#maximum dysfunction

[jenahsey-creates]

Finally finished this expression study of Sassy Quokka Aziraphale I've had sitting unfinished for like a month. Inspired by this group of classic Aziraphale faces from a "What Aziraphale are you today" poll:

[jacenbren]

Sometimes a family is just you, your slutty machine gun-wielding ex-catholic-priest boyfriend, your girlfriend and her girlfriend who work for space geico, your "old druncle," and your eldritch horror eco-terrorist twin brother who wears a snuggie at all times

[crimson-nail]

i have been cooking an over-complicated roleswap au for. a VERY long time

[stefisdoingthings]

plagued by the modern au millionsummers visions again………….can u tell i love them

[vladdyissues]

https://www.tumblr.com/vladdyissues/767142280948760576/take-two-lol-i-need-the-most-angsty-guy?source=share No, Vlad and Danny both have PTSD attacks from different moments. And they both help each other.

The hurt/comfort ouroboros is

[crowlore]

Toast to a Saint

[ohitslen]

Confession time: I’m just at chapter three of Trigun, the first volume OANSNKW

I meAN, I’ve been meaning to read forward, but I know it’ll leave a gaping hole inside my heart and I need to FUNCTION you know, I have to pull the last push of the semester and Trigun is already occupying too much of my mind, can’t imagine what will happen once I read the manga. So that is that.

[class1akids]

"I like food"

I saw many posts people saying how random Shouto's line is about praying at Touya's altar and realizing that he likes food - and I wanted to point to how it helps wrapping up his arc.

Shouto is saying: "When I was praying at Touya's butsudan (Buddhist altar), I suddenly realized something, I liked eating food. I realized there's more to me than just the person I want to become."

Food was a "negative space in the Todoroki family, so liking food was not evident to Shoto growing up.

In Shouto's flashbacks with his family, we never see him eat food. His only memory tied to the kitchen is the kettle incident. We know from Natsuo that Shouto ate alone, a diet prescribed by Endeavor, no doubt all geared towards maximum performance, rather than enjoyment. Not even knowing your siblings favorite food is the ultimate symbol of how dysfunctional the household was.

2. Food was a positive space in Class A - tied to comfort, bonding, friendship

In class A, Shouto starts eating with Iida and Midoriya after the Stain incident. Food becomes comfort, connection, sharing, caring, teamwork, etc. He experiences things like using his fire to prepare food together, eating together, cleaning up.

Many memorable Shouto-scenes are tied to Class A eating together (e.g. heroes cry too) and he connects to Inasa over a discussion about favorite foods (udon vs soba) which is a theme that carries over to his endgame with Touya

3. As the Todoroki family tries to reconnect, food plays a central role

As the family changes, they attempt to reconnect around the family dinner table (the famous sluuurp scenes). But Todoroki dinners end in a disaster - still they are useful bringing to the surface important conflicts and trying to communicate about them (another important theme discussed in Shoto Rising).

There is more in the light novels: Shoto's and Rei's decade late reconnection as Rei offers him a little kid strawberry milk that she remembers he liked when he was 5, and their attempt to connect with Natsuo ending up in a mush of ruined soba - it's all out of sync.

4. Food as a symbol of lost time and broken futures

Food is also very central for the hopes of a happier future: Enji's dream of his family at the dinner table, Natsuo's regret about years of missed meals, Shoto wanting to share noodles with Toya, all culminating in the heartbreaking realization that they have the same favorite food they'll never get to share.

5. Food as a symbol of processing grief and healing

Praying at the butsudan (the Buddhist altar at home set up for a deceased loved one) involves the preparation of offerings of food and drinks, which then the family eats afterwards. We see this practice referenced in Ch 249 when Enji prays at Toya's altar.

So Shouto making a reference to it is a shorthand for telling us that Touya died at some point, Shouto is still grieving him and just like Deku and Ochako, he's trying to make sense for himself out of their short encounter. So wanting to learn how to make chopsticks and bowls (a traditional Japanese craft of woodwork and applying lacquer, often involving intricate patterns) implies that he wants to bring Touya the perfect offering, but also that he's finally stepping outside fully of the framework Endeavor created for the family, where children are cast into roles of heroes, villains and by-standers, masterpieces and failures but never human beings. He's thinking about what connects him and Touya together and who they would have been in a different story.

