#maybe at least 3 chapters

[midnightsnaq]

A week later

I'm almost done fr this time. Probably another week. But it's around 20k now

Almost done with my mp100 fic. It's around 18k words. Which is one of the biggest writing works I've done. I'm going to upload it on ao3 and wattpad

[thegreatyin]

current fallen london fandom experience feels like im standing at the corner of a party holding a sippy cup going. i thought firmament has been pretty fun and intriguing so far

[starrysharks]

google "how to write a character who is known within her universe for having no filter and swearing a lot (especially in the face of authority) without having it read like i graduated from vivziepop school of writing"

[cupophrogs]

Did you bring anything(like a phone or something) or a reason to be in the factory before you got thrown into the metaphorical deep end of “Toy hell”

Also, what happened after you got pass Huggy

“And Huggy? Honestly, I tried to get back to the front entrance after he took his tumble to The Depths. But whaddaya know, the vent was closed! So, downstairs my grumpy ass went. Then I met Poppy. But I’m lucky enough to still have song downloaded on my Spotify, so we get to play music, albeit sparingly.”

[dreamyichigo]

I’m keeping you forever and for always 🌌

day 1 of ryukotoweek2024 Outlaw

Chapter 1 of Old Western Au Ryuji/Makoto Fic “Wanted: Dead of Night”

[osamusriceballs]

The Accident - Part IX

Atsumu x fem reader

Warnings: None

Words:- ~ 1,2 k

About: The phone call with Atsumu! What could he possibly want from you?

Part I II -> Next Part

"Hello?"

"Y/n? It's me, Atsumu Miya."

You glance at Yachi with wide eyes, and she nods frantically, clearly excited by the call. She urges you to respond, gesturing for you to say something to him.

"Oh, yes. Atsumu. Is everything alright?"

"Everything's good. Don't worry. I just wanted to let you know that I've talked to my lawyer, and apparently, we both can't have the same lawyer for the divorce. I've contacted Samu's lawyer, though, and they're willing to help us out. I'll cover the cost, don't worry. They're discreet too, so we don't need to worry about the public getting involved." You try to focus on his words, but his voice flows like honey through the speaker, causing your heart to skip a beat. Yachi taps your shoulder, urging you to respond once again. You clear your throat and quickly start to answer.

"Oh. Thank you. I really don't know what to say. I've been thinking about the public, especially since I found out you're in the Olympic team. I was wondering if the situation would cause problems for you."

"No! No, yer not causing me trouble. It's not like we're under a dating ban. Most of us just try to be discreet about our dating life. Some fans are... a bit obsessed." There's a brief silence, and you debate if you should mention stumbling upon his profile and complimenting him for it. You're technically still strangers, yet it feels like you're the early stages of actually dating.

"But don't worry about that; your husband will take care of that, 'kay?" His tone turns playful, and you snort at the comment. "Okay. Let me know how I can help." You ease back into the couch, Yachi attentively watching you with a curious expression.

"Of course. You could start by telling me about your plans for next week. We need to talk to the lawyers; can you fit me into yer schedule sometime?"

"I have the next week off, so just let me know when works best for you." You smile at the thought of seeing him again, ignoring Yachi's encouraging grin.

"Sure. How about Wednesday? We can have dinner after the appointment; I can show you Onigiri Miya, if ya want? You can say no too; I just thought it would be a good idea to get to know each other. We started rather... unusually." Your cheeks heat up at the memory of how you technically met—waking up naked and married.

"Oh! That sounds lovely, actually. I've seen some pictures of Onigiri Miya, and I'd love to try Osamu's food."

"You've seen pics? Found my Instagram, didn't ya?" His teasing tone intensifies, and you feel even more heat rushing to your cheeks.

"I just- I wasn't trying to-" You stammer, the image of a shirtless Atsumu vivid in your mind.

"Just teasin' ya. Are you getting shy on me now? We literally slept in the same bed; I'd stalk my husband's Instagram too if I woke up married like that." He teases, and you can't help but get flustered.

