, chest heaving as you squeeze your eyes shut. your head thuds against the cabinet as you tighten your grip on ellie's hair. she groans, fingers pressing deeply into the skin of your hips, hard enough to leave a bruise. your thighs tighten around her head, a coil of heat sitting heavily in the pit of your stomach. "ellie, i'm—"

she tilts her head up slightly, nose pressing into the bead of your clit. she watches through lidded eyes as you come undone onto her face.

she savors it, committing every little detail to memory. a habit this has become, watching you. your brows knit, your legs shake slightly, you breath hitches. and ellie retains all to it.

she made you see stars. made you look into a mirror and see yourself.

that feeling of blissful release is what she feels every time she's fortunate enough to gaze upon you. and now you've experienced it. and she cannot feel more accomplished than she does right now.

"this," you pant, tugging on her hair to bring her face up to your own. she does as you direct her, standing from the floor to press your foreheads together. "was a terrible idea."

"yeah?" she breathes out. "and why's that?"

you run your hands up and down her back, fingertips tracing the stitching of her leather jacket. you can feel the outlined letters of her 'fbi' label. that familiar twinge of guilt encircles you.

she's a good person — a woman who's to spend the rest of her life helping random people she doesn't know. and yet, here she is. made unfortunate enough to have succeeded in her endeavor.

she stares at you like you're a god, something heavenly. something seraphic. something worthy of her.

"i'm not a good person." you whisper, leaning away from her proximity. predictably, she follows, leaning closer with a desperation only fit for one in love.

the guilt of what you must do is eating you alive. it claws at your chest, snapping your ribs like twigs as it wedges between them to burrow deep within you. it's agonizing yet completely unavoidable.

and in a sickeningly poetic outturn, a random butcher knife is sat neatly atop the marble counter only a foot away from where you sit. just as ellie meets your eyes, the blade happens to catch the light and reflect yellow luminescence. a grotesque reminder of what you're unable to run from.

"nobody is innately good. and, as a nun, y' should know that better than anyone." ellie huffs out a laugh, eyes not daring to stray from you. "in other words, i don't care."

"but you should." you insist, voice teetering on the edge of plea.

"and yet, i don't." ellie counters, just as passionate in her solemnity. you suck in a breath, eyes glossing over. she looks at you with a fondness that feels foreign. she cups your cheeks between her palms, repeating, "i don't."

"i've done horrible things." you say.

"you're a nun." she points out with a light chuckle rumbling her chest. "how horrible could these things have been?"

part of you wants to open up to her, tell her everything that's been weighing on you for these past three months. but each time you get close to a confession, something inanimately symbolic taunts you. whether that be the butcher knife, the hum of electricity, the gun holster at her hip, the residual lust in your chest, or the bright yellow lettering on her jacket.

that gun is meant for you just as that butcher knife is meant for ellie. she'd been wise to bring a weapon, a clear sign that she'd intended on finding someone culpable enough to suspect. and you'd been wise to set the blade atop the counter on the off chance that you'd meet your final victim tonight.

you feel sick to your stomach.

"oh shit," ellie curses as she takes notice to the way you're visibly crumbling in front of her. "i— uh, i didn't mean to be, like, insensitive or anythin'. i'll still listen to you. and i promise to not hate you. promise to never hate you."

"ellie, stop." you sigh. "you can't promise something like that. you don't even know what i—"

"then tell me." she insists, your face still in her cupped hands. you look at her through blurred vision, naught but sincerity behind her pale green irises. "if y' tell me what it is that y' did, we can both carry the burden."

you're instantly shaking your head.

"you don't have to do this alone." ellie says. "plus, isn't a weight split a lighter load than one full?"

as you stare into her eyes, you can't stop yourself from what comes next. you're unable to keep your mouth shut when she's looking at you like that. you decide to tell her, opening your ribs and bearing your heart as though she hadn't already taken it from you. you truly feel more bare in this moment than you did when she'd literally been eating you out.

ellie put her entire trust into you when letting down her guard and abandoning the case she'd obsessed over for weeks. she dropped it like it were nothing, focusing entirely on you in its stead. the least you could do is be honest, right? plus, she's not leaving here anyway. you'd locked the door the moment you two entered the kitchen when she'd been too distracted by your beauty to notice. the trap is already set and she's sitting inside of it without a care. all you need to do now is pull the strings.

but first comes honesty.

for ellie, you'd peel off your clothes. you'd peel off your skin. you'd peel off your flesh. then, when you're naught but bones, you'd give yourself to her. you'd give your entire being to her. not because you think you're worthy of her possession, but because this is all you have. the only thing you're able to offer her as a symbol of your devotion, it's yourself.

though, while you're unable to strip yourself clean off your bones, you feel as though rendering yourself vulnerable and fragile is the next best thing you can offer. for her, you are willing to do the priorly unthinkable.

"you're here in search of the missing men, are you not?" you ask, beginning with baby steps. "in search of who's behind their absences?"

ellie straightens, "i am."

"well." you gesture down at yourself. at your crooked veil that shows stray hairs peeking from underneath; at your hiked up habit, just barely falling to cover your underwear; at your knees that rest on either side of ellie's waist; at your vulnerable state that you're offering up to her. at your bones. "you've found me."

ellie's heart stutters in her chest. not because of what you'd revealed to her, but because you trusted her enough to do so. she no longer cares an ounce for the missing people of bluefeild. all she wants is you. she may be a fool to be this way, but she's in far too deep to mind.

she gives you a weak smile, "i don't care."

"what?" you croak. you stare at her incredulously. there's no way she doesn't care. there's no fucking way. "yes you do."

"i don't."

you blink, looking her up and down. there must be something you're missing — her reaching for her gun, her taking a step backward, her eyes darting toward the knife. but she does none of that. she simply remains stood between your legs, keeps her hands on you, and stares directly into your eyes as you confess your gravest of sins.

"but—" you shake your head, stammering. "but i killed all those people. they're dead. all of them. over two hundred men are buried behind the church."

"i don't care." she repeats, noticing the way your voice raises with trepidation. she traces her hands down your arms, stopping only when they reach your own. she tangles your fingers together, feeling the way your body relaxes slightly to the feel of her touch.

"i killed them because i was paid to." you tell her, your mind reeling as you're unable to grasp her lack of care. you talk in a frantic quickness, rushing to get the truth out for fear that ellie will change her mind in the time it takes for you to speak. "their wives, neighbors, daughters. they— they'd come to me in the confession booths and tell me of the men's abuse o-or assault or misdeeds. and i'd kill them for them. i don't—"

ellie's face remains soft. "you did a good thing, then."

"you can't be serious." you huff, eyes watering with the sheer confusion building within you. "i don't understand how you can still look at me like that. i took their lives. these people, i— they had dreams, they had aspirations and goals and families and—"

"listen," ellie whispers, her hands squeezing yours. "they were horrible people that hurt women. they were abusers and rapists and i don't care what y' did to them or how. all i care about is whether or not y' feel better."

"what?" you ask, voice nigh a breath. "what do you mean feel better?"

"to have gotten that off your chest." she digresses.

you take a deep breath, grounding yourself. the adrenaline of the confession slowly dwindles and you're no longer spiraling. you stare at ellie, centering on her face as the world comes back into focus.

you count your senses one by one. the smell of tea, the sound of humming lights, the feel of a hard counter beneath you, the taste of a bitter truth, the sight of ellie's fond expression. your breathing levels out, slowly but surely. and ellie stares at you the entire time. memorizing you.

"yeah." you whisper. "yeah, i do."

"then that's all that matters."

a supernova; to watch a star combust and explode, a colossally significant occurrence that only the most fortunate are able to witness. ellie considers herself to be substantially fortunate. not only because of what she'd just seen, but because of who it was that did it.

to her, this is even better than a natural supernova. rather than watching a random gassy ball of light die, its you. someone she adores and treasures. and you didn't die. instead, you opens yourself willingly to her. you broke down your walls and bore yourself to her. for ellie, that is far more important than some star's death.

"but—" you say, bringing her attention back to your face. your brows are knitted, clearly struggling to get the words out. she watches you with an easy patience, pupils blown as she submits this to her memory alongside all other files in her brain saved under your name. "but there's more."

"let's hear it." she replies, raising a brow.

you suck in a deep breath, lowering your head as to not face ellie before speaking. "i didn't just start killing whatever men that these women were asking of me. it started smaller. i killed animals, put them in a circle of salt, drew and pentagram, the whole ordeal."

"you sacrificed them?" she asks, tone remaining laced with gentility.

"yes." you nod. "i felt my baptism wasn't enough. god never answered me anyway, he never aided me when i needed it most. he watched my suffering and did nothing. so, i resorted to a new deity of worship." you lift your gaze to meet ellie's. "satanism."

"i'm sorry, i don't—" she blinks a few times, confused. "i don't understand."

"as a child, i relied on god to do everything. my life was nothing without him in it to keep me going. but as i grew, i realized it was unrequited. he cared nothing for me, watching with regale as i sobbed and begged for his help." you explain. "so, as a teenager, i switched over to satanism — worship of someone who actually cared enough to save me."

ellie says nothing, staying silent as you confide in her. she continues to hold your hands, softly cradling them on either side of where you sit.

"but then he wished for payment." you continue. "sacrificial lives as a form of repent for all those years i'd spent as a baptist. i obliged, of course. i killed bunnies and deer, doing research to understand how exactly to offer the stolen lives to him. but as of late, he's wanted more."

"humans." ellie guesses.

"yeah." you confirm. "but i couldn't bring myself to kill random innocent people. so i became a nun and listened in on the confession booths. then, i'd ask the confessors if they wished for me to intervene. they'd concur, paying me to take the lives of their abusers." you recall the fear in the women's voices, the shakiness to their hands as they slipped money through the cracks of the door. "they never saw my face, only heard my voice. and, seeing as i live in the church, none of the recognized me. i soon became a symbol of hope for women and one of fear for men."

ellie's mind strays back to all the religious symbols staked in the yards. "that explains their heavy faith. they think you're some type of prophet."

"yeah, but there's more." you say. "i've researched many, many books to make sure i get this ritual right. and, as it turns out, my 250th victim has to be a martyr. someone who doesn't believe in anything. doing this seals the ritual, ending it."

"good luck finding someone here who meets that criteria." she chuckles.

"exactly." you say carefully. "everyone in bluefield is heavily religious. unless that someone has come from out of town."

"me."

"i wish it wasn't." you rush to explain. "i wish there was some other way i could do this. but it has to be today. i need to do it before another woman comes in asking for my help or the numbers will get thrown off. and if i decline her, i'll lose the faith of all the women in bluefeild."

"okay," ellie shrugs. "do it."

"...what?"

"i don't care." ellie says, the sentence becoming something of a catchphrase for her.

the world stops. again. it screeches to a halt and you almost slam forward at the speed of which it crashed down. you stare at ellie with wide eyes, made shocked by her for a second time. someone so hauntingly perfect cannot truly offer herself up to you like this. she can't seriously be holding out her hand, asking for death to take it.

but what you don't know is that ellie would deem it a gift to die by your hand. it'd be better than dying as a withered elder attached to a beeping machine, or as an agent amid a case who only got to see you in her dreams.

but, this way, she'd be with you always. her love for you would be immortalized; she would be tied down to the very threads that make up the the fabrications of your soul. oh a gift that would be.

"do it." she repeats.

"what?, i don't—" she silences you by leaning forward, pressing her lips against yours.

ellie had kissed you out of impulse, knowing no other way to silence that thundering uncertainty that rumbles your brain. but the moment she does it, she's positive she'll never be able to pull away.

your lips are a cathedral of which she cannot help but melt into, your body a temple she's knelt before and wouldn't hesitate to do again. she kisses you with devout piety, her body molding into yours with each touch that lingers on your skin. somehow, this measly kiss is far more intimate than all else before it.

a silent tear slips from your closed eye as you subtly reach your hand over to where you know the butcher knife lies in wait. ellie surely feels your movement, there's no way she doesn't. but she makes no move to stop kissing you, her lips moving with a vehement neediness.

you loathe the way your fingers find the hilt of the knife. even more so, you despise the way you wrap your hand around it and bring it toward ellie.

she knows. she knows what you're about to do.

and she allows it.

love isn't easy for ellie, never had been. but with you, everything falls into place as though it'd been predestined to do so her entire life. as she feels your body shift toward the knife, nothing runs through her mind aside from your name. on repeat, the singular word replays over and over. she wraps your name around her skull, weaving the letters between her thoughts and molding the syllables against her brain. she was born to love you. and so long as she was able to do so, she'd be okay.

just as the tip of the blade brushes her jacket, you pull away from the kiss and stare at her. the knife remains at her back, resting against leather but not daring to press any harder. ellie's pupils are blown, her lips wet from your own saliva.

"i can't." you utter. "i can't do this to you."

she sighs, "i already told you it's fine, angel. just— as long as i have you near me, i'm content with my decision."

"no." you shake your head. "no i know. it's—" knowing ellie wouldn't understand your explanation, you decide to show her what you mean. with your free hand, you place your palm against her gun holster. "whatever you go through, i want to be there with you."

her eyes widen at your words. she jolts away from you, appearing as though she'd been burned. she sets her jaw, turning her hip away from your reach. "no."

"ellie, please." you implore, tone beseeching. "i can't live on knowing i'd done this to you."

"it's unavoidable." she reminds you. "y' made a deal with the fuckin' devil, or, well— i'm honestly not too sure on the details, but— y' can't not follow through. i understand, okay? finish the damn ritual and live your life."

