#not like I’m actively looking for one piece fanfiction of all fucking things

[romanoffsbish]

This is a whole ass man & I’m pulling bets on the fact their mad because they literally have nothing interesting about them that would attract anybody in their right mind.

Not a single thing this person says is truth or makes any sense. Their poor mother probably wishes she actually swallowed that night, it’s okay love, we all make mistakes. I feel bad she’s had to look at them for the past 10+ years.

I’m sorry this anon is pure trash, don’t listen to anything they say 💜 you’re an amazing person, a wonderful write and out of this world beautiful! Fuck them, keep smiling love 💜

Well, I think there’s truth to some things they say, there’s just no reason for it is all. Like, discussing ones identity or size as if that’s a negative piece of them or even representative of a full person. Because like, I am fat, but I’m not made of whale blubber, nor am I this way because I’m just some ravenous glutton lmao. On top of that, it doesn’t make me undeserving to live / breathe. I’m not less than anyone else.

I’m honestly torn between their identity. Part of me imagines a man, likely on our accounts b/c he wants to get off to wlw fanfiction, which is why when he sees intersex characters he loses his shit because he’s stepping into a space that was never meant for him, and is wondering why the pieces don’t accommodate to his needs. As if the world doesn’t placate to his every whim.

I see people headcannoning the anon as a basement dweller, but I don’t. I actually think (if it is a guy) that he has his own place. Probably has a job in tech, or a similar scope, that gets him a comfortable salary — he has it all. Except he doesn’t because he has the personality of a toothpick, and probably makes any women to ever exist uncomfortable so all he has is a hand. So he finds himself infiltrating wlw spaces, then insinuating that we are gay because we were unwanted by his kind, when the truth is, even if we were straight / bi, we wouldn’t want him and that unbearable truth keeps him up at night.

Then, I wonder if it’s a woman who used to be a writer on here, and got shunned for being a terf. Either are likely, but the reason I lean towards this is simply because they are attacking writers who don’t even write or read(never reblogs) intersex pieces. They attacked the person who was blamed(unfairly) for her departure, and they seem vengeful in a way that gives off “has been scorned” vibes. A reason she didn’t go after me from the jump (I presume) is b/c before she left she’d had me blocked (no clue why, but like — thank fuck, right? 😮‍💨)

If so, then to her I say find a different fandom, maybe Harry Potter, it’s obvi more up your alley. Because the majority of the MCU - LGBTQIA+ fandom is not interested in their radicalized (abhorrent) rhetoric. Not everyone on here reads or writes intersex, but from what I can see (and it makes me happy) is that majority rally behind and support the Trans community.

But at the end of the day this is all speculation because whoever it is, they are a faceless coward who gets off on making others upset. Which, btw, isn’t going to work on me because I promise you I don’t care what they think of me. People who actively harass the marginalized don’t garner my respect, and therefore whatever they think / say is nullified to me.

Thank you for reaching out though, I had a good giggle over your meme, and I genuinely appreciate your kind words. I do take them to heart because I actually respect you, ❤️

[sand-worms]

🔥 one piece sorry and/or ummm kof :)

If people are going to write fanfiction or whatever with Law they should be legally required to spend five fucking minutes googling the way his -ya suffix is used to understand the context of why he uses it or just don’t use it at all. Also people need to stop acting like Kiku and Yamato are good trans rep when they really aren’t.

KOF ummm god I don’t know. Yuri should break up with Robert and get with a real man like me I guess.

[lqtraintracks]

I'm sorry to bother you, but what do you think about all the comments saying everyone needs to stop interacting with all HP material including fanfiction because of how horrible JKR is?

Hi there. Yes, her again. I want to take a moment to just acknowledge the next-level cruelty, ignorance, and hatefulness of her newest tweet(s). I saw one of them yesterday and felt sick to my stomach, and then I felt an all-consuming rage. The false and inflammatory rhetoric she’s spreading, make no mistake, contributes to violence against trans women. It contributes in a very real way to them being targeted with physical and sexual violence and to being murdered. JKR is an actual piece of shit. So I will never presume to tell people what is the right and wrong way to handle that for themselves.

Here’s the thing. We all have to make good decisions on our own behalf about whether or not to engage with HP material, whether that be the books and merch, or fan creations. I will never ever think it’s my place to decide that for someone else, and I respect and honor every fandomer’s choice to completely disengage with it all. Take care of yourselves, whatever that looks like.

I will also say that for me, there is a big difference between, say, buying a box set of the HP books or a Hogwarts Lego set or anything else that makes that vile scourge of a person money, and producing or engaging with fan content. I will never buy her shit again. That’s a firm boundary for me. I do not support her or her sickening views in any way. I do, however, continue to write fanfiction and engage in fan content for that fictional world. And let me tell you why.

I’m finding that HP fanworks are not only the best place but maybe the ONLY fucking place to find solace as a queer and gender fluid person who loves HP. It’s the only place I’ve found that is actively producing queer and trans content, which is more important than ever, in my opinion, to countering JKR’s awful lies and monstrous beliefs. There are trans fandomers creating beautiful things, and I would never presume to tell them that they shouldn’t. If your response to JKR hating you is to throw that hatred back in her face and write or draw self-love and love for others instead? I honor the fuck out of that choice. Trans fandomers making one another feel loved and seen is a spectacular way to deal with this shit if you ask me. I respect it just as much as I respect the choice to walk away.

When I write for this fandom now, it is always at least in part a big fuck you to Joanne, but more importantly it’s a message to trans fandomers, and that message is this: I see you. I love you. You are not only valid as a person but you are essential to this and every other fandom. These stories are yours more than they are hers at this point. You have great power here, to create an HP world where you set to right everything that JKR destroyed by being a heinous bigot. Not that you have any responsibility to do so. But it is your world, if you want it.

You are Hogwarts. You are HP. You are magic.

She can never ever fucking take that away from you or any of us. And as a fandomer and creator here, it is my honor to unfuck this world of hers and make it as queer and trans-friendly as possible. Because it should be.

I have not always included trans and nonbinary characters in my fanfiction. This is relatively recent for me, because I’m learning as I go, becoming a better ally as I go, and opening my eyes to the need there a little more every day. It has in fact been JKR’s utter bullshit that finally pushed me to get over my fear of writing trans characters badly, because I was afraid I’d get something wrong, and to just do it anyway, fear and all (and employ a sensitivity reader). It’s because of her hatred and the huge platform from which she spews it that I got over myself real fucking quick on that issue and wrote my first trans characters into a fic. But I’m late. I recognize that. I’m trying to make up for my lack of awareness now.

Look, I love writing HP. These are the characters I fell in love with writing before JKR showed how truly horrible she is. I’m still in love with them. I love telling stories about love with them. I also hate that JKR has made it feel unsafe for many trans fandomers to be here. I fucking hate her for that. But I imagine a world where we all abandoned the fandom because of her, and I think… does that let her win? Does that let her define what Hogwarts is, who these characters are? I don’t have that answer. And just as we all have the individual right to walk away, if there were a mass exodus because of that, so be it. She’d certainly deserve to see her world burned down around her. But that’s never going to happen to her. That won’t affect her, sitting on her piles and piles of money and being a raging TERF. No, that would only affect us. That would be a loss for us.

Yes, it’s a valid choice to walk away, and I support every individual’s right to do exactly that. But I’m going to stay. I’m going to stay so that any trans readers of mine can see themselves in what I write, can see themselves loved in it. I don’t think I’m all that important personally, and there are a ton of creators producing more trans content than I am. But I want to contribute to that. I want to be a small part of someone feeling welcome in HP rather than reviled. I want to be some small speck of someone feeling like they matter and they belong, that it’s her that doesn’t belong anymore, not us. I want to take HP back and write stories about how well we can love each other rather than let her define that world with her hate.

So I’m staying. And I’m writing HP. If you need to back away and leave fandom because of her rampant toxicity, please do that and know that I love and support you. But if you want to stay… there are those of us that are here for you, that want you here, that know trans fandomers make fandom, and we appreciate you. I’m here for that.

[spnfanficpond]

Pond Diving - thoughtslikeamindfield

Welcome to today’s Pond Diving Spotlight! We hope that you enjoy this little insight to our members and perhaps even find some useful tips for your own writing. Happy reading!

Want to volunteer, send us an ask! We’re looking forward to learning more about all of you! Not sure what PD is, you can learn more here.

“Don’t Be Koi About It” - All About You

Name: MJ

Age: 49

Location: Aspen, Colorado, USA

URL: @thoughtslikeaminefield

Why did you choose your URL: I’m a diehard Foo Fighters fan. When I came back to Tumblr after a 4yr hiatus, Foo’s album Concrete and Gold had just come out, and the first single was “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” with the verse:

Thoughts like a minefield I'm a ticking bomb Maybe you should watch your step Don't get lost

What inspired you to become a writer: I love telling stories, both verbally and written. What’s kept me motivated is connecting with people through shared experiences, making people laugh, and making life-long friends as a result of those connections.

How long have you been writing: I’ve been writing since I was 8- or 9-years-old!

What do you do when you are not writing i.e. Job/Hobbies etc? I sell mortgages for a living, laugh and enjoy life with my husband, hike with my dogs, talk smack with my friends and family. I recently hosted a group of fandom friends here in the Rocky Mountains in a big house, where we did all of the above at one point or another, and it was such a joy.

How long have you been in the SPN Fandom? It feels like I’ve been here forever. I was reading Dean/Faith Lehane fic back in 2008 and I’ve been laughing at memes on Tumblr since as long as I’ve been on Tumblr (this is my fourth blog), but I didn’t start actively watching the show until 2015 (-ish?). I truly joined SPN fandom when I started writing SPN fic in the spring of 2018, so a little over 3yrs.

Are you in any other fandoms and do you write for them? Yes! I was active in The X-Files fandom for years via forums, chat rooms, and geocites (it was the 90s and early aughts, after all lol), but never wrote for it; Buffy and Angel in the same manner as well as LiveJournal and wrote a little; I was active in Twilight fandom for a few years and wrote fic there, once sitting on a Twific panel at SDCC; I’ve been peripherally active in several of Norman Reedus’ fandoms and written for him and his roles; and currently, I’m active in SPN, The Boys, anything Jensen does, Ted Lasso (I have fic ideas), MCU and other Marvel media, Star Wars and all things associated (especially Din Djarin’s tiny green bebe Grogu), Lucifer, anything Keanu Reeves does, and super fucking excited for my boy Pattinson in The Batman.

Do you do any writing outside of fanfiction? If so, tell us about it? I am working on a sort of fictionalized memoir based on my family and my relationships throughout my life. My sister and I have a lot of stories to tell, so we’ve been piecing together a concept for the past couple of years!

Favorite published author: Carrie Fisher

Have you ever read a book that made an impact on your life? Which one and why?: Several. I will say, however, that neither Postcards from the Edge nor Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher ever leave my bedside.

Carrie had such a gift with words and expression. She struggled with mental illness, loss, and addiction; she was a soul sister.

Favorite genre of fanfic (smut, angst, fluff, crack, rpf, etc): I’ll read just about any genre, but I seem to gravitate toward explicit content, both to read and write.

Favorite piece of your own writing: This is Sophie’s Choice, so I’ll just go with something easy, fun, and sexy -- Plus One (for which I am currently working on a sequel!)

Most underrated fic you have written: Cactus - Dean Winchester x Meg Masters x Castiel

Idk if it’s underrated, but I don’t think a lot of people have seen it, and I don’t write Destiel very often!

Story of yours that you’d most like to see turned into a movie/tv show:

Run Me Like A River - AU Dean Winchester x AU Jessica Jones

Summary: AU wherein Jessica Jones is super-powered by gov’t experiments to create elite soldiers, the Winchesters are military officers in humanity’s War Against Evil, and they have all gone AWOL from their assigned roles. Dean and Jess embark in a relationship that ends abruptly and explosively until Dean calls her for help on a very personal case.

Warnings: explicit, this is not your mother’s dean winchester, major character death, unhealthy relationship dynamics, bondage, rough-sex, biting, bruising, blood, anal sex, ptsd

Favorite Tumblr Writer(s): @inkiestdawn @itmighthavebeenintentional @lastactiontricia @littlegreenplasticsoldier @mrswhozeewhatsis @rockhoochie @stusbunker @there-must-be-a-lock @wayward-and-worn

Favorite Fic from another writer: Heard, Seen, Believed by @stusbunker -- yes, I beta’d this fic, but I beta’d it because it was amazing. This is easily one of my Top 5 Favorite SPN fics ever. It’s sooooo sexy and relatable and UGH.

Favorite character to write: Dean Winchester

Favorite Pairing to write: I have a very soft spot for Megstiel.

Least favorite character to write (and why): I don’t write anyone I don’t thoroughly enjoy writing!

Do you have anyone you consider a mentor? Hmm, Idk about mentor, but I probably wouldn’t be writing fic and I certainly wouldn’t be sharing it without having @icemankazansky @mskathywriteswords and @cracksinthewalls in my life who have each supported and encouraged me through the years in ways that have been absolutely essential to my confidence and competence.

Do you have any aspirations involving your writing? Some day, I want to be able to tell My Story, if I can ever figure out what that is. lolllll

How many work-in-progress stories do you have: Oh, lord, a dozen? Maybe more.

What are you currently working on? The final installment for a 3-part FWB to lovers Dean x female reader AU, some Soldier Boy fuckery, and I’m trying to work up the gumption to get back to my Sam x female reader AU series. I also have a ton of AWESOME prompts from tumblr friends and from Bingos and Challenges that are just waiting for me to not be such a disaster.

“Pond Diving” - All About The Writing

What/who has had the biggest influence on your writing? Style-wise -- songwriters like Jim Morrison, Stevie Nicks, Sarah McLachlan, Dave Grohl, Trent Reznor, and Josh Homme; content-wise -- the feelings and experiences of my life like love, loss, heartbreak, lust, and trauma.

Best writing advice you've been given: Just get the words down; you can edit it later!

Biggest obstacle you’ve faced in your writing: When I jump the gun and think I know where I’m headed but then hit a roadblock and have gotten too far ahead to figure out how to back up!

