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ignitedbynatsu · 4 years ago

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Little Devils

A/N: @exhaustedpotat0 I hope I exceeded your expectations 🤗. Fun fact about me; I get story ideas at the most random times during the day, like for example when I’m making chocolate milk, poof there is an idea I’ve been trying to come up with for days (yes I am 20, yes I still prefer chocolate milk above coffee, fight me 🥊). ANyWaz thank you for the request and support!

Warnings: near death experience I guess? Bribing if that’s a warning

Genre: fluff? Crack? Idk tbh

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"It is time for the annual girls-day!" Cana announced as soon as she walked into the guild.

The Fairy Tail girls had picked a date and proclaimed it as the Fairy Queens off day. That day no girl of the guild would work a job or work at the guild itself. They'd all go out of town and enjoy a peaceful day at a resort.

It would be your first time since you had only recently joined the guild because Laxus had requested it. He proposed the idea since you were a bartender at a bar a couple of streets away. He didn't see the point when you could just work here in the guild alongside Mira-Jane. Everyone knew that the real reason was actually, so he could keep a close eye on you and making sure you were okay, but God forbid he'd ever say that out loud.

"I can't," you said as you separated your boys from fighting. Aidan and Keishi were the spitting images of their father. Both having the same blonde locks paired with two soft eyes matching yours.

"Why not?" Erza asked as she helped you.

"I can't leave the boys unattended" you explained as you picked up the crying child and placed him on your hip while Erza scolded the other.

"Let Laxus do it" Bisca shrugged her shoulder as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Alzack did so with Romeo when he was still a child"

You bit the inside of your cheek as you let the suggestion sink in. Laxus had never cared for the children alone. You were always around, and if for some reason you had to go do something, one of the girls was always there to assist him.

"I don't know" you mumbled as your eyes landed on Laxus that was unbothered chatting with Freed and Bickslow.

"Come on, (Y/N). He'll be fine. He's their dad after all" Levy tried to persuade you.

"Oi! You girls still here? Shouldn't you be leaving for your annual girls day?" Natsu asked, ditching the argument he had with Gray just moments ago.

"That's the plan, but (Y/N) doesn't want to go because she isn't sure if she should leave the kids alone" Lucy explained.

Upon hearing the explanation, Laxus decided to stand up and join the conversation as well "they wouldn't be alone, they'll have me"

"Are you sure you'll be able to handle them?" You asked as you looked up at your significant other.

"Is that a challenge?" He shot back while raising an eyebrow in amusement.

"No! No, of course not. It's just... They can be a lot sometimes" you hurriedly explained at which a soft chuckle left his lips, followed by a kiss pressed against your head "I'll be fine"

"Then it's settled! Let's go!" Lisanna yelled as she linked her arm with her sister, basically dragging the older girl with her as she left the guild.

Erza grabbed your arm, refraining you from turning back "Call me if something happens! I'll be back as soon as I can! I love you!"

And with that all the women of Fairy Tail had left the guild, leaving only the men and children behind.

The first few hours flew by as if nothing had changed, the biggest adjustment being Mira-Jane or you not filling their cups when they were empty.

"I really don't understand what (Y/N) was making a big deal out of. This day has passed by swimmingly" Bickslow chuckled as he placed his foot on the table while leaning back in the chair. Normally you or Mira would've scolded him, but with neither of you being there, he thought he'd take advantage of it.

Karma was lurking around the corner, cause as soon as the words rolled off Bickslow's tongue, everything went South.

Your children started a competition to see who could climb the highest point in the guild. They were both a couple of feet in the air when the youngest slipped, losing all flooring underneath his feet.

Had it not been for Jet's speed, the fall would have been catastrophic. "Not a word to (Y/N) about this"

Laxus was desperately comforting Keishi who was inconsolable as he just saw his short life flash before his very own eyes. Meanwhile, Gray and Natsu were trying their hardest to get the eldest down.

"Aiden! Get down here!" Natsu ordered as he started climbing up as well. The child didn't listen, only climbing higher as he took notice of the struggling adult.

His laughter filled the guild, but that soon turned into screams as the Fire Dragon Slayer got hold of his leg. "No! Let go of me!"

Natsu succeeded in getting down safely along with Aiden that was now also crying uncontrollably, leaving Laxus with two very upset children.

"Mommy!" "I want mommy!" The two cried out for their mother that was unbeknownst to the situation, relaxing in a hot spring a couple of cities away.

Laxus held Keishi close, rocking him softly as his hand softly rubbed circles on his back. He had seen you do this countless times, so why did it seem so hard when he did it? Elfman held the oldest, copying Laxus as good as he could.

"Shouldn't we call (Y/N)?" Gray sighed, annoyance evident on his face as every attempt at trying to calm the boys down seemed to fail.

"No!" Laxus exclaimed, earning him even louder sobs from the young child in his arms. He shushed him before returning to Gray in a lower voice "(Y/N) doesn't think I can handle our children"

"I can see why" Natsu snickered, resulting in a murderous look from the father.

"Freed, can't you put them in like a soundproof box or something with your magic" Gajeel groaned at the loud wails that kept coming from your children.

"You will not do such a thing" Laxus snapped at Gajeel in a hushed tone, already learning from his previous mistakes "I will prove to (Y/N) that I'm perfectly capable of taking care of my boys. Otherwise, she'll never trust me with them again"

"We still have a couple of hours left until the girls come back. We could try bribing them with sweet, perhaps?" Freed suggested.

Everyone turned to look at the green-haired mage as if he was an angel that was sent from up above. "Why didn't you say so earlier!"

"Aidan, Keishi, if you stop crying we'll go get ice cream" Laxus tried and at the sound of the cold deliciousness, their crocodile tears slowly came to a halt.

"Can we have two flavors, daddy?" Keishi asked as he looked at his father with puppy dog eyes.

"No- yes, fine, you can have two flavors" Laxus quickly changed his answer as he saw tears forming back in the corner of his eyes. He knew you'd have his head if you found out. The two boys really turned into little nightmares if they had too much sugar.

"Yay! Let's go" Aidan exclaimed happily, wriggling in Elfman's arms, signalling that he wanted to be put on the ground.

Laxus let both his sons grab a hand as they guided him out of the guild and to the ice cream shop.

"Please don't come back!" Gajeel called after them as they stepped outside the guild, sighing happily at the thought of some peace and quietness.

"Alright, now boys, I need you to listen to daddy for a second" the dragon slayer crouched down to look at them on eye-level while the two carelessly licked away at the sweet dessert in their hands. "Mommy can't find out about today. It was a normal relaxing day without any problems, alright?"

"What's in it for us?" Aidan asked as he looked at his father, still eating the ice cream that had slightly melted on his hand.

"What the- there's nothing in it for you. I am your father" Laxus started but stopped when the boys shared an unimpressed look. For being only 3 and 4, the two definitely had an attitude. "Fine I'll each give you 5 bucks that you can spend in the candy shop"

"10" Keishi chimed in.

Laxus stood perplexed. Was he really negotiating with his own children? More importantly, how was he the one losing the negotiation? "Fine"

The elder mage did as promised, handing both boys their money to which they high-fived. "Let's go back, the girls are about to return home"

Not even 5 minutes later as the three arrived back at Fairy Tail, the girls had returned.

"Mommy!" The two children ran up to you once they caught a glimpse of your face "boys!"

Laxus walked up as well, giving you a soft peck on your lips, earnings fake gagging from Aidan and Keishi "boys that's enough. How did it go, baby?"

"Normal, not much out of the ordinary, right boys?" As on cue, your children nodded their head in agreement.

"Really? So I could leave you more often with the boys?" You eyed him suspiciously, already picking up on his small habit of twirling a strand of your hair between his fingers when he was nervous or lying.

"No! I mean, I think I should help you take care of them more regularly. I'm sorry for ditching you so often to sit with the guys" he apologized at which a small chuckle escape your lips.

You wondered what happened today, but decided not to press it. It will be a secret between all the men at Fairy Tail and you respected it, knowing very well one would slip up when they had a couple of beers too much "it's alright, and I would love that"

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firelxdykatara · 3 years ago

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You’re doing a LoK rewrite, correct? Would be really interested in hearing how you plan on fixing Suyin’s character and the Lin-Suyin conflict because……. oh boy. Man there’s a lot to unpack there. This is what happens when we don’t let Toph just raise her fucking kids for the sake of pushing a stupid as hell narrative about working women and single motherhood.

I am indeed!

In... you know, the way I'm doing most of my big potential projects, in that I have a folder with some documents that have plot notes and... some day I may actually get full, finished fics out of them (h2o AU is in there, as is my voltron!atla fusion AU, and uhhhh my book 3 atla rewrite, and a few other things), so... but I will say that the docs I have for my LoK rewrite so far amount to roughly 4.2k words of just Plot and Character Notes, which may some day turn into words of Story, hopefully.

ANYWAY, POINT IS: yes, this exists, and I have Many Many Thoughts.

Including how the Gaang kids would shake out! Cause I know I'm doing Zutara, and maybe Tokka???? Although I don't wanna just leave Suki out either... maybe a throuple??? Or Sukka having an amicable breakup before Sokka and Toph get together--maybe she already has Lin by then, and Sokka helps support her through the grief of losing Kanto???? Idk honestly, I haven't actually figured any of that out definitively yet except that Aang was perfectly happy to settle down with an Air Acolyte from one of the rebuilt temples because he grew up and out of his crush on Katara pretty easily once he hit puberty and matured a bit.

UHHH none of which is actually an answer to your question, because it's a valid one! Which is why I've been sitting on this a while (10 days I'm so sorry) bc I haven't made any solid decisions but I've been letting it percolate around my head a bit. And the more I think about it, the more I really like the Sukka -> Tokka idea (and I don't want to kill off Suki since the kids all deserve their awesome Kyoshi warrior auntie in their lives, and also I want a Sukka kid to be besties with Iara [zuko and katara's youngest] so maybe she gets with someone else after she and Sokka split? I could be talked into Ty Lee/Suki actually, the more I think about it....), but obviously having a stable father figure and a Toph who is... not what LoK made her out to be will dramatically change the Beifong family dynamic.

That said, I think I actually have a solution. (I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do.) Toph has Lin with Kanto--and he passes away when Lin is two or three, which is why she has very few memories of her father. (Although none of this 'she doesn't even know his name until she's 50+ cause Toph didn't tell her daughters about their fathers' bullshit.) Sokka is there for her through it all (all of the gaang is, of course, but you know that it sometimes just hits different when it's someone you're also starting to fall in love with, especially when there are older and much more deeply buried feelings there that are now resurfacing, because at least in my version Toph was deeply in love with Sokka when they were teenagers, but he was in love with Suki and she also loved Suki so she didn't want to mess up anything about their family or the group dynamics by making her feelings anyone else's problem), they fall in love, get married and have Suyin.

(Sokka may jokingly refer to it as a shotgun wedding, but the truth is he wanted to propose well before he found out she was pregnant, his attempts just kept getting messed up in increasingly comedic fashion.)

Throughout all of this, Republic City has been established, Sokka is Chancellor, Toph is something of a defacto police chief--mostly because, at the time, no one else was willing to volunteer, and she jokingly offered to whip the law enforcement, but unfortunately everyone else at the meeting took her seriously. However, she is also the founder of the probending league, and basically her feelings about law enforcement are complicated and she actively discouraged her kids from joining the force which is part of why Lin did. How else do you have a teen rebel phase with a parent like Toph? (Which, in this instance, means tough and firm but fair, with a 'you break it, it's up to you to fix it' attitude and very little desire to actually control her daughters and their behavior.)

Ah, but here's the rub.

Suyin is ten years old when Sokka dies, and Lin is sixteen. I'm not sure how he's killed--maybe by Yakone, to tie it into my plans for Amon and book 1. (Note that I'm not sure when the Yakone bloodbending trial happened in canon, but it doesn't matter. The timeline I'm gonna build will be completely different post-comet, and I'll eventually write it all down so that I can keep things straight.) Which would incidentally provide excellent means of having Katara have a very personal stake in the Amon conflict, and perhaps color the fight between him and Iara, but I'm getting off track. And I think Sokka being killed by Yakone, and Toph being unable to protect or save him, or deliver her own brand of justice to avenge him (because Aang is there to stop her and.... shit probably got ugly, I suspect she didn't talk to Aang for at least twenty years after Sokka's death--and this isn't to say I think Toph is particularly violent or murderous, but in that moment, she absolutely wanted to kill the man with her bare hands, and however much she may have regretted it afterwards, she took a very long time to forgive Aang for stopping her in the first place), is what results in Toph stepping down as police chief.

She didn't withdraw from her daughters or fuck off into the swamp or anything (words cannot express how much I hate that part of her canon history), but she did grieve for a very long time. Lin, meanwhile, felt like it was up to her to keep her family together, while also feeling a desperate need to... prove herself, I think. And because her mother was so adamant that she not join the police force, that's exactly what she does. I think Lin completely misread Toph's intentions, too, and believed that the discouragement was because her mother didn't think she had what it takes, when in reality I think Toph was scared of Lin losing herself in the job like she herself had begun to, and eventually coming up on something she couldn't change or fix and making the same mistakes she had.

(I think Toph and Lin have communication issues largely because they are both headstrong and willful, but where Toph thought she was giving her daughters the room they would need to make their own way, what Lin desperately craved was direction and she felt like that was something her mother simply couldn't understand.)

Suyin, on the other hand, fell in with a bad crowd like in canon. I think that what she desperately needed was attention, similar to Lin craving direction, and Toph was trying so hard not to be her own parents that she went a little too far in the other direction and Suyin began to feel like it didn't matter what she did, her mom wouldn't care, or get angry, or discipline her, or anything. Lin and Suyin butted heads a lot growing up, too, especially after Sokka's death, because Lin tried to rein in her sister's behavior and this was met with resistance and derision because Suyin felt like Lin was trying to be both mom and dad and she was neither but her big sister would never admit to being just as lost as she was and it made her furious.

So when Suyin is sixteen, and Lin is twenty-two and new to the force, The Big Rift happens. Lin catches Suyin and her gang, tries to apprehend her, gets a scar on her face in the ensuing conflict. But instead of abusing her power and sending her problem child off to her mother before fucking off to the swamp to avoid the consequences of her actions, Toph tries to actually fix things. Suyin cools her heels in prison for a while, because she was paralyzed by guilt at the time when she hurt her sister (a few inches lower and she could have slit her throat), and was still there when Lin's backup arrived.

Uhhhhhhhhhhh..... I'm so sorry I rambled for so long, BUT THE UPSHOT IS: I think Suyin learned a bit about culpability and taking responsibility for her own actions, Toph realized that her daughters had different needs than she did at their age (and I think a lot of the problem was that grief clouded her own ability to connect with her daughters, and in trying to not be her own parents she lost sight of how to be the parent her own daughters needed), and Lin, I think, had to realize that she had never fully processed the loss of not one but two fathers and had turned to her job in order to avoid actually confronting the grief that had overshadowed her childhood.

However, she did not forgive Suyin, at least not right away--and she wasn't forced or expected to. Suyin understood that she crossed a serious line, she took her lumps and did her time, and no one shamed Lin for her anger. I think, as a result, she had less reason to hold onto that bitterness, and perhaps by the time the story actually begins, she and Suyin are on much better terms, though I haven't worked it out exactly yet.

