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dewykth · 4 years ago

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SWEET SEPTEMBER.

a @periminkle and @dewykth collaboration.

synopsis. for many, september symbolizes new beginnings. but for namjoon, this month never fails to send him back into the past. though this time, something seems different.

pairing. kim namjoon | female reader contains. fluff, angst, slice of life au, ballet instructor!reader, single dad!nj word count. 7.5k+ warnings. death mentions, mature audience

dae’s note. surprise !!! this fic is dedicated to my favourite virgo karla @guklvr !! happy birthday bae i hope you enjoy this lil thing me n vira whipped up for u!! (i stress wrote a lot of this ha.) also sry for lying & keeping you up but hopefully this makes u forgive me. but i hope ur day goes amazing ILYSM DUDE !!! <333 and a huge thank you to vira for hopping on board for this idea bc i cld not have done this without her !!! pls give her all the love !!!

vira’s note. KARLAAAA!!! i always gotta scream ur name it’s mandatory to start with a good scream ykno? bUT HAPPY BIRTHDAY GIRL 🥳 i already told u this too many times today but ILYSM !! like that full day without saying a single word to u felt so weird and i kept going into our chat and rereading our mssgs and wishing I was talking to u??? which is weird to admit?? but that literally how much i missed u idk how but im addicted to u so if you leave me I will literally die :))) aNYWAY have the bestestestest day ever and i hope u love the fic bc I ignored all my uni work to finish this !!! (also i feel reallyreallyreally bad about last night sO IM SORRY AGAIN BUT I HOPE THIS IS WORTH IT) 💖

Despite the papers carelessly stuffed into his leather briefcase, the dark coffee stain on his black slacks, and his unkempt locks resembling that of a bird’s nest, Namjoon’s become accustomed to the hectic nature of his mornings.

The kitchen table is practically buried under stacks of files, yet he brushes them aside to allow one corner of the glass surface to peek through. He plops the toddler in his arms onto a high chair before racing to the counter and sloppily pouring some honey nut cheerios into a small bowl, handing it off to his daughter.

“Daddy?” her voice squeaks, a patient smile stretching across her lips. Her brown strands are tied up into pigtails at the crown of her head with pink ribbons that flutter with the movement of her tiny head.

“Yes, angel?” He scurries around to their bedroom, peeling the stained fabric off his body and threading one leg through another pair of slacks fresh from the laundry.

With Namjoon’s focus pinned on checking off the mental to-do list in his head, he misses the gentle, reassuring smile that stretches across her rosy lips. The adoration for her father is clear in her gaze. “You forgot to pour the milk.”

At the reminder, he squawks and hops back to the kitchen on one foot as he maneuvers his other leg through the pant hole. Swinging the fridge door open, he grabs the carton and sloppily pours the milk into her bowl—white droplets leaping out with their newfound freedom and forming perfect domes on the glass tabletop.

Cleaning the mess falls to the bottom of his priorities at the moment, and so he speeds off to the bathroom to ensure that his appearance is presentable for work while Dasom reaches over to pluck a tissue from the box, swiping the milky beads away before diving into her breakfast. She shoves as many cheerios into her small mouth as she can, rushing because she refuses to finish her meal in the car with their wild driver behind the wheel.

Despite her mere four years of age, she knows from experience that a bowl of cereal and a shaky vehicle is a recipe for disaster.

Namjoon races over to his briefcase with most of his hair sleeked back, only the locks of his bangs hanging out to frame his forehead. As he slips his dark blazer on to complete his form-fitting suit, Dasom scoops the last few brown rings into her mouth and slurps the remainder of the liquid.

“Did you finish your milk?” he questions while cramming the edges of the loose leaves that peek past the seam of his briefcase, hurriedly zipping it up and turning to face her.

Dasom flips the edge of the bowl up to display its empty contents, gulping the last of her breakfast down her throat. As per routine, she scans her father for any inconsistencies in his attire, landing on his odd fitting bottoms.

“Daddy, your pants are on backwards.”

His eyes nearly bulge out of their sockets, glancing down to affirm that the pockets at his sides are no longer at the front of his hips. Hastily, he shimmies out of his slacks once more and twists the fabric around to the proper orientation.

Dasom hops off her chair, her bowl and wet kleenex in hand as she waddles over to the sink and waits for him to deposit the dirty dish into the sink and the sullied tissue into the trash. Although her short arms couldn’t reach over the countertop just yet, she’ll diligently drink every last drop of her milk in hopes of growing tall enough to take some of the load off of her father’s back.

He hoists Dasom up at the sight of the red car pulling up to the driveway, squeezing into the back seat. Namjoon doesn’t have to tell the driver to book it, as the calm man in front has learned to keep his foot pressed on the pedal. The car weaves through the morning traffic with concerning speed, snaking through the other vehicles littering the road as if they were no more than stationary pylons, simply there for practice.

Dasom remains on her father’s lap with his arms looped protectively around the seatbelt over her torso. She sinks into his embrace, fiddling around with his long, slender fingers as she watches the blurs of colour speeding past the window.

“Did you put your ballet shoes into your backpack, angel?” Namjoon loosens his grip on her, unhooking one hand to rummage through his own briefcase in order to confirm that he had indeed slid his laptop within the chaos inside. To keep her entertained, he playfully extends his digits out of her reach.

“Of course!” she chirps, a wide grin revealing the gaps between her teeth. The pads of her fingertips brush against his palm and tickle the sensitive skin there when she realizes that her arms lack the length required to latch onto his hand. “I can’t wait for class, we’ve got a new teacher coming in today!”

Humming absentmindedly, he sighs in relief at the sight of the silver device and packs the crumpled papers back in. “What happened to Ms. Kim?”

“She’s teaching the older class now.” The pout on her lips can be heard within the muffled lilt of her voice when she continues, “I asked her to stay until my birthday next week b-but she didn’t.”

Namjoon’s breath hitches at the reminder, but attempts to compose himself for his daughter’s sake. “It’s out of her control, angel, plus she’ll probably swing by anyway.”

His mind starts to fog up with the emotions he thought he buried last year–they swarm his every thought and nibble away at his sanity. He knows better than to believe that they would ever disappear. September will always be an insurmountable month for him.

“I might be a bit late to pick you up later, just sit tight and wait for Daddy, okay?”

She eagerly nods in response, noticing the dull red bricks of her school coming into view. “Okay, bye Daddy!”

Namjoon unlocks the seatbelt, wistfully watching his toddler bounce out of his arms and onto the asphalt below. No matter how many times he drops her off, it’s always difficult to be separated from her bright smile, but he reminds himself that it’s all for her; it makes things a little easier to bear.

“Have a good day at school.” He reciprocates her frantic waving through the window, craning his neck to watch her adorable form become smaller and smaller with the increased distance. Her full cheeks and crinkled eyes are engraved into the back of his mind.

Before long, Namjoon finds himself rushing into his office after an earful from his surly boss about everything from the late hour to the long list of meetings scheduled to all the work he’s got piled up. With his lips pursed and his head bowed, he somehow manages to make it past another lively morning.

Namjoon has a habit of overthinking. He figures it’s normal when you have a stressful job and a four year old full of energy to balance all by yourself. Not that overthinking about his daughter does him any good, because that is far from the reality. If anything, it just makes him, what you’d call, a bit... overprotective (over worrisome if you asked Jin). But it’s something he can’t really help. Even when she had just entered his life, so small and so blissfully unaware of the awful and evil things in the world, all he wanted to do was hold her in his arms and shield her from it all as long as he could.

Though he’s very aware of the fact that it won’t be much longer, that won’t stop him from going over every single little thing that could go wrong in the meantime.

So, of course, when Namjoon’s asshole of a boss makes him stay two hours over his shift, all Namjoon can think about is Dasom. Is she okay? Has she eaten anything? Did she drink enough water today? She’s always dehydrated after her classes too. He usually calls Ms. Kim to check up on her, but his calls went straight to voicemail, which definitely wasn’t helping his hectic mind. Perhaps something had happened to her?

Oh god, maybe someone broke in and had injured Dasom?

The doors are thrown open, the sound of the doorknob hitting the wall reverberating through the room. The receptionist wearing her usual polka-dot dress jumps in her seat, eyes lifting from the intense scene on her phone to the entrance of the building. An unsure smile stretches across her ruby red lips at the familiar figure, though a bit disheveled and breathless. But before the customary ‘hello’ can even form on her tongue, the figure is rushing past her, leaving only a gust of air in his wake. The papers on her desk fall to the ground, and she sighs.

Namjoon is prepared to fight the (fictional) person who thinks breaking into a toddler ballet class is a good idea, but the scene in front of him once he pushes past the doors of the studio is one he is wholly unprepared for.

He sees Dasom first, and the relief that fills his body is indescribable. It’s far from the usual sight he’s greeted with when he picks her up late. She’s not sitting on one of the chairs in the far corner of the room. His heart doesn’t feel heavy, which comes with seeing his daughter so glum. This time it’s her laughter that greets him, not one provoked by him but by the figure standing in the middle of the room with her.

Dasom doesn’t seem to be aware of the presence of her dad yet, but the figure twirling her around turns, and her eyes land on Namjoon.

The reaction is immediate. The carefree smile that had been on your face slips off, a look of embarrassment and surprise overcoming your features. Namjoon only catches a glimpse, and somehow finds himself wishing that won’t be the last time he sees it. You let go of Dasom’s hand, quickly making your way to the stereo on the other side of the room. And that’s when-

“Daddy!”

Dasom wastes no time running into her father’s open arms, and Namjoon suddenly can’t remember why he was so worried in the first place. “Hi, angel.” he says, just loud enough for her to hear. She pulls back. “I’m so sorry for getting here so late. I promise i won’t do it again.”

But of course, Dasom holds nothing but forgiveness in her heart for her hard-working father. She does love teasing him, though. “Don't say sorry to me, say sorry to her.” she giggles, pointing behind her and Namjoon furrows his brow until he remembers they’re not the only ones in the room.

His eyes immediately move to where you stand awkwardly near the stereo, eyes moving around the room as if you hadn’t been watching the whole exchange. Namjoon sighs, realizing he definitely can’t avoid talking to you now. He stands straight, holding onto Dasom’s hand as he makes his way over to you. You only seem to grow more nervous as he nears, and Namjoon distantly recalls Jin telling him he came off as intimidating to most people. Something about his ‘beefy’ arms, in his own words. (“And that stupid and unfairly attractive face!”) He goes for a smile because it's not like he can control his physique.

“Hi, I’m so sorry about…”

Namjoon stops.

Maybe it was the overwhelming distress before, or the really shitty lighting of the studio, but he hadn’t realized how pretty you were before. But now he’s standing right in front of you and he can’t seem to form a coherent thought. Pretty can’t be the right word. He realizes how creepy he probably looks, running in here like a madman and then downright staring at the (very beautiful) woman who looked after his daughter? Not cool, man.

You clear your throat, before extending a hand to him. “Hi, I’m ____, the new ballet instructor.”

Your voice sounds just like honey.

Namjoon stares at your hand dumbly, before the sound of Dasom snickering (very discreetly) behind him snaps him out of it. But instead of introducing himself, or apologizing, or just taking your fucking hand, he says-

“What happened to Ms. Kim?”

He mentally face-palms.

Not. Cool. Man.

Your face falls, and Namjoon has never wanted the ground to open up and swallow him whole more than he does now. “Uh, she’s instructing the teen class now.” you chuckle awkwardly, dropping your hand.

“Oh-”

“Daaaad,” Dasom's voice sounds annoyed, and perhaps it’s a bit silly of Namjoon to feel like he’s being scolded, but that is exactly how he feels right now. “I told you this. In the morning. Remember?”

He doesn’t. “Ah, right of course,” Namjoon scratches the back of his neck. It wasn’t like he meant to forget, he had just been too busy thinking about the other things every September would bring. “Sorry, I’m Kim Namjoon. Dasom’s dad.”

This time he offers his hand, and he thanks the skies above that you don’t seem to hate him because you fit your hand against his. Warm, like honey. How long had it been since he last made a fool of himself in front of a pretty girl?

Too long.

“I’m terribly sorry for arriving so late it’s just that my boss, who’s a huge-” Namjoon glances at Dasom, who is now in her own world, singing some song she learned in school, “jerk, decided to assign these reports last minute and the printer would just not work and then traffic hour-”

Your hand comes up to cover your mouth, but Namjoon can see the amusement bubbling in your eyes. He flushes a deep red, eyes falling to the floor, realizing he started ranting.

“It’s okay. Really.”

When he looks back up, there’s a smile on your face. Not like the one before, this one was more reserved, but genuine, reassuring. And just like that, he’s sure you don’t hate him.

Namjoon’s not sure he likes this feeling though.

“Straighten your arms out, girls!” you belt over the classical music that floods the studio’s walls, scanning your army of toddlers in tutus whose arms immediately tense at your command. Making your way through the row, you poke and prod everywhere from their shoulders to their ankles. “Arch your back more, Somin.”

Their muscles violently tremble in response to the strenuous routine you’ve introduced, facial features scrunched in concentration and a resolute will to uphold their positions despite the hyperextension of their limbs. A mix of pity and pride swells in your chest at their effort. ��Keep your chins up, the annual recital is only a couple of days away.”

Cheers erupt throughout the small room, disrupting the focus and spoiling their perfect form, yet you refuse to quiet excitement because of the renewed vigour buzzing throughout the room. The next hour depletes all of their built-up energy with demi-piles, pirouettes and sautés.

A glance at the analog clock in the corner informs you of the five minutes remaining before the end of class, so you pause the speakers and instruct the girls to stretch themselves out as they wait for their guardians to trickle in. They collectively sigh in relief before dropping to the floor like flies.

You snort at their dramatics with an amused smile playing at your lips. “I said to stretch, not to lay down and nap.”

“Can’t we nap and stretch at the same time?”

Strolling over to the source of the voice, you cluck your tongue at her limp form sprawled across the wooden floor and cross your arms, struggling to keep your giggles from breaking your angered facade. “And how do you suppose we do that, little Miss Dasom?”

She flashes her toothless grin up at you. “Like this!” With one leg bent over the other and her hands looping around to hold her twisted limbs to her torso, she shuts her eyes and exaggerates her snores.

At this point, it’s nearly impossible to withhold your snickers, and the rest of the class joins in your laughter. You pick up on Dasom’s tinkling giggles between each of her heavy breaths. The lighthearted jokes continue as kids are signed out with bright grins on each of their faces.

You wait for the rest of the toddlers to file out one by one, waving goodbye and checking them off your list until, as usual, Dasom is the only toddler left. Her tiny feet still clad in her faded ballet shoes waddle up to you, tugging on your blouse.

“Your pirouette was a bit wobbly today, do you want to go over—”

“‘M tired,” she interrupts, slouching her shoulders with an adorable frown marring her lips. Her exhaustion is justified, since the routine is rather exhausting, and with their recital right around the corner, you worked them to the bone today.

The odd timing of the switch between you and Ms. Kim left you with a little under a week to tweak and perfect their current choreography. A sloppy routine is not the way you want to present your skills to their parents for the first time, thus you were stricter with the kids than normal.

Your sympathy wins out, and so you gather Dasom’s lithe figure into your arms as you head to the closest wall. With your back supported, you spread out your legs and place her in your lap.

“My birthday is this Thursday.”

“Mhm,” you hum, bobbing your head to signal for her to continue her train of thought.

Her back faces you, but when her head tips down to stare at her hands, you know she’s contemplating her words carefully. Rather than encouraging her to speak freely, you wait for her to feel comfortable enough to reveal her thoughts; and surely enough, her shell cracks open just enough for you to peep through. “Do you wanna come?”

“I would be honoured.” A giddy smile splits across your lips. “Is Daddy picking you up again today?”

She flips around in your hold, wrapping her arms around your waist and snuggling her head to your chest. Her words are muffled into the fabric of your thin shirt, but her tone indicates her affirmation.

Suddenly self-conscious of your heartbeat—that Dasom can definitely hear with her ear pressed up against you—picking up pace at the mention of her father, you suppress your thoughts with a guilty conscience. You internally chide yourself for harbouring feelings for the charming, taken, man, defying arguably one of the most important fundamental rules of becoming an instructor.

Do not develop silly crushes on your student’s parents.

“Ms. ____?” her faint question snaps you out of your reverie, attention brought back to the present moment. While preoccupied, your hand took on a mind of its own, gingerly patting the space between the little girl’s shoulder blades at a slow rhythm.

She gazes up at you when you halt your rhythmic movements, sharp eyes boring into yours. “Are you gonna ask Daddy to come see me dance?”

The edges of your lips flip up in what you hope to be an encouraging smile as you nod your head. Subconsciously, you begin to stress over another encounter with Namjoon, formulating a script to hopefully avoid the stiff, tense atmosphere that lingered throughout all your previous interactions.

“Daddy’s always really busy,” she slurs, drowsiness coating her words and weighing down on her lids. Grumbling under her breath about her numb legs, Dasom crawls onto the floor beside you with her head resting on your thigh. “He’s always working hard for me.”

Your eyes soften at the fetal position she’s taken up on the ground; not only was Dasom lucky to have such a dedicated father, but Namjoon was also blessed with a caring daughter. “You don’t think he can make it?”

“It’s okay,” she whispers and you have to crane your ears to listen. You stroke the strands littering her forehead, gingerly caressing the crown of her head. “It’s okay if Daddy can’t come. I know him, he’s trying to do it all because Mommy’s not with us anymore, but it’s okay. I still love him even if I can’t see him lots.”

A knot forms between your eyebrows, a bittersweet ache forming within the creases of your heart. The painful constriction of your chest ebbs and flows with your shallow breaths that can’t seem to make it past your throat. You bite your lip to subdue the plentiful liquid gathering at your waterline.

No more than a croak escapes your lips before the door to the studio flies open, meeting the adjacent wall with a bang!

“I’m so sorry, my meeting ran late and I couldn’t—” the rest of his speech gets stuck in his windpipe at the sight of you, eyes rimmed red and sniffling, with Dasom, ostensibly dead asleep, on your thigh. “Did she…?”

You blink away your incoming tears, although your dignity has been completely thrown out the window, seeing as he believes that his four-year-old kid made a grown woman, who just so happens to be her ballet teacher, bawl her eyes out.

As you go to gently shake Dasom awake, she sluggishly lifts her head off of your lap and starts to scale your torso like a koala on a tree. Your confusion is vocalized through the high-pitched hum in your throat, but your efforts to pry off her limbs, tightly wound around the small of your waist, are futile.

“Uh, Dasom? It’s time to go home now, angel.” Despite his firm words, Namjoon’s tone is unsure and shaky; he can feel cold sweat build up in the lines of his palms. He knows his daughter, and she can be periodically stubborn and insistent the way children are at her age, thus even as you come to stand, she’s stuck to you like glue. “Would you, uh, did you need a ride?”

You mimic the sheepish smile on his face, hoping the flaming blush you feel on your cheeks isn’t as visible as it seems. “Sure.”

With Dasom latched onto you, both of you make your way to the red car outside after you lock up the studio. Namjoon courteously opens the car door for you, what with your arms supporting his clingy toddler; although, with the brute force he uses, you worry for the state of the hinges. Thankfully, they stay intact and he’s able to slip into the backseat after you.

Before an awkward silence can settle, you clear your throat and prepare to ask him about his day, but you’re interjected by Namjoon’s sudden stammering, “D-driving’s such a hassle for me so Jin drives us everywhere. Jin knows how to drive though, so, don’t worry.” He finishes with a deep chuckle that dies off nearly as quickly as it began. Oh, that’s unexpected.

“You don’t to drive yourself?” Rather than being processed in your brain and logically thought through, the question immediately enters your mouth without any prior scanning for dumbass-content. You instantly regret it, feeling as though it’s much too invasive. “You don’t have to answer that, I—”

The hearty laughter that meets your ears is “No, I do. Sometimes. But its easier raising this one like this.” His tone turns sweet at the mention of Dasom as he reaches over to pat her head, and you’re overcome with an intense desire to prod more into his personal life. Why does he have to work so much? Which shirt in his closet is his favourite? How does he like his eggs in the morning?

“I’m not sure if you already knew about the annual recital on Saturday, but Dasom’s been practicing really hard for weeks and the kids are all really talented, so it would definitely be worth your time...”

As he’s gazing at his daughter, galaxies of devotion and longing swirl within his cocoa irises. The cool light of the moon shines through the windows of the car, illuminating his sharp jawline and strong brows. You’re absolutely mesmerized by the sight in front of you. “You must be really busy, huh?”

“More than I’d like to be.”

You rip your entranced gaze away from Namjoon, willing yourself to steady your frantic breaths.

The remainder of the ride still drips with awkward tension, although with a definite lighter tone than before. Jin pulls up to your apartment with your direction and you dislodge a sleepy Dasom from your torso, which is much easier now that her limbs have gone slack with sleep. Handing her off to Namjoon, who practically engulfs her tiny form with his broad chest, you rush out of the vehicle with a quick, “See you!”

You slam the door closed before he can say anything, racing into the comfort of your home with your heart in your throat.

The last thing you had expected to do on a Thursday evening was to go to a birthday dinner. Thursdays are your days off, your in-days. The ones you spend lounging on your couch with a face mask and some wine. And yet, here you are.

When you received a text this morning, the last person you had expected it to be was Namjoon. Much less Namjoon asking you to come over for Dasom’s birthday. You weren’t going to say yes, hell, you had thought of downright ignoring it. It was weird, wasn’t it? But Dasom had quickly carved a toddler-shaped hole into your heart. Truly, you had said yes before the message was even typed out.

And so now you stare at the tall apartment building in front of you, definitely feeling more nervous than before. You knew that Namjoon had to be well-off to afford a weekday chauffeur, but damn did you not expect him to be this well-off.

It seemed today was the day to expect absolutely anything.

You enter the opulent building, signing in at the front desk before entering the large, mirrored elevator. The beating of your heart picks up the more floors you pass, and you can’t help but fidget with your appearance. Namjoon had said it would only be you three, which you guessed was supposed to calm your nerves but really, it did anything but that. The mere thought of eating dinner with Namjoon was nerve-wracking. But now you were about to eat dinner and enter his home; you had no fucking clue what you were getting yourself into.

The doors slide open, and you step into the hallway. A single door could be seen at the end of the hallway, so you quickly make your way over. You stop right in front, taking a deep breath in before pushing the doorbell. A beat, a crash, another beat, then-

The door swings open, and your breath catches in your throat.

Namjoon looks heavenly as always, but seeing him in clothes other than his usual black slacks makes your heart do a cartwheel. God, this is dangerous.

“Ms. ____!”

Before Namjoon can form a hello, Dasom is running past him and wrapping her small arms around your legs. “You came! See daddy! I told you she’d come.” her tongue pokes out of her mouth, aimed straight at her father and you stifle a laugh.

“Did he think I wouldn’t?” you ask, eyebrow arched as you glance at Namjoon, who seems to have a permanent pink hue on his face.

“He said you wouldn’t!”

“Oh, really? What else did he say?”

“He said I had to help him clean either way!”

“Alright, Dasom. That’s enough.” He says firmly, clearing his throat and trying to act as unaffected as possible. His eyes shift to meet yours. “Why don’t you come inside?”

As much as this day really sucked for Namjoon, today had been… different. Not all too much. Of course, getting up was the hardest part, but he had decided to make Dasom her favourite breakfast meal instead of her usual cereal. He had also made sure to get her all the toys she had been wanting, and planned their day out to do Dasom’s favourite things. Namjoon just wanted this day to be special for her. That was all he cared about.

But when Dasom had asked him to invite you, he had hesitated.

Dasom had never spent her birthdays with anyone else but Namjoon. Not that it was intentional, but Namjoon liked to have this day just for the both of them. Because that’s how it’s always been. He didn’t know what it was about you that made his daughter talk about you all the time. Or why she wanted to spend a birthday with you. But how could he deny her? And so, the text was sent.

