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youryurigoddess · 11 months ago

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The stuff dreams are made of, or the interesting case of Anthony J. Crowley

We’ve talked a bit about Crowley’s trauma and his way of reclaiming the narrative in the past, but it’s time for some deep dive into the story he’s trying to tell. A story that meanders through the fabric of time and space, slightly changing with the human fashion trends, but slowly and surely bringing the demon closer to a certain angel like the red thread of fate.

1793

Some stories start in a garden, some even Before the Beginning, but this one starts with an Arrangement. Or, to be precise, a little bit after that.

See, most of the iterations of Crowley we saw throughout the history until then didn’t delve too deep into human cultural tropes. If anything, they were the inspirations behind more or less prominent biblical figures, maybe some nameless villains matching his demonic provenance and role assigned to him by his employers.

But in the hustle and bustle of the revolutionary Paris, Crowley emerges as a prototype of the Scarlet Pimpernel — a chivalrous Englishman who rescues aristocrats before they are sent to the guillotine. Stan Lee famously called him “the first character who could be called a superhero”.

Sir Percy Blakeney, the main character of the novel and the West End play under the same title, leads a double life. Appearing as nothing more than a wealthy fop, in reality he’s a formidable swordsman, a quick-thinking master of disguise and an escape artist. Even his own wife, Marguerite, has no idea.

Unfortunately Marguerite is being blackmailed with her brother’s life to find and expose the wanted Pimpernel. She regrets betraying her husband the moment she's forced to do it and spends the rest of the plot working to save him. She does, they make up, and return together to England.

In Aziraphale and Crowley’s case there was just a short stop for crêpes. But what seems to be an inspiration of a specific scene might as well come up later in the wider perspective of the show, so keep in mind those fragments of the musical’s libretto:

We all are caught in the middle

of one long treacherous riddle.

Can I trust you?

Should you trust me too?...

We shamble on through this hell

taking on more secrets to sell

'til there comes a day

when we sell our souls away.

We seek him here, we seek him there,

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere!

Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?

Where is that damn elusive Pimpernel!

1941

The London Blitz is when we see a full-fledged iteration of the superhero Crowley performing dashing and heroic deeds under the literal cover of darkness and air bomb smoke. In a bespoke double-breasted suit and a fedora — still free from the unfortunate modern connotations from the internet culture — he’s clearly channeling Humphrey Bogart as a private investigator Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) now.

It all starts with a woman and a simple plan gone wrong: Spade’s partner is shot dead, just like the man he was supposed to be tailing upon the request of a mysterious Miss Wonderly. And when a very soft-looking, sweet-scented man named Joel Cairo appears in his office willing to pay a hefty price for a "black figure of a bird", Spade starts not only a new job, but also his own quest for truth.

On the surface, The Maltese Falcon ends happily: the killer gets caught, and the hero winds up with the Falcon. But Spade's victory is completely hollow. The Falcon itself, originally meant as a symbol of loyalty, transforms into a symbol of a corrupting, futile, and self-destructive greed that makes people betray their own loyalties.

The treasure is just a worthless forgery and he’s fallen in love with the criminal — one of the first femmes fatales on screen. Despite his feelings for her and a kiss, Spade gives her up and submits the statuette as evidence, describing it as "the stuff that dreams are made of".

Remember the eagle lectern? The eagle was believed to be flying highest in the sky and therefore closest to heaven, symbolizing the carrying of the word of God to the four corners of the world. Aziraphale in the 1941 church scene is the closest to Heaven we’ve seen him on Earth. Just look at him: dressed in a smart, well-fitted coat with peaked lapels, symbolizing his Heavenly allegiance, and doing good this time not as a work assignment, but of his own accord. Being the closest to Heaven means the furthest and most unattainable for a demon like Crowley.

The Maltese Falcon is a metaphor for unattainability — things out of reach to desire and fight for, although never truly possess. It’s “the stuff that dreams are made of”. But Crowley secured the original — made of gold and encrusted with jewels, but hiding its real value under black enamel — eerily reminiscent of the demon himself and the unending kindness behind his inappropriately tight black clothing.

Quoting Michael Ralph — the production mastermind behind Good Omens — from the S01E04 “Saturday Morning Funtime” DVD commentary, “We wanted to tip our hat to the Maltese Falcon as being a precious object that no-one thought really exists but it does”. So we can safely assume that Crowley can and will achieve his dream in the future.

1967

Do you know what else happens in 1941 in Scotland? Ian Fleming, a British naval intelligence agent, meets with the famous occultist Aleister Crowley and asks him to lead the interrogation of newly imprisoned Rudolf Hess — a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany appointed Deputy Führer — given the two men’s shared enthusiasm for the occult.

This meeting has a significant impact on Fleming’s work as a writer; Aleister Crowley becomes the inspiration for his first villain Le Chiffre and creates a blueprint for most of the James Bond’s franchise ever since 1953, the publication date of the novel Casino Royale.

Meanwhile our Anthony J. Crowley believes in himself not being the villain he’s usually and sometimes forcefully painted as, but a superhero in disguise. The character of James Bond in particular inspires him so much that he buys petrol to get the limited You Only Live Twice (1967) window decals for his Bentley, dons his own tactical turtleneck, and sets off to organize a heist like no other. Sean Connery style.

Like a typical superhero, Crowley’s once again both saved and betrayed by his love interest. Aziraphale leaves him with a thermos of Holy Water, a faint smile, and a hope that they’ll soon match their speeds to meet halfway at the Ritz. The cancelled heist is not an ending, but a promise of a new beginning. And the fact that UK decriminalizes homosexual acts in the very same year is more than telling in this regard.

2019

An exceptional situation calls for exceptional solutions, and what’s more important than the impending Apocalypse? Demon Crowley does his best to put the arsenal of his 20th century film inspirations to good use.

"Ask yourself, do you feel lucky?" Crowley drawls, clearly imitating (although slightly misquoting) the titular Dirty Harry (1971). He’s hoping to be menacing and making the point of being the one on the right side of the law and history.

Some situations require more than quoting action heroes is not everything though. He knows what to do:

A jeep was heading purposefully towards the gate, and it looked as though it was crowded with people who were about to shout questions and fire guns and not worry about which order they did this in.

[Crowley] brightened up. This was more what you might call his area of competence.

He took his hands out of his pockets and he raised them like Bruce Lee and then he smiled like Lee Van Cleef.

'Ah,' he said, 'here comes transport.'

When in doubt, Crowley acts. He transforms into a combination of a stoic martial arts phenomenon and a sardonic, menacing character. His smile alone — even on Aziraphale’s angelic face, as seen in one of the final cut scenes — seems to be enough to ward off evil spirits, angels, and humans alike.

But we all know that even as breathtaking performances as those can’t protect anyone from the cogs of the Heavenly machine and its plans.

2023

No wonder that Crowley’s tactical turtleneck comes back in style after mere four years of retirement with a self-introduction “Former Demon, hated by Heaven, loathed by Hell. How will our hero cope?”. Something has changed during this time; he’s more mature now, not playing pretend by hiding behind the usual veneer of sarcasm and movie quotes anymore. Finally comfortable with the fact that this is his own story and there’s no need to become anyone else than himself.

The bookshop fire and the Heavenly trial still seem to haunt the demon in a way that makes him realize what all humans know: that every hero is his own biggest enemy. His ultimate dream might effortlessly change into his greatest nightmare any moment now, and the only thing he can do about it is hover in a two-minute distance from the epicenter of his feelings. But Crowley has no time to work on it when a new mission appears, to protect his angel from Gabriel and the combined powers of Heaven and Hell. Even if this — rather ostentatiously — is the last thing he wants to think about at the moment.

Crowley tries to plan ahead, while his story slowly warps into a different genre due to Aziraphale’s interruptions. He eventually changes back into his usual Henley shirt after agreeing to swap places and guarding the bookshop while the angel is off to Edinburgh, collecting more clues. Did he finish his personal quest off-screen? Did he just give up on it in the whirlwind of matchmaking shenanigans? Remains to be seen.

In the S2 finale our master of disguise in yet another turtleneck proves that he can successfully infiltrate even the universe’s back office. We don’t know where he drives off in the end, but one thing is certain — he’s got a plan. And a world (and his dream) to save, like a superhero he is.

#a turtleneck kind of day #crowley is a superhero #and a master spy #with a plan #good omens #good omens 2 #good omens meta #go2 meta #ineffable husbands #crowley #turtleneck crowley #yuri is doing her thing

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redhoodinternaldialectical · 1 year ago

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Finding character motivations for everything Talia Al Ghul does and says in Lost Days

People say she was manipulating Jason to be more violent but like... was she?? Why would she be doing that??? She spends years trying to heal him for Bruce and then tries to make him more violent towards Bruce because... ????????

I've read Lost Days a fair few times and it never felt like she was being cruel or manipulative and this has confused the fuck out of me for a long time. Since I'm going to be writing her into my Jason centric fic pretty soon, I figured it would be good to go back to Lost Days and really focus in on her and her character motivations.

This is a post because I do my best thinking through the act of writing essays, and figured someone out there might also be interested.

tl;dr In the text as written Talia does her level best to guide Jason to become a Hero again out of genuine compassion. It is her explicit goal to make Jason less vengeful, less violent, and more like the hero he was before he died. She is not predatory towards him, and the only times she works in ways that could be damaging to him are when she feels her own safety is threatened by him. Talia is depicted as a good but flawed person shaped by the trauma Ra's and the League has put her through.

So yeah, wildly over detailed analysis of everything Talia does and says during Lost Days under the cut:

Scene one: Ra's and Talia yelling dramatically on a lawn right after Talia uses a Lazarus Pit on Jason.

Her stated justification for doing so is "I did--what--needed to be done" (em dashes for choking). Considering she risked a LOT to do this, I figure she's probably telling the truth. She believed this was necessary.

Then we flash back to her first learning about Jason's death. She posits that his death will essentially break Bruce.

In the panels directly after this she's shown looking at a picture of Jason and Bruce, face in hands, clearly upset. Probably primarily for Bruce, but like idk she's an empathic human I feel like it's safe to say she's upset for the kid who died too, especially since the picture centers Jason prominently, with focus/close-up panels on both Bruce and Jason, with Jason's scanning first.

Then we have the sequence of her learning that Jason is still alive, through her agents who have been instructed to keep a very close eye on Bruce.

Her first big decision is to bring him to her Father. She doesn't make any attempt to hide him, so it's either a good idea to her or a necessary one. Ra's obviously wants to figure out how he managed to cheat death, and it seems likely to me, given that she's loyal to him, that she'd also want to do so. She doesn't seem to want him dead, even if she's at odds with him pretty much the whole time to one degree or another.

Then we get her investigating Jason's ressurection and the doctor she's got telling her about his brain damage and the Doc claims he's not getting better

We're just gonna breeze on passed that autistic affect weirdness...

She disagrees.

This is the third time now that Talia has had faith in the humanity and emotional capacity of people the rest of the League write off as being capable of nothing but violence. Considering she's been right the other times it stands to reason that she's right about this too. It also says a lot about her character that this is something she's repeatedly done.

She attempts to prove he's getting better by slapping Jason across the face, declaring, "He never fights back when it's me! Explain that! Never when it's me!"

This strongly suggests that she must treat him differently than the rest of the league, specifically that she treats him with more kindness and more attention. He recognizes her as someone safe, who he doesn't need to fight.

This is further backed up by the next page

Ra's then decides that all this has been a complete waste of time and demands that Jason be put out to pasture so he can't distract Talia from her work for the League.

During this argument Ra's posits that she thinks handing over a healed Jason would make Bruce love her, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I think Ra's is misreading her, in exactly the same way all of the League has been misreading everyone all issue: he's failing to understand that people are capable of actual love and compassion. He's interpreting her acts of kindness and love as something manipulative and selfish. Maybe that's something she believes or hopes for on some level, but it's obviously not her "real" motive here like Ra's thinks.

