#main reason i quit this one is bc low pay

[itadore-you]

slay finally quitting one of my tutoring jobs (already applied to 5 more 🥹 cant afford to not have a job) + also trying to apply for fun summer jobs (like at a festival/ summer camp) does anyone have recommendations on what else to watch out forrr

[harlequinoccult]

thank you for explaining the caustic personality!! honestly Vulpine might as well have caustic as his main w apathetic tendencies instead, ig ill find out when the demo is updated XD both personality types fit him too well. honestly he's not that aggressive as a person, he's actually mostly quite polite, but he does have a tendency to stare. the ones who really get to see his aggressive side are the people he dislikes (Host better fucking prepare himself-)

well i figured i'd just finish what i started, and continue on my never-ending ramble. usually i like making Ariel an orphan, it's a bit of a callback to his roots and it fits him, but this time i think the second option i usually go for him fits best: single child of a single mother. she's the only family he has that he knows of, a very loving, religious and hard working lady who was shunned from the community for getting pregnant out of wedlock. the very first fights Ari would get into in his childhood were against kids who would say some unsavory shit abt his mom. having a mother who was blindly dedicated to the same church that constantly made her suffer for the mistake of having a kid without a husband also played a very big part into Ariel becoming an atheist and rebelling against the church in his teen years.

she was p absent as a parent, having to work p much the whole day to be able to support them both, but she tried her best the moments when she was present, and Ari recognizes that and loves her dearly. he started stealing things and got his first job quite young to try to help her pay the bills.

he got arrested when he was around 18 yo, probably getting caught on one of his "heists", trying to steal from the richer houses around, and he hasn't seen her since then. his time in prison was... bad. really fucking bad. the worst, lowest point of his life, in fact.

i have no idea how the legal system works in england and i have no desire to learn, but for what's worth he is caught trying to escape at least once, and spends 2 miserable years in there until he finally manages to leave.

did he actually complete his sentence? lol. lmao.

no. no he didn't. be it by a month, a year, a day, the important thing is he didn't.

is Ariel Fox even his real name? i doubt it. that would be stupid wouldn't it, illegally immigrating to a different country after escaping from prison and using your real ass name to do it, he's smarter than that.

fun fact abt Ari: he does not want to go back to prison. he'll kill himself before they have the chance to catch him.

on a... "unrelated" note, the reason why Carter managed to wrap such a tight leash on Ariel is bc he learned smth he shouldn't have and he's holding that little secret right over his head. im sure you can't possibly guess what he found out that would make Ariel put up w his shit the way he did-

so the fact that Ari ends up in this city (i forgor the name and i can't leave the askbox to check or ill lose everything i typed 😭) is honestly not rlly much of a surprise, nor is the fact that he's p much alone despite living there for years. he's always been a bit of an outcast, a loner, someone who avoids people on purpose. he hasn't seen his mom since he left england, but he looks her up every once in a while. debates whether he should call her. decides it's for the best that he doesn't.

he starts over. new life, new me, or whatever the hell people say. starts off already with shifty connections, he needs a fake identity and a fake birth certificate and a fake everything if he has any hope of passing by unscathed, after all. needs to lay low. not call too much attention. be a nobody. wait until things calm down a bit.

he stays at least a year living like that, settling in, subduing his accent until he can pass it off as having learned it from a family member or some other bullshit. applies for university. becomes just another american college student.

meets someone.

falls in love.

has them taken from him. has his entire life destroyed. again. needs to try to pick himself up. again. is struck with such crippling grief unlike anything he has ever felt before. it's almost as bad as the two worst years of his life.

almost.

he's never letting anything like that happen to him ever again.

anyway! as mentioned before, he was working on getting a doctorate when Carter came along, and he sort of had to drop out after that, to the dismay of his teachers. what was he getting a doctorate on? honestly p much anything would be in-character for Ariel, he's an everything nerd, from language to history to engineering to biology that man wants to know quite literally everything the world has to offer him. his infodumps are the most complete and varied possible, he's a walking talking encyclopedia.

he's an extremely paranoid person who overthinks everything including his own overthinking and really, if nothing else here's to hoping that OD can at least teach him to loosen up a bit-

he never enjoyed doing drugs very much, despite partaking in them quite often in his youth. he's way more likely to experience a bad trip than a good one, so he learned to stay away from them as much as possible, but alcohol and nicotine were a completely different story. he's still addicted to nicotine to this day, the one drug he allows himself to never let go. he was an alcoholic through a big chunk of his life, until someone did Very Bad Things to him when he was too drunk to be able to fight back. that experience just flipped a switch inside of him, it broke him badly enough to make him promise himself to never touch another drop of alcohol in his life, a promise he did very well by until Carter killed his beloved and he had the worst relapse of his life. he's back to being a straight edge now tho, its fine! its not fine

he has immense distaste for the cops of the city, but part of him is kinda grateful that they're so bad at their job or else he would be Fucked. he absolutely despised doing work for Carter, even after he became so numb to it all it made him want to tear his own heart out just to make sure it was still beating. i cannot stress enough how much he suffered inside at the start, part of the reason he started drinking again was to try to ignore how much all of it hurt. at least he could try to make sure Carter didn’t kill innocents. he couldn't really be sure every time, but he tried. he really did.

he probably tried killing Carter at least once. or thought abt it, at the very least. made plans. had it all figured out in his head, down to the last detail, how he would do it and get away with it. ngl, he was probably on the verge of putting it into action when Host sent him that email and just gave him the perfect chance to do it just like that-

as a killer, Vulpine is very much the stealthy type, hiding in the shadows, walking withouth making a sound. if its a group, he'll pick them off one by one, until someone notices and all hell breaks loose or until all of them are dead. if he's forced to kill someone he doesn't think deserves it, he's merciful. very quick, clean deaths, going straight for the vitals, almost painless. if it's someone he thinks deserves to suffer, however... well, he's always been curious to know what a human vivisection would look like.

truth is, he's a sadist. well, a sadomasochist really, but he gets off on making people suffer, and he hates it. he especially hates the fact that hurting the person he loves is such a tantalizing thought. marking them blue and black, covering them in red, it's not really his fault blood is such a beautiful thing, is it? and if his lover wants to do the same to him, well, he's more than happy to oblige. anything for his love. except bondage. getting tied up/held down is actually a pretty bad trigger for him, he hates it, no matter the context

ok well i think that's everything! thanks for indulging me!!

-🦊

The ask is somewhere around here, i know it, but with caustic mcs, Carter assumed they were all bark and no bite. Fitting, i think.

And, given everything, OD is a fitting match, they like learning and they are smart -in their own way- the drugs and partying is for themselves, they aren't the type to pressure people into drugs, in fact, they can and will tell you about the various side effects of any given drug because they think its legitimately interesting.

[sovonight]

hi sovo ;u; I hope it's okay if I ask you a shop question! So um, I'm lower on money than I've ever been and I'm too burnt out to do commissions for ppl due to personal stuff, but I feel like... if I made one charm or one sticker for a particularly huge fandom/movie that's out right now, and if I put it up as preorder and sold at least 20 keychains then I'd be able to pay my bills this month. but I've never sold physical merch before and I'm a little nervous to try it haha :'D

Would you recommend I try making an Etsy since it seems to have a large enough audience, or do you think I should try making my own website/shop? I'm definitely not ready to consistently sell things as a steady job yet, I thought I'd try literally just one single keychain or one sticker sheet (I already learned how to make those, thankfully) in order to pay my rent this month bc I've only got about a hundred dollars to my name sdflkfssdf;; and if it goes well then maybe I can try it again.

I'm also not quite sure how to price things? if I made a 3.5 inch acrylic charm with the little star shaped keychains like from Vograce, do people normally price those at $15 when they sell them? should I also account for shipping? I've also umm never shipped merch before and I'm so worried about somehow messing it up sldfjsf like I don't know what kind of envelopes I have to get or if I should even use my own address bc I'm so nervous about my personal info being out there, but I don't know if it's worth paying for a PO box if I'm so low on money already. if you have any tips on anything whatsoever, I would appreciate any feedback if you're not busy. But if you don't want to answer please don't worry about it ;u; anyway thank you so much for reading this I really appreciate you! ❤

no prob! here are my thoughts:

pros/cons of etsy:

apparently if you're new to selling on etsy, there's a probationary period where etsy withholds your profits for 3 months. i don't know anything about it personally since it started in 2020, but it seems that funds are only released when your shipped orders are scanned at the post office. i think i also remember hearing about other cases where payments aren't released at all for 3 months--and etsy customer service has a reputation of being difficult to get a hold of if you have a problem as a seller, so if etsy made a mistake with your shop, it may take even more months to resolve. since you have preorders in mind, i would hold off on etsy unless you can pay out of pocket.

etsy can drive traffic towards your listing for you (if you choose the right keywords--it's more difficult to be discovered just randomly if you don't).

they have high fees (for a $15 charm they'd take $1.88 in fees, which is 12.5%).

people may be cautious to buy from a shop that has no reviews yet, but many customers are protected by etsy's purchase protection and can be refunded at no cost to you if their order gets lost in the mail (provided that you ship with a tracking number and meet other criteria).

etsy will strongly recommend that you offer free shipping; ignore them. i don't think i've ever bought fanmerch with free shipping in my life, and their advice isn't geared towards sellers like us.

preorders don't work very well with etsy's system--iirc you're not supposed to do them (even though people still do, of course) but the main reason i remember is that the max processing time etsy lets you set per product (as in, the time between the customer purchasing the listing and you shipping it out) is 6 weeks. that means that the time you allow for customers to place their preorders, the time it takes for you to order and receive the merch, and the time it takes for you to ship out orders, all need to add up a max of 6 weeks, which was personally a difficult timeline for me to meet when making keychains. ofc, it's possible to extend the processing time, but going over the processing time may make it possible for customers to leave reviews/open cases early before you're even ready to ship out their orders, which could affect the reputation of your shop.

pros/cons of not etsy:

if you're not going with etsy, i've heard people recommend bigcartel, since it doesn't require a subscription like shopify or other places do. bigcartel's free plan is limited, but it should work for what you're looking for. another alternative might be ko-fi--i've heard that ko-fi shops aren't ideal for shipping out a large amount of orders, but since you're targeting just 20 i think it should be manageable.

ofc, you'll have to drive all your traffic yourself, so consider if you have enough of a following in your target fandom, or how you should go about getting your post noticed by your target fandom.

unlike etsy, shipping isn't auto-calculated, so i'd probably set a flat rate (in the US i'd expect $5). flat rates might make calculating your taxes just a little bit more complicated; in california at least, you have to pay taxes on the difference between the shipping you charge your customers and the shipping you actually pay to the post office, so iirc you either refund the extra shipping to the customer or hand it all over in taxes.

pricing:

yes, the standard price for ~3" acrylic keychains is $15, though i've also seen people go up to $16 or $17, especially on etsy where the fees are high.

shipping should be a separate cost, either auto-calculated for you (if you're on etsy/shopify) or a flat rate that you set based on shipping rates for your country, so in the end a customer might pay $15 + $5 = $20 in total.

unless most of your prospective customers are international, i'd recommend against shipping internationally to avoid dealing with customs forms, especially since you already have a lot of info to take in.

you can ship everything in a regular bubble mailer, though if you're just shipping stickers not keychains, a flat envelope should work fine. when shipping packages, you'll need to know the weight of each package, but you can just go by an estimate. a 3" acrylic keychain weighs about 1 oz (it weighs less than that, but they don't accept decimals) so i just multiply based on how many keychains are in an order. for usps at least, shipping is the same rate up until 10 oz iirc, so you don't need to weigh it super accurately. you could also always just go into the post office and have them weigh and label everything for you.

po box:

if regular PO box rates in your area are too high, you can also consider using a virtual po box; they go for about $10 per month at their most basic plans. if you're not expecting to get any mail redirected back to you, you should be able to just buy a month's subscription when you're ready to ship things out.

words of caution:

you probably already know this, but large fandoms can often be oversaturated by merch, so just choosing a large fandom might not be enough to guarantee a sale--you might have to stand out by, say, choosing a character who's in demand but doesn't have much fanmerch, having a funny meme concept, or having such a unique/attractive style that people can't help but want your fanmerch in particular. if you haven't already, i'd recommend looking around the market and seeing what's out there and decide why a buyer should choose your merch over anyone else's. though honestly, depending on your fandom, it could also not be this serious and not warrant much research--it all depends!

even if the preorder process works out and you get the funds to place the order, the manufacturer could always mess up on your order, which could lead to delays in your fulfillment and at worst, more expenses if you need to pay to get them remade. if it's easier to get sticker sheets made (like if you make them yourself/locally instead of ordering from overseas) they might be a safer choice of merch to make. ofc, i don't generally see sticker sheets up for preorder so you'd probably have to order them out of pocket and hope they sell, and you'll probably have to sell more of them than you would of keychains to get the same amount of profit. i don't know the whole situation, so i can't say anything definite about the risks/rewards between choosing to sell keychains and choosing to sell stickers.

