#like you fucking GET the scales here are VASTLY different. right????
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y'know having some of my fellow Americans say it's bad to celebrate a CEO's murder is obnoxious but kind of expected in today's political climate
hearing a European express such a sentiment is lowkey enraging though
#Sawk talks#YOU GET UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE.#YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIVE UNDER OUR GHOULISH HEALTH CARE SYSTEM#YOU DON'T ALWAYS HAVE THE SPECTER OF GOING BROKE DUE TO HEALTH ISSUES LOOMING OVER YOU#if being happy he got killed makes me a bad person then okay fine. I could theoretically accept that.#but being the CEO of a company that denies a third of its IN-NETWORK CLAIMS is far far worse. like you get that right#like you fucking GET the scales here are VASTLY different. right????#but sure keep looking down on Americans from your European high horse#keep pretending Europe isn't also deeply flawed and that y'all aren't also sick-minded in your own ways lmao#sorry this is kinda vagueposting about a buddy of mine. yes I tried explaining my viewpoint. no I don't think they listened :^)#whatever. back to looking at and reblogging memes about this dude getting merced like the sick fuck I am I will enjoy every minute of it <3
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alright I beat veilguard, here are my thoughts. light spoilers but I'm avoiding anything explicit.
TLDR: worth it if you can get it on sale and can make peace with some cringe writing, lore changes, and lack of meaningful reactivity based on the race you choose. A major thing going for it is that it feels 100% complete and fully realized before release, which is more than what I can say for a lot of games. I had a lot of fun with it at the end of the day even if I doubt I'll replay it all the way through again any time soon.
Gameplay
The combat is very fun, and it's kind of incredible how different your experience of the game can be depending on your class (on a mechanical level). I've tried both mage and warrior, and their base mechanics are VASTLY different to the point where it feels like I might as well be playing a different game with some similar mechanics. I've talked to my friend who beat the game as a rogue, and even their mechanics seem very different from what I experienced from the other two classes.
The bad side of that is that they reuse the mechanics of a lot of enemies. It's not noticeable right away, but once you fight a few mages or two of the seven or so dragons you can fight in the game it gets very repetitive. The dragon mechanics barely changing depending on the type of dragon was especially annoying. Also, if you reach the max level (50) just know that enemies stop scaling after level 45 and things won't feel like a challenge anymore once you reach that threshold. For context I beat the game on the second hardest difficulty.
I still would've rather they changed around a few things so we could bring 3 companions with us like in previous games. I also wish they had more automatic skill use from our companions since I always forget to get them to use any of their skills. I heavily relied on some of the skill upgrades that had them use it automatically.
Exploration/Level Design
The world exploration is fine. I find that it's a bit too hand-holdy at times, and seems to rely heavily on giving you a shiny thing (chests) in order to keep you engaged which makes it feel cheap (in addition to all the chests/collectables being marked on the mini-map. again, a bit too hand-holdy for me).
That being said, I like how relatively limited the world is. Especially in comparison to Inquisition where there was just WAY too much. The areas aren't absurdly huge, but I felt like I was getting a good baseline for the vibe of whatever country I was in. In some ways, it felt like a more streamlined and higher quality version of the areas in Origins/DA2.
The areas are obviously very well thought out and designed, and I really enjoy the stark difference between areas you see both before and after your first major choice. I've seen people critique that choice being too early in the game, and I kind of disagree. My gripes with it are how it was handled after the change, but I'm not going to go into a tangent about that here.
The one thing that irks me to no end is the teleport beacon system. You always have a designated "respawn point" when you die. What this means in practice is that every single time you load a save that isn't in the middle of a cutscene, you'll spawn at whatever teleport beacon is set as your spawn point instead of where you physically were when you saved.
I hate this. To me it contributes to the cheap feeling of the game and also throws me off because every single time I loaded a save I didn't know what the fuck I was doing since often times I was far away from the actual thing I was in the middle of before I quit the game for the day. It's okay-ish if you're just tracking a quest, but there's actual world exploration in this game without markers.
Alright, now the actual writing of the game.
It's cringe too much of the time. It assumes you're not paying attention to anything most of the time. I hate the "next time on..." narration after the quests that sometimes outright spoil you for the next thing that's going to happen. I hate that you get the resolution to mysteries that have existed since Origins before you're even fully out of the intro to the game without giving any of it time to breathe.
Meanwhile, it seems unwilling to engage in anything that might potentially be vaguely "problematic". The companions don't argue, or if they do it's resolved almost immediately. Any tension between the companions is caused by one person having concerns about another person, and then the other person is like "yeah I get why you're concerned we're cool" (both in banter and in scenes at your base).
The world feels devoid of basic elements of previous games, like elven oppression, beyond a few non-specific references about "elves having it hard. In addition, they seem to be adding NPCs of different races to the background of the world seemingly at random. No, I don't think that there'd be this many vashoth or tal-vashoth shop-keepers in this part of Antiva, or this many elves casually intermingling with humans in Minrathous or all these veil jumpers that aren't elven much less Dalish.
It seems almost random, and more in line with modern dnd played for fun with friends or the atmosphere in the lower city in BG3 than a dragon age game. The fact that you can choose any origin regardless of your starting race is kind of insane considering the reality of some of those origins. There doesn't seem to be much, if any, intention behind it. Which makes it even more frustrating that I can count on half of one hand the amount of times it came up in any real way that I was playing as a dwarf, and lost track of the amount of times it should have considering a big part of the main plot has to do with dwarven history.
To be specific, and without giving too many spoilers, there's one scene where you find out something about the origin of modern dwarves. The "angry" dialogue option for that is for Rook to start yelling and making very good points, only for it to end with them saying that they can't dream with the same weight as everything else and it comes across as goofy as hell considering we don't know dick or all about the downsides to not dreaming in-universe. It's just something they can't do. But no, not dreaming is the same thing as your entire civilization crumbling right?
The companions themselves are written to be hard to dislike. Aside from Taash, all their hard edges have been smoothed down into something that barely manages to stay engaging. To be completely fair, I might be especially sensitive to this. I had just beaten BG3 and then DA2 before playing this game, and they're both games with a bunch of shitty people who slowly get better over time. VG, in contrast, doesn't have any tangible character arc for a lot of the characters outside of maybe one choice at the end of their quest line. Even then, it's minimal.
The game clearly has a few themes it was going for, but it either hits you over the head with them or doesn't earn them. There was one point where Rook (with no prompting from me!) said that their group had become a family. Which, yes they all get along and are working well together towards the goal of saving the world, but that didn't really feel earned at the point they said it.
Another theme I think they wanted were "a real leader takes responsibility for their actions" but we don't have any real options to either take responsibility or deny responsibility. This ties back to the issue I mentioned earlier where interpersonal problems get almost immediately resolved, and most were never even that serious in the first place.
There's a lot of explicitly telling you what the narrative themes are without following though. I've critiqued BG3 for hitting you over the head with themes, but it's NOTHING like what I've seen in VG.
They also have a very bad attempt at calling back to earlier parts of their arc/things Rook said. Forgive me for bringing up Astarion, but an example of that is Astarion saying "this is a gift, I won't forget it" both when he bites you for the first time and when he stays a spawn after killing Cazador. In Veilguard it's just people saying the same line almost verbatim about 100 times. Like I said earlier, the game assumes you're not paying attention.
And finally, I like the overarching story as a concept. Rook being forced to take responsibility for this team, in part because they feel guilty and in part because everyone else is too bogged down in their shit to do it so they HAVE to. And then working hard to build that team and the factions supporting them up in preparation to face something completely unprecedented? Then the individual plot points without having to slog through how they're written to get to the end? Love all that! Great bones to work off of!
I also really liked a lot of the arcs of the NPCs, and the one I think about constantly is Jacobus (SPOILERS IN THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH) specifically where Treviso is blighted. I'm not sure if it's different if Treviso isn't blighted, but I was so heartbroken by everything that happened to him culminating in him giving in to the taint to lead a group of darkspawn against the mayor to stop them from releasing gaatlok.
SPOILERS OVER
And that's the thing, there's so many little moments like that in the game that felt so incredibly real that it made me more and more frustrated at a noticeable amount of the game that seemed to be written by someone who read a few bullshit pop psychology articles and wanted to gloat about it by inserting a bunch of surface level mental health understanding into the game.
All that being said, and despite the fact that I don't think the game earned a lot of the character moments that came in the finale...it has, by far, the BEST end game sequence of ANY game - RPG or otherwise - that I've ever played.
I've never been hit so hard emotionally by characters I otherwise didn't give a shit about. I made one choice knowing it would result in someone specific dying (and I didn't really care because I didn't like them), but the way that person died and the way that death is talked about afterwards broke me in ways I didn't expect.
And the ending is LONG, too. It really feels like you're fighting a final battle alongside an army and the army is supporting the small group you're in so you can make it to where you need to go and kill the gods. And it feels realistic. There's no way everyone gets out unscathed, it's physically impossible in the game itself.
For a game that made me feel incredibly safe in the sense that all the companions had plot armor up until that point, it felt like a shock in a really good way. You spend all this time with your companions, learning about them and watching them interact with each other in the lighthouse and see their relationships with each other and then at the end of it there's nothing you can do to save some of them. Some don't die, but face something almost worse than death. And it's all for your benefit so you can have a small shot at pulling this off.
It's like the suicide mission in ME2 on crack in the best way possible. You learn things over the course of that long ass finale that made me look at the entire game differently and understand a lot of characters so much more.
To dial it back a bit, I think the romance in this game is pretty well done. I've only done Neve's, but it feels more realistic than other similar RPGs in the sense that y'all aren't falling over yourselves to commit to each other and there's no expectation on staying together after this. It feels like a new relationship, and she even still flirts with Lucanis which I honestly didn't mind! It, perhaps unintentionally, made it all seem that much more realistic plus it would've built up nicely to them getting together had I not romanced either of them.
It almost marketed itself as a dating sim, but really it's such a small part of your interaction with your romantic interest. I'm assuming other romances are slightly different, but I kissed Neve a grand total of one time before the finale and then there were a bunch of longing glances. I played with the idea of romancing Taash before reloading, and it feels like y'all are just incredibly casual about it even after going to have dinner with their mom. Both felt VERY realistic for the stakes of the game and the level of commitment both of y'all would be able to offer.
Do I think this is GOTY worthy? No, but I do think it's overall more fun to play than Inquisition which DID win GOTY. I think it's worth the $40 I paid for it, and I had a very good time playing it despite how much I just wish it wasn't a Dragon Age game. Unlike with Inquisition, I don't dread the idea of playing this game again. Leading up to me playing DAV, I was going to replay all the DA games, but I ended up skipping Inquisition because I did NOT want to have to slog through all of that again (I was doing completionist playthroughs).
The game is really good at cinematics and the big moments in the world, and I just wish that same love and care translated to. I don't know. The actual writing all throughout the game.
I really hope the series ends here, and they don't do something with the vague hints that have been in this game and Inquisition about some bullshit going on across the sea (the secret post-credits scene pissed me off but I'm not going to get into that).
It has a sense of finality to it, and I'm happy with this wrapping up everything I've seen this series build towards since I got Origins for Christmas when I was 13.
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A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine - 4.5/5
Turns out I fucking love space operas. My god. I wish I had discovered this book so much earlier in my reading journey. I feel like this is the book I've always wanted to read, the one that finally takes all my favourite pieces of the stories I love and puts them together the right way. It's taken me a long time to sit down and write about it, because I barely know where to start, the story was just so intoxicating and personal that I almost feel like just keeping this one to myself, close to the heart. But I'll try anyway...
Right off the bat, I got big The Left Hand Of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin) vibes from this story. It has a similar premise, and explores similar themes; An ambassador is sent from a different planet with some sort of goal in mind, and they get embroiled in a mess of political intrigue as they struggle to grasp for familiarity in a strange new culture. Themes of duality in identity are explored as well, although this is a VASTLY different take than Le Guin's and it is damn brilliant. But A Memory Called Empire, despite mostly taking place in one city, also has the massive scale of a world spanning sci-fi epic such as Fall Of Hyperion, in the way that the actions of our main character trigger a cascade of events that ripple throughout the universe (there are also frequent mentions of "jumpgates" that remind me a lot of Hyperion's farcaster portals). So it truly has the best of both worlds; the deeply intricate (and often confusing) personal relationshipsâand when you zoom out���the space battles, the crusading empire and it's mass planetary colonization efforts.
A Memory Called Empire is home to some of the best worldbuilding and character work I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Martine just pays so much attention to the minute details of everything. She is truly an observer of humanity, and it shines in her writing. Every gesture, every facial expression, every subtle difference in the phrasings of different cultures are put under the magnifying glass. Every character has such a unique and believable personality, and I really felt like I was beside Mahit Dzmare the whole time as she tries to navigate and understand the differences between herself and the citizens of Teixcalaan. This book also made me realize just how important colour is in worldbuilding. This is easy to do poorly (for example, how Dan Simmons' heedless overuse of "lapis lazuli" basically turned into a inside joke amongst readers), but everything in Teixcalaan is bathed in rose quartz and gold and silver whites, a really flowery language that is befitting of a place nicknamed the "Jewel of the World". Martine brings a sense of soft elegance to the empire and it's technological marvels that was utterly engrossing, and a stark contrast to the insidious nature of the Empire.
A lot of this story revolves around understanding the nuances of language. The people of Teixcalaan often speak in poetry and even encrypt their political discourse with poems and fancy glyphs, but this sense of poetry and decryption is also present directly in Martine's prose. There are a lot of reflections of our modern society to be found in here, some of which are implemented beautifully, some of them a little awkwardly. My only real criticism of the book is that there are a few moments where the metaphors became almost too clear. It's not that I didn't appreciate the underlying meaning, it just sort of took me out of the story and ruined my immersion. Fortunately it doesn't take long for Martine to get the story back on track and stop indulging in poetic double entendres, and these moments sort of just become little hiccups in an otherwise beautiful journey.
A Memory Called Empire was just so refreshing. This is the tale that contemporary readers of science fiction deserve. It's sensitive, it's aware, it turns the social norms of modern society upside down and completely normalizes things such as same-sex relations, ambiguous identities and our deep internal conflicts without lowering any of the stakes of the plot or deterring the average reader. We need more writers like Martine in this world. I wish I could have read this slower, but thankfully there's a sequel that I'm already about 60 pages into and holy shit, it's already just as good.
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UPSET THAT I CANNOT REPLY TO A POST WITH AN IMAGE. I AM SITTING HERE LIKE THIS THINKING ABOUT VASH/CPHIL PARALLELS:
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IM GONNA REPLY TO THIS WITH MY CPHIL/VASH COMPARISON ANALYSIS. BECAUSE THE BRAINROT HAS SET IN AND IT'S KILLING ME.
OK OK ALRIGHT. OK. so first of all. cphil and vash the stampede. angel imagery. lost their best friend. lost their family. lost their home. extreme family issues. vash has a missing arm and phil has a wrecked wing. vash can't use his powers at the end of trimax and phil can't fly anymore. crying. ok so now we've got these fuckin parallels right. ok i'm gonna get into their classpects because they are so similar but so different. this is gonna b under a cut this got away from me i'm so sorry i could talk classpects for HOURSSSSSS
so cPhil to me is a Seer of Life, right? Seers are supposed to guide their fellow players on the right path. cPhil TRIES to do that. right. like he TRIES. but god he is so bad at it. he's so disconnected from mortals in general that he just doesn't know how they work. he thinks they're all doing things wrong and they just need some guidance to do it right!!! and Vash is a Muse of Life to me. lots of parallels here between him and Calliope (seen in this post where i delve into Vash and Knives' classpects).
They're both Life players with the same goals, but with vastly different ways they go about achieving those goals. they just want peace for everyone else, but god they are both so fucking bad at it. they are at opposite ends of a morality scale here. Vash's main focus is keeping people alive and it doesn't matter what he has to do to keep it that way, no matter what happens to himself or whether keeping one guy alive will indirectly result in the deaths of others. Phil's main focus is establishing peace, and he doesn't care what he has to destroy in the meantime to do that, as long as it doesn't harm himself or the people he's close to. To Vash, the ends justify the means. He can sacrifice his own wellbeing to keep others safe as long as no one else gets hurt while he's there. To Phil, the method of getting to his goal matters just as much, because instead of looking at it as just "the ends justify the means" he sees it as "everything i do pushes myself towards achieving what i want, my goal will never be reached without these actions so i might as well do what i want and maybe the destruction will teach everyone a lesson along the way" LIKE HE'S SO FUCKED UP <3
cPhil is so derse dreamer and Vash is so prospit dreamer. THAT'S the big difference!!! they see their actions very differently and that's partially why they act so differently when they have the same goals. Lunar sways are difficult to analyze because there's so much nuance to them, you could have a lot of Prospit traits but have one extremely different trait that could make you a Derse dreamer instead. like it's so weird??? but I once saw a post that summarized it like this: For Prospit dreamers, the end result is more important than the methods it takes to get there; for Derse dreamers, the journey is just as, if not more important, than the end result. Phil HAS to be a Derse dreamer, bc to him his journey is neverending. He's an immortal who has been alive long enough to know that not everyone will see his logic, and he will spend the rest of his life either convincing them to see his ways or he will get rid of those people entirely. To Vash, if he can just convince enough people, if he can just get to others before the destruction occurs, if he can TALK to enough people, maybe the violence will stop one day. It's an IMPOSSIBLE goal, but he keeps trying to look towards that one day where he'll be able to look out at a paradise without death and violence (much like Callie in a lot of ways BUT I'VE ALREADY GONE OVER THAT!!!).