This is what makes her decide that it's necessary to make one last attempt to heal him, and get him out somewhere safer than with the League. It's a desperate last ditch attempt, but she's a competent motherfucker.

The rest of the issue is narrated as a letter Talia sends off with him in the bag of supplies she gives him. In it she says that she had other reasons for attempting to save him.

So, at the end of issue #1 we have three clear motives for why she healed Jason:

To heal Jason is to heal Bruce.

She has a basic sense of decency and wants to help a murdered kid recover. Jason healing is its own reward.

She wants to find out how Jason "survived" so that her Father might be able to replicate that for himself.

Healing Jason might bring her emotionally closer to Bruce.

ALL of these are based in love, and thus could qualify for what she meant in those last few lines of her letter. However, I think I want to emphasis that she almost certainly has to be including love for Jason himself, not just for what Jason represents to Bruce, though Bruce is still a huge focus for her.

And she didn't tell Bruce because Ra's might kill Jason. He doesn't want Batman to know he's alive, ever, and may very well kill Jason to keep that secret.

ON TO ISSUE #2

This is where it gets a lot harder to figure out why she's doing things.

Talia's first act is to refuse to tell Ra's where Jason is. Her second revealed act is that while tossing Jason into the ocean to help him escape she says this:

"Do not seek him out. You remain unavenged."

Third thing she does is check up on her loyal agents who tell her "We know where he's going You're not going to like it." This is immediately followed by the reveal that Jason is going to Gotham.

So uhhhh... Why doesn't Talia want him to go to Bruce now? Also, why does Talia think that being unavenged would mean Jason going to Bruce was a bad idea? Like how is the unavenged bit not a complete nonsequitor?

Cause the thing is, we the audience know what Jason is like in the future, Lost Days was written after UtRH, but Talia doesn't know Jason's personality, she's only met him while he was incapable of communication, so what reason does she have to assume this would impact him like this?

Hypothesis one: She knew about Felipe, thinks he killed him, and thus counts him as a killer of abusers, someone who would want revenge.

Seems pretty unlikely. There's absolutely nothing in the text to support this, it's completely made up conjecture. Also, she doesn't seem to think Jason is the type of person to do revenge all that harshly in later panels.

Hypothesis two: She's counting on the temporary adrenaline-rage-pain boost from the Pit to convince him to be mad about the whole unavenged thing.

Why tho? Like, for realsies, there's no reason for her to try to do this? If this is a plan to keep him away from Bruce, it's a dumb one, like why would that be her choice of strategy?? Also the letter contradicts this.

Hypothesis three: She believes it was wrong of Bruce not to avenge him, or at least thinks that most people would be incredibly angry to find they weren't avenged

Baring her just being fucking precognitive and knowing the future for no good reason, this seems like the most likely cause. Growing up in the League hasn't exactly given her a view of how healthy people handle their anger, and violent retaliation is a nigh daily obstacle for her to navigate. It means she told him that because she thought it was important and she probably always intended to tell him whenever he healed enough to understand it.

Hypothesis four: She assumed him finding out was inevitable, and wanted to do that in a controlled manner... uhhh... and the best controlled manner avaliable was... while flinging him off a cliff??? Instead of in the letter?????

Not buying this one.

We see Jason try to kill Bruce and then get him explaining himself to Talia.

That's... that's not how sociopathic works I'm pretty sure... whateves...

Talia seems to have believed there would have been a fight about the Joker, but not that Jason would have actually tried to kill him. Or at least not that Jason would have tried to really, truly kill him in such a cold, calculated way once all forms of Laz juice were out of his system.

So again, why the fuck was she preventing him and Bruce from meeting?! Would the Dark Knight not have survived a fist fight with an angry sixteen year old??

I don't get it. That's uhhhh- that doesn't make any sense to me. I guess she was just wary of how bad the confrontation might get, but not fully expecting this kind of rage? Maybe she was acting much more confident of her decisions in front of her father and was really worried about this outcome? I dunno, and that's all the evidence we've got!

And now we have a new problem! Why does Talia agree to help him?

She believes she's released a curse into this world. She believes that she has kickstarted a nasty cycle of violence spiral. She doesn't want to see Bruce hurt or killed by his kid.

So the only conclusion left is that she thinks she can better mitigate the damage by helping and misdirecting than she can by actually confronting Jason. Considering who she interacts with, that seems perfectly reasonable.

ON TO ISSUE #3

We get some proper answers here hopefully

Our previous idea about why she was helping him was correct, this is an attempt to keep him less violent, steer him towards other things, and let his desire for revenge fizzle or find a different target.

She's not giving him over to Bruce because Bruce would never forgive her for having kept Jason from him... And also Jason will fucking kill Bruce.

Make special note here of the idea that sex is why she isn't beating the crap out of this guy. Put a pin in that. It'll be important later.

Back down at the murder ranch, Jason finishes killing his teacher and then explains himself

I believe she's genuinely happy about this, because it is actually a step in the direction she wants him to take. He went from being completely obsessed with just killing the father who didn't avenge him, to saving a bunch of kids and delaying his own revenge goals to do it. The tin man IS growing a heart. Her plan is, miraculously, kinda working!

ON TO ISSUE #4

Further proof that her plan is working: Jason leaves Rip, the mercenary driver, alive. He's developing standards for who he is and isn't willing to kill, and those standards are evolving because he is being pushed outside his conflict with Bruce.

His treatment of the bomber's connection with the mob is further proof of this.

That little smile and her gently nudging him towards the idea that he's picking "old habits" back up is very telling. She's guiding him back to the path of actually being a Hero. I think this is meant to imply that Talia is deliberately throwing scumbags towards him to not only distract him, but also to remind him of the heroism he did before he died and give him new purpose beyond mere violence towards Bruce.

And again, her plan is working! He's doing hero stuff!

Aaaaand now we have another curveball. Why show him Tim?

Again, him finding out about this was probably inevitable. He seems more chill, the dark circles under his eyes are gone, I think she's hoping that while in the middle of a new investigation Jason will be in as good a place as she can find to tell him about this.

It's better than mid cliff dive, if nothing else.

Now, to head this off at the pass, because I've seen people assert this in other posts before: this is definitively, absolutely, 100% guaranteed, NOT WHEN TITANS TOWER HAPPENS. He hasn't even come up with using the red hood as a persona when she shows him this picture, so even if he let the extremely time sensitive bombing plot go for a day or two worth of private jetting to beat up the new guy, there's no way in HELL Tim would be able to recognize the Red Hood as Jason. Heck, Tim wouldn't even be with that set of Titans yet, the fucking HUSH plotline hasn't even happened yet!! Okay moving on...

ON TO ISSUE #5

Talia isn't in this one

Jason acts as a Hero. Tim man definitely has a heart.

I really like this plotline tbh, it's just great.

He kills all but one of the Russian mobsters that come to kill him and then he runs out of ammo on the last, and that guy offers up the Joker's location in exchange for his life.

This is when the Tin Man relapses.

ON TO ISSUE #6

CONTENT WARNING FOR DISCUSSION OF CONSENT ISSUES

He hunts the Joker down and fails to kill him. I want to emphasis here, that failing to kill the Joker is a failure to adhere to the morals that Jason has established for himself, and a failure to keep being an anti-hero the way Talia was encouraging him to be.

This is not him being a good guy. This is him getting worse again. This is him failing to care about the world and things other than his own revenge.

Once again he explains himself to Talia, and reveals that he's known for a while now that she's been stalling him.

And then they fuck, and Jason wakes up alone.

So what just happened and why?

First of all I think the fact he KNEW he was being stalled combined with his heroism prior to the Joker being brought up strongly implies that Talia's plan would have kept working and that Jason would have kept letting it work, drawing him more and more into just being an anti-hero. He has a heart, he has morals, but his rage for Bruce and the Joker eclipses those morals pretty completely. Talia's plan was always to guide him away from revenge and it might have worked if he hadn't run out of ammo at the wrong time.

Secondly, Talia has just been given a bunch of reasons to feel threatened. Her plot was revealed, and Jason no longer has reason to believe that she isn't an obstacle to his goals.

Considering the sheer amount of violence that Talia regularly narrowly escapes only through manipulation and leveraging men's emotions, it seems pretty reasonable to me that she'd assume she needed to do both those things in order to protect herself.

She tells Jason about Ra's death, claiming that she's angry with Bruce for that. I don't know if this is the truth, but it would serve this purpose either way. She's giving him reasons to believe she's still on his side. Then she gets emotional leverage on him by sleeping with him. Take that pin out of the fact that she didn't beat that other guy for talking out of turn to her because she was fucking him. Then she escapes while he's asleep and only contacts him again from afar.

She does both of these things because she is afraid that a freshly refocused on vengeance Jason will hurt or kill her if she doesn't. After all, she herself is a killer. Jason might just decide it's her turn to join his other teachers.

The scene of them sleeping together isn't framed as traumatic for Jason; he seems to be perfectly willing.

There two very important questions that need answered before we cast judgments though: Is Jason still a minor when this happens? How old is Talia in comparison to Jason?

The only indication of timeline that we have is that it takes place JUST prior to Hush, as the story ends with Jason meeting Tomas Elliot. According to the Batman Chronology Project, Tim should be 16 during the events of Hush. We know Jason is about two years older than Tim, making him 18 during this scene.

According to Dennis O'Neil "I’m pretty sure that Talia is still a young woman – young by our standards, not just her father’s." According to some random fucker on an ancient comicvine forum going by the handle "brock4618", O'Neil said in a different interview that she was 18 when Bruce kissed her and is about Dick's age, not Bruce's age. I can't find O'Neil saying that, but it does line up with the quote we know is real.

So this was a case of an extremely traumatized 18 year old boy agreeing to sleep with a woman in her twenties after he accidentally made her feel that she needed to use sex and emotional manipulation to protect herself from his possible violent retaliation.

This is still a deeply unpleasant situation, but it's so much better than the initial impression that I got!

CONCLUSIONS TIME

Talia healed Jason because

She's a kind and loving person, and was especially kind and loving when she was younger. She wants to help Bruce, she wants to help Jason, and she wants to help her father. She did it for love.

Talia kept Jason's existence a secret from Bruce because

Her father demanded she keep it a secret, then she was afraid Bruce would hate her for it, and by the time she ought to be warning Bruce about Jason, well he was a scary motherfucker and she was in too deep.

Is Talia portrayed as a sexually predatory monster?

No. A woman using sex to escape violence is not predatory; I will fucking fight you. That whole scenario was bad, but acting like she's evil for this doesn't pan out unless you disagree with some of the facts of the case. It also really doesn't feel like Winick intended for the audience to assume this was predatory. Jason never seems uncomfortable with the fact it happened, and he even gives Jason a bit of beard scruff to help convey that he's older now. (it uh... it didn't work. Because I thought Talia was like 52 at minimum. Also just the timeline. But that was the intent I feel)

Is Talia attempting to make Jason more vengeful?

No. Exact opposite actually, every lie and manipulation is in service of preventing him from going on his vengeance quest, guiding him to be a better person, and protecting herself and others.

As a side note: I haven't touched the potential misogyny or racism angles, because that's simply beyond the scope of this analysis. I don't have the time, energy, or resources to dig into this myself, you'll have to find a different post for that angle, sorry.

So... yeah. That's my findings, I hope at least one other person finds this useful!

#jason todd #talia al ghul #lost days #nightmarishly long analysis that I hope is half decent lol

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finalfantasyx · 20 days ago

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Yue Yao (because I need to scream about her awesomeness and the dangers of retconning), Yue Qing, and How NOT to Write Women - A Rant(TM) about Dashing Youth & The Blood of Youth

Spoilers ahead for Dashing Youth and The Blood of Youth if you have not seen either live action drama, since we haven't gotten there in the donghua yet. You have been duly warned. Now come scream with me. I've been wanting to scream about this for a while.