6. Shouto's personal arc

Shouto's character was always about balance. Balance between past and future, ice and fire, duty and family, etc. So crafting chopsticks and bowls to elevate good food connects the grief and survival guilt with healing and growth. It is both a tribute to Touya's memory and a new possible hobby to express still undiscovered sides of himself.

It fits the theme of the chapter "More" - as it focuses on what lies beyond being a hero, reaching a goal, working hard and how Izuku, Ochako and Shouto have been transformed by their experiences of trying to save their villains.

But it also fits Shouto's personal arc that was about discovering who Shouto really is. Earlier in the chapter, Shouto refers to being constrained into the framework of a bigger story, where his choices are bound to happen. As a hero of the sidestory of that manga, Shouto has no choice but decide what kind of a hero he wants to be (not-Endeavor, like All Might, reassuring, family hero). Encounters with his family helped crystallized this image of himself.

But now that he's being released from this story, he can look outside of the framework of a hero manga and discover those "more sides than just a hero". And Touya was the last encounter - the last piece of that puzzle. I think there is a parallel in how Tomura destroyed much of hero society - Touya also destroyed the foundations of the Todoroki family, so something different can maybe built.

Without Touya, I think the family would have kept at trying to piece themselves together in a tense, fake kind of peace to keep up appearances. If nothing else, Touya's actions tore through that need of saving face - leaving them all exposed and grappling with the harsh realities of their actions. But I think it also allowed the younger siblings to step outside the cage their parents created for them and build things better from scratch. It allows them to find more sides to themselves outside of the logic of the Todoroki household.

[meichenxi]

12 hyper-specific actionable neurodivergent-friendly goal suggestions for the New Year!

If you are considering writing goals / intentions / focus points that are more ADHD and/or autism friendly and not overly focused on career or relationships but rather on feeling at home in your body, here are 12 very specific, very actionable tiny steps that have made my life actively better in the last year. Feel free to reblog with similarly actionable points!

(Obligatory disclaimer: these are what have helped me – hence why ‘hyperspecific’! They might be completely the opposite of what you need, or irrelevant to your situation. And all of them, of course, are funds-dependent. But I hope you can find something to inspire you to think about more actionable goals for the coming year.)

1) Get a recipe box

This is number one for a reason. In the past, I have lived for three years on sandwiches (!). I cannot cook or reliably feed myself, and have been beating myself up about it for years. At its best it is humiliating, and at its worst I have gotten various illnesses from malnutrition. I find cooking a sensory hell, as well as triggering past ED thoughts, and shopping and deciding every day what to eat is an executive dysfunction nightmare.

‘You should be able to cook’ – okay, but you can’t. If you can afford it, what’s more important – that you eat well, or that you fail again and again at doing what you ‘should’ be able to do? I think of it as part of my autism accommodations, and just one of the ways that existing as a disabled person is more expensive. Please take the shame away from it, and use it if you need.

I pay for Gousto – it’s the best for vegans, and costs about £35 a week. This is a huge part of my budget for the month, but I find it worth it a million times over. It delivers the recipes and packaged foods in correct amounts to my house every week, and I always choose the quickest recipes to cook. They are done in about fifteen minutes. This forces me to be in the kitchen every day, which has the added benefit of making it very clean, because I can’t stand to cook when the kitchen is very dirty.

2) Go to the gym for ten minutes a day

- (If you don’t want to go to the gym but do other exercise instead, swap the location out for your preferred place!)

- Most traditional advice around exercise revolves around not doing too much – so for most beginners that means 3-4 times a week, at the maximum. The problem is that for AuDHD and other neurodivergent people that habits may be much harder, if not impossible, to form. This means that the executive function required to remember to go to the gym if it’s only 3 times a week, conversely, is actually significantly higher than if you do it every day.

