#jk I live for whimsy

[puckspoetry]

I really hate what Cameron did in this scene but I can’t lie, his eyelashes were eating 😍

[triglycercule]

alright i finished this so i need to celebrate my accomplishment (???) by sharing it to the world

BETTER versions of my trio designs. because boo boo the other old ones were BORING and TOO SIMPLE and lowhighkey UGLY. i had no idea what i was thinking when i made this but i guess design notes before to see if i can figure out what the fuck these mean 💀

killer🔪:3

he got a GLOW UP!!! when i was figuring him out i was thinking like. this man needs to look combat ready he CANNOT look chill and relaxed he MUST look good to fight. killer can't catch a break 💀 anyways. it's ALSO not revealing (⁎˃ᴗ˂⁎) because i feel he would NOT wear that stuff cmon flirty =/= revealing. his charms are found through his words and actions (stabbing someone through the heart) (speaking of the heart i couldn't be bothered to draw his soul mb)

the gloves/shirt/leggings under his clothes may LOOK seperate. but its actually all one big piece!!! because i thought it would be silly and funny :3 but like on a serious note i like this because it provides an extra layer of protection (both in a fight and not) and like. a sense of anonymity i guess??? like you can't see killer's natural body you cant SEE who he was before because hes changed that much (or i guess HE cant see who he was b4 wtvr)

actually a lot of killer's outfit has meaning behind it. knee pads = unnatural body imitation killer is a whole new being now not monster (also adding 2 the combat look :3) belts = restraint killer needs to stay in line and do as he's ordered (i needed some visual interest 💀) zippers on shoes?? actually no meaning i just thought it would be cute. somehow i managed to find meanings 4 all of the trio's zippers. killer's is jammed in that spot. show like idk he is irreversibly changed to what he is now (a lot of this makes no sense)

horror 🪓 :3

if you remove all the rips in the clothes he'd be the most basic out of all of them. but theyre there so he's NOT the most basic! 4 horror i was thinking like "you can see he's fucked up but you can also see he's desperately trying to keep it together" type feel. i totally didnt steal those under socket lines (thank you mania and paranoia for donating to your og versions :3) to make horror look more 🌀🌀🌀 (cannot describe it)

the cloak was stolen from undyne trust. he wears it as a power move FUCK YOU!!! to her :3 also it looks royal and regal which could kinda show like horror's power and sway over snowdin. he's DEFINITELY not a king but he is a provider and a lot of what he says goes around those parts. a lot of ppl look to him as like world's shittiest leader(ish). also i just wanted him to have something unique!

underneath horror's jacket his shirt is reaaaally torn he should probably replace it. there are some holes from when he was pinned down with spears during the core incident and then the whole lower half is just totally torn off from that one comic 💀 but thats why the jacket is zipped up! however the zipper broke and now the jacket can't unzip! (because horror struggles with the fact that horrortale ISNT gonna be perpetually shitty (everyone say thanks aliza) and would rather nobody see him vulnerable)

dust🧣:3

i didn't change much about him lowkey he's pretty much wearing the same CLOTHES. just that the style and way he's wearing them changed. wanted him to give like,,,,, comfy (because bro did not change out of his sansish clothes) but also like FOCUSED o(≧口≦)o like horror he has the under socket line but thats just to make him look more stressed and tired

i moved around the scarf to NOT be around his neck bc it was sooo annoying drawing the hood and then having to account for the scarf. it kind gave him a baby face vibe which i did NOT like. also i think dust would wear the scarf however. very versatile as long as the scarf remains intact. so it COULD go around waist COULD be around neck COULD be around limbs

i didn't mean to do this but the black thingy around his shoulders (was originally there just to fill in the empty space without the scarf there 💀) could be seen as like mourning wear. again with the silly zipper symbolism but dust's zipper is fine its not broken like horror or killer's are because he chose to go down this path. dust CHOSE to zip it up and now its too late to go back now (so bro MUST power through ‼️‼️ he cant unzip the zipper now!!!!)

overall i like these. usually i like coming up with cool unique character designs its so fun but my trio was hard (im hard). probably bc i didnt wanna make then wear anything too weird Dx BUT NOW AT LEAST THEY ALL LOOK LESS BABY!!!! i think i depicted how i see them though like ughhh cannot explain but now they look like how i want them to sound

[loverboybrightsideghost]

i hope the new superman is soooo good that it reintroduces superman back to the world on a big-ish scale and gives everyone a good story and gives back some good classic characters to truly love and that the music is great and that it reminds everyone (everyone) what superman is really about

[whimsyprinx]

ANYWAYS i made plans to get coffee and donuts with lex and kane on sunday and if my plans fall through I’m not responsible for who i become as a result

[avelera]

"I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a school novel, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited."

- Ursula K. Le Guin

It's been understandably popular to take pot-shots at Harry Potter lately because of JK Rowling's truly disgusting and reprehensible comments lately. This quote above by Le Guin, which I agreed with even while a teenager, got me thinking about my own views on the series and apropos to nothing, I felt this was a better place to expound upon them than Twitter.

I have a knee-jerk dislike of the very human condition of saying we, "Always knew something," after the fact, that we "Always knew" someone problematic™️ was problematic or we always knew this thing that was popular was Bad Art after it became less popular. I find it intellectually dishonest.

So I'll preface all of this by saying: I had minor issues with the Harry Potter series back when it came out that went against the mainstream view of it, in that I thought it had many good qualities as a book series, but not enough to warrant its popularity compared to other, similar YA and fantasy series. I was genuinely baffled by its superstar popularity but as a fantasy book reader in the days before it was easy to access online fandom, I would take what I could get and I certainly didn't mind fangirling about Harry Potter stuff with friends even if it wasn't my #1 favorite series of all time. I enjoyed the fanfic for Harry Potter immensely so that allowed me to sort of blend in with those who enjoyed its popularity. (Special shoutout to MY favorite Harry Potter book of all time, "Harry Potter and the Battle of Wills" by Jocelyn over on fanfiction.net, that was MY Harry Potter series lol.)

So here's the thing, it's easy to say, "I always hated Harry Potter" or "I always knew it was trash" and that's a lie. For me, the truth is:

I enjoyed Harry Potter much like I did many of the fantasy series of its day.

What they had going for them was their pacing, whimsy, and inherent mystery structure in the first 3 books. They're fast, fun, easy reads with a likable protagonist. They are not bad books. But as Le Guin says, they're stylistically ordinary and imaginatively derivative. There's a lot of books like them.

I did not think the books were better than Pratchett, or Gaiman, or Garth Nix, or Dianne Wynn Jones, or any of the many other fantasy authors I was reading at the time. I was confused by their popularity as compared to better books like Pratchett's Discworld which, while popular, never got a theme park made for them in terms of order of magnitude popularity.

Now, JK Rowling on the other hand I had some issues with from the start, if not the ones that emerged later with her being a bigot. It is worth mentioning for the sake of intellectual honesty that decades ago, she gave a lot to charity and was a voice for tolerance in the early 00's when Bush/Blair, the Iraq War, etc were in full swing. It makes it all the more heartbreaking and baffling to see her swing towards bigotry on LGBT+ issues. Truly, a lot of young people first learned to stand up to fascism and be accepting of those different from them because of Harry Potter, just like they did reading the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card, and in both cases it's absolutely heartbreaking and so very confusing to see these authors fall to the very dark side they wrote against in their books. I have no answer for how or why this happened. I don't say this to make an excuse for either of them, simply to express confusion and mourn the loss of someone who was once a voice for some level of good in the world.

Now, my issues with JK Rowling were writerly, and they are the ones I feel somewhat empowered to say I "always knew" and "always had an issue with" and that, like the worst sort of hipster, "I talked about before it was cool".

Really my dislike began when JKR very famously said in the early 00s that she didn't read any fantasy before writing Harry Potter. Considering how derivative it is (heck, Neil Gaiman already had a YA series about a black-haired wizard boy with a scar) it left one wondering if she was lying or she truly was that ignorant in the genre in which she wrote. Either way, not a good look, and it soured me towards her pretty permanently as an author.

Terry Pratchett, the author I would actually follow into Hell, criticized her for this comment and got a lot of flack for it, asking how in the world she could not realize she was writing fantasy. This solidified my opinion of her as something of a hack, even if she had stumbled upon a winning story. Neil Gaiman also chimed in saying he didn't feel ripped off but seemed to tacitly agree with Pratchett that her lack of institutional knowledge about fantasy was odd.

As a big fantasy fan of the early 00s, I can say that fantasy was still a bit of a forbidden genre (at least in the Anglosphere), one not taken seriously. So for JK Rowling to be asked if she wrote fantasy had a layer of nuance, basically she was being asked if she meant to write a fantasy novel, ie, in a "lesser" genre, barely above dime story penny dreadfuls in value.

No one literary would admit to writing fantasy at the time, it was a whole thing where if you admitted to writing fantasy you were "downgraded" as an author in terms of prestige (Stephen King went through a lot of this). BUT, if a fantasy book achieved popularity, it was labeled as "literary" so the literary folks could claim ownership of the quality genre fiction, and never have to admit that "literary" is a genre and not a mark of quality (a deep-seated rage button issue for me and a rant for another day).

So when JK Rowling said, "She didn't know she was writing fantasy." That meant something. And what it meant was she was throwing the rest of the genre under the damn bus. With her visibility she could have helped actively tear down the biases against fantasy (something she did indirectly with the popularity of her books). Or she could have simply had humility and said she wasn't as versed in the genre as she should be given where her book ended up being shelved, but there's a lot of good works there and she's honored to be among them.

She did neither. She stuck to her ignorance (what would become a common trait of hers, apparently) and did very little to elevate others in the genre, or the genre itself, and indeed, seemed to try to distance herself from it in what was the safe move at the time.

I cannot stress enough how intellectual dishonest, arrogant, and safe it was for popular writers who got dubbed "literary" when they were in fact writing genre fiction to cleave to that title of literary, guard it jealously, and refuse to acknowledge that literary is a genre of its own, not a mark of quality. To be labeled "genre fiction" was to be considered "lesser" and that stigma is still out there, though much lessened by the wave that began with the Lord of the Rings movies, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and the Marvel films making so much money and really setting up genre fiction to at least be seen as lucrative if not artistic. We have come a long way from how fantasy was viewed 20 years ago.

JK Rowling also said she wrote no other books before Harry Potter. That's another puzzling instance where either she's lying, sold her soul to the Devil (and hey, maybe she did and he's collecting by making her turn into a frothing bigot), or was simply a more lucky and less skilled writer than people realized. Every writer has a closet full of short stories and novels they've written before publishing their first work. I can't stress enough how bizarre it is for her to claim she never wrote anything else before putting pen to paper with Harry Potter, that simply does not happen. Then again, her later books make it seem more likely that is true.

Writerly aside, but JK Rowling is utter garbage at structure. She lucked into the perfect scaffolding for a basic plot with the Harry Potter school year, but as Fantastic Beasts and her other, non-school based plot structures reveal, she didn't realize what a crutch that was for her because the woman does not and has not learned how to build a plot that isn't strung up on the structure of a school year for building tension and story beats.

Look, JK Rowling has always been a weird author. She really did come out of nowhere in terms of previous works. She doesn't acknowledge her peers in the genre that built her fortune, not even to confess that while she didn't know about them, she's now learning about a wonderful rich genre out there. She went the other direction and disavowed fantasy (it's possible she backtracked since and had nice things to say about the fantasy genre, I'd love to hear it if so).

There was in fact always subtle bigotry and a ton of tokenism in the Harry Potter books. That said, in the 90s, that was pretty par for the course, and she deserved some kudos for making the books so explicitly about fighting fascism, even if I'm not sure she fully understood her own themes.

