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cosmosluckycharms · 2 days ago

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Show☆Time

this night has opened my eyes

After a while of you sobbing quietly on the floor of your room, you finally got up and locked in.

First off, you changed out of your performer costume into a more casual outfit.

Your performer costume was soaked from the water, so you hung it up to dry and clean later.

You needed a plan

so you started a plan.

You had lots of ideas planned out. All of which were very elaborate.

Different ways to get them all together to make amends, different ways for them to talk, plans to make everyone apologize and get together to become a troop.

You get out your comically large whiteboard and regular-sized markers and start planning on what to do.

You spend a couple of hours finding ideas, only for you to keep running into problems.

You didn't know what to do.

You were stuck.

You decided to just walk to the park to tell Tsukasa you would have to quit, it was nearby anyway.

Walking out of the manor wasn't hard, they wouldn't notice you walking out. They were away at whatever rich people jobs they had.

You never saw them at night, and you never understood why.

As you made your way to the theme park, you tried to make yourself as small as possible to not get seen by anyone bad.

You tried to calm your nerves by thinking of memories to keep your mind off the whole situation.

You think about how one time when you were younger, around 10 years old, while getting up to get water you saw Nightwing in costume in the kitchen.

You saw as he froze like he was shocked to see you walk in.

You smiled at him and waved, you were half asleep and assumed he was a hallucination.

He waved and smiled back to you and you just walked back to your room.

For a while, you assumed that either Nightwing was coming into the manor to steal something, or he was just visiting.

Either that or you were dreaming.

You assumed you were dreaming.

You smiled at the memory. Nightwing has been one of your favorite vigilantes since you were younger.

You liked how his smile seemed to light up the room.

You liked how his smile reminded you of your older brother, Dick's smile.

You wanted to smile like Nightwing and Dick.

You were close to the park when you saw a red hood on a rooftop.

You saw him watching you, somewhat menacingly.

You get scared for a moment, You've heard stories about the crime lord and the people he's killed.

Sure, they were bad people and you had never done anything bad, but you could never be too sure!

You smiled and waved to him, which caught him slightly by surprise. Usually, people didn't smile and wave at someone they were scared of.

You walked a little faster, you needed to hurry before it was too late at night.

The park closes at 9, and it was now 8:26 pm.

You didn't notice how Red Hood kept watching you.

You didn't notice how he started coming towards you.

As soon as he got within 7 feet behind you, you could sense him.

You spun around dramatically to look at him.

You waved to him, again. "Hii!" You said excitedly, hoping this interaction will take your mind off everything. You realized you did not sound as excited as you usually did, probably from the sadness you felt.

"You look happy," He said walking towards you.

He didn't know why he felt the need to talk to you. He had never even had a conversation with you.

"Not really." You looked down at your feet, slightly sad.

You see him sitting down on a bench nearby and patting the seat next to him.

"Well, what's up?" He asks as you sit down next to him.

"What do you mean?" you asked, your leg shaking from nervousness.

Were you in trouble? Had you done something wrong? Why was he stopping you? Didnt he have people to fight?

"I mean, you look upset," He said, pointing out the obvious.

You started explaining everything to him.

About how you started a group and how it fell apart.

"I don't know what to do. I was just on my way to tell my friend I was gonna quit. It's no use to keep trying." You said while having your head in your hands and trying not to cry.

Jason didn't understand.

You usually weren't like this.

You usually wouldn't quit.

You were the type of person to keep going no matter what.

He's seen you fall down and get up likr it was nothing!

He leaned up against the railing of the bench. "Well, why would you quit?"

"What do you mean?" You asked as you lifted your head from your hands.

"I mean, why quit when you're almost there? All you have to do is go to the park, find them, and tell them to keep going. encourage them like you encouraged others." You watched as he stretched a little.

You thought about it for a minute.

"Plus, wouldn't you want to keep going for your grandfather? he would want you to keep going, right?"

He was right.

You had to keep going.

You had to go ahead and convince Tsukasa to apologize to Nene and Rui.

You had to convince them all to stay together.

You got up from the bench.

"Thank you for everything, Mr. Red Hood!" you waved bye to him and started running towards the theme park.

You checked the time on your phone.

8:47 PM

If you ran fast enough, you could probably make it in time to find Tsukasa and make him apologize!

So you ran.

You ran and ran like there was no tomorrow.

When you finally got to the park, you stopped for a second to try and find Tsukasa.

You find him packing his stuff up on the stage, and he has also already taken off his performer costume.

You grabbed him by the shoulders and practically yelled to him "TSUKASA- WENEEDTOGETTHEGROUPBACKTOGETETHERANDANDAND-!" You talked too fast. You made no sense. You were scared and nervous.

"Y-Y/N! Slow down! I can't understand you!" Tsukasa said, his head feeling like it was spinning.

You took a deep breath and started yelling again, this time you accidentally shook him violently. "WE NEED THE GROUP BACK TOGETHER! We need to create smiles! Us breaking up was a dumb idea!" Your eyes were slightly teary, you were passionate about this.

It took a couple of minutes of you convincing Tsukasa (and apologizing for shaking him and leaving him dizzy) before you guys went to look for Nene and Rui.

When you guys finally found them, the park was about to close for the night. You guys had to hurry.

Nene and Tsukasa apologized to each other, Nene for ruining the show and Tsukasa for yelling at her.

Rui was holding a slight grudge, which makes sense, but you were sad about it.

It took all 3 of you to convince him to come back to the stage and forgive Tsukasa, and it worked!

You all got kicked out of the park for the day because technically you guys were trespassing, so you 3 parted ways and went home.

While walking home, you started thinking about your day.

You liked thinking about it, it made you feel like you were living through it again.

You realized you had never told Mr.Red Hood about your grandpa.

How did he know about that?

oh god rhis was so short sorry

PLEASE why do i keep accidentally neglecting emu reader hi guys

also jasons prolly ooc sorru

taglist:@shirp-collector-of-fixations @maybeethan69 @iluvcatzz @tacendxx @ninihrtss @tsxukikami @d3sperate-enuf @staarflowerr @chaoticmoontimetravel @crazycaoticsimp @sugarrush-blush @kaitense1 @ryuushou

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deathofacupid · 2 days ago

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creep!nerd!jo, but he's not all sweet and innocent. actually, he's far from it. creep!nerd!jo who's a creep.

admiration, bordering on downright obsession. except, it's not bordering, it is.

creep!nerd!jo, who's your best friend. he doesn't want to see you hurt, never. so, think of it like he's protecting you — especially when he's playing dumb, consoling you when your shitty date from last night, he suddenly went missing.

god, you were so freaked out. in fact, you still had the ticket stub from yesterday. he takes it from you. for safe-keeping. out of sight, out of mind, creep!nerd!jo tells you.

oh, speaking of, the plastic coffee cup — the one you threw out, after finishing — he has it, too. silly, you! you didn't recycle it. he has it in the back of his closet, in a little shoebox with your ticket stub. creep!nerd!jo just hasn't had time to dispose of it properly.

you think creep!nerd!jo's so sweet. he offered to do your dirty laundry the other day. actually, he found a pair of panties with a hole in them. he felt bad, so he put it in the shoebox, until he can replace it. think of it as a surprise gift!

you left a hair tie at creep!nerd!jo's once. he wears it on his wrist all the time, hidden under his long-sleeved sweater vests, just in case you ever need it. of course, you don't know he has it. he's sure you'll be more amazed when it comes out of the blue.

creep!nerd!jo's got a habit of moving where you put your things. whenever you go back to find them, you always look so confused. he can't help it! it's cute. besides, he loves the extra interaction he gets when you ask him if he's seen it, to which he let you know. and, every time, you smile, "what would i do without you?" he doesn't even want to think about that; good thing he's here to protect you.

everything creep!nerd!jo does is smart, it's in his nature. it's not your fault your brain doesn't work at the same pace as his. but, it's okay! that's what he's here for, right? somebody has to be the intelligent one in this relationship.

and, aw, would you look at that? creep!nerd!jo's collection is growing.

tagging my sweet @jeonwiixard! also, let me know if you want to be added to a permanent taglist!

#creep!nerd!jo #creep!nerd!jo x reader #gojo x reader #satoru gojo x reader #jjk #jjk x reader #satoru gojo #whoops my hand slipped #literally queefing for this guy

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imaluvsj7 · 2 days ago

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✿ ─── BOYFRIEND HEADCANONS : 박성훈

SYNOPSIS : where sung𝒽oon wants to make his new classmate his girlfriend

PAIRING : 𝓅ark sung𝒽oon x 𝒻em reader; GENRE : fluff, 𝒽eadcanons, classmate to bestfriends to 𝓁overs ; WC : 744

───── 【 𝒾mas’ note 】 ❍ :: this was requested, anon I hope it's what you wanted if it didn't turned out good I'm sorry it's my first time writing headcanons :⁠^⁠)

WARNINGS : english is not my first language!

DISCLAIMER : This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

CLASSMATE SUNGHOON! who was awestruck when you introduced yourself as his new classmate.

CLASSMATE SUNGHOON! who wanted to befriend you but due to his shy demeanor he couldn't muster up the courage to approach you.

CLASSMATE SUNGHOON! who was envious of his friend Jay when you approached him during lunch hours but soon became flustered when you recognised him and talked to him.

CLASSMATE SUNGHOON! who made the decision to talk to you after his friends, Jay and Jake motivated him and boosted his courage — “look she knows you, idiot and even talked to you so you shouldn't miss out the chance or at least try to continue your talking stage.”

CLASSMATE SUNGHOON! who has successfully made you his friend, now feels happy and giddy everyday thinking about his interactions with you.

CLASSMATE SUNGHOON! who is no more just a classmate but your best friend after 4 months you both are getting closer to each other.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who treats you way better than anyone else among your loved ones, who makes you feel seen and visible despite the crowd.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who is observant and notices every detail about you, who makes sure to you are always eating well after knowing you love different types of foods.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who treats you like a princess and always prioritizes you — asking what you want from the mall when he is out shopping with friends, bringing you random small gifts which remind him of you.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who drops not so subtle hints about his liking towards you. Always blushing, giving small smirks, holding you close to him, finding any excuse to be with you.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who is always present during your vulnerable and anxious moments, holding you close to him and whispering soft and loving words to you.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who wipes your tears and cooks you / orders you your comfort food and cuddles you to sleep.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! whom people assume is your boyfriend but you don't correct them leading him to collect hints.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who introduced you and invited you into his friend group leading you to become friends with some lovely people.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who couldn't help himself but admire you and adore you every chance he gets.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who takes you out on a dinner as a surprise date to make you his girlfriend after 8 months of waiting.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who gets shy when you accept to become his girlfriend but makes sure your first kiss of the relationship is memorable.