What aspects of writing do you find difficult when you write fanfiction? Series. I have shit patience so I post too soon sometimes and the next thing I know I’ve hit a wall and the damn thing is stalled.

Is there anything you want to write but are afraid to (and why)? There are things I want to write but haven’t figured out yet, but I’m not really afraid of writing anything.

What inspires/motivates you to write? Human connection, reader feedback, my friends.

How do you deal with self doubt? Go back and re-read things I’ve written that I remember loving and the feedback from readers that touched my heart. I talk to my friends, too.

How do you deal with writer's block? Walk it off, make graphics, ask for insight, read something fresh and different.

Do you plan/outline your story before you start? I try to and I want to get better at this, especially for series’, but I don’t do it enough!

Do you have any weird writing habits? Idk how weird it is per se, but my usual habits include making playlists and graphics and talking out my ass about anything and everything related to the concepts or themes. I’m all about the vibes and aesthetics.

Have you ever received hateful comments on your fic and how do you deal with it? Not really. I had a woman several years ago harass me for being “irresponsible” with the main characters because they had sex without contraception and it was a one-weekend stand, but I just listened to and talked it out with her.

Conversely: what’s been some of your favorite feedback on your fanfic? Most recently I received an incredibly in depth and thoughtful observation on one of my darker and more personal fics that was so spot on that it made me cry. But I can’t not mention my long-time beta here since she is my beta because of her consistently detailed and thoughtful feedback for more than 10 years. She’s been with me ever since.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new and/or struggling writer, what would it be? Surround yourself with people you trust and respect and who feel the same about you so that you are able to be vulnerable, try new things and fail, and grow.

[kleenexwoman]

Fanfiction Trope MASH-UP

25 + 48 + Bucky and Tony

Soulmates and fake dating!

Bucky falls. White clouds his vision. Then there’s something soft under him and the clouds blow away to reveal friendly green letters which say:

Welcome!

Everything is fine.

Bucky is sitting on a white couch in what looks like a moderately nice hotel room. There’s a wooden door on one side. He figures that’s where he goes to meet God or whatever, and it’s a nice couch but it’s not an interesting room, so he takes a breath and opens the door.

“Oh, hello!” A gorgeous dark-skinned woman with flowing black hair rises from behind a big marble desk. She’s wearing a glowing, almost silvery white three-piece suit. “Mr. Barnes, it’s very nice to meet you.”

“I didn’t think God would be so pretty,” Bucky says. He winks at her, then cringes. “Oh fuck. I just hit on God. I’m so, so sorry--”

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” God laughs. “I’m not God, or at least not in the way you traditionally think of God. I’m just the designer of your afterlife. You can call me Architect.”

“Architect,” Bucky says. His dad was a Mason and he’s seen “Dogma” so he’s pretty okay with calling lady God whatever She wants to be called. He lowers himself onto the big comfy armchair nudging at his backside and surveys the office. It’s all white marble with fancy little gold designs, pink flowers in vases and a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. “So I died.”

“Yes, and you’re in the Good Place.” Architect smiles at him. “I know that you were raised Catholic in St. Michael’s Church in Brooklyn, and you can think of it as Heaven as you want, but that’s actually where the similarities to Catholicism end.”

“So there’s no Hell?” Bucky asks.

“There is a Bad Place,” Architect says. “But you don’t need to worry about that, because you’re not there. The good you’ve done in life far outweighs the bad.” Architect picks up a folder made of gold paper and opens it up. The letters writhe like black fire on the white paper and Bucky can’t make out the characters. “Shall I go through it all?”

“Sure,” Bucky says, “refresh my memory.”

“James Buchanan Barnes, mother Winifred, father George, sister Rebecca. A medic in World War II, you fought for civil rights in the 50’s, spoke against the Vietnam War in the 60’s, fought for gay lib in the 70’s and AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s, and continued to be active in other causes throughout your life. You married your long-time partner Samuel Wilson in 2015, your wedding was attended by over two hundred various family members and friends, and you even got an announcement in the New York Times. You died saving a young man from falling onto train tracks. I’m afraid your pacemaker gave out, and it was a painless death.”

“Yep, yep, that all sounds right.” Bucky bounces his leg. “Uh, good, good.”

“I’m sure you’re eager to explore your neighborhood.” Architect smiles. “Let me give you the grand tour.”

*

“There are six hundred and sixteen individuals in each neighborhood,” Architect explains. “That’s hundreds of ready-made new best friends for you! Everyone is carefully selected to create a harmonious blend of personalities which complement each other. Which is not to say that everyone is exactly the same or likes exactly the same things, but simply that you’ll find plenty to enjoy and appreciate about everyone here.”

The neighborhood is like Brooklyn, but cleaner, more colorful, and with blossoming trees everywhere. The streets are soft and springy and nice to walk on. There are stores with names like “Everything Fits Perfectly!” and “Classic Art With Your Favorite Actors” and “Books You Loved In Childhood”, restaurants with names like “Capra Pizza” and “Goat Cheese?” and “Beet of my Heart.”

“Why are there so many places selling goat cheese and beet pizza?” Bucky asks.

“It’s healthy, and people like it,” Architect says a little defensively. “I rather like it. The sweet and the tang go together, and with a little balsamic vinegar and rocket on top… It’s the number one choice of pizza in Roma, Italy, you know.”

“I’ve never tried it,” Bucky says. He doesn’t like beets, he’s never tried goat cheese, and he doesn’t know how you’d put a rocket on pizza, but he guesses it can’t be that bad if God likes it. “So this is it?”

“Well, your ‘neighborhood’ is actually several million miles in every direction, includes over one hundred thousand biomes including a sizeable Candyland and a series of explorable dungeons complete with their own dragons,” Architect says as she leads Bucky over to a charming little town square with a gazebo in the center. “But this is the very center, and it’s ringed by your homes. Well, your starter homes, anyway. If you want to set up your own marshmallow fortress in the Draconic Mountains and live there, you’re quite welcome to, there’s plenty of space, but we’ve arranged for everyone to live in a home that’s perfectly suited to them and their soulmates’ needs.”

“Wait, soulmate?” Bucky asks as Architect beckons him across the green square. “You mean Samuel Wilson?”

“I’m afraid that while the life you shared with Sam was a fulfilling one full of love, he was not the person that was most ideally suited to you in the universe within the time frame that you lived,” Architect says, “which is how we calculate soulmate-ship. Very few people are genuinely compatible with someone who lived five hundred years ago, and even though time is a little bit more fluid here we don’t like to make people wait too long. Fortunately, yours is already here.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready for that,” Bucky says.

They’re in a suburb now, full of wide green lawns and elaborate gardens, wide white sidewalks and smooth brick streets, and houses that range from rambling Victorian mansions to simple log cabins to monochromatic Frank Lloyd Wright cubes filled with huge seamless windows.

“Not ready?” When Architect laughs, it’s like crystal bells chiming. “It’s not like getting married. You don’t have to choose, and you don’t have to worry if it will work out, because it will. The relationship doesn’t even have to be sexual. Some soulmates consider themselves more like siblings. Plenty of people even date outside their soulmate duo for fun, and let me tell you, those neighborhoods throw inventive parties.”

Bucky relaxes a little more. A God who goes to inventive parties definitely isn’t the God from St. Michael’s Church. Maybe Heaven really will be a Good Place for him.

“We’re here!” Architect exclaims. “Welcome to your new home.”

“Home sweet home.” The house Bucky is in front of is… nice. It’s one of those big Victorian farmhouses with just enough gingerbread to be cute, bright sky-blue paint with faded red trim, plenty of little gables and abutments, and a big spreading porch. There’s morning glories climbing over the side and a vegetable garden in the back and a little brook tinkling past. It’s not exactly Bucky’s dream home, but it’s a lot nicer than Brooklyn. He could be happy here, sitting on the swing on the porch and drinking beer with whoever his soulmate turns out to be.

“Oh, not that poky little thing.” Architect laughs again. “To the right, dear.”

The house to the right looks like a huge white alien spacecraft. The front lawn is half lawn and half a gigantic pool, complete with a water slide, diving board, and white sand beach that stretches for several yards around the water. The lawn half is dotted with enough spreading trees to ensure a good mix of sun and shade.

“I live in that house?” Bucky points to the alien spacecraft. The huge, shady lawn and the gigantic personal pool are straight out of his brownstone fantasies, but the enormous sleek house is like a Christmas present he didn’t even know he wanted until he unwrapped it. “The big one? With the pool?”

“The very same!” Architect walks him up the long white driveway. There’s a gorgeous red convertible outside, right next to a sleek black motorcycle. “I believe you wanted a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952?”

“Nothing has a soul like a Vincent ‘52,” Bucky breathes. He runs his hand over the black paint.

“Now that’s a fine motorbike,” says a familiar, male voice. “A guy could feel special on any such like. Been waiting for you to get here so you could give me a ride.”

Bucky’s jaw drops.

Tony Stark, dead billionaire philanthropist and tech genius, is leaning against the open doorway of his new house, black jeans painted on and Judas Priest T-shirt tight over his very sculpted chest. He looks really good for someone who got blown up in Afghanistan last year.

“Are you my soulmate?” Bucky stammers.

“I don’t know,” Tony shrugs, “I think yours might actually be the bike. Which is fine, because there is a cold welder in the lab which is definitely mine.”

“Tony Stark, may I present Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes,” Architect says with a little curtsey. “Sergeant--”

“I know who you are,” Bucky breathes. “Oh my God. My soulmate is Tony Stark.”

“And I know who you are.” Tony smirks. “Veteran, peace activist, committed to the same guy for the better part of a century. A real hero.”

“Yeah, that’s all me,” Bucky says. He closes his eyes and wonders if he’s going to snap out of it any second now, wake up in a hospital bed, but when he opens them Tony Stark is still smirking at him.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to get acquainted!” Architect says cheerily, and glides off down the driveway. Actually glides, literally.

“She’s wearing Heelies,” Tony observes. He hooks his thumbs into the waistband of his jeans and jerks his head toward the door. “C’mon, Sarge, I’ll show you to your room, and yes, we do have separate rooms because I know that you’re kind of a paragon of virtue and I guess waiting is--”

“I’m not a Sergeant,” Bucky blurts out.

“What?” Tony frowns. “Did they get your rank wrong? It doesn’t seem like the kind of mistake--”

“No, no, they made a big mistake.” Bucky shakes his head and little tears prickle at the corners of his eyes. “Really big.”

“If you already think this is a mistake--” Tony begins, mouth curling down into a frown.

“Aw, fuck.” Bucky buries his face in his hands. Now he’s really fucked up everything.

“Whoa, whoa, hey.” Tony’s hand slides down between his shoulders to the small of his back, and then he’s ushering Bucky inside. “Come inside and let’s talk this out, all right?”

*

The house is very high-tech and tasteful, but Bucky doesn’t pay it much attention until he’s seated on a huge cushy couch with a glass cup of something amber in his hand.

“Drink that, calm down,” Tony says. He’s perched across from Bucky in some kind of egg thing and he has a fairly full glass in his own hand. “Are you really that disappointed? Miss your own guy already? I might not have been around during the Civil Rights movement, but I promise I have a few redeeming qualities.”

“I’m not disappointed, believe me.” Bucky downs the shot and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Whatever’s in the glass burns pleasantly and has a hint of vanilla. “I could use a chaser. Do you have Vanilla Coke?”

“Uh, sure.” Tony raises an eyebrow. “Jarvis?”

“At your service.” A slim blonde blue-eyed man appears out of nowhere. He’s dressed as an old-fashioned butler, complete with tails and gloves. He’s got a fancy English accent, too.

“A vanilla Coke for the gentleman,” Tony says.

“Vanilla Coke.” Jarvis holds out a silver tray with a bubbling glass of Coke on it, complete with a twirly straw.

“Thanks.” Bucky tries the drink. “This is really good. Um, what are you?”

“I am an assistant designed to help you make the best use of your neighborhood,” Jarvis says. “You may ask me to provide or answer anything you’d like.”

“He’s amazing,” Tony says. “Watch this. Jarvis, can you get me a panda steak cooked rare, with a side of a baked potato grown on Mars and topped with unicorn butter? And for dessert, I want a Fruit by the Foot that solves Fermat’s Last Theorem.”

“Anything to drink with that?” Jarvis hands Tony a plate of steak and gleaming iridescent baked potato, then unrolls a Fruit by the Foot with a bunch of numbers and characters printed on it. “I selected blue raspberry for your dessert.”

“Actually, Vanilla Coke sounds good.” Tony retrieves the Vanilla Coke and waves Jarvis away. “Thanks, perfect, bye.”

“Goodbye.” Jarvis blips out of existence.

“Panda steak?” Tony offers the plate to Bucky. “It’s really sweet ‘cause all they eat is bamboo. Tender.”

“Uh, no.” Bucky takes the Fruit by the Foot instead and munches on it.

“Mm-hm.” Tony sets the plate down and hunches over, fixing Bucky with a penetrating glare. “So what’s going on? It’s not me?”

“Okay, you gotta gotta gotta promise not to tell anyone,” Bucky says. “Please?”

“I can keep secrets.” Tony’s eye gleams.

“I wasn’t in World War II,” Bucky says. “I’ve never been in the military at all. I’ve never been to a protest. And I’ve never been married, either, and definitely not to a guy because I still haven’t told anybody I like guys. Not even my mom.”

“Wow.” Tony leans forward, his expression softening. “So… who are you? What’s up with you? Do you just not remember anything?”

“My name is James Buchanan Barnes and I live in Brooklyn,” Bucky says. “But everyone calls me Bucky. I am--was--flunking out of high school because I think homework is bullshit, not because I’m stupid. My mom doesn’t know that I got fired from Hydra Burger three months ago, but I make a lot more money selling dime bags of doctored oregano to dumb Long Island kids who think it’s primo kush than I did cleaning out the grease traps. My guidance counselor thinks I’d make a pretty decent garbageman if I can’t make it as a celebrity DJ and rap producer. I bought an issue of “Manscape” for my eighteenth birthday in March and hid it in the bathroom and my mom found it and yelled at my sister Becca for it, and Becca said she was a goddamn adult and moved in with her boyfriend Dennis and I didn’t say anything because my mom let me set up my XBox in her room.”