To say these books were unpopular or that they had no writerly merit at all is intellectually dishonest. They were popular for a reason, mostly because they're fun. However, they were not unique, there were many like them, she got very lucky and it's bizarre how little she's acknowledged this or her peers. Of all the negative tendencies any human has, I'm shocked and dismayed that her tendency to stick to her ignorance like she did with the wider fantasy genre is the one that won out and was transferred to LGBT+ issues, to the point of doing active damage to her works and brand. But as her attempts to branch out from Harry Potter have further confirmed, JK Rowling was always a stylistically ordinary writer. Her mean-spiritedness didn't stand out as much in the 90s but it absolutely does now and it's ugly how she leaned more into sticking with the moral heights she reached at that time rather than trying to learn and grow as a person.

JK Rowling went full Whedon and figured because she was slightly ahead of the curve in the late 90s that she had nothing more to learn and it hurts when people who are creative, people whose job it is to have empathy for other walks of life, never learn or grow and stick to their old laurels that are increasingly out of date. I personally don't think myself as a hardcore Harry Potter fan, I have no horse in this race for the redemption or lack thereof of JK Rowling or the book series. I can only offer my view as a fantasy writer and someone who grew up through the cultural phenomenon of these books.

But, as usual, Ursula Le Guin was right, I agreed with her then, and her words have only borne out more and more with time.

[kinsey3furry300]

Elon Musk:" I'm a futurist seaking human immortality, soon we will be able to upload our conciseness and live as we please in a perfect simulation, free of this imperfect flesh."

Me: "Interesting so..."

Elon:" And it goes without saying that there will be boy disembodied minds and girl disembodied minds, which align perfectly with the gender thier redundant flesh was assigned at birth, and nothing else. Buy my stuff."

Me: "Ah..."

JK Rowling:" It's a magical world of whimsy and wonder where anything is possible, and their is canonically a potion that can let you live as another, reshape your body, and swap your physical biology."

Me:" Oh, interesting..."

JK: "Its canonical that no one has ever used it to explore their gender identity because that would be perverse, and in fact that one time a girl was about to become a boy I made her a cat instead. Buy my stuff."

Its not just that we have rich powerful bigots with huge platforms, it's that they lack the imagination and self reflection to see how traditional gender ideas could not survive in the imagined worlds they cherish.

[lightbulb-warning]

[MAJORLY uncoherent anecdotal storytine:]

entertainment value: mild

cw: blood exams (not described in detail), vague mentions to struggles that aren't elaborated on, tmi personal rambling written by someone who is loopy from blood loss aka bad grammar/syntax/morphology/yeah also this got long whoops

im feeling mega loopy cuz blood exam (dundnt faint!! how outstanding of me. iamcurrently instanding. batumtssk!!i lie down now.)

but AT the blood exam a newer nurse stopped by and my usual nurse was like "PIVELLA meet [redacted <- (me. im redacted.)] this kid is a STAPLE in this department bla bla" and wow mom look im famius!! it only took me getting my blood displaced and stared at medically and faintinf a lot very often hshahahaah

the usual nurse is so NICE she's been doing my blood check traslocations since ive been like 15 i think maybe earlier?? idk idk i love her she's so nice and a kickass lady and she bullies all her coworkers and also me a lot!!! bully as in teasing she's nice yeah anyway yeah

me having to get my blood checked often is really inconvenient and kinda sucks!!! because i get koed and fuck if i can do anything for the next 24hs blegh but but BUT this lady has seen my grow up and seenbthe fuck up my life became and is seeing me pick up the peices abd whenever she sees me in the waiting room she shouts "its YOU" very dramatically and the staff has inside jokes about me and my dumv unoptimezed blood stats and thats REALLY NICE SOBS

like i dont wanna make a fable moral out of it like live love kaugh kindess uwu because realistacally, when i was fucked up previously (in the way that was bad compared to how i am fucked up now. funny joke. laugh.) i didn't gove two shits about people being nice to me because i was a massive hater and hated myself most (loser behavior!!!! the world hates you already love yourself out of SPITE!!!!!!!!!!) so people going out of their way to make a horrible situation slightly less horrible for me COMPLETELY went over my head "broom broom autopilot kill crush destroy ourselves!!!" (<- that's what my head looked like.ew there's no whimsy and silly in there, gross!! jk baby me gets the reatroactive love myself treatment bc noone els ecan do that for me!! what was i saying) and yeah i wasn't neurobiologically capable of giving two shits about anything, especially some random nurse going out of her way to crack jokes but idk i appreciated now!!! and she realizes i appreciate it now!!! and it's nothing big or grandiose i guess the world is still turning and nothing in the essential state of things changes bc i did a navelgazey testimony of WOW SOMETIMES THINGS CAN BE OKAY OCASSIONALLY HOLY SHIT?? but also!!! if i don't do it!!!!!!! who will!!???????

aesop would prolly write about foxes and grapes and terracotta pottery and crows and things being okay with time, but ME, a certified "just some guy", is gonna ramble about " it's gonna be okay" semantics because its!! been!! bullshit!! BUT THAT'S OKAY!!!!

shit got SO MUCH worse than what i could've imagined in my catastrophation!!!!!! id wasted my life preparing and planning for all the plans Ds and Gs and Js and Zs because my situation was FUCKED and i didn't have power to fix it, and too bad!!! SHIT HAPPENS AND IT SUCKS!!! time isn't gonna fix SHIT!!!!!! time is just a tracker of when!!! time does no good time does no harm!!!! what time did give my stupid fucking idiot idiot lovely self was time to change!!! not in just "omg change your perspective ✨" (which can be really really really important!! but you shouldn't take anyone's shit just because you see their perspective!!!! no you don't deserve to be treated like shit!!!!!! they don't deserve to get away with treating anyone like shit!!!!! what makes you so special that the world's evil needs to converge upon you?? you're just some guy!! they're just some guy!!! you be nice to you!!)

time is just there!! what does get okay with time is being!!! your enemy is no longer gonna cause you stress once you outlive them!!! you can be better than your yesterday self at any time!!! life goes on if you fuck up everything and you CAN do whatever you want with the peices!!! FAIL!!! FEAR!!! if we're scared we do it scared!!! it's not gonna be okay because its gonna be perfect, it's gonna be okay because it CAN be different!!

im still not """""fixed""""" , im still screwing things up and i still don't really understand what exactly is """""wrong""""" with me and that's okay for now, and hey!! i am capable of having a nice interaction with someone!!!! that's progress.

massive tangent lmao

local tumblr user gets some blood consensually stolen, has a positive interaction with someone, goes home and starts preaching at [unidentified recipient] jesus fucking christ maiora go to sleep this isn't the time for monologues

tl;dr: someone was nice to me just to be nice and im happy because i wouldn't have been able to appreciate it previously and it's nice to see people being nice for the sake of it

im nap now buh bye thanks for reading have a night or day!!!! be nice to you i can't do that for you!!! /lh

<3

[themightyrancho]

I would like to hear your insight, do you think liking Harry Potter is bad? I don’t support JK Rowling’s views, but I can’t help but still like Harry Potter for the characters and overall universe

Oh wow, hello! Thanks for your interest in my lil opinion lol

No, you still liking a franchise you probably grew up with isn't bad. You can enjoy something and also be critical/aware of its faults at the same time. Nostalgia and whimsy is a beautiful thing to have in your life, and if it was important to you, it doesn't make you wrong or bad. Nuance exists. You can even criticize the canon itself... and still enjoy it!

Personally, I wouldn't continue to spend money/consume new products from the Author. If they're alive and own the IP, individuals spending money on their work is supporting their work, and you're allowing them to make a living in which they have a platform to continue to do harm. So ideally, no new money spent, but if you want to keep your old smerch and watch the movies on streaming sometimes, I get it.

Like I love the first Twilight movie unironically, but I'm the first person to talk about the problematic elements/foundations of the source material and following film. I've written entire papers criticizing the misogyny, racism, and troubling dynamics. But I also fully participated in the digital Twilight Renaissance... let people have fun! Sometimes it's even MORE enlightening to come back to things you liked with a critical eye and new world experience.

There are also certain situations where you can't enjoy the material the same because of the "author's" actions or real-life developments. And that's okay if it no longer brings you joy because of it. It's okay if it was "ruined for you". It sucks but separating the art from the artist (aside from the monetary aspect) isn't a real thing that can truly be accomplished fully and completely.

[orchidyoonkook]

Jungkook is so right about his tiger lily. Where I live they grow wild/feral pretty much everywhere as well as in actual gardens, and they all started to bloom this past week. They usually stick around until a bit past his birthday. To me they symbolize summer, whimsy, and wildness; they always have this beautiful, cheery vibrance. Their color is rich, bright and deep all at once, and it really stands out in the mix. I always loved them, but have even more so over the past several years since seeing them now also always reminds me of him (1/7)

I almost said tiger Lily for him too!!! It’s just so him 🥹. But I wanted to put my flower knowledge to use just a little bit! You’re so right tho. Everything you said is so JK 🥰🥰

@violetsiren90

[ultramaga]

I've been thinking about this since I was in High School. We were assigned a story written by a woman about some boys about our age. It just seemed off. Then years later I read a book about what things were like; I mean, really like.

And to give you some context, I met the author as a lad, but I don't remember her well. All that remains is annoyance that she was on MY beach - we were renting at Currawong, and she came over with her boyfriend - I can't even remember if she was on a surfboard. BUT IT WAS MY BEACH, DAMMIT. And the thing that got me was that none of the stuff that was there would have been allowed in a YA novel. There were 13 year old girls having anal sex. That was drastically aged up for the movie because they knew parents would freak out. But what the kids needed to know was that it could happen, and that it was dangerous to do the things that happened in that book - not only at that time, but for the rest of your life. So as a kid, seeing some horrible things, I loved escapism, and thoroughly enjoyed books similar to the early Harry Potter, and I even enjoyed spooky ghost stories, but at no point did I enjoy when the authors were trying to make the stories realistic yet kid-friendly because they were showing the fake reality that parents wish they lived in. And when I read adult fiction, like Dune, where some pretty grisly stuff happens, I was fine with it. I immediately lose my immersion when I am shown the unreality of the later Harry Potter, and it has nothing to do with magic, and everything to do with how everyone behaves. JK Rowling should have kept it as light fantasy, skipped over the petty stuff, just had fun romps like ...

Where the unreality is fine because it is consistent. (*spoilers*) I mean, everyone dies in the end. I can't think of too many kids books like that. But it is presented as the start of a fantastic adventure, not a traumatic horror that would haunt the survivors.

Correctly done, unreality actually services the plot, because then you aren't wondering about the minutiae of plotholes.

Don't get me wrong, if it had started with the YA, I would not be bothered, or even interested, by it.

It wouldn't bug me that we actually saw a lot of them mucking about but never doing anything naughty really, and not even the evil kids were doing them. But then you go back and look at the early stuff, and of course they were mucking about without any consequences, and there was no safety to anything. It just didn't matter that the house point system was insane. It was all whimsy. And if it was consistently one way or another, that would be fine.

I'm not the only one to have noticed it either. I had relatives who bought all the books, but I noticed the early ones were dog eared. Why? Because people borrowed and read those. They stopped reading as it attempted to move into the YA field. It no longer created immersion. People couldn't pin it down. As Red Letter Media put it, you might not have noticed what was wrong - but your brain did.

Grown men yet to learn what a children’s fantasy novel series is. More at 11

[ofherlionheart]

hi :3

I was wondering do you think a Rapunzel au would work with either zukka or mailee??

oh wait!! enchanted mailee au and a tangled zukka au, thoughts?

I can kinda see it but I'm not particularly good at characterization

oh my god i love this question because yes!! the answer to "would X au work for Y couple?" is almost always yes!!

i think the joy of an AU/crossover like this is that you get to decide what to pull from each source. no one's gonna tell you you have to include this part from one source and this part from the other source in order for it to be a "proper" au. no!! fuck that shit!! cherry-pick the shit you wanna steal and have fun with it!

e.g. the hsm2 au i did—if i was trying to be some crossover purist, the dramatic staff talent show showdown should have been the climax and also about katara and yue reuniting after yue dumped katara by the pool yada yada yada, BUT that didn't make sense for what i wanted of the story. i didn't want katara and yue breaking up, and i was more interested in s and z's arc, so i made the talent show more of a blip on sokka's radar and spent more time after the show, in the treehouse, in the dugout, at the diner.

so yes to any of the above—enchanted mailee, enchanted zukka, tangled zukka, tangled mailee, whatever you want to play with can work! remember: at the end of the day, you're the writer, and you should be writing for you. what will make the story fun for you?