Phil, as a combination Seer and Derse dreamer, knows that the journey is neverending, and he's either given up on pacifism or never tried it in the first place. He SEES that his ideals are not universal, and that knowledge gives him the ability to be apathetic towards other people and destroy what they love to "teach them a lesson." Vash, as a young spry century-and-a-half years old, and as a Muse and Prospit dreamer, still thinks that he can reach his goal of world peace, even though that hopes fades more and more from day to day, but like. his speech near the end of tristamp ep 12 to Knives?? About how he'll just keep going no matter what??? He's not giving up on his ideology because he doesn't SEE. He doesn't KNOWWW that his ideals cannot be universal. Ofc this changes later on in Trimax and he finally takes direct action by killing Legato and gives up on his staunch pacifism, but like. my guy. it took you a LONG ASS TIME to get to this point. my god.
Life players are described as "concerned with the betterment of themselves and those around them, as well as the onward march of positive progress... They also have the tendency to put other's needs before their own, which never ends well for anyone, because the Life-bound can grow bitter if they feel their own self-care has had to be shunted aside. At their best, they are great listeners, caretakers, and nurturers. At their worst, the Life-bound are passive aggressive, and pushy-they're certain they know best.â Both cPhil and Vash are the best and worst of their aspect. They both grow bitter, Vash in Trimax from having to take the high road all the time, and Phil from thinking that no one can see that he knows best. They do listen, and they do care for and nurture others, and they work towards the betterment of others, but sometimes it's people who don't want to be nurtured or bettered. Vash tries to help people who don't want help, and Phil babies cWilbur when he comes back and his "help" towards cTommy is um. not great!! They can both be passive aggressive, and they're both so incredibly sure that they know best. They're both so incredibly stuck in their ways.
Phil is the most stubborn Seer ever, because he only wants to see what will benefit his own life and ideals, not everyone. And Vash, the Muse, keeps on his one-track thought process and resigns himself to doing what he's always done (much like Callie) instead of taking direct action to TRULY change others' lives for the better. They both do finally change this in the very end of their arcs, with Phil reaching out to Niki and retreating to the End with her, Connor, and Kristin, giving up his old lifestyle to help a couple of people he's only known for a couple years and genuinely cared about for much less, basically a blink in his immortal lifespan, and Vash killing Legato to save Livio and Razlo and confronting Knives head on to save the planet.
but like. FUCK, you guys took so long to get just to this point. you are so stuck in your ways you have PROBLEMS
#trigun#dsmp#whiskeys word soup#mcyt classpects#<<this has 2 go in my classpect tag bc it summarizes my cphil seer of life thoughts completely#ALRIGHT. WELL. THAT GOT AWAY FROM ME. BUT UMMM. YEAH.#anyway im gonna rotate these two around in my brain for a few hours <3#i almost want to write a silly little crossover fic where these two just get to sit down and chat. yk?? like. let em talk#chat about their ideals and their immortal lives and how it's affected both of them yk??? sad immortal guys club#I FUCKING LOVE CPHIL I LOVE HIM SO MUCH HE HAS PROBLEMS I WANNA PUT HIM IN A FOOD PROCESSOR <3
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in your opinion, what should an anarchist and post-carceral society do about dyed-in-the-wool wrongdoers who *will* make the active choice to hurt people *deliberately* regardless of the societal conditions or measures taken to prevent harm?
(i'm not meaning to sealion here, i am just genuinely thinking about this question myself)
not really sure what youâre counting under âmeasuresââfor example, taking a measure such as âkilling themâ would, obviously, ensure they stop hurting people. other things like (hypothetically) âisolating them w/no resources & no way outâ would, also, drastically reduce to likelihood of them hurting peopleâno matter how much they want to & are willing to, if they donât have the physical means, they canât
though, Iâm not in favor of things like imprisonment, bc to be able to lock up & hold someone like that already means you have some degree of disproportionate power and other things built and set up in place, and also it would be way overkill causing vastly more harm than needed which is bad
I struggle to imagine a world without any more prisons, bc Iâve never lived in one & our entire lives are saturated w/prison culture, tho there are some pre-carceral societies you could study; & personally tho I find it easier to think abt these things thru âwhat can I do right now,â bc itâs already a similar issueâtrying to stop harm (a lot of harm happens in my life even rn), but w/o carceral apparatuses (also knowing that those canât really help us with anything and are the harm, in similar ways)âand really anything we would do once we get to something that could be called a âpost-prisonâ point is already what weâre doing nowâor trying to do, tho the carceral state tries to prevent those things
& a key point abt that is that âharmâ (esp in the form of abusive relationships) tends to not really follow a âcommunity is in a position to stop it while itâs happeningâ in the first place, bc of how the entire society has a culture of silence built into it, & how tons of factors go into making these situations hard to escape or resist. & also how communities tend to suck at handling abusers even after they find out (lots of victim-blaming, not understanding how this stuff works, not understanding the risk etc). so w/, like, close interpersonal violence Iâm very focused on improving the ability for victims to use self-defense, to escape, to cut contact w/abusers & decreasing the consequences for that, & helping us retake control of our narratives and decreasing tolerance for abuse & abuse apologia in general
there are also people, for example, I might come across near spaces I orbit rn & who are obviously not safe to be around (determined bigots, harassers, abuse supporters, etc) and a lot of the time Iâm not in a position to do anything about that directly, but I try to spread knowledge abt right-to-not-interact-with-people-you-dont-want-to (for example), and awareness of how bigots & abusers/supporters use platforms and positions of power to enact harm, and making it easier for ppl to fuck off from them if theyâre being toxic (think antifascist tactics, but including how they're applied on a smaller scaleâfocusing on preventing fascists from building power, denying fascism a platform from which to promote itself, interrupting the problem in its tracks before it can escalate to assaults or state takeovers)
every situation of harm/victimization is different, every manipulative/exploitative/abusive person is different, the treatment each gets from surrounding communities is differentâbut in general (if these things can even be said to be generalizable) whatever they are using to be able to cause the harm, whateverâs preventing ppl from doing effective self-protection, etc etc take care of that (& no one size fits all ofc but if itâs, like, a person who targets ppl in certain types of communities for attacks then a great first step would be removing them from their projects and disassociating from them and informing other at risk communities abt them)
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gill
wc: 6.4k
odessa places a firm hand on gills chest, stopping him from walking any further. if she hadnât, gill would have blown right past and put his son in headlock.
they were at some grand ceremonial event for a product release, and hades being the hotheaded one out of odessaâs three personal bodyguards, had just gotten in someoneâs face. it wasnât not well deserved, but hades has a certain tendency to use inappropriate language in professional settings, which isnât good for odessaâs image. his twin brother on the other hand was more reserved and respectful. gill wishes hades was a lot more like zeus so he didnât have to chew him out for every mistake.
he could always just decide to let it go, but gill wasnât the type of adoptive father to be passive. he was strict. the twins learned early on what tough love was. gill wasnât cuddly or really family driven, nor was he ever willing to talk about feelings. this may have something to do with the shark that he is.
âi oughta pull you boys both out of this job.â gill seethed at his boys when odessa finally let him go talk to them behind the stage. it took him a second to calm himself enough to convince her to let him go.
it was dark back there, casted shadows fell over the men, especially over gill and his mean brow with a scar running through and all the way up into his hairline. he had many scars, but the most prominent ones were that one and the one ripping through the left corner of his upper lip.
gills short and jagged silver hair suited his vibe and matched his usual slate grey blue clothes.
âwhat? me?â zeus brought his hands up in defense. âi havenât done anything!â
âyeah. havenât done anything about this knucklehead of a brother you got. youâre supposed to be keeping an eye on him.â
hades huffed an annoyed sigh like a child as if gill was overreacting. but gill continued.
âyou want to talk about being responsible? itâs up to you to keep yourself and your brother in check.â
gill is harder on zeus than he is on anybody. and itâs because he expects the most out of the strong young bull orca whoâs come of age. hades has too, the both of them at 25, but their levels of maturity are on vastly different scales, making gill lean more towards zeus to pull their weight.
âas for you,â gill huffed at hades, placing his large rough hand on the boyâs trapezius. âi donât want any funny business from here on out. otherwise youâll be staying with your great aunt franny for another week.â
hades shuddered at the mention of their great aunt. she was half mako shark, old as bones, and had the most crooked, fucked up teeth one could imagine. her thin frame and serpentine swimming patterns weirds everyone out, even gill. sheâs tough as nails though and runs a tight ship. literallyâ she lives in a sunken, abandoned pirate ship at the edge of a ravine. not very much sunlight reaches that area.
hades gets sent to her every so often when gill has trouble dealing with his behavior and he comes back on the straight and narrow.. at least, for a few months.
there was a time when hades spent nearly three weeks with aunt franny. he was maybe 16. during his time there he was in optimal shape. never talked back, always cleaned up after himself, made the beds, did the dishes, took out the garbage. he even took out her eel on swims every morning, going all the way to the reef to say hi to neighbors. her eel was old and didnât ever have energy to swim back so hades carried it, returning to the ship with it in his arms. franny would grill him on where he was and what he doing out for so long, not recognizing that he was trying to be on his best behavior. she never liked the twins, more so hades, and probably never will.
hades being gone for those three weeks had its ups and downs. at home, gill and zeus bonded better. they shared more time with one another and got along in silent respect. but it was too quiet, without hades there was no fun. no commotion or laughter or anything like that, just mutual silence existed in their household. zeus found himself falling into a lull, constantly being unimpressed and uninterested in everything. his daily routine was as solid as concrete and he did nothing out of the ordinary. but as soon as hades got backâ the second his twin brother entered their home again with gill on his tail making sure he swam straight, zeus got his mojo back. from then on it was hard to separate them, as if it wasnât already hard before.
the two are each halves of one whole, and to honor that, zeus shaved off all of his brothers hair, per hadesâ request. hades sat on a chair wearing a trash bag with a hole cut out for his head, having all his silky long white hair sink down to the floor. all except one lock.
the long white strand that zeus ceremonially cut off got braided into his own hair, which was chest length and black. they were truly yin and yang.
âgot that?â gill stated, letting go of his son. hades straightened out his shirt and blazer, fiddling with his gold chain after nodding in agreement. but once gill leaves, heâs quick to mutter profanities under his breath, loud enough for only zeus to hear.
âwhatâs his fuckinâ problem with me?â
zeus rolls his eyes and stands up from leaning against the alley wall, tossing one of his two braids over his shoulder. âhe loves you.â
âthats his problem? love?â hades scoffs and trails after his brother, coming back into the crowd. the music is louder, lights are flashing, odessaâs getting reading to go on stage escorted by gill, and people are clamoring around to see her and ask questions.
âyes. love, care, family, all of the above. he does it because he wants you to beââ zeus got cut off by his brother.
âbetter? more like you?â
âno, that isnât what iâm saying.â
âbut itâs what youâre thinking.â
âyou donât know what iâm thinking.â
âi bet i can guess what youâre thinking about right now.â hades jeers.
âand what is that?â
âwieners.â
zeus lets go of his stoicism and laughs, pushing his brother. âshut up,â itâs not hard enough to shove him to the ground but enough to jostle him. âi was not.â
âbut you are now!â hades pushes him right back.
âyeah but it doesnât count because you put the idea in my head!â
breaking them out of their goofy moment was a fan of odessaâs screaming loudly with a sign in hand, trying to get past the velvet ropes.
zeus steps in cordially, excusing the person away and asking folks to back up. he was good at this job. he was professional and chivalrous.
hades on the other hand was more of a brute when it come to asking people to move, putting his hands on shoulders and chests if they got too close.
which, unfortunately for everyone, happened all night long.
âdid you see the way he looked me?â odessa says to gill while staring at the ceiling. she had a glass of red wine in one hand and the other rested on her chest, submerged in the water of the tub. her large tail hung out on the end of the tub, dripping onto the marble tiles of the hotel bathroom.
in gills opinion, the bathroom along with the rest of the hotel, was too stark white. too pristine and clean and perfect. he felt uncomfortable opening anything or touching anything, even when running the bath he made for odessa. he thinks everything is set up in a way that is so human. so capital.
it was all designed for them, not anomaliesâ but why would it be inclusive? they need not make bigger beds or bigger tubs or bigger doors. nor smaller rooms and smaller amenities. itâs not like an anomalies can ever stay here, or even come at all. its all human sized. luckily for them, they fit in (somewhat) perfectly but that wasnât enough to make gill ever stop resenting humans secretly.
despite that, he had a job to do. they all had a job to do now. it was just the way the world worked, and if he denied the presidents offer to work under them as recruiters for an uprising, theyâd be exposed to the public for what they truly were. gill: a glorified fish out of water with far too many scars. the twins: outcasts with parents in a tank, and odessa: a mind controlling monster with the body and face of a goddess. and not only them, all the other undetected shapeshifters who were god knows where, lingering around in the capital city. theres no telling what the angry freak-hating humans of the capital would do if they knew.
gill often wonders what life would be like if odessa never got captured that day. the president left the great walls in search of something thatâd make a subtle, secret weapon. something with a voice so hypnotic and powerful that could entrance a whole city and mesmerize them, distract them from what really went on in the labs within the government buildings.
he had her in his net of the discrete fishery boat. it was a small operation, but a necessary one. she was handpicked from the other sirens also trying to attack the boat, their serpent eyes just above the water. the president had watched odessa, naked and struggling and tangled up in the net. the sky was gloomy and murky and the water was more so. she spoke and pleaded and sang all she could to force him to let her go, but the president took precautions and wore ear protection. he was immunized to her. he promised her fame and glory for her cooperation and if she were to say no, to not accept his offer, heâd âgut her like the fish she wasâ.
odessaâs fame came to her just as promised. she was a one hit wonder, an overnight sensation. only, the attention never subsided and her songs and public image only garnered more and more idolatry. thus, gill, an ex militant, came along as her arm. he was young, just out of his service. many shapeshifters who were naturally hybrids of strong breeds were forced into the human militia, sought after for their brute strength and mobility, and it happens all under unsuspecting civilians noses. for all they know, their city isnât puppeteered by the president and there are no anomalies within the walls, working here under presidential rule.
âi did notice that.â gill responded from his stool by the door. no one is allowed in or out unless theyâre apart of odessaâs team and gill would make sure of that. he would protect her no matter what, even if it meant sacrificing his own time to relaxâ which looked like him in a tub that couldnât possibly hold even half of his shark tail. ârelaxationâ was that. again, not designed for anomalies.
she took another sip of her wine and smiled. âbefore we know it weâll have the harringtonâs heir apart of the presidentâs operation. hook, line, and sinker.â odessa smiled.
gill couldnât help but to return it, feeling his cheeks turn up at her fishing-relevant joke. she always knows how to make light of a situation. in fact, itâs easier for her to do that than ever talk about whatâs really bothering her.
he looked at odessa in the tub, watching her struggle with the weight of her glossy dark teal tail in a confinement too small for it. her hair was wet, just how he was always used to, and itâs length covered her exposed breasts. though, it wasnât in gills nature to ever look.
âbut what if he doesnât join?â odessa cocked her head to him. âwhat if i canât convince him? i mean we barely talked tonight.â
gill shook his head. âtheyâll be more opportunities. more events. youâll be able to.â
he was confident in what he was saying. there hasnât ever been a man that odesaa wasnât able to charm (aside from the president). part of it was her voice of courseâ sirens had the ability to hypnotize and manipulate. but also, part of it was her as an individual. sheâs charming, bold. sheâs a minx.
this dean character sheâs meant to recruit will be no different than all the other men.
hopefully.
in one sudden move there was a loud bang on the other side of the wall. both of their heads turned toward it and then toward each other. gill slowly rose, his concern growing with each second. his hand reached for his gun holster, resting on it so he can easily pull it out right as he opened the bathroom door.
within a swift click, he latched open the door and pointed his gun.