BESTFRIEND SUNGHOON! who is no longer just your best friend but also your boyfriend, a proud boyfriend.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who isn't much into pda but holds your hand, gives you hand and forehead pecks occasionally.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who doesn't care about other opinions about your relationship, rather looks forward to being a good boyfriend.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who makes you feel like the happiest partner through his loving gestures, actions and words.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who cannot believe how he managed to make you his girlfriend.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who invites you to his skating performances and practices because for him you're his good luck charm.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who looks up to you with bright eyes and shy grin waiting for you to praise him and tell him how good he is and how proud you're of him.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who has his own insecurities but is open to communicating with you to build a healthy relationship. Who always talks about his day to you and listens to your talks.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who cannot keep his hands to himself with you alone in his dorm, always sliding his hand down your hips or gripping your hips.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who loves when you wear his clothes because he thinks you look so stunning and beautiful and can't help but make you sit on his lap while making out with you on the couch.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who has not only impressed your friends but also your parents — who want him to be your husband too.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who blushes to the thought of being your husband but has the thoughts of making you his wife when the time comes.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who has his own flaws and makes some mistakes in your relationship but regardless always looks forward to acknowledging them and improving himself for you.

BOYFRIEND SUNGHOON! who loves you dearly and wants to spend all his life spoiling you.

💌 ─── NOTE : please leave feedbacks and lemme know if you want to be added in my perm taglist :)

˙ . ꒷ 🍥 masterlist daily click . 𖦹˙—

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that-house · 2 days ago

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The Tarrasque Can Blow Me or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Make 5e Bosses That Don't Suck

HI, I'm Catherine that-house, and I play Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition almost as much as I hate it. I do this because I am a sicko pervert who likes to tinker with abysmal dogshit, not because it's a good game. This screed is dedicated to everyone trapped in the same mine as me.

D&D 5e combat sucks! Here's the flow chart for your melee champion fighter's turn:

IF BAD GUY: smack bad guy

IF BAD GUY WITHIN 30 FT: move to bad guy, smack bad guy

IF LOW ON HP: second wind

IF NO BAD GUY WITHIN 30 FT: dash towards nearest bad guy

action surge, take it from the top

IF YOU'RE FEELING DARING TODAY: maybe a grapple or an item interaction

And pretty much any non-caster monster has a pretty similar flowchart: there's no real back and forth, just the same set of actions over and over and the only time you have to pay attention on someone else's turn is for an attack of opportunity maybe. Finally one side reduces the other side's number to 0, and you can get back to roleplaying in your roleplaying game.

In general, I strive to make my boss fights hard and interesting, with interesting being the more important of the two. For some reason the wicked clowns working at WOTC got it into their heads that the only ways to make a fight hard are Bigger Number and Less Counterplay. I don't have any data on how they sought to make fights interesting because as far as I can tell they were too busy siccing the Pinkertons on people like it's the fucking 1800s.

Probably not all 5e combat is like this. But, like, look at the statblock for the Tarrasque, the CR 30 "strongest monster in the game" and try to tell me that that thing looks INTERESTING to fight. Difficult? Maybe, if your stats are bad. But INTERESTING? It walks at someone and murders the shit out of them, then rinses and repeats. The fetid dog turd that is the Tarraque is the perfect example of the Bigger Number, and even its meme status as the DM's "fuck you" monster is eclipsed by later additions to the game.

The other end of the "strongest 5e statblock" spectrum is shit like Sul Khatesh from Eberron, who earns the title of "most bullshit" by being immune to nonmagic attacks and creating antimagic fields. This is progress, because you might force someone to grapple it out of the field or something so everyone can deal damage! But this is still ultimately a pretty linear fight, not unlike fighting any other caster in the game, but with Less Counterplay.

My DMing style is pretty character goal-oriented, with the occasional bullshit superboss. We sit around for a few sessions while people pursue side projects and gather information, and then I subject them to the Horrors of a 5e fight that requires things like "positioning" and "planning" from turn to turn.

When playing a high level D&D campaign with insanely bullshit homebrew magic items and character-specific custom mechanics, it becomes necessary to pull out the big guns. The biggest guns. I'm talking a gun like my boy Hierarch Ozyas, undead demigod, father of monsters and heart of a living city, who had a meaty 2000 hit points and took somewhere in the vicinity of thirteen rounds of combat to bring down. Building bosses is an arms race and it's my job to lose in style. Here's Ozyas' statblock:

The bitch himself

Anyways I've been talking for a bit without actually saying anything of substance besides making fun of the Tarrasque. Which I will do one more time:

...deep breath...

D&D 5e is a pretty widely-disdained game by pretty much anyone who's ever played more than one RPG system. I myself only play it because I enjoy game design, and the thoroughly-beaten dead horse that WOTC calls a game serves as a decent foundation to do a lot of heavy tinkering. The Tarrasque is perfectly emblematic of all of the trash I have to wade through in order to get to the stuff worth keeping: it is an uninspired, anticlimactic relic of the past that didn't even manage to cling to a shred of its old glory and is instead content to wallow in the filth of what it once was, never once providing a challenge to any character with a flying speed. I would probably attempt to beat it to death with my hands (and fail, because it checks your character's stats rather than challenging you as a player in any way), but Jim the 1st level aaracokra with a save-forcing damage cantrip already solo'd it for me, so I'll settle for chewing through the throat of whichever game designer forgot they were making a "game" and submitted a three step flowchart for D&D's ultimate boss monster.

But anyways, I promised you a guide to how I design boss fights these days, so let's get to that.

Actually, first here's a quick aside about action economy that I didn't bother finding a place to fit in elsewhere: legendary actions are basically a necessity for any boss past level five or so. One big action is going to be a lot more polarizing than several small ones (i.e. one big crit on a large attack could completely flip the course of the fight, whereas multiple smaller attacks offer the same amount of damage output in a more consistent fashion). If you don't want to give your boss a bunch of HP to make it live long enough to take a few turns, you could consider giving it two turns in the initiative order (reducing the damage per turn to keep the damage per round constant). Low health minions are also a good way to pad out action economy, and even if they're easy to kill they tend to buy the boss another turn or two just from the actions it costs to take them down.

ANYWAYS, here's the core ideas I like to focus on in my boss design:

Keep them moving

Keep them working

Keep things changing

Reward good play

Punish mistakes

Make it a game

Along the way I'll be using snippets of the boss I mentioned above to illustrate examples of these principles and how they affected play. Let's begin.

KEEP THEM MOVING Positioning doesn't really matter in 5e. AoEs and movement values are both so large that you can easily get away with not having a battle map and sorta just tracking "in melee" or "not in melee." I run most fights without a battle map and just kinda track that, but for a good boss you need a map.

But how do we keep the game from just falling back into "move into range and hurt people," you ask? Simple: the Zone of Nasty. The Zone of Nasty is something on the map that is going to hurt the PCs if they're in it, and the Zone of Nasty moves. Depending on the boss, it could grow, shrink, follow a player, follow the boss, alternate between areas of the map, whatever. Some bosses might have multiple different Zones of Nasty that move in different ways and do different things.

There are other ways to force movement besides a moving AoE, such as punishing players for being too close or too far from each other or the boss.

The general principle here is that a boss should at times force suboptimal play: optimal play involves simply standing around, spending all your actions on damaging the boss, and it's incredibly boring from a strategic standpoint. There should be turns in which your players have to spend their action economy on protecting themselves or helping their allies. If they find themselves in a Zone of Nasty, it should force a decision between suffering the consequences to continue optimal play, or spending resources to get out of it.

Our boy Ozyas had a Cancer Field that he could move slowly around the arena that damaged and debuffed PCs inside it, and Pretender-God-Piercing Strike, a telegraphed line attack that oneshot anything that stayed in its area too long (more on this one later).

KEEP THEM WORKING Everyone needs a job to do! This job is probably just going to be based on what their class and abilities encourage them to do, but it sucks for someone to not be able to meaningfully participate in a boss fight.

Let the DPS players kick the boss's teeth in, obviously, but make sure the person who focused on AoE effects has some extra enemies that they can deal with. Bonus points if the extra enemies have something that forces them to be dealt with instead of just rushing the boss' HP bar.

Worst case scenario, throw in a secondary objective like completing a ritual, controlling a point on the map, or fighting the boss' soul on a higher plane to give someone who isn't immediately needed for DPS to still have something to do.

Ozyas spawned a bunch of extra monsters from these gross Birthing Pillars around the map, and killing the monsters and destroying the pillars provided a nice secondary course of action for people either not equipped to slug it out with the boss or not currently positioned right to fight him.

KEEP THINGS CHANGING The tarrasque sucks because it does one thing over and over until it works or it dies. The Theros splatbook improved on this marginally: Mythic Traits are fucking baller! Combats should change over the course of the fight, or this could have been a fucking autobattler. But we can go further.

In addition to occasionally shaking things up based on health thresholds, here's a few ways I like to do it:

Rotating list of effects that change every round

Huge list of options the boss can choose from for one of their effects with no repeats

Some sort of meter that increases and decreases based on what's happening in the fight and modifies the boss' abilities

Ozyas summoned new monsters every round and could customize the statblocks with a bunch of quick templates I whipped together, and in his second phase he started alternating between scaling the to hit/damage of his tentacle attack, the reach of his spear attack, and applying extra buffs to his summons.

REWARD GOOD PLAY These next two kind of tie together but the core idea here is that it's okay if a boss is a bit easy, as long as it makes your players work for it.

This can include things like ways to trivialize certain parts of the encounter as long as the players utilize them, typically at the cost of advancing other parts of the fight.

I knew that Ozyas was going to be a long fight, so I gave my players the ability to heal to full health, as an action, whenever they wanted. They were fighting inside Ozyas' body, and he was a generous host. However, any time they healed, he would be healed for the same amount. They got around this restriction by hitting him with Chill Touch to disable his own healing whenever people needed to heal, but that obviously had the cost of losing two actions' worth of damage output.

Towards the end of the fight, everyone was still standing thanks to that healing, but as he began to infinitely scale his stats once he reached his second phase and started taking them seriously, they couldn't afford to waste turns healing anymore and the safety net they built up by healing earlier in the fight kept anyone in the party from dying.

PUNISH MISTAKES The range on D&D characters' HP pools and general survivability can be pretty broad. I like to give my bosses a reasonably-heavy hitting melee and some sort of light ranged attack to remind the backliners that they too can die. But there's a third kind of attack.

The great equalizer.

The One Hit Knock Out move.

