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robininthelabyrinth · 3 years ago

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Prompt: What character ends up with a reputation as the anti-JGS (they will acknowledge ALL their illegitimate children) and how did that come about/is it justified?

Got Without Merit

“You can’t just throw the boy out like that!” Lan Qiren exclaimed.

He waved a hand over to his attendants, who got the hint and rushed down to the bottom of the stairs of Jinlin Tower to see if the boy that had just been thrown down those stairs was all right. Those were an awful lot of stairs, and he was still only just a regular mortal, even if he had a cultivator’s bloodline.

Though perhaps that made it worse, in some ways, given that the cultivator whose bloodline he shared was the one who had had him thrown out like some pile of trash.

“Why not?” Jin Guangshan asked, utterly disinterested and a little surprised by Lan Qiren’s reaction; it was clear he hadn’t expected any of the more respectable guests at his legitimate son’s birthday – among them the leaders of the other Great Sects, who he’d decided on a whim to invite mostly to show that he could – to follow him outside. “I certainly don’t want the brat here.”

“Are you or are you not a cultivator?” Lan Qiren snapped. “Your duty is to protect the innocent, to fight evil and stand up for the common people – and tossing a boy that barely seems any older than ten or twelve down multiple flights of stairs is hardly any of those! Even if he were a complete stranger to you, you’d owe him more civility than that!”

The other sect leaders were watching the discourse in the same way they might a game, their heads swiveling back from Lan Qiren to Jin Guangshan in anticipation of his retort.

Noticing their gazes, Jin Guangshan’s face reddened a little bit – with anger, not shame.

“It’d be one thing if he was a stranger, but he’s here claiming to be my bastard son,” he said coldly, sparing only a quick glance backwards as if to assure himself that his fearsome wife was not there. “Assuming he’s correct, then I have the right to deal with him as I please, and without argument or comment from you. A father is an absolute tyrant where his son is concerned, and anyone who sticks their nose in other people’s business is the one who’s wrong. Isn’t that right?”

Lan Qiren’s cheeks were flushed red with rage as well. He seemed genuinely offended, his fingers shaking with fury, and it seemed like swallowing down his anger might cause him to break something.

“That assumes he’s your bastard,” Lao Nie put in, an unexpected entry into the game – everyone turned to look at him. “The principle of a father and son is correct, to be sure, but for it to apply, you must befather and son. Does that mean you’re acknowledging him?”

“Certainly not!” Jin Guagnshan scowled at the dazed-looking boy being brought in front of him once more by solicitous Lan sect disciples. “His surname is Meng; his mother is Meng Shi, one of the most famous prostitutes in Yunping. While I certainly don’t deny bedding her, who’s to say that I’m the father? Perhaps she was mistaken.”

The boy looked stricken by Jin Guangshan’s words, his expression twisting with despair: despite his best efforts to keep his face neutral, his lips were trembling a little, his eyes filling with tears as his hopes were brutally ripped away in front of him.

“Hey now, that’s true, that’s true. Maybe she really was mistaken,” Lao Nie said, his tone amiable and friendly in a way that usually preceded him being especially troublesome – tellingly, Wen Ruohan had already started smirking in anticipation – and then he added, “You know, I’ve been to Yunping myself. Maybe she got the sect leader part right, and the rest wrong.”

Jin Guangshan stared blankly at him.

Everyone stared at him.

Lao Nie grinned back at all of them, completely unashamed.

“Of course, that would be rather awkward,” he continued thoughtfully, stroking his chin – he had a beard today, small and well-trimmed; it lent him even more of an air of reliability than usual, however false that impression was. “If he really were my son, Guangshan-xiong, you wouldn’t have just assaulted some random boy on the street, but the son of another Great Sect. I could start a war over a slight like that if I wanted to. Isn’t that right?”

“Don’t be preposterous,” Jin Guangshan snapped.

“I’ve been to Yunping, too,” Wen Ruohan said mildly, and the words dropped into the conversation like a stone into a well, sending ripples of dismay everywhere.

Lao Nie might be martial and fierce, but the Qinghe Nie were loners by nature, disinclined to spread their power much beyond the borders of their rich and fertile lands. In contrast, Wen Ruohan was an empire-builder, ambitious and hungry as a ravening wolf at the door: unlike Lao Nie, he might really take the excuse, however flimsy, as an opportunity to start a war that could by some stretch of the imagination be considered justified, just for the chance to conquer the territory that opposed him.

“We’ve all been to Yunping! There was a discussion conference there a little over decade ago!” Lan Qiren said, either completely missing the context or deliberately ignoring it. “None of that changes the fact that the boy can’t be tossed around as if he were an empty pillowcase – there’s disciplining your child, and then there’s wanton cruelty. The former is every man’s right, but I will not tolerate the latter!”

“You know, I think he’s right?” Lao Nie remarked into the air, tapping the side of his nose. “We really were all in Yunping all that time ago – Sect Leader Jiang, that was the conference you hosted, wasn’t it? Yunping being in Yunmeng and all that.”

“That’s right,” Jiang Fengmian said, not looking especially pleased about being dragged into the conversation. “I did indeed host a discussion conference around that time in Yunping.”

“Oh, yes, yes. Now that I think of it, I remember it quite well. Your Yunmeng hospitality is well known for a reason – as is the potency of your liquor, of course. Really, who can say that they remember everythingthey did in the half-month we were all there?”

“You can’t seriously be claiming a prostitute’s bastard as your own son!” Jin Guangshan shouted. “Lao Nie, you have two sons already – would you dirty your ancestral line by throwing filth onto it? If your sons die, would you really risk a cuckoo stealing your ancestor’s blessings?”

Lao Nie’s smile faded into a scowl at once at such inauspicious words, and he started to look angry. It did not take a great deal to make a Nie angry, much less the Nie sect leader, and implicitly cursing his children to an early death was by far the fastest.

“Oh, is that what we’re doing?” Lan Qiren asked, voice cross as if he were belatedly catching up with the conversation and was thoroughly annoyed about his own late entry to the party. “Well then, why not say he’s mine? There’s no line of succession to worry about with me. Everyone knows I’m only sect leader in the interim, waiting for my nephews to grow up and inherit their birthright.”

Wen Ruohan coughed into his sleeve, only barely bothering to disguise his laughter. “That’s true, Sect Leader Lan,” he said, his eyes curved up into one of his increasingly rare genuine smiles. “Of course, it would require you to have slept with a prostitute.”

Everyone took a moment to consider the remoteness of that possibility.

“As Lao Nie has pointed out, the liquor in Yunmeng is quite strong,” Lan Qiren said with dignity, though his ears had gone decidedly pink. “Who’s to say what did and did not happen?”

“Sect Leader Lan, you don’t drink,” Jiang Fengmian pointed out.

“How would you know? Do you check on your guests’ whereabouts after they’ve gone to sleep?”

“I – no, of course not – ”

“You know, out of all of us, Jin Guangshan excluded, the only one who is rumored to have bastards outside the home is Sect Leader Jiang,” Lao Nie put in, having put aside his anger and resumed his original expression of glee in destruction. “With that rogue cultivator, Cangse Sanren, was it? You brought him home just recently…and you know what they say, where there’s one there may be more. I nominate him as an equally plausible candidate.”

“Wei Wuxian is not my bastard –”

“Don’t just dismiss me out of hand, Lao Nie! It’s entirely possible that I could have –”

“I feel like I’m being overlooked here,” Wen Ruohan remarked. “One could argue that my surname Wen the most commonly spread out –”

“He’s obviously mine!” Jin Guangshan roared, silencing them all with his frenzy. “Look at his face – he’s got my nose and eyes! What is wrong with all of you?”

Everyone quieted down to look at the boy, who shuffled his feet a little in embarrassment.

“Why, so he does,” Wen Ruohan said, mild and poisonous as always. “Quite classic Jin sect features, if a bit more charming and delicate than the usual run of the line.”

“Unmistakable, I suppose,” Lao Nie said, giving a dramatic sigh. “Nothing to be done about it. Hey, boy! What’s your name?”

The boy blinked owlishly at him. “This – this one’s name is Meng Yao.”

“Yao, huh? What character?”

The boy told him.

“Auspicious enough, I suppose. What’s the current generation name for the Jin sect? Ru?”

“No, it’s Zi,” Lan Qiren said. “Together with his given name, it would be Jin Ziyao – I suppose that’s what you’re getting at, Lao Nie?”

“It most certainly is.”

“What are you talking about?” Jin Guagnshan demanded. “I’m not acknowledging him!”

“Really?” Wen Ruohan asked, demonic smirk appearing on his face as a perfect match to the one currently lighting up Lao Nie’s expression. “Isn’t that what you just did?”

“I – that is –”

“Are you really that set on entering the Jin sect, Ziyao?” Wen Ruohan asked, turning to look at the boy directly. “I assure you that you’ll have a miserable time of it. And by chance Wen Ziyao is a perfectly auspicious name –”

“Sect Leader Wen! You can’t recruit the children of other sect leaders like that,” Jiang Fengmian protested, looking thoroughly alarmed, possibly at the chance that Wen Ruohan might get it into his head to make that Wei Wuxian boy he’d brought home a similar offer. “Stop handing out your surname like – like some sort of party favor!”

Lao Nie cackled. “Oh, I like that! Like a party favor!”

“You can come study at the Lan sect regardless of your surname,” Lan Qiren told the boy, deciding to ignore the whole lot of them; screeching jackals and cackling hyenas, one and all. “We take guest disciples from every clan, and you wouldn’t have to give up the Jin surname to do it, either. Lao Nie’s eldest boy came to study with me just last year…”

“Now I’m starting to feel left out,” Lao Nie mused. “Hanhan gives promising people his surname, Qiren takes them as students, and everyone else has got bastards…should I set up some sort of adoption program?”

Jin Guangshan looked around at all the other sect leaders, each one smirking or smiling at his misfortune – even the normally placid Jiang Fengmian looked as if he were having at least a little fun at his expense, and Lan Qiren might not have an expression but his opinion on the matter had been made quite clear – and gritted his teeth. “Don’t be absurd, he can stay here,” he forced out.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Jiang Fengmian said, and he sounded sympathetic. “Isn’t your wife the jealous type? You wouldn’t want to anger her any more than this will already…”

Lao Nie punched him approvingly on the shoulder.

“She’ll understand,” Jin Guangshan said, very stiffly and a little nervously; it wasn’t very believable at all. “It’ll be fine.”

“Maybe you should send your wife to visit Lanling for a bit,” Wen Ruohan remarked to Jiang Fengmian, clearly intent on pouring oil onto a raging fire. “She’s practically sisters with Sect Leader Jin’s wife, isn’t she? She’ll help calm her temper.”

“Sect Leader Wen, what in the world are you talking about?” Lan Qiren demanded, sounding bewildered. “The Violet Spider doesn’t calm anyone down. She’d only make things worse…ah, that is, no offense meant, Sect Leader Jiang.”

“No, no, it’s fine. I know my wife.”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea, though,” Lao Nie said thoughtfully. “After all, someone ought to keep an eye on how things are going in the Jin sect if the boy stays, shouldn’t they? Make sure the boy isn’t being abused?”

“What?! How dare you imply -!”

“We did just see you throw your son down the stairs, Sect Leader Jin, and that was before he even had the slightest bit of cultivation to protect him,” Lan Qiren said icily. “A father may have control over his son’s life, but ethics demand that we not look away when there is the possibility of suspected abuse. A monitor seems perfectly reasonable.”

“But…”

“Would you prefer to have someone from the Wen sect monitor you, Sect Leader Jin?” Lan Qiren demanded. “I’m certain that Sect Leader Wen would not object to sending someone.”

“I most certainly would not object,” Wen Ruohan said, smiling. “In fact, it would be my pleasure.”

Jin Guangshan went a little pale. “That won’t be necessary, Sect Leader Wen.”

“You could have someone from the Lan sect go,” Lao Nie said. “They’re known to be honest. Honest and thorough.”

“We would be more than happy to host Madame Yu,” Jin Guangshan said hastily, clearly imagining one of the more censorious Lan sect elders following him around and commenting on his conduct. “Isn’t Sect Leader Jiang’s daughter affianced to my son already? It’d be an excellent opportunity for them to meet.”

“I’ll…pass along the invitation?” Jiang Fengmian said, sounding a little confused as to how things had gotten to this point. “I’m certain A-Li would be happy to visit Lanling.”

“Well, then it’s all settled, isn’t it?” Lao Nie said happily, clapping his hands purposefully. “Off you go, Jin Ziyao. I look forward to seeing you alongside your brother Jin Zixuan at the next discussion conference – my own two boys are half-brothers, too, but they’re as close as blood-related siblings. I have every confidence that you two will soon be the same.”

And I’ll have questions if you aren’t, his smile said.

“If you’ll all excuse me,” Jin Guangshan said stiffly. “I will go see to it that he’s properly settled.”

The moment he had left the balcony, everyone – sect leaders large and small – finally burst out into the laughter they’d only just barely been suppressing, all but Lan Qiren who was looking around with a slightly mystified expression.

“Congratulations,” Wen Ruohan said to Lao Nie. “You’re officially Sect Leader Jin’s opposite: he doesn’t take in any of his Jin bastards, whereas you adopt them into the Jin sect for him.”

“Good for me,” Lao Nie said, looking smug. “Me and Qiren, of course. Couldn’t have done it without him.”

“Leave me out of your nonsense,” Lan Qiren said.

“I will do no such thing. Hanhan, don’t you think Qiren owes us some more detail about all the prostitutes and drinking he may or may not have been doing behind our backs after we all thought he’s gone to sleep?”

“That was – that’s not –”

“Oh, to be sure. After all, I am certain that the Lan rules say ‘Do not lie’, do they not?” Wen Ruohan said, his eyes for once bright with humor rather than calculation.

“I raised a possibility!” Lan Qiren yelped. “A possibility!”

“Oh, I’m not getting involved in this,” Jiang Fengmian said, standing up with a grin of his own. “I have a letter to write to my wife. Have fun, Sect Leader Lan.”

“You did this to yourself,” Wen Ruohan told Lan Qiren, not even pretending to be sympathetic. “You know that, right?”

“Preserving life even at the cost of your own,” Lao Nie said, and pretend to wipe away a tear. “You’re so noble, Qiren, really…someone get us some wine! We have an experiment to conduct!”

“Lao Nie! Get your paws off of me!”

#mdzs #lan qiren #jin guangyao #sect leader nie #wen ruohan #jiang fengmian #jin guangshan #my fic #my fics #got without merit #this actually doesn't answer the prompt precisely but I hope you enjoy anyway

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drabbles-of-writing · 3 years ago

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Can we get some raeda hc from any au please

I know you said an au but they are on my mind constantly so I'm just giving general hcs that could probably go with a few different aus. Who knows. I care them.

As we have seen, both of them are little bastards. Trickery, the two of them. Raine is sensible enough to know how insane an idea is but goes through with it anyway. They have impulse control but only barely, and Eda is their enabler. It keeps going in circles.

The difference is that Raine is v good at acting innocent and knowing when to cut their losses. They don't piss off teachers unless they know they won't be caught or have a backup to get off scott-free. Eda usually ended up taking the fall for a lot of failed schemes that Raine was involved in. Every single time, Raine offered to come clean bc they knew they'd get a reduced punishment. Every single time, Eda refused. She insisted it was bc they needed to have someone who could bail her out with needed and with a clean track record, and it was maybe half-true.

Eda was always more anti-government than Raine. They both hated Terra and Raine disagreed with the restricted use of magic, hell, they always knew Eda as a wild witch, and she was a loose canon, sure, but not evil. They ended up joining the Bard Coven more out of a desire to not live a life on the run when it was eventually found out they hadn't chosen one. They kind of always knew it was gonna wind up like that, and Eda figured it was going to happen at some point, too. Tried to make a bunch of plans for how their relationship was gonna work when Eda inevitably became an outlaw, including, but not limited too: house with a secret basement, moving outside the cities, changing her name, & fake coven branding. Of course, she never used any of these plans, and scrapped them. Raine didn't know about them until they were clearing out their stuff.

Raine very much wanted Lilith to like them bc she's Eda's sister and Eda rlly liked her. Lilith wasn't jealous of Raine being close with Eda, but she was certainly a little off-kilter about it. Yes, she was spending less time with Eda to study as much as she could, but she was still used to Eda always being there, since nobody else wanted to talk to her. This mostly resulted in young Raine trying to start conversations before chickening out/growing too anxious to continue and Lilith mostly ignoring them before occasionally dropping a question like "did you actually switch schools to see Eda?" and "did you really try to attack a head witch w her?" of which Raine was never sure if they should answer with the honest pride they had or fake sheepishness. It mellowed out after a few years.