UHHH yeah I went on for days lmao. All of this is subject to change, too, depending on the needs of the story whenever I get around to actually writing it all down, BUT these are my initial thoughts, at least.

#atla #lin beifong #toph beifong #suyin beifong #tokka #lok rewrite #lok rewrite notes #precious-metal-girl #asked

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harpersplay · 3 years ago

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Genuine non-troll white woman here - you wrote "So I already knew that Good Girls was a white feminism phantasmagoria...But, jesus fucking christ, y'all are just showing your true colours lately. The way you talk about a MOC in relation to a white woman is disgusting." Not asking you to call out specific people or posts or start any kind of flame war but what would be a general example of what you are talking about? I follow a good chunk of people and I'm not seeing this maybe b/c I'm not following the same people, maybe out of willful blindness, maybe I'm not recognizing it - again, b/c of ignorance, etc. Just trying to understand what you mean - and not do it obviously, if I am doing it.

I apologise for taking a longish time to answer this. Honestly, I wasn't sure I wanted to get into it. Anyway, I'd first like to say that this is all my opinion. What bothers me might not bother someone else. BIPOC are not a monolith. Even subsections aren't. Not all Mexican trans men are a monolith. Neither are all Japanese lesbians. You get the idea. And that's not even including people like Ben Carson or Caitlyn Jenner—people who support and work for policies that actively harm the marginalised group of which they are a part. Secondly, I know this isn't your intention, but asking POC to tell you what is ok to do and what is not is a slippery slope to "my [blank] friend said this was ok." Finally, the fandom is quite small so it is pretty hard to give general examples. I don't know if it's more trouble to quote specific posts or not, because some will think it is about them anyway. Anything I'm going to mention I've seen on Tumblr, Instagram, Reddit and/or Twitter. But there are definitely popular Tumblr blogs that all push the same narrative. Oh, and one last thing, I haven't seen any of what I'm referring to from people I follow.

Ok, let's go. For a very long time, mainly WOC have pointed out the racial problems within the show and the extremely dismissive attitude about those problems from mainly white women. And while these same women have written thousands (even tens of thousands) or words about Beth (it's always Beth) and her struggles and the amazingness of such a complex female character (ymmv), they brush aside commentary about racism as either nitpicking, not understanding the show is about the 3 women (tell that to all the white men with fleshed-out storylines), or misogyny. The last is especially hostile because they are often talking over Black women and misogynoir is a very real fucking thing that couples the fun of being hated for being a woman with the delight of good old-fashioned racism. They espouse the idea that people having a problem with Beth are all covert & overt misogynists. But talk out the other side of their mouths that they can't possibly be racist even when they support racism in the show or ignore concerns brought up by fans of colour. And that is just the absolute height of hypocrisy. Because by the former they acknowledge that people in a marginalised group (women) can still be anti- that group (a phenomenon with which I agree). But in the latter, suddenly they don't understand that concept.

Specific to the post you are responding to, fans that purport to like Brio write about the relationship in ways that reveal how much of their enjoyment comes from Rio being inferior to Beth. It's all about what he can do for her, how he acts against his best interests for her, how he literally denies himself sexual pleasure for her. Those are all meant to show how in love he is with her. But the show never bothers to tell us why. And, no, this is not because the show is so deep. Other romantic relationships they have scenes that are explicit about the characters' feelings. But Rio, after being shot, after being betrayed, after being mocked, is just so in love with Beth....because. (MYSTERIOUS!) And the Beth stans are more than fine with this because they think everyone should be as obsessed with Beth as they are. But it's bad storytelling. And, in this particular case, it gets into very dicey racist tropes. A white women treating her Latino lover like an afterthought is not the same as a white women treating her white lover like an afterthought. It just isn't. And if some of these fans are as smart as they pretend to be, they know that. They just don't care. Much like the showrunners.

There was so much talk defending the drawn-out Boland marriage because why can't we understand how hard it is for Beth—who is, at various times, claimed to be emotionally abused by Dean or staying with him because it is safe and comfortable—and we don't appreciate how difficult it is for her (I may be one of the few divorced people talking about this show on Tumblr, so this has always made me laugh). Yet there was nothing but glee when Rio flipped on his brousin (who was written as both abusive and safe) for Beth. Where was the empathy for Rio and how hard it was for him? Especially because, unlike Beth, he didn't even have one parent? Hadn't the Beth stans used her very tragical history™️ to explain away her every shitty act? idk, not having any parents and going to jail (as a minor?) and being betrayed by your family seems pretty tragic. But I didn't see them all of a sudden excusing Rio's bad behaviour. Because, feminism or something?

What about Beth's feelings? Last season she spent trying to have him killed. This season she spent looking annoyed by him. Throughout both she talked down to him in a specific white woman way that every BIPOC has experienced, even if some of them are cool with it. There were multiple opportunites for Beth to talk about her feelings with Ruby and/or Annie, but the writers made the deliberate choice to always make it about sex (and god, the immature way they had these three grown women talk was fucking obnoxious). She spent the last 2 seasons also wanting him out of her life to the point that a majority of her actions in S4 were motivated by getting to Nevada with her husband and kids. Beth doesn't care about Rio but Rio needs to put Beth above everything because he's just so in love like he's never been before (which is blatant Marcus & Rhea erasure). And anyone who doesn't think Beth would have just as happily been sitting on that bench plotting how to "run the city" (hahahahaha!) with Nick if the situation worked out differently hasn't been paying attention.

So, what do we have? A white woman who is constantly excused (by the loudest portion of the fandom) for all her ill treatment to her Black BFF & her Black husband, her Asian coworker, her Latina "friend," and Rio (among others) because her life is hard and who is not required to even be nice to her supposed "endgame". And a MOC who is expected to accept being treated poorly by the white woman because he loves her.

And, a last thing, this attitude grossly crossed over into talk about real people when the fans—who self-righteously claimed to be above anon sources or talking about the actors—latched on to the narrative and enjoyed blaming the MOC actor for the cancellation of the show, even dragging his insignificant (in terms of influence) Black wife into it. All while conveniently ignoring that the creator/showrunner is a white woman. The star & producer is a white woman. The people making the decisions at NBCU & Netflix were white women. All white women with so much more power than the Latino actor.

Shit, did I answer your question? I know this is a lot. But I could honestly make mulitple posts on each issue I touched on here. Basically, white people ain't slick, be they content creators or fans. We see how & what y'all talk about. We see that Rio not having a last name is not a big deal to you and we know why that is. So we're fucking tired. And we're over a show that had so much potential crapping all over their POC characters to prop up a white woman. And we're repulsed by the white women in the fandom who use their tears to seem oppressed and who toss around the word misogynist because POC dare call a Karen a Karen.

#nbc good girls #good girls nbc #racism in the text #racism in fandom #fragile whiteness #white feminism #what fandom chooses to talk about #and what it chooses to ignore #anon asks

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lassieposting · 4 years ago

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Bit late and random but it's the anon you leave food out for here to give away I am also bi and I think exactly the same as you about bi val pretty much, every time Derek offers me representation my reaction is to slowly, hesitantly take it and say "thaaaaaaaaanks..." while rolling my eyes, in much the same way one accepts their least favourite flavour of sweet from an annoyingly enthusiastic uncle-type-individual. Ironically I feel I had more in common with her before the bi shit started up.

What I find really amusing is that Landy actually did reasonably well at representation when (and only when) he wasn’t trying.

Oh god, this got long, anon, my ass rambled.

tldr; I'm glad actual bi people dislike bi val (or how Laundry handled bi val) as much as me, this will probably offend at least one person but i don't really care, Dirty Laundry wrote better rep when he didn't mean to write rep at all, and if he ever starts trying to "represent" groups I'm part of I'll take him out back like a dying horse and shoot him.

Like, yes. He had stupid and potentially offensive shit - I say potentially because what offends one member of a group won’t necessarily offend all of them. His attitude to mentally ill people is, frankly, disgusting. We’ve had “Skulduggery can’t be abused, he doesn’t have feelings”. We’ve had “eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY”. We had Ping, who seemed to be pretty much universally offensive. And that's what's always going to happen when a straight, cis, white, wealthy, male author tries to write marginalised groups he doesn't know shit about, because inevitably he's going to fall back on stereotypes.

But we also had:

SEXUALITY REP: Phase One's nonstraight characters were treated like the straight ones, and like, isn't that the whole point? There was no need for a massive Coming Out Story TM to grab for those sweet sweet Woke Points, because sexuality isn't supposed to be important to mages. I never understood why Val needed that whole Coming Out Panic storyline. Like...Des and Melissa are ridiculously supportive, encouraging, loving parents. They accepted you dating a ~19 year old when you were ~16. They accepted you revealing you could do fucking magic and that you'd been lying to them for like seven years. They took your undead buddy in stride and the most pressing question your dad had was whether magic toilets exist. There is zero reason to think that "I'm bisexual" is gonna be the thing that makes them flip and throw you into the streets in disgrace, Valkyrie. Come on.

Tanith had girlfriends and it was just mentioned casually, because it's normal.

China had massive UST with Eliza. That was an opportunity right there to not only include a f/f relationship, but also to bring back one of the few precious surviving characters from Phase One, using characters and a relationship that already had several books' worth of setup and tension and interest from fans.

The Monster Hunters have a casual conversation about which one of the Dead Men they'd date.

Ghastly has a conversation with Fletcher about the pain he's been through being in love. He never uses any pronouns.

It was confirmed at one point re: the Dead Men that at this point, after 300-odd years, everyone's been with everyone else at some point.

Thrasher is gay, and while Scapegrace's...everything...is treated as a joke/comedic relief, Thrasher's love for him isn't. He's completely devoted to Scapegrace, and that in itself is not played for laughs, even though the rest of the scene usually is. Thrasher's description of their first meeting is essentially a love-at-first-sight situation for him.

"ABNORMAL" RELATIONSHIP REP: Age gap relationships are normal for mages. Off the top of my head, using only canon, canon-implied or almost-canon ships:

Ghastly/Tanith (~350 year age difference)

Tanith/Sanguine (~250+ year age difference)

Tanith/Saracen (~350 year age difference)

Caisson/Solace (~250 year age difference)

China/Gordon (~400 year age difference)

Kierre/Temper (~500+ year age difference)

If you include fan ships, there's also things like Mevolent/Serpine or my Mevolent/Vile, which are both ~600 year minimum age gaps based on the timeline, or Valdug (and its variations) which is ~400 years.

Now, whether you consider this kind of rep positive or negative is up to you, but it’s there.

MENTAL ILLNESS REP: more like "Which characters in this series don't have a mental illness or a personality disorder?" I have some of these issues, but not all of them, so this is just how I read it, but:

ADHD: Skulduggery

Dissociative Identity Disorder: Skulduggery & Vile

Dissociation: Skulduggery again, most notably in DD and DB

Schizophrenia (or similar): Valkyrie & Darquesse, Valkyrie "seeing" Darquesse's ghost thing in Phase Two

Impostor Syndrome: Reflectionie

Autism: Clarabelle

Trauma/PTSD/CPTSD: Skulduggery, Valkyrie, China, Ghastly, Erskine...pretty much everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. People struggling with trauma are spoilt for choice of characters to see themselves in.

TRAUMA REP: This series is a trauma conga line, but everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. I see little bits of myself in more than one Phase One character.

Childhood Abuse (of varying degrees & types): Skulduggery, Carol & Crystal, Omen, Fletcher, Ghastly, China, Bliss, Sanguine...

Estranged Family: Skulduggery abandoning his crest, Fergus & Gordon, China & Bliss

Bad Romantic Relationship: Skulduggery is also very clearly an abuse victim. He’s got a solid history of romantic attachments to women who manipulate, use and gaslight him for their own agendas. There's a whole paragraph in SPX about how Abyssinia broke him down, isolated him from his friends and preyed on his desperate need to be loved, all classic abuse tactics.

And I’m personally a huge fan of this backstory for two reasons:

1) Society likes a plucky victim in media. The "My suffering made me stronger" type of victim. And it's not always like that in real life. Not all survivors come out of their abuse stronger or kinder or more understanding. Some of us come out cold and fucked up. Some of us end up as emotionally stunted, bloodied-nails-and-bared-teeth survivors, broken in ways that can't be fixed and sustained by enough rage to power a small sun. But society doesn't like to tell the story of that kind of survivor, because we're not usually a likeable protagonist. When we're shown in media, we're usually the sympathetic villain, or maybe the antihero. But Skug is someone who's done awful things and lost pretty much all his faith in humanity and been burned more times than he can count, and he still makes the conscious choice to try and be the good guy when he could so easily go Evil Supervillain on the world, and I don't know about any of y'all, but I've modelled myself on him in that. I've made the choice to do something good when all I really want to do is just become a horrible, shrivelled ball of nastiness and revenge. And that's because I saw him do it and realised that I could do that too.

Skug is an incredibly capable, strong, masculine Man's Man. He gets in fights all the time, and he usually wins. He's military, an industry that's Really Bad for stigmatizing weakness and mental illness, and he's right up at the top of the hierarchy. Almost everyone is afraid of him. He's a straight up cold-blooded killer. Skulduggery Pleasant is precisely the type of person who's not normally portrayed as a victim of anything. Nothing about him screams "victim" at all. But his abuse history is insidious. He's so conditioned to respond in a certain way to abuse from the women in his life, probably from a very young age, that despite all that strength and capability and stubbornness and ego, he just goes along with it. And it's an established pattern going back hundreds of years. He keeps going back to China, even though he knows she's bad for him and his friends keep telling him to stay away from her. Abyssinia latched onto him when he was traumatized and vulnerable and weaponized it against him to make him easier to control - and when she reappears, hundreds of years later, she jumps straight back into using, tmanipulating and gaslighting him and not only does he let her, he doesn't even seem to realise that behaviour is abusive. He thinks it's normal! That's how he's always been treated by his long-term girlfriends, with the notable exception of Wifey. Even when Val is being fucking nasty to him in the first couple books of Phase Two, sniping and lying and blaming him for everything under the sun, he just takes it. There's no attempt to tell her she's being unreasonable, no telling her to fuck right off and give her head a wobble, no defending himself even when she's bitching over something that isn't even his doing. And this is a man who has an absolutely gleaming steel spine the rest of the time; Skug has no problem saying no to anybody else, but he can't get past the way he's been taught to treat the important ladies in his life. Skug is a walking reminder that anyone can be a victim of abuse, even the ones who seem least likely to be susceptible.

GENDER REP: This one is the most iffy out of the bunch and definitely was not done very well in the eyes of the people who matter most, but I'll include it anyway because it mattered to some.

So there's Nye, who's...agender? Genderless? And uses "it" pronouns? Nye was generally considered horrible rep because it's also a war criminal and experiments on people and I've seen people say "Well I don't want to be seen like that" but? It's still possible to be a war criminal and also genderless. I never saw the two things as being related or relevant to each other.

There's also Mantis, who's in exactly the same gender/pronouns boat as Nye and always seems to be forgotten about, which sucks because Mantis is a war hero. It fought for the Sanctuary during the War and they never lost a battle when it was in command. It's called out of retirement to fight for the Supreme Council in LSODM, ends up fighting alongside Skulduggery during the Battle of Roarhaven, and ultimately dies attempting a very brave, very risky strategy. Mantis is, unreservedly, one of the good guys. It was also my introduction to sentient beings using "it" pronouns, and did it in a way that felt natural, so when I met my first person online who used "it" pronouns and hated to be referred to as he/she, it was...weird, but not as weird as it would otherwise have been, because I was like, "Oh yeah, like the Crenga. Okay."