“So you’re not a veteran activist hero who’s lived a life of virtue and bravery,” Tony says. “You’re a slacker, a drug dealer, a wannabe DJ and probable garbageman, and a eighteen-year-old gay virgin. Who sold his own sister out for porn and video games.”

“Hey, she’s actually really happy with Dennis,” Bucky says defensively. “He’s the Beeper King of Brooklyn.”

“Okay, MC Trash Party.” Tony chuckles. “Beepers. Sure.”

“So, uh.” Bucky finishes the Vanilla Coke, wipes his hands on his jeans, sets the empty glass aside. He closes his eyes and sucks in a shaky breath. “Not really your soulmate and I’m pretty sure I’m not Good Place material. And I know you probably want to call Jarvis and clear this all up so you can get to your real soulmate, he sounds pretty amazing--”

“Wait, wait wait.” Tony holds up in his hands. “Let’s not jump to conclusions here. Let’s think this out. Do you really want to go to the Bad Place?”

“Fuck no,” Bucky says. He lets out a breath and feels better. Safer. A little special, even. He might not belong here, he might be the subject of some cosmic mix-up, but he is in the Good Place, and one of the smartest human beings to have ever lived is going to help him figure out how to stay there. “I really wanna stay here. Would you let me stay here? Even if I’m not your soulmate?”

“Yeah, you can stay here.” Tony frowns, then holds a finger up. “Jarvis?”

“What can I do for you, sir?” Jarvis appears. This time he’s floating a few inches above the ground.

“Am I being tested?” Tony asks.

“I can prepare a short quiz for you on any subject if you would like to estimate your abilities,” Jarvis says.

“As fun as that sounds, that’s not what I mean.” Tony gestures at Bucky. “I mean him. James Buchanan Barnes over there. Is he a test of some kind?”

Bucky’s breath catches in his chest again.

“No, sir,” Jarvis says. “He is not a test. He is a real person and your calculated soulmate.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Jarvis?” Tony asks.

“I am incapable of falsifying any information I know to be true, sir,” Jarvis says, “and I know everything that is true. I assure you that this is your eternal reward, which you two are destined to share together. This is not a simulation, a dream, a bad trip, a magic spell, or a psychotic breakdown, and any feelings of happiness or contentment are normal and to be expected.”

“So you keep saying.” Tony takes another gulp of his drink, then eyes Bucky over the gold-edged rim of the glass. “James. Any questions?”

“How bad do you have to be to get into the Bad Place?” Bucky has a million questions, but that’s the only relevant one right now.

Jarvis holds both of his hands palms up. Two insanely complex equations start to scroll over each palm.

“These are the relevant formulae,” Jarvis says. “I can provide a printout if you would like… which will be five hundred and three miles long in your preferred font and format.”

“No, that’s fine,” Bucky says at the same time Tony says, “Upload it to my cloud.”

“As you like.” Jarvis closes his hands, and the numbers disappear. He turns to Bucky and tilts his head. “Allow me to anticipate your question.”

Bucky tenses.

“Your mother and sister currently qualify for a Good Place neighborhood if they die at this time,” Jarvis says, “and you will be notified for a reunion should they arrive in theirs. However, we are unable to retrieve your father from the Bad Place at this time for any reason at all, including forgiveness and/or revenge, although I can provide you with an audio feed of his most recent moments. Would you like that?”

“I did that with my dad,” Tony says. “It was pretty cathartic.”

“No,” Bucky says. “No, I honestly don’t care. Can I have another Coke? Cherry this time?”

“Of course.” Jarvis produces another fizzing Coke with a different kind of curly straw and a little sword that has three long-stemmed maraschino cherries impaled on it. “Just so sir is aware, elimination is opt-in and at will. You do not have to ask me to toggle that setting, as it were.”

“In case you like that sort of thing,” Tony adds.

“Well, sometimes you gotta leave your mark.” Bucky tries the Cherry Coke. “Mmm. Thanks, this is really good.”

Tony reaches over, slides one of the cherries off of Bucky’s sword, then drops it between his goateed lips by its stem. He curls his tongue around the bright red orb, then pulls it back out of his mouth with an audible popping sound.

“If you don’t require anything else,” Jarvis says politely. He bows to Bucky and disappears.

“So what do you think we should do?” Bucky asks Tony. “I mean, your soulmate is still out there, right? Don’t you want to get this straightened out or whatever?”

“I have been married and then divorced seven times,” Tony said. “Count ‘em, seven. Five women, two men, and one of the marriages was a secret. I’m up to here on soulmates. Also, this Sarge guy sounds like someone my dad would have known and I wasn’t really looking forward to meeting him that much. You sound like you actually know how to have fun.”

“Yeah, I like to have fun,” Bucky says. “It’s kind of my thing.”

“What’s your idea of a good Friday night in?” Tony asks.

“Blunts, pizza, GoldenEye, Beastie Boys on the sound system,” Bucky says. “I like first-person shooters.”

“Classic,” Tony says. “What do you like on your pizza? Are you a beet guy?”

“No, and what the fuck,” Bucky says. “I have a processed meats-only policy on pizza. Nothing from a bird either. What about you, what’s your Friday night in like?”

“A meat lover,” Tony says. “Delightful. Uh, for me it went kinda like… let’s see. Coke, poppers, ben-wa, Wargasm on the stereo. You into any of that?”

“I like jalapeno poppers,” Bucky says uncertainly. “Is ben-wa one of those old Japanese arcade fighters? I’m pretty good at Mortal Kombat. Uh, Smash Brothers.”

“I bet you are,” Tony says. He licks his lips. “Jarvis? Let’s get some jalapeno poppers and sausage pizza in here. Me and my soulmate are gonna play some video games.”

[bukojuiice]

thank god for plot twists like you.

ೃ pairing: (katsuki bakugo x fem! reader)

ೃ warnings: cursing, (courtesy of Bakugo) and slight innuendo.

ೃ genre: fluff overload!! ♡

ೃ  my ongoing bakugo x reader smau (please do give it a read if you have time!) my writing masterlist (if you want to see more from me! c:)

ೃ word count: 1,388 words

ೃ  song inspo: plot twist by niki

ೃ  Katsuki barges in your dorm room after class to see you crying in your bed with your phone in your hand... but why exactly?

It was a typical Saturday afternoon. After a tiring day of classes and hero training, you finally have the chance to rest and relax. And what better way to do that than to read fanfictions?

Oh... fanfictions.

These literary pieces are either a blessing or a curse to a human being on this earth. They bring joy, sorrow, anger, frustration, and it allows your imagination to run wild as you think of all these scenarios and alternate universes. There are even times when fanfiction itself is written better than it’s source material.  

Reading fanfictions is a hobby and daily activity done by millions of people in this world. However, how will your explosive boyfriend react when he finds out?

Not that it is a big of a deal anyway but... Katsuki is a bit harsh, abrasive, and he tends to speak his mind a lot. At times, he says things that he doesn’t even mean at all. The two of you would hang out every day, usually after classes. And so, you are always constantly putting yourself in the middle of danger whenever he comes to hang out with you in your dorm room. As there’s a slight chance that he would catch you reading a 30,750 word fic on Tumblr or Archive of Our Own.  

But there was never really a special activity out there so that the two of you could bond. 

Watching movies with him and playing video games was normal for a couple in a relationship but you wanted to do something with Katsuki that was unique to the two of you alone. 

Unbeknownst to you, that day would soon come. 

Not only did he discover something about you, but, the two of you ended up being much more closer after this fated day.

And that day... is today.

“Sorry Mina-chan! I’m busy this afternoon! You guys can go on and get some ice cream without me!”

You slowly shut the door behind you, waving goodbye to your pink friend. As you  drop your school bag on the floor, you quickly and rather hastily change into much more comfortable sleepwear. After a few minutes, you jump and slump on the bed as you let out a tired yet relieved sigh. “It’s time to read once again and be whisked away to another world.” You then crawl to the edge of your bed, and reach out to pull the drawer from your bedside table. 

You’ve hidden snacks in there from time to time so that you could eat something while reading your beloved stories on the internet. For today, you decided to bring out a box of Pocky you had stashed inside.

Hours felt like minutes as you continued to read with no care in the world. It was a few minutes before sun down, and here you are. A sobbing pile of mess. Crying your heart out over the fact that the Main Character is too naive and dense to notice the feelings of your favorite character (who is the second lead) and so, your favorite character starts falling in love with someone else. 

“Why does this happen to me!? Why is this fic putting me through so much pain and torture!?” 

You continue to bawl and cry your eyes out that you didn’t even notice someone entering your room.

“(Y/N).... why the hell are you crying!? Did something happen!?” Bakugo says in a annoyed yet concerned voice.

You feel your body freeze up. You do not want him to see you in this state. Especially since you’re crying over stories. Fanfictions for that matter. What would we say? How would he react? What if he thought you were weird and end up saying something insensitive that could possibly strain your relationship?

“I-it’s nothing.” You slowly turn your head to him. Once the two of you met each other’s eyes, his annoyed expression softens. “I’m fine Katsuki-kun. Don’t worry.” You try to ease his concern by giving him a half-hearted smile. You noticed that he had just finished with training and then most probably took a shower as his hair still looked a bit wet 

The blonde teen sighed as he ran his fingers through his hair. “Why were you screaming anyway?”

You jerk up from the bed and twiddle your fingers. “Ahahahahaha that’s a good question.”  Katsuki continues to give you a suspicious look as he approaches you and sits down next to you on the bed.

Before you could even react, he grabbed (more like snatched) your phone from you and began to scroll down. “(Y/N)... are you reading stories online?”

“Maaaybe maaybe not~” You whistle, trying your best to act normal and TO NOT PANIC as your boyfriend had literally just snatched your phone from you to check what you were doing. At least you were able change to a different story from the tabs before he could see what you were originally reading.

“He licked the tip of his-” Your explosive blonde boyfriend began to read aloud an excerpt from the fanfiction you were reading. “My oh my (Y/N)... is this the reason for your screaming and squealing?” He smirks deviously and scoots closer to you by putting his arm around your shoulder.

You nod. “Yes. This is also why Ochaco-chan has been teasing me by saying that she’s been hearing me snicker and silently cry at night... It’s embarrassing. I know.” You look down on the floor, unsure of what else to say to Katsuki.

The tense atmosphere suddenly disappeared when Katsuki began to laugh. “Silently crying?” He stifles another laugh. “Seriously?”

“Okay... imagine this.” You reach for his hands. He raises a brow at your sudden gesture of affection. “WHAT IF if your favorite character who was meant to be with the main character, gives up hope because the main character is too dense to notice their feelings that they start falling in love with someone else!?” Tears began to stream down from your cheeks again, remembering the angst and the pain the Author put you through. “Won’t you feel really bad and depressed about that!?” 

Katsuki looks at you with a with a very perplexed yet peeved expression. He then notices the passion and the eagerness in your eyes and he couldn’t help but smile a little because of how cute you looked. “Yea. I guess that would be pretty shitty. Why the fuck are you letting it get to you so much though? It’s just a story.”

“That’s the thing!” You exclaim, scooting even closer to him, resting your head on his shoulder. “These are just stories yet they’ve impacted me so much to the point that I’m crying over literary pieces of fiction.” 

“Would you like to read one with me?” You look up at him with your brightest puppy eyes, tilting your head. 

He averts your gaze in attempt to hide hid his usual gruff look, you were about to declare defeat as he might not want to do this sort of thing with you and you didnt want to pry any further. 

Until...

“Fuck it. Let’s do this.”

♡‧₊˚

“(Y/N...) I can’t take this anymore.” Bakugo whines in defeat, dropping your phone on your hands. “How can a story like this fuck someone up so mentally? Can we read something else? Like some of your shoujo manga shit instead?”

Your eyes lit up at Bakugo’s dramatic reaction to the fanfiction you had just made him read. He was surprisingly interested. His eyes were intense and passionate. The same look he has whenever he would train against Midoriya, Todoroki or even Kirishima and, you couldn’t be happier. The two of you finally had something to do that was only unique and special to the two of you. 

“Sure! This one over here is a pretty short read, so we can finish it before dinner!” You wrap your arms around his torso, and hug him close. Although Katsuki wasn’t your typical physically affectionate boyfriend, there were times were he couldn’t help but reciprocate your love language. Today is one of those rare times. 

His arms encircle your waist as he brings you closer to him. “This better be good or else.” He grunts.

“Oh it is and there are so many other genres for us to read that is just waiting to be explored.”

Fin.

[amerrierworld]

Supposed To Be

Ocean’s 8 fanfiction

request: the reader finds out what Tammy does at party with the girls and maybe gets angry at Tammy for not telling her and lying to her. Then hets angry at everyone else and they all fell guilty. And maybe tammy says something that’s losses the reader of more. Then the reader walking out. The next morning the reader is ignoring all the texts and calls from Tammy and the girls. Tammy going over to talk to her...

Summary: Tammy is planning something for you with the team, but can’t let you know about it.

Characters: Tammy x fem!reader, the Ocean’s girls, (divorced!Tammy)

Word Count: 2,550

Warnings: Angst angst angst angst angst angst!!!!!! Miscommunication!! Hurt & comfort! Eventual happy ending :)

You first started feeling uneasy when Tammy’s text responses went from excited paragraphs and emojis to one-word answers. It was such a simple thing, but you barely got to see her in person some weeks, and this was the only thing that kept you connected.

After an inevitable divorce, Tammy moved to the city to be closer with the entire group, sharing custody of her children every other week. It had been stressful, but you had been there for her every step of the way, and a fruitful, happy romance had blossomed.

But now, even after all those months, there was a sudden barrier you couldn’t seem to get through. Her phone calls were hasty, her texts short, and no one else in the group seemed concerned like you were. You got no updates on her kids, which usually she couldn’t stop taking about. Frankly, it felt like she had gotten tired of you.

So, you shut your phone off and went out for the rest of the day, window-shopping and wandering around the city to get your fuming mind off of things. 

-

On the other side of the city, in Lou’s spacious loft, Tammy had gathered the other ladies, vigorously typing lists on her phone as she paced back and forth.

“Really, Tam, you’re overthinking this! Why do you feel the need to go through all this?” Lou sighed, swirling her glass of rye. 