"I wasn't stalking!" You clarify and clear your throat uncomfortably. "Did ya make sure to follow me? I wanna stalk my wifey too." He laughs, clearly unfazed by the situation, and his lightheartedness quickly transfers to you. "I didn't. I just had a short look; I don't know if I remember your username."

"Oh? You only remember the food on my page? Guess that's the only thing I'm good for. Only known for being the brother of the famous Osamu Miya, chef, and successful restaurant owner. I'll ask Samu to post some pictures of me to gain more followers." He sighs dramatically, and you snort at his exaggerated acting. "Did you just laugh? You seemed so tense before; I'm glad yer feeling better already."

"Thank you. I really appreciate everything." You smile, and even though you can't see his face, you're sure he's smiling too. "And I'll make sure to follow you. Maybe it will help raise your popularity- I want your volleyball career to thrive, after all." He laughs at your words, and you notice Yachi looking at you with raised brows, clearly curious about what you're talking about.

"Maybe I can finance us someday with my volleyball skills. Stick along, wifey. I'll get you an even prettier ring then." You blush feverishly and cough nervously while glance at the ring on the couch table. "The rings don't look too bad actually. The diamond looks almost real."

"Oh, about that. It is real, so make sure to wear it often to show off."

It takes you a few moments to process his words, and you take a sharp breath through your nose as you look at the ring. "What do you mean it's real? Like a real diamond?" Yachi stares at the ring too, and her mouth is agape as she hesitantly reaches for it, holding it in the light. It shines beautifully, and you lean forward to inspect it closer.

"Yeah, real diamond and all that. I found a receipt in my pocket. The rings are from a real jewelry store. I got the certificates for them too. I'll give you the one for your ring when we see each other again."

"I don't know what to say- Atsumu-" You hesitate, gazing at the ring once again. The diamond is not small, not overly huge, but tastefully big enough to shine brightly. "Don't mention it. We'll talk next week? I'll message you the time. I can pick ya up, or we can meet up there; I'm fine with both."

"Okay. Thank you. See you next week, Atsumu."

"See ya, wifey."

You hang up with a smile and stare at the screen for a few moments, until Yachi starts to laugh right next to you.

"'See you next week, Atsumu'- the way you made sure to say his name, ohh, y/n, you're crushing on him."

"I don't even know him, Yachi! And we're in no position to be liking each other; it's just business!" You shake your head and furrow your brows.

Atsumu is a nice guy. Funny, charismatic, kind. And extremely good looking. You know that you realistically have no chance to score a catch like him, and yet, you find yourself married to him. You wonder if he is regretting the whole situation, even though he seems to play it cool. He's on top of his career and you're just distracting him right now in this important phase. He's probably just worried about his reputation, worried that you'd go to the media and claim that he had forced you to do something. He might just be nice to you because he's scared- scared that you could potentially ruin his career. You need to make sure to always remember that and not to let his words get to you.

You'd have to make sure you don't fall for him— or else you'd end up with a broken heart.

[puredoesnotmeankind]

14 days since my rat bastard babygirl left me alone come morning. Aerin, if you're reading this, I miss you, please come back

[grassbreads]

I’d love to know about Yulma and how important it is to representation in shounen manga

This has been sitting in my askbox for a couple months (because I am incapable of punctuality), but anon sent this to me back when I was talking about Yulma over on my vnc blog. For those unaware, Yulma refers to Yu Kanda and Alma Karma from the manga D.Gray-man.

So the thing is, to be honest, I don't know if you can say Yulma is/was important for representation. They don't tend to get brought up as an example of representation (except by diehard d.gray-man fans like me, lol) in shonen, and their whole thing is complicated enough that I feel like the queerness of it all flies over a lot of people's heads.

However! They're very important to me personally, and I do think it's kind of remarkable their story came out in like 2010. Because even though their queerness gets overlooked a lot, it's like. really there no matter how you interpret it.