"i don't want to." you plead with her. "not without you."

she shakes her head, eyes glossing over. despite the evident distaste, her refusal is weak. she stands only a foot away from you, seeming as though she's physically incapable of moving any farther.

"ellie," you say, whispering her name like a prayer. she can't help but look up at you through watery eyes. "ellie, please."

"i don't want you to die." she says, voice nigh a whimper.

"we'll be together, ellie," you tell her, hopping down from the counter to approach her. the blade remains in your hand, long forgotten to the both of you as the sight of the other is far more appealing. "if we do this, we can be together for all of eternity. they'll find our fossils in a million years, bones entwined. they won't even know who's who."

she chokes out a laugh that sounds more like a sob. "god, how stupid would that be?"

you laugh with her, "so stupid."

you're both crying now, tears streaming down your faces as you stare at one another. slowly, ellie pulls the gun from her holster. she's unsure on how this will go down, but she's willing to try. for you.

to be loved is a horrific thing, you've found. it's to be swallowed whole by something so disgustingly beautiful that you're incapable of turning away.

ellie takes a step closer, the distance between the two of you closing. her left hand holds the gun, her right hand coming up to wrap an arm behind your neck. she pulls your toward her, pressing another kiss to your mouth.

your tears mingle, forming a salty sea on your touching cheeks. you sob against her, chest heaving as you pull her closer with one hand, the other holding the knife. she tastes of sacrilege, salvation, and sacrifice. the ghosts that will haunt this decrepit church until the end of time. together.

whatever string that pulled the two of you toward each other will be knotted, tying two lost souls in search of the other.

"ellie," you whisper between wet kisses, lifting the knife to rest at the nape of her neck, "it's time."

she lets out a sob, a convulsive gasp tearing from her throat. "okay,"

you count down, the two of you agreeing to do it at the same time. you'll drive the blade into her neck whilst she pulls the trigger. your bodies will fall in unison, clinging to one another.

when you reach one, you sink the blade into her with a sickening squelsh. she chokes, dropping the pistol to the floor. it lands with a loud clank moments before her body falls with a thud. your eyes widen, heart ceasing. blood pools onto the white tiles and only one thought runs through your mind: she didn't pull the trigger.

she didn't pull the trigger.

she

didn't

pull

the

trigger.

she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't pull the trigger. she didn't—

you fall to your knees beside her, hands coming to cradle her bloodied face. you pull her head into your lap, rocking back and forth as crimson soaks into the black fabric of your habit. you clutch her tightly against you, pressing hard on her slit neck, willing the blood to go back inside.

death doesn't take her hand. instead, he grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her for the untimely demise she'd agreed to. the heart she'd taken from you rattles. the death rattle. you choke out a sob at the sound, everything aching.

you lean forward, pressing a kiss to her cold, dead lips. she doesn't kiss you back. you pull away, panting hard as your chest heaves and your eyes burn.

then, in the corner of your eye, you see the metal of ellie's pistol. you crawl across the kitchen toward the weapon, realizing she hadn't even cocked it. god, how had you been so stupid? you do it for her, loading the bullets into the chamber.

with the gun now in your possession, you crawl back over to ellie.

you position yourself atop her, entwining your legs and placing your head on her chest. it doesn't rise nor fall, no beating heard from beneath her ribs. you sob, placing the gun's barrel to the soft part of your chin.

then, without another thought, you pull the trigger. you pull it because ellie was unable. because ellie couldn't bear to do it for you. a part of you resents her for this, but another part can't feel anything for her aside from utmost love.

and there lie two bodies. lifeless.

ellie found what she'd been searching for all her life: something worthy of her devotion. something she can pour her all into. that had been why she became an fbi agent in the first place — in search something to worship whole heartedly. simultaneously, you'd found what you'd been searching for as well: peace.

in the end, however, it had all been for naught.

the ritual didn't work.

it needed someone faithless, someone who didn't care for religion, for god. but that wasn't ellie. not anymore, at least. because, after having met you, she'd finally found something worth her revere.

you were her religion.

⊹ ࣪ ˖𐙚 perm. taglist. @luvsturniolo @ilovewomenfr @zzombiegirl @elliessweetheart @kasqnxx @xlovla

⊹ ࣪ ˖𐙚 additional note. i want this to be said here because i know this piece is super fucking heavy. ellie and the reader's relationship is so fucking toxic. anyone who reads this, i hope you realize how absolutely horrific their love story truly is. there's a shit ton of symbolism weaved within this story that i didn't outwardly state (though most of it i blatantly explained). if u have any questions regarding this piece, i'd love to talk about it bc i put a lot of time into making it.

but, again, their relationship is TOXICCCCCCCCCC!!!!!! it's not meant to be idolized or romanticized in any way. if you didn't notice, i barely used the word 'love' and never made either of them say 'i love you'. that was for a reason!!!! because what they share isn't love. it's unhealthy obsession & i need that to be outwardly said before i post this

[retroaria]

kiyora jin: boyfriend headcanons

BLUE LOCK M.LIST | reblogs are appreciated! | enjoy !! - aria :3

a.n - I actually am in love with kiyora jin (potential self ship ngl), enjoy this dump of kiyora brain rot. no explicit warnings.

pre-boyfriend!kiyora who sees this all as one big challenge. how long can he tease and flirt with you before one of you eventually caves. he loves the exhilaration of the chase, loves the way it keeps him on his toes and makes his heart flutter. he relishes in the butterflies that swarm around his stomach when he’s with you, and can’t help but be amused by his own nervous flirtatious ramblings.

pre-boyfriend!kiyora who takes in your personality and interests like a god damn sponge. he analyzes you, but he sees it as a bit of a game, like how excited can he get you while sparking up a conversation about your interests. he also does a quick fact check on you to ensure you can find some sort of interest in the stuff he likes as well. would take you some speakeasy underground dance studio so you can cheer him on lol.

pre-boyfriend!kiyora who doesn’t say his feelings outright but definitely isn’t afraid to show you how he feels in other ways. specifically physical touch, quality time, and more-than casual flirting. he’d wrap his arm around you, grad your hand to drag you places, let you take up his free time outside of practice, give you sweet compliments at every chance he gets.

pre-boyfriend!kiyora who eventually finds himself hanging over the edge of insanity every time he thinks about how he can’t call you his. the confession would be swift and almost nonchalant. he’s proud of his feelings for you and doesn’t feel the need to act shy about it once he’s ready. when you say yes he can’t help the smile that creeps across his face which he quickly tries to scrunch up so he isn’t cheesing at you like a dork.

boyfriend!kiyora who has an endless list of hidden gems and secluded spots that he takes you to regularly, places where you can both be alone and enjoy each others presence. he loves any date that involves food, likes going to food festivals and trying all the different food stands. definitely tries to feed you stuff and doesn’t see the problem if you tell him it might look a little weird to other people lol. “Whatever just try it, open up~” he’d scoff at you playfully.

boyfriend!kiyora who loves taking candid pictures of you! he has two separate albums in his phone, one for you looking stupid and one for you looking gorgeous. sometimes his cover is blown by the camera shutter sound from his phone and he has to quickly shove it back in his pocket, looking around like he very obviously was doing something sneaky.

boyfriend!kiyora who dedicates everything to you. if he scores a goal during a game, he looks over to you in the crowed, putting his hand up and pointing at you with a smile as he runs back into position. he makes playlists for you, (attempts to) make you food and desserts.

boyfriend!kiyora who makes silly little stick figure drawings of you two on restaurant napkins when you go out to eat. sometimes he leaves you little notes that he wrote on the back of random pieces of paper he came across, he’s a crafty boy lol.

boyfriend!kiyora who gets jealous rather easily but doesn’t outwardly act possessive about it. he tends to keep those feelings to himself, but if some other guy is really all over you he’d just thrust himself into the situation as aggressively as possible until they get the hint that you’re taken. overall, he trusts you so at the end of the day he knows he has no need to worry!

boyfriend!kiyora who secretly loves being the little spoon. having your arms around him makes him feel so special it warms his heart in a way he can’t describe. he lays his head down on your chest or in your lap whenever you guys are on the couch or in bed together. he loves holding you too but he'll take any chance he can get to be engulfed in your embrace.

divider credz: @cafekitsune

[going-to-ikea-for-the-fries]

141 Headcanons: Going Shopping

Grocery/Food Shopping

John Price loves being the one in charge of the buggy/shopping cart. He loves being the one pushing it, holding the list, and watching you walk ahead all pretty, plucking whatever you'd like to buy onto the cart. He also has a natural eye for deals and sales, and knows when something is actually for sale or when the shop is trying to lie to you.

Johnny MacTavish is a menace when he's shopping. With or without you, he's definitely straying from the list and the budget. He's definitely the type to go shopping while hungry and ends up getting too many snacks, or buys seasonal products that you don't need but that "will get rotated out" of the shop so he better buy them Now.

Kyle Garrick makes a whole day out of going shopping. He'll disappear while you're getting a cart and come back with Starbucks or a cold drink of some kind for you to sip on while you go along and buy whatever you need for the house. He's also very efficient, so he bags everything very well, heavy stuff on the bottom, light/fragile on top, and, especially, all the cold/frozen things together.

Simon Riley is too efficient. It's almost scary. He goes in and out of the shop in record time and doesn't even let himself be affected by sales, new products, limited-time-only displays... Nothing. He follows the list to a T and would rather go inside alone than have you follow him and slow him down. But that also makes him an ass and he'll definitely realize you forgot to add something to the list, but will STILL not stray from his 'route' to go get it. If you wanted it, you should've written it down.

VS.

Clothes' Shopping

John Price is of the opinion that all his clothes are fine and, therefore, he doesn't particularly need new ones. That being said, he does know all his sizes and measurements, and won't be opposed to getting news shoes or a new button-up every once in a while. He's also very much the type that'll give you his honest (and sometimes hurtful) opinion on the fit of the clothes you're trying on and sincerely suggest you try the size up/down.

Johnny MacTavish doesn't really like buying new clothes, though he can be convinced... if you promise him you'll go to a lingerie shop and pick out something sexy to wear just for him, he'll let you take him to Levi's or what have you to get him new clothes. That being said, he is the type who, when you're trying to find his size, will fuck off and disappear, only for you to find him by the till, looking at the male jewelry displays and analyzing all the chains and bracelets and cheap watches.

Kyle Garrick is a sweetheart to shop with. He has a good sense of what looks good and what doesn't, and knows the basic of 'big prints work well with small prints and with plain colours', even if he doesn't really wear much of either. He also knows about colour blocking, funnily enough. He loves when his sweetheart tries things out in the dressing rooms just for him.

Simon Riley is the worst person to go shopping with. Be it for yourself or for him. He hates waiting around as you skim the clothes' racks... He'd rather sit outside in the Husband Chair™️ until you're done. And if you try to drag him to a male clothing shop to buy him stuff? He'll complain the whole time about the price and the quality. "Why would I pay 15 quid for a t-shirt when I can put in an order and get 5 shirts from the Army for free, da'lin'?"

[tumblingxelian]

How do some even think that RWBY has male characters “hijack the narrative?” It’s like they project what their grievances with past stories on what looks like the same but not really.

Like Jaundice in Volume 1 flies right by marathoning the season. No bigger than a single episode of TV at 20+ minutes.

So the answer to that questions ranges from what you said to several things like:

Not watching un years & misremembering what was watched, being misinformed & not having watched at all, lying and such. But, I think I hit on another major reason for this problem and its kind of hilariously twisted so please hear me out.

Every arc I've noticed that a certain strain of "Fans" get very attached to one or two male characters and start projecting the idea that they are the real MCs & then get offended when it turns out they aren't.

In V1 to 3, it was Jaune & Adam. Then in volumes 3 to 6 it was Qrow & then Ozpin, Followed by Ironwood in volumes 4 & 7.

All these guys are introduced either in a typical shounen hero or antagonist or mentor and ally role.

Then have the layers people back to show what exists beneath the archetype and what they either have to overcome to remain on the actual main characters side. IE, Jaune, Qrow & Ozpin.

Or what it is that they long since failed or will fail to overcome and grow from that makes them into villains, IE, Adam and Ironwood.

The reason this keeps happening is because that particular strain of "fan" has such a "Men as default" head-space that they cannot, genuinely cannot grasp that they are watching a story about women. Thus they keep expected ay given guy who shows up to be the "real" main character.

Aside:

You may also notice Ren, Oscar & Marrow never gets on the above list. The closest they get is being someone else's cheerleader or not mentioned at all. Meanwhile the white (Or perceived as white in Qrow's case) cis and overtly straight men do get said treatment. I wonder why that could be? Such a mystery :/

But I digress, this is important because it reflects a deep subconscious bias in those "fans" & I think said bias also exists in the people making claims like this.

IE, because they treat men as the default & the protagonists in a given scene, while subconsciously placing women below them and more as accessories, their focus on any given scene is always on the men.

Kind of like those tumblr posts that are explicitly about women & have a bunch of people with piss poor reading comprehension tagging it with dudes or even going so far as to say "Just say gay men". & rather similar to that observation that a lot of fandom treats men, any man from a piece of media, as an inherently deep and complicated character with so much to analyze or so much freedom to expand on. Meanwhile dismissing women out of hand as awful & or boring.

Thus, when they see a group conversation scene, they instinctively assume that the one leading the conversation, with the most to gain from the conversation, with the most narrative weight in the conversation is a man.