[redshiftsinger]

This tweet from DJ is SO VALIDATING bc that's what I've been saying the whole time, and a big part of what I've been saying the whole time is that Ed and Stede being out of sync with each other is what drives the entire main story. They swing between being parallels for each other and inversions of each other's experience. They hit their highs and lows out of step with each other. At the end of s1 they're at their apogee, distant both physically and in their current location in their respective emotional arcs, with Stede regaining hope as Ed is losing it. Stede started his Protagonist Journey first, so he's further along in it than Ed is. S1 ends and s2 begins with Ed paralleling the position Stede was in with some of the flashbacks to his life before he ran away to sea -- trapped by a pile of expectations that are suffocating him unbearably. But at the same time, they react in ways that are each other's opposite.

Stede builds a ship and runs away, full of hope that there must be more to life. Ed spirals into despair, becomes confrontational, and tries to wreck that same ship. They're parallel and perpendicular all at once.

The whole narrative flow is like they're in collapsing orbit. They coincidentally got close enough to yank on each other's gravity wells, then their pre-existing momentum pulled them apart again but never quite far enough away to break their link, and every repetition of the pattern is closer and smaller than the last until they'll finally collide for real like

So yeah, I'm sure s3 would follow the same pattern where they're wrapping that process up. They won't fully stabilize as a new cohesive unit until the end of s3, or there would be nothing to drive the main point of the story, which is their relationship. It's a romcom, and a romcom always centers on a romance, no matter what the surrounding conceit might be. (OFMD is particularly interesting in that they treat both the romantic leads pretty narratively equally, rather than focusing strongly on One Protagonist + The Love Interest. In s1 Ed is set up more in a position of The Love Interest while Stede is The Protagonist, but it's clear even then that they're a paired set of protagonists rather than one main guy and the other guy just exists in the narrative as a prominent accessory, and that's confirmed when s2 focuses more on Ed's protagonist arc with Stede more in the role of Love Interest.) (sidenote to the sidenote, I wonder how much of the weird fandom drama comes from some people initially interpreting s1 as a standard-formula romcom. If one missed noticing the paired-protagonist angle, I can see how it would be very easy to assume that rather than being the primary antagonist to Ed's protag arc, Izzy must narratively exist to be the Protagonist's (Stede's) rival for the affections of the Love Interest (Ed). Distort that reasonable-but-mistaken baseline assumption about the intended narrative structure for a few iterations of insular fandom wank cycles, and.... hm.)

I think "Ed wants to get married and Stede doesn't think he ever wants to get married again bc being married sucked the first time" would definitely be A way to logically follow that narrative structure into a third season. The implications are set up, we all saw Ed giving Stede the "wife me up" eyes at the LuPete wedding, ready to fuckin throw elbows to get that goddamn bouquet. And we all saw Stede not even noticing that Ed was blatantly giving him A Look -- not his fault, he's paying attention to his friends getting married, and he's happy for them, really! He's just in the very long habit of assuming that marrying for love isn't something he'll ever get for himself, and hasn't yet cognitively reconnected with the idea that, yeah, getting married for love is something he could do, if he wanted to and so did the other guy.

I think there would also have to be a perpendicular-parallel plot point for Ed. Stede's got his whole "learning that he really can actually have the stuff he learned to assume he can't have" point (and that neatly circles back on the parallel with Ed's belief that he's not allowed to have nice things, doesn't it). I don't know what I think that might *be*, yet, and if there's one thing I learned from trying to predict s2 it's that these writers go to some very unexpected places with the details (speculation is still fun but I'm running out of brain too close to bedtime), but the narrative structure would lose cohesion without another round of a smaller apogee before the final resolution of the story, where both have an individual Growing As A Person moment before their relationship stabilizes.

do you have any other theories about a potential s3? what you said about the timeskip makes a lot of sense to me!

glad you liked it and sorry this took a while to answer, i have had a busy real life recently! what this was about was me predicting a hypothetical s3 would involve ed really wanting to get married and stede not feeling ready for it. i will return to that prediction at the end of this but first here's other stuff i'm willing to predict about s3 if it happened, ordered from the what i'm most confident about to least:

(i'm going to phrase some of this in the future tense as if s3 was actually going to happen but that's mostly because couching everything in hypotheticals made this really wordy and also sort of bummed me out. please do not take any of this as a prediction that s3 is or is not likely to actually happen. i am firmly agnostic on that. i'm just talking in here about what i think would happen in a s3 if there ends up being one.)

ok back to the fun part!

the inn is going to fail obviously (actually i think there's a decent chance when we pick up with them in s3 they're running some completely different business and we only find out in flashbacks how the inn and like 20 other harebrained ventures all failed). BUT, this is the thing some people get wrong, it is not going to be framed as "opening an inn was a mistake" but "the inn was a learning experience we needed to try and fail at in order to grow"

izzy appears as a ghost, probably framed sort of ambiguously as to whether he's a LITERAL ghost or some other character's Inner Izzy appearing in an imaginary/hallucinatory way like 1x02 nigel. i suspect he'd show up mostly in one episode, not a constant ghostly presence, BUT he'd be mentioned at least semi-fondly in several other eps and when he did appear it'd be a lengthy scene that gets a lot of emotional/narrative weight put on it. (no physical resurrection or "he never really died" fakeout, obviously.)

ed and stede will have tension in the relationship BUT they will not be constantly fighting and on the verge of divorce. obviously the show is a romance so there will be conflict in & around the central relationship but there are several reasons i don't expect them to be miserable together and considering breaking up: first of all if the writers had any interest in putting ed and stede really at odds with each other they had a perfect setup for that in s2 and they chose to avoid it almost completely. second at this point those guys have already broken up dramatically like three times before they were technically even boyfriends, you can't just keep hitting that beat. third the thing rhys and taika are best at as a duo, the place where their chemistry really shines, is when ed and stede are being sweet and affectionate or playful with each other; if we got one final season of them the show wouldn't waste time NOT giving us that.

ed will not be on a quest for revenge against ricky. to do so would be to disrespect izzy's last wish for him to Just Be Ed. ricky is stede's nemesis.

stede would have the central character arc, in which he finally has to actually be emotionally vulnerable. s2 was ed's season, s3 would pivot back to stede (not that we'd ignore ed but stede would get primary focus this time). everyone noted that in s1 we never really see stede open up to anyone else about his issues, and s2...sort of felt like he was meant to, to some degree, but his arc ended up sort of muddled probably due to exec interference in the second half of the season. it's fairly likely (but not certain) stede's s3 arc would end up being some version of the arc i suspect he was supposed to have in s2 before the cuts, where he's wrestling with the belief that he has to be the butch manly pirate hero from his dream in order to be truly worthy of ed's love.

some of the ed-stede tension will involve stede missing the revenge but i doubt it'll involve a return to full-time piracy. if stede does have the "wrestling with ideals of manliness" arc i'm predicting for him you can see how they could use this to tie it in with tension between ed & stede about their future together though.

ricky's also likely to get some of his cut material from s2 recycled. i mean, they already set him up as an evil mirror version of stede and then did nothing with it, so it's hard for me to imagine what you COULD do with him that wouldn't involve finally actually developing that.

jackie will have a bunch of new husbands in addition to the swede. apparently some people think she's monogamous now but i have no idea why. we already knew it was a position with high turnover due to mortality. also she'll be back running her own business operation, she's not permanently taking orders from captain frenchie.

jim resumes their s1 role as deuteragonist. this would almost certainly involve explicitly canonizing garlic soup as a polycule if they could get away with it this time around, but i don't think it would be limited to that; i'm guessing jim's arc might also involve some "who am i now that i'm not a murder ninja on a kill bill quest anymore?" introspection.

ok so the big prediction i had that set this off is that the tension between ed and stede would be about whether to get married, with ed really wanting stede to propose and stede being unsure he's ready for it. i think this for a lot of reasons.

as we are all aware s2 signaled really really heavily that ed very badly wants to wed stede, to the point where he was having heartbreaking little fantasies about it when he'd known stede for like three weeks total and expected to never see him again. as for stede though? he obviously loves ed very deeply, and we know as a young man he hoped to one day marry for love - but there's no sign he didn't give up on that dream decades ago. s2 never indicates that the idea of marrying ed has even occurred to him - he's not sneaking glances at ed during the lupete wedding. and i can see where the idea of getting married again might really scare him! for ed, marriage is one of the fine things he never thought he could have; for stede, it's a trauma he went through once and might be afraid to repeat. he was really bad at being a husband the first time around: how could he face disappointing ed the way he disappointed mary?

i already said earlier my best guess for stede's arc is that it would be about feeling like he has to live up to some ideal of piratey masculinity to be worthy of ed's love. this would be a pretty strong setup for that, right? in bridgetown he constantly felt like he was failing mary as a husband by being unable to perform masculinity in the right socially acceptable ways - it would make sense for him to feel like he needs to succeed at pirate masculinity before he's ready to be a good husband to ed. (of course ed would not actually give a shit about this and that's what stede would ultimately need to learn.)

something really striking about nearly every interview where david jenkins talked about writing the ed/stede relationship in s2 was that he seemed to always start from the lens of taking common issues faced in modern relationships and figuring out how to reflect it in this fantastical pirate setting. and "we've been together a while and one partner is ready to get married while the other isn't sure yet" is a very, very common issue in modern relationships.

djenks also said something more specific in two of those interviews, that one of the relationship questions s3 might look at was "what if one of you has grown while the other stops growing?" which i thought at first was kind of odd phrasing. but you look at the setup we've already established - blah blah mental health recovery is not linear and everything, but narratively ed has really confronted and overcome the central demon he was wrestling with in the first two seasons - his belief that he's unlovable - while stede hasn't faced down his own trauma quite so definitively. and "ed has grown enough to be ready to take their relationship to the next step of marriage, while stede hasn't yet found the courage he needs to grow in order to be ready to take that step with ed" would pretty closely match the setup djenks is describing.

like i said earlier i think a tricky needle s3 would have to thread is for the show to stay a romance the central conflict needs to be about ed and stede's relationship BUT they won't want to have them broken up or on the verge of breaking up. and this setup would accomplish that pretty nicely. there's a conflict that's internal to the relationship but the question is not "do we get together" or even "can we stay together" it's "are we ready to take this next big step that one of us wants very badly?"

and then of course fandom really wants an ed/stede wedding. you regularly see even people who don't normally care about wedding tropes admitting they want to see it in this one case (i'm in that camp myself). the ofmd writers' room doesn't feel obligated to give fandom everything they want if it's not right for the story, but when they know we want something specific that would also fulfill a bunch of different narrative needs very neatly at the same time, i think they'd go ahead and give it to us. so i'm not super confident about this - when it comes to s2 i got a lot of big high-level predictions right but i still wouldn't have predicted a lot of the details - but i do think s3 would engage (heh) heavily with the marriage question in some kind of way and to me this is the approach that would make sense.

[roscgcld]

GOJO SATORU || pain in the ass

request: gojo and reader are special grades and their parents want them to get married so they could make a strong generation for their family (she doesnt like this and she thinks it's stupid). in the first meeting, they went together to exorcise some curses in mountain (their family asked them to do it together so they can get along), she ignored him bc she thinks he is kind of asshole but gojo keeps teasing her (he thinks her reaction is cute and she looks hot and actually he likes her and thinks getting married with her doesnt sound so bad).

could you make it jsjjdks i keep imagining this in my head and i think it's cute if the reader started to catch feelings too...... btw your writings are amazing i really love them and thank you!!

note: AHAHAHA I LOVE THIS! I am so happy most of us agree that Gojo, as hot as he is, can be an asshole. But this one is v fluffy, and very cute! I tried to cut down on not making it too long cause not going to lie, I always love reading tropes like this! the “annoying-ass-to-kinda-cute’” sort of trope, and I love it cx but here you go babes! I definitely enjoyed writing something like this.

pronouns: she/her

“Y/N, guess what?”

