#my 'go for it' tag has quite a few ask memes in it

[allur1ngs]

Lusher and tatter being little shits and teasing Bada whenever they happen to hear her and reader fooling around like “man I REALLY had trouble sleeping last night…” bada being like 🤨 at first but when she does get what they’re referring to it she’s blushing while threatening to kill them 💀 and it’s not just bada- them teasing hyo too for having to stand outside wherever reader is and lusher being all like “doesn’t that bother you??” Tatter making it worse by saying “she’s probably into that kinda thing” and now hyo is all flustered too trying to defend herself 😭 (I’m sorry hyo I promise I want justice for you)

Ever since I made that meme of hyo from succumb to me this thought has been in my mind 😭

this would SO happen knowing lusher and tatter...

tw: very suggestive also please ignore any mistakes it's 2 am for me rn🤍 (this'll make sense after the drabble...🤭)

like for the first time in forever you, the bebe girls, and bada are all eating together like the little family you are. you'd somehow managed (it was so easy, all you had to do was ask) to persuade bada into eating breakfast with you and the girls and not in her office.

the second lusher and tatter realize bada's going to eat with them, they start glancing at each other, mischievous smiles growing on their lips. and almost as if they have telepathy, they both know what the other is thinking--

a plan starts to form.

...but really, it had all started last night.

lusher was laying in bed, cozied up under a heavy and warm blanket, scrolling on her phone before she went to bed. she was on instagram, going on her daily round of account check ups--making sure she hadn't missed any new posts from you or the other girls. she noticed you and minah uploaded new stories, and clicked on minah's first.

it was a picture of the delicious dinner you'd cooked for them. minah tagged you below the picture of the food, writing, "unnie is the best chef to exist, i'm grateful to have her in our home" with a heart-eye emoji. lusher smiles at the caption, about to press a heart on the story when a small sound grabs her attention.

a few giggles ring from the wall behind her bed, making her turn to look at it with a confused look.

she hears the sound again, though this time the noise is a bit clearer, and she's able to realize it's your voice. you're giggling from bada's bedroom, and saying something that lusher's not quite able to make out.

lusher stares at her wall for a second before shrugging, assuming you and bada must just be cuddling or doing something sweet together. she focuses back on her phone, realizing minah's story had timed out so she taps on it again--this time clicking the heart in the bottom right-hand corner.

she then gets distracted seeing some photos of socialites filling her feed. she scrolls through them, liking some posts--rolling her eyes at others before another sound startles her.

this time, a loud banging has lusher jumping out of bed, making her reach for her gun out of instinct. but then, she hears it.

a semi-clear moan makes it's way through the walls separating your and bada's room from lusher--your moan.

lusher's mouth drops out of instinct, her hand coming to slap over it.

again, your moan rings through her bedroom, and the sound of headboard slamming accompanies it. but this time, it doesn't stop.

the sound keeps coming from your bedroom, now only seconds of intervals between each slam, but they're so minuscule that lusher has no time to breathe a sigh of relief.

"jesus unnie." lusher closes her eyes, trying to bite back a laugh at how incredibly loud the headboard slamming is. "i hope you can walk tomorrow."

after a few minutes she decides to ignore all the noise--despite how...passionate and blissful you sound. lusher opens her phone again, instagram popping up immediately. her eyes go to the top left corner instantly, and she catches your profile announcing that you had an unviewed story.

she clicks it out of curiosity, and what she sees makes everything click into place.

it's a picture of you and bada, although your wife isn't fully in frame. all lusher is able to see is her arm wrapped around you and under your breasts in a back hug type of position. but what grabs her attention most of all is you.

you're wearing the most flattering dress lusher has ever seen. white straps and silky fabric barely hold onto your breasts, the sides of them popping due to bada's arm under you. although the picture is scandalous in nature, you're smiling widely, your eyes closed as you lean into bada's chest, looking like a sweet angel in white.

the small caption you'd added to the bottom of the photo reads, "date night" with a white heart emoji.

lusher chuckles, nodding. "yeah, makes sense."

she hearts the story, then swipes up to message you. she writes, "i can tell bada loves the dress. or more like she loves taking it off of you."

right when she sends the cheeky dm, a notification ding grabs her attention. effectively blocking out the sounds of your moans, lusher clicks on the notification.

she's transported into her messaging app, tatter's contact photo in the middle of the chat. she reads her text and quickly responds back.

lusher smirks at her text, seeing tatter's grey bubble pop up, indicating she's typing.

lusher hears another of your moans before she quickly types back.

lusher smirks at her friend's message. they continue texting back and forth, each of them giggling inside their respective rooms.

one of your particularly loud moans penetrates through lusher's wall, making her release a long breath.

...and a chance did they get.

--

lusher starts out simple, dropping slight hints.

"tatter, you look a little tired, are you alright?" she says, her voice dripping with fake sincerity.

you look up from your plate, eyebrows furrowed in slight worry as you cast your gaze onto tatter.

"i'm fine. i just didn't get much sleep last night." tatter says wistfully, biting back a smile.

"oh i totally understand, neither did i with all the noise coming from next door." lusher nods, eyeing you and bada not-so subtly.

you give lusher a look of confusion before it clicks in your mind and you instantly look away from her and tatter, your entire body burning with embarrassment.

bada seems to have finally tuned into the conversation because shifts her focus away from her breakfast to speak up. "what are you talking about? we don't have neighbors."

"we mean there was a lot of noise coming from the bedroom next to ours." tatter clarifies, finding it even more amusing that bada isn't picking up on their joke.

the other bebe girls however, although they were not clued into the plan nor did they hear the noise last night, all seem to understand what lusher and tatter are talking about. they all start to whisper to each other and snicker.

...all expect two girls. soweon and hyo.

"i didn't hear anything." soweon speaks up in between bites of her breakfast. "maybe it was a dream?"

"oh definitely not. the sounds were very realistic, there's no way we could have both dreamed them up." lusher shakes her head, a full-blown grin overtaking her lips.

you shift uncomfortably in your seat before grabbing your phone and unlocking it, hoping to distract yourself from the embarrassing conversation.

expect, it's then you realize lusher had dm'd you late last night. you click her chat and instantly shrink in your seat, hiding your face behind your hands.

bada, always attentive of you and your mood notices, and turns to look at you. "honey? are you okay--"

before your wife can say anything else, you shove your phone in her face, showing her lusher's dm.

as her eyes scan the message, the image, and the timestamp, her cheeks slowly but surely turns bright red--whether it's out of embarrassment or anger, you're not sure.

"you perverts." bada sends lusher and tatter disgusted looks while she she pats your back in comfort and brings you into her chest to shield you from the girls' view.

"you're the pervert!" lusher argues back playfully. "again and again all we heard was--" she bangs her fist against the dining room table, imitating the headboard slamming from last night.

"enough, seoyoung." bada scolds her subordinate, giving her a disapproving look. "you're making my wife uncomfortable."

"actually," tatter cuts in, her smile so wide that even lusher is anxious to hear what she says next. "the biggest pervert here is hyo." she points her finger at your bodyguard, who had become uncharacteristically quiet, and was keeping her head down the entire conversation.

"tatter..." hyo finally mumbles, a red tint staining her cheeks. "i'm serious--"

"she was standing outside the entire time, listening!" lusher exclaims, giggling.

hyo flounders, feeling all pairs of eyes on her. bada's in particular is the most heated, making her sweat in fear. "it's my job!"

"your job is to hear your boss fucking your other boss?"

"be honest, you're into that type of stuff--"

"oh my god." you squeak into bada's chest, wanting to crawl into a hole and die.

chaos finally erupts at the table, hyo trying to defend herself against both lusher and tatter's accusations while also trying to ignore the fact that bada has yet to move her eyes off of her--death is most likely imminent and will be swift, yet painful--while cheche and kyma laugh their asses off, minah focusing on plugging soweon's ears to keep her from hearing the genuinely unhinged things lusher and tatter are saying.

but sometime through the bickering, lusher breaks off and sneaks over to you and bada, grinning like an idiot.

"so tell me unnie, can you still walk after last night?"

[spacebarbarianweird]

Asking specifically for chronically ill/chronically fatigued Tav?

I have Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or Chronic Fatigue and amongst many other symptoms like low energy and crashes, I'm really sensitive to sunlight and loud stimuli.

I think it'd be cute if when the tadpole was removed, all her symptoms came flooding back, and on a mutual decision, they decided to move to the Underdark with the freed spawns and it's so much better low sensory for Tav! 😍😍😍

Love your work, take your time!

Hi! This HCs has been in my drafts for ages (I started to write it a few times but never finised). Thanks for @warmteaslibrary for insights!

Masterlist

Headcanons

Astarion x Chronically ill!Tav

Your adventure has not been easy, but quite bearable.

Until the very end.

The wave of necrotic damage murders you on the spot and you remember nothing but blissful darkness.

You are revived - the Jergal's last blessing before he leaves the Prime for good.

You wake up cradled in Astarion's arms as he cries and whispers the words of love.

But you can feel nothing but pain.

Your body remembers being killed.

It remembers the skull being broken, the limbs being torn, and the skin being burnt.

The tadpole is gone but your mind has a new master.

Pain.

Physically, you are healthy but you are constantly exhausted and depressed.

Your brain barely functions, and your memory worsens.

You constantly cry, even though you try your best not to.

You expect Astarion to leave - you are no longer the person you once were. You are a wreck, almost disabled.

You can't even walk on your own sometimes let alone helping him with his sun-sensitivity.

But Astarion doesn't go.

Together you settle down in the outskirts of Baldur's Gate, somewhere Astarion's condition won't get too much attention.

When it's so bad you can't move Astarion touches you gently and assures you he isn't going anywhere, and he will always be here with you.

Astarion never says it's all right and it's going to be better.

He knows your condition is hardly improving.

Astarion helps you to find things you can enjoy, and that won't require too much physical activity.

With the return of vampiric powers, he carries you in his arms when you can't walk anymore.

The thing that brings you pleasure is bathing.

Warm water takes your pain away. Astarion washes your skin, and massages your sore limbs.

You often spend time in the bathtub together - Astarion wraps his hands around you and reads you aloud.

Actually, you've never been a bookish person - you were a fighter, a traveler...

But no more.

Reading brings you a lot of comfort. It doesn't require any physical activity, and books take you places, making you forget the pain.

Especially when Astarion goes away - hunting or working with supernatural contracts (so many stupid people, so many dangerous deals, so much money a former magistrate can make).

What surprises you sometimes as sharp as his tongue is he never makes fun of your state and never complains.

He also brings home healers from time to time but their spells have a temporary effect.

During long sunny days when you are both locked inside, you sometimes wonder if it ever gets better. Will the pain ever go away?

Astarion shrugs.

"I once asked the same about my inability to walk in the sunlight. What did you tell me?"

"That I would stay with you regardless?"

"Yes. That's my answer. I am not going anywhere."