Even if he barely said anything and all the lot relevant, interesting character stuff and such was being done by women.

This head-space persists consistently and inflames any given scene, story beat or exchange.

But, here's the twist, these "critics" know o a conscious level that RWBY is about women and that, that is a selling point. But then they look back over their memories, subconsciously blurring out the women and think, "Wow, the girls didn't do anything, it was all about the guys!" Even though its actually just cos they refused to pay any attention to a character that wasn't a man.

Then they get mad because "Clearly the writers are doing this wrong" and ten they get madder when these men fail, or are villains or have to learn lessons, because in their eyes, those guys are the righteous protagonists, and super complicated, "Can't these blank slate girls realize that? Can't the writers!?" But again, its just because they weren't paying attention, rather tan it being a problem in the writing.

Its very similar to that trend of, "There was no queer foreshadowing, they were both obviously straight!" & then their evidence is like, she looked at a man once, & so therefore every interaction with women she has is platonic by default and therefore does not contain foreshadowing.

Damn, could have just led with that, its male bias, rather than straight bias, but the end result is the same. They don't perceive the women on the screen, they don't see the queer signals.

Then, when the story develops around those women, when queer characters & events set up across years happens it slaps them across the face & they insist it must have come out of nowhere.

Sadly, nothing you can say is liable to change their minds, because in a way, they really are watching an entirely different show.

It'd be like if I went into Naruto thinking Rock Lee was the main character & then never adjusted from that perspective.

Not an identical situation, but one that conveys my point regarding why they claim so much nonsense with such confidence.

[inchidentally]

"short and easier to read" babe I am so sorry to you and everyone else for how my insane posts come out - it's why I link to so much stuff bc it is a struggleee for me to not write just run-on sentences ;__; but I do get what you mean and I promise I tried my best - it's def shorter than the og and in smaller bites if that helps ??

(I actually wrote this on someone else's laptop so it's got proper punctuation and capitalization and everything!)

For those who don’t know: Oscar is an acts of service guy Lando is a words of affirmation guy. Let’s remember that someone’s love language is how they choose to express themselves, not what they should demand of others!

Oscar is also very much not a PR guy, for anyone totally oblivious to the obvious (and that all his "greatest hits" in PR were done unintentionally or bc he's awkward or bc his mom is cooler than him). For example, Oscar brings up his girlfriend of 4-5 years a fair amount but it’s almost hilariously not gushy or romantic (having a “cuddle” is as far as it goes lasfgjlsagfl). But he’s said himself that for the most part he’d prefer not to have too much private life available to the public. *His downtime with Lando joins in with all his other social life in being extremely limited to the public. 

The “thanking the sponsors” thing is one of Oscar’s safe, approved speeches he pulled from Andrea so that Oscar doesn’t have to do spontaneous on-camera speaking. Sorry but not all of us are good at it and it’s wayyyy easier to just have some rehearsed pre-approved soundbites. He tends to have a few that he repeats for a while until he updates the list lsafjslafhlafh.

He also very openly struggles to do on-camera speaking and no one knows that better than Lando who’s had to help him a huge amount. 

It does seem to be mostly cameras that make him stressed bc he was fine thanking Lando for his help in Baku at the fan stage in Singapore and overall he can use more of his dry humor when he's speaking to people rather than just to a camera. 

Lando’s recent inclusion of Oscar in his media responses to this degree is a reaction to Hungary and Monza - normally, his post race responses focus on himself and his own performance (which is literally normal and the default for drivers!!). The recent emphasis on teamwork/Oscar is something he feels he needs to do with his own PR work right now. He’s a smart man who’s been doing this a long time, so his reasons are valid no matter what fans think. He’s not sitting there working out or analyzing Oscar’s PR, just his own. 

People are absolutely running away with themselves over Monza and ignoring that apart from that one moment, Oscar is widely popularly seen as the supportive teammate role. To the point where last year and even part of this year, Lando was criticized by a lot of fans for not acknowledging Oscar enough.

Going off of that, let’s show how easy it is to take PR and media to make one of them look bad by turning it around onto Lando (!! this is for an example, I do NOT endorse hating on Lando for any of it !!)

Lando openly disliked being referred to as the “older teammate” and kinda left Oscar to his own devices so much last season that Oscar wouldn’t know where he was going a lot of the time and even semi-joked “my teammate’s abandoned me” (again, reminder this was not a source of drama for anyone but fans). He got called a little duckling a lot bc he’d tail Lando closely so as not to lose him. In fact it started irking some people that Lando would spend so much time with Carlos or Daniel and not getting to know his new teammate and helping him out with his rookie season of F1 the way Carlos did for Lando.

In every team photo where Lando has had a podium and Oscar has had nothing (and sometimes due at least in part to team orders!) which is very often! the comments sections have always had plenty of ‘Oscar is such a great team player, always happy and showing up for Lando no matter what’. So the whole ‘Oscar doesn’t do enough for Lando’ narrative is extremely recent and at odds with the rest of reality.

Please read the very first part of my enormous full post bc Lando didn’t thank Oscar for his Miami win, he praised his driving.

Even though at Silverstone this year Lando got on the podium and Oscar didn’t, Oscar made the fan stage all about bringing Lando out of his disappointment and even said he did the shoey “to make us feel better” and then dedicated the top row of his IG that week to photos and videos of him and Lando. Special note that this is in no way Oscar’s home race and he was solely seeing it as emotional for Lando and McLaren - and he had zero reason to personally be very happy after that weekend.

I’ve seen Melbourne this year get mentioned in the team orders discussions on my fyps, so that’s a handy example in many ways: Despite Melbourne being Oscar’s literal hometown race - and Lando even filming some Quadrant stuff at Oscar’s childhood karting track where a corner is named after him* - this year Lando didn’t acknowledge Oscar really at all over the weekend until someone mentioned him at the end of the podium press conference. Lando acknowledged that Oscar following team orders made his (Lando’s) drive a bit easier in Melbourne this year but said that he was faster than Oscar and deserved third over him anyway. (Good contrast to Hungary and even Carlos stating that something an undercut due to pit strategy shouldn’t erase one teammate being faster/more dominant in a race in order to give the other teammate the win!) He did PR work with pretty much everyone except Oscar actually, even doing promo for his (Lando’s) dad’s electric scooters on the new dotmov acc. Kind of like him being on a similar PR campaign at Singapore this year because of a sneak preview of Quadrant rebranding and announcing the Landostand at Silverstone  - he went for the biggest PR hits and posted Daniel on his jpg account, did a golf day with Carlos and Max F and was more active on socials than he had been for months. All while only having Oscar in one photo out of the whole weekend’s carousel despite the McLaren double podium. You could even read into him cutting Oscar and Oscar’s trophy out of two of the shots if you wanted! (He did include Oscar in the big group photo after the podium celebrations.)

*I saw some ppl say he didn't include Oscar in the Melbourne karting filming bc McLaren doesn't cross over with Quadrant, which isn't true. Zak has shares in Quadrant and Bianca has been included in the Quadrant rebranding launch with Lando's Singapore helmet design.

See how easy that was to flip it around?? If you’re even slightly biased against a driver or never see flaws in another- or are dying for two teammates to hate each other - then confirmation bias will always find plenty of “evidence”! Because the reality is that after the Austin GP, Lando found his “older teammate” mode and began helping Oscar out with his rookie year. In Melbourne, Lando spent his first day filming for his .mov account including the Oscar jersey and merch he came across - and Oscar mentioned how he and Lando talked about Lando filming at his old track. (Again, not PR coordinated or filmed, just mentioned!) And that after the Singapore race this year, they beamed at each other every other second of that night, filmed a deliriously happy post race video and joked in the cool down room - I honestly doubt have even noticed yet what the other has posted to IG salfhsalfafa. All of the negativity fans are coming up with is their own personal spin and does not resemble how Lando and Oscar are behaving to or speaking about each other.

They base their relationship on their conversations and interactions solely away from the public and the cameras and don’t do any inflammatory commentary about each other. They bragged about the door in the team hub that separates their drivers rooms from everyone else and leaves them open only to each other. Their communications only matter to each other when in private.

Segueing on from that: media and social media are literally PR. Lando is extremely skilled at it now and Oscar is not at all naturally skilled and is still learning. Lando is quick to be able to adapt his media responses, Oscar is not and often sounds stilted and uncomfortable. But it still has nothing to do with how they think of each other and talk to each other personally.

And “Landoscar” has never had the typical PR bromance aspect that we all love in other teammates, and it never will. Lando and Oscar mention but don’t broadcast or package their downtime together and they don’t share their private dynamic with fans or the media apart from the glimpses we see in more relaxed content. It’s just their choice! And just like it doesn’t mean Lando and Oscar are less friends because they don’t PR their relationship, it doesn’t mean the friendships who do utilize PR are less friends! 

And tbh that’s a good note to leave on: that seeing two drivers with no PR to gain from openly liking and respecting each other should mean that we as fans place less importance on the PR responses they give to media and put on social media. So many people want them to hate each other (Netflix even begging them outright) and rivalries get far more headlines and fan engagement, that if these two didn’t like each other or even were blah about each other, they wouldn’t waste time trying to fake it (side note ppl actually thought this joke was deadly serious for a short while). F1 isn’t team sports, no one really cares if drivers or teams appear “friendly” unless they’re desperate for money/engagement to keep them afloat (even there, Alpine prove it clearly isn’t a priority to have friendly teammates when you’re lower down the grid!)

There is absolutely nothing to be gained for them in faking the smiles and laughter and twinning. Equally there’s nothing to be gained by us as fans in judging them and their relationship based on their PR responses and PR work. Lando beams and smiles the same at Oscar after all of Oscar’s awkward, stiff debrief speeches and I kind of want one of these crazy stans to say to him that Oscar is a bad team player and doesn’t show Lando enough appreciation just to watch what his adorable face does in response (don’t do that I’m joking).

[comicaurora]

These have been pent up for a while, so there's a whole list lol. Some are Aurora, some are not.

1) Can lacrimas carry out multiple purposes at once? Or will they blend them? I'm assuming that this is possible, considering that the automaton in the ruins was using a lacrima as a brain

2) Has anyone tried to make tools or weapons out of lacrimas? I'm talking like chisel that needs no hammer. Or maybe a Fire lacrima on a bow that sets your arrows on fire

3) Can you engrave runes on lacrimas to make them affect themselves?

4) Where can I read more about the Twins? If I'm not wrong they're the creator gods, aided by the Light dragon and the Void dragon to create life, but I might be getting a wrong read on that

5) Since we see Erin successfully become the first Void mage, does that now mean there's potential for him to make a Void lacrima? The dragon probably won't allow it, but still

6) What exactly does elemental corruption of each element do? Fire literally burns you up, as we saw in Arc 1. I can infer that Life likely makes you a chimera. Void corruption makes you a cave crawler. But what do the other one do? Does Earth make you a statue? Does Wind disintegrate you, Thanos style?

7) Now onto the non-Aurora questions, is your art vector or raster? I believe it's vector, but it's always better to confirm

8) What are your opinions on reading into the environment and the character design to infer things about the character themselves? In any type of media

9) Have you played Baldur's Gate 3?

10) Do you have any music that you'd recommend? I've listened to every song I liked so many times that I hate them now.

11) I'm new to Tumblr, anything that I should know? You don't have to answer this one if you don't wanna. I think I know some of the basics already. Reblog what you like, and avoid the terfs, right?

You might be able to tell that I like the idea of the lacrimas a little bit. Just a teensy bit. The artificer in me definitely isn't obsessed. I appreciate any answers you can give :3

Cheers!

Ooh, lots of stuff!

Yes, it's possible. A lacrima can be engraved with multiple spells, set in a casing engraved with commands, or some combination of the two. Typically, all spells engraved directly on a lacrima will activate at once when the lacrima is "switched on", but a spell can be quite complex, and conditional activations are possible - "if-then-else" statements, basically.

Yes, magic items exist.

Generally no. If the lacrima is disrupted or broken, the spell generally stops functioning, so a self-affecting lacrima will run only as long as it takes for the lacrima to distort or break.

There's an extra lore page about them!

He probably could if he wanted to (and the Dragon allowed it) but Void energy is very dangerous, so he likely doesn't want to.

Each form of elemental corruption agitates the presence of the element in the mage's body. Earth corruption can damage or alter bones, encourage unhealthy petrification of soft tissues, etc. Wind corruption can have physical effects but it often most obviously produces breakdowns in the person's ability to speak or understand language. Lightning damages, numbs or intensifies a person's physical senses.

Raster, I draw with CSP's digital pens. I've only very briefly experimented with vector art - I don't like how it simplifies the lines.

I think it's a fun school of analysis but, like all literary analysis, it runs into trouble if it tries to lock down exactly what the writer was thinking or intending (which is an objective fact that one can be incorrect about) rather than trying to analyze the story on its own and what meaning might, intentionally or unintentionally, be factoring into it.

Nope

don't trust my taste in music it's 90% nu metal and sonic OSTs

Like what you like, reblog what you want, generally it's considered dubious form to add a comment to a reblog unless you have something profound to contribute (commenting in the tags is fine), steer clear of discourse and callout posts and generally the sectors of the site that are constantly on fire, blocking someone for any reason is 100% fine

[lucky-clover-gazette]

kings rising highlights & annotations

chapter 4

indented text is from the book. some quotes have commentary, some do not. some comments are serious, and some are definitely not. most of them will only make sense to people who have read the series. and, like, there are spoilers. so please read the books first if you're interested!

also: part of the reason i'm doing such a close reading is to study cs pacat's style, especially in terms of how she does romance and erotica. there are "craft notes" that might seem weird, like i'm being redundant or restating something rather than analyzing, but those are more things that i want to remember/take away from the writing!

i'm going to tag these longer posts with "sam reads capri" in case anyone wants to read them all at once.

this is a google doc i wrote with overall content warnings for the captive prince series. it's not perfect, but i do think it's important to include.