âgoddamn it-â he tsked at his boys who were on the floor along with a hoard of pillows. by the looks of it they were playing their stupid âcrash landerâ game. itâs a game they made up when they were little and it can only be played in on-land hotels (it just doesnât work in underwater hotels. gravity and whatnot). the point of crash lander was to make a landing pad out of pillows on the floor against the foot of the bed. each would take turns jumping on the bed, and the other was on the ground in a sniper position, closing one eye and pretending to shoot the other. the one on the bed would fall like a dead man onto the pillows. hades is better at doing the fall because he doesnât have any sense of danger and wonât flinch or hesitate when he falls off. zeus always hesitates. the game has more to it than that and thereâs a complex point system but no matter how many times they repeat the rules to gill, he just doesnât get it. even after he spent 20 minutes teaching them how to actually get into a sniper position. it was his job in the military afterall, so he knew all about it.
they are strictly not allowed to play crash lander anymore on gills orders after last time. ever since zeus broke his collarbone hitting the wall, the game was âbannedâ. although, the twins disregard that and now zeus is only allowed to be the sniper, and hades, the deadman.
gill looked at his buzzed haired son, who was half upside down with his ass in the air looking straight back at gill sheepishly. he drew his lips in a thin line and lowered his gun back into its holster. âwhat did i tell you guys about crash lander?!â
âto not play it.â zeus said, not making eye contact. hades just rolled his eyes at his brothers immediate tail tuck and unfurled from his position on the pilows. he rubbed his head a little from where he bonked it on the wall, earning a concerned glare from gill. before he could get scolded, hades beat him to it.
âgill. weâre fine, my headâs fine, you can untwist your panties.â
there was a stunned silence. a sort of âyou did not just say thatâ vibe hung in the air. zeusâs mouth hung agape, gills eyes were wide and angry, and there was even a chuckle from the other side of the wall coming from the tub. odessa had heard him from the far side of the bathroom. she giggled as if she knew what was just about to go down.
âthatâs it. youâre done. go into that room and think about what you just said.â gill pointed to the second bedroom attached to the first. it had two twin size beds it it.
âwhat am i? five?â hades laughed, picking up the pillows and tossing them on the king bed he took half of them from. âgill. cmon.â
gill didnât budge, his expression stern and unmoving. âit was a joke.â hades smiled, throwing his hands around. heâs not serious, is? hades wondered.
âfine.â hades huffed, still not convinced gill was actually upset with him. he straighted out his black tank top and grey sweatpants before heading into the room, zeus following quietly.
gill hesitated on stopping him, wanting to tell him that only his brother is supposed to go in and have a time out, but they canât be away from one another, and he knows that.
the two shut the door behind them and gill fixes his holster before coming back into the bathroom to odessa.
âyou really set him straight that time,â odessa joked sarcastically. she was looking like it was about time to get out of the bath, her wine class emptied.
gill huffed and helped her out of the water to sit on edge the tub. her tail flopped in front of him and he grabbed a fluffy white towel to wipe it down.
âi didnât know what else to do, itâs always the same routineâ discipline and pushback.â he muttered, looking down. he sounded gruff but quieter than before.
odessa hummed while watching him dry her and her tail transformed back into human legs. her gaze ran up to his eyebrow scar, digging into his hairline rather offensively. gill was self conscious about it and odessa was the only person that knew that. this information came from a drunken conversation where the both of them laid on their backs, aimlessly floating on a secluded lake and night. it was when the twins were toddlers, just couple short years after he earned said scar. gill told her about his entire life on the lake, calmly.
putting a shark on its back is a known way to get them to relax. itâs then, and only then, when gill is relaxed. but itâs a blessing and a curseâ it puts him in a state that is so vulnerable, emotionally and physically. he canât easily break it either, like being on a strong sedative. his words just poured out him from a place so sensitive and raw, all with his tone being so casual.
he told her all about how he got the scar from a run in with a minotaur in the wild west. how the reason he went all the way out there to the driest place he could think of was to die. the heat would surely kill him and he wouldnât have to think about caspian or pearl. or their two godforsaken twin boys who were only just calfâs.
he was naive, didnât know the lay of the land. in the heat of the sun, gill was burning up as he stumbled upon a settlement. breaking and entering wasnât his style but this oasis was his only option to survive after he changed his mind on death. he jumped the short barbed wire fence and crossed the yard, passing by a large peach tree. he plucked one and brought it up to his mouth, feeling the fuzz and sweet aroma wafting to his nose. normally, gill doesnât like anything but meat or seafood, and fruits and vegetables were never his thing. but this peach, fuck, it was blessing. gill finished his peach in a few bites, finding a duck pond on the property and stripping down his clothes, spitting the peach pit out onto the ground.
in his naked vulnerability, gill slid into the pond and dunked his head underwater, immediately forming his fins and ears and larger than life shark tail. his near-heatstroke thirst made the dirty pond water taste like liquid gold and he drank and bathed until he was satisfied.
just before he was about to decide get out, he watched a white, plump duck waddle by. it looked like it wanted to jump in too, unaffected by the shark man that was wading in it.
gills mind was all over the place, constantly switching from donât do it and do it. blindsided by the ferocious grumble of his belly, gills blackened eyes narrowed in on the fat duck, and he breached out of the water to grab it.
it began squawking like crazy, crazier than he had ever heard any duck sound, and he hesitated on killing it.
it was odd. normally he never had any hesitation with a kill. it was what he was trained to do, but this innocent little duck was in his grip still breathing.
there was a sudden loud noise coming from the big house on the property. the front door swung open with a slam.
gill had no idea anybody was home; much less an absolute unit of a minotaur that was now dashing his way. he had a baby in the pocket of his overalls like a bjorn and he gently took it out, setting it on the grass as a safe distance. he gave one look to the baby boy and it crawled to hide in the taller bits of grass.
once the minotaur came close enough to gill, gill noticed he wasnât any old minotaur. he had the face of a man, and great big bull horns, along with a bull ring and cattle legs and feet.
he asked, âhow did a shark find its way into my duck pond?â
gill gulped, releasing the duck. it squawked again and flapped its wings in an angry manner while running away. the bull man in front of gill was above average size. perhaps it was the angle that gill was, but even then he could tell the minotaur was over 7, maybe 8 feet tall. âi was thirsty..â was all gill could mutter out.
âthirsty? for duck shit infested water?â
gill looked around, swimming a bit farther away. he couldnât admit to himself that he was scared but his body could. it fled.
âlisten.â the man huffed, his shiny, heavy septum ring moving when he did, âif you want some water, or.. i dunno,â he scratched his head under the brim of his cowboy hat. âa beer, you can come in. but put your clothes back on, i got kids.â
gill nodded, not sensing any danger from the bull. he quickly pulled himself out of the water and dragged his heavy tail onto the ground. it collected dirt and grass, sticking to his wet scales. itâs times like this he most wished for towels. in the hot sun he dried up quickly, forming back into 100% man, and threw his dirty clothes back on.
the minotaur led him back to the house, which was even larger than gill had initially thought. it looked hand built, every log placed was intentionally stacked and intact, crafting a beautiful and grand western house. gill asked the man for his name and if he built this home himself while the minotaur leaned down to pick up the baby he put in the grass.
âbeau.â he said to gill, looking at his cooing, cute baby. âand yes, everything you see on these 15 acres has been built with my own two hands.â beau gestured to his settlement before leading him into the house. they passed two big old dogs who slept on the porch.
of course it was warm and invitingâ the interior vast and wooden and beautiful. his countertops were butcherblock, his floors a gorgeous, shiny oak, and handmade furniture placed everywhere.
there was a child standing at the top of the stairs, one sat at the table coloring, and another in the kitchen sorting vegetables. beau rounded them up to introduce to gill in order from oldest and tallest to smallest. gill was sat down in a chair at the table and given a beer, listening to beau proudly introduce his beloved kids.
first was adelaide, the oldest and tallest. she was 15 and had a muscular stature. âaddieâ they call her. she was a friesian cow hybrid, black and white spots blotting all over. she took care of a lot of the settlement along with her father.
the next was a 14 year old son, a goat hybrid. he was the same height but skinnier, and he wasnât from the wild west. he came from a foreign country and he spoke with an accent. filipe was his name.
thirdly was rudy, a chubby bison boy with curly hair covering his eyes and the smallest, stubbiest nubs peaking through the crown of his head. he was no older than 5.
they all wore worn out and well loved clothes and had dirt on their faces that beau would probably get on their cases about later.
lastly, there was the baby at just 18 months old. âbaby coleâ they call him.
âand what is he?â
beau smiled and placed him into a play pen. âminotaur, just like his pop.â
âoh! whereâs.. um,â gill tapped the table and looked around, not aware that he was being invasive.
âmy wife? sheâs um.. sheâs out right now.â beau said with a complete change of tone. it was deeper and somber. almost offended. he turned around to look at gill at the table.
âoutside?â
âin town. errands. sheâll be home in the evening.â
gill let it go. throughout the day and into the late evening, he stayed with beau and learned the ways of their family as a guest.
he watched them collect eggs from the chickens, water the vast garden, and harvest the fruit from the peach tree when the sun kissed the horizon goodnight, painting the sky shades of oranges and pinks. gill made sure to point out to beau that the peaches were delicious later around the fire.
it was then when the topic of the minotaurâs wife returned. it was her peach tree. she planted 16 long summers ago when the house was finished being built.
âthe tree is dying.â beau said, his face illuminated against the glow of the fire. they were outside and cactus owls cooed in the distance.
âdying?â
âi knew itâd happen soon after brooke passed on. peach trees donât live that long anyway.â
gill realized this manâs wife wasnât in town and she wasnât coming home.
beau held back showing any emotion in his voice, wanting to not get choked up in front of a stranger. gill could tell it was particularly tough on him, so he shared his own story.
pearl was the most beautiful woman gill had known. on the outside and the inside. interspecies love wasnât illegal but it was looked down upon for its risk of potential child mutations. the bad kind of mutations were it affects the childâs brain. gill couldnât do that to her, or her offspring, so he went to his best friend.
he told his friend to marry her, the two of them both being the same species and ability to form a pod. orcas. they had two children, twins, before pearl and her husband got taken by humans to be transported to their sea themed amusement park.
he never saw pearl again, apart from when heâd look into the eyes of the twins he was forced to look after.
beau thought gills pain was real. raw. new? where were his twin boys? he wondered, so he simply asked. gill was ashamed to answer that he left them with his only family, his older cousin francine. âaunt franny.â
âand you canât live out of water. can you?â it wasnât a question because he knew the answer, beau side eyed his duck pond. earlier the ducks swam happily in it now that the shark man wasnât occupying it.
ânot for long, no.â
âthen go back. be a man.â
âexcuse me?â
âthey need you, gillian.â beau smiled, looking at him for a moment before turning his attention back to the fire. it was weakening, signaling that it was time for beau to come back inside and check on his kids. addie would have everything covered at this time but he still did his rounds.
âi canât just go back.â
âyou can. and you will. repurpose your energy.â he furrowed his brows. âyour love. you may think losing her means you lost everything but i can tell you that isnât true. sheâs here,â beau tapped his finger on gills chest, right on his heart. âand her boys need you.â
gill stirred in his seat on the fireplace chairs, watching beauâs earnest expression. the man was too fucking large for gills comfort.
âgo.â
too much silence went by. when beau noticed gill couldnât make up his mind, he gave up. as he began to stand, gill did too in that moment, realizing that maybe he should go home and repurpose his energy into care for what was left of what he loved. what gill didnât account for though was coming into direct contact with beaus sharp horn, cutting through his eyebrow with a sudden pierce as they bumped into one another.
gill hadnât noticed he was that badly hurt until beaus face was cold and bled seeped into his eye. it was an accident, a mistake.
but beau would never forgive himselfâ not after they cleaned and bandaged him, not after gill assured him it was okay and doused him in praise and thanks for all the hospitality and insight beau offeredâ nothing would make up for the way he felt so bad about leaving that scar on gills head.
itâd be there forever as a reminder for how gill ran away.
gill held odessaâs calf and explained that he just doesnât know what to do anymore with hades. zeus, itâs another storyâ heâs an angel. the golden child.
âwhy donât you have a heart to heart?â
âhe wonât listen to me,â gill turns around and hands his boss her clothes.
âhave you tried?â
âwellâŚâ gill found many interesting corners of the room to occupy himself so he wouldnât accidentally look up and see her changing in the mirror. âno, but i just know him. he wonât want to listen.â
a few moments went by while she slid on her silky nightgown. odessa never wore pants. she didnât own a single pair and probably never will purchase any. why would a siren?
âwhyâs that?â she says, all dressed and looking for her bag. she walks out of the bathroom in search of her hairbrush, and gill follows.
âbecause thatâs just how he is! i swear, that kid is trying to piss me off. everyday.â
âim sure thatâs not true.â
âit is.â gill hands her the hairbrush in her bag that he got to first. itâs on her bed across from hisâ the one that just got mutilated from crash lander. âitâs always some new thing that he does that gets me agitated. like this,â he gestures to the mess they made while playing their game.
âi think youâre just worried. because remember what happened with zeus and that game?â she also gestured to it.
âthat is exactly why i donât want them playing it!â
odessa dropped her hands and tossed her brush into her bag again, climbing into the tucked white sheets. gill stood above her and tucked her in, telling her goodnight.
âgill.â
he shut his eyes. no.
he could feel it coming. the trance he was about to be put in. odessa uses her magic on him when heâs particularly antsy, and tonight is one of those nights. he gave her his word that it was okay to do it to him as long as it served their higher good, but the contract was so tight and binding that even if he wants to go back on his wordâ to not let her entrance himâ he couldnât.
âtalk to them. talk to him.â
gill was lulled. he moved softly, controlling his own mind and body but feeling more at ease, more compliant. odessa could make anybody feel like this, but it worked particularly good on younger human men. gill was only one of those categories. a man.
he knocked on the boysâ door and heard zeus say come in. the twins sound identical but gill knows the difference. he could identify them no matter the circumstance; entranced or not.
he gently pushed the door open and saw zeus on his bed, his black hair down and unbraided. he changed into his plaid pjâs instead of what he had on earlier, a done up suit and tie. zeus often doesnât like to change out of clothes like how hades does. the man goes nuts for getting into comfortable clothing as soon as he gets home.
âhey,â zeus said, looking up from his book. his little book-light illuminated his nose scar in a way that saddened gill to look at.
âhi buddy,â he whispered in response, noticing the bed to the left was occupied by a sleeping hades. or so he thought.
zeus nodded in hades direction with a certain glance that told gill everything he needed to know. with easy steps, he walked over to hades and sat on the edge of the bed, dipping them down.
hades wasnât sleeping, just staring at the wall tiredly. he didnât flinch when gills hand touched his arm.
âkiddo.â
âhm?â
âwhatâs up?â
hades rolled over even further so his face got muffled into the pillows. ânothingâ he mumbled.
gill pulled his shoulder back, turning him. âtalk to me.â
it was hurtful reaction, what hades did. he yanked himself away and sat up against the headboard, feeling frustrated and confused.
his feelings were not easy to talk about and he doesnât have outlets or sources to figure them out. well, he has zeus but hades wasnât mature enough to explain how he only wants gill to be proud of him.
âi canât.â hades choked out, still not making eye contact.
âwhy not?â
the sound of zeus shutting his book was so quiet and subtle but gill caught it, knowing his other son was behind them on his own bed listening to what was about to happen.
âbecause you never listen.â
âi do listen.â
âno,â hades huffed, his chest showing that his heart rate rose by a few extra beats. âyou donât.â
âi am right now. tell me whatâs wrong and weâll fix it, kiddo.â
âwe canât fix it. you never listen to me because you donât take me seriously.â
âi do take you seriously hades. why do you think i bring you along on missions?â
âbecause you canât leave me alone?â
..it was true. hades was rightâ cannot and will not separate the twins.
gill sighed. it was long and full of exhaustion. as if exhaling was the solution, it opened up the floodgates of emotion. the reason was unknown and he didnât have the means to have tears well up in his eyes until hades said something that broke him.
âwhy don���t you love me, dad?â
it was spoken through tears of his own. hades was wiping his face with such embarrassment and frustration that he couldnât face anything, he turned to the wall once more.
gill was shocked, his heart beat out of his chest and escaped through his hung agape mouth. his eyebrows were so close to his eyes that his lashes brushed against them.
âhow could you say that?â he whispered. âi love you more than anything.â
âthen why do you treat zeus better than me? you give all your attention to him.â hades didnât care that his brother was right there and listening. laying flat on his back and lost in heavy thought.
âhades. look at me.â
hades didnât want to but he instinctively turned his head to listen and look at him. what he saw broke his own heart too. the two of them were just on such a different page but in this moment they were alike.
alike in the way that both of them know theyâre misunderstanding one another, and that life doesnât have to be this way.
âyou remind me so much of myself when i was your age.â
for once, hades had nothing to say.