- The ‘ten minutes a day’ thing, for me, means that my goal is not to do X amount of exercise or overwhelm myself. My goal is only to get there. Once I’m there, I can do whatever I want. This formulation of the goal in my mind removes the demand-avoidance and executive dysfunction barriers because if I really don’t want to exercise, I can just walk on the treadmill for a bit and then leave. Knowing this means that I almost always do more exercise than I otherwise would if I were forced to follow a difficult and tiring exercise regime.

- The key to this is that you actually have to mean it. Don’t beat yourself up if after ten minutes, you go home. That’s okay. Your goal was ten minutes – your goal is to make going to the gym a habit, not necessarily the actual exercise you do. That comes next.

3) Use a weighted neck-wrap, cushion or plushie

- For a disorganised sensory system, as many autistic people in particular have, proprioceptive input (that tells your body where it is in space – so weight, pressure, compression etc) can be hugely regulating and calming. A weighted neck wrap is small enough to go under your clothes or can go over your chest as you sleep. I already use a weighted blanket, but this means I can have a little bit of calming proprioceptive input as I work at my desk as well.

4) Get a smoothie box

- This is a similar point to the recipe box. I frequently have health problems because I absolutely hate the texture of fruit and vegetables, and just don’t ever eat them. Rather than forcing myself, as I have done for the past several years, to just try – I’ve leant into my difficulties and worked around them. Smoothies work for me. A smoothie box that comes every month averages out to about £2 per smoothie, which is less than the cost of a bottle in a supermarket. You don’t have to chop anything, just put it in the blender with water or oat or coconut milk.

- Most smoothies have 3 of your 5 a day at least, and some even have 5! If you are struggling nutritionally, it might be something to think about. It’s helped me hugely, and I now consider it an essential part of my budget.

- If it’s too expensive, consider buying frozen fruit by yourself if you have the spoons for that.

5) How can you look the most ‘put together’ without doing anything at all?

- I don’t mean showering. I mean infrequent practices like haircuts! I hate wearing makeup for sensory reasons, but I have a good haircut, one that makes me feel like myself and sharp and confident – I feel so much better, and it’s something I only have to do once. I now make it a deliberate choice to put a haircut in my calendar for every two months.

- Consider a ‘no style’ haircut that will look smart whatever you do! My haircut is a short French bob. You need essentially no styling, it works curly or wavy or straight (though if you have curly or coily hair, you should go to someone who can work with your texture – if you don’t thin it out properly, it’ll give you a horrible triangle shape!). I feel SO put-together with this haircut – it elevates even pyjamas, and I have to do absolutely nothing.

- I bite my nails to the point of bleeding – getting professional gel paint on my nails (no extensions) is the only thing that works to stop me, because the smooth round tips meant I could stim with those instead of biting. For ages, I didn’t because it was a ‘waste of money’. This year I realised: if I’m not going to stop stimming, I need to give myself something to stim with that doesn’t hurt me. Accept your neurodivergence and work around it. I now book a nails appointment every 6 weeks or so, for £20-£25. I find it again more than worth it.

- Similarly, I have just got a nose piercing, and I am considering tattoos for next year. For me piercings and tattoos do the same thing as the above two: they make me look more put together without actually ever having to think about wearing temporary jewellery or makeup (which I can’t for sensory reasons). What might work for you?

6) Dress for Sensory Good

- I have found a noticeable difference in my self-confidence with my appearance once I a) accepted that I have sensory differences, and b) bought clothes that accommodated those differences without making me look like a slob. For example, I hate feeling constricted around my thighs as I like to jump and stim and dance, but I don’t want to live in tracksuit bottoms because that leads to Depression Soup – so I have started buying formal, ‘monk-style’ trousers with a wrap-around belt and flowy legs. I like the feeling of pressure around my waist that a tight top provides, but I hate it around my shoulders (don’t ask me why…), so I have started wearing tops with huge baggy sleeves and a wrap-belt around the waist. So many of these tiny adjustments, and for the first time in my life I feel both comfortable and beautiful in my wardrobe.

- Do you like heavy things? Soft textures? Scratchy wool? Lots of badges to play with? Tight compression? Flowing fabrics? And how does this work with your lifestyle? When I am overwhelmed, I often want to cover the lower half of my face and neck – it feels comforting to me. So I have started wearing light scarves that I can wrap around my face like an old lady (!) which both block out the world, provide that comfort, and also look...normal? It lets me stim without visibly outing myself as autistic, which I don’t always feel safe doing.