They were never exactly friends, but they were nerds, so Raine and Lilith mostly got along. Very awkward after the breakup, but they'd both elected to ignore that whole debacle when it became clear Raine was swiftly climbing ranks and would be seeing Lilith more often. They were neutral up until the huge fight Lilith and Eda had on the bridge, of which anyone who hadn't watched it heard about it twenty times from everyone else. Had Lilith not have fled during the petrification, Raine would have absolutely decked her.

Raine spent so long trying to teach Eda bard magic. Mostly because Eda could never decide what instrument she wanted and kept goofing off and making her own songs up that did not sound even mildly pleasant to the ear. They eventually settled on a mandolin and Raine was wholly dedicated to teaching her how to play. The Rhapsody wasn't the first original song Eda made up that sounded nice, but it was the one she was the most proud of.

Raine did so much research on King and Luz when they were in the clear for supposedly being brain-washed and could move around mildly unsupervised. They took everything with a grain of salt, because all they could really get was news outlets that mentioned the kids, but they did gather that one of them was a human, and the other was a demon that probably hadn't even reached double-digits. Eberwolf and Darius bullied them for being an emotional mess over the whole thing bc Eda has kids and she very clearly loves them and Raine almost let her die with them. Casually avoiding having to think abt almost leaving the BATTs on their own with their little stunt. We have already learned that Raine is not immune to doing the same things Eda did but with a different hue.

Obligatory 'Raine finds Eda's harpy form hot' here. As if anyone who could see thought otherwise. Absolute disaster who swears they're good, they're fine, they can cool it for five seconds. They cannot. But they try.

Also, to add-on; do all the coven heads have those other forms or is it just Darius and Eberwolf? I hope it's all of them. Raine deserves their own transformation form. Dana can you hear me. Apollo if you had any reason to gift me another prophecy-

#asks #the owl house #toh #raine whispers #eda clawthorne #lilith clawthorne #darius #eberwolf #luz noceda #king #raeda #headcanons #bards #WHOA HEY AN ASK FINALLY #anyway this is buildup to a fic im gonna be posting very very soon.

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illumilu · 4 years ago

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there’s only one bed” - illumi zoldyck x reader

a/n: a very stereotypical cliche for fanfics, but, yk what? cringe makes the world go round. so here, have my drabbling of what would happen if you were to spend an unwanted night in the same hotel bed as the adultrio. i feel like i may have made this way too long again, but who cares?? this time it’s with illumi! aka loml ...

summary: after a lengthy car trip, you arrive at the hotel with illumi, but to your horror (wink wink), there’s only one bed. including: you dreaming abt him when he’s literally right in front of you (embarrassing). this is part two of a three-part series, with the adultrio. hisoka is already written and chrollo will be coming soon!

warnings: no particular trigger warnings, lowercase intended, a lot of fluff! and cuddling! only on your part though, since illumi is basically awkwardness personified... no nsfw <3

illumi zoldyck:

- the trip to the hotel had taken 6 hours. 6 hours in which you had fallen asleep multiple times, cramped your legs, somehow made every sleeping position dangerously uncomfortable, cracked your neck and twisted your back, possibly to the point of no return.

- for mr zoldyck, or rather, “illumi”, as he had instructed you to call him, the trip was no problem. his upbringing, which consisted of mainly torture, included staying awake for as long as a fortnight at a time. 6 hours may as well have been a few minutes.

- “the silent son of the zoldycks” was his reputational nickname, or, rather, “lifeless koi fish”, as your friend, hisoka, enjoyed calling him. either way, illumi was not going to let a car ride tire him.

- when you had first met him, he had scared you. a lot. the entire “trained dangerous traumatised assassin” storyline was one that felt like a threat. you were undoubtedly taking a risk by working with him, but it was one you were willing to; it may have been twisted, but murder was your forte, and you were searching for a partner.

- over time, you had grown to be less intimidated by him.

- you were now colleagues with him, working on a new assassination.

- shockingly, planning murder took time, and who better to plan it with than the assassin himself? you had spent the past day on a “business trip”, paid for by illumi’s grandfather, where you sized up the area and familiarised yourself with yorknew.

- all for the big night.

- tonight was the day before the murder of the ten dons.

- illumi and kalluto would carry out the murder, while you made sure everything went smoothly, via a small mic attached to his clothes. the entire operation was based on trust, and would therefore be executed like clockwork.

- you had taken the necessary mental images and kept the targets in mind; all that was left was a night at a pre-booked hotel and then it would be go-time.

- you had assumed that the hotel would be high-class, with doormen, perhaps some marble flooring and pillars - it was the zoldycks who were paying, after all, and you knew they had money to spare.

- “we’re here.” illumi stated blankly, face reflecting in the window. admittedly, he did look a little bit like a koi fish.

- you nudged past him to look out of the window, leaning over to get a good view.

- oh.

- it seemed you had made quite the overestimation. it was a simple, plain building with a few stories. no doormen or extravagance could be sighted.

- you supposed keeping a low profile was important, but the depressing accommodation was somehow making you wearier.

- the two of you didn’t exchange any conversation on the way up to your room, but you were used to that.

- you and illumi had met around 5 months ago, and most of it had been comfortable silence. you hadn’t expected it to be like that - in all honesty, you had expected him to kill you - but illumi seemed... calm around you.

- it was probably because you shared such an odd passion with him; the logistics of murder. you assumed it gave him a chance to loosen his harsh demeanour and enjoy himself. the both of you had worked on multiple murders together, focusing on theory and planning, but this was a huge assassination. nevertheless, you knew he could pull it off; illumi was smart, you had to give him that.

- finally, you arrived at your hotel room, sighing from the lengthy stairway winding up to your unnecessarily high room. you assumed it was for safety purposes, but for god’s sake; why did safety have to be so enervating?

- illumi pushed the door open, and you walked in with him. finally, you could catch some rest.

- except, you couldn’t.

- a singular bed placed in the middle of the room.

- “why.” you thought to yourself tiredly.

- you stood there silently, waiting for him to say something.

- then, you remembered that he was illumi. he obviously wouldn’t see anything wrong with the situation.

- the bastard.

- it didn’t help that he gave you no visible reaction when you stared at him with your face scrunched up expectantly, as if to ask what his plan was.

- “is there a problem, y/n?” illumi asked, his tone flat as usual.

- you took a deep, worn out breath, clearing your throat.

- after a bit, you shook your head. this was strictly professional. illumi wouldn’t do anything, because he was illumi. nothing would happen.this was an important night, where rest and a clear mind were essential. blame it on the fatigue, and nothing else. you were just exhausted. there was nothing else to it. nothing.

- “no. i’m just a little tired.” you dismissed.

- a silence skimmed past.

- “my grandfather... he often tends to be absentminded. occasionally, he forgets to do certain things, or plan them correctly, i suppose. you could say this is a prime example of such.”

- “zeno forgot another goddamn bed, hm?” you laughed nervously.

- illumi stared at you once again, blinking a few times, in a methodical manner, face neutral and robotic. you smiled awkwardly and remembered that he was not one to laugh at jokes. or anything, for that matter.

- you wondered if he laughed at bloodshed. or maybe hisoka.

- “i’m going to... go to set up my stuff now.”

- turning your back to illumi, you winced at the uncomfortable air. even after all your time with him, you never learnt to stop trying to lighten the mood. the mood was literally just always unnatural, in some way. that was another one of illumi’s specialties.

- after some time, in which you had finalized tomorrow's plan and each changed into comfortable clothes, you watched illumi tie his hair up from across the room.

- his hair had always fascinated you.

- you had always wanted to touch it. honestly, even when you had first met him, apart from his magnetic eyes, you had been drawn to his hair. you imagined it felt like silk sheets, caressing over one’s hands as smoothly as honey. you were glad he grew it out; in fact, upon seeing his teenage photos, you had laughed so hard you ended up getting a nosebleed from hitting your face. illumi had been left in confusion for a while.

- you realized how random you sounded. why were you reminiscing so much?

- shaking yourself back to your senses, you admired as he artfully twisted his hair into a loose bun, strands of hair cupping his elegant, pale face.

- what a beautiful koi fish.

- most people couldn’t compute that illumi had true, human feelings. after all, it would be hard to believe a man like him felt anything. but, of course, he did, unhealthily so. he channeled all his trauma and hurt into his villainy, and received happiness from his villainy, anger from his villainy and occasionally fear from his villainy. however, there was one emotion he could never grasp. he hated himself for it, but soon realised he could manipulate his hatred into villainy, too.

- illumi was a man who could manipulate anyone or anything he wished.

- except himself.

- internally, he had always felt at a loss whenever he confronted his emotions. but, after he had met you, something had changed. as he caught you staring at his hair through the hotel mirror, he couldn’t help but feel something small stir inside of his stomach. not evil, not happiness, not hatred, not anger. perhaps, friendship?

- this tinge of new emotion inside of him initially made him feel uneasy, but that worry morphed into giddiness, a childish high buzzing somewhere in his core.

- eventually, he stood up to face you and suggested going to sleep. you checked the time on the wall clock. 8 in the evening. well, illumi had always been particular. you agreed that rest was essential for tomorrow.

- you hesitantly took the left side, and, upon seeing your choice, illumi followed to lie on the right.

- after a few minutes, you looked back at him, noticing illumi fell asleep abnormally quickly. you furrowed your brow quizzically at the rock-like manner he was in. frankly, he looked like a plank when he slept. you almost laughed, but held it in for his sake.

- he had a very specific sleep schedule, as did the other zoldycks. he could go to sleep immediately at his own command, and stayed perfectly still as he did so. he woke up at 5 in the morning every single day, without fail, almost like he had some sort of alarm clock planted in his body.

- looking at him lying there like a block, you smiled softly. illumi was quite the conundrum to you. you often speculated whether he ever got what he deserved; love, affection, anything really. you knew about his past from when he had told you nonchalantly, within a few weeks of your acquaintance. you always hoped he’d find someone to love him, but doubted whether people would bother looking beyond his bleak surface, and into his excellent mind. lost in thought, you found yourself getting drowsier. you also fell asleep generally quickly, limbs aching from the stupid car ride.

- the night passed.

- illumi was the first to wake up at 5am, stoic and in the same place he had fallen asleep in. no surprise there.

- but you.

- that was the first thing he saw when his eyes opened.

- he did not expect you to be lying on him lazily, snuggling into his body, arm and leg comfortably wrapped around his side. you were breathing lightly, face burrowing onto the ridge of his chest.

- i suppose you didn’t expect to be there either, which he realized, but the point still remained.

- why were on you his chest.

- “y/n.”

- no answer.

- illumi could have pushed you away; in fact, he could have blown you 983 metres away (his personal record).

- but he didn’t.

- it wasn’t the thought of disturbing your comfort that stopped illumi from hurling you into oblivion. it wasn’t the fact that he explicitly enjoyed it, either. he remembered that the mission was today; if he were to wake you, and you hadn’t slept enough, you wouldn’t be at your upmost performance.

- the murder of the ten dons was his priority, right? yes. it was. there was no doubt about it. that was the only and final reason he wouldn’t wake you. end of discussion.

- so, illumi stayed there, waiting for you to wake up and get off of him. 30 minutes passed, and he watched you for every single one.

- hard as it was to admit, watching you rise and fall in sync with his chest made the spark of emotion in his core grow fervently. what had that foreign feeling been? yesterday, he had settled at friendship, but now he wasn’t so sure.

- you looked so peaceful while you slept. less confusing. he remembered the time you had accidentally complimented his hair when the two of you had first met. he had found that amusing. he remembered the time you got a nosebleed from hitting your face too hard - it was after laughing at his teenage pictures, which perplexed him greatly. he remembered the times you two had sat together, working and theorizing on missions, accidentally meeting eyes or brushing hands. one time, you had dipped one of his pins in ink and scratched his name on some paper “for fun”. you had handed it to him and, for some unknown reason, the scrap was still tucked safely in his wallet. your unrivaled intelligence, your idiotic sense of humour, your smile, your lack of common sense, your twinkling eyes that so ironically contrasted his, everything. everything crossed his mind while he lay there.

- illumi found it strange how people remembered the oddest things at the oddest times.

- why did he think of that now, as you were sleeping? even worse, on the day of a meticulously planned assassination. why couldn’t he manipulate his emotions to stop fluctuating around you so much?

- it all frustrated him.

- why had he let you call him by “illumi” so quickly? mr zoldyck would have been fine. and why had he been so lenient with your antics? no one else got to touch his pins. why did he feel like keeping you on his chest forever, and keeping you safe? most importantly, why was he thinking about you so much?

- his contemplation came to a halt when he heard you stir a little in your sleep.

- finally, you’d wake up and he could forget about this entire problem.

- he watched you, expecting you to get up soon.

- you began shuffling around, brushing against his chest, and soon your eyes fluttered open, hazy and glazed over. it almost seemed like you were still in a dream, in some sort of half-sleep.

- “huh?” you whispered quietly, still lying on illumi. you looked up lazily, meeting eyes with him.

- “oh... i get it...” you hummed quietly, falling back onto his chest.

- he furrowed his brows.

- “why are you here?” you hugged him from the side, softly laughing at your ridiculous dream. he tensed up at you embracing him, but soon relaxed after realizing what was going on.

- illumi looked at you, one eyebrow raised. did you... think you were dreaming?

- to be honest, he found it kind of entertaining, the way you were fawning over him. if he let you stay there, he could figure out a lot of things about his newly found emotion. it could be worth it. just not today.

- illumi came back to his senses fairly quickly; you were obviously awake now, so why couldn’t you get off of him already?

- “y/n.”

- “mmm? what? so serious all the damn timeee, illum-”

- “you aren’t dreaming. get off.”

- SHIT

- SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT

- you jolted off him immediately, staring down at illumi zoldyck.

- the real illumi zoldyck.

- oh my god what. what. what. what.

- every nerve in your body began to panic, and, in the stress of trying to find the correct words to say, you just ended up making some sort of incomputable “aaaahhh” noise and jumping off the bed.

- illumi had finally gotten up and was now staring concernedly at you.

- an awkward pause.

- “let me just start by saying i did not-”

- “y/n. we have more pressing priorities for today. i don’t care.”

- illumi zoldyck had lied. even to himself. he did care. and so what if he ignored it until it festered so intensely inside of him he couldn’t do anything but tell you? he cared about you. and he knew it.

- “ok. you’re right. you’re right! illumi. one question. was i like that the whole night?”

- “i don’t know. i woke up at 5 and you were there.”

- you looked at the clock. it was 6am? what had he been doing for an hour? you opened your mouth to ask but closed it soon after. you recalled your thoughts about illumi growing up void of affection, or love, or appreciation.

- some questions were best left unanswered.

- “how long was i... mumbling like that?”

- “a few minutes.”

- you gulped. there were a few things you had to come to terms with. shutting your eyes firmly, you apologised profusely, annoyed at yourself.

- “y/n. i don’t care.” he lied once again.

- “you’re right!” you rambled - “the ten dons are today! it doesn’t matter what i said... none of it matters, we can both just forget it!”

- you sounded like you were trying to convince yourself more than anyone.

- “so all we need to do is go over the plan one last time, get kalluto, and then we’ll carry it out, and soon enou-”

- “stop it. you’re wasting time. just go and get ready.”

- you sighed and smiled weakly. on the inside, you were sure your soul had died a little.

- while you left to change, overcome by embarrassment, illumi lingered by the bed for a few seconds. he tried to push down whatever he was currently feeling, but it was no use. the feeling in his core had risen up to his throat, a burst of something waiting to leave his lips.

- for the first time in a while, illumi zoldyck smiled. not at murder, or at power, or fulfillment, or achievement, or even villainy.

- illumi zoldyck had smiled at the thought of you.

- let’s just say illumi had trouble focusing on his mission.

i am honestly so fucking sorry you had to read that whole thing. the way i am literally in love with illumi zoldyck and ended up writing 2857 words bye bye bye i’m so sorry!!! PLZ what?? anyways,, i feel like i heavily underwrote hisoka now, since i did such a prologue thing for this! honestly i feel like this one came out a little boring, im sorry again AAAAA just agh; chrollo should b coming when i have time but i have exams rn so idkkkk hh

either way, likes or reblogs or whatever are super appreciated, but don’t feel forced to or anything! either way, i feel like no one’s gonna see this with my reach LMAOO but anyways thank you for reading, if you made it here! feedback and tips for writing on here are always helpful :)

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get-shiggy-with-it · 4 years ago

Text

Just My Type Pt. 1

Pairing: Tomura Shigaraki x Reader

Word Count: 3.7k

Warnings: slight dubcon, stalking behavior, voyeurism, male masturbation, sorta subby shiggy if you squint, reader is pretty gender neutral, no pronouns used, 18+ MINORS DNI

Summary: You’re a part time transporter for the LoV and Shigaraki just can’t seem to get you out of his head. So much so that he follows you home and jerks it to you changing in front of your window.