‘Does it bother you to think of him hurting your country?’ ‘You know it does. Are we playing now with the fate of nations? It won’t bring your brother back.’ There was a violent silence.

the girls are fightinggggg (love damen calling laurent on his misdirected bullshit)

‘You know, my uncle knew who you were,’ said Laurent. ‘He spent this whole time waiting for us to fuck. He wanted to tell me who you were himself, and watch it wreck me. Oh, had you guessed that? You just thought you’d fuck me anyway? Couldn’t help yourself?’

i’m sure it’s easier for laurent to entertain the notion that nothing damen did was real at all, and doing so also hurts damen, so two birds one stone

‘You said, “Kiss me”,’ said Laurent, each word enunciated clearly. ‘You said, “Laurent, I need to be inside you, you feel so good, Laurent,”’ He switched to Akielon, as Damen had, at the climax, ‘‘it’s never felt like this, I can’t hold on, I’m going to—’’

i did my complex analysis of laurent’s mean girl era last chapter. this is a good example of him just being a petty bitch for the reasons outlined in that analysis

‘Charcy,’ said Laurent, ‘was a distraction. I have it from Guion. My uncle sailed for Ios three days ago, and by now he has made landfall.’

and it worked, and laurent was too emotionally compromised to anticipate or prevent it. imagine laurent learning that, directly after being tortured. and now he’s dealing with this. Ls on Ls on Ls.

(or did he know? stuff he says later makes me think he might have, but then again, he also lies to damen a LOT in this scene)

‘I see. And my men are to die fighting him for you, the way that they did at Charcy?’

i mean the previous chapter already established that they both know laurent meant to be there, but if they’re doing cheap shots, i guess this works fine in a pinch

Laurent’s smile was not pleasant. ‘On that table is a list of supplies and troops. I will give it to you, in support of your campaign to the south.’ ‘In exchange for,’ said Damen, steadily. ‘Delpha,’ said Laurent in the same tone. He felt the shock that made him remember that this was Laurent, and not any other young man of twenty.

He had not come here prepared to negotiate. Laurent had. Laurent was here as the Prince of Vere facing the King of Akielos. Laurent had known who he was all along. The list, written in Laurent’s own hand, had been prepared before this meeting.

all true, but don’t underestimate the fact that laurent did NOT anticipate falling in love or actually trusting you as an ally

He said, ‘Did you plan this from the beginning?’

so "from the beginning" is complicated here. if i'm going to try to sort things out to the best of my ability, i think a good place to start is making a list of things laurent could NOT have expected at the beginning of the series, when he was presented with damen:

that damen would not immediately take any opportunity provided to him to escape captivity

that damen is a respectable and admirable person and invaluable strategic and military asset

that damen and laurent would fall in love (and even still now, i don't think laurent is letting himself believe damen really cares, and certainly isn't letting damen do the caring)

that the regent would try to assassinate his own nephew. laurent says in the text, at some point, that this was a genuine surprise, and that he didn't think his uncle would ever go that far

but, okay, even if laurent didn't expect the assassination attempt, or any of the other minor things in vere like the patras debacle, did he expect at some point to find himself and his men forced to do a military campaign? he must have, which is why he started the correspondence with delpha. i suppose he could have planned to do that from vere, too, and just adjusted things when he was forced to travel. and nothing that laurent failed to expect directly got in the way of the foundation of his plan, if his objective was to obtain delpha and make enough allies that together they can take down the regent.

so to answer damen's question, yes! laurent planned this specific long-term objective (taking delpha, getting kastor and the regent in ios, methodically turning a faction of powerful akielions against kastor and gaining the support of vask and patras) from the beginning. because he recognized damen the moment he saw him, laurent could immediately put together that kastor is allied with the regent, who would totally come up with something like this to torture laurent. and so laurent put his mental energy into planning a way to gain enough political and military power to defeat both kastor and the regent, and further manipulate them into being so confident that they would have no time to retaliate when the people laurent enlisted attacked them. i don't think laurent gave a shit if kastor lived or died, or stayed on the throne, as long as the regent was defeated, but it made sense for kastor to be a priority as well since the alliance between kastor and the regent makes the regent more powerful.

and, to be generous to laurent, none of this really has anything to do with damen. like none of it is designed to punish him, it doesn't even really involve him. it's another instance of laurent just living in a different genre from the start. damen's pov has been so fixed on his relationship and interactions with laurent, but there's been so much more happening that we just haven't seen. and laurent, i think we can assume, is and has always been deeply focused on things other than their relationship.

but even now, this plan doesn't do damen direct harm. the most harm it does is make things awkward with nikandros, and make damen feel bad about the regent being in his own country (which was probably going to happen anyway). but still, damen is super pissed. he doesn't realize or admit it, but i almost think the fact that laurent always had this plan makes him a little insecure. like, to realize that he hasn't been as important or useful to laurent as he previously assumed. on top of all the other stuff pissing him off about the situation, he's also jealous of an abstract plan, because it's had laurent's attention from the start, and right now laurent is choosing that plan over their friendship/relationship. a kingdom, or this.

laurent doesn't want to deal with "this," and honestly has some pretty pressing matters beyond "this" to handle, so he's chosen "a kingdom." even if damen's heart is still stuck with "this," he'll have to follow laurent's lead and focus on "a kingdom" too. i'm sure they'll both do a perfectly professional and functional job of this, and it won't make things inconvenient or uncomfortable for any of their allies at all.

‘The hard part was getting Guion to let me into his fort.’ Laurent said it steadily, the private edge to his voice a little more private than usual.

do they ever talk about it? like does laurent ever tell damen what happened in the cell?

also i like how damen doesn’t take this as like flippant and arrogant, as he would have in book 1. he immediately clocks that laurent is hiding something and just deflecting.

Damen said, ‘In the palace you had me beaten, drugged, whipped. And you ask me to give up Delpha? Why don’t you tell me instead why I shouldn’t simply hand you over to your uncle, in exchange for his aid against Kastor?’

like you ever would.

‘Because I knew who you were,’ said Laurent, ‘and when you killed Touars and humiliated my uncle’s faction, I sent the news of it echoing to every corner of my country. So that if you ever crawled back onto your throne there would be no possibility of an alliance between you and my uncle.

good failsafe, laurent didn’t know he wouldn’t need it. although i’m sure it’s both vindicating and hurting laurent to hear damen threaten this, making the failsafe necessary, even if we know that damen’s heart isn’t in it.

'Do you want to play this game against me? I will take you apart.’

this is all very complicated and unnecessary and frustrating to damen, but it's laurent's area of expertise. this kind of emotionally evasive manipulative political negotiation makes him feel empowered. the approach laurent takes in this scene is almost certainly a way for him to cope with the things in his life that feel uncontrollable and uncomfortable, by doing something familiar that he knows he can control.

‘Take me apart?’ Damen said deliberately. ‘If I opposed you, the remaining scrap of land you hold would have a different enemy on each side, and your efforts would be split in three directions.’ ‘Believe me,’ said Laurent, ‘when I say that you would have my undivided attention.’

this is soooo amy dunne of him

Damen let his eyes pass over Laurent slowly, where he stood. ‘You’re alone. You don’t have allies. You don’t have friends. You’ve proven true everything your uncle ever said about you. You made deals with Akielos. You even bedded an Akielon—and by now, everyone knows it. You’re clinging to independence with a single fort and the tatters of a reputation.’ He gave every word its weight. ‘So let me tell you the terms of this alliance. You will give me everything on this list, and in return I will aid you against your uncle. Delpha remains with Akielos. Let’s not pretend you have anything here worth a bargain.’

damen honey i’m so sorry but you cannot win this one. especially when you yourself would probably lay down your life on instinct for laurent if someone randomly came into this tent and tried to kill him

‘Please,’ said Laurent, ‘insult me further. Tell me more about my tattered reputation. Tell me all the ways that bending over for you has damaged my position. As if being fucked into the mattress by the King of Akielos could be anything other than demeaning. I am dying to hear it.’

and somehow laurent still manages to turn even his own shitty decisions back on damen, implying that even if laurent owned up to being fucked by damen, it couldn’t be anything other than demeaning, and damen is a fool for considering it to be genuine lovemaking

‘Did you think,’ said Laurent, ‘that I would come here without the means to enforce my terms? I hold the only proof of Kastor’s treachery that extends beyond your word.’ ‘My word is enough to the men that matter.’ ‘Is it? Then by all means, reject my offer. I will execute Guion for treason and hold the letter over the nearest candle.’

cunt (affectionate)

‘Are we going to play another kind of pretend?’ Damen said. ‘That it never happened?’

and in this game of pretend, damen doesn’t get to hand-feed a pretty blonde named laurent >:(

‘If you are concerned it will go unmentioned between us, never fear. Every man in my camp knows that you served me in bed.’

“you served me” GOD laurent you are such a bitch

And that is how it is to be between us?’ said Damen. ‘Mercenary? Cold?’

if laurent was normal, there are plenty of reassuring things he could tell damen to explain that they can do this together, and ios will be okay, and they're in a good position to win as a team. but since he's being a salty little bitch, he's not going to do any of that, and he's going to make damen feel extra bad by using their romantic history against him. and despite all of these slights against him, damen knows that he has no choice but to give laurent delpha and ally himself with laurent's cause. because laurent really has planned this from the beginning. sure, current damen probably still would have done all that if laurent had just asked, but book 1 laurent had no idea of anticipating their allyship, and book 3 laurent is intentionally trying to push him away.

‘How did you think it would be?’ said Laurent. ‘You’d take me to your bed for the public consummation?’ It hurt.

this is a brutal scene for damen, even if i understand laurent’s headspace. i’m sorry buddy, breakups are no fun.

actually, do you think damen has ever experienced a breakup? he’s a prince who grew up with a harem of sex slaves. jokaste just kind of did whatever she wanted and damen was chill with it. so probably not.

It was too neat. He hadn’t thought as far as Kastor’s defeat, or who would become kyros in Ios, the traditional seat of the King’s closest adviser. Nikandros was the ideal candidate.

not laurent doing damen’s job for him…

‘I see you’ve thought of everything,’ said Damen, bitterly. ‘It didn’t have to be—you could have come to me, and asked for my help, I would have—’ ‘Killed the rest of my family?’

i mean, laurent definitely wants the regent dead. i think this is just a dig about auguste, and furthermore about damen not telling laurent the truth at any point.

also, damen straight-up admitting that he would have helped damen is something laurent would have needed a gun to his head to say out loud, and there aren’t even guns in this world. i said this in a note last chapter, but laurent assumes that damen is just as terrified of attachment and vulnerability as he (laurent) is, but we see that damen is willing to swear attachment and make himself vulnerable in order to support laurent and build trust. laurent is just denying that aspect of damen, because he’s traumatized and stubborn and doesn’t want to be let down.

Thickly, Damen remembered running his sword through the man he’d believed was the Regent; as if killing the Regent would be his expiation. It wouldn’t.

that explains why damen acted how he did in battle. but he also knows, in the reality of this moment, that it wouldn’t have made up for auguste even if he had killed the regent. killing a member of laurent’s family isn’t going to make up for the fact that he killed a member of his family.

He thought of all Laurent had done here, every piece of impersonal leverage, to control this meeting, to ensure it played out on his terms. ‘Congratulations,’ said Damen. ‘You’ve forced my hand. You have what you want. Delpha, in exchange for your aid in the south. Nothing given freely, nothing done out of feeling, everything coerced, with bloodless planning.’

this is almost laurentian, in terms of dialogue. very poetic and theatrical. damen is not handling this breakup well, and it’s almost like he’s defensively taking on some of laurent’s overdramatic bitchiness. it’s a reaction from him we haven’t really seen since book 1.

this dialogue also feels slightly anachronistic, in a good way. with some minor editing it could be a believable text that modern au damen would send after laurent breaks up with him in a formal email even though they still have to work on an assignment together. i think it's the "nothing given freely, nothing done out of feeling, everything coerced, with bloodless planning" that really gives off the vibe of an emotionally compromised teenager trying to cope with the fact that they still have to see their ex in english class.

‘Good,’ said Laurent. He took a step back. Then, as if a pillar of control had finally collapsed, Laurent surrendered his full weight to the table behind him, his face drained of all colour. He was trembling, his hairline pricked with the sweat of injury. He said: ‘Now get out.’

laurent: i won. get out. also laurent:

Laurent had known who he was, and had still made love to him. He wondered what mix of yearning and self-delusion had allowed Laurent to do that.

may i interest you in the “sam reads capri” tag on my tumblr blog, damen?

also i just think “he wondered what mix of yearning and self-delusion has allowed laurent to do that” is a BANGER line. maybe one of my favorites in the series. astute, bewildered, devastating (sad), and devastating (scathing) all at once.