- Other things to consider that might help: compression clothing, weighted jackets, heavy boots, ankle and wrist weights (there are some that are very minimalist and look like bracelets), wrap trousers, tight belts, cloaks with hoods, cowl necklines, activewear, Merino wool (if you sweat a lot or can’t shower / do laundry often), complete light-blocking sunglasses (you can buy these from a ski shop), stretchy fabric, etc. Whatever works for you – find it!

7) Use a sippy bottle with a straw

- I can’t stay hydrated. If it’s left up to me, I drink less than a glass of water every single day. I have constantly bleeding cracked lips and skin from lack of hydration. The only thing that has worked so far – and it has been a game-changer! – is to buy a huge 1.2 litre / 40 oz water-bottle with a built-in straw that I can take around everywhere. I can stim with it, the straw feels nice, I much prefer drinking from a straw because I hate accidentally wetting my chin / sleeves - and all I have to do is remember to fill it up twice a day. That’s way less mental effort than remembering eight glasses!

8) Get noise-cancelling headphones and Loops

- I assume everyone who is autistic has these. If you don’t – they will change your life. I only got them last year and suddenly so many places have become accessible to me that I would have just avoided before. I also tell people very honestly that I often wear them, so please don’t be alarmed if I do – if you want to start this, I’ve found it less intimidating to do it with strangers first, and then moving up to friends / family. Now everyone is used to it, and I get way less overwhelmed.

9) Use an audiobook service

- For a long time I thought that I had lost the ability to read. I now know that’s directly correlated to my levels of overwhelm (which makes my ADHD traits worse), but even so, my short-term memory is so poor that I have basically never been able to read non-fiction – it goes in one ear and out the other. Now that I use an audiobook service, however – I am listening to lecture series about so many things I’m passionate about and actually remembering things for the first time in my life!

- Knowing that I can listen to things I love whilst I clean or tidy my room or pack or whatever helps me so much. I also enjoy lying down in the dark under my weighted blanket listening to audiobooks as I wake up and go to sleep – it has completely replaced scrolling on my phone as the first / last thing to do in a day. When I’m overwhelmed I often can’t look at a physical book as it hurts my eyes, so an audiobook is far better.

10) Get Huel / Pleny / other meal-replacement drinks

- Because sometimes even with a recipe box, you won’t be able to cook. You’ll have forgotten to go shopping. You’ll be so sensory-weird that the thought of eating food is awful and makes you want to vomit. This doesn’t work for my partner, who hates the texture of Huel, but for me I can bear it and often enjoy the same-ness of knowing exactly what to expect. On days when I can’t cook or go out or sort out a meal, Huel is a life-saver.

11) Add active rest time to your calendar

- I don’t mean necessarily an actual calendar, but about how you think about time and your day. I make it a habit now to automatically add the same amount of time as the activity took as recovery time afterwards. So if I schedule a date for 2pm to 4pm, then I know that after I get home I will need two hours to recover before I can do something else.

- This has helped me be both more deliberate about my rest time (I don’t scroll or watch anything – I deliberately ‘go in’, as I call it, using my weighted blanket, other weighted things on my chest, a blindfold, brown noise, pitch black room etc), and also be realistic about how much I can do in my life. I know that if I have to rest for two hours after a two-hour event, it’s very unlikely that I can do more than one social engagement in a day. This expands to longer periods: if I go and visit my family for four days, I will likely need four days doing not much afterwards, and certainly no cognitively demanding tasks or socialising. This is a reality check which helps me say no to certain things that are not crucial.

12) Try compression clothes

- These provide a subtle and constant proprioceptive input which can calm the nervous system – as I have said above, proprioceptive input (knowing where your body is in space, pressure etc) is hugely regulating to AuDHD nervous systems. It also massively affects the other sensory systems if it is dysregulated – so if you aren’t meeting your sensory needs for proprioception, it’s likely that visual or auditory will be even harder. You don’t need to buy ones specifically for autism – UnderArmour or shapewear or activewear works just as well.