And now, as Namjoon puts away the dishes while you sit on his couch, he realizes he hadn’t thought of her today. Not as much as the years before. Dinner had been so... nice. It felt nice to have someone else around. Namjoon loves Dasom, but he hadn’t realized how distant he had gotten from everything that had once seemed to be the centre of his life.

Namjoon closes the dishwasher, exiting the kitchen and making his way to the living room. He places the two glasses on the table before pouring the dark red liquid.

“I hope you like Merlot.”

“Oh, please. Anything’s fine.”

You take the wine glass, sending him a thank you before taking a drink. “So,” you lean back, “remind me how to play this again.”

“Ms.____ I told you. You have to take a block without knocking the tower over,” Dasom shows you by pushing a middle wooden block out, “then you have to place it on top, like this.'' She places the same block on top of the tower.

“Ah, right! I just need to make sure if I want to win.”

“You can’t! I’m the best!”

“Oh really? And what about you?” you turn, brow raised and eyes playful.

“Pshh,” he scoffs, leaning forward. “Who do you think she takes after?”

He doesn’t think he’s ever lost a game so quickly.

Namjoon watches as you close Dasom’s door quietly from the hallway before you make your way back to the family room. “She’s out like a light. I guess all that tower building got to her.”

Namjoon snorts. He feels oddly disappointed as he watches you gather your things to go. Was it weird that he wanted you to stay? “Do you need me to get you a ride? I can call Jin to drive you home.”

“No, it’s fine! Really! I already ordered an Uber anyway.” You grab your coat near the door. Before Namjoon can unlock the door, you touch his shoulder. “Listen, thank you for inviting me today. I know you probably wanted to spend this day together instead, but I... “ you inhale, because you aren’t sure of what you want to actually say “thank you.”

Would it be weird to say how much better you made today? Probably. “You don’t… have to thank me. I think I should be the one doing the thanking. I really wanted this day to be special for Dasom and you… you definitely helped. So, thank you.”

The door opens, and the light of the hallway fills his dim flat. “Guess we’re even then.” you smile before turning, making your way to the elevator. Namjoon shuts the door once the sight of you is gone, but the smile on his face remains

“Guess we are.” he whispers wistfully

Perhaps stopping at a flower vendor when you’re already running late was a bad idea, but Namjoon wasn’t thinking about time. He had seen the bouquet of flowers and imagined the huge smile that would stretch across Dasom’s face, and that was all he needed to swerve into the left lane.

Now, though, as he anxiously watches the cars in front of him move a foot forward after thirty minutes, he’s sure he should have just left the fucking flowers alone.

Namjoon doesn’t know how long he’s been shifting his eyes from the traffic to the watch ticking around his wrist, but by a miracle, the cars start moving. Slowly, then he’s speeding down the highway, praying to the skies above he’ll make it in time. Even if he arrives in the midst of the dance, he can’t miss this recital. He won’t.

He sighs in relief when he sees the familiar glass building, though it’s cut short when he sees the parking lot. No available place in sight. Fuck. Namjoon is sure he looks insane right now, swerving around the parking lot in search for an empty spot, or really just any fucking spot that looks like it could fit his monster of a car.

Then the clouds seem to open up, and right near the entrance is a vacant spot. Namjoon swears his mouth almost waters at the sight. Quickly speeding around the lot, he parks, but not before flipping off the angry parent who tries to beat him to it. Namjoon exits his car, quickly grabbing his coat and the large bouquets of flowers from the backseat. He runs to the entrance, practically throwing the shriveled paper at the ticket clerk.

Namjoon slows as he nears the theatre doors, taking a deep breath before calmly opening it. He had completely forgotten to book seats in advance, so he’s not surprised to see the velvet seats filled to the brim. When he looks to the stage, he’s relieved to see that there’s still time until Dasom comes on.

Now, Namjoon knows he’s not the most… balanced person. It’s common knowledge that he trips over his feet and knocks things over sometimes. (Oh, but definitely more than the average person.) Now, if you were to ask Namjoon if he pays attention to his surroundings, he'd say yes.

But if you were to ask Namjoon what he tripped over, he wouldn’t know. It doesn’t matter, because now there’s a furious mother with a horrendous bob cut glaring at him, and what he thinks to be a broken camcorder on the floor. The only thing he can manage is an awkward smile and an even more awkward apology. Namjoon offers to give her the cost for repairs, hell, even offers to buy her a new one. The woman snatches the bills from his hands but she doesn’t go back to minding her business like he thought she would. No, instead she starts to argue with him, in the middle of her child’s recital, no less!

Namjoon can’t do anything but stare at her as she blabbers on about how horrible he is for throwing her camcorder on the floor. (Not like it had much life left, that thing looked like it was from 2007.) She’s damn near spitting on his face, and causing other parents to turn around and glare at them. As if it was his fault. Who knew she had such an attachment to the damn thing!

A hand lands on his shoulder, and for a second he’s sure it’s security ready to escort him out of the building. But when he turns, he’s surprised to see it’s you. Like an angel had ascended from the clouds to save Namjoon from the wrath of a ballet mom. And just like that, you’re leading him away, taking a seat two rows before the stage. Namjoon’s eyes widen at the sight of the empty seat beside you.

It’s that feeling again, and Namjoon’s palms start to get sweaty as he takes a seat. “Jesus, thank you for that,” he whispers, relishing your quiet laughter that follows.

“Of course. She was probably a blink away from going full-blown Karen on you.” you tease.

“Oh, and that wasn’t?”

“Oh, Joon, you haven’t seen how angry ballet moms can get.” you both laugh, huddled together as if you’re sharing a special secret. It seems so natural. As if this is where he’s supposed to be. So much that Namjoon almost doesn’t catch the nickname, but how could he miss it when you say it just like she used to?

The stage lights darken, and Namjoon is grateful for the excuse to look elsewhere. He’s sure if he would have stared at you for just a bit longer, he would have done something completely and utterly stupid. “This is her.” you whisper, and Namjoon buries the thought away.

A blue hue shines across the stage before the soft melody begins to play, filling the room with the sounds of strings and keys. One by one, tiny swans begin to come into view, prancing around the stage. Namjoon catches sight of Dasom, looking adorable in her white tutu and he can’t help the proud smile that makes its way onto his face. He watches with adoration as she does her pirouettes, and maybe there’s some water overflowing in his eyes as they finish their dance, bowing towards the audience.

You both stand, clapping and cheering the loudest, uncaring of the stares from the snobby rich parents because you’re both too damn proud of Dasom to care. For a moment, Namjoon pretends that it’s different, simpler. That it’s not only his child on stage but yours. Ours. He thinks he likes the sound of that too much.

Once the show ends, you lead Namjoon backstage where the buzz of dozens of girls talking fills the air. You tell him that you need to check in on the other kids and disappear through a hallway. He spots Dasom quickly, or rather, she spots him.

“Daddy! You came!”

Namjoon lifts Dasom with his free arm, twirling her around before placing a big kiss on her forehead. Her giggles fill him with delight, and he doesn’t care that his cheeks hurt from how hard he’s been smiling. “Of course I came, angel. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

He places her on the ground before he grabs the bouquet of sunflowers from his other arm. The sight of her favourite flower makes Dasom jump with joy. She takes the flowers, and Namjoon silently coos at how much smaller they make her look. Then she spots the other bouquet of flowers in his arm. She scrunches her brows together, about to ask who those are for before her eyes catch something behind Namjoon.

“Ms. ____!”

“Dasom!”

Dasom jumps into your arms, and you laugh at her enthusiasm. “You did so well! I’m so proud of that pirouette!” You twirl her around once her feet hit the ground, smiling as you watch her stumble slightly. Namjoon can’t help but smile too.

“Look what daddy got me, Ms. ____! Look!” Dasom lifts the flowers up, almost shoving them into your face.

“Wow, these are very beautiful, Dasom!”

“Look! He got you some too!” she giggles, and you look at her confusedly then at Namjoon. He sighs, looking pointedly at Dasom despite the cherry hue making its way across his cheeks. She giggles once again before running to her friends. “Dasom!” but it's futile.

If it weren’t for the consistent chatter, Namjoon’s sure there would be an agonizing silence to fill the space between you. You walk closer to him, looking down at your shoes bashfully. “Ah, these-” he takes the bouquet from his arm, “these are for you.”

You looked surprised to say the least. Eyes wide and glassy, your mouth falling ajar. “Wow, uh, really?” you ask, glancing up from the bouquet. He nods shyly.

Listen, he had only planned to buy Dasom her favourite flowers. But then he caught sight of these beautiful yellow roses, tips painted a light amber orange. Somehow they reminded him of you. And the way you had left him with his heart feeling lighter for the first time in years the other night. Maybe it was a way of saying thank you. He’ll admit, he didn’t think it all the way through, but the way you’re smiling at him right now makes him think it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

There’s a moment where it seems to just be you and him, despite the tons of parents and children running around. He’s only focused on you, and the way your eyes drop to his lips, if only for a millisecond. Namjoon wants to say it. God, he wants to say it so badly. “Listen I… I’ve been meaning to ask you,” his voice fades away as his eyes catch yours. Hopeful. Beautiful. Glimmering.

Just like hers.

“Do you, uh, need a ride home?”

And the bubble bursts.

You step away, looking at anything but him and he hates it. He despises it. He wants you to look at him like that again. He wants nothing more than to pull you back and kiss you senselessly, like his mind is screaming for him to do. But he can’t. He can’t do it for some fucking reason and he almost wants to cry in frustration because why can’t this just be easier? Why is it so hard to move on? You don’t deserve this. You deserve so much better than what he can offer you. And that thought keeps him still.

“Uh, sure.”

Quiet.

Say something, idiot! Tell her what you’ve been dying to say! Just fucking say it!

Namjoon hates himself for the next words that tumble out of his mouth.

“Let’s find Dasom.”

The drive to your house is just like it was before, except this time there’s no chatter to fill the emptiness. Dasom is sound asleep in the backseat. You've never seemed more distant than now, facing the window, body pressed against the door. You had almost begged to go in the back with Dasom, and Namjoon doesn’t know why he didn’t just let you.

How did it come to this? This wasn’t what he wanted. This night wasn’t supposed to go like this. Everything should have gone differently.

He doesn’t know how he’ll ever fix this. If things will go back to normal. If he completely ruined it. But he’s too afraid to ask. Too afraid to know.

Namjoon has never hated the quiet more.

The sight of your apartment complex fills him with dread. All he can think about is all he wants to say, all he should have said, all he wants to take back. God, Namjoon wishes he could take it back. If only there was a way to turn back the time. Why had he been so afraid to make a move? Why did it hurt so much? But he knows going back wouldn’t help. Not when he doesn’t know if he would have done it differently.

His car comes to a stop, and the doors unlock. He faintly catches the small thank you before the passenger door slams shut. Namjoon watches as you make your way up the pathway, feet moving briskly and it feels like he’s watching you walk away from him.

You’re shuffling through your bag, looking for your key. And fuck, is he really just going to this go? Is he that stubborn that he can’t see past himself? He can’t. He can’t let you go. Not like this.

Well do something, dumbass!

The door of his car is thrown open, and before he can overthink it-

“____!”

You still. You turn.

Namjoon shuts the door. He walks up the steps and stops a few feet away from you, but he feels like he’s miles away. You look up at him, questioning. Your eyes aren’t the same ones. Not like you looked at him before. Yet they’re still warm. Inviting. Namjoon is tongue-tied, and all those words he wanted to say are gone now.

“Are we… good?”

“Why wouldn’t we be?”

“I just…” he scratches the back of his neck. “That moment back at the recital. I… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” you say, simply. When he looks at you, he can’t tell what you’re feeling. You’ve blocked him off. “Namjoon, really. It’s fine.”

But is it really? He wants to ask. But he doesn’t. It’s quiet again, this time the sound of the wind rustling the browning leaves above filling the space. Still.

“I… god, I don’t know why this is so hard. Ever since, you know,” you don’t. “I… I didn’t think I'd ever get an opportunity to…” he inhales, unsure of what he wants to say first.

“I just feel like I ruined it so carelessly.”

You don’t say anything for a few moments. You only stare at him, really stare at him. Like you can see through his mirage, through the walls he’s spent so long building up. You’re taking it all, but there’s nothing he can take back from you.

“You didn’t.” you whisper it so quietly, Namjoon would have thought his mind had taken pity on him. But a smile slips onto your face. Unlike the other ones. It doesn’t fill him with joy. It doesn’t give him butterflies. This one hurts.

And he knows you’re telling the truth.

“This… It might take a while.”

The wind picks up. The leaves rustle. The cold, biting.

“That’s ok. I’ll wait as long as you need me to.”

Your lips are bittersweet on his tongue.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AGAIN TO KARLA !! ILYYYY <3

#bangtanhq #btsbookclub #ficswithluv #btsguild #btsgoldnet #cypherwritersnet #namjoon x reader #namjoon angst #kim namjoon x reader #kim namjoon x you #bts x reader #namjoon fanfic

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laidbare-a · 3 years ago

Note

— 22 // Are there any red roleplay flags for you that make you back off immedately?

Mun questions || Accepting!

Things like overly aggressive rules and people who equate fiction with reality are huge ones, but I don't think I could possibly put it any better than how you have on those subjects! Honestly I still laugh when I remember a gh/etsis who followed me with rules like that... like, if you believe writing a villain or problematic things are morally wrong, you are sure playing the WRONG character to get your point across, buddy! It was also blatantly obvious they didn't even skim my rules and just... yeah. Heavy sigh. That in itself is a massive red flag.

Instead I'll talk about something else I learned the hard way! Heads up for mentions (not the slightest bit in-depth) of fictional noncon and abuse!

You'd think this would have been more obvious to me, but if someone comes up to you with their evil adult au of a decidedly non-evil child canon character and almost right off the bat starts discussing the possibility of an arc that leads to abuse and noncon with your one female character as the victim, that's not a good sign! Especially when I made it very clear that a topic that dark is something that would take a lot of careful discussion and planning and is strictly something I would only consider if the other mun was a deeply trusted friend!

Back then I was too polite to straight-up tell him off, so I just tried to steer things away. (Don't be like I was! Stand up for yourself, you deserve to have your boundaries respected!) He also had a second character who was bit too interested in my character as well. Like the dude really showed up with two separate characters to aggressively ship with mine. It was finally when he started asking me to RP his oc's brother and wasn't taking no for an answer that I finally snapped. Like forreal, I have my OWN characters to juggle, why should I write yours for you? What?! I finally sent him the bee movie script and blocked him and he ragequit from his blogs the same day. Like legit, it was a really awkward spectacle.

Absolutely wild, y'all.

If someone shows up asking for really dark stuff and ignores all of your very clear boundaries, it's only going to go downhill from there and you should block them before it can possibly reach that point. I love being liberal with the block button now! I also hate that it's so hard to even think about rping my own character publicly again bc of weird stuff like that! Like, of course it's my One feminine girl who gets all the people like this................... I'm willing to write some dark stuff but not with randos off the street. And most certainly not in public either, that stuff is personal and no one else's business.

#how can you just sit there and eat pizza?! || mun #out of sight || ooc #long post #abuse mention #noncon mention #sexism cw #bo i am so sorry you kept getting so disrespected #i still love you you're a very important character to me and that's why you're staying in a box where you'll be safe gjkhdbfhijdfnh #this is why i can't play feminine women #... and part of the reason I play w/ the sweet polly oliver trope so much #god i have so much stuff to work through

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snarktheater · 4 years ago

Text

Ready Player Two — Opening Cutscene & Chapter 0

Hello again.

It’s been a while. I haven’t been active on this blog since, fittingly enough, Ready Player One. I was going to do this sooner—even had an alarm set up and everything—but then, it turns out, I’m feeling so much negativity about the world in general that a book just pales in comparison.

Seriously, I had to scrap this post’s entire intro because it’s not even 2020 anymore as I write this. And you know, maybe that’s for the best. I’m not really in the mood for doom and gloom and bitching anymore. I uninstalled Twitter from my phone a while back, I’ve been doing good at my daily writing sprints, my biggest fanfic project concluded on a positive note from people I didn’t even realize had been following it for years.

So I don’t know what this is going to be like. My commentary, I mean; I’ve heard echoes of what the book is like, so I’m not expecting a surprise there.

The book opens right after the end of Ready Player One, in a “Cutscene” where Wade recounts to us what happened after he won Halliday’s contest. It also assumes you remember exactly who the main characters of the book are, which is a bold move for a sequel that came out almost a decade after the original.

Technically, I could just look up the details I’m fuzzy about. But also, I think it’s more authentic if I don’t. I trust my memory enough that if I’m wrong, it’ll be in subtle enough ways that it’ll almost be a private jokes between all of us. An “if you know, you know” sort of error system. And I don’t think there’s anything more true to the spirit of this book than that.

Shoto had flown back home to Japan to take over operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division.

So Wade starts his tenure with nepotism. Wasn’t Shoto really young? Why is he qualified to run anything?

Aech was enjoying an extended vacation in Senegal, a country she’d dreamed of visiting her whole life, because her ancestors had come from there.

You know what, I’m not touching “send the token black character back to Africa.” This isn’t my lane.

And Samantha had flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother, Evelyn.

Why is she saying goodbye? Why, she’s moving to Columbus to be with Wade, of course! It’s not like there was anything else in her life. Was there? And why isn’t she referred to as Art3mis? I’m pretty sure Wade found out all of their offline names in the last book, and the inconsistency mildly bothers me.

These three sentences are back to back, by the way. Someone—I forget who—once described Ready Player One as a book that’s fun to write a wiki about, because it’s got fun concepts to summarize about until you realize that all the emotional connective tissue you need to turn a list of things into a story is missing, and that’s roughly how this first page feels.

Hell, the first line of the book is Wade telling us he remained offline for nine whole days after winning the contest, but by the end of the second paragraph we’re already to him logging back into the OASIS to "distract himself from [his and Samantha’s] reunion.

I’ll give Ernest Cline one thing: it feels like he wrote this opening nine days after the first book and did about as much maturing as a teenage boy would do between the two books.

Way more time is spent describing Wade’s OASIS rig, or the in-game planet where the climax of the last book happened, than anything else in this introduction. He is immediately greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who have been waiting over a week for him to come back in the game, because they’re all grateful that our protagonist and his friends restored their avatars after they were annihilated by the Sixers.

You’d think the adoring fans would serve some kind of purpose, or that something would happen, but no. Wade immediately goes “ew, people” and teleports away, since he essentially has ultimate powers within the game. With a caveat: the powers are actually coming from the Robes of Anorak he’s wearing, and I’m mentioning that in the hopes that it will pay off sometime in the book’s future, assuming Cline at least learned to do that. But still, let’s not skip too fast the fact that we introduced that crowd of adoring fans for no other purpose than to tell us they’re out there, because it fits right in with the last book’s attempts at saying as little as humanly possible in as many words as possible.

Anyway, Wade went back into Anorak’s study, where he arbitrarily checks out the Easter Egg he got at the end of the last book, and finds an inscription on it. I was dreading another riddle, but no, it’s just straight-up instructions to a vault in the GSS archives, so Wade logs off and goes to check it out.

Of course Halliday had put [the archives] [on the 13th floor]. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ.

I’m equally shocked that it took two whole pages (on my ereader) to get to the first slew of references, and that one of these references is from 1999. I didn’t know we were allowed to think of anything that isn’t the 80s. Speaking of which, I’ll spare you the whole paragraph, but the book does feel the need to explain why it’s vault 42.

Inside the vault, there’s another egg containing a super-fancy and advanced OASIS headset. The egg also has a video monitor that plays a video message from James Halliday shortly before his death.

But despite his condition, he hadn’t used his OASIS avatar to record this message like he had with Anorak’s Invitation. For some reason, he’d chosen to appear in the flesh this time, under the brutal, unforgiving light of reality.

That oh-so-important message? An infodump about the headset’s working. He called it an OASIS Neural Interface, ONI for short. It basically lets you experience the OASIS through all your senses with sensory input just like the real thing, you know, that thing Wade had to get a fancy suit and massive rig to do in the first book. And yes, Wade does spend a paragraph or two comparing it to other works of science fiction. Of course he does.

More importantly, it also records all the sensory input into a separate file, which can then be replayed over to re-experience said sensations, or live someone else’s experiences. Halliday tries to frame it as a tool to generate communication and empathy, seemingly all without acknowledging the potential creepiness of that. But hey. Who knows. Maybe that’s because this is the setup stage, and it’ll pay off eventually.

I also wondered about the name Halliday had chosen for his invention. I’d seen enough anime to know that oni was also a Japanese word for a giant horned demon from the pits of hell.

Add “reducing Japan to anime” to the list of things the book has failed to improve upon. By the way, the narration insisted on spelling out ONI letter by letter earlier, so it’s weird to make that link now. It’s also just kind of inelegant to just tell us “this is the symbolism behind the name”, but that’s just the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from this book.

Anyway, the reason Halliday kept this for his successor to find is he wants Wade to test out the technology and decide if humanity is ready for it. Why Halliday thinks the most glorified pop culture trivia / video game competition qualifies you for such a decision should be a problem, but sadly, a lot of billionaires have said and done a lot of dumb and eerily similar things in the past few years since I read Ready Player One, so actually, I can’t fault the book for that one. Tragically, our fates really are in the hands of people who should rightfully be cartoon villains.

To his credit, Wade does question Halliday’s motives in keeping this under wraps at all rather than releasing it himself. So hey, maybe it really is setting something up.

Wade goes back to his office with the ONI, and we’re treated with this lovely piece of narration:

I was grateful that Samantha wasn’t there. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to talk me out of testing the ONI. Because I was worried she might try to, and if she did, she would’ve succeeded. (I’d recently discovered that when you’re madly in love with someone they can persuade you to do pretty much anything.)

There’s a lot to unpack about the implications this has for their relationship, but it’s way too early in the book for me to editorialize when one character hasn’t even been on the page yet. So I’ll just leave it here for the record. Hopefully you see the problem without me needing to point it out anyway. If not, feel free to hit my inbox.

So Wade, confident in the fact that Halliday would have warned him if there were any risks to using the ONI, decides to try it out. Even though he immediately follows up that statement with this:

According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer’s brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. So the titanium-reinforced safety bands made certain this couldn’t happen. I found this little detail comforting instead of unsettling. Riding in an automobile was risky, too, if you didn’t wear your seatbelt…

Wade. My dude. What the fuck is this simile. And why don’t you see that maybe a machine where you’re forcibly trapping yourself inside a virtual reality might be dangerous? Hell, when I said this was setting something up, I was expecting something vaguely interesting about the potential breach of privacy, or how you don’t need to literally walk in someone’s shoes to feel empathy for them, or anything substantial, but now I’m worried it’ll just end up as “man, sometimes science fiction machines will scramble your brain, isn’t that weird”?

Like, I don’t know, to me “it will put you in a coma” sounds like a good reason for Halliday not to release the ONI. Maybe we can still make it into a commentary on how corporations will sell stuff they know is directly harmful if it can make them a profit. Who knows.

The book waffles on about more risks, and the mechanics of how the ONI activates, and the warning disclaimer when it does turn on. Specifically, there’s a time limit of twelve consecutive hours, after which you’ll be automatically logged out, because yes, using the thing for too long can also cause brain damage.

Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface.

See, now there’s the sort of thing that could be a source for commentary, but no, instead it’s thrown in there like it’s nothing and Wade glosses over the entire warning, and instead keep wondering why Halliday didn’t just release the ONI if even the safety disclaimers were in place.

By the way: this whole system has apparently gone through several independent human trials already, so I’m finding it hard to imagine that it’s actually a secret Halliday took to the grave as Wade says. Unless he also had everyone involved in those trials killed afterwards. Or maybe they all ended up with brain damage which rendered them incapable of talking about it.

