#italics by author

[dominiq-e]

Pasting the article for those of you who don’t want to make an account with the site (it’s missing dozens of cited links; make an account to view the whole article yourself if you would like to access them):

Twenty-five years ago, computers were on the verge of destroying America’s energy system.

Or, at least, that’s what lots of smart people seemed to think.

In a 1999 Forbes article, a pair of conservative lawyers, Peter Huber and Mark Mills, warned that personal computers and the internet were about to overwhelm the fragile U.S. grid.

Information technology already devoured 8% to 13% of total U.S. power demand, Huber and Mills claimed, and that share would only rise over time. “It’s now reasonable to project,” they wrote, “that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.” (Emphasis mine.)

Over the next 18 months, investment banks including JP Morgan and Credit Suisse repeated the Forbes estimate of internet-driven power demand, advising their customers to pile into utilities and other electricity-adjacent stocks. Although it was unrelated, California’s simultaneous blackout crisis deepened the sense of panic. For a moment, experts were convinced: Data centers and computers would drain the country’s energy resources.

They could not have been more wrong. In fact, Huber and Mills had drastically mismeasured the amount of electricity used by PCs and the internet. Computing ate up perhaps 3% of total U.S. electricity in 1999, not the roughly 10% they had claimed. And instead of staring down a period of explosive growth, the U.S. electric grid was in reality facing a long stagnation. Over the next two decades, America’s electricity demand did not grow rapidly — or even, really, at all. Instead, it flatlined for the first time since World War II. The 2000s and 2010s were the first decades without “load growth,” the utility industry’s jargon for rising power demand, since perhaps the discovery of electricity itself.

Now that lull is ending — and a new wave of tech-driven concerns has overtaken the electricity industry. According to its supporters and critics alike, generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT is about to devour huge amounts of electricity, enough to threaten the grid itself. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said, arguing that the world needs a clean energy breakthrough to meet AI’s voracious energy needs. (He is investing in nuclear fusion and fission companies to meet this demand.) The Washington Post captured the zeitgeist with a recent story: America, it said, “is running out of power.”

But … is it actually? There is no question that America’s electricity demand is rising once again and that load growth, long in abeyance, has finally returned to the grid: The boom in new factories and the ongoing adoption of electric vehicles will see to that. And you shouldn’t bet against the continued growth of data centers, which have increased in size and number since the 1990s. But there is surprisingly little evidence that AI, specifically, is driving surging electricity demand. And there are big risks — for utility customers and for the planet — by treating AI-driven electricity demand as an emergency.

There is, to be clear, no shortage of predictions that AI will cause electricity demand to rise. According to a recent Reuters report, nine of the country’s 10 largest utilities are now citing the “surge” in power demand from data centers when arguing to regulators that they should build more power. Morgan Stanley projects that power use from data centers “is expected to triple globally this year,” according to the same report. The International Energy Agency more modestly — but still shockingly — suggests that electricity use from data centers, AI, and cryptocurrency could double by 2026.

These concerns have also come from environmentalists. A recent report from the Climate Action Against Disinformation Commission, a left-wing alliance of groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, warned that AI will require “massive amounts of energy and water” and called for aggressive regulation.

That report focused on the risks of an AI-addled social media public sphere, which progressives fear will be filled with climate-change-denying propaganda by AI-powered bots. But in an interview, Michael Khoo, an author of the report and a researcher at Friends of the Earth, told me that studying AI made him much more frightened about its energy use.

AI is such an power-suck that it “is causing America to run out of energy,” Khoo said. “I think that’s going to be much more disruptive than the disinformation conversation in the mid-term.” He sketched a scenario where Altman and Mark Zuckerberg can outbid ordinary households for electrons as AI proliferates across the economy. “I can see people going without power,” he said, “and there being massive social unrest.”

These predictions aren’t happening in a vacuum. At the same time that investment bankers and environmentalists have fretted over a potential electricity shortage, utilities across the South have proposed a de facto solution: a massive buildout of new natural-gas power plants.

Citing the return of load growth, utilities across the South are trying to go around normal regulatory channels and build a slew of new natural-gas-burning power plants. Across at least six states, utilities have already won — or are trying to win — permission from local governments to fast-track more than 10,000 megawatts of new gas-fired power plants so that they can meet the surge in demand.

These requests have popped up across the region, pushed by vertically integrated monopoly power companies. Georgia Power won a tentative agreement to build 1,400 new megawatts of gas capacity, Canary reported. In the Carolinas, Duke Energy has asked to build 9,000 megawatts of new gas capacity, triple what it previously requested. The Tennessee Valley Authority has plans to add 6,600 megawatts of new capacity to its grid.

This buildout is big enough to endanger the country’s climate targets. Although these utilities are also building new renewable and battery farms, and shutting down coal plants, the planned surge in carbon emissions from natural gas plants would erase the reductions from those changes, according to a Southern Environmental Law Center analysis. Duke Energy has already said that it will not meet its 2030 climate goal in order to conduct the gas expansion.

In the popular press, AI’s voracious energy demand is sometimes said to be a major driver of this planned gas boom. But evidence for that proposition is slim, and the utilities have said only that data center expansion is one of several reasons for the boom. The Southeast’s population is growing, and the region is experiencing a manufacturing renaissance, due in part to the new car, battery, and solar panel factories subsidized by Biden’s climate law. Utilities in the South also face a particular challenge coping with the coldest winter mornings because so many homes and offices use inefficient and power-hungry space heaters.

Indeed, it’s hard to talk about the drivers of load growth with any specificity — and it’s hard to know whether load growth will actually happen in all corners of the South.

Utilities compete against each other to secure big-name customers — much like local governments compete with sweetheart tax deals — so when a utility asks regulators to build more capacity, it doesn’t reveal where potential power demand is coming from. (In other words, it doesn’t reveal who it believes will eventually buy that power.) A company might float plans to build the same data center or factory in multiple states to shop around for the best rates, which means the same underlying gigawatts of demand may be appearing in several different utilities’ resource plans at the same time. In other words, utilities are unlikely to actually see all of the demand they’re now projecting.

Even if we did know exactly how many gigawatts of new demand each utility would see, it’s almost impossible to say how much of it is coming from AI. Utilities don’t say how much of their future projected power demand will come from planned factories versus data centers. Nor do they say what each data center does and whether it trains AI (or mines Bitcoin, which remains a far bigger energy suck).

The risk of focusing on AI, specifically, as a driver of load growth is that because it’s a hot new technology — one with national security implications, no less — it can rhetorically justify expensive emergency action that is actually not necessary at all. Utilities may very well need to build more power capacity in the years to come. But does that need constitute an emergency? Does it justify seeking special permission from their statehouses or regulators to build more gas, instead of going through the regular planning process? Is it worth accelerating approvals for new gas plants? Probably not. The real danger, in other words, is not that we’ll run out of power. It’s that we’ll build too much of the wrong kind.

At the same time, we might have been led astray by overly dire predictions of AI’s energy use. Jonathan Koomey, a researcher who studies how the internet and data centers use energy (and the namesake of Koomey’s Law) told me that many estimates of Nvidia’s most important AI chips assume that their energy use is the same as their advertised “rated” power. In reality, Nvidia chips probably use half of that amount, he said, because chipmakers engineer their chips to withstand more electricity than is necessary for safety reasons.

And this is just the current generation of chips: Nvidia’s next generation of AI-training chips, called “Blackwell,” use 25 times less energy to do the same amount of computation as the previous generation of chips.

Koomey helped defuse the last panic over energy use by showing that the estimates Huber and Mills relied on were wildly incorrect. Estimates now suggest that the internet used less than 1% of total U.S. electricity by the late 1990s, not 13% as they claimed. Those percentages stayed roughly the same through 2008, he later found, even as data centers grew and computers proliferated across the economy. That’s the same year, remember, that Huber and Mills predicted that the internet would consume half of American energy.

These bad predictions were extremely convenient. Mills was a scientific advisor to the Greening Earth Society, a fossil-fuel-industry-funded group that alleged carbon dioxide pollution would actually improve the global environment. He aimed to show that climate and environmental policy would conflict with the continued growth of the internet.

“Many electricity policy proposals are on a collision course with demand forces,” Mills said in a Greening Earth press release at the time. “While many environmentalists want to substantially reduce coal use in making electricity, there is no chance of meeting future economically-driven and Internet-accelerated electric demand without retaining and expanding the coal component.” Hence the headline of the Forbes piece: “The PCs are coming — Dig more coal.”

What makes today’s AI-induced fear frenzy different from 1999 is that the alarmed projections are not just coming from businesses and banks like Morgan Stanley, but from environmentalists like Friends of the Earth. Yet neither their estimates of near-term, AI-driven power shortages — nor the analysis from Morgan Stanley that U.S. data-center use could soon triple within a year — make sense given what we know about data centers, Koomey said. It is not logistically possible to triple data centers’ electricity use in one year. “There just aren’t enough people to build data centers, and it takes longer than a year to build a new data center anyway,” he said. “There aren’t enough generators, there aren’t enough transformers — the backlog for some equipment is 24 months. It’s a supply chain constraint.”

Look around and you might notice that we have many more servers and computers today than we did in 1999 — not to mention smartphones and tablets, which didn’t even exist then — and yet computing doesn’t devour half of American energy. It doesn’t even get close. Today, computers use 1% to 4% of total U.S. power demand, depending on which estimate you trust. That’s about the same share of total U.S. electricity demand that they used in the late 1990s and mid-2000s.