The short version of their very complicated story is that Kanda and Alma are a couple who were resurrected into new bodies. Alma was a woman when they were originally together in their past lives, but is physically male in the present. Kanda is still very much in love with them by the end of their story, which, depending on the reading, makes Kanda very bi and/or Alma very trans.

This sound like something you want details on? If so, let's talk about how D.Gray-man's fan favorite edgy badass toughguy character briefly became the star of his very own heart-wrenching tragic queer romance.

Here's a brief crash course in Yu Kanda and Dgm for the uninitiated:

D.Gray-man is a manga about a group of exorcists (in the loosest and most anime sense of the term) in the 1890s fighting a holy war against mechanical demons powered by the souls of the dead. There are two things you need to understand about this plot for me to explain Yulma:

The Black Order, the secret branch of the church that exorcists work for, has a long history of committing horrific human experiments to further the war effort.

Due to complications of world building, only a tiny number of people can become exorcists, and tracking down new ones is extremely difficult.

Yu Kanda is one of the exorcists, and though not the actual main character (that's the lad in my icon), he's a very important secondary character. Arguably he's the most important secobdary character, since he's the main guy's biggest foil and the first character to play deuteragonist in a major story arc. He's also a huge fan favorite. The character popularity polls that Jump used to do always had him and the mc going back and forth over who won #1 most popular.

Kanda was also a classic edgy toughguy character. His first two scenes are him almost murdering the main guy because he thinks he's an intruder, then complaining about people grieving for their friend too loudly. He never smiles. He argues with the righteous mc about wasting time/energy protecting civilians. He threatens (and delivers) violence on anyone that annoys him. He looks like this:

TLDR; Kanda was an adored-by-fans mean badass archetype in a 2000s shonen manga. Not generally the guy you peg for starring in a piece of queer romantic storytelling.

And for the entirety of the original anime adaptation's 103 episode run, for the first 188ish chapters of the manga, you do not learn a single thing about his early life. You learn he joined the Black Order very young, and you meet the mentor that took him in at that point, but although there are little hints, a couple cryptic mentions of him searching for a certain person, his early origins remain a complete black box.

Then came the Alma Karma arc.

This is the point where I start getting into spoilers.

To make a very long story short, the Alma Karma arc reveals that Kanda is one of the Black Order's human experiments. The Order ran a secret project 9ish years before the start of the series in which they essentially tried to re-use dying exorcists (since finding new ones is so hard). They took the bodies of dying or recently deceased exorcists and harvested their brains, implanting those brains into new magically grown child bodies.

Key to this project—the second exorcist project—is that these newly grown second exorcists were not supposed to remember anything from their previous lives. Kanda, however, recovered a few hazy memories from his past self. Most importantly, he can recall an unclear image of the woman that his past self was in love with. This memory gradually becomes Kanda's reason to live. He wants desperately to find and meet that person.

Now, aside from Kanda, there was one other successfully revived second exorcist. This was a boy named Alma Karma.

Over the course of their brief shared childhood, Kanda and Alma become extremely close. However, due to a series of horrible events that I'll spare you the details of, Alma is eventually driven to murder-suicide. He wants himself and Kanda to die together to spite the Order, and Kanda almost lets him do it.

The one thing that keeps Kanda from letting Alma kill him, the thing that drives him instead to kill Alma, his most beloved and only friend, is that he can't bear to die without finding that woman again.

Have you figured out the twist yet?

9 years later, in the present, Kanda discovers that he didn't actually quite kill Alma. The Order kept Alma secretly half-alive in order to do more dubious experiments. And, more importantly, when they meet again, Kanda discovers the truth. The woman that he's been searching for his whole life, the woman he's in love with, the woman he tried to kill Alma in order to find, was also killed and made into a second exorcist. And her brain was placed into the body of Alma Karma.

