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gainingfiction · 3 years ago

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Go Big, Go Home

Summary: Finn is a slacker with a fondness for milking the system. When he learns that employees of a certain size can apply to work from home, he hatches a plan to get fat enough to qualify. Finn likes his food, and he’s already a bit chubby, but he soon unleashes the inner hog buried deep within him, and a gluttony that won’t let him stop gaining—even when he’s hit his target. This story was inspired by a prompt from a follower based on “King-Size Homer” from The Simpsons.

Finn always preferred the easy way out. Why study when you could copy your friend’s test? Why cook if you can afford takeout? Why do more when you can do less?

Sure, maybe it wasn’t the best attitude, but it had served Finn just fine. At 22, he had a decent job and an equally decent apartment. And even if he did care more about his own orgasms than pleasing his partners, he still did well enough on his preferred hookup apps. For Finn, life was going pretty well.

That is, until he learned he was doing more than the bare minimum. That was something Finn couldn’t accept.

He was pouring himself a cup of coffee when he figured out a new way to game the system, eavesdropping on a pair of receptionists as they swapped some particularly juicy office gossip.

Finn’s ears perked up when he heard that Tony from IT wouldn’t have to come into the office anymore. The story was that he’d gained so much weight on the job that human resources and the union rep had agreed that he could work from home. Phrases like “mobility issues” and “occupational hazard” were thrown around. Apparently, employees who reached a certain BMI could qualify for that sort of program.

Finn wasn’t even aware that his employer let anyone work from home, although he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like Finn needed to be at his desk: he worked in customer service. His job consisted mostly of fielding calls and sending emails… all things he could do from his couch—if he was allowed.

The wheels in Finn’s head were already turning as he left the kitchen. He deposited his coffee on his desk and went straight to the bathroom, where he took a good look at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t bad looking—green eyes with a mischief he couldn’t hide, some light stubble, and a crop of floppy, light brown hair.

His figure was masked by a loose-fitting button-down and dress pants. It was hardly the body of a god. His softness stemmed from an extreme distaste for physical exertion, which was part of his natural laziness. This aversion to exercise was no problem when he was in high school—it was easy enough to stay thin with his genetics and a teenage metabolism. But as he coasted through his bachelor’s degree, the Freshman 15 blossomed into a forty-pound weight gain: he weighed in at a spritely 154 pounds the first time he walked onto campus, and by the time he left, he was up to 196. The numbers bounced around Finn’s head as he returned to his desk.

Finn didn’t mind being a little chubby. He certainly didn’t care enough to diet or work out. If anything, the idea of getting to stay home every day, sitting around in his underwear with the TV playing in the background, never having to sit in traffic or make awkward small talk again, seemed like a great reason to expand his extremely average build.

It took a bit of searching, but he found a PDF of the employee handbook and searched it for “BMI”. It didn’t take long to find a very interesting section.

Employees who struggle with significant weight gain as a result of their work-related sedentary lifestyle may benefit from a range of modifications. These include, but are not limited to, a modified workspace (e.g. a standing desk or other modified equipment), accessibility aids, and, in certain circumstances, a voluntary work from home program.

Bingo. Finn read on:

While there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, employees with a BMI of 60 or greater will generally qualify for the voluntary work from home program, particularly where this is medically recommended.

Jackpot. So Gina the receptionist was right. If he got fat enough, Finn would never have to go into the office again. He opened a new tab and found an online BMI calculator.

Finn’s eyes widened as he plugged in the numbers. He was 5’10”, and weighed around 205 pounds these days. That put his BMI at just shy of 30—already embarrassingly close to the “obese” range, although he didn’t think he looked that big. But to get to a BMI of 60, he’d need to soar up to 418 pounds….

Finn exhaled. His weight had been steadily increasing for years without him even trying, so it wasn’t like he’d be fighting nature. But to gain over 200 pounds? That wouldn’t be easy. It would take time, money, and, worst of all, effort.

He got back to work, but the thought stuck in his brain for the rest of the day. He sat in his uncomfortable office chair, in a small cubicle he shared with another customer service rep named Ron. Ron was a couple of years older than Finn, with a slim build, a plain face, and thinning hair. He often talked to himself, hummed out of tune, clicked his pen constantly, and never turned off his phone notifications. Their workspace was small and slightly messy, with files scattered around and stacked on top of a metal filing cabinet that hadn’t been replaced in decades. The only “decoration” was a potted plant, half-dead from a lack of natural light.

Finn made his decision by lunchtime. If it meant putting office life behind him, he was going to go for it. He was going to get fat. Really, really fat.

He felt an unfamiliar sensation as he stepped out of the elevator onto the building’s main floor: determination. The lobby included a small food court, with a selection of fast food restaurants to choose from. He ate lunch there most days, but today, he was going to truly feast.

The cashier at the burger place was a middle-aged woman who seemed unfazed by Finn’s massive order: three burgers, two large fries, a large Coke, a large chocolate milkshake, and an apple flip. His tray heavy with food, he walked towards an empty table.

Slumping into a chair, Finn stared at the mountain of fast food in front of him. It was as much as two of his regular meals, maybe more. Was he really going to do this? Was it worth it? But the idea of working from home, of never again having to get dressed up to go into the office, beckoned him onward like an irresistible siren call. Sure, he’d be huge—but he’d be free.

So he unwrapped the first burger and dove in. He ate like a starving man, taking huge bites of burger, stuffing his face with a handful of fries, and washing it down with a gulp of thick, chocolatey shake. It all tasted amazing, the sugar and grease flooding his brain with pleasure. He’d already finished two of the burgers and half the fries before his stomach clued into how full he was.

But he couldn’t stop. He had a goal to achieve. So he unwrapped the last burger and took a bite, absentmindedly rubbing his small starter belly as he ate. With mechanical motions, he loaded his mouth with fries, forcing the food down with long slurps of his soft drink. By the time he pushed the last bite of pastry through his lips, he was uncomfortably bloated, his stomach looking larger than usual. He leaned back in his chair—he felt sick, but he also felt good. Like he’d accomplished something.

His stomach ached and gurgled as he rode the elevator back up to the third floor, ignoring the signs that recommended taking the stairs. Lethargy set in by the time he reached his desk, and he spent the whole afternoon stifling burps, covertly massaging his overfull stomach, and wishing he could take a nap.

His appetite picked up again a few hours after he got off work. He’d been watching TV on the couch since returning home, picking away at a bag of chips. By 8 o’clock, he felt ready for a proper dinner. He was craving pizza, so he picked up his cellphone and plugged his choice into his favourite app. Seeing a 2-for-1 special in the discount section, Finn knew what he had to do.

He went to bed that night with a painfully full stomach, a feeling that would become increasingly familiar in the days that followed. For the rest of the week, he picked up a large fast food breakfast before settling in at his desk, and followed it up with lunches that were as vast as they were greasy. Then, he dragged himself back to his office for a series of semi-comatose afternoons. At home, he would order as much as he wanted from his preferred takeout spots, washed down with soda or beer, sometimes both. At night, as he lay in bed cradling his bloated gut, it was like he could feel his stomach stretching, expanding to accommodate his escalating portion sizes, his body and brain working to adapt to whatever he was doing to himself.

The first comment about his developing gluttony came that weekend. It was subtle, but enough to let Finn know that people had noticed him making a pig of himself.

Finn’s best friend, Damian, wore a look of concern mixed with curiosity as he looked over from across the table. Their families had lived next door since before either was born, and they had been friends for as long as Finn could remember. Unlike Finn, Damian was high-strung, always striving to be the best. It was Damian’s tests Finn had always copied from in school. And while Finn did the bare minimum to get his degree, Damian made the dean’s list every year, graduating with highest honours and a job offer from a prestigious engineering firm.

Damian had a slender build, toned during his years as a swimmer and track and field champion and maintained by a rigorous diet and daily workout regimen. His straight, dark hair was always tightly coiffed and gelled, his narrow face clean-shaven, his dark eyes probing and analytical. His eight-part beauty regimen overwhelmed Finn, who got by with some cold water splashed on his face.

Finn couldn’t deny some attraction to Damian, but they’d never hooked up, except for one drunken teenage makeout session that neither ever mentioned again. Finn was more interested in hookups and flings, while Damian always claimed to be looking for The One. That was too much pressure for Finn, who wanted to be “the one” who fucked around and had a good time.

They were still best friends, though, and they met up for drinks every weekend. This week, however, Finn suggested they meet earlier and get dinner instead, an offer Damian accepted. When their meals arrived, Damian was still nursing his first vodka soda of the night, while Finn was already on his third pint of beer.

“You, uh, hungry?” Damian asked, sizing up the huge pile of food in front of his friend.

Finn felt Damian’s eyes linger on his already-enlarged gut, before snapping back up to his face. “I must be,” Finn lied, resting a hand on his belly. “I skipped lunch,” he lied again. He’d actually eaten two lunches—a burger combo, and then a heaping plate of Chinese food. Then, he’d spent the afternoon snacking on the bags of chips and chocolate covered peanuts he now kept in his desk drawer.

“Right,” Damian said, rolling a cherry tomato around his bowl of garden salad. “Oh, I have to tell you about this guy I met at the gym today. Major daddy bear energy. He gave me a ton of tips about weight training. I’m like, 90% sure he wants to take me out.”

Finn chuckled, rolling his eyes. When it came to men, Damian was fairly predictable—they were all burly, dominant, and (most importantly of all) emotionally unavailable. It dawned on Finn years ago that Damian was looking for some version of his father, a stern, plump Catholic with a well-groomed beard and impossible expectations. Damian’s endless string of brief, ill-fated relationships made for some interesting stories, at least.

Finn was in good spirits (and a little drunk) by the time they left the bar. After Damian caught his bus, Finn groaned and rubbed his overfull stomach. As usual, he’d overdone it; the two-block walk to his apartment was torture. That night, he leapt into bed, holding his packed, round stomach like he was posing for a pregnancy photoshoot. He was asleep a few moments later.

And so, Finn settled into a routine. On weekdays, he’d eat a few pieces of toast at home, before grabbing breakfast sandwiches and hashbrowns at the food court in the lobby of his office building. Then, by lunchtime, his appetite would have recovered enough for another feast. He rotated through the various options over the course of the week, sometimes eating a second lunch, often picking up donuts or other pastries to snack on during the afternoon. He’d even struck up a rapport with the 20-something cashier at the donut shop and the young hunk at the Chinese takeout counter. Then, after work, he would drive home and collapse onto the couch to watch TV or play video games until he decided where to get dinner. After ordering yet another ridiculous spread, he’d eat it on the couch, washed down with a beer or five. Then, he grazed on his favourite snacks until it was time to roll into bed, thoroughly and completely stuffed. And on Saturday, he would shock Damian by polishing off massive servings of pub grub and an ocean of cheap, high calorie beer.

As the days turned to weeks, the effects were getting harder to ignore. The consequences of eating thousands of extra calories a day started to pile up on Finn’s frame, and they piled up fast and furious.

He noticed it everywhere. His work shirts, once loose, grew tighter, until they started to cling to his distended belly and puffy chest; on cold days, when his office was chilly, his nipples poked obscenely against the cotton. His love handles swelled and expanded, deposits of side fat that enfolded his torso and merged into widening back rolls. His hips widened, too, thickening with fat as it settled around his thighs and ass. Big hips ran in Finn’s family, especially the women, but Finn was starting to put some of them to shame. Packing his growing thighs into his dress pants had been getting more difficult lately, and they swaddled his porky butt like plastic wrap, accentuating every curve. The outline of his boxer-briefs (which were also tight) was clearly visible, cutting into his ass fat. He was definitely developing a bit of a pear shape. Standing in front of his hallway mirror before work, he made a mental note to upgrade his wardrobe before he popped a button or busted a seam.

He was starting to raise some eyebrows at the office, too: it seemed that every day Finn managed to come to work fatter, wearing worse-fitting clothes, and eating more at his desk than he had the day before. Ron, his office mate, never mentioned it, but Finn caught him staring once as he leaned over to pick up a bag of chips he’d dropped, his thick rump aimed in Ron’s direction. He looked away quickly, but Finn was pretty sure Ron spent the rest of the afternoon humming “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen.