Okay, what the hell??? Prefacing this again with the fact that I watched Dashing Youth before TBOY and I'm just...floored? Yue Yao was so interesting. She was up against some major political issues where the repercussions of her choices and the choices made by the people around her would impact and probably, most likely, cause the deaths of thousands. She was dealing with a missing father who, for all they knew, could have been dead, a clingy sister-turned-annoying-character-trope, the fate of her people, and also the fate of all of Beili and Beique (I mean, seriously, you want to talk about Yi Wenjun being at fault for instigating the three-way war between Nanjue, Tianwaitian, and Beili, AND SHE WASN'T ACTUALLY AT FAULT ASIDE FROM NOT COMMUNICATING WITH HER HUSBAND BEFORE MAKING A HUGE DECISION THAT WOULD IMPACT THEM ALL and leaving her infant son in the house BY HIMSELF, PLEASE Yue Yao would have been directly responsible for all the deaths resulting from any move she made), all the while trying to find a way to do what was best for everyone AND getting to know the prodigy and dumbass with a heart that was Baili Dongjun, whose grandfather Baili Luochen helped Beili in the war with Beique that resulted in her people being killed and displaced to the unforgiving north.

/breathe

And oh, does she ever find a way. Baby girl decides to just DIY this whole shebang when she finds the natural-born martial arts prodigies with the special meridians or whatever the hell the drama said it was that set Baili Dongjun and Ye Dingzhi apart from alllll the other martial arts practitioners and just takes her sworn sister's identity, gets a makeover, and BAM joins the Jixia Academy...audition.

Not only that, but we see that she is more than her pretty clothes and her miss-fairy-in-a-carriage persona that we've seen up until this point in the drama. SHE CAN FIGHT! SHE CAN BEAT SOMEONE'S ASS! SHE CAN CHEAT AND GAMBLE! SHE STRAIGHT UP APPROACHES BAILI DONGJUN AND CHALLENGES HIM. SHE. APPROACHES. HIM. FIRST. Also it's really freakin' cute.

SHE STANDS UP FOR HERSELF AND HER TEAMMATES AND PROTECTS THEM. SHE SAVES BAILI DONGJUN'S TAIL. SHE'S GOT HER OWN WAY OF THINKING AND SHE'S FUNNY AS HELL. SHE SLAPS HIM CLEAN ACROSS THE FACE FOR GOING TO A BROTHEL.

We see her enter Jixia Academy, we see her train under Liu Yue (which I am still salty about because we could have used a lot more scenes of her and Liu Yue training and just being master/apprentice, see her having a hard time with really just using Liu Yue to stay near Baili Dongjun for her own/Beique's ends, especially with Liu Yue declaring that he doesn't care about her true identity, just that she is now his apprentice and that means that he's always on her side please Liu Yue was the best and he got fking nuked at the end, even if he got to retire from jianghu with Mo Xiaohei lol), WE SEE HER STRUGGLE. This entire time, Yue Yao is absolutely torn between a) doing what is best for her people, b) doing what is best for everyone and not causing the deaths of thousands, and c) not falling for the guy whose grandfather is a war hero because he killed her people.

Also the fact that this dumbass she is falling in love with has been pining after her miss-fairy-in-a-carriage persona for so long he has no clue she's right in front of him. Good job, Dongjun /pat pat

Let's play this out.

If Yue Yao a) does what is best for her people, which everyone thinks is reclaiming Beili, a warmer and far more fertile land, and creating better lives for themselves, that would incite another war and cause many, many deaths. Also, there's a very, very high possibility that Beique might lose anyway!

If Yue Yao b) does what is best for everyone and not cause another war and the deaths of thousands, she is condemning her own people to a harsh life in the cold, icy, desolate north.

If Yue Yao c) falls for the guy whose grandfather is a war hero because he killed her people, she will be seen as a traitor and will be turned on because they'll think she turned on them first, especially since she is basically their princess.

What's a girl to do.

SHE FREAKIN' OWNS UP TO IT AND COMES CLEAN with Baili Dongjun and her followers, Mo Qixuan and Zi Yuji. She does not lie to them and is up front about her vision and what she wants to do for her people and for herself, because they don't have to be mutually exclusive things. She follows her heart; she knows that while she wants a better life for her people, it cannot be found in a new war with Beili to settle old grudges and claim old land. She wants to find a new home for them.

Yue 👏 Yao 👏 is 👏 so 👏 great.

...Only for all of that buildup in the first half of the drama to go absolutely nowhere as her vision is never recognized. She returns to Tianwaitian only to be locked up for betraying Beique with zero timeline as to how long she was locked up for and how she actually got out of the cage. There were no repercussions for her escaping or leaving. In fact, as soon as she leaves Tianwaitian, Yue Yao's character basically stops caring for Beique, and she literally did not matter to the plot going forward. Her people in Tianwaitian never find a better home for themselves. They never get to leave the far north, never reclaim their old kingdom, and never get to rebuild, even before Ye Dingzhi establishes the Demon Sect. Ergo, even if we disregard the events of TBOY, Yue Yao still doesn't get to help her people and all of that development was useless.

Instead, after all that talk about wanting to find a better home and do better by her people, after all the character development and establishment, after all the scenes where we get to see that Yue Yao has a backbone and the fighting skills to prove it, she ends up as arm candy for Baili Dongjun for the next like seven years while the two of them remained unmarried. Um??????????

Why build up all that character and her skills and her relationships with Liu Yue, Baili Dongjun, her freakin' sister, and Mo Qixuan/Zi Yuji only for all of them to basically go kaput? Even with Baili Dongjun, most of the time, she's...just there. Just...looking pretty. Not doing anything.

No one waits seven years to get married, especially when they're in such close quarters like Yue Yao and Baili Dongjun were pre-war and during the war. This makes zero sense, and honestly just cheapens their already-sad relationship even more because it shows a lack of respect on his part. There's no denying that he does love her, but the respect, which is based off of the values of the people in their time, is not there, whether for her honor, virtue, or just the progression of their relationship. Seven years is a long time, especially in period Chinese dramas (and reality, back in those times) when two people are hanging out in an established relationship.

Yue Yao is displeased.

And then we come to the problem of her sister, Yue Qing, who has decided to play a self-insert victim and villain, somehow both at the same time by not actually being relevant to the plot and generally not actually being good at anything at all.

Her motivation: Yue Yao is her older sister, the one she has always looked up to, and she sucks at being the eldest princess and has essentially abandoned them to chase after the sweet, sweet tail that is Neo Hou in a period drama. Ergo, Yue Qing needs to leave Beique to find the other special person martial arts prodigy, Ye Dingzhi, and homegirl does her best to manipulate the hell out of this poor, traumatized kid in order to get him back to Beique and free her father so that they can march on Beili and reclaim their kingdom. He sees right through her though, and because there is no way in the eighteen levels of hell she can beat him in a fight, and she tries, she goes back to his doorway like a kicked puppy every time he throws her out because it's clear she has no idea what on earth she's doing except that she thinks she's all that and has every reason to condemn thousands of people to their deaths so that she can incite a new war for a better life for the people of Tianwaitian.

In the same way that Yue Yao was SO great in the first half of Dashing Youth, we do not give two shakes about Yue Qing and how she is barely even relevant to the plot, because if you stuck Mo Qixuan or Zi Yuji in there to manipulate this poor bastard, the result would have ended up the same way and she does not impact the story whatsoever.

And then Ye Dingzhi saves Yue Qing's life, and all of a sudden, she understands why her sister decided to go with Baili Dongjun instead of staying in Beique, according to the story lore. It also doesn't hurt that he's pretty and he's feeding her medicine and didn't just...let her die.

PFFFFFFFFFFT HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Yue Qing, the bar is on the floor. Also girl, you manipulated him and used him and he does not care for or about you. In fact, the only reason he saved your life was because he lashed out at you and almost killed you and felt guilty for it before he proceeded to throw you out again.

Because Ye Dingzhi is untouchable at this point, Yue Qing proceeds to then manipulate his wife, Yi Wenjun (which is another convoluted story point because she's already married and is a secondary consort to Xiao Ruojin who is an absolute monster in the actual worst way, which is why I did not feel a lick of empathy or sympathy for him in TBOY--I mean, he put her under using some drugs and it was HEAVILY IMPLIED that he gr@ped her while she was completely unconscious and everyone just kind of breezes over this plot point in the dramas), and sends her back to Tianqi by spreading false news of Xiao Yu being really, really sick (causing problems even at a young age, I see). Because of this, Ye Dingzhi is then manipulated into going to Beique to free Yue Qing and Yue Yao's father so that he can be number one in the world and take his wife back, blahhhh blah blah.

AND THEN THEIR FATHER DIES after a confrontation between him, Baili Dongjun, and Ye Dingzhi, and it's almost like Yue Qing and Yue Yao are pitting their respective special martial arts person against each other because they're both natural-born wumai which is NOT actually a thing, and I don't even understand what it is and do not care to actually translate this; IT'S SUPER DUMB.

And because the official leader of Beique, Yue Yao and Yue Qing's father, dies, Ye Dingzhi goes full demon mode and takes over the people of Tianwaitian and establishes the Demon Sect by uniting all 30-something sects in the outer regions of Beili, which was supposedly impossible until this point. He then begins the infamous three-way war between Beili, Nanjue, and Tianwaitian which Yi Wenjun then gets blamed for instigating.

UMMMM??? DOES THIS NOT SOUND FAMILIAR??? DO WE NOT ALSO KNOW OF A WOMAN WHO WAS SAID TO BE SO BEAUTIFUL THAT MEN WENT TO WAR FOR HER AND LAID SIEGE TO AN ENTIRE FREAKIN' CITY WHICH IS NOW A FAMOUS TRAGEDY? DID THE DIRECTORS OF THIS DRAMA WANT A CDRAMA VERSION?

(in case anyone is lost, the answer is Troy. It's Helen of Troy.)

Also, RUDE that her "instigating" this war is what she is known for, even in The Blood of Youth. Yi Wenjun gets blamed for this massive, awful historical event when the only thing she did was be manipulated by Yue Qing using her child. Like, what on earth /eye roll

It was also never talked about how she was coerced into this marriage by her father in TBOY (which we find out in DY) and that this was never something she wanted anyway. Also the gr@pe because that was completely unnecessary and again, breezed over by every single character in Dashing Youth, which, also, WHY did it have to happen that way? Xiao Yu's existence in TBOY could literally be explained by "marital duties" or "wedding night" or something even if the spouses hated each other, did y'all really have to sink to gr@pe????? Especially since I watch dramas for escapism and fantasy and not historical accuracy because of course this has happened probably many times over the course of history. I am angry.

We find out later that Yue Qing is locked up by Ye Dingzhi and then just dies via suicide in prison at the end of the three-way war while Yue Yao rides off into the sunset with Baili Dongjun in her fairy carriage, intent on marrying her at last after SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS TOGETHER, YES I DID THE FREAKING MATH (let me know if anyone needs an approximate timeline).

Following this trainwreck and what Dashing Youth has established, we get to the canon in The Blood of Youth, which takes place twelve years after the prequel. Now that the twelve-year pact between Tianwaitian and Beili where Ye Anshi, the son of Ye Dingzhi and Yi Wenjun, is a hostage in Beili is over, the story picks up where we see our heroes in the following places:

Baili Dongjun: Master of Xueyue City and a depressed drunk after (we learn later) mistakenly killing his wife because he was manipulated into doing so, making this the biggest regret of his life

Yue Yao: dead. Was dead before Tang Lian stepped foot into Xueyue City, and was dead because someone manipulated Baili Dongjun into thinking Yue Yao was Yue Qing and he kills her.