If he’d imagined it, it was as a single, cataclysmic event, an unmasking that, whatever followed, would be over. Violence would have been both punishment and release. He had never imagined that it would instead go on and on; that the truth had been known; that it had been painfully absorbed; that it would be this crushing pressure that wouldn’t leave his chest.

damen always thought that he would be the one to rip off the bandaid for them both, so the entire time he has been saving them the pain by waiting. but now he knows that laurent never had a bandaid, and he (damen) has been left to slowly and painfully pry off his own. the pain isn’t over, it’s just beginning. and laurent has felt it this entire time, in a way damen put off for himself.

Laurent had tamped down the smothered emotion in his eyes, and would endure an alliance with his brother’s killer, though he felt nothing but aversion. If he could do it, Damen could do it. He could make impersonal negotiations, speak in the formal language of kings.

(also wow do i want to tell damen that laurent isn’t averse to him, he’s just lashing out, and badly needs someone to show him love and support at this time. but as always, oh fuck, he can’t hear me. and to be fair, it isn’t really in-character for damen to just passively accept poor treatment, or to force laurent to accept his support when he’s been told to go away.)

The ache of loss didn’t make sense, because Laurent had never been his. He had known that. The delicate thing that had grown between them had never had a right to exist.

and yet it did exist, and it does exist, and it will exist, and that’s why we’re reading about it.

damen and laurent both feel like they have a right to their kingdom’s thrones as princes, but they don’t have the right to simply be people in love. again, a kingdom or this. the themes are theming.

If it hurt, it was fitting; it was simply kingship.

what did i just say??? THE THEMES ARE THEMING!!!

If he could give Laurent up, he could do this.

stoppp can someone get him a pint of ice cream and an olivia rodrigo album (should i make lamen divorce era playlists. like one for each of them.)

Damen remembered hoping for a homecoming where it could be between them as it was in the old days. As if friendship of that kind could survive statesmanship.

damen’s being soooo broody about the ways kingship nerfs his social and romantic life, omg. it’s a hint of his immaturity and relative youth to other people in power, and his difference in jadedness and trauma compared to laurent. he is still lowkey a frat guy who wants to party, even though he cares about his schoolwork and future prospects

‘He’s playing us against each other,’ said Nikandros. ‘This is calculated. He is trying to weaken you.’ Damen said, ‘I know. It’s like him.’

"yes, honey..."

nikandros private twitter venting moment #4. especially considering damen’s response

‘He left us at Charcy.’ ‘There was a reason for that.’ ‘But I am not to know it.’

damen doesn’t really know the reason, but he can assure nik, there was a reason. nikandros private twitter venting moment #5.

It was not worth Delpha. He could see that Nikandros knew it, as Damen had known it. ‘I would make this easier,’ said Damen, ‘if I could.’ Silence, while Nikandros kept his words in check.

nikandros private twitter moment #6. this time he just posts a blurry picture of laurent’s offer and captions it with “🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬”

‘The men will talk,’ said Nikandros. He was pushing the words out with distaste, he did not want to say, ‘About—’ Damen said, ‘No.’ And then, as though Nikandros couldn’t help the words that came out next, ‘If you would at least take off the cuff—’ ‘No. It stays.’ He refused to lower his eyes.

kind of curious why, in this moment, damen is so determined about this. he’s had reasons in the past, but it would be cool to get some current insight, if it’s not just an instinctual thing

Nikandros turned away and put his palms flat on the table, resting his weight there. Damen could see the resistance in Nikandros’s shoulders, bunched across his back, his palms still flat on the table.

nikandros private twitter moment #7. he just posts this meme with no further elaboration:

Into the painful silence, Damen said, ‘And you? Will I lose you?’ It was all he allowed himself. It came out in a steady enough voice, and he made himself wait, and say nothing more.

AWWW poor baby :( no like fr damen :(((( it’s going to be okay

As though the words were coming up from the depths of him, against his will, Nikandros said, ‘I want Ios.’ Damen let out a breath. Laurent, he realised suddenly, wasn’t playing them against one another. He was playing to Nikandros. There was a dangerous expertise in all of this; in knowing how far Nikandros’s loyalty might be stretched, and what would keep it from snapping. Laurent’s presence in the room was almost tangible.

i think this was more an unintended outcome of the plan, but i’m sure mean girl era laurent would be pleased to know that his actions inadvertently incentivized damen’s best friend to declare himself loyal to his ex (laurent) instead

‘Listen to me, Damianos. If you have ever valued my counsel, listen. He is not on our side. He is Veretian, and he’ll be bringing an army into our country.’ ‘To fight his uncle. Not to fight us.’ ‘If someone kills your family you don’t rest until they are dead.’

i know this is nikandros trying to convince damen that laurent isn’t just going to let go of what damen did to auguste, and can’t be trusted as an ally. but it also makes nikandros accidentally sound like a book 1 laurent apologist, by making the statement with “you” as if it’s a universal maxim. like, if nik was in laurent’s shoes, he would have wanted damen tortured and dead too. nik is an interesting guy, because he's a little more aggressive with his principles unprovoked than damen, but he’s also similarly limited in perspective due to his status and lack of humbling experiences. i’ll try to do more complex analysis in addition to memeing on him, if/when opportunities arise

Nikandros was shaking his head. ‘Or do you really think he’s forgiven you for killing his brother?’ ‘No. He hates me for it.’ He said it steadily, without flinching. ‘But he hates his uncle more. He needs us. And we need him.’

damen going full ant with a bindle :(((

‘You need him enough that you would strip me of my home, because he asked you to?’ ‘Yes,’ said Damen.

nik private twitter vent #8. this time he literally just tweets a single “.”

The men came to attention as he passed, and said only, ‘Exalted,’ if he spoke. It was not like sitting around a campfire swilling wine, exchanging low tales and ribald speculations.

he should be at the club

Jord and the other Veretians from Ravenel had been sent back to Laurent to rejoin his army in the extravagant tents at Fortaine.

jord and the others standing awkwardly nearby laurent’s tent, trying to ignore the muffled adele ballad playing within

Alone, he didn’t have to be King.

i can’t believe that damen, groomed from birth for eventual kingship, now resents that kingship almost exclusively because it means he can’t be boyfriends with laurent. blonde man brainrot

He wasn’t alone. She was naked, at the base of the stark pallet, her full breasts hanging downwards, her forehead to the floor. She didn’t have palace training, and so could not quite disguise the fact that she was nervous. Her fair hair was caught back from her face in a fragile clasp, a northern custom. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty, her body trained and ready for him. She had prepared a bath in an unadorned wooden tub, so that if he pleased he might make use of it; or of her.

the way this is written, especially in the context of the series so far, makes this hard to read as anything other than revolting. i think this is due to a few craft elements:

the clinical description, lacking sensuality entirely

damen relating the things he’s observing to the aspects of the institution that he understands (she wasn’t trained in the palace = slaves are trained to do this. she was placed here for him to use = she didn’t show up here because she wanted to be here, or even knew him at all, or wanted pleasure of her own). unlike his past self, who passively understood the institution but chose not to think too hard about what it implied, the mental connections damen has made through being a slave himself prevent him from regarding this slave with the same thoughtlessness

damen's observations portray the anxiety and vulnerability of the slave, rather than willingness or submission. in book 1 we have a lot of moments where damen thinks of slaves as lovely, sweet, aimless non-people, almost like they're lobotomized. he regards them in a way that's both condescending and unconcerned for their free will, because they don't want or need free will, because they're slaves. his issue with the mistreatment of the akielion slaves in vere wasn't with their enslavement itself; it was with the cruelty of their masters, non-slaves who have free will and therefore should use it honorably. at the time, he truly believed that, as long as a master is kind, a slave has no reason to feel anxious or vulnerable or afraid, because there is honor in a slave's submission. if book 1 damen noticed that a slave was nervous, he would have found it adorable and charming, and would have taken it as an invitation to prove himself a caring master. but that doesn't even cross his mind here, while noticing this slave's nervousness in book 3.

another interesting craft detail: a sort of parallelism in the last part. damen notices that the bath, an object, has been prepared for him—just as the slave, a person, has been prepared for him. he groups them together, in that their same designated function is to be used: "he could make use of it; or of her." and that's where he stops the description altogether, because i don't think he feels comfortable with what that similarity between person and object implies.

it's easy to simply tell a reader that a character has evolved. if this story was written by a different author, there might have just been a moment where damen said out loud, "actually i've realized that slavery is bad," while the topic was otherwise avoided beyond its relevance to the story.

it's much harder to show, consistently throughout the story, exactly how that evolution has occurred, and the difference in damen's perspective compared to how he'd thought about slavery at the start. well done, pacat.

He had known that there were slaves with Nikandros’s army, following behind with the carts and the supplies. He had known that when he returned to Akielos there would be slaves.

… but seeing it in person is still viscerally uncomfortable

‘Get up,’ he heard himself say, awkwardly, a wrong order for a slave. There was a time when he would have expected this, and known how to behave around it. He would have appreciated the charm of her rustic northern skills, and bedded her, if not tonight then certainly in the morning. Nikandros knew him, and she was his type. She was Nikandros’s best, that was evident; a slave from his personal retinue, perhaps even his favourite, because Damen was his guest and his King. She got up. He didn’t speak. She had a collar around her neck, and metal cuffs around her small wrists that were like the one that he— ‘Exalted,’ she said, quietly. ‘What is wrong?’ He let out a strange, unsteady breath. He realised that his breathing had been unsteady for some time, that his flesh was unsteady. That the silence had been stretching out between them too long. ‘No slaves,’ said Damen. ‘Tell the Keeper. Send no one else. For the length of the campaign I will be dressed by an adjutant, or a squire.’

see my previous comment. this is really well-done, especially the panic attack-esque reaction and ptsd trigger. i made a comment a WHILE ago about the way both damen and laurent have ptsd in this series, but it manifests differently due to their proximity to their own traumas. laurent’s trauma was prolonged but a few years in the past; he’s had a lot of time to learn how to cope with it since. but damen’s trauma began when the story began, and it’s been intense and unrelenting basically the whole time: his father’s death, kastor and jokaste’s betrayal, his enslavement, his time in arles, his loss of identity by laurent’s side, and his forced return to his royal identity and obligations. that’s a lot of shit to unpack, and most of it is still happening. it's raw, and damen has had no time to process. nor has he received comfort, or even acknowledgement of what's happened to him as the trauma it is.

"he realised that his breathing had been unsteady for some time." this is a person experiencing a ptsd trigger for what might be the very first time, realizing as it happens just how quickly and thoroughly trauma can disorient his mental, physical, and emotional awareness and self-control. there is the complex intellectual development i discussed in the previous comment re: damen's feelings about slavery, but it's also this visceral gut reaction that tells damen and the reader that things will never be the same.

‘Wait.’ He couldn’t send her naked through the camp. ‘Here,’ he unpinned his cloak, and whirled it around her shoulders. He felt the wrongness of it, pushing against every protocol. ‘The guard will escort you back.’

he felt the wrongness of doing the right thing, but he still did it anyway. i think that is a big moment for damen, especially relating to akielion slavery.

i know i talk a lot about laurent in these notes, because i love laurent very much. but i also love damen, and i’m glad that he is our narrator. his pov is a big reason why these books work, in their chosen genre, at all. and i do think that this genre was a choice—laurent may be living a gritty psychological thriller, but a big theme of the series as a whole is that laurent was sweet in the past, and has the right to a life where he can be sweet again. but laurent, as we meet him at the start of these books, is heartless by choice. damen is many things, but he is never heartless. and whatever genre these books are, i think they're deeply defined by the fact that they're written with heart. they are not cynical, and they are not jaded. that's why damen, and not laurent, is our narrator. laurent's cynicism and jadedness are a foil to damen's idealism and trusting/forgiving nature. while damen does have some things to learn from laurent about strategy and cultural misconceptions, the ethos of the series matches damen's emotional and philosophical outlook far more than laurent's. ultimately, damen's heart helps laurent reclaim his sweetness, and become a better ruler and happier person. damen's heart is also what leads damen himself to reform akielion slavery, unite his kingdom with vere, and step out from his father's shadow. this is, at the end of the day, damen's story. and i don't think it would be the same story, with the same meaning or heart, if it was told by anyone else.

which, regarding meaning—in addition to the individual chapters, i do want to start thinking more about some of the more overarching things going on with capri. so i might as well start now. and if i had to start formulating an overall series thesis at this point in the re-read, i think it would have something to do with the concepts of submission and captivity.

captivity and submission both imply, in our common perception, a coerced and degrading loss of free will. and we certainly see that, in the way damen and laurent have both been held captive and degraded throughout their stories. we also see how, despite being victims themselves, they both have used captivity and submission to coerce and degrade others (laurent coerces and degrades damen to avenge his brother) and deny them free will (damen is complicit in the institution of akielion slavery, which denies slaves free will). for a lot of the series, damen and laurent are in constant disagreement about which of them is morally worse—damen thinks laurent is worse because of the coercion and degradation, laurent thinks damen is worse, and therefore deserves the coercion and degradation, because damen is complicit in akielion slavery and killed his brother. but we as the reader start to realize, as the series goes on, that they're both right about some things, both wrong about other things, both hypocrites on occasion, both doing harm, both trying to help, both captors, and both captives.

from this, it would make sense to assume that captivity and submission are the problem here, and the story's thesis is that those concepts are always dishonorable. however, i don't think that's the point at all. i think capri is about the ways captivity and submission can be honorable, if actively chosen with the moral responsibility, complex thought, and emotional depth of a person with free will. after all, what are loyalty and integrity, if not freely-chosen emotional and intellectual captivity? what are vulnerability and attachment, if not physical and emotional submission freely given?

damen and laurent are both complicated people who do dishonorable things. however, in their own respective arcs and in their shared romantic plotline, they both come to understand the multifaceted nature of captivity and submission, and reclaim those concepts as sources of empowerment, healing, and positive change. it's the difference between damen being forced to submit to laurent as a slave in arles in book 1, and damen choosing to stay by laurent's side in book 2 as a man. it's the difference between laurent submitting to his uncle, being manipulated into vulnerability so he can degraded and abused, and submitting to damen, making himself vulnerable despite his trauma so he can be truly loved and cared for.

this isn't a fully formed thesis yet, but it's good to at least get it cooking. and i'm not trying to guess the author's intention as much as summarize my own succinct interpretation. there isn't, like, One Right Answer here, and i'm not setting out to read the author's mind.

but still, i dunno, man… i think i'm onto something. after all, we have these major arcs about damen realizing slavery is wrong and laurent struggling with submission, and yet both of them proudly choose to keep the cuffs. and in a more metatextual sense, the evolution of this story's genre and purpose (slavekink erotica -> whatever the fuck these books are) is not irrelevant. so i'll keep an eye on it, and hopefully come up with something solid by the end of the re-read. i unironically love the challenge of writing a succinct thesis, which is not the nerdiest thing i've ever said, but it's definitely in the top 5.