Eating the way he did was fun, but it was also a challenge. Finn imagined himself as a pro-athlete, always trying to beat his personal best and take his game to the next level. How many burgers could he eat without making himself nauseated? How many milkshakes could he drink? How many calories could he stuff into his face during the afternoon without making himself too full to enjoy a Chinese feast or a family-size portion of Mexican food for dinner? Sometimes as he pushed his bloated stomach beyond all limits, he thought of Rocky and his “Eye of the Tiger” training montage. Rising up straight to the top… Had the guts, got the glory.

So his weight climbed. He checked the scales periodically, feeling a perverse sense of accomplishment as he ticked past 250, 260… When he saw 282 flash across the scale, he felt almost giddy. He was really doing it. His life of leisure was getting closer by the day.

Six months into his journey, he did discover one downside.

He’d been so focused on turning himself into a fat boy that he’d mostly put his social life on the back burner, except for his weekly gossip sessions with Damian. So when he got a message on a hookup app from an old fling looking to reconnect, Finn jumped at the opportunity. He invited the guy—James—over to his place for “drinks” that Friday night.

Finn wasn’t much of a cleaner, but he did manage to throw out the mountains of empty food containers and bottles of beer and soda that cluttered his apartment. Satisfied that the place looked at least decent, he focused on making himself look decent.

The problem was, he’d only upgraded his work clothes. When he was at home, he mostly lounged around in his boxers, and if his sweats and t-shirt were too small, no one was around to see. But with James on the way, he had to at least find something to wear; even for Finn, answering the door in nothing but his undies was a little too forward.

He fished a pair of jeans out of the closet, realizing how much smaller they looked than his work pants. He looked at the tag: 36”, the size he’d worn before he started his daily pig-outs. He frowned. His dress pants were 44”, roomy when he bought them but increasingly fitted. Even allowing for the difference in fabric, 36” would be a very tight squeeze.

Still, he gave it a shot. They were supposed to be a loose fit, so even if they were too tight, maybe he could still get them on.

His thunder thighs completely shattered that illusion. Getting them up to his knees had been okay, but then the resistance started to increase. His legs were just too big; there wasn’t near enough denim to get the waistband up over his massive buttocks. His blubber butt was an unconquerable challenge that those poor jeans had no hope of surmounting. They were half way over his booty when he gave up, his thighs crammed in like sausage casings, putting the seams to the test.

It would have to be sweatpants. Those were tight, too, wrapping every inch of added flesh without a stitch to spare. And his stomach… that was its own problem. He tugged at his shirt, desperately trying to get it down past his deepening navel, but his gut put up fierce resistance. Inches of chub sprung out under the hem, bulging over the waistband of his sweats.

Finn felt a surge of panic as he looked in the mirror. A fat man stared back at him, completely overflowing his clothes. He thought about changing into some dressier work clothes, but the doorbell rang before he had the chance.

He would just have to roll the dice. His rolls jiggled as he made his way to the door, forcing his shirt even further up his exposed gut, and his sweatpants further down over his behind, a swathe of plumber’s crack on full display.

He tried to play it cool when he opened the door, smiling at the twink in front of him. “Hey, James,” he said, realizing that the combination of stuffing himself into undersized clothes and rushing to the door had left him breathless. He tried to slow his panting as he leaned against the doorframe.

A look of shock and disgust crossed James’s slim face. The svelte young man stared back at him, mouth agape, eyes roaming up and down Finn’s heavily fattened body. “Uh, what the hell, Finn? You never told me you got so fucking fat.”

“I thought you liked dadbods. And anyway, it’s just a couple pounds,” he said, tugging fruitlessly at the hem of his t-shirt. He knew that was a lie.

“Yeah, a couple dozen. Look, I’m not into chubs. Call me when you lose some weight,” he said. “And update your damn photo, I feel like I just got catfished.”

And with that, he turned on his heel and walked down the hall, tiny hips swinging. Finn stood in the doorway. He was humiliated, but he felt something else, too. His dick was starting to get hard, tenting the front of his overloaded sweats. He tried not to overthink it, assuming it was just the expectation of sex. He shook his head and closed the door. At least there was a carton of ice cream in the freezer with his name on it. Ice cream never criticized his weight. Ice cream was the best boyfriend a guy could ask for.

He told Damian about his failed hookup when they went out to dinner that weekend, portraying himself as the innocent victim of a shallow tease. “Can you believe that?” he said, through a mouthful of cheeseburger. He took a swig of beer. “He literally said I catfished him. Over a couple pounds.”

Damian frowned, fiddling with his glasses. Finn couldn’t help but notice how powerful Damian’s biceps looked, the way his pecs stretched his t-shirt. While Finn had been packing on fat, Damian was layering rock-hard muscle onto his narrow frame, building his body from slim and twinkish to something approaching Achilles or Adonis.

“Right. Listen, I don’t want to be rude, but…” Damian glanced away, rubbing his sharp jaw. He wouldn’t meet Finn’s gaze. “Is everything okay? Y’know, you kind of have been gaining a lot of weight recently.”

Finn’s stomach fluttered. For some reason, getting called out like that by muscular Damian, athletic Damian, perfect Damian, made Finn feel… well, a little turned-on. He couldn’t figure it out—it was embarrassing, but it was the sort of embarrassment that started in his crotch and radiated outwards, sitting like a lustful pit in his stomach. Why did this keep happening? He decided to explore a little further. “Really? Is it super noticeable?”

Damian still couldn’t look Finn in the eyes. He pushed some wild rice around his plate, before spluttering: “It’s—well, I don’t know, that’s… I just wanted to make sure nothing was going on with you.”

Unlike Finn, Damian was a terrible liar. That’s why Finn always did the talking when they were up to no good as kids. Damian hadn’t even answered his question, which made the answer obvious: it was extremely noticeable. Eighty pounds on a 5’10” frame would be noticeable to anyone with eyes.

“Too many good meals, I guess,” Finn said, dragging a hand along the outline of his gut, framed by a too-small button-down, and letting it rest on the underside of his expansive belly. “You must think I’m turning into a real pig, huh?”

Damian reddened slightly, and ran a hand through his thick hair. He kept fiddling with his glasses, eyes flicking from Finn’s belly to finally meet his gaze. “No, of course not. I was just checking in. And I wanted to offer to train you if you wanted any help losing weight. At the gym.”

Finn cracked a smirk. “Actually, can I let you in on a little secret?” he asked, his voice low.

Damian nodded, leaning forward slightly. His expression was intense, the sort of look Finn recognized as deep interest. He rested his hand on his chin, slender fingers covering his pink lips.

“I’m doing it on purpose. I figured out that I get to work from home if I get fat enough. So I’m trying to gain even more. I've packed on eighty already.”

Damian’s jaw dropped, but he closed it again, quickly. “Wait, really?” he asked, arching his brows. “Finn, don’t you think that’s a little… reckless? Dangerous, even?”

Finn took a long slurp of his soda; he liked to have something to wash down the beer. His smirk widened. “Well, you know I live for a little danger.”

Damian’s mouth opened slightly, and he closed it again, his eyes searching his plate. He seemed to be trying to comprehend the information that had just been dropped on him. He gave a slow nod as Finn shovelled a mouthful of nachos into his eager maw.

“Do you think that’s stupid?” Finn asked, after the silence had gone on for a little too long.

“No,” Damian said, quickly. He sighed, looking down at his own plate. “I mean, it’s the sort of stunt that only you’d come up with. But it kind of reminds me of myself, in a way. Setting a goal and pushing yourself until you get there, no matter the cost… It’s just… Well, I don’t want you to get hurt, Finn. Don’t want anything to happen to you.” His chocolatey brown eyes searched Finn’s face. “I care about you.”

Finn’s smirk turned into a genuine smile, at that, a big, toothy grin. “Aw, shucks, you’re gonna make me blush.” He gave his friend a playful punch in the arm. “Anyway, I’ll be fine. As soon as I get permission to work from home, I’ll drop it all. I’ll look like you in no time.”

Damian nodded again. He looked away from Finn, back to the steamed vegetables and wild rice on his plate. “Of course,” he said. “I’m sure you will.”

Finn frowned. Damian really was a terrible liar.

After that night, something in Finn changed. It wasn’t just about the job anymore. Now, there was something inside of him that wanted to get fatter, a part of his libido that pushed him to expand his stomach and add even more fat to his obese body.

Finn had always been lazy, but the added pounds made him even lazier. Even the most basic tasks started to seem like a chore, if not a workout. He loathed standing in front of the sink to wash dishes, or picking up the garbage that accumulated around his apartment. Hauling a load of laundry down the stairs might as well have been a marathon. He didn’t mind showers, since they gave him a chance to size up his expanding body, but the amount of time it took to wash all that added flesh was getting to be a headache.

And he abandoned any pretense of keeping his office clean. Was he supposed to get up and walk over to the recycling bin, like some sort of olympic athlete? Not fucking likely. Ron glared at him, staring at the empty soda bottles and takeout boxes that littered his desk. Finn knew that Ron was the one who ended up disposing of the absurd amount of waste he produced in the run of a day. His disgust was like an aphrodisiac to Finn, who relished the judgmental stares of skinny people, the way they watched, uncomprehendingly, as he treated his ballooning body like a dumpster for a repulsive array of junk food.

Other than Damian. His reaction had been a complete shock to Finn. Damian didn’t judge him, or push him to work out. In a strange way, Damian seemed to appreciate the effort that he was putting into his body, to admire his dedication to this new lifestyle of laziness and voracious greed. Damian sometimes showed up at Finn’s door with a heavy bag of takeout, tidying up Finn’s living room as he devoured whatever offerings his friend delivered. And it wasn’t just takeout: sometimes Damian brought a six pack of beer, a pan of homemade brownies, or a freshly-baked cheesecake. Finn hadn’t realized his friend was such a talented baker until he tasted his delicious food.

Finn was becoming a lazy, slovenly eating machine, a paragon of ever-expanding gluttony. Hardly a moment passed when he wasn’t stuffing his face with something. There was no denying that he was getting seriously fat: he had gotten into a rhythm, a routine of pushing himself and then pushing himself further. Being full just didn’t cut it anymore; he had to be stuffed. Once, eating 5,000 calories in a day was exceptional; now, it was the norm. He was downright cranky when he didn’t have something to snack on, his mood brightening as soon as he got his pudgy fingers on a bar of chocolate or a greasy slice of pizza.

Blake, his friend at the donut shop, seemed astonished at how much food Finn consumed, even as Finn noticed the cashier’s polo shirt fitting tighter around his growing beer belly and love handles. And he loved teasing Sam, the skinny cashier at Imperial Wok. He’d sidle up to the counter, letting his belly lead the way. “You know the drill,” he’d say, with a wry smile, the slight cashier’s dark eyes boggling at the massive slab of all-American beef parked in front of him. He always made eyes at the dark-haired cutie as he loaded up boxes with a banquet’s worth of egg rolls, fried rice, noodles and sweet-and-sour pork. Sam really did know the drill: dish out enough food to fill Finn’s monstrous belly.

He ballooned up to 300 pounds, and rocketed past 310, more than twice what he weighed six years ago as a trim 18-year-old, and a hundred pounds fatter than the chubby guy he’d been less than a year before. 310 gave way to 320, and then 330. He realized with glee that he was closer to his target than his starting weight.

His new lifestyle was putting a strain on his savings. In addition to blowing money on groceries and takeout, keeping himself clothed was starting to cost a fortune. He tried to plan ahead, but it was only a matter of time before 48” pants went from roomy to cozy to uncomfortable, and then they stopped buttoning altogether, his widening waist overwhelming them, his fat butt consuming every scrap of material.

The contrast between his body and Damian’s was marked as they sat at their usual bar. They had given up on booths, which were starting to become a bit of a squeeze for Finn. Damian looked totally built in a Sun’s Out, Guns Out tank top. And boy were his guns out.

“I deadlifted 350 today,” Damian said, as he speared a piece of lettuce with his fork. His tone was totally casual, like it was the sort of thing he talked about all the time.