...wait what? But...but I thought Yue Qing died in the prison even before Baili Dongjun and Yue Yao got married in canon? I think we're told in TBOY that Yue Yao blocked an attack for her sister or died for her sister or something via her husband attacking her thinking she was her sister or I DON'T KNOW it's not really clear. The point is, the events of both dramas can't both be true or canon at the same time.

Aaaaaand we've hit one of the biggest retcon snags between the two dramas. Shifting the focus over to the problem with retcons, my first question is this: DY directors and producers, you guys had the perfect template and formula since The Blood of Youth exists and had such incredible ratings. Y'all already have a world and a story and storyline and characters to work with and are able to entirely and completely plan ahead. How did y'all come up with this dumpster fire???? And it's not even a good dumpster fire?? How could Yue Qing cause Yue Yao's death, which we are told is what happens in Baili Dongjun's dream in TBOY, if she's dead??

Other honorable problematic retcon mentions:

There's a specific voiceover at the end of DY telling us what happened to the main characters at the end of the war, and though in TBOY the story said that Lei Mengsha died fighting against Nanjue, we are shown that he and Xiao Ruofeng are both fine and victorious. WHAT???

In TBOY, we are told by Li Suwang of the Sword Heart Tomb that his daughter, Li Xinyue first met Lei Mengsha at the Sword Heart Tomb when he and his buddy his pal Baili Dongjun stopped by and convinced her to duel and then roam jianghu with them. We see that at the beginning of Dashing Youth, Lei Mengsha actually meets Baili Dongjun a LOT later in the narrative, and by then, Li Hanyi is already about five years old and Lei Mengsha and Li Xinyue have been married for A While.

Yin Luoxia and Yue Yao are shown to be sworn sisters who met and became extremely close even before the events of DY, even closer than Yue Qing and Yue Yao at their absolute tightest. Luoxia lives in Xueyue City in TBOY. She knows Baili Dongjun personally. THEY DID NOT INTERACT. SHE DIDN'T EVEN TALK ABOUT YUE YAO ONCE IN ALL THE SCREENTIME THAT SHE HAD.

Sikong Changfeng says in TBOY that Li Hanyi is four years younger than him, but started studying under their master first and this is also why she is the Second City Master and he is the Third. This is only half true; while Li Changsheng took Li Hanyi in as an apprentice, she was literally like five or six at the time. Nangong Chunshui then proceeded to take on Sikong Changfeng not long after, but Sikong Changfeng by then was already a teenager headed into his adult years. Like, he's at least eighteen when Dashing Youth starts.

Speaking of Sikong Changfeng, TBOY says that the healer Hua Jin is his shimei, his younger martial sister from their master, the number one healer in the world, Xin Baicao. DY shows us that they met the one time where Xin Baicao was told by Baili Dongjun's uncle (who was a top poison user and the two of them got into competitions all the time wink wink cough cough) to save Sikong Changfeng's life. Sikong Changfeng stayed in the Medicine Valley for something like six months, all the while studiously not learning medicine from Xin Baicao and instead focuses on his spearwork and fighting skills. Also, Hua Jin isn't in DY at all.

This one is less of a retcon issue and more of a gripe, Baili Dongjun was literal childhood friends and best buds with Ye Dingzhi. Wuxin/Ye Anshi would literally be the equivalent of his nephew/godson. Do we get to see them interact at all aside from like 5 seconds in DY???? No. We do not. WE WERE CHEATED.

Another gripe, Sikong Changfeng and Baili Dongjun were bros in Dashing Youth, and have been for many years (according to my math, it's 21 years between the beginning of Dashing Youth and The Blood of Youth) and did we get to see them actually interact in TBOY??? NO.

Oh, with all this talk of Sikong Changfeng, another gripe about HOW TO NOT WRITE WOMEN--Feng Qiuyu (who is she, you may ask???).

She is, my friends, the mother of Sikong Qianluo.

BUT DO WE REALLY KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT HER? No. WE BARELY REMEMBER HER NAME. SHE WAS LITERALLY WRITTEN INTO DASHING YOUTH SO THAT SIKONG CHANGFENG COULD MEET HER AND SIKONG QIANLUO COULD BE BORN. SHE WAS ON SCREEN FOR A MAX OF 5 MINUTES DURING THE DRAMA AND WAS NEVER REALLY SEEN OR TALKED ABOUT AGAIN EXCEPT FOR LIKE A MINUTE AT THE END. WE DON'T EVEN HAVE THE COURTESY OF KNOWING SHE DIED BEFORE TBOY; WE HAVE TO PUT IT TOGETHER USING CONTEXT CLUES.

I AM YELLING.

Man, I started this rant really just wanting to talk about how best girl Yue Yao was done super dirty by the producers/writers of DY, but the more I thought about it and analyzed and wrote it all down, the more I got to the underlying issue of just the less-than-lackluster way this already-awfully-written drama treated their women, the angrier I got.

All this to say, Dashing Youth does not write or treat their women very well and that, my dears, is bullshit.

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underforeversgrace · 2 years ago

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wrong paper

DannyMay2023 Day 19: No Backspace Challenge

title: wrong paper

words: 665

Summary: Mr. Lancer gets an assignment from Danny that is not right.