And then there's the Scapegrace sex change plotline, which...I might have an unpopular opinion on this one. From what I’ve seen, trans people don’t seem to think was handled well or with any sensitivity at all. I’m not trans, so if the trans community says he was being offensive to them, I’m not going to claim otherwise. But...I first read the Scapegrace plotline as a young teenager in a tiny rural school with zero diversity, going through a period of being deeply confused about my own gender identity. He was more or less my first introduction to the idea that genitals =/= gender. I was relieved, at that point in my life, to read someone having a lot of the same thoughts I was having about being in the wrong body. So while it may have been badly done and yeah, the series would probably have been better without it, it did make at least one kid suspecting she might not be cis go “Huh! So there are other people who feel like this.”

Thrasher is also implied to be legitimately trans/gender-questioning, and that's not played for laughs either.

So? Phase One, while it absolutely had faults and issues and things that were just "Oh god why", was actually full of rep, at least compared to the other series that I read as a child/teen. But? As soon as Dirty Laundry started trying to be woke? He fucking sucks ass at it. Aside from confirming Phase One's hints that Skug has a background of abusive relationships, every single attempt at shoehorning rep into Phase Two is Bad.

The painfully OOC, forced, badly-written awkwardness of Val suddenly being rabidly horny for women out of fucking nowhere. The stilted, forced cringiness between her and any of the women she's flirted with - contrast that with Sorrowscorn's interactions, full of natural chemistry that had us all like 👀 I mean, I never shipped Val/Melancholia, but I could always see why people did - they had miles more chemistry than Val/anyone in Phase Two.

The fucking mess that is v*litsa, because if someone says "I'm really not interested in friendships/relationships right now", clearly the route to true love is to bulldoze their boundaries and forcibly insert yourself into their life and proceed to treat them like a delicate soft uwu flower, completely ignoring the horrible things they've done, while gleefully damning their best friend as an irredeemable monster for the exact same things, which is. You know. Gonna affect your so-called love's self-confidence and self-esteem because she knows she's no different to him. Y'all know I love an angsty ship, an unhealthy ship, a ship with fucked power dynamics, but I literally cannot roll my eyes any further back in my head at this shit. I never read Demon Road, but from what I've heard from friends who did, it does seem like every time Laundry tries to write an f/f ship, he comes up with a cringey abusive/manipulative caricature and tries to call it rep, and he needs to Stop.

Val's Mental IllnessTM arc. It's funny how he wrote Skulduggery as a wonderfully complex character with deep-rooted psychological damage and long-lasting trauma, but believes he wrote a character with "no feelings" - but when he tries to delve into the damage the world of magic has done to Val, he turned her into a weak, whiny drug addict who treats everyone around her like garbage and is so selfish and dislikeable that I? Honestly can't even reconcile Phase Two val with Phase One val. They're two completely different people. He's shown on Twitter that he doesn't have any respect for mentally ill people, and it shows. Other mentally ill people might see it differently, but the whole thing just makes me go "yikes".

Never, who has no personality outside of being genderfluid, and whose pronouns make no sense. I'm sorry, I have never met an nb person who insists that you change from male to female pronouns multiple times in a sentence, every time you refer to them. It's confusing as fuck. Now I have been told that Never has apparently received some character development in the last couple books, and if so, fair play, but I quit reading after Midnight, and Never and the rest of the personality-less new characters introduced in Phase Two who just seemed to be 2D Stereotypes to snag Woke Points were a big part of why, so. Development too late, I'm afraid.

(Now, if anyone is looking for a well-written genderfluid character, I recommend the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb. I have a lot of issues with her as a writer, and unfortunately I hate her POV character which puts me off the series as a whole, but she wrote the Fool/Amber/Lord Golden and their gender identity/approach to sexuality with so much more respect and realism. That is the kind of rep nb people should be getting: 3D, complex, realistic characters whose gender is only a tiny fragment of their personality, not the be-all-and-end-all of their existence. You know. Like cis people get. Nobody wants to be represented by a 2D cardboard cutout stereotype.)

Anyway idk how much sense this makes it just really amuses me that Laundry would include all this rep completely unintentionally and then go on Twitter and remind us all that actually he's a massive asshole via insensitive/offensive tweets about the groups he'd actually done a fair job of including (i.e. Skulduggery has no feelings, mentally ill people should find another series to read, the bullshit about Val being "heteromantic bisexual" on Twitter and then spouting all the "the woman she loved uwu" shit in the books (proving he has no idea what he's talking about), eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY. He can only write half-decent rep when he's not trying and he inevitably outs himself as having a really shitty attitude towards those people anyway, proving that ultimately it's all either unintentional rep or performative wokeness.

#skulduggery pleasant #sp meta #derek landy hate blog #Anon #fire message #anti valitsa #anti val #anti phase two tbh #phase two fans will not enjoy this post

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em-neko · 4 years ago

Text

KISSED BY THE BADDEST BIDDER MAIN ROUTE REVIEW

hey! so i just finished watching kaylaslovely on youtube’s review of the main five (+ rhion) bidders routes and so i thought i would make my own review, because i felt like it. so here you go!

i will be reviewing all nine main routes, or main stories. each story will be rated using these five categories: plot, pace, romance, mc (since she’s different in every story) and love interest. at the end, i’ll give the story its final rating and i’ll let you know whether i recommend it or not.

i will try not to include any spoilers, but just in case, consider this your spoiler warning!

remember, these are my personal opinions.

summary: you are a maid at a hotel called the tres spade hotel, owned by the ichinomiya group. one day, you get dragged into the ivc (an exclusive party for the elite, held inside the hotel) and you basically get lost. while you’re wandering around the area, you enter a storage room where a lot of expensive items are held. little did you know, those items belonged to a blackmarket auction, the ivc was only a cover for said auction. being the clumsy queen that you are, you manage to bump into the statue of venus and knock it over. when the men responsible for the expensive items find you, they throw you into a giant birdcage and put you up for auction instead of the statue.

from here, you can pick one of the main five love interest (eisuke, soryu, mitsunari, mamoru and ota) to buy you. the other love interest (except for rhion) only appear in the second/third season, they purchase you from eisuke (presuming eisuke bought you but you never fell in love). rhion is part of an “au”, but his story technically takes place in season one. does that make sense? okay, perfect. now, on to the review!

EISUKE ICHINOMIYA: THE ARROGANT CEO

plot: 8/10, the plot is a cliche and fairly overused trope... but i love it. it’s well executed and feels unique and original, even though the core of the plot really isn’t.

pace: 8/10, in my opinion, i think the pace was very good. it wasn’t too slow or too fast (although it leaned on the slower side) and i feel like mc fell in love with eisuke at an appropriate time in the story. the ending felt slightly rushed but i feel like that’s a common theme with love 365 stories.

romance: 7/10, not as romantic as other routes (i mean, it’s eisuke we’re talking about), especially at the beginning, but there were moments that made me smile.

mc: 6/10, she’s definitely a bit of a pushover in this route. i wish she stood up to eisuke more, i wish she was sassier, it would’ve made the story sooo much funnier!

love interest: 7/10, eisuke’s kind of a jerk in this story, but hey at least he’s entertaining? (he has his cute moments tho)

final score: 72% (b-)

recommendation: sure? to be honest, it was pretty okay, a little boring compared to the other routes but for the low low price of literally 0$ (his main route is free), it’s not bad.

SORYU OH: THE COLD MOBSTER

plot: 9/10, i really liked his plot! i’ll admit, i’m not a fan of gang related stories, in fact, i usually hate them, but soryu’s story genuinely surprised me! i especially loved the fact that mc made a female friend along the way, usually other females in stories are seen as rivals (as in eisuke’s case), but it wasn’t the case here and that made me really happy. we support women in his household <3

pace: 7/10, the ending was really rushed in my opinion, like way more rushed than the usual rushed love 365 ending. when it ended i was like, “are you serious?” it just felt abrupt. the rest was fine tho.

romance: 8/10, the romance was subtle (due to soryu’s cold and mysterious demeanor), but you could definitely feel it. there was sooo much chemistry between the characters, so it felt really romantic.

mc: 8/10, she’s a little boring, but at least she’s relatable, like her actions/choices make sense in this story.

love interest: 9/10, c’mon, who doesn’t love soryu? there’s a reason why the whole fandom simps for this man. he’s the perfect mix of cold and innocent, and his reaction to regular people things (like going to the supermarket) is hilarious! he’s really sweet too and you can tell that he really cares for mc.

final score: 82% (a-)

recommendation: yes! even if you don’t like gang related stories, i’d still give his route a chance.

MITSUNARI BABA: THE WOMANIZING THIEF

plot: 9/10, i really loved the plot. it’s basically a romcom with action and criminal activity, it’s gold.

pace: 8/10, there were some parts that felt rushed, but overall i think the pace was fine.

romance: 10/10, the most romantic story of them all (i don’t expect any less from baba). their interactions are so cute and i loved watching them get closer and more comfortable with each other.

mc: 8/10, even though she’s kind of dumb, it works because this story is more comedic, her naivety and trusting nature helped the plot advance rather than disrupting it. she’s also really sassy in this story, i loved watching her shoot down baba!

love interest: 9/10, i love baba! i love the womanizer character trope, i know it’s an unpopular opinion but i still love it. he’s actually a total dork and he has the best lines, i smiled throughout the whole story!

final score: 88% (a)

recommendation: it’s one of my favorite main stories, so i definitely recommend it! however, if you don’t like romcoms or womanizers, you’ll probably hate this story lol

MAMORU KISHI: THE SLACKER DETECTIVE

plot: 8/10, his plot is intense. it’s action packed, there’s twists and turns and it definitely kept me on my toes. however, it is a little hard to keep up with at times, i definitely had moments where i got lost.

pace: 8/10, like mitsunari’s story, the pace was a little inconsistent, there were times when scenes felt rushed, idk if it was on purpose because it was a more “action-y” story, but even some of the “romantic” moments felt rushed.. which was a shame because there weren’t many.

romance: 7/10, it wasn’t very romantic, honestly. they had their cute moments, but they were rare. they have good chemistry, like the best friends you hardcore ship, but there just wasn’t much actual romance. i would compare their relationship to judy and nick in zootopia, like friends but a little more.

mc: 5/10, the mc actually bites back in this story, which is refreshing. however, she nags mamoru a lot, and i got sick of it really fast, to the point where i’d roll my eyes whenever she opened her mouth towards the end of the story. she acts like mamoru is a child incapable of taking care of himself, yet she gets angry when he calls her “kid” or treats her like one? wtf? ALSO, one third of the story is her being jealous of a dead person, which is literally so unreasonable and illogical. i could rant about her all day i swear.

love interest: 9/10, mamoru is so relatable, it’s not even funny. i love the way he speaks and i love the way he reacts in situations. he acts like he doesn’t care, but you know damn well the man cares more about mc than anyone else. he’s also surprisingly patient (which, few bidders are), as i said, the mc is really immature in this story, and even tho he acts annoyed, he never actually gets angry at her. there’s something really cozy about him.

final score: 74% (b)

recommendation: if you like action packed stories, i would recommend this story! with that being said, the mc really ruined it for me.

OTA KISAKI: THE DECEPTIVE ARTIST

plot: 5/10, it was too predictable. literally three chapters in i was like, “oh, i see where this is going” and sadly i was right! it was really dramatic, which i actually enjoyed, but the overly predictable plot ruined it for me.

pace: 7/10, the pace was fine, however i feel like mc realized she was in love with ota at the wrong time. i wished they would’ve picked a different moment (maybe later) in the story to make her realize she’s in love with him, or just change the scene completely. because it was like one moment she just saw him as her buyer and at the snap of a finger she’s in love with him, like what?

romance: 5/10, there was literally one romantic scene in the whole story. there were some other cute moments but they were completely overshadowed by ota’s attitude. also, the whole dog fetish really turned me off, especially because the mc was clearly uncomfortable with it.

mc: 7/10, i feel bad for her. she’s really submissive and shy in this story, but like it makes sense (i would act the same as her tbh, i’d be too weirded out to give any sass), so she gets a pass.

love interest: 4/10, ota is so unlikeable in the first season omg i’d almost forgotten how much i used to hate him. however, he becomes really sweet after season 3, you just have to suffer through the first seasons lmao

final score: 56% (d)

recommendation: i really like ota but that story was not it. i wouldn’t waste my coins, honestly. if you really wanna read ota, read one of his substories or any story after season 3, don’t bother with his main route. however, his cg’s were one of the prettiest, so hooray?

SHUICHI HISHIKURA: THE ALOOF POLITICIAN

plot: 8/10, i liked this plot. it felt more serious than the other stories, but that wasn’t a bad thing.

pace: 7/10, same problem as soryu’s story, the last chapters were hella rushed and it made the falling action pretty confusing.

romance: 7/10, it wasn’t very “romantic”, but there were definitely scenes were you could really feel the attraction between the two. i find they compliment each other well.

mc: 8/10, this story was not meant to be a comedy, but the mc made it one. she’s so stupid that it’s actually hilarious, i honestly couldn’t stop laughing at her cluelessness. usually i’d find stupidity annoying, but in this story, i loved it. it made the heavy storyline easier to digest.

love interest: 9/10, shuichi’s a vengeful bitch, which makes his soft moments that much cuter. i like how he has his quirks, and how he has a professional stoic side as well as a soft caring side.

final score: 78% (b+)

recommendation: yeah, for sure. however, if you don’t enjoy the stoic stern hard-to-read type, you might not enjoy this story.

HIKARU AIHARA: THE MYSTERIOUS HITMAN

plot: 9/10, i really enjoyed this plot. it was like a romcom mixed with a dark-ish drama, it was really unique.

pace: 8/10, the pace of the story was good, however i felt like there was a bit of repetition in the story, in scenes and in dialogue.

romance: 7/10, i absolutely love hikaru and mc’s bantering! i think they’re so cute and it’s just really funny to read. it’s subtlety romantic and you can definitely tell that they like each other. with that being said, hikaru’s treatment of mc at the beginning of the story really ticked me off.

mc: 9/10, okay, she had her annoying moments like she always does, but the mc is so funny in this story! she reminds me of the mc from our private homeroom. i really liked her.

love interest: 9/10, here’s the thing, if you don’t like tsundere’s... you’ll fucking hate hikaru, because he’s a tsundere to the max. i love tsundere’s sooo, yeah i loved him hihi. he’s fucking adorable and his dishonesty towards his feelings is really cute. he’s also a sad boy, which made me have a soft spot for him.

final score: 84% (a-)

recommendation: honestly, i did not enjoy this story the first time i read it. i think it was because i didn’t understand hikaru’s sense of humor at the beginning, so i thought he was just a dick and mc was an idiot for liking him, but when i reread it after reading a couple of hikaru’s substories, i actually liked it. so, if you like tsundere’s i’d definitely recommend this story, if not, steer clear.