(and, if my thoughts are of any interest to you, since you've got me going, now …)

the Q i kind of asked myself when writing the hsm2 au was what's at the core of hsm2's narrative? the answer: chlorine. lmao jk but also, like, what it means to be a teenager in the summer having your first summer job but also getting to know a new side of a classmate who in the first installment of the trilogy was shown as little more than a henchman to his piece-of-work sister.

so what's at the core of the stories you mentioned? ngl i know too many variations on rapunzel to try to condense that, so imma ignore that one. but for the others, pick any lil nugget:

tangled: a person forced to live in seclusion "for their own safety" is broken out by someone else. a person with unique powers is manipulated by a parent (who isn't actually their parent). a brash and roguish bandit acts the way they do b/c they're actually a very sensitive and vulnerable person. a person learns to see their entire life from a brand new, illuminated perspective. love isn't when someone covets a particular trait you have, but when they admire you for your being. can love that's stifling and possessive still be called love? does true love always mean freedom? can love overcome hostile architecture?

enchanted: widowed single parent has been corporate for too long and needs the whimsy of another world to see brightness again. absolute himbo with a square jaw promises you more adventure in his world than your 9-5 desk job does in this world. sometimes the dramatic makeover reveal IS worse (coughcough purple dress amy adams coughcough). there's strength in persevering in seeing the good and bright in all things. sometimes a woman only has 2 braincells and that can be the sexiest thing in the world. if the freeloader that your daughter dragged into your life suddenly eats a raw fish, don't question it.

from there, i think about character's canon arcs, and what could possibly map onto these themes. zuko's arc matches up well with the whole rapunzel seeing her world anew thing. ty lee's character matches well with the incredible strength from brightness and optimism thing.

and then, sometimes, i like to challenge myself a step further and invert the obvious. like, if zuko's the obvious rapunzel, what would it look like if sokka was rapunzel? how did he get there? was sokka blessed by the moon and, idk, general zhao caught whiff of his powers and stole sokka way from hakoda and kya? if zuko is eugene, which version of zuko is he — angry ponytail believes in ozai zuko, blue spirit teenage and state rebellion zuko, or enlightened s3 zuko who's technically fire lord but iroh's letting him have an actual young adulthood?

isn't is fucking magical, all the diff directions in which an AU can spin out?

[dreamcatcherjiah]

Until we meet again. JK x reader

Part 1

A/N: @mabel-k3​ sent these my way and I had a fantastic idea so I asked her and she allowed me to combine both!! What beautiful requests, these have unleashed my creativity big time!! Thank you for requesting, Momo!!

Also thanks to my lovie @lysjeon​ because she hyped me up so much after reading it and what can I say? THANK YOU TO YOU BOTH 🥺🥺🥺

Pairing: Jeon Jungkook x reader (Jungkook has different names throughout his different lives, but they’re easy to spot ;))

Genre: ANGST, fluff, Reincarnation fic

Word count: 11.5k

Warnings: graphic violence, weapons, mentions of death, mentions of war, assassination, main character death (repeatedly), (and I think that’s it. If you find something triggering that I haven't listed, please let me know!! Enjoy!!)

Kingdom of Great Joseon, Hanseong. Year 1398.

Voices carried through the garden. Some of the guards were posted at the doors to prevent the peasants from entering the palace. Or to stop someone from getting out. The tumult and noise wouldn’t stop, carried by gossipy maids and new, inexperienced soldiers. They would learn, either one way or another. The Palace had been in an uproar since the King started thinking about abdicating, the Princes feeling uneasy, waiting to see which one of them would wear the crown next. Having listened to your fair share of courtly gossip, as the first assistant to the royal doctor, you knew there was actually no love lost between the Princes. Their attitudes were haughty at best and most of them were more concerned with their whimsy pursues than the good of such an incipient kingdom as Joseon was. King Taejo was a good monarch; he made peace with China and the Ashikaga Shogunate, bringing peace to his country after many years of war and uncertainty, yet it seemed his problems laid closer to Hanseong than he would have hoped.

His advisors had been the most loyal to him until the moment came when they had to pick a side to place their loyalty. Only one of his eight sons would become King and with him would come new favours to those who supported him and punishment for those who went against him in the battle for the throne. Word at court was that one of Taejo’s advisers, Prime Minister Jeong Do-jeon, was siding towards the two sons Queen Sindeok had borne the king. He had managed to place Prince Uian as the main heir to his father a few years back, but the opinion of most of the advisors was leaning towards the opposite direction; Crown Prince Uian and his brother Prince Muan may have been the most beloved by the King, but it was clear they were not what the kingdom needed of a monarch.

“Word has it in the King’s chamber that he will heed Jeong Do-jeon’s advice and do away with the Fifth Prince once and for all,” said one of the Queen Shinui’s chambermaids. The Fifth Prince, Prince Jeongan, was the favoured alternative at court. He was everything his half-brothers weren’t, intelligent, determined, and good for the kingdom. Naturally, he was a threat to Do-jeon and his cohort. “I hope Crown Prince Uian does become king,” she said, a dreamy cadence to her voice, “I may think about asking my father to introduce me as a possible consort.”

They were so enthralled in their conversation that they did not notice how they were directly in your path and neither did you, carrying boxes of supplies definitely too heavy for you. The inevitable crash echoed through the place as an explosion, glass vases and tonic bottles breaking, the minuscule shards of crystal flying in every direction leaving you, sitting ungracefully at its centre looking bewildered and quite a bit furious.

“What in the world do you think you were doing, gossiping like that?” you asked them. Your authority in the palace giving you quite the leverage to properly chastise these two silly girls. “What would have happened if it had been a higher official you had crashed into? Or, God forbid, one of the Princes or someone from the royal family?”

That last remark made them both drop to their knees and start profusely apologising. The prospect of losing their heads was a tad bit more fear-inducing than crashing into the Doctor’s apprentice and doing away with their supplies. As they scurried away and you picked up what you could salvage from the floor, you thought how convenient it was for them, here in the palace; their fathers trusted advisors to the King, with significant names backing them with years of honour and courageous deeds for the advancement of the monarchy. They would have everything they asked for at their feet if they so much as muttered they found themselves wanting it.

Passing through one of the storage rooms by the Doctor’s quarters, a hand emerged out of nowhere and you found yourself losing your balance and the grip you had on the glass of herbal poultice you rescued from the wreckage in the garden, which crashed on the straw floor with a muted thud.

“What you did back there to the daughter of Nam Eun could as well cost you your head,” said a voice you could recognise in a crowd. The soft chuckle that accompanied the threat and the sweet of his breath against the shell of your ear calmed your anxious thoughts and gave freedom to your heart to beat its way out of your chest. Strong, calloused hands circled your waist and you found yourself leaning against a firm chest that vibrated with his laughter and got closer and closer to you with every breath he took. “But I won’t tell on you, my dear.”

Turning around, you laid your eyes in the weathered and dirty face of the person you held most dear in this world. Oh Jookee was the captain of the Palace Regiment assigned to the protection of the Crown Prince and he had just arrived from accompanying him on a stakeout, preparing for the hunting season. His brown eyes held yours tenderly and his whole face morphed as he tried to contain a smile from overtaking his features. His pink lips finally gave way to that beautiful smile, his eyes turning into crescents and his cheeks becoming flush with happiness.

“My love, how did you manage to come back so… untidy?” you asked, pushing back some stray hairs that had escaped his manggeon. His hair was curling at his temples having escaped from the confines of the leather binding in at the top of his head. The accessory was a bit crooked and you could see the sweat beads along the black cloth. He gave you the image of how he must have been when he was younger and played on the dirt with his brothers. “I thought the Crown Prince just wanted to breathe some fresh air and prepare for tomorrow’s outing?”

Jookee nuzzled his nose along the column of your neck, causing that welcomed current from the tip of your toes to the end of the longest hair on your head. You hadn’t seen each other in months, and this meeting, while short-lived and clandestine, would be what would carry you through the months before you could ask the king permission to marry.

“We encountered some trouble on the way back and thought it prudent to bring the Princes back earlier. They are in Prince Muan’s chambers as we speak and I am required to join them presently.” He said. Even though he was young to be in such a powerful position, he took his duty to heart and he would never disobey an order, which made you question what he was doing hiding with you in the supply cupboard, and so you made him aware of your worry.

“You know Crown Prince Uian,” he answered, a sardonic smile spreading his lips after he managed to steal a kiss from yours, “he enjoys beauty and pristineness. In my present state I am still beautiful, but much less than pristine,” he joked. “I was sent away with the mission to do myself up with clothes fitting for a general, my dear.”

“Why, General Oh, I am afraid you will find yourself quite a long way away from your quarters,” you flirted. “How will you go back to the Prince in time, and all decent, if you don’t leave me now?”

Laughing at your poor attempt at jesting, he hugged you close to his chest, releasing a sigh when he couldn’t get his body any closer to yours. The happiness you felt in these kinds of moments was matchless to anything you had ever felt before meeting him, and nothing you would feel in your life together from then on.

“I must change my clothes, I am afraid,” he said, separating himself from you, slowly as if it was costing him an immense effort to do so, “go back to your master and be careful today, my flower,” he frowned. “The slight inconvenience I mentioned before is not yet taken care of, please watch yourself.”

Knowing he wouldn’t play you with something he didn’t consider serious, you promised to be more mindful of your surroundings and watched him go, with happiness in your heart and that already familiar sensation in your whole being, that sensation you felt every time you were forced to part.

It was nearly dusk when you were called to what used to be Queen Sindeok’s chambers before she died. A normal occurrence, it made you be just that bit more careful today. Even though Jookee’s warning managed to keep you on your toes through the day, there was no harm in being reasonably suspicious. After all, you were living in court.

Princess Gyeongsun, regal and poised, was sitting at a low desk in the middle of the room, flanked on both sides by her brothers, Crown Prince Uian and Prince Muan. Giving a quick overview of the room before being granted access, you located Jookee easily, a very imposing presence by Crown Prince Uian’s elbow. He looked completely different, wearing dark clothing beneath his shining armour and a concentrated scowl distorting his handsome features. He was the living, breathing image of a hero. His eyes drifted to yours for a brief second and you noticed how his mouth set in a thin line and a crease of worry settled between his brows.

With a twist of her wrist, the Princess called you over, and you busied yourself with serving her special tea blend, infused to perfection, just the way she enjoyed it. The Princes were bickering, back and forth, about some unbelievable treason they had not expected, how it completely changed the power game between the walls of the palace. Having been living this power struggle since you arrived at the palace five years prior, you were quite accustomed to the tension and the fear of betrayal that so delicately held the equilibrium of life in court; that being said, there was a seriousness to Crown Prince Uian’s tone that you had never heard before. He was the youngest of the princes, carefree and with a happy disposition, so to say that the frown adorning his features was disturbing was quite an understatement.

Chancing a look at Jookee’s face, you noticed his eyes moving nervously from the windows on the sides of the room, flanked by armed soldiers of the Crown Prince’s guard, to the door equally heavily guarded. Something was seriously amiss, but you needn’t have wondered any longer, as there was a commotion by the door and Jookee along with some of his soldiers moved in unison, blocking the Princess and Princes, and subsequently you, from whatever it was that waiting on the other side of the door. After a few minutes, silence took over and the tension escalated. Prince Muan was whispering furiously to his brother, his face red and distressed.