It may well be that AI devours more energy in years to come, but utilities probably do not need to deal with it by building more gas. They could install more batteries, build new power lines, or even pay some customers to reduce their electricity usage during certain peak events, such as cold winter storms.

There are some places where AI-driven energy demand could be a problem — Koomey cited Ireland and Loudon County, Virginia, as two epicenters. But even there, building more natural gas is not the sole way to cope with load growth.

“The problem with this debate is everybody is kind of right,” Daniel Tait, who researches Southern utilities for the Energy and Policy Institute, a consumer watchdog, told me. “Yes, AI will increase load a little bit, but probably not as much as you think. Yes, load is growing, but maybe not as much as you say. Yes, we do need to build stuff, but maybe not the stuff that you want.”

There are real risks if AI’s energy demands get overstated and utilities go on a gas-driven bender. The first is for the planet: Utilities might overbuild gas plants now, run them even though they’re non-economic, and blow through their climate goals.

“Utilities — especially the vertically integrated monopoles in the South — have every incentive to overstate load growth, and they have a pattern of having done that consistently,” Gudrun Thompson, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me. In 2017, the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank, found in 2017 that utilities systematically overestimated their peak demand when compiling forecasts. This makes sense: Utilities would rather build too much capacity than wind up with too little, especially when they can pass along the associated costs to rate-payers.

But the second risk is that utilities could burn through the public’s willingness to pay for grid upgrades. Over the next few years, utilities should make dozens of updates to their systems. They have to build new renewables, new batteries, and new clean 24/7 power, such as nuclear or geothermal. They will have to link their grids to their neighbors’ by building new transmission lines. All of that will be expensive, and it could require the kind of investment that raises electricity rates. But the public and politicians can accept only so many rate hikes before they rebel, and there’s a risk that utilities spend through that fuzzy budget on unnecessary and wasteful projects now, not on the projects that they’ll need in the future.

There is no question that AI will use more electricity in the years to come. But so will EVs, new factories, and other sources of demand. America is on track to use more electricity. If that becomes a crisis, it will be one of our own making.

[livecrow]

You've been kidnapped by the local butcher and he convinces you he's going to fucking eat you.

Dark!Ghost x fat fem reader drabble

CWs: dead dove, rape, dehumanization, gaslighting, bondage, undiscussed kink(?), animal play(?), threats and talk of cannibalism but no actual cannibalism

(A tidied up and extended ramble I subjected @391780 to on anon. Inspired directly from their post where Butcher!Simon draws a diagram of beef cuts on you.)

_____________________________________________________________

It’s pretty immediately obvious he’s a murderer. He’s probably a serial killer for all you know.

In reality, Simon doesn’t consider himself a serial killer, despite his body count. He’s just someone who doesn’t have qualms dealing with nuisances. He’s a retired vet, after you’d killed enough people, what’s a few more? 

No, his kills were just business, practical. They were men who made the mistake of getting in his way, of being inconvenient. Most, anyway—there’s at least one or two whose only crime was being an especially annoying cunt. Sometimes, some people  “jus’ need killin’”. 

As a butcher, he does find the implication funny, but no, he’s not eaten any of the scum he’s off’ed. “Don’t serve ‘em up to customers, neither”. After all, Simon’s got far higher standards than that. They weren’t even fit for dog food and he has a reputation to uphold. No one can compete with his quality. 

No, you’re nothing like them. You’re special.

Never in his life had he seen a prettier creature—and you’re absolutely prime. He’s salivating just looking at you, plump and oh so soft. He can see it in the way your skin wobbles gently as you move about. Simon couldn't find a straight line on you. And he’s looked. He’s been transfixed watching you, aching.

You live your life meandering obliviously, no brand in sight, not even a tag on your ear. He's surprised no one else snatched you up. Poor thing left to fend for itself ‘s cruel. Nothing else to it. 

Wrangling you was simple, it’s not like your large form actually offered you anything towards your defense. It was easy, really. Your lack of instincts was staggering, it was even more shocking that you lasted this long, he almost couldn’t stop himself from laughing.

You were clueless to the danger, even when it was directly in front of you, it only endeared you to him. Your eyes roved over him, not paying him any mind, just carrying on about your undoubtedly inane business. Only when he was on you and it was too late did you start to kick up a fuss.

The look of panic on your face was just priceless. All this crying and babbling nonsense like, “What are you doing?!” and “Stop!”.

Simon's main concern was not damaging you too much, he was careful. Just a single huge bicep around your neck and any fight you had seemingly evaporated with fright. You're bent over in a headlock, his grip as rigid as a pillory, but he’s not applying enough pressure to actually choke you. You’re just forced helplessly to come along or be dragged.

Not that it would have mattered if you were too wild to be led, he would simply tighten his hold, and allow up a quick nap. He’d pull out the dolly, load up the truck and be on his way.

On the big stainless steel work table the metal stings you even through your clothes. Unfortunately for you, even that scant protection doesn't last. The sight of the shears was enough to paralyze you again, and with a handful of strategic snips, Simon rips your last vestiges of humanity from you. All your skin transforms to gooseflesh, shivering on the table, but your nipples is where his roaming gaze finally settles.

He’ll have to remember to adjust the heat later. After all, “‘s a bit early to start chillin’ you”, he’d chuckle. You were a bit of silly thing, he thought. Maybe it’d be a minute till you’d actually catch on.

You're his little prize. Simon will coddle you, give you plenty of softness and warmth. You’ll not want for blankets, pillows, and other such treats, but not a stitch of clothing will ever touch your skin again. There would be no hiding your nakedness.

“Clothes? Clothes ‘re for people, what y’ need clothes for?” he scoffed. You don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s a question, because he doesn’t want you to answer. A dog doesn’t answer “who's a good boy?” does he? 

He’s measuring you, jotting things down. You think distantly that the pencil looks puny in his fist. While he's at it, he's feeling and squeezing every inch of you. You’re groped and prodded like some saran wrapped package of beef at the grocery store.

Only when you think there’s finally a reprieve, you’re being hogtied. You’re trussed up in practically half a roll of twine, fat bulging between the strands, desperate to escape its bite. Simon says it looks good on you, can’t resist taking one of your new little rolls between his fingers, giving you a teasing pinch. You struggle of course, but the terrifying man commands you to “Settle”, says the only thing your fussing will get you is rope burn. 

He claps you on the ass affectionately, assuring you that the scratchy string is only temporary. He knows a guy for leather, does good work. All hand stitched. Simon will have a proper harness made for you. Something with a lot of d-rings. It will be more comfortable for you and he can situate you how he likes with minimal bruising or chaffing. 

As he admires your skin, he’ll remark offhandedly that he’ll have to ""'ave somethin' from you" too. He’s not usually one to bother, but it’d be a travesty to waste hide like yours. Couldn’t find more supple could y’? He hasn’t decided what’ll be yet, he’ll need to do some maths to figure out how much material you'll make. Behind his mask and the façade of impassivity, he savors your reaction. That’d be about the first time your consciousness flees from you.

Simon will lay it on thick, praise how "well-marbled" you are. Delectable. So plump and well-fed, you can't blame him for any of this, really. He'll say something about kobe beef and taking good care of you. He’ll massage you daily, knead every inch of you between his huge oiled hands. He'd take his time, temple t' toes. You couldn’t get a knot in a muscle if you tried.

Your more delicate bits don’t escape his tender ministrations either. He takes painstaking work in rubbing your insides down with thick fingers, wringing orgasms from you until you're limp and still as the rest of the meat in his shop. Says it’s good for the flavor, will make you even sweeter.

It’s all completely horrifying, it has to be a nightmare. He says all this so casually, like he’s telling you the time of day. This man is truly completely deranged. 

His hands are always on you, it’s never fucking ending. He's taken it upon himself that you never “exert” yourself and you have no choice in the matter. Bastard won’t even let your hands free to eat or bathe. He "grooms" you. Brushes your hair, trims your nails, cleans your teeth, brushes, lathers, rinses, dries, moisturizes your skin. It’s humiliating and you hate every second of it.

The juxtaposition is too much, the horror and absurdity of it all. All the restraints and manhandling, your looming demise, while insisting on soft surfaces for you, water temperature just right, food carefully curated and cut up just so. He won’t let anything happen to spoil the meat.

He doesn’t spare any expense on your “feed” either. You eat what he eats, might as well be eating off his plate. Albeit simple, it’s good food, you don't see a point in denying it. It's fresh and flavorful and to no one’s surprise it includes a lot of meat. Always from his shop of course, only the best for you.

He’ll bring out some new parcel every night for dinner, unfolding the brown paper wrapping, holding up to you to admire his work. “‘S a ribeye”. He goes on about the marbling, the even color of the meat. “Couldn’t find fresher” he’d say, "was only jus' bleedin' this mornin'".

You’re his captive audience. There’s nothing else you can do but warily watch him make dinner, even if seeing a blade in his hand gives your heart palpitations. Steak, sautéed mushrooms, jacket potatoes, roasted broccoli.