--

Tag list

@tugoslovenka @marcynomercy @wintersire @vixstarria @not-so-lost-after-all @ashiro20 @theearthsfinalconfession @herstxrgirl @starlight-ipomoea @micropoe10 @astarion-imagine-archive @veillsar @elora-the-slutty-songstress @fayeriess @lumienyx @tallymonster @caitlincat-95 @tragedybunny @valeprati @lynnlovesthestars @marina-and-the-memes @waking-electric @ayselluna @connorsui @asterordinary @darkarchangel96 @locallegume @brainfullofhotsauce @coffeeanddonutscafe 

[osaka-lilac]

Asking you to kindly elaborate on the strollonso football au:

hello raapija my beloved, i would love to elaborate <3

for those out of the loop, refer to my tags on this post!

warning: i am an american with a incredibly basic understanding of footy ("soccer"). there is a reason the actual talk of any gameplay is basic and limited

fernando is this new guy to Lawrence Stroll's footy team right. (because in every universe, lawrence has to own a Team.) i can imagine he's some draft pick from spain for a new striker or something like that. possibly some trade, maybe a mid-season exchange (they do that in american football but idk if they do that in footy) those who know specifics of positions in footy please let me know your thoughts on what position fernando would play

lance: couldn't give two shits about footy. he's seen maybe once in a blue moon on the sidelines tagging along, and he's known for being visibly bored or on his phone during matches. (he has the Pout Blast 3000 for this.)

the reputation he receives from fans is much like the perceived impressions he gets irl: some spoiled kid who shouldn't be there. he's more into hockey than any match his dad's team could ever play.

now when fernando shows up its like a fucking slap to the face. like. "holy fuck i didn't think they could be this hot" type beat.

for the first time, lance shows up to a team practice with his father, not just a match. but he's really not there for the team: he is enamored by fernando. his speed. he's a sly yet devilishly handsome fucker with this wicked grin when he knows he's tricked his opponent yet again, and lance is obsessed.

not only does he start going to way more matches. he also starts showing visible interest and gets invested. and he gets loud. the mumbles online about his "spoiled reputation" turn to joy. he becomes a meme of the team for a few weeks after a clip of him getting frustrated after a poorly-called card is given to fernando ends up going viral.

and maybe this entire time, fernando has been watching this young boy from afar. he totally believes he can't be with his literal manager's young son and jeopardize his spot on the team and a shot at glory. and maybe he believes that lance initially isn't interested. but maybe when he sees lance become more invested in the team, he figures he might have a chance. he just can't figure out why lance has become so invested in what was, quite frankly, a very short amount of time.

so maybe fernando's on the side for a while in a practice. lance is there, but he seems distant. not in the game. not really watching the drills by the other players with much enthusiasm. and fernando's a smart man. and he puts some pieces together in his brain. and makes a move.

he comes up to lance and asks to talk with him once practice is done. when all the other players are gone. in the locker room. of course lance agrees

flash forward a bit. n lance is like. hanging out by the exit outside of the locker room. he counts all the players. and when there's only one left. he goes inside. finds fernando sitting on one of the benches, still in his kit.

they get to talking. what lance does outside of being at games, (i can imagine him being a student but i don't have the will to kin assign him a major right now), what his favorite hockey team is (habs. of course) and of course, the loaded question:

"lancito, what's gotten you so interested in the team now?"

of course, lance doesn't really respond to this, kinda dances around the question. he gets flustered. he doesn't want to be found out. what if he sees right through him, what if he already knows, what if he tells his dad??

fernando leans in slightly, and slides his hand over lance's hip. he cups his chin softly, and slowly turns lance's head to look at fernando straight on.

"be honest, niñito."

and when has lance ever been anything but honest.

[steddieas-shegoes]

wrote a song about you

for @corrodedcoffinfest prompt 'your song'

rated e | 998 words | cw: sexual content | tags: established relationship, domestic fluff, blowjob, anal sex, gareth and sam are losers in love

🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶

Gareth is not a singer. He knows it, everyone knows it.

He doesn't even contribute much to the lyrics usually. It's not that he's bad at writing songs, it's just that Eddie is so good at it. Jeff's a pretty close second. He's not even in the same atmosphere with them.

But he still jots down thoughts he has in case they ever turn into something worth mentioning.

When Corroded Coffin takes a much needed break, he spends his days at Sam's apartment. Sam works all day at the school a few blocks away, but Gareth doesn't mind finding things to keep him busy. Most of the time, it's cleaning, or running errands for Sam, or texting the guys random memes.

He writes in his journal, too, but he doesn't tell anyone.

At least not until he's staring down at what seems to be a complete song, one he wrote entirely by himself, and one he's actually quite proud of. Sam's in the shower, dinner is heating up in the oven, and Gareth is smiling at a piece of paper with the most disgustingly romantic lyrics he's ever seen.

He's not sure if this can even be turned into a song for them.

Gareth hides his journal when he hears the shower shut off, suddenly scared that Sam will hate it. He shows Sam a lot of the gibberish he writes down, always gets encouraged, and then forgets about it. Once in a while, if something makes it into one of their songs, Sam recognizes it and beams over at him proudly, like he can't believe he gets to hear words Gareth wrote on the radio.

"Babe!" Sam calls from the bathroom. "You busy?"

Gareth rushes to the bathroom, nearly slipping on the tile floor when he stops next to Sam.

He's got a towel wrapped around his waist, his short hair dripping water onto his shoulders. He's leaning over the sink, plucking a hair from between his eyebrows.

"You okay?" Gareth asks, unable to stop his hands from drifting to Sam's sides, lips pressing a soft kiss to his shoulders.

"Mhm," Sam leans back into Gareth and closes his eyes. "Just was gonna ask if you were gonna tell me about the gray hair on the side of my head or wait for me to see it myself."

Gareth laughed against his shoulder. "Neither. I was gonna try to pull it while you slept so you never knew."

Sam turned to kiss Gareth's lips, his tongue brushing against his bottom lip slowly.

"I'm only 31. How am I gonna keep up with my hot rockstar future husband if I keep finding gray hairs?" Sam mumbles against his lips.

Gareth turns him and tugs the towel away from his waist, leaving him naked and half-hard.

"Your hot future husband is plucking his gray hairs out daily so he stays hot enough for you," Gareth smiles as he kisses down Sam's neck. "I like the gray on you."

"Oh yeah?" Sam's smirking, head tilted back as he lets Gareth's mouth wander down his chest. "You got a thing for older men?"

"You know I do." Gareth looks up at him from his knees, rolling his eyes. "I'm marrying you, aren't I?"

"I'm barely a year older than you."

Gareth doesn't respond, just takes Sam's hard cock in his mouth and moans. His favorite thing in the world is making Sam feel good, so he can't resist the urge to swallow around his length, gripping his thighs to pull him closer.

"Fuck, baby, what brought this on?" Sam gasps out.

It's not unusual for them to mess around randomly, but considering that dinner will be ready any minute, he can see why Sam's a bit surprised. Gareth has taken cooking very seriously over the band's break, and anything that may risk his meals not coming out perfect is a no-go.

Except for a blowjob in the bathroom, apparently.

Gareth pulled off after another minute, grinning up at Sam as he wiped his mouth. "Wanna ride you."

"Now?" Sam asked in disbelief, breathing heavy from what Gareth had already managed to do to him.

"Now."

"But-"

"Do you not want me to ride your dick? Because I can just go ride the one in my bedside drawer instead," Gareth knows he's being a bit of a brat, but he doesn't care. He wants what he wants.

"I always want you to ride my dick, baby. I just thought dinner was-"

"Fuck dinner. Let me fuck you."

Sam's nodding before Gareth even stands up all the way.

They do make a detour to the kitchen to turn off the oven before Gareth drags Sam to the bed, ignoring his protest that his hair was still wet.

He opens himself up, makes Sam watch, makes him keep his hands to himself. He loves seeing how desperate he gets when he can't do what he wants.

When he finally slides down on Sam's cock, they both let out shaky breaths.

"I wrote a song about you," Gareth says as he sits there, adjusting to the feeling of being so full. "Might actually show it to everyone."

"Yeah?" Sam's blushing, or maybe just turning red from trying not to move inside Gareth.

"Wrote about this."

"Fuck, baby." Sam can't hold back anymore, which is exactly what Gareth wanted. Sam's hands grip his ass, spreading his cheeks apart and lifting him up before pulling him back down. "Can't believe you wrote a sex song."

"I'll show you after."

Gareth's knowledge of exactly what Sam likes is what gets them both coming in less than a few minutes.

When Gareth's collapsed on Sam's chest, both of them still catching their breaths, he starts humming the guitar riff he imagined Eddie playing for the song.

"Gonna sing it to me?" Sam whispered.

"Maybe after another round," Gareth smiled against Sam's sweaty skin. "I'll have to see if it needs edits after I fuck you against the wall."

[soulrph]

good morning my beloveds! this is a bit of a surprise post, but i'm thinking it makes more sense to say this in a post now rather than copy and paste it for the heartbreaking number of people asking abt this in my inbox!

allow me to paraphrase the overall message of, at present, fifteen nearly identical messages in my inbox:

"hi blue. i'm wondering if you have any advice on how to deal with people not interacting with you anymore. i make all these posts and starter calls, i post memes, i answer drafts, i do everything in my power to make my dash a nice, happy place for people to feel comfortable enough to approach me for interactions and conversations, but nobody is doing anything. nobody is liking my posts, or commenting, or reblogging. my notifs are empty, and i feel really awful about it."

that's actually, word for word, what has been in my inbox for three days now. and i didn't know how to respond, because quite honestly, i have no advice for you. none except for this:

please, please, please start interacting with your mutuals some more.

i'm guilty of it myself. i go silent a lot, i've no idea why. however, i still make a good effort of trying to comment on people's posts, because that's what this place is. tumblr is a social media platform. we socialize on this platform. if we stop doing that, it ceases to be a social media platform.

but a single like can do so much for a person. sending a DM to do some plots, commenting on a post about how to make a grilled cheese REALLY special (i like to add pesto to mine!) or sending unprompted asks to a new mutual! it doesn't have to be massive. but we have stopped interacting with one another, and it really, really sucks. it's so disheartening, it really is, and if that happens to one person, they'll stop sending out notifs as well. and it'll expand, like ripples in a puddle.

it breaks my heart to see so many people facing this challenge. and i'm so sorry that i've been unable to provide a solid answer or suggestion. but the issue here is the community itself. it's a classic example of an individual issue expanding into a social one. if we stop communicating, if we stop socializing, on a SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM, then it's no longer a social media platform. we're no longer a community. we're just a bunch of people who like to write, and we're all on tumblr.

let's make it a resolution. in fact, a challenge. let's all agree to like a few posts each day. or comment on a friend's post, or send in a few memes, or randomly tag people in starters. it's not a massive effort, it's not a huge energetic loss. if we all did a small bit each day, i can guarantee that the dash would transform almost overnight into the community we all knew and loved and deserve! but we all need to be making that conscious choice to interact and communicate more often.

[polyamzeal]

Why do you steal art?

I am going to lose followers for this but I need to for my own mental health. I am so tired of getting harassed by Tumblr punks (because Tumblr is the only place this even happens). There is this narrative that I went to an artist's tumblr page, saved their art, reposted it on my page making sure not to credit the artist I knew, claimed I did the art myself, and then asked people to commission me for more art. When in actuality I came across an uncredited meme on Facebook and thought, "Hey I like the message and I think my followers will like it too. I want to show them." Then I was informed who the artist was so I reblogged it and credited the artist. I said go give them money. Anyone who wants to know who the artist is can easily find it in the notes as the artist has been tagged several times in several different ways. Several people have told me to delete the post yet you know who has not asked me to do so? The artist, @eliasericson. If they are ask me to take it down in any way I will do so with no questions asked. Not a problem. Who I am not going to listen to are random people who think they know what the artist wants and is best for them. The post has over 7,000 notes, that is a lot of people that enjoyed seeing it. But no fuck all those people because opinionated randos think that much exposure for the artist, who again did get credited several times, is going to hurt the artist somehow. No consideration that maybe the artist just wants their message to be heard and affect people while not really caring if they are credited or not for this particular picture. Regardless though I have supported many artist through out the years and have commissioned art from quite a few different artists. But you know what, if I saw an artist's fans were harassing people about stealing art like this I would be far less likely to want to commission them because if there fans are assholes then what does that say about the actual artist? So who is really hurting the artist here?

So in summary, I will do my best to make sure any art, which only seems to be visual art as nobody seems to care about literary art anyways, is properly credited. But no promises that something doesn't accidentally fall through the cracks here and there. I do greatly appreciate when someone POLITELY points who the artist is and I can let people know. But any further rude mean asks or notes will just be ignored. I have so many more important asks that deserve my attention and effort way more than this childish nonsense.

[chimchiri]

Hii WB anon here and I'm back again!! Saw your posts about spitdash and oh my god, I love the way you actually acknowledge the unfortunate power dynamic and found a way to make it work!! I think it's very romantic how Spitfire chose to step down in order to date rainbows dash, it's adorable!! As always your art and headcanons are great. Speaking of headcanons!! Since you've mentioned soarin and spitfire dynamics a few times, can we have more about them/soarin as a whole? I do not remember if I've mentioned it in the last ask but soarin is my personal favorite, I have a closer bond to him since he's the reason I got into the wonderbolts in the first place. So I'd love to see if you have any headcanons about him (fyi I will probably go back into your ask box to ask about the others but for now we're focusing on soarin he needs his moment to shine)

You hold a special place in my heart for asking about the WB, Soarin and Spitty... Oof long text incoming about them!