Y/N’s chopsticks came to a stop as she closes her eyes, taking a deep breath to brace herself before slowly bringing her eyes away from the meal before them; meeting her mother’s eyes head on. “What is it, Mother?” She asks the older woman hesitantly, unsure of how to respond when she saw the familiar glint in her eyes - immediately telling her that she was not going to like where the conversation was heading. “Remember how we talked about being in the main family? How, as the oldest child, you need to set an example for your siblings?”

“..yes?” Y/N’s voice was uncertain, which made her mother frown but she didn’t comment any further on it. “Well, your father and I met up with a family recently, who has a son around your age.” The older woman said just as an annoyed sigh was heard, the woman narrowing her eyes at her daughter who sets her chopsticks down quite loudly. “Mother, how many times have I told you that I don’t like this whole arranged marriage scheme you and Father have come up with.”

Before her mother can give her a response, her husband reaches over to grab her hand in his, giving her a soft look before he clears his throat loudly. “Everyone, would you give us a moment?” He asked as he glances over at the rest of his kids, who all gave their oldest sister a concerned glance before they started to make their way out of the room; their mother closing the door after them. Not without giving her husband another look, one that Y/N caught and had her blood boil a little in annoyance.

Once the shoji doors of the dining room were slid shut the older man lets out a soft sigh before he made his way towards his oldest, taking up the zabuton that his son had left empty by her side. Quietly he reaches out to take her hand in his, his rougher hands incasing her own ones that were roughen up by years of combat training; but there was still a certain softness and feminine touch to them. “Princess - you know your mother and I just want to look out for you.” He started off with a tired sigh, to which the younger woman just gave her father a look. “I know you don’t see marriage as a viable route. But you have to remember, not only are you a Special Grade sorcerer, you also come from a strong clan like ours.”

“Yes, yes, I know - but what does my marriage status have to do with this?” Y/N stresses with a frown as she looks over at her father once more. “You and I both know that the elders can be very old schooled. I mean - who still insist on marrying every of age person of as soon as possible?” She ranted with pure annoyance lacing her voice, the older man just listening to her complains with a soft smile. He can’t get upset at her - he himself went on a rant when he was first told of his own engagement during his teen years. “I know it’s sudden and against your wish, but can you entertain your old man once? One meeting, that is all I ask of you.”

At first his words was met with silence, but he just waited for her to slowly but surely give in. Which she did after a few more moments. “...just once.” She said with a tired sigh, causing the older man to chuckle before he leans over to kiss her on the head softly. “But if I don’t like him, I am never going to let you forget about this.” She stated simply as she looks over at her elderly father, who just smiles softly in return. “I am sure you’re going to enjoy his presence. He’s of your age, and a Special Grade sorcerer too. I am sure you two are going to get along just fine.”

“I am going to murder his dumbass.”

To say Y/N was upset would be an understatement - there were clear waves of annoyance just radiating off the sorcerer. Today was the day she was supposed to meet with her ‘fiancé’ for the first time, and he was not giving her the best first impression. Not only is he half an hour late, he didn’t send anyone to give her a heads up either. So now she was just standing there, tapping her foot impatiently as she glanced at her watch once more. 

They were supposed to meet at the gates of a mountain temple to exorcise some curses that had started to appear around the temple. Hence why she stood by a traditional torii gate, her mood souring with each passing second. She glanced over at the monks who care for the temple and bow at them apologetically, to which they just gave her reassuring smiles and bow back softly as well. “I do apologies for my companion. Seems he still lacks the ability to read a clock.”

“How rude. And here I thought that you’d be excited to meet your future fiancé.” A teasing voice came from behind her, causing her to turn her narrowed eyes back to finally get a look at her fiancé - only to have her eyes widen when she realised just how tall the man was. She gave him a once over, noting his handsome features and white haired style upwards; and how his eyes were covered by a blindfold. He sported a soft grin which he thought might have tell her how apologetic he was, but it just causes her to get more irritated. “I do apologise for making you wait. I had a run in with some pesky curses along the way.”

For some reason Y/N did not believe his words, but she just rolled her eyes before she turned and made her way towards the torii gate, walking on the side like she was taught to do. Quietly she started to climb the stone steps up to the temple, not even caring if the man was following behind her. But she can tell from the footsteps that followed behind her, and soon he opened his mouth once more. “What? No introduction?”

“L/N Y/N.” She stated simply, her hand resting on the beautifully carved katana that rest on her hip as she started to glance about the wooded area; trying to see if she can sense any Curses near by. “Nice to meet you, Y/N-chan. My name is Goto Satoru.” The white haired shaman greeted back with a grin, to which the woman just lets out a soft hum, not necessarily paying attention to what he had just said. But Goto wasn’t deterred, walking a few steps behind her as he watches her walk before him. “You’re the oldest heir of the L/N clan?” 

“Unfortunately.” The woman replied back in annoyance, to which the taller male raises an eyebrow at her response. He can tell that in that sense, they can definitely relate - they were both heirs to clans who are so backwards thinking that they think that they need to find ‘the best matches’ for all of their available heirs. 

If he was being honest, Gojo had no intention of coming to arrange meeting. He wanted to blow it off with some lame excuse, or just flip off his elders when they ask. But something told him that he should just come for the sake of seeing which miserable soul was forced into the same position he was in. And if he was being honest, he doesn’t regret coming to the meeting that much anymore. “By the way, do you consider this to be our first date?”

“If it is, I can definitely say my low standards for the day just reached the floor.” She grumbled before she paused just underneath another torii gate, looking up at the Curse that was wrapped around one of the sides like a giant snake; hissing at them loudly. “How rude.” Gojo replied back with a pout, standing back and watching the woman unsheathes her katana, how she imbed her own Cursed Energy onto the blade; raising a curious brow at just how strong her Cursed Energy was.

Weirdly enough, he finds her not only interesting, but extremely hot. Who wouldn’t find a strong woman hot?

He watches her in silence as she sliced the air before her, the Curse letting out a loud cry of main as it was sliced up into pieces by invisible blades. But the woman didn’t cast the withering Curse another glance as she pushes forward. “Come on, let’s get this over with.” She sighs as she rest her katana over her shoulder, looking back at the man with an unamused look. Gojo instead grins before he follows behind the woman now getting more interested than he was before. “You know, I think you and I are going to get along well.”

“What a pain in the ass.” Was her only answer, causing his grin to widen as he hums to himself whilst following behind the clearly fuming woman. Yeah, he definitely doesn’t regret his decision to come now.

It wasn’t the first time the both of them were forced to cross paths with one another.

With all that said and done, both Gojo and Y/N were definitely quite the duo. Both of them are Special Grades, and both of them work together almost flawlessly. Even though Gojo is considered ‘the strongest’, Y/N is the more polished and definitely more refined sorcerer; since she had taken her early training. Because of this they balance each other out quite nicely, making them quite the formidable duo. Due to this, they are scent to many missions together, forcing them to spend a lot of time with each other.

Y/N’s first impression on Gojo is that he doesn’t necessarily care about anyone or anything. Yet Y/N can tell that he cares for all of his students with his entire being, and is always willing to go the extra mile to make sure that they get to experience their youth to the fullest extent. Besides that, he’s also someone who can try and make light no matter the situation. Even Y/N can admit that his snarky comments and sarcastic responses has made her let out a laugh or two.

It wasn’t just that - it was also how, even though they were forced into a union together unwillingly, he tries to make the most out of it. Not only does he show her around Tokyo, since she’s from a town in Kyoto Province - he also made it his own mission to show her all the fun restaurants and dessert cafes all over the city that he himself visits. He also goes out of his way to make sure that her elders are not bothering her too much about when the wedding is going to be. Gojo can tell that Y/N’s elders are pushing for this more than his are, so he did visit her clan’s home a few times to make sure that they weren’t pressuring her about marriage.

Along the way he has met her parents and her siblings, somehow managing to fit into her family unit in a short about of time. Whether it’s playing video games with her younger sister, or rough housing with her younger brother, even bonding with your parents over tea - there was no denying that he somehow manages to get along with everyone. It did make her heart flutter a little, since finding a man who is not only an ease to be around, but also makes the effort to get to know your parents is a rare gem to find. 

On days when they are both free, he would appear and drag her out of her home, begging for her to bring him around her hometown and to the Kyoto School for a visit. For the most part though, he just goes to the Kyoto branch so he can annoy  Utahime, who will turn to you with the most annoyed scowl on her face. “Out of all the men on this planet, you had to choose the white haired menace?” The woman would ask her junior with an unamused scowl, to which Y/N would just apologise wordlessly with a soft one of her own.

If she was being honest, she had no idea that the man she once found annoying become attractive; and was definitely not even sure when she started to fall for him. But she remembers the day when she realised that there was definitely something more she felt for him - it was family game night. Gojo, who had visited Kyoto to handle something, had dropped by with some takeout to share with your family. After a nice dinner, which was filled with laughter, Y/N sat down on the engawa of her family home; smiling softly at the sight of Gojo playing with her younger siblings.

Just the sight of the three of them bonding together, laughing and running around the courtyard that cause a warm feeling to travel through her entire person; a wider and much more sincere smile tugging against her lips. It was when a pair of crystalline blue eyes that seemed to almost glow in the night turn to face her, half hidden behind darkly tinted sunglasses as the owner grinned over at her with such child like happiness that it hit her like a truck.

“Holy shit, I’ve fallen for him.” She whispered quietly to herself as she continues to watch the oblivious trio before her, her cheeks warming the longer she watches him laugh and play with her siblings. If her past her sees her now, she might not be too proud at how they had decided to go against her number one rule - and that was not to fall for the man. 

Now she is never going to hear the end of this any time soon.

© roscgcld — all rights reserved to me, rose, the author and creator of these works. do not repost/translate/claim my work as yours on any platform

[polyghostfacehours]

You and Stu convince Billy to play Healer and regret it once he power trips.

I don't know if it's bc Im high, but the thought of you and Stu playing FFXIV and convincing Billy to be healer bc you two suck so bad at it won't leave my head so here is something that literally no one asked for lol

Modern!AU where you guys play Final Fantasy XIV

Billy the Power-tripping Healer:

So, for the sake of this, you and Stu main DPS and Tank respectively. Billy didn't play XIV.

You've been needing a dedicated healer for your free company and were having trouble nailing down someone you could trust.

It's then that you have a crazy thought. Billy was meticulous, observant, and detail-oriented. He'd be perfect. You tell Stu as much.

You both laugh your asses off at this. Billy? Playing fucking Healer? There's no way his pride and ego would let him play a support class. Stu jokingly asks how you'd convince Billy and you jokingly reply with a "mad sloppy toppy". You both have a blast making fun of the idea.

"Tell ya what. You convince Billy to play our healer, and I'll pay your third of the rent this month." Stu snickers.

Oh. Game on.

So you start thinking about how to do so and you realize exactly how to do it.

Tell Billy the healer is literally the most important party member, the party member that shifts the tides of battle, and the one who decides who lives or dies.

Billy comes home and you set out on your mission.

Initially, Billy is vehemently against it. He's not playing the fucking support. Fuck that. If he did play your stupid game, it'd be as the leader ("that's not a job class Billy." "Dont care, didn't ask.")

But then you lay on the reasonings. Really gas him up. Talk about how smart he is and how playing healer is the most difficult role. Tell him how you have to have the brain power to pay attention to the enemies attacks, your party's health, what buffs are needed to be placed, what enemies need debuffing, etc etc.

This gets him slightly interested. You beg and beg until finally he gives it a try to shut you up. Success!

You and Stu get him to make a character and before long you're helping him practice in low level dungeons and at the practice dummies for his rotations.

Billy comes close to quitting a loooot. If he isn't immediately good at something, he gets mad. But you and Stu keep praising him like crazy whenever he does well and that felt too good to pass up right now.

And Billy gets good fast. Like crazy fast. To the point you and Stu actually get kind of jealous? Like how tf did he become a master healer in the span of like a week? He's able to pay attention to everything happening on screen at once so easily wtf.

And slowly, Billy begins realizing something.

He can be petty.

And this is where you and Stu begin to regret bringing him in.

Billy is a brutal healer. You follow his orders or you die.

A regular conversation in game goes like this:

-"Billy why the fuck didn't you heal me man?!"

-"Stu I told you 50 fucking times not to stand in the AOE. If you're gonna be a dumbass and not listen Im not wasting my MP pool on you."