“We should have fled the palace,” he was saying, “as soon as we found out Do-jeon was murdered!” When those words left the Prince’s lips you knew how serious the situation was. The delicate equilibrium of power had just been altered with the death of the most powerful pawn at the hands of a very powerful enemy. “We should have never trusted him, he played you brother—”

Jookee made a curt but powerful hissing sound that managed to shut the Prince’s mouth in an instant. In any other circumstances, that would have gotten him the most severe of punishments, but as things stood, Jookee and his men were the only thing standing between certain death and the royals, and both princes knew that.

The doors imploded and in flooded many soldiers led by a very tall imposing man: Grand Prince Jeongan, the Fifth Prince. His face was impassive and his clothes were covered in dry blood. He didn’t seem at all bothered by this fact, as he wasn’t at all worried that the blood of the people he had murdered at the door was reaching his shoes. He straightened his shoulders and marched on forward, standing eye to eye with Jookee.

Your blood turned to ice. Jookee was the Captain of Prince Uian’s guard. If this was an attempt on his life, he would be the first one to fight. He could keep up in a fight, you had been witness to his quick strength and cold strategy when he trained on the palace grounds, grace and sheer power emanating through every pore of his body. But still, he was a guard sworn to protect the royal family, what was his fate when faced with such a decision as to protect one brother from the other? He would be seen as a traitor if he did so much as to grace Prince Jeongan with his sword, but if he resisted and didn’t raise his weapon, he would be seen as a traitor either way and executed for it. Your heart was trying to beat its way out of you, this time out of utter terror for what was about to happen. Your thoughts were your own, and so you allowed yourself to pray for him, to pray for the brightest star in the universe, the reason you drew breath every morning, you prayed for him to know his duty but also to know the value of his own life in a world that valued it so little in comparison to the people he was sworn to protect.

Time seemed to be at a stand-still, Prince Jeongan and Jookee face to face, looking each other in the eye, not a word being uttered. The Prince was a few years older than Jookee and much older than his brothers by Queen Sindeok, the youngest of them having barely turned sixteen last spring. There had been a time when the brothers played together and there was deep respect from the younger ones to the older, and a deep sense of responsibility and desire to protect the younger ones from the older princes. Now there was only betrayal in the eyes of the Fifth Prince and utter fear in the eyes of his younger siblings.

“You have no authority to stand on the way of a Prince, General. Move aside while I feel benevolent,” Prince Jeongan’s voice was deep and imposing, the voice of a person who was used to having his will fulfilled and his detractors beheaded. Turning your head, you saw Jookee’s shoulders take an even more determined stand and he stood, taller, determined, while more soldiers filled in the room.

Prince Muan, taking advantage of the distracted state of his older brother, had moved slightly to his right, so he was partially hidden behind Princess Gyeongsun. In the meanwhile, his younger brother, Crown Prince Uian had shifted in his sitting position and was sitting facing forward, towards the soldiers, with an impassive frown and a set sneer. In your opinion, neither one of them was fit to be king of Joseon, but you knew now who was the best of the two; at least the King had managed to marginally avoid putting a gutless puppet on the throne.

“If I move aside you may do something you will regret, my Prince,” answered Jookee, his voice calm and levelled. His words were not betraying the tumult that he was sure to be feeling inside. In a subtle movement, while he was still watching the Fifth Prince carefully, his eyes turned to you and you wanted nothing more than to tell him not to worry for you, to keep his head where it should be. “If you are here to talk to your brothers, allow the Princess and the servant to leave, they shouldn’t hear what will be said here tonight.”

You had no time to wonder what that was, for the prince had already drawn his sword and was pointing it towards Jookee’s throat, making thick droplets of sweat appear on your temples.

“And allow them to go warn my dear father’s guards of my presence here?” Jeongan chuckled and pressed forward, his sword drawing blood from Jookee’s skin. “I don’t believe so. It is, however, such a pity that you should find yourself here, General Oh, on the night I have come to kill my brothers.”

Those words made the night turn into chaos. With a swiftness you didn’t think him capable of, Prince Muan raised his sister from her cushion and moved with her towards one of the windows. The Princess, scared, reached for you and dragged you along behind her coward of a brother. When you were close to the window, you realised there was a shadow moving behind it. What a terrible mistake to leave the windows unattended when the prince entered. With a crashing certainty you knew now there was going to be a bloodbath tonight and there was nothing you could do to either flee the scene with Jookee unscathed or having him leaving with you willingly. What a horrible night for all the intrigues in the palace to come to fruition.

The soldiers charged forward and Jookee finally drew his sword to fight off the Prince, his movements fast and certain to try to defuse the sheer rage with which Prince Jeongan was pushing him backwards. The closer the squabble got to the Crown Prince, the harder he fought, and the harder Prince Muan pushed his sister to get to the window. Reacting just in time, you pulled the Princess backwards in the same second the window burst open and an arrow pierced the Prince’s chest. Incredulous, he dropped his eyes down in time to see a crimson stain spread over his blue silk-covered chest. Mere seconds after his eyes rolled back into his skull and his body dropped to the floor as if he had been nothing more than a marionette whose strings had been severed. Princess Gyeongsun, to her credit, kept a stoic and quiet calm even while life escaped her brother and got a hold of your hand. The both of you retreated to the furthest corner of the room while the fight to get to Crown Prince Uian was still ongoing and the bodies were dropping to the floor at an alarming rate. Jookee, now fighting the Fifth prince tooth and nail, kept his place close to the door, mindful of his surroundings in case he had to intervene if one of the soldiers got too close to his charge. More soldiers were entering through the now open window and now there was the added issue of arrows flying in all directions through the narrow window, taking down both friend and foe.

One of the Fifth Prince’s soldiers got rid of the guard fighting him off and advanced on the Crown Prince. Jookee, seeing this, turned his back on Jeongan and dispatched him before he could reach his target. In the few seconds that passed between the soldier falling and him looking at you, the dimension of his faux pas dawned on you. With his back unprotected and his eyes fixed on you to make sure no wounds were visible, he didn’t see Prince Jeongan raise his sword over his head and drop it in a powerful arch that cut deep wounds onto Jookee’s legs. The momentum propelled him forward, landing on his knees with a deep grimace of pain distorting his features.

You were frozen, pushing your body against the Princess’ so that she would come to no harm, but your whole world was leaning out of its axis. Your breath caught in your throat and all you could do was watch helplessly as the Fifth Prince walked by Jookee as if he was nothing more than an insect and approach his brother, who remained imperturbable and unmovable at the table. Looking up at his older brother, his frown still set, he straightened his shoulders and adopted a regal pose he rarely displayed.

“What are you doing here, brother?” he asked, knowing perfectly well the circumstances of his brother arriving at the palace in the middle of the night, and still enquired.

“You know perfectly well why I have come, little one,” he answered, sneering down at the young prince. “There was an attempt on my life not two days ago by that rat, the Prime Minister! And you and your filthy family were all behind it!” his voice was rising with each word, ending on a terrible scream that made the paper lamps hanging from the columns tremble.

Jookee was still kneeling, two soldiers standing rock-still next to him, one sword at his throat, the other at the nape of his neck. His eyes kept moving from where you were standing at the back of the room, to the quarrelling brothers, not knowing what to do, whom to help. He looked utterly helpless, his shoulders slumping and his trousers absorbing the spilt blood of his men. When you caught his eye, you saw the intense desperation that his eyes were hiding. You were aching to run to him, to tell him everything would be all right, but with the corpse of Prince Muan at your feet, you felt that the circumstances wouldn’t actually improve.

“That conspiration you are mentioning, brother, was staged by my mother Queen Sindeok and the Prime Minister as you so eloquently put,” spoke then the Crown Prince, “At present, I believe neither of them is a threat to you; the Queen died two years ago and I believe you did away with Do-jeon’s head not so long ago.”

“YOU ARE A THREAT TO ME!” Jeongan shouted. “Don’t you see? Had you not blindly followed your mother schemes; you wouldn’t have to die!”

The princes faced each other now, Jeongan in his thirties and Uian barely a teenager, both standing their ground. You could see their younger versions, the siblings everyone saw when the Fifth Prince would come back from a campaign in the name of his father and his siblings would be waiting for him in the palace, waiting for him to tell them the stories of his exploits and missions. What a fanciful far away dream that was.

With a snap of his wrists, one of his soldiers zeroed in on you and the Princess, who stood her ground with a presence few were able to muster in such circumstances. The man didn’t immediately make any move to grab any of you but his menacing eyes were set and his mouth contorted on a wicked rictus. He was the kind of soldier who thoroughly enjoyed his job; they were rare, those who instead of the honour of serving the royals sought only the power and the bloodbath, but they did exist. Jookee noticed him approaching from his position on the floor behind the princes and your hopes of leaving the room alive flew out of the window upon seeing his ashen face turn even whiter. You tried to convey how much you loved him with one look but the brute got in between and you could only see the soldiers pointing their swords at your lover’s throat.

“You have always sneered down at me knowing you would be sitting on the throne, safely away from me, when I realised how deeply treachery ran in your blood,” someone was saying. Your ability to concentrate on anything happening around you was slipping away from you, a blindly, white panic taking its place. “You shielded yourself with all the glamour and fanfare while your family were busy scheming, even your dear siblings conspired against you.”

As if some silent signal had been given, the Princess was taken from your side and made to kneel next to her brothers. She was still impassive, but now that façade wasn’t so much bravery in the face of danger, but actual knowledge of what was going to happen in the room and certainty that it wouldn’t affect her.

“You see, out of all our sisters, this one here has proven herself quite useful,” Jeongan droned on, unbothered by nothing while the future of a kingdom hung on the tip of his sword. “I was told ambition is not an appreciated trait on a woman, but I’m inclined to disagree. You can leave the room now, sister,” he said while she rose to her feet. She was nearly out of his reach when he reached out with his hand and caught her arm just above the elbow. “I don’t need to tell you that your presence here and what has happened tonight is not for public ears, now do I?” She shook her head and scurried out of the room faster than lightning.

If his sister’s betrayal did something to the Crown Prince, he didn’t show it. His face remained unreadable, his eyes fixated on the Fifth Prince as he pranced around him, comfortable in his victory. After a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, Jeongan faced Crown Prince Uian for the final time and raised his sword in a silver, lethal arch. Aside from a minuscule flinch, the younger prince didn’t betray any reaction to the crimson stain spreading over his silk garments, nor to the metallic smell that seemed to penetrate the pores of every person in the room.

“I could let you live,” said Jeongan, “if you begged for your pathetic life on your knees. You have no supporters and you have proven to be the coward every single one of your detractors thought you were.”

Jookee was vibrating with rage behind the Princes. His eyes were thin slits that promised murder. In all the years you had known him, he had never looked as lethal and dangerous as he did now. He had been tasked with protecting the Crown Prince when he was no more than a boy himself and he had told you many stories about who Uian really was behind his mother and the minister’s plans. Granted, Jookee was as exasperated with the younger man’s excessive knack towards frivolity as everyone at court, but he also admired the Prince’s tenacity and courage. Growing up in the shadows of bigger people has taught him how to stand out, and yet remain unseen, he had told you one day, while the two of you returned to the palace from a festival in the city. He was relaxed back then, the Queen was still alive and, even though Minister Do-jeon was meddling on the King’s affairs more than recommended, the air of the palace wasn’t stale with tension and the expectation of tragedy, at least not for a few more years. It was around that time when he took you to his hometown and introduced you to his family; his mother, who shed tears as soon as her son told her his intentions on marrying you, his father, a stern man but who had warm eyes and very pleasant disposition; and his older brother, a high ranking officer in the King’s personal guard. You had spent the week helping his mother with anything she needed, tending to visitors and sharing private smiles with him. Happiness filled you back then.

“You came here to kill me,” answered Crown Prince Uian, bringing you back to a much darker present, “so go ahead and do it. I will not be considered some lesser being and be reduced to begging for my life.”