You’ve long since stopped fighting him when it comes to meals. Because it can always get worse. After being bent over on the floor, forced to eat off a dish without the use of your hands, you’d resigned yourself to the fact that eating off his fork was a sufferable compromise. Still, if he’s in a mood he won’t even allow that. You'll eat off his fingers, and he’ll laugh at your expense and chide you when you inevitably “make a mess”. 

The food was prepared, but this time the kitchen knife didn’t leave his grasp. It wasn’t a steak knife. It was too big and not serrated, but that didn’t seem to bother Simon. It certainly bothered you. Its presence loomed like a guillotine in your peripheral.

He feeds you bites between his own. Every mouthful and he looks so pleased. You desperately missed his mask at meal times. At least then you couldn’t see his smug fucking face.

On the plate the steam billows and curls. The meat gives easily under your molars, practically melts in your mouth. Hot and rich and juicy, it’s basted in butter, with garlic cloves and sprigs of rosemary, seasoned with cracked peppercorn and flakey sea salt. It’s a touch rarer than you’d like. 

You wish you were capable of escaping the horror of it all for even a second, pretend you were anywhere else, with anyone else.

Simon punctuated his first bite with a low rumble of approval, watching you with those dark, cavernous eyes. He’d continued in that way, a man content in silence.

”...you'll taste better.”

He waited until your last bite to say it, maybe that was mercy on his part. The meat transformed in your mouth, became sinewy and bitter. You couldn’t swallow, and went to spit it out. But he expected that apparently, was on you in a second. Giant rough hand sealed over your lips, practically enclosing the bottom half of your face, smooshing your cheeks up into your eyes. 

“Chew.”

It takes longer than usual, but you try to obey. His hand hasn’t moved from your mouth.

“Swallow.”

His eyes move from yours to your neck, his thumb grazing your throat lightly, tracing the bite’s trajectory as you force it down. His eyes are back on you then. 

With Simon’s free hand he deftly pierces the last drippy morsel off the plate with the knife, popping it between his scarred lips. The hand still on you moves, migrates to cup your jaw, gradually starting to squeeze. You don’t have any fight left and open before it becomes painful.

Fear paralyzes you again, when he brings the knife towards you.

The movement is slow, as if he’s actually concerned about frightening you. He’s holding it longwise, pointed off to the side.

Then it’s on your tongue.

He drags the flat of the blade’s length across the trembling muscle, leisurely, only moving it away to flip it and clean the other side, myoglobin discarded on your tongue 

“They’ll say ’m ‘spoilin’ ‘er rotten’. Eatin’ off my own plate, sleepin' in my own bed, warm under my roof. Keepin’ you safe indoors. Such a sweet, tame thing, are you?”. He strokes your cheek, wiping at a drip at the corner of your mouth with a thumb before popping that in his mouth too.

Whenever Simon’s put up enough with your smart mouth, he enjoys the look of your wide wet eyes and your trembling lips stretched around a padded ring gag.

The sounds you make when gagged are special little nonsense noises, almost like you're trying to talk like a person would. Sweet, pitiful sounds. He also loves when wet, choked sobs that cascade out of your open mouth, forcing you to drool. “You’re so messy, sweet’eart. Nose runnin’, too.” Says you're leaking from practically every hole. Eyes, nose, mouth, cunt.

Sometimes, you might almost be fooled into thinking he feels sorry for you in those moments when you're hyperventilating and hysterical, or wailing so mournfully. He always hushes you when you're crying, pets and hold you, dries your face, as if he’s not the cause of your tears. Despite how much Simon adores the taste of them, adores the soft jingling of the little cow bell tied ‘round your throat when your whole body quivers with sobs, the stress will sour the meat. He’ll say as much, but surprisingly it doesn’t help calm you down.

If it was necessary, he's not opposed to sedation. After all, he's done the research to find one that won't affect your flavor. But most of the time, his solution to your despair is yet another thorough fucking. Dopamine to counteract the stress.

Simon forces the orgasms out of your body as easily as he forces his cock into it, you're utterly helpless to stop either. His livelihood is working with his hands and unfortunately he’s damn good at it. When all's said and done and you're spent, he’ll lightly chastise you for working yourself up, for fussing.

He loves the heft of you in his hands, weighs your heavy tits in his palms, grips your ample belly. Simon can't resist taking mouthfuls of you into his mouth, worrying your supple fat with his incisors. Your tits, ass, thighs, arms, belly, back fat, hell, your double chin. It doesn't matter, any squishy bit of you. You're always afraid he might be getting impatient, that he’ll take a bite out of you, but he never does. Simon says he's just sampling, maybe tenderizing you a little. 

His favorite taste of yours is still between your legs. He has you thank him for being so careful there. Past you inner thighs and plump mons, the pressure of his teeth yields, feeling barely a graze. 

He likes putting mirrors in front of you, says he wants you to see how lovely you are. Your hands are clipped together, chain snagged in one of the shop's many meathooks, just low enough that you don’t strain your shoulders or quite have to stand on your tiptoes.

He directs you to watch, popping the lid off of a permanent marker with a squeak.

He maneuvers you this way and that as he works, dragging the marker down your body. His lines are surprisingly clean considering his canvas is such a pliant, organic shape. Hand are as steady as a surgeon. The marker tickled terribly on skin, the ethanol smell burning your nose, making it hard to think.

It only took a minute to recognize what he was doing. Your skin itches under the felt tip. You flail, trying desperately to smear it, to muss his work, but the ink dries too quickly.

Simon wouldn't let you keep your eyes closed, so in that moment you were grateful for the onslaught of tears blurring your vision somewhat.

That day, he showed you all your different cuts, as if you cared, as if you were together enough to pay attention.

Chuck, rib, loin, sirloin, rump, round, flank, plate, brisket, shank.

He tells you which are his favorite. Tells you which of his mates he’ll have over to enjoy you, ponders what pieces he’ll think they’ll like best. How to cook different cuts to get the best effect, that some cuts are naturally tougher and have to be cooked slowly, while the other cuts are tender and fatty, can be cooked at a higher temperature, quicker. 

From the very beginning, he’s referenced the “Big Day”.

He’ll ask if you're excited over the shinnnnk of a knife against a whetstone. Simon always keeps his tools in order, clean and sharpened expertly, but he thinks he'll polish them up extra shiny for the occasion. To a mirror finish, so you can see yourself. You're so beautiful, it'd be a cryin' shame for you to miss it. 

It’s been months now you’ve been with him and the day never comes. 

...

You didn't dare question it.

But if you did, Simon would just chuckle, amused that you're so eager. Maybe he'll say that he decided he wants some milk from you instead.

[prolibytherium]

I never touched it but I feel like i only ever hear positive things said about song of achilles.. in (rough strokes at least) what makes it dogshit to you?

Okay it's been a while since I actually read it so some of this might not be spot on accurate. Sorry if at any point I say 'the book never does xyz' and it actually does once or twice but I think my underlying criticisms are accurate

-Patroclus is made into like this soft gentle tender quivering little yaoi boy. In the source text, he's shown as compassionate and moved by the suffering of his own men (and apparently having some medical skill, tending to the wounded in the camp), but very much invested n combat and very, very good at it (pages worth of descriptions of the guys he's killing left and right). In this, the arguably more complex character from this 8th century BC text is flattened into Being A Healer, he doesn't want to go to war he just wants to help people, he only goes because Achilles has to but he doesn't want to fight he's a HEALER he's a gentle lover NOT A FIGHTER who just wants to help he just wants to help everyone around him he HEALS while Achilles is a doomed warrior who is so good at fighting and KILLING its a DICHOTOMY GUYS!!!LIKE THE BEAUTIFUL SUN AND MOON DOOMED LOVERS SO SAD patocluse HEALER . (I Think he's specifically characterized as being BAD at fighting but might be misremembering)

-I don't remember much about Achilles' characterization I think it just makes him less of a jackass while not adding anything of interest and levels out into being mad boring.

-Not getting into the literal millenias old debate whether the mythological characters Achilles and Patroclus were being characterized as some type of lover by the original oral sources of the Iliad or its Homeric writers. We will never know. We don't even know what (if any) culturally accepted conventions of male homosexuality existed in bronze age Greece (we know much more about their descendants). But there are some interesting elements of their characterization in this direction, with how unconventional their relationship is WITHIN the text itself- Patroclus is described as cooking for Achilles and his guests (very specifically a woman/wife's job), Achilles chides Patroclus like a father, but there's also scene where Achilles' mourning of him directly echoes a passage of Hector's wife mourning her husband, Patroclus is explicitly stated to Achilles' elder, and is overall treated as his equal or near-equal, closest confidant and most beloved friend (to the point that pederastic classical Greeks would debate over who was erastes (older authority figure lover) and who was eromenos (adolescent 'beloved')- many took it as a given that this text depicted their present-day cultural norms of homosexual behavior but it existed so Outside of these norms that it had to be debated who was who). Their relationship is non-standard both within the text and to the descendants of the civilization that wrote them.

Basically what I'm saying is this book had opportunities to like, explore the unconventionality of the relationship (being presented here as explicitly lovers), explore the dynamics of why Patroclus wants to do 'women's work' (besides being a tenderhearted softboy), the weird dynamics where they take on paternal roles to each other but also roles of wives, how they feel about being this way, and just kind of Doesn't. Which I guess isn't an intrinsic fault (because it omits much of what I just talked about to begin with). it's just like.... Lame. This book takes jsut abandons everything interesting about the source text in favor of flattening it into bland Doomed Yaoi.