One recurring hc I have is that they're childhood friends - even platonic soulmates.

I hc Spitfire to have had a lot of trouble making friends as a kid. Mainly because she had way too much energy, an insane competitive drive and quite the anger issues. She didn't have anything against other kids per se, she wasn't just mean. But her natural talent for flying and quick frustration when others wouldn't do as she wanted (like a partner not giving it their all during a race or a slower runner making it hard for her to pass them during a run/race) were a toxic combination and made her explode regularly. Hearing her shout and stomp in frustration wasn't uncommon. Naturally, kids used to avoid and/or gossip about her, even if she tried to find some friends and help others get to her level so they could do some friendly racing or sparring. Some kids may have provoked her, which would usually result in a brawl or some form of violence depending on the other kid's attitude, as soon as she felt her pride was harmed. Ultimately she didn't want to harm other per se. She was just hyper-focused on running, flying, anything adrenaline, and had a lot of trouble managing her emotions.

Insert Soarin: I mentioned that he definitely loves a good race and winning as much as the other Wonderbolts - a quality anyone has naturally in that position. But outside of a race, I hc him as the softest, most relaxed, and also most tired guy there is. He really just encapsulates this meme for me (just imagine there are also dark circles)

He's docile, friendly and (as a kid) very agreeable - which unfortunately, resulted in him having trouble finding true friends as well and getting bullied. While he got to tag along, he was often the butt of a joke due to his soft nature. Being used as a water boy or personal butler also was daily routine, which he accepted with a heavy heart. I hc Soarin to have a strong sense of justice and having very developed empathy even as a kid. He's a thinker, a strategist. He observes, notices and concludes. He's not stupid. He knows and can tell the other kids don't really like him and treat him badly, but he just wants to have some friends. Plus, he's not very courageous (as a kid) and doesn't want to face arguing and fighting. He just wants to be included.

His "friend" group doesn't like Spitfire and definitely called her a crazy devil. Soarin initially only heard bad and frankly, quite intimidating things about her. But after meeting her he quickly concludes that she's not a real threat and just has some trouble with her anger. But she's trying to be helpful and outside of any competition is actually rather calm and nice.

There's no specific hc how they met but it was definitely Soarin who tried to initiate contact and a friendship. And Spitfire who was probably wary about him due to his friend group. I love to think they connected very quickly and balanced each other out well. Soarin was the first kid who would race her no matter how often he'd lose and not get annoyed or angry at her. Which was because he immediately noticed that she doesn't like to put others down - she just loves to race, win and get better. After a while he also realized, that she loves any kind of improvement, really. Not just her own. She'd give him tips, train with him and would also get just as excited when he got better. She just loved adrenaline, training and most importantly - seeing improvement and success. For her or others. It's something Sptifire never noticed herself and it was Soarin who, years later, would mention it and ultimately be the reason why she would end up as captain of the Wonderbolts.

Kid Spitfire would be good for Soarin too: not only standing up to anyone who treated him badly, but also getting him to speak out for himself and say out his thoughts out loud.

Honestly, I just love them getting each other. Even when they're completely different in character. They look at each other and they just know. They know when the other is unwell or when there is something off. There is almost no secret they can keep from the other. They know what the other needs, wants, desires. And by adulthood, they'd trust each other with their life. UGH I really really love them as platonic soulmates.

They walk side by side in each others lives. They're a perfect match and in the Wonderbolts, as captain and deputy, they're an almost unstoppable team. Not only because they trust and care about each other like no one else, but also because they both can separate work from their personal feelings. They're both able to make decisions that may be unpleasant for their friendship but greatly benefit the Wonderbolts.

A characteristic also great in arguments btw: Just because they understand and get each other doesn't mean they always agree with each other. I imagine they definitely get into loud arguments. Soarin can be just as stubborn as Spitfire in some aspects, especially when he thinks he has the correct facts and logic on his side. (It's the stubborn, analytical science side of his.) Though for them, it's easy to not take arguing personal. They may get frustrated but they can clearly differentiate that the topic at hand is the problem and each other. So it's not uncommon for them to be arguing and shouting at each other and having casual, friendly lunch 15 min later. Something that the other Wonderbolts definitely have a hard time understanding.

Some last points: Soarin has never had any jealousy towards Spitfire, neither as a kid, nor as her deputy. And maybe it's exactly because of this why she's made him deputy and then captain after her departure. I imagine her stepping down (for romance of all things, which he later learns) is the first thing he truly, never ever saw coming. He's usually great at reading and anticipating her. But this? It takes him by COMPLETE surprise and he definitely has a very hard time accepting it. It's like a surreal fever dream. He may even have a small crisis, thinking that she'll be gone for good after - just leaving him behind. This fear probably takes a LOT of reassurance from Spitfire to calm him down again.

I've written way too much already, so I'll just end it with two short hcs:

1) He's got trouble with sleep and insomnia since teenage years. It's often a joke with friends or later on in the WBs. Jokes he usually goes along with or even initiates. Spitfire is one of the few people who know that it's more than just jokes, and that some days it really takes a hard toll on him. They used to share beds - which helped Soarin sleep - and still sometimes do in the WBs. Which also leads into:

2) In some AUs, I hc they did have some flings and physical/sexual experience with each other. But the details are too much and complex to write out and too nsfw to include into this post.

[eloise175]

Profile and Masterlist info ^^

𖤐 ̊⁎+˳✧༺ Welcome to my blog! ༻𖤐 ̊⁎+˳✧

Who am I and what do I do?

I go by El for short (most used), Eloise, or even Eli if that’s what you’d prefer (though not very used); she/her prononouns.

This blog is focused on VADTD and that only. My main focus most of the time are Callisto and Penelope, I love them so so much and have made it a mission to yap about them constantly <3

I post lots of my personal headcanons, AUs, memes and even episode/character/series analyses. Novel reader so beware of spoilers, there are plenty on my page!!

I'm a VADTD fanfic writer and artist, tho I rarely post my art. You can find my fanfics on Ao3 (I'll link my profile down below) ^^

➠ Callisto and/or Penelope haters DNI with me or my posts, you will be blocked. Yes I will block even if see you hate for no reason, and if I see misinformation being spread!!

What fandoms am I in—manhwas/webtoons I've read?

(These are obviously not all of them, but mostly the main ones);

Villains Are Destined to Die (VADTD/VADD) — my longtime favorite and hyperfixation

Genshin Impact: EU sever; AR 60; Yelan main

Honkai Star Rail (HSR): EU server; TL 67; Acheron main

Sailor Moon — mostly SM Crystal

How to Win My Husband Over — quickly became one of my favorites, may or may not be because I have a thing for men with red eyes (what can I say I’m a woman of culture)

The Siren: Becoming the Villain's Family

A Business Proposal — comfort manhwa, I watched the kdrama too but the manhwa is still my favorite

Daytime Star — comfort manhwa yet again, it’s sooo cute

Positively Yours — comfort manhwa pt.3 :))

Unholy Blood — another one of my longtime favs, Euntae and Hayan my beloved <3

Where can you find me?

I have pages on a few other socials, and I'm usually pretty active except stated otherwise. All of my profiles are still very much dedicated to VADTD or underwent changes to conform:

Read my fanfics on Ao3 — For now I only post my fanfics on Ao3 so if you see them posted somewhere else, that is not me! Please let me know if you come across anything like that, or any sort of plagiarism of my works (yes, it has happened before)

Eloise_175 on X/Twitter — Quite active on there lately, sometimes I post things I don't end up posting on here, like threads and whatnot

VADTD Discord server — I tend to be pretty active on discord and consequently on the VADTD server too, everyone is welcomed to join! (please make sure to read the rules carefully ^^)

calliopeys_ on Instagram — I don’t really post much on there as I’m not an Instagram person, but hopefully I’ll get around to posting more on there as well. Created a new account from scratch to maybe post my art and fanfic updates. If I see an influx of people from here on there, I may do some of those quick asks in the stories :))

calliopeys on TikTok — Empty for the moment, but maybe I'll do some silly memes on there

Tags Directory

(might edit this section later on)

Villains Are Destined to Die | Novel | Headcanons | Analysis | My Fanart | Memes | My Fanfics | Merch | Asks | Incorrect Quotes | Scenarios | Reblogs |

Calliope: Penelope Eckhart x Callisto Regulus

Characters:

Penelope Eckhart | Callisto Regulus | Judith Regulus |Cedric Porter | Ivonne Eckhart | Reynold Eckhart | Derrick Eckhart | Winter Verdandi | Duke Eckhart |

[imnotskyguy-remake]

OMG LOOK!!! AN INTRO!! LET'S READ IT!!!

Hello besties! Welcome to the remake of my blog! I have a few things I'd like to say before you scroll down, so let's get started!

My name is Sky (not my real one, but real my name has been posted - let's see if you can find it!), does make the whole "not skyguy" thing a little confusing tho lol

DNI if:

You are a pedophile or zoophile

You are anti-palestinian

You do not support the LGBTQIA+ community

You are racist

My tags:

ins yaps - Me talking about smthn or other

ins rb - me reblogging smthn

ins loves avatar - me reblogging or talking about Avatar: The Last Airbender

ins love peanuts - me reblogging or talking about Spy x Family

ins loves kotlc - me reblogging or talking about Keeper of the Lost Cities

ins loves EPIC - me reblogging or talking about Epic: The Musical

ins loves wof - me reblogging or talking about Wings of Fire

ins loves star wars - me reblogging or talking about Star Wars

ins answers - me answering an ask

help stop israel - any reblog or original post about palestinian needs

moots taggy - my mutuals tag

ins new fandom - me reblogging a fandom that i'm not in

ins memes - me either posting a meme i made or reblogging a meme someone else made

ins art - my art tag (i have HEAPS of art, very rarely post any of it lol - my first posts on the original blog are all art tho)

koalas and emus - my tag for anything to do with Australia

purrs and cuddles - my tag for when i reblog or post about cats

rainbows - my tag for when i reblog or post about LGBTQIA+ (THIS TAG HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED)

🖱️ moot - my tag for @yellow-computer-mouse (quite new - not everything has this yet)

☕ moot - my tag for @sombrathedragon (also very new)

🦅 moot - my tag for @ilikebookssomuch (again, very new)

🥪 moot - my tag for @ham-cheese-toastie (wow, a lot of new tags, isn't there?!)

🐺 moot - my tag for @wolfdog-weatherman (this tag is hot off the press!)

🍦moot - my tag for @k-is-for-potassium (brand-spanking new!)

🦃🪓 moot - my tag for @turkeyaxearg-official (from yellow's blog!)

NOTE: I am starting to use "sky" instead of "ins". I have made over 700 posts and my lazy ass is not going back to change them all, so I will just say here that you will be able to find a majority of my posts under "ins" still.

That's about it! I'd also quickly like to thank @yellow-computer-mouse @sombrathedragon @mythos321 for remembering so quickly about the url change! You guys really are amazing!

And one last warning.....

And also, one more thing i'd like to mention,

both by me, do not use either without my express permission.

userbox rules here

[gnashingwailing]

@fireflywritesgt ok i read your tag on ch21 and i took that as a personal challenge (and then while I was writing this you dropped ch22 and THEN 23 and murdered me. but i'm back now. so)

HELLO Ok fuck yeah hold on everybody take my hand. We’re theorizing about this chapter 🙏 spoilers thru ch23 below

Re: the tag: dare I hope the next story will be set in a similar time/place… i MUST ADMIT despite the significant broader cultural stigma of such a thing. I have often contemplated. Harry and Joe helping with providing socialized miniature healthcare 😭 (maybe to wherever Lorraine lives[?] or knows of?) and when I heard mention of a Tiny Town Hospital… one must wonder how this compares to a Giant Hospital, or to the barber surgeon dens that Joe has presumably had some frostbitten toes cut off at.