These need to be telegraphed. There needs to be copious time to get out of the area, or to stop the boss from using it, or whatever the case may be. But any superboss should have a way to threaten any player on equal standing: a move that will always hit if its conditions are met, and puts them clean to 0.

Ozyas' OHKO was Pretender-God-Piercing Strike, where at the end of each turn he would wind up a spear thrust with enough range to hit across the entire map, targeting a 15-foot line through the nearest player. Neither he nor the line could move after that, and if you were still in that line at the start of his next turn, you were done.

It wasn't hard to avoid: just walk like 10 feet and don't get pushed back in by another enemy. They even lined it up to target some of his own allies sometimes. But it forced them to think about positioning and stay moving, and there were a few times where it aaaaalmost caught someone in the line. The prospect of Instant Death really does wonders to ratchet up the tension.

And now, finally, we come to the most important part:

MAKE IT A GAME D&D 5e likes to jerk off while fantasizing about being real. "Catherine what the fuck are you talking about?" What I mean to say is that D&D makes a fumbling attempt towards a more simulationist style of game, trying to distance itself from the fact that it is, in fact, a game. It tries to comport itself like reality, such that every part of its combat makes sense in-universe, and then immediately falls short because it can't be assed to indulge in actual simulationism.

It is my belief that if you're going to spend 4 hours fighting a boss, and one of the boss mechanics doesn't really make much sense as an in-universe concept but does make the boss more interesting and fun to fight, then that's a perfectly fine mechanic. Obviously finding some way to justify it is preferable, but my bosses prioritize good gameplay over verisimilitude.

The upcoming boss in my campaign has a feature which puts the fight on a ten-round time limit before he begins kicking substantially more ass than he was before (and the prior ass-kickery was indeed already substantial). If this is a desperate fight with his life and his dreams on the line, why doesn't he open with that? If this were a WOTC statblock, barring a mythic trait, that's exactly how it would work. But fuck that, because it would make the fight way less interesting! Now there's time pressure! And sure, the post-round-ten version of the boss is meant to be fled from, not fought, but if he's at a low enough HP it could instead make for an insane climactic finish!

I let my players see the whole statblock before the fight. We talk through all of its abilities, and I'll even point out some of the potential points of complexity and the big risks to watch out for. There's no in-universe justification for why the characters would know this (beyond, perhaps "you're exceptional adventurers and are good at evaluating your foes"): in fact, one of the quintessential examples of classical 5e metagaming is the Guy Who's Read the Monster Manual. I think that's fucking stupid, though. With open statblocks:

Features can be game-warpingly deadly without instantly incurring a TPK born of ignorance. OHKO moves don't feel fair unless the counterplay is known

The players can strategize around the ways in which the boss is going to change throughout the fight

It's fundamentally fair. Some GMs just wait X turns and then let the boss go down when it takes a big, impressive hit (and I fully respect people who do that! That's still more compelling boss design than 5e's normal schlock), but I personally like when numbers have meanings.

You can still hide some information (I like to black out the boss' Mythic Trait, and then only use it if the players stomp the fight too easily), and you can still tweak it to adjust the difficulty, with the difference being that your players know it's being adjusted and how so (which again comes back to my feelings of fairness).

A few other fun mechanics to toss in include stacking debuffs that trigger something horrible at some certain threshold, additional win conditions or lose conditions, and silly little minigames. One trick I particularly enjoy is having my players secretly vote between two or more bad outcomes, and punishing them even more if the vote is tied.

CONCLUSION Your mileage may vary, but I'm hoping at least some of the insights here were useful to you! I have a particular strain of undiagnosed mental illnesses that make me especially predisposed towards piloting huge convoluted intricate bosses with 1k+ word statblocks, and I'm lucky enough to have players who know their shit well enough to play around this bullshit. Find something that works for you and your players.

If you hate 5e combat and think this sounds like way too much work to be worth doing, go play something else, like Pathfinder or Lancer or (heaven forbid) a game that actually struggles to trace its lineage of inspiration back to D&D. Go to itch.io and find some game no one's ever played before, and toss the creator a bit of money. The only way we're making it out of these goddamn Mines of Phandelver is if people try something new from time to time.

On the subject of cool games with cool combat, bear with me as I shill for a friend real quick. If you want a game that cares less about combat as an abstract dick measuring contest and more about combat as a facet of violence and all that that entails, check out [BXLLET> by @rathayibacter.

And, finally, from the bottom of my heart, fuck WOTC. Your books aren't even worth pirating, and the Tarrasque can blow me.

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olderthannetfic · 19 hours ago

Note

There's an author of a long fic that's been running for awhile that I've been following since the start. They don't respond to comments, never have, as is their right I suppose. Recently the fic has gotten a burst of attention and new comments, big name fans sharing it and so on.

They've added an author's note to the latest chapter along the lines of "I have severe social anxiety so probably won't respond to comments unless they're a specific question that needs an answer (I'm happy to provide trigger warnings if needed and stuff like that.) but know that I do appreciate and treasure your comments, so thank you for reading along. I read them all."

And it kind of pisses me off and feels hypocritical. I have social anxiety, but I've been commenting all along with no response? Just putting myself fucking out there. And they read it, but never bothered? They only say something when they get flooded with comments other writers would fight for? I'd kill for that kind of response to any of my fics. And even then they can't respond to people beyond an AN? If their anxiety is bad enough they can't do that, maybe ao3 isn't for them? Or they think they're that much worse off than everyone else? Or better than the rest of us? I know it's not personal, but it sure feels personal as someone who's been there all along rooting for and encouraging them to silence. Is there such a thing as "bare minimum" engagement with your audience? Good for them I guess. I'll keep reading but if they aren't going to push past their anxiety to interact why should a commenter for nothing?

Is there such a thing as "bare minimum" engagement with your audience?

It's tragic how much funnier it would be to post this with no response from me at all.

(No, there's no widespread expectation that an author spend their time replying to comments. It depends on the part of fandom and a bunch of other factors. The reward from commenting is that, hopefully, the author is encouraged to post more of the thing you want to read.)

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burrythebusy · 3 days ago

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This page never fails to make me laugh (in a good way) because I just have to imagine being sasaki here. Every previous impression of Kagiura (that wasn't because of what Hirano has said about him) has been wiped from his memory (e.g. ch. 12). You think you're having a normal conversation with your friend and you look up and your friend's roommate is giving you the CRAZIEST look and we've yet to see what the look is. I find it so funny particularly because of how tense this moment was. Like I FELT it. And the fact that it's sasakagi makes me have to laugh. This is (at least some) the context of their awkward "i don't like him" thing we've been waiting for.

Which makes me wonder why in ch. 46 sasaki was asking about him, like considering the state of their relationship were seeing currently, I couldn't imagine sasaki going out of his way to talk to him, so why ask about him at all lol also he really does not retain any info about kagiura only "kagi-kun" because that's what hirano calls him and that's he's on the basketball team. They're so funny dawg. I bet kagiura couldn't even tell u anything about sasaki at all. They're too funny

Also, I rlly hope we get to see them interact again... preferably alone bc that would be hilarious. Can yall tell I love them they're so awkward and stupid and weird. It's the funniest dynamic in the series by far and they've interacted (directly) once. I don't have them but there were graduation messages for each character from sempai to kouhai and vice versa after the movie, and Kagiura did thank Sasaki (reluctantly) and Sasaki did acknowledge Kagiura (reluctantly) which makes me think they do interact again. And my God they're just so funny. I could write an essay on how funny I find them

#noo what i dont like sasakagi #<- me when i lie #the dynamic just kills me so #i wrote a whole thing about what they have in common too #some hashtag haters didnt like that but #doesnt make it any less true #theyre parallels!!!#anyway i find them soooo funny and i love them #hirano to kagiura #sasakagi #sasaki shuumei #kagiura akira

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cannibal-walleye · 5 hours ago

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First Meeting

"You guys shoulda seen it!" Impulse proclaimed loudly, tail swinging wildly with excitement. "I mean, Tango was great, but the lead singer—" The demon whistled.

"That good, huh?" Gem asked with a look that promised teasing should Impulse say much more.

He didn't heed the warning. "Yes, that good! I wish you guys had come; it actually blew me away. Like, the drums and piano blended perfectly, and so many of the songs made me want to start dancing right then and there," he gushed, pausing only for a moment to take a sip from his water bottle.

Scott, meanwhile, waved his phone at him, the screen displaying a pink heart that was on fire. "This is the same Heart Foundation you saw, right?"

"You found their insta already!" the demon beamed, reaching to grab it before the blizz snatched the phone away, blizz rods whirling happily.

"A'course I did, I am a professional. We need to do as much research as we can on your new crush before he can have our approval," Scott teased, scrolling through photos and posts.

"It's not a crush," he pouted, though he didn't bother with defending the claim against Gem's snort.

The warden peeked over Scott's shoulder, watching the photos fly past. "You said he's an angel, right?" she asked, glancing back at Impulse. She picked up her cocktail, taking a sip while the demon replied.

"Yeah, an angel. He's got these massive white wings, plus little pink ones on the sides of his head—though, I don't know if that was the lighting or dye or natural. Either way, they matched his suit perfectly, I didn't know it was possible for someone to look so good in hot pink! And- and! He's absolutely jacked, his arms were like the barrel of a cannon—and his hair also had hot pink streaks in it, and-"

"Like this?" Scott cut him off before he could ramble more, showing a photo of the angel, his arm slung around Tango as both of them laughed at the camera. He wasn't wearing the pink suit, just a tank top and sweats, but damn, if he didn't look just as hot, scars and muscles on full display.

Impulse's tail curled happily, a purr rumbling in his chest. "Yes, that's him! What does it say? Is his name on there, any other info about their next performance—though, I could just ask Tango when I see him-"

"You don't even know his name?" Gem interrupted, incredulous.

"I was distracted, okay?" he tried to defend, feeling a blush creeping up his cheeks. "I was taking a video for Tango while he was introducing everyone, and his voice was just so smooth, I couldn't really focus on the actual words. It's not my fault!"

They just giggled at him, Gem's elbow coming up to prod Scott, who looked up from the phone. Surprise flashed across his face, but it quickly turned to a teasing grin to match Gem's.

"You were distracted, hmm? Too busy eyeing up the hot angel to pay any attention?" the blizz asked, eyebrows wiggling suggestively.

"I think so," the warden agreed before Impulse could defend himself. "Enamored with a complete stranger, our little Impy's all grown up~" she teased, eyes narrowing as though daring him to disagree.