Note: first time writing for shig and this sat in my drafts forever, I’m thinking of a part two If there is any interest.

Part 2

AO3 Mirror

He didn’t understand you.

Though, to be fair, he didn’t really understand anyone—he never needed to.

As long as the League did what he told them to do when he told them to do it, that was always enough. Ultimately, people were nothing more than overly complicated pits of questionable motivations, each arbitrarily categorized as good or evil and judged accordingly. Whether or not he understood those motivations was immaterial.

It was enough to have them simply obey.

And he’d never bothered with wondering why they followed him.

But that wasn’t exactly true anymore, because Tomura Shigaraki did wonder now—wondered often, and somewhat obsessively, about you.

He was doing it now, even. Eyes creeping their way across the dingy floorboards to where you stood by the bar’s entrance. You looked very out of place there, and your voice was almost too loud as it broke the almost constant silence.

It wasn’t that you stood out, though—really it wasn’t. To anyone else, you probably didn’t at all. In fact, the only reason he became even tangentially aware of you at all was because you came to him for payments. You were just a transporter, showing up every now and then to drop off or pick up a new order and rushing out again.

‘Reliable’ is the word Kurogiri used. That’s why he recommended you, and he was right.

You did your job quietly, without error.

All this was just to say that from the outside you were frustratingly unremarkable—a blip, a smudge on the page of his life’s work in the making.

And yet.

And yet you were so impossible to ignore, standing out immediately every time you walked in a room.

You were nothing special, nothing he hadn’t seen before. Though, now that he thought about it—neck tingling the second he felt your eyes on him—maybe it wasn’t so much that your presence itself was incongruent. No, objectively speaking, you did fit in perfectly amongst the shitty furniture and refuse. But it was specifically the way you carried yourself around him which seemed so blatantly unusual.

“Everything’s unpacked and accounted for,” you called to him, sauntering over to his seat along the bar.

You had a particular walk—It was something he noticed early on. Like you always knew exactly where you were going.

“Good,” he nodded and tossed an envelope of cash your way.

He never knew what to say to you, so he tried to say as little as possible. Though there were plenty of things he wanted to say. Questions and phrases occurred to him nightly, clamoring at the seal of his lips to escape, to be spoken into reality.

“Same time next week?” you asked, obvious to the rampage of thoughts in his head.

You always looked him in the eye when you spoke, no one ever did that.

“Yeah.”

The upward quirking of your lips when you spoke made his palms sweat, “See you then. Pleasure doing business with you, as always.”

Your hand was the last thing to disappear from around the door frame and into the street. As your figure faded away into the crowd, the air seemed to grow heavier. The soft clinking of glasses as Kurogiri tidied up, the oppressive scent of bodies and liquor and smoke all wafted back in.

Now he’d wait another week to say all of two words to you and pretend it wasn’t the only thing he’d truly looked forward to in years.

***

So no, Tomura Shigaraki didn’t understand you, but he was beginning to wish that he did.

Which was concerning in it’s own right. He was not accustomed to whatever the pit that developed in his stomach when you came around was called and for good reason. Things like that got in the way of progress. He knew that much at least. And he tried, so very hard to disregard it, but you kept coming back every week and he—

He couldn’t.

It was just because you were attractive. That was what he tried to tell himself. It was because you were attractive and you wore those tight uniforms sometimes and Dabi was...Dabi, so he always pointed it out. It was because you were attractive and he was only human, as much as the rest of the world tried to deny it. That was the only reason you ever crossed his mind. He could accept that. It was a physical response, nothing he could help.

You were nice to look at, and he appreciated your willingness to do your job and keep your mouth shut otherwise.

In the beginning, it was easy to convince himself of this.

Easy to live with just the stolen glimpses of you rushing in and out the door. But as those short few seconds grew and your employment with the League became increasingly stable, just the sight of you weaving through the tables or negotiating with Kurogiri at the bar wasn’t nearly enough to keep him satisfied.

Then you started staying for drinks some nights, maybe every other week or so, which certainly didn’t help the situation.

The others liked you enough. Despite the effect you seemed to have on him, to everyone else you were unassuming in a way Tomura was beginning to think must be purposeful. Shallow, yet personable enough to be appealing to just about anyone. He was sure the rest of the team would never notice it, but he had such a hard time doing anything other than drinking in every word that fell from your lips that it was hard not to see the way you casually dodged every question thrown your way.

In any case, it made you easy to get along with, and so when you did decide to hang back after runs, the bar was always a bit lighter and filled with the scent of drugstore shampoo instead of blood and grime. Tomura himself never actively participated in ‘team bonding activities,’ but he remained in the periphery.

Listening. Looking.

At you.

Tonight was one of those nights, and it was following the same formulaic structure as usual. Kurogiri made everyone a drink, Toga laughed too loud at a terrible joke, and after a few shots Dabi made a thinly veiled pass at you.

Tomura was starting to think that he did it specifically to get to him, and it was annoyingly effective. His chest grew tight as he watched a scarred and stapled hand slide it’s way into your lap. Tomura’s own nails dug painfully into the scabs of his neck while Dabi’s bit at the flesh of your thigh.

But the surge of anger, of jealousy, didn’t mean anything. Not really.

Dabi always pissed him off, so he tried to blame the visceral reaction on the fact that the burnt piece of beef jerky masquerading as human was a bit of a bastard. And since everything Dabi did pissed him off, it also made sense that this did too.

This had absolutely nothing to do with you particularly he thought to himself, even as the burning in his throat lessened when you pulled away and stood to get another drink.

It made a frustrating amount of sense for you to fuck Dabi, though. He was outspoken in a way Tomura could never match, with a more traditionally dominant manner that attracted partners like moths to his flame.

He thought maybe you would at first.

Fuck Dabi, that is. You struck him initially as one of those quiet types who saw softness where there was none and clung to it. Gravitated towards broken people in a desperate attempt to fix them, as if that could bring some meaning to your useless existence. Of course, he’d probably made an equally poor first impression as well.

Regardless, he was fairly certain you never did fuck Dabi.

Mostly because he would have assuredly rubbed it in Tomura’s face and because sometimes—like right now—he’d push past the churning in his gut to look up as Dabi not-so-casually propositioned you into his bed. And when he did, he caught the way you hid a secret grin behind your hand, ducking your head down with the most incredulous look plastered on your face for just a second. Like you knew that charred asshole didn’t have a fucking clue.

Though he really couldn’t be sure if that was anything more than a trick of the light.

“Care to join?”

Your voice ran through him like a thousand volt shock as he looked up from the table to see you standing just behind him.

“What?” he asked incredulously.

He didn’t seen you coming, too busy glaring at your empty seat to notice the signature sound of your footsteps drawing near.

“Do you want to come drink with us?” you said again and nodded towards the empty glass in his hand.

This wasn’t part of the routine. You hadn’t ever approached him before outside of the necessary work related conversations. Predictably, Tomura fumbled just a bit.

Yes. “No, I’m done here.”

The way you kept moving your head to keep eye contact with him was nearing oppressive. He just barely caught the slight frown as you backed away for him to brush past you towards the stairs.

“Suit yourself,” you shouted after him.

He didn’t bother answering, just slammed his bedroom door and sat at the edge of the mattress with his head in his hands and his dick raging hard in his pants.

***

Even from two floors away Tomura heard you getting ready to leave. He could easily picture it, and was currently despite his attempts to think of quite literally anything else. The way you’d slide your empty glass across the bar top and just fade like a shadow into the night air.

He could hear the rest of the League beginning the crawl up to their respective rooms one by one. And it was the persistent thought of you sliding back into your coat that convinced Tomura to finally let his mind slip.

All the failed attempts at concocting business strategy, budgets or what he would need you to deliver next fell away, leaving only thoughts of the way your lips fit around the rim of a glass. How the moisture beaded just on the plushest part and your tongue flicked out to wipe it away.

Then his hand was slipping too, teasing under the waistband of his pants and stroking his still aching cock.

He’d never had his dick sucked but he imagined—in the dark of his room, listening to you offer your goodbyes through the floorboards—that you’d be good at it. Thought you might nip at his thighs and take his whole length into the wet heat of your mouth in one go. You’d roll your pretty tongue over the head of his cock until he couldn’t take the teasing doses of pleasure. He’d buck his hips up, milking himself with your throat and you’d happily let him.

Tomura pumped his length, fucking his hand in earnest now. Curiously he made a small ‘o’ with his thumb and index finger, trying to replicate what the seal of your lips might feel like. He closed his eyes and attempted to conjure a good accompanying image: you, on your knees, head bobbing on his cock. And, god that was so good. He even muttered the words under his breath, but it wasn’t quite enough.

The image quickly shifted as he chased his climax. Maybe you’d want to press your fingers past the tight ring of his ass too till he was a shaking mess, cumming all over your face and chest. He did it himself sometimes, rocking back on his hand when he was really desperate to achieve a knee-weakening high.

That almost did it, his hand sloppy with drool and precum all while you were just downstairs.

These moments were the most delicious. When he stopped trying to deny himself of the fantasy—what was always buried in the back of his head when you came around.

That you might touch him. That you might tell him how good he feels. That you might like it.

But then the loud click of the door swinging shut on the main floor rang through the halls. And at the thought of you, gone once again, all the images were soured. Instead, the pressing reality wormed it’s way back in. Reminding him that he would only wake up in the morning—as he had so often done—crusted in cum and sweat and wondering if you were the type to stay the night or if you’d disappear from his bed just the way you did from the bar every time the others got a bit too close.

And the more he allowed that thought to creep it’s way into his head, ripping away his climax, another compulsion grew. He could feel himself cresting a hill as you slipped right through his fingers—taking a nosedive straight into a disaster that smiled up at him with your pretty, pretty lips.

***

It was just good business practice.

That’s what Tomura repeated in his head, hoping from streetlight to streetlight just a block or so behind you. But nothing he did was ever strictly good, and the only thing even slightly business related about following you home tonight was that you happened to sort of work for him.

Damn, you moved fast.

Tomura guessed that shouldn’t come as a shock considering your job depended on it, but it was a struggle not to lose sight of you. He ducked into doorways or alleys when you stopped to cross the street. Your form flitted quickly between the patches of neon-lit sidewalk, passing 24-hour convenience stores and clubs whose thick bass beats reverberated in the cool night air.

He hung back when you finally began ascending the stairs of what seemed to be an apartment complex at the far side of a dead end. It looked shitty, but in a sort of charming way—vines growing haphazardly up the iron railings and paint chipping so the walls looked like an oil canvas from far away. Tomura watched you take the stairs two at a time until you disappeared into the depths of the building.

In the stillness that followed, he began to question the point of all this.

The decision to follow you was not well thought out.

After whipping the mess of spit and cum from his hands, Tomura had snuck out into the hall. Really, he’d only meant to listen, maybe catch an extra glimpse of you before the night ended. But then, through the halfhearted bantering and inane pissing contests, he caught you drifting towards the door. And as he watched you slip, really watched and felt the distance growing between you, something struck him.

Maybe it was the way that sliver of light pollution from the doorway illuminated the dips and hollows of your profile. Or the sparkle of your coat buttons amongst the smoke from Dabi’s cigarettes. But more likely, it was the way you paused—one foot already in the street—and glanced at him for just a split second. Immediately catching his face hidden between the railings as though you could sense his gaze on you. Like you felt the same shiver down your spine.

When your eyes roamed over him, they left tremors in their wake.

It was pathetic. It was sad and disgusting—a part of him knew that—but just that one simple look, that small acknowledgement of his existence had him raging hard in his pants once again.

Tomura moved without thinking, moved by the shameful compulsion to grab any scrap of attention you’d throw his way and cling to it.

And now he was here, standing outside your apartment like the creep he knew he was, to do what exactly? What had he hoped to accomplish? He just...he wanted, needed to feel it again. So long he’d subsisted on incredibly complex daydreams and nightly fictional scenarios in which you kissed him and didn’t spit in revulsion at the feel of your lips on his.

And when you looked at him, half caked in shadow and lit up with haze, he was overcome with a desperate, mortifying need to know for sure that all those dreams weren’t unfounded.

Tomura Shigaraki wanted you so badly it hurt, like his ribs were cracking under the pressure of it.

You gave him a crumb with that glance, but he was never known for his patience. No, he was greedy and selfish and he needed more.

And for once, the powers that be seemed to have taken his side. Just a few minutes after you were swallowed up into the mass of concrete, a light flicked on in one of the upper windows. Through the drawn back curtains, Tomura was absolutely blessed by the sight of you—hands tugging the top from your shoulders and baring swathes of your naked skin for him to wonder at.

If just a look could get him hard, then this might just kill him on the spot.

You really shouldn’t be changing in the open like that. Anyone could be watching.

But with a show this good, well it would be insulting not to take full advantage wouldn’t it? Of course. You’d want him to. How could he waste such a perfect opportunity to jerk himself off to the thought of fucking your perfect chest while he could actually see it. And oh, oh god your nipples were definitely hard and just begging to be sucked on. He could almost taste you in his mouth, feel how silky the buds would be against his tongue.

Fuck.

You were going to ruin him.

Looking around, the street seemed to be deserted, no other buildings lit either. It wasn’t so much that he cared if anyone saw, but letting his guard down so out in the open was never very appealing. Though the visage of you, stripped and illuminated for him alone, was enough to over power any amount of trepidation.

Tomura’s hand dipped back into his jeans, wrapping around his cock and stroking as best he could in the confined space. Precum streamed from the tip as he teased it with his thumb while you started to shimmy out of your pants. He whimpered at the glimpse of your ass on full display.

His mind raced.

You were both exactly and nothing at all what he expected. Which was more to say that the you that existed in his head was an amalgamation of all his favorite porn vids mashed into one, but this—this was nothing like he’d ever seen hastily sifting through tabs on his PC.

There were marks and dips and curves and angles that he hadn’t thought of before. Hadn’t ever really seen without the separation of clothing and it was delicious and not nearly enough. God, his cock throbbed, gushing at the thought of your thighs around his waist, or head, or hiked over his shoulders. He could give you what you needed, he had no evidence of this but he just knew it.

You stretched, and he could nearly hear the joints popping. Out in the open, exposed and so close to being caught, all of Tomura’s sense were heightened.

God what he’d give to see your face, watching, knowing how hard he was for you. He could picture it now: the twinge of shock, the barely disguised pang of want. Maybe you’d be disgusted with him, but really this was all your fault. This is what you did to him.

The wrongness of it all only made that much more enticing.

Tomura set a steady pace, pumping his hand along the length of his cock, so hard and dripping with every swipe of his thumb over the tip. You were shifting in and out of his view now, rummaging around what he assumed was your bedroom. It was physically painful every time you disappeared, a whine bubbling up in the back of his throat at the loss.

His length pulsed against his palm and his toes curled inside his sneakers.

Small, ragged gasps leaked through the cracks in his lips and condensed in the air. In the dim streetlight, the little clouds of condensation shifted and sparkled like sweat on taut skin. He envisioned drool dripping down onto your back as he pounded into you. His free hand dug into the meat of his thigh, pretending as though it was your flesh he was leaving fingerprint bruises on instead.

Trying to convince himself this was anything other than what it was.

Tomura’s hand moved faster, knuckles scraping the zipper of his jeans and spilling slow, thin streams of crimson onto his aching dick. It stung and stoked the coiling low in his gut. Fuck, his teeth ground down biting into phantom flesh. What he wouldn’t give to mouth at that perfect curve in your neck, run his tongue up the pulsing vein and hear whatever lovely noises spilled from your lips.

He was so close to spilling over, but he just a bit more. He’d come this far already, why not dive just a little deeper off the edge?

It wasn’t entirely conscious, the quick steps he took across the street and up the stairs you’d taken. Tomura’s body was functioning on base instincts, carrying him mindlessly closer to the object of his desire. It wasn’t hard to find the right room. It wasn’t a large building, only a few units, and he swore he could smell the familiar scent of your soap wafting out from under the door.

God he really was a pathetic fucking dog, sniffing you out while his dick was aching to rut into his own hand.

But as he stood outside, debating whether to dust the whole wall separating your sweet, naked form from him or to pick the lock and slip inside, the knob turned on it’s own. Before he could even think of rushing back to the street, you were standing before him, eyes alight in a way he’d never seen before—wide and blazing and hungry.

#tomura shigaraki x reader #shigaraki tomura x reader #tomura/reader #shigaraki/reader #tomura shigaraki #smut #tw dubcon #tw voyeurism #stalking #bee.writes

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stellocchia · 4 years ago

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So, I once made a post about c!Tommy and c!Dream’s relationship throughout season 1 (which you can find here), but today I was thinking, why not do the same for the Exile Arc?

There are some people that still don’t seem to have a comprehensive idea of what actually went down during that time (either because they joined the fandom afterwards or haven’t watched it at the time) so I’ll try to do that here. I’ll cover the first 2 streams here, and then continue in the next part because this is gonna be way too damn long otherwise...