-"I didn't see it!"

-"You didn't s-what do you mean you didn't see it!?!? It's a giant fucking glowing yellow line you dipshit!"

Or

"Y/N you run ahead without me, you die. I'm not chasing your ass."

"Y-yes Billy..."

The power-trip this man feels. The fact that he has you and Stu's lives in the palm of his hand? The satisfaction of getting praised when he pulls clutch or you two begging for forgiveness when he lets you die for not listening or for simple revenge? Godly.

He also DOES end up becoming leader of your free company lmao. He furnishes the house and living room as he sees fit.

Billy refuses to play Miqo'te. No catboy!Billy for you and Stu 😔

[gwaaaaar]

The evolution of Noah Thy Creature

wow I am bored af but let me info dump rq teehee, ofc there's gonna be Thy Creature spoilers but its mainly from outdated stuff like the demo/early access so it's not detrimental to the canon lore, just a documentation of how hes portrayed.

The first edition of Noah was with his character profile in March 2021

"A kind and wise mortician. But there is a rumor about him. He never prays for himself."

Portrayed as kind and mysterious, also oddly pious as he prays, to God or whatever idk if hes Christian.

In the kickstarter trailers he is briefly mentioned once, never shown, you meet beta Alex and Justine first instead.

Then there is his demo, "Muscular man in glasses. Kind and level-headed, but somehow uncomfortable to make eye contact with. Claims to not be a pharmacist but has fingers that reek of chemicals."

Still kind, but also with the new information that he's uncomfortable to make eye contact with. I actually have a theory that his eyes are of an unnatural color via supernatural reasons or symbolism. Like how victor and the creature are associated with yellow eyes when that is not a natural eye color for humans to have. A "eyes are the windows to the souls" type beat.

Poc like Noah should not be able to have blue eyes? It depends though. But it's also possible hes biracial bc of his straight hair and nose. Mazm can do poc features considering Mihir Saha and Crack is on the team, so it may be a deliberate design choice to imply his ethnicity because the main focus is not on his ethnicity so it's not as if they can just drop that.

Ok that was very offtopic but in the demo he relatively has a nice demeanor but he's like. since I did this for you, you have to do this for me. Like very entitled, already giving red flags but whatever maybe he's a little quirky. You also meet him first too, and only him bc its a short demo.

That is where he goes from bad to worse bc the early access amps it up by 10. His bio in that edition is "A well built man with glasses. He stares as if his cold eyes are looking through people. His calm voice is low and deep." and then something similar to the he insists hes not a pharmacist thing. His blue eyes are described as cold, so it really may be a personality thing.

This time right off the bat he asks for monetary compensation from the creature, not even a pay back a favor, just straight up money. He has bandages on his hands and a snazzy new pendant. He's far more snarky and dickish in the EA. It's almost funny. He says shit abt how beggars on the street ask him for free services and that he wasnt a charity when the nepe steals his memories from him. But he develops a friendship with the creature anyways, you can see he had loved ones and people he cared for. He wasn't heartless, just reserved. For quite a bit of time you are with him alone and he's the first one you meet, so he has a special role.

I only watched Millie Parfaits stream and some rumors abt the final edition, but from what I hear, Noah gets meaner? From what I saw however he was, kind of the same tbh. Although the personal connection to him gets ruined because you don't meet him alone at first, you meet with him justine and El together. An interesting thing I noticed was they somewhat remembered his pious aspect from his wayyyyy older bio. He wanted to help kids in the slums which ties into the fact that he only prayed for others, never himself. a selfless aspect.

I wonder, is the reason he insists he's not a pharmacist or a doctor or whatever is because that job is associated with helping/caring and he doesnt want to be taken advantage of that way/doesnt wanna be seen as kind.

[the-bjd-community-confess]

Ok can I just mention how weird it is to me that people are still so overly aggravated by just specifically the "100 vs 25 dollar" thing? The OP literally stated that "Do whatever you want, but not everyone can afford to do it for cheap, and for many it won't work in the long run. If you wanna sell for 25 do that." Literally no where did the OP in the OG confession say you can't sell your stuff for cheap. And some people seem to only look at the numbers and completely ignore the message of the OP, and are just keeping on being mad that someone would encourage selling something for 100 instead of 25 usd, even though that wasn't even the point of the OP.

The point, as I personally understood it while reading, was just accepting that some people are going to sell for higher prices because that's what they can afford and selling cheap isn't something that may be sustainable for a lot of people with all the outside cost. Seemed to me the main topic was just about what the producer can afford to do in the long run. If the OP had actually mentioned a specific item and tried to claim "you should never ever sell below 100 bc you'll lose money, and selling for 25 is going to kill you" maybe I'd get people being dumb about this. But it never was about a specific thing either, so people are just being mad about a hypothetical price difference, about items that don't even exist in the original confession. You guys are literally being mad about a non-existent item price with no actual object which is being sold, only "listed cost" was a hypothetical material and shipping cost. And you're being mad that said "never-mentioned" item would be sold for 100 if someone wanted to sell stuff long term.

To make it even dumber, what do you even imagine is being sold here? Eyes? Yeah, then 100 vs 25 is a quite brutal price difference. But ya'll never even put up a reason why you're angry at these numbers, even though you're just harping on price specifically, even though the confession wasn't even about that. It becomes extra weird when someone imagines something that might fit into said price range, like what if the price is a full outfit? Are you still gonna argue that it's too expensive to pay 100 to have your doll fully clothed in one order? Imagine someone spending 10 hours on a full outfit for a doll, and ya'll are here being mad that someone said 100 vs 25 isn't viable in some hypothetical confession about being a long time seller in the hobby. 

Btw I also agree with the OG OP: If you wanna sell at a loss, or just do it for fun without care for the money, do it. Making stuff for cheap can be a treat for those who don't like to buy expensive stuff. Just don't push the idea that sellers who sell for higher prices are greedy, or that only low-price sellers care about other people having fun in the hobby, or whatever people's point is trying to be.

~Anonymous

[arrowsandbats]

Tim’s Complicated School History

So I’ve noticed there seems to be a fair bit of confusion on where Tim went to high school, whether he dropped out or not, if he went to private or public school, etc., so I thought I’d create a general chronology of (Pre-Flashpoint) Tim’s tumultuous high school career. The confusion about this is deserved, as Tim has literally gone to no less than FIVE high schools and also homeschooled for a bit, so it’s a LOT to keep track of. Tim has attended both private schools and public schools, and has gone to school in Gotham and Bludhaven (and almost Keystone!), ultimately ending his school days when he dropped out of Gotham City High School during his senior year to go search for Bruce after the events of Final Crisis.

Here’s the breakdown:

Pre-High School: Tim attended private boarding schools until he was about 13-14 years old. To my knowledge these schools are never specifically named, but 13-yr-old Tim mentions in Batman #441 that he attends a boarding school just outside Gotham. In Robin III #4 Tim angrily tells his dad that him and Janet “shipped [Tim] from one boarding school to another and nobody paid any attention as long as [his] grades stayed high.” This seems to imply that Tim attended a number of different boarding schools, when there’s really no reason for him to have attended more than two (an elementary and middle school), and even then a number of private boarding schools are actually K-8 (if not K-12) so I don’t know why he attended so many schools?? Nevertheless, from K-8 Tim attended private boarding schools, primarily in the Gotham area presumably.

Tim was probably still in middle school in his earliest appearances (Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying, Batman: Rite of Passage, etc), but he starts high school right around the time he finishes his Robin training (around the time of the first  Robin miniseries).

High School #1---Gotham Heights High School: The first reference to Tim being in high school comes from the 1991 Robin II miniseries. Tim has recently started at Gotham Heights High School as a ninth grader. This comic takes place after Tim’s parents were kidnapped and poisoned, and so while Jack is in the hospital Bruce is acting as a guardian of sorts for Tim. It’s at Gotham Heights that Tim befriends Sebastian Ives, as well as his friends Hudson and Callie Evans. When Ives asks Tim about the fact that he seems too rich for public school, Tim explains that he used to go to private school but that Bruce had him transferred into public school because he thought it would be “more broadening.” Even after Jack gets out of the hospital he allows Tim to stay at Gotham Heights HS, although Jack clearly has a low opinion of public schools. Tim presumably started at Gotham Heights HS at the beginning of the ninth grade and attended for about a year and a half.

Interlude---Keystone: After the events of Cataclysm, Tim’s family moves to Keystone to avoid the chaos going on in Gotham. (They only end up staying a few weeks at the most, but they moved with the intention of living there permanently, meaning that Tim was transferred out of Gotham Heights HS.) In Robin #63 Jack mentions trying to get Tim into Keystone Academy, but that it’s tough in the middle of the school year and that he was working on getting him a tutor in the interim. Tim was supposed to meet his new tutor the same day that he went back to Gotham to be with Steph while she had her baby. He left without telling his dad, and so Jack and Dana come back to Gotham to get him and they all decide to stay in Gotham after all. It’s unclear if Tim returns to Gotham Heights HS briefly or if he just doesn’t return to school until he’s enrolled at Brentwood.

High School #2---Brentwood Academy: After the events of No Man’s Land, Tim is enrolled in Brentwood Academy, a boarding school in Bristol Township (a wealthy suburb directly to the north of Gotham, where the Drakes and the Waynes both live). After missing so much school, Jack forces Tim to go to a boarding school so that his grades will hopefully come up. (I think the reasoning here is that if Tim lives at school then he’ll have no good excuse for missing class?) In Robin #75 Tim refers to himself as a “new sophomore,” and he transferred to the school some time after sophomore year started (almost definitely after winter break, but I can’t find an issue that confirms this?) but before spring break. Tim’s main friends at Brentwood are his first roommate Ali, his second roommate Wesley, and his classmates Buzz, Kip, and Danny. Tim isn’t at Brentwood for very long though. After only a few months (maybe even less) of Tim being at Brentwood, Jack finds out he’s lost a good portion of the Drake family fortune in bad investments. He’s forced to withdraw Tim from school as he can’t afford the tuition anymore, and the Drakes sell their home in Bristol Township and move into their townhouse in inner-city Gotham.

Interlude---Rest of Sophomore Year: When Tim left Brentwood it was rather late in the year, and it was apparently too late to re-enroll him in public school, so he took the rest of the school year off. That summer he has to take a placement test that will keep him from having to repeat the 10th grade. He passes, so when he re-enters public school he does so as a junior.

High School #3---Louis E. Grieve Memorial High School: Tim starts his junior year at Louis E. Grieve Memorial HS, where he quickly befriends Bernard Dowd and Darla Aquista. He doesn’t attend school here very long, probably for about 3-4 months (he’s only been at Grieve Memorial HS for a few weeks when he’s forced to quit being Robin, Steph takes over for about 2 months, and then it’s only another couple weeks until the events of War Games). During War Games, Tim’s friend Darla is targeted by several mobs (because her father is an Italian mob boss) and mobsters take over his school and end up killing several students, Darla included. Darla’s funeral is one of three that Tim has to attend in as many days, his dad being killed during Identity Crisis and Steph “dying” at the end of War Games.

High School #4---John Wayne High School, Bludhaven: After War Games and Identity Crisis, Tim moves to Bludhaven to try for a fresh start. He picked Bludhaven specifically for an in-patient facility that will help his stepmom, Dana, process her grief over Jack’s death. Tim moves to be close to her and starts attending John Wayne High School. He probably only attends for about two weeks though, before he has his (fake) Uncle Eddie withdraw him from the school to start homeschooling. Tim withdraws with the intention of homeschooling until he can test out of school early. But it isn’t long (maybe another month or so) until Infinite Crisis, and then Tim and Dick go on a nearly year-long training journey with Bruce.

Interlude---OYL: During the missing year* between Infinite Crisis and One Year Later, Tim isn’t in school at all, as he and Dick and Bruce are travelling the world and training. 

(*Also, with the nightmare that is comics continuity and the passage of time, Tim really couldn’t have been gone for more than like,,,,6-8 months, as it was late winter/early spring when Infinite Crisis happened---at least according to the Robin series---and it’s summer when he returns to Gotham. He’s still 17 early in the Red Robin series so it couldn’t have been a year and a half that he was gone, therefore he could only have been gone for like half a year.)