-The conflict that sets off the core story of the Iliad is Achilles and Agamemnon fighting over Briseis, an enslaved Trojan woman taken by Achilles as a war-trophy, Achilles spends most of the story moping because he was dishonored by his 'trophy' being taken. Achilles and Patroclus and everyone else are raping their captives, all the women in the story are either captured Trojans (or in the case of the free women within the walls of Troy, soon to be enslaved, and are slave owners themselves). Slavery as an institution and extreme patriarchal conventions are innate to the text and reflective of the context in which it was developed. You cannot avoid it.

But obviously you can't have your soft yaoi boys doing this, so the author has them capturing women to Protect Them from the other men. Their slaves are UNDER THEIR PROTECTION and VERY SAFE (and they might even Like And Befriend Them but I might be misremembering that. Briseis does though). Our heroes have apparently absorbed none of the ideals of the culture they exist in and the author seems to think "they're gay and aren't sexually attracted to their captives" would translate to them being outright benevolent (also as if wartime sexual violence is just about attraction and not part of a wider spectrum of violent acts to dehumanize and brutalize an accepted 'enemy')

In the source text, Briseis mourns Patroclus as being the kindest to her of her captors, who tried to get her a slightly better outcome by getting her married to Achilles (which probably would be the Least Bad of all possible outcomes for a woman in that situation, becoming a legal wife instead of a slave), and wonders what will happen to her now that he's gone. This is a really really sad, horrible, and compelling dynamic which could be fleshed out in very interesting ways but is instead is tossed entirely aside in favor of them being Besties. Like brother and sister.

All of the above pisses me off so much. If you don't want to engage in the icky parts of ancient/bronze age Greece then don't write a retelling of a story taking place in bronze age Greece. I'm not gonna get mad at children's adaptations of Greek myths or silly fun stories loosely based on them for omitting the rape and slavery but it is SO fundamental to the Iliad. If you're not willing to handle it, either fully omit it or better yet set your Iliad inspired yaoi in an invented swords-and-sandals setting where you can have all your heartbreaking tragic doomed lovers plot beats and not have to clumsily write around the women they're brutalizing.

-The author didn't seem to know what to do with Thetis and she made her just like, Achilles bitch mother who spends most of the story trying to separate our Yaoi Boys (iirc her disguising Achilles as a girl and hiding him on Scyros is made to be more about getting him away from Patroclus than trying to save her son from his prophesied doom in the Trojan War) until she sees how much they loooove each other and I think helps Patroclus' spirit get to the afterlife or something in the end?

-This is more of a personal taste gripe but it has that writing style I loathe where the prose feels less like a story and more like an attempt to string together Deep Beautiful Hard Hitting Poetic Lines that will look great as excerpts on booktok (might predate booktok but same vibe). It's all very Pretty and Haunting and Deep but feels devoid of real substance.

I really like The Iliad and The Odyssey in of themselves. They're fascinating historical texts that give a window into how 8th century BC Greeks told their stories, saw their world, interpreted their ancestors, etc. And genuinely I think these texts have 'good' characters, there's a lot of complexity and humanity to it.

WRT the Iliad- all of the main Achaeans are pretty fascinating, the one singular part where Briseis Gets To Talk and laments her situation is great, Achilles fantasizing that all of the Trojans AND the Achaeans die so he and Patroclus alone can have the glory of conquering Troy (wild), Achilles asking to embrace Patroclus' shade and reaching out for him but it's immaterial (and the shade being sucked back underground with a 'squeak' (the squeak kinda gets me it's disturbing and sad)), Hecuba talking about wanting to tear out Achilles' liver and eat it in a (taboo, exceptioally pointed) expression of rage and grief for his mutilation of her son's corpse, just one tiny line where the enslaved women performing ritual wailing for their dead captors are described as using it as an outlet to 'grieve for their own troubles' is heartrending, etc. A lot of grappling with anger and grief and the inevitability of death, a lot of groundwork laid for characters that could be very interesting when expanded upon in the framework of a conventional novel.

And Song Of Achilles really doesn't do much with all that. I know a lot of my gripes here are kind of just "It's different from the Iliad", I would have thought of it as mostly mediocre and forgettable rather than infuriating if it wasn't a retelling (and I DEFINITELY have strong biases here). But I think the ways in which it is different are less just a product of a retelling (of course there's going to be omissions and differences) and more a complete and utter disinterest in vast majority of its own subject matter, to the book's detriment. I think a retelling has a point when it EXPANDS on the source, or provides a NEW ANGLE to the source. This book doesn't Really do either, it just shaves off the complexity of its source material, renders the characters into a really boring archetype of a gay relationship, and gives very little else. Its content boils down to a middling tragic romance that has been inserted into the hollowed out defleshed skeleton of the Iliad.

Bottom line: I definitely would not be as mad about it if I wasn't familiar with the source material but I think it's fair to expect a retelling to Engage with/expand on its source, and I also think it's weak purely on its own merits. This book was set up to disappoint Me specifically.

[aroaceleovaldez]

i hope this doesn't sound like a silly or weird thing to send you, but i'm autistic and have long thought of nico and a handful of other riordanverse characters as autistic and i love your posts about why nico in particular seems intentionally autistic-coded. but i've been thinking, if rick did intend for any of his characters to be autistic, why wouldn't he say so outside of the text at least? i can't think of a good reason why not, when he goes out of his way to be explicit about so many other characters' various marginalized identities and has confirmed things like reyna being asexual outside of the original text. so it gives me this nagging sort of doubt that maybe rick just made nico come off as so extremely autistic coded by accident, somehow. if it wasn't an accident i do kind of wish he'd say so because there's next to zero explicitly stated autistic representation in, like, any media so it'd be nice to have here even if not strictly necessary. either way though, like i said, i love your posts and i agree with you 100% about autistic nico! some others i like to think are autistic are annabeth and leo.

(Most of this is gonna be kind of a tangential ramble to your point and i apologize in advance just bear with me)

This actually touches upon something I've been meaning to do a write-up on recently, which is: depending on the coding, that is our explicit statement. In most coding, actually, that's kind of the point. (Also something something Death of the Author.)

You may have noticed a recent trend across media of characters saying things directly rather than expressing them in a natural way, and often this includes incredibly stilted dialogue of characters explaining things in very politically correct, wikipedia-esque descriptions and terminology that make absolutely no sense for the characters' personalities or mannerisms. This is born out of the idea that if something is not stated in explicit terms, no amount of evidence below an outright direct exact statement will ever count - if two characters of the same gender have an explicit kiss and wedding on-screen, it doesn't matter because they never said the word "gay," etc etc.

In PJO, prior to more recent books, we get plenty of examples of characters explaining parts of their identities without direct statements. Percy never needs to say in outright terms that he has PTSD from Gabe - and it doesn't make sense that he would! He's 12! He's never been diagnosed for that. He probably doesn't even know what PTSD is really. But we, the audience, know without a doubt he has PTSD, because it is clearly expressed to us. That is coding. Tyson is coded as having down syndrome. Nico is coded as being autistic. It doesn't make sense for Nico to turn to the camera and explain that he's autistic and what that means, because he definitely never got diagnosed for it and probably doesn't know what that means cause the diagnosis literally did not exist when he was growing up - and heck, autism terminology was still kind of getting sorted out back in 2007 when TTC was published, so it's unlikely we could have feasibly gotten any exact terminology wink-wink-nudge-nudges short of something like how Percy outright mentions other students called Tyson the r-slur in Sea of Monsters. And in fact we see that same exact style of coding with Nico later on in the series. Nico never turns to the camera and says word-for-word "I am gay, I am mlm, here's me wearing my exact pride flags" (until TOA/TSATS, which... did the exact thing i mentioned about characters speaking like theyre trying to get a good grade in therapy, or giving a powerpoint presentation). But it is never unclear that HoO is telling us outright that Nico is gay. It's not just hinted at. It's there, in your face. But entirely because no one ever outright says "gay" specifically it's technically still only coding. We know he's gay, we know the characters have trauma/ptsd, etc etc. We don't need it spelled out - that's just kind of condescending. It's like if you said describing a character with "eyes like moss" means they were "green-eye coded."

Nico being autistic-coded isn't hidden. It's not a secret. It's very overt. If you know what autism looks like, well, yeah, there he is. Even if you only know very vague 2007 media presentation of autism, Nico in TTC is easily recognizable enough as autistic because that's the point. Tyson is easily recognizable as being coded as having down syndrome and it's very clearly very intentional! It's just never spoon-fed in exact terms to the reader because it's not necessary! You've already been told the information necessary to tell you what is up with this character, so just plainly going "oh they're [x] in exact terms" is very much telling-not-showing and feels redundant. And while there are places for that kind of thing, most of the time it's very unnecessary. Sometimes coding is subtle, sometimes it's obvious, and yeah there are times where writers code characters unintentionally, but the textual evidence is there, and that's the whole point.

And that's what Death of the Author is about - it doesn't matter what the author intended at the end of the day, because if it's in the text it's in the text. You can look at author intent to try and figure out what that text means, but the text is the text. A Separate Peace is a very classic example - author John Knowles denies there being homosexual subtext, and meanwhile one of the protagonists living in 1942 puts on a pink shirt while saying he doesn't mind of people think of him as gay. What the author says after the fact doesn't matter - if it's there, it's there. So Rick saying anything outside of the books is completely irrelevant. And Rick talks about this a lot - he actively tells people that his statements outside of the books are just his own thoughts, but what's in the books is what's in the books, and if the text supports it then that's all the evidence you need.