As always I’ll be talking only about the characters and the roleplay from here on out and also I’ll be touching on some very heavy topics under the cut (such as gaslighting and abuse). Also this is gonna be another one of my Overly Long Analysis, so... you know... be warned of that.

I’ll be going through this vod by vod, so It will be so long... God why do I always do this to myself?

Let’s start with TommyInnit Is Exiled From The Dream SMP... which is the vod when Tommy actually get’s exiled.

So, the exile scene per se has been covered a 100 times over, but, right after Tubbo asking Dream to “please detain and excort Tommy out of my country” Dream yeets Tommy off the walls and then he immediately establishes the general idea of how it’ll be in exile: “I don’t think you wanna die Tommy. You need to- to listen to me”.

Also it is to be noted that in this “exile” time and time again Dream establishes arbitrary rules that were most certanly not meant in the initial sentence (which is why it’s much more of a kidnapping then an actual exile). Starting from before they even leave L’Manburg completely. In fact when they are still in the vc with the others and still just down from the obsidian walls, Tommy and Dream have this exchange:

“Do I have any time to speak words? What can...” “NO. NO. NO. NO!” “what the...”

And then right after (just after leaving the vc):

“Do you have food?” “Yeah...” “Good, we’ll be going a long while still” “Am I not allowed- well surely- surely I’m only exiled from L’Manburg-” “Oh, no no no. You’re exiled from everywhere that’s been touched”

The sentence was only for him to be exiled from L’Manburg. Dream theoretically only had authority over the Greater Dream smp in any case, so how come immediately Tommy’s “sentence” becomes being exiled from “everywhere that has been touched”? What authority did Dream have to exile him from the Badlands? Or the Holy Grounds (considering those are widely considered neutral)?

This is from right after Ghostbur joins them:

“Well, I don’t- I don’t have to come with you” “Well, I mean, I’ll kill you” (...) "I don’t have to follow you! I don’t-” “Tommy! Then I’ll just kill you. What happens if I kill you?” “I die...”

Again, technically Tubbo only asked Dream to escort Tommy out of his country, not all the way to his place of exile. Tommy here is right, he is exiled, he is not supposed to have a jailor going with him, he is not supposed to be imprisoned. All he supposedly had to do was get off the lands he wasn’t allowed into and then he’d be good. Of course Dream’s plans were different there.

Also the trend of constantly undermining anything Tommy is feeling at any given moment sure doesn’t stop with the Exile Arc!

“No, no! I don’t want to head anywhere! I wanna to go back! I wanna go back!” “Fine fine, we’ll head this way then. It’s fine, this is fine” “I don’t wanna go!” “Tommy come on...”

Honorable mention to Dream talking about the first time he exiled Tommy:

“Do you remember- this is actually funny! Do you remember the first time you ever joined the server? And uhm... you got exiled? By me?” “Yeah?” “It’s kinda like that, except now if you don’t listen you die”

And the conditioning begins all the way here, with Dream trying to decide Tommy’s emotions for him:

“Oh... I hate you” “*laughs* Okay Tommy, you don’t hate me” “No, no I definitely do” “Noooo, you don’t hate me”

Cue Dream just blowing up Tommy’s second Summer Home after he explained that it was supposed to be a safe haven for him and Tubbo. Also note that Dream is already getting rid of any mob attacking Tommy even if at this point he still had armour and weapons to defend himself. I talked about this before, but Dream does seem to want Tommy to be as dependent on him as he is on Tommy, which is why during exile he made him dependent on him for protection/safety and company and in prison for food. Also Ghostbur going: “I don’t think this man is very nice...”, thank you Ghostbur, I wish you could remember that, but you’re trying your best and I appreciate it...

“How long is- how long am I exiled for? When can I just go back?” “You can’t (...) if you go back you die”

Again, not Dream’s decision to make. Tubbo was the one exiling Tommy meaning that, if Tubbo actually had the decision power in that istance, Tubbo was the one who should have decided when he could come back. Also, again reiterating the point from before:

“I thought I was only banished from L’Manburg, that was the deal, not the entirety of the smp-” “Oh no. No you’re banished far enough where they don’t see you”

Also, a little look into Tommy’s mentality here:

“Tubbo said he wasn’t thinking with emotion, but with reason, but: what the fuck is the point if there isn’t any- any emotion?!”

This is honestly why he is Dream’s exact opposite and probably why he finds him fun, while Tubbo is irrelevant to him. Tommy thinks emotions should always be taken into account when making decisions and he values sentimentality over everything. Dream is the opposite, to him emotions are irrelevant and sentimentality is a weakness. Tubbo is a bit of both, which makes his clash of ideologies with Dream a lot less evident.

Anyway, they get to the island and Dream builds Tommy a dirt shack for him to set his spawn into. And then there is the first istance of Dream taking all of Tommy’s stuff (building blocks and food included) and blowing it up. Which, again, is in no way an actual exile condition. Tommy is in jail basically. He got kidnapped and now he is in jail. Also right after that Dream gives them food and obsidian (of course acting like he is doing them a big favour, when he actually just created that need), which Tommy bromptly refuses, later burning the obsidian.

Also Dream’s parting words here are: “I’ll see you never”. Which couldn’t be less true! There is quite a bit more after that, of Tommy and Ghostbur settling in, finding a ruined portal with some armour and the village nearby and Techno visiting, but this is about c!Dream and c!Tommy and it’s already incredibly long as is, so maybe I’ll talk about everything else another time...

Onto the next one: Tommy Is Alone in Exile with Dream...

This stream starts off with Bad visiting Tommy to give him a few presents (which consist of Chirp, 2 diamonds, an enderchest, and almost dead diamond pick with silk touch, some coocked chicken some bones and a few stacks of oak wood logs). Also Tommy sees Logsteshire for the first time. Then Dream arrives and he is not happy about the present (something something, having other people giving Tommy useful stuff would make him less reliant on Dream). Also Bad seems to be slightly scared of Dream since he immediately tells Tommy that he should not say that any of the stuff he gave him was from him. Anyway, Dream destroys everything, but Tommy, with Bad’s help, manages to save Chirp. Here’s their exchange in this scene of course:

“Tommy?” “Yes! Yes?!” “Do you have uh... something you wanna put on the floor here?” “Yes *throws in 3 red concrete blocks*” “Anything else Tommy?” “No! You’re evil by the way, you’re an evil man-” “Come on... I know there is something else you wanna drop down here...” “No there-... *gives disk to Bad* I don’t reckon there is!” “Okay are you sure...?” “Yes!” “Alright... how about uh- how about your armour Tommy?” “No this is- I actually earned this myself” “I know you did! Just drop it in the hole Tommy” “No, no! You can’t just come and demand things from me! I’ve been exiled, I’ve done your shit! What- what do you mean-” “Tommy~” “What?” *Dream hits Tommy with an enchanted netherite axe* “Drop them down~” “Hooooo okay okay okay!”

So, in case anyone was wondering, physical abuse is there as well. And this is fully depicted as physical abuse. Like, normally, with this being Minecraft, it is implied that violence is generally inconsequential, here though c!Tommy reacts to it clearly in pain and shock. There is no doubt there.

Sapnap arrives at this point as well. After that Dream makes it a point that Tommy cannot have the enderchast that Bad gave him because you can never have enough random arbitrary rules when kidnapping someone apparently!

“Why are you here? Why are you here? What- what could you- what could you possibly want more from me? You’ve tortured me-” “I’m just! I’m just... keeping an eye on you Tommy”

I’ve highlighted this because, considering the last time Dream was there he said he would never see Tommy again, Tommy’s confusion here is more then understandable. But of course Dream acts like it’s obvious that he would be there and that it’s necessary to make sure that Tommy is not “up to no good”. Also, another extremely important exchange:

“You’ve exiled me you stupid manipulative green bastard!” “Yeah I know! I know! And you know why I did that” “Yes? Yes?” “No, you know why” “Why?” “Because you don’t listen to me ever. You’re the only person who doesn’t ever listen to me (...) listen, you are like a little annoying bug in my room and it pisses me off so I take you and I put you outside and that’s what I did. And now I’m just making sure that you stay outside”

So... the bullshit about this being about George’s house is out of the window by the first proper exile stream. Also Dream goes in the ever increasing list of villains who, if annoyed enough, will reveal all their evil plans to the protagonist. Like Tommy screaches enough and Dream will immediately go in evil monologuing mode...

“So what do you actually want from me then?” “Well nothing, I’m just here to talk to you. Tommy, we’re still friends ok? Just because I exiled you doesn’t mean we’re not friends-” “Just because I killed your friends and family doesn’t mean we can’t be bros...” “Well, it’s true!”

Ok so, it’s confirmed that Dream would still go on with this “friendship” facade even if he killed Tubbo or Wilbur then. Also:

*Tommy sees a creeper* then in the most monotone tone ever: “Help me” Dream sprinting from the other side of the cave: “TOMMY!”. I love this scene and I love this two dumbasses (and I mean the cc’s here). Also, to go back to the serious stuff: once again Dream is the one killing every single mob around Tommy because he blew up all his means for defence. Also Bad and Sapnap are still there as well, but Dream is always the on interveening (mostly because he is the one following Tommy around more closely). I’ll have a few of the more interesting quotes here afterwards until the next interesting scene:

“If I had 8 legs I would fuck you all up” “Oooh, no you wouldn’t” (Dream de-valuing Tommy’s anger once again)

“Stop following me” “NO” “Well okay then...” (honestly this was just funny...)

“Can I call you Wilbur? Or is it Ghostbur...?” “You can call me whatever you like” (for those saying that Ghostbur not correcting Tommy was weird)

“Alright Wilbur, what do you need an enderchest for? I might make an exception but-” “We- we need it so that we can access our stuff from the old world, the old world” “But not to go back” “How would we be able to go back with an enderchest?” “Well I don’t know maybe there is stuff in there that’s... better” “Tommy do you have anything that could get you to go back? In the enderchest?” “A boat? What’d you mean?” “Yeah to be honest we just need wood to get back, it’s not really-”

Here we have Ghostbur poking holes in one of the new rules that Dream added that day. As a matter of fact, why would an enderchest be dangerous? Tommy mostly keeps sentimental stuff in there and a bit of iron. Still that’s the whole point: Dream is trying to get Tommy under his control so he needs to bring him to a point where he’ll listen to his orders even when they don’t make any actual sense. Also, btw, Dream doesn’t actually give them an enderchest after this exchange.

“Do you want to come with me Tommy? Do you want to come with me and visit the old library?” “No no no” “Yes! Yes please!” “No he wants to stay here with me” “I don’t. I definitely don’t” “He does! He’s just trying to be nice to you Wilbur. He’s trying to be nice to you” “I’m not Wilbur, I want to come with you” (way to gaslight an amnesiac ghost...)

“So how long is Tommy supposed to be here?” “Like a week?” “Oh, a week is not bad!” “*laughing* No he’s here forever” (Like goddamn, imagine if every minor griefing was punished with permanent exile!)

“M-maybe like- does Tommy gets like visitations? Like once every month he get’s to go to L’Manburg-” “No! No no no” “No visitation, huh?” “No visitation” (well, let’s thank Sapnap for trying...)

So, after this Tommy gets his plan to go through the Nether and find a quick way to and from L’Manburg to, perhaps, sneak in unnoticed at some points. Dream “allows” him here to go to the Nether (even though technically there is no reason why the exile would extend to there as well), so they get to work on fixing a ruined portal. “Did you know, I apparently blew up a nation and killed everyone” (thank God we have Ghostbur, he makes everything better). One thing I want to note though: at this point Tommy still kills the mobs attacking him when Dream is not stalking him and doing it for him, which is kind of nice. We are still at the first exile stream though...

“Can I go back for like an hour and see all my friends?” “No, they can come here though. I-I mean Tommy, I think- I think that someone could come here and visit you, but you can’t ever go back. Like I-I don’t have anything against people coming here and visiting you if they want to. They don’t HAVE to, but they can if they really want to” “Tommy think of it this way: whenever you’re in prison you can’t just go and visit your friends, but they can come and visit you” “They can come and visit you, yeah, that’s actually a very- that’s a perfect analogy”

I wonder why the best analogy for Tommy’s situation is not a f*cking exile analogy, but actual prison. Maybe because he is confined to one place, not allowed to keep any personal items and never allowed to go back? Also they actually get to Nether hub at this point and there is the famous scene with Tommy looking at the lava:

A curious thing about this scene (aside from being a clear indication of the beginning of Tommy’s depressive spiral) is both that Dream didn’t seem to particularly care about Tommy dying up until now (and in the future as well) as long as he is the one to kill him. Meaning that he seemed fine with it as long as he had control over it. And yet at the end there he agrees with Tommy’s statement of “it’s never my time to die” which kinda makes me think that Dream by this point was already entirely set on his idea of Tommy needing to be alive for Dream to control the whole server. Tommy and Dream head back to Logstedshire after this scene.

*Tommy looks at the lava while standing very close to the edge* “I’ll go back through just to... check and see” *Dream hits Tommy away from the edge* “Come on” *Tommy goes back to the edge and Dream pushes him away again, this time covering the hole* “It’s not your time to die yet Tommy” “It’s never my time to die” “That’s true”

“Home sweet home...” “Home sweet home. I think it’ll be good! People might visit you all the time, I mean, I can visit you! It’s- it’s actually fun to come here! It’s a little bit- it’s a change of scenery, you know?” “It’s not fun to be stuck here” “Well... you’re not ’stuck’ it’s your vacation home!” “Can I go back? I’m ready...” “No but you can leave this area, you can go somewhere else. This is just- like, I took you far away, you can go further if you want”

So, if anyone is wondering, this is not, in fact, Dream giving Tommy more freedom. Especially considering that when Tommy does leave Logstedshire later on Dream literally hunts him down, so no, that was never an option. What Dream is doing here is make himself sound benevolent by comparison by telling Tommy that the only other options he has are worse since they are even further away.

“I’m here for a good time, not for a long time” (more hints towards Tommy’s depressive spiral)

“Guys how do you know when it’s too much?” (and again)

“Can I go and see the tree?” “Tommy, you can’t go and see the tree” “Dream why don’t you let him just- it’s not in L’Manburg! Why don’t you let him just see the tree and then escort him back?”

Ghostbur my beloved, pointing out holes in Dream’s rules all the time. Something tells me that’s the reason why Dream tried to kill him later on...

Anyway! This concludes this first post because it’s... Oh fuck this is REALLY long.... welp! I’ll make the others in the next few days!

#dreamwastaken #tommyinnit #ghostbur #dream smp #exile arc #tw abuse #tw manipulation #c!dream critical #character analysis #relationship analysis #this was supposed to be just all the quotes of c!dream being an asshole during the exile arc #then I went 'how about I write a couple of my thoughts in as well?'#and mistakes were made...#long post #my post

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siren-virus · 4 years ago

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Ok, first question about Luckyboy!AU, Rook has a girlfriend? As far as I know in cannon he doesn't even have a love interest? thought that might be my fault since it's been years since I've watched any Ben 10 series (really have to rewatch some eppisodes here :P) Who is she and what is she like? Has Rook ever taken her girlfriend in a date to the coffee shop? How much of a tease is Ben with Rook when he isn't on a date? And how much of a wingman is he when he is in one?

How is Ben's social life outside his Nekomata persona by the way? I imagine he still has some friends since he's a charismatic extrovert, but with how different everything is here compared to the prime timeline, I can't see who he might be friends with besides Julie.

Now, let's make some questions that aren't about Ben :D With the amount of invasions that Earth has had over the years is the general public privy of the existence of aliens as something more than just tourists that one almost never sees, or do they know but only aknowledge it when they see an alien in person? How is the general people view of aliens regardless?

Also, does Gwen 10 have good or bad public relations? Like, does Will Harangue berate her and turn the public against her, or is she lucky enough that he's focused on Nekomata and not her? How do the humans see her, as a hero, a child soldier, a menace, a necessary evil?

Also also, how do the Plumbers play in the whole PR thing? Do they manipulate everything so the humans have the view they think is the healthiest between humans and aliens? Do they only play damage control whenever alien activity is reported to the public? Are they known or are they still an underground organization? How does the public view them as, considering they're basically intergalactic police that aren't the most competent, specially considering that some countries have beef with their own police forces?