“Because it has to be just right,” Tammy snapped back. 

Everyone knew how detail-oriented and perfectionist Tammy was. It was a life-saver for criminal activity and ensured safety for the gang to get through undetected. But sometimes, in ordinary life, it was a bit overkill.

“I really don’t think Y/N needs all this, babe,” Nineball added, lounging in a large, velvety bean bag and a joint between her lips. “Lou’s right, you’re overthinking it.”

“Listen, she’s my girlfriend, and this is my plan. Can you please just be a little bit supportive of this?” Tammy threw her hands up, exasperated. 

“Her birthday isn’t for another month,” Debbie pointed out.

“Exactly, I’m already running behind!”

The remaining seven shared a few bemused glances before Daphne handed Tammy a glass of wine to calm down. Debbie sighed, pulled up a chair and reached for the snack bowl.

“Alright, what’s the plan, TamTam?”

-

You still had one of Lou’s door keys from the last heist, and figured it was the best time to return it. It was starting to get late, and it was a bit of a walk, but you didn’t mind. The fresh air did good for your nerves and bad mood. 

You hadn’t seen Lou in ages either, so you figured a quick catch-up was needed too. Not even thinking, you used the key to let yourself in, washed over by warm light coming from inside, and-

Laughter? Music?

You froze. The first person you saw, of course, was Tammy. Your eyes were drawn to her in any room, always. She was laughing, nursing a drink in her hand, chatting with Lou and Debbie, who looked equally as pleased.

There was popcorn popping in the microwave, and the TV was showing a movie. Your heart sank little by little, as you realized that yes, they really had gotten tired of you. You didn’t register the pile of paper and notes on the coffee table, at all.

Lou saw you first, and went a little pale. She registered the keys in your hands were hers, and it clicked in her brain why you were there. She nudged Debbie, who immediately turned off the music, as if they’d been caught doing something illegal.

Then Tammy turned her head and saw you, her beautiful smile fading away instantly. Her mouth hung open a little, as if she didn’t know what to make of you standing there, in the flesh.

Suddenly your confusion melted into anger, and your heart broke little by little as they stood there, staring at you, not even bothering to say anything.

You tossed the keys to the floor, turned around, and slammed the front door shut. 

-

No one was moving. Tammy’s brain was lagging, still trying to register why you  looked so distraught, so betrayed. The rest of the group eyed her shyly. Constance had a mouth full of popcorn that she was afraid to chew down on because of how loud it would be in the silence.

“You fucking idiot,” Rose was the first to speak up- Tammy was shocked to hear her swear. “What’re you doing jus’ standing there? Get out and go after her!”

“Yeah,” Amita said, “she didn’t look too happy when seeing all of us.”

“Did you tell her where you would be today, Tam?” Debbie questioned her, looking her squarely in the eye. Tammy bit her lip, and shook her head. Cue a collective frustrated groan. 

“Tammy, we love you, but you can be so stupid sometimes,” Lou said, grabbing her glass from her. “Go on!”

Tammy nearly stumbled over her heels as she hurried after you, fearing she wouldn’t be able to find you in the dark.

“Y/N?” she called out, frantically looking out as the door closed behind her. She  spun around, looking left and right. “Y/N!”

“Stop yelling,” you snapped. She turned and saw you leaning against a streetlamp, face washed in eerie light. 

“You’re still here,” she said, relieved.

“No, I’m just waiting for a cab,” you said, not meeting her gaze. “You should go back to your party.”

“Do you want to come inside?” she asked you, wringing her hands.

“No, thanks,” you said, shoving your hands deep in your pockets. “I wasn’t invited, so.”

“Oh, Y/N, I didn’t mean to-,”

“No, no, you clearly did,” you shook your head, interrupting her. “It’s fine, really. But next time you get sick of me, have the fucking courtesy to actually break up with me, please?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re barely answering any of my texts, and every time we talk you’re miles away. And now you’re throwing a party with the whole team, except for me. What gives?”

“It’s not what you think!”

“What the hell am I supposed to think, then? Do you even realize what the past few weeks have been like for me? Jesus, Tammy, I’ve been worried sick.”

Tammy didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to lose you, she knew she couldn’t lose you, but to explain the plans and explain everything she’d prepared would ruin so, so much.

“Y/N, I love you with my entire heart. I can explain, I promise.”

“No, forget it,” a cab pulled up to the sidewalk and you yanked open the door. “Come back when you’ve made up your mind, I guess. Unless it’s something I don’t want to hear. Bye, Tammy.”

With that, the cab sped away, and you left a stunned Tammy standing on the sidewalk.

-

It was nearly two weeks later. You didn’t know how on earth you got this far without talking to Tammy at all, but you figured you made it clear where you stood. If she never talked to you again, you understood the message, and you were through.

A bit overdramatic, maybe, you wondered? If it was, you weren’t prepared to be the first one to cave. You wouldn’t go begging and crawling back to her. You were too stubborn and proud- even with the constant crying over the past few days.

You were sitting at a bar, drinking a sweet and fruity drink while watching some mindless sports game on the monitor when a familiar blonde slid into the seat next to you.

“Go away,” you said, not looking at Lou. She  waved her hand, and the bartender set to work on a drink for her.

“Good evening to you too, sweetheart,” she said. 

“What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing. This is my bar after all,” she received her drink and took a big gulp, leaning forward on the bar and looking over at you.

“No it isn’t,” you frowned, trying to piece your memory together. “Your club is dozens of blocks from here.”

“Yeah, and then I bought almost every bar and club on this side of the city. You’re looking at one rich-ass owner, Y/N.” Lou grinned, but you couldn’t be bothered to return the smile.

“Well, congrats Lou. No need to rub it in. Some of us are meant to just be broke.”

“Since when did you become such a downer?”

“Uh, since my girlfriend decided her life was better off without me?” you scoffed.

“Is that really what she said to you?” Lou asked, blue eyes piercing. You shifted in your seat.

“Not exactly, but I know when people are tired of me,” you muttered. “Walking in on the whole team who went through hell together having a party without me kinda sends a clear message.”

Lou chewed her lip, and sighed. She pushed the empty glass away from her and took her time to unwrap a stick of gum. 

It was quiet between the two of you as she got up and straightened her jacket, flicking her bleach blonde hair away from her eyes.

“It wasn’t a party, Y/N,” she said. “Talk to Tammy. She’s been absolute shit the past week.”

You bristled, not wanting to think about Tammy again. But Lou left you to it, paying for your drink, and headed out the door. You rubbed your face, tired, and lonely, and cursing yourself for letting it get this far. 

Hesitantly, you took out your phone, reading the ‘six new voicemails’ notification, and lingering your finger over the green listening button. All from Tammy. 

“Hey, Y/N. Giving me a taste of my own medicine, huh?” A weak laugh. “I’m sorry for not responding or talking more with you.. you have every right to be angry.”

You got up and headed home slowly, going through each voicemail carefully, listening at least twice.

“God I don’t even know where to start. It’s been so... empty without you. Please call me soon? There’s so much I want to tell you.”

Turning multiple corners, you put on your sunglasses, hoping it would hide the tears threatening to spill over. 

“I feel terrible. And the girls are mad at me for letting you get away. Not-not like you ran away, but- but not fighting for you, you know? For such a stupid, stupid reason too. I, uh, hm... I miss you.”

I miss you. You stared at your front door, listening as the voicemail ended, frozen. You were mere steps from getting inside, but there was something in the way.

Tammy looked over her shoulder, standing on your doorstep, and you nearly burst into tears all over again. She was startled just like you were, surprised to see you there.

Your arm dropped limply to your side, voicemail forgotten, and you took a shaky breath,

“I miss you too.”

-

You sat across each other awkwardly. You offered her a cup of tea, she politely declined. Tammy was carrying a large tote bag with things inside, and you were intrigued, but didn’t make any effort to start the conversation. You would remain stoic, and not cave. No matter how beautiful she looked, how rosy her cheeks were, how done up her hair was. But there were giant bags under her eyes that you could not ignore, and something pulled at your heartstrings. 

“You look well,” Tammy said, smiling weakly.

“No I don't,” you replied. Her face fell. “Neither do you.” Ouch. 

“Crazy what only two weeks can do to a person, right?” she chuckled hoarsely.

She continued, “I realize that... that I didn’t handle things very well, with how it ended.. on the sidewalk that night.”

“Hmm.”

Her fingers were shaking, and your resolve nearly crumbled. She reached into the bag and grabbed a massive binder, nearly bursting with the amount of pages. Your name was written in thick letters on the front. 

“This is why I wasn’t talking to you,” she muttered, bashfully. “And I realized that keeping this a secret from you isn’t worth the risk of losing you.. like, actually losing you and never getting to have you in my life again.”

Your mouth fell open as you turned to the first page. It was one of those massive wedding planner books that some young girls like to have when dreaming of their future wedding. 

Only it was for your birthday. Lists and lists of your favourite music, your favourite foods, restaurants, colours and clothes. Plans for venues, DJs, special outings and reservations. Plans for each member of the team to take care of little things; drinks, dances, meals, performers...

“Oh my god,” you whispered.

“It was going to be your first birthday with the two of us really together. It was supposed to be a surprise... perfect and special. I guess I went a little over the top..” she rubbed her neck with her hand and blushed.

“Tammy... oh my god,” you kept saying, with every new page, and new intricate lists and ideas. “Oh my god.”

“This is incredible,” you breathed, tears falling freely now. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“No no, I should be the one apologizing,” Tammy replied firmly. “I should have told you.”

“But then it wouldn’t have been a surprise! Oh my god, I should have been more trusting in you,” you cried softly. “Tammy, oh, god. Tammy, I love you so much.”

Every detail was spot-on. She knew you inside and out, like no one else ever  knew you. No one had ever cared so deeply for you, to think so deeply for you. 

Now Tammy was crying too, and you were two blubbering messes, clasping hands across the table and spilling tears on the pages. Thankfully, they were laminated.

“I’ve scrapped it all,” Tammy confessed. 

Your head snapped up, “What?”

“Well, when I say scrapped.. I rescheduled it for next year.. I didn’t think that you would want this anymore. Not after what I did.”

“Debbie thought it a good idea to just move it to next year, in case you still wanted it, and.. well, in case you and I are still...” she cleared her throat, face red, not wanting to finish her sentence for fear of jinxing it.

You pushed your chair back and walked over to her, cupping her face and kissing her sweetly. She melted in your touch.

“Of course I’ll still want it,” you said, brushing her mouth with your lips. “I want you.”

“So-, are- are we o-okay?”  Tammy’s breath hitched with increasing sobs and you kissed her, again and again.

“Yes, yes, yes,” you laughed, kissing her tears away. “I don’t want anything except you.”

“Good,” Tammy giggled, “because I don’t think I had anymore energy to finish these plans.”

“When did you start making this?”

“About a month ago.”

“Oh, Tammy, my God,” you threw your head back, understanding why she had gotten so distanced now. “You can’t possibly think all of that-” gesturing to the thick book, “would be possible to plan in just a few weeks right? Not with your perfectionist habits, at least.”

“Hey,” Tammy warned, but her eyes were twinkling. 

“Plus, I love every single detail you put in there, I swear, but I don’t need anything except you and the people we love on my birthday. Seriously.”

“Good, because that’s exactly what Lou offered after she slapped some sense into me,” Tammy confessed. “A party at her loft or one of her clubs? And then.. cake?”

“Yes!” you clapped your hands. “Our friends, and cake.”

You slid forward to sit in Tammy’s lap and pressed your warm face in her neck, kissing her there and hugging her closely.

“That’s all I need,” you murmured. “That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

Tammy let out another sob, wrapping her arms around you tightly and kissing the side of your head, nuzzling your hair without abandon. 

A/N: A bit longer than usual but I wanted to do the lovely request justice :D Miscommunication is such a bitch... especially when it doesn’t work out, but in this fiction land it does!! We love soft!Tammy~

[toraashi]

writers on tumblr I’m obsessed with lately (+ why I’m obsessed)

good afternoon I’m 3 hours away from getting off work and about 3 minutes away from losing my mind due to boredom so here is this go follow all these individuals and give them all your love because they’re amazing and their writing deserves all the love and attention in the world 🥰

Author: @nagito-kissmaeda:

Fandom: danganronpa (specifically SDR2)

Rating: 18+ (there are sfw works tho)

My Thoughts: kay listen… i’ve been rereading all these fics over and over for the past week and I can not get over how perfectly nagito is characterized 😭♥️ I love how much attention there is to emotional detail in these works. Like the surroundings are important ofc ofc but I think one of the author’s strong suits is conveying emotion through small actions. Like you can tell the characters love each other, but it’s through the twitch in their eyebrow rather than some straight to the point claim. It makes it feel real and tender even tho the characters are basically being tortured the whole time. Like despite everything horrible happening around them there is still a touch of humanity and it’s found in the smallest of nuances that feel like a hidden gem to the reader, a saving grace sort of thing. also the smut is great So yeah go check these works out.

Personal Favorites: arcade (sfw), lapse in judgment [chapters 3 and 4 have me 😳😭🥵😞] (nsfw 18+), alone at the edge of the universe (nsfw 18+) and the professor komaeda ones are hot as fuck okay that is all thanks

Author: @gureishi

Fandom: Mystic Messenger

Rating: 18+ (with some sfw fics)

My Thoughts: another author I just literally read from religiously anymore. The author’s writing feels so mature and cohesive that it’s so compelling to read. It flows so smoothly while also leaving you on the edge of your seat. The main thing that stands out to me about these fics is how adult the relationships are. I love the healthy dynamics and the way it’s so clear that each character actively works to maintain a positive, healthy and stable companionship and it’s just so fulfilling to read. LIKE ESPECIALLY THE SMUT FEELS LIKE THIS like leading up to the sex just feels so legit and like home-y? Is that a weird way to describe sexual tension? It just feels intimate and familiar. Like even in sex the characters feel really deeply for each other no matter how kinky it gets I guess. Listen idk if that made sense but the point is I really really like it. Also the titles are so cool teach me how to make good titles pls.