DISCLAIMER: This is no backspace, no spell check, no auto capitalization, and no punctuation shortcuts. I'll probably provide a better copy later on because ya girl can't fucking spell. Or type. Or write. Some of the crossouts are my fuck ups. Some are for flavor. ...to hide all my fuck ups.

~~~~~~

Mr. Lancer streched tiredly, blinking sleep from his eyes as he pulled the next essay towards him. Not for the first time, he considered asking Ishiyama to allow him to o go over basic penmanship in class, how could absolutely none of these children write legibily? At least they were workingon a creative writing course so the papers were varied and interesting for once.

Eve i Or at least… some of them were. Thus far, Dash had written about a football star with superpowers, Paulina about marrying a superhero, Mickey wishing he was a superhero…

living in a town with an actual superhero probably influenced some of these papers, if Lncer had to take a stab in the dark.

The next paper he pulled ou was one with a lot of smurdged and crossed out text, no name a t the ti top. The hanwriting was familiar, at least. Mr. Fenton certainly had a… unique version of chicken scratch.

Lancer frowned at the paper as he began to read it. this… didn’t look like the ‘Write A Story’ assignment he’d assigned.

The sear words indicated as much, vulgar languageLancer had never heard Fenton use.

Man, I am so fuckingover this shit. Mr. Popular Asshat shoved me into a locker FOUR times today. I’m so ecsawus exhaush exhausted. I’ve shoved at least 15 ghosts back into the Zoe at Zone this week. It’s Wednesday. Wednesday!!! Skulker has come for my pelt four times alone.

Oh I forgot the date - it’s Jan 23 26 2005.

honestly I should be working on my stupid paper for English class for Lancer. But what stoy could story can I possiblytell that isn’t less ridiculous than my actual life? or whatever the phrase is. My life is everal way too wild, more than anything I could imagine up.

Like… I’m a half dead teenager. I’ve been dead for nearly a year and no one’s noticed. I fight for my life everyday. I’m a superhero with a secret iedentity and best freind/sidekicks - though if I eevr called them sidekicks to their faces again I’m getting side-kicked in the face. I’ve even got extra bonus points! My parents want to dissect me, I’m failing school. Hell, I’ve even got an evil alternate timeline version of myself that caused the fucking end of the world.

The TV shows make it look so easy. so do th e comics. I’m so tired. I’m only 14, I’m not supposed to be atri sk atrisk at risk of getting murdered daily. Well, not this high of a risk. I don’t want to live like this. But if I stop fgihting, trying, I’ll be dead within a week.

It isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair and neither is death.

Still, might be a cool story idea.

A teenage slacker who gets electrocuted by his parents invention, dies, and get brought back halfway. Turns into a ghost and saves people while his human life seems to wither and die around him. Is constantly hunted and villified when he just wants to help.

Yeah. My life as Phantom would make a hell of a story, wouldn’t it?

Lancer stared at the paper in confusion. It certainly sounded like a wonderful fictttitious story… but somhow it didn’t seem like fiction. It seemed more like a journl entry.

Lancer turned to his computer, pulling up the local news website. It wasn’t hard to find an article about Phantom, he was in the top three stories.

PHANTOM SAVES 13 FROM OFFICE FIRE

Lancer studde studied the article, blowing up the picture of Phantom’s dace. Of Danny Phantom’s face. He opened up another screen, pulling up the student files (complete with pictures). He pulled up D. Fenton’s file, several alerts coming up about truancy, tardis, tardies, absences, missed assignments n fa and failing grades. Lancer enlarged the human boy’s photo and sat it side by side wth the one of Phantom.

Change the coloration… and these two were identical.

Oh no.

Ohno.

Oh no.

#grace writes #danny phantom #dannymay2023 #Dannymay #Challenge: no backspace #Ya girl tried #She rly did

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crepes-suzette-373 · 2 months ago

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Germa's Ancestors

(+ Shandora connection?)

This is a kind of long theory post. I feel like at some point it would make more sense to narrate this as audio/video, because I think people don't like walls of text.

Anyway, bear with me for now, this is a long post.

I want to begin by analysing this scene:

To my knowledge, the phrase 無念の魂 is very specifically only applicable to the souls of the dead, and you can't use it to say souls/spirit in a euphemistic sense. E.g "put my soul into my work", or something like "the spirit of the age". I did my best to check various examples of usage, and far as I can find it really just means dead people.

In that case, then the dialogue about 300 years in the raw would mean "To think that I entrusted you with 300 years' worth of my kingdom's regretful souls".

"Regretful souls" is, as it says, the souls of people who died with a lot of regrets or resentment. It's quite a different sense from "longing".

Also another thing, he says 合わせる顔もない about the dead. This isn't "disgracing their memory". This is "I'm so ashamed (of myself/my failure) that I cannot face them", hence the "I despise myself" dialogue that comes after. It didn't really specify a word for "direct ancestor" so I assume he meant all people of Germa of the past.

So... this could be either/or, but if failing to restore Germa = regrets, and supposedly people there have been dying in regret for 300 years, then it sounds like wanting to restore Germa was the people's dream ever since their destruction.

Though, that is still open to interpretation. It doesn't have to mean "reconquering North Blue" really was the goal that was passed down through generations. Maybe actually the ancestors just wanted to have some land again, but over the years that goal becomes corrupted and twisted.

Or all of that was just crazy talk and the ancestors never actually wanted this. Who knows?

(I do apologise to anyone who really don't like Judge for putting this stuff on your dash, but he's kind of the only one who ever actually said anything substantial about Germa history, and for analysis purposes he has to be in there)

Also a little conspiratorial bent.

The dialogue text said that the souls cannot return to their homeland, it strongly implies the land is just completely obliterated. It's similar to how the Shandians said that their ancestors no longer has a place to return after the sacred trees were cut down.

Germa, or at the very least Judge, has a similar attitude towards the ancestors as the Shandians. Perhaps not quite to the point of worshipping them as gods, but Judge view the past dead of Germa with deep respect.

I feel like it's hinted that "Moon = high technology", as shown by the robots on the moon that Enel saw in the cover story. I've made theories before speculating that Germa is thematically connected to the moon, but maybe they actually literally are related to the moon via one of the moon tribes that descended to the Earth.

I'm not sure how canon it is, but one of the Data Books had said that Skypieans don't actually have wings. Their wings are just costume/decoration.

Assuming this is real (Data Books and Vivre Cards are sometimes wrong), are there humans in the world who are actually descendants of Skypieans? After all if they literally have no wings, then they would look no different from regular humans. Skypieans didn't really have an obvious strong ancestral worship like the Shandians, but perhaps there is some shared culture that we don't know.

That, or possibly somehow the Shandians' wings are also fake. In the moon murals you can see that the Birkans' wings are differently-shaped from the other two. If the Skypiean wing is fake, who's to say that the Shandian one isn't?

Also, an interesting thing is that the Shandian ancestor seems to be the one making the robots, while the Birkan is either observing or giving instructions. So the Shandian ancestor is at least some form of engineer. Curious.

On that note, the people of Wano also deeply respect their ancestors, as real Japanese people do. They have curious Princess Kaguya hints, as well as strong prevalence of moon symbols all over.

As I noted in my analysis of honorifics, Skypieans, Wano, and Germa all share the 上 honorific usage. This is an unusual honorific that no other kingdoms in the world seem to use. Aside from the above 3, only the merfolk royalty and the Tenryuubito use them.

It could be that it's simply "archaic language" even in the One Piece universe, and it just fell out of use in most of the kingdoms. It still makes me wonder if there are actually a lot of humans who have blood ties to the moon tribes that isn't revealed yet as well.

I've also previously mentioned that young Judge has a "Kabuki face" that reminds me of Kin'emon, but I didn't consider that Kalgara also kind of looks like that too. It might just be design coincidence, but maybe it actually means something, I don't know.

#one piece #theory #analysis #conspiracy theory #germa 66 #vinsmoke #vinsmoke family #vinsmoke judge #long post #language

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many-but-one · 7 months ago

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Recently saw a post about folks feeling upset about CDD systems saying they are endo-neutral yet also not wanting to see endo stuff on their dashboards. I’m not reblogging and adding to it because I feel like it would kind of be beating a dead horse because a mutual of mine said basically the same thing I’m about to say and I wanted to make my own post about it. I rarely make posts about syscourse for a variety of reasons but I do think this is something that is important.

I’ve been endo-neutral for a long time, a couple years at least. I’ve openly stated that I find endogenic plurality plausible and interesting. I’ve made a video on tiktok about this subject that got me a plethora of vague posts and made people despise me for having the take that I did. I’ve gotten both hate anons and positive anons on tumblr thanking me or hating me for taking the stance that I did. I’ve met endos who were lovely people and I’ve met endos who were really shitty people. And the same for anti-endos. I’ve been watching the syscourse battle rage on for years and the fact that the same stuff keeps coming up over and over with no “winner” (because it’s a discussion that doesn’t need to have a winner imo—endos can believe what they want and so can anti-endos) makes it feel like the two sides are constantly battling over a fictional no-man’s-land that has only ended in people being hurt, people being hurtful, and just so much fucking negativity.

However, as a CDD system, I don’t think it’s completely implausible to not want to see endo related stuff on my dashboard. I personally believe that the two groups *should* be separate. Because clearly the two groups trying to blend together is what *causes* this discourse to get so bad in the first place. Even if you believe you have a traumagenic system but identify as endo because you don’t think you’re disordered, then the resources and experiences talked about in the CDD tag won’t apply to you. Folks who have a CDD have childhood trauma and therefore their experiences are going to center around being traumatized. I shouldn’t have to want to see stuff from a non-disordered/endo system on my dash if our experiences don’t align at all. I shouldn’t have to preach my neutrality or support for endos day and night for me to be able to say that I am endo neutral or endo supportive.

The main reason I identify as endo neutral despite having a general support of endo systems existing is for a variety of reasons. The main ones being 1) I cannot police other people’s personal experiences 2) whether endogenic plurality is proven by science or not doesn’t matter to me because I’m not endogenic 3) I hate participating in syscourse and taking sides or disclosing sides openly is by nature partaking in it but Gods Forbid I don’t declare what side I’m on or I’m somehow betraying one side or the other 4) both sides can and have been incredibly toxic to each other and I don’t like that kind of negativity in my life, I’ve had enough of having to take sides who are both shit in my life 5) I think the fact that we are STILL fighting over this shit and have been for years with no leeway one way or another makes the fight pointless and should just Stop and 6) I do believe in a separation of the groups because I genuinely believe many if not most systems on either side will refuse to exist in harmony, not to mention the experiences of each side are completely different and non-comparable in exception to both sides having alters present—whether formed by trauma or other means.

I support the views of some endos. I support the views of some anti-endos. I understand why there is animosity on both sides. It is not possible for me to even take a side. However, because I’m a CDD system who has A Lot of trauma, my experiences are not comparable to that of endos and I don’t want to see their content on my dash. I don’t follow the plural tag, I don’t follow the syscourse tag, so I don’t often see endo stuff on my dash because those tend to be spaces in which both are present. And that’s fine because I can curate my own tumblr experiences. But when I see endo stuff in the DID tag or the dissociative disorder tags, that’s when I do get annoyed because endogenic plurality is not comparable to a CDD. And if you’re a traumagenic system who identifies as endo, I feel like that means you should make your own tags and stay out of the ones meant for one side or the other. Or stick to endo only tags. Mixed origins tags exist, don’t co-opt the traumagenic tags when you have distanced yourself from being traumagenic by identifying as endo. You know? Traumagenic tags, DID tags, dissociative disorder tags—all those are for disordered systems, systems who have a complex dissociative disorder. We HAVE made our own tags and our own spaces, they just semi-regularly get co-opted by endo users.

And the same goes for anti-endos. Stop freaking tagging your endo hate with endogenic tags. If you don’t want them in your spaces so badly, don’t invade their spaces either. Fucksakes.

#endo neutral #rare syscourse post from many but one #syscourse #I’m not taking feedback on this one because you’re not changing my mind #if I lose followers then oh well I literally do not care #if you follow me you should know by now that i’m syscourse unaligned or endo neutral

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bamboozledbird · 5 months ago

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IGNITE: A Teen Wolf S1 AU // prev, chapter 2, next

Characters: Stiles Stilinski, Original Female Character, Lydia Martin, Scott McCall, Allison Argent Pairing: eventual Stiles x OFC, but man are we talking slow burn Word Count: 4.6k Warnings: canon typical gore/violence, parental death, depictions of depression (apathy, dissociation, 'numb little bug' vibes) Tags: canon has been lovingly scrapped for parts, author majored in english lit and is a choatic bi and it shows, prolific overuse of the em dash, the slowest of burns i fear

Summary: Four years ago, Drea Dickinson's entire life fell apart. Her mom died, her best friend replaced her, and all she could do was watch listlessly while everything else burned down around her. All she wants is to forget and maybe get through her sophomore year without flunking chemistry and completely unraveling at the seams—a seemingly impossible task with the sudden appearance of ghosts from her mother's mysterious past and a hair-raising beast ripping people apart all over town. It would be easier to pretend if she hadn't accidentally entwined her life with the most interrogatory bastard in town. She could have gone her whole life without meeting Stiles Stilinski, and she would've been perfectly fine, but now she's stuck knowing that she's made her bed in the fragile, breakable bones of the boy with all the answers. Chapter Summary: After an awkward encounter with Lydia Martin, Stiles realizes that his new acquaintance might be the perfect person to jumpstart his 15-year plan. Drea, on the other hand, isn't interested in discussing her ex-best friend; she's much more focused on the man who was attacked by the mysterious beast ravaging the town.