Nico specifically is a case where yeah, he's clearly autistic-coded. It's very obvious and very obviously intentional when he's younger, and as the books progress it remains a background trait of his but is still notable (except for when it gets forgotten in TOA/TSATS like everything else, including the adhd/dyslexia, but i digress). It's a clear pattern within the first few books that Rick is intentionally including. It doesn't make sense, especially for the year the book was published, for the reader to be directly told in explicit terminology that Nico is autistic, because the reader is already being told that Nico is autistic.

And yeah, Rick doesn't mention Nico being autistic-coded outside of the text, but he also doesn't mention Tyson being coded as having down syndrome. He also said one time that Percy doesn't have PTSD at all, which is very incorrect starting from book 1. Again, Death of the Author. Whatever Rick says outside of the books does not matter, because he already said it in the books. And there's plenty of other stuff in the books that Rick doesn't touch upon, particularly relating to character identity - did you know Leo is Native? Sammy mentions that the Valdez family is Native in Son of Neptune but we don't get any specifics and then it's like never brought up again anywhere. That happens all the time in the series - and outside of the series - Rick can't possibly address every single point to confirm/deny everything from the books. That's what analysis is for! And that's why my blog exists 👍

[danzainosolitude]

Once again I read fanfiction that seems to have been precisely written to deal psychic damage to me.

[starsamongskies]

yk what trope i just fucking eat up in fics, titans tower au’s where jason realises midway through beating up tim that he’s just like the joker and he has a fucking panic attack and runs away, i love that shit

[succulent-stuff]

hell yeah new kitagoro fic! and its so good!!!

[voidimp]

honestly as someone who never really got into lotr but independently also came up with the idea that the most sensible way to handwave everyone in a fictional setting speaking english & using terms that would have no reason to have originated in that setting is to just pretend its all a translation/localization of whatever language theyre actually speaking, it was such a relief to learn that tolkien also did that. like oh ok so im not crazy for wanting to do it that way. or like, maybe i am, but at least in the same way that a wildly successful fantasy author was, so i think im good

[life-series-losers-blog]

Is red winner grian or double life grian??

****

[that-disabled-princess]

⭐? for the fanfiction ask game thing. if you want to. ^_^

Whoo BOY, thanks for the ask! Well, the fic I'm dying to talk about is very very NSFW, so I'll pick another one! I'll give a director's commentary on Who we're supposed to be 💖 I have so many Aro Thoughts (and other thoughts) that never got expanded upon in the fic because it would've taken away from Baz's story too much.

Buckle up: I had Thoughts. And we're getting personal, baby! (While still staying in the "I'm being safe on the internet" zone.) This fic means so much to me because I drew on my own experiences for it and because I've always wanted to write a fic that explores aromanticism.

I started writing this fic under a week before Baz's birthday because I had the sudden realization that Baz's birthday falls during aro week. That got me thinking--what if I wrote a fic where Baz realizes he aromantic?

I jotted down some quick notes for myself at first, mainly general tags and themes to write about. I knew I wanted it to be post canon, and I wanted it to be a fic about self-discovery, but that was about it.

I bolted upright in bed while on the verge of sleep, mere days before Baz's birthday, with the first line in my head. (My doc history says it was 11pm haha.) I grabbed my phone and wrote several paragraphs down... then spent the next day or two agonizing about where to take the fic. This fic meant so much to me, and I wanted to write the very best version of it I could.

Baz questioning himself with all those little moments in his and Simon's history is so similar to my own questioning.

"But I was so sure I had a crush on this person!"

"But I dated someone!"

"But I kissed someone!"

"But we've had sex!"

"Am I allowed to call myself aromantic after [insert action usually classified as romantic]?"

"Will they still want to be around me?"

"What will society think?"

And the list. Goes. On.

Using the word concluding in the sentence "Concluding I'm in love with him by fifth year" was an intentional choice I'd given thought to. The word was originally realizing, which just didn't feel right, but I couldn't think of a better word to use. I was ready to give up and just say "good enough" when @bazzybelle pointed it out, and the word conclude popped into my head.

And isn't that just accurate. I don't speak for all aros, but concluding we have a crush on someone, concluding we must be in love with someone, concluding we must want to date them... it really screams how amatonormative our society is. And yeah, Baz is attracted to Simon! He does adore Simon! I wrote some aroallo rep into this fic!

But Baz isn't attracted to Simon in the way society says he should be. He's not in love with them. (@martsonmars you were so right in saying we need to burn the world to the ground xD)

I loved going into detail about Baz's physical and aesthetic attraction to Simon. I wrote this based on my own experiences, and physical and aesthetic attraction is something I experience! (If you're someone I'm really comfortable with, I can be a very touchy person. I love cuddles.) Belle put it really well in their comment on the doc--physical attraction and caring deeply about someone doesn't equal romantic love. We all have different ways we experience attraction and different ways we care for people, and that's perfectly okay!

Baz is right--it is so incredibly strange realizing and acknowledging that you go against society's norms and structures. Acknowledging you're different. But Simon's right, Baz! Different doesn't mean worse at all. You're still you, you're still beautiful, you're still a wonderful person. (I love Simon's wings and tail and Baz's vampirism being disability parallels for this reason.)

Writing Baz freaking out and running away hurt my heart. I despise beating around the bush and prefer facing conflict head-on, but running away from my sexual/romantic orientation was something I did a lot as a baby queer. Especially with my bisexuality and asexuality. Poor Baz is struggling so much with imposter syndrome and internalized arophobia right now.

Arospec Aggie! Agatha was so heavily arospec-coded in the first two books, I got whiplash when she kissed Niamh in the third. All of a sudden, it was like her being aspec-coded didn't exist anymore. I was honestly disappointed.

Like... did that really just happen? Was her entire characterization in the first two books all for naught? Was this the plan all along? This is the reason I love how, in the epilogue, we don't know if Agatha and Niamh are still a Thing! It's open to reader interpretation!

I've come to enjoy brobelove, but aro Agatha will always have a special place in my heart. I purposefully left it open to interpretation where on the aromantic spectrum Agatha falls, and if her and Niamh are in a relationship or not.

All of Agatha's advice to Baz are things I would tell a baby aro me. For so much of this fic, I was thinking "What would I say to a younger, baby aro me?" (Whiiiich, of course, meant I cried like a baby the entire time I was writing this fic.) I sat for a while just thinking about my experiences as an aromantic queer and what it was like thinking I'd felt all this romantic attraction, thinking I'd done all the right romantic things, thinking I'd dated the right people, thinking I'd done what society wanted...

Everything I thought I was supposed to do.

Fuck society. Fuck whatever expectations society and your parents and your friends place on you. Fuck them. You're allowed to do what's right for you.

You're still allowed to be happy and find happiness.

Man, I wish someone would've told baby queer me that. I'm so happy I got to give Baz the queer emotional support I never had. I am so thankful to the friends that have helped me through all my queer identity crises, and I'm glad I got to give Baz that, too.

Plus--Baz and Agatha friendship! Who doesn't love their friendship?

Baz's journey is very similar to what my own was like. I read about aromanticism, sought out aromantic characters in books and movies and TV shows, talked to friends about it. And Loveless? An absolutely amazing book. I highly recommend it to anyone who's aspec.

The Baz reading poetry bit was inspired by me writing poetry about aromanticism and being aromantic haha. I've written several poems about aromanticism and amatonormativity.

His reflections are also similar to what my own were like. I was never in a proper relationship, but I did have crushes and did "date" people. (I use the word date loosely--we never actually went out and they were both shitty people.) I experienced attraction, too... just not the kind society expected me to experience. Growing up being different than everyone else around you is hard. And when you have shit parental figures you can't turn to? Even harder.

Oh, the "Good parts, bad ones, everything in between" line! This comes from a great song from the movie Purple Hearts. The song is, as with most songs, literally about romance (though, it does make me think about how I adore my best friend), but I love the line "you loved my everything / the good, the bad, the in between." I think of that line a lot. It's made its way into a couple of my snowbaz fics before actually.

And ace Mordelia! I absolutely adore queer Mordelia, and I love queer Mordelia having big queer brother Baz there to turn to <33

Oof, the coming out scene. This was a hard one to write. I was already crying by the time I hit this scene, but writing the coming out from Baz's POV--really, the main and only POV I wanted to do for this fic--turned the tears from a river to a waterfall. I sobbed my way through writing this fic, and I enjoyed every minute of getting to tell Baz's story.

Be brave, Baz! Light a match and blow on the tinder. I've always taken that saying of Natasha's to mean "be brave."

Okay, so love vs adore... To me, love is an overused cliche word. (No hate to anyone who likes it, this is just my opinion.) I'm also loveless, so... yeah. I'm suuuper uncomfortable with people telling me they love me and telling people I love them. (This also probably has a lot to do with pieces of my past I'd rather not discuss on the internet lol.) I prefer when people use the word adore! To me, adore is a much more beautiful word. I think it's so much more meaningful and special, which is why when I'm talking about something I truly adore, I'll use... well. Adore.