He rolled his eyes, taking another long drink from his water; playing earlier had really left him drained, but not quite drained enough to sit out Tango's performance, despite Gem and Scott abandoning him to go get drinks. Impulse sighed happily, the image of the angel silhouetted by the backlighting still fresh in his mind, not to mention the memory of his voice. He'd need to ask the blaze hybrid later how they had met.

"So what if I am?" he argued, hands coming up to rub away the growing flush on his face. "I mean, he's friends with Tango, so he's gotta at least be a chill dude, plus he was so funny during the show, he interacted with the audience perfectly—honestly, Gem, you should be taking notes."

Her mouth fell open in amused shock, while Scott's smirk only deepened. They shared a glance, one that Impulse recognized well enough by now to know that they were categorically not going to drop this any time soon. Not that he cared; he was happy to keep rambling about what an amazing performance the niche band had put on; Impulse could recognize good music when he heard it.

"I don't know, I think you might be a tad biased," the blizz said, the frosty sparkle in his eyes refusing to disappear given Impulse's enthusiasm.

Gem nodded. "Definitely. You just think he's hot, you want to find a quiet spot where you two can kiss and-"

"Gem!" Impulse interrupted, flush deepening at the implications. "I don't even know if he likes guys," he retorted, wilting a little at the thought. Not that it mattered; he didn't know the guy, it's not like he'd somehow end up in a situation where hooking up was even possible.

"I dunno..." Scott drawled, eyes shifting to glance over the demon's shoulder. He grinned again at Impulse's embarrassment. "I feel like he'd be open to that sort of thing."

"And how would you know?" he snapped back, suddenly very self-conscious, as though the two of them were in on a joke that he didn't get. They did love to tease him, and it wasn't often that Impulse got a crush—not that this was a crush!

Gem just snorted while Scott waved the phone. "Instagram," he answered shortly, still smirking.

"But you didn't even answer the question!" the warden accused, taking another drink.

"What question?"

"Would you kiss him if you could?"

"Gem-" he tried to argue, hiding his blush with a hand again.

"Just answer! You never tell us about your love life, it's only fair," she insisted, giving him an intense and expecting look, one that warned against any arguing.

"I don't know him," the demon sputtered. "I guess I would, but I'd want to get to know him first, maybe take him out to dinner..." he trailed off, eyebrows furrowed at the thought. It really wasn't all that unrealistic that Impulse could meet the angel, since Tango could introduce them. But the odds of the guy actually being interested in anything?

"I was going to offer to buy you a drink, but I think it might have to be the other way around," came a deep voice from behind him.

The demon nearly jumped out of his skin.

Right in front of him was the angel, in the flesh, very close up and personal and—fuck, he was even hotter in person, suit torn at the sleeves and unbuttoned at the top, showing off his arms and chest. He was leaning against the bar, a stereotypical smolder painting his features, blue eyes dark as they looked the demon up and down.

Impulse short circuited.

He was stammering something, but he wasn't sure what—a greeting? An apology? How much had the angel heard, did he think Impulse was weird, did he-

"I'm asking if I can buy you a drink," the angel clarified, smirk fading into a more serious expression as he repeated the offer.

"I, uh-" The demon's mouth went dry. "I can't, I have to drive later," he answered weakly, brain still not catching up to the fact that the guy was hitting on him.

"No, you don't," Gem denied cheerily, the smile in her voice clear even though Impulse's back was turned. "We'll get an uber. Go have fun, enjoy yourself~"

He looked back up at the angel, who was now giving him the sweetest, most encouraging smile, and swallowed thickly. He nodded. "Yeah, yeah, I- I'd love a drink," he managed, still unbearably flustered, tail curling in on itself.

The man grinned, the wings on his head puffing up happily—that's adorable—as he offered an arm to the demon.

Impulse took it, letting the angel lead him away to order drinks.

"Just be back by hotel checkout at ten tomorrow!" Scott called after them.

---

So that's their first meeting! I also want to write Skizz's first impression of Impulse and his pov of this encounter at some point, and potentially even extend the scene a little further when we see him ;)

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed! And if there's any questions about anyone in this au, feel free to drop an ask <3

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butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway · 1 day ago

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I think what really stands out to me is, for example, the difference between training a K-9 unit and mondio training for a sporting dog.

An above commenter talked about teaching aggressive and lunging as inherent abuse tactics of k-9 training and while that's not WRONG it is slightly inaccurate.

It's not necessarily the action being cue-ed (e.g. a lunch or a bite) but how that training is applied to the dogs.

Mondio teaches dogs to lunge and bite too, and while I would never suggest it's a sport without risk, it certainly doesn't seem to produce the same rates of outcomes in terms of aggression and needing to put down an unsafe dog.

I think it's worth remembering that there are a LOT of working dogs that are effectively trained to direct protective aggression, without making them unsafe dogs to be around at rates that suggest the choice is a poor one. So why are k-9 units the way they are? Well lets look at some history:

Even in their own propoganda, where they are somehow the heros, cops cannot speak about their interactions with their dogs without explicitly naming and lauding the creulty with which they are trained, used, and abandoned.

There have been MANY cases made, by animal welfare specialists, policing reform activists, community organizers, and many others, that k9 units should not be a continuing role available to working dogs, and should be discontinued promptly. Each stakeholder in this conversation comes from a different starting point but ends, with all their expertise, in the same place:

K-9 cop units are abused animals trained in indiscriminate and reactionary violence. Their existence is a threat to everyone who encounters them and ends in inevitable trauma, injury, and even death for the dog.

The problem here goes far beyond anything to do with the commands one CAN safely instill in a working dog. Instead it is about the way law enforcement offloads their lethality onto non-human entities like k-9 units and AI which are deemed A) unaccountable to anyone, and B) disposable in the event of a need to propogandize the appearance of consequences for brutality performed by law enforcement using weaponized k-9s.

I understand many people have never seen a flock/herd guarding dog direct aggression. Usually people who don't work with these dogs only see snuggly ppics of giant dogs with fluffy cozy lambs. But these dogs will KILL to protect their flock. Responsible training for working dogs who need to effectively use directed protected aggression is a careful balancing act of training, socialization, temperment, and history for each and every dog trained in it. When their aggression shows ANY signs of failing to be appropriately directed, these dogs must be removed from the work and re-assessed for duty and retired (family pet not "farm upstate" or eurhanasia)/re-trained as appropriate.

The system of policing is designed to produce abuse, trauma, and the threat of or actualized violence, so even if we do acknowledge the fact that many working dogs CAN safely be trained to do work similar to what k-9s do, we also acknowledge why that CANNOT POSSIBLY MATTER to the conversation.

ACAB includes all cops, but k-9s aren't cops, their live fucking grenades that cops fling into communities as stochastic terrorism.

All k9 dogs are abused hands down if you post any pro k9 stuff on my dash you’re unfollowed I don’t care if we’ve been mutuals for years, you can claim to be anti-cop or a leftist or whatever but if you post k9 dogs with like “a good doggo! A good boy!” fuck off, if I lose followers over this then good riddance

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raayllum · 22 hours ago

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Hi. I don't mean this to be confrontational at all and apologize if I come off that way. I'm asking purely out of curiosity.

I feel like I rarely see you post any TDP critical takes or engage with TDP critical takes made by others unless you're rebutting those takes. I believe (unless I'm mistaken) you even said once or twice before that you have the "tdp critical" tag blacklisted. I was wondering if there was a particular reason for that. Whether you were just uncomfortable posting anything negative regarding the show given that you're primarily a fanblog or maybe you simply lack takes that are actually critical of the show or for some other reason.

It's absolutely fine if you don't want to share or engage with criticisms of the show. I was just curious why for such an active blog that's even existed since the very beginning of the series I see most exclusively positive takes shared regarding the show by it.

Not confrontational at all! TLDR at the bottom because I'm sorry in advance for how long this is.

It's because of 3 main things:

1) It's my blog so I only really engage and focus on (to the best of my ability) takes that I agree with. Occasionally I rebut more critical takes, but most of my stuff I post is things I wanted to write regardless (like my "why Callum made his choices in 7x02" meta) and then discourse came after I'd started writing the thing privately, but it was still a topic I thought was fun to explore. If people posted critical stuff that I agreed with, I'd probably reblog it, but it has just yet to happen, and I'm not too interested in generating it myself (more on that in a second).

2) I have a background as and was trained to examine things like an English major; I also tutor/teach humanities and literary analysis (and a surprising amount of math) for a living. This does not by any means make me an authority, but it does mean I approach stories from a very specific good faith lens that I think the majority of fandoms in general just... don't? Or at least seem not to, as far as I can tell, but maybe I'm wrong; I don't know what's going on in anyone else's head. (This also does not mean that anyone who's an English major has to or should think this way, or does; this is just how I personally internalized further what I learned from my degree and how it aligned with what I'd already been inclined to do with stories since like, childhood.)

What I mean, therefore, at least (and more elaborate thoughts on it here in terms of the perspective I'm coming from) is that because of my lifelong inclinations of 90% of the time Enjoying Canon / my background, I typically go into stories assuming two things: first, that the story is exactly what is supposed to be; and two, if something doesn't work or make sense to me, I assume first that I'm wrong, and I go looking for reasons about why the story would do this before I pass judgement on it. This can apply to character beats / characterization, execution, plot, etc. just about anything. This doesn't mean that the story can't be 'wrong' (or 'bad'), just that it's never my initial assumption.

My search for reasons/answers also does not mean that I'm going to magically be able to deduce reasons, or that any reasons I find are objectively correct and/or intentional or have to work for anyone else; sometimes I can't find the reasons (which to me is my biggest indicator that a story is not for me or no longer for me). Sometimes I find the reasons and it still isn't 'good' or is still not my preference (a good example would be when I thought a TV show randomly paired 2 characters together that I was a not a fan of in their s4, and I still don't like them together, but when I got to S5 I was like "Oh yeah, for plot reasons, of course you'd pair them together, that makes perfect sense") but I know I'm giving things a fair shake. I'm engaging with the story as is, which is my primary interest, not necessarily what I expect or even want the story to be. No piece of media promised to be my ideal; I entered in the story contract of being along for THEIR ride and gauging if the loop-de-loops are a thing I'd enjoy, but they're not going to (nor do they need to) tell my story to be 'Good'.