And before you think I’m being unfair and maybe we’re supposed to understand that ourselves even if the protagonist doesn’t, I’ll remind you that the book didn’t trust its reader to know what the number 42 is a reference to, or what an oni is, even though I don’t think anyone in the target audience wouldn’t know about these two things.

There’s also the fact that, since this book came out, a video game did release with a scene intentionally designed to cause seizures, and it had countless fans flocking to defend it over that fact. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not assuming this book’s stance on whether your video game console causes brain damage and possibly coma is actually a bad thing, or just an acceptable risk.

Wade certainly seems to think so, since he agrees to the terms of service.

As the timestamp faded away, it was replaced by a short message, just three words long—the last thing I would see before I left the real world and entered the virtual one. But they weren’t the three words I was used to seeing. I—like every other ONI user to come—was greeted by a new message Halliday had created, to welcome those visitors who had adopted his new technology: READY PLAYER TWO

Well now that’s just silly.

And that’s our opening cutscene. And while this post is already long enough, I feel like I have to go on to chapter 0, because it feels like barely anything has happened so far. We didn’t even introduce any new character motivation or conflict, or a mystery to set the plot into motion, unless I’m supposed to think “why didn’t Halliday release this?” counts.

So Wade is back into the OASIS, and tells us about how much more real it all feels thanks to the ONI. I especially have to question how he can smell or taste anything—both of which he tells us he can. Like, who coded that? Did Halliday implement every single smell and taste himself, without anyone noticing? I hope you don’t need me to tell you that’s not typically how features are added to a large-scale video game.

If it feels like I’m nitpicking at the logic of the book, even though I always say I’m not very interested in that and would rather talk themes, it’s because I am, because there isn’t much else to discuss so far. Wade is happy about tasting virtual fruit. That’s the scene.

He tests out if he can feel pain, but no, the ONI reduces pain (a gunshot is translated as “a hard pinch”). On one hand, good, it would be a nightmare otherwise. On the other hand, I sort of hope there’s a setting for that in there, because otherwise, you just lost an entire clientele of kinksters.

This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.

Ah, now we have some juicy themes. Because if you think this is the inevitable final step in the evolution of video games, I invite you to look at literally any other art form, and what happened to them once hyperrealism became easy. Hint: they didn’t stop evolving, because it turns out realism isn’t the only goal one can achieve with art.

The realism discussion is not a new one in video games, mind you. In case you’re out of the loop: most of the big-budget blockbuster games (“AAA” as they’re known) are aiming for hyperrealism nowadays, and it results in development teams being forced to work in horrible conditions (known with the equally horrible euphemism of “crunch”). And, because it turns out that 1) humans working themselves to the bones isn’t healthy and 2) racing for realism with little to no vision besides it makes for poor creativity, a lot of these games come out as disappointments. Oh, there are hordes of Gamers™ who will defend them to the bitter end, but inevitably, in the months following release, the defense cools off while the criticism keeps on going, because the defense was a knee-jerk reaction born of a mix of people hyping themselves up for a game they hadn’t seen that much of yet, then attaching a part of their identity to liking that thing.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this throwaway line feels like it comes from someone who is so out of touch as to accidentally support a world view that has in fact resulted in the biggest part of the industry stagnating artistically while growing more toxic for the people working in it. All the while, more and more independent games come out every year, proving that that realism is nowhere near the most important thing to making a game good, and that you can achieve much better results with a small team.

What I’m trying to say is: watch Jim Sterling’s channel, they’ve been bleeding out subscribers since they came out as nonbinary and make much better commentary on this topic than I could, and play Hades.

Back to the book, which sadly hasn’t become any more interesting since I decided to go on a tangent. Wade tests the ONI functions some more, all the while musing on how he knows Samantha would disapprove but that he doesn’t care, because what loving relationship doesn’t consist of that?

Among the functions, he tries the ONI files, the aforementioned recordings of someone else’s experiences. Specifically, a woman, which Wade tells us by telling us he suddenly has breasts, I suppose because Ernest Cline saw that subreddit about men writing women and went “I want a piece of that”. Oh, and also, those sample files were recorded from real people, in the real world. And yes, this goes exactly where you think it does.

SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni

Look, I actually started writing a complaint about the boobs thing, and I deleted it, but now Cline is doing it on purpose. So, here goes: I saw a quote from this book on Twitter that looked like Cline attempting to make up for Wade’s casual transphobia in the first book. It wasn’t good, but it at least sounded like he was trying. So to immediately get this is…a lot? Let’s go for a lot.

I can almost excuse the use of “M” and “F”. You gotta name your files and you could excuse a non-exhaustive list. But…nonbinary? On one hand, I want to know what Cline means. On the other hand, I don’t think he can come up with an answer I’ll find satisfactory.

We are thankfully spared from finding out because Wade has just lost his virginity to Samantha a few days ago and he’s 1) not ready for this and 2) pretty sure this counts as cheating. You could make a case that this is more like porn, but I can see that this is more of a personal distinction anyway, and I can respect that one. Plus, you know. I don’t want to find out.

Wade logs off, and he can’t tell the difference between the OASIS with the ONI, and decides this will change the world. And then it’s back to the “how did he do it and keep it a secret”, even though Wade now finds out in the documentation that this had been in development for twenty-five years, basically since the OASIS launched. So it’s not really that it’s a secret, so much as there are a lot of people under very strict NDAs out there. Or, again, they’re all dead and/or otherwise incapacitated.

The ONI is the product of the Accessibility Research Lab, and Wade tells us about other stuff that the lab has produced using similar technology, mostly for medical purposes.

GSS patented each of the Accessibility Research Lab’s inventions, but Halliday never made any effort to profit from them. Instead, he set up a program to give these neuroprosthetic implants away, to any OASIS users who could benefit from them. GSS even subsidized the cost of their implant surgery.

Look, it’s nice that you want Halliday to be the good guy through and through, but it’s kind of hard to take any social commentary seriously when you think this is how a billionaire is made. Hell, even when he shut down the lab and fired its entire staff, he gave them a big enough severance package to set them for life. You know. Capitalism!

Hey, remember when Samantha said she was going to end world hunger if she won the contest, a thing billionaires right now could be doing, but aren’t, and she is now the co-owner of GSS? Yeah, I kind of hope the book remembers that too.

Speaking of the co-owners, the book just completely skips over the debate that our four main characters have over whether or not to release the ONI to the world. All we know is that they voted, and the vote goes in favor of releasing it. I mean, why have characters who could have opinions and feelings that could create a discussion? That might make us care about them! And who wants to care about characters in a story?

We put them on sale at the lowest possible price, to make sure as many people as possible could experience the OASIS Neural Interface for themselves.

What exactly is “the lowest possible price” here? Your company literally owns money. Like, OASIS money is real money. There is literally nothing stopping you from giving them away, especially because what you’re giving away is access to the platform you’re already running for a profit.

It’s almost like, even trying to make “good billionaires” out of its protagonists, the book can’t stop and actually make them significantly good.

Oh, I should mention. If you thought my Ready Player One review was angry at capitalism, wait until you see what the past couple years have done to me.

Anyway, once they his 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users, a new riddle shows up on Halliday’s website. Because yep: our plot is apparently not about the implications of releasing the ONI, or any of the potential ideological discussions associated with that, it’s another riddle. Oh boy, do I wish I’d known that.

Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role For each fragment my heir must pay a toll To once again make the Siren whole

I cannot wait to have the book give me just not enough information to solve the riddle until it’s solved by the book itself. That was so much fun the other…what was it, five times? Six times? Something like that. Wade already tells us the Siren might be Kira Morrow, because her alias was named after one of the sirens of Greek myth, so I can’t wait for that plot point to stick around. It was so fun to hear all about this man pining for another man’s wife the first time!

So this is the “Shard Riddle”. People are apparently convinced it was made by Wade and his crew as a publicity stunt, but of course, they know that that isn’t the case, and they also don’t know what that riddle is supposed to lead to. So, that’s great. We have a puzzle, and we also don’t know what the stakes are. All we know is that Wade wants to solve the puzzle essentially because it’s a challenge.

We skip over a year, and Wade tells us about how IOI collapses and gets absorbed by GSS because of the ONI’s launch. Remember IOI? They were the bad guys, so I guess we have to cheer?

GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform.To celebrate, we released all of IOI’s indentured servants and forgave their outstanding debts.

On one hand: good for the slave. On the other hand: not gonna cheer for a monopoly, you guys.

Another year’s skip, and now 99% of the OASIS users are using the ONI, and yes, that includes trading their experiences with one another too. And I guess we’re still hand-waving any possible problems associated with that technology, because the technology is made so that all recordings must be shared and played through the OASIS.

This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users.

How? Do you know any of the problems associated with content moderations on the current platforms? I don’t know if I want to point to Youtube’s extremely faulty algorithm, Twitter’s complete apathy towards its Nazis, or Facebook doing moderation by making underpaid staff watch all potentially problematic content, which resulted in serious psychological damage to said staff.

You can’t just say that as if it solved everything. The chapter later says this is handled by an AI called “CenSoft”, and as an AI engineer myself, let me tell you: this is not going to work. Again: Youtube is the way it is for a reason.

It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world.

And again, monopolies are totally a good thing as long as it’s in the right hands!

When I’m implying that the book does not care for any of these potential problems, I mean it. These enormous ethical issues are sidestepped in cold narratin, and we just keep going on introducing new slang that I hate, but have to quote so help you keep up.

“Sims” were recordings made inside the OASIS, and “Recs” were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And “Ito” was slang for “in the OASIS.” So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito.

There. You have been infodumped.

In the midst of all this (still extremely dry) exposition about how this changed media, we also get this tidbit:

You could take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex, without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences.

Now, I was going to rant about this, but then, a page later, this happens and spares me the trouble:

I’d struggled with OASIS addiction before the ONI was released. Now logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin.

So, you are aware that addiction isn’t just possible, but extremely facilitated by this. But sure, no worries! It’s perfectly safe! Because our protagonists are good.

Also, remember how the last book ended on a weak attempt at having a moral that maybe the real world is good, actually? Yeah, Wade tells us the ONI helps poor people live enjoyable lives in the OASIS. So. Fuck that message, I guess. It only applies if you’re the literal wealthiest man on Earth.

And me? All my dreams had come true. I’d gotten stupidly rich and absurdly famous. I’d fallen in love with my dream girl and she had fallen in love with me. Surely I was happy, right? Not so much, as this account will show.

Aside from the aforementioned returning OASIS affiction, there’s the Shard riddle that Wade is now obsessed with, to the point of offering a billion-dollar reward to anyone with information about the riddle’s answer.

I announced this reward with a stylized short film that I modeled after Anorak’s Invitation. I hoped it would seem like a lighthearted play on Halliday’s contest instead of a desperate cry for help. It seemed to work.

On one hand: good, Wade finally has a character flaw that the book actually acknowledges as a character flaw. I can work with that. On the other hand: this is all told to me in such a dispassionate that I am dreading how the book will handle this character flaw. Which is to say, I’m not expecting it to be very good.

(For a brief time, some of the younger, more idealistic shard hunters referred to themselves as “shunters” to differentiate themselves from their elder counterparts. But when everyone began to call them “sharters” instead, they changed their minds and started to call themselves gunters too. The moniker still fit. The Seven Shards were Easter eggs hidden by Halliday, and we were all hunting for them.)

Especially when this is something the narration feels is more important to tell me about.

Anyway, skip another year, and a gunter finally leads Wade to the First Shard. Solved that riddle, I guess. And wait, wasn’t part of why IOI was ~evil~ in the first book that they were paying people to find the Easter Egg for them? How is this any different, Wade?

And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race. As one of the only eyewitnesses to these historic events, I feel obligated to give my own written account of what occurred. So that future generations—if there are any—will have all the facts at their disposal when they decide how to judge my actions.

And that is the end of our chapter 0. And can I just say: what a mess already. I don’t think my snark can properly convey how utterly devoid of emotion this book’s writing is, and that alone is honestly more of a turn-off than anything else in the book so far. Even, knowing that I railed about it in the first book, I still feel newly unprepared for it. And it’s not like this double-prologue is making me hopeful that the book will show an ounce more critical thinking—or decent fucking humanity towards marginalized groups—as its predecessor.

So, that’s a lot to look forward to! For the sake of my sanity and schedule, don’t expect me to do such big posts every time. I’ll probably do one chapter a week from now on, if that. We’re in for a long ride, but I hope it’s worth it, at least.

#ready player two #ernest cline #st: ready player two #book reviews

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bettsfic · 4 years ago

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february pinned: the real & the ideal

in this month’s edition of my lowkey writing-related newsletter, in addition to my writing-related post roundup and consultation availability, i have short story recommendations for you and an essay on the nature of reality in fiction!

if you want to receive my lowkey writing-related newsletter directly, you can subscribe here.

in other news, i finished two fics this month:

digging for orchids (hualian, 43k, explicit, fake marriage au)

let ruin end here (hualian, 8k, mature, neighbors au)

full newsletter below the cut, or you can read it here.

oof,

what a month. january is already a rough time. throwing in a pandemic, a coup, and an economic revolution spearheaded by reddit just seems unfair. as for me personally, the spring semester came at me fast and even though it’s only week 2, i am already buried in grading. which i realize is my fault, considering i’m the one who assigned homework.

so after hearing your feedback, i thought i’d make this newsletter even more writing-related by writing more about writing. this month i’ll start off by talking about the nature of reality in fiction in a segment i call “been thinkin a lot about.” more on that below.

new resource

i’ve compiled a folder of PDFs of the short stories i teach most often, which is to say, the stories i like enough to re-read every semester. most of them are literary fiction but a few veer into fantasy, sci fi, and horror.

i know before the MFA, i didn’t really know what a short story was. like i knew, abstractly, the concept of a short story (it is as it sounds), but i could only list a couple i’d ever read as an adult, and i hadn’t read anything that had been published in the last decade. i remember wondering why i was even being asked to care about short stories. who writes short stories? who reads them? apparently, a lot of people. short storyists are a lot like fanwriters in that they make no money and when you talk about your writing in public, people give you that “why would anyone waste their time with that?” look.

so here’s why i was asked to care about short stories: a good short story gives you the entirety of a world in a very condensed space. moreover, it can sometimes leave you as satisfied as a novel in a fraction of the reading time. all the stories i’ve compiled here are ones that stuck with me, that i find myself recommending over and over to writers who want a good example of developing character, or weird narration, or establishing stakes.

if you’re a writer considering publication or an MFA in creative writing, i highly recommend familiarizing yourself with short stories, if for no other reason than to get the feel for them so you can write some of your own. if you can get a few short story publications under your belt, it’ll be easier to open doors when you’re ready to query agents for a novel. also, short stories make a great writing sample for grad programs, workshops, fellowships, residencies, and grant funding.

if you want to check out more short stories but have no idea where to start, the 2020 best american short stories just dropped in november, or if you want a cheaper one, used copies of 2019 and earlier are available on thriftbooks. if you want an overview of the history of the (american) short story, there’s also the best american short stories of the century. fair warning, though, while it’s more diverse than expected, it’s still a bit heavy on dead-white-dude writing.

content warning: the stories in the above-linked folder may depict instances of sexual assault, suicide, and/or abuse. i have not labeled them individually with warnings but i hope to soon, as well as provide a catalog with summaries.

i’m also still working on my essay and novel recs. more to come on that hopefully next month.

writing-related posts

how i quit my banking job to do a creative writing MFA

how i learned to read faster/stop subvocalizing

how to write when you have no time or energy to write

my experience writing fic in small/dead fandoms (aka fics that will probably not get any traffic)

how to describe facial expressions

how to ask for help from your professors

how to navigate tenses during flashbacks

how to separate yourself from your work

how (and why you might want to) write a shitty first draft

why you should consider making the climax the inciting incident

for a complete list of my writing-related posts, check out this masterdoc (which i still need to update it with the past few months’ posts).

stuff i’m into rn

i’m about halfway through the rhetoric of fiction by wayne c. booth which has more or less become my narrative bible. it’s a little dated (1961) but it tackles banal writing adages that are somehow still believed, like “show don’t tell” and whatnot, and breaks them down with amazing insight, clarity, and research. it’s a bit of a dense text so i’m only reading a few pages a day, i think the first time i’ve ever let myself read something so intentionally slowly. now i’m kind of obsessed with doing things slowly. reading slowly, writing slowly, cooking slowly. i even drive slowly, because it’s so rare to go anywhere at all, and i want to enjoy it. also, it’s very snowy where i am. also also, the battery died in my car this month and i really have to make it a point to drive more often.

february availability

i have 2 openings for initial writing consultations in february! if you’re interested, please fill out this google form.

you can learn more about my services on my carrd.

been thinkin a lot about

compulsory reality in fiction. many of us have probably received feedback along the lines of, or thought to ourselves as we read, “that’s not realistic.” many of us believe, consciously or not, that fiction that is more “realistic” is inherently better than fiction that is less “realistic.” for some of us, real means a saturation of details, the clear depiction of the surfaces of things. reality is found in the rendering thereof; if you can “see” it, it’s real. for others of us, it might be the development of complex characters and their growth across a narrative. and for yet others, reality is subtlety, or misery, or the idea of “slice of life,” a term i don’t think means anything, because aren’t all stories a slice of a character’s life? what would a story that’s not a slice of life look like? you’d either have to take away the “slice” part and render a whole life, which is impossible, or you’d have to take away the “life” part and create a dead story, which may be possible, but why would you want to? even if you wrote a story about a rock, the rock would be brought to life by virtue of being written about.

anyway. i think the word “real” is a shitty word for the same reason “slice of life” is a shitty phrase: everything is real and therefore nothing cannot be real. slices of life are all we know because we are alive and cannot truly perceive not being alive; reality is also all we know, and any depictions beyond reality are thus made real because they have been depicted.

so the “goal” for fiction to be “realistic” seems to me to be a false one. all fiction is real because it exists and no fiction can be truly real because it’s only a facsimile of reality. not to get all “this is not a pipe” but writing is just making squiggles, and we as a community of English-knowers agree that certain squiggles correspond to certain sounds, and certain sounds together make words which conjure meanings. and words put together into sentences into paragraphs conjure even more complicated meanings. and when those paragraphs are woven into narrative we create yet more and more complicated meaning.

every time you write anything — a text message, an email, a tweet, a fanfic — you are taking the infinite abstraction of your own cognition, narrowing it into a single concept, and representing that concept with patterns in the form of sounds represented by letters and given meaning with words, so that the infinite abstraction of your own conscience can be fractionally witnessed by the infinite abstraction of someone else’s. and even though we can’t definitively prove for ourselves that any other thing possesses a consciousness, writing shows us the shape of someone else’s mind, and tells us we are not alone.

and yet we still expect writing to be “real.”

have you ever read a story where a character sneezed? like just, a description of a sneeze for the sake of it, with no purpose or function in the plot? if not, is it because our characters aren’t real enough to sneeze, or because the sneeze isn’t relevant to their plight? what would a written sneeze look like, and why would somebody want to write it? moreover, why would somebody want to read it? that leads me to wonder, do we depict reality in the service of narrative, or narrative in the service of reality? in other words, do we write to portray reality (sans sneezing), or do we depict reality to constrain our writing, the way one might request bumpers when bowling so as not to fall in the gutters?

i’ve never read an artful rendition of a character pissing or shitting, either, even when those things are related to a character’s plight and circumstance — stories involving long road trips, living in the woods, being kidnapped. the only exception i can think of is when those things are eroticized (we do not kinkshame here in this lkwrnl), the same way it’s rare to find detailed sex writing that isn’t for the purpose of reader arousal. are there just some things about the nature of being human that are too intimate, too complex, or too boring to write?

once i wrote a murder that takes place in a small fictional midwestern town in the 90s (for the ~aesthetic), and it went uninvestigated by said town’s police force. early readers repeatedly commented along the lines of, “that’s not realistic.” and i thought, no, if anything, the incompetence of police is too realistic for the heightened reality i’m trying to render. have you ever heard of a cop solving a murder that didn’t come with an obvious suspect or immediately found evidence? i haven’t. that doesn’t mean those cases don’t exist, but i definitely think they’re less likely than mass media has us believe, and the average small-town police force has far less motivation (and possibly training) to solve crimes than we think.

i started working on the above-mentioned novel in 2016, and my goal was to depict a reality that hovers above the surface of plausibility. in this novel, which is based on macbeth, a preteen girl, mercy, becomes jealous of the love her best friend elisa shows to her father. mercy decides to get her older and very unstable brother to kill him. naturally the deed goes awry, but it does occur, and the cleanup is far messier than anticipated.

is it plausible for a 12 year old girl to plot and execute the murder of her best friend’s father? no. is that what this book is about? yes. a book about a 12 year old girl who has a perfectly healthy relationship with her best friend and who has no feelings toward her bff’s father one way or another is probably far more “realistic,” but that’s not the book i’d want to read and certainly not the one i want to write. my goal of a heightened reality is what henry james calls the intensity of illusion, the thing that allows a reader, through the witness of one’s distilled cognition into language, to exit physical, knowable reality, and enter a new and unknown reality. and isn’t climbing to that higher place, that intensity of illusion, the purpose of fiction? if it’s not, what is?

the best feedback i got on the aforementioned murder scene was from one of my professors, who, of the perfect calm of all children involved, said, “they just shot a guy. at least one of them would be freaking out.”

he was totally right, but it opened up a lot of questions for me. by what standard did he reach that conclusion? was it something in the chapter itself, was it his personal understanding of the work of narrative, or was it the logical conclusion of the slim plausibility of the scenario? moreover, where did i come up with the idea that all of my preteen characters would commit a murder and proceed to be very chill about it? if an implausible scenario begs the expectation of emotional distress, would it be more compelling to buy into that expectation or deviate from it? is it even my obligation to be compelling when i can never have a cogent grasp of the personal tastes of my audience?

that brings me to what appears to be reality’s opposite: idealism, the state those of us who write fanfic are often trying to achieve. we’re working in an entire genre of ideals, of happily ever afters, of hurt that is always followed by comfort, of glossily rendered sex during which everyone orgasms and no one has to pee afterward. we fix broken texts and continue incomplete ones. sometimes, we want to make existing things better, deeper, more complicated. but all the time, we want to make a text more than what it is.

some see this process, this drive for the ideal, as antithetical to realism, and i think that’s part of the reason fanfiction and other idealistic genres (romance, etc.) get a bad name — the assumption that more real (which for some means more miserable) is better, and therefore its opposite, the ideal, is worse. for them, i have this quote from vladimir nabokov:

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

the ideal, aesthetic bliss, the intensity of illusion. these are all phrases that boil down to the same thing: you the writer get to define the constraints of your own reality. you get to choose if your world even complies with the known laws of physics. and if it doesn’t, you get to choose which ones to break, and why to break them. you get to choose if your stories take place in a real house in a real town on a real day. if you wrote a story that takes place on september 11, 2001, would the events of that story be shaped by the events of that actual day, or are you writing a better world where 9/11 doesn’t happen? consider the consequences of both: why might you want to write reality? why might you want to write ideality? how do these things shape your identity and goals as a writer?

no matter where a work falls on the real-ideal spectrum, you have to accept that prose itself will only ever be a verisimilitude of reality and therefore an interpretation of it, one that might be interpreted differently by a reader. in writing and everything else, you can never have complete control over what others perceive. it’s like giving someone cash as a gift. they might buy themselves something nice with it, or they might spend it on groceries. the point is, eventually we all have to let go of our realities.