It's also why I put Baz telling Simon he adores them after telling Simon he loves them. (Every word in this fic was chosen carefully. This fic could not be more over-analyzed even if an English teacher was analyzing it xD) (At least I know exactly what the author intended lmao.)

Simon already understands what aromanticism and asexuality are in this fic! He has a frame of reference already because Mordelia is asexual and Agatha is arospec. I wasn't quite sure where to go with Simon's reaction to Baz coming out until I put two and two together and went "Wait, they already know aspec people." (Thanks @tea-brigade for helping me figure that one out!) Being able to give Baz a caring and supportive partner was wonderful.

QPRs are one of my favorite things. It's beautiful how many ways relationships and queer people just exist. Queerness is beautiful.

Sweet Simon's rambling questions. Those questions were inspired by the own questions that have been running through my mind about getting into a QPR.

"Where would I feel comfortable being kissed?"

"What pet names would be okay?"

"What would I want to be referred to as?"

"What about cuddles?"

"What about sex?"

And, once again: the list goes on.

How Simon handled Baz coming out was important to me. It was important that Simon was still an adoring and supportive boyfriend, even while both they and Baz were figuring things out.

Aroallo Baz is also so important to me. Aroallo rep for the win!

Baz is so right--cuddles are The Best. And he deserves to be at peace and feel comfortable with himself.

Ugh I need an aro blanket now. I have my stars blanket, but I need more blankets for my blanket mountain!

Baz hugging Simon at the very end and having that be the last line was an intentional choice. So many movies, even non-romance ones, all end with kisses. And for what? For a nice neat little bow on top? For your little cliche tropey romance plot? (Not saying all movies are like this, this is just what I've seen overall.) I liked ending it with a hug instead of the overused kiss ending. Endings are something I used to really struggle with, and being able to branch out and write fics without ending them with "I love you"s or kisses feels great! (It also means I can now end a lil sweet and silly fic with an "I love you" or a silly lil kiss and have fun with it.)

I really loved shaking things up in this fic. In terms of writing about queerness, giving Simon and Baz the opportunity to just exist, and playing around in the big ol' "fuck amatonormativity" sandbox.

It was an honor to be able to write a fic about something so near and dear to my heart and to have it reach so many arospec people. I've been wanting to write a fic about aromanticism for a long time. I'm glad I was able to do that.

I adore this fic, and I hope y'all could find a piece of yourself in it, too 💖💖

Some quick non-aro-related thoughts!

A little nod to trans he/they Simon! I just love the image of Simon all splayed out on the bed, allowing himself to take up space. Both trans!Simon and Simon having a tummy mean so much to me.

And a nod to Baz having chronic pain! I have chronic leg pain myself, so I love seeing Baz having trouble with his leg after the numpties in fanfic. Plus--it's right there in canon! He's canonically disabled for a time! After becoming disabled myself, Simon healing Baz's leg with his ✨god-like magic✨ just weirds me out. But I'll spare you my thoughts.

The pumpkin scones! One of my favorite personal headcanons is that Baz's favorite food is pumpkin scones. I also love the thought of Simon making Baz pumpkin scones on bad days to cheer him up, or as a celebration for something he achieved.

I also love the thought of Simon crocheting. I wrote Simon as a crocheter in last year's COTTA fic, and I've loved this idea ever since! Simon gets to make all the crochet blankets for their partner, and Baz gets to snuggle under the mountain of blankets his partner made him.

Baz's "Fang-tastic!" mug! I adore that mug. Another one of my absolute favorite headcanons is that Simon bought Baz that custom mug 🥰

And Baz needs more friends lol. Let the man live! Let the man have uni and orchestra friends! Let the man join Discord servers and fangirl over the most recent classic book he read! (I would love to see that fic actually.)

"Down, boy" makes me laugh out loud every time I read it. It's just so goddamn funny. Spadey has a mind of his own, and we love that for him xD

[nateslehky]

i love leaving long comments on fics!!!

[gorbo-longstocking]

Also idk if we have different time zones or something but it says you last updated nemesis and nike on the 10th but it’s literally the 9th for me? 😭 That confused me so hard

wait fr? thats so odd because im in the est timezone and its the tenth in like… two minutes as i write this. maybe ao3 thinks im in the wrong timezone or something???? because i dont really mess with anything when i post save for the authors note or slapping the chapter down.

[softguarnere]

22, 54, 74 please!

Hi friend! Thanks so much for the ask 😁

22. Are there certain types of writing you won’t do? (style, pov, genre, tropes, etc)

I don't like writing fics from a first person pov, so I generally avoid doing it. Other than that, I'm pretty game to try anything at least once

54. What’s your favorite part about the fanfiction writing process?

Oooohhh okay, you know when you get a really good idea that you can see so clearly in your head, and then when you finally get the chance to write, it comes out on the page so smoothly? I live for that feeling. (bonus points if I end up getting comments about that particular part - it makes me feel like I've hit the mark)

74. You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?

The way this question now has me highkey wanting to anonymously post a fic just to see what happens lol It's no secret around these parts that I use and abuse italics like there's no tomorrow. This might just be me overthinking it, but I feel like I use "maybe" and "especially" a lot in my writing for some reason. I would be caught red-handed in no time

For this ask game!

[distortedclouds]

[writtenbygrimes]

The Othering of Language

A discussion on the use of dialogue and language in novels. #language #power #dialogue #sharonbala #theboatpeople #robertludlum #thebournetrilogy #umbertoeco #thenameoftherose

This past weekend, I attended a workshop put on by The FOLD, The Festival of Literary Diversity. The author of the award-winning novel, The Boat People, Sharon Bala, was the speaker. The workshop, titled Mastering Dialogue, provided wonderful examples to illustrate the many delicious layers of dialogue and how authors use dialogue in various ways to show power dynamics, address elephants in the…

[itsallyscorner]

At Fault | MV1

pairing: Max Verstappen x reader

summary: Max invites his ex to a gp and upsets you. Soft and stubborn Max, but he’s a cutie. A mix between angst and fluff, but mostly fluff towards the end. Lots of reader just ranting. Plus a little cameo from the Ferrari WAGs <3.

warnings: Does Kelly count as a warning? Kinda of toxic, I’m not really sure? But who actually likes seeing their boyfriend’s ex girlfriend??

author’s note: Italics are flashbacks! This turned out longer than expected, but I hope you guys like it! It’s also been a while since I’ve written fics, so it there are any errors pls ignore them😭

The tension in the car was thick. So thick, Max believed he could cut it with a knife.

Your arms were crossed as you stared out the window while Max glanced at you wearily every other second. Thankfully, there were only three of you in the car. You and Max in the backseat, and the driver in front being separated by a divider. Though, Max was sure the driver was able to hear the current disagreement between you and him.

Max fidgeted with the lanyard of his paddock pass and stared at the side of your face. He knew he had upset you and honestly you had every right to be. You were biting the inside of your cheek in frustration trying to keep your emotions at bay. As much as you wanted to argue with Max about how you disagreed with his actions, he was due to race in a couple of hours and you didn’t want to add any more stress on his shoulders.

But Max wanted to talk about this now while you were both alone.

“Schatje, are you really mad?” Max asked quietly, leaning closer to you and trying to get you to face him. He truly didn’t mean to dampen your mood before the race. Most importantly, he didn’t like that he was the reason for you being upset. Your brows furrowed ever so slightly and a faint pout was on your lips, both indications that you were in fact not happy with him.

“Yes, Max, I am mad.��� You answered, your voice trembling a bit. You had finally turned away from the window and were looking at him. Max felt a pang of guilt in his heart once he saw the look in your eyes. They weren’t glaring at him with the heat of anger, but they were soft and glossy, you were hurt—he hurt you.

Max cautiously reached out for your hand and tangled your fingers together, though your hand felt limp, like you didn’t want to hold his hand at all.

“I told you the truth.” Max said, leaning his head down trying to catch your eyes again. You took in a deep breath before turning to fully face him.

“Yes Max, you did and I absolutely appreciate it. I really do.” You began, grasping his hand between yours. “But that doesn’t make up for that fact that you’ve had this planned out for nearly a month and only told me thirty minutes ago!” You argued.

Thirty minutes ago, before your ride to the paddock can pick you guys up, Max had revealed that his ex-girlfriend, Kelly, and her daughter would be at the garage to watch the race. When you asked how they got passes to the garage, he shared that he had flown them out and provided them with passes for the weekend.

“So she’s been here all weekend?” You questioned him, arms crossed and a brow raised at him. The Italian heat felt even ten times worse as you grew frustrated with your boyfriend.

“Yeah, but they were at the Paddock Club, they’re going to watch the race from the garage though.” Max shrugged, as if it were not a big deal. He adjusted the bag on his shoulder and grasped your hand in his free one.

You couldn’t help the feeling of insecurity seeping into your bones. Kelly was rich and gorgeous, she was a model, and you weren’t. You had a normal job that offered you stability, paid you good money, and you knew how to clean up nice. However, you were no where near her level of anything or any of the other WAGs at that.

“You’ve known this whole time that she was here?” You asked quietly, your brows furrowed at him. You hated that you kept asking him questions, it was like you were interrogating him.

Max looked down at you, confusion etched on his face, “I did, schatje. I flew them out and got them some paddock passes.” You acted before you could speak, and shook your head at him, rolling your eyes in annoyance. Your boyfriend was one of the sweetest people you’ve ever met, however, many people took that as a sign to take advantage of him. While it took him longer to realize it, you noticed it instantly.