Upon seeing the older Prince raise his sword you started struggling against the thug keeping you in place. To impede you from reaching the royals, the soldier threw any decency to the wind and, taking advantage of his position, groped you all over. You hardly noticed as Crown Prince Uian straightened his shoulders and faced his brother head-on, for you were trying your hardest to escape the ruffian and get closer to them, perhaps if you could get rid of him and run fast enough you would be able to get in between the sword, avoid more years of chaos and instability. A double assassination could throw the kingdom into war and that could not happen.

“That’s it, you little bitch, you asked for it,” growled the man, and seconds later pain exploded from just below your ribcage, ripping through you until you felt the skin of your back breaking apart. There was a moment of blissful nothing until the sword was hastily jerked from your body and your body broke into violent spasms, your knees giving away and collapsing on the floor with an audible thud.

“NO!” you heard Jookee scream, an agonising growl, almost animalistic, as if it had been ripped from the deepest part of his soul. You heard him from a distance as if your head was submerged in water. The black edges of your vision made it difficult to see through the haze setting in; there was movement and a good amount of noise, of which you couldn’t make any sense, as the room tilted and you felt your temple hit the ground. In comparison with the flaming hot agony you felt around your mid-section, this injury felt ridiculously insignificant.

“Restrain him!” was saying the Fifth Prince, but Jookee was putting up an impressive fight. Not minding the swords at his throat, he rose to his feet and charged forward, swinging his sword at anything on his way to you. Rotten luck his was, as one of the things keeping him away from you was Prince Jeongan, who narrowly missed one of Jookee’s swings by a mere breath, jumping aside and seizing him by the hair at the back of his head. The crazed look on your boy’s face slipped away for a second and you could see the determined captain fighting against his better judgement and thinking if whether or not it would be worth it to raise his sword against the Prince. “You fool,” the Prince droned on, a dangerous glint in his eyes, “do you even know what you could have done? Had you left a scar in my body, I wouldn’t have been able to become king and all these assassinations would have been fruitless! I see you care more about some servant than the people you’re tasked to protect, do you not? If I recall correctly, the punishment for high treason is death.”

If you weren’t already trembling and cold, the ice that covered your heart at the Prince’s threat would have had you an incoherent mess in the floor in seconds. Your throat produced a drawn-out wheezing sound, but no one paid any mind to the agonising woman on the floor, not even your murderer, who had gone back to his position behind Jeongan.

Restrained from moving by the strong hand yanking his head back by the hair, Jookee moved his eyes to look at you and you could see through them how much it was breaking him to see you on the floor, away from him, and not being able, if not to take the pain away, to be next to you. He turned his gaze to the Prince and, with a voice clearer and steadier than you expected, giving that he was trembling out of rage, defied him one last time.

“I won’t protect a King whose throne is cemented over the blood of his own kin,” he said, poised and authoritative, even in this situation.

Not even deigning to give words back, Jeongan took the sword with which the soldier had run you through and impaled Jookee with it. For an instant, your vision cleared through your panicked tears and you could see the placid smile on your Jookee’s face, as a small spring of blood run from the corner of his mouth down his chin.

“If you care so much for this woman, over your own Prince, you might as well die by the same steel that killed her,” said the Fifth Prince before pulling out the sword and pushing Jookee’s head forward by the neck so that he fell on his side, a bit closer to you.

Whatever happened from the moment he collided with the floor onwards was lost to you. The sole focus of your drifting attention was focused on how Jookee was pulling himself by sheer force of will away from the royals, leaving a crimson trail behind him, toward where you lay, tears leaving his eyes from the pain, but certain and determined.

Lifting his head, his eyes locked with you as he grunted and you could see a thousand moments in one second; when the Court Doctor had introduced you to a scrawny lithe fifteen-year-old boy from the provinces, that seemed so long ago and yet you lived it as if it had been that same morning. When the bickering of childhood had turned into a beautiful friendship over the years, with him visiting you every time he was stationed at the palace, going on walks together, patching him up when he got rough with another soldier during training. The day he told you about his feelings it had been raining. Both of you had gone fishing to the river and when the sky broke it rained down with a vengeance. Your clothes soaked through so fast you’d had no time to seek shelter, and so it made no difference if you walked leisurely back to the palace or run your way there. Laughing as his hair stuck to his forehead and got tangled on the hilt of the sword strapped to his back, you didn’t notice how he was looking at you, with the softest smile on his lips, and reached a hand out to grab yours.

“I love how you laugh with your whole body,” he whispered. You shouldn’t have been able to hear him over the thundering rain, but you did. “I was meaning to tell you something as soon as we left the palace, but I just seemed to be missing the right moment.”

Tell me, you had whispered, as he drew you closer by the hand, moving a lock of wet hair away from your cheek with his thumb and leaving his hand there, caressing your face. You felt your heart on your throat and your eyes wandered around Jookee’s face, committing every second, every movement of his face to memory: the little scar under his left eye that he had gotten playing with his brother when they were children, the little dimples that showed on his upper lip when he tried to stop himself from laughing, everything.

“I know I am just a simple soldier and you could do much better than me, but I can’t live another day without telling you how you make my heart beat harder and are there every waking moment, in my mind and in my thoughts,” he said, quick and without drawing breath, giving away his nervousness. “We have grown old together. I can’t exactly tell you when my feelings for you changed, but I can just hope that yours did too and I am not overstepping your boundaries. I very much adore you and would be the happiest man on this earth if you loved me back just half as I love you.”

You couldn’t remember if you said something, or just jump into his arms, yours around his neck, and hugged him for the longest time. By the time you got to the palace, soaked through, you were a giddy happy couple who had planned, in such a short little time, what your life would be like when you got married.

It is incredible what the mind remembers in the most inopportune moments. We have grown old together, he had said and damn destiny, you wouldn’t get to grow any older. He was still painstakingly dragging his body to you, your vision blacker as the seconds went by, his face ashen but set. You knew he would reach you even if it cost him the last breath of life he had in his body. You wanted nothing more than be close to him until the end.

When he did reach you, he manoeuvred his body so that both his arms were encircling you, your face set against his chest which was shaking with shivers as violent as the ones you were suffering. Lifting your head with his bloody hand, he angled his so that you could look him in the eye. There, behind all the pain and the sadness at having both your lives cut short, was your boy, your Jookee, the one who had kissed you under rain and sun, over snow and with joyous passion, now dimmed as his consciousness began to slip away as fast as yours was. His lashes were wet with tears as he smiled at you, his teeth tinted with blood. You wanted to scream at the unfairness of today. What were the chances that you had to be here, the both of you, when a power-hungry Prince and a Princess too ambitious for her own good, decided to go around killing their siblings for the throne? Your life was fantastic, you were to be married to Jookee, a loving, caring and sensitive man, who would, no doubt, make your days beautiful and worth living if only to see the smile on his face when he came home.

“I love you,” he whispered, a tear escaping his eye and running down his temple. Your hand, resting on his chest, felt the erratic thump of his heart, trying to pump the little blood he had left to the rest of his body. Numbness had finally taken a hold of your body and you could feel nothing except from an overpowering sadness and helplessness.

“I don’t want you to die,” you sobbed. The hiccup caused by your cries did no good to your tired lungs, that tried to bring back the air you had expelled but were failing miserably. “Why did you… why would you act… so rashly? You… could have lived! You… have so much… to live for.”

“I have nothing to live for without you,” he whispered back, a wheezing sound leaving his body with every word he spoke, “I have no regrets if we leave together, we’ll die as we wanted to live. Holding each other.”

You could no longer keep your head upright, unable to kiss him one last time as you desperately wanted to do. Looking him straight in the eyes, as you heart broke into a million pieces, you whispered to him as your vision blackened completely. His sparkling eyes were the last thing you ever saw.

“I love you,” you told him, feeling your eyes close.

“If there is a life after this, let me find you again,” he said and those were the last words you heard as his body stopped moving and you slipped into unconsciousness.

You were walking along a river, barefooted. You felt as the warm, dark sand caressed your feet as you trod along, tirelessly. You knew you were looking for something, but couldn’t know what. Your mind was foggy and you couldn’t make sense of the flashes of thought that pierced through the milky white sheet. So, you kept on walking, maybe someday you would reach that place. What place? Days turned into months, or did months turn into days? Each hour passed swiftly and each second seemed to last a millennium. The shadows around the transparent willow trees grew closer to you the brighter the sun shined and the meadows were the most brilliant when the moon made its course across the sky. At some point between arriving at the river and then, you had stopped looking at how the sand engulfed your feet and lifted your head to look upon the thousands upon thousands of multicoloured stars that seemed to go on forever and whose light took residence in the most hidden corners of your soul. Silence surrounded you, incredibly noisy, even your footsteps on the sand were silenced. Weren’t you walking along a river? Shouldn’t the stream make some noise and silence your thoughts? You were meant to be someone else, somewhere else, and this unknown guilt was eating away at you. Yes, the night was silent, until it wasn’t anymore. The sound made you drop your head and you saw. The lonely figure walking along the same riverbank, only in the opposite direction. It was getting closer and closer as the years ticked by and you could almost distinguish the dark hair and the strong complexion that made him unforgettable to who you used to be. He was walking towards a bridge, standing proud atop the calm waters of the stream, red and powerful in a land where the dullest of colours were the brightest and the stars shone purple and green. His eyes and expression were covered in shadows and his gait stood out brilliant against the dark colour of the sand. You spent months walking towards him as he kept his steady pace towards you and, even though he was close enough to touch him, you never stopped walking but never could meet him in the bridge standing between the two of you. You were losing hope of ever this familiar stranger, what with having walked what felt like the longitude of the world twice for centuries. He was surely meant to stay there, the focus of your vision, and yet out of reach. Without knowing why that fact struck you as highly unfair. What had you done while living that the person you wanted to hold the most would forever stay strange to your touch? The stars faced and died and still there you were, walking to him, arms wide open and eyes brimming with tears, whispering over and over strange sounds that seemed to form words. Unknown words to you but familiar to him as he started to run. The seconds seemed to tick as if you were now walking through treacle instead of sand and you reached the bridge. Your body collided with his and intense happiness filled your whole being. Keeping him at arm’s length you were finally able to see his features, similar to the ones you remembered but not quite the same; brilliant eyes that seemed to reflect the galaxy over your heads, the scar was still there, but his hair was shorter, trimmed at the nape of his neck. His smile was still the same, blindingly shiny and unchanged.

“I’ll see you on the other side, my love,” he whispered and everything around you dissolved into nothingness.

Pink Hibiscus Cottage, Dartmoor, England. Spring 1922.

Watering the plants in your little cottage, you waited for the people to arrive. After a couple of quiet days, the cottage was going to be full of people and noise again. It had been so long that you could barely remember a time before your husband and you were the only occupants in the small wood house, close to Plymouth in Devon County.

Putting down the hose with some difficulty, you painstakingly made your way back inside and busied yourself with making tea. Once the kettle was hovering over the fire stove, you set aside two teacups and a little saucer with scones. It wasn’t likely that your husband would have enough appetite to munch on some sugary treat, but you were still trying to convince him to drink some tea. He was so quiet these days, so subdued. Up until a couple of months ago, he had still been his mischievous, playful self. His eyes always smiling at you, even when you bickered over small things; where did you put the stamps again?, he would ask you, exasperated that he seemed to forget all the time or, We should invite the children over more often, Christopher feels intimidated when we are alone and it is incredibly entertaining to watch. Christopher was your youngest son-in-law and your husband still teased him about the first time they met and the poor boy had tried his hand at introducing himself in Korean. His wife, your eldest daughter, had inherited a knack for pranking her husband, back then fiancé, more often than not using elements from her father’s Korean heritage that obviously went over the young man’s understanding.