Finn didn’t really know what he was talking about. “Huh,” he said, through a mouthful of pizza. “Is that good?” It certainly sounded like a big number.

Damian shrugged. “New personal best. I’m pretty happy about it. I’m almost as strong as Richard now.”

Finn nodded. Richard was the “daddy bear” that had inspired Damian’s ongoing transformation into a muscular jock. Finn didn’t have the heart to tell Damian that no amount of muscle gains would convince Richard to leave his wife, so he just nodded along.

“So you could still lift me,” Finn said, as he grabbed a handful of fries. He grinned. “For now.”

Damian chuckled. “Seriously? How big are you gonna get?” He was trying to sound casual, but there was an edge in his voice. Was it… eagerness?

“420’s the goal,” Finn said, feeling his cock start to stiffen at the thought. “I’ll have to get high to celebrate.”

Damian whistled. “That is… wow, that’s big,” he said, brows arching as he surveyed Finn’s gigantic form.

“Only 75 pounds to go,” he said, slapping his hand against the side of his belly and making it jiggle. “So close I can almost taste it. It kinda tastes like butter.”

Damian laughed. After that, he seemed to show up at Finn’s house practically every day, carrying boxes of snacks and plates loaded down with homemade goodies. Finn always accepted them appreciatively, happy to fill his gut for free—Damian had that engineer money, anyway. And he wouldn’t admit it to his oldest friend, but there was something a little erotic about lazing around on the couch, greedily stuffing his gut, as a muscly hunk picked up his trash and cleaned up his apartment. He’d popped a boner more than a few times watching Damian wash the dishes, firm glutes shifting back and forth as he scrubbed pots and pans.

God, I’m weird, Finn thought to himself. But if it was wrong to get aroused by a gorgeous guy playing housemaid while he gorged himself, Finn didn’t want to be right. Even if that guy was just a friend.

Finn didn’t realize just how many extra calories Damian had been pumping into him until a few weeks later, when he was getting dressed for work. He was used to a bit of a struggle, but this was worse than usual. His pants were skin-tight against his tree trunk thighs, booty fat spilling out over the top like bread dough overfilling its pan. He gave another tug and managed to get his ass covered, but getting them buttoned was an entirely different matter. He pulled as hard as he could, to no avail. He inhaled—still nothing.

He fell backwards onto his bed and sucked in with all his might—a pointless exercise for a man of his impressive size. His stomach was so huge, so laden with fat, that it barely made a difference at this point. But with a little wriggling, he managed to get them to button. His shirt was untucked, but there was no way in hell he was going to try to fix that. With the way his waistband dug into his blubber, he had no prayer of stuffing anything else in there.

He spent the morning in his usual way—feasting on donuts from the shop downstairs. Blake was looking very overfed himself, but his obvious weight gain didn’t even come close to Finn’s astronomical expansion. Finn was annoyed when he had to retrieve something from the printer, but he still hauled himself out of his creaking desk chair and walked over to get it.

But as he lowered his behind back into the chair, he heard a rip. His heart sank: his pants had breathed their last. He peered down at his side, pushing his love handle out of the way so he could size up the damage. He examined the popped seam, realizing that his colossal thighs had completely wrecked his dress pants.

And worst of all, it turned him on. Ron was looking over at him; the ripping sound was loud enough to carry through their narrow office. “Uh, wardrobe malfunction?” he asked.

Finn flushed. “Little bit,” he said. He rested a hand on his oversized gut, giving it a little rub. “Hitting the snacks a little hard I guess.”

Ron raised an eyebrow, and then turned back to his computer without comment. Finn’s boner strained against the front of his ruined pants, and he grabbed a handful of chips from the bag on his desk.

Eating five large meals a day used to be a struggle. Then it became the norm. Now, if Finn didn’t load up on lunch from at least two places, he was left crabby, his vastly overstretched stomach howling for more. But today, he used his lunch hour to waddle over to the mall next door, where he crammed himself into a pair of dress pants from a big and tall store. Seeing the way they cradled every bulge and roll, he faced facts and went a full two sizes up, hoping to accommodate his sprawling lower half for at least a little longer.

He only had time to grab a tray of burgers and fries from the mall food court, and he spent the rest of the afternoon feeling cranky and ill-at-ease, trying to get full from the horde of snacks he kept in his desk drawer. His constant chewing and burping clearly drove Ron insane, but Finn didn’t care—he was fucking hungry.

Finn’s expansion continued at its usual breakneck speed. Egged on by Damian, he packed more and more junk food into his gut, which turned into more and more lard padding his frame. He was blowing up like a balloon, and it drove him crazy with lust.

He’d invested in a scale that read the number out loud, since seeing past his voluminous gut had become impossible. It wasn’t like he missed looking at his chubby feet, and as long as he could still reach his cock, he was happy. When he heaved himself onto the scale and heard that he’d crossed the 400-pound mark, his heart soared. He was so tantalizingly close, now. At this rate, he was only a couple of months away from his target.

He stepped off the scale and ordered three pizzas to celebrate, washed down with a whole case of lager.

The looks he was getting at work ranged from curious to hostile to simply awestruck. His colleagues must have remembered just a few years earlier when his build had been fairly average; now, he was morbidly obese, left red-faced and sweating from the constant exertion of moving so much lard around. He took up so much space, stuffed his face constantly, chairs creaked and bowed under his heft—even his reinforced desk chair, a relatively recent addition to his office, was starting to show signs of wear. Hearing the indiscreet whispers as he left the breakroom carrying a handful of donuts made him insanely horny—what’s going on with him? He used to be kind of cute, now look at him! He’s as fat as a house!

Finn booked a doctor’s appointment, knowing that was the next step to make his dreams a reality. As soon as the date was set, he upped his intake even more, devouring thousands upon thousands of calories a day. Damian never seemed uncomfortable with the uneasy looks on the server’s faces when Finn ordered multiple appetizers and entrees at their weekly bar night; if anything, he encouraged Finn to order even more.

He got his bloodwork done in preparation for his doctor’s appointment, noting the shocked look on the nurse’s face when he showed up in a shirt that clung to his gut and moobs, framing it like the world’s fattest painting.

Finally, the day arrived. That morning, he realized he’d actually overshot the mark when he weighed in at 428 pounds. His thighs rubbed together as he waddled down the driveway, and he squeezed himself into the driver’s seat of his car, which dipped to the side under his bulk. He stopped for a bag of burgers on the way to the clinic.

Sitting under the fluorescent lights of the doctor’s office, Finn shifted his giant bulk, which ballooned over the sides of the chair like an avalanche of flab. He squirmed uncomfortably as Dr. Hendricks looked over a piece of paper, his handsome face grim. The fact that he was something of a silver fox—with an athletic build, chiselled features, salt-and-pepper hair, and short stubble—deepened Finn’s embarrassment about the whole situation, as well as his arousal. The doctor looked up, removing his glasses.

“Well, it’s not good, Finn,” he said, finally. “Your thyroid levels are normal, so it’s not hormonal. But your cholesterol is high, blood pressure is high, blood sugar is almost dangerous… young man, this is serious. You’ve gained over 230 pounds since our last appointment two years ago. If 230 pounds was your entire body weight, it would still be about 50 pounds too high.”

Finn nodded along. Hearing it put in those terms made his cheeks flush. He shifted again, aware of the way his giant ass bulged and spilled over his seat, the chair’s arms cutting into his expansive love handles. He was grateful for the way his gut monopolized his lap, disguising his boner.

“So, what’s going on with you, Finn?” Dr. Hendricks asked. “In my whole career, I’ve never seen anything like this. Not so much weight, so quickly, in a patient so young, without a hormonal component. Has there been… some trauma, maybe, that’s made you turn to food as a coping mechanism?” The doctor was clearly looking for some explanation that didn’t involve Finn using his body as a garbage can for every type of fast food that had the misfortune of crossing his ever-widening path.

Finn shook his head. He rubbed the rolls on the back of his neck with his pudgy fingers, a move which caused his undersized t-shirt to ride up, exposing a thick expanse of belly fat. Dr. Hendricks glanced at it, wide-eyed. Finn tugged it down, but the hem still couldn’t contain it all. “It’s—it’s nothing like that, doctor. Honestly. I guess I just like my food a little too much.”

Dr. Hendricks frowned, and made a note in Finn’s chart. He wondered what the doctor was writing. Fat fuck, maybe? Giant pig? Finn inhaled: it was showtime.

“But… I think I have one idea, at least about part of the problem,” he said. “At my job, I’m just sitting around on my computer all day…. When I was in school I used to bike to campus sometimes, but now I sit in my car, ride the elevator to my office, and then I just sit and snack all day….”

The doctor nodded along, jotting down a quick note. “Remind me what you do, Finn?”

“Customer service. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent job, but I share an office with, well, a pretty big guy,” Finn lied. “He’s always bringing in unhealthy snacks, and I guess it’s rubbed off on me. It’s like, when I’m at my desk, I’m always eating. And there’s a food court on the ground floor of our building, it’s so tempting that I end up eating three meals a day there, sometimes. Sometimes more. Big meals.”

The truth was the opposite: Finn was the big guy in the office, and Ron was the one who was picking up his bad habits. And he didn’t just eat three meals a day in the food court; it was almost always more.

Dr. Hendricks nodded. “And you haven’t had success with portion control, or exercise?”

Finn reached across his blubbery breasts, running a hand along his flabby upper arm. “I keep trying to cut back, but I’m just too tempted. And in terms of exercise, I feel so tired by the time I get home from work that I just can’t make myself go to the gym.”

That part was mostly true, at least. Except for attempting to cut back.

“Have you considered seeing a therapist?” Dr. Hendricks’ voice was gentle. “What you’re describing sounds like it could be food addiction.”

Finn swallowed, feeling a lump form in his throat. He was fully clothed, but sitting under the fluorescent lights, he felt exposed—an enormous, naked blob of a man. A small part of his brain knew that maybe the doctor was right, maybe he was getting hooked on the high of fat, salt, and sugar… assuming he wasn’t hooked already. It was more than a little erotic. But he pushed those thoughts aside and pressed ahead with his performance. “Maybe I should see someone, yeah. But I really think the biggest problem is my job.”

Ten minutes later, Finn left Dr. Hendricks’ office with a note recommending that work from home would be helpful to Finn’s weight loss plan. He’d also sworn up and down that he would change his diet, start exercising, and see a therapist—promises he had no intention of keeping. He’d gotten what he wanted, and he didn’t plan on going back to see his doctor anytime soon.

Finn was glowing as he made his way home. The next day, he handed the doctor’s note to his boss, who looked it over. The slim man’s exasperation was obvious, but he managed to keep it contained, no doubt conscious of the union rep staring at him with a serious look on her face.

And then, it was done. His plan was complete. He boxed up his office at the end of the day, and headed home, hoping never to return. Except, perhaps, to flirt with Sam and keep tabs on Blake’s steady and seemingly inexorable transformation from cub to chub.

Okay, now that I’ve got what I want, I can start to shift some of this weight, Finn thought when he woke up the next morning. He’d celebrated pretty hard the night before—pizzas, fried chicken, cake, pie, with beer and soda to drink… a true feast. It was supposed to be a last hurrah. But now, he had to start cutting back. Time to put Damian to shame, he thought, grinning.

His diet plans didn’t exactly pan out.

Before settling into his couch to work, Finn had two pieces of toast with peanut butter for breakfast. In the old days, that would have been enough to carry him through the whole morning. But he was hungry again within a half hour, distractingly hungry. He kept zoning out when he was supposed to be answering emails, conscious of how empty his stomach felt.

Well, I can’t exactly change overnight, Finn thought, as he punched in a mobile order for a couple of breakfast sandwiches and a few hasbrowns. Not realizing what he was doing, he finished off a box of cookies before they even arrived.

The rest of the day went similarly: he thought about cutting back, and then his stomach and his brain conspired against any attempt to actually do it. By the end of his workday, his stomach was achingly full, packed with more donuts, pizza, and Chinese food than he ever ate at the office.