I've shipped things or enjoyed ideas that would 100% make a story worse if it was canon, and I didn't want them to be canon! I didn't need them to be, either. I'm interested in learning, growing, and adjusting with whatever is presented to me, and if I can't do that (or am no longer enjoying doing so) then it's time for me to go. This doesn't mean I never approach stories from a lens of 'here's what they could do better' (I'm not a big fan of She-Ra or The Owl House, which are both notoriously popular, and I have Thoughts on both of them; I can talk all day long about how structurally broken but fun Frozen is, or how poorly butchered the Star Wars sequel trilogy is) but that's usually when a story has a persistent flaw to me on a structural or overarching basis—consistent tonal issues (which I don't take seriously even for shows like Shera that I think have them, because I'm the adult choosing to watch stuff made for children so of course the tone's not for me) or broken lore, ableist/racist writing, or too many underdeveloped characters or retcons. A single scene, episode, or season (depending on the percentage of the show it is, if it's a full third or something than yeah that's more of an issue)—depending on the severity of the fumble—is probably not going to be enough for me to be pissed about it.

Part of this also stems, I think, from giving stories the grace that I'd want my own to receive some day, but I digress.

I also know from my experiences as writer is that sometimes the choices I (or a story has made) won't work for everyone, wasn't made to work for everyone, and what I dislike about a thing is 100% a choice that the author was making On Purpose that they love, and well - it's their story, isn't it? So holding space for "this is how I subjectively feel, this is what I think the story was trying to do, here's why I feel it didn't quite hit that goal, or did have the pay off to set up (just not in the manner I'd predicted" is like, important to me to all hold simultaneously as separate things that can occasionally overlap.

3) As stated before, I do have critiques—quite a few, actually—for TDP (a few I've briefly touched on here before, such as its lack of female-female relationships) but generally speaking I've never seen anybody else have the same ones.

Part of this is undoubtedly because I don't go looking, but I've also been in the fandom for 6+ years and have seen a Lot of critique for the show to the point it all gets redundant/recycled (hence the blacklist because I've never agreed with any of it) and I do think—not all—but a lot of is just... not that well founded in the text or just not very well expressed, which makes it harder to understand where people are coming from. I've written before about different types of fandom critique (vague/assumptive vs more specific critique which I think is more communicative/productive) but I know for myself, my critique is going to be Consistent for the whole show and specific about why I think what I think. If something bothers me in one season, I'm gonna meticulously check to be like "is this in other seasons? did it bother me then? if so, why or why not?" and if I'm not being consistent on that basis in terms of where and why I'm levelling critique, that's gonna change my mind.

For example, I think S6 repeats a lot of dialogue / ideas, sometimes almost if not directly back to back in scenes, and sometimes in exceedingly similar ways, particularly at the Starscraper sections of the story. For example, Kosmo explains that "on every moonless night, a blizzard rages and shrouds the heavens" and then Kosmo repeats the exact same information like 7 minutes later in the exact same way: "for centuries on every moonless night, a blizzard rages and shrouds the heavens." And it would be one thing if these repetitions were like, in different episodes, because not everyone is going to binge or watch the previously on, and you gotta get audiences caught up. That's why Karim and Miyana have a similar discussion/repetition in 4x08 and 4x09 respectively, but we're in the same episode in S6, we like Just learned this. I don't necessarily know what information we'd put in the 2nd instance with Kosmo instead (maybe highlighting his desire to see the stars, foreshadowing that he'll be timeblind further?) but I've looked for a reason for the repetition, and while I think it's a cool idea for Kosmo to have a tendency to repeat things as a character quirk / set up his affinity for being timeblind (because to deal with alternate timelines is to deal with repetition until things branch off) it's not a satisfactory reason for me.

Or like, S2 has my least favourite pacing in the show, because while I adore the flashback episodes and they're really fucking important for theme (my number one fave thing!!) they do cause the middle of the season to more or less grind to a halt in terms of the main storyline when 2x04 was already more of a transition / filler episode (which we needed after the Moon Nexus arc, 2x04 is one of my fave eps in the season, but it would typically be a transition episode to move us into a new plot section of the story, & that's not quite what happens here, so the pacing drags a lil).

But I don't think season 2's pacing is bad. I don't think 6x04 is a bad episode or that Kosmo is a poorly written character. It's just not my personal preference, and I think I'm a lot more cautious about using that metric (my enjoyment, my preferences, how relatable it is to me, etc) to discern how "good" a story is quality wise. A story can be a great story even if there is nothing relatable in it to me or if it makes me deeply uncomfortable, because art can exist for a lot of different reasons and my limited-ass white western perspective or personal story preferences is not the be-all end-all. I think TDP is a beautiful example of rejecting punitive punishment, and I've gotten more pro-abolish prisons as I've gotten older, but some of my own works have characters who chase revenge and that's the portrayed as the right thing to do, because not everything has to line up perfectly or have a singular way in which to align. It's interesting to explore a variety of viewpoints and that's the whole reason I write.

None of this means I never use my personal preferences or enjoyment as a metric, but that's usually when I'm making recommendations to people or just talking about my personal feelings, and I don't tend to lean on those much when it comes to Analyzing a story other than a jumping off point of "Huh this scene made me emotional, I wonder why? [examines the narrative for set up and pay off]". Cause I think I do, ultimately, consider myself a meta blog, and that's always been my #1 in fandom ever since I got into fandom at 12 years ago, that's what I love doing and engaging in.

If people wanted to have Actual Discussions of "this character beat felt ooc" and they could present their evidence from the text (similar scenes where a character responded differently or something or whatever), and I could say "oh, interesting, that felt in character to me because of XYZ" and I would present my evidence for the text, and we would go back and forth both having a good time before probably respectfully agreeing to disagree, I'd love to engage just for the discussion, I love character and characterization analysis. One of the most fun times I ever had was arguing both for and against the "S4 Rayla is a fake/illusion" theory before the season released because it was fun to consider and counter stuff. I have one friend who's also autistic and back in university we would just swap contrarian story viewpoints for like, an hour on something we had both read, and it was the best. (That friend loved the end of Game of Thrones, which like no one fucking liked, and also has S4 and S7 as like their top 2 TDP seasons, which isn't even true for me, god bless their soul.)

But I would say at least 70-85% of the time when people are critiquing a thing, while it might be coming from a consciously analytical standpoint, that's not what they want to express or that's not how they express it (or at least, not in a way that I can personally understand). They want to vent, and I've definitely done that before with stories myself, I get it. Sometimes a story pisses you off and you just gotta vent. But I'm not going to engage with someone who's venting unless I agree, and if it becomes clear that they are after I do engage because I think maybe they're not venting, and then they are, then I'm just gonna leave 'em in peace. I hope they're having a great time / get whatever they need out of the process.

I also just... am not going to post things I don't agree with. I'm not gonna pretend to have critiques I don't. If I have a critique on... anything that I felt was worth posting about, I would. I don't think I do. Like, I walked out of S4 feeling so happy and excited and content with the season as a whole, MUCH more than I felt when first walking out of S6 or S7, but like I process that shit privately and now I really do like those seasons, so? Yeah.

I think a lot of my disdain for Heavy constant critique comes back to like, I remember being like 13-14 years old and being so excited to come onto tumblr and find out what the ATLA fandom was analzying, because it's in many ways the show I reverse engineered literary analysis from (Katara-Azula was an early, apparent, and favourite foils dynamic of mine, for example) and there's so many lovely things about it. At that point my fandom experiences had been like a really small fandom of a show that wasn't that good but we loved it for what it is, and HTTYD, which had a very thoughtful thriving community of analyzers, and they would debate episodes and ideas in a very friendly manner even if they didn't always agree. So getting on ATLA tumblr and seeing nothing but hate for so much of the show for miles, and seeing so much hate for all the specific things that I loved the most, and that were the most meaningful to me and that I was stupid or childish to like or enjoy or get excited about them, broke my heart honestly. And I just never want to be that or potentially contribute to that for anyone else; I really don't. And at a certain point, if your critique does align with the majority takeaway, you gotta ask yourself if you wanna or really need to toss your hat in the ring and if you'd be adding anything to it, because sometimes we don't all need to comment on every single particular XYZ thing has commented on (no I didn't like the Crowlord jokes in S4, I don't like his character in general, he's also barely in the show, my dislike does not matter to me; the story uses him for comedic relief, he objectively fulfills that role even if he doesn't subjectively work for me, it is small potatoes, I'd rather focus on the more interesting, more prominent things that I love).

TLDR;

Thus far, every time TDP has done something I went ??? about, I've found a reason + one that worked for me, or it's small enough that it's a nitpick. If I don't love all parts of canon, then I stop enjoying it, and if I stop enjoying it, I leave the fandom. If I'm in the fandom, then I love and appreciate all parts of it, even if things may not always necessarily align with my preferences. I'm interested in seeing what the story is doing and focusing on that with my blog, my primary interest is not based in what I want it to do (not saying that's where anyone who does critique the show is coming from or that it's lesser to do so, this just how I'm conceptualizing the difference in mindset, but maybe I'm wrong about where the divide is or what the mindset is). 90% of the time whatever the show does I end up liking more or finding more interesting anyway, and I've also never had anything align with my specific brain more than TDP has. Kinda simple as that, in some ways.

#thanks for asking #forbidden op lore #dragons rambles #anonymous #im sorry this got so long but it seems you've followed and/or interacted here for a while #so we both knew this undoubtedly wasn't going to be short #anyway if some day someone wants my full 'tdp critique' list lemme know #analysis series #age 12 onwards of the curse of 'i love canon i hope other fans also like canon!'#and then inevitably. the cookie crumbles while i still continue to enjoy canon #cause i've had like. maybe 2-3 stories actually disappoint me in my entire life and that's it #tag ramble #i've also just. always had a soft spot for things that get a bad rep and asking why #/ watching or learning more to make up my own mind #aka my favourite animal when i was 5 was a goddamn hyena bc i felt bad for them in the lion king.#and it's one of the most on brand facts of my entire life #also if u see me feeling anxious about this post bc i don't want to hurt anyone's feelings no u don't

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writingwisterias · 2 days ago

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I had this random idea that came to mind - how would the different eras Leon act around reader's parents. like I imagine him meeting them for the first time and they're the stereotype old overly sweet parents that like to show pics of reader as a kid, making so so many questions about marriage and kids and future plans in general, embarassing them sm 😭 i have a feeling that especially with re2r Leon it would be so cute and funny

OMG! I'm so happy you asked for this because I was originally going to do Leon meeting the parents for the first time but I got so many requests! Ily for this

Also I'm so sorry it's out late I've just been working on some personal oneshots but now working through the requests!!

Warnings: insecurities, Fluff, themes of self doubt

AFAB!Fem!Reader

RE2:

When meeting your parents for the first time he sort of shy

He doesn't really talk much unless asked questions and it's not until a few times visiting your house that he actually interacts with them

I feel like he would have the relationship with your dad where he just gets dragged to help out and do things

He doesn't care though, it gets on his good side

Polite enough to help your mom clean up after dinner too

I think he would get flustered over topics of the future because he's still in that puppy love phase.