[baeddel]

long post abt accessability in games, DMC3, DS1, and control schemes

games like God of War or Devil May Cry can be inaccessible because they have inputs which require button mashing, which is difficult for someone with arhritis or other problems that affect their hands and wrists. but these inputs are generally not required to beat the game; you have a lot of options, so you can just avoid using any move that's too difficult. the main issue is that these games become more demanding the further into the game you want to go; keeping a combo going in DMC requires a very high apm and use of the entire controller, so a person with a motor disability will hit a wall eventually.

this is a design problem which i think is difficult to analyze. DMC starts from a very unique design—it has a huge number of moves, almost all of which are accessible out of neutral rather than hidden at the end of an attack string—which it has to pay for by using a large number of unique inputs (forward + attack, back + attack, forward then back + attack, hold shoot to charge, hold devil trigger to charge [charges can be buffered]). it introduces a lot of complexity, but it's actually less complexity right away than other action games; instead of having to memorize a long list of complicated strings (cf. Bayonetta's Punch, Punch, Kick, Kick, pause, Kick, which is different from Punch, Punch, Punch, Kick, Kick, pause, Punch [click]—have fun with those!), you can learn attack, shoot, devil trigger, then forward attack, hold shoot... etc., one at a time, and mix them into your play and find out when they're good. its combo system is not just complex but also discoverable; players can try out how its different pieces fit together without opening the movelist.

but once a player already knows all the moves, the game starts to ask more and more out of them. not only do you want to use all of the inputs one after the other very fast (try jump cancelling Beowulf's Killer Bee into another Killer Bee for the first time—pretty tough, right? and all you're pressing there is X and △! the inputs get harder!), but since your charge moves can be buffered, you also want to hold O and L1 to charge your shot and devil trigger for when you might need them, and you might also want to lock-on by holding R1. when watching a really good player playing with an input viewer it's not uncommon to see every single button on the controller light up at the same time. doing that stuff is really fucking hard.

so far we don't have any problems; it's a picture perfect picture of a system that's 'easy to use, hard to master,' right? but because the thing thats hard to do in this case is input a lot of buttons at once on a physical controller, we've just frozen out any players with hand/wrist problems or motor issues from high level play, at least without adapting the game somehow. this is a problem that's difficult to predict, difficult to foresee, and difficult to design around; i don't see how you could fix it without making DMC a completely different game than what it is.

so if you started from the premise of designing a game that was accesisble to people with hand/wrist and motor issues (including suckers like me who played a bunch of high apm games like DMC and Runescape and fucked up their wrist), you'd have to come up with something pretty different at a very fundamental level.

this is why Dark Souls is, in a lot of ways, a VERY ACCESSABLE action game. what do i mean? its control scheme is extremely simple. once you press every button on the controller you've learned everything you're going to learn about it (apart from one very non-obvious hard-coded universal cancel, but don't worry about it). all you have to do is dodge or block the other's guys attack and then hit him with yours.

there's a lot of ways that DeS/DS1 approached the action genre differnetly to other games, but right now i'm only going to highlight one: the kind of 'questions' DS is asking its player. if you think about DMC, what is DMC trying to get the player to do? while you can beat the game with one or two simple combos, the system is obviously made in a way that encourages freedom and flexibility, and the game has systems to reward long, varied combos (the 'style' rating). and that's all it wants you to do (apart from in a couple of levels where they want you to do platforming—ugh!). to accomplish this, they lock you in a room with some enemies and only let you out when you beat them all.

in Demon's Souls the main thing they want you to do is navigate complicated dungeons that are full of traps; some levels have mazes in them, and lots of traps kill you instantly. it's similar to Kings Field, which its a spiritual successor to, but it's also similar to other early 3d RPGs: Deathtrap Dungeon, Die by the Sword, Dungeon Lords... (in one interview Miyazaki said part of his job was to play a bunch of 'open world RPGs' for research, and i imagine that included some of these old, weird games; the first dungeon in Dungeon Lords has a rafter-walking section with projectile-shooting enemies, chain-pulley mechanical elevators and highly damage-resistant slimes). they also want you to kill enemies. but the game never forces you to kill these enemies; you're never locked in a room until you kill all the enemies, and enemies never have items that are necessary to progress in the level. enemies are just one obstacle among others. consequently, enemy encounters are designed in a certain way that makes avoiding them difficult and approaching them complex. an enemy that throws firebombs will stand at the top of a long, narrow staircase, forcing you to dodge them on the way up; two enemies will stand behind a doorway and, if you run in blindly, will both attack you from behind. things like that. it was hard to avoid enemy encounters in Demon's Souls because the levels involved suffocatingly narrow corridors and the enemies followed you forever. but it was possible and sometimes desirable. in DS1 running by enemies is often preferable and, with foreknowledge of the level, always possible. it's also a lot easier as enemies don't follow you very far anymore (this change was patched into the game after release).

running and jumping both consume stamina, as do dodging, blocking, and attacking. getting hit costs hitpoints, and falling off a ledge costs all your hitpoints. both aspects of the game (navigation and combat) use all of the same resources, and engaging in combat is generally one of a few options the player has to navigate an area. it is, a lot of the time, by far the easiest option, but most players will find a few areas that they hate enough to always run through. one of the messages players can leave to each other is 'try dashing through.' the game rewards you for killing enemies by giving you souls and loot drops, but it also punishes you for making mistakes by leaving you down on resources—less health, fewer estus, and fewer spellcasts—so the best thing to do at any given time is difficult to analyze.

the questions DS is asking its players, therefore, is to familiarize themselves with the level, come up with a plan, conserve their own resources and make it out with the loot. at lower levels of play the game is mostly about succeeding at lots of combats and navigating lots of traps over a long distance without making too many small mistakes. then, at high levels of play, the gameplay is mostly about movement, exploiting the game's verticality and taking advantage of holes in the enemy placement. but the change from low to high levels of play mostly takes place in the mind of the player, not their hands; they understand the levels better, they are better able to respond to things which were previously unpredictable to them, and they have more confidence in their ability to do what is needed of them.

so our game not only starts off very accessible to players with hand/wrist or motor problems, but it finishes there too. although, i've gone a little too far: the player's hands will change a bit as they improve at the game. like Monster Hunter, the best way to play Dark Souls is to have a claw grip in both hands; the thumbs should operate the analogue sticks, the index finger should operate the d-pad (for toggle escales, the universal cancel i mentioned, as well as changing spells) and the face buttons (for rolling, using items, interacting with doors and items), and the remaining digits manipulating the shoulders/triggers (for attacks, blocks and parries). while running, you want to hold L1 (block) so you can roll (circle) out of a run without jumping. this might be hard for you depending on your condition, but i don't think it's that much worse than holding a controller the regular way.

anyway, the point is this: you might want to think about making your game accessible not just to the general player with disabilities, but to the 'hardcore' player with disabilities. do you want disabled people to not only beat your game, but be really good at it? how would you design systems to accomodate that? i've talked about hand/wrist and motor issues here because it's what i was thinking about (and some games, like Runescape, aren't really accessible to me anymore thanks to my wrists, at least in the way i used to play them), but there are other disabilities you could probably design around. imagine a player who has CFS or ADHD in a way that keeps them from practicing consistently; could you make a game that is rewarding for such a player to try and get really good at nonetheless? Runescape (conceived of competitively, ie. racing to the leaderboard &c) was good for players with certain kinds of disabilities and neurotypes since it required a huge amount of time and dedication, it really rewarded being unemployed, LOL. but what if there was a game that somehow rewarded inconsistency? who knows...

anyway, i'm saying how i tend to think about it as a rebuttal to the way i see most people talk about accessibility in games, which is merely playing games. thus Dark Souls can be criticized for being difficult for a new player to complete, for example. but this always struck me as a bewildering way to talk about games. plenty of disabled people don't just want to complete games, they want to be good at them. and disabled people can and do become good at games and compete and win at them. so the question for me is not so much 'how do i make a game someone with this disability could play?' but 'how do i make a game someone with this disability would want to master?'—a game which doesn't create headaches for them, which works with rather than against them, and which they actually enjoy at all levels of play.

[friendlybowlofsoup]

Another Update

Hello Friends,

I have a rather long (but optimistic!) update to share with you all today. As many of you are probably tired of reading these kind of posts, I have a TL;DR here, but I did want to share what has been on my mind in that past half-year that I haven't been here.

It has been rough, and busy as always, but I think I'm finally facing myself and my project for the first time in a very long time.

TL;DR (it's actually long, I have a lot to say (*_ _)人)

I soul-searched and decided to stop compromising on my own feelings with regards to this project. I gave in to everything I wanted to do.

Plot changes, which means some character changes, which means some of the demo is outdated.

GotRM will be switching over to Twine.

----

OH MAN DID I SUFFER THE LAST FEW MONTHS

After my previous update, I hunkered down and really analyzed how I wanted to proceed with GotRM as a project. Because even prior to that post, I had already been going through long periods of hiatuses (which you are all aware of), and while I didn't lie about school taking up my time, I was also harboring a growing dissatisfaction with my own writing that really killed my progress for a long time.

So after everything had settled, I sat down and forced myself to peel apart my work. I know I said I would answer asks, but I uninstalled all of my social media and put aside this blog to focus. I made a note of all the things I liked and didn't like, and I made a list of things I wanted to change or improve on. The biggest point was that I also looked at my efficiency during actual writing sessions: how much of my time was spent writing vs. fighting with code? How could I change that?

And after a lot of deliberation, I figured there were a few things I had to change from the ground up, summed up in four points:

My working style was super incompatible with grad school. I can't spend 20-30 minutes scrolling up and down CSIDE checking code or looking for narratives while also jumping between chapters to make sure events line up. As this story grows, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all the branches, so I needed an alternative working method, which I am adhering to now, and it prioritizes efficiency.

I hated the way I was tracking and coding stats in-game. I have griped so much about coding stats, and I have adhered to such a rigid style that I really felt trapped whenever I was confronted with balancing them out. So I'm throwing that to the wind and redoing how I utilize and convey them. Player-side, this decision doesn't change much since I never fully utilized stats in the demo anyway, and the stats page with indicators will still exist, but I'm getting rid of stat bars and how I treat stat checks.

The story I want to write now is different from the one I started out with. I've known for a while that GotRM was becoming far more than the tiny, wishful novella that I wrote as a teenager. I held onto that old story for a long time, but there's just so much I want to change that I realized I'd been clinging to a story I no longer enjoyed writing. So I spent the majority of the last few months rewriting GotRM from scratch. I redid some worldbuilding, I changed a lot of plot points, and I fixed a lot of characters' backstories accordingly. This meant scrapping stuff from even the demo, but that turned out to not be the biggest issue because:

I wanted to branch away from ChoiceScript. Honestly, I never really cared about getting officially published, but the camaraderie in the forums and on Tumblr were why I committed to CS and CoG. However, ultimately, I really want the functionality that other tools can offer GotRM, and so after a long internal debate, I will be switching over to Twine. Fortunately, since I was rewriting everything anyways, this has been relatively painless, and passage mapping has made everything so much neater. I am trying my best to make it up to chapter 2 before I release the new demo, so please look forwards to that!

And so yes, I am still here, chugging along.

I love this game and this story: it's been my creative escape for as long as I could remember, and you can imagine how frustrated I was when I realized I was starting to dread working on it.

I am forever learning more about myself and my writing style, and this is simply more of that journey. Thank you everyone for sticking around, for joining the discord, and for checking up on me--that I have all of you has truly been a dream.

Hopefully more updates to come soon! I understand that there may be questions about these new changes, so please ask away! I will (try) to release some asks that I've been working on in the drafts too, but I will wait until at least tomorrow to release them so that this post doesn't get drowned out immediately.