LUKE FOSTER: THE GOOD DOCTOR

plot: 9/10, i liked it! it felt a lot sadder/darker than the other plots, but it wasn’t overly depressing. there were lighthearted moments throughout and i like how luke gave mc a job instead of using her for personal gain or pushing her around all day. it was also surprisingly intense, with a few steamier scenes here and there.

pace: 8/10, the pace was pretty good, but like hikaru’s route there were scenes that made me go “i feel like i’ve read this before...” there was a rhythm to the story, or at least that’s what it felt like.

romance: 8/10, this story was definitely more intense than romantic. they still had their cute moments though, especially towards the end.

mc: 6/10, the mc is so nosy, impatient and short tempered in this story omg. she’s so quick to judgement and she has no sympathy towards luke for like the first 11 episodes of the story which really bothered me. also, she didn’t seem to understand luke’s way of showing affection and it got a little frustrating. she’s just exceptionally bad at reading people.

love interest: 8/10. if you love sad sweet boys who are surprisingly hot, you’ll love him. his collarbone obsession might weird some people out, but i found it hilarious and it was the perfect way to balance such a sad story.

final score: 78% (b+)

recommendation: if you like sad yet cute stories, i think you’ll really like this one.

RHION HATTER: THE MAD AUCTIONEER

plot: 10/10, his plot is amazing! it’s so adorable, innocent and unique, all while somehow managing to make me a little emo. rhion’s also the only bidder (besides luke) who didn’t use mc for personal gain, he actually bought her for some sort of companionship which was really refreshing (wow, the bar is set low yikes).

pace: 9/10, the pace was really great, it’s a slow burn too, which i love, but the last couple of episodes felt a little rushed.

romance: 10/10, it’s probably as (or maybe even more) romantic than baba’s story. there are so many cute moments, even when mc and rhion don’t really know each other yet. the romance is really sweet and pure, but it feels so real.

mc: 9/10, i love how she interacts with rhion! she’s relatable in this story and her actions are sensible, she has a mind of her own and she isn’t afraid to speak it.

love interest: 9/10, it’s rhion. he’s so precious! his shy and sweet nature is such a nice change from the other bidders and i really love how he slowly opens up to mc. also i think his alter ego of the mad hatter is really cool!

final score: 94% (a+)

recommendation: it’s my favorite story on the app for a reason. i definitely recommend it, even if you’re more into the sexy stories, i still think you should give rhion’s main route a chance! i made my friend who isn’t even into otome games play it and she really liked it.

FINAL RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

i’ll admit, trying to look past the human trafficking bs was really difficult at first, but if you can manage to turn a blind eye to it and try to remember that it’s just a video game and everything’s fictional, it’s pretty good. the love interests are great, there’s some action, there’s a some drama and there’s a lot of humor. the sub stories are really good too!

#kbtbb #kissed by the baddest bidder #voltage inc #otome game #love 365 #love 365: find your story #kbtbb review #otome review #nina’s words

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historic-old-guard-lover · 4 years ago

Note

Do you have any headcanon on the cast’s sexuality ? ( I really like the demisexual Yusuf one )

I've been meaning to get around to this, so thanks for asking! Its important to keep in mind that Nile (and maybe Booker) is the only member who doesn't predate modern identity terms. Consider that the obligatory most-historians-frown-at-anachronistic-labeling plug, though my response is (as I point out here a little bit) that this just seems to serve to make queer history more difficult and it can be done respectfully.

TL;DR: Lykon as aro-spec bi/pan-romantic, Andy as chaotic bi/pan-sexual, Quynh as bi/pan with a slight femme-aligned preference, Yusuf as demi-sexual bi/pan-romantic, Nicolo as homosexual/gay, Booker as the token heterosexual, and Nile as queer. Scroll to the bottom for a free (trans)gender headcannon that no one asked for but that I’m handing out for free.

I personally headcannon that the oldest members are both too old for rigid social sexual norms and too old to give a damn otherwise. We know canonically in both the film and the comics that Andy is openly attracted to and having sex with multiple genders, so you can pry bi/pan Andy from my cold, dead hands. I put Lykon and Quynh in the same never-monosexual category as well. I have the totally unsupported concept of an aro-spec (bi/pan-sexual) Lykon mostly because I don't want his life traveling with two love-sick warrior women to be made worse by his #forever alone status he seems to get. It’s a choice and he’s not into romance. I also cannon Quynh to have a slight femme-aligned preference to Andy's true-chaotic-neutral bisexual energy. Yes, it's for angst purposes as most things in my life are. And it fits in with the Special Bonus Gender Headcannon at the bottom of this post. Oh, and I think that they all have poly-amorous inclinations because monogamy is overrated. Guilt and shame around sex and relationships are just not in their vocabularies.

Our Immortal Husbands are from a time where homophobic attitudes are starting to become a thing, so I don’t hand them the bi/pan-by-default card that I do for the older members’ attractions. I too like the idea of a demisexual bi/pan-romantic Yusuf, though I am totally open to him being homo-romantic as well. My issue is that I find it unlikely that a merchant in his 30s would not have already married a woman, especially if he is the first-born son or his family is particularly wealthy. There are definitely story lines where that doesn’t happen, though they require a bit more careful planning and Yusuf having nerves of steel. I’m all for the angst of a political marriage, but I worry about how the spouse might get depicted if people go for a totally homo-romantic Yusuf and she deserves more than his contempt. I assume that Yusuf values honor/righteousness (he ends up fighting in the siege of Jerusalem despite being from the Maghreb), so he would not be the kind of man to cheat on his wife even if he was not hetero-romantically inclined. They would build a relationship of mutual respect for certain.

I know I just said that homophobia is starting to become a thing, but the medieval church and knighthood was hella gay. I have absolutely zero qualms about cannoning Nicolo “that feral gay priest” di Genova as 100% certified homosexual. It’s up to any fanfic writers whether they make him internalize homophobia, but I will just point out again that monks having gay sex was a problem that the Catholic Church purposefully overlooked back then. Mix and match your angst to your own delight. Maybe he’s a tortured soul who joins the priesthood once he figures out that he could never marry/love a woman and then realizes that he’s not alone. Maybe he’s a quiet pining mess in the priesthood. Whatever route you take, please make him gay.

This brings us to Booker who grew up with good old-fashioned religion-induced homophobia. We know canonically that he married a woman and had multiple children, so I’m down for Booker as the token heterosexual of the group. I also like that it gives him the chance to reach full himbo potential and not realize he’s surrounded by three queer icons. Just imagine him thinking for decades that Andy is sad because she lost her “gal pal” Quynh and then at some point as he’s amassed details he starts realizing that they were Our Immortal Wives... It makes the Western erasure of female homosexual behavior into comedic gold.

And finally, the new kid on the immortal block. I like to think that Nile would strongly identify with the label queer and be uninterested in more specifically labeling her sexuality. Am I projecting? Maybe so, but it has value as a shared bonding experience with Andy. Also, a queer Nile brings history full circle, so to speak, from a time where sexuality labeling was unimportant to a time when people are starting to realize that it’s not always important to them. The heart-warming poetics of it all!

The Super Special Gender Headcannon That Lives in My Head Rent-Free: Transgender Andy

In a previous post, I discussed the existence of a third-gender/transgender shaman role in Scythian cultures called Enaree or Enarei ( ἐναρής ) which allowed individuals assigned male at birth (AMAB) to undergo possibly the earliest hormone replacement therapy (HRT) process. We know that the name “Andromache the Scythian” is weird for Andy because her supposed ~6,000 year old age predates the Scythian culture for a while. Consider, however, that an AMAB Andy chose to take the name of the Scythian culture because they helped her medically transition! Obviously she can find acceptance and support long before then (and I’d be mad if anyone tortured her for literally three thousand years without love and support), but I think that it would be a way for Andy to honor a people who helped her achieve something that she didn’t think was possible while simultaneously cleaning up a glaring cannon issue. It also makes the whole femme-preference bi/pan-sexual Quynh that much sweeter because Quynh would 200% see Andy as a woman regardless of whether she has access to medical transition.

#asks #lovely anon #the old guard #people asking for my opinions #and me oversharing #queer #bisexual #pansexual #aro-sepc #demisexual #homosexual #gay #heterosexual #the token straight friend #transgender #trans #historic #reference

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ryuichirou · 4 years ago

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Sorry if this is personal but is it tough to be LGBT in Russia/ produce LGBT content in Russia (I mean it’s the internet but still)

Oh, this is an interesting topic… I’ll answer both of these questions and start with the content.

While being LGBT isn’t illegal per-se, there are a lot of limitations that LGBT people meet here. When it comes to creating content, for example, there is the Gay propaganda law. You might’ve heard about this one, it basically means “you can’t produce any content that portrays LGBT in any way, because it’ll make our children turn gay and we don’t want that”. But the thing is, the wording in this law is so… convenient for the State, they can basically call anything an illegal propaganda if they want to. Technically what we’re doing over here is illegal too. If they’d want to call it illegal, that is.

This is the reason people who publish works that have LGBT-related content in them may have issues in the process. There are ways to avoid them, but it is still very hard to officially publish something that has any “iffy” content. Sometimes putting a “18+” label on the book/movie/tv-series/etc helps, sometimes selling said piece of media only on the internet helps, but still: there is always a possibility that a publisher might not be able to produce the product they want. Censorship is a thing, bans are a thing, all of this exists, but you never know whether you’ll be hit by it or not. Please keep in mind that Russia is also an extremely corrupted country.

If you’re just a content creator and post your stuff on the internet only, it’s usually ok. Homophobes exist, but they tend to exist somewhere else, not near fandom places. There are tons of artists from Russia who draw explicit stuff (and a lot of these people are LGBT), a lot of them print their merch and sell it on the geek art markets, and even though there were cases where a printing house refused to print someone’s slash illustration, it’s usually ok. But.

But but but. You still can be targeted and sued for the most ridiculous stuff. For example, you can read about Yulia Tsvetkova’s case, who was arrested for her body positive series of drawings + a drawing in support of LGBT-families under the “distribution of pornography” and “gay-propaganda” laws respectively. There are tons of drawings like these on the internet, but Yulia was specifically targeted because she is an activist who wasn’t quiet about her support of women and LGBT. As you can see, the “gay propaganda” law is a very convenient way to shut people up.

Another example that comes to mind is two gay guys who got married in a country that allows you to get married when you’re not a citizen (I think they did it in Denmark), and they tried making their marriage legal in Russia too because it doesn’t really contradict any law. They fled the country because they started getting threats and their passports (along with their marriage) were deemed invalid. They were also charged with a fee for “damaging their passports”.

Now our wonderful government, which loves cheating during its elections to the point where you get 146% total when the max is 100%, made this wonderful terrible election for changing the constitution. Their changes are a joke (not really funny tho) and its own topic, but one of the changes was that marriage is “a union between a man and a woman”. Now it says that in the constitution.

TL;DR: If they want to get you, they’ll find a way to get you. But if you’re just a rando who posts slashy smut on your twitter, they don’t care, at least not yet. They will use it against you if you start annoying the police. There are a lot of homophobes but the fandom spaces are usually relatively peaceful.

Personally, we’re lucky enough not to face any severe problems yet. We’re careful irl (people usually think we’re related lol) and only some of our friends know about us. We don’t show any affection to each other publicly. On the internet we’re surrounded by people who are friendly, and once again, people from the fandom spaces are usually more progressive than a regular Russian Pyotr or Oleg.

I, being an idiot that I am, used to draw tons of slash (nsfw too!) at classes right in front of my teachers while I was at the uni. And even though it definitely wasn’t very wise of me, no one ever approached me with “umm are those gays, are you gay too” question. The only ones that were interested by my drawings were two straight girls who read slash fanfiction. Maybe the rest of those who noticed were too shy :(

Katsu: I was always an idiot who likes to flex things as a teenager, so when Ryu and I started dating, I mentioned it in my school to some of my classmates. I’m pretty sure it started some nasty rumors, one guy was openly disgusted, but other than that, I haven’t heard anything from them and they never told teachers or parents, which could be consequences that I never considered. The only thing he said was “Are you a lesbian?” which wasn’t really offensive even though I’m not really a lesbian, but I was like... was that supposed to be an offensive word? Because it wasn’t. Right now I realise that I was lucky not to get beaten up lol I’m from a small city (not a town) and not the best district, but I guess nobody cared that much about this info even if they heard about it, plus people were/are usually afraid of me, so not even the worst boys who were obviously stronger (like that disgusted guy) touched me. I only mention it because I know for a fact that some of the people (like 2-3) were usually openly aggressive, it’s not like the worst class you can get in Russia where the only solution is to fucking suffer.

At the uni, I heard our group discussing lesbians, since students there were mostly girls by another disgusted individual, and I actually wanted to say to her something with a “Come at me bro” attitude (I tend to do that when I’m pissed off), but I just decided not to intervene, probably because these were the first couple of days in my first year. I still told one guy like a month later, he was rather cool with it. Anyway, as Ryu mentioned, there are places and people where you can mention it and get away with it, and where you better keep your mouth shut. Most of the country is the second option, but there’re for a fact a lot of nice and accepting people even out of the fandom. We don’t talk about our relationship for the most part because we don’t really need to, so here’s that. Sorry for being so talkative lol

#replies

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army-of-mai-lovers · 4 years ago

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~another Zuko redemption arc meta~

I’m reading this book for class called Women and Evil by Nel Noddings and the author’s already brought up some really interesting ideas. Basically, her thesis is that the tradition of white male philosophy has never looked at evil from the perspective of women, and when you look at evil from the perspective of women, lots of things that male philosophers take for granted become suspect.

I know what you’re thinking: “Arthur, this is all well and good, but this is your ATLA blog, and you promised me a Zuko meta, why are you talking about some random feminist philosopher?”

This line:

“When we look at evil from the standpoint of women’s experience, we will question the whole tradition of honor that has grown up around war and violence.”

Y’all know when I saw that quote I immediately thought of Zuko. Smarter people than me have talked about how Aang and Zuko’s arcs are reflections of one another, as well as how Aang is a feminist hero, and I think we can use Noddings’s work to connect these two ideas.

First, we have to talk about the arguments that have already been made: 1) that Zuko and Aang’s arcs are reflections of one another, and 2) that Aang is a feminist hero. I think the first one makes itself pretty clear in some artistic decisions, namely that we get both Aang and Zuko’s backstories in “The Storm” (which, if you have ever talked to me about ATLA, you’ll know that’s one of my absolute favorite episodes). We get both of their backstories, sure, but more than that, both of their characters are complicated so much by the information divulged in this episode. We learn that Aang left his people because he was afraid of being the Avatar, and we learn about a major moment of Ozai’s abuse towards Zuko. Notice how we learn these things too: Aang tells Katara about what’s going on with him, whilst Iroh tells the ship’s crew about Zuko. Aang is open about his feelings, and after a bit of prodding from his friend, can talk about what he’s experienced and what he believes to be a major flaw of his. Conversely, Zuko does not volunteer this information about his backstory himself (and Iroh raises some serious questions about consent by telling people without Zuko giving his permission) Consider also how this episode resolves: Aang and Katara have a real conversation about their emotions regarding Aang’s backstory before going to save Sokka and the fisherman, while Zuko...lets his crew not risk their lives to try and capture the Avatar? The emotional payoff is not there for Zuko the way it is for Aang, and it is precisely because he closes himself off from feeling his emotions,. I really think this episode does a great job establishing them as each other’s character foils, and I also think that Aang’s ability to talk about his emotions is a big part of what makes him a feminist hero. Unlike Zuko (and most male heroes) Aang wears his heart on his sleeve. He resolves conflict as much as he can by being, as he puts it to Avatar Yangchen later, “quick or clever”, not angry or violent (by and large.) He is, ultimately, a peaceful, respectful kid with good communication skills, and this extends to the respect he pays to his female bending teachers and friends and all the women in the show who aren’t actively trying to kill him. (and before anyone comes for me, obviously Aang is not a perfectly feminist hero because he exists within a work that has sexist and racist flaws. However, in comparison to Zuko and much of Western canon, he can be viewed as a feminist hero.)