---

I hope these help! I have many more suggestions, but will leave that to another post :)

[sunnycanvas]

Hello, it's not a fanfic, it's a question. Do you think that Balwin can or resists, so to speak, having intimate relationships?

It's actually going to be difficult. Baldwin IV suffered from lepromatous leprosy. It is said that people in this condition suffer from loss of libido, Ejaculation dysfunction as well as infertility in men in small percentage. Baldwin IV also been known to be prone to weakness and constantly in ill health. Example: The King was unhorsed and carried to safety on a knight's back because he could not remount on his own. He did need soldier's help sometimes to get up and get down from the horse. He was also easily prone to diseases as well. I personally don't believe Baldwin IV would participating in sex. Not just because of religious reasons but because maximum times he won't feel the need for it(loss of libido). Ejaculation dysfunction is going to make it painful. Him being sickly is also another reason. I personally believe sex life with him will be non existent unless he decides to compromise for his s/o. Then also it's going very few occasions where he will have sex with his s/o

@trobairitzdedia has done a really good job in explaining to me. Thank you so much!

[communistkenobi]

genuinely curious, if you think "it's a girl!" and "it's a boy!" categorisations are inherently oppressive, do you believe a world where gender isn't recognized in any meaningful way before the child has means to define it for themself to be the best alternative?

I’m going to use a different abolitionist example to illustrate what I mean: when people advocate for abolishing the nuclear family, they are not saying “get rid of parental relationships” or “get rid of fathers.” They are identifying a specific social relation that is used as a building block of society and advocating for a world where it doesn’t exist, because its existence is the foundation of certain forms of oppression. The western social model where children are raised in private detached housing by a maximum of two parents (and realistically, mostly by their mother - a huge problem in itself!) who have complete control over their material, emotional, and social needs produces a fucking huge amount of adverse outcomes - abuse, trauma, dysfunction, poor health - the list is nearly infinite. And this family model also inherently reproduces class, race, and gender by virtue of the fact that children inherit those things from their parents and are forced to exist in those contexts. And even in individual cases where it doesn’t produce abuse, even if you have very good parents who are not abusive to you in any way, that social relationship is still oppressive, in the same way that having a cool boss doesn’t mean that wage labour is good. A society where children are not entirely dependent on one or two people for all of their needs, where they are free to form meaningful relationships with adults outside of strict categories of family, where children are not legally and socially treated like the property of their parents, where bloodline is not privileged as the dominant mode of intergenerational transfer of knowledge, culture, skill, wealth, etc, is a much better world!

“Gender abolition” is, I think, a poor term for a similar goal, and one that has a lot of reactionary baggage (baggage that is not coincidental - I think its imprecision as a term is useful for terf politics). Abolition of patriarchy is probably more precise - I am advocating for a world where gender is entirely non-coercive, where gender does not produce any oppressive social relations. You can engage in gender as a culture in the same way you can engage with different forms of art, in a way that is purely voluntary. This configuration does not prohibit the possibility of trans people; we would just exist in an entirely different form than the current western, medicalist, patriarchal, white supremacist context we are forced to navigate.

So yes, I think for gender to be truly emancipatory, it needs to be engaged with as a voluntary form of human culture, as a form of art that we do with ourselves and our bodies, and to do this we need to abolish sex distinctions on medical records, gender markers on state documents, gendered facilities, and many, many other things.

[jacenbren]

Don’t you just hate it when your dysfunctional family comprised of three quasi-immortal interdimensional aliens with autism, strong senses of justice, godlike powers, and wildly conflicting opinions on humanity manage to single-handedly reduce a large metropolitan area to a smoking crater

read the fic here lmao

[butchcarmy]

CARMY X READER ENJOYERS I need ur input

I wanna write a rly dysfunctional fic abt a relationship between you, a chef working at the beef (for maximum distress) and carmy (YOUR BOSS!!!) im thinking friends with benefits, messy emotions, angry sex, just a gigantic traumatic clusterfck

What do u guys wanna see from a messy carmy fic like this?? I’m trying to come up with scenes and meat for plot but I want some outside input

For example here are some scenes I vaguely have in mind

Carmy being rly mad and arguing with you and you argue back and shut him up by giving him a blowjob in the back (LMFAO)

You doing a REALLY good job at handling the chaos of a day in the kitchen and he is like “come to the back for a reward” and he gives you head

Taking a smoke break with him in the back after saying just the WORST things to each other in the kitchen. Maybe you will make out. Who knows

You and carmy usually argue but one day he makes you cry and then he feels really bad

It’s sort of an enemies to fuckbuddies/friends to lovers situation and you guys bring out the worst in each other because…it’s fun to explore!