#lkwrnl #pinned

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albatris · 4 years ago

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ok ok alriiiight ok so the plot of ATDAO

this post is not, like........... well, it’s not gonna be a blurb or a summary or a nice neat synopsis, this is not Professional Writeblr Business, this is, this is, uhhhh

this is like drunk house party logan rambles

works best if you imagine ur just like “hey man how’s it going” super casual and I grasp you firmly by the shoulders and look you dead in the eye and just ramble all of this without taking a single breath

could I have explained in a nice neat concise "elevator pitch" sort of way? probably. mind ur business. that’s not how we do things here at albatris.org

anyway the purpose of this post is “hey people seem to know a lot about the characters and the worldbuilding and the premise but have no clue what happens in the actual story” so I’m not going to be talking about said characters and worldbuilding and premise in depth

in terms of rambles, that stuff’s been covered! this post assumes you know what Ports are, n what the nature of the ATDAO apocalypse is, vaguely what the MCs are like as people......... though I can fetch this info for you if you like

but yeah if you are coming into this post with zero prior ATDAO knowledge........... deeply deeply from the bottom of my heart: sorry

also if this is your first time experiencing One Of These Rambles

also @safe-in-the-steep-cliffs and @siarven I am tagging you because you said you would like to be tagged and also hi and also I hope y’all knew what you were in for

anyway without further ado

(visual representation of my approach to this rant, not of how complicated my plot actually is)

(my plot is not that complicated)

ALRIGHT

there are two viewpoint characters! and two plotlines which converge near the end of the story, but honestly there’s a very real possibility I will decide these are two separate books meant as companion stories to each other because I love making things difficult for myself yeehaw

ATDAO’s co-protags are Tris and Noa, best buds four years and counting. their friendship is one of the single most important aspects of the story, n the ongoing love and trust they have for each other despite the way unfolding events force their relationship to change is integral to the themes and making the heart of the story what it is. I will now proceed to not mention this friendship for the entire remainder of this post. they’re bros. that’s all u need to know. listen. listen. I have a lot to cover

so yeah, ur first key player is Tris Greer, whose parents are dicks but whose siblings are chill. most notably of said siblings there is Jacob, older brother by thirteen years, whom Tris believes is just about the coolest person on the entire planet. this plotline kicks off when Jacob gets caught in the midst of a freak car accident that kills a dude and wrecks a street corner and also somehow causes Jacob to just kind of................. blip out of existence entirely and without a trace?

n Tris is understandably horrified and distressed by Very Much All Of This, but hey, at least there are responsible adults who can look into this obviously Port-related weird disappearance and figure this mess out, right?

INCORRECT

the relevant interdimensional authorities are brought in to suss out the situation and these authorities are kind of like “hmmmm idk about this” but are all set to take Tris at least somewhat seriously until they learn the following:

that Jacob had already been reported missing to police in his home state three days earlier

that Jacob was in the midst of several ongoing personal crises and at least one nervous breakdown

that Jacob was allegedly tangled up in some real weird shit that would more than account for a disappearance under suspicious circumstances

that Tris is schizophrenic, prone to hallucinations, confusion, memory issues and quote unquote “letting his imagination and anxiety get the better of him”, and precisely zero people can actually corroborate his story that Jacob was even there are the time of the accident to begin with

and after some back-and-forth and Looking Into The Evidence pretty much everyone in any position of authority comes to the conclusion that this is just Ordinary Regular People Crimes and whatever happened to Jacob had nothing to do with weird apocalyptic energies, and that Tris is (at best) stressed out and delusional or (at worst) lying through his teeth because he knows more than he’s letting on

so Tris is forced to hop pretty quick from “I’m sure someone will handle this” to “no one believes me but I’m sure if I can find some concrete proof they’ll listen and someone will handle it” to Well Fuck I Guess That Someone Is Me

cue bizarre reality-hopping fantasy quest, which is ten times easier said than done when most of the time Tris is terrified enough just, like, going to the supermarket

he enlists the help of his new classmate Shara, amateur paranormal investigator and professional weird-bullshit enthusiast, who agrees to help him puzzle out what the fuck happened to Jacob in exchange for his assistance in mapping out Adelaide’s interdimensional “fault lines” as part of her ongoing quest to track down the source of the apocalypse

she’s got big fuckin dreams, ok, go hard or go home

slso worth noting at this point that there HAS been an uptick in Ports and their related reality-bending strangeness in Adelaide recently which is why this is of particular interest to her currently. gotta find out What Makes The Weirdness Tick, gotta find out Why The Sudden Extra Weirdness

..........and also Kai is there

Kai has no nice neat reason to get involved with the plot, Kai just likes drama and being all up in people’s personal business. Tris brings them on board for one single afternoon like “hey I will pay you some money to come to my house and fix my fucked up phone so I can listen to an interdimensional voicemail” but forgot the apparently key addendum “and then leave”

their first three chapters of knowing each other is basically Tris being like “stop inviting yourself into my house we are not friends” and Kai being like “that’s a rude thing to say to your friend. also your sister gave me the netflix password and I used your kitchen to bake pastries feel free to help yourself”

but yeah so Tris’s story mostly focuses on his quest to figure out where Jacob got yeeted to and how to get him safely home (y’all probably know a bit about The Unreality already maybe?), whilst also dealing with rising family tensions, whatever shifty stuff Jacob was involved with prior to his disappearance, and his own creeping doubts about his perceptions of reality

n I’m also saying flat out it’s not a plot that’s going the “oh the whole thing was just a delusion all along” route because ew

his psychosis is a fairly involved part of his character but the explorations around it are more to do with, like......... the difficulties he has in trusting himself and whether he has the luxury of letting himself get swept into some Big Weird Implausible Adventure when this has extremely different implications for him than it would someone else. n eventually to how his success and survival is not ~in spite of~ but specifically because of the different way he understands and interprets the world and the skills he’s developed

THAT TANGENT WAS A PERSONAL RANT IT WAS NOT RELEVANT I just have words to say on the subject of how psychosis is treated in fiction and didn’t want people jumping to the “none of it is real” conclusion anyway ok moving on

ur SECOND key player is Noa Yun, who has rather a lot on her plate right now. she’s broke as fuck and her mum is sick and her car is making Noises and she’s not getting enough hours at her job at Not-IKEA and everyone is on her back about her failing studies as if that’s a thing she has the energy to care about. feeling rather backed into a corner by life’s bullshit and her financial situation, she blatantly lies her way into a field job at the Department of Interdimensional Instabilities, because A) surely it can’t be THAT bad, and B) what does she have to lose?

so more or less what she’s doing is the equivalent of emergency services for Port-related weirdness, it’s going out and dealing with highly unstable otherworldly energies head on, navigating Weird Phenomena and bendy patches in reality......... it is, among other things, a job that’s relatively easy to get into because no one wants to touch it with a ten foot pole unless they absolutely have to

n the DII is a whole other post, this shit has lots of different functions and levels and branches and corruption and secrets and a tendency to view workers who have to go out and deal with the brunt of the apocalypse head-on as vaguely expendable and I’ve talked about it a bit before and in more Serious Words

things kinda kick off for her when in true Noa fashion she hurls herself into a dangerous situation to help out a coworker, n enters a pretty standard issue “overlap” where the barriers between universes are a little fucky, but hey, she seems to come out of it with nary a scratch, so it’s reasonable to assume everything is fine, right?

INCORRECT AGAIN

she basically gets some whacked-out otherworldly energies latched onto her that are now following her through her everyday life, and it turns out she’s starting to bend the reality around her the way certain types of Ports do, which is! obviously not ideal! she’s not exactly a Port herself, because she’s pretty sure that’s impossible, but it’s clear capital s Something happened to her in that overlap, and she doubts it’s good news. and to make matters even more disconcerting, she’s now being dogged at every step by strange visions of a child who speaks in an unfamiliar language and who seems Real Fuckin Pissed at her

so her thing is basically “I acquired fucked up reality-bending powers against my will and they might be lowkey killing me ‘cause Ports are notoriously unstable like that and also I’m haunted for some godforsaken reason” which all somehow ended up being, like, the least interesting part of her plotline for me lmao

oh and Noa also enlists the help of Shara, Because Ghosts

anyway yeah so her search to find out what’s happening to her re: Weird Children, being a Port-adjacent something-or-other, and whether there’s a way to stop her own unravelling leads her to (rogue computer programmer? mad scientist? general shifty bastard?) Laurence Marrick Thiele, who claims to have suffered a similar affliction in the past and now does some real interesting research on the subject. n this guy. well. he’s got some fuckin stuff going on

he definitely knows more about the nature of Ports than he should. also is he actually researching what he says he’s researching? also what’s with all the weird tech? also did he just straight up murder that guy Avery? all will be revealed later, maybe, if I feel like it

but yeah at about the same time as Noa goes “actually fuck this you’re shady as hell I’m out” she stumbles into, like, The Actual Reality of what Marrick is up to re: manipulating Ports and interdimensional doorways for his own gain, and the various ways this spells bad news not only for her but potentially for the entire city and anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire, and she shifts gear to “actually you know what I’m gonna kick your ass”

there are various reasons for this, but first and foremosterly you have to understand that Noa’s got a fuckload of pent-up rage and she will bring it in full force the moment you say some stupid shit like “some people are expendable” or “it’s inevitable for the greater good”

(there’s also a fun ongoing subplot with her work at the DII where she and her team are investigating a string of strange illnesses with bizarre symptoms that appear to be spreading via obscure radio stations so that’s. happening. I guess?)

but yeah the main story here mostly follows Noa’s attempts to undermine Marrick, bastard supreme, and find a way to fuck him up before he goes, like, Full Cartoon Supervillain, n also like........... her attempts to keep up her work at the DII despite her rising paranoia that the teammates she’s growing to care about will notice her increasingly unstable state and the fact that she’s all tangled up with the very forces they’re meant to be thwarting. n along the way discovering the reality of what happened to her in The Aforementioned Overlap Incident and about her visions and such

so that’s all that. did that make sense

n she’s got a whole arc going on about trust and learning to lean on others, like, she comes into this story as a very standoffish person with lots of paranoia, she’s spent much of her life feeling like she can only rely on herself, n she’s. well. yeah, like I said, she’s got a lot of anger at the world and at the various systems that have failed her and her loved ones, n the story puts her in a position to become even more isolated

and her plotline isn’t so much “you have no reason to be angry or afraid” or her learning to Not Be, It’s more, like........... yeah you have every fucking right to be furious and of course you’re afraid! but there are people around you who love you and who will jump at the chance to defend you and who will help you carry the weight of your anger and grief and none of this needs to be yours to bear alone which is extremely cheesy

which applies to both her Weird Supernatural Goings-On as well as her regular ordinary life goings-on

I feel like Alice and Jet deserve a mention for Noa’s plotline but also this went on and on too long already so. well. Alice and Jet exist! yep. they work with Noa at the DII. I have things to say about them. I will not be saying them today

and uhhhhhh

in general, for Tris, his plotline, you wanna think, like, fantasy/adventure vibes which veer pretty sharply into horror, and for Noa you wanna think...... kinda, sci-fi mystery conspiracy vibes with a dash of some superhero bullshit maybe except not really

and that

pretty much is it I think

also the fact that Kai just invites themself into the plot for funsies and then is dragged kicking and screaming into caring about themself and making positive changes in their life means there was no convenient place in this post to be like

"oh there's also a whole major subplot about a time loop"

but there's also a whole major subplot about a time loop

goodnight! thanks for coming to....................... whatever this was! have a nice saturday everyone

#alcohol mention #just in the first little intro bit #being concise is not my strong suit! this should be apparent perhaps #tl;dr #tris's brother jacob gets lost down the back of an interdimensional sofa and tris has gotta go get him back even though #he's terrified enough just leaving the house let alone leaving this entire reality on a stupid convoluted mystery quest #and noa has a run in with some interdimensional bullshit and acquires Powers and A Ghost neither of which she wants #and then accidentally uncovers the schemes of literal cartoon supervillain marrick and is like #''oh sick i was looking for a reason to go absolutely fuckin ballistic and fuck someone's shit up''#And Both Of Them Make Nice Friends And Learn To Love Themselves :)#atdao #i constantly walk the very fine line between not wanting to be Too Vague about noa's plotline vs not wanting to be Too Spoilery about it #like............... the stuff about the kid and about marrick's endgame i'm never quite sure how much to delve into hahahaha #but yeah anyway #imo i only went on ONE mildly unrelated tangent which should have been cut but i decided to indulge it instead #which is the couple paragraphs about noa's character arc #character arcs not important for this post!!!!!! but also. dfkhgkdfjshg. try and stop me #(i mean i did pretty ok staying on track for the most part i think)#(still a rambly post though)

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bluecoloreddreams · 4 years ago

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(Disclaimer: this contains spoilers for the Fruits Basket and Fruits Basket: Another manga, as well as taking into consideration tidbits from Takaya’s twitter.)

So, okay, first of all we have to address the YMMV aspect: Some people don’t like this ship. As long as they’re respectful, I have no beef with that. I’m well aware that some people cannot/choose not to make the distinction between “real life” and “fiction”— I have the luxury of this choice, so some of the “problematic” ships/character aspects within Furuba don’t bother me (for the most part). It’s fiction, and I’m aware of this.

Again, some people cannot/do not make this distinction, and that’s none of my business because that’s their personal life. I’m aware that people dislike aspects of Akigure, and that’s fine.

Personally? I’ve been reading Furuba since like, basically the dawn of time. I was reading scans on, like, MSN groups. I remember a friend at church (of all places) telling me about the Akito reveal because I was behind on updates. It’s literally engrained upon my shipping heart at this point.

(Headcanons ahoy! Like literally, this is all headcanon/my perspective on the series as a whole. YMMV/YKINMK/Dead Dove, the whole works, if you know you know

YES I wrote it like it’s an actual research paper because I have No Chill At All, please forgive me. It’s long and pretty rambling.)

Addressing the first elephant in the room: Given my limited interactions with the fandom, my impression of Akigure from a generalized fan POV is that it’s pretty divisive. Every episode she comes up there are “I hate this kid” comments and I cry

Akito is a favorite of mine, and it’s impossible for anime-only’s to make a deep, informed call on her character. On the other hand, a lot of manga-readers dislike her too.

So, why am I talking about whether or not people like Akito as a character?

I’m of the opinion that it impacts people’s ability to view her character arc as one that deserves a happy ending. That she doesn’t deserve to have love, happiness, or forgiveness, all of which are given to her when she and Shigure finally end up together on equal footing. (Do I think the way it’s rushed in the original Furuba ending? Yeah, but hey. Sensei had like a huge ensemble cast to wrap ends on. Now there’s Furubana to look to and it’s just chef’s kiss.)

There’s a mental aspect in this, involving the dichotomy between “reality” and “fiction”.

There is absolutely zero argument that are a lot of things that Akito does that uh, listen, if it was IRL she’d be in jail! Jail for terror baby! Jail for life!

Fortunately, Fruits Basket is a work of fiction. These characters aren’t real, they’re idealized brushstrokes of human nature created to move a plot and a message along.

That’s why Akito and Shigure work as a couple and as characters:

They’re both incredibly deep characters that get passed off as one-dimensional by a lot of people (and the original anime, woof). Some of it is again, because anime-only fans just don’t have the whole story, since Akito’s arc is one that builds gradually until it hits a point where all hell breaks loose, which we are a ways away from.

So what’s the message that their relationship and characters are supposed to pass on?

Well, it breaks down into two categories: world building and thematic arcs. The latter is more important and what I’ll be focusing on, while the former is just a little spice that I, personally enjoy, and won’t really talk about in depth. (It’s that the magical realism in Furuba sets up the idea of soulmates, it’s just…. Something I enjoy and it’s really heacanony, so I can’t really justify spending more words on it!)

When discussing Fruits Baskets in any capacity, I feel like we must first keep in mind the thematic “lessons” of the series:

There is an inherent loneliness in living as a human being, since loss, grief, and hurt are indelible parts of the human experience, and learning to cope with these feelings in a compassionate manner is a life-long lesson

People react differently to the loneliness of existence, and their reactions are based upon their personalities, their upbringings, and their own choices

Everyone is capable of change and learning, if they choose to do so, however:

Personal agency is taught, but in the vacuum of positive reinforcement, the ability of a person to choose to be compassionate is stifled or outright inaccessible

Therefore, if you are not taught to deal with your grief and existence outside of others, your ability to connect may become warped, manipulative, or abusive, and this is not the fault of the child but instead the parental figure

Eventually, you will be aware of your actions, and then it is your burden to choose—some people do not take this choice (the head maid, Ren, Kyo’s bio dad, Rin’s parents, Sawa’s mother in Furubana)

Abuse has long lasting effects on the psyche and can be physical, emotional, and/or mental in nature and must be dealt with in order to grow as a person

“Dealt with” does not mean that it goes away, but that it is acknowledged and given a positive outlet (Yuki’s garden, Aaya’s shop, Rin’s art, Momiji’s violin playing)

Forgiveness is not linear

Forgiving yourself is a long and arduous process, and happens independent of other people’s forgiveness

This is really brought to the forefront in Fruits Basket: Another, when Shiki talks about how his mother interacts with the rest of the Sohma family. It’s shown she’s done what she can to make amends, but recognizes that while she can individually hold relationships with certain family members, as a whole, it's best if she allows them to be away from her.

This is a whole tangent on its own, but there’s a certain blanket of casual forgiveness given to Akito by the entirety of the shown Zodiac in Furubana, in that they trust that she’s raised a kind and thoughtful son and allow him the grace of his own family.

Again, in Takaya’s tweets post-series that acknowledges that Akito’s friends with Uo-chan, despite her relationship with Kureno (and it shows a depth of awareness on Kureno’s part that he stays away

People flourish in environments where love and positive reinforcement is given freely, even when people are in the wrong

This doesn’t mean that no one is ever scolded: see Komaki and Kakeru, Kisa and Hiro, Hatori chews out Shigure all the time, but never ceases being his confidant

So okay, that’s A Lot. But every single character in Furuba follows these themes in their own manner, because the series is about healing and learning how to heal from abuse, neglect, and isolation. Someone’s gonna have to be doing it. Point blank, the end, to tell a story there must be conflict, and boy howdy, there’s a lot of conflict in Furuba. Every personal thematic arc in the series ends up tying into a romantic one, because Furuba is a romcom drama.

There’s a loop that goes “personal betterment”->”crush”/”friendship”->”conflict”->”personal growth”/”relationship growth” in the series for every character. That’s the bread and butter of Furuba.

But anyway. To the question:

I love them because they work, they’re both their own people with their own narrative focuses, motivations, conflicts, and flaws. Both Shigure and Akito are believable in their own right in the context of Furuba, and I think Takaya did wonderfully in crafting a story where their personalities mesh well and give each other reasons to better themselves.

To talk about them together, you have to talk about them separately.

I’m gonna start with Shigure because, truthfully?

I just want to lament about how often he’s simply passed off as either comic relief or absolute trash. He’s so underestimated!

“He’s a joke of a grown man… He is reliable and I trust him.” (Another, v. 3)

He’s incredibly intelligent when it comes to interpersonal relationships, which is why he’s able to do what he does. He’s also incredibly kind—no one made him take in Yuki or Kyo or Tohru. He could have just went “ah, I’d prefer not to” and moved on. But he didn’t, made up some bullshit so Haru would feel like taking in Yuki was a transaction, and let me just tell you, I am the same age as Shigure and if you gave ME three teenagers to be the guardian of?! It would be a full on disaster.

He’s actually incredibly trustworthy (if he wants to be), insightful, and a genuinely good guardian despite his jokes and wisecracking.

He forced Kyo to go back to school, knowing full well it would be good for him. He lets a whole host of children run rampant through his home. Kids who actually enjoy his presence. He’s shown as having a good familial relationship with Rin (who tries to warp that for her own means), Kisa, Haru, and Momiji. His advice to Tohru is genuine, insightful, and ridiculously helpful.

Shigure is good with people. He gets up at the crack of dawn to drive Shiki to see Sawa in Furubana. He’s who Mutsuki and Hajime immediately go “holy shit you need to do something about this” to when they find out Shiki’s getting nasty notes about Akito. He’s who Shiki goes to when Sawa fell down the stairs as a child. As much as Shiki and the others make fun of Shigure, he’s obviously someone who’s trustworthy. And that’s not some new development, he’s always been trustworthy in regards to those he loves. No one asked him to show up to Tohru’s teacher conference, he volunteered. Like this dude loves people, he’s the dog spirit after all, and rightly so.

Does he have his own motivations? Of course! But so does everyone else in Furuba. He’s a complex character, man!

He laughs and jokes a lot because he’s projecting this image of a laid back, doofus. When you think about who he’s friends with, the whole middling goofball act makes a lot of sense. Just like some of Ayame’s over the top behavior is a defense mechanism, I believe that Shigure casts himself as a generally unappealing man to keep himself safe from advances when he was in school, but also to temper the wildly unequal personalities of his other two friends. He’s the sort of person who would just go “eh, whatever makes it easy”, and that’s just how he is.

He doesn’t mean the creepy school girl thing, it’s a bit and I think the only people who don’t realize he’s running a bit are Yuki, Kyo, and Tohru who are absolutely too stupid to realize he’s playing them for reactions. He thinks it’s funny.

Anyway:

When the older Zodiac had the dream of Shigure, Shigure is the only one who made the active choice to seek out that feeling. His soul was touched, and he decided that he wanted that and only that. This doesn’t necessarily mean he went full Jacob from Breaking Dawn, but it does mean he acknowledged there was a bond, and he wanted it.

When you get into the technicalities of the curse, it’s mentioned that their Zodiac spirits influence how they interact with Akito, and that going against her can cause physical and emotional pain. Yuki cries when meeting her, and it’s mentioned that that’s just the normal reaction for the Zodiacs.

It’s hard to say how much of their early interactions are influenced by the curse, but it’s obvious that Shigure has genuine fondness for her. She wasn’t always absolutely broken, as shown in Yuki’s backstory, and was a precocious child, one who sought affection openly.

Shigure has an indulgent personality, and is shown to love being adored. Guess who loves him! Akito! Guess who wants lots and lots of affection! Akito!

Their personalities are very well matched as they get older: They’re both intelligent and coy. They both have fairly sharp tongues when needed, and have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to get what they want.

Shigure wants Akito to be independent from the curse. He’s made it clear to her he doesn’t want to be her father, he doesn’t want to be her friend, he wants to be her lover. Those are boundaries that Akito’s never been given before, and his frankness with her and his jealousy with Kureno is something she agonizes over, simply because she’s never been given any sort of serious interpersonal boundaries, or repercussions for her actions. He’s always kept himself separate from her, because of those boundaries, even when they were children.

That’s important. It opens the door to the idea that her actions have consequences, and is a persistent nagging in the back of her mind.

“Even though you hadn’t realized it, I was waiting for that day.” (ch 101)

For the bulk of the series, the only person who sees Akito as a person separate from the curse, and sees a future where she can grow is Akito. He has an extraordinary amount of patience for her, and forgives her for a lot.

There are only two incidents that Shigure cannot forgive: Her sleeping with Kureno, and at the very end of the series, I’m of the full opinion that if Akito had pushed Tohru off the cliff, Shigure would have been done with her. Look at that expression, that is the look of someone who is toeing the line of throwing away all his hopes and dreams. If she really had pushed Tohru, I just...... The series would have taken a much darker tone.

OKAY that’s enough about our favorite terrible author! (Okay, an aside, Shigure, please share your work ethic, you goof off so much but you’ve published so many things…how…)

ONTO AKITO!

“I’ve finally realized… she hated her own shallowness all this time, from the very start.” // “It’s frightening because you have no choices.” (ch 121)

A lot of people dislike Akito because she, for the bulk of the manga, is violent, manipulative and just downright unpleasant. And that’s fine, but it’s not the point of her arc or the themes of the manga. (It is, however, the point of Rin’s: you don’t have to forgive everyone.)

She’s not the only violent person in the series. If we as readers can forgive Uo-chan and Kyoko, or even Hana-chan for her moment of violence, why can we not extend the same grace to Akito?

Violence is often shown as a knee-jerk reaction to fear and sadness: Kyoko, Uo, Hana, Kyo, Rin, and Akito all react violently to negative situations and feelings. Even Kisa reacts violently when she’s at her worst, biting both Haru and Tohru when she’s in her tiger form, which is shown to actually cause pain like a real tiger would. (It’s played for laughs, but has anyone been bitten for realsies by a house cat? That hurts! How much more would a house-cat sized tiger hurt!!!)