A/N: This is an entirely selfish project. This rewrite has been so incredibly nostalgic, and I may or may not have cried a few times because the TW era was such a special time of my life. To be 17 again, sigh. You can also check me out on ao3 (dork_knight)!

Her dad’s SUV was parked in the garage when Drea finally pulled into their circle driveway. It was a rare sight; her dead battery had disrupted their usual routine. She was supposed to be safely tucked away in her room after an early dinner—take-out usually, sometimes a quesadilla if she was feeling exceptionally inspired—by the time her dad got home from work. It was dysfunctional in every sense of the word, but it was the only way they could function in the same space.

He used to stare at her from the other end of the dinner table: not eating, not speaking. The only way Drea knew he was alive was the slow rise and fall of his chest. After a while, he moved dinner to his office. ‘Working dinner,’ he’d say in passing, ‘budgets are due.’ Eventually, he stopped coming home altogether. It was better that way, Drea thought. They loved each other better from afar, where the power of nostalgia could cloud all the present unpleasantries. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her now. She wondered, and she desperately didn’t want to find out.

Drea shouldered her backpack and made sure her car lights were off twice before quietly creeping into the mudroom. She could hear the buzz of the microwave as she toed off her sneakers and tried to discern the smell emanating from the kitchen. Something with garlic and tomato. Bona Vita, probably. Her dad loved their al pomodoro.

She tried to make herself as small as possible as she skulked into the kitchen, shoulders hunched to her ears and grip tight around the strap of her backpack. Her dad’s back was to her; she could see the wrinkles in his collar from where he tugged at it when he was agitated. He stopped stirring his pasta once she reached the island.

“Did…” her dad trailed off for a moment, still facing the kitchen counter, “did everything go alright with the Sheriff?”

Drea shrugged even though he couldn’t see her, “I guess.”

“It’s just,” he rubbed at his jaw and looked down towards the oven, “it’s almost eight. I was wondering…worrying.”

He still wasn’t looking at her. Drea stared at the back of his head and sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. Look at me. Her brows pinched, and her back molars ground together. Look at me.

“I called him. Sheriff Stilinski. He said that you didn’t speak for long.”

“Didn’t have anything new to say,” Drea shoved her hands into hoodie pockets, realizing belatedly that she forgot to give Stiles his sweatshirt back. Another problem for another time.

“That’s not what I—” Drea’s dad grasped the lip of the counter and hung his head like it suddenly weighed too much for his spine, “I was wondering what happened to you.”

“Oh,” Drea shifted her weight onto her other foot, “dead battery. I think it was the door light.”

Her dad nodded a little, “Do you need someone to pick up your car?”

“Got a jump from a friend.” Not a friend, not really, but she supposed it was the closest she’d come to one in the last four years. That was just a little too sad to say out loud.

“Good.” He nodded again, “Good.”

Drea nodded because it seemed like the only thing to do and slipped towards the hallway. She’d taken no less than five steps out of the kitchen when her dad said, “You could call me. Next time, you could call me.”

Maybe. Maybe she could if he would look at her.

Monday came, and Drea had forgotten about Stiles Stilinski and his sweatshirt. In all fairness, she almost forgot her essay too. Lack of sleep, maybe, or perhaps lack of Wellbutrin—she’d also forgotten if she’d taken her pills before she left for school.

Drea crinkled her nearly empty can of Red Bull a few times and twisted the tab in circles until it snapped off. Nervous habit. She flicked the tab into a trashcan and squeezed the can until it crumpled in on itself. Okay, she’d definitely forgotten to take her pills. However, on her list of things to forget, homework outranked antidepressants by several places, so her day wasn’t off to the worst possible start in the world. Dr. Lin always said that she should spend at least five minutes every morning changing her ‘self-talk’ to ‘gratitude, not negatude’—she also said that consistently taking her meds was imperative to her mental health, but one out of two wasn’t so bad. See. Positive thinking; she was killing it.

It was, however, pretty damn difficult to put a positive spin on a bloodied school bus cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape.

Drea lingered on the outskirts of the swarm of teenagers gawking behind the barricade that a few deputies were fruitlessly attempting to enforce. The back door of the bus was crumpled in the middle, wrenched open, and barely clinging to life with a lone intact hinge. More concerning, was the blood smeared across the yellow paint and the bloody handprints pressed against the windows.

She peered through the mass of shoulders in front of her and squinted. There were four large gouges in the door and tears in the vinyl seats—claws: Drea realized. They were claw marks.

Baffling. The entire scene was, in all sincerity, baffling.

Awful, Drea quickly corrected herself. The carnage was awful, first and foremost. It was awful, horrific, and totally tragic…but it was also bizarre. Animals, wild or not, generally didn’t hunt on school grounds; that honor was reserved for creepy super-seniors and perverse volleyball coaches.

Drea chewed on her bottom lip and stewed. A bear seemed most likely, given the battering the bus took, but they were a long way from Los Padres. Mountain lions and coyotes, however, often strolled into small-town suburbia to snack on unaccompanied emotional support animals. Still, she doubted they had the strength or dexterity to rip a steel door off of its hinges.

The first warning bell rang, and it was especially shrill while Drea was lost in her own head. She managed to not flinch with a herculean effort and pushed through the remaining voyeurs towards the front doors. Stuffing her airpods into her ears, she turned up the volume on her phone until the bass vibrated all thoughts of coyotes, cougars, and bears out of her mind. Oh my.

Positive: Ellie Rowsell’s ethereal vocals demanded her full and undivided attention.

Negative: Ellie Rowsell’s ethereal vocals demanded her full and undivided attention.

She grabbed her chemistry notecards, a few highlighters, and a fat stack of books from her locker just as an overly-cologned jackass shoved his equally pungent friend straight into her crowded arms.

Positive: She hadn’t gotten the chance to organize her notes by unit number before they scattered all over the floor.

Negative: They were still scattered all over the floor.

Biting back a few choice expletives, Drea crouched down and gathered her notecards into a messy heap. She stretched across the scuffed tile for her highlighters; one brushed past her fingertips and rolled into the pointed toe of a sleek brown leather boot. Drea glanced up, apology ready, but her tongue went cottony when she locked eyes with Lydia Martin.

Lydia Martin was many things to many people, but Drea supposed the general consensus would be that she was the apex predator—regardless of what the bloodbath outside might lead a person to believe.

Most students were consenting prey. Enthusiastically consenting, in fact. Drea understood the impulse. Knowing she could destroy you, that was the thing that made Lydia so undeniably captivating. There were few people who proved the theory of the sublime in the flesh, let alone before they had the chance to get out of Dodge and really grow up. It was only natural to gravitate towards the only exception in Beacon County. Lydia was the duality of fear and attraction. She defined indefinable beauty—because she wasn’t just beautiful (anybody could be beautiful), Lydia was fiercely beautiful and, in the same breath, the grace of girlhood. She was…she suckerpunched Jordan Aadams in the third grade for making fun of Drea’s eyes without lifting a single manicured finger; that was the closest Drea could come to explaining the phenomenon Lydia Martin left in her wake.

Lydia’s thick red curls spilled over her shoulders as she looked down at the obstacle in her path. The angry pinch in her brows softened briefly once she made eye-contact with Drea, but she quickly corrected her slip and schooled her face into a blank expression. Returning her attention to her friend, Lydia’s heels clicked against the floor as she stepped over Drea’s copy of Metamorphosis and continued on with her conversation like it hadn’t ever stopped. Like Drea was just a mirage or a distorted oil-slick reflection—like she was a ghost who just wouldn’t fucking die already. Drea watched her go, forgetting to blink, until they reached Lydia’s locker on the other side of the hall.

Before she got extensions, Lydia liked to wear her hair in a French braid. Before she discovered full-coverage concealer, her freckles were golden against the fairness of her cheeks. Before everything fell apart, she was her best friend.

In the end, it wasn’t a terribly dramatic thing. There wasn’t a melodramatic scene or an explosive fight; sometimes, Drea wondered if that would've been better. There was a certain kind of brutality in a slow, quiet death; one that lasted long after the hot water had run out in the shower and shampoo stung her eyes. After the funeral, Drea could taste decay in their conversations, in their silences. The rot crawled listlessly—everything did back then—tauntingly sluggish. She saw the end coming weeks before they stopped speaking, and she didn’t even try to stop it. To be fair, Lydia didn’t either. On the first day of seventh grade, Lydia had new friends; they all smelled like vanilla and owned matching couture purses. She had always been magnetic, but evidently losing her only constant was her final quest before she transcended to godhood. Drea made her human; that must have been the problem. They were babies together. They were more than family. Now, they sat across from each other in a class she couldn’t bring herself to care about, and they did not look at each other unless it was straight through.

Drea snatched the runaway highlighter and quickly sunk back against the wall, pressing into it like she could force her body through the cracks in the bricks or at the very least shed the sentimentality clinging to her skin. She darted her gaze across the hall and almost snorted when she saw the amount of people who’d flocked to Lydia’s side within the last thirty seconds. Lydia was unobtainable, unknowable—and yet ever so desirable. No one really knew her, so of course they all wanted to be her.

Lydia only liked one of them, the new girl with shiny black hair and dark eyes; Drea could tell. Her top lip pursed ever so slightly when she was holding back a barbed comment and a violent eye roll. Usually, Lydia didn’t bother with niceties, but for whatever reason she’d decided her new persona should only intimidate peons with looks and confidence, never brains. It was a shame, really; her cave-dweller boyfriend desperately needed educating.

Drea resisted the urge to look across the hall again and smoothed out the bent corner of a notecard until ‘alpha’ became ‘alpha particle’. A shadow fell over the pink-highlighted text, and she frowned. Glancing up, her frown cemented when she saw Stiles’s elven nose and remembered that she still had his sweatshirt wadded on her desk chair.

“Hey,” Stiles adjusted his grip on his backpack, “did your car make it home okay?”

Drea nodded and shut her locker with her elbow, bending with the wobbling tower of school supplies in her arms until it stabilized again.

“Cool.” He nodded a few times, mouth puckered like a duck, and scratched at the back of his neck, “So. You and Lydia, huh.”

Drea stared intently at her notes, “Is that a question?”

“No, it’s a statement.” He hooked his thumbs around his backpack straps and leaned back slightly, “And that episode of telepathic taekwondo was definitely a statement.”

Drea glowered until ‘alpha decay’ and ‘helium-4 nucleus’ mushed together into an illegible pink blob, “I’ve got a statement for you—only two words actually.”

“So it is a thing.” She could hear the smirk in his voice as he grabbed the books from under her arms.

She refused to feel grateful, even as she readjusted her grip on her cards and managed to free one of her hands, “Get lost, Stilinski.”

“That’s three words.” The smirk was deafening now.

The one-minute warning bell rang and a mass of students swarmed the hallway, effectively drowning out Stiles’s smugness with a sea of jock whooping and band geek trumpeting. Drea met his gaze and smiled sweetly before stepping around him, “Kindly. Choke.”

She ignored the sound of Stiles’s large footsteps following far too closely behind her. She wanted to be annoyed with him, but English was his first-period and he did have her books in his stupidly big hands. Instead of flipping him off, Drea focused her itching fingers on stacking cards and pencils on top of her desk until Stiles sat down in the seat next to her—without permission. She changed her mind; he was annoying.

Stiles scooted the desk closer to hers with his feet, and the metal legs screeched against the linoleum flooring for her. “Was it like a ‘grew apart over the summer’ thing, or did some serious shit go down?”

Drea sighed heavily and lined her pencils and pens next to each other, first in order of length and then color, “Why do you care?”

His mouth remained open for a second, and then he shrugged a little too casually, “I’m a naturally inquisitive person.”

“You’re unnaturally irritating,” she grumbled, low in her throat, and scowled at her picked-apart cuticles like they had done her a particular disservice.

Stiles huffed through his nose and threw his hands in the air, “Come on, I totally saved your ass Friday—very chivalrously too, might I add. I won’t even press charges for the theft.”

“Theft?” Drea finally turned around in her seat to face him at the accusation.

Stiles nodded solemnly, “My sweatshirt. My most favorite sweatshirt of all the sweatshirts.”

Oh. Drea deflated a little; she’d forgotten about that pesky little detail again. She snatched her books off of his desk before their lives could become further entangled and replied flatly, “I’ll overnight it.”

“No, I insist you keep it.” His smile was a little too crooked to be truly cocky, “I’m a good guy like that.”

Drea tapped her pencil against her chin, eraser side up, and cocked her head to the side, “Isn’t it incredible how every self-proclaimed ‘good guy’ is exclusively terrible.”

Stiles’s face twisted into a petulant scowl as he collapsed against the back of his chair, and Drea was a little surprised that the desk managed to contain all of his gangly appendages without collapsing as well. “I like her, okay!” His exasperated confession carried to the next row of students, and Stiles melted into his seat when a jacked sophomore with no neck whistled lewdly behind them. Squeezing his eyes shut, Stiles lowered his voice, “Actually, I’m kind of in love with her if you want to be technical about it.”

“Oh.” Drea blinked and then laughed.

“Don’t laugh, dickface.”

“Sorry,” she grinned, not sorry in the slightest, “it’s just…isn’t everyone?”

Stiles shook his head and sighed wistfully, “Not like I am.”

Drea turned to get a better look at him, and she didn’t mask the doubt in her eyes. He was wearing a brown flannel that was practically mewling for a good ironing and a red t-shirt with the silhouette of a spider embossed over his chest. Spider-Man’s emblem, obviously. If she had to hazard a guess, she’d bet it was the Andrew Garfield version. Regardless, it was blatantly clear that Stiles’s home planet was lightyears away from Lydia’s.