OTHER THINGS I’M SPECULATING ABOUT: “certainly, bandits were a problem a borrower occasionally had to face” 🤔 damn that's rough. I do love the sense that there are few overarching cultural norms, whether it's around marriage or language or so on. Everybody is kinda doing their own thing (including robbing each other oof).

I am also VEEEERRY curious about the implications of WHATEVER the tinies that are working in Tiny Town are doing. What kind of mechanized thing could be profitable from a lot of little guys pressing buttons? Or is it maybe not something physical they’re producing? Is it instead a research project? Some attempt at “civilizing” the tiny society for giant colonialism reasons? There’s got to be some kind of output here that is valuable to some kind of giant, but I’m still mystified at what it will be. “Joe wanted to ask him about the four armed giants who stood outside of Tiny Town” YEAH MAN ME TOO‼️ <- secretly delighted this is still coming up because I want to know what it means QUITE BADLY

Joe lamenting that there don't seem to be any libraries, or restaurants, or speakeasies, or any mark of ... art or entertainment? In Tiny Town? I REALLY HOPE Joe and Harry get over themselves and kiss soon so they can TALK ABOUT HOW FUCKING WEIRD THIS PLACE IS???? It made me INSAAANE THAT JOE JUST BRUSHED OFF TALKING ABOUT IT AT ALL 😭 JOE TO HAVE THOSE THINGS. PEOPLE HAVE TO WORK AT THEM. ARE ALL THE PEOPLE IN TINY TOWN JUST WORKING ON PUSHING BUTTONS??? JOE PLS

“Expecting handouts from the bloody giants…” sooo fascinating to hear him voice this, since this whole project is a handout in the absolute best case scenario (given that scraps are worthless to giants), although likely closer to a prison, as Professor Hill called it. Still patiently waiting for his smart and cool wife to explain things to me <3

I hope Joe will deign to really talk about what happened to him… GURL go process it with ur beautiful best friend!! Let him hold you and comfort you and tell you you’re literally so smart and correct and everything you’re saying about ditching the buttons part entirely is literally so beautiful and true!!! Go rock his world with your insights king!!!

Also lmfao Joe is definitely not Irish bcuz his Irish Goodbyes need some SERIOUS work. King of just literally running off when he’s not feeling a conversation anymore.

Me 🤝Joe <- autistically just leaving

He does this so often and it makes me cackle every time. Wait hold on those great meme posts make me want to make a JUST WALK OUT! One.

Absolutely loving the tension of it all… the reveal that Joe was doing watchmaking when he was TWELVE, meaning (if I'm keeping track of time correctly) he got snatched right after he was ABANDONED BY HIS ONLY FAMILY IN THE WORLD, was so artfully done. I had to stop in my tracks and think at the “he’d known O’Grady longer in his life than he hadn’t” and do math and be like “oh fuck.” Maybe this was teased prior and I didn’t pick up on it, but it hit HARD. For some reason I hadn’t assumed he was a kid — but why wouldn’t he be? If little kids are already doing things like crawling into discarded beer bottles. Fuck, Warren, heartbreaking stuff. Bravo. Of course Joe would be as dedicated to going and seeing him as he was Harry in the hospital. He cares so deeply about everyone, but especially his friends. It’s too bad O’Grady is no longer in a place to reciprocate the love Joe gives !!! But of course Joe still would not be ready to throw away the boot knife O’Grady made for him… “a decision that would forever change Joe’s life” btw I can hear ur evil hehe from here. :)

Also btw THIS little detail is one of those things that makes rereading your story so delightful: “They invade our end of the city, take our jobs, show up at our bar… did we invite them? No.” O’Grady was practically ranting. “And when we politely tell them to leave, what do they do?” O’Grady pointed to his bandaged head. “Watch out for them once you get here. They’re not good Irishmen like you and me, Joe.” juxtaposed with the actual breaking news we heard from the radio ? "“AN IRISHMAN AND AN ITALIAN ARE IN THE HOSPITAL AFTER A MASS BRAWL OUTSIDE A BAR ENDED IN A CRACKED SKULL AND A STABBING. NEITHER OF ‘EM HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED YET.”" a fucking STABBING = "politely tell them to leave"? What kinds of things has Joe's friend gotten used to excusing?

And of course I love the moments of solidarity within the tragedy of the newly realized (or at least newly stoked) xenophobia between borrowers. Joe being reminded of how his parents spoke, and how his brother shooed him off, in the gestures of a stranger… you really do a great job of evoking the ways we are all connected to each other. His family is gone, but he still sees them everywhere he looks. [pacing my enclosure and being sooo normal about how Joe has purposefully isolated for a decade and yet cannot help but see the beauty and humanity of his fellow man whether tiny or giant bcuz despite thinking he’s wired wrong, he’s actually wired like all of us who have felt that way for our unusual proclivities. He’s wired for connection with his fellow man. And he’s so wired for it u can feel how much it hurts his heart. Haha I’m sooooo .] The older guy was trying to warn him off crossing a white line into the “Irish ward”, too, right? The gesture was a kindness. And speaking of, does that mean the little tunnel somebody dug is to the Irish district? Or was I turned around and it was the Italian one? Either way — who would be trying to get in here, and why? Maybe it’s just a desperate person, but O’Grady talking about how bad it’d be if they saw Joe, and the need for an ID, makes me think it’s not someplace you can sneak into and integrate with. Just makes me curious as to whether it’ll come up again!!

THIS is also something I'm wondering about -- could the 'output' of Tiny Town maybe be researching, like... ethnonationalism? In the wake of WWI? Those drawn lines separating different 'wards'... do we think Tinies came up with this shit on their own? I doubt it, if someone like Dawson who is immediately assigning people nationalities that we know from Calloway's nobody "normal" in borrower society knows/cares about. HMMMmmmmMMMMM. I'm still reaaaaally curious how much Hill knows about this place and what hand, if any, he had in it. ONCE AGAIN, boys get kissing so you can also get TALKING. I think Harry would have much to say about how pointless it is to hate individuals from other nationalities after everything he saw during the war. Or so I assume, given he had no bad reaction to Joe being Italian.

AND WELL THIS IS LESS THEORYCRAFTING AND MORE “ME WANTING TO WRITE MORE FANFIC ABOUT THEM” BUT I WAS SOOO DELIGHTED THE CHAPTER DIDN’T END WITH HIM LEAVING TINY TOWN AND WE INSTEAD GOT DRESS REHEARSAL 2 OF HARRY AND JOE GETTING SO FUCKING DOWN BAD FOR EACH OTHER AT THE WINDOW & IN THE BEDROOM. YIPPEEEEE <- this was written before ch22 lol pictures taken moments before disaster

“Joe fidgeted for a moment as he fought with himself over whether or not to say what he really wanted to say.” … did you say what you really wanted to, there, pal? 🤨

I'm sooooo glad Joe's books are making more and more appearances... much like Harry I'm endlessly delighted by his culture. I wanna know what shaped his romantic fantasies!!

""Yeah, the ending on this one isn't great. They're cowards. Could've at least said they loved each other." Joe said.

He closed the book and snuggled into the crook of Harry's neck." <- Lmao @ these two guys so allergic to talking about their feelings shit-talking the romance book protagonists while they're literally cuddling in bed and not acknowledging it

Did he own these books when he was a kid? I imagine so, but on the other hand? HEY HOLY SHIT I REALIZED AFTER CH23 SOMETHING I SUSPECTED BUT COULDN'T CONFIRM: if homophobia isn't something borrowers have. Is one of these romance novels Joe owns going to be between two men? Harry is going to get his fuckin world rocked. Him and Georgie stole books from the library before, but I doubt they found any gay romance stuff (still impossible for baby-gay-Gnash to find that almost 100 years later in their rural libraries, lol.) Would this be Harry's first exposure to something like that? Wahhh... hurry up and open up to each other again you need to talk culture ASAP...

I'm also very curious if borrowers would have more taboo novels of their own, particularly giant/tiny stuff. And would Joe have come across any of it? I imagine it'd be extremely difficult to sell things like that without a beating, but maybe in bigger night markets -- and Joe said he's been in lots of very big cities... if his third novel is some really salacious g/t writing that would do numbers here on tumblr dot com I'm going to lose my god damn mind.

[ril-sillyart1st]

BATMM FF AU: "Understand my ship in 5 mintunes" meme!

My own version of this meme! Full credits to gibbarts for the template and inspired by @dead-cat-batmm, @ask-the-blasher-fam, @meliskindachildishlol and more. (Sorry for the tags, just let me know if you don't want to be tagged so I could remove"@")

Drawings itself:

And yeah I didn't fully render instead because I thought it would look too much for an god-damned little work lol.

Chibi Blaze Flarelyn and Crusher Flarelyn:

Going to make their reference sheet and exes version next! :3

Just a heads-up: this will have both SFW and NSFW parts!

Their bar thingy information:

"who's the big spoon and little spoon?"

They're both a big and little spoon (they switch), though Crusher was at first the big spoon when their relationship started and Blaze was still kinda short but after Blaze's 26 birthday she grown older and taller than his boyfriend making them also the big spoon.

Crusher was the clingy one when it comes to waking up.

SLIGHT SUGGESTIVE/NSFW PART AHEAD!

Blaze just loves to use Crusher's chest as his pillow sometimes (same goes to Crusher) but this mostly happened when they were boyfriends at that time.

And Crusher likes to use Blaze's belly and sometimes his ass as his pillow.

SLIGHT SUGGESTIVE/NSFW PART ENDS!

"Who borrows and lends their clothes?"

Pretty much they kinda also both lend each other's clothes swap because both are plus size though Crusher is way bigger than Blaze so it's more rare for Crusher to borrow their partner's shirt because it's too fitted on them. That one cat shirt ended being Crusher's shirt instead because it was bigger than his size (the one that has a cat with pizza everywhere on space), they really, really loved that shirt so much that they never gotten to give it back to Blaze every again lol but Blaze wasn't mad at all because she actually didn't like that shirt that much if they're being quite honest.

After their third date, Crusher has once again stole another cat shirt from his boyfriend that also fits perfectly on them. (It was two shirts this time!)

"who doesn't and does use pet names?"

Blaze and Crusher actually kind of rarely use pet names (ex: love, smarty-pants, etc) when mostly flirting! When they're having a normal conversation or fighting they'll use their real names.

Though this stops when they got married as it got more fewer for them to call each other pet names. This is where they start calling each other "daddy" and supposedly "dad" (parental role names).

SLIGHT NSFW PART AHEAD!

When it was their first time making love, they started to call each other pet names again (ex: sexy, love, etc).

Though Crusher was kind of shy to call Blaze "sexy" while getting all the fun he gets from his husband.

NSFW PART ENDS HERE!

Does this part even still about pet names? Prob not but I'll add this little lore anyways.

After Crusher was tested as "positive" in his pregnancy test he was in full joy to have his own child after being a former child psychologist, child therapist and taking care of children in his younger adulthood (aka babysitting).

Crusher was hoping for the best for his future daughter (Fiar) to say "daddy" as her first word. 👀

But it was "dada"!? Fiar's first word was "dada" instead of "dad" which Blaze wasn't expecting her to say the least. Blaze tried so many types to get his daughter to say "dad" instead but "dada" was his official parental name.

"who's introverted and extroverted?"

Both are socialized trucks (aka extroverts).

"who's affectionate through words and who's affectionate through actions?"

Blaze's way of flirt is being affectionate through her words more than his actions. Even few words would make Crusher's engine explodes from overheating due to easily get fluttered.

Crusher's flirting is through actions instead. Though Blaze isn't the type of truck who would easily be so giggly and fluttered like them but that doesn't mean Blaze can't get fluttered at times sometimes.

"who confesses first?"

Crusher always wanted to confess first but his weak ass was too shy to say it to Blaze so they waited for him instead which didn't last too long for Blaze to say what his confidence ass want to say to his love.

Blaze was having butterflies in his stomach when he confesses to them, which Crusher felt the same as well.