High School #5---Gotham City High School: After the OYL time jump, Tim starts attending Gotham City High School. He starts during the “summer session” (presumably to make up for the semester he missed during OYL?) before his senior year. His main friends here are Zoanne Wilkins (who he starts dating), Jared Walton, Craig Pulaski, and then both Ives and Steph transfer to GCHS during Tim’s senior year (altho Steph is usually a year older than Tim in Pre-52 canon, so it really makes no sense for her to be there??). This is the high school Tim is attending when he drops out of school in his senior year to travel the world looking for Bruce. In Red Robin #17, Tim and Ives meet for lunch (after Bruce has returned and Tim has moved back to Gotham) and Ives mentions Tim not finishing senior year. Tim asks Ives how senior year is going---implying that the events of the first arc of Red Robin only take a few months---and catches up on how Ives and Zoanne are doing.

Some general Tim school stuff: Tim is a very smart kid, but not a very good student. In the Robin III miniseries both Jack and Tim’s school counselor make reference to the fact that before high school Tim had always been a straight A student, but that his grades and attendance have slipped considerably. He is routinely too tired to pay attention in class, he’s constantly missing weeks of school, he fails to complete homework assignments bc of Robin missions, etc. Several times he even references in his inner monologue that he thinks he might fail a specific class. And honestly, Tim just doesn’t care about school. He often makes irritable inner-monologue comments about preferring practical application over learning things in a school setting, he tries to get himself out of school permanently when he lives in Bludhaven, etc. That being said, he’s never been noted to actually fail a class and even with all the school he’s missed he’s never had to be held back, so presumably he’s still earning like Cs in most classes.

[lochnessies]

I guess my discomfort with the AM route could actually be summed up as

“I went straight from playing The Gayest House to the Most Heteronormative and Patriarchal House and even though it makes sense from a worldbuilding and storytelling standpoint, it still made for a very uncomfortable experience for me, the player.”

i’m not here to say what can and cannot make a person uncomfortable since that’s so heavily subjective and i personally also don’t like patriarchal undertones as well so i completely get it. however, i have always found it weird when people refer to the black eagles as the ‘gay house’ and act like that makes it superior to the others. i mean… i like edel, dorothea, and linhardt but their sexualities don’t make or break them for me as characters. and the ‘gayness’ of these characters only happen if you happen to s-rank them as the same sex and has no impact on the story. plus you can recruit 2/3 of them out of house and marry them there so it’s kinda irrelevant. the only house that doesn’t have canonically lgbt characters is golden deer and i’ve never seen people use that as a reason as to why they don’t like them. hell, i’ve seen people call them the ‘gayest house’ before. also blue lions does have a canon bisexual… mercedes. plus a lot of endings for the characters have a lot of homoerotic subtext… mercedes/annie, dedue/dimitri, dimitri/felix, sylvain/felix, dedue/ashe. opening an inn together, living together, being buried together, dying on the same day, loving a man more than his wife…. last i checked these are not very heteronormative things. quite the opposite actually lol

as for patriarchal…. are you sure you wanna say that about the kingdom rather than the empire? what makes the kingdom more patriarchal than the place that has a man drill into his daughter how to be the perfect wife, the emperor has lots of concubines, daughters are thrown to the streets, women are desperate for husbands bc it’s the only ways to gain stability, a woman used as a broodmare till it kills her, a noble woman with a crest can’t inherit her house and her daughter is almost forcibly married and raped to have children by her step father.

is it because a lot of the main characters for the plot are male rather than female? that’s not patriarchal it’s just slightly lazy bc patriarchy is systemic not a a problem of plot structure. once again, the golden deer only has judith as a female general/essential npc and the rest are men but i don’t see people get upset about that.

Imagine if I only played AM and I came away thinking this was a typical medieval fantasy where the men are all in leadership roles,

not all the men are leaders and some women are too. such as cornelia and edelgard and they hold a lot of it.

the women are all relegated to support roles and struggling against forced marriages,

no they are not. once again, edel and cornelia are major characters and definitely not supporting roles. also, nobody is being forced into marriage in the blue lions. ingrid’s father suggests suitors but she has complete control over saying yes or no. and in her endings she gets to be a knight. however, we do know forced marriages are a thing in the empire.

men act out their feelings with violence,

yeah, dimitri does get violent but it’s seen as extremely negative and as a sign of his poor mental health and lack of ability to rule at the moment. if this was a typical fantasy game then his violence would be praised and a sign of a warrior and king. dimitri has to let go of his violent impulses in order to become a good kings and as shown in ss/vw he will die if he continues down his self destructive path.

in azure moon byleth and everybody else is constantly telling dimitri to get his shit together where as cf everybody just vapidity nods along to edelgard’s violent impulses.

women in power are inherently suspect,

women are not inherently suspect due to their sex. they are suspect bc the main female characters are suspicious and they do shitty things that hurt the other characters and they are rightfully angry. hell, even male characters are suspect. for example thales and even dimitri himself is seen as suspicious during the academy arc.

hints of flirtation between women are aggressively shot down,

i assume this is about ingrid? i hate to tell you but rejecting somebody’s romantic advances isn’t homophobic and if you don’t respect people’s boundaries then i don’t want to be around you. all other female relationships are treated very well and the female characters admire and respect each other.

hints of feelings between men are treated awkwardly and uncomfortably.

once again, with feeling this time, opening an inn together, living together, being buried together, dying on the same day, loving a man more than his wife are not examples of feelings between men being treated awkwardly. hell, most of the deep and loving relationships are between men. some are strictly platonic (rodrigue/dimitri & gilbert/dimitri) and other are much more 👀. dimitri was even critiqued by some straight men bc he was so open about his feelings with bylad and many people read him as bisexual (my sister even hcs him as completely gay). he literally calls another man ‘irreplaceable’ and ‘cherished’ while he’s apparently shirtless.

Not knowing there’s a whole other route where multiple women are in charge,

just because a woman is in charge doesn’t mean she’s good at it and we know edelgard isn’t a good leader and is willing to stoop to the lowest of the lows. just bc she’s a lady doesn’t make her horrific actions suddenly #girlboss and #feminism

men pay women respect and never degrade them,

women are not above critique. and men don’t violent degrade women for no reason on blue lions (you could say felix and his ingrid supports but he’s a dick to everyone and sylvain whos a rampant misogynist regardless of route and the same could be said for lorenz on golden deer). also hubert does degrade petra and that’s a cf exclusive.

nobody ever suggests that there are inappropriate roles for any gender,

and i have good news! neither do blue lions! ingrid is wholeheartedly supported by her male peers and dimitri (by op’s definition a violent man) even wants her to be his knight and serve in his guard.

men are allowed to be soft,

dimitri, dedue, and ashe??? hello?!??

women are allowed to be aggressive,

ingrid and catherine??? hello????

everybody has at least one potential gay ending and it’s not treated as a shameful secret. 

i hate to be the one to tell you but none of the characters from any routes have explicate gay endings outside of the few with byleth. you can read into something all you want and make headcanons but that doesn’t change what is provided in canon. i find all the same sex endings in azure moon to have romantic undertones (outside of gilbert of course go home to your wife dude). and NONE of the endings are treated as a shameful secret. homosexuality is never talked about as being shameful in the game and that sounds like you projecting.

[violetnotez]

hello!! how are u today? i hope youre well💖 may i request a baku crushing on a girl who is native eng speaker, but has never heard her speak. however one day the whole class is watching some eng movie n y/n starts dissing the movie in eng bc its so bad n the whole class is sHOCKED BC HER VOICE IS SO FLUENT N SM DEEPER IN ENG. bakubabe is just there like damn thats hot.

Hey babes! I’m doing well thank you, just doing some stuffs for my art blog! I hope youre doing well 💕💕also thank you to @gallickingun for the mangacap, it saved me so much time and I was actually able to color it! 😍

Also: IM ALIVE!!!! I LITERALLY WROTE THIS TODAY AND OMG I MISS WIRITNG! I’ll start on that Dabi x reader fic I mentioned in a little bit, just wanted to post this! Hopefully it’s good lmao

⤷ Genre: Fluff

⤷ Word Count: 2020

⤷ Warnings: cursing its bakubabe

⤷ Synopsis: Bakugo won’t admit it to himself, but he’s conflicted: he knows he has a crush on you, but his dumbass won’t admit it-well, until he hears your sexy American voice.

Song Recs: ⤷If I Cant Have You-Shawn Mendes⤷Thinking About You-Calvin Harris ⤷Rather Be-Clean Bandit

This was so stupid. Completely dumb and a waste of his time.

Bakugo slumped in his seat a little more, a grumble escaping his lips as he tried to focus on the screen in front of him, his broad shoulders crossed in front of him.

He should be sleeping right now, not sitting and watching this dumbass romantic American movie, especially when you were by his side.

There was no reason why his cheeks should feel hotter when you laughed at the movie, or his hands feel clammy with his sweat everytime you shifted your body closer to him.

It was pissing him off, because no matter how much he tried to ignore the pent up emotions in his chest, he had to admit it to himself-he had a goddamn crush.

On you, the goddamn exchange student.

Fucking great.

His lips pouted as he sulked in his seat on the couch, trying his best to glue his eyes to the screen instead of sneaking a glance at your profile.

The TV showed one of the most sickly sweet and horrific scenes he had ever witnessed: the main couple on screen were finally declaring their love to each other, their voices getting louder and more desperate as they tried to one up each other, almost as if battling to see who could last the longest.

“I love you to the moon!”

“I love you to the moon and back!”

“I love you to the moon and all the stars in the sky!”

“And I love you to-“

A laugh erupted next to him, Bakugo swiveling his head over to see you giggling in your seat, your pretty lips parted as those sweet sounds came from your mouth.

“God, this is terrible!” You chuckled, shaking your head as you said it.

Bakugo’s face reddened, his eyes widening from the sounds coming from your mouth.

Your sentence wasn’t in Japanese: it was foreign and new, American sounding.

Bakugo was used to your voice sounding light and airy when you talked in Japanese, like a leaf on a autumn breeze as it floated into his ears and danced in his mind whenever you spoke his native language. Sometimes you would fumble over the words, trying to piece the meanings together as a blush formed on your cheeks and your eyes turned up from embarrassment. He always made fun of you from it, usually telling you to “Spit it out Baka, I don’t got all day”, but really-he absolutely loved it. You sounded so sweet, so innocent and endearing: he just wanted to wrap you in a hug and envelope himself in your sugar sweet voice.

But right now, your voice was somehow the opposite-it was deeper and richer, like warm,auburn honey on a summer evening. It coated his mind in its thick numbness, the only thing he could think of was how deep and sultry, and well, sexy, it sounded coming from your lips.

He squirmed in his seat, hating how much that little change in your tone affected him so much as you continued to giggle at the wreck of a movie in front of you.

Your class turned to look at you, their faces clearly as shocked as Bakugo’s-they had never actually heard your voice when you spoke English, and they weren’t quite used to it.

You looked at your classmates, your face twisted in innocent confusion.

“What? What did I say?” You asked again in that sultry American voice, making Bakugo shift in his seat, his face looking away from you as he covered his mouth with his hand.

Damn you needed to get that voice under control-he felt like you were controlling his emotions when you spoke like that.

“Whoa y/n you know English!” Kamianri propped himself up, his face clearly in awe as he yelled it out the words.

Sero, who was sitting beside him, chuckled at his air headed friend, giving him a judging look.

“Uh, you do realize she’s from America, right?” Sero snickered, Kamianri looking sheepish as he realized his forgetfulness.

“Oops, Sorry!” He yelled out again, earning a laugh from you and the rest of your classmates.

Jealousy bubbled inside Bakugo like a volcanic eruption, the dangerous emotion barely being contained inside him as his fists clenched.

He hated when others made you laugh, especially his freinds, who unfortunately figured out the crush he had on you a few weeks back. Hearing you giggle at his idiot friends made him want to yell out in possession, declaring that they should know that you were his-well would be his- and they should lay off. But you didn’t suspect a thing about his feelings, and he really didn’t feel like looking like a possessive freak in front of you.

He felt your body shift next to his, his heart beating faster as your finger tapped his shoulder.

“Hey, Uh, Bakugo?” You whispered, the sweet tone of your Japanese voice making him shudder pleasantly, as well as long for your deeper American voice.

He grunted in response, his arms still slung across his broad chest.

“Did I talk in my American voice?”

He scoffed, his eyes rolling in his sockets at how adorably oblivious you could be sometimes. He sent you a shit eating smirk, his vermillion eyes dark like wine.

“What do you think?” He stated, but he didn’t say it in his language, no-he said it English.