âbut you also, you both,â he turned to zeus too. âremind me so much of your parents. you look just like them. youâve got..â gill took hadesâ head in his hands and smushed his cheeks, earning a giggle from him. âyour mothers eyes.â
gill didnât want to admit that giggle was like a pink bandaid on his heart, hearing his boy laugh like he was little again.
âand you, zeus, your dads nice old nose.â
zeus touched his scarred up nose, happy to know that gill sees it as beautiful when all others see is something scary.
gill dropped his hands. sighing this time but it was the inhale that gave him peace. satisfaction.
he and hades might not be on the exact same page, but they were getting close, perhaps the same chapter.
âi do love you, hades.â
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Merman Fucking Hours
NSFW 18+ ONLY minors do not interact
Pairing: Character Ă Dom! GN! Reader
Additional CW: AGAB reader, clit/cock used, no pronouns for reader, monster fucking, non human genitalia. This has been sitting in my drafts for the longest time, so here you are
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The last thing you were expecting was to be asked to be someones 'life mate', and yet here you were, kissing someone breathless as they ran their hands over your body, moaning when you dug your own nails into his hips.
Watching as he gets all cute and flustered, hips rolling beneath the surface of the water when you push down just right on the sensitive part of his tail.
Imagine the way he lets out gasps muffled slightly by the way he bites at his lip. His cheeks flushing slightly along with his scales, rough hands sliding down your back to cup your ass and bury his face into the crook of your neck.
He lets out a deep moan when your fingers slip just past his slick entrance: "Fuckkk," they gasp, grinding up into your touch, pulling you impossibly closer and kissing at your jaw, "Fuck, Y/N please..."
When you finally push your fingers in properly, swirling your index around a throbbing tip, his jaw drops and his head lolls back.
"You can, you can take them out." His eyes moving to meet yours once more. You let out a pleased hum and capture his lips in a hungry kiss, tasting salt as his tongue rolls against your own, swallowing down his moans as your hand wraps around his cock and eases it from his entrance.
It slaps against his stomach, painfully hard and throbbing. The tip a deep flushed purple and generously leaking a sticky, thick liquid.
"Oh." Is all you can manage, watching in awe as underneath, a smaller hole throbs.
He blushes and mumbles something under his breath, not that you'd be able to understand it anyway, your languages vastly different from one another.
"You're pretty" Gripping the base and running your fingers up the length, "God, look at you. This needy for me?"
A thine whine escapes his lips and he bucks into your touch, cock twitching at your words.
You run your fingers through his hair and finally start stroking him, the natural lubricant making it easy as you twist your palm over his head, slide it back down and squeeze.
"Ngh- " He lets out a surprised groan, his own hand sliding between your thighs and running over your arousal, "L-like that."
Pumping his cock as his hips buck, and slipping your fingers into his hole, curling them upwards until-
"Yes yes yes! God don't stop please!"
Meeting his lips with your own as he strokes over your aching clit/cock, bringing you closer and closer to the edge.
"Shit." You moaned, breaking from the kiss and panting when he touched you just right.
" Y/N, m' so close," he whimpered, and you could tell by the clench of his pussy on your fingers.
"Me too baby, me too."
Biting into the skin of his neck, sucking in a deep purple mark, and groaning against him, working him closer and closer to coming.
"F- I'm gonna cum!"
And that was all it took. With one final squeeze on his cock his whole body tensed up, pressing against you with a final, strangled moan of your name.
Thick, hot, sticky spurts of cum left his cock as it pulsed in your palm; pussy clenching and gushing over your fingers, covering your hands as you worked him through the high.
Whispering how good he was, how beautiful he looks when he comes, kissing him when his eyes rolled back and his limbs trembled from the near overstimulation.
"That's it, that's it," letting him calm down and cupping his jaw.
"Mmm," leaning into your touch and smiling, still in a post-orgasm haze. And then his fingers trail over your neglected clit/cock, teasing your most sensitive parts and ripping a moan from your chest.
"But there's one more thing to do my love..."
#jojo smut#tw monsterfucking#monsterfucking cw#limoneđ#malibusmoke#jjba smut#gender nuetral reader#male reader#dom reader#gn reader#gn!reader#full fic
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New au idea just dropped: abducted by aliens + found family; familial anadukeceit addition with a twist:
tw: minor abducted by aliens, mentions of illegal scientific experimentation on a minor, general au theme following the rescues of ppl getting abducted, those are the big ones, lmk if i missed anything!
Virgil and Remus are normal adult humans that are part of a galactic crew that specializes in rescuing aliens that were abducted for black market trade and experimentation purposes and rehabilitating them
Janus is a young teenage human who'd been abducted and experiemented on for two years before his rescue, leaving him half-covered in abnormally healthy scales, sharp fangs and coldblooded-like qualities, and without a way to talk like he used to.(he can growl and hiss and whine ect., but they mostly ruined his ability to mimick sounds without it being painful and thus he cannot actually try to speak without pain.) He's not seen another live human in years, and is way too young to know how to cope with it, so he doesn't trust anything anymore and often comes off as extremely violent because he doesn't know whats a threat and what isnt, and isnt honestly sure hes not experiencing a vivid nightmare half the time.
Cue this team getting a report from a different rescue group about requesting help for a specific rescue from their mostly human rescue team, this time its about a small earth-like dealthworlder that had been discovered and rescued as one of the few surviving aliens from an illegal testing facility.
Report lists it as extremely volitile and hostile, but only when provoked(see: any attempt to interact with it). If left alone, it simply cowers in a corner and cries. There have been efforts to get it to eat that have only been semi successful due to the poor thing seemingly not being able to digest certain foods, and they worry it will simply die of starvation, or loneliness, if they cant get it's condition stable.
The reason theyre requesting Virgil's team is because the original rescue has never seen this kind of alien before, but it looks mostly human and thats the assumption. Humans are known to have high-packbonding instincts, and that persistence for kinship is pretty much this rescue's last hope.
To the humans, its a bit of a far leap seeing as they arent provided with any clear pictures of the thing, but its their job and theyre getting paid to do it, might as well try.
They.. They arent prepared to arrive to the sight of a child. Well, sort of child. A teenager? Whose regardless way too thin and quite too small to look anything but vastly unhealthy.
From his one side of his ribs curled up all the way around one side of his face and down that arm are rich yellow scales, that perhaps look like the healthiest part of him.
He wears a blindfold from his previous containment, and word has it the first alien to try and take it off was met with the worst lash-out yet and was still in recovery. They had kept it on him because he wont let anyone near take it off. It keeps him calm to be sightless, and its unfortunately all they can do to keep him that way.
And well, while Remus has always been the best at taming some of the wilyest deathworld creatures, its actually Virgil who has skill in taming those few labeled 'deadly.'
He sees this 'dangerous' behavior for what it really is.
Fear.
This is a child who is scared, terrified, and lashing out at anything that doesn't feel safe.
So you can imagine the brief uptic in nervous alien chatter from the main observation room when Virgil decides to walk straight into the containment room with no gear, no food, nothing but himself and his jacket.
Its a little jarring to hear a teenager hiss angrily at you, but Virgil used to Be That Teenager, so he doesn't really react. And he can see it when he speaks, using a soft and comforting voice, the way this kid freezes at being spoken to. In a langauge he understands.
"Hey buddy."
There's an immediate growl of uncertainty, pressing himself further away. Disbelief. It cant be, right? It's been 2 years since hes been in a room with another living human, there's no way.
..Right?
"Cmon now, none of that. It's just me here right now. My names Virgil."
He doesn't really want to believe it, that hes hearing another human. But he cant help the instinctual need to turn and hide the scales, the thing that makes him a freak of nature, no human would want him after what had been done to him.
Its a slow back and forth, really. Virgil asking a mundane question and getting some cautious hiss or growl or click in reply. But slowly, ever so slowly, the boy is relaxing.
"Can I reach my hand out? I wont touch you, okay? I want you to reach out too, if you're okay with that. We can move at your pace, okay?"
And maybe he gets a slightly petulant whine, but theres no aggression. Just. stress.
He holds his hand out, palm down, and waits. And is rewarded with an extrsmely shaky hand reaching out and grasping his own with a little fumbling. And then theres a pause, where the boy is taking thw time to register the hand.
Human.
And then the boy is all but flinging himself forward, blindly reaching out with a sob. Maybe some aliens in the observation room tense, but the humans in the room remain completely calm.
And now Virgil has a lap full of entirely too distraught child and no say in the matter, but thats fine. Hes content to just hold the poor thing and let the kid cry it out, god knows he needed this.
They learn this kids name, Janus, through some shake tracing of fingers on skin, then pen to paper. He's barely 16, and was abducted at age 14.
They learn one eye had been tampered with as well to match the scales, but all that was successful was a color change to yellow. It fortunately affects Janus's sight very little, except when hes tired and finds himself with migraines from his eyes being tired.
Janus is a special case, because he cant go back home, not with the things hes seen and experienced, as the galactic rescue is still a bit of a secret to earth. But hes a minor, so he cant very well join the rescue yet, even if he wanted to.
So, Virgil and Remus adopt him. Janus is more than happy about it, despite his struggles to show it.
They have a number of humans and humanoids on their team, one of which is a therapist named Emile(human), and another who is their navigator and unofficial translator named Remy(half-human).
Janus p much gets unofficially adopted by them as well, standing in as the cool uncles most likely, but through them he learns to deal with his trauma, and gets to learn how to communicate via galactic hand-sign language.
Sometimes a family can be a Team Rescue Group Leader, his Danger Tamer Chaotic Boyfriend, and their Half Danger-Noodle Half-Sassy Human Son, and two fun uncles who collectively know how to heal trauma and 47 different ways to say 'fuck you' in alien.
#sanders sides#anxceitmus#familial dukexiety#familial anxceit#anxceit#luka writes#luka's aus#virgil sanders#remus sanders#janus sanders
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What specifically are your grievances regarding female designs in Housamo?
oh i did mean to elaborate on that didn't i. well i guess i should say 1) that i'm including the mobs in this 2) ig the female designs are more broadly annoying rather than infuriating but just thinking about the sentences i am about to type i can already feel myself becoming infuriated. tl;dr: my issue is that where there is a LOT of variance in the designs for the guys, that's not as much the case for the girls (in a way i feel like isn't just a matter of there being vastly more guys than girls). like the girls aren't Allowed to diverge in appearance from Conventionally Attractive Human Woman nearly as much as the guys are from Conventionally Attractive Human Men, which can get. completely ridiculous. there are some designs i do like ofc, but basically no more Sexy Dimorphism or i'm gonna snap, NO MORE BOOBS ON NON-MAMMALS, and for the love of god let women have designs that aren't perfectly Feminine PLEASE, especially if it's at the expense of being interesting or making sense
the rest of this post goes under the cut so i can risk going raving mad in good conscience
yeah imo one of the clearest, if not the most egregious, examples are the merpeople
like this bugs the hell out of me, and the sprites being done by different artists doesn't excuse it when they easily could have coordinated designs. come on. like there's a lot i could nitpick here but. come the fuck on they didn't even give her fins. not even just a dorsal fin, which barely would have been visible. like theres sexual dimorphism and then theres The Girls not having physical characteristics that The Boys have when they would be evolutionarily advantageous/vitally necessary to merfolk regardless of gender. they gave her fin ears. fuck you
now here's where i'm going to nitpick. and if you can believe it i'm going to be restraining myself here, because if i don't i will reopen pandora's box and oh my god i can't do that to myself right now, so i won't even touch on my issues with how she's written. but this is so lame in so many dimensions. i ask for a dragon lady who swings around huge fucking weapons like its nothing and you give me THIS. first and foremost, this isn't even a dragon lady, this is a human woman with horns and a tail and pointy ears. this is a human lady in cosplay. where are the claws, the fangs, the scales? they didn't even give her SCALES. bombom designed a better reptilian girl than this. her wings aren't even attached. and for the love of GOD, if she is a DRAGON, refrain from giving her Honkin' Tittums. is a dragon a mammal? is that what you're telling me? fuck off. and while i have you here why is her build so dainty? actually i know why and i don't gaf, melusine should be jacked. look the size of the gun she is ONE HANDING. you know what, get this fucking disgrace out of my sight and come back with a proper dragon woman, with claws and scales and fangs and wings that are attached to her goddamn back-- and a physique that can accommodate them (i remember someone at one point having a line about how his chest is muscled specifically to allow for his wings) + all the gun-slinging and fighting with snow and mountaineering and whatnot she gets up to. and i'm going to be nice/preempt any comments about why her barely-draconic design is good actually: if, for WHATEVER fucking reason, you want to allow for her looking basically like a human woman in cosplay, it can be like a glamour or something. but when she summons her wings, the glamour should fail, and i want to see a DRAGON WOMAN. in fact, if you give her a human glamour, you have to give her true form draconic digitigrade legs to balance it out. or i'll kill you.
oh my god. ziz's design makes me so fucking mad this is the only one of her sprites i can look at without taking chip damage to my psyche. like with melusine, i'm not going to touch on any issues i might have with how she's written, but this is a TRAVESTY all on it's own. her design is SO FUCKING GOOD. she's massive, to the point of being imposing without meaning to, she's covered in feathers, she has claws and TALONS, and i really loved the thing with her legs looking HUGE and giving her an exaggeratedly feminine appearance but that just being from the sheer fluffiness of her feathers, w her legs looking WAY different with her feathers smoothed down, esp since that felt like it was poking fun at the whole 'generically sexy ~Recognizably Female~ monster girl' thing. and her tail is really cute. if it weren't for a massive, glaring, design-ruining flaw, my only real complaint would be that i wish she had a broader upper body/a sturdier frame, again so her physique is better suited to accommodate her HUGE wings + the whole Protector thing, and also because the whole 'cinched waist, hourglass figure' thing she's got going on is just. uncomfortable to look at. and there we encounter that massive, glaring, design-ruining flaw-- Obligatory Boobs, bane of my fucking existence. it would have been one thing if the plumage at her breast was especially dense or something and gave her the appearance of having boobs, i probably would only have complained a little about that. but they took what otherwise would have been a FANTASTIC design, and (sorry) chickened out at the last second and slapped tits on a fucking bird woman. and they did not just slap tits on a bird woman, they gave her a bare, human torso, just so they could slap huge dobonhonkeros on a FUCKING bird woman, and honest to fucking god it looks grotesque. it looks disgusting. i'm so mad. WHO is that meant to appeal to. they ruined a perfectly good harpy. i fucking hate it here
to nobody's surprise, babalon is the example that infuriates me the most. and i'm not going to talk about how much i hate her default sprite (again), or how i think she should be able to fuse with therion to become a huge fucked up demon werewolf lady (for a third time). in fact, i honestly really like most aspects of this skin: the swimsuit is lovely and suits her very well, her shoes are really cute & the hat is a nice touch (though i'd have preferred a proper sunhat), and the adult woman isn't dressed like a child for no reason. all very neat, though i do wonder where she put all that hair, not to mention therion. and with that all out of the way, i really just despise this skin, specifically because of what it very glaringly lacks: scars. babalon was tortured, then hunted relentlessly by angels, then necessarily maimed when those angels killed her unborn child. but despite all these being literally character-defining traumas, they're not reflected in her design at all because the women's designs aren't allowed a diverge too far from Conventionally Attractive Human Woman So Generic Your Eyes Start To Glaze Over, and that would be too unsightly. that this is with babalon in particular really pushes it from infuriating to exhausting. i can't even rave at this, i'm just tired. and i'm not accepting babalon's vanity as an excuse for this, because her inability to let go of her trauma, and especially any reminder of her first lost child, is a crucial part of her character. they didn't even let her have a scar on her abdomen from when she lost her unborn child. but you know what they did give her?
nice, symmetrical, visually appealing scars from losing her wings. that you only ever see in the artbook. come on, man đ
#tokyo afterschool summoners#housamo#this has got me main tagging just to feel something :|#error.txt#error.jpg#babsposting#uh something something im bi and trans. whatever#genuinely this shit sucks. like i was gonna be more jokey here but that last part took the wind out of my sails. come on#error.ans
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The Witching Hour - Chapter 1 - All Hallowsâ Eve
Summary -Â When her friends dragged her to Gothamâs old cemetery for some Halloween ghost hunting fun, Y/N really didnât think her life would end up changing like this.
Chapter Warnings - referenced/implied character death
Word Count - 3.3k
The cell phone on your nightstand buzzed incessantly as your friends continued to spam your messages. They had been doing so for the past hour or so. You were surprised that the damn thing hadnât vibrated off of the nightstand yet. When it finally stopped, when you finally thought they had given up, you returned your attention to the document you had open on your laptop. Just as you were about to start typing again, your phone resumed its buzzing.