And as always, with a lot of love,

FriendlyBowlofSoup (Mei)

[psychelis-new]

pick a pile: "Your true colors - (3/7) Yellow"

take a breath and choose the photo or number that calls you the most to read a message for you from the color yellow, the third of the 7 rainbow's colors. in this serie of readings about the rainbow's colors, I will try to channel about your true colors, so to help you look inside and see your most beautiful self, appreciate yourself more and hopefully provide some type of guidance if necessary. as cindy lauper would say: "your true colors are beautiful like a rainbow", so let's look at them and hear what they have to say to you and how they (you) can help you look at things in a more positive way.

yellow is the color of intellect, happiness, optimism, confidence, power, charisma, humor, leadership (solar plexus chakra)... in this reading, I'll try to analyze this side of your character.

you can find the other colors' readings in the pacs list in my pinned post

don’t take the reading too seriously. only take what resonates with you and leave the rest. if you're not called by any pile, let this reading slid as it may not hold messages for you. if you're called by more than one pile, there may be messages in each of those piles. remember that is a general reading and some things may not resonate with you. energies can change and readings are based on present ones (as you read); you're always in charge of your life.

(photos found on unsplash)

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1 2 3 - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ - ’ -

pile 1 (pile 3 may have messages as well, if you feel called by it too you can check it)

You may try to hide yourself a bit, cause you don't feel confident enough or cause it scares you to have others around judging you. Probably you've been judged (maybe gaslighted too) a lot in your past, even on small useless stuff. You don't like to be under the spotlight, you rather stay behind the scenes, but what you don't see is how worthy and deserving of staying there in the light you actually are. You're funny and bright, but you hide behind your walls made of fears and insecurities. You don't let that cool side of yours show that often or that much. Ofc you may have blockages around trusting new people, but it's like you kind of let only a few chosen ones into your core self. Something, or better someone, or a bunch of different people and situations, may have really hurt you in the past. Probably you felt like you were treated in a special way and then you were abandoned out of nowhere, and it feels like you've been betrayed and told lies by all those people. And your mind sees that as an evidence of your fears: you're not worthy, not enough. But honestly, you can't let others decide your worth: especially those people who cannot see it or understand it fully, or treat you as you deserve or show you care and only send you mixed signals. Trust your guts: you are an amazing being. Validate your feelings, realize what you've been through, grieve about what has been but realize also that nobody has the right or power to give you a value or remove it from you. Only you can give yourself value, and you have plenty honestly. You know, I just read that elks energy's is about taking and radiating pride in the self, having perseverance, endurance, resilience and strenght to reach your dreams and seen that you have elks in your picture, you should totally start doing the same cause you can. Believe in yourself and your power more, see your real self, not what others see of you (they cannot grasp you fully anyway, especially if you don't let them in: how can they "judge" the real you?). Build a better relationship with yourself: the way you see yourself has a lot to do with your fears about others may see you. If you only see flaws in you, you may fear others will do the same (and you may unconsciously let them notice those alone as well, while there's more of you... I heard irony, so you may use that too if necessary). You don't start nor end with your flaws (which all the humans have anyway). You're much more than this. Realize it and remind yourself of the amazing soul you are. Keep doing that until you won't be scared anymore to be seen and won't run away from others but let them into your amazing world, having no fear of being seen and even "judged" for who you are. You are you, and you should never be sorry about it. Take pride in the person you are and in the fact that you are even willing to make yourself better (not for others, but only and always for yourself).

song: mammamia | maneskin; my way | frank sinatra (channeled in my mind during your reading)

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pile 2

I think you have it all: you're fun, gentle, cool, kind, a positive presence in others' lives as you're able to cheer them up pretty easily. It feels like you know what to say almost all the times, no matter what they go through. You also know how to make them think and believe in themselves more. But... you are somewhat afraid of taking charge and being that same person for yourself. It's as if you unconsciously thought of yourself as someone "less than" or... you're too focused on others that you forget about yourself or end up having not much time left for you. That's not good. Ofc, you're doing an amazing job and all the ones that happen to be in contact with you, even to exchange only a few words, may feel relieved, happy and glad that you're around (you may be able to grasp the smallest change in someone's mood or energy and kinda know what's the matter without even talking, you know how to adapt to the other person -despite at times you may overthink a little too much and let your mind wander and get to a point where it's your fears talking... and basically misinterpret it all). We're all thankful for you being around btw. But you need to value yourself as much as you do with others, to give yourself the same amount of attention and support and time. You need time for yourself, for your hobbies, for anything you want. Maybe your boundaries need to "level up" (I literally heard a videogame music here like in Super Mario, maybe it's a sign for someone). I am not saying you need to be harsher or not help others at all, but rethink about urgencies and priorities. Evaluate situations better: sometimes we perceive an urgency in an answer we need to give when actually there's none. It's just our need to be of help asap talking and fearing the other will feel let down (maybe you felt/feel the same) while in reality we're just asking for a little break to regain our energies (which you totally can do: just openly tell the other). Actually, thinking it over a little more and taking our time, can also let us be more accurate and find better words to understand the other and explain ourselves. And maybe will help also the other person to calm down and gain another point of view too in the meantime (sometimes people just want to be listened to and feel seen/acknowledged... I know you know, I'm only reminding you). It also seems like you're waiting for something to happen and you're not really going after what you want by taking charge. Maybe you don't know how and that's fine. It will come to you the moment you try to focus on yourself again a bit more (if you first think about others' problems, you cannot focus on yours accurately). I think you have all you need to make it, but sometimes you don't believe this, you don't believe in yourself... Start believing in your power, plan things for you too, be your own cheerleader as well, not just others'. You need yourself more than anyone else. Ofc, others may need you too, but they can rely on more sources and on themselves as well in the meantime. Give yourself the things you want as well. (I think this pile could also have some people pleasing and codependency tendencies, but maybe not everyone: most of you are a very giving person and may get carried away with it -meditate on this though). Also you have time, the right amount of time you need to do everything, for yourself and others too... just schedule it better. Be more in control of it. Do not wait for others to take control of your life or tell you what to do, do not wait for things to happen to you, go after them and make them happen. Take yourself to the other side of the window from which you're looking at your life. Be the protagonist of your story. You can and honestly have to: you deserve that for yourself.

song: come away with me | norah jones; the silence | manchester orchestra (it popped up)

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pile 3 (pile 1 may have messages as well, if you feel called by it too you can check it)

Pile 3 you're pretty smart, probably you have lot of air placements in your chart, but even if you haven't, you do appear as someone cultured and book-smart/well-read as well. You may love to read or gather infos/learn here and there about any random subject. Your mind is well structured and if you put it to something, you know you can reach amazing results (at times you just tend to not do that out of laziness? lol I understand). There's some type of confidence here anyway which is very good. I'd say you're pretty analytical. But it feels that this is also "your cage", or has become this. Maybe you feel like people mostly uses you for your knowledge and your abilities to solve problems or find solutions, and after that you're left alone. Or you use this side of yours as a way to hide your more emotional self (you deal with emotions through your analytical mind, which is not that bad per se, it could be a way to start). You may feel a bit lost on how to relate with others. It feels like... you don't know how to manage your emotions well, you shy away when it comes to express anything emotional. You don't know how to deal and express them properly. Maybe you fear being too much at times, and be seen as too much or made fun of. It's like, you don't know well this "emotional world" or how to navigate it, and you feel more at ease and in control in the analytical world, where "things have strict rules", or something like that. You know you can't mess up things there, while relationships may sound a bit scary and make you feel a bit lost. Try to work on the relationship with yourself, to know your emotional self first. To let yourself see yourself. It's nothing too scary: don't you know that math is the base of everything in life? (And yeah, if you don't like it or don't get it much, by any chance, it's cause of this too... dw).

But anyway, you're smart, you can find the key to your emotions as well and you can learn to relate with them and talk with them and about them with others too. You only need to work on that a little more and... to let go of your control a little more. Make mistakes even (which you may fear a lot: but they're part of learning, remember?). Emotions are about this too: letting go, letting yourself feel them and experience them without any fear or restriction. Emotions aren't as structured as you'd like them to, but they're complex. And I think you may enjoy complex things (probably you like to solve puzzles or something like that, maybe you enjoy detective movies/series or anything of that kind), so work on emotions with your analytical mind this way. You can do that too to start with, as mentioned above. And the moment you'll realize there's nothing really scary about them and you can process them with your mind to transform them into feelings (you can control your feelings based on your experience and perception and explain them to you), you'll be able to let them flow through yourself, your body in particular too. Don't be scared to feel, you are able to find solutions about that too so trust yourself on this. Be more positive about this experience and about yourself (I think you are a positive person, you just feel a bit insecure at times when you don't know where to put your mind to or when there aren't determined rules to follow -which yeah emotions don't have). And if you cannot navigate this world alone, find someone else that can help you. You don't have to sail on that boat by yourself. Or you can read books on this matter (especially psychology stuff I hear?). Don't be scared of being in touch with yourself and get even more in touch with others. Let them guide you too if you need. Maybe you're a bit shy or really fear being seen on an emotional level at times or being made fun of for something (? Only stupid people would and that's not the type of people you need in your life anyway), but there's nothing to fear. Just try. You're cute btw, I bet all the people around you find you cute too, even if they don't tell you. Rebalance yourself by finding your own power also in the things you don't know well and don't feel confident into. Confidence can come later in those too.

song: touch | yoshimi iwasaki; what makes you beautiful | one direction (others had 2 so... here's your second as well)

[vicholas]

i can't remember which page exactly but before october 7 one of wikipedia's pages on israel-palestine conflict had a section continually stressing how many Poor Israelis have died but another page linked in that same section showed statistics clearly displaying the far higher rates of death for palestinians. been wary of wikipedia's handling of this topic since

It's pretty bad, I only learned today that their official policy is to use the term "Israel-Hamas war" :|

It's extremely easy to exploit Wikipedia's guidelines regarding sources and 'neutrality' to endorse fascist bias. Wikipedia's bureaucratic system just makes it harder to fight against that because they make it harder to change that status quo when the biased version is considered the neutral one.

This person in that one discussion page put it well:

How do you take a stance in neutrality when you're convering a conflict in a world of biased journalism? What is the use of having a list of "reliable sources" for Wikipedia if those sources are unreliable in a specific topic? Wikipedia admins are too spineless to take strong stances in things like these, regardless of importance or consequences. That's how you get the right wing taking advantage of that.

Even a decision as simple as "The BBC is a reliable source when it comes to X topics but when it comes to Y it should be analyzed how it handles the topic, rather than taken as gospel just because it's the BBC" is too complicated and how their policy of reliable sources works. The BBC either is entirely reliable in everything or it is not.

It's particularly irritating seeing people in the discussion page saying stuff like "we can't call it massacre because we have to wait first for media to agree on how to call it". You can't preach about being all about neutrality and they say that you aren't allowed to call a person killing another 'a murder' unless the news explicitly used the word murder.

But that's not the Wikipedia way of seeing "neutrality". The Wikipedia definition of neutrality is this:

And it's worse because Wikipedia's influence in the world means that whatever they call the page has a strong chance of increasing the usage of the name of their choice. But somehow I feel like Wikipedia admins have no conscience on how much they affect bias.

So of course people who want the article to be named 'incident' instead of 'massacre' insist on keeping the 'incident' title "just for now" and wait to see what terms ends up more commonly used. Because of course the term that Wikipedia uses will bring more search results over time.

They know it and they exploit Wikipedia's system of bureaucracy by making the title changing discussions go on forever so it keeps making this the common term.

Sorry if I sound insane I need people to understand how frustrating the inner workings of Wikipedia are and how people exploit the flaws in the system for their own gains and Wikipedia admins are too incompetent to even admit this is a problem.

A lot of us who grew up with the internet didn't even get to know physical encyclopedias and thus the Wikipedia model has been kinda internalized as the only way to handle encyclopedic knowledge, but god this isnt normal. A historian has to take stances towards biased sources and analyze them in order to reach conclusions rather than relying on a list of "trusted" secondary sources as gospel truth. An encyclopedia writer should be no different! The whole model is wrong.

[chakotaybodypillow]

sorry yall for not posting about my Chakotay stuff ☹️ even though i said i wanted to get as much out before school started, Ive taken a bit of a turn on that for a few reasons.

I really wanted to start by addressing and sharing info about the Nicarao, but I wanted to provide more information than what was available with a quick google search, and tbh, it has proven to be difficult. I've been able to find some solid research backed with sources so I'm working on summarizing that, but I want to languish over the material so I can fully grasp the historical context being discussed. Its mentioned several times in the book I've chosen to read that the research is a difficult mosaic. So its taking me several reads to digest the series of events listed. It's a lot but not that much a at the same time. Ive had to expand my readings to encompass the entirity of Central America as well as Mexico.

Unfortunately the amount of contemporary ethnographic research of the Indigenous people of the Rivas is also very very limited. Which is disappointing :/ from what I've read the Nicarao as a group are extinct. So I've also had to shift my focus to groups that are still active to get a better understanding of the Native populations.... its a lot and i more than likely will post in chunks as i take in more information. So when i finally do make the first post it will be a small historic break down of theories and studies about the arrival of the Nahuas to Nicaragua :)

Also....off topic i had a discussion with my editor (my mom) after i posted my topics and she told me that i had essentially created an outline for a master's thesis 😅... and that posting it publicly was a mistake 😅😅... bc now it cant be considered my research😅😅😅 ....... She was telling me to consider making this into real academic research and we discussed the different methods of pop culture research and such. Ive considred making this into something bigger, but idk. it would make all of this worthwhile, but im also kinda insecure about this .

But to clarify i use the terms "thesis" or "research" lightly. While yes ive done research, i dont plan to make this a formal thing when i post to tumblr and elsewhere, just to stay on the safe side. I guess I'll make this more of a blog where i discuss my thoughts and address concerns rather than dive into these super academic discussions.