“I don’t understand why you’re so upset though, I told you the truth, it’s not like I’m doing anything with her.” Max defended himself, his hands wildly moving around. “She reached out telling me that P missed me and wanted to come to a race, it’s not for her, it’s for Penelope.”

“I understand that Max and as harsh as this sounds, Penelope isn’t your responsibility. I get that you helped raise her, but you guys broke up, you don’t need to provide for her anymore.” You threw a hand in the air, emphasizing your point. “Kelly’s fully capable of flying herself out and buying tickets to a race weekend.”

“I was just being nice.” Max raised his voice, also growing frustrated with the situation.

“And she’s still using you!” You fumed, tears welled in the corner of your eyes. “How many times does she have to use you for you to realize it? You guys broke up and she still manages to get what she wants out of you! Do you know how embarrassing it is to walk in and see her there?” You tried to reason with him. While many of his fans didn’t approve of Kelly, you knew Twitter would have a field day clowning you when they find out Kelly was present in the garage. Social media was never always a nice place and you’ve learned to ignore it, but that didn’t mean it stopped the hate from happening.

Max ran a hand through his hair and sighed.

“This is ridiculous.” He muttered under his breath, you scoffed and leaned back into your seat, staring at the window again.

“Do you not trust me?” Max asked forcibly, staring at the side of your head again. You let out a defeated sigh and turn your head to look at him, “I do trust you, Max.”

Max’s shoulders slouched as he leaned on the seat sideways, his body fully turned to you.

“Then why do you not trust me with this?” He pushed, nudging your knee with his, trying to get an answer out of you. He knew he was at fault and he just wanted to make it right.

“I don’t trust her.” You simply answered, feeling done with the conversation. The car turned, nearing the entrance of the paddock. You sniffled as you untucked your hair from behind your ears, removing your sunglasses from the top of your head.

“You don’t have to worry about her, schatje. I want you not her, there’s a reason why we broke up.” Max reassured, trying to ease the tension between the two of you.

The car came to a halt, a knock came from the driver, indicating that you guys arrived at the paddock. Before you could leave, you turned to Max and said, “Yet, she’s still here.”

ଓ⋆˙⟡₊ ⊹

Entering the paddock was always a frenzy. The moment you stepped out the car, fans were quick to recognize you, knowing that one of their favorite drivers were right behind you. You slid your sunglasses on and smoothed out the white maxi dress you wore. Max followed in suit and flashed a smile at the fans.

Shouldering his bag, he held his hand out to you, “I know you’re upset, but can I please hold your hand?”

You nodded and entangled your fingers with his. The two of you began your walk into the paddock hand in hand, as fans screamed and waved at Max. He gave your hand a squeeze before guiding you guys to some of the barricades and signing a few things for the fans.

After you guys scanned your passes, Max led you guys to the Red Bull garage. However, you came to a halt. Max was quick to look back at you, “You okay?”

“Yeah—I’m gonna meet up with Alex and Rebecca, if that’s okay? We were planning on seeing each other before the race.” You tell him. A small pout formed on Max’s lips, “Oh, okay, I’ll drop you off.” He offered, still holding your hand.

You and the girls decided to meet up at the Paddock Club. In front of the entrance, Max stood in front of you.

“You’ll come to the garage to watch, right? I need you there.” He asked quietly, so that people passing by cannot hear your conversation.

You nodded, “Yeah, I’ll be there before you’re in the car.”

Max mirrored your actions, “Okay, I love you.” He pulled you in by the waist and pressed a kiss onto your forehead. You squeezed his waist in response, “I love you too.”

Max watched as you entered the building, huffing to himself, while he watched you walk further and further into the building.

Placing your sunglasses above your head, you scan the room until you see one of the girls, Alex was the first to spot you, standing in her spot and waving at you to come over.

“Coucou mon amour!” She greeted you, (Hello, my love!) immediately wrapping you in a hug. You squeal as she squeezed you, “Helloo!” You giggled. You go to greet Rebecca, who is immediately giving you a knowing look. Being the older one amongst the three of you, she was often looked up to as the older sister.

She wrapped an arm around you and smoothed your back, “What’s wrong?” She asked while you got situated in the chair beside her.

You shook your head, “It’s just Max.”

Rebecca grabbed the bottle of champagne on the table and poured some into a flute glass. She offered you the glass, “Thank you, I needed this.”

She smiled watching you take a long sip from the glass, “Oh honey, I know.”

Alex pouted and nudged your foot with hers, “What happened with Max?”

“He invited Kelly to watch the race at the garage today.” You bluntly shared, slumping yourself in your chair.

Rebecca’s eyes widened, “Shut up.”

You raised a brow at her, “Oh, I didn’t even get to the kicker yet.”

Alex’s brows raised, “Which is?”

“He flew her out—he fucking flew her out and gave her tickets for the entire weekend.” You revealed through gritted teeth, still being aware of your surroundings. Rebecca cursed under her breath as Alex took your glass and refilled it with champagne.

Grabbing the glass, you continued, “She’s literally been here all weekend and he only told me this morning. I just don’t get it, they broke up, I don’t know why he’s still so concerned about her.” You took another long sip of champagne,

“What was the reason why?” Rebecca asked you.

“Apparently Penelope missed him—which I can believe, but did he really have to do all the providing when she can financially support herself? I get that he was trying to be nice, but still.” You grunt, fiddling with your glass.

Alex comfortingly rubbed your arm, “No, I get it, if Charles did the same thing with his ex, I’d also be upset.”

“I literally told him that she’s using him once again.” You threw your hands up. “If he wants her to be there so much, he might as well just get back with her. Like—am I crazy for losing my mind at the fact they were in contact with each other, even if it wasn’t in a romantic sense?”

Rebecca shook her head, “No, your feelings are absolutely valid. You’re just concerned and it obviously caught you off guard. He shouldn’t have been texting his ex in the first place.”

You groaned and held your head in your hands, “I hate feeling like this, it makes me question if he actually wants to be with me or not.”

Rebecca held her finger up, “I’m gonna stop you right there.” Placing her hand on your shoulder she says, “Max might be acting very stupid right now, but one thing I know for sure is that Max loves you and absolutely adores you. Without a doubt.”

Alex nodded, agreeing with Rebecca, “Like have you seen the way he looks at you? He literally worships the ground you walk on. I’m sure he’s beating himself up right now for doing what he did.”

“He loves you, (y/n), everyone who’s seen you guys together knows it. I don’t think he’d put himself in this kind of position on purpose, you’ve got that man wrapped around your finger, babe.” Rebecca reassured you, throwing her arm around your shoulder and pulling you into another hug.

“Come on cheer up, who cares if she’s in the garage today? You’re the one he’s gonna be going home with tonight.” You laughed shaking your head at her teasing.

“Hey! Tonight and every single night!” Alex pointed out raising her glass at you.

ଓ⋆˙⟡₊ ⊹

Two hours. It’s been two hours since Max has dropped you off at the Paddock Club and he still hasn’t heard back from you. He’s been distracted all day. During a meeting with Christian and some of the engineers, he couldn’t help but constantly check for a text from you, earning himself a scolding from the team principal. Checo and a couple of people from the team tried talking to him, but he wasn’t paying attention. His eyes wandered wondering when you would enter the garage.

He did in fact see Kelly and P—obviously he was expecting to see them since he invited them, but all he felt while talking to them was guilt. Guilty because he remembered the look of hurt and betrayal in your eyes and how he was the reason behind it. He hated it, he felt grimy, and dirty for going behind your back and texting Kelly. Not even ten minutes into catching up with the mother and daughter, Max realized that you were in fact correct. Kelly had used him again, instantly making advances on him despite knowing he was happily taken. But for the sake of P, Max made sure to be friendly though kept his distance to not feed into her mother’s schemes.

It was nearing lights out and you were still not in the garage. He had gone through his warm ups with Bradley, had his fireproofs and suit on, and even laced up his shoes. Still, no sight of you whatsoever in the garage. He was beginning to worry about you, sending you a couple of messages to your phone.

The car was due to be on the grid and there was about half an hour left till lights out. Max looked around the bustling garage, checking to see if you had snuck in without him seeing, though to no avail, you still weren’t there.

“Max…Max…Max?” GP tried to get Max’s attention. Snapping a finger in front of the driver’s face, Max’s eyes flickered over to his race engineer.

“What do you want now?” Max groaned, throwing his head back. To onlookers, it looked like a typical interaction between Max and GP. Though, GP felt like he was babysitting a child whose attention span couldn’t focus on one thing for more than a few seconds.

“Mate, I’ve been talking to you for the past five minutes.” GP claimed. Choosing to ignore the information he had just “briefed” Max on, he decided to be a friend.

“Where’s your head at?” GP asked Max. The Dutch man sighed, leaning against one of the storage units in the garage.

“I messed up with (y/n). I did something and it was my fault, I know it was. But she’s not happy with me at the moment and I just want to make it right.” Max summarized, not sharing any more details to protect the privacy of your relationship.

GP motioned towards Kelly who was talking to one of the other influencers in the garage, “Does it have to deal with that?”

“Unfortunately.” Max mumbled, crossing his arms and choosing to stare at the floor.