Out of all of them, Hanajima and Kisa are the only characters to show immediate remorse, because they have what the others don’t: A positive support system. Once positive role models and support systems are in place, all of the others begin to learn how to react differently and ease out of the knee-jerk reactions that were ingrained in them.

It’s made explicit in the manga that you have to be taught how to react positively, you have to learn and choose to be good, to be friendly, to love yourself outside of others’ perceptions of yourself. Look at Yuki’s arc. Look at Uo-chan’s. Kyoko’s.

Yuki sums it up nicely in the last chapter of the manga, where he tells Tohru that she taught the Zodiac how to become human. She allows them to grow into people who can make the choice to be loving, compassionate individuals.

Just because Akito doesn’t interact positively with Tohru for the bulk of the manga, it doesn’t make it any less true:

Akito is kept in a juvenile state of being: No one teaches her to suck it up, that the world exists outside of herself, that other people are people and not things. In fact, she’s actively encouraged to act the way she does. She’s incredibly broken, between the maids of the Sohma estate just… allowing her to do whatever the fuck she wants and her absolutely jacked up relationship with Ren and Akira. She has no moral compass at all. No one bothers to teach her that her actions have serious consequences.

She knows, in a roundabout way that hey, these people don’t like me. There’s a serious mental dissonance between what she latently knows—these are all people with no connection to her other than the bond of the curse. This is why Tohru is able to break through to her at the climax of the manga:

She knows she’s wrong, but no one has ever told her she’s wrong but understood why she’s doing it. Akito just didn’t have the words to explain herself. What do children do when they cannot communicate? They lash out. Kids will bite, scratch, yell, kick, fall to the floor and have screaming tantrums out of frustration. Eventually, most kids learn that there are other ways to express frustration, and move along. (Not all, though, but most.)

Akito was taught that this is acceptable, allowable, and is her right as god. She is actively broken and kept that way through the neglect of the Sohma family maids, Ren’s abuse, and how Akira framed her role in the Zodiac.

I can go on and on and on and on why the way Akito was treated for her role in the Zodiac by her parents and the rest of the Sohma estate was just awful. I hate it, it’s terrible, she never had a chance to learn and grow and be the genuinely thoughtful woman we know she grows into.

She doesn’t force her path of forgiveness onto others and is fully cognizant of what she did, the repercussions of her actions, and lives her entire life after the curse breaks trying to right what she did wrong.

“Even if she gets hurt, she says she deserves it. She tells me not to let it bother me, but… I’ve always, always loved her so much.” (Another, ch. 13)

Tohru opens the door for Akito. She extends her hand, offers her friendship despite having seen the absolute worst of Akito. She tells Akito that everyone is lonely, everyone wants bonds, and acknowledges Akito’s worst fears, that Akito herself is selfish and dirty for wanting something assured and unending because she, Tohru, herself is dirty and selfish. Tohru knows what Akito has done, knows she’s injured some of her beloved friends, had plans to lock up Kyo, hurt Hatori.

Tohru still forgives her. One of Tohru’s striking traits in the manga is that she is suffering, every day, she struggles with the grief of losing her mother and the fear of being alone in the world. Through nothing but her own empathy and realization that loneliness is universal, she’s able to forgive people. She forgives Akito and cares for her, and through Tohru, Akito is introduced to the realization that she’s been wrong and that maybe, she shouldn’t be forgiven.

Shigure also forgives her, and this is the crux of their ship.

To me, that itself is wildly important.

They’ve always circled around each other, and Shigure has always been waiting for Akito to be able to come to him again, in full control of her life and choices. He wants Akito the woman, not Akito the god.

He’s been waiting for the day Akito can meet him as an equal. Akito wants it too, and has wanted him to turn and see her for a very very long time. But she’s been terrified, the entire time, that when he does see her as herself, Shigure won’t like what he sees, and will leave. She’s aware of what she’s done post-curse, she’s aware of the impacts it will have on the former Zodiac members, and she’s aware that once the “bonds” of god and the animals is gone, there may not be anyone left for her.

Neither of them are under any illusions at the end of the series: Akito knows she has to atone for what she did, Shigure knows she has to learn to grow into a person who can function alone. They both know that there are people who are against them changing the oppressive structure of the Sohma family.

Neither of them care. There are things that they want, together, and it’s enough. There’s a whole new world for them to explore and learn about. And in Furubana, this is shown to be a lifelong effort on their parts:

“She said after meeting me, she learned so many things for the first time. She smiled happily as she said it.” (Another, #13)

To close, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the curse and Shigure, and how he set things in motion.

Without Shigure, the curse would have devolved on its own, yes, but the circumstances would not have allowed for the freedom the Zodiac had at the end of the manga. It would not have ended with Akito being able to learn and live freely. Allowing Tohru into the Sohma family cracked open a door to compassion and kindness none of them had ever experienced before, because the Sohma family seems to exist in a vacuum of stability and love.

It wasn’t that Shigure knew instantly that Tohru was kind and loving and thoughtful, if anything, his read on her was “completely normal, albeit strange, teenage girl who obviously has a rough life”. But she was normal, she was from outside the Sohmas, and he knew that was enough. No one in the family was stepping up to change the status quo and how stifling and abusive it was, so he did it himself.

He did it because he loved Akito.

Not because he felt bad for himself, or Hatori, or any of the others, but merely because he loved her to the point of manipulation. It backfired in his face, because he got a big ol’ dose of “loving and respecting” juice from Tohru, but he still got the end he wanted.

What I mean to say is best summarized in chapter 123:

“It would be nice to live in a kind world, without any troubles, without any fear, without hurting anybody, without ever being hurt, only doing the right thing. I wish I could reach this kind world by the shortest path possible. … “That’s wrong”, or “that’s stupid”: If it’s someone else’s life it’s so easy to make such irresponsible comments. ...It would be great, but it doesn’t exist. … Little by little, walking one step at a time, is all you can do.”

We get to experience the roughest part of the path with Akito and Shigure, we got to watch them be terrible people who were lonely and in want of love struggle and learn how to get up and move on.

They tease each other, Shigure is thoughtful of the distinction between “the person Akito was raised to be” and “the person who Akito is”. He’s seen her at her messiest, and she’s seen him at his most jealous. They still chose each other, despite the hurt they caused each other, and others. They make up for it, reflect, and live a life that demonstrates that they have learned. They have friends who are thoughtful and loving and would not hesitate to drop everything and help them, lend an ear when they’re frustrated, help them not to make the same mistakes.

And then we get to see them be wonderful, kind, thoughtful, loving parents in Furubana.

We got to see their adorable, kind, compassionate child be friends with the children of the people Akito hurt, because everyone in the former Zodiac’s family collectively decided “never again, no”.

Their child adores them. Shiki in Furubana #13 radiates love for Akito and Shigure the same way Mutsuki and Hajime do.

They are genuinely good parents, even when they tease Shiki, and I think that is testament for how good they are for each other and how much they’ve changed as adults.

I think that’s enough of a reason to ship them, don’t you?

#Mitkun writes stuff #fruits basket manga spoilers #fruits basket another #fruits basket spoilers #akigure #fruits basket akito #fruits basket shigure

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sobdasha · 4 years ago

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"I definitely updated my list of books I was reading on tumblr so it's all good" -me, a lying liar, right before spending several months finishing my reread of All The Discworld Books I Own But In Chronological Order For The First Time Ever Which In Fact Makes A Difference.

(and then I did it again after the libraries closed)

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin Hm, so. I definitely read this. At some point. It was not really for me, not bad, but not really for me. This particular edition had various notes before and after the text, all of which I read, which made it an experience I got more out of. It's important for me to know that the author is aware that the protagonist is a raging misogynist who's stupid, and yes this was on purpose so you'd realize how really incredibly stupid he is and thus maybe be tricked into changing your mind yourself. It is a legit tactic, but one I tend not to enjoy, so if I hadn't been forewarned I'd have been UUUUGGGGGHHHH MAKE HIM SHUT UP ALREADY and probably rage-quit. As it was, I was able to better appreciate what Le Guin was doing here, even if this book didn't win a place in my heart and I probably won't reread. I definitely preferred Ancillary Justice's take, with the feminine pronouns. For my brain, masculine pronouns = they might as well all be men = business as usual = I didn't really get any gender queering from it. I can't really remember much else now. Oh, it was also part "survival in the wilderness" story, which they're big on making you read in school (which I find very suspicious), and which I tolerated and read a few classic ones on my own until they kept assigning these kinds of stories for us to read and now I get nothing from them and mindlessly hate them. Anyway, as I said, not bad at all but not really for me.

Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin This one's a reread--I picked it up from the library during college because we were doing Titus Andronicus in class and it didn't occur to me that there might be more than one Lavinia???? But hey it worked out because later in college we did the Aeneid and then I had Background for rereading Lavinia. This is the book that is lyrical and beautiful and pulls me in and makes me care deeply about the world and the characters. This is the book of Le Guin's that makes me feel the way everyone else feels about Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness and etc. I would like to find more of Le Guin's work that makes me feel the same way, because as I've said you can really tell from her other stuff that she's a solid writer who knows her stuff. I just…don't enjoy any of the other things. Anyway I recommend. I always forget about this book, and then when I reread I'm like "wow why don't I read this more often?????"

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?, N. K. Jemisin I liked every story in this short story collection. I should just reread it and try writing this up again tbh but also tbh I'll probably do the rereading and then just not write anything up again. Just read Jemisin's stuff I love her writing so much okay. ETA: that’s exactly what I did, I reread this during my covid rereads and said “I should do a proper write-up this time” and lo and behold where is it

Tehanu, Ursula K. Le Guin Okay, this last Earthsea book treated me much better than the others. It's probably not for everyone else, which might be why it's for me. It's much more domestic, much less "plot" happening, full of introspection, and centered on women rather than men. This novel acknowledges and confronts the rampant internalized misogyny in the previous three books, engages it in a way that the misandrist in me finds satisfying even though it never comes to a good solution for the problem. This book is more like a reflection. Earthsea has never been about "light is always good, dark is always bad; be a hero, fight evil" etc. But this one I think shifts the tone a little farther; it's less about balance, and more...I guess I'd put it as, "actions have consequences." It's not concerned with right or wrong, it's concerned with people getting hurt. It's pretty somber and serious, without any humor to balance it out, tons of bad things happen to people, lots of PTSD...but this time I really cared about the characters, and I feel like it was all handled really well? In addition to critiquing internalized misogyny, it also critiqued victim blaming. Seemed like it handled disability pretty well too--was honest about how people are jerks about it in reality, while still being optimistic and treating Therru as valuable; made occasional mentions of considering work-arounds for having only one fully-functional hand, while mostly just having Therru go about living and doing chores and being capable and assuming she did find those work-arounds without having to draw attention to it; and Therru's terrible scars didn't get magically healed at the end, the whole book makes a point all the way through that her physical scars will always be with her the same way her emotional scars will be, and she's simply learned how to go on living with them. Tehanu: a book full of trauma happening to people, where what would normally be the plot in a fantasy novel ended up not even getting started to be resolved, but Le Guin's writing and handling of the subject matter helped heal my jaded soul.

Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee A quick summary of my experience: Chapter 1 - ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh what is going on what even Chapter 2 - no, no this is just, this is what sci fi is like, right? Just give it a few chapters and then by the end of the book everything will probably make sense. I'm sure that's how it works. Remember how even in Ancillary Justice I ended up with two separate Battles of Valskay, but now everything is fine??? It's. Fine. Chapter 4 - (ohhhhhhh I still don't know what's going on) Several Chapters Later - still no clue what's going on, but hit my stride with the terminology, my foreign language instinct kicked in where words stopped sounding weird and while I could not for the life of me define any terms for you, I had a vague comprehension of how the words operated In Context. Sort of. And by then I had, without realizing it, begun page-turning and binging, so I guess I liked the book lol! Another serious-but-not-funny one, but with an extra dose of War Memoir and all the gruesomeness that entails (but probably, like any good War Memoir, probably not actually gratuitous and actually in fact the necessary amount of gruesome). Jedao was turned into a woobie at the last minute and, well, damn, guy knows the way to my heart. The novel apparently gripped me enough that I don't even mind that it only came into play at the very end of the game. And hey, there's two more novels to deal with that revelation, which I have picked up from the library to read immediately! Yay! Current personal theory: based on the heavy math references that made me want to cry at the start, but the almost entire absence of actual numbers, and a reference to "there's no way actual physics works like that, it was obviously a calendrical effect" or something…I'm going to throw out a wild guess that the calendar stuff (and all the social structuring that goes with it) is so that they can break and reinvent math. So they can effect a universe where 2+2=5 and therefore a bunch of people standing in this exact position makes a force field or bullets of rose thorns or whatever and some other dude can make himself immortal. This sounded like a pretty terrible theory already and it sounds even worse now I've typed it up but oh well.

Raven Stratagems, Yoon Ha Lee Guess who didn't write this up back when she read it!!! Also, I returned Ninefox Gambit to the library right before the libraries shut down for covid. So, I had Raven and Revenant on hand for months but I didn't have Ninefox on hand to do an immediate reread to see if that made the sci fi make more sense. (It probably wouldn't have, but I would have liked to do a rereading while the ending was still fresh.) By this time there is a lesser degree of visceral viscera. Lee is brutal, however, about continuing to be honest about what war costs and whether war is worth that cost (which depends, really, on whose lives you think matter. Very relevant for these times. Very much prepared me to shut up and not whine about the inconveniences of protests and their fallout. There is no pretty and clean way to have a revolution, since it involves destroying a particular [terrible] way of life, so we're all just gonna have to sacrifice together). Also I think by this point all the character development from the first novel paid off in the form of character dynamics being hilarious now despite, y’know, the gruesome shadow of war.

Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee Continues to discuss the honest price of war and the messiness of fallout. Shuos "The risks I took were calculated, but boy am I bad at math" Jedao. Oh I think this is also the one where every so often one of the characters thinks, "Okay so this person is a tyrannical murderous dictator but he is ensuring that there will never again be food shortages and no one in the space empire ever goes hungry." And then Lee turns around and is like, "Haha but don't forget this same person invented a form of vital infrastructural technology (and also immortality) that is optionally based off ritual human torture sacrifice. Like he didn't have to do that to make it work. He just decided to anyway. And that's always bad :) " (Also useful in our current climate of "Okay but we should consider the other person's circumstances and point of view" and also "Yeah but that doesn't apply if they're literally Nazis tho.")

Hexarchate Stories, Yoon Ha Lee A collection of short stories set in the universe of those three books. There's one story at the end that does satisfy the "But I wanted another sequel!!!" urge. And there's a bit of backstory for Jedao and Cheris. But by and large what you should be in the mood to read is flash fiction snippets that simply happen to be set in the same universe but have no bearing on the plot. Which is pretty cool and interesting if you are in the proper mindset! Even better, Lee includes author's notes at the end of each story to talk about the story, or the influences, or the context of his life at the time, etc etc. That is always my absolute favorite part of a short story collection. Also these notes told me everything I needed to know about why I liked certain things about his writing. "I wanted to write my own AUs," "If I get stuck I go on TV Tropes," "My only regret is that I had to cut the scene where Jedao goes to ~Halloween~ dressed as himself and trolls people" ahhhh that's also a regret I share.

Dragon Pearl, Yoon Ha Lee This one is YA! There is a lot less gore although I guess there was still genocide! Read this when you are in the mood for something that doesn't attempt to hide the fact that the plot is completely, conveniently contrived to give you fast-paced action and fun. Min sure has a lot of coincidental meetings that should stretch my disbelief but I don't care. Also, I am enjoying reading books with girls as protagonists that do what I'm tired of being told to love about boy protagonists--just keep barreling along with complete self-assurance that you are right and, if you run into trouble, you can egotistically figure your way out.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N. K. Jemisin Gods and mortal ruling family's messy soap opera sexcapades is not exactly my favorite genre, but luckily it is handled by Jemisin so it's all good. Lots of Souma Family Values. I'm really appreciating how Jemisin considers choice of narrator very carefully and uses it to brilliant effect in this trilogy. Stories are things told by a narrator to an audience; why should we rely on the artifice of an "impartial" "reliable" "omniscient" 3rd person narrator writing into the void? This trilogy was Jemisin's first, I believe, so it's a little awkward coming back to them now, only because Jemisin is such a powerful writer that the themes she's begun working with here have only gotten stronger with each successive work.

The Broken Kingdoms, N. K. Jemisin This one I rated as I read for Protagonist Is Blind based on the scale of a sighted person going "but some of my best friends are blind!" In that regard, I think the book does really well! Blindness doesn't define Oree's life and value; Oree doesn't get magical powers that make her a blind person who isn't really blind; Oree moves away from home and gets a job and lives on her own which seems very accurate to me based on my knowledge of one (1) person who is blind; instead of being ~cured~, Oree actually gets more blind at the end of the story and this is considered a Good Ending. Also personal bonus points are awarded for references to her stick being handy for hitting people with. Some stuff was stereotypical, but Jemisin's intent was not. A+, will read again, please support including way more characters who are blind in media. Anyway I enjoyed this one.

The Kingdom of Gods, N. K. Jemisin First off, Jemisin directly up front critiques the narration choices she made in the first two books and then pays it off like a boss at the end. Like holy crap. I admit by now I was getting a bit bored of the genre, but the book was still very engaging because Jemisin is a master. It may also have been affected by how much increasing pain I've been in lately.

The Awakened Kingdom, N. K. Jemisin I'm dead. This one was way more my speed and you need the other three books to understand this novella but ohhhh my god it's perfect. I read a lot of choice passages of this aloud to my roommate because how could you resist. It's still heavy but it's hilarious. Bless Shill.

#sobdasha booking

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eldritchsurveys · 4 years ago

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873.

5k Survey I

1. Who are you? >> I’m Mordred. 2. What are the 3 most important things everyone should know about you? >> I’m sensory-defensive and post-traumatic, I'm part of a multiple system, and I’m a fictional character. 3. When you aren’t filling out 5,000 question surveys like this one what are you doing? >> Taking way shorter surveys. When I’m not taking surveys at all, I’m posting on tumblr or pillowfort, reading, playing video games, researching video game lore, watching a movie or show, or trying to manage my hellbrain (which is a whole separate task in itself). 4. List your classes in school from the ones you like the most to the ones you like the least (or if you are out of school, think of the classes you did like and didn’t like at the time). >> I do my best not to think about school, the last bit of which was 15 years ago anyway. 5. What is your biggest goal for this year? >> I don’t make goals like that.

6. Where do you want to be in 5 years? >> It’s inconceivable to me to plan ahead that far. Even to think ahead that far seems silly and pointless to my very present-focused (and past-haunted) mind.

7. What stage of life are you in right now? >> Adulthood. Just the general “adulthood” between hectic young adulthood and transitional middle age. 8. Are you more child-like or childish? >> I’m not child-like or childish. I simply understand that the division between “childhood” and “adulthood” isn’t nearly as cut-and-dried as society has organised it for the sake of legality and social interaction, and I also understand that the desire to escape childhood and “childish things” is a conceit of the young, who wish to be seen as grown and independent creatures (which is part of development! it makes perfect sense). By the time you get to your thirties, it really stops mattering. You know you’re an adult. You know that being an adult means you have the freedom to do whatever you want (as far as leisure and play and stuff like that goes, I mean), which means you can sit in your pjs watching cartoons and eating sugar cereal if you like, and no parent can chide you for it, and your peers can fuck off if they don’t like it. (The “adult” part of doing that is knowing to stop after one and a half bowls of said cereal, lmao. It’s all a balance, innit?)

9. What is the last thing you said out loud? >> I don’t remember. 10. What song comes closest to how you feel about your life right now? >> I don’t think there’s any song that can capture that. Or, maybe there is, but I don’t know about it. 11. Have you ever taken martial arts classes? >> No. I’ve been interested, but frankly, I can’t afford anything like that. 12. Does your life tend to get better or worse or does it just stay the same? >> There is no set trajectory, like that. Life has high points and low points, and the majority of it is really spent somewhere in the middle. It’s just that we focus on the high points and the low points most often (and when the low points are particularly low, they often end up defining our entire existence, even when we’re in the middle or even at high points). 13. Does time really heal all wounds? >> It’s not time that does it. Time just always happens to pass while the healing is being done, so we figure it’s the most common denominator. It takes work to heal, not just passively sitting around waiting for it to happen. 14. How do you handle a rainy day? >> I bring an umbrella, if I have to go out. Usually I don’t, so I just... do what I would do normally? 15. Which is worse…losing your luggage or having to sort out tangled holiday lights? >> Obviously losing your luggage... 16. How is your relationship with your parents? Will you miss them when they are gone? >> We have no relationship. There will be nothing to miss. 17. Do you tend to be aware of what is going on around you? >> Yeah. Especially since I’m prone to hypervigilance. 18. What is the truest thing that you know? >> The truest thing that I know is that I don’t know shit, and neither does anyone else. We’re all just elaborately guessing about shit, and interpreting reality the best way we can. Which is great, really. The fact that we keep trying to understand shit is cool. Just... “the map is not the territory” kind of applies to a lot of the stuff we think we know. ...Or not, right? After all, what do I know? :p 19. What did you want to be when you grew up? >> I just wanted to be free. 20. Have you ever been given a second chance? >> Probably. 21. Are you more of a giver or a taker? >> I’m a fair amount of both, being, you know, a person. 22. Do you make your decisions with an open heart/mind? >> I make my decisions the best way I know how. Whatever that means. 23. What is the most physically painful thing that has ever happened to you? >> Menstrual cramps. 24. What is the most emotionally painful thing that has ever happened to you? >> Yeah, right, like I’m going to be able to rank that. 25. Who have you hugged today? >> No one. 26. Who has done something today to show they care about you? >> --- 27. Do you have a lot to learn? >> Of course. I don’t necessarily have to learn all of it, but it sure is out there. 28. If you could learn how to do three things just by wishing and not by working what would they be? >> I don’t think that would be of any benefit to me. As much as I balk at taking those long uphill journeys to skillfulness, I feel like those journeys are beneficial and aid one’s growth. I’d rather not just snap my fingers and have a djinni grant me abilities like that. 29. Which do you remember the longest: what other people say, what other people do or how other people make you feel? >> How what other people do and say makes me feel. 30. What are the key ingredients to having a good relationship? >> Meh. 31. What 3 things do you want to do before you die? >> I don’t have a list like this. 32. What three things would you want to die to avoid doing? >> I think I would rather die than be incarcerated. So I’d take the death penalty if I could avoid a life imprisonment sentence... 33. Is there a cause you believe in more than any other cause? >> Not particularly. 34. What does each decade make you think of? The 1920’s: Prohibition. Wait, was that the 20s or the 30s? 30’s: World War II. 40’s: The rest of WWII. 50’s: I just think of... all the propaganda images from that era. You know, all the... domestic Whiteness... also, weird foods like meat aspic. 60’s: Hippies and Woodstock. 70’s: The Vietnam War (and the protests). 80’s: Hair metal. 90’s: Grunge and weird television/movies. 2000 : Well, I was an adult for most of this decade, and more or less aware of the world, so I don’t have a succinct “concept” of the aughts the way I have for decades that I didn’t live through, that I only have historical knowledge of. 2010’s: ^

35. Which decade do you feel the most special connection to and why? >> I feel an emotional connection to the spirit of the nineties. I don’t feel like trying to organise my words to explain why, I feel like that would take a lot of energy right now and I still have fifteen questions to go. 36. What is your favorite oldie/classic rock song? >> I don’t have one particular favourite. 37. What country do you live in and who is the leader of that country? >> United States. Donald Trump is president, weirdly enough. If you could say any sentence to the current leader of your country what would it be? >> I’d rather not, thanks. 38. What’s your favorite TV channel to watch in the middle of the night? >> I don’t watch television in the middle of the night... 39. What Disney villain are you the most like and why? >> That’s a great question, but the thing about Disney villains is that I don’t relate to them as much as I just love watching them do what they do. Like, my favourite is Judge Frollo, but I don’t think it’s because I have anything in common with him. Or, hell, maybe I would burn down an entire city because I don’t know how to handle the fact that I really want to bone this superbly hot chick. (My actual favourite villain is Catholic Guilt.) 40. Have you ever been a girl scout/boy scout? >> Briefly. 41. If you were traveling to another continent would you rather fly or take a boat? >> I would rather fly. I feel like boat travel would take a particularly long time and I’m not into that. 42. Why is the sky blue during the day and black at night? >> Oh, you know. Science. (I’m not Google.) 43. What does your name mean? >> I’m not sure anyone really knows what “Mordred” means. 44. Would you rather explore the depths of the ocean or outer space? >> Outer space. 45. What is the first word that comes to mind when you see the word: Air: Astrology. Meat: Beef. Different: Strokes. Pink: Panther. Deserve: Entitlement. White: Power, unfortunately. Been reading about too many fucking Nazis lately. Elvis: Pelvis. Magic: Mountain. Heart: Head. Clash: Punk. Pulp: Fiction.