He watched your face instantly light up, your eyes bright with excitement and awe as you gasped.

“Wait-you know English?!” You yelled out in awe, a smile erupting on your face. That smile seemed to shake his world, his mind eternally thanking that the room was so dark as his cheeks flushed.

“Of course I know English,” he scoffed, “what idiot doesnt.”

You giggled at his comment, your body shifting closer to his.

Damn it, his cheeks were getting hotter-he could feel your shoulder a mere centimeters away from his, your skin radiating a coolness that felt so soothing being near his permanently hot flesh.

You leaned in closer, your eyes watching his face with sweetness. “How long have you been speaking it?” you asked, but in that hot ass American voice-he was about to combust right then and there.

Shit-he would never admit it, but he hadn’t been exactly practicing his second language. He had learned it back in middle school, when it was a required class, and he had passed it with flying colors of course. Over the years though, he began to forget it, and he was pretty rusty now, now only remembering a few phrases (‘What do you think?’ being one of them)

“Ahh-“ he grumbled out, feeling stupid for not even understanding what you had said. He felt those pretty eyes of yours continue to stare at him, making him feel almost guilty for leading you on as you face fell slightly.

“You didn’t understand what I said, did you?” You asked sadly, back to using your airy Japanese voice. He hated seeing you look so disappointed, as if he let you down in some way.

“Of course I do, dumbass, I just-“

“It’s been awhile since you spoken it?”

He grunted in reply, your mind already translating that to a “Yes.”

Your face somehow light up again, your body even closer to his as you shimmied yourself near him.

“Then I’ll reteach you it!”

“Huh?” He looked at you, his eyes slanted as you peered at you with an almost judging look. What the hell were you playing at?

You nodded again, your lips letting out a slight hum.

“Yeah, I’ll teach you a phrase in English! To be honest, I miss having someone to talk to in my language…” you chuckled at your revelation, your eyes coated in embarrassment.

Well shit-if you needed someone to talk to in English, he was going to be the one to do it. With his damn luck Icy Hot and damn Deku would jump in and be your little English buddy. His skin crawled at the idea of you getting all cozy with one of those two bastards, his insides light up like a fire.

“Fine,” he huffed out, pretending like he was giving in, “but I’m not sitting through a whole damn lesson.”

You chuckled slightly, brushing a piece of hair behind your ears.

“Don’t worry, I’ll start off easy,” you smiled up at him, looking up slightly as if in thought.

“We’ll start with a something easy,” you instructed.

“I’ll teach you-“your sweet Japanese voice suddenly turned rich like syrup as it switched to American. ‘Hi my name is Bakugo”,

“Easy enough?” You asked, switching back to Japanese.

“Fucking elementary,” he scoffed, “yeah I can do it.”

“Cool!” You exclaimed quietly, still mindful of your classmates watching the crappy movie. You shimmied again, your face squarely staring at his as you waited for him to start speaking, your eyes expecting and wide with anticipation.

Shit he was supposed to be paying attention?

Bakugo cursed himself in his mind, as he was too preoccupied listening to your hot as hell American accent.

Damn, he was going to have a hard time talking to you in English, especially if you said his name like that. He hadn't realized how mezmorized he was by the way you spoke his name, your voice low and sultry as if you were telling him a secret, something he was only able to hear. His spine tingled and his hands clammed up again, making his mouth feel dry.

Shit, you’d be the end of him.

He opened his mouth, feeling uncharacteristically nervous as he tried to speak the words you had spoken. He could barely remember how you had said them though, the syllables coming out his mouth feeling cracked and awkward.

“H-hi my n-ame is...shit!” He cursed at himself, hating the way the words felt in his mouth. He couldn't say them right, knowing full well he looked like an idiot as his cheeks began to redden.

He heard you giggle next to him, the voice sounding sweet and kind against his ear.

“It okay,” you reassured him, “your just opening your mouth a little too wide...here-“

Before he could register what was even going on, your hand had wrapped delicately around his jaw, the floral scent of your perfume swarming his mind and making him unable to think straight. Your digits were pressing against his hot cheeks, forcing his lips to pout out slightly.

Damn, if he thought he was blushing, it was nothing compared to this-it felt like his cheeks were on fire.

You laughed at his clearly shocked face, his vermillion eyes wide and filled with confusion.

“Don’t worry, Bakugo, I’m just helping you,” you reassured him, your voice feathery as you whispered close to his ear.

Why the hell did that sound so hot?

You sent him another smile, speaking again in Japanese and then back to English, “Just say- ‘Hi my name is Bakugo’,”

he continued to star at you, actually beginning to like the feel your digits pressed against his mouth.

He swallowed, trying to coat his dry mouth with saliva.

“Hi-my name-is-Bakugo,” he stuttered out.

He wouldn’t ever say it out loud, but he had to admit it-his English voice did sound much better with your fingers pressed against his cheeks like that.

You clearly noticed it as well, your face triumphant and proud. “There ya go, that sounded so much better!” You congratulated him, your fingers retracting from his skin.

He already missed the feeling of your cold skin against his hot flesh, his cheeks feeling empty without your digits pressing against them.

He sucked the flesh of his cheeks into his mouth, moving his jaw.

“Shitty woman-need to give me a warning-“ he scolded you, his hands feeling clammy with the sudden change in events.

You rolled your eyes, lying yourself against the couch cushions and returning your gaze to the TV.

“Well, your going to have to get used to it if I’m going to teach you more-“

“Teach me more?!?” He practically yelled out, gaining a few confusing looks from his classmates.

“Of course!” you smiled as if it was obvious, “need to make sure your fluent enough for a conversation dumbie!”

“It’s also fun seeing you blush like that Bakugo,” you playfully nudged his ribcage, sending him a wink as you turned your gaze to the movie, unaware of how flustered you just made him.

Well shit-he thought numbly, a small grin playing against his mouth-you were something else.

Taggings:

@weebartistinc​ @orokayagi​ @leeeah-loooser​ @bakarinnie​

[pluviophile-imagines]

Fic Reflection: Rule of Three

↳ This fic was one of the fastest I’ve ever written. From concept inception to post-ready it took days, though I’ve been wanting to write a poly getting-together fic since like the very start of this blog I just hadn’t found a ship that spoke to me enough (almost happened with Dabihawks but I didn’t get my shit together in time)

↳ The first line written was “‘Sei’s being impatient.’”

↳ The last line written was “In fact, he’d come to genuinely enjoy spending time with you, both when Nagi was around and otherwise.”

↳ Reonagi as a ship holds a v special place in my heart bc it’s probably the only thing I really ship in Blue Lock. It’s also a ship where i can definitely say id be interested in dating both parties, and i think they would work well in a triad like depicted

↳ Big fat shoutout to mr @venexus​ who somehow shot me with a reonagi raygun when they wrote their reonagi fic; i blacked out for 12 hours and when i woke up I’d written like 80% of the fic. Also shoutout to them for beta-ing and listening to me scream about the reader getting a mind of their own and becoming a dom

↳ It’s not openly stated in the fic but nagi and reader met through online gaming! Reader’s a bit of an e-thot; when they got together with nagi they weren’t quite popular enough but by the time of the fic they’d quit their job to do it full-time. nagi didn’t meet them through a stream tho they just met on an mmo and hit it off. They got together literally the first time they met irl; they realized they lived rlly close to each other so reader stopped by to meet nagi & hang out one day and he just. Impulsively kissed them while they were gaming together lmfao

↳ In case u couldn’t tell from his narration at the beginning, Reo fell for the reader almost immediately upon meeting them, he just didn’t realize it. The reader knew about it the whole time, both his feelings for them and his feelings for nagi and nagi’s feelings for him. The only reason it took so long for the poly thing to happen was bc reader thought Nagi and Reo were oblivious to the whole situation and it took Nagi broaching the subject for it all to click (if anyone’s interested in how that convo went,,,,,, send in an ask)

↳ Reo definitely tries to sneak away in the morning but reader catches him in the kitchen and they finally have like. A real conversation explaining that yes they rlly do wanna bring him into the relationship and no it’s not just bc they want a third they specifically want him while nagi is asleep in bed and Not trying to make out with the two of them. Hes a fucking menace (I might write this scene too if theres any interest tbh shoot me an ask im truly a sucker for morning after scenes)

↳ Deadass considered learning how to color just for this fic’s banner ngl….. I had a rlly great mental image of the two hapibas i chose with watercolor-type coloring, rlly simple with just their hair and eyes colored, but that didn’t happen. Would’ve ended up spending more time on the banner than the fic LMFAO

↳ I do imagine this in a universe where the bllk team is a professional team and i think the whole thing is…. Not exactly hush-hush (bc dear god nagi would never be able to keep something like that a secret hes way too impulsive in a “i dont fucking care who sees im tired and i want a kiss right now reo” way) but deffo low-key they dont go announcing it so it just kinda…. Comes out slowly n naturally and the reactions are either “oh thank god we were about to lock all three of you in a closet” (isagi, chigiri, bachira, etc. basically the ones who r closer to nagi n reo) or “ur saying reo wasnt dating them this whole time????” (gagamaru, karasu, eita, etc, basically Everyone else) bc tbh he like. Basically fucking was

↳ In that vein their relationship genuinely doesnt change all that much once reo starts dating them tbh the main difference is that now he can kiss them and spoil tf out of them (bc why does reo have money if not to spend it on me 🙄)

↳ First thing he does is buy a bigger bed and a bigger couch cause it gets cramped with the three of them on either….. And then reader complains enough about them being too big for their apartment and reo buys them a new apartment obvi (“no this isnt an excuse to move in. stop laughing reader im being nice bc you keep saying the couch is too big- no you will not be paying for it at all stop trying to”)

↳ Nagi doesn’t like dates that involve going out and doing things so more often than not reo takes reader out to mikage corporation dinners etc while nagi stays home. He pretends to be exasperated when they do their spitfire routine but tbh he brings them on purpose so theyll make the geriatric executives and bad-touch-happy daddy’s boys uncomfortable…… and when the two of them come back home at like 2 in the morning nagi is always up pouting on the couch cause he couldnt sleep without them and they promised theyd be home three hours ago

[enchantedpendant]

physical medicine & rehabilitation

pm&r, physiatry, whatever its called in english man idk lol. its an elective rotation here(i’ll admit, it’s a part of medicine that is quite rarely taught and learned about here)

imma go right to the point and say that this rotation gave me mad respect for my preceptor (one of the very few physiatrists around that has to handle multiple hospitals across multiple cities) and the specialty itself. this specialty thrives on making the patients happy, perhaps even happier than they could ever imagine. rehab is often overlooked but if u actually pay just a lil closer look its v easy to see how good rehab could actually save a patient's life instead of making them have piles of complications on complications from prolonged hospital stay and immobilization. (i personally used to be most interested in OB/GYN bcs i thought that was the specialty that makes patients the happiest, esp the OB part of it i suppose. i used to joke that the only specialties that get to attend to patients who are happy to see the doctors, greeted with smiles and excitement and all, are OB/GYN and psychiatry lol - but obviously these thoughts were all before i got to know physiatry)

so, (+) it's a v noble specialty that makes all their patients happier and deserves all the love. it's relatively low stress bcs no death is gonna be on their hands. theres a very low number of physiatrists where i live, so "competition" is less of a concern.

the (v personal) (-), however, is, despite my abundance of respect for it, i could just truly feel that its not for me. shadowing my preceptor for 4 weeks gave me a sense of "........is that it?" no i am not underestimating the scholarly span of this specialty. what i mean is the (relative) lack of variety in the work on the day-to-day basis. and honestly... it felt restricting to me. as in, from what i observed, my preceptor only handled consults and thats it. getting into physiatry means you'd barely ever be the main doctor that's in charge of the patient. and i dont feel like im gonna like that. i dont think i'd like to spend the rest of my life doing "just that" everyday. i feel like i wanna actually handle a patient and like actually get to know em and actually see their treatment through to the end. these are all v personal reasons that also exclude many other specialty choices for me.

SO! tl;dr: (+) very noble, makes everyone happy, changes lives in a unique way compared to most other specialties, relative less stress bcs no death is gonna be on your hand. (-) does not fit my personal preference.

i rate it a 7.5/10

[butiamlookingforlove]

a letter for the lonely

hi fellow humans,

I’m here to confabulate out loud - writing, in my case, is a big step onto the thing people do when they share their lives - about my experience and hopefully this message resonates with you if you’re feeling down or something.