He does think about it but admitting aloud that he does makes him all giddy

RE4R:

Think's way too much in his head about what to say to your parents and how to interact with them

He's forming a whole as script and checklist making sure to tick all of them

Feels more comfortable around your mum but really stresses out internally on making sure he proves to your dad that he's actually worthy of your love.

In terms of chats about the future I feel like he has them in his head already, so when they bring it up it's a subject that he can talk about and doesn't wait for you to divert the subject

By that it's obvious that he can't say what his job is so when they originally asked he allowed you to explain it briefly.

Infinite Darkness:

He hides his stress a lot better and doesn't have a hard time sliding in your family dynamic because of his humour

They love him because he's respectful, funny and kind

He loves it when your mum brings out the photo albums

Asks if he can take some home just so he can look at them and picture what your children would be like

Helps out your dad with the car all the time, offers to do any odd jobs for him as well

He enjoys feeling useful

He would get flustered when he actually admits he has thought about the future with you only because he glances at you and sees the heart eyes you give him

Damnation:

Despite his more miserable look he manages to surprise your parents and they are quick to admit they have misjudged him

They don't get to see him often because he's always being dragged somewhere by his job

So when they do they have prepared a big meal for the both of you

Leon spends this time bonding with your dad working the BBQ and you get your mum talking about how cute you are together

The conversation carries to the evening when they offer for the both of you to stay the night and they bring out the albums

She even declares that she's got one ready for all the future photos of grandkids and your wedding

That makes Leon choke on his drink in surprise they even think about that for you

RE6:

Comes across as very confident but on the inside he's panicking about saying the wrong thing

Knows nothing about sports but pretends for your dad if there's a game on, will just watch him carefully and match his vibe if they do or don't score.

All the answers in his head are planned out in fear he will say something that seems cringey or too annoying

Gets along with your dad really well very quickly

After any event or meal with them he has long naps because he's so mentally tired from thinking about everything he is doing

You have caught him and your dad napping on the sofa and armchair at the same time.

Vendetta:

They can tell that things are bothering him and trusts that the two of you can work it out together

He hides it well to give him credit but towards the evening like always his mood will falter

Your parents don't judge him of course, from the little bits of information they have about his path they offer their support

It's almost weird to him to have parents that are so loving and care about not only you but him like a son

Appreciates them but can never really express it right

For events like christmas or thanksgiving he tries his best to be happy and present but they understand he needs a break

It's like a silent acceptance of them knowing he's a great guy just going through bad things so they opt to just be a place of comfort and let him relax with you here.

Death Island:

He is a dick if you end up sleeping in your childhood bedroom

Teases you with your dad all the time

Loves it when your mum brings out the photo albums! He's looking through them all

He will openly talk about his plans for the future and keep them in the loop about any updates in your life

He texts/calls them more than you at this point

If they want something from you they just ask you through him because they know he'll reply

Plays board games with them all the time, and helps with anything they need around the house like he does with you at home.

#~mads rambles #~mads~mail💌#leon kennedy #leon kennedy x reader #resident evil x reader #leon scott kennedy #leon s kennedy x reader #resident evil #resident evil fanfiction #leon kennedy x you

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vulture-cultist · 12 hours ago

Text

I maintain an observation beehive for the museum I work at in order to teach people about animal domestication, the honey industry, and biodiversity. I just wanted to add a little point-by-point debunk to this post so people can reference it if they need. I'm by no means the Ultimate Bee Expert, but all of the following information will be researched and sourced to the best of my ability.

For the purpose of my reply, I'll only be discussing Apis mellifera, or the western honeybee. This is the most common honeybee species in the world and can now be found on every continent except Antarctica. It's difficult to pinpoint the exact time they were 'domesticated,' but we have evidence of human-bee interactions through ancient Egyptian iconography (2400 BC) and even Neolithic rock art, in addition to beeswax in lipid residues preserved in pottery vessels. Ours is a very old relationship.

Photo by Puzzler4879 on Flickr. All creative commons.

It's also true that the western honeybee is an introduced species in North America. They were imported from Europe around the 17th century. They owe a good part of their success to human help, but Apis mellifera are also known to be a highly intelligent and adaptable species, changing their behaviors to take advantage of new environments. They are truly remarkable! Insect intelligence and cognition is definitely a field of science that needs more love. I don't have a PDF, but I highly recommend reading The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka for an excellent overview of hymenopteran behavioral research.

Now, let's get to it!

"Actually, beekeepers take many precautions to keep their bees from leaving."

As a standalone statement, this is true! A hive costs time, money, and effort, so ideally you want to convince those bees to stick around. Many of us also have a fondness for our hives and want to see them thrive by taking some basic precautions. These are things such as ensuring adequate hive airflow to prevent fungal diseases, situating the hive in such a way that it is protected from predators, providing supplementary food for your bees in times of scarcity, monitoring for diseases and parasites, and maintaining a balance of full and empty frames so that the hive isn't overcrowded and uncomfortable. If the bees have all of their needs met, they don't have reason to go rough it in the woods (similarly to how you and I are not abandoning our warm, safe houses and access to fresh food and water to sprint off into the wilderness. Well, I think about doing that a lot. But I shan't.)

But why all the fuss to prevent a hive from leaving? Swarming is a natural and predictable behavior. It's a colony's way of reproducing and tends to take place in the spring, and it can actually indicate the good health of a hive. In a swarm, the old queen takes herself and the majority of her daughters to find a new nesting location, leaving the rest of the workers behind with their provisions and new queen. The problem for both the beekeepers AND the bees is that most swarms fail and every single one of those bees dies. Less than 25% of swarms make it through their first year. It's more time, energy, and cost effective to manage swarms; be ready to collect the swarm and place it in a shiny new hive, or artificially split the hive beforehand to prevent overpopulation.

"many clip the wings of the queen, destroy new queen cells, cull queens they don't like and use bee pheromones to prevent a hive from naturally swarming or absconding."

Okay, so this is contentious. All of those ARE technically hive management practices. 'Queen clipping' is the practice of notching a single forewing, making sure to avoid the nerve and only clip a veined area filled with haemolymph. This reduces a queen's ability to fly, but not her ability to begin a swarm. The reason some keepers practice queen clipping is so the queen 'swarms' just outside the box, making the swarm easy to retrieve and place back into the box, split, whatever needs to be done. Queen bees only really fly during their nuptial flights and during swarms; their large bodies make it a cumbersome task, and they spend most of their life inside the hive laying eggs.

Now, I don't wholly agree with the author of that article I just sourced. Do insects feel pain? Do they feel fear? These are interesting and important questions that are difficult to study because both of those things are ultimately subjective. I tend towards 'yes'. In chapter 11 of his book, Lars Chittka writes "it is now clear that many invertebrates (and certainly all insects) have specialized sensory mechanisms to register tissue damage, and segregated neural pathways for nociception and regular mechanoreception" (245). Overall, there isn't much scientific literature on queen clipping as of now, so it's not something I would personally practice. But I can understand why other keepers might see this as the responsible thing to do to give their hive the best chance of survival.

Removing cells with unhatched queens, culling lackluster queens-- yes, these are things beekeepers may do. If the queen is not thriving the entire colony may die. It's like the trolley problem sometimes. The thing is, while I have personal proclivities about interfering with my queen unless absolutely necessary because I am a weak crybaby human, her subjects certainly do not. Welcome to honeybee regicide hour!

The queen is not a purely benevolent ruler; she secretes a pheromone that hinders the development of reproductive organs in her workers (the queen mandibular pheromone (E)-9-Oxodec-2-enoic acid (9-ODA) is responsible for this), and she seeks out and slaughters other prospective queens from the moment she hatches. Likewise, her daughters aren't messing around. When workers detect a drop in pheromones by an old and failing queen they will kill her (this is called supersedure). If the queen is not laying enough eggs, they will feed royal jelly to new brood to raise a rival queen. They will also starve, kill, and/or expel all of the drones, or male bees, at the end of the season, because they contribute nothing to hive defense or foraging and represent only a drain on the hive's food stocks (this is called drone ejection). Those aren't human decisions. Those are natural behaviors honed by over 80 million years of evolution. If anything, we take a page from their books when we employ these hive management practices. They are one of the world's most successful eusocial species for a reason.

"They also try and prevent mating with the African honey bee, which makes them less docile among other things."

I'm assuming this person is talking about the Africanized bee, which is a hybrid between A. m. scutellata (East African lowland honeybee) and various European species such as the Italian or Iberian honeybee. I'm going to lazily direct everyone to this Wikipedia article because there's a lot to know and I'm running out of steam.

Essentially, the hybrid was created with the goal of increasing honey yields, which has backfired because these bees tend to be more aggressive and prone to swarming. They also kill people. Which I suspect is the main reason people don't want their Apis mellifera boinking them lol. Makes the beekeeper's job a lot harder.

"Not to mention that honeybees are an invasive species in most places, competing with native pollinators and spreading disease"

Now we're getting somewhere! This is a very hot topic at the moment. As I previously said, Apis mellifera is invasive in a lot of its range. They receive a lot of attention from conservation campaigns and good PR, when really, it is our native and often solitary hymenopterans that need our help most. I'm going to quote Lars Chittka again. From the final chapter of his book:

"[Honey bee keeping] is not a contribution to nature conservation. The western honey bee, to the extent that it is kept in hives, is a domesticated animal that, despite media reports to the contrary, is not under threat. A hive of 40,000 bees will deplete floral resources that could otherwise feed 40,000 solitary pollinators, many of which are at the risk of extinction." (272)

But, recall, humans and honeybees have coexisted for centuries. The honeybees themselves are not, alone, the cause for native bee species' decline. Restoring habitats and reducing or banning pesticides, I wager, would do more for our native bees than if every honeybee simply vanished tomorrow. I could write a whole other post on this issue lol but it's a whole other can of worms, so I'll leave it.

I guess my takeaway here is that insects perform innumerable and incredibly vital roles in our ecosystems, which all living things share. Humans are animals. We are not separate from nature. Everything exists in a cycle of give and take, life and death, and humans and honeybees have been dancing that dance for thousands of years. I'm sure that at some point while checking my hive for chalkbrood I have replaced the lid and accidentally crushed a worker, prematurely ending her 5 to 7 week life. Someday I will also die and my body will be reconstituted into nutrients that feeds and meadows and flowers that the bees harvest from. And so it goes.

Wild that folks keep saying beekeepers abuse bees as if bees are not both venomous flying animals and fully unionized

#this is scattered sorry i've had way too much coffee today #entomology #conservation

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captain-huggy-bear · 3 days ago

Text

The New Guy

Pairing: Kiefer Sherwood x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Sexual innuendo

Summary: You have an interesting first interaction with the new Canuck, Kiefer Sherwood.