46. If you could meet any person in the world who is dead who would you want it to be? >> I don’t care about this. 47. What if you could meet anyone who is alive? >> I still don’t care. 48. Is there a movie that you love so much you could watch it everyday? >> Of course not. I did watch Event Horizon every day for like a month, but I was in the psych ward at the time. What the fuck else would I have done anyway? 49. You are going to be stuck alone in an elevator for a week. What do you bring to do? >> What do I bring to do?! That’s definitely the least of my concerns with a hypothetical like this. I can’t fucking survive in an elevator for a week, dude. 50. Have you ever saved someone’s life or had your life saved? >> Doubtful.

#surveys #survey #5000 question survey

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theliterateape · 5 years ago

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The Cinema of 2019: A Literate Ape End-of-Year Review

By Don Hall and Brett Dworski

Editor’s Note:

With projects like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Watchmen, The Mandalorian, and pretty much everything produced for the CW, we are smack dab in the epicenter of the Age of Fan Fiction. The films of 2019 have some nods to this trend with Joker, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Yesterday playing hard and loose with expanding the existing iconography to tell new stories.

We enjoyed a lot of movies in 2019. While not a banner year like 1968 or 1999, the year certainly had its standouts. Here is our end of the year list of the films that impacted us the most compiled by Don Hall and Brett Dworski, both film fans and people with acceptable vision and hearing.

NOTE: These are not ranked because generally, we believe the practice of ranking films is fucking stupid. However, we do rate them from 1 to 5 Apes. Enjoy.

Apollo 11

4 Apes (DH)

There really was a time when America was great. Sure, there was still segregation and violence, the war overseas, the draft, and the host of problems faced by the country but the men and women who took up Kennedy’s challenge to get a human being on the surface of the moon elevated us all. Apollo 11 is a documentary using entirely archival footage of this historic moment when mankind exceeded itself.

Honey Boy

1 Ape (BD)

The anticipated debut of writer Shia LaBeouf is choppy and disappointing. Newcomer Noah Jupe plays child actor Otis—based on LaBeouf—whose drunken father disrupts his recent success. The film’s inconsistencies stem across the plot, casting and performances. The father, played by LaBeouf, flops between abusive asshole and tender daddy by the minute; neither is compelling. Lucas Hedges, who plays Otis as a drug-abusing teenager, looks nothing like LaBeouf or Jupe. And once things get interesting, Otis forgives his pop and tells him he’s “going to make a movie about him.” Very original, Shia. The fact that Honey Boy is based on LaBeouf’s life is intriguing, but the film is ultimately a huge letdown.

Midsommar

4 Apes (DH)

Ari Astor gives us a twisted break up story wrapped in the bloody flowered crown of a horror film set in blinding sunlight. I loved Hereditary for a million reasons. I loved Midsommar for five: Florence Pugh, the bizarre mating ritual, the fucked up mushroom visuals, old people willingly plunging to their deaths, and a dude being stuffed into the skin of a recently slaughtered bear and burned alive.

Dolemite Is My Name

3 Apes (BD)

Eddie Murphy rewinds the clock to his Raw and Delirious days in this biopic of Rudy Ray Moore, a comedian and musician behind the Blaxploitation movement of the 1970s. While wildly erratic at times, it’s also an affectionate and sobering look at the hustle of show business. It took years for Murphy to ditch his affable family-man routine, but it was worth the wait: Dolemite Is My Name cements the raunchy, cocksure comic as one of the greatest talents of all time.

Yesterday

3 Apes (DH)

I wrote about this here. Loved it.

The Lighthouse

3 Apes (BD)

Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are exhilarating in this delirious indie thriller. They play 19th century lighthouse keepers who struggle to maintain their sanity upon learning they’re stuck on an island off the coast of New England. The stunning black and white landscapes of Nova Scotia are overshadowed by Dafoe’s and Pattinson’s constant bickering, farting, masturbating, and binge drinking. The Lighthouse is bizarre, hilarious, terrifying, peculiar… and quite good. You’ll never view seagulls the same way after watching it.

Endgame

5 Apes (DH)

The culmination of nearly two dozen interconnected films all stemming from my Gen X childhood? I’ve been waiting since I read my first Avengers comic when I was ten years old for this and it did not disappoint. Packed with incredibly satisfying moments (Professor Hulk, Cap gets the Hammer, “...on your left...,” and “I... am... Iron Man”) this was the most fun three hours I could imagine that didn’t involve cheese or sex.

The Art of Self Defense

4 Apes (BD)

This deadpan and absurdist comedy highlights toxic masculinity through a ruthless karate class. Jessie Eisenberg plays Casey, a lonely, frightened accountant who enlists in the course after a mugging leaves him hospitalized. Led by a vain and puzzling instructor, the class soon absorbs Casey’s life and brainwashes him to commit barbaric acts beyond self-protection. Although clearly a blend of Fight Club and The Karate Kid, The Art of Self Defense carries an unusual rhythm that separates it from its predecessors—and displays a refreshing kind of filmmaking from newcomer Riley Streams.

Joker

4 Apes (DH)

The politics that suddenly surrounded this were nothing more than distraction. Was it a response to the humorless Woke culture? An Incel Fantasy? Who gives a fuck. It was a film that did something a lot of movies lately refuse to do—it surprised us. It also included an amazing, painful performance by Joaquin Phoenix and, like Logan before it, used the pop culture iconography of the comic book tropes and deepened them in ways that only a bold approach could.

High Life

4 Apes (BD)

Visually-stunning cinematography and a harrowing storyline carry High Life, one of the most daunting films of the year. Set in a futuristic world where death-row inmates are sent to conduct eerie experiments in outer space, High Life is as morbid as it is alluring. The movie—which was made in 2018 but not released in theaters until 2019—resembles a space version of The Shining with its isolation-leads-to-madness concept. While too edgy for some, High Life is one of the most uniquely made films in years.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

5 Apes (DH)

Tarantino’s homage to revisionist history, the plight of growing old and becoming replaceable, 1960s Hollywood, and chock full of snappy dialogue, incredible performances, and both a sense of celebration and melancholy makes this one of the best movies about movies ever made.

John Wick Chapter 3

5 Apes (DH)

With next year’s Keanu-mas when they release both John Wick 4 and the Matrix 4 movies on the same day (yes, I will participate fully) the franchise that spawned the newfound love for all things Reeves is absolutely worth noting. Full of that comic book/video game world-building, odd but sensible rituals and oaths and rules plus plenty of head-shot, bloody violence, I sat in a Las Vegas theater with a crowd and we all gasped, laughed, and applauded at the absolute action-porn that is John Wick. Yes, these films are pornography of comic book violence and Reeves is our big-dicked John Holmes.

The Painted Bird

5 Apes (BD)

Those seeking a feel good shan’t see The Painted Bird, a bloodcurdling Holocaust drama seen through the eyes of a child. Petr Kotlár gives a robust performance as a nameless boy fighting to survive the violent societal breakdown in Eastern Europe. In doing so, he experiences one nightmare after another—each worse than the former—and loses hope in human kindness along the way. The beautifully shot black-and-white landscapes are a mirage for the routine abuse the boy encounters, leaving audiences as numb to it as he is by the film’s end.

The Irishman

4 Apes (DH)

Scorsese caps a triptych of films over decades with this much slower but no less magnificent look into the Italian Mafia from the inside/out. Goodfellas is an Irish kid’s ascent and is an explosive young man’s movie. Casino is a Jewish man’s climb up in the Mob and, while still explosive, is a bit more subdued and a decidedly middle-aged man’s film. The Irishman is an old man’s view, looking back, reliving awful and magnificent moments.

Together, the three films mark a masterwork in a genius director’s canon.

Ad Astra

5 Apes (BD)

Ad Astra takes a different approach than most solar-system journeys by exploring the man behind the suit. Brad Pitt is Roy McBride, an accomplished astronaut whose dedication to space has damaged his marriage. When called upon for secret mission to Neptune, the stoic McBride finds he’s more than a government robot, and his ascent to madness results in one of Pitt’s finest performances. Supported by a wonderfully played asshole in Tommy Lee Jones, Ad Astra is as much a family drama as it is a space adventure.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

5 Apes (DH)

Sure, there were unanswered questions leftover and I really didn’t care for that kiss at the end but I loved this film from start to finish. Completing a story as massive and, in many ways, disconnected, was a tall order and I think Abrams and team did about as good a job as anyone could expect. This will be in rotation at least a couple more times in the next few weeks.

Marriage Story

5 Apes (BD)

Oscar-worthy performances from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson drive Marriage Story, a clever, poignant narrative about divorce. Noah Baumbach’s behind-the-scenes view of the crippling situation separates it from movies alike, exploring factors beyond courtroom troubles and custody battles. Marriage Story empathetically—and even comically—shows both sides of the fight, and its effect will last far beyond the screen. Get your box of tissues ready.

Alita: Battle Angel

3 Apes (DH)

Not a Manga-Boy so the inconsistencies with the story and characters didn’t bother me. I thought this was the closest to watching a dramatic video game with some cool performances and great use of camera and technology. It was also the film I saw first as a resident of Las Vegas so that counts for something at least to me.

Parasite

5 Apes (BD)

Superbly written, shot and performed, Bong Joon-ho’s account of class discrimination in Korea is an electrifying and emotional masterpiece. What begins as a lighthearted story of two families—one rich, one destitute—spirals into shocking sequences of deception. It has every element of an instant classic: witty comedy, sexual tension, thrilling violence, social themes and a stunning finale that mirrors the horrors of reality. Calling it the best movie of 2019 isn’t enough: Parasite is one of the top films of the decade and transcends the arc of modern cinema.

#Movies of 2019 #Honey Boy #High Life #Parasite #Ad Astra #Once Upon a Time in Hollywood #Yesterday #Marriage Story #Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker #The Irishman #The Painted Bird #John Wick Chapter 3 — Parabellum #Joker #The Art of Self Defense #The Lighthouse #Dolemite Is My Name #Midsommar

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terramythos · 6 years ago

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Review: Vicious by V. E. Schwab (Villains #1) (REREAD)

Length: 364 pages.

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Science Fiction, Superheroes, Revenge Narrative, Dark, Time Jumps, Perspective Shifts, Third-Person, Great Characters, Duology

Warning(s): Graphic violence and torture. One of the main characters is just straight up genocidal. There is a very dubious consent scene later in the novel (non-explicit). Child death (sort of?). This is like, a gray versus black morality kind of story, so don’t read it if that isn’t your thing?

My Rating: 8.5 / 10

My Summary:

Victor and Eli, two genius college roommates at the top of their game, come up with a hypothesis for their senior project— that near-death experiences sometimes result in superpowers. However, when they test their theory, things go terribly awry, and both are left forever changed. Victor finds himself with the ability to manipulate pain. Eli becomes functionally immortal. And with a body count behind both young men, they transform from best friends into bitter enemies.

Ten years later, Victor escapes from prison. Cunning and manipulative, Victor has had a decade to contemplate revenge against the man who put him there— Eli. When he finds an injured 12-year-old girl on the side of the road, he discovers Eli has spent the last decade systematically murdering EOs— people with supernatural abilities. Sydney, who can raise the dead, is the one of the few to escape.

With the help of Sydney and his former cellmate Mitch, Victor begins to enact his revenge. But it’s only a matter of time before Victor and Eli finish what they started ten years ago…

But these words people threw around— humans, monsters, heroes, villains— to Victor it was all just a matter of semantics. Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human. The difference between Victor and Eli, he suspected, wasn’t their opinion on EOs. It was their reaction to them. Eli seemed intent to slaughter them, but Victor didn’t see why a useful skill should be destroyed just because of its origin. EOs were weapons, yes, but weapons with minds and wills and bodies, things that could be bent and twisted and broken and used.

Vicious is an interesting book to reread because, while the book itself hasn’t changed, the context behind it has. When I read this back in 2016 it was a standalone novel, originally published in 2013. Now I’m rereading it specifically because there is an unexpected sequel (Vengeful, 2018), and I wanted a refresher before jumping into it. Second, maybe a more minor detail— this book is homoerotic as hell, and I remember wondering if it was intentional on a first read. Now that Schwab recently came out as gay, I’m thinking it probably was, which makes it all the more entertaining.

It’s also interesting to see how much Schwab’s writing has changed over time. Originally, I read Vicious, enjoyed it, then decided to read her big fantasy series Shades of Magic, and… Well, let’s just say *that* ended up being one of my favorite trilogies ever. Whoops? But in many ways I feel my enjoyment of Shades of Magic overshadowed Vicious. I enjoyed this book, but honestly I kind of forgot about it even though it was the first one I read. That was another reason to revisit it; while I might not like it as much as Shades of Magic, it’s still plenty good.

Before I do a deep dive into the book, I think it’s important to discuss the structure. Vicious basically has two stories— one in the past, and one in the present. The first half mostly focuses on the past, while the second half mostly focuses on the present. “Mostly” is important here— the story is very anachronistic. This serves to heighten the drama; we learn about Victor and Eli’s past relationship, then get a glimpse of just how corrupted and different it is in the present day, and of course wonder what got them to this point. While I feel it’s easy to do time and perspective jumps poorly, the chapters themselves are pretty short, so I never felt disconnected from any particular plot thread. The pacing was always solid. If anything I found this novel pretty easy to read, because I could tackle just a few chapters at a time yet make significant progress in the story.

Vicious is, without a doubt, character-driven. People with superpowers exist— called ExtraOrdinary people (EOs)— and said powers develop in a unique way. Other than that there’s nothing super special about the setting. And aside from the interesting structure, the story is pretty standard. But the characters themselves are fascinating and by far the strongest point of the novel. The main focus is obviously on Victor and Eli, and how they serve as foils to one another. Both are arrogant and straight-up terrible people, but the way they see the world differs greatly, and that’s ultimately what separates the “hero” of the story (Victor) from the villain (Eli). Gray versus black morality, hooray!

Seeing the initial relationship between the two leads and how it sours and twists over time is quite interesting. At first Eli seems to be the most level-headed of the two, but as the story develops you learn how fanatical and unhinged he really is. Dude just straight up embraces genocide after a point. Meanwhile, Victor is clearly a vindictive and selfish dick from the get-go, yet as Eli’s true nature shows, seems much less terrible by comparison. The story is sometimes a bit on-the-nose with the whole hero vs villain thing and how the two defy usual expectations, but it is still interesting to realize you’re genuinely rooting for Victor. Despite everything he’s a pretty likable character.

Aside from Victor and Eli, there are three supporting characters who substantially affect the story. Preteen Sydney gets the most screentime, and with Mitch (Victor’s bodyguard/hacker/cellmate) serves as the humanizing part of the story. Victor even seems to sort of care for the two! Though how much of that is genuine attachment versus just finding them useful is debatable. There’s a super twisted found family vibe with the trio which starts to form near the end (they adopt an undead dog and everything!). On the antagonistic side of things, we have Serena, Sydney’s older sister, who has the power to compel others. She’s pretty terrifying, and has her own twisted motivations for helping Eli. At times she’s honestly more unsettling than he is.

One of my main complaints about Vicious when I first read it was *just* as I started to really dig the side characters, their relationships, and their developments… the novel ended. Yes, Sydney gets significant development through the story. But Mitch and Serena get shafted. We only really get to know them toward the end of the novel with backstory dumps or a handful of perspective chapters. A lot of the novel’s real estate centers on Victor and Eli’s past, and while I think that’s an integral part of the novel, it feels like something is missing. At the time I thought this novel either needed to be longer or it needed a sequel. Well, now it has one of those things, so it will be interesting to see what Vengeful does with the characters.

Thematically and philosophically there’s some interesting stuff going on. The hero vs villain thing is the most obvious, and as I mentioned gets pretty direct at times. But one idea I found interesting to consider is what happens to the souls of ExtraOrdinary people. It’s initially stated as fact that EOs lose a part of themselves when they die and return. They’re different, changed in a way they can’t quite describe. And for most of the novel this seems to be true. Victor and Eli both become twisted, detached people, obsessed with their own perceptions of reality. The two realize they should feel or think certain things and simply… don’t. Both attribute it to the fact they died and came back “wrong”. But the more we learn about both characters, the more we realize they were pretty much like that all along. The idea that people lose something doesn’t really hold up when you examine Sydney, who turns into a stronger and more vibrant person after coming back. It’s an interesting realization, because it highlights just how wrong Eli’s actions are.

There’s also a whole deal regarding God and spirituality vs science. Eli justifies nearly everything he does in the name of God, whereas Victor is an atheist— but the extent to which this affects things is a definite gray area. There are some uncanny coincidences in the story (like Victor discovering Sydney) that would be bad writing… except the characters notice it happening. On multiple occasions Victor notes that if God or Fate exists, it seems to be siding with him, not Eli. Even the formation of ExtraOrdinary abilities is bizarre. One gets superpowers based on their final thoughts and feelings? That’s so decidedly unscientific, especially from something that starts as a science experiment, that it really sticks out to me. Is there more to this dichotomy? I guess we’ll see if the sequel explores it more.

There are some small details I really like, but I think my favorite is the blackout poetry thing. There’s just something interesting and really funny about Victor defacing his famous parents’ self-help books. He mentions it’s one of the best gifts he got in prison, and it’s also one of the first things he does when he gets out. Probably the funniest part in the whole story is an intense chase scene where Victor is trying to escape someone through an unfamiliar house. He spots a Vale book on a shelf, and pauses EVERYTHING to just grab it and throw it out the window, then returns to the scene as if nothing happened. It’s just such an unnecessary detail that might have ended up on the cutting room floor but I honestly lost my shit laughing.

The ending is also viscerally satisfying. So much stuff ties together well. While the novel is about Victor and Eli and (ultimately) Victor’s revenge, you don’t actually learn much about his plan until it happens. A lot of lines and actions read differently in context of the ending, which is always something I like in a story.

(And here’s a totally skippable aside— *is* there some connection between this series and Monsters of Verity? The latter is a young adult duology by Schwab, which I read and reviewed here and here. But the first book has an opening quote from Victor. Hell, it’s part of the quote I picked for this review. They don’t seem to be in the same universe but… maybe they are? It’s just such a goddamn weird choice to quote a “V. Vale” at the beginning of an unrelated series. Maybe Vengeful has an explanation? Maybe Schwab just really liked that whole monsters vs humans line? I have no idea.)

Anyway, yeah, that’s Vicious! It’s certainly a fun one to read. The writing is punchy and easy to get through. The conflict between Victor and Eli is very well written and compelling. And, as I mentioned, the characters are the strong point (in my opinion, anyway), so if you enjoy character-driven media I definitely recommend it. Just note my caveat about some of the character development. Skip it if you’re one of those people bothered by Bad People Doing Bad Things In Fiction or think portraying Bad People Doing Bad Things is somehow Endorsing Bad Things. If dark stories aren’t your thing you definitely won’t enjoy this one. There are some aspects of the story that I feel could have been smoother or done differently, most of which I touch on in the review. I think Schwab has improved a lot since writing it, which is one reason I’m excited that my next read is the 2018 sequel.

#taylor reviews #taylor reads #8.5/10 #THAT'S RIGHT... i'm switching to a 10-point scale lmao #i'm too lazy to change the old ones though so... eh?

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sheisbornadreamer · 5 years ago

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Blend in, chapter eight

Disclaimer: Don't own Digimon. Sex without consent is bad. 'Nuff said. This is fiction, not sex-ed

Warnings: graphic language and male on male content

Chapter eight

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Please tell me you're kidding!"

-'-

During the last couple of weeks the redheaded girl's surroundings had changed dramatically. From having her two guy friends to joke and chat with, it had gone to comforting Yamato (without progress) and keeping him company, to being stuck in the extremely awkward space between the guys, to witness them being more than friendly all of a sudden, to see Yamato fall into depression, to be the loyal and comforting friend telling Yamato that being gay isn't the end of the world, to get stuck in an even more awkward space between them, to listen to Taichi's endless wining about the other avoiding him, and finally being the one to tell the brunet to give up.

Taichi blinked innocently –well, he would've looked innocent if he'd been able to wipe the grin off his face- tilting his head slightly to elucidate that he had no idea what she was talking about. The truth is that he actually didn't.

"What?" came the surprised and slightly hesitant reply.

"You think I'm stupid? You think I'm too blind to see? Tai, it's written all over you! What the hell did you do to him?"

Taichi's eyes darkened and his grin suddenly disappeared. Then he sighed and shook his head. "Sora, don't jump to conclusions, alright? It wasn't me this time."

Sora's amber eyes narrowed as she studied his face suspiciously. "What do you mean?"

Taichi's grin returned and his eyes lit up, making him look like a dog receiving a bone. (A/N: no bad thoughts here, people!) "He wanted me. He wanted me, not the other way around! Well… 'course the other way around too, but… Sora, he came on to me. And we-"

"Again?"

Sora buried her face into her hands, shaking it dramatically. She looked up again, staring at him with devastated eyes. "Tai, how could you let that happen?"

Taichi raised his eyebrows. "Wha…? No, you don't get it –this is a good thing!"

Sora snorted, turning away from him and started pacing back and forth. She suddenly stopped and turned to him again. "How?"

Taichi looked up and blinked, opening his mouth to respond. Before he could she interrupted him. "How is this a good thing? Are you two friends? Are you dating? Do even give a shit about each other?"

"Sora, calm down… this isn't another mistake, or another crisis. It's just sex, damn it! We both wanted to, no one got forced. Everything's fine." He grinned again, throwing his arms out. "I'm happy! See?"

She looked at him with a mix of contempt and disbelief, but she couldn't find anything fake in that smile, so she sighed, giving up.

"Alright. I guess I should believe you." She threw him another doubtful look. As weird as it seemed, she couldn't force herself to think that he was lying. Taichi couldn't lie about being happy. If he was, it shone right through him. The tanned boy could however lie about being miserable. He was very good at throwing on a happy face. Sora had known him for long enough to see the difference between the happy face and actual happiness.

But there was still one thing to worry about.

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Thursday 1.55 P.M.

Walking through the hall, carrying a thick textbook in a hideous mix of sage-green and purple, wearing a blank expression that stopped most eyes from noticing him, Yamato Ishida was on his way to his locker. Some heads still turned, perhaps two or three, which was a small number considering the overfilled corridor of chattering teenagers. Most people had forgotten the rumor that had started three weeks ago. Yamato was finally invisible again.

School had been working surprisingly well this day and he had for once been able to keep his focus throughout the classes. He hadn't even back-talked Mr Watanabe, which surprised both his teacher and him.

The only times he spent in the hallway he knew Sora and Taichi would be in, was when he had to get his books for class. But he had still managed to avoid talking to them or being spotted.