Huffing, you shut your laptopâs lid, placed it on the bed next to you, reached over and grabbed your phone off the nightstand. Over eighty messages both from your friends individually and within the group chat, begging you to come along with them to the old cemetery that sat outside of town. They wanted to go because it was Halloween and that meant it was the best time to go ghost hunting! And they wanted you to go along because of how you were usually drawn to this type of stuff. As well as how this type of stuff was also usually drawn to you.
Come on! For old timeâs sake? Plus weâre going to have a much better chance at actually catching something if you come along!
The message was from your friend John, the ringleader of your group. The reason you and your friends had always gotten into trouble at school. Now he was trying to work his magic once again.
Only because Iâm a meta with an uncomfortably close relationship with deathâŚ
As far as you knew, your powers were genetic instead of being caused by that arc reactor explosion that had given a lot of metas their powers. You were able to look past the âVeilâ, as it was called, and see and interact with spirits on the other side. Not that you did so often or even liked to do. It creeped you out and you sometimes saw things that would certainly traumatize most people if they saw them. Not to mention the strain on your body and mind each time you did it.Â
Why the obsession with the old cemetery now?
It had been years since John had mentioned ghost hunting, let alone the old cemetery. Back during your last year of high school, it had been all John could talk about. He was convinced that it was where the âcoolâ ghosts would be hanging out. None of you had ever actually gone because your last year had passed surprisingly quickly and before you all knew it, you were all moving to different parts of the country for college. In all that time it had never been mentioned again. Until now.
Ha! She finally replies! I knew you wouldnât leave us to scream into the void forever!
The next message was from Tom, your oldest friend. Unlike the others, you two had known each other since kindergarten. If anyone was capable of talking you into going, it was probably him.
Itâs been years since all of us were in the same place at the same time! Not to mention itâs Halloween and a full moon! I donât think it could be more perfect!
Well, he wasnât wrong about that.
You know you want to come! And donât you dare lie!
He wasnât wrong about that either. You were a little curious. The cemetery was on the outskirts of Gotham City. According to the internet, the cemetery had members of Gothamâs oldest families buried there. If you were to use your powers there to look past the Veil, there was a chance some of those people could still be hanging around. It would certainly be an unique opportunity to converse with them and, perhaps, attempt to help move on. Or maybe you would find inspiration for your next short ghost story. You certainly had been struggling with inspiration recently so maybe this was exactly what you needed.
Okay! Fine! Iâll come!
You scoffed as you hit âsendâ. Once again, Tom had talked you into joining them. A small part of you was convinced he was a meta with some sort of manipulation power. Â
Thatâs great! âCause weâre already outside your house!
John replied, causing you to roll your eyes. Of course they were already outside. Why wouldnât they be?
You locked your phone, got up from your bed and slipped your phone into your pocket. You grabbed your jacket from your wardrobe and made your way out of your bedroom and down the stairs. You grabbed your keys from the bowl on the table, near the front door.
âY/N? Where are you going at this hour sweetheart?â your grandma called from the living room.
âIâm going to meet up with some old friends. Iâll be back soon!â you replied. You didnât tell her where you guys were going since you knew she would most definitely disapprove.
âStay safe!â
âWill do!â
After your parentsâ death, your grandma had not only raised you, but helped you learn how to use your abilities so that, should you choose to, youâd be able to use them. Not that she would approve of you constantly using them. Looking through the Veil could sometimes draw the attention of extremely unwanted creatures that were looking for a route to the physical world. You knew how to defend yourself from them, but that didnât mean you really wanted to get into that situation to begin with. If you were going to use your abilities tonight, you were going to have to be extremely careful.
The entire drive there, your friends excitedly talked about what they could potentially capture on either video or audio. John was driving, Tom sat in the passenger seat next to him and you were sitting in the back with Rebecca.
A couple of hours later and the car finally pulled up in front of the cemetery. John turned off the engine and you all got out. Since it was pretty much pitch black out here, you all got out your phones and turned on your flashlights.
Tall stone walls covered in moss and vines surrounded the cemetery and an old rusted iron gate stopped the car from going any further. Threaded through the bars of the gate was large rusted chain with an equally rusted padlock. Even if you guys had the key, you seriously doubted it would have worked anyway.
âAre you kidding me?â asked Tom, as he useless pulled against the chain. âThis is so unfair!â
âUh, maybe we could try to scale the walls or something?â Rebecca suggested as she walked over to where the vines seemed at their thickest. She gave them a gentle tug. âLooks like it might hold our weight, if we go up one by one.â
Tom shook his head. âAnd get covered in spiders? Yeah, no thanks!â
Rebecca frowned as she used her phoneâs light to have a closer look at the vines. âI canât see any spiders.â
âThatâs because youâre not looking in the right spots,â he replied as he walked over to her. He shone his own light up at the vines.
While you walked over to them, to get a better look at what Tom was trying to show her, John shook his head and walked back toward the car.
âSee all of those tiny turquoise dots shinning back at us?â he asked her as he pointed above where there were a lot of tiny turquoise dots sparkling in the light.
âYeah, theyâre like little drops of moisture right?â
âYou would think, but theyâre not! Those are the eyes of all those horrid little spiders!â
Rebecca squealed and immediately backed away from the wall. âTom! Why the fuck would you tell me that! Fuck! Thereâs probably going to be so many of them inside the actual cemetery! And now I know how to spot them!â
âI donât think thatâs going to be much of an issue considering we canât get in anyway,â you said as you gestured toward the very locked gate. This whole thing was starting to feel like a massive waste of time.
âOh! But we can!â John announced as he strode on over to you three with a large pair of bolt cutters in hand. He also had a backpack slung over his shoulder. As he cut the chain, John explained how he had swung by here earlier to see if there was anything that would stop you lot from getting in. When he saw the chain, he had gone to the hardware store, that was located in the worst part of the city, and bought these. âOnly place I could find that had bolt cutters big enough for a chain like this!â
âArenât we like breaking the law or something right now?â Rebecca asked just as the cutters snipped through the chain and it clanged against the gate.
âProbably,â John replied very nonchalantly. âBut weâre pretty much committed at this point now. Besides, look at this place! No oneâs been here in years! I seriously doubt weâre going to get caught.â
The iron gate creaked loudly as it was pushed open and you all headed inside. The others walked ahead while you trailed behind. The way they were talking, discussing who was buried here and therefor who they could potentially âcontactâ, made you feel like you had time-travelled back to high school.
When you all got to the centre of the cemetery, John took the backpack off and opened it. It was filled with all sorts of equipment that was used in modern day ghost hunting. Voice recorders, emf meters, even a couple of high end night vision cameras. Damn, he had really gone all out for this. After the gear had been handed out, John began to give everyone directions as to where they were off to investigate.
Tom and Rebecca were going to be investigating the southwest of the cemetery, which was the newest part, John was headed up to the north, where some mausoleums were shaded by an old willow tree and you:
âAnd Y/N, you get the oldest part of the cemetery which is toward the east!â
âRight, of course, send the meta to the creepiest part of this place,â you said, playfully rolling your eyes.
âWell, you said it, not me! Good luck and weâll meet back here in a couple of hours,â John replied. With that, you all split up and went your separate ways.
The cemetery was vastly overgrown. Most of the headstones were buried beneath the long unruly grass, brambles and vines. Every now and then your flashlight would catch a glimpse of the grey stone underneath. You also caught more glimpses of those glowing spider eyes and were doing your best to ignore them. You really hated Tom sometimes.
Thanks to all of the plants, you could barely see the path. The only thing that indicated you were walking on one was every now and then you could feel a stone slab shift underneath your feet.
The further east you walked, the darker and darker the cemetery seemed to get. It also seemed to get creepier and creepier, which was strange to you because you never really found cemeteries creepy. Instead you had always found them peaceful. A lot of people found you weird for that. There was also the feeling that something was watching you. The uneasiness that came along with that feeling was enough to prevent you from using either your recorder or your abilities. If there really was something watching you, you got the feeling that the last thing you wanted to do was attract its attention. After all, who knew what truly lurked here? Especially on the other side.
You eventually reached a group of mausoleums. Much like the rest of the cemetery, they were covered in bramble, vines and other plantlife. They were tall and the parts of them you could see, you could tell were certainly made of far more expensive stone than the rest of the place. This wasnât just the oldest part, this was also the richest part.
You approached a few of the mausoleums and managed to clear away some of the plants covering the name plates. The majority of the names had been erased due to the elements, but not all of them. The names that were still readable were also names you recognised. Kane, Elliot, Crowne. Three of the First Families of Gotham.
You were about to approach another when you saw something large and black move, out of the corner of your eye. You spun around and shone your flashlight in the direction of the shadow, but there was nothing there.
âHello?â you called out, which was probably a terrible idea, but it was the only thing you could think of doing. âWhoâs there?â You waited for a reply, but no reply came.
Was your nerves making you see things? It couldnât be a spirit; you werenât using your powers. Unless⌠Throughout your life you had heard of non metas who had âseenâ things in their peripheral vision. Sometimes they were spirits that had briefly broken through the Veil, other times it really was just people imagining things. Until now you had never experienced it before and you hated how impossible it was to tell which one it was. Â
Turning on your phoneâs screen, you looked at the time. You still had an hour before you had to head back to meet back up with the others. Turning the screen off again, you looked back in the direction you had seen the shadow move toward. Did you follow? It sounded like an awful idea, but the only other thing you could do was head back early and then wait around for everyone else, and that sounded incredibly boring.
â Okay, guess Iâm doing this then,â you thought as you began to head down the path, in the direction the shadow had gone.
You had previously thought that there was no way this cemetery could be anymore overgrown than it already was. This new part you were now walking through proved you wrong. Extremely wrong.
Branches hanging low off of trees and thorns from the brambles tugged at your clothing as you passed them. You had to keep an extra careful eye out on where you were stepping so that you didnât trip over and injure yourself. There were more mausoleums, but you could barely make their shapes out through all of the greenery.
As you walked, that feeling that something was watching you increased tenfold and you found yourself constantly glancing back. Each time you looked you were met with the same result. There was nothing there.
â Itâs just my overactive imagination ,â you told yourself, but that did nothing to soothe your growing fear. What if the thing you had seen had been an actual person? And not a good person at that. This was Gotham after all and for some reason Halloween was when most, if not all, the psychopaths suddenly came out to play. Were you about to become another notch in some serial killerâs knife hilt? Oh, you really hoped not. That was not how you wanted to go.
Before your mind could lead you down a dark path of all the vivid ways you could be brutally murdered right now, the path came to an end. At the end of it sat a lone mausoleum. This one didnât look nearly as old as the others nor was it as covered in plants like the rest. As you walked over to it you saw one of the large iron doors had fallen off its hinges and now laid on the ground.
Cautiously, you approached the entrance. When you were close enough, you shone your light on the name plate. The name âWayneâ was engraved on to it. You got a feeling that that was somehow important, but you really didnât know why. Nor why you were so drawn to it. Almost as if you were now on autopilot, you stepped inside the mausoleum.
The first two names you saw were Martha and Thomas Wayne. Even years after their deaths, you knew the names well. Before their untimely deaths they had been trying to use their fortune to help the city and its more vulnerable citizens.
The next name you saw, you didnât recognise. Jason Peter Todd. You were shocked when you saw his death date. âFuck, you were barely sixteen years old,â you whispered. That was... that was not fair at all.
The last name was Bruce Wayne. It stood out to you a lot more than the others had. Almost as if it wasâŚ. Glowing? What? That made no sense. Okay, you were definitely just seeing things now. To prove that to yourself, you turned your flashlight off. The name continued to glow, in fact now it was a hell of a lot brighter.
âWhat the fuck?â
You peered closer to see if there was any small lights or something similar causing it to glow, but there wasnât anything. The name was actually glowing! Freaked out, you took a picture of it (without the flash of course), and sent it to Tom. A few agonising minutes passed before he finally replied.
Why are you sending me a completely black photo?
What? You checked the picture you had sent and, yeah, the name was definitely visible.
Canât you see the glowing name?
If Tom couldnât see it, then what did that mean?
What are you on about? Thereâs nothing there. Are you okay?
Was this somehow related to your powers? Is that why Tom wasnât able to see it? If that was the case, and with each passing second it seemed to be, then he or the others couldnât help.
Yeah, Iâm fine. Nevermind.
Sighing, you checked the time before you shut off you phone and slipped it into your pocket. Thirty minutes before you had to head back. You were on your own. If this was related to your powers then what exactly did you do with it? Your grandma had never mentioned anything like this before, so you had no clue. You still felt uneasy and this new discovery had done nothing to help so you really didnât want to peer through the Veil, unless it was absolutely necessary.
Would anything happen if you reached out and touched it? You sometimes got flashes of memories or feelings when you touched some items. Maybe this could be the same? You supposed the only way to find out would be to touch the stone. Cautiously you reached out and pressed the palm of your hand against the cold stone.
Images flashed through your mind. Movie tickets, a pearl necklace, a gun. There was the sound of the gun firing, a childâs blood chilling scream and the loud wailing of police sirens. Then it was over and you were brought back to reality, with far more questions than you had previously started with.
Before you were able to question or make sense of what you had seen, your phone vibrated. Taking it out, you saw a text from John, as well as several others.
Are you nearly here?
We were supposed to meet up fifteen minutes ago. Where are you?
Did your phone die?
It did, didnât it. Unless youâre currently doing one of your meta things?
So what had simply been mere seconds for you in reality had been forty five minutes for everyone else. Which wasnât all that unusual for you, but could certainly make people that didnât deal with it daily worry. With that in mind, you fingers flew across your keyboard as you typed out your reply.
Yeah, meta thing, sorry. Iâm on my way back now.
You turned your flashlight back on and walked back to the entrance. Before leaving, you looked back to where the glowing of Bruce Wayneâs name was now slowly fading away. Whoever he had been, he was asking for your help. You were sure of it and thatâs exactly what you were going to do.
#batman x reader#bruce wayne x reader#batman#bruce wayne#batman x fem!reader#bruce wayne x fem!reader#metahuman!reader#the witching hour#my writing
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Gilded Cage, Part One
Summary:
Keigo Takami, AKA Hawks, has turned villain and you don't know why. After a run-in with the League of Villains, you give chase after the former hero. When you end up taking a bullet to the knee, you're surprised that Keigo not only left you alive, but has taken you to his secret lair. He's built a special cage for you. He says it's to keep the League from coming after you, but you can't help but wonder if it's true or if he just wants you for himself.
Content: Kidnapping Sorry. No smut this time, but it'll be in the next one. Stay tuned
Villain!Hawks x Hero!Reader
(You're a pro-hero whose quirk is basically bending metal. Think Toph Beifong from Avatar: The Last Airbender)
PART 1 / PART 2 / PART 3
This part does not contain smut (See above mentioned note). For smut, please follow the links for Parts 2 and 3
                            ---080---
It was hard to walk down the halls of Endeavorâs agency these days. The news of Keigo Takamiâs, also known as Hawks, betrayal hit Japanâs hero world like a tsunami. It turned into a question of who the next hero will be to go against their moral code and become a villain. Your workload had increased in the drama and paranoia that followed after Keigoâs sudden villainous change. Endeavor worked you down to the bone, but that was because he must have seen you as useful. Your hero name? Iron Maiden on account of your ability to bend metal, such as iron, steel, and copper. Netting bad guys was a whole lot easier when you could wrap them in a fence or trap them with a lamppost.
You finished the afternoonâs paperwork before heading to the breakroom for some lukewarm coffee. You half-expected Keigo to be sitting on the counter where you used to find him. He used to be a fan of Endeavorâs, so he frequented the agency whenever he felt like it. Of all the time you got to see him, it became evident that he wasnât there to goof around Endeavorâs office. You should have known better than to encourage his casual flirting, but you couldnât help yourself. Keigo was the first guy who turned your way after a dry spell in the romance department. It had been months since you last had a date, and even if Keigo was joking, it was nice to have a conversation with someone that didnât involve hero work.
If only you knew back then that his over-confident smile belied an insidious plan to turn to the other side.
Keigo didnât hurt people. Much. It wasnât a great comfort to know that he at least didnât go around murdering people as soon as he became a villain. That didnât change the fact that he had become one of them. He robbed banks, caused collateral damage to the cityscape, and set the hero society into panic mode. Nobody knew who would switch sides. Heroes and civilians were starting to look at each other with suspicious eyes ever since.
You fixed yourself a cup of coffee when the cellphone on your hip went off. You immediately stopped what you were doing to pick it up. Shocked, you found your bossâs name and number on the screen. You didnât hesitate to hit âreceive.â
Endeavorâs voice came loud and clear, even over the sounds of fighting.