The kettle whistled and you put everything on a tray to take it to your bedroom. It was a very sunlit room, the most luminous of the cottage, with windows lining the south-east part of the property. The wallpaper was a lively yellow flowery print, worn in certain places from the sun and bright and striking on some others. An armchair was put against the furthest wall, memories of rocking your children to sleep coming to mind the second you saw it, next to a massive oak shelf filled to the brim with books, both in English and Korean. If there was something your husband wouldn’t stand for as your children grew up was them not knowing where they came from and the riches of the country of their ancestors. Only your daughter Areum had been to what used to be the Kingdom of Late Joseon up until ten or so years ago, but even you, having been born in Plymouth, felt somehow part of that distant country. The centre of the room was dominated by a massive bed, the headboard and intricate pattern of forged iron, soft pillows supporting your husband’s body while he rested a few moments. Both of you knew those few moments were getting longer and longer, but no one mentioned it.

“I brought you tea, dear,” you said, leaving the tray on the nightstand and sitting on the bed. You leaned closer to your husband’s prone form, moving a few strands of grey hair away from his forehead. You found it funny, how after so many years, his hair refused to let go of the black colour it used to be, settling in a stubborn dark grey when he was fifty and never changing to white. He had also refused to cut it a while ago, and now it was getting closer and closer to the collar of his shirts. “Wake up a short while, my love. You need to be awake when the children get here.”

Groaning a bit, he opened his eyes and looked at you. As soon as he did, his face turned from a sombre and pained expression to the smile he always greeted you with.

“You know, Y/N,” he said and cleared his throat right away, straightening himself against the headboard, leaving a space for you to sit next to him. “had you not woken me up, I would have continued dreaming about the day we met happily.”

“I’m sorry I disturbed you, love. That was such a long time ago, do you still remember?”

“How can I not? I was the best day of my life.”

My father and I were set to arrive at Plymouth by mid-April, given that we had had to make a little detour to Massachusetts, but we didn’t expect to arrive at the beginning of May. Your father sent a letter telling us not to worry about our arrival, as he lived close to the harbour and would have no problem picking us up whenever he saw our boat beginning to dock. I still remember how nervous I was, coming to England and not speaking anything close to basic English, I was afraid I would be carnage to the old dogs of the docks, no matter what a big merchant my father was. After crossing the Atlantic, we arrived and just from the deck, my father pointed to where you and your father were standing.

You were so short, standing next to your father and not reaching his shoulder yet, and yet you were looking up at the boat, listening intently to how he explained something to you. And then you looked at me. I still don’t know what happened that day but it felt ethereal as if I already knew you and I was already madly, deeply in love with you. I could see your smile from the boat and my father would never stop reminding me in the following years how the first thing I said in English soil was “Have I seen an angel?”. You were so friendly from the first time we spoke to each other and even came to see me to our little room by the harbour with your books and your little sketches. Plymouth became a home to me thanks to you, you made a new country feel just like I felt in Joseon before we left.

“Oh, but I remember that day differently,” quietly, you interrupted him. He smiled tiredly and threaded a hand through your greying hair. You loved the feeling of him being caring and close to you. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you stuttered and were so shy I even thought you disliked me from the beginning.”

He chuckled as he tried to make himself a bit more comfortable in the bed, his back cracking and his lungs overworking themselves from the effort. Even if he was feeling bad, the second he turned to look at you, his eyes regained their spark and he kissed your forehead, allowing your head to rest on his shoulder.

“Why, I thought you were the finest woman I had ever seen. I even heard bells when you kissed my cheek later that week.”

“You Casanova,” you laughed, “I was already madly in love with you back then, I had to show everyone you were mine.”

He turned quiet, remembering those early days of your relationship, how you had been always together, when he would accompany you everywhere, under the pretence that his father had tasked him with keeping you company while the adults worked. You had been keeping correspondence while he studied English back home and him, being the strong-headed man he was, refused to return to England until he could properly talk to you. He would say back then that English didn’t make his native Korean any justice to tell you what he wanted to tell you.

“I proposed to you after that man insulted you for associating with me, remember?” he asked you.

“Kwangsu, please,” you saying his name was something rare. He was so fond using pet names and terms of endearment with you and your children your names were rarely called in the house, only when someone was in trouble or seriousness was needed, were those names called.

“No, I know you don’t like to talk about this because you think it upsets me, but I want to tell you, once again, how proud I was that day of calling you my friend. If I had any doubt that you were the bravest woman I knew, it was obliterated that day. I knew marrying you was the best decision I would ever make, and I am still amazed to this day.”

You had been waiting for Kwangsu to arrive back to your house from the harbour. Your father had been overjoyed when you told him your intentions of starting a courtship with him and so had been mister Yi. The two of you had been closer than blood since you had met two years prior and no one could doubt how strongly you felt for one another.

Someone had knocked at your door shortly after noon and thinking it was Kwangsu, you had run down the stairs and was unpleasantly surprised when Jack Richmond walked through the door, cane and walking coat in perfect condition and blond hair slicked back. He used to be your friend back when you were children until he had developed an attitude not many could stand. He seemed to think that only because his father owned the biggest training company in the city everything was his and everyone in town owed him respect. This attitude translated into his uncomfortable obsession with you, not so much unpleasant as it was unwelcomed. He would drop by unannounced, demand that you accompany him on one of his many strolls through Hoe Park, take you back to his immense house for tea with his mother and many other things that were not entirely tiresome if they weren’t coming from Richmond. Today, of all days, his presence was particularly tiresome and you itched with the want to run out of the door and go find Kwangsu. As soon as you saw Jack’s face, though, your every thought dissolved into weariness. He seemed angry and unsettled, twisting his neck in every direction, in search of something that obviously wasn’t there. If you hadn’t been starting to worry, you would have laughed at the perfect ostrich impression he was gifting you with.

“Where is that yellow friend of yours?” he asked, foregoing all courtesy and jumping straight to the reason for his impromptu visit. Which made you incredibly angry.

“What did you just say?” you demanded, livid on behalf of Kwangsu. How dare he, from his high and fragile pedestal, to speak such ill words of the person you held most dear?

“Ah!” he ignored you, looking over your head as the sound of the main door closing reached you across the parlour. “It seems I needn’t had worried, your shadow just arrived! It’s my lucky day!”

He brushed past you, making you lose your footing and grab for dear life at the bannister ascending to the second floor for balance. Jack was tall, slim and sharp and yet, he didn’t reach Kwangsu’s jaw when he tried to face him head-on. He was at an obvious disadvantage and he didn’t seem pleased when he realised it was so, his nostrils flaring and his brow creasing past the point of possibility. His shoulders straightened and his breathing became shorter and swallow.

Kwangsu, on the contrary, was calm and collected. He didn’t seem faced at all, his posture relaxed as he took on the other man’s stand. His feet moved a mere millimetre, slightly separated and firmly planted on the floor, making you remember that time he had told you how he had been taught martial arts since he could walk. In the event that a fight broke out, you were sure which of the two would end up fairing worse.

“What, you think you can just arrive from wherever you crawled out and take our women?” Jack was livid without reason. What did he care what the relationship between Kwangsu and you was? Apart from it being none of his business, he had managed to anger you past the point of reason.

You marched and walked in between the two men, your back to Kwangsu’s chest. If you stepped on Jack’s foot with excessive impetus, you would never recognise it.

“And according to you, whose property am I?” you asked, leaning back into Kwangsu and glaring at Jack through your lashes.  If he thought he had the right to barge into your house and through ridiculous accusations left and right and lay a claim to you, he was sorely mistaken. “I must have lost the telegram telling me we were engaged to be married, Jack. Or is it that you are a long-lost member of my family to have a say in who I spend time with?”

His mouth turned into a deep frown and he screwed up his face in disgust. You could see the cogs inside of his head turning to figure out an appropriate comeback and coming back empty-handed.

“You are a good Englishwoman, Y/N,” he finally said, nothing better to voice. “I don’t know why you are wasting your time with this – this foreigner when you could be making connections for a good marriage.”

“Shove that good marriage of yours where the sun doesn’t shine, for all I care!” you retorted, as you saw your parents descend the staircase down to the parlour, surprised faces showing their confusion, but still they frowned and shot suspicious looks at Jack when they felt the tense atmosphere in the room. “Kwangsu is a thousand times the man that you are and if you insist to continue spewing your disrespectful propaganda, I am in the obligation of telling you that our association has finished today.”

Kwangsu took one of your hands in his and squeezed as your father shoed the dandy out of the door and your mother hugged you. None of you had ever cared highly for the Richmonds and thanks to what you did that day, you wouldn’t be forced to stand their company anymore.

“I didn’t last the week without asking you to marry me, did I?” said now your husband, hugging you tight to his chest.

“Oh no, you didn’t. and if you had I would have done something very indecorous and proposed myself,” you answered back with the same retort you did whenever you talked about that time. He loved how you weren’t the type to sit back and let things happen to them, much preferring to take the reins and make those things happen.

You lapsed into silence again as the shadows flickered around the room, highlighting parts of the wallpaper with brighter patches of light. Little by little the both of you drifted off to sleep and dreamed of the life you’d had. He woke you up with a coughing fit a couple of hours later and you painstakingly cleaned the beads of sweat from his forehead. He then asked you to help him change his sleeping shirt and trousers so that he could hug your grandchildren when they arrived. With a little too much effort on your part, he changed and settled back into the pillows, looking at you with guilty eyes. He had always been a very independent and dependable man, who would rather take care of everyone around him than being taken care of. As fate had it, he was destined to depend on you now.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you admonished him sweetly. “For every time you’ve depended on me, you’ve taken care of me a thousand.”

“I just find it difficult to make you worry so much,” he whispered, taking an iron hold of your hand. His eyes shone with unshed tears. “Guilt is eating away at me because I am leaving you behind, my love. I swore a long time ago that we would be forever.”

With a tired smile, you got closer to him and kiss his forehead. You had never had this conversation before, but you had known it was coming. He started looking at you with that guilty look the second the doctor had said there was nothing else to do except wait for the inevitable. He had been set on being as careful around you as he could be, not wanting you to exert yourself on his behalf.

“We both know forever is just a fancy young people tell each other, Kwangsu,” you smiled. If these were to be your husband’s last memories of you, you would make sure he remembered you smiling, if not happy. “We’ve had a great life together. Three wonderful children and so much love. I don’t regret anything.”

“Still,” he stubbornly retorted. It would be easier to sway a mountain than this man’s will. “I don’t like leaving you here in this house alone. We built it together and I thought we would have more time to share it. Why must I leave you when I would like to share a thousand more years with you?”

“Do you remember what I told you the day Soyeon was born? If you don’t remember that is the day in both our lives I depended the most on you.”

Frowning he nodded. You knew he remembered. As the years passed, he may have forgotten many things, but never that day.

“I nearly lost you both. I don’t think I’ll be able to forget it.” His face had turned ashen as the memories flooded him and it made you feel a little guilty at having provoked such reaction. Your intention was giving him fond memories to distract him while your children got to the cottage, but his mood had changed so suddenly you hadn’t thought it through.

“That day we got our Soyeonie, we became a family Kwangsu. I had never seen you so happy as the moment I woke up and you were holding her.” His eyes were now looking at you but he was very far away, maybe that day forty years ago when you had welcomed your first child into your hearts. “I still remember clearly how terrified you were when she fell off the tree in the garden one summer and she came back skipping, her mouth bleeding and her baby tooth held proudly on her fist.”

“That one was a calamity!” he said, letting go a strong laugh, his eyes wrinkling at the corners. “It is one of the biggest mysteries of humanity how we survived her childhood. She was always bleeding and giving us a heart arrest after another.”

“Yun wasn’t so bad, he was just happy following her around,” you remembered, seeing in your mind a pair of small children. A dark-haired girl with a sweet pink dress stained with mud and her hair going in every direction, and a baby boy waddling behind her, trying to keep up and getting dirt all over his short trousers in the process.”

“Yet neither of them gave us as many headaches as Areum did fifteen years ago,” he sighed, even if those days were a fond memory now, at the time it had seemed terrible and dangerous. “To fall in love with Yun’s friend and go back to Joseon when the situation was as bad as it was.”