The two football-players' absence didn't really bother him, and he didn't feel any need to talk to either of them. The fact that he'd practically spent the whole day alone with hardly anyone to talk to, was something he hadn't bothered to think of. Nor did he mind everyone ignoring him. This new understanding he had with Taichi was probably the main thing to keep him from losing his mind, plus it was way better than jerking off. He was finally free from all the drama, the angst, the painful desire and shame. Now all he had got to do is start living again.

Reaching his goal, he opened his locker and put his book back. The area he was currently standing in was the one with the highest risk of meeting one of the football players. Yamato had no shared classes with either one of them today, and he was glad to have escaped any needless trouble.

Walking towards him, listening to some loud music that should make his ears explode but for some odd reason didn't, Taichi noticed the other boy and stopped immediately, quickly turning off his mp3. Yamato turned around, not once looking at him and started to walk back the way he came from. The confused brunet made several attempts to speak, move, shout or just do something, but none were very successful. He ended up staring after him as he walked out of his vision of sight.

The blond was frowning slightly as he walked; annoyed by his sudden bad luck.

He'll learn, Matt, a comforting voice said in his head. Tomorrow he's got it.

Yamato smiled inwardly, a smile that almost reached his delicate features. Then he turned left and entered class.

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At was a miracle that he hadn't even noticed her intense gaze. If he had, he would've cringed under it, begging her to stop looking at him like that. But he was currently zoning out, head threatening to tilt down from his right palm that was supporting it, which would naturally lead to him jerking it back up and looking around with a confused and drowsy expression.

So he was tired. Okay, not the same thing as miserable, and not the same thing as trying to hide that he's miserable. Just… tired. She sighed, briefly looking away from her observing-object. She couldn't help it; he was supposed to be depressed by the way Yamato was still avoiding him, even after…

To her, that was a pretty good reason not to ignore someone. Of course that's just the way guys work, isn't it?

She jerked slightly when feeling a light hand on hers and came back to reality. Mimi's hand, that had for one second pulled away again when noticing her reaction, rested on hers. "Are you okay, Sora?"

"I'm fine." She sighed, throwing her friend an apologizing look for not having the strength to, well, act fine.

Mimi studied her with concern, then finally gave up, figuring they'd talk about it at another time. Koushiro, sitting across the table, was still talking to Ken about his latest updated program about God knows what, –she'd never get what the hell was coming out of that guy's mouth- the reason Taichi, who was sitting next to the genius, was falling asleep of course. It was one of the few days when her schedule matched theirs and she could actually have lunch with them. Then there were the even fewer days when Koushiro's best friend Joe could join them. That had happened three times.

The redhead beside her looked at Taichi once again, frowning. Even if he's dense now, doesn't mean he won't get hurt eventually. And the longer it takes, the more it'll hurt.

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Taichi had never in his life observed his friend for so long.

To have walked behind him for the last ten minutes, he'd discovered many fascinating things. He walked in a very interesting way, unable to be described. Not slutty, like a girl. Not stiff, like a guy. Not overdone, like a "cool" dude. Just…

Man, what a weird way to walk in, he thought for the tenth time, shaking his head. The reason he was walking 20 feet behind the musician was because he had not yet found the courage to approach him, much less speaking. Plus he had a feeling that wasn't such a good idea. Don't poke the bear. He snickered at the thought of his friend as an angry bear, chasing annoying kids and growling. Then he shook that thought away, rolling his eyes at himself. After all, he had better things to do.

His eyes returned to Yamato's back, studying with interest. When he finally came to the spot where their shared way home split, Taichi sighed to himself and started walking his own way, feeling a little weird doing that without the usual "see ya" or "bye". Busy with feeling sorry for himself, he almost missed Yamato's words.

"Where're you going?"

Taichi spun around, founding his friend standing right at the spot where their separate ways met. It was an invitation, not a question. Even though it didn't sound very inviting, it were the keywords for I want you to follow me home and fuck my brains out. Okay so it didn't necessarily mean the last part, but Taichi was obviously not going to be home for the next hour or so.

All of this raced through Taichi's head, as he just stared at him, careful not to smile or look smug or even hopeful. One mistake and Yamato might get mad and this would be all over.

Without another word, Yamato turned his way and started walking. Taichi quickly considered if it was 100 per cent safe to follow, and started walking, finally letting the smile spread across his face.

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"Did you know that Kari's got class meeting tomorrow? Apparently one parent has to attend."

"Mmm…?" Mr Yagami mumbled, eyes glued to the magazine. His wife was pouring herself a cup of coffee, still having her black coat on. There was no need to take it off; she was going to leave again soon.

"Class meeting?" he finally muttered, affirming that he'd caught that word at least.

"Yes," Mrs Yagami replied quickly, sitting down beside him and drinking the hot gift from heaven. If she survived the day without coffee or not she didn't know; she would never in her life try. Believing that it made things better was enough. "Could you be there?"

"Maybe. Why not you?"

"Got a client" Big gulp –she never drank it slowly nowadays. "Ms Kobayashi" she sighed, and smirked a little as her husband immediately uttered an understanding 'oh'. Calling an over middle-aged woman 'Ms' felt odd, though she could certainly understand why she was still a Miss. I swear to God, if that woman didn't have more money than she deserved I would never have anything to do with her.

"Believe me, I would much rather listen to that stupid teacher for hours, than dealing with Ms Kobayashi."

He smiled, finally turning his attention away from random crises and disasters in the newspaper. "I know. You're admirable, you know that?"

She snorted, a brief show of amusement and gratefulness visible on her still youthful features. Then a serious face. "Tai is having some grade problems"

Their sixteen-year-old son wasn't exactly any more open than other teenagers; he just had a very inquisitive mother. At least when in came to things that had to do with school. She would occasionally ask him how every thing was, but it wasn't like he would ever reply 'oh well everything sucks right now and I'm very depressed because I'm feeling this and she said that and they did this and he did that…' If he ever informed her about anything having to do with emotions she would probably choke on something or fall off the chair. She accepted the 'okay' for an answer, appreciating that he at least talked to her about other things.

"In what?"

She snapped back, blinking. In a second or two she remembered what she had been talking about. "English, mostly. Do you think there's something wrong with him?"

Mr Yagami turned page. "Wrong?" he glanced at her. "Just because he's got some school problems doesn't mean he's stupid."

"No that's not what I meant" she sighed, rolling her eyes at him. "I mean besides school, I haven't seen him with Yamato for a while." She said as an example, though that wasn't really what she thought was the case.

"Why would I know?" he muttered, not turning his eyes away from the newspaper. She blinked, slightly disappointed. Then she shrugged, hit by the realization that neither of them did know.

"Girl problems?" she offered half-heartedly, rubbing her eyes. She didn't really have the energy to discuss it anyway –especially not if neither one of them had a clue.

"Maybe"

She checked her watch and noticed that she should have left two minutes ago. After giving him a quick kiss she said goodbye and ran out, leaving a ready-to-be-cleaned kitchen, a ready-to-be-shaved man and a half-empty cup.

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Yagami Taichi was a quick learner. When he was little, he used to watch guys play football down the street, and then mimic their moves and tricks until he could do it in his sleep. He made up new ones too and, simply by finding it more fun than anything else, trained to be the best when he started school, shortly becoming a star. He learned to be funny by idolizing his uncle, who –to him- was the funniest man on the planet and made everyone around him smile and laugh. When he first met Sora, it was because he made her laugh that he escaped getting beat down for destroying her red hat with mud. Back then she was taller than him, and he only had his charm to save him from receiving physical damage. Yamato was a different thing. While football and jokes were simply fun, this new blond kid was a challenge. Eventually Taichi learned exactly what to say and do to get his attention at all, to startle him out of his defense and finally trick him into surrender. Before Yamato knew it, he'd become so attached to Taichi that he couldn't turn back.

This afternoon, Taichi was once again faced with a challenge. He had already learned his mistakes; this time he didn't look like a human question mark when Yamato had tried to hint that he wanted sex, he didn't ask a hundred times if he really meant it, he was quick to start touching him without teasing, and he didn't speak. Still, there were so many new mistakes to be made.

Yamato pushed Taichi's hands back with an annoyed sigh, giving him a quick glare and removing his shirt by himself. Taichi ducked his head, feeling useless. There were so many things Yamato didn't like, and so many unspoken rules that Taichi was expected to follow. He let Yamato remove his shirt and then his t-shirt, slightly encouraged by the lustful look on the blonde's face as he gazed at his body. He then made the biggest mistake he could've done, he leaned in and kissed him, unable to resist. Yamato pushed him away with surprising strength, and Taichi was a bit taken aback. He barely had time to realize what he'd done wrong before Yamato started unbuttoning his jeans. He hesitatingly responded by unbuttoning Yamato pants, looking carefully at him from under his bangs. As the musician didn't make any signs on irritation, he quickly unzipped and pulled them down, leaving Yamato to take them off completely.

As they stumbled into bed, Taichi's mind was focused on what he was allowed, and not allowed, supposed and not supposed to do. He didn't want Yamato to feel unwanted, but he couldn't grope around like last time. He probably shouldn't speak, he shouldn't look at him, get him frustrated, or annoyed. He shouldn't be dominant, nor should he be slow.

When he made the blue-eyed boy frown, he thought it was the end of the world. Then suddenly he was moaning, and Taichi thought he was going to burst with pride. When he got a command to stop, he took it in and remembered it, and when everything just rolled on, Yamato silent and pleased, he tried to memorize that as well. There were times when he lost himself, -after all they were rolling around naked in a bed- and he happened to spontaneously do something that just felt right.

"Stop kissing me."

Taichi looked up at him –another mistake- and blinked. He swore that he had heard Yamato moan when he was kissing his collarbone, although that may have been because he was touching him at the same time.

Remembering to be quiet, Taichi just nodded and continued jerking him off mechanically. Just before Yamato was about to stop him, getting close, he removed his hand and waited for him to make the first initiative to go further. Pride filled inside him when his friend was a bit taken aback by his fast learning, and he made a mental note to himself that next time he'd make it without any slip-ups whatsoever.

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Next day arrived, and during its hours of school time, Taichi made no attempts to approach, talk to, talk about or even think about the blond-haired jerk that seemed to have fallen off the face of earth. He talked about other things like football, his "cruel big-mouthed asshole for a coach" (which Sora could agree with; she had him as coach too), and various grade problems –or as he put it; grouchy teachers that either had love problems, money problems, or simply hadn't got laid for a very long time. Taichi even went as far as talking about girls, and trying to make Sora talk about guys, which was very ironic by a fact she chose not to say out loud.

It was one thing to see your friend miserable and hear him whine over it, but seeing him in this weird situation that could be working, but could screw everything up just as well was both worrying and frustrating. It was a dangerous balancing between chaos and brief happiness. Then again, she had to remind herself every so often that the brunet didn't think the way she did. Not at all. Therefore, he probably didn't feel the way she would've felt. Question is if that makes it right.

Either way, he kept surprising her by filling out the hole Yamato had left them with endless chattering, jokes and just being himself. She couldn't decide whether he was very good at acting, or if he was dumb enough to be happy, if there were something she had missed or maybe just –God forbid- didn't get. Since the blond wasn't a good topic to bring up, she couldn't exactly get any information out either. It was an evil circle, unless of course they were happy, but…

"…so then he said "Yagami, if you don't get your lazy ass out on the field, I'm throwing you out of the team so fast you wouldn't know what hit you!" I mean was an ass; I just explained everything about Kari –which I shouldn't even have to do, cuz it's none of his fucking business if she's in the hospital and why would I even have to talk about that, it's a hard thing to talk about y'know and then he goes and completely ignores everything I just said and threatens to kick me off the team! And he called me a lazy-ass! And then he gets even angrier when I say this and he makes me do a hundred push-ups. I think it was two hundred even…"

Sora sighed to herself. Originally it had been thirty push-ups.

"Hey, guy with blue hair! Ken right?" Taichi suddenly hollered, -making Sora jump in the effort- waving a cheerful hand at the younger teen that was passing them.

Sora blinked at her friend. Man, he's good at moving on. She was almost a bit proud of him, perhaps he'd even forget about Yamato after a few days. Obviously he wasn't as attached as she'd thought.

Ken observed him hesitatingly, slightly suspicious by the elder boy's wide grin and friendly manner. He felt tempted to jump back when Taichi made his way over to him faster than he'd expected, dragging him by his arm.

"You've met Sora right?" Taichi asked, pulling him down on the bench.

"I guess" Ken mumbled distractedly, politely nodding at Sora before glancing at the brunet.

"Sora, this is my stalker. Stalker, this is my… -ew-" he paused long enough to make a face. "This is Sora. She's not mine."

Ken looked back and forth between the rambling brunet and the sighing redhead. "In case you've missed it, Tai's retarded." Sora mentioned as a sort of excuse.

"No, I've noticed." The blue-haired boy assured, "I've had lunch with him"

The girl smirked, and Taichi immediately brought up their talks, chattering like only he could do. The only thing that he avoided mentioning was their missing friend, which Ken instantly noticed. Apparently the two had divorced themselves from the third person to complete the trio, question was why. Ken had some theories that he ��now knowing better- kept to himself.

Well-raised boy as he was, he listened to the brown-eyed teen's pointless and quite random rambling until he had to get to class. He then quickly excused himself and hurried away to get there in time. Manners and punctuality often had a way of crashing with each other.

Taichi turned to the redhead and grinned widely. "Great kid, huh? Little weird though. He spies on people"

"…yeah." Sora replied hesitatingly, eyeing him.

Taichi's gaze rested on something behind her, and, noticing the change in his face -which was a day to night kind of difference- she turned around.

"Ah… I don't think you should say anything to him…" Taichi mumbled, eyes still glued to the blond musician who was making his way through the hall, soon about to pass them. The unfazed and somewhat distant expression on his face made her frown, raising an eyebrow at the tense teen beside her, as if he would be the one to explain. Ignoring his advice, she threw an arm up, waving.

"Matt!"

He merely glanced her way before passing her, turning his back to her shocked stare. After a few seconds of gaping, she looked at Taichi who looked both guilty and embarrassed.

"What the hell was that?" she gasped, still in shock. Sure, she had grown used to the blond acting strange, but this was a new record.

"Nothing. He' just like that, forget him." Taichi mumbled, desperately searching for something else to bring up.

"Hey, ah… I saw this girl the other day…"

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

The second he could make Yamato's face out he knew he'd done something wrong. He cursed inwardly, angry with himself. It hadn't even begun and already he had made a mistake. When would he learn?

"You do not wait for me like that." Yamato said as he passed by, not even looking at him. Taichi stared as the blond walked pass him, feeling like killing himself. Why couldn't he have just done it right and then everything would've worked? He had one chance and he fucked it up.

Not having the strength to move, he watched the musician walk home –for no reason. It was over.

There was a moment of regret when he saw the other teen turn around and glare at him. Maybe he shouldn't have stared like that.

"What the fuck are you waiting for?" the blond boy then said, loud enough to be heard by the brunet still standing where he had waited in the first place. At first he was just confused. Then fear of making another mistake built up in him. Yamato's impatient look forced him to take a ridiculously hesitant step forward. As soon as he'd done that, the blue-eyed boy nodded and turned around, once again starting to walk home.

-'-

Taichi smiled faintly as he walked down the stairs. He'd made him scream. Not once had he yelled at him or even frowned. Hell, he almost smiled once! Taichi hadn't lost focus, he hadn't said a word, and his timing was prefect. Plus they were done in time, so Yamato didn't even have to worry about his dad. Though he did rush afterwards anyway. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that he'd actually done everything right.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Monday 10.45 A.M.

When a person keeps looking at you for a very long time and doesn't say anything, you really start noticing things about them. Especially if it's a very strange look they're giving you and their mouth is hanging open just a little, and their eyes are slightly bigger than usual. What he noticed about Sora as she was staring at him, was that her eyelashes were actually pretty long even though she never put mascara on them, and her eyes were not just the color of amber. They had both darker, almost sangria-colored shades and lighter golden glimmerings. Even though she had frozen in that rather amusing expression, different reflections of light made everything mix and blur. It was confusing as hell once he tried to define it all. Frustrated for no particular reason, he gave up on it and observed the skin instead. Again, as he paid more attention to it than he ever had before, he discovered new things. It was slightly yellowish and yet sort of pink and slightly sun-burnt. Though right now it seemed almost pale. Her mouth was still hanging open and, being a few inches taller than her, he could see a bit of the inside of her lower lip. There was a line right were the lips met, and the inside was darker than the outside. As she never used lip-gloss either, the outside looked pretty dry and he could spot very fine lines hinting lack of moisture.

Taichi had known Sora for about eight years and only once had he liked her as a girl and not just a friend. But that lasted for one day and no more. He had never had any distracting attraction towards her but still, right now he realized how much more interesting her face was compared to the plastic-looking ones on TV. He decided that Sora –even now, as she seriously looked like an idiot- was way more beautiful than any other girl he'd seen.

-'-

"…you did what?!"

Taichi ducked his head, avoiding her unforgiving eyes. He couldn't understand why she was so against it. He and Yamato finally had something, and she hated it! Why?

Something suddenly struck him, and he almost jumped back in horror. Sora raised an eyebrow, now looking more suspicious than angry. When he pointed an accusing finger at her, still not managing to speak, she frowned. "What the hell's wrong with you?"

"You're jealous!" Taichi hissed, and now it was his turn to gape.

Sora gaped right back for a second, then put a hand to her forehead, sighing darkly. One sentence was trapped behind her gritting teeth, desperate to jump out. But she was used to suppress it and she did, even though this time it was more difficult than usual.

"Tai, you're wasting my time. Just tell me why the hell you did it." She demanded lowly, frustrated that he was so stubborn.

"I'm wasting your time? Sora, will you drop this already! Will you let me live my fucking life and stop pretending that you know everything." He clenched his fists, determined to not give in. "Or deserve to know, for that matter" he added coldly. "It was just an accident that you found out in the first place. We wouldn't have told you if you didn't."

Sora closed her eyes, fighting the urge to choke him. He deserves the effort, he's just blind right now. Help him.

"Tai, please…"

He immediately softened, and sat down beside her. He'd always been a stubborn person, but he couldn't stand it when people got sad. The times he had cried the hardest as a child, were when someone else was crying. Sora knew this weakness, and right now she took advantage of it. Fair? She didn't give a shit.

"I just want you to talk to me. Even if everything's fine. Don't just avoid it."

"Sora, please. Let it go, will you?" he stared at the wall, as if that was what he was begging to get off his back. From his left, Sora's frustrated gaze buried itself into him. She hardly stopped herself from smacking him across the head.

"No, we're talking about it and that's final! I still don't get this. He doesn't want you to talk to him, look at him, be near him or even think about him. But then after school he demands you to-"

"No, its just… we've both realized that we want this, that… y'know-"

"You rather sleep with guys?" Sora finished, smirking at him. Until now, it had never been put out in the open, but it was rather obvious that Taichi preferred boys over girls. Or at least wanted both.

He shrugged. "…yeah. And I took it way better than him to say the least. But we can't be anything deeper than…" he paused, hanging his head and sighing.

"Fuck-buddies?"

He winced, closing his eyes. Sora stood up, running her fingers through her short red hair. Seeing the brown-eyed boy like this was irritating her. Not because he irritated her, but because he was suffering from his own stupid kindness and she couldn't help him. He was like a little puppy following his owner no matter how many times he got hit. She looked down at him where he was sitting on the bench. They were in the sports hall; the current class were having football outside on the field and wouldn't return until the end of the period. Sora had dragged him over there since Taichi refused to talk to her about this out in the hall.

It was obviously a sensitive subject and he wanted to avoid it. But she was not going to let him. If he told her everything, he could at least put some of the weight on her and not carry it by himself.

"Can't you hear yourself? Stop being a such doormat!"

He glared at her, anger building up. He knew that she was just trying to help and up until now he had looked past her constant nagging. But the way she was acting right now –like she had him all figured out and angry with him for not getting it himself- was something he couldn't stand.

"Will you for once realize that I'm not like you! I won't break just because he doesn't want to be my boyfriend and marry me and tell me he loves me everyday! I don't care, alright! I know sex to you is such a fucking big deal but to us it's just release. Sure it would be nice to have it with someone I care about but right now I don't fucking need it! We're not friends anymore, but I have someone to screw and for your information –since you apparently want to know everything- he's fucking good at it too! The only thing that seriously bugs me right now is you and your big mouth!"

He stormed out, punching the wall, knocking some box down and slamming the door on the way. If Sora hadn't felt so jaded she would've rolled her eyes.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

tbc

#fanfiction #digimon #taichi #yamato #taito #yamachi #sora

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peridot-gladioli · 6 years ago

Note

For the drabble meme: 4, 27, 90? :)

Gonna be posting these separately because I can’t Drabble and this first one *alone* is 1000 words (give or take).

For context this ties in to what this will be. If my plan holds true this scene will be part of Chapter Four; I hope it still makes any kind of sense out of order. :(

4. “I’m too sober forthis”

Foggy was quiet as he read through Elektra’s will—his braille-readingtorturously slow to Matt—then let out a long, slow, noisy breath.

Matt realised he had been holding his own breath and let itout more subtly.

“So let me see if I’ve got this right, Matt. Elektra had achild—has a child—and made you its guardian?”

“Yes.”

“When you didn’t know he existed before now?”

“No.”

“Jesus.”

“There… there’s other paperwork,” Matt gestured to the metalfile-case, “but, uh, I can’t read it. It’s not, umm…”

“Do you want me to do it?”

“Uh. Yeah. Yeah, if you could… that’d be, that would begood, thanks.” He realised he hadn’t told Foggy the most important part of allthis, what Elektra had told him in her audio-message, what Stick had come tosay, but he wanted to know if there was any evidence. If Foggy could put ittogether for himself from the papers. That and also he had no idea how to actuallycome out and say, Elektra told me he’smine… So did Stick.

He heard Foggy unlock and open the case, take something out,and then there was barely a moment’s pause before he took a sharp breath.

“What?”

“Birth certificate. First thing in there. Matt. Father’s name is blank but EvanderMATTHEWS,” he paused, significantly.

Matt was briefly annoyed at the emphasis. That part had beenin the will.

“Evander Matthews was born November eighth 2005. If memoryserves—and trust me, I remember your break-up with Elektra—Elektra dumped you inAPRIL 2005. Please, tell me there was someone else.”

“What?! No! She didn’t… That wasn’t… We didn’t break upbecause of that.” He felt indignanton Elektra’s behalf. The ending had been awful, true, but she had loved… Shewouldn’t have done that.

“Matthew! I literally gave you the safe-sex talk because Iwas worried you’d learned bullshit in Catholic school and would try to usewithdrawal or something equally stupid! I physically gave you condoms!”

Oh, yes, Matt remembered. And even now he felt his cheeksheat, though he had also been so touched at how concerned and considerate hisfriend had been, because Foggy had been right, Matt’s sex-ed had been stuff heover-heard and rumours from the others boys. (He had actually been told that ifshe peed after a sex a girl wouldn’t get pregnant.) And Foggy had BOUGHT HIMCONDOMS not left him to struggle, blind, in the drug store and maybe have toask an assistant to help him out. He found himself stuttering a bit before hedefended, “She told me I didn’t have to worry about birth control! And she wastelling the truth! How was I supposed to know that she meant it because she wasdeliberately trying to get pregnant because Stick wanted a child with my DNA?!”

“Whoa. Okay.” Foggy held up a hand in a “stop” gesture and ranhis other hand over his face and into his hair. “I am too sober for this. There’sa hell of a lot to unpack there. Firstly… Stick?! Your knock-off Jedi Master?Old blind guy who taught you the ways of martial arts? What the fuck has he gotto do with anything?”

Oh. Oh God. “He… He trained Elektra too. He sent her. Toseduce me. Test me. Recruit me to his war. Umm… He’s, uh, part of a ninja clan.The Chaste. Apparently they’ve been fighting the Hand—that’s the ninjas thatkilled Elektra and abducted Karen and everything—for hundreds of years orsomething.”