"who's a scary cat and who isn't for a bug?" (TW: mentioned about bugs and k🫧lling a r🌊ach!)

Crusher happens to have a love-hate relationship towards non-pest bugs, they do still find some bugs cool! Their favorite bug would be a dragonfly! And speaking of dragonfly, Crusher have a little dragonfly friend named "hasty", they met them when they where in the garden watering their plants.

Blaze in the other hand loves non-pest bugs as they find them delightful.

Though the only bug both would obviously kill will be a roach and any pest bugs that are harmful to anyone.

"who can and cannot cook and bake?"

Both can cook and bake but Blaze only knows a few recipes from other sweets but isn't a afraid to get out of her comfort zone when it comes to new stuff which same goes to Crusher themselves.

When it comes to Blaze making pancakes, it always tasted weird because some parts of the pancake are still dough and uncooked and this is why Blaze can only make waffles and other breakfast food instead.

"Who likes and dislikes PDA?"

Blaze loves to tease and flirt Crusher time to time Infront of their friends, not to exactly embarrassed his boyfriend but rather as a playful romantic act as she just loves Crusher's reaction to it.

Blaze only do it if they're with their friends at a safe spot despite Axle City is LGBTQIA+ friendly.

"who's overprotective and who's chill?"

Both are quite overprotective to one another especially Blaze. But it got a little chiller when they got married.

When they have Fiar (their daughter), the two were protective but not overprotective towards her and one another.

"who has more relationship experience?"

Crusher used to date someone in senior collage life who just used them for live streaming and videos but good thing Pickle helped them try to break up with thier ex girlfriend, Maritime aka Gas Guzzler.

Blaze didn't dated anyone in her life not until Crusher themselves. Blaze has been asking advises from his parents when he was 15 years old.

when Blaze finally dated Crusher, his parents were worried and was having second opinions on dating someone who's his frenemies but she told them that Crusher was slowly turning good that they don't need to be worried about, Blaze could handle this one his own. (which he was right, Crusher was now a good truck and he handle it properly in his own).

NSFW PART AHEAD!

"Their horny level"

Like I mentioned earlier about their first time making love, both where really ready to not just have a baby but also wanted to get the fun started in their marriage.

Blaze was patiently waiting for this to happen for some time now. This man was ready to have a blast with his spouse, Crusher.

Both are getting to enjoy the fun, as both are equally giving each other the love. (They're basically doing the "ho-ho-ha-ha" funny number position 👀)

Blaze was mostly the top when she was 😻 her husband so goodly, Crusher was way louder than Blaze though good thing that the neighborhood didn't heard them (somehow lol 👀).

Both Blaze and Crusher gave each other 💕 marks which Crusher looks more obvious than Blaze.

END OF NSFW PART!

"Awkwardness level"

Crusher is way more to get the awkwardness level than Blaze despite being extrovert.

"Jealousy level"

Crusher pretty much can still get easily jealous at his own boyfriend and future husband at time especially on race though he's trying to not get insecure about it and enjoy the race instead.

And I didn't put their relationship lore here because it would take me forever to think and I want it to separate the lore somewhere else.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Linkty Dumpty

I was supposed to be on vacation, and while I didn’t do any blogging for a month, that didn’t mean that I stopped looking at my distraction rectangle and making a list of things I wanted to write about. Consequentially, the link backlog is massive, so it’s time to declare bankruptcy with another linkdump:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

[Image ID: John Holbo’s ‘trolley problem’ art, a repeating pattern of trolleys, tracks, people on tracks, and people standing at track switches]++

Let’s kick things off with a little graphic whimsy. You’ve doubtless seen the endless Trolley Problem memes, working from the same crude line drawings? Well, philosopher John Holbo got tired of that artwork, and he whomped up a fantastic alternative, which you can get as a poster, duvet, sticker, tee, etc:

https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/145078097

The trolley problem has been with us since 1967, but it’s enjoying a renaissance thanks to the insistence of “AI” weirdos that it is very relevant to our AI debate. A few years back, you could impress uninformed people by dropping the Trolley Problem into a discussion:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/

Amazingly, the “AI” debate has only gotten more tedious since the middle of the past decade. But every now and again, someone gets a stochastic parrot to do something genuinely delightful, like the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, who sell chatbots that will pretend to be tantalyzingly confused marks in order to tie up telemarketers and waste their time:

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

Jolly Roger sells different personas: “Whitebeard” is a confused senior who keeps asking the caller’s name, drops nonsequiturs into the conversation, and can’t remember how many credit-cards he has. “Salty Sally” is a single mom with a houseful of screaming, demanding children who keep distracting her every time the con artist is on the verge of getting her to give up compromising data. “Whiskey Jack” is drunk:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-hire-phone-bots-to-torture-telemarketers-2dbb8457

The bots take a couple minutes to get the sense of the conversation going. During that initial lag, they have a bunch of stock responses like “there’s a bee on my arm, but keep going,” or grunts like “huh,” and “uh-huh.” The bots can keep telemarketers and scammers on the line for quite a long time. Scambaiting is an old and honorable vocation, and it’s good that it has received a massive productivity gain from automation. This is the AI Dividend I dream of.

The less-fun AI debate is the one over artists’ rights and tech. I am foresquare for the artists here, but I think that the preferred solutions (like creating a new copyright over the right to train a model with your work) will not lead to the hoped-for outcome. As with other copyright expansions — 40 years’ worth of them now — this right will be immediately transferred to the highly concentrated media sector, who will simply amend their standard, non-negotiable contracting terms to require that “training rights” be irrevocably assigned to them as a condition of working.

The real solution isn’t to treat artists as atomic individuals — LLCs with an MFA — who bargain, business-to-business, with corporations. Rather, the solutions are in collective power, like unions. You’ve probably heard about the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike, in which creative workers are bargaining as a group to demand fair treatment in an age of generative models. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher’s speech announcing the strike made me want to stand up and salute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4SAPOX7R5M

The actors’ strike is historic: it marks the first time actors have struck since 2000, and it’s the first time actors and writers have co-struck since 1960. Of course, writers in the Writers Guild of America (West and East) have been picketing since since April, and one of their best spokespeople has been Adam Conover, a WGA board member who serves on the negotiating committee. Conover is best known for his stellar Adam Ruins Everything comedy-explainer TV show, which pioneered a technique for breaking down complex forms of corporate fuckery and making you laugh while he does it. Small wonder that he’s been so effective at conveying the strike issues while he pickets.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex N Press profiles Conover and interviews him about the strike, under the excellent headline, “Adam Pickets Everything.” Conover is characteristically funny, smart, and incisive — do read:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/adam-conover-wga-strike

Of course, not everyone in Hollywood is striking. In late June, the DGA accepted a studio deal with an anemic 41% vote turnout:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773926/dga-amptp-new-deal-strike

They probably shouldn’t have. In this interview with The American Prospect’s Peter Hong, the brilliant documentary director Amy Ziering breaks down how Netflix and the other streamers have rugged documentarians in a classic enshittification ploy that lured in filmmakers, extracted everything they had, and then discarded the husks:

https://prospect.org/culture/2023-06-21-drowned-in-the-stream/

Now, the streaming cartel stands poised to all but kill off documentary filmmaking. Pressured by Wall Street to drive high returns, they’ve become ultraconservative in their editorial decisions, making programs and films that are as similar as possible to existing successes, that are unchallenging, and that are cheap. We’ve gone directly from a golden age of docs to a dark age.

In a time of monopolies, it’s tempting to form countermonopolies to keep them in check. Yesterday, I wrote about why the FTC and Lina Khan were right to try to block the Microsoft/Activision merger, and I heard from a lot of people saying this merger was the only way to check Sony’s reign of terror over video games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

But replacing one monopolist with another isn’t good for anyone (except the monopolists’ shareholders). If we want audiences and workers — and society — to benefit, we have to de-monopolize the sector. Last month, I published a series with EFF about how we should save the news from Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

After that came out, the EU Observer asked me to write up version of it with direct reference to the EU, where there are a lot of (in my opinion, ill-conceived but well-intentioned) efforts to pry Big Tech’s boot off the news media’s face. I’m really happy with how it came out, and the header graphic is awesome:

https://euobserver.com/opinion/157187

De-monopolizing tech has become my life’s work, both because tech is foundational (tech is how we organize to fight over labor, gender and race equality, and climate justice), and because tech has all of these technical aspects, which open up new avenues for shrinking Big Tech, without waiting decades for traditional antitrust breakups to run their course (we need these too, though!).

I’ve written a book laying out a shovel-ready plan to give tech back to its users through interoperability, explaining how to make new regulations (and reform old ones), what they should say, how to enforce them, and how to detect and stop cheating. It’s called “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation” and it’s coming from Verso Books this September:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

[Image ID: The cover of the Verso Books hardcover of ‘The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation]

I just got my first copy in the mail yesterday, and it’s a gorgeous little package. The timing was great, because I spent the whole week in the studio at Skyboat Media recording the audiobook — the first audiobook of mine that I’ve narrated. It was a fantastic experience, and I’ll be launching a Kickstarter to presell the DRM-free audio and ebooks as well as hardcovers, in a couple weeks.

Though I like doing these crowdfunders, I do them because I have to. Amazon’s Audible division, the monopolist that controls >90% of the audiobook market, refuses to carry my work because it is DRM-free. When you buy a DRM-free audiobook, that means that you can play it on anyone’s app, not just Amazon’s. Every audiobook you’ve ever bought from Audible will disappear the moment you decide to break up with Amazon, which means that Amazon can absolutely screw authors and audiobook publishers because they’ve taken our customers hostage.

If you are unwise enough to pursue an MBA, you will learn a term of art for this kind of market structure: it’s a “moat,” that is, an element of the market that makes it hard for new firms to enter the market and compete with you. Warren Buffett pioneered the use of this term, and now it’s all but mandatory for anyone launching a business or new product to explain where their moat will come from.

As Dan Davies writes, these “moats” aren’t really moats in the Buffett sense. With Coke and Disney, he says, a “moat” was “the fact that nobody else could make such a great product that everyone wanted.” In other words, “making a good product,” is a great moat:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/stuck-in-the-moat

But making a good product is a lot of work and not everyone is capable of it. Instead, “moat” now just means some form of lock in. Davies counsels us to replace “moat” with:

our subscription system and proprietary interface mean that our return on capital is protected by a strong Berlin Wall, preventing our customers from getting out to a freer society and forcing them to consume our inferior products for lack of alternative.

I really like this. It pairs well with my 2020 observation that the fight over whether “IP” is a meaningful term can be settled by recognizing that IP has a precise meaning in business: “Any policy that lets me reach beyond the walls of my firm to control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

To see how that works in the real world, check out “The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy,” a magisterial piece of scholarship from Sarah Lamdan, Jason M. Schultz, Michael Weinberg and Claire Woodcock:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-ebook-economy/

Something happened when we shifted to digital formats that created a loss of rights for readers. Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.

The research methodology combines both anonymous and named sources in publishing, bookselling and librarianship, as well as expert legal and economic analysis. This is an eminently readable, extremely smart, and really useful contribution to the scholarship on how “IP” (in the modern sense) has transformed books from something you own to something that you can never own.

The truth is, capitalists hate capitalism. Inevitably, the kind of person who presides over a giant corporation and wields power over millions of lives — workers, suppliers and customers — believes themselves to be uniquely and supremely qualified to be a wise dictator. For this kind of person, competition is “wasteful” and distracts them from the important business of making everyone’s life better by handing down unilateral — but wise and clever — edits. Think of Peter Thiel’s maxim, “competition is for losers.”

That’s why giant companies love to merge with each other, and buy out nascent competitors. By rolling up the power to decide how you and I and everyone else live our lives, these executives ensure that they can help us little people live the best lives possible. The traditional role of antitrust enforcement is to prevent this from happening, countering the delusions of would-be life-tenured autocrats of trade with public accountability and enforcement:

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

Of course, for 40 years, we’ve had neoliberal, Reaganomics-poisoned antitrust, where monopolies are celebrated as “efficient” and their leaders exalted as geniuses whose commercial empires are evidence of merit, not savagery. That era is, thankfully, coming to an end, and not a moment too soon.