Drea folded her arms over chest and leaned back against her seat, “Have you even talked to her?”

“Technically…no,” Stiles dipped his head from side to side like a bobble head and then pressed his palms together, gesturing with them every so often to emphasize the most ridiculous words in his sentence, “but we have a deep, unspoken connection, mostly via sporadic eye-contact.”

Drea just looked at him, unamused and unimpressed.

Stiles held up his hands like a director and kicked his feet onto his desk, “It’s about the long-game.”

“Gross,” Drea pulled a face. She wasn’t sure if she was referring to the gray wad of gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe or the pride in his long-con. It was probably a bit of both.

“Are you gonna help a Nobody out or not?” Stiles nudged the leg of her desk with his sneaker—the gumless one, thankfully—and sent one of her pens careening towards the edge.

Drea caught it before it could hit the ground and glared at him. “Hate to break it to you, but I’m not an ‘in.’” She returned the pen to its rightful place between her pencil and purple highlighter: a perfect rainbow of neuroticism. Drea straightened her row of writing utensils again and swallowed shallowly, “I don’t even know her anymore.”

For the first time since Stiles had popped up in front of her locker like a chronic zit, understanding clicked in his eyes. Actually, he almost looked apologetic. Stiles sucked his bottom lip between his teeth and leaned forward onto his forearms, “So…what happened? Did you not make queen bee first-string?”

“No,” Drea bristled. After a long exhale, she crumpled in on herself a little and mumbled, “Yes…kind of. I don’t know. I have my version; I’m sure she has hers.”

Stiles clasped his hands together and nodded sagely, “There are as many truths as there are people.”

Drea’s brows scrunched, and her eyes went lidded as she flipped through her mental philosophy rolodex, “Camus?”

He shook his head and clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth, “Evangelion.”

Drea was startled into a snorty chortle, “Obviously you’re a weeb.”

Stiles hid his amusement behind a slow roll of his eyes, “You’re at least 1/16 weeb if you know Evangelion is an anime.”

Before she could deny such blasphemy, Drea was distracted by the boy who usually sat next to her—Greg something, she was pretty sure—coming to a stop directly between her and Stiles. He lingered next to the side of his desk, breathing heavily through his mouth like some kind of sick prowler.

Stiles glanced at him with a flat expression and then looked up again, brows shooting towards his hairline, when he didn’t leave, “Can I help you?” He jerked his head forward and shook it slightly, “Need a mint?”

Greg Something stared at him, red-rimmed eyes thoroughly glazed over, and Drea wondered if being faded at 7:45 in the morning was worth the tortuous five-hour wait until lunch.

“No?” Stiles waved his hand in the air; Greg didn’t even blink. “Okay seeya.”

It took him roughly 30 seconds to comprehend what Stiles was saying, but eventually Greg shuffled towards one of the remaining empty seats in the middle of the classroom.

“Thank you,” Stiles muttered before returning his attention to the side of Drea’s face.

She smirked slightly at her notebook, doodling a little bird with sharp talons along the margins of her notes on Kafka’s thoughts on absurdism—spoiler alert: the guy who wrote a book about a dude randomly transforming into a bug was a big fan of it. She added a long feathered tail to her bird and said, “It is his seat.”

Stiles scoffed and looked over his shoulder. They watched Greg shove a handful of Cheeto Puffs into his mouth in slow-motion for a moment, and Stiles replied, “I think he’ll live.”

“Oh,” Drea shook her head a little, freshly bitten lips curling around the extended vowel, “I’m not worried about him.”

Stiles aggressively clicked his pen with his thumb and pressed his mouth together until his lips disappeared into a flat line. “If you would just answer my questions the first time, I wouldn’t have to keep asking them, so, for the love of god—” fortuitously for him, he was cut off by a loud scratchy buzz before Drea could succumb to her base instincts and throw an eraser into his flapping mouth.

Principal Montoya’s voice crackled through the loudspeaker, “Attention students: I know that many of you are concerned about the…incident in the parking lot, but rest assured that the police have it well in hand. Classes will proceed as scheduled as they continue their investigation. Have a productive day, Cyclones.”

A resounding groan echoed throughout the classroom and into the hallway, followed by the hum of students breaking into various complaints. Mr. Lyman thwacked his pointer against the whiteboard, and the force of his swing sent the cartoonish hand on the end of the stick into rapid vibration—effectively shutting everyone up. The quiet was only disturbed by the rustle of zippers being unzipped and papers being smoothed when he instructed them to turn their essays in.

Drea hastily wrote her name across the top of her paper and pointedly kept her eyes on the board when Stiles leaned across his desk. “Life’s short, y’know. One day you’re a traveling salesman, and the next you’re a grotesque, monstrous insect, wishing that you’d seized life when you had the opposable thumbs for it, so—”

“A man just died; have some class,” Drea interrupted him, voice dry as it was soft. Stiles might not care about getting in trouble, but she had worked very hard to remain on a no-name basis with all her teachers.

“We don’t know that he’s dead—or that he’s a he.”

“Oh yeah,” Drea jotted down the daily prompt in her notebook and muttered, “I’m sure the guy just decided to go home and sleep off the mauled limbs.”

“It could’ve been an animal,” Stiles huffed, bowing his head in submission when Mr. Lyman shot him a stern look from behind his desk. He continued with his hand over his mouth, muffling his words, “And they do run off to die alone.”

Drea stared at him for a long moment. “That’s cats. Are you saying a bear ripped a bus apart for a cat.”

“Well, if you say anything in that tone, it’s going to sound ridiculous,” Stiles muttered sullenly against his palm, and she was pretty sure that he was pouting behind it too.

She opened her mouth to reply and then squinted slightly when a boy with floppy hair skidded to a halt in front of them. His mouth was slightly agape as he looked back and forth between Stiles and Greg, who was now licking the nearly toxic orange dust off of his fingers.

“Sit, Scotty,” Stiles jerked his thumb towards the empty desk behind him. “Good boy.”

The boy, Scott she gathered, did not look amused, but he sat down behind Stiles anyway and leaned forward to whisper something in his ear. Stiles whipped around and responded in a hushed screech.

Drea was distracted from her eavesdropping when Lydia’s friend sat down next to Scott—directly behind her. Her jaw could cut glass. She dropped her chin onto her folded arms and refused to let herself frown; the end result was a slightly constipated pout. It was just…Allison had just started going to Beacon Hills a few weeks ago, and she was already completely intertwined in Lydia’s life.

Lydia was…prickly, so she was just surprised, that’s all, how easily Allison fit into her life. More palatable, Drea thought as she risked a peek over her shoulder; she must be more palatable than most. A terrible, ugly thing creeped over her, and she found herself imagining Allison choking on her beautiful, silky black hair until her beautiful dark eyes popped out of her head. Just for a moment. A brief, awful, horrible moment—until she remembered it wasn’t Allison’s fault.

“Hey.” Drea flinched when she felt a gentle tap on her shoulder.

She reluctantly shifted in her chair so that she could see Allison. She just looked at her for an uncomfortable moment, and Allison smiled awkwardly, “The tests.” Drea blinked and licked her dry lips, at a loss for words. Allison smiled again, a little nervous but still kind, “They're on your desk.”

“Oh,” Drea said dumbly and reached for the pile of papers on her desk that she’d missed during her lengthy period of dissociation. She kept one and then held out the rest to Allison, mumbling, “Sorry,” under her breath.

Allison looked at her for a moment, and Drea didn’t like the discerning look in her doe eyes. “It’s okay. I zone-out all the time.”

She could see why Lydia liked her; she was nice, overly so. Drea felt that ugly feeling slip into her mouth again, bitterness coating her tongue, and she wished that Allison was catty or at very least a vapid twit who was either too stupid or too self-involved to notice other people—like the rest of Lydia’s circle.

“I like your necklace.” Allison nodded a little towards the black chain around her neck.

A heavy pendant rested just over Drea’s sternum; the maze etched into the stone had eroded in places, like it had been left out in acid rain for decades. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was made of; her mother never said when she gave it to her, and she never asked. It didn’t matter much now.

“Thanks,” Drea finally said, because that was what normal people did when they were complimented, and she was a normal person. Mostly. She swallowed thickly and bit down on the scab in the center of her bottom lip before adding, “I like your jacket.” She did. It was simple, unadorned by gaudy zippers and lapels like so many of the other leather jackets on campus. She would wear it herself if she didn’t break into a sweat in any temperature warmer than tepid.

Allison’s cheeks dimpled when she smiled, and Drea quashed the sigh rising in her throat. Her smile was magnificent. “Thanks. I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off, but my friend convinced me to—” Allison let out a little breathy laugh, “Sorry, you definitely don’t want to hear my jacket’s tragic backstory.”

She didn’t, not if it included hearing about Lydia’s fashion tips second-hand. Still, Drea managed a little smile, “As long as it doesn’t begin with a cow, you’re golden.”

Allison laughed and held up her hands, “It’s faux; I promise.”

“Ladies,” Mr. Lyman called from across the classroom, “I wasn’t aware that existentialism was so amusing.” Drea felt a dizzying heat crawl up her neck to her ears once she realized that the only noise in the room, other than Allison’s tinkly laughter, was the scratch of pencils on paper as students worked on their tests.

“Sorry,” they mumbled at the same time, and Allison mouthed another ‘Sorry’ just for her before Drea turned around. Damn. She liked her. How incredibly inconvenient. She almost wished that Stiles was still pestering her so that she had a real reason to be upset—until she finally got a good look at the mid-term, more specifically at the thickness of it. Drea flipped through the lengthy test and looked at the ceiling briefly: Six essay questions?

Positive: At least, she found a legitimate excuse to sulk.

Negative: She felt a migraine coming on.

#stiles stilinski imagine #stiles stilinski #stiles stilinski fanfiction #stiles stilinski x oc #teen wolf #teen wolf imagine #teen wolf fanfiction #stiles stilinski fic #dylan o'brien imagine #stiles stilinski x ofc

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roboticchibitan · 1 year ago

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Someday I'm going to write a Very Problematic lesbian romance about a knight and a thief. The thief is a mage who can heal from any wound and her blood has restorative properties. This has caused her a Tragic Backstory. The knight is in love with the princess the thief steals something important from, but is currently out of favor with the princess.

The knight catches the thief in the act, but the thief slips through her fingertips. Knight gets obsessive about redeeming herself by getting the important thing back. Ensue cat and mouse chase. The thief is just playing with her at first. She curses the knight to be unable to lie to her. Cue seething rage from the knight.

These two women are Actually Trying To Kill Each Other. There are Murder Attempts. But also banter and the thief is REALLY hot and the knight slowly stops thinking about the princess every waking minute and starts thinking about this thief that she totally isn't attracted to.

Meanwhile, knight gets into deep shit with some other people. The thief keeps appearing to interfere, and each time, she tells the knight one component she needs to break the curse, but says she'll give the last component "over my dead body." She's playing mind games and toying with the knight.

Finally, the knight finds herself in dire straits. She's cornered with no way out. Suddenly! Thief to the rescue! Cue "only I'm allowed to kill you" line. There's a dashing escape and some witty banter before the thief uses magic to restrain the knight (and tease her because bondage is hot) and runs off.

After that the murder attempts get a lot more half hearted. The knight completely loses sight of her goal and is completely wrapped up in the thief. They end up drinking together in some back alley bar and having a drunken night of amazing sex. Knight wakes up alone with the important thing and a note left on the nightstand.

But on her way home, she's attacked by the people she's in deep shit with. She gets gravely injured and the last thing she remembers before losing consciousness is the thief appearing before her and screaming at her to open her eyes.

Knight wakes up completely healed at thief's home base. There's a moment of genuine intimacy and emotional connection. Almost jokingly, the thief says, "admit it, you're in love with me." Knight opens her mouth to say no but the lying curse stops her. Oh. But she's also angry about the curse. The knight demands to know the last curse breaking component she needs, and the thief sadly says she can't tell her. They fight a lover's quarrel.

The knight gets angry and leaves, heartbroken. But! After she gets home with the important thing, she can't stop thinking about the thief. The princess's petty drama doesn't interest her anymore. She wants the woman she's been obsessed with for months.

I'm not going to give away the ending but it's a "I'm asking you to hurt me" situation. A "you have to hurt me now if we want to be happy together later" situation. A "I love you and I'm sorry and I'm begging you to hurt me please don't deny me" kind of a deal.

Someday I will write it. I have other things I want to write first, but someday I'm going to write the most problematic of all lesbians. A story of obsession.

#my writing #long post

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playawner · 3 months ago

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HEYYYYYYYYY

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Hello! I'm Zash. I use It/She/He and I'm a multifandom artist. I'm also an aspiring writer who is yearning to improve one day!

Currently hyperfixated on Smiling Friends :-]

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Lil funny notes here:

I'm on the funny spectrum (Autistic 🌈♾️), so I may struggle with some things (especially socialization). Along with that, I struggle with Anxiety and therefore may be seen as awkward. Don't be discouraged from interacting though! I enjoy making friends :-]

The main thing I do is just reblogging, can be anything I enjoy or consider important really. From fandom posts to things that needs to be reblogged immediately.

That being said, I usually don't check people's profiles when I interact at first. If I happen to break your dni, you can just block me and move on! (Interactions ≠ endorsements most of the time. If I happen to constantly interact with a "problematic" person w/o knowing, please let me know)

Asks are open EVERY. DAY. WEEK. AND YEAR!!!!! If you want to ask something GO AHEAD!!!!!! I don't bite and in fact I appreciate that. Same thing for DMs but I rarely check those.