GP took a minute to stare at his driver. Max was deflated, he wasn’t as hyped for the race or over explaining some random fact about god knows what. Instead, Max kept to himself, greeting people when he had to and communicating with his team prior to the race. Other than that, Max chose to stare at his phone and look longingly outside the garage.

“Listen, I don’t know what exactly went down. But I’ve seen you with (y/n) and she clearly makes you happy, we’ve all see how lively you are with her around. You’ve got a lot of groveling to do bud, but it’ll be worth it.” GP advised, clapping Max on the back to wake him up.

“She’ll always be worth it.” Max quietly said, taking another glimpse at his phone. Only to be met with his wallpaper of you and him, with no notifications.

ଓ⋆˙⟡₊ ⊹

Christian Horner stared at his monitor at the pit wall watching as drivers and their teams gathered on the grid. He saw Checo by his car, taking a few sips of water before the race. When the camera panned to Max’s Red Bull, the driver was no where to be seen. Sparing him a second of wondering where his driver was, the camera cut to the garage where Max stood, race suit at his waist, looking no where near ready to participate in the race.

“Why is Max not in the car?” He turned to GP, stress evident on his face. GP turned in his seat and looked back into the garage to see Max pacing. Cursing under his breath, he excused himself from Christian and rushed to Max.

“Max, the race is literally about to start!”

Max stops his pacing and places his hands at his hips, “I need my girlfriend.”

“What?” Bradley and GP both stuttered out. Max deadpanned at the two men in front of him.

“(Y/n), I need to see her before the race.” Max demanded. Bradley pinched the bridge of his nose, “Max, she’ll be here after the race, you’ll be fine.” He pushed the balaclava towards Max’s chest, who simply let the mask fall at his feet.

GP sighed at Max, before calling one of the Red Bull employees.

“Please send out a search for (y/n), Max is refusing to get in the car.” He whispered to the intern. The girl looked at him confusingly but nodded and set out the garage.

ଓ⋆˙⟡₊ ⊹

You rushed as best as you could in kitten heels towards the Red Bull garage. You were supposed to be at the garage at least half an hour ago. You and the girls got caught up catching up with each other’s lives that none of you realized it was getting close to lights out. It truly was a funny sight, the three of you rushing out of the Paddock Club and running through the paddock like a bunch of maniacs.

“(Y/n)!” You heard someone yell. You stopped in your steps and looked around, only to see a girl dressed in Red Bull uniform. You recognized her, you believed her name was Nicole and was an intern for the team this season.

“Hey! Is Max on the grid already?” You approached her, a little sad that you missed seeing him before the race.

“No, he’s actually waiting for you. They’re sending out a search for you because he’s refusing to get in the car.” Nicole explained, placing a gentle hand on your back and guiding you through the crowd of fans and towards the garage.

ଓ⋆˙⟡₊ ⊹

GP released a sigh of relief once he saw you enter the garage. He shoved Max’s shoulder to avert his attention to you.

“What—oh,” Max began, only to stop himself and rush towards you. You met him half way, placing a hand on his elbow.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t meant to stay there for too long.” You quickly apologized. Max shook his head, “I don’t care, I’m just happy you’re here.”

Your brows furrowed at him, “Why are you here? Why aren’t you in the car yet?”

Max placed both his hands on your waist with a faint blush on his cheeks, “I need my goodluck kiss.”

You paused your actions, “You’re kidding me. Max, the race is about to start in five minutes!” You scolded your boyfriend.

“Please, schatje.” He pleaded, leaning closer towards you. Other team members and guests watched the both of you, the scene in front of them peaking their interests.

You gazed up at his stormy eyes, giving in because you knew he was stubborn and wouldn’t stop until he got his way. Plus, the team would hate you if you lowered their chances of scoring points this weekend.

“Just because I kiss you doesn’t mean I’m not mad at you anymore.” You clarified quietly. His forehead nodded against yours, “I know schatje. I promise to make it up to you, I really do.”

A small smile forms on your lips, “I know, Maxie.”

Max takes that as his sign to crash his lips onto yours. One of his hands support the back of your neck while the other rests on your lower back. You smile against his lips, pulling back and placing a peck right above the small mole on his upper lip.

“I love you.” You whispered to him.

“I love you too.” He whispered back. Before you can fully pull away from him he quickly adds, “I’m serious about my promise.”

“I know, baby.” You squeeze him comfortingly. “Now get out there and win the race. Stay safe.”

He pressed a kiss to your forehead as both you and GP ushered him towards his gear that’s been waiting to be put on.

ଓ⋆˙⟡₊ ⊹

A man of his word, Max won the race. With at least a five second gap between him and Lando, your boy was top step yet once again. As much as he won, the thrill of seeing him win and crossing the finish line never got old. You celebrated every win of his as if it were his first. You’d always be proud of him, whether he got pole or not.

Many of the engineers and members of the team began to rush towards the grid, eager to greet Max once he got out the car.

Looking around, you suddenly make eye contact with Kelly, who seemed to have been sizing you up. You weren’t really sure what look was on her face, but the hints of a snarl were on her lips. With her nose stuck up in the air, you watched as she carried her daughter and began to follow the rest of the team.

“Don’t mind her. You’re the one he wants to see when he gets out that car.” A voice said from beside you. You jumped, coming face to face with Christian. Your eyes widened at your boyfriend’s boss. Prior to the race, he was informed of the search party the entire team had for you to get Max in the car. While he was annoyed earlier, he thought it was rather cute that Max was so fond of you.

“You know, he’s never begged her for a good luck kiss.” Said Christian, a knowing look on his features. “You on the other hand—he can’t seem to function whenever you’re not around.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know he was gonna put that much of a fight earlier today.” You apologized, feeling a bit flustered. “He’s a bit stubborn sometimes.” You added, to which Christian chuckled at.

“Oh, I know. Max and I have worked together for years.” He stated. He glanced out the garage and motioned towards it, “C’mon now, I’m sure he’s already looking for you.”

ଓ⋆˙⟡₊ ⊹

You make your way through the crowd of Red Bull members, many of them recognizing you and helping you squeeze through till you were at the very front of the barricade.

Max was already out, helmet in his hand, while his other embraced GP and a couple other engineers. You watched as he high-fived Penelope, barely sparing a glance at her mother. A little burst of pride went off in your stomach, you couldn’t help it.

His blue orbs scanned the crowd of red and blue, looking for you. You yell his name, his eyes immediately finding yours. A smile breaks out on his face as he rushed over to you, dropping his helmet in the process. Despite the barricade between you two, he wraps both his arms tightly around you, lifting you off the ground.

“Max!” You squealed, your arms wrapping around his neck. His large hand found your cheek, slightly pulling you away from his neck so he can connect his lips with yours. Naturally, your lips moulded perfectly against his moving in synch. The team erupted in cheers around you.

“I’m so proud of you!” You tell him once your lips separate.

“I couldn’t have done it without you.” He grins, gently pinching your bottom lip between his pointer finger and thumb.

He couldn’t stay long, being told that he had to get to the podium for the trophy ceremony.

“I’ll see you after the podium, schatje!” He yelled with a wink over his shoulder, causing a blush to form on your cheeks.

ଓ⋆˙⟡₊ ⊹

The ceremony and the media tent took a while, you finally got to see Max an hour later. You were sitting in his driver’s room, when he bursted through the door already looking for you.

You stood up, smiling at him, “Hey.”

He mirrors your smile. Placing the trophy on the couch he opens his arms for you. You walk into the comfort of his hold, burying your head into the crook of his neck and wrapping your arms around his torso.

Finally it was just the two of you.

“I’m sorry.” You said, though it came out muffled against his skin. Max’s hands stopped the circular motions they were rubbing on your back.

“For what?”

You pulled back looking at him, “I overreacted about the whole Kelly thing. I should’ve taken your word for it.”

Max immediately shook his head, disagreeing with you. “No, you were absolutely right about her. I should’ve listened to you from the beginning. The moment I said hi to them she was already trying to come onto me—I avoided her by the way, I just entertained P.”

“I’m also sorry for what I said about P. I was in the wrong for that comment.” You said, a small grimace on your face when you remembered the off hand comment you made about the poor child.

Max chuckled, “Schatje, seriously, it’s okay.”

His calloused hands were rough against the soft skin of your face. He tucked a strand of hair behind your ear and cradled your jaw in his hand.

“I may have a soft spot for P, but they’re in my past. You’re my future, (y/n). The future that I only want and see myself in.” Max admitted. Your eyes gleamed at him, “You’re the future I want too, Maxie.”

“Good because you’re not getting rid of me that easily. You’re stuck with me.” He joked, squeezing your cheeks.

“I love you. So much. I know it seemed like I didn’t trust you today, but I want you to know that I do. I fully trust you with my life and I mean it.” You said, your fingers playing with the ends of his hair at the nape of his neck.

Max nodded, “I believe you. I love you too.”

The two of you basked in the silence and comfort of being in each others arms. Max was the first one to break the silence, “You don’t have plans after this right?”

You hummed against his neck, “Besides celebrating your win, nothing. Why?”

“Because I’m taking you out on a date.” Max proudly announced, a goofy smile on his lips.

“Don’t you wanna celebrate with the team?” You asked him. Max shook his head, “Nope, the only person I want to celebrate with tonight is you.”

You giggled at Max’s antics, “Whatever you say, Champ.”