Notes: Request from @toasttt11: I went with a close friend of Quinn rather than sister because that way more people can relate but I hope this is the kinda vibe you were after for this :)

A short little one, but hopefully funny/silly

Totally happy to take requests/ideas/prompts at the moment in my ask box :)

Writing Masterlist

You've seen more trades than you can possibly comprehend in your time as Quinn's best friend. Witnessed the way everyone grew solemn as a friend and teammate had to leave suddenly to somewhere else, sometimes right before a game, sometimes in the off season. Saw how difficult it was when they were opponents, rivals rather than teammates for the first time in years. But, also the excitement when someone new came in and no one was more excited for this particular acquisition than Quinn.

Your best friend had pushed so hard, so much for the team to get Kiefer Sherwood and it meant that the day of his official signing, official joining, Quinn was abuzz, or at least as abuzz as Quinn can get, which meant slightly less haunted than usual. Some of the usual stress of being captain having been lifted from his shoulders with the prospect of a new teammate to help them win the Stanley Cup.

"He's going to be so good for the team, Y/N. We need a solid enforcer, someone to make big hits." He'd been ranting on and rambling all day about how good Sherwood would be for the team and it was starting to dull the shine, just a little. You couldn't help but roll your eyes as the two of you walked through the corridors of the arena.

"You've only said about a thousand times." You're happy for Quinn and the team, of course you are. The excitement palpable as you stop outside the locker room. You can't even deny that you are a little excited yourself to meet the 6ft tall forward, a new teammate for Quinn usually meant a new friend for you...it helped that he was handsome and that meant another face to ogle at when you were in the stands watching the games. You liked having a little bit of eye candy in your day, not that you'd tell Quinn that. He'd probably complain that you were a HR incident waiting to happen.

"Hey! I mean it. This is our year!" Quinn smiles at you in such a genuinely hopeful way that you really hope he's right. Being captain has meant he takes every error, every loss onto his own shoulders. You really hope Sherwood and the team prove Quinn right, for Quinn's sake more than anything else.

"He better be nice, that's all I'm saying, if he treats me like a coffee girl I'm going to enforce him." You cross your arms over your chest as if you might fight someone, quite hilarious when you consider the sorts of men you're surrounded by on the daily. Still, you're determined not to be undermined or treated like just a pretty face, casual workplace sexism was not something you were going to allow. You hoped this new guy wasn't one of those hockey players. You'd dealt with your fair share in your life and couldn't stand them.

"What does that even mean?" Quinn huffs out a laugh at you, shaking his head at you because he loves you, but fuck, you can be so weird sometimes. You remind him a little of Luke. A little weird, a little strange but in the best sort of way. Endearingly bizarre.

"It means he'll get shoved into the boards." He might be 6ft and 200lbs but you're pretty sure that with the element of surprise you could get Kiefer Sherwood into the boards if he annoyed you enough. Maybe even onto his back on the ice with a well aimed stick to the ankles.

"Y/N." Quinn seems to disagree, it's quite insulting actually, the way he looks at you like you're mad. Like your smaller stature makes it impossible.

"You don't think I can do it? I've shoved Luke into the lake before."

"Lukey is a bean pole and loves you, so he let you." You're actually quite hurt that Quinn is convinced the Luke let you shove him into the lake when you know that you did so on your own merit and skill.

"You think I can't shove Kiefer Sherwood into some boards? You think I'm weak!"

"Y/N." Quinn's gaze shifts behind you, just over your shoulder but you don't take much notice of it. He's probably looking at one of the arena workers.

"This...you're supposed to be my best friend. I could take him! I could definitely take Kiefer Sherwood!" You're actually a little hurt that Quinn doesn't seem to think you're capable of taking Kiefer Sherwood in a fight. Even if he's probably right. Sherwood could probably toss you like you're a doll...an appealing thought depending on the circumstances behind it.

"Y/N!" It's the urgency behind Quinn yelling your name and the way his stare is directed above your head, mixed with the hint of a laugh that tells you you're about to be terribly embarrassed.

There's a beat of silence, your shoulders tensing, mouth pursing in realisation.

"...He's right behind me, isn't he?" Quinn nods in confirmation, holding back a laugh as you briefly close your eyes, trying to swallow the embarrassment that you can feel rising in you like a wave. Not the best first impression you've ever made.

You turn to look behind you once you've composed yourself. Kiefer Sherwood is there, leaning against the wall with one shoulder, arms crossed and smirking at you. He looks frustratingly handsome, perfectly rugged and dishevelled from the dimples around his smirk to the dark curls that seemed to fall perfectly around his face. He looks...big too. The only accurate way to describe him, broad shouldered, solid, like he's immovable and perhaps you'd overestimated your ability to fight the man. Perhaps Quinn was right. But, you're certain you could take him...just maybe not in a fight.

"You can shove me into the boards any time you want, princess." The way he looks at you, all dark half lidded eyes and long lashes, makes warmth flood through your entire body, but mostly ending in your face. You're certain your cheeks are on fire with how warm they are.

"Kief, don't flirt with my best friend." You want to tell Quinn off because Kiefer Sherwood can certainly flirt with you if he wants, especially if he looks at you like that. You did not need the overprotective best friend act right now.

"But, she's cute." His eyes don't leave you even as he responds to Quinn, like he's still talking to you.

"Kief."

"Alright, alright..." He pushes off of the wall, practically sauntering over to you, stopping a few feet short, respectable enough to give you space, but there's nothing respectable about the smirk he's still sporting. "Still think you could take me?"

"Oh, definitely." There's absolutely no mistaking the way you lower your voice, the coy tone to it, the fact that you most certainly don't mean in a fight. It has Kiefer throwing his head back with a loud, rumbling laugh while Quinn all but hisses at you like a scolding parent.

"Y/N!"

Yeah, you think you might like the new guy...maybe more than you should.

#huggy bear writes #kiefer sherwood x reader #kiefer sherwood/reader #nhl imagine #nhl x reader

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worstgenerationloser · 1 day ago

Note

#NeedAceFicWithNipplePlaying/NippleOrgasmWithHeavyDirtyTalkingFromAce

Please and thank you🙏🏻

,, A little more... ''

Portgas D. Ace x F! Reader (NSFW!)

Summary... you can't get enough of sneaking around with the second division commander, he can't get enough of his hands and tongue all over you.

Contains... nipple orgasm, nipple play, edging, sloppy kissing, friends with benefits, some attempted dirty talk... (fail)

Words... 1.5k!

A/N: I cringed at myself trying to write the dirty talk IM SO SORRY, also another apology it's kinda short...

"Slow down— the door isn't even closed." You speak in a hushed tone, paranoid that there would be eyes watching through the crack in the door, Ace groans dramatically and rolls his eyes at your paranoia, however. It's not like he's some kind of exhibitionist, he's simply recognizing that you're being completely ridiculous in your worries.

"Yep. Mhm... there's definitely sober people on Whitebeard's crew that would think to check an old raggedy closet and see if Ace and Y/N are getting it down. I think half of them forget we even interact half the damn time, chill out." Ace giggles, that sleazy smirk and those heavy lidded, tired eyes drawing his whole look back into the same work of art he is always.

When you two first started this little arrangement, that may have been true, but you've kept this up for a while now and even though you don't plan on stopping, things would get a little more complicated if Marco actually spoke up instead of smirking each time you and Ace stare at each other. Suddenly, the hands on your hips pick up their previous pace, rubbing your upper thigh and gliding up your body smoothly.

He sits down on a dusty crate of unnecessary items bought by whoever it was, long forgotten in a secluded storage closet. Ace's hands reach the hem of your shirt, sliding under without a second thought. Before you could retort, the clicking of the door shutting sounds off into the room, and you're engulfed in darkness.

"Wanna do it in the dark?" He teases you with the ghost of his breath, the pads of his fingers tracing your stomach before holding your thighs before he pulls you up onto his own, a soft gasp escaping you despite yourself. Another teasing remark is coming, and so you silence him with your lips, the same way you did the very first time.

His warm lips meet yours, coated in saliva and desire with barely anything else to give other than something sloppy and dirty. His eyes are shut as if he were pondering something, and his hand comes to your face to feel how much warmth has gathered on your cheek, while his lips do their best to warm you more. Ace's tongue smears saliva onto your mouth, and it's an odd slippery feeling, but not that different from when his mouth is on your other lips. He doesn't like kissing you much, and you don't know why, but you can't complain about someone's preferences, maybe it's a good thing he withholds things like this from you, because he is utterly addicting.

Your body is warm, you start to feel sweat forming on the back of your neck and the inside of your elbows, things are steamier in the closet, literally. Ace is sliding his hands over the fabric of your clothing, raising goosebumps on your warm skin with his tantalizing touch. A moan slips into his mouth, your tongue quivering as you scrape his bottom lip with it, and he finally lets you go breathe your own air.

"You know I got a light if you need, just ask." Ace pants, but he still holds up his flaming finger for you to gaze at, his freckled face illuminated by orange flames. He's beautiful, you think to yourself, you know he would only scoff and roll his eyes if you said something like that at this time again. One day he's gonna see his worth, and you hope it comes from the time you two have spent together so far.

"You're a jackass. Just fucking touch me." You groan, better not make things too emotional, he's sure to view it as just sex. You keep having to remind your giddy heart that this isn't romance, it burns but not as much as when his flame flickers a bit too close to you. He puts out his light, and you're both back in the dark again. Gods, you're nervous and anxiously awaiting his eager touch.

His long fingers come to rest under your shirt, tracing the curvature of your breasts over your bra. You have recently learned that Ace's eyes carry a strong presence, you can always feel them on you no matter how far he seems to be, and it's just that much more intense up close. Slowly, he lifts your shirt up just so it wouldn't cover your breasts, and you feel his breath begin to tickle your sternum. Without a word, you take your blouse off yourself, giving him a bit more free reign.

The barely audible noise of your bra coming undone and hitting somewhere on the floor as Ace throws it aside softly resonates in the room.

"I'm gonna need that later." You huff.

"You'll get it later, we got better things to focus on." Ace chortles, his smirk prevalent in his voice.

The cool air of the closet stiffens your nipples, making goosebumps form on the soft skin of your breasts as well. A small hum escapes Ace's lips, and you hear the sound of saliva clicking in his mouth as he shifts closer towards you, then things are silent for a second... Before a soft sigh whimper escapes you when you feel two fingers gently tug at your nipple, rolling it under their warm touch. Your hardened nipples begin to soften upon contact with such warmth, and Ace seeks to stiffen them back up. His other hand reaches to grope your untouched breast, kneading it firmly while also keeping a dash of tenderness in his palm as he grabs it in his hands the way you like, he's always been a fast learner when it came to various things, you could say he's an expert in you and your body at this point in time.