Leading the fight is the aforementioned FTC chair Lina Khan, who is taking huge swings at even bigger mergers. But the EU is no slouch in this department: they’re challenging the Adobe/Figma merger, a $20b transaction that is obviously and solely designed to recapture customers who left Adobe because they didn’t want to struggle under its yoke any longer:

https://gizmodo.com/adobe-figma-acquisition-likely-to-face-eu-investigation-1850555562

For autocrats of trade, this is an intolerable act of disloyalty. We owe them our fealty and subservience, because they are self-evidently better at understanding what we need than we could ever be. This unwarranted self-confidence from the ordinary mediocrities who end up running giant tech companies gets them into a whole lot of hot water.

One keen observer of the mind-palaces that tech leaders trap themselves in is Anil Dash, who describes the conspiratorial, far-right turn of the most powerful men (almost all men!) in Silicon Valley in a piece called “‘VC Qanon’ and the radicalization of the tech tycoons”:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

Dash builds on an editorial he published in Feb, “The tech tycoon martyrdom charade,” which explores the sense of victimhood the most powerful, wealthiest people in the Valley project:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade/

These dudes are prisoners of their Great Man myth, and leads them badly astray. And while all of us are prone to lapses in judgment and discernment, Dash makes the case that tech leaders are especially prone to it:

Nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life. They all sacrifice family, relationships, stability, community, connection, and belonging in service of keeping score on a scale that actually yields no additional real-world benefits on the path from that first $100 million to the tens of billions.

This makes billionaires “a cohort that is, counterintutively, very easily manipulated.” What’s more, they’re all master manipulators, and they all hang out with each other, which means that when a conspiratorial belief takes root in one billionaire’s brain, it spreads to the rest of them like wildfire.

Then, billionaires “push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they’re genius outliers who can see things others can’t, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit.”

They live in privileged bubbles, which insulates them from disconfirming evidence — ironic, given how many of these bros think they are wise senators in the agora.

There are examples of billionaires’ folly all around us today, of course. Take privacy: the idea that we can — we should — we must — spy on everyone, all the time, in every way, to eke out tiny gains in ad performance is objectively batshit. And yet, wealthy people decreed this should be so, and it was, and made them far richer.

Leaked data from Microsoft’s Xandr ad-targeting database reveals how the commercial surveillance delusion led us to a bizarre and terrible place, as reported on by The Markup:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

The Markup’s report lets you plumb 650,000 targeting categories, searching by keyword or loading random sets, 20 at a time. Do you want to target gambling addicts, people taking depression meds or Jews? Xandr’s got you covered. What could possibly go wrong?

The Xandr files come from German security researcher Wolfie Christl from Cracked Labs. Christi is a European, and he’s working with the German digital rights group Netzpolitik to get the EU to scrutinize all the ways that Xandr is flouting EU privacy laws.

Billionaires’ big ideas lead us astray in more tangible ways, of course. Writing in The Conversation, John Quiggin asks us to take a hard look at the much ballyhooed (and expensively ballyhooed) “nuclear renaissance”:

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Despite the rhetoric, nukes aren’t cheap, and they aren’t coming back. Georgia’s new nuclear power is behind schedule and over budget, but it’s still better off than South Carolina’s nukes, which were so over budget that they were abandoned in 2017. France’s nuke is a decade behind schedule. Finland’s opened this year — 14 years late. The UK’s Hinkley Point C reactor is massively behind schedule and over budget (and when it’s done, it will be owned by the French government!).

China’s nuclear success story also doesn’t hold up to scrutiny — they’ve brought 50GW of nukes online, sure, but they’re building 95–120GW of solar every year.

Solar is the clear winner here, along with other renewables, which are plummeting in cost (while nukes soar) and are accelerating in deployments (while nukes are plagued with ever-worsening delays).

This is the second nuclear renaissance — the last one, 20 years ago, was a bust, and that was before renewables got cheap, reliable and easy to manufacture and deploy. You’ll hear fairy-tales about how the early 2000s bust was caused by political headwinds, but that’s simply untrue: there were almost no anti-nuke marches then, and governments were scrambling to figure out low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels (this was before the latest round of fossil fuel sabotage).

The current renaissance is also doomed. Yes, new reactors are smaller and safer and won’t have the problems intrinsic to all megaprojects, but designs like VOYGR have virtually no signed deals. Even if they do get built, their capacity will be dwarfed by renewables — a Gen III nuke will generate 710MW of power. Globally, we add that much solar every single day.

And solar power is cheap. Even after US subsidies, a Gen III reactor would charge A$132/MWh — current prices are as low as A$64-$114/MWh.

Nukes are getting a charm offensive because wealthy people are investing in hype as a way of reaping profits — not as a way of generating safe, cheap, reliable energy.

Here in the latest stage of capitalism, value and profit are fully decoupled. Monopolists are shifting more and more value from suppliers and customers to their shareholders every day. And when the customer is the government, the depravity knows no bounds. In Responsible Statecraft, Connor Echols describes how military contractors like Boeing are able to bill the Pentagon $52,000 for a trash can:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/20/the-pentagons-52000-trash-can/

Military Beltway Bandits are nothing new, of course, but they’ve gotten far more virulent since the Obama era, when Obama’s DoD demanded that the primary contractors merge to a bare handful of giant firms, in the name of “efficiency.” As David Dayen writes in his must-read 2020 book Monopolized, this opened the door to a new kind of predator:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

The Obama defense rollups were quickly followed by another wave of rollups, these ones driven by Private Equity firms who cataloged which subcontractors were “sole suppliers” of components used by the big guys. These companies were all acquired by PE funds, who then lowered the price of their products, selling them below cost.

This maximized the use of those parts in weapons and aircraft sold by primary contractors like Boeing, which created a durable, long-lasting demand for fresh parts for DoD maintenance of its materiel. PE-owned suppliers hits Uncle Sucker with multi-thousand-percent markups for these parts, which have now wormed their way into every corner of the US arsenal.

Yes, this is infuriating as hell, but it’s also so grotesquely wrong that it’s impossible to defend, as we see in this hilarious clip of Rep Katie Porter grilling witnesses on US military waste:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJhf6l1nB9A

Porter pulls out the best version yet of her infamous white-board and makes her witnesses play defense ripoff Jepoardy!, providing answers to a series of indefensible practices.

It’s sure nice when our government does something for us, isn’t it? We absolutely can have nice things, and we’re about to get them. The Infrastructure Bill contains $42B in subsidies for fiber rollouts across the country, which will be given to states to spend. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin breaks down the state-by-state spending:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/us-allocates-42b-in-broadband-funding-find-out-how-much-your-state-will-get/

Texas will get $3.31B, California will get $1.86B, and 17 other states will get $1B or more. As the White House announcement put it, “High-speed Internet is no longer a luxury.”

To understand how radical this is, you need to know that for decades, the cable and telco sector has grabbed billions in subsidies for rural and underserved communities, and then either stole the money outright, or wasted it building copper networks that run at a fraction of a percent of fiber speeds.

This is how America — the birthplace of the internet — ended up with some of the world’s slowest, most expensive broadband, even after handing out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Those subsidies were gobbled up by greedy, awful phone companies — these ones must be spent wisely, on long-lasting, long-overdue fiber infrastructure.

That’s a good note to end on, but I’ve got an even better one: birds in the Netherlands are tearing apart anti-bird strips and using them to build their nests. Wonderful creatures 1, hostile architecture, 0. Nature is healing:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/11/crows-and-magpies-show-their-metal-by-using-anti-bird-spikes-to-build-nests

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/15/in-the-dumps/#what-vacation

Next Tues, Jul 18, I'm hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. It's in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshop's fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:

https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins

[Image iD: A dump-truck, dumping out a load of gravel. A caricature of Humpty Dumpty clings to its lip, restrained by a group of straining, Lilliputian men.]

[gallusrostromegalus]

For the fic writer ask meme, #8: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Here's a bit from An Elephant Is Soft And Mushy, where after Kenpachi goes on a short visit to what will later be Hueco Mundo, he and Byakuya sit down to do some scheduling late at night:

Warnings: This is the result of the Angst Goblin in my brain suddenly remembering Bleach OVA content and realizing that it makes several people's backstories much, MUCH worse, and not so much kicking the door in as blowing it away with a #suffering shotgun. Discussion of a canon character death, and an additional implied death :)

(tagging @cesium-sheep because you wanted to see what I was going to do with the characters.)

***

“...Ken-chan?.”  Yachiru glared from the doorway, rubbing the dark circles forming under her eyes. “Its really late.”

“I know, I know.”  Zaraki sighed. “Can’t sleep?”

“Nm.” Yachiru mumbled, shaking her head and leaning on the doorframe.

“Hand me that pillow behind you.”  Zaraki pointed, sitting up and shifting positions so his leg was sticking out beside him. 

“Ta. C’mere.”  he nodded, taking the pillow from Byakuya and setting it in his lap. Yachiru plodded over, waved at Byakuya briefly while yawning, and curled up beside Zaraki’s leg, head on the pillow and shoulders in his lap. He returned his attention to the patrol schedule, changing which hand he was writing with to gently stroke her hair. 

“...I didn’t know you were ambidextrous.”  Byakuya blinked.  Perhaps this was the key to his success as a swordsman with no experience in kendo?

“Nah, I’m Buddhist.” he shrugged. “Right, where were we-?"

"I believe were up to May." nodded Byakuya, tabling his questions of handedness for now.

"May... That’s right before graduation and when everyone who is gonna quit or transfer does, right before summer scheduling so I’ve got a skeleton crew until the end of June-”

“Every division has the same problem, but yours does tend to suffer it more severely.” Byakuya agreed, watching Yachiru roll over and pull Zaraki’s leg closer like a stuffed toy, apparently setting quickly.  "Prob'ly a terrible idea, but what about dropping bait in a few tactical spots so we draw the hollows to places that can be managed with fewer patrols, rather than try to cover more ground.” Zaraki suggested, tapping a few open plains on the map.

“It’s been done in the middle districts with good results.” Byakuya nodded. “The difficulty is in the cities, where there is too much cover to patrol effectively, and in the more remote regions, where bait doesn’t have the range to effectively draw the hollows in.  But it may alleviate some of the staffing issues…”

Half an hour later they’d worked out a reduced patrol schedule that would still likely catch the majority of hollows approaching human settlement, when they were interrupted by Yachiru’s soft snores. Zaraki paused mid-sentence to grin apologetically, and turned his attention back to Yachiru, shaking her shoulder until she rolled over and quieted down. 

“She sleeps very soundly, but not if you’re absent?” Byakuya asked, watching the girl in the yellow lamplight.

“Yeah, but it’s not really a surprise.” Zaraki shrugged. “If anything, it’s that she’s taken to sleeping in her own bed as much as she has.”

“At her age?”  Ages were a relative thing in the soul society, but Yachiru was reading well and getting her adult teeth, as she had demonstrated her loose incisor at the last captain’s meeting- by the time he’d done so, Byakuya had been commanded to sleep in his own room for well over a decade. 

“I mean-  Sure, she’s five hundred thirty-eight now, but she spent nearly all of that homeless with me.  She was just a cabbage when I found her, and you don’t sleep without something between you and the ground, but you really don’t let a baby sleep where they’ll get cold, so for the first couple decades she slept inside my Kosode, then after it was on my chest, and then when she got to heavy for that she slept in my lap and now it’s by my back or under my arm.” He explained fondly, stroking her hair out of her face. “I’ve been her bed for half a millennium now, and I’ll probably be her bed when I’m ten thousand years old and nothing but bones and liver spots.”

Byakuya was silent for a long time.

…Had he ever slept in his father’s arms?  If he did, he had no memory of it.

“That’s a miserable mug.” Kenpachi said, nudging his arm. 

“I am rather morose this evening, it seems.”  He sighed, looking out at the moon. 

“Any hope of cheering you up?” he offered, gesturing around the small room that made his home, broadly offering whatever he had on hand.