Now compare this to Zuko. Zuko does not chug his respect women juice. He sips at it sometimes when it’s convenient for him, but he very much does not chug. He also has emotional problems, and views emotion as a weakness for most of the story. His entire character, especially in season 1, is predicated on seeking honor within a violent context. I’ve seen a lot of people argue that Zuko “restores the Fire Nation’s honor” through his redemption arc, and while I agree with that, I don’t think we’re really dissecting the concept of honor as it’s presented in the show as fully as we could be. To apply Noddings’ work, the honor in the Fire Nation is dependent on the existence of war and violence. This is most succinctly illustrated in what Ozai says to Zuko as he’s about to burn his eye: “You will fight for your honor.” To Ozai, honor is fighting in an Agni Kai that you shouldn’t have been challenged to because you’re a literal child, and not living up to that definition of honor is deserving of violence. This is personal violence towards Zuko, but I do think that there’s evidence that, at least since the beginning of the war, this has been the way the Fire Nation views honor and violence at a structural level. We can draw a parallel between Zuko not fighting Ozai and Ozai responding by burning his eye, and the Air Nomads not fighting Sozin and Sozin committing genocide against them. And this violent definition of honor very much corresponds to the way he treats women, because expressions of imperialism and toxic masculinity are deeply, intrinsically connected. He’s disrespectful to June and the Kyoshi Warriors. He doesn’t really see Azula, his own sister, as a human being. But in my opinion, the incident that damns him the most in this regard is how he treats Mai in “The Beach.” I know part of the reason he is the way he is in this episode is because he’s really conflicted about his path and all that jazz, but he honestly treats Mai like a jewel that the boys talking to her are trying to steal, not a person. As a self-avowed Zuko stan, it makes me a little sick. I feel terrible for her. While he doesn’t treat every single woman he encounters poorly (Jin comes to mind), generally, as a rule, he’s pretty all about toxic masculinity as a response to abuse. For him, honor largely means enacting violence towards others (capturing the Avatar, the way he treated Iroh for a lot of b1 and 2, yelling at the crew in “The Storm”) as well as not really respecting women.

But his attitude changes the closer he gets to redemption. For years, I’ve wondered why it was Katara who was down in the crystal cave with Zuko, given that he was more Aang’s foil than hers at that point. Now, I think it has a lot to do with Katara being quite a strong and empowered female character from a nation that the Fire Nation has historically oppressed. We have hope for Zuko turning good and joining Team Avatar in this moment because he has (it seems) overcome some of his toxic masculinity and imperialist thinking (remember, these are connected) and now sees Katara as a human being that he can connect with (one could argue that Jin is an early example of Zuko learning to connect with marginalized women). Later, redeeming himself means supporting Katara unabashedly as she seeks to right the wrongs that his nation has done to her (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, “Southern Raiders”? powerful. simply powerful.)

Thus, when we say that Zuko “restored the Fire Nation’s honor”, what we really mean is that he changed their entire definition of honor. Through his interactions with Aang, Katara, and the rest of the gaang, as well as his own self-reflection, Zuko established a definition of honor built outside of the framework of imperialism, colonialism, and toxic masculinity. Rather than being based in violence and war, Zuko’s honor is based in love and understanding. Honestly, I wish we’d gotten a Steven Universe: Future kind of thing with ATLA, because I think seeing Firelord Zuko as he struggled with understanding what a love-based honor looks like when you’re leading a nation that has done absolutely horrible things to the world would have just been the cherry on top to his redemption arc. But we see that he understands at least part of it by the end of the show: respecting women. His relationships with Suki, Toph (y’all saw how gentle he was with her in the finale right? B1 Zuko would never. Early B3 Zuko would never.) and most importantly, Katara show that he’s learned how to communicate his fears, deal with his emotions in a healthy way, and support women.

#longpost #zuko #aang #katara #look i know i'm sick of zuko metas too but i HAD TO #caps tw #zuko meta #another zuko meta #genocide #imperialism #colonialism #iroh #toxic masculinity #patriarchy #abuse #ozai #the storm

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ahiddenpath · 4 years ago

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What do you think people like about your fics?

Ahhhh, geez, I’m averse to guessing what other people are thinking. But- I do have my own thoughts about what my stories have to offer beneath the cut.

So I’ve mentioned before that I often write about trauma:

-How it can shape a life

-How it’s omnipresent and never “in the past.” It’s not a “you survived, it’s over, you live happily ever after” scenario.

-How it is often intergenerational, or a ripple. We Americans, for example, still deal with the trauma that soldiers faced in wars, such as WWII and Vietnam. Soldiers go to war, see horrors, return home, have few options for mental health care, and often end up venting that horror on their families, who grow up and vent it on their families, etc. It can also be a smaller thing, a ripple. Someone hurts Bill, so Bill hurts someone else. Pain goes outward unless a hurt person makes conscious, concentrated effort to avoid spreading the pain- something many people simply aren’t equipped to do without professional guidance, which is often difficult to obtain and stigmatized.

-You are never “cured” from trauma, but you can develop the tools to handle it in healthy ways, and to avoid spreading it.

It’s impossible to live on this earth without encountering hurt people who are desperately trying to do something to ease their hurt. We are all exposed to trauma, so... I assume a lot of my readers are interested in this aspect of my writing.

BUT, I also write about emotional abuse in a family setting, which... Honestly seems almost... Taboo???? In our media? Many stories that I’ve seen show the family sort of... Working out the abuse with a simple conversation, and then everyone is happy. Or, even worse, the child (or adult child) just decides to deal with the abuse, “because faaaaamily,” or because, “that’s just how mom/dad/whoever is.” Or, like, there’s almost this idea that... Well, if you weren’t physically hurt, then it couldn’t have been that bad, and you can recover from it. Our media seems to echo the secrecy and “look-the-other-way” attitude that a lot of families have in real life. Like- yes, we know Uncle Bill can’t open his mouth without being cruel, but you just have to calmly take it, because frankly, we adults are also scared of Uncle Bill and don’t want to deal with the inevitable explosion if someone speaks up. Your comfort, child, is not worth that effort.

So, I think showing a character change for the worse in an environment like that (pick up behaviors meant to protect her, like being reluctant to draw attention to herself, being guarded, and constantly alert for threats), then slowly find confidence again, then acknowledge that the situation is unhealthy and she needs to escape it, then find the tools to deal with the trauma she suffered and place boundaries for her own health... It’s powerful, but also sobering, because I never show the trauma being over and defeated- just the characters purposefully seeking tools to deal with it, and supporting each other to do the same.

I also explore what Emily Nagosaki calls Human Giver Syndrome in her book, Burnout. It’s... Basically the concept that women are expected/socialized to devote their lives to supporting others, at the cost of their own wants, and even needs.

“If you have ‘human giver syndrome’ you believe that it is a woman’s moral obligation to be pretty, happy, calm, generous and attentive to the needs of others.” – Emily Nagoski

I highly recommend the book, although I should say that it is directed to women’s needs. If you want a preview, here is an interview with Nagosaki about some of the concepts.

Now, obviously, no one is arguing that women should stop supporting other people 100%. The point is that old adage, “don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.” If your desire to be helpful is hurting you, then there’s a problem. If you don’t particularly want to help in a certain situation, but feel obligated out of social conditioning, then there is a problem.

But Human Giver Syndrome can also materialize in the form of swallowing your negative emotions, because you were socialized to be emotionally available to everyone else, but never need emotional help/never “bother” other people with negative emotions. Or, you might feel shame over not being “pretty enough”/”thin enough”/”whatever enough,” to the point where eating disorders are not uncommon in women.

ANYWAY READ THE BOOK! It’s really important stuff! It has lots of tips for dealing with stress, too, which, like- Uh, yes please. Your local library likely has a few copies, as it’s a new, hot read. I didn’t have a title and a nice definition for Human Giver Syndrome back in 2012, but I’ve been writing about it for years- and I think it’s been resonating with readers. (I should maybe also say about Burnout- the ideas are not necessarily new, but having language for them and having it spelled out plainly is so helpful).

Other than that, I’m a character-focused writer, I love the heck out of digimon, and I’ve just, like... Been around for 9 years (NEXT YEAR IS MY 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY AS AHIDDENPATH, WHAT THE CRAP!). Familiarity and frequent updates, I imagine, increase general... likeability?

BTW, I’m not saying you have to have some grand, thematic mission for fics! For most readers, I imagine “it was fun, generally in-character, and featured the ship/AU/trope I love,” is more than enough! Like, don’t add pressure to something that is supposed to be fun. For all I know, maybe people read my stuff because they think it’s funny or has nice dialogue, lol!

These are just the issues I explore for myself, and for my own mental health/sense of understanding the world. And I figure, if it helps me, maybe it helps someone else out there?

Thanks for the ask <3

#ask hidden #Anonymous

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jonthethinker · 5 years ago

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Expositor Beauregard And The Mighty Nein

Others have said it before, but because I think it should be screamed from the mountaintops everyday, Beau’s growth is so fucking good!

I think back to the runaway monk we met at the beginning of this campaign, all sharp edges and curt words and no roots, committed to convincing the world she doesn’t care about anything and she’s fine on her own (but the loneliness already showing as she asks Jester and Fjord whether they’re going to leave town without her.)

Then we have Beau now, who has deep friendships with every member of the Mighty Nein sans possibly Caduceus and Yasha (who still fall under the domain of her protective instinct, and who she still very much considers her people.) It could be argued that Beau is the sturdy foundation of the Nein, offering each other member of the Nein some sturdy ground to stand on to grow themselves:

Travis has mentioned Beau’s commitment as first mate as a comfort for Fjord, and when he was deliberating whether to reveal his accent to the group, He never doubted that Beau would continue to support him if he told the group the truth. Their easy relationship is among my favorites on the show, and when the action starts they’re never out of sync.It is safe to assume that to the half-orc orphan who very much attended the school of hard knocks and has every reason to distrust others, having a friendship in which the only thing that is asked is a willingness to call Beau on her bullshit and an openness to Beau calling him on his, is an immeasurably important feature in Fjord’s current life and one he wouldn’t trade away for anything.

Beau is undoubtedly fiercely protective and supportive of Jester, and made it clear to her that she will support Jester being more honest about negative feelings she has, while also standing up to Jester when she thought she was making a reckless decision in how to confront her father if it meant keeping Jester safe and the door open for a healthy relationship with said parent. Jester has in Beau someone who will continually encourage and support her through thick and thin, and have a good time along the way. I want to say a hell of a lot more about their friendship and the parallels of their lives, because their friendship is the most precious thing to me in all of critical role, but that’s not what this meta is about, so I’ll save it for another time.

Her sisterly relationship with Nott is something that is easy to forget about, but I imagine it means more to Nott than is let on; Nott was a bit of an outsider even as a halfling. Since the Iron Shepards (And arguably before, in Hupperdook,) Nott has had an easy relationship in Beau, with Beau being about as judgement free as Nott has ever experienced. The two are playful with each other in a way I imagine Nott wishes she could have been with her brothers, and Beau’s willingness to forgive Nott for any harmful decision she has made (a certain bullet in the ass comes to mind) can’t be underscored in its importance towards the goal of keeping Nott’s beaten-up heart healthy.

While I disagree with some in the fandom who think that Beau’s friendship with Caleb is the single most important relationship in his life right now (which to me has been unquestionably, from the beginning, Nott, and is nowhere near changing to anyone else in my humble opinion,) to say their friendship has not been a critical step in his growth as a character is absurd. Caleb perhaps had not planned on one of the keys to his success in his wizardly pursuits as well as the reclamation of his humanity being a rough-and-tumble friendship with a blunt, somewhat aggressive monk with a knack for getting him to admit to things he never wanted to admit to, but life doesn’t often go according to plan. Despite a rocky beginning, their friendship has evolved into something beautiful, with Beau always there to keep Caleb grounded, whether he risks letting his thirst for knowledge drag him into trouble, or his past begins to eat him alive. And it’s certainly nice to have someone around who can help him find that book he’s looking for.

Beau’s relationship with Yasha has been interesting from the get-go, what with Beau immediately seizing on the opportunity to flirt with the giant, introverted barbarian. While shipping discourse tends to dominate the discussion of their interactions, we shouldn’t ignore the chance to take a crack at what these moments mean to the characters as individuals.

With hindsight and insights Marisha has given on Talks, I’ve gathered that to Beau these moments were driven by this weird relationship in Beau’s mind between sex and power. She uses these casual, almost doomed to fail, encounters with women as a band-aid to avoid confronting her actual problems with developing intimate, meaningful romantic or platonic relationships with women she’s physically attracted to. She sort of game-ifies the encounters into a power struggle between her and her potential conquest; the end goal not being the sex or denial thereof, but of the buzz of the conflict itself. On the outside it looks like a pure expression of ego, and some of it may be, but I interpret it mostly as a deflection from Beau’s clear struggles with self-loathing and her fear of abandonment; I speculate that to Beau, after how things ended with Tori, has not allowed herself to feel the same about anyone else (With the recently revealed exception of Jester, who is all too conveniently deemed inaccessible; “She has a thing for Fjord, and so it’s not a possibility,”) for fear of utterly letting down yet another women she loved.

With Yasha I take these moments as a sort of siren’s song. Here she is, having lost the most precious person in all her life, a love she knew was forbidden but pursued anyway, and clearly blames herself and her desire for Zuala as the very reason she died. To Yasha, the lesson she learned from all of this is not that her tribe was wrong, but that her desires are wrong, that she can’t trust herself to want anything, and can’t trust herself to love without getting someone hurt (A feeling only exacerbated by the death of Molly trying to save her from the Iron Shepards.)

So she feels all this and then there’s this monk who relentlessly flirts with her. Their first interaction indicates to me that Yasha has had some experience handling this sort of thing since joining the circus, and with arms like those, how could she not? But Beau just keeps going and going the more time they spend around one another, and Yasha has eyes, and Beau does indeed have those abs, and is incredibly persistent and almost admirably self-assured about herself, and okay maybe eventually even the tough Barbarian might be flustered and stutter a little bit.

And that would be that, if that’s all their relationship was. But Yasha being the quiet one who looms to the back in social interactions and group planning watches the others, Beau included, and maybe begins to see another side to the monk. The side that clearly cares a great deal about this group. Who looks out for the others and will gladly put her body on the line to protect them. Beau isn’t as sturdy as Yasha, can’t take as many hits and depends on avoiding being hit in the first place, but still there she is, tanking a Hydra, rushing to the front lines and protecting her friends. There she is, reassuring party members in a well-meaning if a little rough around the edges sort of way. There she is, comforting Yasha after she reveals her past to the group, seeking a way to relate to her even when it’s clear Beau doesn’t share personal details often.