Other interests I have are: Geometry Dash, MLP, Pokemon, Digimon, Mythology, Roblox Games (especially rp-ish ones!), Lapfox and cartoons!

I am a CREATURE FREAK!!!! I like to draw my faves as little creatures sometimes. Either for fun or for AUs and stuff. Cringe culture is dead and its grave is my pillow; if you don't like that you either have to go along or leave sorry

ACC IS 14+++++++ I may post content such as gore, vents, body horror, some suggestive jokes (tho nothing really big) and yaya. If you are 14 or younger I don't reccomend following me. I'm not your parent or anything but I'd rather block you than anything else.

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I HAVE A STRAWPAGE TOO!!!!!

FUNNY BLINKIES HERE !!!! ↓

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Ty for sticking around! I hope you'll be able to find a lot of things here <3

#zash's stuff #pinned #pinned intro #once again: tagging with my current fandoms/things I like (mostly to find friends; but otherwise then yeah)#smiling friends #geometry dash #lapfox #lapfox trax #my little pony #pokemon #digimon #may tag some misc stuff later but not for now

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alifeasvivid · 11 months ago

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Let me be very, very clear.

England and America's caregiver/ward-charge-""~son~"" relationship (as it kind of relates a lot to this post) is only interesting to me at all if they end up in a romantic/sexual relationship later and not because I think it's incest because it is not that (.that's not a thing in hetalia. even if it was, America is not "blood" related to England. England has actual brothers, we know what that looks like. the implications born out of England being his colonies' "father" give me the ick.)

It's interesting to me in the sense of America having "been in love" with England for his entire existence and England being basically the only one with that caregiver view of the relationship. America definitely wanted to be England's wife and/or husband from the time he was very wee smol and England laughed indulgently and said of course, of course and thought it was "cute" at the time, but America was dead fucking serious about it and never really stopped being so.

Even England thinking that he is/was a caregiver to America is a retcon in his own mind because he definitely was just the world's worst babysitter. He's painting a better picture of himself by claiming that he gave America the world on a string and nursing his own ego over America giving him the finger and demanding independence. He liked knowing America was out there, across the sea, loving him and always being happy to see him, but he was never there. Not even at the end (rainy battlefields be damned, he was way too busy with more pressing matters).

The fact that England is so much older than America but they end up at very similar ages in the modern day so that England is suddenly forced to see America as an adult and equal in a way that isn't the same old "older adult sees 18 year old as 'grown up' for the first time', is just... I dunno it's very unique to them as far as I've encountered and I can never properly articulate just exactly what I mean by this. It's a vibe. I've only ever gotten the full experience of it from a few artists/writers.

Let me be even more clear: in my mind, as far as Hetalia goes, America declared independence, yes for himself primarily, but also because England wouldn't see him as an adult and specifically because he wouldn't see him as a potential partner.

I understand where people find the idea of them having a father/son relationship sort of warm and sweet (esp face family) and/or sort of dark and twisted (they're too alike in all the wrong ways). I get it. And I go out of my way to respect people who don't ship them. If a post says "don't tag as ship" I don't tag it as ship... and if it's not tagged when it comes across my dash and it's not overtly shippy, I check OP's tags and honor that. So let's just be clear. If you interpret a post of mine as them having a familial relationship, keep your mitts off of it, capiche?

#smh #sorry guys but they be fuckin'#I'm objectively correct about this XD

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mayakern · 1 year ago

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Whenever I see you respond to someone who is like "oh I missed out on a my fav skirt and it won't be restocked :((( any chance it'll be restocked?" I would kinda wonder if you would find it annoying. But reading through your asks and realizing that this is a way of gathering information for business decisions has made me feel a lot better about inquiring about retired designs, especially since you mention how the more people are being vocal the more chances there are of bringing the designs back from the dead sometimes haha

it used to be pretty overwhelming, but for the most part making the skirt design has helped make it more manageable

part of what makes it overwhelming tho is having the majority of it be anon asks. sometimes publishing and ask asking about a certain design is good because i can gauge like the number of likes and whatever comments it gets as part of my metrics, but anon is difficult. i can’t really take those requests at face value because someone could be inflating demand by sending multiple asks. plus, i already take up a lot of dash space for a lot of people and i don’t want to be obnoxious (too late, i know). 😅

so honestly one of the best things you can do is if you see a post about a design you’re interested in, comments/reblogs are really helpful, especially because it helps to organize things in a more condensed location.

anyway here’s the obligatory link to the skirt design tracker.

#ask #store

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double-jango · 1 month ago

Text

A multimuse RP side-blog, written by a queer trans person with a zero tolerance policy for any form of homophobia. Please take a moment to check out my Rules, which you can find below the cut. Follows back from doublejango, without the dash.

Quick note: It is fine to reblog anything (except RPs) from me. Memes? Go for it, you don't have to send me anything and you don't have to reblog from the source. Art? Same deal. You like an Ask that I answered and you want to reblog it? Fine by me. Dash commentary? Sure! And tbh I wouldn't mind you reblogging RPs, but most of my partners don't want RPs reblogged. So if it looks like a roleplay post between two people, please leave it alone and don't reblog <3

I also don't mind if you Like posts. Liking and reblogging is fine, just please don't repost.

Minors, DO NOT INTERACT. Do not follow me, sends asks, or try to interact in any way unless you're over eighteen--and the same goes for your characters. I do not interact with characters who are minors. I strongly prefer to write with people who are over twenty-five. I’m in my thirties, so if you are too (or older!), that would be great!

I try to always tag for content that is likely triggering. I’ll use the tags example tw or example cw for those. I don’t anticipate there being a whole lot of that on my blog, but when it's there, I'll do my best to tag.

Activity: I am very slow. Very, very slow. But I generally don’t lose things, so please trust that I haven’t lost interest in our thread.

I respect Dead Dove Do Not Eat and will fight for people’s rights to write it. I will always tag with what applies, either NSFT (as in Not Safe for Tumblr) or DDDNE. I don’t necessarily write a lot of DDDNE, but I am willing to, and I will not judge you if that’s something you enjoy. I have some personal hard limits for it that I am willing to discuss if we start going down that path, and will gladly hear yours!

Don't try to bully or guilt-trip me into writing smut, please. I can and will write it. I'll write filthy, explicit smut (tagged and under a read-more). I'll write soft vanilla stuff. I'll write fade to black, whatever my RP partner prefers--I'll do my best to match your vibe. But if you mock me for the fact that I prefer to let smut happen organically? I'm out.

If you demand people tag any character from the fandom we're writing in, especially if it's because you want the mun to prove they know the character is bad, we are not a good fit. That's another form of virtue signaling and no matter how much I may otherwise like you, I'm firm on my limits for that.

And on a last note, aggressive virtue signaling doesn’t fly with me. If you need to post about how people are nasty for liking fictional, legal, not real content? You and I are not going to get along. It’s a short trip between the Purity Police and censorship/fascism mindsets imo, so I will avoid people who participate in that kind of culture like the plague.

#shut up dj ooc

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neonscandal · 1 year ago

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So, if you asked to write your top 5 fav characters each from JJK & BNHA, what genre will you put them (or you agree that they should be in shounen)....

My asks are getting funnier. 🥰 As always, thanks for asking, lets dig in.

Look at these knuckleheads.

JJK Top 5

I've seen people make really funny observations about how every character in JJK belongs in a different universe but was shoehorned into a horror battle shonen and it delights me to no end. I'm not sure if Gege Akutami actually penned characters that are typical of other anime genres, in a sense, but do believe we all collectively just want our faves to have better odds of survival. At this point, Gege looks at fan polls like a dead pool. I think a story where characters are so obviously not meant to be there would be hilarious if done intentionally, camp even.

Satoru Gojo - The duality of a man who is "The Strongest" in universe while maintaining a girly pop facade to circumvent feeling othered by his strength? Two of my favorite things about Gojo are that he is 1) traumatized 🤪✨ and 2) down astronomically for the days he spent with Suguru Geto. Put this man in a shonen ai, stat.

Nobara Kugisaki and Maki Zenin - Yuri. I feel like I don't need to explain myself here except to say that I put them as one item on the list because I didn't want a list of 6 (I have so many faves). Both iconic, both bad ass. No notes. On the other hand, I would never want to rob Maki of her revenge story so... grain of salt if she stays in universe.

Kento Nanami - I was going to say "this man wants to be in an office sitcom so bad" but, truthfully, would not find the overdone gags and antics palatable. Nanami deserves to rest at an even, dulcet tempo. Traumatized in his youth, he really only returns to jujutsu because office work is unfulfilling but imagine if he were in an office shojo with a found family that he had to provide for? I'm not saying this anime is particularly good but plop him in something cozy like "The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague" but with the home life of "Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid". He'll work for the money because it provides for someone else, you know? Let him suffer fools in peace.

Yuji Itadori - Sweet baby angel. Yuji follows the "best of both worlds" phenomenon that we see in other horror anime like Chainsaw Man, Tokyo Ghoul and Attack on Titan wherein he is both human and curse (avoiding further spoilers). But his disposition, his resilience, his pure physical prowess before he ever ate Sukuna's finger? Put this boy in a sports anime and let him thrive. While he'd absolutely body in a fighting sport, what if he was plopped into "Blue Lock"? Sports anime with a dash of horror aesthetic. He'd crush while being as upbeat and hilariously chaotic as Bachira.

Suguru Geto - Baby Girl is one of the most compelling villains we have. I'd say across multiple anime, honestly. He's what happens when a good person, someone who aims to be so morally upright, is faced with the reality that being good actually guarantees you nothing. With someone so unwavering, someone who can't live in shades of grey like Gojo, he can't bend. So he breaks. Honestly, it adds a layer of complexity to the overall story where... can we really, as the viewer, fault him? I feel like he wouldn't have this evolution anywhere else and that there's something to be said as to whether Geto was always doomed by the narrative.

There's never not been a good time to celebrate this frame, honestly.

BNHA Top 5

What's cool about BNHA is, it is authentically a shonen manga/anime while subverting a lot of it's tropes. BUT, we see this really interesting progression in the art that drifts into horror. Not aiming to spoil anything that's to come in season 7 (body horror, it's body horror. Bones better come through) but you see the beginning of it with the change in vigilante Deku's appearance. If Horikoshi felt inclined to do a horror anime post-BNHA, I'd definitely read.

Katsuki Bakugo - Hilariously, Bakugo wants to shonen so bad but is actually so damsel in distress/love interest coded that it almost undermines his role as Midoriya's rival. Almost. Shonen, shonen ai, I don't think he's out of place in either.

Shoto Todoroki - Todoroki's entire personality and character arc being so intrinsically linked to his family is honestly so amusing given the universe. Like, people have real life superhero powers but awful parents are very much still a thing. So it's interesting to expose the complexity of their family dynamics in tandem with the overarching story because, in every way, the Todoroki family are very much members of the Have's of BNHA society but they are still hopelessly miserable. TBH he could be in a slice of life just experiencing and resolving family trauma. "Kotaro Lives Alone" comes to mind.

Shouta Aizawa - I would cast Aizawa in "Life Lessons with Uramichi Oniisan" but he wouldn't have the decency to show up to work without a sleeping bag. I'm not saying it wouldn't look out of place in universe but do better for the kids. Joking. He's honestly both the perfect teacher but also a big ole hypocrite. He condemns Midoriya for his recklessness and self-sacrificing (re: breaking bones to use his quirk) but didn't think twice about hacking off his own leg, logical though it may have been. I know All Might is cast as the quintessential mentor in the shonen dynamic but Aizawa is the real MVP when it comes to mentoring and guiding the Class 1A competently. Shonen all the way.

Izuku Midoriya - I can't say Magical Girl Anime, I can't say Magical Girl anime. I appreciate Midoriya's similarity to eponymous crybaby hero Sailor Moon, tbh. She too was OP and with the fate of the world on her shoulders, just saying. He falls in line with the shonen trope of eating something and powering up (re: JJK, One Piece, Attack on Titan) but has emotional range that is not typically seen in shonen which, honestly I love. He is masculine while still being aggressively expressive (even if he struggles to articulate his feelings). His character and subsequent development is another way that Horikoshi subverts shonen tropes and I can't wait to see how his story wraps up.

Dabi - This crispy piece of bacon is a walking, talking and dancing personification of resolute rage. He is quite literally a vendetta held together by staples. Later chapters especially, he just gets unrelentingly grosser and more unhinged and it's both disgusting and emotional. To be honest, between him and Shigaraki, they are undeniably horror fodder by design. In fact, the reveal that he was a little misogynistic extremist radical was particularly wild of Horikoshi. Like, basically if he hadn't self destructed on that mountain he'd have been some incel plotting violence on the deep dark web? I'm trying to think of what to plop him into (maybe not his charred body but just his general... maliciousness, conviction and extremism). I feel like something horror, psychological with a sprinkle of thriller? What comes to mind is a dark series on my TBR but the name escapes me about a kid getting revenge one by one against sadistic bullies though its unclear where Dabi falls on that spectrum.

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