Personal Favorites: kiss me harder (yoosung), the only love i’ve ever known (yoosung) [nsfw], gentle fingers (saeran), breathe, darling, breathe in deep (saeyoung) [nsfw]

Author: @kisskunimi

Fandom: Haikyuu

Rating: 18+ only

My Thoughts: okay okay okay I will never ever shut up about this blog ever ever. Every piece of work is stunningly beautiful and literally feels like free verse poetry in the best way. The flow is very stop and go and the “stop”’s are utilized in such a brilliant way to emphasize some of my favorite lines in writing. (I see this especially in learn me, it’s so stunning) This author takes some of the most cliche metaphors/similes/common descriptions I see in fanfiction today and gives it a new feel. I was gonna give an example but it’s so startlingly present in all of the author’s work, so please just go read them, they’re phenomenal and make me feel like life is worth living if I can find a love that feels like this.

Favorite Lines: [I had to include this for this author, some of this writing is brilliant] there’s also more than this but these are my top favorites

“But in your arms he could fall. He could fall and land softly” - learn me

“He can look at you when you talk and see the stars shining in your irises like they somehow came down to earth to possess you. And he looks, he looks and longs.” - learn me

Personal Favorites: instantly (iwaizumi), learn me (akaashi)

[bao3bei4]

kpop music videos that gave their fans sexual brainworms

OR accidental fetish pop and its fringe fanbase: meditations on gendered desire 

large warning here: i am someone who has been into kpop for the past 10 years. however, i have always been an extremely casual fan. i do write fic, but not rpf. if any of that makes you not want to hear me talk about kpop rpf (or you don’t want to hear about it in general), please keep moving.

anyway, obviously pop is corporate, soulless, and manufactured. but sometimes some truly bizarre shit gets past the committees and destroys a generation. these are their stories.

the video that started this is all is got7’s just right, released july 10th, 2015.

yes that’s all 7 members of got7 (one is out of frame) shrunken down for your viewing pleasure. they live in your room and tell you you’re just right. 

this sheer fetish power of this video is nerfed only by how utterly sexless it is.

they’re styled like and dance like this. it’s a totally unironic sendup of the seminal work that preceded it by four years, “what makes you beautiful” by the white kpop group “one direction.” the chaste energy of the whole thing makes you legitimately wonder if the good people at jyp have just never heard of microphilia. (during a dramatic reading of this piece, here a friend interjected seriously, “i think it’s korean culture not to talk about things like this, fetishes in the workplace.”)

it’s for the best, honestly, though because the actress in the music video is lee ja in, who was 11 when the video was shot. considering that the members themselves ranged in age from 18-23 at the time, i think it’s actually very impressive that we only have to cancel one. 

you receive absolutely no prizes for guessing that it’s jackson wang we’re sending to social justice prison. why’d he do this? no one asked. 

at any rate, got7 fans, or “gans” (they actually call themselves igot7s which is too twee for me), have much to think about here: all 7 very small members of got7 sneaking into their room, possibly weird age play, and jackson wang eating a very large cake.

let’s see what they actually did. 

twitter was actually very tame. the most charged thing i found was (unsurprisingly) from a bts fan (“ban”). i don’t actually know what it means, but i think it means something.

so, of course, i turned to the internet’s last bastion of free speech, where you can say whatever the fuck you want and receive cheers, or as the kids say, “kudos.” that is, i read fanfiction. 

for those of you who don’t know your herstory, i started my journey at Asianfanfics.com, where, at the time of writing, there were 12,067 got7 stories. i want to start this by saying that i think feminism won, because someone was paying real human dollars to advertise their irene/wendy fanfiction on a banner ad, which is quite possibly a win for women for everywhere. 

anyway, Asianfanfics.com’s search engine sucks ass (i kept on finding stories about different combinations of bts members worrying about their weight and being reassured by another member that were entitled “just right”), so i decided to look through all got7 stories written between july 2015 and december 2015. 

but, alas, not a single got7 microphilia fic to be found. 

also, some genre commentary while i’m here: i think the stories i respect the most are the “[y/n] is a ordinary girl who’s assigned to be got7’s manager! can she make them into superstars? as sparks begin to fly, can she keep it professional?” like fuck yeah that sounds like a kickass dating sim. it almost definitely already is one. i salute all the teens around the world for buying into the fantasy of dating a boy band member that they themselves sell you. 

however, i don’t think i respect the “[member a] and [member b] are mafia/jocks and nerds/college students/high schoolers” concepts. in my opinion, the whole fantasy of boy band member is their personas, their hidden real personalities, their celebrity, and the show business setting. find a different intellectual property if you wanna write about school. i even respect the “yugyeom drank girl juice [not estrogen] and turned into a sexy girl” story more, because at least it knows exactly what it wants, and also because they’re all still boy band members. well, band members. shout out to yugyeom. 

so, anyway, i looked elsewhere. at the time of writing, archive of our own only had 11,645 got7 stories, but it does have a better search, so it effectively has more. as an aside, i think it’s so funny, and mildly disorienting at first, that archive of our own separates the “music & bands” section from the “celebrities & real people” section. boy band members aren’t real people. 

the first problem i encountered is that only 20 or so stories were written within a year of just right’s release. absolute cringe gans. don’t you care about your boys? there were zero stories tagged “vore” or “microphilia” either. stories containing the word “tiny” that were rated either “explicit” or “mature” were all normal (“normal”) size fetishization rather than, you know, just right. 

however, i learned my lesson from twitter. i realized that what had happened was that watching this video had created sleeper agents, just waiting for their activation phrase. that activation phrase? bangtan boys. and yeah, lo and behold, there was one! unfortunately (fortunately?) it had nothing to do with got7, let alone just right, so i’m not going to talk about it.  

basically what i learned is that this video may have actually been very normal, and my brain has just been destroyed by being too online at a young age. 

however, there are plenty more videos in this genre. i present to you exo wolf, a banger from may 30th, 2013. i say banger, because in a comedic inversion, it’s actually fucking terrible. 

this video is pretty self-explanatory in terms of why it might induce certain responses. 

let’s get the formalities out of the way. this video, the member who’s getting cancelled is kai. he has braids in this video :/

also skating on thin ice: xiumin and chen. guys what was up with the whole exo-m thing? like, we’re gonna have a cpop subgroup, but it’s going to be part chinese members and part korean members that we’ll give a chinese name? unsurprisingly, the three exo members who have departed from the group are all chinese. they weren’t able to stand the microaggressions probably. but xiumin and chen remain uncancelled as an official chinese apology for five thousand of years of on-and-off invasions of korea. sorry guys that was kinda fucked up. our bad! 

anyway, there are basically three avenues for exo fans to take: 1) humans with wolfish characters (usually wolf pack dynamics, which even wolves themselves don’t fucking use so i think all of you should shut up. the real omega here is your brain), 2) werewolves (duh), and 3) wolves with human characteristics (i.e. standard furry fare). 

exo themselves let all these possibilities exist at the same time, superimposing them over each other, which is very woke and egalitarian of them. let’s see what the people decided. awoo.

Asianfanfics dot com had many stories in this vein. i feel very validated that this time i was able to correctly predict a fetish. that said, briefly returning to my earlier comment regarding alternate universes: it’s intense psychic whiplash reading about these vampires and werewolves, and going okay okay luhan is a vampire this that whatever, and then seeing the actual real performance photos the author attaches at the bottom of each chapter. bro i forgot these were actual people.... it breaks immersion so bad... i’m sorry, i just can’t believe that any of these dancing boys are having weird vampire sex with wings or whatever. 

archive of our own also had many stories in this vein. and i think there are some important difference between the two sites worth talking about. 

first of all, i think the higher engagement rate of archive of our own really enables some of the authors to get super bold. it makes Asianfanfics.com seem a little quaint, actually. like the wordcounts are waaay longer, for one. it’s uncommon for a story hosted on Asianfanfics.com to be more than a few thousand words long (most of them could easily be published in the new yorker), whereas some of these archive of our own people have written full length novels about if the members of exo were werewolves. i guess it’s just intensely demoralizing for the aff.com crew to get, like, three comments per story. 

the second big difference is that i’m noticing more common themes between the ao3 crew’s writing. like stan intertextuality, or plagiarism, or whatever, but they seem to be implicitly engaging with each other’s characterizations, storylines, and tropes. i think it is because they probably all follow each other on twitter. (i have been active on twitter for three weeks now so i am an expert on fanfiction twitter.) 

anyway, like not that i am a particularly big gan (cannot even list all the members), but these people seem to have reached a very specific consensus on how jackson wang, for instance, would react in a variety of situations that really surprises me? if i were to sit down and write a got7 story, i think the fuckboitude, the douchebaggery is a big part of his charm. not to be nationalist or anything, but for god’s sake, he’s from hong kong. but these people have him as very sensitive, lots of protective instincts. not that i understood what anyone on aff.com was doing with his character either, but they did all seem to be doing different things. “kudos” to that, i guess.

but: exo. wolf. i searched the “wolves” tag. this filtered the list down from 33459 stories to 52 stories. and the “wolves” tag was very different from the aff.com “wolf” tag. for the most part, aff.com liked stories where a member was a wolf (usually shapeshifting), feral boy, lots of y/n, lots of y/n dating a feral boy who is secretly a wolf. 

ao3 really, really, really likes alpha/beta/omega stories. sorting by the most popular stories, only five on the first page weren’t a/b/o. and one of them was a cis f!baekhyun story, so i think the intended effect was communicated. anyway, let’s talk about some of the themes. 

first of all, i’m disappointed. today’s bonus cancellation is of ao3 “wolves” writers. why the fuck are you drawing so heavily from european wolves?? there are wolves in asia!! you don’t need to keep giving their packs and ranks weird latin names. i will kill you. i hate italy. korea literally has a native wolf. i hate all of you!!! if you want to write caucasian wolves go watch that dumbass cw show!!!! my god. 

the second theme (the first one was white supremacy) is that no one wants to be a wolf who fucks. i think that we need a sex positivity movement, or something, for omega rights. like, are all of you doing okay? you’re queering misogyny by inventing new genders to oppress. another level to “no one wants to be a wolf...” is the “who fucks” part. there are so many consent issues. and not even in like, a sexy intentional way? in a “i genuinely do not think this author understands how their writing comes off” way. unfortunately i am sensitive to untagged sexual coercion, and there was a lot of that.

at any rate, the aff.com wolves were at peace with being wolves, very self-actualized. the ao3 wolves know that every minute they spend alive on this bitch of an earth is suffering, and also sex.

the third theme is the evolution of y/n. y/n, who, in a startlingly woke move for aff.com, is almost always korean, is a girl main character stumbling into love, boy bands, and wolves (i think it’s because aff.com is oldschool kpop fandom, so therefore heavily asian itself in userbase). but y/n is not the main character in ao3 stories. she is the straight best friend. in what i think is a hilarious move, ao3 authors invert the gay best friend paradigm to give the gay main character a straight girl as best friend. she usually calls him “a gay,” she has lots of thoughts on boys, and she knows his sexuality better than he does and before he does. (sidebar: if all the men are gay, and all the women are straight...)

there’s a really fun twist to this, though, because the main character is always a self-insert in fanfiction. but where older fanfiction like aff.com was at peace with this and literalize it via y/n shenanigans, modern fic writers who haven’t finished distangling their complicated relationship with wanting to be a man who loves other men instead simply imbue their main character with their essence. a little voodoo doll sehun, with a lock of y/n hair. 

this creates a deeply ambivalent relationship with gender in these stories. the main character is usually an omega, but one who resents being an omega. their body and its parts is usually described, if at all, as ostensibly intersex (except more offensively), but in practice, these discourses inscribe a trans body. (nb: i think cis writers approach this in a really fucked up fetishizing way, but i hope by this point we know that that goes without saying) it’s incredibly straightforward to read this, and see the underlying desires and fears in a heady cocktail of unfiltered writing that’s deeply confessional. you know when freud had people say whatever the fuck they wanted and figured they’d eventually free associate into releasing their subconscious into reality? yeah. 

okay, and while we’re on the topic, let’s talk f(x) nu abo, released on may 4th, 2010. 

this is a blitzy, maximalist, amped up dance hit that even has its own applause and cheers built in. it’s so fucking annoying, and i love it. 

this song is on here because the second most popular kpop a/b/o story on ao3 is called “nu abo” except it’s about bts. that’s offensive enough in its own right. write something about f(x) (702 works). when will women win the right to have their own self-lubricating holes.

anyway, even though f(x) is probably innocent in all of this, i’m still cancelling amber liu. 

for queerbaiting. who told her to look like ruby rose but hot? and for what? i’m also cancelling her for racism, but that wasn’t in this video. 

moving on to a double feature: vixx voodoo doll and vixx chained up, released november 19, 2013 and november 9, 2015 respectively. this is because while voodoo doll is more formative, i think the fans who write fanfiction today got into kpop more recently, so we are casting a wide net.

anyway, voodoo doll is jam packed with weird pseudo-medical imagery, blood, vivisection, bondage, puppet shit, femdom, sharps, piercings, asphyxiation, dollification, stabbing/penetration metaphors, and a really sick and catchy dance. god that looks like the list of tags on the a/b/o wolf stories. 

for this song, we’re cancelling you, for being way too into this song when you were 13.

vixx voodoo doll made me goth i guess! insert that pic of the your music saved me sign, except it saved me from getting into emo or pop punk probably. 

chained up, comparatively, is much more tame. the only thing of note about it is that there are around 10 completely different chokers and choker looks the members wear in this music video. also they’re singing about being chained up, but that seemed a bit obvious. 

we could argue that voodoo doll is gay while chained up is gay (derogatory); that voodoo doll is queer while chained up is gay; that chained up is a sensitive masterpiece of omega4omega sexuality. but we’re not going to. 

we’re going to talk about what voodoo doll fanfiction was and was not. first, Aff.com had plenty of it. however, i was extremely disappointed to see that much of it did not hew to the spirit of vixx voodoo doll. my god, the voodoo doll becoming the one preying upon you disgusts me. the fantasy of the voodoo doll is that of absolute power. the idea that the doll itself has agency? instantly breaks the fantasy. i’m even not into voodoo dolls and i’m offended. 