Okay, I’m really gonna do it today, Finn would think each morning. I’m actually going to lose some weight now. But after years of stuffing and overstuffing his gut, stretching it to new and obscene proportions, it took a lot to make him feel full. If anything, any attempts to cut back left him feeling so miserable and hungry that he invariably ended up overdoing it, eating more than he needed to compensate for his few hours of attempted restraint. So he kept eating, and his portions kept escalating, and he didn’t lose any weight.

In fact, as he tried to button up his shirt before a video call one morning, he came to the uncomfortable conclusion that he’d piled on even more. The shirt wouldn’t even button over his fat gut. He managed to close it over his tits, though, and got away with it by keeping the camera pointed at his chubby face and soft shoulders.

He confessed his struggles to Damian one night, when his muscular friend showed up with a bag brimming with takeout. Finn had told him to stop bringing snacks, and then immediately changed his mind, telling Damian to keep that good food coming. Damian was a little reluctant, at first, but it didn’t take him long until he was back to his old habits: filling his car with family-sized meals and bulging bags of snack foods to ply on his ever-greedier, continuously-expanding best friend.

“I don’t think I’ve lost any weight,” Finn said, frowning as he took another heaping forkful of fried rice.

Damian looked him up and down, seeming to take in the sheer vastness of Finn’s enormous body as it dominated the couch. “Well, have you tried cutting out snacks?”

Finn frowned. “Not exactly.”

“What about exercise? You could come to the gym with me.”

“Definitely not,” Finn said. The idea of stuffing his hundreds of pounds of blubber into workout clothes and putting on a humiliating show for the muscle-heads at Damian’s gym sounded like an exercise in humiliation, besides being utterly exhausting.

Damian sighed. “I was kind of hoping you’d say yes. I need a new workout buddy.”

“What about Richard?” Finn asked, through a mouthful of General’s chicken. “You were just saying last week that you finally benched more than him.”

Damian looked like he was about to cry. He bit his lower lip and looked away. “Richard told his wife about us. He confessed everything and begged her to forgive him. He told me he joined another gym, so I doubt I’ll be seeing him again.”

Finn frowned, and rested a hand on Damian’s steely shoulder. He knew this was coming, even if Damian was blindsided. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Sounds like you need a drink.”

Damian hesitated. He was always going on about liquid calories, but Finn watched him leap off the couch and stride into the kitchen, where he pulled out a couple of beers.

A few hours later, Finn was buzzed and Damian was plastered. He’d spent the evening pouring his heart out about how he’d never find love, how he’d never heard a guy say “I love you”, how there must have been something wrong with him.

Finn swallowed a mouthful of cheesecake. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you,” Finn said. He meant it. In Finn’s eyes, Damian was totally perfect. Hardworking, honest, funny, kind… not to mention stunningly attractive and with a great job. “You’re the whole package.”

Damian scoffed. “You’re just saying that. You have to say that, you’re my best friend.”

Finn looked him in the eyes. “No, I really mean that. I think any guy would be lucky to have you.”

“Not any guy,” Damian mumbled. His voice was bitter. He took another sip of beer.

“What do you mean?”

Damian’s eyes searched Finn’s round face. “Well, the only guy I’ve ever wanted sees me as a friend. No matter how hard I throw myself at him, he never makes a move.”

Finn was floored. “You mean…”

Damian nodded. An embarrassed look crossed his handsome face. “Yeah. You. I still think about that night we kissed, how much I wanted it. How much I want to do it again.”

“I think about it, too,” Finn admitted. He’d never stopped thinking about the feeling of Damian’s soft lips against his, their slender bodies pressed together. “All the time.”

“I’ve loved you since we were 12 years old, Finn. Looking at you through our bedroom windows, across our yards… God, I would have done anything for you. Why do you think I let you copy my homework, my tests? Or took the fall for you when your parents found that weed in your backpack, even though I got grounded for a month? Because I’ve always been fucking crazy about you.”

Finn’s heart was pounding in his chest, and not only from the mountain of dessert he’d just devoured. “What, even now? Now that I look like this?”

“Especially now,” Damian answered. His expression was so serious, his eyes so honest… “God, it’s like… the bigger you get, the crazier you drive me.”

Finn smiled. “What, you mean you’ve liked blowing me up like a balloon?”

Damian grinned shyly, pushing his glasses up his nose. “It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever done. Some days after I bring you snacks, I have to rush home to, uh, relieve myself.”

Finn laughed at that. “Wow. And here I thought you were just being friendly.”

Damian looked across the room, not meeting Finn’s gaze. He took another swig of beer. “A real friend would’ve told you what a blimp you were turning into. A real friend wouldn’t get off on seeing how many calories he could pile into your gut in a single sitting.”

Finn shook his head. His cock ached at the thought of Damian feeding him, getting off on his fattening body. “Well I guess I don’t want a ‘real’ friend. I want a friend like you.”

Damian blushed. Finn leaned forward, straining to reach over his beach ball-sized gut, and set his beer on the table. He couldn’t take his eyes off of Damian’s face.

“So many times when I’ve been with Richard, I’ve been thinking about you. Thinking about how big your butt is, how badly I want to grab it and squeeze it and make your whole body shake. Thinking about how you used to be even smaller than me when we were younger, and how now you could bury me under all your weight and still have plenty to spare. Thinking about—”

Finn leaned in and pressed his lips against Damian’s, shutting him up. Damian melted into the kiss immediately, his body slackening as he collapsed into Finn’s bulk.

And suddenly, they were 18 again, drunk on fireball shots and lying on Damian’s bed after Lindsay Decker’s house party, giggling like fools until their lips met and the whole world disappeared around them. It was just the two of them, just Finn and Damian, their shared past and future collapsing into one breathless kiss.

Damian exhaled, and then kissed Finn even more forcefully, his arm draping around Finn’s neck, his free hand reaching out to cup one of his soft, bulging breasts, nipple poking against his slender fingers. Finn kissed him back, one hand on Damian’s narrow waist, the other cupping his angular face, the tips of his fingers brushing through Damian’s soft hair. He’d been waiting so long for this moment, always afraid that he’d misread some signal or that he couldn’t be the man his best friend deserved. But he’d waited long enough. They both had. He was ready.

They laughed when their lips pulled apart, the tension vanishing behind them. “Are you gonna regret this in the morning?” Finn asked.

Damian’s expression turned serious, almost defiant. “The only thing I regret is taking so long.”

Finn couldn’t keep himself from smiling.

“So…” Damian said. He fixed Finn with a lusty gaze, eyes lidded with pleasure, and licked his lips. “How about we take the rest of this cheesecake and head to the bedroom?”

Finn raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? You’re not just saying that because you’re drunk?”

Damian shook his head. “I’m not that drunk,” he said. He trailed his fingers along the endless curve of Finn’s palatial belly, caressing the naked flesh that erupted out from under the hem of his shirt. “I’ve just spent so long fantasizing about feeding you properly, and… well, why settle for off-brand diet cola when you can have classic Coke?”

Now Damian was speaking his language.

Finn’s ears perked up at the sound of the key turning in the front door. He shifted in the love seat, briefly considering getting up to greet Damian at the door, but decided against it. It would take a couple of minutes to build up enough momentum to haul himself to a stand.

“I’m home!” Damian called from the kitchen.

“Perfect timing,” Finn called back. “I’m so frickin’ hungry. Starving, even.”

“Hold your horses, big fella, let me get my coat off first.”

“Hurry,” Finn whined, trailing his hand across his gut to soothe it. He’d polished off two pizzas for lunch, followed by two family-size bags of chips and a package of twinkies, but he hadn’t eaten in almost an hour. He knew he wasn’t actually hungry, but when he wasn’t eating, he started to get antsy. He chugged some soda, squirming in anticipation.

A moment later, Damian appeared in the living room doorway, muscular arms flexing as he carried two heaping grocery bags. Damian had to make grocery runs on a daily basis to keep up with the demands of Finn’s relentless appetite.

He must have encountered quite a scene in the living room: just like he always wanted, Finn was seated on the couch in his underwear, TV playing in the background. Except, he’d never imagined just how truly, colossally, unbelievably fat he would be. He was so wide that his bulging flanks brushed against the sides of the loveseat, which bowed in the middle under his immense, crushing weight. His laptop balanced on top of his belly, which was more a table than a shelf, which plowed outwards in front of him as far as his knees. His thighs were like industrial drainage tubes, his melon-sized manboobs pouring off his chest and sticking out to the sides. When he leaned back, the combined weight of his breasts and mountain of belly fat compressed his lungs.

“So, how are those weight loss plans coming along?” Damian asked, with a wry smirk.

“Very funny,” Finn said. He still maintained that he would lose some weight, but that was starting to seem more like fantasy than an actual, tangible possibility. Just halting his astronomical weight gain would be a challenge at this point, given how hopelessly addicted he was to stuffing his face. He had an appointment with Dr. Hendricks in a few weeks, and he could only imagine the look of horror on the gorgeous doctor’s face when he showed up so fat that he could barely fit through the doorway, not to say into an office chair. “Are you just gonna stand there and watch me slowly starve to death, or are you gonna bring those snacks over?”

Damian rolled his eyes, still smiling. “Yeah, I can tell you’re really famished. My first clue was all the garbage scattered around.” He did as he was told, bringing the grocery bags over to Damian, who immediately tore open a package of donuts. Relief flooded across his brain as soon as the taste of powdered sugar touched his tongue.

Damian had a point: there was garbage everywhere. In addition to Finn’s gluttonous afternoon, there were also pastry boxes and fast food wrappers scattered around from his two breakfasts and morning snacks. He’d asked Damian to start leaving the door unlocked so delivery drivers could let themselves in and bring the food straight to the couch; getting up was too much effort. Finn enjoyed watching them squirm uncomfortably at the sight of such an enormously obese blob of man sprawled out across an entire sofa, too fat and lazy to even reach his front door; he wondered if they ever felt morally conflicted about their role in his escalating obesity. He hoped they didn’t, given how much he was enjoying it. Sam and Blake certainly didn’t seem to mind, when he’d made his way to the office to get a new work computer a few weeks earlier. Blake had to have crossed the 300 pound mark—big enough to catch Sam’s attention, judging by the looks they were swapping across the food court.

“How was work?” Finn asked, through a mouthful of donuts. “And the gym?”

“Work was lame, gym was good,” Damian said. He reached for a donut but Finn slapped his hand away.

“It’s not—braaaaawp—cheat day,” he said; a window-rattling burp interrupted him mid-sentence.

Damian sighed, “You’re right.”

“Can’t—urp—have you getting chubby on me,” Finn joked. He honestly didn’t care how much Damian weighed; if his boyfriend thickened up a little, he wouldn’t mind one bit. But there was something deeply erotic about being so incredibly fat and still forcing a complete beefcake like Damian to submit and obey. It wasn’t about food or weight—it was about power.

“No, we can’t have that. Nothing but whitefish and flaxseed and creatine for your live-in manservant,” Damian joked back. Finn made it clear early on that he loved Damian’s body no matter what; his jockish boyfriend knew that any teasing was all in good fun. He clearly liked his submissive role in their flirty back-and-forth. “How was your day?”

Finn belched again; that second bottle of soda was really wreaking some havoc. “Good. I had to put a shirt on for a Zoom meeting, so I guess it was a gym day for me, too. Oh, Tony from IT is back in the office, apparently. Lost a bunch of weight. So I’m officially the fattest guy at work by a long shot.”

“Congratulations,” Damian said. The fact that Finn considered putting on a shirt to be a workout clearly had him hot and bothered, judging by the bulge in his pants; he hooked his thumbs into his waistband, sliding them down a little to reveal his Adonis belt. “How do you wanna celebrate?”

“With cake,” Finn said. When he saw Damian’s frown, he smiled: “Only kidding. Well, half kidding. Cake, but also a nice game of ‘find my dick’, if you’re up for it.”

“Oh, I’m always up for it,” Damian said, smiling devilishly as he ran a hand through his hair.

“But, uh, wanna grab me some ice cream first? To go with the donuts?”

Damian nodded, “Of course, big boy,” he said. He disappeared into the kitchen, the picture of obedience.

Finn smiled as Damian returned, cartons of ice cream clutched in each hand. Finn had found the ultimate life hack: as long as Damian was around, he could get away with doing absolutely nothing.