So to Yasha, Beau is a few things. She’s someone who she can rely on to keep this lovely found family alive no matter the personal cost. She’s someone who can be leaned on and relied on not to judge. And she’s someone who makes her feel like a person, not just a tool or a wall of muscle, or a burden to be dealt with, but a person. I think Beau will be second only to Jester in the importance she will play in Yasha’s recovery and victory over her grief and guilt, which, let’s face it, is a long road yet to be traveled, but a road made all the easier due to Yasha’s friends of the blue persuasion.

Caduceus sees in Beau potential. Where he may get frustrated or confused by many in the Nein, I think in Beau he finds a reliable and easy to understand set of motivations. Beau wants to keep the Mighty Nein happy, healthy, and most importantly alive, and maybe make a positive difference in the world along the way. While her gruff demeanor can sometimes grate him the wrong way, I feel her actions have spoken for her in Caduceus’ mind. I take that he feels that while he may be the only adult in the room, Beau is definitely the rather mature teenager that can often be trusted to make decisions in his absence. Condescending? Of course. But a delightfully Caduceus-like thing to think.

This long diatribe is not me saying that Beau is the be all end all of the Nein, but just my way of illustrating the impact of her and her growth on her friends, and the role she plays within the Nein. The other members have had just as much of an impact on her. From Fjord’s trust and charm training, to Jester’s love and support and faith in strangers, to Nott’s open ear and sisterly banter, to Caleb’s ability to establish goals and remind her of both the forest and the trees, to Yasha’s fierce protectiveness and soft treatment of their friends, to Caduceus’ encouragement to tell the truth and be open and the successes that attitude has led to.

And to Molly, who arguably, made this growth possible, or at least as quickly progressive as it has been. Without him pushing her towards making the world better than she found it, it’s hard to imagine the road she would have had to travel to get to where she is now, fighting to save the world, standing up to and earning the respect of her Cobalt Soul mentors, sharing her feelings with the group, and allowing herself to love.

Beau is my favorite character on Critical Role. She has been for a very long time, but my love for her has only aged like a fine wine. From barely being able to meditate at all, to mentally transporting herself to a beach in Nicodranas in order to escape Obann’s thrall. From telling Jester she didn’t worry too much about her well-being, to telling her on several occasions that she loves and cares about her. From being incredibly antagonizing towards Molly, to getting a tattoo in his honor very visibly on the back of her neck. Her Journey to become the Expositor she is today has been an absolute delight, and her journey towards forging the ties she has with this beautiful found family have been heartwarming and some of the best storytelling I’ve ever seen. And she has so much potential for growth and I just can’t wait to see more.

#Beauregard #critical role #critical role spoilers #cr spoilers #the mighty nein

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hazelandglasz · 5 years ago

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Netflix And Chill

Inspired by this post, as requested by @lilyvandersteen

As a side note, I know literally nothing to how the netflix help service works, so let’s call of this artistic license ;)

On AO3

“Come on, come on, work this time …”

This is, officially, Kurt’s worst night ever.

And to think, he kept his expectations so low too: all Kurt wanted for this Monday night was to come home, reheat a soup he had in the freezer, and binge-watch The Good Place with a bowl of ice cream afterward.

Was that so much to ask?

Apparently, yes. Because his Netflix is not working.

It’s not a matter of unpaid bill, that’s certain. He already unplugged and replugged his provider’s box, so why doesn’t it work, for fuck’s sake?

Kurt doesn’t cry often, but this time, when the white screen with a big “ERROR” appears again, he feels like bawling like a baby.

Before going to that extremity, though, he has one more chance.

The Hotline.

Also known as the 8th level of Hell, by all users and customers worldwide, but he has no other option at this point.

So Kurt dials up and puts his phone on speaker.

Twenty-one minutes later, the waiting music stops and a perky male voice echoes in his living room.

“Thank you for your patience and welcome to the Netflix hotline. I’m Blaine, here to help you.”

“Oh!” Kurt didn’t expect someone with such a … positive attitude. “Hi. Hello. I’m--I’m Kurt.”

“Good evening, Kurt. Can you confirm your address and your subscription?”

Kurt gives him all the correct information.

“And before you ask me, I already tried turning it off and back on,” he adds just as Blaine seems to launch into his next question.

“Oh. Alright then. That already makes you my favorite customer of the evening.”

“You don’t say.”

“There is major network problem in your area right now, but we have found out a way to regulate that. But having to explain to some of our, err, older users how to use their remote …”

Kurt lets out a surprised laugh.

Blaine laughs too, a small but warm chuckle, before clearing his throat. “Right. Back to your issue. So, what you need to do is …”

What follows is almost half an hour of Blaine gently guiding Kurt through plugs and buttons, all while doing tests and manipulations on his own side of things.

And then, finally, miracle of miracles, the big, red N appears and lets him in the menu.

“Yeah!” Kurt exclaims, and Blaine sighs in relief. “You fixed it!”

“I’m glad it worked,” Blaine replies. “Maybe we can … try it out? To make sure the problem is gone for good?”

“Try it out?” Kurt repeats, a smile forming on his lips without him realizing it. Through the whole ordeal, Blaine has never lost his cool, being gentle and supportive and, yes, charming. “Like, watch a movie or something?”

“Or something.”

“That is very … thorough of you. Do you hang out with all your customers in need, Blaine?”

“Err. No. Only the ones who don’t insult me and my ancestors and laugh at my jokes.”

“I feel privileged.”

“You should.”

“Oh.”

“And, um, if we’re being honest, I need to tell you that you’re probably the most interesting person I’ve talked with all day.”

“Oh!”

“Now, um, what could we watch to test my repairing superpower?”

“What about ‘When Harry Meets Sally’?”

“Excellent taste, Mr. Hummel.”

Kurt grins at his phone. “You flatterer.”

“Gets you everywhere.”

Kurt lets the movie load before starting it, snatching his snack box from under the couch.

“Are you munching on something?” Blaine asks as the credits roll at the beginning of the movie.

Kurt looks down at his lap. He has a bag of pretzels and a bag of M&M’s opened, and he mixes them.

“I am. Is my speaker that finely tuned?”

“It is. I’m jealous.”

“Don’t have snacks?”

Blaine snorts. “I have been forbidden from having snacks in my cubicle.”

Kurt openly laughs. “Is it that bad?”

“Oh, it is. I have a tendency of mixing snacks together and it bothers my colleagues.”

“Mixing?”

“Sweet and salty. The last straw was when I dipped potato chips in Nutella.”

“Oh but that sounds delicious!”

The movie goes by while they chat--except for some key scenes, where Kurt and Blaine can recite the lines in perfect synchronisation.

“Well, Kurt,” Blaine says when the movie is over, “it seems like everything works perfectly now.”

“So it seems.”

“Did you have another question for--”

“What will I do if it stops working unexpectedly?”

“--me, oh. Well. You can always call back. Either one of my colleagues or me will be delighted to help you.”

Kurt can feel his face turning red. “But what if I want to be sure you help me?”

“I--”

“Because you did it so well, and with such gentleness.”

Kurt would swear he can hear Blaine smiling, even though he doesn’t know what Blaine looks like. It doesn’t matter.

“That is very kind of you to say, Kurt. And if you could just say that when they send you the automatic email to check on your contentment level …”

“Of course.”

“But if, um, if you want to be sure to contact me to check on your Netflix, maybe I could …”

“Yes?”

“Give you my personal number?”

“Is that the usual protocol?”

Blaine doesn’t speak up, and Kurt has his answer.

Blaine sighs. “I’m sorry if I overstepped or misunderstood …”

“No!” Kurt exclaims. “No, no, you didn’t. I just--you surprised me.”

“Ah. So …?”

“So I would be honored to have your phone number, for my … peace of mind.”

“For your peace of mind.”

Blaine gives Kurt his number, and it is definitely a New York area code.

“Well, Kurt, if that is all,” Blaine says, his voice changing to his earlier “corporate voice”, “on behalf of Netflix, I thank you for choosing our services and I hope you’ll have a pleasant evening.”

“You too, Blaine,” Kurt says softly before hanging up.

Kurt looks around his empty apartment, looking for a witness, but the only other presence is the glow of his TV, where Harry and Sally look at each other.

“Was that a date?” he asks aloud, but alas, the characters stay quiet.

Where are Santana and Mercedes when he needs them?!

The interaction stays on Kurt’s mind for days. It wasn’t just Blaine’s niceness, but his humor, his comments, his laugh …

They’re occupying every single one of his thoughts, to Santana and Mercedes’ long suffering.

“Okay, Kurt, you know I love you,” Mercedes starts one evening where all he did was sighing when they turned Netflix on, “but enough is enough. Either call him and get a date, or go out and get yourself a man--”

“Or go out to a club and get litteraly fucked,” Santana calls from the kitchen where she is in charge tonight.

Mercedes glares in her direction. “No need to be crass, ‘Tana, but yeah, it is the gist of it. Either do something about your Netflix Boy or shut up about him.”

Kurt pouts at her, crossing his arms over his body pillow. “I haven’t talked about him that much.”

Both women give him a look of such condescension that all he can do is flee the room.

And dial the number.

(Turns out, Blaine was slowly driving his own roommate crazy with his description of the Customer Who Went Away.

Kurt apologizes by asking him for a coffee.

And then another.

And another.

Until he knows what Blaine is going to order simply by looking at him, and until Blaine knows Kurt’s coffee order down to the extra drop of caramel syrup.

And then they go to the movies.

And to the restaurant.

Until Blaine asks Kurt to come to his place for a Netflix date.

Where they don’t spend that much time actually looking at the Netflix menu and dedicate a lot of the date on the “chilling” part of the popular saying.)

#lilyvandersteen #sometimes i write #klaine au #netflix #help line #fluff #thank you for the prompt #and sorry for the time it took me to write it!

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bigtittyhimmler-blog · 5 years ago

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Who Goes Nazi? Brooklyn Edition

If you’re anything like me, a twenty-something Twitter leftist with an advanced degree in the humanities, you hate absolutely everyone around you and badly want to kill them. You live in a brownstone playground of Timorese food and adult coloring books, and you want to suicide bomb the L train but leave a note blaming it on manspreading or whatever, so people don’t think you’re one of “those” random mass murderers (the bad kind). You hate having to tell people at parties that you “work in content,” and you hate the fact that they all also work in content. You hate that they all make content for outlets that are slightly cooler and more prestigious than the outlets you make content for. You hate that none of them have even fucked you for like thirteen months. You hate that you can’t even hate them for the ways in which they’re different to you, because there aren’t any. But fear not! There’s one thing you’ve got that nobody else does: you know that you’re definitely, 100% Not A Nazi.

But what about them? Imagine if the Nazis took over America and it was suddenly cool and prestigious to be a Nazi, and there were trendy Nazis on the TV the whole time, and they once again sold soap with slogans like “Dove: The White Pride Soap for Hating QTBIPOC and Not Amplifying Their Voices.” But also don’t imagine, because that’s exactly what’s happening.

This game was invented by Dorothy Thompson in her classic 1941 Harpers essay Who Goes Nazi?, in which she presciently pointed out that intellectuals are definitely more Nazi than aristocrats, but not nearly as Nazi as union leaders. But she set her essay at some dinner party in the Hamptons or wherever, and last time I went out there I went swimming in the sea and a wave hit me and I lost my bikini top and a bunch of bros in boat shoes started laughing and pointing at me in a way that despite my white privilege I still feel was somehow like imbued with racism, and then afterwards I just stayed inside for three weeks writing content and ordering groceries online, so the setting needs to be updated. Let’s look at your group DM. Which of these Twitter creatives who live in Brooklyn would go along with it and become a Nazi? (All of them.) And who never, ever would? (Me.)

Mr A isn’t actually in your group DM, and you’ve never encountered anyone like him irl, but you literally can’t stop talking about him, so he gets included anyway. Mr A is a short ugly loser, and he’s already a Nazi. He doesn’t even live in Brooklyn, he lives in his mother’s basement, and eats chicken tenders, and he doesn’t get laid, but in a different way to the way you don’t get laid, which has to do with patriarchy. Mr A is a Pizzagate. Mr A is a Gamergate. Mr A is a segregationist. Mr A opposes the reforms of the Emperor Diocletian (284-305). Mr A won’t shut up about the superiority of a “free silver” bimetallic monetary system over gold specie, and keeps on talking about the “gold shills” in a way that doesn’t really make sense until you realize that your own name is Goldschmidt, and yeah, he doesn’t really care about expansionary monetary policy at all, he’s talking about the Jews, and specifically you. Mr A is basically a pathetic worm whose life sucks and nobody likes him, but also he represents the whole of the repressive forces of society and he’s at the top of the social hierarchy. Everyone you’ve ever met is actually Mr A, wearing various masks. He is the source of all your problems. He must be killed, and once we kill him, we need to find more people like him to be the source of any problems we have left over.

Mr B is in your group DM, but you also have a separate group DM with everyone else except Mr B in it. He keeps trying so hard to be nice, and says stuff like “so how is everyone’s day today” with a smiley emoji, and when you’re talking to him you get this airless feeling like you’re about to suffocate in his treacly good-natured presence. Every time you see Mr B at a party you’re afraid that he’s going to blurt out that he loves you, but you can’t keep your distance too much because he’s so clearly autistic, and you don’t want to be ableist. Anyway once in the group DM he said that while he obviously thought divining for water with Y-shaped copper rods was good and important and valid, he didn’t understand what it had to do with socialism. That made everything better, because clearly he’s a Nazi. The whole group DM expended hours of emotional labor educating him about how dowsing is part of LGBTQ+ culture and how his dismissive bro-y attitude was reactionary and gross, and eventually he posted a video of himself crying and begging for forgiveness and promising to do better, because you guys were the only friends he had. This was classic white fragility, but in the end you let him stay. You just have the other DM now, where you make fun of him and it’s ok, because if the Nazis came and he had license to start being cruel and sadistic to other people, he’d definitely do it.

Ms C is one of those women who doesn’t like other women, and you know this about her because you can’t fucking stand the bitch. Plus she says stuff that’s really not ok, even though it costs nothing to have empathy and be kind. You’ve personally heard her use the D-word, the H-slur, and the L-pejorative, all while laughing and holding a glass of white wine by the stem, like she doesn’t need to consider the harm this does to others, just because she’s “funny” and “an artist.” She’s the Cool Chick. She makes nude self-portraits (the bad, skinny kind), and she’d throw you under the bus in a second for male attention and approval. She’d definitely go Nazi. But the worst thing about her is that she has the impudence to be bisexual and Asian, which makes it really hard to call her out. But then you realized that all Asian people are collectively responsible for the long history of anti-Blackness and misogynoir in their communities, and you’re thinking of holding her collectively responsible for the Rape of Nanking too, once you’re certain she’s a sushi Asian and not the dim sum kind.

Ms D’s boyfriend works in finance, or like accountancy or something, or I think I heard he was a musician? Maybe a drummer or possibly he used to bartend at a place where they had live music. Anyway they definitely have vanilla cishet sex in the missionary position and you can’t stop thinking about it, his body, her body, naked, moving, breathing, together, almost silent, tender, disgusting. She says she’s a socialist but doesn’t devote every minute of her waking life to getting mad about people online. This means she’s just vaguely following a trend, and if the trend were being a Nazi (which it is), she’d be a Nazi (which she therefore is). You can’t imagine yourself actually hitting her but it’d definitely be punching up to maybe poison her food?