“I appreciate the sentiment, but I do not think so.”  Byakuya shook his head.

“Ah. Monsoon mood kind of thing.” Kenpachi nodded, and frowned, turning something over in his head.  “If you’re already going to be miserable, can I ask something awful?”

Byakuya tilted his head a bit to indicate he was listening.

“Yachiru goes to your place a lot- don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful for every minute you’re willing to watch her. Was hard enough taking care of her out in the Rukongai, but now with the job- thanks.”

“It is… pleasant. To have her company.” Byakuya nodded. “Thank you for trusting me with her care.”

Kenpachi nodded in acknowledgement, chewing his lip. “...Last time, when I came to pick her up, I saw a lotta toys in the compound.  Cute stuff- dolls, the tea set she badgered you and Jushiro into playing tea ceremony with her-   But no other kids. You an’ Rukia really are the last generation, aren’t you? At least, until one of you is lucky enough to have kids.”

Byakuya looked up at Kenpachi, eyes hardening a bit in suspicion.

“...You used to be married.” Kenpachi continued.

Byakuya glared outright.

“-My condolences. Honestly. I’m not so lucky in love as you were, and losing her suddenly like that must’ve felt like getting your chest ripped open, ‘cept you don’t get the mercy of dying too.”

“What was it you wanted to ask?” Byakuya demanded, voice hard and dangerously quiet..

“I worked with a lotta women, and saw the problems they have up close. Retsu’s a damn good doctor, but even she can’t stop something if she doesn’t know it’s there to stop. Like an internal hemorrhage or septic infection, where there’s no outside problem and everyone tells women they’ll be sick and in pain during a pregnancy, so she just ignores it for a few hours but by then-”

He was interrupted by the crunch of wood as Byakuya’s fingers dug into the table.

“What was her name?” Asked Kenpachi.

“Hisana.”  Byakuya growled. “My wife’s name was Hi-”

“-Not her.” Kenpachii growled back. “Who was the little girl all those toys at the compound were intended for?”

Byakuya froze. 

“You had the baby sexed, or you wouldn’t have gotten dolls and tea sets. Surely you picked out a name.”  Kenpachi met his gaze, cool and unflinching like iron. “What was your daughter’s name?”

For a minute, there was only the horrible numbess of grief.

“...Noriko.”  Byakuya finally whispered, hands shaking as he let go of the table and hid his face. “My daughter’s name was Noriko.”

“Noriko.” Kenpachi nodded.  His face didn’t exactly change but the hardness was gone.

Byakuya choked, hands pressed to his mouth. “I never-  nobody’s ever said her name aloud-”

“Noriko.”  Kenpachi repeated, and Byakuya sobbed.  “Noriko, daughter of Hisana and Byakuya.”

Byakuya crumpled, hand clasped to his mouth to try to stifle the sobs, staring at Yachiru, still snoring in her father’s lap, tears streaming down his face and staining his scarf.  There was a weight on his shoulder.  It belonged to Kenpachi’s hot, scarred hand.

“I’m sorry.” Kenpachi’s voice was barely a whisper, eyes maybe just a bit red too. “But I needed to know, so I can ask what I actually need to ask.”

“What?” Byakuya whimpered, staring back at him.

Instead of answering, Kenpachi let go and shook Yachiru’s shoulder. “Hey, Kiddo.”

“Mgh?”  She blinked. 

“I need to get up a minute and your uncle needs a hug.” he said, pulling her up into a sitting position. 

“ -’kay.” she yawned, getting up and plodding over to Byakuya and leaning into his shoulder, eyes still closed. He held her, trying to not squeeze too hard, face in her own shoulder, gasping-

“Bya-chan?”  She mumbled, blinking at him. “You okay?”

“Just-  Just missing someone.” he stammered.  Kenpachi was rifling through the file cabinet on the other side of the room. 

“Oh.  Here-”  Yahiru said, straightening up and hugging him back properly.  

He couldn’t stop the sob this time, squeezing Yachiru to his chest for a long moment. “...Thank you, Kusajishi-san.” “ ‘s Yachiru.” she groaned, rolling her eyes at him. “Sorry, ‘m really tired…”

“-Curl up on him, I can’t find the damn thing I was looking for.” Kenpachi called from the other side of the room. 

“ -‘kay. G’night.”  Yachiru mumbled, sliding down Byakuya’s chest and immediately settling in his lap. He had to fight the urge to sob again, trying to hold still and cradle her. He watched her eyelashes flutter and she drifted off, the way she wiggled to make herself more comfortable, the slow rise and fall of her chest as she slept-

“She out?” Kenpachi asked, peering over the table. 

“Y-yes, I believe so.” Byakuya whispered, trying to not wake her. 

“Good, I don’t want her hearing and worrying.” Kenpachi grunted, sitting down again and placing a file folder on the table between them.  “Sorry to ask you such a bitch of a question but-  Well.  Needed to know the measure of man you are.”

Byakuya watched as Kenpachi pulled off his haori off his left shoulder, with a small grunt of pain, followed by the same shoulder of his kimono and kosode-  Byakuya belatedly realized the thing that had looked off about Kenpachi earlier was that his uniform was closed up properly for once, as he stared at the bandages, gauze, still-healing stitches and brace that was only barely holding the left half of his ribcage together. 

Apparently the campaign in the realm of the hollows had been harder on Kenpachi than he had let on. 

“Restu said the blade that fucking thing had got within half an inch of my heart, and that almost wouldn’t have mattered with the amount of broken bones and other damage.”  he explained, wheezing “I have the devil’s own luck somehow, but I’m not convinced that I’m actually immortal, so I needed to know-”  he pushed the file folder closer to Byakuya and opened it, revealing legal documents. 

“-If something happens to me, will you be Yachiru’s Godfather?”  He asked,head bowed and his only mobile hand up like he was begging. “You’re her favorite person in this city after me, and now I’m sure you’ll take good care of her-”

"You are spectacuarly bad at diplomacy, Zaraki." Byakuya sighed as signature was already drying on the paper.

[guhamun]

SHIPPING INFO // answer the following for your muse(s) so people know how shipping works on your blog.

REPOST. don’t reblog.

What’s your OTP for your muse?

I honestly don’t have an OTP fkjdshf in any fandom. But ships I have with mutuals? Those tend to be my OTPs – but usually just with those people if they’re canon muses as I often become attached to people’s specific interpretations rather than who the muse are themselves. This can go into faceclaims too for ocs.

What are you willing to rp when it comes to shipping?

I think it’s easier for me to say what I don’t like when it comes to shipping. Highly toxic stuff is a big no for me personally since it makes me super uncomfortable and I feel bad writing it as a result of this, but other than that, everything is free game I guess??? I also don’t like Aged up muses like individuals who were like 13 or something aged up to 18 for shipping for a verse as that can stay 10000 feet away from me. So come at me with that and get a flat no and a block. I used to see this a while back in certain fandoms so maybe things are better nowadays....maybe.......

How large does the age gap have to be to make it uncomfortable?

For immortal muses or muses with very, very long lives, this tends to be free game since as long as both them and the other individual share the same mental / physical maturity and they're adults then we’re good to go. For outside of this, five years is my max and anything above that is too much for me. This is different if both muses are older adults, though, as 40 and 45 become quite inconsequential.

Are you selective when shipping?

VERY. It’s one of the reasons why it can take some time for me to ship with someone in the romantic sense as I need to get to know the mun through ooc communication on the dash or through tags or something. I need to get a feel for those vibes. Since I don’t go into interactions looking for this, that also makes it take some time to actually get to that point. It’s rare for me to go outside of the slow burn period unless I know someone and we’ve talked a lot / discussed things.

How far do steamy moments have to go before they're considered nsfw?

For me, the moment a lot of touching starts to get involved is my cue that things are more than likely going to get pretty spicy from there and to get ready to slap that readmore / nsfw tag on there.

What are other muses you ship your muse with?

-Vague hand gestures-

Does one have to ask to ship with you?

You can most certainly! Just don’t bring it up when we first start interacting because it’ll make me annoyed and that ship more than likely won’t ever happen. As someone who has been used before for having a specific muse for part of a ship, I’ll think that’s the only reason for the interest. Now, if we’re interacting and you see chemistry over time, then you can let me know. That’ll give me an idea of where the interest is, and then from there, if I’m feeling that chemistry too, I can send in those shippy memes without feeling like a weenie. 😭

How often do you like to ship?

I do like shipping, but not too often. Normally when I have a few ships, my interest in it tends to dwindle down into the aether. The type of muses I pick up doesn’t help either as they are often uninterested in romance from the first and or it takes 10 years to get a single doki out of them. Oh to have a muse that is easy to ship...

Are you ship obsessed or ship more-or-less?

I like shipping, but I’m very chill about it overall (until we actually start shipping---).

Are you multiship?

Yesss very much so. For some muses, though, that might be few-ship.

What is your favorite ship in your current fandom?

As I said, I don’t tend to be interested in ships much even with fandoms. However, I am fond of Ningguang and Beidou in Genshin. For Honkai, Bronya and Seele, and Natasha and Serval (I say that as if I have Honkai muses on here---). I like these in very specific ways and don’t tend to be fond of how fandom explores a lot of ships in general because I'm weird I guess FJHSJKFFS.

Finally, how does one ship with you?

Just interact! Really, that’s it! Don’t approach me with intent on shipping first time we interact and just let it happen. Talk to me too! I like having some kind of connection with whoever I’m shipping with or it feels like I’m in an echo chamber. That’s about all I can say in regards to all this! ^ O ^ )9

[dunktape]

can you genuinely, i mean so genuinely not copy a creator who's already been through and is going through rough shit? i thought you were an alt of chocoperrito's, i saw you were "heavily inspired", same style and similar intro, this is plain disrespectful and cruel to do to an artist who's already stated they're not okay with that.

i hope you can find it in your heart to at least apologize to hym.

hey , saw this and genuinely wanted to address it as my intentions are genuinely not to copy anyone , let alone cause harm . summary is all the way down under the cut ( last paragraph )

first of all , i'm sorry to hear that reki isn't doing well . i hope hy'll get better soon , but i couldn't have known he wasn't in a well mental state because i don't want to and can't interact with hys blog . i've been blocked quite a while ago , just after the first post i made on this blog . what happened will stay private as requested , but ive apologised and as far as i know , we made up . hy doesn't want to interact with me and i respect his boundaries .

talking of boundaries , i did not know hy was uncomfortable with people getting inspired by his art style . it is true that i took inspiration from hym , but to be fair all i took inspiration from was the shape of fur . my colour theory was fully taught to me by ashenoranges , round shapes have been inspired by another artist who does not want to be named , the way i draw hands along with cartoon-ish ( and also the round shapes ) by an artist on tiktok whose name i forgot ( but did a lot of utau / fell art , something along the lines of pupbiteez ) and the eyes i've just always drawn that way because i adapted it from when i just started getting into animation memes , but i tend to add tearducts too ( which i've adapted from p0ny.world ) . also , i love the chalky way calciumdreams's and yokoneko's art looks which i'm trying to work on getting into my art . i also mentioned some other artists in a previous ask about my artstyle , those artists also provide me references for when i'm trying to draw animals that stand on all fours .

asked one of my friends if they had any art of reki saved , for comparison . i guess i can see the similarities ?

the thing is that i use several outlines and lots of rendering on top of it and use a shade between green and orange always - when reki uses one line-art layer , has highlights instead of shadows in the hair , usually a blue shade and overall has thinner line-art where parts between similar parts of clothing and / or fur gets coloured differently in line-art .

i'm not saying my and reki's styles do not look extremely similar or that he never said anything about not liking inspiration , but i did not copy ( or at least INTEND to copy ) hym , neither did i ( key word , i ) ever read he was uncomfortable with inspiration . if you would like to provide proof then i'd love to have you dm it to me /gen

my intro post had taken me quite a few months to come up with , going through a few things to get inspiration from . however , i can see why you think i copied him , especially with how i provided my links . asked a friend of mine to provide a screenshot of reki's blog to compare them after you sent this ask . to clarify - i actually got inspo for my graphic and the stars between links from a friend of mine , who used to make simple transparent background graphics and used the 𓈒 symbol in between links instead . since i'm a pretty big fan of stars , i used stars instead . went through tags to find introduction posts that i could take inspo from , which mostly used different colours , and since i usually use orange or green shades in my art ( since they're my favourite colours ) i thought i'd apply that to highlight parts i thought were important . just talked a bit about me , connected a link to my identity in case you want to get to know me better , provided a link to my toy house in case you wanted to see my characters , then talked a bit about asks because i barely really got any before . it looked a bit empty at that point , so i thought i'd largen up something , but doing that at the top of the post seemed like it went from big to small and i didn't like that . moved the links to the bottom , largened them up and that seemed pretty good . but now it was a bit empty on top of the page , so after messing around with the graphic i realised that maybe i should add something that would devide the graphic from the text - a divider . now everything looked tidy , while not being too little nor too much . a link to stuff that went more into detail ,, perfect right ? but ;

i can totally see why you think they look familiar : same colours , same link stuff , separate part about the inbox , divider between texts and images , but i don't have access to reki's blog so i wouldn't have known . even if i did before , i wouldn't have remembered that in the past 2 months where i was much more busy with other stuff than remembering what someone else's , who didn't want to interact with me , intropost looked like .