"I ever told you that you got some pretty tits?" Ace licks his lips, just barely able to see better than you can in the dark, and he's got his eyes on the prize. His fingers quit toying with your nipples as he dips his head downwards, pressing his moistened lips to your areola in hot kisses. Breath heavy, his tongue darts out to swirl around your nipple and coat it entirely in his saliva, making you squirm in his lap. A desire bubbles up in your stomach, and your thighs coincidentally trap one of Ace's own.

Though you try and still yourself, it's harder becasue it's Ace, not some random guy you'll forget about the very next week. You've practically trained him in all areas, so what if he's got you horny and wanting more just from a little nipple play? It's a natural reaction with a boy like him. Squeezing your eyes shut, your brows furrow when you give a small roll of your hips into Ace's thigh. A chill runs down your spine, and you feel your arousal dripping into your underwear. Ace's teeth come out to play in a soft nibble against the fat of your breasts, his tongue is hot and heavy against your skin, and it's not stopping here.

"I can feel how hot your pussy is getting." It sounds like he's about to giggle, but his mouth is stuffed full of your breast to the point most of what he says is illegible besides his wet breathing and sucking, your suspicions are confirmed when he smiles midway into sucking on your nipple.

"Whose fault is that?" That retort of yours only fires him up more— literally. His back is bursting into flames, and it lights up the room a little too much for your liking, but atleast you get to see his pretty face showcasing what must be pure bliss with his mouth wrapped around your tit. It feels warm, now that it's colder outside Ace seems to be the only thing to warm up your body. Your hands reach around the back of his neck, fingers interlocking themselves between the messy locks of raven hair on his head, and it calms him... you think.

Ace lets out a low hum, drool trickling down under your breast.

"Hm... Is it mine? 'Cause I'm worried you've got a side piece you're thinking of." Ace's giggles are muffled into your skin again. Finding time to make small jokes during sexual things like this is a bit too intimate for people who are supposed to be just friends with benefits. The impending retort you had in mind is shoved back into the depths of your mind when you feel his hands slide down your body, heading for the waistband of your pants.

Ace always keeps you on your toes, who has need for someone else? You would tell him, but maybe it's better if you show him instead. Gently placing your hands to cup his face, you ease him away from your chest and he thankfully gets the message, but it feels like losing a part of you when his tongue is no longer tracing your skin. Cocking his head to the side, he begins to speak up.

"Not feeling me tonight?"

Resisting the urge to make a joke, you keep the retort to yourself. You'll be feeling him a lot tonight.

END.

(here is ace photos for you to enjoy because I left on a cliffhanger)

#xochitlwrites #portgas ace x y/n #portgas ace x you #portgas ace x reader #portgas d ace x reader #portgas d. ace smut #portgas d ace smut #one piece x y/n #one piece x you #one piece x reader #one piece smut

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alexturntable · 1 day ago

Note

what's with charles wearing blue workout gear, using blue background and a blue heart for his new music announcement? you ain't slick charlie boy!

on that note tho, charlos reunion day tomorrow!!!! them in different suits for the first time in so long is gonna hurt like hell but hopefully we'll get them in the same frame, interacting and being chaotic tgt and that'll soothe the heartache a little bit 🤞🏼

He has been wearing soo much blue during this break (especially when he went to watch Carlos Sr. drive Jr.’s car in Maranello). To be fair, he did say that baby blue is one of his favorite colors before so he wears it a lot.

And now with new the logo and the new song, there’s a even more blue.

Also, his instagram feed is so blue, kinda like Carlos’ (there’s still a lot of red ofc).

I didn't even think about them being together again tomorrow and now I'm gonna be so disappointed if they don't interact.

#ask #charlos #f1 #charles leclerc #carlos sainz

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menlove · 9 hours ago

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youve probably answered this before but what DO you think is the most realistic version of what went down?? like do you think paul misinterpreted john's hints or that john never made it clear enough to paul how he felt? i know theres no way to know but you have such a good grasp on their personalities and this seriously might haunt me forever lkadjf

i actually don't think i have ! i wrote a lil speculative Thing about what things would look like if paul were queer and closeted (which is what i think) and that interpretation but never specifically this question but...

this is long and rambly but have my thoughts lmfao

basically To Me i do think they had some sort of sexual relationship. to me it's honestly the most likely scenario given the..... everything. their interactions with each other, some of their songs about each other ("i used to hold you in my arms"), the way things blew up so spectacularly, etc. and my reasoning there is mostly that. we know already that they had really loose sexual boundaries with each other. they jerked off together, they fucked women in the same room together & allegedly together as well. and already just those two/three things constitute as a sexual relationship, but not smth they would've seen as one.

but i do think they did more than that. i mean, it doesn't really matter if they did more than that, the rest of what i'm gonna speculate stands even if all they ever did was jerk off together and fuck women together, but like... aside from the like Mountains of evidence that there was something there, i just think it makes sense w their personalities. john isn't the type of person to have self-restraint and i don't think paul, especially when he was younger, would've turned john down. i think if john was into men (which he was, we know this) and if he was into paul (incredibly likely) then he would've made a move. and i think if he made a move and got rejected he would have raised hell, and that never happened.

i think they probably started doing shit together (again, the extent of that is debatable) and they absolutely did Not think of it as being anything queer. i couldn't tell you the mental loops they tied themselves in there, but i have Some thoughts just based on who they are. i think john probably passed it off as like "a hand's a hand, a mouth's a mouth" type of thing (which is hilariously something yoko talks about him saying in her audio diary during the white album sessions). and i think paul probably saw it (& any other things he was doing with men, if he did) as something fun that feels good and isn't something he needs to like look into deeply. i think neither of them would've thought of themselves as queer, bc they probably thought of queerness as very binary- you're either gay or you're straight. and they both were into women (.....ostensibly) so they couldn't be gay. i think john like realized, on some level, that he was queer and Hated it about himself for a very long time and only started coming to grips with it towards the end of his life. i think paul eventually came around to it but by that time he was married to linda (& if rumors are to believed, possibly having threesomes with her and men lmfao) & i don't think he would Ever want to come out publicly even if he's out privately (which i do think he is).

so why didn't they get together? why is paul so insistent that john was straight and not in love with him? i think they just genuinely never talked about it. ever. like i don't think they had that conversation. if neither of them were gay and their sexual relationship was just john and paul things, there wasn't any need to talk about it. queerness was more acceptable for the young. not in an open sort of way, absolutely not, but in the way that they could tell themselves they'd grow out of it, they were just messing around, etc.

i think things got harder when brian died- he died queer, alone, and in a situation that a lot of people thought was suicide. and ofc, we know the band didn't think it was suicide, and i don't think it was either, but that's the kind of thing that sticks in the back of your mind. esp if you're like john who had a lot of mystical/magical thinking. i think it was a bit of a wake up call. time to grow up. i think they both thought they were each the Only one dealing with actual queer feelings & attraction to the other and were soooo sure the other one was just straight and fucking around. which probably hurt, quite a bit, but wasn't something they wanted to look at anyway.

and when john got with yoko and got serious with her, i think that was the bubble bursting. cynthia was different. they got together so young, he never made her a priority, he cheated on her constantly, belittled her, didn't have a place for her by his side bc he carved that space out exclusively for paul. and you can tell that just by the amount of quotes paul has about john marrying yoko being the catalyst, about it being time to grow up, etc which is insane considering he was already married and so were george and ringo. for years. so it was something deeper than that. and it's bc he was actually taking yoko seriously. paul's spot as john's primary partner got filled by a woman. who john was genuinely in love with, not like cynthia which was a marriage fueled by the age old tale of an unplanned pregnancy and comphet. and paul can't argue with that. like....... if he viewed what they were doing as messing around as kids, with john being straight and him being the one pining, he wouldn't want to fuck up john's chance at a Normal Straight Love. if he were a girl, he could, but he wasn't. what he Could do was match him and grow up too. cue the immediate pivot to get married and have children, eventually fulfilled in linda.

but i don't think he expected the band to implode just bc they stopped being so close in whatever manner. but it did. along with other reasons, obviously- there's a million reasons the band broke up, but i think they could've weathered it if they had kept the closeness they'd had at the beginning. or if they'd been single or even if they'd just kept viewing each other as their primary partner aside from their wives.

i think they both came to terms with what they actually meant to each other in the 70s, but they never actually... told each other. what we have from john is jealous guy, which paul was allegedly told was about him, and that demo version of real love that paul never even heard where he laments about him having a baby/farm and how he used to hold him. there's also (just like) starting over, but that one's easy to see as being for yoko too and paul wouldn't have thought twice about it. then you have now & then and real love, which were on that damn tape for paul :( like he literally didn't hear them until after john died and we know he likes the idea that now & then is about him but even then he doesn't sound totally convinced

for paul we have a lot. but a lot of his like more vulnerable songs were only released after john died. like here today, obviously, but there's also some pretty telling ones that john never would've heard (like best friend, which he played live, but wasn't on any album until 2018. or a more of a Stretch of one but i 100% think is about john, hey diddle, which was kept off ram and only released in 2001).

so like i think they very much both came to grips with the fact that they had been in love with each other, but they never really.... thought that could be returned. so ofc paul's going to say shit like how he likes the theory that john was in love with him or wrote now & then about him. but he doesn't believe it, because to him john was Genuinely straight and he was the weird one. and vice versa. i think i saw a more recent thing from him coming around more on the idea of john being bi, but honestly i think that's just hard for him to come to grips with bc what the hell are you supposed to do with that? like yeah, he was into men, possibly even romantically, on a genuine level, just not him? that's hurtful. i don't think he wants to think of that option. bc that's more likely to him than the idea that john was in love with him and hiding it the whole time. which is also heartbreaking. bc then it's just a tragedy of circumstances and missed chances- which is what i think it was. and neither of those routes are something i think he wants to consider, so john has to be straight in his mind.

but if he's coming around on that, he's probably coming around on one of those two options. i hope it's the latter bc the idea that he'd think even now that john never loved him is just so fucking sad. and considering his comments about now & then, as well as the lyrics video for now & then, i really do think the latter is more likely.

anywayyyyy tl;dr i think they fucked around sexually in Some Way, never said a single thing romantically, both came to terms w their feelings in the 70s but by then it was too late and they didn't think the other one would reciprocate anyway, and now paul's been trying to come to grips w the ambiguity of their relationship for the last 40+ years.

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