Mr E used to be a comrade, but then he did a tweet that got 38.6k RT’s and now he’s moved to Los Angeles to spend his whole time in writers’ rooms. Last you heard he was pitching an animated show for adults about a snail with borderline personality disorder. It hasn’t even been greenlit yet, but you’re already thinking about all the ways in which it will be a missed opportunity and do harm and perpetuate tropes. Mr E will definitely turn out to have been a Nazi, and then you can start an anonymous petition to get the show cancelled so he has to move back to New York. Once he’s back you can send him a long email about how much it sucks his career burned out and how (even though you won’t say it in public) sometimes people do actually take the social-justice thing too far. That way he’ll be a comrade again, which is good, because we believe in rehabilitating people who have a genuine change of heart.

Mr F probably thinks he’s better than you. He’s a union organizer. So are you (you added “#Unionize” to your Twitter name), but his union stuff involves workers who aren’t in tech, content, or grad school, and he probably thinks that makes him more in touch with “the real workers,” who he probably thinks are just a bunch of cis white males in a factory, who are probably all racist and probably have thick, heavy dicks that intrude on your mind in a kinda #MeToo way a lot of the time. He talks about class, and you agree that class is important because you’re not a lib (you support Bernie, you just want him to Do Better). But from the way he says it you’re certain he doesn’t acknowledge all he/him lesbians as part of the working class. He’s trying to save a tiny sector of the workers from a necessary and important socio-economic shift that will impoverish them and make their lives worse, and that’s what being a Nazi is. This is why his union needs to stop dragging their heels, change all of their rules and priorities, and let you get him fired.

Ms G (me) will never go Nazi, because she is beautiful and kind and pure, and has all the good opinions instead of the bad ones. Because of this she’s allowed to do things that other people can’t do. She can totally fail to understand what having an authoritarian personality actually means, and construct a version of the Who Goes Nazi? essay in which the people who go Nazi are just people who are already right wing, having confused politics with personality, probably because she herself has no personality other than her politics. She can minimize, ignore, or even encourage the infliction of actual suffering when it happens to the wrong kind of people. She can write that “nothing that terrible has really happened” since the publication of Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, even though Mark Fisher himself is mysteriously not around to appreciate that fact. She can do some shit with threatening to leak an unedited draft that I don’t even want to go into. She knows that the Nazis don’t come promising hatred but promising to be your friend, but it’s ok because she doesn’t really have any friends, just mufos. She’s doing great. She’s building a better, kinder world. She will never, ever be the Nazis.

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hookedontaronfics · 5 years ago

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Honky Dancer series - Chapter 7

Chapter title: Secrets and sorrows Read the previous installments here: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 Rating: M Pairing: Taron x OC Warnings: None A/N: This chapter tore the hell out of my emotions, and I actually expect it to do much the same to you. I’d apologize for that but I know you’ll all stick with me to the end, because the story has a long way to go to get to that happy ending you all want so much! Enjoy! X

The next three weeks were some of the best weeks of my life. Being Taron’s girlfriend, being loved by him, was an exceptional experience. Despite both of us being incredibly busy and in the thick of filming, he never let a day go by where he didn’t remind me in some way that I was loved and that I was his. I’d never had a relationship that had felt so genuinely real and sweet and supportive, and it made a difference in how I felt about my own life to that point.

One of my favorite moments had been the evening I was making dinner, some kind of cauliflower pasta recipe Taron had agreed to be the guinea pig for. He and Clara were seated at the dining table, going over her fractions homework. Clara’s frustration at not understanding the problems was palpable, but I just remember how patient and calm Taron remained until that look of understanding dawned on my daughter’s face. They’d both looked up at me, leaning in the kitchen doorway, with the sweetest looks on their faces.

Their bond was growing every day, made even stronger when, unbeknownst to me, a special delivery had been made of a Steinway upright studio piano so Clara could continue her lessons at home. I will never forget the look on her face when she realized it really was hers and it would be staying in my front room. Taron rebuffed every “you shouldn’t have” I tried to give him, telling me he knew first-hand how important it was to be supported in the pursuit of your art. I couldn’t deny him that, because I knew it to be true as well. Still, a few internet searches later made me gasp at how much he had spent on us; I knew I could never repay him.

But that was just the thing; he didn’t want or need repayment. He did things for people out of the kindness of his heart; he never expected someone to give him a favor back. He was generous to a fault, and whether he knew how much money he was worth or not, he never affected an attitude that he was affluent. He remained the working class boy he’d spent his childhood growing up as, the boy who needed financial help from his family just to audition for RADA. And I think I loved him even more for that.

Trying to pin Markus down, though, that was a whole other story. I knew I needed to tell him we were definitely done, but every time I tried to make plans to grab a coffee he had something else come up. We were dancing every day, learning choreography for both “Saturday Night’s Alright” and “Bitch Is Back,” and my body hurt in every way it was possible to hurt. Both of those pieces were massive, and when they secured set locations we would have to be ready to go.

I’m pretty sure I spent more time at Rocketman rehearsals those few weeks than I did teaching my own classes, but I was beginning to wonder if Markus was blowing me off because he already suspected what I needed to tell him. I had finally decided to just grab him after rehearsal that day and make it final, and the stress and anxiety of it made me feel slightly queasy.

We had just finished rehearsal and Leah immediately came up to me before I could pull Markus aside. “Are you okay?” she asked me, and I shrugged.

“Of course. I mean, I’m with Taron now anyway,” I said, watching Markus flirt a bit shamelessly with another dancer, and she was all-too-happy to be receiving his attention. I’m not really sure how someone could manage to make a leotard look slutty, but she certainly got an A for the effort.

“Markus can be a dick, forget that. What I mean is that you’re really pale but your cheeks are also really flushed,” Leah said, staring at my face.

“Oh, that, I don’t feel great, no,” I shook my head. “I’m kind of nauseous, but hey, I’m here. The show must go on,” I said, giving her a faint smile.

“Or it really doesn’t if you’re really sick, Juliette,” she said. “Maybe you should sit down for a moment.”

“I just need to deal with Markus and get home and take a nice long soak and get some sleep. I’ll be fine,” I said, giving her a tight smile even though I was fighting the urge to lose my lunch at that moment. “See you tomorrow?” I said, and she nodded, still looking concerned. But when I turned away from her to find Markus, he had already disappeared, and I was in no state to try and chase him down.

I changed into my sneaks and gathered up my bag and, as I was leaving, had to make a detour into the bathroom to puke after all. I hadn’t had much to eat that day anyway, so it was mostly orange Gatorade and bile and I felt worse for throwing up, since it was now burning in my throat and sinuses.

“Ugh, fuck,” I groaned as I left the stall, trying to wipe the clammy sweat off my forehead. The truth was that I was waking up most mornings feeling a little ill and sometimes it lasted long into the day. I was beginning to think I needed to go to the doctor, but it seemed to come and go at random. I imagined it was likely just stress from everything going on, but it would probably be wise to see the doctor anyway. I washed up, splashing water on my face, and smiled as I scrolled through my texts. Taron never failed to make me feel better no matter what.

I left the bathroom and passed Riley and her posse hanging out in the hallway, ignoring their stares and the whispered comments on how I must be bulimic because that’s why I was always running to the bathroom during rehearsals and why I stayed so skinny. I had no idea what they were talking about, and ignoring them was always the safest bet, but their bullying still got under my skin some days. I wished I could turn to them and tell them off, but that probably wouldn’t satisfy anything or make me feel better.

The subway ride to my mother’s to pick up Clara, and subsequently home, made me feel even more queasy, and I lost my appetite for dinner for the rest of the evening. After I helped Clara with her homework, her piano lessons, and made her food, I ended up just laying in front of the telly, exhausted and lacking any energy, for the rest of the evening. It wasn’t the most inspiring end to the day, and just as I was crawling into bed, Taron called me.

“Hey love!” he replied when I answered the phone, probably sounding as sleepy as I felt.

“Hey T,” I groaned, rolling over slightly in my bed, all of my muscles protesting.

“Everything alright?” he asked, the excitement draining from his voice slightly.

“I just feel miserable, honestly,” I said softly. “I think I might go to the doctor tomorrow.”

“Oh, babe, you should have called me over. I’d bring you the best soup my mam made to make me feel better,” he said sweetly.

“I just need sleep. And probably strong drugs,” I mumbled into the phone.

“Do you want me to go with you tomorrow to the clinic?” he asked, and I shook my head before realizing he couldn’t see that.

“I’ll not have you cancel on your film scenes to go wait in a clinic lobby. I’m sure it’s just some kind of bug. I’ll be fine,” I insisted, and I could hear him pacing on the other end, the way he did when he was anxious about something.

“Alright, but if you need me, you know I’ll be there, right?” he said quietly.

“Of course, babe. I know that. With my whole heart, I know that,” I smiled softly. We chatted a bit more but I couldn’t hardly keep my eyes open, and soon we ended our call and I passed out.

I actually felt better in the morning, enough to keep some dry toast down, and after seeing Clara off to school, I managed to teach my first two classes of the day before taking my lunch break to go to the clinic. My stomach had started to churn again, and I was ready to just be over this stomach bug. I got checked in and had to groan at the long wait time, having to text the Rocketman choreographer that I’d be running late to rehearsals but he only told me to take care of myself and he’d see me later, and to let him know if that somehow changed.

I was a nervous wreck by the time my name was called, and after having my vitals checked (and frowning over the fact that I’d gained 10 pounds despite my diet restrictions) and explaining my symptoms to the nurse, I was left to wait in the room for another 15 minutes, shivering in the cold air. I bounced my knee and aimlessly scrolled through Facebook until the doctor came in. After describing my symptoms, yet again, even though they were in my chart, the doctor asked if there was even a remote chance that I could be pregnant. And since I couldn’t answer that with utter confidence, she made me take the dreaded urine test.

I was so nervous I nearly couldn’t do it, and then had to wait even longer for the results to come back, my stomach tied in knots for an entirely different reason. I’d had my period, though, so I’d never thought to take the home tests I’d bought. I’d believed that was a sure sign I wasn’t. But what if I’d been wrong? I thought to myself, my head a complete jumble.

When the doctor knocked and came back in the room, interrupting my train of thought, I nearly fell off the table for having been holding my breath so long. I was clutching my phone in my hand so hard my knuckles were turning white.

“Well, Juliette, your symptoms are very explainable by one very simple thing. You are indeed pregnant, about seven weeks or so,” the doctor replied, as gently as possible.

“But it can’t be,” I whispered, feeling the walls of the room closing in around me, the tightness in my chest threatening to overwhelm me. “I had my period,” I said stupidly.

“Many women still have menstrual cycles, especially in the first trimester. It’s quite common, and some can even exhibit period symptoms throughout the entire pregnancy. But the results are very clear,” she explained sympathetically after gauging my reaction as not-of-the-excited variety.

When I didn’t respond, couldn’t respond, the doctor continued, giving me a prescription to help with the nausea and telling me I needed to follow up with my Ob-Gyn. I could only nod my head, still frozen in the ocean of confusion, fear, anxiety, joy and excitement that came with “You’re pregnant.” Where do I go from here? I had no idea.

I left the clinic in an absolute daze, and instead of going to Rocketman rehearsal, I ended up wandering around Regents Park, not really seeing anything at all as I worked through the torrent of emotions and thoughts and questions inside my head. Seven weeks meant the baby was definitely Markus’ - that was the only good thing about this situation. I wouldn’t have to spend months wondering who the father might be.

But now I wasn’t sure what to do; I was in love with Taron, but how could I possibly ask him to carry this burden with me, to take this responsibility on when it was another man’s? Even more so, I was adamant that Clara know her father; I would fight just as hard to make sure this baby knew his or hers. And I had yet to actually leave Markus, so maybe the right thing to do was to decide to be with him even if it didn’t make my heart entirely happy. I now had a responsibility to this baby to not be selfish, to not choose only my own happiness but what would be best for all of us.

I gently touched my belly and smiled for a moment; a new chapter in my life was most definitely beginning.

I finally made it to rehearsals, texting Taron that we needed to talk later, as soon as we could manage to find time. He responded immediately that he’d meet me after rehearsals were over, so I spent the next few hours trying to dance through my anxiety. As soon as I stepped out of the rehearsal room, bag slung over my shoulder, Taron was there waiting for me.

“Juliette, darling, everything alright?” he asked, kissing me on the forehead and making me feel intrinsically sad.

“No, not really,” I said softly, nodding toward one of the empty studios. We stepped inside and instantly I felt smaller, diminished by what I was going to do, a lesser person somehow.

“Please tell me what’s going on,” he asked, his eyes wide and full of the vulnerability that had endeared me to him, my hands clutched tightly in his.

“I can’t do this,” I said so quietly I wasn’t sure he even heard me. “I can’t be with you, Taron,” I mumbled, hearing his sharp intake of breath and feeling it like a knife wound in my heart.

“What the hell do you mean?” he asked, slowly dropping my hands and staring at me.

“I have to break up with you. I’m going to choose Markus,” I said numbly, unfeeling.

“You told me you loved me,” he said, the hurt in his voice hurting me.

“That was a lie,” I said, trying not to tear up. I’m not sure I sounded even remotely convincing.

“No, it wasn’t a lie,” he said, shaking his head and calling my bluff. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, at all. I don’t understand it, but I won’t play these games with you,” he said, waiting for me to explain myself. But I couldn’t tell him about the baby now; it would only hurt him further. “I gave my heart to you. You can’t just toss it away or pick it back up when it’s convenient to you,” he said, not an ounce of anger in his words, only resignation. His eyes were a bit red at that point, and if I wasn’t already feeling low, seeing him nearly cry would have broken me down further.

He sighed heavily when I still said nothing. “When you’re good and ready to love someone proper, come back to me. But until then, I wish you all the best,” he said gruffly, tearing himself away and leaving me standing alone in the studio, the pain in my heart echoing silently off the walls.

****

It turns out that I deserved the biggest Oscar award in the world. To act sincerely happy when your heart is shattered into a million jagged pieces is no small feat. Markus, for his part, was beyond thrilled that I had chosen to be with him after all, and while he wasn’t Taron in any capacity, he was still kind to me at least. I had yet to tell him that I was pregnant though; somehow that felt like a secret I needed to protect until the moment I couldn’t hide it any longer.

For now, I continued to dance, eating anti-nausea meds like Pez candies and trying to find the right balance between eating enough food to sustain myself and the baby but not so much that I’d gain any more than I had to. If the production never found out I was knocked up, then no one else would have to be the wiser. I hadn’t told my mum yet either, afraid of her judgment, nor Madison, even though I desperately needed to talk to someone about this. All she knew was that I had decided to cast my lot in with Markus and that I was, according to her, figuratively insane.

The worst part was the cold politeness I now received from Taron any time we ran into each other at the studios. I hated what we had become, hated the pain I had caused him and myself. I knew he’d shut himself down to protect his own feelings against me, but knowing how warm and compassionate and open he could be just made this feel even worse. Still, I knew for certain that he couldn’t know about the baby, and so I bore the ups and downs of the pregnancy for weeks in silence, sometimes dreading getting out of bed, sometimes full of a strange energy I couldn’t explain. But glowing I was not; I mostly felt bedraggled and exhausted, so much that even Clara asked if I was sick one day.