Anyway yeah if y’all have any thoughts on it PLS HMU whether it’s in dms or my inbox!!

[veliseraptor]

Top five canon ships from your fandoms?

canon ships? what're those. also I mean. how "canon" are we talking, like, explicitly canon, implicitly canon, they-get-together-at-the-end canon, they-at-some-point-were-a-thing canon, plausible-deniability-canon, it's complicated

but okay, to try to take this in the spirit it was probably meant

Hua Cheng/Xie Lian from TGCF. one of the most incredible things about TGCF is that it actually made me wholeheartedly and enthusiastically ship a completely canon and...relatively functional...ship. I mean, they've definitely got their dysfunction (Hua Cheng get some self esteem and maybe pedestalize Xie Lian a little less challenge) but they're weirdo4weirdo and friends in a delightful way that makes me really enjoy how they do it. I'm not saying they invented love, as the saying goes, but they're certainly good at it.

Felix Harrowgate &/ Mildmay from Doctrine of Labyrinths. look, if there's explicit incestuous attraction at at least one point I think it counts. this is one of those ships that straddles the line between & and / for me a lot of the time, because any sexual stuff aside it's so intense and intimate that, like. it might as well be a "classic" ship, just without the sex, and we're agreed that something doesn't have to have sex in it to be a ship, right? and there is the canonical one-sided incestuous attraction, so, like. it's not even completely without the sex.

Vegas Theerapanyakul/Pete Saengtham from Kinnporsche. cannot believe that this is canon thing that actually happened in a show that I watched. made 4 me. incredible. forever grateful to Kinnporsche for giving me this gift.

Caleb Widogast/Essek Thelyss from Critical Role. I feel like it's canon enough? maybe that's controversial but I'm going to stand by it. fascinating dynamic, two fucked up people being fucked up together, atonement arcs that aren't usually my thing but crossed with a wondrous amount of wizard hubris and people who are both kind of bad at being people. I'm into it.

Chu Wanning/Taxian-jun from 2HA. this spot was more of a toss-up but ultimately I settled on these two. I specify Taxian-jun here because while I really enjoy Mo Ran/Chu Wanning other flavor it's truly the Maximum Fucked Up that gets/got me. the hate/love/obsession of it. so good, I'm rolling around in it like a cat in catnip. thank u Meatbun for giving this to me with all its laundry list of associated trigger warnings

I feel like everyone should know how fucking tempted I was to put xuexiao on here. because it was very tempted. they're so close, you guys, I would argue implicitly canon, but, well. probably not what you meant, anon.

a number of what I'd call "plausible deniability canon" ships from mxtx, really. but again, spirit of the question.

[new-tella-us]

Next King Ending!

That doesn't end in death for everyone involved. James!

You know what that means! Tired, rambling historian voice!

*AHEM*

The Golden Era was an era of many hiccups and controversies but ultimately was the most prosperous era of all the Abyssal Plains. With one major hiccups by the demon only known as the Demon Lord, and a bumpy transition back to normalcy, today we will be talking about the rulers that started the Golden Era's comeback.

That being King Raestrao and Queen Ezaeur. Raestrao is the son of the previous Golden queen Istorae and the Demon Lord. Ezaeur is the daughter of two pure blooded royals of the Lilith king that, due to the carnage and subsequent scrubbing from the history books, we don't know the names of.

Now the immediate assumption is that these two were set up in an arranged marriage and...you'd be like 40% right. They were but then Raestrao along with his brothers would disappear on a ten year excursion thus ending the arranged marriage and probably triggering the massacre of Lilith Kingdom.