I’ve been res-pec-ting quarantine for a long time now, my country has taken a lot of time to take care of lockdown and etc. so as a matter of HONOR I believed the right thing to do was to at least res-pect quarantine.

But it’s been crazy, we can’t avoid the fact that it’s been a tough experience, for a number of reasons. So, in my case, it’s been a hardcore roller coaster, but I’m fine (:,)), anyways, the point is that I’ve been spending my newfound free time learning and studying philosophy, more specifically, I’ve been studying in depth The Golden Verses of Pythagoras and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

The challenge of trying to grasp like 30% of everything they were teaching through these pieces of their knowledge always boosts me to go further, seeking more. Unfortunately, during those recent days, time and space, it seemed that the more knowledge I found and learned the worse I’d have existencial crisis afterwards. (I’m not sure if this sentence is correct, might edit later)

I’ve started feeling extremely angry, frustrated, and even low-key violent. There was just something inside me hurting a lot, I’d say to my mom “I hate the shadows, and like the guy who saw the Sun in Plato’s allegory, I want my friends to see the Sun with me, I want to live in a place where people truly live for their values, like simplicity, humbleness…” - it went down as a ‘normal’ conversation but I was still felling quite troubled and irritated.

Eventually I forced myself to go outside, ride my bike, push myself out of my own misery. To be honest, I ended up pushing me beyond my limits since my legs are sore right now. But one hour afterwards I felt renewed. I was like “what?? exercising makes you feel physically and mentally better and I knew that all along?? what??” I don’t know, lol, maybe I haven’t been doing this for too long and now there’s WAY TOO MUCH neurotransmitters in my brain making me feel good about myself.

I’m dumb, but not stupid. Keep in mind: you’ll feel complete when you nurture your mind and your body. If I recall it honestly, maybe I wasn’t ready for all that knowledge, as Socrates would say, books can’t tell you if you’re not interpreting something correctly. And I was getting a TON of information, maybe I didn’t grasp them completely yet.

So now onto my experience on the outside world after months only walking sporadically around my neighborhood: it was kinda weird?

I’ve always considered myself as a 0% antisocial person, I usually have no problem starting a new conversation with people I don’t know, doesn’t even matter where the person is from, it’s never been too much of a challenge for me. However, when I was riding my bike through the main place young people get to reunite at afternoons nowadays in my city - even during a pandemic -, I got kinda scared, self-conscious.

I mean, I AM self-conscious, like, always. I love talking to new people and meeting new people, but it doesn’t mean I’m not afraid of it, and it also doesn’t mean I don’t “prepare” myself for it - like if I’m not looking so good I’ll probably get a bit insecure, if I start overthinking I’ll believe I’m acting awkward and also get insecure, you know, basic infj stuff.

I know this “apprehensive” feeling comes from a place inside me that is constantly seeking the approval of others - bc the thing I truly despise is a negative (and rude) comment that is specifically aimed for me, it’s something I just accept and recognize, there’s no use denying it, lol -, but… If I would explain what happened to me as a third person narrator, I’d say that this feeling - which I know is not exclusive to me - occurs when we get afraid of people that don’t do what we do. You know what I mean?

It’s a completely normal thing to judge negatively someone that disagrees with you bc they do the absolute opposite you do, I understand that coming from me and from everyone else.

But… I don’t know, it makes me afraid anyway, you know, the thing about ending up isolated because you do NOT participate in a particular group - in this case, most groups - of people because you don’t seem to find people that do what you do and agree with you about doing what you do.

So yeah, the conclusion is quite obvious. I’m just going through the pain of fighting for my own integrity - and also fighting against the part of me that wants people around me to say “you go girl, keep up with what you do, good job”, it’s like… pretty pathetic, and I know that, lol.

(hmm, so that’s why I can’t be cool like those intjs out there whaaat)

Anyways, that was long, all over the place and about a ton of stuff that might seem disconnected but for me they’re not.

And don’t worry, I’ll pay more attention whenever my crybaby ass start seeking approval when I pretty much shouldn’t be doing that. It’s a natural fight inside me at this point, the thing is that sometimes I can’t anticipate it - specially after months going through this exceptional experience called quarantine.

Also, whenever you find people online saying “send me a message if you need to talk”, trust it, go for it, these people are offering something pretty nice that you might not be able to find later. So, if you need to talk, I’m all ears, doors open 24/7.

Take care buds, gen z, this is for you, I love you, keep fighting through.

xo

[jbuffyangel]

Bored Now: Arrow 6x19 Review (The Dragon)

What in the ever-loving hill tops of Olympus was THAT?

I was exhausted Thursday, so I missed the episode. However, I waited until Sunday because I wasn’t motivated to watch given the fan reaction. But I figured it couldn’t be that bad right?

Yes. Yes it can.

I would rather watch Oliver pontificate about his super-secret plan to stop gun violence (without revealing his super-secret plan to stop gun violence) than “The Dr*gon.” I would rather watch L*urel earn her BC suit (without really earning it) by hallucinating her dead sister. I could watch Oliver and Sara bang fifty times over. Yes, I know what I am saying. 6x19 is worse than all the terrible 13th episodes combined! After six years and 134 episodes I am bestowing “The Dr*gon” with the title of WORST EPISODE EVER.  Congratulations. We have a new low.

I flitted between enraged and bored watching “The Dr*gon”, so I feel Evil Willow’s iconic expression conveys my emotions nicely.

Let’s dig in… it won’t take long. I promise an excess of snarky gifs.

Felicity Smoak and Curtis Holt

This is the first week post Oliver firing Felicity. Yes, he can dress it up any way he likes, but that’s exactly what he did. Felicity chooses to devote her extra free time to her company and reaches out to Curtis for a truce. A truce in these writers’ minds means FELICITY APOLOGIZES TO CURTIS. 

Liz Kim, who co wrote the episode, explained:

Let’s pretend we live in a world of rainbows and unicorns where the main governing body is the Girl Scouts and instead of paying taxes we get free cookies. 

We must live in this kind of world to understand what Liz Kim is pushing. Fine. Felicity isn’t holding a grudge. She’s being the bigger person and is sorry for her role in the fight. If we look objectively at all six characters Felicity has the least to apologize for, but that’s just details. 

What infuriates me is Curtis just stands there and glowers at her. He oozes moral superiority, contempt and arrogance. 

Why, dear writer, didn’t Curtis then apologize to Felicity? If this is all about being the bigger person and not holding a grudge, why didn’t Curtis step up to the plate next? Last time I checked, Curtis has as much to apologize for if not more than Felicity. Instead, we get Felicity apologizing to yet another man on this show and Curtis just stands there like a condescending lump. 

UNACCEPTABLE.

Then Curtis cannot hide his glee over Diggle quitting the team. He wants to skip around the room and sing, “Nananana boo boo” while Felicity is distraught about her husband being alone in the field. CURTIS HAS THE NERVE TO TELL FELICITY HE MUST FIGHT THE DESIRE TO GLOAT. But sure, what an amazing friend. 

Listen asshat, if you tell someone you are trying not to gloat that’s the same as gloating.

Why is Curtis the only “friend” Felicity is ever allowed to speak to? Why couldn’t she have gone to Lance or even Diggle. Diggle has a beef with Oliver, not Felicity. I don’t see how going to Curtis is any better than going to John in Oliver’s eyes. Hell, I’d take a phone call Thea over this. I don’t need to hear her side of the conversation.

How does anything Curtis says correlate to real friendship? He states the obvious – Felicity is using work to distract her from worrying about Oliver. OH MY GOD. THANK YOU SO MUCH CURTIS. WHAT WOULD WE HAVE DONE WITHOUT YOU HERE TO EXPLAIN THAT COMPLETELY OBVIOUS PLOT POINT TO US ALL?

Then, he almost laughs in her face about it, but can control himself enough to only gloat. Wow. Felicity’s friendship cup runneth over. And last, but not least, he refuses to take any responsibility for his role in the team breakdown. How magnanimous of him. What a petty little prick.

Also, why is Curtis always the one to fix a problem with the Helix tech? JUST ONCE I would like to see Felicity solve something tech related to this company without Curtis’ help. Felicity Smoak can program and hack anything. SHE INVENTED THE KEY PIECE OF RAY’S ATOM SUIT. But whenever Curtis is around she is forced to be clueless and rely on Curtis’ brilliance to save the day because LOOK AT WHAT A GOOD TEAM THEY ARE. She is a shining example of a genius female character and now she’s being used to prop Curtis’ man baby brain. It’s nauseating and unbelievably insulting to my gender.

If this is the route Arrow chooses to fix the breach between the two teams (OTA members apologizing while Newbies gloat) then I can safely say I will not forgive the newbies for anything they’ve done. They will be on my list of “Characters Who Need to Die” for the remainder of the show. Starting with my number one spot – Curtis Holt.

Olicity

At least the writers knew the only way to get Olicity fans to watch this garbage pile of nonsense was to stick a 3 minutes Olicity scene at the end and promo the crap out of it.  Unfortunately, the scene didn’t give me “all the feels” the writers intended. 

Felicity comes home in a panic after watching a news report stating the Green Arrow is probably dead. 

Source: @oliverfelicitygifs

Oliver pops up behind her and a very relieved Felicity throws herself into his arms. Any gooey feels I have over Felicity’s concern and emotional hug are about to be obliterated. Felicity informs Oliver this set up doesn’t work for her. When she’s in the bunker, and knows where he is or can see what is happening, it’s easier to cope with her worry. Oliver condescendingly implies there’s very little Felicity can do to help him while she’s in the bunker.

Excuse me, but is Oliver a pod person now? How do we get from THIS

to THIS 

to THIS. 

Do the Arrow writers watch Arrow? This is why people get so fed up. We can go from one episode to the next and characters act completely OOC to push a storyline along. Oliver “You’re My Partner” Queen is now saying Felicity can do very little to help? 

Let’s just unravel the entire basis of the show and the reason the character exists in the first place 

for another bullshit Oliver Queen regression that makes no sense. 

All I am asking for is a modicum of character cohesion and storyline consistency. Is it so much to ask that the Arrow writers know the show and characters they are writing for? I think not.

After Felicity correctly argues she can and HAS helped Oliver many times, he does another 180 and tells Felicity she can never be helpless. Cool bro, but you stated the exact opposite 15 seconds ago. 

Oliver decides it’s time to placate his wife’s legitimate fears by telling her he will always come home.

Source: @oliverfelicitygifs​

Sure, it’s a nice foreshadow for the future since Oliver is probably going to land himself in jail. This scene can serve as reassurance for all those terrified Oliver is going to do 25 to life. I take issue with the promise, however. Do you know why Oliver didn’t make that promise to Felicity in 2x09? 

Because he respected her too much to lie to her. Oliver knew then he doesn’t always have control over what happens to him in this line of work. Accepting death and not being afraid of it is part of the job description. Oliver knows this is a promise he can’t keep because NOBODY CAN. The tiny look of hesitation and resignation his face after hugging Felicity proves it.

Source: @oliverfelicitygifs​

We tell our children little white lies to ease their fears because sometimes they aren’t old enough to understand the truth. Was the promise Oliver made to William completely true? No. Should he have made the promise? Probably not, but I understood why he did. Oliver was trying to ease his son’s fears because William is a child.

But Felicity is a grown woman. Oliver doesn’t need to tell little white lies to his wife so he can continue his deeply stupid need to regress. The only reason Felicity needs to buy into this obvious lie is so she can function while Oliver is out in the field by himself.  How about Oliver LISTENS to his wife and acknowledges the truth – he can’t do this without her. Even emotionally stunted Oliver Queen understood THAT. 

We’re really supposed to believe emotionally evolved Oliver doesn’t? 

I MEAN GIVE ME A FRIGGIN BREAK.

This is why viewers get so frustrated with Arrow. The characters can change personalities like the show changes writers. 

Things we know to be true, and are the backbone of the series, are tossed aside to make an illogical plotlines work. It does nothing to service the characters, show or viewers. All that’s left is a terrible hour of television.

The Dr*gon and Bl*ck S*ren

The function of this episode is to make us give a flying flip about the Dr*gon. However, we are given a sloppily slapped together back story that doesn’t connect to any of the main characters whatsoever – particularly Oliver.  

Di*z grew up in an orphanage and was bullied by an older boy. This is the reason he’s become a menace to society. 

He named his fear “The Dr*gon” and tattooed it everywhere because he’s so tortured and intense.