Now, to leave all of the political and heavy talk behind, how often does Ben play with Ship and Julie? Like, they're friends, obviously Ben gets petting privilegies and becomes a pet sitter whenever Julie has to go on a tournament and can't take care of them herself. PET SHENANNIGANS MUST ENSUE THERE, AND YOU CAN'T CONVINSE ME OTHERWISE XD

Also, I imagine a scenario where Kevin and Gwen enter the coffee shop unaware that the other is in there and Ben does everything in his power to force them to sit on the same table, reminding both of them that this is a true neutral zone and "Please don't break anything here and remember to play nice, if you manage to get through this without punching eachother I'll give you a discount on your next coffee", which is a very good offer if they think about it. Meanwhile Argit is waiting at the bar watching over the situation "Bet you 10 bucks they'll be shouting over eachother in 5 minutes" "Bet you it takes them 10 minutes"... It takes them 7 and a half minutes exactly and they can't decide who wins the bet. "There's no way they're getting out of this hating eachother any less" "As long as they don't break anything and don't bother the other clients, I count it as a win"

So Rook had an established relationship in Omniverse with Rayonna, she was introduced abit later in the series when Ben and Rook with to Revonnah. It was a very 2D relationship, just put there maybe cause of the whole shipping fiasco between Ben and Rook(?) don't take my word for it ;;

For the Lucky Boy! AU, they're together, but it's been years since Rooks been to Revonnah, crime never takes a break, neither does he. So his relationship with Rayonna is very flakey, they're on the verge of breaking up, buuut due to Revonnahgander traditions, they're together still. (pulling this out of my ass ;; )

Rook ends up mentioning he has a girlfriend at some point, it was just a casual thing, Ben won't bring up the topic because the way Rook talks about Rayonna makes him feel a little bit iffy towards the subject.

Outside of work and the Nekomata persona Ben's a little awkward in the social circumstances. At that point his social battery's almost completely clocked out. So unless he's dragged out by his friends, Julie, his old soccer mates - although it's happening a lot less now, since school finished a while ago and they're moving on with their own lives- (i refuse to call it football), Alan, if they both end up clocking out at the same time. OR, Rook. Sometimes Max if he's around will invite Ben for lunch or an afternoon snack run. (Mr smoothies, with a "healthy" dose of chillie fries. Best way to lure Ben out.)

Hell yeah, let's get down to the world building buisness, my favourite cup of tea.

Humans are very knowledgeable about alien existence, you'd have to be pretty ignorant to not believe in aliens. (I mean, lets face it, in the world we live in today, I bet, that if aliens did show themselves, some group would just say they're government actors, or russian/chinese spies. Comical, but sadly a realistic scenario...)

With the amount of invasions that have happened, and the daily attacks- normally done by humans with access to alien tech- Humans are quite fearful of them. Which has urged the plumbers to keep the aliens that live on earth down underTown.

It's not all humans of course, just most. Media influence has also pushed the feardar way up.

Will Harangue, surprisingly uplifts Gwen 10 to the eyes of the public, he's also much more focused on Nekomata. (bad news= views= good news). In Harangues personal opinion though, he'd prefer no aliens at all. So he does let his badmouthing of Gwen slip sometimes.

They do a lot of damage control, their original goal was to keep alien life hidden from the public until they(the people) were deemed ready, however, not so easy when an invasion happens nearly once a month. At least it's all limited to Bellwood. For now...

The plumbers are known to the public but aren't like your typical police force- you can't just call them. But they're always around on patrol. The police aren't exactly fond of them cause "They're terking our jerbs". But they have a joint thing going on, the police handle the human crimes, unless alien tech is involved, and the plumbers handle the alien crimes.

The public views them as an iffy subject, not exactly hailed as heroes, but more of a neutral, they're here to stay I guess, kinda thing. The focus is on Gwen mostly, as the poster child(adult) of the plumbers. (this is where I really wanna separate reality and fantasy, cause like, the issues with the police at the moment is major sooo, eh, it's a touchy subject matter)

Yes to this one. When Julie's away Ben and Ship play. Ben and Julie don't meet up often, work and the vigilante life make Ben way too busy, buuut when they do meet up Julie will pop by Bens apartment - Ben makes sure nothing incriminating is around if that's the case - , or they'll hang out at the dog park, and watch the dogs go ballistic around Ship.

For the pet scenarios, visualize them to your hearts content. I got some cats laying around for my reference... even though they mostly sleep- lazy bastards.

Yes to this too! Argit and Ben would totally make bets- Ben being an anodite can sense Kevin and Gwens emotions and when they're gonna break out into a fight- So he always wins the bets. Argit has learned to not bet too high when it comes to that- if he actually forks up in the first place- .

In the case Kevin and Gwen had broken out into a fist fight, Kevin obsorbing the marble counter, Gwen turning into fourarms. Ben nearly broke his cover trying to prevent any fights, until a coworker had stepped in and promptly kicked them both out. (maybe I'll design some coworkers)

Now to get me some mint tea, cause my fingers are about to freeze off ;;

#ben 10 #lucky boy! au #answer

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maxwell-grant · 4 years ago

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Downfall of a Dark Avenger Part 2: Shadows of Manhattan

Having finished reading Al Ewing’s El Sombra trilogy and having had enough time to digest it, I’d like to talk about the trajectory of it’s titular protagonist, the character and series’s relationship with it’s influences. Relating to The Shadow and Zorro and general pulp archetypes, and also the way it incorporates Astro Boy’s Pluto into the mix.

This part is focused on Gods of Manhattan and El Sombra’s first appearences in Pax Omega and the ways in which the urban vigilante manifests itself in the books.

In Gods of Manhattan, El Sombra takes a backseat to it’s central players, Doc Thunder and The Blood-Spider. I’ve mentioned how Thunder, while ostensibly a Doc Savage/Superman amalgam, also combines aspects that allow the character to condense the entire history of the superman into a single being, but to a character very much centered on the future and in progressive ideals, described in the book as someone considered both the city’s ultimate savior as well as viewed as "a faggot, a liberal and a miscegenationist”. In that regard, the Blood-Spider becomes his opposite. Perhaps the most comprehensive savaging of the dark detective/The Shadow ever put on paper, that has a larger point behind the questions and criticisms it brings up to what this kind of figure can be.

"You can hardly have a war on crime unless you are the one defining what a crime is. First rule of the war on crime: everyone is guilty or something"

Us am vigilantes! Am us not men? Us use violence to effect social change! Am us not men? Us bring terror to underclass, make streets safer for overclass! Am us not men? Am us not men?

Making them loved rather than feared. Having them fight crime, or the right kind of crime, at least. Created a persona designed to appeal to the worst in people, to bring the citizens of New York around to his cause, his war on crime, which would, of course, then become a war against ‘urban crime’. Or some other little euphemism. ‘Inhuman’, for example. Sounds a lot more relatable than subhuman, doesn’t it? Comes to the same thing, though.

Although The Blood-Spider is an evil take on The Shadow, most of his character traits are taken from characters that followed him. He’s got the moniker, savagery, fright tactics and branded murders of The Spider, he climbs buildings and has a civilian identity akin to Spider-Man’s, with constant name references to characters like Stacey, Jonah and a redhead named Mary Watson, with him sharing a name with Peter Parker as well as Batman villain Jonathan Crane, he’s got Rorschach monologues that are echoed by his associates past his demise in white supremacist organizations dedicated to carrying off Spider’s legacy, predating HBO Watchmen’s take on Rorschach legacy. If Doc Thunder is all about taking the superhero’s past to create a better future with it, Blood-Spider takes the future of the urban vigilante and uses it as a conduit to enact a barbaric and reactionary agenda in service of undoing everything Thunder stands for, even before he’s revealed to be a Nazi agent.

Blood-Spider is what happens when the absolute worst aspects of said characters are brought to the forefront and twisted by a dose of reality. He’s to The Shadow what Plutonian is to Superman, the most sour way said character and legend can be twisted into something horrendous. He’s the Doutrinador in a fedora, everything I vehemently argue that The Shadow wasn’t, and yet seems sadly ever closer to as more and more comics dehumanize the character. He’s Howard Chaykin’s Shadow, naked and raw and exposed for what it ultimately is. An insult and a wake-up call, if a necessary one.

In fact, said poisoning of a legend is explicitly a plot point in the book, because the book establishes that, before The Blood-Spider, the city’s main vigilante used to be a man by the name of Blue Ghost, friend of Doc Thunder and, although a mysterious public figure, still firmly on the side of good. Unfortunately, moral victories aside, “good” alone doesn’t cut it in the world of El Sombra.

You took a look at the Blue Ghost - mysterious masked avenger, operatives all over the place, big fan-following with the working classes, and you figured...we need one of those. Just take away the Japanese orphan kid and replace him with a foxy Aryan chick.

Blue Ghost is almost a textbook Spirit analogue, even defined as being beat up a lot as his main asset, except here, he’s placed as Doc’s counterpart that died before the story began and is now replaced by a darker and more horrendous counterpart, and because The Spirit was influenced by The Shadow, it opens a roundabout connection. You can read this as a comparison between the shift from Adam West’s Batman to Frank Miller’s Batman, or a comparison between The Shadow and earlier more straightforward pulp vigilantes like Jimmie Dale, or a comparison between the pulp/radio Shadow and later iterations of him or analogues to his archetype that upped the nastier aspects. Again, nothing in El Sombra is ever quite just one thing.

And at last we come to El Sombra, who spends much of the book caught in between the duels of Doc, Untergang and players in between. And it’s interesting that here, while El Sombra’s final victories over the story’s major conflict lie in his willingness to team up with Doc, despite knowing of his origins as a Nazi weapon, his victories over Blood-Spider instead come from turning tricks of The Shadow against him. First, when he discovers Spider’s true nature, spying on him by pulling a Fritz the Janitor. And then in the finale, when he schools Spider on what a real shadowy avenger looks like.

"Amigo...that's my sword"

The voice came from the darkness above them, where the gaslight did not reach. The Spider's blood ran cold for a long moment, and then he grabbed hold of his other gun, tearing it from its holster and raising it to fire a volley of bullets into the darkness. "Where are you? Show yourself!" he hissed, turning in place, the gun raised to fire at the slightest sound or movement.

"You're not the only one who can hide in the shadows, my friend. I've got very good at it, over the years."

"Show yourself!" Another volley of shots, with no result. Was he throwing his voice? Was he everywhere at once? Was he a shadow himself? A ghost?

The voice echoed from another place now, continuing his speech exactly where he had left off. And still that mocking voice echoed from the shadows above.

"See, I didn't know if you were a good guy or a bad guy. I mean, sure, you killed people, and you were kind of a dick about it, you know? But I didn't know if you were one of the bastards. I didn't know if you needed to die or not, amigo."

The gun clicked empty. He was out of bullets. He turned again, and there was the man in the red mask. Just standing there, in the middle of the concourse. His smile didn't look human. And his eyes. Oh, his terrible eyes...

"Stay back." The Spider whispered, and his voice sounded in his ears like a frightened, animal thing, waiting to curl up and die in its hole.

The man in the red mask only laughed. A rich, deep, joyous laugh, a laugh that echoed and filled the whole station, bouncing from pillar to pillar, careening through the great vaulted arches. Such a laugh!

Then the laughter stopped, and he fixed the Blood-Spider with a look that would freeze the fires of Hell.

And suddenly - quite suddenly - there was no Blood-Spider. There was only Parker Crane, the Nazi. Parker Crane, the traitor. Who thought he could destroy America, and only managed to destroy himself. Parker Crane. Just a man wearing a mask. He ran, and left the sword behind him.

"Nice trick," Doc murmured, turning to the masked man. "Throwing your sword from up on the balcony - good aim, by the way - then throwing your voice and a little mental suggestion to make him think you were up in the arches where he'd been. Where did you learn that?"

The masked man shrugged, lifting up his weapon. "In the desert. You can learn a lot in the desert, if you put your mind to it."

By the story’s end, once Lars Lomax, Thunder’s arch-enemy and Lex Luthor, takes center stage as it’s ultimate threat, Parker Crane is left a traumatized, broken shell unable to even move, utterly stripped of any mystique or power that his mask and guns may have brought him. And in the end, El Sombra finds him, neutralized and no longer a threat to anyone. And he makes his choice.

El Sombra knew what it was to hate, to hate so hard and so long that you knew nothing else, to hate so strongly that it crossed that line into something beyond reason.

He lifted his sword, resting the blade in his palm for a moment, considering. Crane only stared, weeping and making his soft, mad noises. El Sombra sighed, shaking his head. "You know, I don't know if I can kill a guy who's already dead. Even if he is one of the bastards."

"Don't let him in here." Murmured Crane, his eyes wide.

"Shhh, I won't let him in," smiled El Sombra in response, trying to be reassuring. "You'll never have to face him again. I promise. It's okay, amigo. It's okay."

It was strange. He knew he should feel hate for Parker Crane. It was Djego's job to bear things like pity and doubt, to feel sorrow and shame. That was Djego's role in their team of one. El Sombra was there to take never-ending revenge and to laugh and to never look back. But to know that his murder of Heinrich Donner - his righteous kill - had resulted in so much harm coming to so many... and now to see the leader of Undergang, the man he'd come to New York to kill, just an empty, broken madman, a shell of a person... El Sombra wondered if he was changing.

"Don't," whispered Crane, a tear rolling down his cheek. "Don't let him back in."

El Sombra smiled, placing a hand on his shoulder. "It's okay, amigo. I'm going to go and make sure nobody ever needs to see him again. And I couldn't have done it without you." He squeezed lightly. "You didn't mean to, but you did some good. Remember that."

Then, gently, he pushed the tip of the sword through the front of Crane's skull and into his brain.

He was not incapable of pity. But he was who he was, and he did what he did.

And broken or not, the bastards had to die.

We’ve seen El Sombra struggle and be faced with choices, choices between Djego and El Sombra, choices between kindness and violence, between peace and conflict. We’ve seen the conflict in his soul between things that he knows are right, because Djego is a good man with a good soul who wants good things for himself and others, and things he knows he must do, because he is El Sombra and El Sombra was created to kill the bastards that brought his world to ruin and therefore it’s what he must always do. And in the end, El Sombra is simply stronger. He has to be. But strength and violence and hatred can only get one so far.

Gods of Manhattan is the trilogy’s moral compass, the book that most clearly defines the morality the series operates on. And in between the spectrums of justice embodied by Doc and Crane’s approach, between the two urban avengers in The Blue Ghost and Blood-Spider, El Sombra made his choice. And it’s the first choice that dooms him.

Enter Pax Omega, and we learn that, 4 years since the previous book's events, El Sombra joined a squad of agents called Yankee Bravo Seven, who work for an organization named STEAM, who enact missions against Nazis to turn the tides of war. He is joined by several other types of characters, including The Blood Widow, Crane’s former assistant Marlene Lang now having taken up the moniker (just as Nita van Sloan did for The Spider, even with the “Widow” prefix). We see that El Sombra has joined a team of bantering heroes and even formed a friendly rivalry with a man named Savate, modeled after Batroc the Leaper.

But we see that the hunger for vengeance still burns, still burns beyond reason, restless because it’s been 4 years and the war still isn’t over and Hitler still isn’t dead by his sword. And it’s that restlessness that again dooms him, when he once again makes the wrong choice and betrays leader Jack Scorpio, Scorpio who had personally brought him on board and gave him the best shot he ever had at getting to Hitler.

El Sombra frowned. "We need to make our move now."

Scorpio shook his head. "Not yet."

"What?" El Sombra looked incredulous.

"Wait for my signal, I said! Damn it, I need you to trust me!" Jack Scorpio reached up to brush the back of his finger across his forehead, and realised he was sweating.

Through his special glasses, El Sombra's aura was glowing an angry, pulsing red, like a throbbing vein. "Just...trust me. I'm asking you to hold back for just five minutes. There's more going on here than you know."

El Sombra just stared at him, his lips pulling back from his teeth in a cold snarl.

"Trust me. That's all I ask." Jack Scorpio looked into the blazing eyes behind the bloodstained mask, and spoke softly, soothingly, almost desperately. "Can you just hold back for one minute?"

The eyes behind the mask narrowed.

"Can you?"

PERSONNEL FILE: DJEGO "EL SOMBRA". TO EYES ONLY: THIS INDIVIDUAL IS HIGHLY DANGEROUS. IT IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED HE NOT BE INCLUDED IN ANY OPERATIONS CLASSIFIED ABOVE TOP SECRET OR HIGHER. (I'll take the risk - J.S)

El Sombra spat in Scorpio's face.

"Chinga tu madre."

Then he drew his sword and leaped down into the fray.

After the mission is over, with the base destroyed and a major victory secured, although with Jack Scorpio having been killed, the team disbands. El Sombra continues to wander the forests near the Luftwaffe base for about two weeks, killing as many Nazis as he can, until an explosion blast hits near him, knocking away his mask and portions of his leg and arm, and rendering him unconscious for 8 months. By the time he wakes up, the war has ended, and so has El Sombra for the past 7 years.

Djego was afforded the best of medical care at the hospital in Venice. El Sombra was nowhere to be found.

His mask had been torn off in the explosion, along with some of the meat of his leg and arm. He walked stiffly, now, with a pronounced limp, and his left arm was all but useless, hanging limply at his side. The Wildcat crew had salvaged his sword, but Djego had little interest in using it.