Where did Raestrao's brothers go? What happened to the remnant of the rebellion? Why did Raestrao disappear and abandon the marriage only to come back and get married to Ezaeur ten years later? If I even tried to figure those out I would die of lack of energy and coffee overdose. (I'm already tired man... leave me alone)

Aka, we don't know. He just vanishes and the earliest records of his return are ten years later during the war against his father.

Speaking of, how did that end? Another place of murky details! It would have been as straight forward as "Raestrao and Ezaeur killed the Demon Lord and took the throne," if staff didn't find feathers at the scene. Angels were involved but it's completely unknown on how. There is also evidence that the disappearance and supposed death of Istorae was caused by angels as well so there's that. Other than that, we know nothing.

Now that the Golden Kingdom has been restored, how have the two rulers faired. Not great! The most stable part of their rule were their laws and attempts to rebuild. Raestrao and Ezaeur were clearly very intelligent being that they manage to start a new set of laws, repair their kingdoms far past their previous glory and even improved agriculture by using methods only seen in the human world and combining them with magic for maximum efficiency. As law makers, they were beloved by all.

As rulers... we get a little worse. Reports of madness yellow imply that both rulers suffered from it and that would explain the higher amount of executions than previous generations -minus the Demon Lord-. The best way to describe the pair as rulers are ruthless, especially to whatever people they didn't originally belong to. Aka if someone of the Lilith kingdom pissed them off, they were better off pleading their case to Ezaeur as Raestrao would show no mercy and vice versa.

Then there was them as a couple. Dysfunctional as HELL. There are no reports or paintings of those two being happy together. In fact, on more than one occasion, a fight between the two rulers had to be quelled to keep it from getting physical. They also slept in separate rooms on the opposite sides of the castle. That was damn near unheard of! Even Istorae and the Demon Lord shared a room! All of this plus the existence of a harem girl and the rumored relationship between the Queen and her bodyguard are proof enough that those two clearly did not like each other and there was no sense of loyalty in their relationship.

It's strictly business.

Speaking of the harem girl! This human's name is a little unclear. Some records would say it's "Mika" though the most common thing she was called was "Human" and the most common nickname she was given was either "Aphrodite" (The human, greek goddess of love and beauty) or "Ambrosia" (Another human, greek name meaning "drink from the gods"). For the sake of giving her a name, we'll call her "Ambrosia" as that name was the most popular. Unlike many concubines before her, we actually have VERY clear records of her existence! Yay! My job is easier for once! This is the girl you would look to if you wanted to see any semblance of happiness out of the king, though she may have not been as happy to be there. She's a human girl a few years younger than the king and the two most likely met during Raestrao's disappearance as Ambrosia starts popping up in the records during the war like Raestrao.

Now easier doesn't mean easy, there still a lot of questions about how exactly she made it to the demon world, why she was involved in the war and what made her stay after the war -if she was even given a choice, which was unlikely seeing the chains often depicted on her wrists and ankles.

She was clearly a prisoner in the castle and there to serve Raestrao personally but she seemed to be treated better than most harem girls. (Side note- Yes I'm going to say that with every version of Mika in these endings. The boys aren't abusing her like the Demon Lord abused Omaizel) Often her main outfits were compared to the ones the previous queen, Istorae, would wear and this seems to be no accident as she was also provided Istorae's scarf-thing. This was probably to give her an air of royalty and be a subtle reminder that she was to be treated like how you were to treat a queen.

Another interesting figure would be the Queen's knight, Saero. Surprisingly, there's less information about him than there is about the human that appeared randomly 100 years after him. He was a servant of the Lilith kingdom and specifically Ezaeur since he was young. Even after the kingdom burnt down, he stayed loyal to his mistress and followed her even to this new kingdom. There's supporting evidence that, like the harem girl and the king, there might have been a sexual relationship going on between the Queen and her guard especially since he seemed to be the only one that she ever confides in.

Now, what about heirs? There was at least one! Though might have been two? Okay let me explain. There were at least four children that were the daughters and sons of Raestrao or Ezaeur. However, there is only one that is confirmed to be the daughter of Raestrao and Ezaeur. That would be the heir and eventual next Queen of the golden kingdom. There were also three others of dubious origins. From the taint we can assume that the firstborne son and youngest daughter were Raestrao's children and the secondborne son (aka the middle child) was Ezaeur's child.