Your youngest daughter, Areum was eighteen when she met Hongjoong, your son’s friend. He had been living in Joseon up until he turned sixteen and was sent by his father to help manage the branch of their trading company in England. Yun and Hongjoong had hit it off instantly and Areum had been captivated the second she saw the young boy. She would be found sighing in corners, looking out of windows when the boys arrived at the cottage from Plymouth in summer. The young man was bound to notice and it happened the year he decided to go back to his home country and help his father with their boat company seeing the Japanese threat getting closer and closer. In a fit of what she labelled courage and you labelled stupidity, Areum had left with him without telling you and had married when they arrived at Joseon. After that little stunt had followed many letters, getting scarcer and more worrisome as the years went by. It was early 1910 when they had arrived out of nowhere, with their son on tow, telling the news of how the Japanese had taken over and they had decided that returning to you was the best option for their family.

“Grandpa!” screamed a little voice, followed by the slam of a door and many adult voices admonishing the younger ones.

A huge smile illuminated your husband’s face and he sat upright in the bed with more energy than he had displayed in the last months. He was brimming with happiness at the mere laughter of your youngest grandson who, at six, was the biggest calamity the walls of the cottage had seen. Knowing how much you’d had to deal with his mother and her siblings, you weren’t really in agreement with how much Kwangsu validated the child, but you wouldn’t say anything. The door to the bedroom opened and in poured many dark heads and some slightly lighter. Your grandchildren all approached the bed and smothered their grandfather in love while your children stayed standing by the door, shocked to see their father is such a state. They must have remembered him as the energetic, happy and generous father they had last seen at Christmas, not this weathered and tired old man, laying on the bed, his face ashen and his bones noticeable through his skin.

Your eldest daughter, Soyeon, approached you, setting a hand on your shoulder and smiling wearingly at you. That gesture was enough to tell you how much they had missed you both and how much they were hurting too.

“Mother wants me to study so much!” was saying Yun’s daughter. At fifteen, she was an exact copy of her aunt Soyeon, a little explosive body and a personality to match. If it were up to her, she would be out of the house exploring everything she could find, including the harbour and the docks, which was no place for a young lady her age, according to her mother.

“Your mother wants you to be a learned young lady, don’t you want to be able to outwit your cousins?” asked Kwangsu, knowing exactly what needed to be said, as always. She was your only granddaughter and she would do anything to get ahead of her cousins and prove to them “what a girl could do”. Usually what a girl could do included swimming, playing polo and any other sporting activity they told her she couldn’t participate in, but it seemed that now that would also include studying, judging from the determinate frown on her face.

The hours after the arrival of your children passed happily. All your grandchildren had something to tell you, their parents complaining about their choice of spouse in the case of the older ones as your husband had done with your sons-in-law when he had been in their place. At some point, between laughter and witty remarks, the younger ones had drifted off to the garden to catch insects while their parents and older siblings went around bringing out chairs to take the evening tea in the sunlight. Kwangsu had asked you to open the curtains a bit wider so he could see your family enjoying themselves in the garden and you had, joining him on the bed again after and laying against the headboard while he settled against the pillows.

“I know now what you meant before,” his whispered, his eyes looking at you, reflecting the young boy you met in the docks all those years ago. “They make everything worth it. I have no regrets.”

His eyes gave a last determinate glint, memorising every corner of your face and he kissed the hand caressing his cheek. He relaxed, his body a dull weight against your side and the both of you listened to the laughter of your family as the shadows were growing and the light turned dimer.

“I love you,” he whispered and when you looked down his chest had stopped moving.

Keeping the tears at bay and through the unbearable knot on your chest, you tried to breathe in deeply and that air escaped your lungs in a strangled sob. His face was relaxed and he looked at peace. How were you going to live your life without him?

“Wait for me,” you whispered back and stood up to search for your children.

He had been waiting for a while, sitting at the bottom of the imposing bridge. He didn’t remember much but the place was oddly familiar and he just knew he mustn’t cross the bridge. He had seen how the trees moved to the soundless music of the river, how the dark sand had been covered by snow and turned even warmer. He had tried to see his reflection in the waters of the river but had never gotten close enough. There was always something that caught his fancy and took his attention away from the water. One day, the stars had started a dance overhead that kept him mesmerised for what only looked like a second. He had dropped his head after and realised the trees had withered. Or was it only an illusion, for it seemed that nothing withered in this land. Time was also a strange concept. He felt like he had been walking for an eternity when he reached the bridge and the time he had been here having passed fleeting and short. The days and nights succeeded each other faster than they should have, had he been still living. Even if the red construction promised oblivion and a cease of this boredom, he still sat upon the wooden steps. It was night, and the stars shined brighter than the brightest sun in multicoloured patterns, so close to him he could feel their coldness in his whole being. And then, in between the stars appeared another figure, clear and almost ethereal. Her hair flying around her body in swift breaths and he stood up. He knew her, he had been waiting for her. No words were needed, he wasn’t even sure if words were possible here. He just hugged her to him with the strength of all those centuries he had spent without her. And together, they crossed the bridge.

to be continued x

[veikonvihannekset]

The male gaze in Harry Potter

One problem with fairytale allegories of justice like that in Harry Potter is that they allow the writer and readers to enjoy the moral complacency of being on the side of good without actually having to engage with the forms injustice can take. Fighting injustice isn’t as simple as yelling and throwing things. And when the antagonist is evil personified, it’s very easy to take the moral high ground without doing anything more nuanced than… not killing people. This fighting for an abstract justice does not always extend to engaging with the real-world inequalities and injustices that pervade the fantasy world as well.

More gifted pens than mine have written extensively on the subject of JK Rowling’s cisheteronormativity, exoticisation of minorities, and Anglocentrism. We have from her own pen the fact that she does not consider persecuted and vulnerable minorities welcome in safe spaces, and that she supports political programmes that endanger trans people’s dignity as well as their actual lives. We cannot overstate the horrific consequences of the hubris and carelessness with which she denies trans people agency over their lives, and dismisses the indignities and actual risks trans people face.

But here I’m going to look at the fact that even her flagship girl power characters (the white, presumed cishet characters who occasionally get to actually do things) are not treated very well.

For starters, let’s look at the way she writes about girls in general. Most of them are hysterical gigglers, hopelessly obsessed with romance, given to cheesy displays of affection and jealousy. (Think Cho Chang’s friends, or Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown.) They are typically credulous, indignant, hysterical, easily dismissed.

The way it’s written, it seems like these characters are meant to serve as a foil to the girl characters she approves of. Hermione, Ginny, Luna, Professor McGonagall, Mrs Weasley. The odd thing is that these characters really aren’t treated much better than the ones who are objects of ridicule.

Now, I have nothing against the characters themselves. They are all wonderful, clever, talented and good people. It is the way they are written that is seriously problematic: we only see them through the gaze of some very straight and faintly misogynistic teenage boys. They are never given a chance to speak for themselves or take centre stage.

I think Professor McGonagall and Mrs Weasley both represent types rather than being actual people. Professor McGonagall is a wonderful character, but she is never allowed to have much impact on the plot, or any real relationship with any of the characters. Of course, this is somewhat in keeping with JK’s message about how adults are unreliable and got us into the mess we’re in. But to me, it’s odd that they look at Albus Dumbledore’s whimsy, truisms, favouritism and general shadiness and see a more reassuring figure than the straight-backed and honest lady professor who is concerned about all students, and does her job faithfully and well. Perhaps she’s too much the ‘crazy cat lady,’ or simply too Scottish? Or just too much a woman?

Mrs Weasley is allowed to be a wonderful, caring and affectionate maternal figure - and yet there’s none of that in her attitude to the girl characters. She can be a substitute mother to Harry, but she will believe any nonsensical story she reads in a tabloid about Hermione (whom she’s known just as long as Harry), and be hostile to Fleur. She may be tolerant of in-world Muggle-borns, but she exhibits real world prejudice towards other women. (It’s strange that a woman writer would make her kindest and most caring character exhibit these prejudices, and moreover, that they’re treated as trivial and amusing. It’s all seen through the male gaze: women are prone to quarrelling and holding grudges, and can’t have real friendships with one another; it’s up to men to treat women well, and protect them from the viciousness of other women.)

But now, on to the main subject of this piece: Hermione.

Hermione is JK’s flagship character when it comes to women’s empowerment. She is clever, confident, speaks her mind, stands up against injustice, when in doubt goes to library. And yet Harry and Ron somehow see her as an object in the background who does their homework and isn’t pretty. Almost every book features an arc where one or both of them gives her the cold shoulder for some reason.

Harry and Ron’s treatment of Hermione hits rock bottom in The Goblet of Fire, where Harry and Ron obsess over finding pretty and eligible partners for the ball and manage to forget that Hermione, their ‘best friend,’ exists and is a girl. (This is probably meant to be funny, but it isn’t.) They refuse to see that they could ask to the ball until they have absolutely no other options, then refuse to believe that anyone else could find her attractive, and then, to crown it all, are actually affronted when someone does. With all the hullaballoo about getting partners for themselves, did they never think to check if Hermione was in the same position? And isn’t it shocking that she couldn’t talk to her best friends about a potential romantic interest? Of course, the worst of all is the scene where Harry doesn’t even recognise her because she straightened her hair and wore a dress. To put things in context, this is after Ron spent a good long time being jealous of Harry fighting for his life and Hermione was the only one who was there for him.

Why is it always taken for granted that Harry and Ron are best friends and Hermione is some sort of third wheel, when she’s the one doing all the emotional labour as well as the homework? Why is she consistently either an imitation boy (and apparently an inferior one) or girlfriend material? Can’t she be their best friend and be a girl?

The false dichotomy between the pretty airhead and the brainy girl who’s unattractive is one that has haunted us for far too long: ‘if a woman have the misfortune of knowing anything, she should conceal it as well as she can.’ Jane Austen, writing from the point of view of women, satirised it; JK, however, buys into it. She seems to be trying to show that Hermione can ‘do both’, beat the airheads at their own game when she wants to, but she doesn’t consider it worthwhile to do it in the normal course… but why does this dichotomy exist in the first place? Why are all the ‘feminine’ girls treated as inferior and foolish? why isn’t Catherine Morland worthy of affection as well as Elizabeth Bennett, and why is being worthy of romantic affection the only metric of importance?

Harry and Ron also mock Hermione’s commitment to social justice. (Another instance of how hollow JK’s allegory of justice is: it apparently doesn’t extend to communities that are actually oppressed and magically mind-controlled.)

Hermione literally gives up everything to be with Harry and Ron on their quest, even wiping her parents’ memory of her,  and yet this is completely taken for granted. All Ron can do is complain that his mother cooks better than she does. This, to someone whose mother was despatched to Australia and doesn’t even remember she exists, because she decided their quest was more important. Shouldn’t Harry, who grew up without his parents and longs constantly for them, understand what a big thing that is? Would they have so lightly wiped Mr and Mrs Weasley’s memory, and sent them to Australia? Are the Grangers less important because they are the parents of a girl character, or because they are Muggles? (If JK was trying to draw an analogy between pureblood prejudice in the Wizarding World and racism in the real one, her own treatment of Muggles really doesn’t show up in a positive light.)

The worst part is that Hermione ends up with Ron, who has never appreciated her in the slightest. We know for certain that at least one man actually appreciated her intelligence and abilities (but perhaps he’s out of consideration for being too foreign? Another instance of JK’s Anglocentrism.) Now, why does the smartest and bravest character in the books have to end up with a rather colourless and grumpy man who calls her bossy and complains that she doesn’t cook as well as his mother does? Isn’t this a little like Elizabeth Bennet ending up with Mr Collins instead of Mr Darcy?

Then there’s Ginny, who went from background object Harry takes no notice of to background object Harry would like to kiss when she developed some Quidditch moves and acquired a boyfriend.