Gradually, he regained his mobility. The back of his head itched constantly, and he suffered from horrendous mood swings, when he would rage against the Fuhrer and the bastards, or weep helplessly, like a child. But gradually, he found his personality stabilising in the gentle, antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital. He found that Djego - so long despised as a weakling, a coward and a fool - was capable of a kind of gentle, melancholic wit that made him popular.

Djego healed and grew, and the itch in the back of his skull began to subside, as El Sombra relinquished his grip.

Djego felt his heart seize in his chest. The cloth was missing a scrap at the end, and there was mud ground into the fabric along with the old bloodstains; but it had two evenly-spaced holes in it, and was unmistakably a mask. It seemed to be looking at him.

He takes up gardening and establishes himself in the city of Brandenberg, he becomes a fixture of the city and a friend of it, he enters a relationship, and El Sombra never appears again.

Until a mysterious stranger named Leonard Lorraine, walks through his door one day, saying he’s got a mission to fulfill, and hands him his mask. And, once again, El Sombra is simply stronger, and he makes the wrong choice again.

Djego shook his head and tried to step back from it, but his legs wouldn't move.

"No," he whispered. "No. Please"

"I was happy," pleaded Djego. "Doesn't that matter to you?" He picked up the cloth in trembling fingers, looking into the empty eyeholds. "Doesn't that mean anything?"

There was no answer. The patrons of the bierkeller did not even notice anything was happening.

"I was happy," Djego choked, and then, in one spasmodic motion, he pulled the mask onto his face, and secured it tightly, so that the knot once again rested in the back of his head, where it belonged: so tightly that it might never come off again.

El Sombra looked at his hands.

He prodded his belly, amused at the rounded shape of it, and took a couple of steps back from the bar. The limp was gone.

He laughed, very softly, so as not to disturb the patrons.

Djego and Lorraine walk through the desolate streets of Berlin, which in the years since has completely sealed itself from the outside world through an impossibly thick dome, and Djego discovers the city completely bereft of life, with only a few lobotomized robotic citizens aimlessly wandering and chewing on the mountains of corpses in the city, as their Nazi ideology reached it’s inevitable outcome of total annihilation of any and all that the party could find an excuse to slaughter in the name of purity, which eventually included it’s few remaining members. In this world, Hitler has been a brain inside a robotic contraption ever since 1945, and it’s amidst this scenario that El Sombra, while thinking about how his final confrontation with Hitler would play out, eventually finds what’s left of Hitler.

All around them, there were the sounds of machinery, but the Mecha-Fuhrer was completely silent, utterly motionless. In the centre of its chest rested a tank of toxic green fluid, and on the surface of the fluid, a human brain floated, like the corpse of a goldfish.

It was quite dead.

El Sombra stared at the Fuhrer for a long moment. Eventually, he spoke, and his voice was cracked and raw, and choked with rage. "Is...is this a joke?"

De Lareine smiled his terrible smile. "The Fuhrer's body needed a great deal of maintenance and repair, you know. After two years, one of the processes delivering oxygen to his brain failed...and there was nobody left to repair it. He died, slowly." There would have been some pain, at the end".

El Sombra slammed his fist into the great iron throne on which the massive body sat, shattering his knuckles and tearing the skin from them. He didn't seem to notice. "Some pain," he choked, through gritted teeth."

El Sombra was still staring into the empty, dead eyes of the Fuhrer.

El Sombra again chooses poorly. It’s this moment, above all else, that truly damns him to his fate, as we come to see what is it exactly that a persona created for the purpose of vengeance has, when said vengeance is robbed from it. Like Parker Crane, his persona crumbles completely to expose the petty, ugly little feelings that drove it to such grandstanding antics in the first place, and the allmighty El Sombra is exposed for the all-too human failings that damned him once and for all.

"This isn't right," he said, eventually, in a strangled voice. "How...how can it end like this?"

"Why shouldn't it?" De Lareine shrugged. "Here's a thought. Maybe, despite his twenty-year tantrum and all his dressing up, spoilt little Djego is not the centre of the universe -"

El Sombra turned, face red, tears streaming from his eyes, and charged at De Lareine, slashing his sword. El Sombra crashed down onto the floor, into the soot scattered about, as De Lareine walked around him.

"Did you really believe Adolf Hitler would wait around for your sword? Did you not imagine that it might be better for him to seal himself off in a hole to die, instead of murdering and enslaving continents until you finally got around to him? Did you think you were the hero of your own little story, El Sombra, with your mask and your laugh and your-"

"Shut up!" El Sombra cried out, scrambling to his feet, the sword shaking in his hand, tears and snot running down his face. "He was mine! He was mine to kill!" He lifted the sword, the tip trembling. "Bring him back," he screamed, "do you hear me? Bring him back to life!"

De Lareine had to laugh at that.

And in the end, El Sombra is crushed, spiritually and physically as his spine is shattered by Lareine, who begins to experiment on him as he lays dying, ready to fulfill fate’s greater purpose for El Sombra. Ready to become not just the perfect machine Pasito’s conquerors intended, but a superior design. Ready to abandon his former life, ready to abandon everything that defined him, ready to shed any and all traces of Zorro and Shadow and pulp hero in his system, because the age of pulp heroes and superheroes has passed.

The metal man emerged from his hole, dragging the corpse of the Fuhrer behind him.

The brain in the metal man's chest would, perhaps, live for thousands of years. He wondered how he would spend the time.

He remembered little of his former life; he had been a man named El Sombra, or perhaps Djego. He had been stupid - he realised that now - but that was something he would never be again.

Apart from that, there was only a succession of faces, the memory of laughter and of a final, awful betrayal that had destroyed him. But there was also the sense that a great and terrible mission had ended at last, and it was time for a new life to begin.

The metal man took a last look back at the great dome of Fortress Berlin. Somewhere in there, the Leopard Man was hunting, freed from his own mission. And in the Fuhrer's old office, the empty, lifeless clay of El Sombra - or was it Djego? - lay, discarded, like a butterfly's cocoon.

The metal man thought on this, as the Fuhrer rusted at his feet and the tanks began to approach from over the hills ahead.

He would need a new name.

It’s now the age of Pluto.

#replies tag #pulp heroes #al ewing #el sombra #pluto

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emerald-amidst-gold · 4 years ago

Text

About - Fane Lavellan

Thank you for the tag @noire-pandora!

Name: Fane Lavellan (Aterian)

Alias: Tempest, Fae, Dragon, Vhenan, Ma’isenatha, Inquisitor, Herald, Dragon of the Dread, He Who Flies Above

Gender: Male

Age: 24 years old at the beginning of Inquisition. 26 (going on 27) years old at the end of Trespasser. (Draconic age is roughly 5,000 years old. I haven’t decided yet.)

Species: Dalish Elf (White Dragon)

Zodiac: aquarius / aries / cancer / capricorn / gemini / leo / libra / pisces / sagittarius / scorpio / taurus / virgo / unknown

Abilities/Talents: Fane’s a warrior; a two handed primarily, but will switch depending on the situation. Has abilities akin to a Reaver’s, but they are more from his inherent nature than the consuming of dragon’s blood and magic. Able to detect emotion through a person’s eye color (again, an inherent ability from when he was a dragon). He adores poetry, sometimes going so far as to write it himself. He also has a special knack for crafting armor and weapons through observation of another alone.

{𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙}

Alignment: lawful / neutral / chaotic / good / neutral / evil / true (with some chaotic parts) (I had to research a little since Fane leans like three different ways lol )

Religion: Fane doesn’t believe in any kind of higher power. He knows there are beings that can have power akin to a god (Solas, the Evanuris, etc.). However, he doesn’t revere them as such, even before he realized what he was. He respects the physical world, and follows its laws, not a supposed god’s.

Sins: envy / greed / gluttony / lust / pride / sloth / wrath

Virtues: charity / chastity / diligence / humility / justice / kindness / patience

Languages: Common tongue, Elvhen (He speaks it as fluently as Solas, but only when he’s either overwhelmed with emotion or furiously angry.) He can write in Elvhen, as well. He also picks up on Tevene and Antivan after Trespasser due to operations he does for himself and Solas. (They work together against the Inquisition in my AU)

Family: His biological parents were dragons, but Fane doesn’t remember them, nor will he ever. Mortal family includes his sister, Mhairi Lavellan (the two three years apart), his deceased mother, Eloris Lavellan, and his missing father, Arsas Lavellan. (Fane is not upset that his ‘father’ is missing.) He feels no kinship with the clan, opting to avoid them all together when he can.

Friends: Solas is Fane’s closest friend and lover (They are extremely close even before Fane’s identity is known). He is also extremely close to Varric, Cole, Cullen, my Hawke (Rylen), and Leliana.

Sexual Orientation: heterosexual / bi-/pansexual / homosexual / demisexual / asexual / unsure / other

Relationship status: single / dating / married / widowed / open relationship / divorced / not ready for dating/ (It’s not official, but dammit! He and Solas are practically married with how I write them! XD) Libido: sex god / very high / high / average / low / very low / non-existent (Fane is more of an emotionally connected person. However, if Solas gets him at the right time, then that sex drive skyrockets.)

{𝑃ℎ𝑦𝑠𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙}

Build: twig / bony / slender / average / athletic / curvy / chubby / obese

Hair: white / blonde / brunette / red / black / other

Eyes: brown / blue / green and gold (changes depending on emotions or when he uses his draconic abilities) / black / other (gold)

Skin: pale / fair / olive / light brown / brown / very brown / other

Height: 6′1. Fane isn’t as large as a Qunari, nor as tall, but he’s much larger than the average elf. (His body is a source of pain for him since the Dalish constantly called him ‘Fen’harel’s spawn’, ‘monster’, or ‘Elgar’nan’s bastard’ It takes him a very long time to accept his features).

Weight: He averages about 170lbs to 180lbs. (I haven’t really thought about this actually, but most of his weight is sheer muscle. Not beefy boy, but Fane is ripped. XD)

Scars: His entire torso, arms, and legs are covered in patch work scars from his father’s abuse and experiments. The mark also scars his entire upper and lower arm before Solas takes it away.

He has a singular deep scar on his left cheek from Haven after Solas had to more or less attack Fane because Corypheus’s use of the orb caused the magic from the mark to surge to Fane’s mind - sending him into an insanity induced frenzy.

He hides the scars on his body with elven leather wraps (the only elven or Dalish inspired clothing that he wears.)

Facial Features: Fane has a very angular face depending on the light and angle. Straight on it appears more square while a profile view is more serpentine. Naturally hooded eyes with slightly high cheekbones. His lips are practically average, but generally display a constant look of boredom or indifference.

Tattoos: Sylaise’s vallaslin. He took it as a way of hiding his face, eyes, and emotional pain, but it only ended up causing him more. Once he learns of his draconic heritage, he asks Solas to take them away since the history they represent infuriates him. (Fane has an acute sensitivity to magic, so Solas’s spell doesn’t take place until the two leave the Inquisition.)

{𝐶ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑠𝑒}

Dogs or Cats?

Birds or Hamsters?

Snakes or Spiders?

Red or Blue? (Can you guess why? *waggles eyebrows*)

Yellow or Green? Black or White?

Coffee or Tea? Ice Cream or Cake? Fruits or Vegetables?

Sandwich or Soup?

Magic or Melee?

Sword or Bow?

Summer or Winter?

Spring or Autumn?

The Past or The Future? Both. Fane is heavily mired in the past, but he uses it to shape the future with how he believes it should be.

Tagging @oxygenforthewicked @dreadfutures @dirthavarens and anyone else who would like to do this! (Oh my god I tagged people, oh boy, oh boy! No pressure of course!)

#dragon age #my oc #oc: fane lavellan #writing #male lavellan #lavellan #dragon age inquisition #oc meme

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justkeeptrekkin · 5 years ago

Text

Don’t Dream It’s Over

Some hurt/comfort for you all.

***

The bedside lamp is on. It’s going to take another millennia for Crowley to get used to having a bedside lamp. It’s more common for him to saunter into his dark bedroom and immediately go to sleep- he’ll even put on a pair of pyjamas, if he’s feeling especially luxurious. Bedside lamps don’t usually factor into his routine. Not exactly required, with night-vision.

But now, his routine has changed significantly. It’s made room for a certain angel, who likes having a bedside lamp on- who likes being able to see what he’s reading, before turning in for the night.

Crowley buries his face in his pillow, where it’s blissfully dark and the light doesn’t irritate his eyes. It’s not just this that he’s had to accommodate; no, it’s Aziraphale’s very striking lack of sleep, as well. Aziraphale will sit there with a light on for hours, reading beside Crowley, not sleeping until he decides he may as well. Sleep is not something either of them need; it is something that Crowley enjoys significantly more than Aziraphale; it’s something that Aziraphale has decided to “try out”, like a new hobby, since Crowley moved in and miracled a bedroom.

On top of that, Aziraphale has, in his own words, decided to “do this whole sleeping thing properly”. Crowley has had to make room for hot chocolate or decaffeinated tea before bed. He’s allowed blankets and extra cushions and Egyptian cotton sheets. They have a linen cupboard for all of it. His normal, wallowing sleeping habits have been entirely disregarded.

He is very much alright with that.

“Are you awake?” Crowley lets out a long, sleepy breath. It makes his face hot, where it’s pressed against the pillow. “Mmmph.”

“Is the light keeping you awake? Be honest with me, Crowley.” “Smufuuhhn.”

“Sorry?”

Eyes still closed, Crowley rolls his head so he can speak, words unmuffled. Relatively. “S’fine.”

“Alright.”

Truthfully, it’s all taking a lot of getting used to. The reason he hasn’t argued with Aziraphale is because he likes having him here. He loves having Aziraphale here, and that makes all the bright lights and sickly sweet bedtime drinks tolerable. (Tolerable. He will never admit to them being nice.) That doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes a bit unsettling. There’s still that very large part of himself that’s uncomfortable, unsettled with being happy. After all, it’s natural to feel wary of the unfamiliar.

He yawns. His jaw unhinges slightly, and he corrects it so as not to inadvertently slip into his snake form. “What you reading,” he mumbles.

Though his eyes are shut, he hears Aziraphale put his book down on the bed sheets. Perhaps looking at the cover. “Brideshead Revisited.” “Again?” “I know. I’m an old bore.”

“Mm. We knew that already.”

Aziraphale tuts. “Thank you.”

Crowley doesn’t smile, but he feels it in his chest. How little has changed, despite the fact that everything has changed.

He cracks open an eye.

A bright, yellow light glows on the other side of the bed. It fractures around Aziraphale’s silhouette. Like a halo, but more artificial. No, when Aziraphale shines, he shines brighter and more beautifully than an Ikea lamp. Right now, Aziraphale has returned to his book, legs stretched in front of him under the sheets and reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. Tartan pyjamas with a red trim. Unlike Crowley, Aziraphale is comfortable with being comfortable. At least, he’s better at it than him; it suits him better.

Crowley lies there, one eye looking. Breathing slowly and silently. A little like when he’s a snake, hiding in the grass; he doesn’t want Aziraphale to notice him watching, committing this to memory. Maybe, if Crowley looks longer, watches longer, memorises this, he’ll convince himself that it won’t all disappear.

Inevitably, Aziraphale does look away from his book. Bright eyes looking down at him. He blinks, and his expression turns into pure love. A look of adoration that only an angel could nail so perfectly.

“Darling boy,” Aziraphale says gently.

Crowley watches Aziraphale’s hand come to stroke his head. He closes both eyes for a moment and feels it.

“You should sleep,” Aziraphale whispers. His thumb stroking the hair out of his forehead. “Otherwise you’ll be a terrible grouch tomorrow.” Crowley snorts. “Cheers.” “You know it’s true,” he chastises quietly, humour in his voice.

It’s warm. And he’s forgotten that his eyes are closed. He’s forgotten everything except the feel of Aziraphale’s hand on his head. He barely hears Aziraphale when he says:

“I’ll be here when you wake up.”

***

It’s so hot. Hotter than Hell, and he should know.

It’s hot enough that his tears boil his skin and his throat goes dry. His body is evaporating. And he’s pulled further into the bowels of the furnace, where the flames wriggle more freely, like they’re laughing. He’s pulled further in and he watches the shop, this corner of his heart- he watches it crumble, dancing in Hell orange.

“AZIRAPHALE! AZIRAPHALE FOR GOD- FOR SA- FOR SOMEBODY’S SAKE WHERE ARE-”

Something explodes. Something happens that means he’s suddenly thrown across the room but he doesn’t know how. His mind will only take him as far as you’re on the floor. You’re looking at the ceiling. You’re alone, now.