The two sons were eventually confirmed to not have been the children of both rulers with the firstborne being most liking Ambrosia's child and the second son being most likely Saero's child. The last child, however, is unknown. She takes most of her appearance from her father so it's hard to tell who the mother of said child is. On top of that, there are multiple paintings that depict Raestrao having a much warmer relationship with his youngest daughter than either of his confirmed child. Yes, including the heir. And we're not completely sure on why. The only theory that's stuck is that the youngest (possibly illegitimate) daughter acted very similar to someone Raestrao cared about, sweet and curious, unlike his eldest son who's far more abrasive in personality and his eldest daughter who was more cold and calculated.

In the end, when the kids came of age; Raestrao's eldest son, similarly to his father, disappeared for a few years before popping up again and settling in a small town. The eldest daughter and heir took the throne and ruled with a similar about of intelligence and coldness as her parents. And Ezaeur's eldest son and Raestrao's (and possibly Ezaeur's?) youngest daughter became nobles for different kingdoms (Despite at least Ezaeur's son being a bastard child) and would marry their rulers and spread the golden reign.

[dissociacrip]

this turned into a long adhd rant whoopsie

it really does suck how people seem to downplay autism and adhd now lol. autism has been reduced to people who can mask and have low support needs and adhd hasn't really changed from its status as a joke.

i don't talk about adhd much but it probably gets in the way of me being able to function just as much, if not more than autism does (in my personal situation) when it comes to mental disability. not showering enough. not cooking. not cleaning my living space properly. forgetting to brush my teeth. dishes sitting in the sink for so long they start getting moldy. only being able to maybe do 1-3 tasks a day maximum because my brain can't organize itself enough to do more than that. difficulty committing to things and being consistent in overarching ways. being late to things a lot. highly impaired verbal recall so i forget things people say to me, forget verbal instructions, etc. on top of the other acutely stressful situations that come with memory and regulating my attention span (e.g. locking my keys in my car or locking myself out of my house when i have a very limited support network to remediate those situations.)

my meds barely touch this stuff for me and i'm not especially inclined to increase the dosage after bordering on psychosis when i was taking 40mg of vyvanse. i've just become so accustomed to living the way that i do (because my case is pretty bad afaik) so i can't just will myself to be another way. any efforts i make to change or be more organized and routine and consistent end up getting dashed away because i just cannot do it lol. my shit just doesn't work. adhd is a massive barrier between me and being a functioning person or being able to take care of myself. i'm pretty sure would still be a "gross" and unpalatable disabled person even if my muscles worked and i didn't have POTS/etc. that also get in the way of my hygiene and the cleanliness of my living space.

that doesn't even go into how other people react to it. a good chunk of physical and verbal abuse i faced from my family as a child was related to my adhd symptoms. i was diagnosed at a young age but my parents "forgot" it happened and it was never addressed otherwise. i got constantly called disgusting for my hygiene problems and was threatened with violence over it (on top of the times where i was actually getting assaulted.) people take my impaired verbal recall and lack of impulse control irt accidentally cutting people off or interrupting them personally, accusing me of not caring enough when it's something that is extremely difficult to be aware of or manage when adhd is a condition that distinctly involves impaired awareness of your own behavior.

so when i see shit like "just set alarms" or anything else that amounts to "you're not trying hard enough" or adhd not very much being a disability, especially when it's coming from other people w/ adhd, it kinda makes me wanna stab things with knives.

sure, it's not the worst condition ever, but just like most other disabilities, the way it affects everyone who is it is different and some are gonna be able to manage it better than others. sure, there a lot of really fucking annoying people (usually able-bodied) w/ adhd on social media that have large platforms and who very often profit from or encourage liberal pop psych bullshit when it comes to adhd, but it's still very much a disability. it can affect hygiene. it can affect employment or otherwise means of earning an income. it can affect our social lives and whether we have a support system. it can affect whether someone can keep their house from getting infested with bugs or mold. it is very much something that causes dysfunction in ways that aren't nearly as cutesy as the little comics you might see on instagram are drawn.

just remember that.