i also don’t think it’s part of the voodoo doll fantasy to release the doll. the only story on there that involved Y/N kidnapping vixx members like in the music video was unavailable because the author deactivated their account. come back qxeen what did you see. 

i think this got off track, actually, in that i was mostly wondering why these people imprinted differently onto vixx voodoo doll than i did. like i don’t think you’re supposed to actually like straightforwardly absorb the morals and aesthetics of music videos like it’s propaganda. however, it’s more entertaining if you do. i hope ao3 doesn’t let me down. 

out of the then 5932 works in the vixx fandom (the least out of every group so far, excluding f(x) because they’re women), 59 of them included the word “voodoo” somewhere. that’s 1%. i legitimately can’t tell if that’s high or not. 

after some more cursory reading through the first page of popular results, my big takeaway is that people watched that video and wanted to be tortured and enslaved? but not, like, in a sexy way where the torturing is the point, the way where the point is to suffer bravely and beautifully, to endure the world’s harms like jesus on the cross, and then to fall into the arms of a beautiful boy who may or may not be the one hurting you in the first place. 

there’s a certain predictability to these fantasies. like it’s not even masochism, which would be fun at least, it’s literally just like the desire to be beautiful, even as you suffer. and i do find that a little boring. (but, i mean, you can’t help being a woman!)

sidebar: on chained up. what’s interesting about chained up, is that most of the then 38 “chained up” works (likely because the video has no storyline) are about the members fucking during chained up promotions. no one’s ever actually chained up, but whatever. it’s fine. it’s fine! 

anyway, here, more than ever, the nature of desire is stripped bare. i’ve written before [elsewhere in the unreleased tshirt cinematic universe] on how kpop boys are, through fandom, re-formed as white, or more strongly, i guess, blank slates. it’s really interesting to me how so much of this dynamic of projection is enabled by the fact that they’re asian men. they’re infantilized, feminized vessels; they’re seductive, but childlike, oblivious to their own charms, so nonthreatening; they have uncontrollable desires for sex, they’re scared of sex. and above all else, white women submit themselves to them, insert themselves into them. basically kpop fans tend to rework old school yellow peril and emasculation fantasies to reenact their own desires, often white, often cishet on them. 

what i am saying is that there’s another thesis about forced feminization and its racialized subtext in here. obviously gender is a racialized construct to begin with, but like it’s fascinating to argue that when white women remake asian men according to their own desires, that is, into themselves, they (hopefully) unintentionally echo these old fears about the sexual order.

it illuminates, it seems, the underlying dynamic in the denigration of asian men, which is of course the fear of miscegenation. now, my breathtaking ability to make everything about me aside, miscegenation is interesting because it presents a racial synthesis, beginning to collapse and trouble the artificial designations of purity. so we make asian men into white women, and end up with an unsettling hybrid. i’m sure this has deep implications for me personally.

but i think we already knew that quite a few of these people had yellow fever, so let’s talk about the gender dialectic at play. basically, the above dynamic, of making men into women (whether literally, in body; or subjectively, in mind; or even relationally, as they are objectified into passive vessels for your desire) coexists with the ostensibly converse dynamic, in which the straight women desires to be a gay man. these aren’t necessarily in conflict: it could easily be that these are different writers writing different stories, that both are ways of expressing discontent with existing in a raced, gendered body, or even that the end product of both is the same.

it’s been a while without a picture. all of you now have the legal right to hunt and kill me for making a d&g joke.

anyway, what i want to talk about is how these two fantasies can coexist. that by making a man into yourself, you can speak on your own desire in a passive way. my normal interest is analyzing forced masc fantasies (albeit in chinese opera lol), and they bear little to no resemblance to this kind of fantasy. this kind offers plausible deniability, of course, because wanting things is embarrassing. but also the fantasy isn’t about wanting to be a man, it’s about having no choice but to be a failed one. the gender pessimism running through these stories is palpable. basically andrea long chu wants what wolf fanfiction writers know: everyone is an omega, and everyone hates it.

at any rate, this racialized dynamic is one that i wasn’t sure how to bring up throughout this piece, mainly because there is no definitive way for me to tell the race of any individual writer, beyond just like the clear and present vibes that i receive. but i think it structures a lot of the fantasies contained in this essay. (i felt more comfortable bringing up the gendered dynamic, because it was fairly trivial to find out the current gender of the person writing each story i was reading.) 

obviously we should return to the specter haunting this conversation: the very much alive david eng. i think this sort of argument is familiar to readers of racial castration, especially his chapter on m. butterfly. btw sorry for mentioning that play 2 out of 3 posts on this blog. i have problems.

let’s talk about the parallel imagery between the depiction of gallimard’s final speech and the fanfiction i’ve described above. in it, gallimard makes himself into his own dream woman, dressing in yellowface and robes, the costume of puccini’s original madame butterfly. and he laments his lost love:

there is a vision of the orient that i have. of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. who are born and raised to be the perfect women. who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally.

in that, i see the self insert, and i see the sufferer of vixx voodoo fic. the fantasy that gallimard has about asian women is repeated, this time about asian men and a helpless identification with them. and on some level, gallimard’s women do have something very compelling to identify with: they suggest that there’s a way to endure white male violence without sacrifice, and even more potently, to enjoy it on some level.

but onward to the titular racial castration. eng argues that gallimard’s wilful ignorance of song’s true gender is a psychic castration -- song’s masculinity is diminished so that his own can be enhanced within their relationship. this, eng believes, acts out “richard fung’s contention that in western imaginary ‘asian and anus are conflated.’” this process stabilizes the relationship between the asian man and the white woman: they occupy the same place within the sexual dyad. 

this is, i think, why some people are addicted to writing from the bottom’s perspective. again -- not implying that irl bottoms don’t exist or that bottoms are psychically castrated lol -- but rather that you can fantasize about this ideal asian man that you can come to embody. in kpop rpf, rather than it being between a white man and an asian man (unless someone’s started writing chad future fic), it’s between two asian men. so this transformation is performed. whiteness is always intruding and so i think eng is helpful here to making it visible again. 

this essay isn’t a callout or actual cancellation or anything like that, i do wanna be clear. i guess i just like talking about fantasies, even the embarrassing ones, and where they come from. i think oftentimes in fandom spaces, we write a lot of stories off as idfic, and i think virtually every single one of the stories i referenced to write this fairly uncontroversially fall into that category. but i think calling something an “id” something or the other naturalizes the satisfaction it gives as purely instinctual and unconscious, when i do think there are deeper narratives at play. while i didn’t ever actually reference the base here (sorry), i do think it’s worth talking about how real world power shapes & maintains the superstructure, and thereby our fantasies. 

anyway in conclusion, maybe i was the one with sexual brainworms the whole time.

[bestworstcase]

farran rereads lost lagoon: chapters 9-10

it’s been a hot minute! previous installments here, in case you’d like to refresh your memory first.

- this chapter opens with rapunzel observing that cassandra is angry and concluding, correctly, that it’s because rapunzel followed her. i think this is a very interesting choice for howland to make. tts rapunzel is not like this. she often, particularly in s1, fails to notice when cass is frustrated with her and is startled when that frustration erupts into anger after repeated pushing. she is also generally quite bad at linking cause and effect together like this; she might recognize that cass is angry, but miss why. she stomps all over cassandra’s boundaries in large part because she doesn’t know any better. she can’t see how her behavior is hurting cass. but lagoon rapunzel does know better. she’s far more emotionally intuitive, and she can see right away that sticking her nose into cassandra’s business upsets cass, yet she will continue to do it. part of me wonders if this change is to facilitate the character growth lagoon rapunzel gets (which tts rapunzel does not)? it’s much easier, after all, to fix poor behavior if you’re able to see how it’s hurting people you care about.

- rapunzel here also observes that cassandra’s “eyes were wide and vulnerable,” indicating how afraid cass was of the water situation. cass denies that she was afraid when rapunzel asks her. this has a lot of similarities to how cass acts in fanon, cassunzel fanon in particular—outright denying her feelings, even when rapunzel accurately identifies them. and i know i’m beating a dead horse here, but tts cass is not like this. tts cass readily expresses her feelings to rapunzel—except when she thinks rapunzel isn’t willing to listen to her. in COTB, her reticence with rapunzel comes on the heels of rapunzel doing something cassandra pleaded with her not to do. in RATGT, rapunzel outright tells her to ‘be okay with’ the way rapunzel treats her, and in RDO cass bottles up her feelings and refuses to talk until rapunzel forces her to. actively hiding her feelings is a behavior she develops after becoming friends with rapunzel, because rapunzel continually dismisses or ignores her feelings. this is probably not the last time i am going to harp on this over the course of this little reread. it’s a huge pet peeve of mine.

- re: romance novel: “I hadn’t seen Eugene since the night before. After Cassandra left my room, I sent Pascal to follow her. I instructed him to come get me if she went anywhere.” ksdkjf

- cassandra, of course, wants the lagoon to be their—or rather, ideally, her—little secret, because she’s decided this is the thing that will prove she’s ready for the guard. her approach to getting rapunzel on board with this secret-keeping is to imply that frederic and arianna might compromise corona’s national security if they are informed. i think this is very funny.

- (again, contrast this to what happens in tts: when cass begs rapunzel to keep their midnight excursion a secret, she explains her reasoning in detail, because tts cass knows how to communicate like an adult.)

- “It’s so…blue” jksdfl cass has a way with words huh

- i do not think ms howland knows what a lagoon is, because what she is describing is absolutely not a lagoon. it appears to be a cenote. i suppose ‘rapunzel and the lost cenote’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though, does it?

- cassandra reveals that she doesn’t know how to swim. i will get into this in a moment.

- corona has 315 miles of coastline, according to ms. howland. for purposes of comparison, rhode island has around 380 miles of coastline. now! in addition to those three hundred odd miles of coastline, corona has 212 lakes, 121 ponds, 67 rivers, of which 17 are significant in size and let out into the sea. with some cursory research i haven’t been able to get a precise count of the number of freshwater bodies of water there are in rhode island, but wikipedia tells me that about 90% of the inland freshwater in the state is contained in 237 lakes and ponds, which is a bit less than corona’s 333 total lakes and ponds, so… assuming the other 10% of rhode island’s inland freshwater is contained in a few dozen smaller lakes and ponds, those numbers are quite close as well. and according to wikipedia, rhode island has 59 rivers, of which 17 are ‘considered major rivers either geographically or historically.’ 

there is not really a point to this digression except that i think it is interesting. rhode island is 1,214 square miles in size and based on the general closeness of these numbers i have decided to tentatively conclude that corona is meant to be roughly similar in size. let’s call it a nice even 1,250 square miles for the sake of ease and to account for the greater number of lakes and ponds. 

this is quite a bit larger than the kingdom appears to be in tts—unless the kingdom is very lopsided and island city is situated within a couple dozen miles of the nearest border—but it’s also quite small for a country. (europe has a few very small microstates and city-states, but excluding those, the smallest country in europe is almost twice the size of rhode island). 

for my own writing, i decided that corona was quite a bit larger than this—bitter snow corona is in the neighborhood of 13,125 square miles, of which about ⅓ was formerly saporia and another ¼ is the disputed territory/province of malinar, meaning saporia is/was about 4,375 square miles, malinar is about 3,288 square miles, and pre-conquest corona would have been about 5,462 square miles—but, if you’re writing fanfiction and looking for an approximate ‘canon’ size for corona, 1,250 sq miles is not a bad guess. just remember that that big old wall rapunzel’s so eager to get to the other side of has to be within about twenty miles of the island capital in order for horses to be able to comfortably get there and back in less than a day! so either the island has to be very near the nearest border, or the wall isn’t actually corona’s border but rather a defensive wall around the capital or something like that. 

- now back to cassandra, and the matter of her inability to swim. i think, given that they live on an island and the generally high standards to which he holds his daughter, it beggars belief a little that the captain did not force the issue of her learning how. it’s a safety matter. if you live near water you need to be able to swim.  but, fine, she has a phobia, whatever. it’s for the romance novel™

- but i hate this. i hate it. ms. howland expects me to believe that:

1 - cassandra hasn’t been in swimming lessons since she could walk

2 - cassandra’s phobia was so severe that the captain never forced the issue of her learning to swim, while living on an island

3 - rapunzel magically knows how to swim, because the three or four minutes she spent almost drowning in a slowly flooding cave and then being spat out into a river and dragged to the bank by eugene was sufficient for her to become a great swimmer.

4 - all it takes for cassandra to overcome her debilitating phobia of water is for rapunzel to spend maybe ten or fifteen minutes gently coaxing her into the water and teaching her how to tread water

5 - swimming in the lagoon with rapunzel then becomes one of cassandra’s most treasured pastimes, and

6 - merely a few months after this, cassandra is a strong enough swimmer to (in fitzherbert pi) DIVE INTO THE FUCKING OCEAN FULLY DRESSED WITH HER BOOTS ON in order to rescue shorty before he drowns.

and NO!!!!!! NO! THAT’S NOT HOW SWIMMING WORKS THAT’S NOT HOW ANYTHING WORKS!!

now i get it. i get it. this is a romance novel and the symbolism of rapunzel liberating cassandra from her fears and teaching her a valuable new skill that they bond over and becomes their shared special secret thing to do together is obviously powerful and a staple trope for the genre. but it makes so little sense for this to be a skill that rapunzel has but cassandra does not. it feels almost infantalizing of cassandra and aggrandizing of rapunzel. like… rapunzel is an exceptionally competent young woman, yes. but no she can’t fucking swim you can’t learn to swim from that one time you almost drowned in a FUCKING cave. fuck!

- i’m still on the first page of chapter 10 and i am steamed.

- “It’s amazing how fast you can pick something up when your life depends on it.” FUCK you, ms. howland. you don’t learn how to turn sommersalts or swim laps by almost drowning. at most you might teach yourself how to doggy paddle.

- this scene would have worked just as goddamn well on the romance novel front if cass were the one who knew how to swim and rapunzel desperately wanted to learn and made big sad puppy eyes until cass caved and agreed to teach her. like! ffs you could even squeeze in the phobia stuff - rapunzel freaks out when she gets to a certain depth because it throws her back to being in that cave and cass, who has plenty of experience dealing with her own panic attacks, is able to gently calm her down.