And there’s Fleur, who is supposedly talented and enters the Triwizard Tournament, but is completely useless at all the tasks. She is also used, once again, to prove the supposed littleness of all the women around her, who mock her and put her down while Harry defends her. Funnily enough, he’s never shown much respect for her capabilities before (or anyone else’s for that matter). JK Rowling may talk about friendship across national boundaries, but this doesn’t extend so far as to let her foreign characters be actual people. (It doesn’t even seem to extend to letting Scottish and Irish characters be actual people.)

Hermione and Ginny are treated so much better than all the other female characters, given that they’re (implied) white, cishet, English and ‘not girly’. And yet they’re not treated well at all. They’re just props for the most part, while everything impressive and important is done by a man.

[freakfromnowhere]

[start ID 1

A dimly lit gif of a man walking through an outside base. The man looks at his phone and laughs before putting it back down. He walks a few paces before saying, “That’s actually hilarious”

end ID 1]

[start ID 2

A picture from an article that reads, “From JK Rowling’s new book: Her Villain’s tumblr header”. Below the text is a sepia-toned image of an excerpt from the book which reads,

“Disabled artist - fashion, music and bird lover - life right now is mostly about being sick

CF - fibromyalgia - POTs - allodynia - I need more spoons

Strike had no idea what the need for spoons referred to and assumed it was a piece of whimsy, possibly from some book or film he didn’t know. He read Kea’s post about being forced to return to live with her mother, then began to scroll through examples of her art, which was heavily anime-influenced. There were…”

Under the picture, the article continues. “A girl living with disabilities who criticizes Rowling’s self insert character of ableism is the bad guy.”

end ID 2]

youre laughing. jk rowling published a book about a youtuber getting “canceled” for transphobia and racism then murdered. like half the book is just mean tweets the sjws send the protagonist. she named the made-up-made-up character the made-up sjws are calling an antisemitic caricature the yiddish word for shit. and youre laughing. it’s the same length as tolstoy’s war and peace.

[lucidlucy]

For the fanfic asks, N and R ☺️

N: Is there a fic you wish someone else would write (or finish) for you?

I’m still waiting for somebody to give me more Hermione/Dolohov (yes, I know, don’t judge me. I love throwing HG to the wolves and see her kick ass regardless) fic, more Reyux fic, more Sarah/Jareth fic, more… lmao. I have a billion ships I want to read more of because there are not enough fics, and I know REALISTICALLY that I could fix that problem by writing it myself BUT WHERE’S THE FUN IN THAT?

As for finishing fics? I guess no? I don’t mind putting in the work… but if I could get all my writer frands to like…lend me their energy via osmosis so that I could, that would be wonderful. Because I’m le tired. 

R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?

Fandom wise, the person that got me writing was @kylorenvevo because I adore her shit (I’ve probably said this ad nauseam over the years but, you know… great artists gotta be recognized). I’m also seriously, helplessly in love with anything @senlinyuwrites puts out and want to absorb her brilliance into my bone marrow. 

I also recently discovered Resmiranda, writer for the Inuyasha epic Tales from The House of The Moon, and her prose makes me very happy. The fic is old and so if it was that lovely back then, I can only imagine what her talents must be now. (i’m still searching for her tumblr…)

Non-fandom wise, I live and breathe and die for R. Lee Smith (my getaway to monsterfucking/true monster romance lmao). Her books are dark and gritty and Not Pretty and full of so many possibly triggers it’s the epitome of Dead Dove; Do Not Eat, which is not usually my cup of tea in fiction because while I like to suffer I only like to suffer to an extent… but her books, man. Her books. Land of the Beautiful Dead and The Last Hour of Gann have ruined me. 

JK Rowling, despite all the garbage surrounding addendums to canon by her AFTER HP was complete, shall remain nestled in a soft spot for me because her books were the reason I learned to read for enjoyment AND simultaneously learn a new language as a shy, insecure, socially isolated 14 yo ESL kid who always felt self-conscious about words. Writing for me has been a new development (I know I’ve mentioned it before, that I only really stopped feeling self conscious enough to write anything when I joined this fandom after  TFA), but Rowling’s magic taught me to at least not fear them long enough to enjoy them.

Then there’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s poetic prose, Neil Gaiman’s wit, Robert Jordan and the weaving of epic worldbuilding, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi turning the painful to the fantastical and unbelievable, Erin Morgerstern’s Night Circus for its dark whimsy… and whatever else has influenced me has probably been snatched in bits and pieces embedded into my subconscious here and there, which I inevitably cannot recall and I’m sorry for that.

Fanfic ask meme 

[douxreviews]

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Review

I really struggled with this review. Mostly because of JK Rowling’s #KeeptheSecrets initiative, designed to keep people who want to see the play but haven’t away from spoilers. So, what I’ve decided is this. In keeping with #KeeptheSecrets, the first bit is very general and totally spoiler-free. Then comes the spoiler kitten. After that, anything goes. We good, JK?

Having grown up with these characters, being in a room with Harry, Ron, and Hermione was…there’s no other word for it…magical. I honestly could’ve watched the three of them sit on a plane for six hours and would have been happy with it. Did I think the play was perfect? Of course not. Would I recommend flying across the world and spending thousands of dollars to go see it? No, that would be irresponsible. Am I glad I did that thing I’m not recommending you do? HELL YES. Now, okay, not all of that is the play. If I had flown to London, seen the play, then gotten right back on a plane, I would have felt cheated. But I really had a killer time in London. Sorry, tangent.

By far the play’s strongest assets are its Golden Trio (for the uninitiated, that’s Harry, Ron, and Hermione). They felt so consistent with their book counterparts. Every actor (I saw the original cast) so perfectly encapsulated their characters. There were no awkward “Hermione wouldn’t do that!” moments* (expanded upon in the spoiler section). The one exception to the wonderful acting may have been the character Delphi, who started out okay but by the end of the play was distractingly over the top.

Without spoiling anything, the effects ranged from “that’s cool but I totally see how they did that” to “NO WAY??!? HOW?????!!!” There’s even a scene that takes place in the lake. Like, UNDERWATER. I remember reading the script beforehand thinking that there was no way in hell they could pull off half of what was written. I’m happy to say I was wrong. One thing, though: there is way more interpretive dance than you are expecting in this show. No matter how much you are expecting, there is more.

I do recommend the script as a piece of literature, if you’re a Potter fan. If you’re not, give it a pass. The plot is fairly uninspired and the whimsy is missing in action without Rowling’s prose. Potterheads should definitely check it out if you haven’t already. You get to spend a few more hours with Harry, Ron, and Hermione and there are a couple of solid humor bits.

*(continued from above) There were moments when I felt like, Hermione wouldn’t do that or Professor McGonagall wouldn’t do that, or Cedric wouldn’t do that, but only in the alternate timelines. You can explain away their totally out of character behavior by saying the past has been changed and time travel can create unpredictable results but I refuse to believe Hermione could be cruel, McGonagall could allow herself to be dressed down by a former student, or that Cedric could kill anyone. By the way, this story features time travel and alternate timelines. Okay maybe at this point I should throw in a quick summary of the plot.

Basically, Harry and Ginny’s youngest son, the tragically named Albus Severus Potter, doesn’t really fit in with his family or at school (he was sorted into Slytherin!). His best friend is Draco Malfoy’s son Scorpius. The two get their hands on an illegal Time Turner (a device introduced in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that allows the user to travel through time). They use their Time Turner to go back to try to save Cedric Diggory who was killed by Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Long story short, they make a total mess of things. They erase family members from existence, destroy relationships, and ultimately resurrect Voldemort. Well done, boys. That’s the first of two thirds of the show. Then it is revealed that Albus and Scorpius’s friend Delphi is Voldemort’s daughter and the entire Time Turner fiasco was masterminded by her in order that she be reunited with daddy dearest. Yeah, I know how stupid it sounds. Finally, after the earlier Time Turner mishaps were sorted out, Delphi goes back to the night Voldemort killed the Potters in order to stop him and save his life. The Potter-Granger-Weasley clan, now wise to what’s going on, follow her back in time to stop him. A final fight ensues, Delphi is defeated (as well she should be, one teenager/twenty something is no match for four adult wizards) and everyone goes back to the future, the end. This is the simplified version. Seriously. The story is…involved.

So as far as the story goes I have favorite little bits and pieces I cling to. For instance, Hermione is the Minister of Magic. Atta girl. Dudley Dursley and Harry remained in touch and Dudley sent him the blanket he was wrapped in when the Dursleys found him on their doorstep. Awww. Neville Longbottom’s importance in the Harry Potter saga is cemented when it is revealed that his death is what triggers the darkest timeline, the one where Voldemort won the war. That said, Neville doesn’t actually appear in the play which I found…irksome.

Aside from the few incidents previously mentioned, everyone felt very much in character throughout which had to be hard to achieve. Harry is still lazy about certain things (Divination homework has turned to Ministry paperwork) and still has a tendency to shout at people when emotional. Not a great characteristic, but one that’s been very consistent throughout the books. Deserving of special mention is Draco who still dislikes Harry but admits now that he was jealous of him and the friendships he had while they were in school. I also really loved Draco’s darkest timeline persona. In the world where Voldemort was defeated Malfoy was a good guy. In the world where Voldemort won he was…less of a good guy. That’s just the Malfoy way, isn’t it? Go with the flow. But less in a hippie dippy way and more in a purely ambitious way.

There were some characters who weren’t used to their full capacity. Ron was played entirely for comic relief. Now, in the books he was usually the one to relieve the tension but he also got important things to do. He played the chess board to get through to the Philosopher’s Stone, he saved Harry from the locket horcrux, he destroyed the locket horcrux, he was the only one who thought to try to get back into the Chamber of Secrets to destroy the rest of the horcruxes. Here, he’s just there for laughs. Ginny, too, is seriously lacking in things to do. She mostly nags Harry about his relationship with Albus and stands just behind him in group scenes, looking worried. She seems to be the logical continuation of movie Ginny, not the book Ginny I know and love.

A lot of people have issues with the idea that Voldemort and Bellatrix Lestrange had a daughter. It doesn’t bother me too much but I also feel the need to point out that there is no proof that Delphi is actually Tom Riddle’s daughter and not, say, an extremely disturbed girl. The only evidence that she may be related to him is that she and he share the talent of Parseltongue, the ability to speak to snakes. Now, Parseltongue is a rare ability, true, but it’s not exactly a DNA test. I seriously think Delphi is just a crazy person with delusions of grandeur.

One of my favorite parts was the darkest timeline bit where we got to see what would have happened if Voldemort had won the war. Umbridge is in charge of Hogwarts, which bothered me a bit (it should, logically, be Snape). But they have this cool handshake everyone does and they say “For Voldemort and Valor” which was kind of awesome and yet it bothered me that everyone used the name Voldemort when, in the books, it was sort of a huge deal to say it and few people ever did. But there were a bunch of cute bits from this part of the play. “Potter” was a swear word, there was a day celebrating the Battle of Hogwarts (Voldemort Day) and Hermione and Ron lived underground as freedom fighters. Watching Scorpius attempt to navigate the world all on his own (Albus had ceased to exist at this point) was hilarious. You know what? Scorpius was hilarious full stop. I loved him when I read the script but watching him on stage he was so…flamboyant is maybe the word. I just adored him. He felt like the weirdest combination of Hermione (mega-nerd) and Ron (blurts out whatever he’s thinking) with just a bit of Neville thrown in for good measure.

And now, more, spoilery details on cool effects!

- The best was every time the characters traveled through time, the whole stage kind of did this visual shudder that was amazing. The audience legitimately gasped.

- In the comedic highlight of the play, Albus, Scorpius, and Delphi take Polyjuice Potion to turn into Ron, Harry, and Hermione (respectively). The transformation was clearly done with trap doors but it was still an amazing bit of stage trickery.

- Delphi’s true identity is revealed by glow in the dark writing on the wall. As the characters discover this, the whole theater lights up, also covered in the same, heretofore invisible writing.

four out of four cursed children

sunbunny