He’s been trying to move up the criminal ladder to conquer his fear and be respected as a legitimate crime lord. Ummm… okay? Good luck with that. WHY DO I CARE? Oh, that’s right. I don’t. 

Ultimately, Di*z gets a seat on the Quadrant (Season 7 villain set up for sure) and revenge on the kid who bullied him as a child. The moral of the story is don’t be a bully because someday the kid you tortured might show up on your door step and light you on fire.

I thought this was supposed to be the season of many villains. Weren’t we doing away with the singular Big Bad? Why are we suddenly zeroing in on the lamest villain in the group? He’s so lame the writers had to come up with an entire episode to mitigate the lameness.

Di*z and Sir*n spend 85% of the episode sitting in a car trading fortune cookie sayings with one another. They go on and on and on about power, control and not being a dog. It’s a lot about not rolling over, bellies, tails... maybe an ear. Think of every single villain cliché you’ve ever seen and that sums up “The Dr*gon.” 

Di*z’s moves are utterly predicable and I’ve heard the dialogue in about fifty other shows/movies. I wish they had just gone full throttle with plagiarism and stuck, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” in there. It’d feel more honest.

BS spends the entire episode asking the big strong man how to be a big strong villain. So, a win for feminism all around. 

BS is so busy telling Di*z not to “roll over” she fails to see she’s following him around like a lost puppy.  

Di*z is the lamest Arrow villain in history (Yes, even worse than Sebastian Blood), but BS is his henchman. So, what does that make her? Nothing good! I’ll tell ya that much. 

In C*ssidy’s defense the dialogue is cringe worthy, but she didn’t make it any better with the over the top acting.

BS tells Di*z not to be a wuss, but when he listens she acts like she has a problem with violence. YOU JUST TOLD HIM NOT TO ROLL OVER. HE’S DOING WHAT YOU ASKED, KEVIN. 

Yet, her eyes cannot behold the horror of Di*z beating a man. Her soul withers at the sight of Di*z killing. She blinks, sighs and turns away in disgust. SHE IS SO CONFLICTED.

Oh, holy hell. Are you kidding me with this crap? This is the same character who killed a security guard begging for his life. This is the same character who screamed in another man’s ear until his veins popped. She’s tried to kill the team multiple times. It’s a little difficult to believe BS has a hard time watching someone get punched. But we’re supposed to believe it because REDEMPTION. Sorry, Imma gonna need a little more than excessive blinking from C*ssidy to sell me on that one.

Di*z’s need to be a legitimate crime boss doesn’t mean the character translates as any more than the common street thug he is. His backstory is intended to make him look complex, but it does the direct opposite. We’ve seen “a villain is made not born” trope a thousand times, including on Arrow. Unfortunately, “bullied in an orphanage” doesn’t hold up against the backstories of Slade, Merlyn, Ra’s Ahl Ghul or Prometheus. 

BS has the nerve to compare Di*z to Adrian Chase and I laughed out loud. 

BS spent all of 15 seconds with Chase, but she knows his anger consumed him? Okay, cupcake. Whatever you say. Comparing the genius ways Chase inflicted pain and revenge on Oliver to the Dr*gon’s hum drum plan of vertigo and the Quadrant is just wrong. Why didn’t they do this villain focused episode with PROMETHEUS? That would have been a good time.

“But Jen, you didn’t like Prometheus at first. You thought he was boring and then you loved him.” Sure, that’s true, but by episode 19 we were full throttle on Adrian’s crazy.

There’s nothing to unmask with Di*z. This isn’t Josh Segarra going to another level. If it was those things then 6x19 was the episode to do it. All that’s revealed is more boring on top of boring.  I can tolerate a misfire in the 10-15-episode range, but we’re rapidly approaching the end. It is incredibly late in the season to be telling us why we should give a flying fig newtin about Di*z. The writers need to come armed with a hell of a lot more than bullied and power hungry for a chair.

Stray Thoughts

It’s safe to say it’s going to be a terrible episode if the writer is tweeting as a PR defense strategy. We shouldn’t need episodes explained to us, but if we do then the answers should make a modicum of sense.

Oliver was in episode 3x10 more AND HE WAS “DEAD.” There’s a reason why Stephen Amell is the star. He carries the show. Don’t ever bench him, writers.

This wins Twitter:

Disclaimer: Any gifs on the blog are not mine. If you would like a gif removed from my reviews, please message me. 6x19 gifs credited.

[v-e-l-v-e-t-g-o-l-d-m-i-n-e]

Given the fact that you're an actual brazilian lol I gotta ask: Did anyone believe two years ago that someone like Bolsonaro could win? Because I'm not an expert in brazilian politics but I'm really shocked, like we have a right wing president but he is like... a normal right wing asshole? As in he doesn't defend torture and so on. I guess I'm scared bc I see our countries as quite similar, I think Brasil is a little more conservative and you guys have more issues with crime but still similar.

This is really, really big, but I wanted to give you the full picture of what happened in my country. I hope it doesn’t happen on yours or any other country from Latin America (or anywhere, no one deserves it).

Honestly… it depends who you ask. His fans/electors have been yelling that Bolsonaro would be president for the good part of two, three years, but big part of the population didn’t take him seriously because he honestly sounds like a caricature. It’s hard to believe a person can be like this, and therefore people did not take him serious.

Big mistake, that was.

To give you a little context: during most of our democratic history (that isn’t very long), Brazil was ruled by right wing parties. We have several political parties in here, but the biggest one from the right wing side was PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira). The biggest political party on the left wing side is PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores).

Brazil was a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. This was a horrible, bloody piece of our history, and we only started to have a democratic state after 1985. During the years that followed, in most of the elections the main dispute was between PT and PSDB, PT always losing until 2002, when Lula aka Luís Inácio Lula da Silva won for elections.

Lula ruled from 2002 to 2010; a presidential term on Brazil lasts for four years, but we have reelections and Lula won a second term in 2006.

His time as a president was marked for several things. There was several social projects for poor people, projects to fight famine, to give finantial help to people who received too low income, projects to help poor people get into universities. They were not perfect projects by any means but I can assure you that it made a HUGE difference for millions of people in this country.

Another thing that marked Lula’s time as a president was the corruption scandals.

You see, it’s not that Brazil didn’t have corruption before, because corruption is in this country’s bones. But it was during Lula’s time as a president that we came to know how big the proportions of this corruption was. This was called the ‘mensalão’; Lula claimed that he did not know about it (which I doubt very much), but people from all political parties were implicated, including from PT.

Lula was still very popular and loved by many people, but this was the first seeds of the so called anti-petismo, that would take much bigger proportions later.

After Lula, we had Dilma Rousseff, also from PT, supported by Lula; her first term was from 2010 and 2014.

Dilma had little experience for this charge, and her time as president showed it. Her term was very mediocre, and popular insatisfaction began to rise, especially because of the World Cup that happened here on 2014 - a LOT of money was spent on it, and often the planning was really bad.

More popular insatisfaction rising; the elites were never happy to have a left wing party on power, but now middle class people started to being deluded that they were elite and anti-petismo started to get bigger. Dilma still won reelections in 2014, but it was a close call with her oponent.

Now we have a very divided country. And during the World Cup there was plenty of jobs everywhere, but after it there was a huge wave of unemployment all over the nation, the economy was a shambles. Even MORE popular insatisfaction. Things getting ugly and uglier by minute.

I won’t give you all details because this is already getting ridiculous long and it is a very long story, but Dilma suffered an impeachment. She was not very competent, but that was bullshit and clearly a coup, because we have recorded audios of the right wing opposition plotting to get her out so they could put in power her vice, Michel Temer, a right wing politic.

So now that’s still our president, Michel Temer. Just two years on power, but boy, the man did so much of damage all around, and no one, not people sympathetic to the left nor people sympathetic to the right like the man.

More popular insatisfaction, all around now. No one is happy in this country; everyone wants a change.

Now, take Bolsonaro, this dumb piece of shit we just elected. The man have been a congressist for 27 years. In this time he aproved like, two projects. In several opportunities he voted against the rights of poor people. You may remember the video of him talking with Ellen Page or Stephen Fry and how horrible that was. No one would want a horrible AND incompetent man like that as a president, right?

Right?

Well. Brazil have a wide variation of people in our nation and most people have black relatives, but we’re still a very racist, misogynistic, homophobic country. This people started to enjoy Bolsonaro’s speeches because they identify with him. Their mentality was something like… we need to stop the corruption in this country, and Bolsonaro will do it! Never mind he says that gay people should be beaten. That his white son would never marry a black woman because he received good education. That police should straight up invade favelas and kill poor people. That he said to a woman that the only reason he wouldn’t rape her was because she was not worth raping. They don’t care if women and queer people, and black and poor people get hurt or killed in this process; our lives are a small price to pay for them.

Now I do believe that even if this planet is loaded with horrible awful people, there’s still more good than bad. There’s still more good people than not, and how could good people vote for this man?

The means they used to get these votes was mass manipulation. Very similar tactics that Trump used in this campaign; dozen, hundreds of fake news all around. While in US they used mainly Facebook for this means, in Brazil they used an app called WhatsApp, because not everyone has facebook on Brazil but everyone has a cellphone and uses this app for easy communication.

In these groups they exalted that Bolsonaro would end corruption, would be a ‘correct christian man’, would stop the ‘LGBT doutrination of children on schools’. He would save this country. Mito (mith) is how his fans call him, or Messias (his middle name), and they absoluted demonized the opposition.

Now Bolsonaro is extreme right wing; the centrists and the normal right wing assholes are another story. PSDB tried to launch a candidate with no sucess, and PT was planning to launch Lula again as a candidate… but Lula was arrested in april (another bullshit). If he was not, he might have won; at least all the surveys showed Lula was more popular than even Bolsonaro. Because of that, PT tried to launch Lula as candidate even from inside prison, and of course, it didn’t work out, so there was a huge delay in PT choosing a candidate.

Eventually, Fernando Haddad was chosen. He’s a professor, a good man; was mayor of São Paulo. Was a ministry in Lula’s term, helped to create several education projects. But he was also not very known - I didn’t even know him until like four months ago.

The fact that he was not very well known helped a lot the pro-Bolsonaro groups to demonize the man and his vice. Many fake news were made up about him, stuff like him trying to legalize paedophilia, that he he was going to give a ‘gay kit’ for kids in school and therefore incentive the erotization of children, that he was a rapist. That he was against traditional family, but Bolsonaro would save the Brazilian Family. All of this being spread in those WhatsApp groups with little to no fiscalization, being spread out by hateful people and by people who don’t have a good grasp in politics and believe everything they read.

There was also a great demonization of PT as a party - oh no, you can’t let PT back on power again, right? PT is corrupt! They stole us! Don’t you remember mensalão? They DESTROYED the country, they’re gonna do it AGAIN, they BROKE this country and tore it apart (anyone would thing we lived in some sort of paradise before), PT is gonna transform this country in a COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP we’re gonna be the next Venezuela.

(I kid you not. I heard this last part from my father’s mouth last time I saw him. People really believed this)

Nevermind that PT was on power for 14 years and we didn’t become communists and if anything they appllied a more centrist line of ruling the leftist; we can’t let PT win. Bolsonaro will save this country.

Now another thing you need to understand is that Bolsonaro is DUMB. He’s dumb as fuck. In the first part of the elections he showed up to a few presidential debates and said horrible things like “Portugueses (our collonizers) never even set foot on Africa, Black people slavered themselves” that caused some popular outtrage. For that reason, in the second part of the elections he didn’t showed up in any debate, least he opened his mouth and people realize the kind of person they were trying to elect to represent them. Bolsonaro also suffered an attack in September (was stabbed in the belly), which helped to incentivate his popularity (after all, the man is a martyr now).

These were the main ingredients that elected Bolsonaro. Anti-petismo, misguided and ignorant people being led on in a flood of fake news, fascists that knew exactly who they were electing, a refusal to hear good arguments, since his supporters think that every piece of evidence we have of Bolsonaro being a piece of garbage was edited or taken out of context (it was not).

They also had a little help from their American friends; in this picture you can see Eduardo Bolsonaro (the son of the piece of shit, also a piece of shit himself) cozying up with Steve Bannon, the white supremacist from Trump’s presidential campaign, and give yesterday’s results, his tips sure seem to have worked here too.

Edit: this article can also help you to understand a little the reasons of why he won:

Bolsonaro business backers accused of illegal Whatsapp fake news campaign