I just want to encourage others to think critically about chakotays portrayal and possibly lay down a framework for his background story. I only intend to speak on things that i feel comfortable speaking on as a poc analyzing anither poc character and will avoid some indigenous specific perspectives.

so yeah school starts for me soon and i'm going to be hemmed up with that, but im excited becasue im taking some classes that will help me with the chakotay topics hehe.

thanks for listening to my yap session! Im almost done with the summarizing and hope to post a little bit soon :D

[lorynna]

Please understand I am writing this from a position of genuine curiosity and not one of malice.

I saw your response to the anon talking about their aroace friend and you both agreed that asexuality is being “muddied” by people who identify as asexual since there’s so much variation between them.

I am honestly quite confused as to why you are dictating the definitions of lived experiences you don’t share. Why do you have to decide how people feel and perceive their feelings if those are completely separate people than you?

Is it truly your business to decide how labels should be applied if you aren’t the one using them? As an asexual, the way you discuss my identity dismisses me and other asexuals as people, because you make assumptions about what and how we should be feeling. It feels dehumanizing.

Again…I write this with no malice, I just don’t understand your position on this matter.

Hello anon.

My response to the other anonymous person submitting an ask involved both of us agreeing about the fact that those labels are hard to get taken seriously due to a lot of people either trying to weaken the definition of asexuality/aromanticism by widening it until cinderella's unique custom-designed shoe is a one-size-fits-all, (in other words:) it completely looses it's meaning and can be applied to the average person or a person who simply has a low sex drive and/or are following a trend, where it "seems cool and quirky" to pick out a label and make it your entire personality until you get tired of it and need to get something new.

Touching on your comment implying that I am calling this term (who in my opinion has become useless due to the above mentioned reasons) as me not rejecting the label therefore but because "there is so much variation between asexual/aromantic people". Which is just...sigh.

I don't think I have to point out that the reasons (again, listed above), that I have also stated in multiple of my takes about this subject, don't indicate any sort of valid variation but the broadening of a simple term until it is applicable to the average person who "sometimes does not feel like having sex" or "feels like not having a relationship for some time in their lives".

Now a counter question. Am I really dictating the definitions of lived experiences I don't share (like you claim) or am I simply talking about my opinion? What power do I have to truly dictate how someone can/has to label themselves? Suprise: I don't! People can continue to pick labels how they please and I can give my opinion accordingly, how I please.

I am challenging you to try and analyze if I am truly trying to be malicious towards actual asexuals/aromantics or if I am just fed up by everything getting used as a trendy label or people pretending to "be cool". I am challenging you to form an opinion on wether or not I am truly coming from a place of hate or rather constructive criticism. And I am challenging you to not see everything that defies your worldview as hate. Opinions are like assholes, everyone has them and sometimes they stink!

My favorite saying : You cannot define something, without actually excluding anyone from said definition. To defines means to limit and that's okay, that is essential. Otherwise words, labels, definitions, it all means nothing. To open the doors to everyone means to protect no one.

I would encourage you (if you are really interested in my take on the topic) to take a look into my pinned post, where I am talking about this more intrinsically. I'll link it here down below.

Also linking here now below the question of another anon that THIS anon is referring to.

[rtfics]

So I'll say it yet again.

AI IS THEFT. IT TAKES THE WRITING AND ART DONE BY AMATEURS AND PROS LIKE ME AND VOMITS IT INTO SHIT USED BY PEOPLE WITHOUT TALENT, DEDICATION, OR ETHICS. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR USING AI.

USE YOUR OWN WORDS OR YOUR OWN ART OR USE NONE AT ALL, UNLESS YOU'RE PAYING SOMEONE ELSE TO WRITE OR DRAW FOR YOU.

I DID NOT SPEND LITERALLY DECADES WORKING HARD AT IMPROVING MY WRITING AND DRAWING TO HAVE SOME TALENTLESS ASSHOLE USE A SOULLESS FUCKING MACHINE THAT REQUIRES THE ENERGY OF A SMALL EUROPEAN COUNTRY TO WRITE A FANFIC OR MAKE FANART.

IF YOU USE AI YOU'RE A THIEF. PERIOD. FULL STOP.

From The New Yorker:

Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?

By Kyle Chayka February 10, 2023

According to the lawyer behind a new class-action suit, every image that a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”

Last year, a Tennessee-based artist named Kelly McKernan noticed that their name was being used with increasing frequency in A.I.-driven image generation. McKernan makes paintings that often feature nymphlike female figures in an acid-colored style that blends Art Nouveau and science fiction. A list published in August, by a Web site called Metaverse Post, suggested “Kelly McKernan” as a term to feed an A.I. generator in order to create “Lord of the Rings”-style art. Hundreds of other artists were similarly listed according to what their works evoked: anime, modernism, “Star Wars.” On the Discord chat that runs an A.I. generator called Midjourney, McKernan discovered that users had included their name more than twelve thousand times in public prompts. The resulting images—of owls, cyborgs, gothic funeral scenes, and alien motorcycles—were distinctly reminiscent of McKernan’s works. “It just got weird at that point. It was starting to look pretty accurate, a little infringe-y,” they told me. “I can see my hand in this stuff, see how my work was analyzed and mixed up with some others’ to produce these images.”

Last month, McKernan joined a class-action lawsuit with two other artists, Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz, filed by the attorneys Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri, against Midjourney and two other A.I. imagery generators, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp. (Other tools, such as DALL-E, run on the same principles.) All three models make use of LAION-5B, a nonprofit, publicly available database that indexes more than five billion images from across the Internet, including the work of many artists. The alleged wrongdoing comes down to what Butterick summarized to me as “the three ‘C’s”: The artists had not consented to have their copyrighted artwork included in the LAION database; they were not compensated for their involvement, even as companies including Midjourney charged for the use of their tools; and their influence was not credited when A.I. images were produced using their work. When producing an image, these generators “present something to you as if it’s copyright free,” Butterick told me, adding that every image a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”

Copyright claims based on questions of style are often tricky. In visual art, courts have sometimes ruled in favor of the copier rather than the copied. When the artist Richard Prince incorporated photographs by Patrick Cariou into his work, for instance, a 2013 court case found that some of the borrowing was legal under transformative use—Prince had changed the source material enough to escape any claim of infringement. In music, recent judgments tend to be more conservative. Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a 2013 case against the Marvin Gaye estate, which alleged that their song “Blurred Lines” was too close to Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” The intellectual-property lawyer Kate Downing wrote, in a recent essay on Butterick and Saveri’s suit published on her personal Web site, that the A.I. image generators might be closer to the former than the latter: ​​“It may well be argued that the ‘use’ of any one image from the training data is . . . not substantial enough to call the output a derivative work of any one image.” “Mathematically speaking, the work comes from everything,” Downing told me.

But Butterick and Saveri allege that what A.I. generators do falls short of transformative use. There is no transcending of the source material, just a mechanized “blending together,” Butterick said. “We’re not litigating image by image, we’re litigating the whole technique behind the system.” The litigators are not alone. Last week, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stable Diffusion alleging that the generator’s use of Getty stock photography amounts to “brazen infringement . . . on a staggering scale.” Whatever their legal strengths, such claims possess a certain moral weight. A.I. generators could not operate without the labor of humans like McKernan who unwittingly provide source material. As the technology critic and philosopher Jaron Lanier wrote in his 2013 book “Who Owns the Future?,” “Digital information is really just people in disguise.” (A spokesperson from Stability AI, the studio that developed Stable Diffusion, said in a statement that “the allegations in this suit represent a misunderstanding of how generative A.I. technology works and the law surrounding copyright,” but provided no further detail. Neither DeviantArt, which owns DreamUp, nor Midjourney responded to requests for comment.)

Visual artists began reaching out to Butterick after he and Saveri filed a lawsuit, last November, in the related but distinct realm of software copyrights. The target of the earlier suit was Copilot, an A.I.-driven coding assistant developed by GitHub and OpenAI. Copilot is trained on code that is publicly available online. Coders who post their projects on open-source platforms retain the copyright to their work—under certain licenses, anyone who uses the code must credit its creator. Copilot did not. Like the artists whose work feeds Midjourney, human coders suddenly found their specialized labor reproduced infinitely, quickly, and cheaply without attribution. Butterick and Saveri’s legal complaint (against OpenAI, GitHub, and Microsoft, which acquired GitHub in 2018) argued that Copilot’s actions amount to “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.” In January, the defendants filed to have the case dismissed. “We will file oppositions to these motions,” Butterick said.

Butterick told me that, given the proliferation of A.I., “everybody who creates for a living should be in code red.” Writers had their turn to be spooked in January, when BuzzFeed announced that it would use OpenAI’s new large language model, ChatGPT, to augment its creation of quizzes. McKernan, who draws income from print sales as well as commissioned illustrations, told me they suspect that the amount of work available in their field is already declining as A.I. tools become more accessible online. “There are publishers that are using A.I. instead of hiring cover artists,” McKernan told me. “I can pay my rent with just one cover, and we’re seeing that already disappearing.” They added, “We’re just the canaries in the coal mine.”

In some sense, you could say that artists are losing their monopoly on being artists. With generative A.I., any user can become an author of sorts. In late January, Mayk.it, a Los Angeles-based music-making app, released Drayk.it, a Web site that allowed users to create A.I.-generated Drake songs based on a given prompt. The results could not be mistaken for actual Drake tracks; they tend toward the lo-fi and the absurd. But they possess a certain fundamental Drakeness: lounge beats, depressive lyrics, monotone delivery. The company’s head of product, Neer Sharma, told me that users had created hundreds of thousands of A.I. Drake songs, a new track every three seconds. The site drew upon software resources such as Tacotron and Uberduck, which generate voices and offer specific voice models, including one trained on the œuvre of Drake. The Web site includes a disclaimer that the songs it generates are parodies, which are protected under fair use, and Sharma told me that the company didn’t receive any complaints from Drake’s camp. But the site has already shut down. The project was designed “just to test out the tech,” Sharma said. “We didn’t expect it to get this big.” The team is now preparing more “A.I. music drops.”

As Sharma sees it, the increasing accessibility of A.I. means that “everything just becomes remixable.” The artists who might thrive in this scenario are those who have the most replicable or exportable “vibe and aesthetic,” he said, among them Drake, the rare pop star who has embraced his status as an open-ended meme. Fans could already dress like Drake or act like him; now they can make his music, too, and the line between fan and creator will blur further as the generative technology improves. Sharma said that the company has heard from executives at music labels who are interested in exploring the creation of A.I. voice models for their artists. He predicted that musicians who resist being “democratized”—giving creative agency to their fans—will be left behind. “The people who could win before just by being there will not necessarily win tomorrow,” Sharma said.

A startup called Authentic Artists is seeking to bypass human artists altogether by creating musician characters based on A.I.-generated styles of music. Its label, WarpSound, features “virtual artists” like GLiTCH, a computer-rendered figure derived from a Bored Ape Yacht Club N.F.T., who plays genres such as “chillwave” and “glitch hop” in endlessly streaming feeds of auto-generated music. Authentic Artists’ founder Chris McGarry told me that the character is meant to give a face to the A.I. machine. “We wanted to answer the question, what is the source of the music? A semiconductor or cloud-based server or ones and zeros didn’t seem to be a terribly interesting answer to that question,” he said.

Listening to Authentic Artists’ music, however, is a bit like trying to enjoy the wavering buzz of highway traffic. If you’re not paying attention, it can serve as a passable background soundtrack, but the moment you tune in closely any sense of coherent sound gives way to an uncanny randomness. It called to my mind a much-memed comment that the Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki made after being shown a particularly grotesque A.I.-generated animation in 2016: “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” I wouldn’t go quite so far, but Authentic Artists’ project does strike me as an insult to human-made music. They can manufacture sound, but they can’t manufacture the feeling or creative intention that even the most amateur musicians put into a recording.

Kelly McKernan sometimes snoops on conversations about generative A.I. on Reddit or Discord chats, in part to see how users perceive the role of original artists in the A.I. image-making process. McKernan said that they often see people criticizing artists who are against A.I.: “They have this belief that career artists, people who have dedicated their whole lives to their work, are gatekeeping, keeping them from making the art they want to make. They think we’re élitist and keeping our secrets.” Defenders of A.I. art-making could point out that artists have always taken from and riffed on each other’s work, from the ancient Romans making copies of even older Greek sculptures to Roy Lichtenstein reproducing comic-book frames as highbrow Pop art. Maybe A.I. imagery is just a new wave of appropriation art? (It lacks any conceptual intention, however.) Downing, the intellectual-property lawyer, argued in her piece that the prompts that users input into A.I. generators may amount to independent acts of invention. “There is no Stable Diffusion without users pouring their own creative energy into its prompts,” she wrote.

McKernan told me about Beep Boop Art, a Facebook group with forty-seven thousand followers that posts A.I.-generated art and runs an online storefront selling prints and merchandise. The images tend toward the fantastical: a wizard hat or a lunar landscape in a Lisa Frank-ish style, or a tree house growing above the ocean. It may not be a direct riff on McKernan’s work, but it does reflect a banal over-all sameness across generated art. McKernan described typical A.I. style as having “this general sugary, candy look,” adding, “It looks pretty, but it tastes terrible. It has no depth, but it serves the purpose that they want.” The new generation of tools offers the instant gratification of a single image, shorn of the messy association with a single, living artist. One question is who gets to profit from such works. Another is more existential. “It kind of boils down to: what is art?” McKernan said. “Is art the process, is art the human component, is art the conversation? All of that is out of the picture once you’re just generating it.” ♦