But you can only go so long without support before you totally break; I learned that lesson the hard way. Five weeks later, after a back-breaking rehearsal, I just totally felt something inside me snap. We were about to start night shoots for the “Saturday Night’s Alright” scenes but I couldn’t even muster the excitement I had originally felt when I signed my contract. I felt like I was going through the motions of everything, and I was worried I wouldn’t even be a proper fit for the film. I was living a lie, only partly happy in this pseudo-relationship I was trying to build with Markus. It wasn’t true, and it wasn’t me, and keeping the baby a secret was crushing me. I also desperately missed Taron, and I can’t tell you how many times I nearly dialed his number, because I knew despite everything he would have picked up the phone, and he would have listened, and he would have tried to help me find a solution even if he wasn’t with me. That was just the person he was; I felt like I had lost my best friend.

I pulled Markus into the same empty studio I had broken Taron’s heart in, and sat down on the floor, my hips aching something fierce.

“Markus, I have to tell you something. Please don’t freak out,” I said quietly, as he sprawled out on the floor next to me, his sweaty shirt sticking to his muscular chest.

“What is it, babe?” he asked, crossing his arms behind his head and staring up at the ceiling. While I loved when Taron called me babe, something about the way Markus said it always made me cringe slightly. For a moment I nearly chickened out in telling him my news, but I couldn’t keep going on like this. At some point he would notice when I was naked that my just-beginning-to-show stomach bump was more than just a large meal I wasn’t even eating.

“You remember that first time we had sex, right?” I said, looking over at him and biting my lip.

“Of course I remember that,” he chuckled. “I fell for you that night,” he said, a boyishly cute grin on his face.

“Yeah, well, we did a lot more that night than just sleep together. Markus, we made a baby. I’m pregnant,” I said quietly, but my words still sounded too loud.

“Woah, no way,” he said, sitting up immediately. “You… you’re sure of that?” he asked, and I nodded.

“I had a test at the clinic, I’m sure,” I said. “I’m twelve weeks already.”

“And you’re sure it’s mine?” he asked, making me sigh.

“Of course it is. Taron’s always used protection, for one, and for two, the timeline is right. It was you.”

He was quiet for a long few minutes, trying to process this news, I’m guessing. “You’re running out of time then,” he finally spoke.

“Running out of time? For what?” I asked, confused.

“Well you’re not going to keep the thing, are you?” he said, and I couldn’t help it, my jaw dropped.

“Of course I’m going to keep your son or daughter. This baby isn’t some ‘thing.’ It’s not garbage you throw away,” I said, feeling the anger rising in my chest.

“Woah, I didn’t mean it like that Juliette. But I sure as hell am not ready to become a father,” he said, holding up his hands to me.

“You don’t get to make that decision now, Markus. You have to take responsibility for what you did,” I nearly hissed. “And what about Clara? You can’t date me without considering her!”

“Yeah, but Clara’s old enough to wipe her own ass. And I’m not her father, she already has one of those she spends time with. I’m fine with that, but a baby is a whole other story. You can’t possibly want this too, it will ruin your career,” he pointed out, and I could only stare at him, unable to process what he was saying.

“My career? Being a mum was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life and I will choose my family over my career every single day of my life. But of course, you wouldn’t know what that’s like because you don’t even want to try,” I said, my face flushing red.

“I’m sorry Juliette. I just can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d support you if you want to, you know, terminate it, but I won’t be the one raising it,” he said. “I’m not going to shatter my life like that,” he continued.

“Then get out. Get out of my face. Don’t ever talk to me again,” I said, my voice shaking in both anger and anguish. “This baby will be better off without someone who doesn’t want it. But I do, and my baby will always know how much I love him or her.”

I buried my head in my hands, bursting into tears as I heard Markus leave the room without another word. I’m not sure what I had expected, but that was not it. I hadn’t remotely prepared myself for the possibility that he would have wanted me to get an abortion, that he would reject fatherhood so thoroughly. Were any of us ever ready to be a parent, even people who had looked forward to it for so long? There was something so deeply terrifying about being responsible for the needs of such a tiny human being, of trying to help them thrive in a world meant for destruction. But that was also the greatest role I had ever held, far more rewarding than any production I had ever graced the stage in. And it wasn’t until the words had left my mouth that I realized how deeply, fiercely I wanted and needed this baby too.

I have no idea how long I cried in that empty studio. I have no idea who discovered me like that through the tiny window in the door. And I have no idea who went and got Taron, but suddenly he was there, pulling me into his safe, comforting arms. I don’t know how long we sat like that, until I had long cried all my tears out and my body had stopped shaking and his fingers grew tired of stroking my hair.

He had stayed silent, patient, until I finally pulled away enough to sit up on my own. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on now?” he asked, absolutely no judgment in his voice. His expression was nothing but kind and compassionate, worried for my well-being over his own.

“I found out I was pregnant five weeks ago,” I said softly. “That’s why I was feeling so ill. I went to the clinic and we did a test. I was already seven weeks at that point. I thought … I thought it would be the right thing to do to give Markus a chance to be the father of the baby he created with me but he wants no part in it. He told me to get rid of it, and I can’t,” I whispered.

“That’s why you tried to break things off with me?” Taron asked gently, smoothing back my hair from my face as I nodded. “Oh Juliette,” he said softly. “I knew there was something, some reason for it. I knew that wasn’t what you wanted, that you were breaking your own heart. I’ve only been waiting for you,” he said, making me want to cry again. “I am here for you in everything, through everything. And we will face this together too. When I told you I loved you, there were no conditions attached. And I love Clara too, and I will love Markus’ baby as it were my own. Because that’s how I love, endlessly,” he said, and my eyes watered up again.

“I can’t ask that of you, Taron,” I said, wiping at my face hastily, but he just reached over and gently brushed my tears from my cheeks before gathering my hands in his own.

“You’re not asking me to do anything. This is something I need too. Maybe it doesn’t happen exactly the way I imagined it would, but that doesn’t mean I can’t accept it, adapt to it, and grow with it. Life has a way of challenging people, but that doesn’t make it all bad. And I right imagine that this could be so much more of a blessing, yeah?”

“My God, you’re a saint. An absolute angel, Taron. I don’t deserve this, at all. I pushed you away,” I said, trembling slightly so he pulled me back into his arms and kissed my forehead sweetly.

“I’m just Taron,” he smiled. “And you do deserve to be happy, and to be loved, and to be absolutely fucking cherished. So I am here for as long as you want me to be here,” he said. “I never really stopped.”

“Even with this?” I asked, touching my belly, which I had started to hide beneath dance sweats because leotards just weren’t cutting it anymore.

“I’m going to be a dad,” he grinned and I’m pretty sure I broke apart in a whole new way at that statement.

“Taron,” I breathed slowly, just gazing at him, feeling excited and a bit bewildered too. “Are you sure?”

“100 percent, Juliette. Now stop asking me that because I won’t change my mind,” he chuckled sweetly. “Now let’s get you up off this floor, and let’s go have a celebratory dinner, shall we?” he said.

“But don’t you have more filming to get back to?” I asked, a bit wide-eyed and still feeling a bit like I was floating a few feet off the ground. My head was swimming with the crazy turn of events.

“Dex understands. You needed me, it’s really as simple as that,” he replied, helping me stand up and even shouldering my stinky dance bag himself, making me roll my eyes.

“I’m pregnant, Taron, not invalid,” I teased him and he just shrugged.

“I’d carry it for you any day,” he smirked, even holding the studio door open for me too. “Get used to it,” he said, before playfully slapping me on the bum as I walked by. “Also just wanted to do that,” he said cheekily, making me groan at that but also feel so grateful that we hadn’t lost what made us feel so special.

“So who all knows about this?” he asked me as we walked out to his car.

“Just you and Markus, really. I hadn’t told anyone before today,” I said softly. “I couldn’t handle it on my own anymore. I was feeling so alone.”

“Well you aren’t alone now, at all. And you should tell your mum, and Madison. Tell them the baby is mine if you like, if you’re worried about anyone judging you. It might as well be, because I’m going to love it that way,” he said, squeezing my hand in his. “But you should feel happy, and proud, and excited. I want that for you,” he grinned, changing everything about the fear and confusion I’d felt just a few weeks before.

“How are you so perfect, Taron?” I asked, shaking my head in awe of him.

“I just wear my heart on my sleeve. It’s not that hard to care about people more than yourself. I find that pays itself back in dividends. And it’s not hard to love you, you know. You’ve brought a lot of color and light into my life in a way I didn’t understand it could be before,” he said softly. “And now I have even more to look forward to.”

“Damnit, T,” I said through the blush rising in my cheeks. “I don’t know how to handle when you say things like that,” I laughed. “It’s like living inside a fairy tale.”

“Fairy tales were written because the truth in them does exist. They aren’t unattainable, impossible figments of our imagination. They can be elusive, yes, and rare, but sometimes you do find yourself living inside one.”

I could only gaze after him as he unlocked the car, opening the door for me again, as I felt every bit of myself being put right again. We decided on our favorite pizza place, but I first made him stop by my house so I could shower and change into more suitable clothes. Clara was with Zayn that night, so we took our time eating and enjoying our relationship again, a relationship that nothing could seem to derail.

I had the idea to stop over at my mum’s, because of all the people who should know, who had been through thick and thin for me with Clara, it was her. Taron almost seemed cutely nervous as we sat on the couch and I broke the news to her. My mom honestly screamed in excitement, jumping up and enveloping us both in a bone-crushing hug. I had no idea why I was so worried about her reaction after all; we never mentioned the baby’s lineage and let her assume since Taron was there. We figured it would be easier this way, to not have to deliver the news with a long introductory caveat, and if the question came up later we could explain then.

As we were driving back to my home, it hit me with a sudden jolt that I would have to meet Taron’s parents, and that we would be sharing the news with his family too. Something about that made everything feel far more real to me, that this was honestly going to be my life. That I would truly become a part of his life, not just in the few dates we managed to squeeze between rehearsals and film sequences, but that we would honestly be creating a life together. There would be many things to have to discuss and figure out in the near future, but tonight wasn’t the night for all of that.

Later, when we were laying on the couch, my head in his lap, the telly on a low murmur and both of us trying to not pass out, everything just felt right. Troy was snoozing on the rug, and I felt as emotionally satisfied as it was possible to feel, and far too stuffed with pizza than I had a right to be. I didn’t have to put on any kind of show with Taron; there was no performance here. We could both comfortably be ourselves, even if that was tired and cranky or moody or whatever.

“Tomorrow’s a big day,” I said with a yawn.

“God, don’t remind me. Night shoots,” he groaned playfully.

“I think it’s exciting,” I grinned. “The set already looks insanely cool. I can’t imagine it all lit up at night!” I smiled. We’d already had a few camera blockings at the carnival they had built specifically for this scene. I was honestly excited about the four days we’d be shooting tomorrow, despite the massive amount of logistics that would go into it. We were definitely in for some long, long nights.

“You think that because you haven’t done it yet,” he giggled. “Speaking of, we should probably head for bed ourselves now. Try to store up some of that energy we’ll be needing.”

I grinned at that and happily followed him back to my bedroom. We both quickly got ready for bed and fell into it, and I was all too happy to see him resting between my frilly sheets and pillows. “You’re cute,” I grinned, kissing the tip of his nose, which he wrinkled in response.

“Well don’t give me a big ego about it,” he teased me lightly, pulling me down to him so that I squealed and then kissing me proper a few times.

“Get some sleep, love,” he smiled, his eyes already drifting shut in exhaustion.

“You too, T. Thanks for saving me today,” I said softly.

“Always,” he breathed out, falling asleep shortly after, his eyelashes sweetly resting against his cheeks in slumber.

Despite my own exhaustion, I was still a whirlwind of emotion and I couldn’t quite fall asleep, so I silently slipped out of bed and grabbed my phone, sitting on the bathroom floor and calling Madison even though it was late and not caring if it woke her up.

“What on earth is going on with you!” she fairly screeched into the phone when she answered, clearly not asleep. “You’ve barely talked to me for weeks. I’m so-”

“I’m pregnant!” I cut in, and she instantly stopped what she was saying.

“What?!” Madison yelled into the phone, so I had to hold it away from my ear for a moment.

“Jesus, Mads. Calm down. Things have really changed,” I said, explaining why I’d broken up with Taron, how things went down with Markus, and that Taron had been more forgiving than I deserved him to be toward me.

“So you’re back together again?” she asked softly.

“Yeah. I’m not sure we really were ever apart. He knew I hadn’t made the decision I wanted to make. That the lie was that I didn’t want him. He knew that the whole time. He truly knows me better than I know myself,” I smiled softly.

“And what about, you know, Markus’ baby?”

“That Markus refuses to acknowledge? Yeah, Taron said it’s his now. He wants to be a dad, and he’s claiming this as his.”

“That’s love, right there, Juliette. It’s staring you right in the face. Don’t you dare ever try and throw that away again, you hear? I will kick your little ballerina ass with my own pointe shoes if I have to!” she squealed, making me laugh too.

“I think I’m done screwing everything up here,” I replied with a laugh. “The universe couldn’t be louder and clearer.”

“That’s for damn sure. Now I’m just curious when he’s going to put a ring on that finger of yours!” she giggled.

“Woah, let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet,” I cautioned.

“Dream a little, Juliette. He’s obviously a bit of a romantic. You know he’s going to make an honest woman of you. You’d better get on Pinterest and start planning. Oh, and I’d better be your maid of honor,” she said, making me laugh again. I listened to her chatter on about weddings and babies and all the possibilities, feeling bemused but also a little hopeful. I had no idea what a future with Taron looked like, not really, balancing kids and our careers. But I was certain that it would be happy; not easy, not perfect, but always fulfilling and supportive.

“Alright, Mads, I should go,” I said with a yawn, breaking into her reverie of my own someday maybe wedding.

“Oh, of course. Momma ought to get her baby rest,” she teased me, but it was all in love and excitement for me.

“You know it,” I giggled. “And that hottie in my bed tonight, snoring away,” I snickered.

“Jesus, you lucky bitch,” Madison joked, sort of.

“Yeah, yeah,” I grinned. “Night, Mads. Love you long.”

“Love you hard, Juliette,” she grinned back before we managed to hang up the call. I leaned my head back against the wall for a long moment, smiling to myself. I could honestly do this - I could have a happy life, I thought to myself.

I used the toilet one last time, already starting to feel the need to do that more often, before slipping back into bed with Taron, realizing just how much I had missed seeing the silhouette of his sleeping form. We had grown so comfortable with each other, that that absence over five weeks had been misery. But like magnets, we had found our way back to each other, his openness, vulnerability and forgiving heart never once questioning whether I should be in his life. He already knew that was where I belonged, and I loved him so much for never doubting it. I needed him, and he accepted that, and trusted so much of himself to my broken heart.

“Love you, T,” I said in the darkness, brushing my fingers lightly through his hair, before settling in next to him, feeling every ache and pain, emotionally wrought, but also feeling a deep satisfaction too. There was a certain courage in what he was choosing to do, and I respected him whole-heartedly for it. The universe had given me the greatest gifts, the man beside me, and the baby inside me. As I fell into the sweetest slumber, I promised myself I wasn’t ever going to let go now.

How will Taron and Juliette’s lives intersect, now that there’s a baby between them? Find out in Chapter 8 HERE.

#taron imagine #taron egerton #taron x reader #taron fanfiction #rocketman fanfiction

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