#wg #male wg #gaining fiction #wg story #realistic gain #gay

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spade-riddles · 4 years ago

Text

Submission: Adjusting expectations

Okay, guys. Wading in here where it’s possible no-one wants me, but … here goes.

We - Kaylors - are in a hard place right now. People feel hurt, they feel hopeless. They feel like they were led on by the likes of Spade. I’m not here to invalidate any of the feelings that come from seeing Karlie and Taylor play out this charade.

But I think we (collectively, as a fandom) need to take a breath and ask if any of this is really as bad or unfixable as we think it is. Because, for me, the recent stunting is hard to stomach but not truly surprising. On some level this is how I expected Karlie and Taylor to handle both the birth of the baby and the launch of the rerecorded albums. As much I wanted to believe in the idea of spring breaking loose and bringing with it a fervent revolution … I could see the pieces still in play on the board and I doubted it was coming.

I think the problem is that there was a split between the optimist and pragmatist sides of the fandom, over the last year or so. To be clear - I’m not judging the optimist side of the fandom. Not at all. Taylor has pulled wildcard moves before, and emotions run so high in all this, especially with a baby involved now, that I don’t blame people for wanting to believe the best. But it reached a stage where some of the things people were trying to talk themselves into were just wildly unrealistic. And when that happens, of course you’re going to get hurt. It’s inevitable.

But let’s really look at this for a second. We should have known that neither Karlie nor Taylor was going to be shaving her beard in March. Ditching Jerk right after or just before the birth would have been too soon for Karlie. It’s not unusual for a celeb marriage to fizzle out within a year of the birth, but before the baby even arrives? That would be weird, and would draw attention just when it seems Kaylor don’t want it. They just had a baby. That’s an adjustment in itself, and Karlie is suffering enough social media hate on top of that. I wouldn’t blame her for just wanting to take a break and lie low during this difficult time. And unfortunately, for Karlie, that means maintaining the status quo of the situation she put herself in with Jerk. She may be doing the bare minimum to maintain it, but if she wants to avoid attention, she has to make it seem like everything between her and her “husband” is normal. And that she’s trying to make it work, which I believe will be important later. Good people try to make it work, even in bad relationships.

Toe wasn’t going anywhere either. Taylor had relied on him so heavily during the promotion of Folklore, with the William Bowery narrative, that she was almost backed into a corner. She had to give some allusion to his air quotes “creative input” and their so-called happy relationship, or her failure to do so would have become the story and overshadowed her night. The headlines would have either been break-up speculation or complaints that she didn’t give him his due. We think the cutesy coverage after she named him in her acceptance speech was bad, but negative headlines have a far longer shelf life and can take on a life of their own. They would have been worse. Whatever we might think of Taylor’s actions, Folklore is one of her best albums and she deserved to have her night.

So, on to the announcement of the birth. This is a tricky one, and again, I completely understand why people reacted so badly against it. It was everything we as a fandom said we didn’t want. It was Jerk using the baby for personal good PR. But I have to be honest here. I always thought we were kidding ourselves believing he would NEVER be seen with the baby or implied to be the father. I do believe Karlie is doing her damnedest to minimize the digital footprint of his involvement and keep her actual baby out of it. But he was always going to get to bask in the glow of playing daddy for a while. It’s the trade off Kaylor made when they used him to shore up their closet.

This is also why I increasingly suspect the timing of the announcement got the green light from Kaylor too. If Jerk was always going to be assumed to be the father of Karlie’s baby, then there was always going to have to be a birth announcement that incorporated him somehow - unless the girls were ready to answer awkward questions, and it doesn’t seem like we’re there yet. So the best way to minimize the damage is to have his moment of glory overshadowed by a bigger win for Taylor. It worked pretty well actually. Even on Kaylor blogs the stunt was mostly buried by Taylor content.

I know a lot of fans feel gaslit by all the hints, but I do think there’s a possibility Taylor really didn’t grasp how hurt Kaylors would be. From her perspective, she “fed” fans three times over that night. She gave us a beautiful performance, a gorgeous red carpet moment, and a win to celebrate. I think it’s possible she really didn’t realize the double whammy of stunting that night would make it all feel worthless for many.

Taylor is in an awkward position. As a consequence of Kaylor retreating into the closet, the support base for them has shrunk. (When I use the words “Kaylor fandom”, I refer to this support base.) I would say Kaylor fandom consists of two parts. There is a silent portion, who observe events and comment anonymously, but don’t say anything “on main”. And then there are the small corps of true believers, who think Karlie and Taylor are still together and the baby is theirs. This latter group do most of the actual talking about Kaylor, but they tend to be pretty battle-hardened. They’ve been around for years, they never believe any of the stunts and their capacity to be hurt by them is, as a result, pretty limited. These Kaylors criticize sometimes, but they tend to fall back in line eventually and mostly adopt a “let’s wait and see how this all shakes out” approach. The problem is that I would say these “chilled” Kaylors are the minority. For their own sanity they curate their blog experience and often don’t post the more negative anons they get. Which is fine, but if you were looking at it from the outside, I could see how it might create an impression that the fandom as a whole can roll with the punches. And for a lot of the silent majority, that’s not the case.

But again, I can see how Taylor might not necessarily know that. She went quiet after the Grammys, when I might have expected more celebratory posts from her. If I had to guess, I’d say she didn’t expect the backlash. I’m especially noticing a backlash against her for allowing Karlie to take so many hits while her own reputation has never been better. And I can’t defend her on that one, except to say I hope she has a plan. But I understand where people are coming from when they say the songs aren’t enough and actions speak louder than words. It’s tough to watch.

Still, we’re in a position we should realistically have been able to see coming. We should have known Jerk wasn’t going to be out of the picture immediately after the birth. This is one of those things nobody likes, but maybe we all just have to be patient on. I don’t see Karlie busting out of the closet to admit her marriage was a fake, or testifying to the FBI. I think she’ll just let her marriage quietly fall apart, as many real marriages did during the pandemic. And for that to work, she needs to make it look like didn’t throw away a family unit lightly. Hence the “I tried” post, the social media break, and the suggestions of spending time with Jerk’s family. All of this can be spun later into a narrative of Karlie having tried to make it work, only to never really be accepted. The hate online affected her mental health and she gradually realized how unhappy she’d become and decided she needed to break free and find her old self again for her baby’s sake. This is the most likely narrative for Karlie’s freedom and it’s one that could work - but it’s going to take time to unfold. Personally, I’m giving it a year. If we don’t see a separation by then, and definitive moves to a reunited Kaylor, I’ll be bowing out. I’ll still know what I believe the truth to be, but I won’t see the need to devote my energy to defending it. ,

Meanwhile, the masters rerecords are about to be released, and Taylor has invested a lot in their success. Because of this, I can’t envision her coming out until at least the big three (Fearless, 1989, and Red) have dropped. She might drop hints, but I don’t expect anything earth-shattering. Even the order of the album releases seems to confirm this. She’s breaking out the big guns first.

I’ve seen people speculate that because Rep can’t be rerecorded until 2022, Taylor will hold off on any coming out until then. And I’m not so sure of that. Yes, people listening to the album for clues would give Scott and Scooter money, but if we’re being honest, a fair amount of people are probably listening to those albums already, regardless of the drama. Those sleazeballs are profiting from Rep, full stop. But if Taylor profits more, from her bigger albums, she still wins. And she can still put out a Taylor’s version of Rep with vault tracks and collabs, to seduce people away from the Big Machine version in early 2022. Honestly, I think there’s a good chance Taylor would consider this is a worthwhile trade-off anyway, if it meant she got to live a more open life with Karlie - and most crucially, begin to repair Karlie’s reputation. As children get older and the world begins to leave the pandemic behind, it becomes harder to live behind closed doors. I guess we’ll find out how Taylor finds the reality of such a life, and what she considers worth sacrificing to step away from it.

All this to say: I can’t predict the future more than anyone else, but I don’t think the situation we’re in now is irreparable, and if we’re being really objective, I don’t think it’s even surprising. I do think Taylor should give us something, if she wants to keep us around. No-one can live on a complete absence of hope, and as I’ve stated, letting the fandom dwindle to this extent has its own dangers. But I think we also need to keep our time frames realistic, even if it means rejecting lifelines like the Spade riddles. We shouldn’t expect Karlie to be free of Jerk for around a year, and we shouldn’t expect Taylor to do anything much beyond general music promo until at least the big three have dropped. Sucks to say it, I know. But at least this way we won’t be disappointed, and if Kaylor do pull a wild card and move towards freedom, we can be pleasantly surprised.

Just my two cents.

___________________

Well written and fair arguments on our reactions and expectations. I had typed up more, but I will let others post their comments before I chime in.

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dgcatanisiri · 2 years ago

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It's basically a Will and Grace storyline, and all that implies - as in, "progressive for the 1990s, not even coming close to to approaching the bare minimum bar in the late 2010s this game was produced in."

I firmly believe that Gil was written out of obligation, not passion or consideration - as bad as Andromeda's queer rep was overall, we KNOW that there were plans for it to be worse, with having to fight to keep Suvi a lesbian and not have male Ryder romance her (I believe it was Mary Kirby who had to outright have that fight). To say nothing of the mess of Jaal definitely being meant as a bi romance and having that cut (between the early datamine info and the fact that there wasn't a recorded turn down line - male Ryder just COULDN'T flirt with him on release).

But Gil probably has the least dialogue of any crew member on the Tempest, and definitely the least in terms of romance options, aside from maybe Reyes (though given his featured role in the plot arc on Kadara, I'd call that arguable). And his writing treats him basically as an accessory while approaching his "arc" as having all the passion of the recitation of a math equation by the kid who gives so little shits about the class, they haven't even opened the textbook.

It's basically as homophobic a story as you can get while still featuring a same-sex pairing. Because the heteronormativity REEKS through every interaction that treats having kids as just accepted and inevitable, despite an acknowledgement that, if it does happen in a same-sex pairing, it requires outside intervention and intentional choice. Moreover, it calls for a proper discussion, not effectively reducing things to the reproduction of salmon - you cannot tell me that an effort that operates on the level of the Initiative didn't account for some significant portion of the population of those who came along either dying or choosing not to reproduce, you're assembling a collection of people willing to leave their homes and travel to unknown stars on the hope that there will be easy to find planets capable of housing life as you know it there. That tends to draw people who aren't likely to stay in one place to raise a family in the first place.

Then there's Jill herself, who... If you're introducing your "best friend" with the fact that she gives you shit for what amounts to not being straight, that's not a best friend. That's an enemy you've deluded yourself into believing likes and respects you. The fact that it's repeated that she questions the reproductive choices of the men around her, to the point that Gil says that she'll tell Ryder he has a "civic duty as a man"... Flip the genders, this would NEVER have flown.

AND IT'S ALL TREATED AS QUIRKY AND FUNNY! As if we're expected to see no issue with it, that it's all just casual jokey jokes, and not... y'know actual anti-queer microagressions.

Like I firmly believe that this story was written as a response to the assholes who acted like a colonization effort would actively discourage gay people from signing up, going all "no, see, we have gay dads! Look at how much gays are accepted!"

Thing is, that was a bad faith argument in the first place - it was used by people who didn't want gays in their game at all, and dressed up that homophobia with "I'm not anti-gay! I just don't think that a colonization effort would intentionally bring along people who won't reproduce and contribute to the colonizing! This isn't me being homophobic, I totally swear, pinkie promise!"

It's assuming that kids are always the end result of a relationship, even though none of the human/alien pairings get that, or even the typical heterosexual breeding pairs, just the gay guys, FUNNY. THAT. It's completely ignoring all that is the queer experience, just to get to the conclusion of "we have a story about becoming gay dads, give us all the brownie points!"

Legit, in my stressed-out, caffeine fueled, looming college final projects deadlines coming dangerously close mental state, I would have still been able to bang out a story for Gil that focused on HIM, as a character and individual, and, at most, addressed the IDEA of having kids, AT THE FINALE of the arc, rather than being made into the main component of his story while ignoring him as a character. And I'd do that writing at scale, too.