âWe need you over by Central Park. Takamiâs new crew showed up, and we need your quirk to help round them up!â
âOn my way, sir.â
Central Park was at least ten miles from your location. Even if you speed, you wonât make it there on time by car. Not this close to rush hour. Of course, you had other methods of getting to where you needed to go. You pried open the nearest window and lept threw it. Part of your hero costume involved strips of steel wire you could sling around with like that American comic book character. Sailing over the city and swinging in between buildings was much faster than any car. You arrived at the scene with the villains terrorizing civilians trying to enjoy their day at the park. You spotted three of them charging at you as soon as you hit the ground. They were nothing but mooks. Clustered together, it was quick work wrapping them in a bundle of wire. You spotted others and repeated the process. Keigo was nowhere in sight. You heard the sound of flames engulfing the trees. Pillars of red and blue flames shot up in the distance. You found heroes to take care of the villains youâd already captured before heading towards what should have been the epicenter of the fighting. Endeavor was busy with Dabi, and there seemed to be no other villains in sight. Still no sign of Keigo anywhere.
âEndeavor!â
You dodged a blue fireball just in time. You hoped that Endeavor would order you to go elsewhere. Five more minutes, and youâd be cooking in your costume.
âTakami headed west. I leave it to you to apprehend him!â Endeavor was so focused on his opponent that he didnât turn towards you when he gave the order.
You had to dodge more flames, both Dabiâs and Endeavorâs, to head towards Keigoâs last known whereabouts. Away from the smoke and flames, you found a trail of red feathers. There was a moment where you stopped to wonder if Keigo had been injured and left behind some feathers by mistake or if he was deliberately mocking you. However, you didnât have a moment to linger on that. You followed the trail of feathers regardless if it was a plot.
Keigo made it easy for you to follow. That should have been your first red flag. You were so focused on getting him in handcuffs that the apparent beeline to him was so fucking clear as day. You picked up the feathers as you went. You had a fistful in each hand by the time you reached the end of the park. Your trail went ice cold.
That is until you spotted the shadow of bird wings graze above you. Your head whipped to the sky. Hawks swooped down, nearly knocking you down to the ground. His wings grazed you. He perched himself on a branch far above you.
His appearance was vastly different from the last time you saw him. He wore an all-black suit with a red and gold tie. Pewter rings were on his fingers. He looked like he hadnât slept in days, but his smile was the most unnerving thing about him. You lashed outwards with your arms, the metal from your gauntlets catching him by the ankles.
âKeigo Takami, youâre under arrest. You have the right toââ
Keigo didnât let the mild impairment weigh him down. His wings couldnât be easily held down by you. He flew straight towards you. His height never hid the fact that he was powerful. He plowed you into the ground. The wires unwhirled around his feet and let him soar above you.
âGet back down here, bird brain!â You lashed out your wires again in hopes of pulling him back down to earth.
Each time Keigo moves just a little bit out of reach. You already spent so much on capturing those D-level cronies that you didnât stop to think of conserving your limited amount of iron wire. Keigoâs wings took him high above to where your weapon couldnât reach him. He smirked down at you before taking off.
You ran after him, going so far as to hopping over the chain-link fence and following on foot. Your wires came in handy twice today as you soared from lamppost to lamppost, tracking Keigoâs aerial movements. Citizens yelled words of encouragement as you chased after Japanâs new most wanted criminal. The air stung your cheeks, and you could feel your eyes watering as you sped faster between rooftops.
Keigo made the mistake of flying to close to the building whose roof you just scaled. There was a split-second decision. You could stop and let him get away, or you could take the chance. You lunged for him, limbs scrambling through the air to find purchase. Your hands grabbed his suit jacket. Hauling yourself upon his back, you managed to secure your legs around him and put his neck in a headlock.
âAs I said before, youâre under arrest!â You screamed as the wind busted your eardrums.
Keigo merely looked over his shoulder at you. His smile was cheeky as ever.
âReally, Princess? The way I see itâŚyouâre the one at my mercy. Unless you got a plan to get us both safely on the ground without bashing our brains on the concrete.â
You growled as Keigo caught you. You didnât think this far ahead.
You screamed as Keigo flew up towards the sun at lightning speed. Light burning your eyes, you had no choice but to shield them. Keigo used your distraction as the opportunity to shift your weight off his back. All too late, you felt your legs and arms loosen around him. Soon you were plummeting back to the ground. With any luck, your wires would find purchase on something and save you from falling to your death at the last minute. At the rate you were falling, good luck.
You were ten feet from meeting a concrete rooftop when Keigo reappeared. He wrapped you in his arms almost in a possessive manner.
âYouâre way too pretty to let splatter. Come on. Iâve got a much better place to finish this!â
His clever hands worked your phone from your belt. Keigo dropped it on the ground, where it shattered several feet below you. Your only chance of survival was to let him take you where he wanted and not get your brains to plaster the sidewalk. His wings soared over the city. You once imagined being in his arms like this. It only made your stomach churn with the thought of what he was going to do to you once you were where he wanted you.
Keigo dropped down in the industrial district. Factories surrounded you. The smell of iron and diesel filled your lungs. But of all the places he picked, why did Keigo go where you had the most advantage? Didnât he realize that with all of this metal, you were the one with the home-field edge? You didnât have the time to ask or react when he pulled out the gun from his jacket.
In a flash, your life flashed in your mind. You didnât stand there waiting to die. At least, you were going to make sure they say you died fighting to your last breath. You charged for Keigo, metal whips whirring to life.
BANG!
It was over. Except instead of sweet oblivion that came with death, you found yourself bleeding on the ground. Your blood pooled around your knee, where he shot you. The pain was exquisite as the bullet lodged itself in your knee cap. You werenât going to be standing on that leg for a very long time; you could forget about fighting. Keigoâs black shoes came into your line of vision. From shock, you got onto your elbows to look at the bastard.
âWhatâŚthe hell?â You ground your teeth. âI didnât pictureâŚyou to be the sadist. Going to killâŚmeâŚslowly? Is that how you roll now?â
Keigo put his gun away. Then, he reached into the other side of his jacket. When his hand came away this time, he held a syringe.
âThat was just to keep you from fighting me. Iâm going to get you patched up real quick. Just as soon as I give you your medicine.â
Keigo was faster than you. Your hand shot up to grab him, but the needle was already in your neck. He squeezed the trigger and pumped you full of the drug. It took a few minutes for it to kick in. By the time he had you in his arms again, your head was spinning. A moment later, you finally found that oblivion you were looking for earlier. This time, you were reasonably sure youâd wake up this time, and you werenât going to know where he was taking you. And that was the scariest thought you had before passing out in the former heroâs arms.
When you woke up, you noticed the stiffness in your leg. Your favorite color draped the bed you laid in. Your heroâs costume was gone and replaced with a negligee you wouldnât own even if you had a boyfriend. It, too, was in your favorite color. The lace hem barely touched your upper thigh.
Further down, your right leg was held in a cast. Your foot rested on a pillow. As your vision cleared, you got a better picture of where you were.
It could have been described as a room if only it had more than one wall. Where plaster walls should have been, stood solid gold bars. The floors were marble tiles. There was a dresser, a desk, a lavish set up on a vanity, and a familiar coffee table on which sat a widescreen T.V. Every item in your cell was made of either wood, fiber, plastic, or metal you couldnât bend, including the bars. Squeezed between the actual wall and the cell bars stood a small room. With its door closed, so you couldnât discern its purpose yet. Footsteps came down the hallway. They rounded the corner. Keigo smiled at you like you were a pretty bird in his cage.
âYouâve been asleep for a while now. Doc had to give you an extra shot so you wouldnât wake up in the middle of your surgery. Sorry I had to bust your knee cap. You can be so stubborn sometimes.â
âWhy am I in a cage? Why am I dressed like this? Just what the hell are you on?â You started to get up from the bed, but it was difficult to swing your leg over the bed when it was in a cast.
âIn reverse order,â said Keigo, âIâm not on any drugs. I thought you would look cute in that negligee, and itâs in your favorite color. I put you here for your protection, and honestly, you look damn good in it.â
âWhy? Why the hell did you do any of this?â You still struggled to move your damn leg.
âI wouldnât do that if I were you. Iâd hate to come in there and show you why.â
His eyes held a glimmer of that charm you once fell for, but there was a predatory light that eclipsed it. Keigo leaned against the bars, stroking the beams.
âSolid gold. It took me a long time to find enough money and resources to build this thing. A pretty little cage for my pretty little bird.â
âJust how long have you been saving?â You wanted to know how long he had wanted to put you in here, yet you still dreaded his answer.
âA couple of years. My original idea was to take us on a cruise. It probably would have been much more romantic, but things come up. You change your plans. Ideals become tainted, and you have to find new ones.â
âWhat happened to you? You were the number two hero! Some so many people looked up to you. There are still people who believe that this is just a rouse to capture the League of Villains. How could you do that? How could you betray everyoneâs trust?â
Keigo didnât say anything. He held his head down as if lost in the thought. He braced his forearm against the bars as he leaned his head against his arm. Inhaling a long breath,
Keigo let out an aggravated sigh. When he looked up at you, you saw a different man. âLet me ask you this, Princess. How could somebodyâs parents sell their kid to the government? How could anyone take a small kid and turn them into a child soldier? For what? So they can pat themselves on the back and say that theyâre morally superior to the villains. They take kids from their parents and steal their childhood. And when those kids grow into adults and realize what a shitty system they were raised in, they stare up at you surprised that you had enough of their bullshit.â
âT-TakamiâŚâ
âI realized too late that everything that was supposed to be mine was taken from me. My family. My name. My childhood. For what? So I can be number two behind a man like Endeavor. Have you spent time with the bastard? I never noticed it before, but all of a sudden, it becomes clear that society cares less about a heroâs moral code and more about their ability to beat down the nail that sticks out. Ever wonder how his youngest got that scar?â
You nodded. You vaguely remember hearing Endeavor talk about his youngest son.
âIt turns out Endeavor pushed his wife around so much that she went mental. She burned the side of Shotoâs face because it reminded her of the man who knocked her around and forced to have his four kids. Does that sound like hero material to you?â
Blood drained from your face. It made senseâŚin a way. You never met Endeavorâs youngest, so you couldnât verify the truth or not. For all you knew, Keigo was pulling it out of his ass to make you sympathize with him.
âWhy didnât you go to the authorities? There must have been someone who would have investigated it.â
âBy the time I found out, nobody would have believed me at any rate. Endeavor might be a bastard, but heâs still the number one hero. Iâm just the rejected garbage the Safety Commission doesnât want to clean up.â Keigo unlocked the door to your cage.
âWhy are you telling me this then?â
Keigo crossed the âroomâ and picked you up from the bed. You couldnât move your leg without feeling a jolt of pain go up to your thigh. There was no way for you to struggle. âBecause I made a deal with the League. As long as I keep you by my side and you donât go anywhere, they wonât touch you or your family. Iâm afraid you wonât be seeing much of the outside world for a while. At least until Shigaraki accomplishes his goals.â
âYou know heâs crazy, right?â You sneered.
âYeah. Little bit. Heâs also the first person who made any damn sense when I realized how badly they screwed me over,â said Keigo as he carried you down the hall.
There were a few rooms that he walked past, but he stopped at the end of the hall. He kicked it open. Your heart fluttered like you were his bride; he carried over the threshold. Your stomach churned with guilt rotting inside it. You shouldnât be having those kinds of thoughts for the man who turned into a villain and kidnapped you. He confessed to planning to keep you as a prisoner for however long it took for that maniac Shigaraki to complete his mission.
Keigo brought you to an actual bedroom. It was a little more sparse than the cage he planned to keep you in. He must have spent more on you than himself. Looking around, the bedroom contained a giant bed and little else. He had you sit on the bed for a moment. Keigo pulled back the covers and fluffed the pillows before gently grabbing you and laying you out. There was a contraption hanging from the ceiling that he pulled down using a thick cord. He slipped your leg into a sling and adjusted it to your comfort before Keigo left you to pull clothes from the dresser. He disappeared into the adjacent bathroom didnât return until he was half-dressed in a pair of black sweatpants.
Small scars littered his chest and shoulders. From what, you dared not ask. You remembered his words about a stolen childhood to be raised as a soldier. You wondered if they were true. Your mind was plunged headfirst back into the present when Keigo crawled under the sheets with you. Your face went red.
âRelax, Princess. Iâm not going to do anything,â he mumbled. He turned off the lights.
âThen why am I dressed like this?â You asked in the dark.
You felt Keigoâs weight make the bed dip. He settled on his side so he could snake his arm around your waist. He snuggled uncomfortably close, but he kept his hands mostly to himself or above the blanket.
âBecause you look damn cute in (fave color). I like looking at you.â
His breath against your skin created goosebumps in its wake. Your eyes eventually closed to sleep. As you drifted off, you asked yourself: How long could you live like this?
                            ---080---
#mha#my hero academia#my hero academia fanfiction#mha fanfiction#mha smut#bnha#boku no hero academia#bnha fanfiction#hawks#Keigo takami#reader fic#hawks x reader#au#villains!Hawks#Hawks smut#minors do not interact#minors begone
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mcu ethics bad
The thing is that, while I was angry at Tony during Age of Ultron, particularly when he rode over Bruceâs compunctions about building a giant combat super-robot and pressured him into the project like a very very bad friend who happened to also be wrong...
...and when he equipped Hulkbuster armor and fought the Hulk in the middle of a city rather than attempting de-escalation or attempting to haul the Hulk out into the giant adjacent desert....
(And my suspension of disbelief snapped like a frayed cable when he brought down a skyscraper that had had no time to be evacuated on a street full of fleeing people and the only reason we were given to believe he hadnât just cold-bloodedly created massive civilian casualties was that he told his AI to find the impossible magic angle where doing this wouldnât kill anyone...)
While I was angry with him then, and unspeakably relieved that he recognized his own damage and retired at the end, haha psych, I was revolted by him during Civil War.
Itâs supposed to make us sympathize with a character more, spending so much time with them, getting into their heads, being shown their emotional drives and reactions to things, and we spent so much time with Tony during that film, understanding his point of view. And...I did understand him. Heâs not complicated. I even sympathized with his emotional state.
But in the context of his actions, throughout the film, I gazed into that understanding the way I did into Kylo Renâs face in the seconds after he first unmasked. I see you, I know you, everything you are is written here, and the lines of your shame and self-revulsion are so thick upon you, and you should be ashamed but your self-destruction does not expiate or justify one jot of the harm you do.
Because everything Tony did in Civil War came from a place of selfishness. He was selfish all throughout that movie down to his very spine.
And selfishness isnât itself necessarily bad--you need a little, to get through life, you have the right to your own portion of it. Your boundaries and your needs. But the type of selfishness that is forcing other people pay dearly for your emotional comfort and sense of control: no.
That is tyranny. That is not acceptable.
And you know how I know he was being selfish? Because his motive for pushing the Sokovia Accords was his personal guilt for the destruction of Sokovia.
But the Accords didnât address that at all! They were tangential to the issue! None of the terms of the Accords would have saved Sokovia--in fact, the existence of them could easily have prevented the evacuation and harm-reduction the Avengers managed there, without saving a single soul.
The Ultron crisis was something Tony did, not as Iron Man but as Tony Stark, with Bruce Bannerâs help, and which Wanda as criminal fugitive later helped exacerbate, and which all the other Avengers were involved in only to mitigate harm.
Legislation, or...treaties, idk, the UN isnât actually empowered to pass laws so who knows what this thing was...aimed at preventing another Sokovia would mandate constant ethical oversight of billionaire science manâs mad science. At the very least! He never has to run things by ethics boards because heâs self-funded, at the very least letâs invent a mechanism to make up for that.
That would address the actual Sokovia issue, both in terms of risks and in terms of Tonyâs personal guilt feelings.
But no one suggests that! Itâs not even on the table! Because no one, certainly not any government, can tell Tony Stark what to do unless he lets them, thatâs been a clear matter of record since Iron Man 2.
And because no one writing this legal instrument of whatever description was actually motivated by wanting to avoid another Sokovia, or even another âWanda tries to neutralize a suicide bomber but merely gives him a different, smaller victim poolâ incident.
They didnât care! They blatantly didnât care! The entire thing was a ghoulish use of the dead to gain enough political leverage over the Avengers to put a leash on them!
(Which might not be a bad thing in principle, everything needs its checks, but when the last quasi-governmental organization you worked for turned out to be Nazis who were only prevented from staging a mass slaughter of undesireables by the skin of your teeth, I think youâre well within your rights to be very choosy about who you agree to obey, and to be firmly against pledging your honor to follow people whose first move was dishonest coercive tactics.
Actually youâre well within your rights to demand to negotiate the terms of even a much less sweeping contract, even without the Nazis. The whole approach to this thing stank to high heaven.
The fact that it was written by the UN like a treaty, expected to be signed by private individuals like a contract, and then enforced like a law except not because 1) laws are for everyone 2) if you break a law you get a trial not extrajudicial incarceration and 3) being pressured to consent to a restriction and then punished for refusing consent is hypocritical circular logic and in fact police corruption at its finest, all continues to show it was a bullshit nonsense franken-document.)