“And he wanted you to fight in a war? And your DNA?”

“He thought a child would have my abilities without the, uh,problematic,” Matt spat the word, “morality.”

“Time out,” Foggy made the T-sign with his hands, “I thoughtyou got your abilities, the enhanced senses and stuff, from the chemicals thatblinded you? Not genetics.”

“Yeah, but he reckoned acquired abilities, enhancements likethat, changed me at a cellular level. And, well,” he shrugged. “Sperm arecells.”

“Definitely way too fucking sober for this. That’s some majorsci-fi shit right there, Matthew.”

“And chemicals which somehow enable me to hear you comingfrom two blocks away aren’t sci-fi,Foggy? The Super-Soldier Serum was chemicals. Chemicals plus radiation areapparently all it takes to turn a five-foot six scientist into an eight-foottall, green, raging behemoth. Maybe we need to rethink what’s science fictionand what’s science reality.”

“Wait a minute! Does that mean Captain America—or the Hulk—couldpass it on to their… No. Nope. Not going there.” Foggy took a deep breath. Letit out again. “Okay. So this Stick guy wanted your baby and used Elektra to getit. And she went along with that. And you’ve only just found out about this?”

“Pretty much.”

“Oh, Matty.”

Foggy’s tone made Matt want to cry. Again. But he hadalready sobbed all over the other man once today. But maybe something in hisface gave him away, because once again he was gathered into a warm, comfortingembrace. He clung on.

“Are congratulations in order? Daddy?”

He let out a (wet) chuckle at Foggy’s teasing tone and Foggysqueezed his shoulder. Shook him a little bit.

“Dude. Come on. The rest of those papers can wait.”

“What?! Why? Where are you..?”

“Matt. Matty-Matt. My buddy, my pal, my best friend. WE aregonna go get hammered—as is only appropriate. We’re both Irish so we have towet the baby’s head. It’s tradition and heritage and culture and stuff. Besides,I wasn’t joking about not being able to handle this sober. And if I feel likethat, God knows how you’re doing. Come on.”

Best friend. Mattwrapped his arms around Foggy and just held him. Thank God for Foggy Nelson. Two hours ago he had not even been surethey were still friends. Now this. Maybethere was still hope of making some kind of sense of everything.

#daredevil #fan-fiction #matt murdock #foggy nelson #my writing #answered asks #ellicelluella

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sinnhelmingrmoved · 5 years ago

Text

@destinysthralls said: 📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜📜 ravioli ravioli give me the formuoli

:)))

Hel and Fang are both polearm fighters. Why not have some sparring with a bet riding on it? A lil fun a lil flirty mostly getting a good sweat going. Get up close and personal trying to take your opponent down and get your way.

One more day until Vanille has to go out and find her new purpose. Time to spend it doing everything they can together until she has to go. Hel not wanting tears, but a happy memory to bookend Vanille’s time with her.

Hel doesn’t know shit about men and here comes Snow crashing in on the squad and giving her a crash course on the human male. Odd friendship ensues once they learn to get along with each other.

The chocobros gain something of a guardian angel, a false friend and ally who merely ensures parts are played and that Noctis is poised to do what her lover requires of him. During all of the subterfuge, two devoted servants to a royal start to bond.

‘I’m being held hostage by this small child and I don’t even mind please introduce me to Chocolina because I hear she is the best thing in the world next to you’ ; or, how Dajh is really good at this friend making thing.

Gladio got his ass beat by the divine once and is not over it, why won’t you face me in battle again you coward? And quoth the Messenger, boy, you would literally die if I came at you again.

Hel has been a part of Aerith’s life, never constant but coming and going as she can. She knew a daughter imprisoned, a girl in a church, and only at the end does Aerith come to realize what was truly hanging over her head -- and how it pains higher powers.

Everyone is on high alert that someone broke into a base and stole Ardyn’s car because it cannot be located. Hel rolls up two hours later in custody with smoothies and a lot of explaining to do because she just wanted to drive the car you monsters.

Cloud and Hel are both traveling worlds looking for people who are important to them in some ways. Hel could use his strength if he could use her connections as they move between KH worlds seeking the lost.

Axel and Saix are itching for a throne to throw as Hel struggles to run her own games behind the scenes. They soon become players in a cat and mouse scenario to obscure their exact motivations while forced to play along with Xehanort’s own ideas.

Hel becomes very intrigued by Barrett’s goals and ultimate success. What do you even do with weird goth chicks that know too much and are a little too happy to see you? What does she mean by she has a message from a friend?

She promises Zack will live on, but he’s not too pleased with the reality of that statement back on Earth. If Aerith is bad about bartering to go back I just imagine Zack is that but on crack. And now Hel is Suffering.

Hel becomes a north star to Xemnas across whatever time he finds himself in, always ready to welcome him back, always ready to listen. So what happens in a time when she cannot be found?

Even gets ‘adopted’ because Hel is just in love with him and his brain. Featuring Even actually having to answer to someone older than him and them talking lore and science for hours as their schedules allow.

Get your contract buddy ATW doesn’t deserve you and I’m taking all of you back to my realm where y’all will get some RESPECT. Yes, Aeleus, you are included in this staff breakout. No she won’t explain herself.

What better way to protect the future than gaining some divine backup? Hel would be happy to help Hope with his goals if she can stop asking who let a child run an organization on his own. No ma’am he is in fact an adult--

‘I don’t know if I kidnapped your moogle or if your moogle kidnapped me but apparently you needed something and I’m sorry for distracting the creature, how can I possibly make it up to you Serah?’

Rude is supposed to be keeping tabs on some kind of creature sighted in certain regions. Hel is less than thrilled with the surveillance, and starts playing games with Rude that leave him questioning if he has been compromised or not.

A Queen of Darkness and a Princess of Light come together in a sort of mentor-student arrangement where Hel can help Kairi grow stronger if Kairi will help get her up to speed on what the fuck the plot outside of the Organization even is to her.

Two immortals spot each other from across the castle despite the bodies they wear, recognize each other’s hearts, and start to roast the shit out of each other: A Hel and Xigbar story.

Local Guado Wants To Crack The Code Of How Lulu ‘Does That’ With Her Puppets, Starts Staying Almost Up Her Ass, Romance Ensues as They Discuss The Journey, Craft, and General Gayness.

A young Guado smells something Hinky on a not so local Guardian. No, Jecht, she will not be so easily put aside. She has the good booze and she will get answers, even if they are all fake.

Hel reunites with a Guardian she met in passing some years ago, and He Reeks of the Farplane. Not that it’s her place to judge. She’s just as curious as ever and willing to listen if he ever wants to talk about what he is.

Two outsiders to the Human majority of Spira band together and will not be separated. Hel is willing to share her spiritualism with Rikku if she will repay in kind with talk of Machina and her native tongue.

Hel actually hearing Dona out and seeing past her antagonism to the fact she’s still willing to undertake a Pilgrimage to try and save the world. Someone actually treats Dona politely. That means the world to me.

SHIPPING! (not necessarily our muses shipping together just shipping as a component of our muses interacting)

Hel discovers that Fang’s breaking point is softness and non-sexual PDA in public. So she continues to press this killswitch for her own amusement on a date night, letting Fang be both loved and mortified the entire evening.

Hel and Vanille get a pet, and then run through conversations they can have to convince Fang this is clearly the best idea ever and not trouble waiting to happen. Just a small domestic fluff about adding to their little family.

When your wives are very important and busy so you get to stay in all night and brag about how much you love them to another work widow(er), or how Snow and Hel don’t worry and just accept they are bonded to actual goddesses.

Hel tries to discern the exact relationship dynamics of the Chocobros and is chided for having ‘shipping goggles’ on. So she goes to Ignis to clear up any confusion. Shenanigans ensue as she either holds the crew dead to rights or is hilariously off the mark.

‘What does ‘If I Had To Pick a Dude’ even mean?’ ‘That you are overthinking a party game and making it weirder than it has to be.’ Or, did she actually mean anything by that or was Sazh just the most tolerable man present?

‘STOP LOOKING AT MY BONER WHEN WE FIGHT’ Or, does Gladio actually mean anything by that or is getting the blood pumping simply messing with his body in ways he cannot control?

Hel calls it Aerith’s Girlhood, a place set aside, a bed in a field of flowers, a sky sheltering and painted with false stars. She makes it soft for her. This is the way of courtship, isn’t it? I read a lot of Gluck and I need a ‘Myth of Devotion’ plot for them.

For ten years, she is the Night’s Queen, though he will not call her that. She is a consort, wearing the crown of an ancient queen, wandering broken hallways, watching him slowly come undone. And she loves him still. Ten years is nothing next to two thousand.

‘So what does Aerith mean to you?’ ‘A lot.’ ‘Oh. What does Zack mean to you?’ And she understands perfectly what his exhaustion with questions means. Road trips and the inevitable embarrassing romantic questions.

Axel and Hel both understanding what it is to watch the one you love battle with themselves, to become a stranger at their cruelest. Share a smoke. Waste the night playing ‘Yes, But’ with someone that understands.

Barrett’s very handsome, and she is very lonely, and she thinks he is a wonderful person. Does he have any plans, now that the Apocalypse is over? Or, she keeps getting weirder and keeps haunting his door.

‘So, you and Aerith, is that going to make things awkward?’ Hel thought she was tired before she started a relationship with both her Persephone and her Knight. Hel is, of course, entitled to be wrong. And exhausted. So very exhausted.

Hel presents Xemnas with an offering that must mean something to him, in what he knows of the old man’s life. She will have him always, if permitted. The question is, will he agree to sharing the Paopu to seal the deal?

‘Isn’t it slightly unethical to date your boss?’ Even is a grown man but Hel cannot help but tease his long term ‘thing’ with aforementioned Boss. But it’s also nice to hear of another side of the Sage King.

‘I will give you many munnies if you will escort me to this fancy dinner because your partner in crime is already spoken for. No, Aeleus, I did not say as my body guard. I said as my escort.’

‘You know, people really like that vulnerable, sensitive thing you have going on.’ ‘This is the last conversation I ever want to be having.’ Or words to that effect. Hel ribs The Baby for being a bit of A Babe when grown.

Please explain to Hel how your relationship works because she is fascinated by the fact someone looks at Snow and said yes, this is where I have chosen to lay my affections for life.

Surveillance Creeper happens to crash an anniversary dinner Rude arranged by sitting a few tables away, observing but never interfering, apparently minding her own business but she’s just THERE SHE’S RIGHT THERE.

Mombie talks to baby about relationships and girls and boys and just has a nice heart to heart about it all. Based on that one Kairi-As-Ansem’s-Daughter idea that I’m still so pumped about.

.Hel and Xigbar make a bet about the relationship status of two of the Foretellers. Both try to doctor the narrative to suit their own take on the pair, obscuring fact, fiction, history, and near fanfiction.

The morning after a ‘There Is Only One Bed’ trope, and how both actually feel comfortable and at ease after so long alone. Can be before relationship or their first night alone together in the same bed, but consider it, won’t you?

Hel has a discussion with someone that Summoners getting involved with their Guardians is completely natural. She talks like she has experience. Well, yeah, not personal experience but -- and someone’s brain breaks at what she is implying.

Hel feels sad about Auron being the only one left, having lost two people he loved. Two people who have lost a lot in different contexts just have a comforting moment together to not be alone. Not romo but more based on lost romo.

‘So tell me about this Paine I’ve heard so much about :))))’ or, Rikku comes to realize she has been adopted and her Guado Mom wants to meet the GF. Chaos can completely ensue coming off of this.

Dona’s pretty and Hel is gay, that’s all I got. Literally anything could happen up to and including Hel making a complete ass of herself trying to either avoid Dona or interact with her without throwing off pheromones.

AUS!

Hel is some kind of figure in the spotlight -- a socialite, a performer, someone of note. Fang is her bodyguard here to keep her safe. No one would ever guess at what happens behind closed doors, the tension that runs between the two of them in spite of contracts and official relationships.

Breakfast club college AU. Just a couple of girls trying to get their shit together and honest to God looking like a modern take on the eponymous movie. They love each other and are here to do kegstands.

Hel is snow’s weirdo neighbor in their apartment complex but damn if he doesn’t know ho to bring the community together. Sometimes in the worst ways, but hey, anything to kick goth chick out of her shell.

Ignis and Hel are rival spies. They play long games and pursue the same leads, each trying to end the stalemate between their respective countries. Both are also far closer to the ruling class than they allow the other to believe.

Hel is just a simple pediatrician. Dajh is a very adventurous boy with a very invested father. At this point Sazh is on her Yule card list, and the two strike up a sort of friendship after hours.

Gym bro/personal trainer Gladio gets a knew client that is too tiny too delicate for this world. That is exactly what she is here to work on. Time to get swole little chronically ill stick woman.

Local witch swears that Aerith’s is the best place to get ritual plants and flowers despite ribbing claiming that she has a crush on the owner, but that crush theory really starts to hold water when the plant Hel really really really needs once is a... succulent.

Ardyn’s the beautiful but chronically ill next best thing in art, fashion, or film. Hel is his nurse and constant companion, the only one that gets to see the man behind the glamour when he is at his worst. Romance ensues.

There’s only one thing above an Angel, and she has come to offer herself to Cloud in his world-saving pursuits. If a covenant can be forged, then who knows what he will become, but at least this ghost will be real.

Yeah it’s awkward for our partners that we moved in next door to each other, but that’s really Isa and Xemnas’ baggage. I, on the other hand, like you and want to be friends. Or, Lea and Hel are goblins.

Hel as the relative to one of ShinRa’s high rollers, selling out her uncle’s secrets and business dealings to AVALANCHE without a second’s hesitation. She’s the inside woman, and one of Barrett’s biggest supporters, even if only in silence.

The feather that fell on the Colosseum did not belong to a certain Angel. What happens when Hel interferes in the life of one mortal who wants only to be a hero, one willing to work hard to get there?

Xemnas is the new literary hotness trying his hand at a play. Hel is the actress that fought tooth and nail for the lead roll. Problem: She has more chemistry with the creator than her fellow lead.

Hel is what was dragged into the lab twelve years ago. For freedom from this castle, she can whisper eldritch knowledge in Even’s ear, slippery as poison. What, precisely, have they pulled from the Darkness, and what threat does she present?

Similar to the above, but Hel knows not how to reason with this guard. He is meant to protect, to defend. All she can do is study him with those cold, sad eyes, try to stir his heart while he still has it.

We Are All Just God’s Abandoned Children. That’s one way to welcome a young foster kid to the house, but Hel is going to look out for this younger kid Hope anyway. Found family ensues.

Mog the Dog is in love with Garmr the Dog. We have to stop meeting like this. People will talk. They’re on texting terms just to say ‘Your dog’s here, he’s fine. Either he’ll find his way home or you can come get him whenever.’

Why would ShinRa have her trailed by the TURKS if they didn’t suspect her of her involvement with AVALANCHE? Tiem for Hel to pull out all the stops to try and throw Rude off her scent.

Reuniting with your family is hard. Harder when you have no memory of said family and Dad has a new love interest. Despite all of that, Hel comes to dote on Kairi, giving them a chance to bond and Kairi get a mom.

A Hel and Xigbar idea: Politician’s daughter and Assassin. MB he’s assigned to keep an eye on her when shit gets real in some of her father’s business dealings. Whether he’s for or against her family would be fun to plot.

Local Goth Summons The Goddess of the Dead, Intentionally or Otherwise ; Death Thinks She’s Kind of Cute. Lulu gains a patron and Hel gains a crush. Everyone goes home happy.

Hel’s the nerdy shy kid in gym class and Jecht is the zealous coach that she despises. Except then she needs an athletic extracurricular to round out her college application. Teeth clenched teamwork for personal and team success.

High fantasy AU where Auron is the black knight who presses on, with a rider all in black hounding his every step. She appears every night to share his company, a little wine, and remind him of their bargain. She’s not reaped him yet, but once his business on earth is settled... He will return to her embrace.

Hel finds a new community once kicked out of Guado society. Or, in which Hel follows after the Al-Bhed and becomes a part of Rikku’s life from a young age, thus securing Momability.

Hel becomes one of Dona’s guardians along the way, and the two fight viciously over who gets to use the brain cell while being harmonious in most other aspects of traveling together. Romance may or may not ensue.

Other muses!

Eraqus: Please stop wrecking shit this is getting out of hand-- Fang: FcuK YUO-- And then they gotta fight and cause further property damage.

I don’t know whose verse we base it in but I need Vanille and Gwynevere to team up, maximize slay, and generally be absolute icons with soft spots for their legendary badass partners.

Kokoro and Snow interacting would be amazing and you know it. I don’t know who would crack first. Kokoro’s realism or Snow’s optimism.

Aqua, Ignis, and discussing how you have to be the strong one holding up the ones you love, no matter the cost. I feel like we could really break our hearts with this one.

Eraqus and Sazh could get frustrated at the kids for having gone a little nuts while they were out on a date, but y’know what? They’re in a good mood. Just cuddle and let the kids sleep and deal with it in the morning.

Eraqus, formerly of the Kingsguard before he got too old to serve, and the esteem of one young Amacitia mb. That or Gladio befriends Eraqus just to piss Kokoro off if we wanna play it that way.

Kokoro being uselessly gay for Aerith FOR TEN YEARS in Traverse Town and having no brain cells to actually convey that to her, then they meet again in Radiant Garden and well fuck she’s still crushing hard.

Every night, the Kingsguard’s daughter storms the city, makes her way towards the Citadel, and means to slay the Dragon. He has not killed her yet. Ardyn and Kokoro have a particular dance, and they cannot say why.

Aerith and Cloud getting soft comrade moments because they have both been through so much please. Please let them catch one break and get to act their actual ages and have a moment for life before it’s all gone for one of them.

Aria and Axel would be fantastic because they’re both a very controlled flame, they both just sort of are casually dangerous. I just want to play them off of each other and see if they end up allies or rivals.

Eraqus and Barrett working together in the field in our FF7 AU. Looking out for each other. Timing their attacks perfectly for the opportunity to fuck ShinRa up as much as possible.

Eraqus has to deal with this kid that is infatuated with his student. Does that kid have a boombox. What the fuck. This shit keeps happening.

Roleswap Xemkoro. Eraqus having become too zealous and thrown off the balance of light and darkness, seeking Kingdom Hearts to wash the world in light and begin again. Xemnas as the echo of an old friend who will see this ended before it goes that far. Kokoro the dutiful daughter who runs things in her father’s absence, who is drawn to this familiar stranger even as they oppose one another at every turn.

Even’s adopting Kokoro. Your father forbid you from pursuing certain knowledge? Terrible, he doesn’t deserve to be a father. I am your father now. We’re going to the opera. You have so much to learn. Meet your brother Ienzo.

We don’t know why Mads has imprinted on this guard in particular, she just has and she will not leave him alone.

I just want Aerith and hope to interact and her to try and cheer him up please. please.

Just throw Serah at anyone via time travel and all of that I can just imagine her falling into anyone’s life tbh. Try and dance around who you are and where in the hell you came from.

Aria is a TURK in training and guess who she gets to shadow for a day? Teach Her Rude!

Aqua and Kairi need to bond! Aqua and Kairi need to have a mentor-student dynamic! They need to catch up! They need to be friends! I will not be silenced!

Eraqus as a descendant of Brain, who fought to oppose MoM and Luxu, meeting with Luxu in some body before Braig. Can you even imagine the tension and sins of the father in that room? Sweet Jesus.

Braska mb interacting with Lulu once or twice because he wants to know about the other children his daughter is so fond of, the ones who... will be there for her, when he is not. Let’s all have a cry about it.

Long Dad Talk ‘Come To Yevon’ meetings between Braska and Jecht where Braska offers no judgment, only support for Jecht to get better. BC growth is important. And so is being a good dad, Braska knows.

Auron’s Bi Awakening for this church pretty boy.

Flower girl meets machine girl. IDK how. Aerith and Rikku rights.

Kokoro and Dona are implicitly to the public confirmed behind closed doors sapphic summoners. cuteness ensues.

Other Muse AUs!

I still want the Xemkoro Penny Dreadful AU. Our haunted and hell-touched protagonist with the werefox lady lead far from home. With Kokoro still trying to figure out how the hell Satan thought appearing as ATW was going to make Xem drop his pants. And then gets baffled that it worked.

Younger Eraqus ends up in Radiant Gardens and runs into Even. Has to play it cool about not being from this world. This world he knows nothing about. Even smells a rat.

Ok hear me out AU where ATW cannot and does not return. Mads goes from heiress apparent to a girl-queen to a world she cannot remember. Kokoro stays on as her regent, arguing that though she is an outsider, she is a blue blood, a noble, the descendant of royalty in her own homeland. But both she and the young queen will need a defender. And for that, she turns to a certain guard...

The Xemrith Hades and Persephone AU. Let’s do it. Let’s go all out. I wanna see it come to fruition.

Also, Xemqua Deathless AU. A deathless king spirits away a clever young fairytale maiden, and all the tears and horror that comes with such a story.

Braska is not the one to defeat Sin. He and his party have to go home and face themselves and figure out ‘What Now?’ as we go fully AU.

Single Dad muses in a modern AU forming a friend group. They all hang out once or twice a month and do fun things together. It’s great. It’s soothing. Nobody goes it alone.

Aerith and Zack getting a happily ever after??? In an AU???

Modern AU Braska, Jecht, and Auron navigating a relationship like the Fooles they are. Braska’s a simple youth pastor with a lot of love to give and incalculable migraines from his babes.

Mads and Rikku as friends burning the whole ass world to the ground. Because come on. Come on.

Anything with my Eraqus and your Aqua please I am dying here. I need some good family interactions.

Kokoro and Fang as sparring partners in some form or fashion. I need to see my queens just battle for dominance. I am very gay please have mercy.

KH AU Gwynevere as a pinnacle of a land of light having to come face to face with Xemnas and all the darkness that follows him.

Kokoro continues to bully Gladio no matter the verse. Because we know she does. Gladio has no rights.

AU where Kairi and Mads are like roommates or neighbors or online pals and get to be sunshine girls and nobody is hurt and no one has any loss of worlds to forget.

Aria as an AVALANCHE agent who infiltrated the TURKs and all that implies for your muses. Good for any of the rebels or even for Rude as far as plotting goes.

A whole ass pantheon AU. Get all our muses in it. Go absolutely balls to the wall nuts.

Mads playing matchmaker to Kokoro and Xemnas in some modern verse. Maybe playing Cyrano and leaving them little clues and letters allegedly from each other.

Sami we are simple gays. And we need DnD AUs. And we can divide our muses into parties and just have at it in some setting. Pwease.

Braska being a supportive dad to pop star Yuna and Rikku is along for the ride and so now he has a whole other kid to be taking care of.

AUs where ships were just a moment off of canon. Where someone walked away, where they just missed each other, where love did not conquer, where love did not last, where someone died, where someone lived, just. The what if of a life without each other.

Fuck me sideways can you imagine Braska Auron and Jecht in a college AU because I don’t think Jecht’s liver will survive.

Kokoro actually embraces her adolescent feelings for a childhood friend and pursues Aqua, only for RP canon to still happen as outlined.

Kokoro mainverse where she is a high born lady of Scala and Aqua arrives to explain what has been going down in the last twelve years and ‘oh no I’m gay.’

And, of course, that one Xemkoro idea we have involving the story never truly ending ;)

And because I still owe you two, here are two generals:

A time traveler’s wife au, any ship u want bb.

Family stuff. Found families, adoption, siblings, parent and child, ship babies, the pet is basically our kid, we have each other and that makes our family, anything I just need some familial relationships to water my crops.

#plottingmeme;#destinysthralls #ask #I GAVE YOU EXACTLY WHAT YOU ASKED FOR BECAUSE I CARE.

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