Y'all remember the announcement about the bi!Jaal patch? They said improvements to male romances for male Ryder. Romances, PLURAL. I'm still waiting for the improvements that weren't focused on Jaal, six plus years later.

CONFESSION:

Ryder and Gil were pretty good until Jill came along with that baby crap. First as a gay man, I would NEVER have a bossy controlling friend like Jill. Hell the only woman I trust is my twin sister. She would never pull that obnoxious bs on me. She even warned in me advance that I would not like Jill and she was right. I can always count on my sister. And second, not every gay man wants kids. Sure its great we can have families but its just not for me or my man. And when we tell people kids are not part of our future they act shocked and sad. Its really annoying.

I would really like to know what the hell the writer was thinking when it came Jill. It almost feels like they read a lot of shmoopy Shepard/ Kaidan fan fiction and got inspired from that figuring thats what we wanted. They even didn't even bother to give Jill a last name. My sister developed this headcanon of Gil and Jill being raised in some sort of group home/ orphanage due to losing their parents young which is why they are close. And that made it slightly tolerable but bioware needs to stop being so half ass about it.

#mass effect #confessions #another angry queer rant

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roseofithaca · 2 years ago

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"It wasn't necessary for Yaz and the Doctor to kiss-"

STOP. JUST STOP.

People the Doctor has kissed in Modern Who, as a man:

Grace (yes I'm counting Eight as modern)

Rose

Martha

Donna

Madame De Pompadour

Elizabeth I

Amy

Clara

Missy

River Song

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.

Please, please tell me how many of those were NECESSARY kisses?! Lets take out the ones that were just for plot contrivances like Donna etc. Wasn't there enough between the Doctor x Rose and the Doctor x River to make it BLINDINGLY obvious they had a romantic relationship without them needing to kiss? Or to say I Love You (obviously what Ten said on BWB)?

People ONLY ever pull this whole "we don't need to shove it in peoples faces by showing them kiss to prove they were in love" when it comes to same sex couples! And it's that kinda bs which keeps letting writers get away with doing to the bare minimum and patting themselves on the back for their "groundbreaking lgbt rep".

It's never necessary for ANY couple to kiss in a story to show their love, and Yaz and Thirteen had more than enough moments that showed how much they cared for each other this episode...But what would have been so bad with a kiss? Or a HUG?! Or an explicit admission of romantic feelings even if they couldn't be acted on? If the Doctor has been shown to do that countless times, in various incarnations, then why not here? Why not Yaz?

Do you know what other Doctor/Companion kiss was unnecessary? Jack Harkness. But RTD gave us the first same sex kiss between a male Doctor and male companion- back in 2005! Back when it was still being debated whether gay people could get married in the UK! No one asked for that kiss, there was no heavily built up relationship between Nine and Jack beyond flirty friendship - but we got it! And the world didn't explode. We appreciated it, that RTD had the guts to not give a shit what any homophobes thought in that moment. And now we probably won't get the chance to see the sapphic equivalent for the Doctor and companion for MANY years, because I'm hoping Ncuti's run is long, but also if who knows if the BBC will try for another female Doctor that soon given Jodie wasn't well received, as what usually happens.

So can we just let people be pissed. We know it wasn't "necessary", we don't care, that's not why we're mad. We're mad because, just like everything Chibnall wrote, we were built up for something that didn't have a satisfying end. And maybe that end could have been a kiss, maybe something else, but just something that felt like we weren't being baited for nothing. The ice cream scene was pretty...but still so distant. This is not just a problem isolated to Doctor Who, there are so many other fandoms I'm seeing go through the same thing with wlw ships in particular (Pattison fans, I feel you), whether it's being queerbaited or our sapphic shows being cancelled. We just want better. Stop getting our hopes up that we're gonna get it if you don't plan to deliver.

#not tagging i just needed to vent

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constant-eggs · 4 years ago

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I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about William on Supergirl from fellow Supercorp shippers, so I wanna talk a bit about Kara and Lena’s love interests and how they are viewed, and also about racism in the show and fandom. This has probably been done to death but I’m new to the fandom — I binge watched the show over the winter and just started using Tumblr in a real way about a month ago. So anyway, back to the men:

There’s the major three: James, Mon-El, and William. Jack is cool too — he should’ve had more than two episodes which is part of the issue I’m going to get to, but he never got to be a major player.

So let’s talk about James. Now, I liked him a lot, particularly in season 1. Of the three main love interests for Kara, he was the only one who (season 1) writers took time to establish as a character separate from her. He had hopes and a backstory (of course), and his own idealism that usually uplifted and sometimes contradicted with Kara’s. He was honest, and vulnerable, and when he made a mistake (like calling Superman against Kara’s wishes) he grew from them. Because he respected Kara, and himself. Now the chemistry between Kara and James for me felt good — it wasn’t earth shattering — but it was typical in what I’d come to expect from a heterosexual pairing. And I would argue that had the writers not done a complete 180 on Kara’s feelings for James in S2 and had let them keep growing together as characters, that the chemistry and relationship could have been really good. But they didn’t because as the writers themselves said, they’re ‘in the drama business.’ So having a healthy, supportive partner for Kara wasn’t their priority, James was sidelined, and then they never figured out what to do with his character from that moment on. Also, I do think that race played a part in the writers’ decision to change direction with their relationship, and it’s...disheartening.

Now real briefly on James with Lena: it reminded me a lot of Laurel 1 and Oliver — when they talked about each other to other people— I believed that there was love, but when they were together, I didn’t see any real spark. Even their drama wasn’t particularly interesting — so I won’t even get into it. But it’s been long enough in this post for me to get to the point of it: the fault of the deterioration of James as a character lies with the writers. They chose to sideline him, have his values constantly shift, and have his character development stagnate post S1. He could’ve had interesting stories as Guardian, could’ve worked more closely with Kara when he replaced Cat Grant, or any number of things. But his potential was squandered. And if they were so dead set on having a male love interest for Kara, he was their best option of the three.

Mon-El and Kara had chemistry. To me, it was very much sibling chemistry in nature, which is kind of funny considering that in the comics he was a pseudo brother to Superman. To be clear I’m talking about Kara and Mon-El and not Chris and Melissa who are married, because they aren’t their characters. That’s how I think he should have stayed — as an antagonistic, shallow brother type who slooowly became decent through character growth and not specifically to become Kara’s love interest. But the handful of times Mon-El did the right thing — rebelling against his parents, trying to be a hero etc. it was because he liked Kara. How boring is that? As a love interest he was subpar — and he continued to be a liar. I don’t hate him like some fans do — and I’m well aware that he was a shallow partner who owned other people on his planet, and a habitual liar. I also see that this show is fantastical in nature where I am rooting for Lena after nearly mind-enslaving the entire population just last season. And also in a universe where a primary hero — Oliver Queen, was a serial killer (as are Laurel 2, Sara Lance, and Mick Rory to name a few). So that isn’t the main reason why I don’t like Mon-El for Kara. I just feel as early Kara felt: She deserves so much better than him.

What is there even to say about William? He’s essentially the audience in character form — the chorus in an Ancient Greek play telling us how we should feel about whatever action he’s being sidelined from. If they wanted him to be endgame, he should’ve been introduced bare minimum a season earlier to give him a fair shot. He needs to be better integrated in the fold, and at this point there isn’t a lot of time to do that well.

I’m making this post though because I don’t agree with some of what I’m seeing in fandom. Yes, I too dislike Mon-El as a love interest for Kara, but I’m not going to yuck someone else’s yum. Same goes for William and James. If you see something romantic, that’s okay. If you’re a multi shipper, that’s okay too. I was into other Arrowverse shows when Karamel and Supercorp animosity was at its highest and saw some of what went on and now I see some people uniting over their mutual dislike for William. But his underdevelopment as a character is once again entirely on the writers and execs. Not Staz Nair. And @motorcyclegirlfriends has a much more nuanced post about how race plays into characters being empathized within fandom and the screen time they are allotted by writers and directors. https://motorcyclegirlfriends.tumblr.com/post/649196192472924160/what-a-lot-of-the-nice-fellow-fans-dont-harass

We shouldn’t be tearing down actors of color or characters of color out of frustration over (potentially/hopefully) queer (white) characters. We should instead be asking for them to have more well rounded stories, just as we ask for better LGBT rep — the two aren’t separate. If Supercorp doesn’t become canon it won’t be because of the subpar heterosexual romances they were given. It will be because the writers see the love story they’ve created, inadvertently or otherwise (even doubling down on it in S5) but chose to ignore it. I really hope that isn’t the case. Us fans deserve more complex, messy slowburn romances, and Supercorp could be up there with She-Ra as one of the best ever portrayed. Here’s to hoping.

#supergirl #supercorp #james olsen #mon el #william dey #lena luthor #kara danvers #let’s be real lena gets the screen time of a co lead #which I love but give me more #kelly olsen #brainy #m’gann m’orzz #j’onn j’onzz #nia nal #and yes william dey if he is going to be the endgame love interest

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dragynkeep · 4 years ago

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Season 3 of the owl House getting cut makes me so mad. LGBT+ content creators always have to suffer to get their stories and good rep out only to get the rug pulled under them by shitty networks while cishets like mkek keep giving us nothing and are rewarded for it.

it’s really sad & why i think a lot more queer people are following content creators themselves & not the networks like disney or nickleodeon. i saw a really interesting thread on it & i’ll come back & link it if i can find it !! but essentially, queer people are recognizing the talent behind queer production & following that, not the companies facing it instead & i hope that we get to see dana make so much more wonderful stuff because she does have a really creative mind.

as for mkek, it is what it is. their fans will adore them for doing less than the bare minimum & those with a braincell will be like wtf?? maybe they’ll finally confirm some queer rep in volume 24 lmao

#rwby #rwde #the owl house #anti disney #owl.txt #answered #q

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diamondcitydarlin · 3 years ago

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Ok I swear to god I'm not trying to rag on asexuality or anyone who is asexual today, in fact I'm talking this much about it because I care about the validity of asexuality and how it is represented on a mainstream platform and I have seen multiple things in SEVERAL fandoms today that are making alarm bells go off in my head and you know what fuck it, we've been ignoring the underhanded propaganda, talking points that have been fed through the internet by the alt-right for too long and look where we are? It's the argument about 'queer' all over again.

I saw many things, but specifically I saw in a discussion where someone was wondering why a show keeps dancing around addressing a character's sexuality (in a show where it has been hinted at but never touched- we ALL know) and several people responded "well what if they're ASEXUAL? I think they're asexual. It's great asexual representation :)"

And like, okay, that is a valid and good interpretation of the situation and I know I for one would love if that is the case, but as the subject material stands now is it really good representation? Is it though? Because they definitely have not addressed head-on the possibility that the character could be ace and/or aro, nor have they dealt with reflecting an ace/aro person's experience. Sure, maybe some of the things that happen are similar, but at this point it is most likely incidental. (I'd love to be wrong, but let's be realistic about mainstream entertainment) This character has not had any of that addressed in any concrete way at all despite the show centering a lot around sex and sexuality for every other character. Why wouldn't it come up and be discussed? And of course, I can't say that wouldn't be enough for an asexual person watching, but I feel like they deserve more than that. Name it. Have the characters discuss it. Show us the effects of this on the character. If we're basing every single character's likely canon outcome purely on the basis of what they haven't done or haven't said we're probably going to be disappointed because that is...pretty broad. Just because the butler's fingerprints are not on the murder weapon does not inherently mean he's innocent; he could have used a glove, after all, and given that he IS a butler-....

My concern here is that this, along with general fandom puritanism and the drive to get icky ew gross sex completely out of fandom spaces, is going to create circumstances favorable for in-fighting and gatekeeping and silencing. Guess who benefits when all of us are arguing amongst each other and not holding Capitalism responsible for properly reflecting our stories and experiences? The people in charge who don't care and would rather not have that expectation hanging over their heads anyway.