HOWEVER ! i do acknowledge that my EMOTE art looks incredibly - extremely , almost completely identical to hys . hand shapes , eye shapes , body shapes , even the yellow body and line-art , the SHADING - all of that . i guess that comes with having similar artstyles , then also worrying about whether or not your art looks ok . i actually asked a friend of mine what i could change about my art so other people would maybe like or use it more , and they said that i only ever use harsh - thick lines , so i should keep the line-art simple and try airbrushing stuff . this is basically what reki did , and so i did use one of hys emotes from a server i'm in as a reference - i really liked the result , and posted it not thinking about how familiar they looked despite literally having his emotes and mine side by side for comparison .

they're extremely similar , especially the little closed eyes and blush . they both have that little red eyelid bit above their eyes and shaded cheeks + hands . i admit this is my fault for not having realised earlier how i basically copied hys style , and i'll try to make it more into my own style next time . i'm unsure of how to yet , but i'll figure something out .

also , besides all that , i'm not really copying his appearances , sonas , other stuff hy might have made . the yellow guy is pretty popular after all since it doesn't have an actual appearance or anything that would relate to identity and can be interpreted as anyone . sure , there's blogs like k9emotes who make white sillies instead of yellow , but i prefer using yellow and i'm also going to use these emotes . not saying i won't change how i'll draw them , this is just a reason , but that's why my and hys emotes look so similar — they're exactly what i and my friends would like emotes to look like if we're going to use them frequently .

all of this is not an excuse but simply an explanation so i hope everything is more clear . as stupid as it may sound , the intro post was truly a coincidence . my art looks similar to hys ( but not that much ) because he was an inspiration , but not my only inspiration and definitely not my biggest but the hair / fur is something i do use the most . i deeply apologise for any harm i have done and crossing unknown boundaries , but i'm afraid i can't directly apologise to reki as he doesn't want to interact with me , boundaries are boundaries .

long story short — yes i got inspired by the fur , the intro post was purely coincidental , unconsciously took too much inspo from emotes , i apologise for what i did but can't apologise directly bc im blocked .

[oldiesstationlover11607]

🎶Oh my God, we’re back again🎶

Well hello….it’s 💛. You said that my requests make you happy and that you don’t mind them so I have returned. By the way, if this ever changes, do not hesitate to tell me. Even if you just don’t want to write TØP anymore. I’m a fan of a lot of fandoms you appear to write for, so I’d probably be able to request other things (again, only if you don’t mind me doing so). For what it’s worth, your stories are the highlight of my day. I frequently reread them when I’m feeling down or in need of an escape.

Alright, enough with my sappiness. You know that meme of the girl explaining something to her mom and the mom is just like 😐 (google “Me explaining to my mom meme” and it should be the first pic that shows up)? I was thinking that a fun story would be Josh trying (and maybe failing) to explain TØP lore to the reader. It doesn’t have to go super in depth to things by any means. I just can imagine that such a scenario has happened before and, quite honestly, half the time I don’t even know the lore. As always, if you hate this idea, no pressure to do it. ❤️❤️

Lore - Josh Dun x Reader

Pairing: Josh x Reader

Warnings: None :)

Word Count: 1374

A/N: I love that you re-read my stuff. It makes me so happy that it’s the highlight of your day. Getting your requests is the highlight of mine, writing helps me relax at the end of the day-especially with how rough it is being in senior year (I’m in the southern hemisphere and finish school late November so exams are imminent 😭). I actually re-read some of mine quite a bit. Honestly I’m so proud of the number 16 cotton candy. The way part 2 ended made me want to cry - I believe I ATE that if I do say so myself 🙌. It makes me want to add more parts, like the reader watching Clancy perform on Good Day Dema and seeing how upset/zoned out he looks and being hurt by it, the conversations they have after reuniting, more of that series’ torchbearer bc he’s funny af, and more! Literally love this request btw bc I tried explaining the lore to my mom and she pulled the exact face in the meme. 

Tyler and Josh were always on social media. It had always been a key part of their relationship with the clique, and I’d noticed it more and more when they started tagging me in memes and pictures that I didn’t know the meanings of. 

“Josh?” I asked. We were sitting on the couch under a blanket in our apartment, the weather outside cold and rainy. Josh looked down at me, I’d planted myself in his lap, my head resting perfectly on his thighs while the rest of my body stretched out across the couch. 

“Yeah?” I brought my phone up to his face. 

“What’s a forest fic and why are the clique tagging me in memes saying you don’t exist?” His face dropped, mouth open wide in shock. “Tyler reposted something about it earlier and I don't get it.” He said nothing, the silence in the room growing with every second. “What?” I could tell he was trying to frame a way to tell me the truth, surely it wasn’t that bad.

“It’s a uh….uhhhh, like a fan fiction. And like….uhhh… I’m like not real in it… like a figment of Tyler’s imagination. Uhh and then a treehouse burns down THE END,” he mumbled, stumbling through the words and giving the worst plot description I’d ever heard. I was still confused. “That’s all you will EVER need to know… no need to look it up or mention it ever again.” He flashed me a quick smile before going back to his phone. I sat there for a few moments trying to understand his words before continuing. 

“But how is that relevant to whatever Tyler posted this morning?” 

He let out a loud sigh, telling me I was starting to get on his nerves. He put down his phone and properly sat up, giving me his full attention.

“It’s related to the lore of the new album, the whole Dema thing,” he explained. I knew that over the last few albums the boys had been telling some big story but that it was too complex to just google and learn about in five minutes. 

“Like how your character is the Torchbearer?” I asked and he nodded in response. “But how is that related to you not existing?”

“Do you really want me to explain the whole lore to you?” he laughed. 

“Yeah, I guess today’s the day.”

Josh had tried to explain everything as clearly as he could but it still didn’t make any sense. He explained that he was called the Torchbearer–which I’d proudly already known–and that Tyler was called Clancy. He also said that Clancy was trying to escape Dema because of the Bishops–I still didn’t really understand the concept of the Bishops… or Dema for that matter. 

“Wait, wait, wait, so you’re saying that there’s like… nine different Bishops?” I asked, trying to get my head around it. 

Josh nodded, “And they’re in charge of different sectors of Dema where the citizens live.” 

“If I’m being 100% honest, I have no idea where we are on the timeline or what the difference between Trench and Dema is,” I laughed. Josh covered his eyes and shook his head. He grabbed his phone, sending off a couple of texts before continuing trying to explain the lore. After about an hour, we both had our computers out, Josh was on the clique side of reddit and I was taking notes, typing frantically. A loud knock sounded from the door and I got up to answer it. It was Tyler, standing in the doorway with a large blanket with ‘twenty one pilots’ printed on it, snacks–including my favorite candy, the mask he’d worn during all the Clancy promotional stuff, a roll of yellow tape, and a stuffed animal which looked like a fat goat. 

“Where’s Josh? I heard there was an emergency and I came prepared,” he spoke, running inside and jumping on the couch next to my boyfriend. Closing the door I chuckled to myself and walked back over to the boys. “Josh said you wanted to learn the lore.”

“Well I tried explaining it to her myself but she wasn’t getting it,” Josh claimed. 

“That’s because you don’t get the lore yourself, come on,” Tyler laughed. He grabbed Josh’s computer and switched the tab to YouTube. “To start with, watch this.” He started playing the band’s ‘The Story’ playlist which featured all of the lore-related music videos. We started with Heavy Dirty Soul–which I’d seen before–and then went on to watch the videos from Trench. 

“Okay so Tyler’s character, Clancy, basically tries escaping Dema but then gets taken back. Josh’s character, the Torchbearer, is in charge of the Banditos–the rebellion group–and gets Tyler–sorry Clancy out of the city and takes him to the camp but then he gets captured again?” 

Tyler nodded, confirming my understanding. We continued watching the music videos till we got to ‘The Outside’. Josh  pulled out the stuffed animal and passed it to me before pressing play. I watched the video, Josh leading Tyler through an island and into a cave. A small gremlin with black eyes, gray horns, and white fur popped onto the screen, the exact same creature the stuffed animal was modeled off of. He jumped about the dark cave mysteriously, leading Tyler to a larger group of them. “Oh my god what is that thing?” I moved into Josh, cuddling up to him, completely stunned at this creature who was both cute and terrifying at the same time. 

“It’s Ned,” he smiled, “it stands for Neuro-Expansion Device.” I nodded and continued to watch the video. Tyler had gotten the horns from Ned and was able to control the dead bishop I’d learned to be Keons. When we finally reached Navigating, Josh paused the video. “This is the video those instagram memes were referring to, the ones Tyler has been reposting.” Tyler pressed play and we sat through the entire thing. The song was catchy and the video showed Josh leading Tyler through the forest and back into Trench after leaving the island Vøldsoy. What I didn’t expect was for Josh’s character to be a figment of Tyler’s imagination and the real Torchbearer to be the Bandito one from the Trench videos. 

“WHAT?!” I gasped, “NO WAY.” There was no way this whole time the Torchbearer was not there for Clancy. I wanted to cry from how sad it was and I had to find out how the story ended. “Wait so what happens next?” 

Tyler sat up and put the computer away, “Well basically we have another music video for Paladin Strait but that’s not coming out for a while. We’ve also got some lore stuff planned for the tour so I’ve got to finalize that soon too.” 

I nodded listening to everything he was saying and trying to remember the few follow up questions I had. “So, the bishops,” I started. 

“Yeah, what about them?” Josh asked, wrapping his arms around me. 

“So I get that Keons and Nico are the main ones but what about the others? Like what kind of a name is Nills?” Tyler laughed loudly, bringing a hand up to his chest.

“They’re from the songs off Blurryface, like Sacarver, “she’s a carver,” he explained. 

“Oh so you went through the lyrics and highlighted things that sounded vaguely like names?” Josh seemed to find that hilarious because he nearly fell off the couch. Tyler however, found it less funny and rolled his eyes. 

“Okay, I think that’s enough for today,” he got up and packed up the blanket. “You can keep the Ned by the way.” I grinned and cuddled him closer to me. 

“Thanks for the help Tyler,” Josh held me against his chest. 

“No worries,” he smiled before leaving the apartment. Josh and I were left to ourselves, the rain still pattered on the roof and I could hear the occasional grumble of thunder. 

“So Torchbearer, what’s the plan for dinner?” I asked, getting up off the couch. I got up, put away all the snacks and drinks while Josh folded up our blankets. 

“You’re never going to stop calling me that are you?” he laughed. 

“What’s that? I can’t see you, maybe you’re not really here.”

//

Hopefully this is good, I wasn't too sure about it but I think it's worth publishing. I'm so glad that I have 💛 anon bc their requests are awesome and I love hearing their feedback. I felt guilty last night about declining a Joshler fic but bc of 💛 saying I should write what I want it felt okay.