It’s so hot. It’s hot, so why is he shivering? Why do the tears keep coming, where are they coming from- everything should have dried up, everything has disappeared- everything inside him has been scooped out and cooked and smashed. The brittle, hollow person that he is. A fragile little glass demon, molded for evil, made empty and aching. Filled with traitorous love for an angel. There’s nothing left inside him now. They’ve taken it all, emptied him again.

“Somebody killed my best friend…”

It’s so hot. It’s hot and he’s burning and he feels ash and smoke clog up his throat. He kneels amongst the rubble. But that’s not what makes this feels like hell.

“BASTARDS!”

He could stay here forever. What good would it do to leave? What good would any of it-

“Crowley?” He can’t see through the fog, the tears, the smoke, the sleep-haze of his mind. He doesn’t need to see.

“Crowley- Crowley-”

Like an electric shock- he hears himself gasp- he jumps upright- convulses with deep breaths- his whole body shakes.

“Crowley- oh, Crowley. It’s alright. It’s alright-”

It’s only then that he begins to see what’s around him- the yellow light of the bedside lamp, the sheets tangled at his feet. Aziraphale, sat in front of him. Huge, anxious eyes trying to make contact with his, a weak smile on his lips.

“You’re here, you’re, you’re, you’re-”

And before Crowley even realises that he’s said this aloud, he’s brought into a tight hug. His own cold, clammy skin pressed against Aziraphale’s cheek; soft eiderdown hair in his vision.

“I’m here. I’m here, dearest.”

He feels Aziraphale’s hand on his head, gently stroking through his curls. He feels another pressed firmly against his back. Held there, as if to stop him from drifting away. And that’s what brings him back- that’s what brings Crowley back to the moment, what makes the scorching heat on his skin disappear and the hollow feeling fill again. That’s what brings him back to now, to a world where Aziraphale is alive, and he feels the sob of relief rise out of him.

His fingers dig into Aziraphale’s back, and he clings on for dear life.

“You’re here, now,” Aziraphale soothes. “It’s alright now.” Crowley is still shaking. He’s shaking because there’s that bitter little animal inside of him that doesn’t believe Aziraphale, that’s angry at him for telling him something so stupid, gnashing it’s teeth at the idea of trusting and relaxing and the suggestion of not being on high alert.

It makes him dizzy, how fast he pulls away from Aziraphale and stands up.

He backs away from his angel. His angel looks back- calm. Prepared. Hands raised like a lion tamer. Kneeling on the bed, amongst a cloud of bedsheets.

“Don’t,” Crowley growls. Backs away a step further. Aziraphale’s serious eyes fixed on him, hands on his tartaned knees. “Don’t. Don’t.” “Alright,” Aziraphale nods slowly. Expression neutral, quiet. “Alright.” “You have- you don’t- don’t, jusssssssssst don’t, don’t say it’s alright now, ssssstop saying alright.” Aziraphale listens. Crowley grips the material of his pyjama top in his hand, as if to tear it off, although he doesn’t. He’s trapped and exposed all at once and he wants to shed his skin like he’s still a snake.

“You don’t know, sssso you can’t say it’ssss alright because you don’t know, you don’t know what’ll happen or what the next ineffable-f-fucking-plan issssss or, you- you can’t, it could all go wrong any minute and you could disappear again just like lassssst- like lasssssssssssst- like-”

None of this really feels like it’s happening yet. It’s the middle of the night, nothing feels real, he doesn’t trust that Aziraphale’s really there and this feels like the dream. This feels like the moment that will disappear, not the burning bookshop. Oh yes, the burning bookshop feels like it’s been branded inside of him forever. But this-

“Thissss- thissss- for FUCK’S sake. This. This is transient. It’ssss not. It’s.”

“Crowley.” Aziraphale’s voice breaks, so he swallows. His expression breaks too, so he corrects it. Body bathed in gold light and shadow. “Crowley.” “Don’t pander me, don’t say those thingssss.” He hears his own voice break now. Feels his face contort with tears. Feels his hands grip the material of his pyjama top again, clutching like a child. “Don’t lie to me. Nothing’sss alright forever.” “Things have changed,” Aziraphale replies quietly.

“NOTHING changes!” Crowley shivers, a whole body shiver. “Six thousand years should have taught you that by now, angel- Heaven, Hell- they’re never gone, it’s never over-”

“Is that what you were dreaming about,” Aziraphale asks, brows raised and eyes sad. God, Crowley’s made him sad. He can’t cope with it. He feels that snarling animal in him falter, whimper. “Is this about Heaven and Hell, Crowley? Because,” Aziraphale shakes his head uselessly. “I don’t know what to do about that. I’m so sorry. I’d do anything to make you feel safe, darling boy. I don’t know how I can do that, not yet, except tell you that I’m here. I’m here.”

“You died, Aziraphale.”

Crowley gasps a shuddering breath. Aziraphale’s eyes flutter and widen in horror and understanding.

“You died. You discorporated, died- however you want to look at it- they killed you and you were gone and I was alone, and I didn’t- I was going to let the world burn for it, angel. I was going to let all of it burn and I was going to go with it because you weren’t here-”

“Crowley-”

“There’s no point in any of this, being here, there’s no point of wine or music or Bentleys without you and you just disappeared. You died, you let yourself get killed and you bloody well left me and I- I- you were gone, angel, you… You and me. How can I believe this’ll stay?”

Aziraphale’s up from the bed faster than he’s ever seen him move before. And Crowley goes to meet him- throws himself into Aziraphale’s hug the moment he’s on his feet. They stand there in the semi-dark room and hold each other, Crowley’s choking, coughing sobs filling the little room. There’s a half empty cup of hot chocolate on his bedside, and the marshmallows have congealed. Aziraphale’s book is on the floor, pages open. And he feels the damp of Aziraphale tears on his shoulder.

“My dear. My dear, dear, Crowley.” Aziraphale’s voice wobbles and strains. Like a bow shuddering along the strings of a violin. “I love you so much. With everything I have.”

Crowley presses his face against Aziraphale’s shoulder. “I love you,” he croaks.

Crowley clutches. Aziraphale’s hands press tighter against Crowley’s back.

“There is no way in Heaven, Hell, Limbo, Earth or whatever dimension God may have devised that would stop me from being by your side. If I’m discorporated again-” Aziraphale sighs. “I’d do anything to come back to you. I’d find you no matter what, Crowley, just like last time. Do you understand?” “I’m sssorry for making you cry,” Crowley whispers.

“Crowley, do you understand? You must know that I’d never leave you, not really. Never.” “Aziraphale.”

His angel is so soft, so gentle to hold. He doesn’t fracture or break like Crowley does. He bends and pillows the blow of every painful thing. His arms are around him and he feels held.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says. “My love. You don’t have to trust me yet-”

He feels sick with guilt. “I do-”

“I understand, Crowley,” Aziraphale says. And then he pulls away a little, enough that he can look at Crowley, enough that he can see Aziraphale’s watery blue eyes and blushing pink face. His hands cup Crowley’s face. “I understand you may not believe it yet, but it’s true. No matter what happens, I’m here. I’ll find my way back to you.”

Their foreheads meet. Fresh, hot tears pour down Crowley’s cheeks.

Aziraphale wipes them away, swallows loudly and takes a deep breath.

“Come back to bed,” he says gently.

They both do. Crowley carefully kneels on the bed, lies down on his side and curls up into Aziraphale, head on his arm. He lies there and feels his shaking body still, feels Aziraphale’s lips press against his sweaty forehead and stay there. Not quite a kiss, but something kinder.

The room is quiet with their slowing breathes, naturally falling in sync. Crowley’s eyes stare at the tartan pattern of Aziraphale’s pyjamas, the buttons close enough in his vision that they blur.

And then Aziraphale moves, just a little- stretches to his bedside table and takes a book. Crowley doesn’t move to give Aziraphale his arm back. Nor is he going to sleep any time soon. And so he allows him one hand only to open the book and prop it open against his knees.

“The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex,” Aziraphale reads. “Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance…”

Crowley doesn’t question it. He doesn’t see the point in arguing, not when the sound of Aziraphale’s voice fills the hollowness. Aziraphale reads Sense and Sensibility, Crowley’s head on his arm and a hand tracing gently along his arm. They lie like that for hours, Crowley quietly listening, arm slung across Aziraphale’s stomach.

Eventually, the light begins to wink through the crack in the curtains. It starts with that light blue almost-morning sky, then with the watery yellow of the winter sun. Crowley watches, Aziraphale’s voice filling the silence; he listens until it feels real. As real and as natural as the rising of the sun.

#my writing #hurt comfort #ineffable husbands #good omens #aziraphale #crowley #fic prompt #except not lmao

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holdthosebees · 4 years ago

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TMA As Classical Tragedy

Building off of this post because it’s rattling around my head--the idea of tragedy-as-wrong-narrative isn’t just a question of what environment a character would thrive in, it’s specifically playing off of the idea of a hamartia, a fatal flaw/error that puts the protagonist on the wrong path and sets them up for destruction. Nowadays, the hamartia is often treated as something inherently wrong with the protagonist, an intrinsic negative personality trait that leads them to make the wrong decisions; however, in its original context, it may also refer to a simple mistake, made in ignorance, that traps the protagonist on the road to failure through no fault of their own. In the story of Oedipus, for example, the hero has no way of knowing that his future wife is actually his mother; the choice to marry her is a reasonable one based on the information he has at the time, even though it dooms him. Tragedy-as-wrong-narrative, therefor, is the idea that a character makes the right choices in the wrong context; their hamartia, be that a trait or a decision, is itself a morally neutral thing that wouldn’t cause them harm if circumstances were different. If Oedipus had been in a different story, one with fewer prophecies and less incest, the choice to marry the queen would have been a positive one, and he would have been elevated to kingship and lived happily ever after. In Jon’s case, boiling his tragedy down to a single hamartia is a little bit difficult. He makes a series of choices that, while they were made somewhat inevitable due to the fact that he was specifically picked by Elias because his trauma would lead him to make those choices, take him down the path to ruin. These choices are impacted by a number of personality traits: the drive to know, the inability to open up to others, and impulsivity, to name a few. Fundamentally, though, I think the narrative points to Jon’s hamartia being the prioritization of knowledge over his own wellbeing: the willingness, or eagerness, to throw himself further into a situation that is dangerous to him, in order to make sense of it.

The Inciting Incident, which locks Jon on the path to destruction and leads to the destruction of the world, is Jon reading Jonah’s letter. This is slightly at odds with the classical model of tragedy: the tragic end is meant to come as a direct result of the hero’s own choices, so having him be mind controlled into doing something he explicitly doesn’t want to do kind of undermines that. However, it still fits if we interpret this moment as the cumulation of a series of choices, some big and some small, that strengthen Jon’s connection to the Beholding. Agreeing to take the job in the first place is one; so are his decisions to shake Jude Perry’s hand, to throw himself into investigating the statements he receives while living with Georgie in season 3, to use compulsions, to hide his feeding from the others in season 4. By continuing to engage with this pattern, Jon strengthens it, until he can no longer break out of it.

In episode 92, Elias essentially states as much:

You never wanted [to serve the Beholding], no. But I’m afraid you absolutely did choose it. In a hundred ways, at a hundred thresholds, you pressed on. You sought knowledge relentlessly, and you always chose to see. Our world is made of choices, John, and very rarely do we truly know what any of them mean, but we make them nonetheless.

This line is controversial in the fandom for a number of reasons, which I don’t particularly want to touch on here. Elias, it should be noted, isn’t the most reliable of narrators, and he’s working on passing blame off onto Jon during this conversation. However, for the sake of this essay, we will take this statement as a given value of true: Jon’s choices repeatedly, albeit unknowingly, strengthened his connection to the Beholding and lead to his status as an avatar of the Eye. Like Oedipus, this hamartia is morally neutral; many of those choices could, in another story, be the correct one. In a world without Jonah Magnus’ scheming, or where the powers themselves were less completely evil, the decision to investigate further in order to better fight evil could pay off. Hell, it might even be the thing that saves the day. If the price Jon payed were lower--if his willingness to sacrifice for knowledge wasn’t tested by situations that demanded higher and higher sacrifices--then his lack of self regard would have less of an impact. In another story, stopping the Unknowing might have been the climax, and Jon’s sacrifices might have been worth it.

So, in reading TMA through the wrong-narrative model of tragedy, my instinct is to look for the story where the cerebral, inquisitive-above-all-else protagonist prevails. The first one that comes to mind is Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock in the original stories is reclusive, self-destructive (all that heroin...), prickly, and bad at making interpersonal connections. He, like Jon, prioritizes discovery over basically everything else; like Jon, he has people that he cares for, but struggles to let them into his life.

However, unlike TMA’s mystery-horror, the format of a classic mystery incentivizes curiosity: uncovering the conspiracy is how you win, not how you die. In a mystery, Jon’s tenacity at uncovering the truth would be rewarded, and his self destruction and prickliness would be points of growth instead of the things that drag him down. In a mystery, Martin and the rest of the archives crew would serve the role of Watsonian foils, putting pressure on Jon to develop his strengths (loyalty, intelligence, capacity for care) while contributing to the discovery process. Jon would learn his lessons in the nick of time, instead of too late, and that would save the day instead of ending it.

Jonah Magnus would still be a bastard, though. That probably wouldn’t change.

#tma #the magnus archives #meta #one day i'll do a full rundown of tma as tragedy #including hubris #the more i type the more certain i am that the idea of the morally neutral hamartia is central to understanding tma #and the fact that the concept has been assigned moral implications #is the source of a fair amount of fandom confusion #but that's another essay #jo(h)n sims #all takes are subjective disclaimer #pretentious lit nerd brain strikes again

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mysnarkyslytherinsecret · 5 years ago

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After the War, the War Continues

When all was said and done, he survived.

The grief was a weight in his chest that he couldn’t shake, a fullness and a hollowness that throbbed and ached no matter how much he slept or drove himself to distraction.

The scars had faded with magic and time, and he wore layers of thick black cloth like armor so that no one else would see, but he could feel each one, itching and crawling upon his skin, begging him to relive the memories that had branded them onto his skin.

He knew he had to live. For there was a Duty still to attend to.

It was true that he had been ready to sacrifice his life to do some good, but what he hadn’t counted on was the waiting.

The damnable waiting.

Slytherins were supposed to be cunning, resourceful, ambitious. They were supposed to be willing to lie in wait for the opportune moment to strike.

Severus just wanted it to end. For all of the things needed of him to be needed no longer so that he could finally let his weary bones rest for good.

Severus supposed he wasn’t much of a Slytherin. Then again, he wasn’t much of anything after what he had done wrong.

Too little too late, but there is too little to do now.

He found himself pacing the halls of Hogwarts like a tiger in a cage, his eyes darting around for the tiniest bit of novelty. Scaring students doing what they oughtn’t and assigning detentions, he found, took the edge off.

It still wasn’t enough.

He wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, or failure, whichever caught up with him first.

He hadn’t expected boredom.

It was a dull, bleak sort of boredom, sapping him of the energy to fight it. He went through his day in a gray haze, getting little enjoyment out of anything. But then again, he reasoned, he deserved this. A cell without physical bars for him to stew in until he could be put out of his misery.

The drudgery of each day only compounded his feelings of futility, and soon he had all but lost his sense of purpose in the day to day minutiae of forcing himself to rise, dress, eat, teach, and close his tired eyes only to rise once more the following morning.

Tired, tired, tired. He could sleep for days and still be as desperate for rest as when he did not sleep at all.

Eventually, he simply allowed the insomnia to consume him.

Walking the halls of Hogwarts at odd hours was almost as good as sleeping, really. It was a dark daze where he could focus on the movement of one foot to the next, the mental math of orienting himself in darkness. Sometimes, he thought that he must be in some sort of nightmare after all— he must have died and fallen into some sort of hell, or maybe he would open his eyes and he would be in the infirmary after yet another deadly prank had caught him unawares, courtesy of the Marauders.

If only, then he could allow himself to finally let go.

The stupid, smug face of Harry Potter always brought him back to reality; those angry, hating eyes the same as his mother’s when she’d finally been shot of him. The hot spike of shame speared him through the chest each time, no matter how much he steeled himself against it. Every glance was a slammed door in his heart, and he could hardly bear it

Severus stood at Dumbledore’s right hand, serving him like he’d served his more sinister master before, in a series of mindless fetch-quests and daily drudgeries that he forced himself not to think too much about. Oh, none of it was as obviously evil as what he’d done before. He’d never brewed a poison, or created a spell that was obviously meant to cause harm. But he created spells to hunt down those who had once called him brother. He created potions to befuddle and entrance those who had once clasped his hand in solidarity and shared a mark. He created brews to give luck to those who he had been at odds against, and to give advantage to Aurors, who in his opinion, were little better to their victims than the brutes who’d carried the Mark. Albus thought that he was sparing Severus the guilt of knowing how his work would be used by the Ministry, but Severus was no fool, nor was he in the habit of lying to himself.