After quite a lot more violence and tragedy, Kanda and Alma end their story arc by running away together on their deathbeds. Alma dies, for real this time, in Kanda's arms, and his last words are to tell Kanda he loves him. These words are presented as something Kanda hears from both the boy and woman versions of Alma's soul.

So! At the end of a very long and complicated story, one thing holds true: Kanda and Alma are in love. As passed down from their past selves, they are specifically in romantic love. They were a couple. And to speak as a fan, the sheer absolute devotion to how Kanda's love for Alma is presented is seriously intense and moving.

Now, given the absolute hell that is Alma's life, gender identity is frankly the last thing they have time to worry about, so it's hard to say how the whole "literally a woman's brain in a male body" thing might have settled for them if given time to think about it. But that is inherently a pretty trans narrative. And given the whole Alma gender situation, there's simply no reading of their whole situation where neither of them is queer.

If you take present day Alma as a guy, which is more or less how he's presented in canon (though again, who knows how he would've felt about that male body in different circumstances), then congratulations! You've got mlm in your shonen manga. They were straight in a different life, but now one of them's a dude, and they are still deeply in love with each other. They've even got not one but two "let's forget it all and run away together" scenes, just as every mlm couple seems to have.

On the other hand, if you go with the angle that Alma's still a woman based on her mind/soul, even in her new body, then Kanda may not be canonically queer, but Alma is inarguably trans. Again, literally a woman's brain in a male body. It may not be how most people end up trans, but that doesn't change the facts of her situation.

You see what I mean about how they're undeniably queer, but also kind of easy to miss? There's so much other insane shit going on in their story that Alma's whole gender situation can get passed over. Plus, you can look online to this day and find people arguing that Kanda's not "technically" explicitly in love with the present day male version of Alma, since he doesn't 100% unambiguously say as much. I love reading comprehension.

Also! As a possible extra reason for why people don't talk about them much, the official English translation of the manga translated Alma's final "I love you" very differently. There's always a lot of nuance and argument when it comes to translating "大好き" into English, but given the full context of their relationship and the scene it's in, Viz's handling really sets off the censorship bells in my head.

Here's the different versions (Japanese then fan then official), if you want to compare:

Nothing more classically queer than censorship by way of questionable translation 🙃.

At the end of the day, Kanda and Alma are in kind of a strange middle ground. They're each in love with the other one, but the whole second exorcist brain transfer situation makes it complicated enough that people argue their feelings aren't explicitly romantic (and thus not gay) in the present. Alma is literally a woman's brain implanted in a male body, but we don't have time to dwell on the gender complications of all that because of the hell that is the rest of their life. They're canon but not canon—queer people whose stories don't have space for them to be queer.

However, given that all this messy, tragic ambiguity was published in a fairly popular shonen manga back in 2010, it still feels kind of remarkable to me. Alma is somewhat an antagonist (it's complicated), and he dies at the end of his arc, but once again, Kanda was/is the fan favorite! And when he re-enters the main story after Alma's death, he's more important than he's ever been, and his history with Alma continues to be a huge part of his character.

Katsura Hoshino took the much-beloved edgy toughguy character from her long-running shonen series and, after keeping his origins secret for such a long time, confirmed that his whole life has revolved around love this entire time. Almost every facet of his character can be traced back to his love for his lost best friend or his yearning for his past life's missing partner. And then she reveals that the best friend and the partner are one and the same.

You can go back and forth about the degree to which they work as representation, but in any case, I think their story is something people ought to know about. It's romantic and it's heart-wrenching and it's fucking wild, especially given the context in which it was published (a Shonen Jump spinoff in 2010). I never see anyone besides the few remaining hardcore dgm fans talk about them, and I think that's a shame.

So anyway, that's tale of one of the most insanity-inducing romances I've ever seen put to paper. I love queer people.