- but that would require ms. howland to allow rapunzel to be bad at something. grumble.

- i don’t think rapunzel is qualified to give cass exposure therapy.

- this is nitpicky but i’m annoyed. this is not how you clean plate armor. “First you hang your suit of armor up to make sure every piece is properly aligned and that there’s no rust” WHAT? it’s not… like, it’s not like a onesie. plate armor is a bunch of individual components tied or buckled to an arming doublet or, in some cases, to other pieces of plate. you can’t ‘hang up’ a suit of plate armor the way you’d hang up, like, a jacket. you can put the pieces together on an arming doublet that you’ve hung up on a dummy, but… why would you do that in order to clean it.

“Then you attach the foot coverings” gjksdfjk just… the mental image of cassandra painstakingly putting a suit of armor together on a fucking mannequin and buckling the sabatons to the greaves or what the fuck ever she means by this and trying to clean the set that way is destroying me

“Then you need to polish the chest plate, with a soft cloth, work in circles, going outward” okay yes but you’d do the cuirrass separate from the rest of the set and you’d do the inside too and cass ought to know the proper name for all of these pieces please it’s not hard

“The arms can be tricky because the joints” WHAT. for arms you’ve got, like, a pauldron (or spaulder and rondel), rerebrace, couter, vambrace, gauntlets. these are separate pieces. you clean them one at a time, inside and outside. does howland think you just… don’t need to clean the inside of a set of plate armor? does she think the inside isn’t just as if not more susceptible to rust as the outside? does… does she realize that you can take plate armor apart i am CONFOUNDED

WHAT is a “mouth cover” in this context. is she refering to a visor. hinged pieces like on an armet? does she mean a bevor? the bevor isn’t even part of the helmet aljksdflkjsfdj

cassandra refers to cuisses and greaves as “thigh plates” and “shin [plates]” respectively i’m die. she also completely skips the poleyns. i do not think this cass has ever cleaned a suit of plate armor in her entire life.

i am losing. my. mind.

- in the immediate aftermath of cass learning how to tread water i think rapunzel asks her more personal questions than she does in the entirety of tts itself. like, it’s almost jarring how much more interested both rapunzel and eugene are in cassandra as a person in this book than they seem to be in tts. compare this conversation to the way cass opens up to rapunzel in beginnings - here, it’s prompted by rapunzel asking questions, expressing interest in cassandra’s feelings and encouraging her by telling her she’s brave. in beginnings, rapunzel builds a pillow fort in cass’s room because she wants to force a bonding moment and cass, after initially trying to kick her out, relents and volunteers some personal information as a kind of apology for being hostile. the vibes are completely different, so different that it feels like i’m not even reading about the same characters.

- like can you imagine tts rapunzel saying something like “it’s your story, that makes it important” to cass? lmao

- cass reveals that she’s afraid of water because she got dragged out by the undertow at the beach when she was small, and her dad saved her and then got so mad at her that she remembers being as afraid of him as she was of the water. this is not unrealistic per se, but… if cassandra was as scared of her dad that day as she was of drowning, then… shouldn’t that have more of an impact on her relationship with him? like…he screams at her after she almost drowns and she walks away with this debilitating phobia of the water but zero lingering fear of him?

- this chapter has given me a headache

- re: romance novel: “Rapunzel gripped my hand. This time I didn’t flinch.” snrk. 

[im-whatchamccallit]

Circles//Kim Doyoung (NCT 127)

Pairing: Kim Doyoung x Fem!Reader

Genre: Series/Multiple parts, Mafia/Crime!AU, Suggestive, Angst, Fluff, Potential Smut in future chapters

Warnings: Suggestive content, mention of guns and murder, mentions of the mafia and organized crime

Word Count: 4.5k

(A/N: So, like I said in one of my last post, I’m trying to start a series so that I will have a reason to post more often and not let this blog die the way I did before. Only problem? This was the first thing that came to mind and I’ve been terrified it won’t do well so please leave feedback if you like it so I know to continue it. This is also my first NCT 127 post so... Yay! Also, I recently read about how taboo a lot of people think the mafia/crime AUs are in fanfiction and I want to be cautious of their feelings in regards to this which is why I also haven’t posted it but I just want to post something while getting out of my writers block. But, again, leave feedback on whether you love it or hate it, leave request if you want, anything’s appreciated.)

Masterlist|Guidelines

You’ve seen elegance but never at this level, eyes glued to the ceiling that seemed to reach heights you could only dream of, not even thirty basketball players stacked onto one another’s shoulders able to graze the top. The sparkling from the crystal gold leaf chandeliers adding to the fairytale-like atmosphere as servers of all kind bustled around you offering food and drinks at any given chance, your hand reluctantly staying at your side as you declined their generosity. You were starving, but you had a job to do and, that job, was Song Minhyun.

He was the newly appointed Don of the Amarillo family, his father passing away from an unknown condition only a week ago but, based on how fast Minhyun made the world aware that he was now in control of all the illicit acts committed in the name of Amarillo after years of having their identity protected and undisclosed, even going as far as to threaten and betray the various families beneath him in an insane power trip, it was clear his father’s death was no accident. But you were never a fan of that man, he was creepy with a bad attitude to match, so this task wasn’t some gesture of vengeance for him, it was strictly about you and your family.

Just like the Amarillo’s, your family went under an alternative name, Nio’s, which closely resembled the name of the pharmaceutical manufacturing company masking it, Neo Tech. It always made you laugh considering no one caught on to their association, given Nio’s were the largest distributors and exporters of controlled substances in majority of the Eastern hemisphere. But joining Nio’s wasn’t a life you wanted to live, you were practically forced into it, but once you’ve engrained yourself into a life of organized crime, it was impossible to leave. You lived every day with the mindset of kill or be killed, Minhyun’s threats to expose your operations to the NIS who, after the death of Nio’s founder, Kim Dongwan, assumed your family officially ceased activity in the crime syndicate, being your main motive for taking him down. Sure, you were ordered to handle the assassination but, considering you could face life in prison simply for everything you’ve done in the name of Nio’s, you were more than willing. There was one problem though, Song Minhyun was an absolute dream.

Your thoughts seemed to fade into nothingness when you initiated conversation, going with the plan to seduce and kill him only to find he was much more enticing than you anticipated. He was a year or so older than you yet spoke like he was some immortal seer, his wisdom and life stories drawing you in and leaving your heart racing. His smile was so wide and gummy but eyes sharp and attentive, never leaving yours even as he drew you further from the crowd which, according to Taeyong, was not part of the plan. And you couldn’t begin to understand how fucked you were.

You didn’t know where he was taking you, too focused on his words while simultaneously adjusting your silky white dress to reveal more cleavage from the already plunging v-neck and your walk becoming sultrier to expose more of your leg from the thigh-high slit.

“You know, you shouldn’t focus too much on your looks when you’re naturally beautiful.” Minhyun spoke, your eyes darting to him as your hands returned to your sides, a shy giggle echoing in the now deserted hallway he lead you through.

“Can you blame me? Standing next to an attractive man can really mess with a girl’s self-esteem.” You admitted, suddenly feeling like some high schooler in a rom-com.

“Well, I can help with those insecurities. Just tell me where to start and I’ll make you feel like an absolute queen.” Your breath hitched as his body turned to face you, hand reaching to cup your neck but it was large enough that his thumb could glide over your bottom lip with ease, smudging your red lipstick against your skin teasingly but still holding your gaze.

His presence, the sheer dominance he exuded made you whimper in a mixture of fear and pleasure. You weren’t going planning to escape yet he made the initiative to hold you close to him, an arm wrapped securely around your waist making a heat rush through you that could only be described as want, no longer aware of your duties and no longer caring. He was perfect, and you wanted a piece of his perfection. Maybe for the night, maybe forever, you decided you’d choose after whatever surprise he had for you was done in the dark office he dragged you into, your excitement blocking out the burning gaze from just down the hall.

Minhyun shut the door, not bothering to lock it seeing that you were so willing and easy to remain with him. He knew who you were and what you were planning to do. You were an orphan taken in by Nio’s, trained to be a child soldier for a man who couldn’t even hold his own against Minhyun’s father, now under Taeyong’s rules and orders. But knowing that his first encounter with Taeyong was less than stellar and the sudden ultimatum to forfeit all their assets to the Amarillos or be handed over to the police for sentences that can range from 50 years to death for each and every one of his precious borgata, the only thing Taeyong could do was kill him and you, unfortunately were just a pawn in those plans.

“You know, your looks are nothing to be insecure about. You’re beautiful beyond comprehension.” He spoke lowly, inching closer and guiding you to his large desk just by the window, the moonlight that seeped through the blinds the only form of light allowing you to take in his features.

You gasped as he grabbed your hips, spinning you and pressing you over the desk. You sighed in contentment at the feeling of his hands caressing up your thighs, dress riding up and slowly revealing the black thong you had, a low chuckle leaving his lips at the sight. Not just because you were practically bare before him, but at the pocket pistol held securely in its holster that you managed to forget about. It was a Glock 42, making him proud that he did his research on you because, if he was in your position right now, and the number of murders you committed were accurate, he’d be a goner already.

“(Y/n), if only you were as smart as you are beautiful.” He said, your eyes widening at the way he spoke but, more importantly, he knew your name. Your real name. Not the one you were given for this mission.

“How’d you-Ow!” You whimpered as he grabbed your hair, pulling you upwards until your back was flush with his chest.

Tears were pricking your eyes, your breathing heavy as you felt a cool metal press to your temple swallowing hard while simultaneously attempting to reach to your thigh discretely to find your own gun, only to find it was the one in his hand.

“When I read about you, I was so intrigued. So curious. You know there’s only one photo of you online and it’s a mugshot from when you were still living on the streets?” He laughed out loud at that, ignoring the way your body thrashed against his in an attempt to free yourself, head leaning further away from the possibly cocked gun in fear that he was finished monologuing already.

“But you’re really weak. And I’d usually like that in women, especially when they’re this submissive but, them wanting to kill me is a deal breaker. So what am I to do if I have the opportunity to murder my would-be assassin?” His lips were pressed to the shell of your ear, your eyes squeezed shut as you tried to silently apologize to the Nio’s. Sorry that you let your guard down, that you let some pretty face turn you into some horny teenager, the only plus side to your death being that it wouldn’t be Taeyong killing you because you knew how much he loved to torture before doing the deed. And with that final thought, you were ready to die, just hoping that someone else could finish the job you’ve failed tonight. And they did.

The sound of the door colliding with the wall was all you heard, followed by two hollow gunshots. Your eyes flew open as you felt Minhyun’s body fall limp against yours, hand slowly releasing your hair until you could move again, quickly shoving him off to adjust your dress to cover yourself before facing your silent savior, your heart stopping at the fierce, angry, “don’t move or I’ll kill you too” gaze Doyoung was giving you.

It was one thing to piss off Taeyong, you knew what to expect, but with Doyoung? He wasn’t a killer. In fact, he was the medic of your unit, coming along in case things went awry and someone needed instant care. He was a gentle person with a snappy attitude, but never one to act on his threats, so to see him with a gun in his hand, a body lying face first in blood from its skull and chest created by the man himself and approaching you with a scowl so deep you thought his baby face would finally start to wrinkle, you felt more fear than when you were almost dead.

“D-doyoung. Thank yo-“ You gasped as your head turned, eyes stinging with tears and cheek burning in both embarrassment and from the harsh impact his hand left.

You slowly peered up, afraid he’d strike you again just to see Yuta and Haechan slipping by silently, giving you a brief glance while collecting to fallen shells and your gun from Minhyun, only to leave you alone once more with the unpredictable aid.

“Doyoung-“

“Let’s go.”

Those were the only words he said before turning to head out of the office, your body immediately following close behind. He was silent the entire time, stuffing the pistol back into his waistband before buttoning his suit’s blazer to conceal it, leading the both of you through the still bumbling party and to the exit. Everything he did felt so tense despite being so normal. The way he spoke to the valets, how he entered the car without bothering to open the door for you, even his group call letting everyone know the task was done felt hostile. But you said nothing, continuing to wait idly by and praying he forgot about the situation.

You were tempted to break the awkward silence looming between the both of you on this seemingly hours long drive but, from the way he was radiating heat from how angry he was, you felt staying silent would be best. But you didn’t want to stay silent. You wanted to thank him for saving you while simultaneously screaming at him for slapping you, but also have one normal conversation with him. It was painful to admit that for the past few years you both weren’t exactly friendly with one another, no one seeming to care as “this was strictly business”, and you hated it. You never said it but you loved the Nio’s members and knew they loved you and each other as well, but for some reason the only two people that kept this family at arms length were the core members, Lee Taeyong and Kim Doyoung.

You knew Doyoung wasn’t a fan of the family ever since his father introduced him to that life, pissed he didn’t follow in his older brother’s footsteps and leave as soon as possible. He was supposed to be the heir to the family and be the boss of the 18 people living under his roof and the 7 working overseas in China to keep production there running and, as much as you didn’t want the responsibility, he was in too deep to run away. He opted to stop training for field work, developing a phony passion for medicine and surgery which led to him becoming the emergency medic for the team and no longer catching his father’s fancy for taking over their empire, leading to his heirship being rescinded. And as for the spot as heir? Doyoung’s father ordered Taeyong to fill. You knew Taeyong a lot better than the others but were utterly shocked to see him take over so easily. He was obviously a natural born leader but he had a habit of complaining about not always wanting to be in charge, using you as his unwilling therapist when he felt like reverting to his unintimidating, crybaby self. But there was no exit at this point, so what more could you do than make the most of a bad situation by befriending one another and having fun when you felt your lives were no longer in danger? And, whether they liked it or not, they were going to have fun with you and the rest of their constantly growing family.

“Y-you know, I was more scared of you then being killed back there. I’ve never seen you so mad.” You laughed, hoping to at least get a smile or something from him, your eyes glancing over to see his grip on the steering wheel tighten at your words. Maybe you should’ve just shut up.

“Doyoung, I’m sorry I put you in a situation where you had to kill, I know you hate stuff like that but, if it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be dead. Besides, it’s kinda like medicine if you think about it. Except you saved a life by taking one rather than just giving drugs to- OW!” You cried out as he slammed on the brakes, the only thing keeping you from flying through the windshield being your hands on the dashboard and the seatbelt crossed over your chest and waist.