The whole movie is people ghoulishly using the dead to manipulate Tony into making bad decisions in response to his emotional pain. Thatâs. The plot of the film.
Then Zemo staged TâChakaâs assassination and framed Bucky for it to raise the tension, ramp up the pressure, and prevent any sitting-down and talking reasonably through this, which might have allowed for the recognition of how extremely bullshit the entire concept was.
Tony was being used. Tony was a tool of bad people for most of that movie, and while Zemo banked on using his wrath for it, the politicos were leaning on his guilt.
And thereâs honestly little I hold in deeper scorn than going out and hurting other people to assuage your own guilt and treating this as having the moral high ground. No. You donât have the moral high ground on account of your guilt motivation. You have it if the actions you took were just, or at least could reasonably be assumed to have been so at the time.
And Tony fucking knew they werenât. He didnât even last to the end of the movie before recognizing that heâd been manipulated and fucked up, and doubling back.
That he then walked into a different manipulation, turned on a dime, and had to be stopped from doing a murder doesnât unwrite that.
And it drives me nuts that people will say Tony was acting out of principle while Steve was acting out of personal attachment. Because sure, the Bucky thing was important, was the reason he was walking forward against all opposition instead of standing still to argue, but it wasnât the reason Steve said no, while...
Tony wasnât acting out of principle. Tony isnât...very good at having principles. Thatâs not even a criticism or condemnation, itâs just how he functions. Since Iron Man heâs been substituting good intentions and emotional investment, which has worked out to varying degrees. It works best for huge, difficult, very straightforward decisions like âride the nuke through the portal and save my hometown.â It works less well for nuanced situations.
Tony was, as usual, acting out of emotion. And some awful shitheads whoâd figured out where his levers were had calculated how to jiggle his emotion switches in the right places to make him do exactly what they wanted.
And you can tell he wasnât acting out of principle because, for example, someone who was trying to get the superhero community under outside control for the sake of harm mitigation...
...well, firstly wouldnât have chosen to stage a massive battle? But itâs possible someone in the UN specifically told him to do that, and in theory they at the very least signed off on it, presumably for its PR value of making Captain America look deranged and violent since itâs a deranged decision from every other angle, so yay, he can pass that responsibility up the chain and not have to angst about it, as promised.
But I was going to say would not have approached a minor who (this timeline takes pains to show us) had no prior experience of battle or even, somehow, serious violent crime, to recruit him to go be a government child soldier on another continent, without his guardianâs knowledge or consent. There were overtones of blackmail in Tonyâs approach, before it turned out Peter was such a big fan he didnât need that. What the fuck frankly.
That is not the action of someone who wants to start doing things by the letter, scaling the violence down, keeping within the law and putting the power of decisionmaking in other peopleâs hands because heâs realized he canât trust his own.
And frankly even if he did act like that I wouldnât necessarily support his choices, in particular his snap decision to behave coercively toward other Avengers with vastly less social power and security than he has.
And thatâs the other thing! Everything about âTony + Accords BFFsâ rings so hollow because he has never thought rules applied to him, and he knows perfectly well the entire time heâs fighting to force this surrender of agency down other peopleâs throats that he is going to be practically immune.
This man was technically a terrorist, proabably the most prolific single terrorist in world history until his rogue android exceeded his body count, but he was immune to prosecution because he was in tight with the United States military-industrial complex and basically untouchable due to his status within capitalism, and pursuing their international goals anyway. In the time between Iron Man and Iron Man II he was basically a one-man upgrade of the US drone program, and so good at it that the crest of blood he carved through the Middle East allowed him to announce he had âprivatized world peace.â
(You are never going to get a world peace worth anything on the basis of a giant flying gun, okay.)
He went to war as a private individual, against non-state actors who were not directly threatening him, which is very much defined as âmass murderâ in all domestic and international law, and the US army in response sued him for control of his weapon. And lost! Lost.
No one attempted to press charges. No one. Because Tony Stark is above all that. And he knows it.
And like. Iâm willing to accept the mass murder under the heading of âsuperheroingâ within the terms of this setting! Even if, after his vengeance rampage on his specific kidnappers, this violence was kept strictly off-screen for a reason. I did that! I bent that far! Genre convention!
But this history is kind of vitally important to any analysis of what he thought he was doing, and what he actually was doing, when he decided to become the iron gauntlet of the Sokovia Accords.
The currently active member of the Avengers who needed muzzling most was very manifestly Iron Man, and he knew even as he jammed the muzzle on all his comrades to make himself feel better that it would affect him the least, even if he didnât finally retire for real this time. You donât force Tony Stark. Not if you want anything out of it but blown up. You persuade him.
And once you have...oh, look at what he can do.
#hoc est meum#mcu#tony stark critical#i am so angry with this man and i will never stop#i throw salt#an ocean of it
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I've been a bit down lately cause of dysphoria I'm sorry to be depresso in you ask but this rn is where i feel most comfy.
I'm an AFAB non-binary person that leans towards masc presenting but i fucking hate that my face is so feminine. No matter what i do i just look like a girl and it makes me so fucking sad. I'm not even allowed to cut my hair, like I'm a legal adult but my damn mother won't let me cut my hair cause she says that people with fat faces like me look like bowling balls we short hair. And fuck if I'm so done with it. I can't even come out to people cause I'm scared to be rejected or be told I'm not trans enough cause I "don't look non-binary" which is a fucking dumb thing to say. Even some people i came out to keep using my deadname and misgender me. I hate that i can't stand up for myself and it's entirely my fault. I just wish i could look more like how I feel inside.
This is really taking a toll on me
-kitten anon
First of all Iâm more than happy to know that you feel safe here, because you 100% are.
Secondly Thatâs so wild to me how ppl can genuinely think someone âisnât trans enoughâ⌠like mf it doesnât have a measuring system, wtf do you mean itâs ânot enoughâ? Iâm so sorry youâre going through this. I know our experiences are vastly different, but I have pcos that blocks out my periods stops/slows my estrogen and makes testosterone build in my system sometimes, and the longer I go without a cycle, the more masculine I start to look. Iâll get random facial hair, my bone structure gets wider, my shoulders start packing on muscle. Last time it got out of hand, I was on Omegle for like 5 mins and some mean ass kids asked me if I was trans because i had âa manâs jawâ. I deadass didnât leave the house or take any pictures for three months straight 𼲠so on a less consistent scale I do know how crippling it feels to not look the way you feel and to be misgendered/invalidated. Iâm so so fucking sorry.
And as someone who is 225 pounds with a round face and double chin, and with all due respect, the hell with your moms opinion. I liked my short hair even though it did give me more of a masculine appearance.. but it was hot ngl. I only grew my hair back out to look more feminine again but hair really REALLY does make a difference. If you want short hair then go for it! PLEASE! You donât even have to take the leap right off the bat, just slowly shorten it inch by inch, day by day, and let yourself adjust to seeing yourself with shorter hair instead of chipping it all at once. That way you know when to stop and keep going, so that you donât overwhelm yourself and regret it, and can stop when you feel itâs enough. Look into all the different styled cuts you can go with and all the stylization you can do with it to fit your taste! Hell, YOU CAN DYE IT TOO!!
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WIP Wednesday
Iâm going to pretend @dreadfutures tagged me because she said it was open. I started a Flufy Modern AU one shot version of my main OC Elspeth Cousland and Nathaniel Howe which has been a ton of fun to play in. Problem is, I need to work on the pacing, because my main pair just spend the entire time teasing each other. One day Iâll come back and turn this into a fully fledged fic.  Iâve never posted stories directly to tumblr before so this is about to be an adventure in HTML -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Soldering pedals was one of Elsaâs great joys in life. It was simple, straightforward, necessary, and immediately rewarding. Working on music could be richly satisfying in its own right, of course, but sometimes she just wanted a project with a clear goal and obvious outcome. And as a bonus, she could listen to whatever tracks she or her collaborators had made, with half a mind to future tweaks even as she worked.Â
Shadow suddenly perked up at her feet, a sure sign that Delilah was home, before turning into a barking dancing ball of energy as she raced towards the doorway. Her mutt was just barely well trained enough not to bump her owner while she was working, but it made her nervous all the same.
âHey, âLilah, because I know you love me, would you be willing to take the monster out while youâre still bundled up?â she called out in amusement. âIâm just in shorts and a sweater over here.â She didnât hear a response, but her faithful muttâs barking began to get more muted, even through her headphones.
She let herself get caught up in her work once more, finishing the last few wires that needed attaching. Elsa Cousland stood, stretching energy into stiff limbs, wandering over to their kitchen to check on the stewing cordero al vino. Soon enough, she heard the barking of Shadow in the hallway, apparently particularly excitable tonight as she returned. Her faithful mutt didnât usually stay hyper this long when Delilah came home.
Keys jingled in the doorway, letting in the hyperactive pup, but Elsaâs attention was caught up blowing on the broth, eager to sample if it was coming along alright. âGeez, Lilah, do you have bacon in your pocket or something?â
âHeard a number of odd pick up lines before, but that oneâs rather new,â a different, comforting voice graveled at her. Elsa started in surprise. It canât be, she thought, even as she whirled. Nathaniel Howe was leaning in the doorway. Of course there was a faint smirk on his face, helmet in hand, and he would choose to look quite so dashing in his snow dusted leather coat. âBut yes, I am happy to see you.â
âNATE!â she breathlessly enthused, dropping the spoon and launching herself at the man.
He grinned, catching her into a tight hug, wonderful chuckles rumbling through his chest. Despite the cold he brought in, warmth of a different kind seared through her.
âHey, Elsa,â he breathed, his cologne such a wonderful, familiar scent. âMiss me?â
âYou canât possibly need to ask, you dork,â she murmured back, voice muffled by his chest. She pulled back to beam up at him, trying to ignore how easily he made her heart flip. Piercing grey eyes crinkled at her, peering past that wonderful aquiline nose. A faint blush from winterâs cold colored his cheeks, all while a smile danced across his lips. His sharp chin sporting that same soul patch she remembered so well.Â
Nathaniel Howe, back after over a year of international travel. Smiling at her, daring to act even a fraction as happy to see her as she was him.Â
She shoved down her pounding heart with firm internal rebuke. She didnât have a crush on the man anymore, really. Clearly this was just the affection of having missed a man she cared dearly for - as a friend! Her energy would settle soon enough.Â
Around their feet, her mutt danced, still bouncing ecstatically, and one particularly affectionate bump nearly knocked Elsa over if Nathaniel hadnât tightened his hug and righted her. âShadow, couch,â she ordered with exasperation, and obediently the dog quieted, following her ownerâs command. Ponderously she climbed on, mournfully huffing as she curled up on the cushion. Large, sad puppy eyes demanded an explanation for such a betrayal, but her supposedly morose demeanor was rather cut by a wagging tail steadily thumping on the cushions.Â
âItâs so wonderful to see you,â Elsa repeated warmly to Nate. âI missed you so much. I canât believe youâre here! Have you had dinner? Can you stay? Iâm making cordero al vino. Oriâs recipe.âÂ
âIt smells amazing, but I donât want to trouble you,â Nathaniel demurred.
âDoctor Nathaniel Howe! Donât be ridiculous, do you see the size of that pot? Besides, I will not be denied the chance to play host, or the pleasure of your company,â she growled, playfully thumping him in the chest.
âI am still not used to that title,â he mused, shaking his head, eyes crinkling with amusement. She giggled. âIâll have to help you get used to it then, Dr. Howe. Indiana Jones wannabe-â
âGreat, good. Years in the field and thatâs never gotten old.â
âProfessional artifact thief.â
âI am not a thief, I do nothing of the sort! I donât even - I work in Greece, Iâm mostly just surveying, and you - ah. You know this, of course you know this, and youâre winding me up.â Nathaniel sighed, rubbing his nose and trying not to smirk. âWhy am I such an easy mark for you?â
Her brown eyes sparkled with humorous delight, grin bursting past all efforts to control it. âI mean, that goes both ways and you know it,â she pointed out, and he had to smirk, dipping his head in concession. âPlease, settle in, make yourself at home. I should warn you, Iâm likely to strongly insist you stay the night.â
âOh?â
She gestured out the window. âLook at the weather. Did you really not know a major winter storm was coming? I donât even want Delilah taking public in this, though I imagine sheâs thinking the same. Her decision, in the end.â
He hesitated, frame stilling as he shed his coat. âOh. Just you and me, then?â
Nerves flashed through her. She kept her tone light, offhand. âIs that a problem? Need me to invite other friends?â
âOf course not, but I feel bad for interrupting your, ah, special date night. And I donât mean to force you to entertain me.â
She rolled her eyes, exasperated, worries settled. âNathaniel. Itâs fine. Iâd really prefer you didnât try and take your bike in the storm thatâs about to hit, but Iâll not pressure you. If you can put up with a slightly more humble abode than youâre used to, oh mighty Doctor Nathaniel-â
â-I feel as though you vastly overestimate the lifestyle of a non medical doctor.â
â-weâd be more than happy to have you stay. Especially for safetyâs sake. If you canât fit on the couch, you can stay in my bed.â He raised an eyebrow at her and she flushed, quickly continuing as if nothing were wrong. âInstead of me! I can sleep out here, Iâve spent more than one night on this couch.â
He smiled faintly, though his eyes looked distant. âIâm sure both you and Delilah have.â
âIf it weighs on the scale, Iâd like to pester you with a thousand questions as your rent for the night. Plus, youâll have to give that shameless flirt - the one with a tail - all the attention she craves.â
Nathaniel grinned, piercing grey eyes sparkling and flipping her stomach in knots. âSuch a price. Are you trying to threaten me with a good time? You know Iâd pay it a dozen times over.â Her heart pounded within her, but she shoved that down. Nathaniel loved dogs. âBut wouldnât I just be in your way?â
âNate, donât joke like that. I havenât seen you in forever!â
âA year and a half!â She huffed at him, and he quickly held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. âI just thought youâd rather - well. I appreciate the offer. Hm.â He checked out the window, noticing the snow flakes getting thicker. âMaybe I will take you up on it, at least for tonight. Mind if I go down and cover my bike, then?â
âExcellent! Good choice,â she praised, and his eyes crinkled in amusement. âAnd go for it. Dinner should be ready in another ten minute or so.â
âI look forward to it. And the promised thousand questions,â he added with a faint smirk, heading out.
Elsa watched him go, double checking on the lamb with sudden nerves, buzzing with excitement that wasnât suspicious. It was normal to be this happy to see an old friend. Those butterflies were just clearly the natural excitement of being surprised. But the growing snow worried her, so she found her phone to make sure her roommate wasnât enroute, and realized sheâd missed several texts from Delilah
 Nathanielâs back in down, you donât mind if I invite him to dinner, right?
Hey
Hey
Check your damn phone buttface. Heâs on his way.
Also Iâm going to stay at Albertâs tonight. Itâs much closer and work held me up. If you end up fucking my brother, please donât tell me.
I lied, please tell me
No donât.
Look tell me but I donât want details. I just want to know it happened finally.
Exasperated, she rolled her eyes, and set about responding.Â
Fucks sake, Iâm sorry! I was working on soldering, alright? Itâs fine, your brotherâs here safely, happy to see him and entertain. Heâs going to stay the night
No Iâm not gonna sleep with him. Have to get him drunk first so heâll even want to and that makes the whole thing too bleh for me
Canât believe you abandoned me on date night, bitch
Iâm kidding. Glad youâre staying with Albert but duh. Even without snow, when was the last time you spent the night here? Tell them I said hi
Soon enough, Nathaniel returned, and was promptly attacked by Shadow. He pretended at irritation, but a smirking grin kept fighting against his scowl even as she twined around his legs and forced him to sit with her on the couch.
Elsa smiled, watching him rubbing Shadowâs belly to her obvious delight, letting him have a moment of calm. Soon enough, though, he looked up, raising an eyebrow. âSo quiet all of a sudden, should I be nervous? I believe you threatened me with a thousand questions.â
âJust giving you a moment to settle in!â she defended solicitously.