Here's some choice pages if you want to cry with me (the last two are a sequence):

[nephilejon]

god seeing the rinshi scene in ep 2 got me falling on the floor giggling to myself in the dark tehehehehehe

and then screaming during the yukio suicide scenes

[blaithnne]

The adhd urge to post every chapter immediately after writing it vs the autism urge to wait until the entire fanfic is finished and has pictures to go along with it before even mentioning it exists

[thatneoncrisis]

oh captain my captain i didn't know what league of legends game was when i watched arcane. so i thought the plot was alright since i didn't (still don't) know the game lore. if it wasn't basically a prequel story, trying to aim the characters at the way they are in canon, do u think the plot and character arcs would have held up alright? or does that actually make the arcane canon story worse since it wouldn't at least have the existing canon as something it needed to land at eventually as an excuse for any "out of character" decisions? thank u

i wouldnt even call it a prequel story? its like a very elaborate au in a sense, one that feels comfortable changing things to a certain extent- clothes, personality adjustments, motivations, but they still have to hit certain beats. vi has to be an enforcer, jinx has to be a wild card harley quinn type, ekkos time powers ect ect. idk WHAT it is maybe the show needed more time or tighter focus or less characters but i just felt that like, some of the story decisions directly relating to LoL lore werent outright bad but didnt have a lot of time to breathe. the standout example being ekkos time thing, where when i watched that scene i assumed it was both a stylistic representation of a fight and establishing his and jinx's prior relationship (which is kind of too little too late considering they did not fucking speak once as kids pre time skip), and then i had to get a friend to explain to me for SEVERAL MINUTES that he literally died during that fight and it was supposed to be showing his rewind thing. it just wasnt clear at all and his character would not change in the slightest if he didnt have it. but you cant NOT include it so. *

really i have no clue the full extent of the story the writers wanted to tell and how much LoL is binding their hands on story beats. and i REALLY dont want to be inflexible considering i still have a full season coming up that might make me more receptive to certain decisions. but considering how much of the cast i REALLY like just straight up are not in the game, i think they are fully capable of making a solid story completely divorced from league

*someone in the comments told me apparently that Wasnt his time thing and my original read of the scene was correct so im not gonna hold it against the show.

[iskierka]

writing that Halstarion Beauty and the Beast fic I talked about and it is uhh. it is gonna be LONG. we haven’t even finished the prologue section way before Astarion finds Halsin at the manor and it’s like 3k words

[rocketbirdie]

dont apologize for going insane im putting my rambles out there to also find insane people 🤝🤝🤝 but yeah i haven't played rebirth yet but seeing people complain on the basis of "it's not og" is ALWAYS crazy to me because it's SUPER clear, in both an in-universe and out-of-universe sense that it's like. Explicitly not OG. It's so explicitly about breaking the chains of og and that's super super interesting. remakeverse is like it's own beast and its very cool and it's also making me lose my mind because the "what if"'s are so beautiful but also [breaking down about the original timeline] THERE WAS SO MUCH LOVE THERE TOO AND IT DIDN'T CHANGE ANYTHING!!!! HEAD IN HANDS. anyway thats to say i agree with all of your thoughts thank u for the insane food

EXACTLYYYYY AAUUUGHHHH the mind-screw of it all..... the implications........

[deus-ex-mona]

renren chapter let’s goooooooooooooo

[masked-alien-lesbian]

Don't know why but the cocky attitude works for Grey Morrison in The Ghost of Us but is annoying on Cai in Along Came Treble.

[lesbiangiratina]

as always thank you so much for your manga testament scans, I've been getting so much mileage out of this one. i love them, they're so critter, I would kill for them if they asked

HEHEHEHE YAY <3 theres so many good testament images in the old anthologies and this is from 1 of my favorite chapters hehehe. I wish i could Properly fully scan some of the volumes i have to help out but id have to take them apart and thats so scary 😔… actually that image is just a filtered phone pic um. Have some acceptable scans of the very good set of pages this + ur icon r from. Cuz its cute. Testament get puppy dog

GAHHH i love this artist’s testaments i wish they got to do more testament chapters… memaiso you will always be famous