Because it's becoming this thing where if a character does not experience any development or exploration in the vein of romance or sexuality then they are indisputably aro-ace and you may not argue otherwise bc that is erasure. Do we not see how easily this can become a way of allowing corporations off the hook without accountability? Not just for properly and unashamedly exploring queer experiences in general, but for aro/ace characters specifically. It's accepting the bare minimum-to-nothing as acceptable rep (for yourself and others) while saying that you are being silenced while you are intentionally trying to silence and censor other marginalized voices. It's bullshit and I'm frustrated that we don't seem to be learning from past mistakes but rather just recycling them again and again in different forms, which is regressive and divisive and helps no one. It also means less quality representation. (To be clear, I'm not talking about headcanoning/interpreting a character as ace/aro or hoping that it will be confirmed in canon, I'm talking about doing that and arguing that any other conflicting interpretations are inherently wrong or a form of violence against you, and/or saying this is definitely what the character is bc the show's lack of addressing anything one way or another is sufficient aro/ace representation)

It is valid to be desperate for representation in media one enjoys; of course it is, and so many of us deserve so much better reflected in the subject material we enjoy and patronize. But we cannot let that desperation drive us to accept less than what we deserve from a system that is routinely pushing back against us and counting on us to fold. We should not allow that to blind us from the true priorities of the people creating the material we're consuming. We can't keep letting desperation put people on pedestals that have absolutely no interest in reflecting us at the expense of other marginalized creators who do and deserve the support so much more.

And also, please. Please. Asexual and sexual fans can coexist. There is nothing inherently wrong with sex, sexuality or wanting to explore sex/sexual behaviors via fictional settings and characters. There is nothing wrong with not being interested in that at all (or just being a little interested or only wanting romantic nonsexual content, etc, however it manifests) and curating your fandom experience to your comfort level. There is absolutely no need for one side to try to invalidate the other, and while the moral right is trying to inject its beliefs and talking points into every available corner of the internet we need to be hyper vigilant about divisive talk and 'otherness' even when it pops up in seemingly benign contexts and places. Any justifying as to why one segment of a group is not as 'valid' or as 'welcome' as the rest. That sort of thing. It's very sneaky and manipulative, but once you're on alert for the red flags and the rhetoric you'll begin to see how this seeps into corners we believe are safe.

They're only as safe as we keep them and the only way we do that is by sticking together, uplifting each other and demanding what we rightly deserve.

#dont know how to tag this and honestly im too scared #but also im not #because it really needs to be said #none of this is new none of this came out of thin air

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lassieposting · 4 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

But we also had:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ghastly/Tanith (~350 year age difference)

Tanith/Sanguine (~250+ year age difference)

Tanith/Saracen (~350 year age difference)

Caisson/Solace (~250 year age difference)

China/Gordon (~400 year age difference)

Kierre/Temper (~500+ year age difference)

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

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

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

ADHD: Skulduggery

Dissociative Identity Disorder: Skulduggery & Vile

Dissociation: Skulduggery again, most notably in DD and DB

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

Impostor Syndrome: Reflectionie

Autism: Clarabelle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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artificialqueens · 4 years ago

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Galactica, Chapter 71 (Group Fic) - TheDane/Veronica

A/N: Fun fact: this rewrite is now the second-longest fic in the Drace Race RPF section of AO3. (Second only to the original story, lol.) So if you’re looking for a lot of content…we’ve got you. ;) Click here if you’re looking for previous chapters (or here if you’d rather read on AO3). 💫

Previously: Violet revealed her estranged relationship with her family to Sutan, and Courtney struggled to live up to Miss Fame’s demands.

This Chapter: Some uncharacteristic vulnerability from Violet, Met Gala meetings and morning television.

***

“Do you want more marshmallows?”

“I always want more marshmallows.”

Katya grinned as she got up from the kitchen table, grabbing Trixie’s mug to top them both up. They were decorating gingerbread men, Katya pulling them from the oven last night. Trixie was doing clothes, drawing in the lines and putting details on them, one of his favorite jobs.

It was a tradition of theirs, spending the Sunday before Christmas in their pajamas, preparing cookies and watching Home Alone, the leftover icing always ending up in the bedroom for some sticky afternoon fun.

***

“Aaaand release...”

“Oh god,” Sutan groaned, rolling onto his back and spreading out like a starfish. “I’m dead.”

When he had jokingly asked if he could join Violet for her yoga session, he hadn’t figured she’d say yes, and he definitely hadn’t expected that it’d be this hard, those last few breaths of extended child’s pose essentially torture where he could feel his bones bend and creak.

“Stop being so dramatic,” Violet grinned, his girlfriend sitting back on her knee, the leg with her cast spread out to the side. “We only did 40 minutes.”

“You’re not even sweating.” Sutan looked at her, Violet’s hair in a high ponytail, the Sunday look of one of his shirts and a sports bra quickly becoming a fave.

“Some of us remember to do more than weights and cardio, Mr. Amrull.”

“I’m texting my trainer right now,” Sutan reached over his head, grabbing his phone that he had left on the floor next to their mats, Violet giggling as she laid down next to him, putting her head on his shoulder.

“There,” Sutan pressed send, his trainer probably falling off of his chair when he read the message, Sutan always attempting to get away with the bare minimum when it came to exercise, but he refused to be humiliated by being unable to reach his toes.

He was just about to put his phone down, when Violet reached up and tapped the screen, his front camera opening up, both of them in frame as they were lying on the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking a picture?” Violet smiled, her sarcastic tone never wavering. “To document the moment.”

Sutan looked at the screen. It was so incredibly tempting to say yes, to keep this moment in the private password protected collection that had steadily grown since Thanksgiving, Violet really and truly trying to let him take pictures, but he couldn’t say yes, not when he knew why she was so confident.

“And can I post it?”

“Post it?” Violet raised an eyebrow, sitting up on her elbows. “Why? Isn’t your hair...?”

“A mess?” Sutan didn’t want to smile, but it was impossible not to, Violet knowing him way too well if she had already figured out that he was sometimes embarrassingly vain about his hairstyle, the mess on his head looking like he had been fucking for an hour. “Yes, but I still want to post it.”

“I-” Violet had pulled away completely now, not a single trace of the sweetness left. “No.”

“Violet,” Sutan sat up as well, putting his phone down, “I know you hate social media, but you’re my girlfriend, and I don’t think what I ask for is unreasonable-”

“Sutan. Please” Violet grabbed her mat and rolled it together in an attempt to avoid him. “I said no.”

“And I’m pushing because I don’t understand.” Sutan could feel the annoyance build, the hurt and the rejection. It stung every single time Violet denied him, hurt every time she neglected what they had.

“I’m not saying we have to announce it with a workout selfie,” Sutan hated that they were fighting, but he couldn’t help himself, “but I want to tell the world that we’re together.”

“And I don’t-” Violet looked at him, her brown eyes filled with hurt. “If the world knows, they know, and I don’t want them to know where I am or what I’m doing.”

There it was. The they, the them, the family from Atlanta that was haunting his girlfriend's life like a shadow that had slowly started to creep into his too.

“Violet, I hate to be the one to tell you,” Sutan didn’t touch her, simply putting his hand down on the floor next to hers, telling her that he was there. “But the internet exists. If they have your name, they can find you, no matter what you do to hide.”

“Have you taken a moment to consider that they might not have that?”

Sutan paused, Violet’s words like a bomb.

“... What?”

Did her family not have her name? It was true that Violet Chachki barely got any hits on google, that it was Parson’s assignments and internships that popped up, the Galactica employee directory right at the top, but Sutan had never considered that possibility, had never even toyed with it.

“This wasn’t how I planned on telling you. Actually, I probably wasn’t counting on telling you at all, but I’m not…” Violet was fiddling with the tiniest hole in her yoga mat, her fingers tugging on the foam. “I wasn’t born Violet. Wasn’t even born a Chachki. Hasn’t it ever seemed weird to you that my last name literally means trinket?”

“It does?”

“Mmh,” Violet smiled, the same heavy sadness he had seen in the hospital in her eyes. “I needed to not be… Blair anymore.”

“Blair?”

“Yes,” Violet nodded. “Blair Dardo. It was my birth name. I never liked it, and I changed it the moment I turned 18, left it behind the second I could. That’s why I can’t,” Violet gestured vaguely to Sutan’s phone. “Changing it meant that they can’t, that they can’t find me, and I-”

Sutan didn’t know what to say, but it felt like he had just been given another puzzle piece in the mystery that was his girlfriend.

“I’m sorry.”

Violet’s head snapped to attention, her eyes widening in confusion. “...What?”

“I’m sorry.” Sutan said it again, making sure he put his genuine emotion behind the words. “I should have realized that you weren’t saying no to be difficult, and yet I kept pushing.”

“Sutan-” Violet still looked confused and a little suspicious, like she didn’t really understand what he was doing. “You don’t have to-”

“No but I do.” Sutan smiled. “I get it now, and I’m sorry, but next time you have a deep dark secret, maybe you could just tell me instead of this charade-”

Sutan was cut off as Violet threw herself in his arms, knocking him down on the floor and kissing him like her life depended on it, gratitude rolling off of her in waves.

***

“Raja?”

Alyssa held out the plate of croissants, Raja waving it away since she didn’t want one. The entire senior management team was gathered in the conference room, Fame for some ungodly reason always insisting on a full breakfast spread for their Monday meetings, even though only a fraction of them ever actually ate any of it.

“So,” Fame looked around, a gold fountain pen in her hand, a black moleskin notebook open in front of her. “Any updates?”

The theme of today's meeting was the 2015 Met Gala, Raja barely hiding a groan when Courtney had sent out the meeting agenda.

It wasn’t that she disliked the Met Gala, the first Monday in May a spectacular party, but it was such a hassle getting there, the gala the fashion world's version of the Oscars.

“Yes,” Pearl smiled, turning around in her chair. She was weirdly chipper, her blonde hair collected in a clip, her signature leather jacket exchanged with a cropped black fur. “We have the final confirmation from Jessica Chastain’s team. She’s in.”

“Good,” Fame nodded, making a note in her moleskin, the fact that Fame was actually writing herself more than enough to cement the severity of the situation. Courtney was standing against the wall, Ivy sitting at the table with her computer open, typing away, but when it came to the Met, Fame left nothing up to chance.

“She’s looking forward to working with us, and she says she’s honored-”

“Yada yada yada,” Fame made a hand puppet, and Raja had to hide a smile, Pearl leaning back in her chair with a roll of her eyes, mouthing at everyone else that she’d send a follow up email.

It was Fame who had requested Jessica, in her own roundabout way, her friend casually mentioning to Raja that she had a good smile, which was more than enough for Raja to make Pearl offer her up as Galactica’s celebrity face.

It wasn’t every house who did it, but the big ones always had a celebrity at the gala, wearing their clothes and repping the brand.

“Does anyone know if they’ve moved away from the terrible theme yet?”

“It doesn’t seem like it,” Alaska offered up, the promotional material the Met had sent out at the start of the fall in the middle of the table thanks to Ivy’s forthsight. “It’s December, and since we haven’t heard anything, they’re sticking with China's influence on western fashion.”

“Good god, I was really hoping they had come to their senses.” Fame breathed out through her nose, and Raja had to agree with her. Sure, ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ made sense as an art exhibition, but there was really no way to convert it to fashion without being culturally insensitive at best and offensively appropriative at worst.

Besides, Galactica had never been a brand that sought inspiration from the east in their designs and aesthetics, which made the entire situation quite the predicament.

“I’m sure we can work with it,” Trixie gave a small smile, the stack of papers by his elbow indicating that he had probably already put his senior designers to work coming up with concepts.

“And how,” Fame turned, looking directly at Trixie. “Are we supposed to work with it? Raja’s the only one who could possibly get away with being theme appropriate.”

Usually, Fame and Raja were the ones who walked the carpet together with their celebrity, Fame a nervous wreck for weeks before the gala because of all the strangers, while Raja enjoyed it because of her modeling days, seeing old acquaintances without the stresses of fashion week, a delightful yearly treat.

“I’m Indonesian.” Raja knew Fame didn’t mean anything by it, and she wasn’t that concerned about being politically correct herself, but everyone knew what it could mean for a fashion house to misstep, Dolce and Gabbana somehow walking directly from one scandal and into another one. “Not Chinese.”