A faint half smirk traced his lips. âConsider me settled.â
It was like a floodgate releasing. âHowâs Greece? Are you still doing GIS? Were you able to start any digs, discover any good sites, and find any exciting sherds? Meet any interesting new people?â
Nathaniel chuckled, and his eyes briefly went unfocused, clearly trying to keep track of each of her questions. âRapid fire questions get rapid fire answers. Greece is good, surveying is excellent, I think we've identified a very interesting new site, specifically because yes, we found a number of interesting sherds. And no, nobody particularly interesting we havenât already emailed about.â He shook his head, bemused. âThis isnât even your kind of field, and youâre not my family, forced to pretend. How do you remember this much? Even Delilah glazes over whenever I try to explain it.â
âPlease, you underestimate how interesting you make things. Besides, âLilah always remembers, sheâs just trying to yank your soul patch. Which I note you still have, and so Iâve now lost a bet with her.â
Self consciously, Nathaniel stroked it. âI think it looks good.âÂ
âIt does,â she soothed with a teasing grin. âI just didnât think those were easy to maintain. Surprised you can keep up such careful grooming in the field.â
âSome things are worth the effort. Besides, youâre one to talk! Youâre here in the middle of a city, and yet your hairâs getting so long,â he retorted. âWhenâs the last time you got a haircut?â
She mockingly gasped theatrically, tossing her long auburn hair. She hoped it would cascade beautifully but realistically knew she was just getting a floofy mess and shedding behind her. âHey, I get it trimmed regularly. Besides, donât you mock my hair, itâs my only good feature, Nate!â she baited him, raising a teasing eyebrow.
âThatâs not even slightly true,â he protested.
 âHow very dare you, good sir. I canât believe you just called my hair ugly.â
 âI did nothing of the sort.â
 âI work so hard on it, too!â
 âYour hair is beautiful, and so is-â
Theatrically she pressed a hand to her forehead, sighing dramatically. âAnd now Nathaniel Howe, Expert P-H-D, just called it ugly. Alas! Iâve disappointed my dear Delilahâs brother. Now sheâll hate me too. Curse my miserable existence! I suppose thereâs no help for it, Iâll just have to shave it all off.â
Nathaniel was outright laughing by the time her performative and overwrought display was done. âSo dramatic. You are such a ridiculous ham,â he teased her. âYou would never do such a thing. You know your hair is beautiful.â
She grinned at him, joy bursting out of her too much to be contained. âCanât help the drama. Iâm too excited, itâs hard to play at calm.â She performatively covered her mouth, then, and by the time she removed her hand, her smile was slightly better controlled, though her twinkling eyes betrayed her still. âSorry, I promise Iâll try to settle down again. This is what you get for surprising me, Nate. My favorite - one of my favorite people is back in town, Iâm a little eager!â
He settled slightly, smiling warmly at her, grey eyes dancing with light that made her heart flip within her. âFavorite? Please. Donât exaggerate, you heartbreaker,â he teased, and as she geared up to protest, he continued, eyes softer, careful smile dancing on his features. âI missed you too, Elsa. Itâs - itâs really good to see you again, energy and all. Especially that, actually. I loved your emails but they always lack a little something compared to seeing you face to face.â
She smiled warmly back, trying not to flush. âI know what you mean,â she agreed. âIâm so glad you could come back early. How long are you back this time?â
âLikely a couple years, actually. Weâve all but got the permit to dig in Greece so now itâs just applying for grants for awhile until we have enough to fund an actual dig. Iâm probably going to be staying near the university, working on data analysis and grant and paper writing.â
Elsa tried not to let her tremor of excitement show. Cool as a cucumber. Casual. Not at all a silly, lovesick girl. Because it would be ridiculous. She couldnât actually be still crushing on a man she should have the good sense to get over by now.
But.
A part of her couldnât help but note this would be the first time in years theyâd be local and single for an appreciable time frame. Most of Nathanielâs graduate career had been intercut with international travel spanning for months on end, often rarely spending more than a season in the country. Last time he was in town for 6 consecutive months, sheâd been dating Sebastian, and before that, heâd had some long distance relationship with someone or other. Alvina? Elvira? Damn, she probably shouldnât be forgetting that.
Nerves would betray her, so she diverted to practical matters. âOh? Thatâs wonderful to hear. Where will you be staying?â
âMostly working out of the university, so Iâll probably settle in with father while I look for a place around here.â
Elsa made a face even as she poured herself a glass of wine. âYou really want to live with your father? I thought you didnât get along with him either.âÂ
Nathaniel sighed, shrugging. âWell, I didnât exactly have an alternative set up. Itâs just to tide me over until I can get an apartment.â
âStay here!â she insisted. âWe can put you up for however long it takes to find a place.â
âThatâs a kind offer, but Iâm not sure Delilah would appreciate it.â
ââLilah would much rather you stay here than with your father, trust me,â Elsa pressed, taking a seat on the couch with him. âDouble check with her if you prefer, but Iâll put money down Iâm right.â
âIâll think about it,â Nathaniel demurred. âIâd rather not, ah. Be in either of your way, though. Wouldnât it be awkward to have the older brother around, looming over you two?â
What a strange way to phrase things. But Nathaniel tended to be more careful in his word choice than others, and Elsa knew sheâd probably thrown him off already with her energy and offer. âNot at all. I intend to be shameless regardless of your presence. We can have late night slumber parties!â she insisted cheerfully.Â
Nathanielâs face flushed slightly, then, though it was hard to tell why. Nathaniel was a flirt himself, and quite smooth about it, so the idea that he was flustered from her flirtations was hard to buy. But then, it was possible she was coming across stronger than she realized. Best to back off, then. âWell, itâs your choice, but offerâs on the table.â
âIâll talk with Delilah.â
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1041
survey by chasingghosts
What is the age gap between you and your parents? 27 for both. Technically, 26 years with my mom since she had yet to celebrate her birthday when she had me, but she was going to turn 27 all the same. Guh. I canât believe Iâm just five years away from that and Iâm still nowhere near building my own family.
How many bathrooms does your house have? Is this enough? Two. Iâd say itâs enough. Two people in the family rarely have to go to the bathroom at the same time so it works out for us.
Have you sent a letter to anyone in the past year? Yeah. I used to give Gabie a handwritten letter every Christmas along with her gifts. I still plan on writing her one, but obviously the content will be vastly different now.
Have you ever video chatted with someone you met online? I did this with Carley a handful of times; weâd video chat when I came home from school which was around the time she would get ready for school. She was such an extrovert who was so lovely and bubbly around me, and Iâve always felt bad that she had to contend with my shy ass with my mic always muted lol.
Are you hungry or thirsty right now? Iâm neither but I can go for a light meal right now, which is great because I got myself a chicken barbecue sandwich and a caramel macchiato from Starbucks as a treat for myself tonight :) I went through five video call meetings just for today alone, went through several breakdowns while at work, and am also on my period, so I thought I deserved a break.
When was the last time you ate something, and what did you eat? Literally just had a bite from my sandwich.
Have you ever seen the film Boondock Saints? Nope. Sounds nothing like my type of film.
Do you own a pair of gumboots? Nah. I donât like walking in floods anyway, so I donât plan on getting a pair.
What colour is your favourite mug? Copper.
How far away from your town/city is your state's capital city? I already live in my provinceâs capital.
Have you ever worked somewhere where you had to clean the toilets? I havenât.
Do you know anyone named Doug? No, not really a common name here.
What cut of jeans is your favourite and why? Do mom jeans count as a cut? Iâve been all over those throughout 2020. Theyâre stylish and yet so comfy, which are two words that seldom go together.
Do you rate people's attractiveness on a scale of 1-10? Uhhhhhhhh unless a friend asked me to rate someone they know, I donât really think in these terms.
Name a few of your favourite actors. Kate freaking Winslet. Also Kristen Stewart, Emma Stone, Audrey Hepburn, Brie Larson, Florence Pugh, and Eddie Redmayne. Iâd name TimothĂŠe Chalamet but I have yet to see a work of his.
Do you collect anything, or have you ever? The first item I ever collected was notebooks. In my past relationship (is it obvious Iâm not over it yet and probably never will be? Ha) I initially liked to collect receipts from places we went to and ate at. Iâd also like to be able to grow a collection of wrestling memorabilia, particularly action figures and belts. Itâs not really a life goal of mine but itâd still be a cool thing to achieve.
So, how has your week been so far? I mean itâs only Monday, so nothing much. I cried and broke down a lot today which wasnât a good start, but tomorrowâs a holiday so no work; and for Thursday I was invited to the Christmas party of the department I initially interned at and apparently theyâll be sending over a Christmas kit over to my place so Iâm looking forward to these! Itâs super touching they remembered and still invited me even though Iâm not a part of the team anymore, so I wouldnât have missed the party for the world.
Is there anything that you could cry about right now? Definitely, and being on my period at the moment makes it so much easier to cry. But I already cried too much and too hard earlier today and it felt exhausting, so Iâm trying to avoid it tonight.
How old were you when you learned how to tie your shoelaces? I was five. I probably wouldâve made myself learn later but one of our âexamsâ in kindergarten was to show that you know how to tie your shoelaces, so I had to ask my grandma to give me a crash course.
Have you ever slept in a car overnight? Why did you have to? Yeah. I had to pull several all-nighters in college and work at 24/7 coffee shops, but I usually gave up by around 2-3 AM and would sleep in the car by then.
When was the last time you used Facebook? Earlier this evening, but I couldnât scroll too much because spoilers for Start Up are everyyyyyyfuckingwhere and Iâm still several episodes away from the finale, which aired last night.
Do you have a PO Box or does your mail get sent straight to your house? Our mails and parcels get sent straight to our door.
Are you interested in entomology? Do you know what that is? Never been. I think itâs great that insects have a lot of capabilities and contributions that we often take for granted; but I personally find a great deal of them icky as well lol so I wouldnât say Iâm interested in this branch.
Have you ever had to claim insurance? What for? Hmm I donât think so. Not my own nor my parentsâ. Do you like to listen to albums start-finish without skipping or shuffling? Iâll do this sometimes with my favorite albums, yes. Fuck knows how many times I listened to After Laughter from start to finish with no skips; it was my favorite for a while.
Do you have any unspoken enemies, or maybe frenemies? Iâm not the biggest fan of Patrice, but itâs not something I broadcast to people because why would I? Iâm sure she slightly does not like me too, so weâre even.
What was the last thing you broke? That would be my last phone charger cord. Iâve since had it replaced though.
Do you have a favourite state/province/territory in your country? Not necessarily an overall favorite but I do have a favorite place Iâve traveled to, which is Sagada. I need a second vacation to see if it still lives up to my expectations and if it would still be able to give me an experience as cathartic and therapeutic as my first trip there, but for the last five years it has sat on the throne.
How many vowels are in your street name? Is this question too mundane? Three. I mean Iâve never been asked this on a survey before, so I wouldnât call it that.
What are your three top favourite flavours of ice cream? Cookies and cream, chocolate chip cookie dough, coffee.
How far away is the nearest Target? At least a couple thousand miles away.
Do you prefer Target, Kmart or Walmart? Idk and idc.
Have you ever farted in class or somewhere else you shouldn't have? No. I suppress my farts, even when Iâm alone haha itâs just my least favorite bodily function.
What's your middle name? Would you change it? Iâm not giving it away. I wouldnât change it and Iâm definitely not giving it up even if I get married. Iâm keeping my middle name then just hyphenate my surname so that I get to keep all three names.
When was the last tie you wore heels? What was the occasion? September. Job interview for a position I didnât really want but still chose to undergo because it was still an interview.
Do you find yourself lost for words often? I guess yeah, depression does tend to do that to me.
Did you share baths with your siblings/cousins when you were a child? Yep, I remember sharing the shower with my sister as late as when I was 10. Then puberty happened to me and I did not want to continue the practice anymore, haha.
Have you ever been a member of an online dating site? How did it go? I joined Tinder while I was in a relationship (she made an account as well at the time so it was fair game) literally just to people-watch. I wasnât interested in cheating; I was just genuinely curious to see how the app worked. I put on a fake name, age, location and my profile photo was of a cat I saw in school so it was impossible to tell it was me.
Do you know what your neighbours even look like? I would not be able to recognize them if you lined them up with a bunch of other strangers, to tell you the truth. Iâd probably be able to recognize the carpenters working on the house currently being constructed in front of ours though; theyâre super nice and theyâre crazy over Cooper haha.
How many siblings does your best friend have? Angela is an only child.
Do you put ketchup on your fries? No. Ketchup does not go anywhere near my fries.
Have you been lucky enough to make out with anyone in the past week? LOL lucky enough...but no, I havenât done that in a while.
Have your parents ever worked in the agriculture business etc. on a farm? Neither have.
Do you have an ex that makes you angry with literally everything they do? No.
Are you easily susceptible to brain freeze? No but tooth sensitivity, yes. I have a certain tooth that acts up whenever I eat ice cream, and it can get soooo inconvenient and uncomfortable for a few seconds.
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penzy first of all... i canât wait for ch 2 u know more than anyone that i live and breath for flowers youâve got me all excited now! second, talk to me abt ur country music recs! and thirdly give me that exr/javid character analysis RIGHT NOW because it is giving me Emotions!!
flowers ch 2 has everything.... banter, sweet sibling moments, artistic metaphors, and charlie
COUNTRY MUSIC RECS!!! ok so obviously weâve got the classics. reba, the chicks, shania, taylor, dolly. these are obvious ones. once again to reiterate for those of you who havent caught up with the chicks: gaslighter saved 2020.
mickey guyton is really wonderful! her record has been WOEFULLY misusing her, but she has an ep called âbridgesâ that went out this year and she performed at the acm awards, so hopefully sheâll see some more attention and chance to build her career soon! sheâs got a gorgeous voice, especially live, and she breaks perfectly out of the usual blueprint for radio country. each of her songs feels distinct and different from the others while still cohesive as all hers. she also makes really good use of some background choir moments if thatâs a selling point like it is for me fhskjdhskhds. sheâs also unabashedly political with her music! bridges has songs about facing inequality and getting through the division in the country, plus getting wasted and fake bitches fsjdhsjhds. this is country after all. i cannot comprehend the guts it took for her, as the first black woman to perform solo at the acm awards, to sing about how we fail to create a better world for our daughters. iâm excited to see where she goes now that she has more attention and an opportunity to build on it!!!
for some great gay country: jamie wyatt!!! she came out within the last year and has two albums out, the most recent being âneon crossâ! she has a really classic country sound AND a gorgeous alto voice, which is always awesome to hear. sheâs dedicated herself to making country a more inclusive genre. specific songs to check out: ârattlesnake girlâ and âmake something outta meâ!! she also wins coolest album cover. it makes me gayer than i was before.
chely wrightâs been making country for decades, she has eight? i think albums, but she pretty much got excommunicated after she came out in 2010 so she hasnât gotten a bunch of buzz recently. her 2016 album, âi am the rainâ, has sort of country âtapestryâ energy, and i highly recommend it!
i also love yola-- she has a gorgeous deep voice, and her album âwalk through fireâ is fucking brilliant. she got nominated at the grammys for it, so iâm really really excited to see what she does going forward. her music just makes me feel very Warm and comforted but also melancholy and its just... hot damn walk through fire is good. her music has a soul feel to it in addition to the country roots!
anyways!! if youre new to country and looking for a good entry into the genre, go for the classics list i put up there, and if you like country and you arenât familiar with any of the less ultra famous artists, check them out for some good tunes!
OK CHARACTER ANALYSIS TIME.
this ask is massive i regret nothing
i will probably go more into detail later but hereâs what i have right now: jack is a naturally supportive person whoâs been forced into leadership, and davey is a natural leader whoâs been repressed into staying in the background.
on jackâs end-- i think heâs really in a situation where he doesnât want to lead or be in charge, itâs just something he kind of fell/was forced into. in my head, since he goes out of his way to help and support people, he gradually became the person all the newsies went to for help, and eventually that formed into him being a leader for the unit. but itâs VERY obvious he isnât entirely comfortable/okay with it-- at his worst moment, in santa fe, he is literally begging to be somewhere where people wonât depend on him but will still care about him. another thing that really points towards this would be that he only resolves to stay in new york when he realizes that he has people to help him and he doesnât have to shoulder leadership alone anymore
on daveyâs end-- this might be a Hot Take, but i think daveyâs a much more natural leader than jack is. look at wwh reprise: his phrasing specifically takes on a lot of very classic leadership ideas in a way that almost makes him seem like a general planning strategies. heâs more capable of looking at the larger picture-- partially because jack cares so much about the newsies and canât bear to see them getting hurt, but i think it also comes from davey being really good at structuring those large-scale, big-picture ideas. i think we often gloss over the rally because it goes to shit, but thatâs his idea! in my eyes, heâs someone whoâs been taught to always keep his head down and stay out of the spotlight-- considering that his family is poor, jewish, and possibly newer to america, and that he was still in school, which would have likely been a hostile environment for him, thereâs plenty of reason for him to do just that. but i think itâs very telling what finally breaks him and gets him to join the strike-- jackâs speech wears him down, sure, but itâs jack ASKING HIM FOR ADVICE that finally wins him over.
anyways. i think the idea of jack as someone who doesnât want to lead but kind of has to and davey as a natural leader who has forced himself into the background for safety is VASTLY more interesting than like. jack is a loudmouth and daveyâs shy. but thatâs just My Thoughts. i will polish them more later fsjdghsjgds thank you for asking me about them!!!
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