He was worse than complacent. He was doing his duty, trying to do good where he could, but there was so much more to the “anything” he’d promised, and it was rare for him not to think of familiar grinning faces twisted in anguish when news of another arrest was broadcast over the wireless.

He couldn’t read the Daily Prophet anymore, not now, now after...everything.

As time went on, he began to realize that the worst part wasn’t the waiting, not really. It was forgetting that he wasn’t safe, getting swept up in the drudgery of the day, only to have the sudden leaping terror of his past actions, his past enemies, his past allegiances thrown in his face. The aurors were the worst. Every time he was forced to chaperone down at Hogsmeade, he would inevitably find himself face to face with one of the ruddy-cheeked bastards, and they’d be sure to follow him about, harassing him and providing him with thinly-veiled threats about how they knew his “true” allegiances and that one day the “old man” wouldn’t be there to protect Severus any longer. Severus, instead, steeled his features into neutrality and locked his body into a pose of nonchalance. Even his body had become a prison to his true self.

Always, Severus kept these moments secret. It would do no good anyway. In fact, Severus had plenty of experience to tell him that it would probably be worse.

And so, it went. Each day, a quiet battle against his baser instincts, his volatile temper, and the great Nothingness that whispered to him about the comforts of oblivion.

“Bae grateful, Severus,” Albus reminded him often, “You still have your life ahead of you.”

“A life, perhaps,” he muttered to himself, “but it is not my own.”

#severus snape #angst #headcanon #mini fic

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botslayer · 5 years ago

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Fantasy and Scifi “Racism,” an opinion piece:

This whole thing is gonna be a slurry of politics, hot takes, nerd shit, some pictures to make it not a snooze fest on the eyes, and me asking the lot of ya to consider both sides of an argument. If you have a problem with any of that, please leave. All that said, let's get on with it: Let’s take three gentlemen for an example. One is from Poland. One is from Angola, one is from South Korea. What does that tell us about them? We can infer averages. For example, The average Polish man’s height is about five feet, ten and a half inches, so the Polish gentleman’s height might be in that ballpark. A very well known Korean dish is Kimchi, so it is moderately safe to assume the Korean man has, at some point, eaten it. Two of Angola’s largest provinces happen to be “Moxico” and “Cuandocubango” and one of it’s most populated is called “Huambo” So it would be a moderately safe bet to assume the man from Angola is from one of those areas. Their countries/continents of origin don’t directly tell us much though. Hell, we could be dealing with a Polish little person, a Korean who has bafflingly never had kimchi and an Angolan from Lunda Sul. We also don’t know about their outlooks, their lives, mental conditions they might have. Hell, we may not know what race these guys are. There’s a slim chance the Angolan Gentleman is Chinese (1.4% of the country’s population) Or that the Polish guy is ethnically German. We just don’t know. What we do know for a fact is that they’re all human men. They have (most likely) similar psychology, anatomy, dietary need to not starve to death or dehydrate, etc. And that’s about it. Now let’s take a sample from three fictional species off the top of my head: Starting with a Furon from Destroy all humans.

Now, Furons are pretty much universally shorter and physically weaker than humans, so it is safe to assume our single Furon has these qualities. He's also likely a psychic as that's a common attribute of his people. Also common would be the perception of humans as cattle, his possession of advanced force field technology is also pretty much a guarantee. Outliers exist and all that but something worth mentioning: This Furon is a Furon. In other news: The sky is blue, yeah? The problem is though: The Furons are very much not humans. And there aren't too many "races" in that equation, either. Just the populace of the Furon Homeworld. It's also worth noting that we don't actually know what Furons eat, their water intake any of that. We know only so many details but with just those, it's obvious that Furons and humans are too damn different. For species two, let's look at Mind Flayers from DnD.

Mind Flayers, otherwise known as "Illithids," are generally humanoid creatures born through a process known as "Ceramorphosis." See, Illithids are anatomically asexual, as in, they self inseminate and produce eggs from their mouths. They put the eggs in with an entity called "The Elder brain" which is a conglomerate of other Illithid brains, the tadpoles eat one another or get eaten by the brain for about ten years before being selected and implanted into a sentient creature (Humans, elves, etc) From there, the tadpole eats the brain of that creature, replacing it with its own and slowly altering their anatomy until you get a malevolent microcthulhu with potent psychic powers and the need to eat one entire human-level brain every month. Mindflayers start their lives as parasites that literally consume your entire sense of self and mutate you into an unrecognizable husk with a cephalopod for a face. And they have the gall to consider humans lesser? How bloody dare... an entirely separate species of sentient creatures come to that conclusion. For our last example, let's talk about a species from a setting best described as Technomystical: The Skakdi from Bionicle.

For those who don't know what that species is, The Piraka from the 2006 toyline are all examples of Skakdi. Now, Skakdi look, and they are, absolutely brutal. For example, the species was beset by an army of large and lethal creatures called "Zyglak" after becoming what they are today, the lot of them being mutants. The Zyglak were completely wiped out. Skakdi are savage in the best of ways. They aren't just beasts, they're berserkers with the powers of the elements, however, it does require two of them to activate such powers. Thing is though, they're all like that. The entire species has been mutated from what it once was into a legion that knows little else other than slaughter and subjugation of others... Generally speaking, at least. The problem with all three of these species, or "Races" (As I do NOT prefer to call it), and in fact most species from almost all settings is that they're a monolith. Illithids, for example, generally all follow the same societal structure, living in large groups wherever they can under the "guidance" (as in "Hivemind link") of elder brains, some strike out on their own, but for the most part, they live under elder brains, no matter where in the world they are. There aren't competing Illithid Nations or sub-species with things that makes them distinctly Korean or Aztec inspired unless the DM adds those things. And even then, when settings do that, say, Warhammer, there are some groups that are a national proxy (The Empire is Germany, Bretonnia is France, etc) and then some proxies are just an entire species. (See the Lizard Men, who went from Native American-coded to Aztec over the course of some years.) Adding to these things is a slight elephant in the room. Alignment systems. See, humans in games like DnD can be anything from neutral evil to chaotic good, true neutral to lawful evil, etc. But then some species are stuck as inherently good or evil or inherently lawful or chaotic. The problem with saying that about a sentient species is that it smacks a bit of actual, real racism/racist ideas. The idea that this group of beings that just lives differently to the rest of us is inherently almost anything is clearly bad, right? Well... Maybe if we didn't do that IRL, that would feel more genuine. The hell am I on about?

We, as humans, understand that other species of everything from primates to insects are naturally more aggressive, more gentle, more poisonous, more endowed with certain senses, etc. All except for other groups of humans. Because save for pigments of skin, general height, and elements of culture, pretty much all human groups are the same. That said: Point me to the the race of humans more naturally endowed with psychic powers. Or the human race that can only go on by implanting itself in other humans and slowly making people lose their minds until only they take over said body.

I can show you examples of animals doing the whole “Eating you from the inside out” thing. But not humans. Hell, even cannibals have to get a cut off of ya first. But that’s just how beings like Mind Flayers operate. I can show you examples of more aggressive insectoid life vs ones that just want to be left alone. Generally speaking, a wasp is more aggressive than a ladybug. But that’s because they evolved differently to one another. Like Mind Flayers have from elves. Or like Furons have from Blisk. Or like The Skakdi had from Matoran, even before being mutants. Does that make them (wasps) “Evil” though? Well... No. The problem is that wasps took on the various scary attributes they did because that was the hand nature played for them. A wasp does not choose to start life by eating it’s way out of a living tarantula and then spending the rest of it angrily defending whatever it considers to be it’s “territory” only to lay another one of its kind into another tarantula, that’s just what the little bastards do without thinking because that’s how they adapted to the world. I would say though that Furons are evil. They view an entire species they consider intelligent (Even “Loosely”) as cattle to harvest DNA from and otherwise use as playthings, killing them en masse just for shits and giggles. Mindflayers, I would say much the same of unless they willingly find violent/genuinely harmful examples of intelligent life that will do the world no good and then eat only them. But no, these freaks bred an entire species of creatures to have massive brains and be super passive just to make eating their brains easier. That’s pretty damn evil.

(Pictured above, an Oortling from Forgotten Realms 2e) Creatures like the Krill from Seth Macfarlane’s “The Orville” believe all other sentient species are lesser than them. The galaxy is for them and them alone to conquer and do with as they please. Such is the Will of their god Avis. They started stabbing a human head live in front of other Krill in an episode as part of their religious practices. But then the species has some nuance. This fundamentalism and extremism is how they cope with being so damn small in the face of an uncaring, unfeeling void. So are the Krill evil? No. They’re afraid.

Coming back to the Skakdi, They started out as relatively peaceful until a creature from the Makuta species showed up and mutated the lot of them into the magabadasses they are now. All of them now have, fighting skill equal to, if not greater than most Toa, and even elemental powers. But they aren’t all evil. They’re just aggressive, angry, and furthermore, also probably hurting. A peaceful existence was just taken from these poor bastards, all they know now is conflict with one another. So are the Skakdi evil? No. Some of them might be but it ain’t because they’re Skakdi.

See, Skakdi and Krill are important things to remember here because they, while still being monolithic as cultures, have a little more depth than just the myriad ways in which they’re evil bastards. But Mind Flayers? Not really. Not unless the DM adds that. Furons? I mean... Sometimes they become friends or mate with humans but not usually. And what of the big old elephant in the room? The Orcs of D&D? Orcs as a species were recently described as only having limited capacities for things like empathy... If raised outside the violent and chaotic madness that is living with other orcs.

This is the thing that sparked this post, so I will now, at the near end, address it specifically: People find the wording here to be reminiscent of things actual racist propaganda and ideas perpetuated about pretty much specifically black people as I understand it. Which, I genuinely wouldn’t know. I never really grew up around that stuff and I do my best to avoid racists/racism in my day-to-day. But to me? This just makes a depressing kind of sense. The species that evolved/was made or whatever to be this big, hulking set of warrior badasses. has a limited ability to understand what it is to be the other guy. Seems legit. Especially when you remember that even if Orcs are just another group of primates, they aren’t human and would likely have psychological differences to humans.

This is a baby chimpanzee. Look at it. It’s cute. You want one, don’t you? Well... That’s not advised, honestly. Chimps can be fucking monsters. Don’t know what I mean? A. I’m surprised. B. Just google “Chimpanzee attacks” if you have the stomach for it. Not all Chimps will do it, but chimps can and do, do it. Some Chimps hunt monkeys for food in their territory. It’s royally fucked up, but its a thing they do. And you know how different human DNA is to theirs? About 1%. I personally don’t see anything wrong with saying “An entire species is evil” in any setting other than that being shallow as fuck. I also personally don’t see anything wrong with suggesting that a species has limited empathy because honestly...? Just look at nature and even humans. Fantasy and Scifi often entertain the idea of “What if we are not the only living things smart/naturally equipped enough to build a society?” But the sad reality is if we weren’t? Most other species wouldn’t act a damn thing like humans, most other species probably wouldn’t give a shit about us, and a large number, even if they can and do act like us in some ways, will not in all ways. So, to bring this ramble to something resembling a conclusive point: Fantasy/Scifi “Racism” (As in just being prejudiced, although it should just be Xenophobia, IMO) is way more understandable and even more easily believable than the real thing because we stopped talking humans the second we brought in the crazy dudes with octopus heads. Or who are just naturally, by virtue of their species (not “race”) psychic. And even if it was just between groups that didn’t exist, nature proves that it would most definitely happen. But those are just my thoughts, anybody wanna weigh in? I’m all ears.

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mneiai · 4 years ago

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My Fanfic Status Updates

Posted WIP:

Everybody Needs Luck - (Star Wars) Obi-Wan travels back in time to his 13 year old body on Melida/Daan and starts changing the galaxy. Time Travel AU. Nield/Cerasi/Obi-Wan, future Jango/Obi-Wan and Cerasi/Satine.

Status: Actively being worked on, have a few new chapters nearly finished. Will probably be getting to a larger time skip soon.

Cuy'kaysh Dar - (Star Wars) Obi-Wan falls on Naboo and flees. Jango sees him fighting Jedi and recruits him to the Cuy'val Dar. Fallen!Obi-Wan AU. Jango/Obi-Wan, Priest/Reau.

Status: Actively being worked on. Have the barebones for a few new chapters.

Biding Time - (Throne of Glass) Dorian's happy ending falls apart and Hollin uses dark magic to send him back in time. Time Travel AU. Valg!Dorian. Many Dorian-centric ships.

Status: Currently just having issues with time constraints because I need to reread the early Manon stuff for the next few chapters and I haven’t yet.

A Dragon in Wolf's Clothing - (ASOIAF) Oberyn's mark fills in--and shows him the true identity of the Bastard of Winterfell, his soulmate. Soulmate AU. Oberyn/Ellaria, future Oberyn/Ellaria/Jon.

Status: Will be trying to get a new chapter or two out soon-ish.

Eventuality - (Game of Thrones) Sequel to Potentiality. Jon and Daenerys die, then wake up in the past in different versions of themselves. Now they face conquering a Westeros very different from the one they so temporarily ruled before. Time Travel AU. Trans!Jon, Genderfluid!Dany. Jonerys.

Status: Currently on the backburner, I don’t want to rush the next few chapters but am not super motivated.

Fire in the Rain - (ASOIAF) Jon brings his girlfriend Sansa home to meet his eccentric (dangerous) family, who still follow ancient Valyrian customs. Modern Westeros AU. Jonsa, Jonerys, Rhaenys/Aegon, others.

Status: I kind of write a little here and there when motivated, so have no idea when a full chapter will be done.

Trinity - (ASOIAF) They loose the War for the Dawn, but Sansa, Arya, and Jon get a second chance. Time Travel AU. Sansa/Elia, Jon/Night's Queen, Robb/Dany.

Status: Omfg I’m so close to being done with this, I’m trying to get motivated to do the last few chapters haha

A Song of Light and Darkness - (ASOIAF) The Targaryens conquered most Westeros with dark magic, now they finally have the key for taking the North. Alternate Fantasy World AU. Many ships.

Status: I’m ngl mostly have updated because it’s one of my friend’s favs. It’s pretty on the backburner right now.

Play the Part of Savior - (ASOIAF) They decide to win the War for the Dawn by stopping the very first one--and Jon ends up back in time in the Bloodstone Emperor's court. Time Travel AU. Bloodstone Emperor/Jon, Bloodstone Emperor/his wife, past Sarella/Jon.

Status: Past me did myself a huge disfavor by skipping a chapter in my draft and not making a note what was supposed to go there, so I’m waiting hoping I’ll remember it.

Broken Pieces Floating By - (ASOIAF) A single night in a haunted house changes Ana’s life forever. Modern Horror AU. Elia/Lyanna, Elia/Rhaegar/Lyanna.

Status: I have a very, very detailed outline for the entire thing, which is a little rare for me, so eventually it will be written.

Cut Strings - (World of Warcraft) Anduin refuses to be a puppet king and instead shakes up the entire political landscape of Westeros. Neutral Stormwind AU. Wranduin, Bainduin, others.

Status: I will probably eventually try to rewrite what I have of this. I was trying to keep it semi-close to canon, but that was before BFA came out and showed us that, yes, it was a boring Sylvanas-is-super-evil plot and not something cool. Now I can just go completely out-there AU with it.

No Peace, No Rest - (World of Warcraft) After Stormwind is destroyed (again), Anduin is taken in by the last people anyone would expect a priest to stay with. BFA AU. Darion/Anduin.

Status: I want to continue this at some point because I love Darion/Anduin and there’s barely any out there and also because I love Anduin and Bolvar being all angsty with their surrogate father-son relationship.

Upcoming Drabbles:

Sequel to my Dark Jangobi Order 66 Drabble - (Star Wars) Obi-Wan resented the Jedi, but he never wanted them to be killed off. And he definitely didn’t want to deal with the fallout of it.

Sequel to my voluntary Integration Obi-Wan Drabble - (Star Wars) Obi-Wan is a model Integrator, which is nervewracking for everyone who knows he was a Jedi.

Sequel to my Mandalorian-from-birth!Obi-Wan Drabble - (Star Wars) Jango’s POV

Requested Soulmate Drabble - (Star Wars) Mandalorians can sense the Mand’alor’s soulmate. It is, of course, Obi-Wan.

Maybe Possibly Upcoming Drabbles:

Terrorist Club AU - (Star Wars) Obi-Wan has a pass to an intergalactic club for terrorists from his time with the Young and he uses it to mess with Vizsla.

#my stuff #fanfic updates #i like sad men with negligent parents okay?#also competence #and time travel AUs #i love time travel AUs #most of my drabbles i just randomly decide to write these are just the ones i know for sure i'm writing and will be posted #except for the maybe possibly one #which I don't really want to write myself but gdi i guess i'm going to #except I keep having ideas for it not to be crack but like crack treated seriously lol

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