“See?” Fame sighed, leaning back in her chair. “It’s a controversial time bomb. Either, we stay on theme, which I refuse since I look terrible in Chinese red, ”

“So we’re going off theme?” Trixie had picked up his papers, sorting through them, and Raja felt a moment of gratitude for their head of design, Trixie of course coming prepared with off-theme suggestions as well.

“Unless they get a grip and change it? Yes. Yes we are.”

“There!” Everyone held their breath as Maxwell pointed at Violet’s screen, an email from Ivy just ticking in, the Met Gala meeting still in full swing.

“Open it, Chachki!” Blu was practically biting her nails, hopping from one foot to the other, her red hair in a braid over her shoulder.

“Alright, alright-“ Violet clicked on the email, Bob standing right behind her, his eyes flying over the screen before he called out.

“It’s Jessica!”

A collective sigh of relief went through the floor, a loud ‘yes’ coming from Kiara who was clapping her hands together, the group breaking up, chatter filling the air.

“Thank god,” Maxwell groaned, putting a hand on Violet’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “I knew having you here would be worth it Chachki.”

“Right.” Violet raised an eyebrow, looking up at him, clearly not understanding why no one had thought to simply ask Ivy for updates before, the suggestion just casually slipping from her during morning coffee, the entire department running with it instantly. “But I still don’t-“

“Get it?” They turned to look over at Jovan who was sitting at his own desk, the man one of the few who hadn’t gathered around Violet’s computer.

“Yes.” Violet nodded. “If you needed information all this time, you could have just asked-”

“Like we could have just asked you?” Bob said, cutting her off and Violet opened her mouth, only to close it again. “Exactly.” Bob grinned. “You would have told us to fuck off.”

“I see your point.” Violet tapped her fingers on her desk, a small smile on her lips since everyone knew she would have said those exact words directly to their faces when she had been in Fame’s front office. “But, why is it such a big deal if a celeb is confirmed or not? The gala isn’t until May, that’s 4 months away and it’s three outfits. A whole collection is usually done in that time.”

“A collection doesn’t have to be approved by the celebrity,” Maxwell counted on his fingers, “the celebrity’s stylist, Vogue and Anna Wintour personally on top of Trixie, Raja and Fame. Alexis usually starts producing concepts in October.”

“As soon as they reveal the theme girl!” Alexis yelled over her shoulder, already pulling her sketches from their shelf, the confirmation meaning that she’d be in a meeting with Trixie for the rest of the day, working out the details of the first round of negotiations with the celebrity.

“Huh…” Violet looked around, the puzzled expression still on her face. “And what about-“

“Fame and Raja?”

Violet nodded.

“You’d think Fame would be the difficult one-“ Maxwell smiled.

“But make something gorgeous and custom in ivory and she’s on board,” Jovan grinned, putting the pen he was using behind his ear as he turned around in his chair. “Every year, she pretends like she’ll follow the theme, and then never does.”

“Exactly.” Maxwell nodded. “Fame is demanding, but consistent. Trixie has an entire drawer of Fame-appropriate outfits that we all contribute to whenever we have an idea.”

“That makes a disturbing amount of sense,” Violet looked mildly impressed, and if any of the rumors Maxwell had heard about how she had managed Fame’s front office, that approach wasn’t too far off from how Violet herself had attempted to tame the beast.

“Rule one of surviving at Galactica: Never disappoint Miss Fame. For once, however, Fame isn’t the problem.” Maxwell sighed, taking a seat on the edge of Violet’s desk. “Raja is.”

“Raja?” Violet looked genuinely surprised. “Really?”

“Yes really.” Maxwell crossed his arms. “Every year, she tells us that she’s chill, that she’ll wear whatever goes with the spring collection or the theme-“

“And every single year, she changes her mind at least four times.” Bob chimed in, the drama loving smirks on his lip. “More if you’re lucky.”

“Which is why,” Maxwell nudged Bob’s side with his elbow. “We’ve unanimously decided that you have the honor of dressing Raja for this year's Met Gala.”

“Me?” Violet’s eyes widened. “What? Why?” Violet looked at them, confusion painted on her face. “I’m the most junior member of staff.”

“True, but you’re also sucking her brother's dick,” Maxwell grinned, “so we figured she can’t kill you during the process, unlike the rest of us mere mortals.”

***

It should have been one of the most exciting mornings since Courtney started at Galactica--Miss Fame and Raja were being interviewed on a talk show, and so she got to go to the famous 30 Rockefeller Plaza building, and be on the set of a real television show. Unfortunately, it was such a whirlwind of activity and Miss Fame was in such a demanding mood that she didn’t have a second to enjoy it.

She felt like a chicken with its head cut off, running around in a hectic scramble to meet every request. Today was the last day before their holiday break, and even though Courtney knew that spending her break with Bianca would be incredible, she also knew that she had about a billion things to do before that could even start. Today was supposed to be a half day, but with how packed the schedule was, she’d be lucky to leave by 5.

She entered Miss Fame’s green room, silently handing her the coffee she’d asked for and then leaning on the wall to catch her breath. Miss Fame took a sip and then immediately spit the coffee back out.

“What is this?” she asked, holding the cup out like it was a bag of dog shit.

“It’s your usual-”

“This is not my usual. This is weak, and not hot enough, and-did you just roll your eyes?”

“No, Miss!” Courtney insisted, praying that she was telling the truth. She was tired, having arrived at the office at 6 am to drop off her stuff for Bianca’s, and there was a teeny tiny chance that she may have (accidentally) rolled her eyes. “Would you like a new-”

“Let me tell you something, Courtney. This may be the last day before a vacation, but I expect you to be fully present and accounted for. We have too many important things going on and I will not accept anything less than your absolute very best. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Now. Please go find me some decent coffee before I get a migraine.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“And after you come back, I need you to go to the dry cleaners. I’ve decided to wear my ivory Valentino suit to meet the investors later.”

“Yes, Miss, will do.”

“That’s all,” Miss Fame said, waving her hand, and Courtney took off back down the labyrinthine hallways of 30 Rock to hunt down a coffee that would meet her standards.

***

“Good morning! Welcome back to Coast to Coast. I’m Nina West, and today we are positively blessed to have with us the icons of fashion, Miss Fame and Raja Gemini of Galactica, here to talk to us about dressing to impress in the new year, and their exciting new business ventures. Thank you so much for being here, ladies!”

“Thank you, we’re thrilled to be here,” Fame smiled, the lie easily falling out of her red painted lips.

Raja could see the way her hands were clenched in her lap, her wedding ring turned inward and digging into her palm, and knew that she was at her tensest.

Raja had long ago gotten used to giving live interviews. She had a laid-back attitude and while she always wanted to represent the company in the most flattering light, she tended to relax and let the conversation flow naturally.

Fame, however, had never quite gotten the hang of it in the same way. She was just so brand-conscious, almost to a debilitating degree, written interviews so much more her speed.

She always looked impeccable, very much the ice goddess she was so often called, but Fame had never gotten the same confidence in her speaking skills as Raja, who had been dragged through developing them in her modeling career.

Even though Fame hated being on live TV, they occasionally got an offer they couldn’t turn down, and between the makeup line being released in January and the overhaul of their website and online store, they had a lot to plug.

The whole thing was so stressful Fame had asked Raja four times to check her pits for sweat stains, her papers with facts from the makeup department and pointers from Pearl not leaving her hand until they literally had to go on.

Raja leaned forward, giving Fame’s shoulder a reassuring pat, and added, “This is our favorite show, we never miss it!”

“Aww, thank you!” said Nina, grinning. “Now, I’ve heard through the grapevine that you have an exciting announcement.”

“Yes, and we’re so happy to be able to share the news with your viewers first-”

“An exclusive!” Nina exclaimed, eyes comically wide and mouth open as if this was news to her.

“Yes, exactly. Early this year, we released a limited makeup line, and it’s been doing just wonderfully. So in 2015, we’re going to be rolling out a full line of makeup and skincare, with special edition palettes and colors all throughout the spring.”

“All natural, vegan, cruelty free...I always want the very best for my own skin and I wouldn’t offer our customers anything less,” Fame cut in, and Raja felt a surge of pride at how natural she sounded. All their rehearsing had clearly paid off.

“If you use it, I’ll use it!” Nina said with a chuckle. “You both have the most gorgeous skin I’ve ever seen.”

“We expect the first batch to sell out quickly,” Raja said, “So go straight to our website, Galactica dot com, and sign up to be part of the mailing list to receive alerts on all new product launches and where they’ll show up in stores.”

“I’m doing that, the second we go to commercials,” Nina said. “But first, I heard that there’s more news about your spring line...”

***

Patrick reached for the remote, turning off the TV as Nina West rounded out the segment with Fame and Raja.

He was sitting in his office, wrapping up the last details before the firm could close down for the holiday break.

Fame had done a great job, the nerves he knew she had felt not showing on her beautiful face. Patrick picked up his phone, a smile on his lips as he started to type out a text.

Fame would probably not read it until she left work for the day, but he was proud of her, and he hoped that she was proud of herself too.

***

Fame collapsed onto her dressing room sofa, completely emotionally drained, the crystals she had stuffed in her bra digging against her skin.

Being on camera for live television always took up every drop of energy, and left her with nothing to spare. Unfortunately, she knew that she didn’t have much time to rest, since she was due at the Russian Tea Room to meet her potential investors in less than an hour. The makeup artist they’d hired was standing by for touch-ups, and her ivory Valentino suit hung in its dry cleaning bag on the clothing rack. But first, she knew that her blood sugar was dangerously low, so she needed…

She looked around. Where on earth was Courtney? Fame had never met someone with such a tendency to be underfoot at the worst times and completely MIA when her presence was required. She walked to the doorway, spotting Courtney having a casual chat with a girl in a headset, carefree as anything.

“Courtney!” she snapped, and Courtney looked up, surprised, even though she was literally here for the sole purpose of taking care of Fame’s needs. “Come!”

Fame turned and walked back into her dressing room, irritated, the rapid click of Courtney’s heels as she ran over grating on her nerves.

“Yes, Miss?”

“I need to eat.”

“Oh…” Courtney’s gaze shifted to the table, where a fruit basket sat amongst assorted pastries and other snack food.

“Not that sugary garbage,” Fame explained. “Violet always had- Don’t you have any protein bars?”

“Oh, of course!” Courtney exclaimed, rummaging through her purse.

Fame rolled her eyes, sighing. That girl truly was useless. What Bianca saw in her, Fame would never understand. She took one of the protein bars that Courtney had carefully lined up on the arm of the sofa beside her.

“I think you’d better head back to the office and prepare the conference room for the investor presentation.”

“Oh, but did you need anything el-”

“No, I’m much more concerned with the meeting,” Fame said. “Everything needs to be perfect. These people will be paying attention to every little detail.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Oh, and take this back with you…” Fame handed over a large manila envelope. “It’s some sketches I’ve been working on.”

“Sure.” Courtney began to put the envelope into her bag, and Fame’s eyes widened with alarm.

“Don’t bend them! For god’s sake…”

“Sorry Miss,” Courtney said, biting her lip, holding the envelope at her side. “Is there anything else you need before I-”

“No. That’s all.”

***

Courtney sat in the back of a cab, eyes squeezed tightly shut, using the time in traffic to center herself and go over her massive to do list. She had to make sure that all the presentations for the meeting were set up, work with IT to test it, messenger out the holiday gifts that Miss Fame added at the last minute, make sure the schedule for January was in order, set up her out of office reply…

Plus, the meeting with the investors wouldn’t begin until they were back from the restaurant, so the “half day” was looking more and more like a full day. At this point, settling in at Bianca’s felt like it was a million years away--and traffic crawling at a standstill didn’t help anything.

She pulled out her phone. Maybe she could set up some of the gift deliveries now, while she was stuck in the cab.

When they were finally in sight of the Galactica building, her phone started buzzing. She looked at the screen. Miss Fame. That couldn’t be anything good.

Courtney took a deep breath and answered, stomach tightening.

“Hello?”

“Courtney!” Miss Fame’s voice was sharp, sharper than usual. “Do you ever use your head? Or do you just go through life without a shred of critical thinking?”

It was fairly obvious that it was a rhetorical question, so Courtney kept her mouth shut, wondering what had gone wrong, what mess she’d have to clean up now.

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