“You bitch!” You snapped at him, watching his blank expression as he removed his seatbelt and turned off the car.

“Meet me in my office. You have five minutes.” Doyoung said plainly, your eyes fixed on him in bewilderment as he exited the car with no concern for you.

You let out an annoyed breath, your fear from before mixed with anger as you hurriedly followed his lead, leaving the car and speed walking to the front door he was entering through. To your surprise, most of the guys were there, not sparing either of you a glance as they knew what had happened and knew better than to interfere, but one person didn’t keep quiet.

“(Y/n), what the FUCK did I tell you?” Taeyong growled, your body practically jumping as he cornered you in the entrance’s corridor, eyes burning with anger and panic that you knew he had no way of controlling. He was always a hothead.

“I-I-“

“I’m having the meeting with her, Taeyong. Don’t bother. You have two minutes.” Doyoung spoke, voice fading as he continued down the hall to the small office he typically frequented to buy and sell shipment for Nio’s personal and professional use.

As soon as he was out of earshot, you grabbed Taeyong’s hands, eyes wide and teary as you tried to plead with him to save you.

“You went off where we couldn’t see you and didn’t even complete the mission. You could have been dead by now.”

“I know and you can punish however you want but, Taeyong, Doyoung is pissed, and I don’t know what to do. He already slapped me, now he’s not even speaking to me,”

“He never talks to you.”

“He does sometimes, when he wants to be a sarcastic asshole! But, please, Taeyong, talk to him. Calm him down so he doesn’t hurt me again.” You tried to use a soft voice, hoping to strike a sympathetic nerve in the doe-eyed man.

“(Y/n/n),” Taeyong sighed, cupping your face and making you lock eyes with him.

“You fucked up and made Doyoung do something he’s sworn to himself and us that he’d never do. His anger is justified. But I’ll be there for you whenever you’re in danger, whether it’d be an enemy or anyone living in this house, I’ll never let you get hurt.” He gave a warm smile, your lips curling to mimic his.

“But not tonight. You put us all at risk as you need to face the consequences.”

“Taeyong!”

“I’ll visit you in the infirmary later tonight.” You whimpered in fear as he kissed the crown of your head and pushed you in the direction of the office, heels clicking against the white marble floor as you stumbled to what might be your imminent doom.

You could taste blood in your mouth from the way you bit down on your tongue to ease your anxiety, your once statue-like body moving forward with caution although the chilly air was urging you to retreat. You couldn’t turn back because Taeyong would just escort you to Doyoung himself but if you went straight to Doyoung, who knows what he’d do. You couldn’t even take a second to cry over your dilemma once you noticed the dark brown mahogany door. The office was soundproof, something you both loved and hated. Whatever Doyoung wanted to scream at you would go unheard by the men possibly showering and preparing for bed after a somewhat successful evening, but then they wouldn’t hear you scream for help. It reminded you of earlier tonight, making the situation a bit more lighthearted until you realized you could’ve died then and would possibly die now.

“Oh god,” You breathed out in a whisper, shutting your eyes and taking a deep breath as your hand gripped the steel doorknob, turning it and entering the spacious and organized room.

“Doyoung.” You spoke lowly, shutting the door behind you but refusing to move any closer to him as he sat with an unrecognizable file before him.

“July of 2016, you were assigned to deliver a new batch of amphetamines to Xu Minghao who ran the Chinese operations of Sebong. Instead of cooperating with Weishen, AKA the Chinese sector of your own team, you thought doing the drop off yourself would be fine, only to let your guard down and let it slip that you were in Nio’s which promptly lead to you not only being ambushed, but Sicheng jumping in to save you and being shot in the lower back in the process.” He said blandly, flipping over the page to yet another as you swallowed hard at the memory, accidentally mentioning Haechan’s name and revealing you weren’t just a middle man in their operation but a direct asset, and Winwin payed the price for your stupidity.

“I remember just fine, but-“

“February of 2017, you knowingly entered enemy territory in Kyoto without alerting Yuta who, as you’ve always known, is in charge of our Japanese affairs. He has people over there for a reason, to handle the shit we can’t while we’re in Seoul. But you waltz over there and initiate a gang war that has only now been resolved.” He said, voice growing in annoyance and animosity that was a complete 180 from his once emotionless tone, your voice caught in your throat as you also remembered that day. You were on vacation and thought it’d be fine as long as you went in some disguise, but you were too well known and the fact you couldn’t speak Japanese only made it worse. You even remembered how Yuta refused to talk to you for months as he traveled constantly to fix your mistake.

“I-I know I fucked up that time but I tried to explain and I-“

“And that brings us to tonight! You had to stay in the spotlight with the man threatening not only your life but everyone you know in Nio’s and neighboring groups, and lead him back to the apartment we set up for you for a simple and quick execution, but you decide to go further into his mansion, expose yourself to him, and allow him to nearly murder you with your bare ass out!” His voice was strained as he screamed this time, your eyes watering as he pushed the large leather chair back to stand, making his way around the desk to approach you.

“I’d remind you about what happened in 2013, but I’m sure you’d never forget that.” He said with no emotion once more, your eyes low as you tried to suppress the urge to touch your slightly sunken head. Your our only job was to shoot if you saw someone escaping during an exchange but, instead, you were hit yourself, every medic working hard to keep you from dying and leaving you with a partially shaved head and a new metal plate in your skull.

“But I want you to tell me who saved your ass that time, (Y/n)?” His voice was playful now, emotions changing like an out of control radio station. Sometimes you wondered if he was just as mentally fucked as Taeyong.

You gasped when you felt his hand gripping your face, forcing your head up and back until your eyes met, a fire behind them that made your stomach swirl in fear but enchantment. You almost even forgot about how rough his grip on your jaw was because his hands were so soft, the warmth he let off no longer intimidating but causing you to turn to putty in his hands and wanting to fall against him in comfort and bliss. But the sudden harsh flick to your forehead made you realize he was anything but comforting.

“Stop acting like a touch starved dumbass and answer me. Who the fuck saved you from bleeding out in a filthy warehouse in the middle of fucking Daegu?” He said harshly, your eyes darkening as you tried to keep your composure.

“You did.”

“And you decided that me handling the responsibility of operating on you was some sentimental, heroic act and that from that day forth, you would make it everyone’s job to save you? That it was my job to save you?”

You felt your eyes tearing up again, lip quivering as a sob threatened to escape you and he could only let out a scoff, harshly pulling his hand back as he watched you cry.

“And now you’re crying.”

“I tried to thank you, I tried to apologize for making you save me yet you won’t let me! You slapped me! You’re screaming at me and making me feel bad when I already fucking feel bad. I know I’m fucking up and it’s hard on you guys but I-I just don’t know what to do! I’m tired and sick of having to live every second of my life knowing there is no one in this world I can trust and that I can never leave and that’s all I want, Doyoung! I just want to leave and be a normal person.”

The silence between you was deafening, almost loud in a way, but it was allowing you both to take in the words you said. You could see the look of conflict and annoyance on his face through your tears, a glimmer of what you both hoped and feared was sadness in his eyes as he rolled them to look anywhere but you. And what Doyoung saw of you was a breeding ground of trauma and dysfunction.

You were no different from anyone there, your life story was so similar to most of theirs that no one had time to pity you. You joined Nio’s when you were only 10, hair matted and filthy like the clothes you wore, hands stained red with blood and a look in your eyes that screamed frustration but hopelessness. You were the perfect tool for his father and it was sad watching yet another lost soul fall into this lifestyle. But you proved to be so capable of yourself, strong and competent but, after the death of his father, something in you changed. You were emotional, distracted, constantly agreeing to do task but never fully connecting mentally. He even noticed you screaming in the middle of the night from nightmares. Whether you remembered or not, you and Doyoung were close, so close it managed to shift the atmosphere of Nio’s into something enjoyable and worthy of being part of, but he knew it wasn’t good for you to stay. Not for any of you. So he gave you a chance to leave, a chance to live your life the way you had always told him you wanted, but you didn’t take it. Your reason? Taeyong. You never explained why he was the reason you were staying but the way you constantly clung to their leader like you were his lapdog was all the clarification that he needed. For Doyoung, the closeness you shared and the desire you both had of living normal lives was nothing compared to the same greed for power you shared with Taeyong. So he stopped trying to save you, stopped focusing on how to help you preserve what little of your sanity was left until now. Seeing you at your breaking point made it clear to him that even if this life would follow you forever, letting you go was better than having everyone killed from your mistakes. And, if you left, whatever problems haunted you would be yours to face alone, and he was fine with that.

“You will never be a normal person. And whatever life you choose to live will be as stressful as this one because you’ll spend every second looking over your shoulder wondering who’s out to get you. But, you’re dead weight now, and it’s unfair we’re the ones that have to keep carrying you. I don’t care when or where you go, just leave.” His tone was harsh and cold, the relief you felt at his words not enough to ease the pressure in your chest.

Doyoung’s no longer had power to make these decisions once Taeyong was appointed as leader, so you knew without the boss’ approval his word meant nothing. But, if you had the chance to run, why not take it? Maybe for one day, you could be free, probably take the time you needed to hide away from Nio’s and the crime world you knew all too well. You had no set plan, but sticking around trying to making one would do you no good.

“T-thank you. Thank you for everything.” You said with a small voice and deep bow, Doyoung not bothering to look at you as you hurriedly exited the room to head to yours and pack any belongings you needed for your new life.

You knew this life was hard to leave yet lived with the ignorant optimism that there was always some escape and no turning back. Unfortunately for you, you were simply a butterfly living in an airtight jar and, no matter where you turned, the air you needed was nowhere to be found and, tonight, was the beginning of your suffocation.

[thewheezingwyvern]

Dark Content

tw:Death, tw:COVID, tw:PTSD, tw:Medical talk, tw:rape mention 

It took me longer than it really should have to sit down and type this up. I don’t know if this is going to help but I hope that it helps some of you understand and to calm down when you get up in arms about dark content. 

As some of you know I’m a smut writer here. Most of what I share here now is smut. However if you were to take those pieces and assume my sexual activity about me you would be very, very wrong. I am on the asexual spectrum and my husband and I have never had penetrative sex. It’s not for me. Hell most times in general I find sex to be gross and repulsive. And yet there seems to be this mindset here that if I write it, it must mean I want it. I’m not even really a dark content writer, and yet I still see that. Why?

I think some of you really need to grasp the concept that just because we have stuff that we enjoy writing and reading does not mean we enjoy it in real life or support it in real life.

Fiction is a safe space for us to explore things. Not just writers but readers as well. I can enjoy exploring dynamics but that doesn’t mean that it’s something I would want in my real life. Take for example....I had the chance once to write a fic (not here) with a religious cult environment. It was super toxic and dangerous and that was part of the intrigue. It raised the stakes and honestly the dynamic was fun to explore. But I would in no way, shape or form want to be in that environment myself.

Not only can writing this stuff be a way to explore things safely, it can also be a way to process and help handle traumas and stresses. My fic Biohazard, is focused around the pandemic and some of the uglier sides of the medical field in addition to a romance/sex plot. And I literally write it because I am a responder knee deep in the trenches of this fucking pandemic. I decided to share that because while it’s helping me, it might also help others. 

I write things because I want to and because they help me and because I can explore things safely in the sanctum of fiction. But what is safe for me may not be safe for others and that is literally why the warnings and tags exist.

I’m going to be honest: it is incredibly hard not to be angry with a lot of you antis right now. Like a deep primal rage in me that could rival the heat of the sun. We are living in a time of a global crisis with an awful virus. I am watching in real time so many people DIE from this pandemic and die alone. Our entire medical system is being taxed to the fucking brink and we have a thousand and one problems that need to be fixed. A thousand and one hurtles to champion for and what do you pick?

Two D fucking lines. 

With all the time and energy some of you sink into this, you could actually address real world problems that are actively happening right now. But the fact is...most of you don’t want to actually “fix” anything. You want to destroy other people to elevate yourself and you pick an outlet that makes you have the “moral high ground” so to speak.

And I am so goddamn tired of it. 

Like I’m not saying you have to LIKE the content. Or even approve. But you literally don’t know anything about that person other than what they write out and believe it or not, fanfiction of any sort is not some kind of manifesto that authors put out on what we want in real life. It’s not a check list. It’s ok to not like the content. Just keep moving on with your life. Block the tag, filter it out and keep scrolling.

I don’t really talk about my experiences on here because one it’s a very personal thing and two a lot of what I see? It’s not something the average person can just hear casually. But I can tell you now in my line of work not only do I see grisly things, bloody things, violent things but I’ve also seen the effects of abuse on people. I have seen first fucking hand the look on someone’s face when they realized “someone just tried to kill me” or “that person nearly raped me”. 

You want to champion victims? Then go actively donate and support organizations or are supposed to actually help those survivors, not harass anonymous strangers over the internet that you make assumptions about without even knowing them based on their content. You want to make a change? Then go find ways to help the organizations that are dedicated to helping those people instead of directing that on fanfiction.

[savrenim]

hi hi hi. so I just got into the Hamilton fandom, I swear I am four years late where did everybody go, and, well. I am apparently a hamburr shipper. bcs that is my life now. anyway I saw your fic ifmlam and I swear it is my favourite of all the fics I've ever read (and trust me I've read literally thousands). I love it so so much, how do you write fics like that??? I cried about four times during the whole thing, I stayed up till 4am reading it even when I had to wake up at 7 because it is just. that. good. I could not stop thinking about it for days afterwards and ifmlam has just ruined me. I can't think of listen to Hamilton without thinking of ifmlam anymore.

on to my qursttion: is it abandoned? of course it's perfectly FINE if it is. don't let anyone tell u differently, your fic is YOURS and u are amazing.

but pls I really need closure from ur fic, it has been haunting me if its abandoned or ongoing and I've read ur other fics and they are just chefskiss and thank you so much for writing them all. thank you thank you thank you, I will never be able to thank you enough for writing this fic and for everything it's done for me. I am probably thousands of miles away but I am sending you virtual jugs through a co.puter screen right now.

(don't feel pressured to reply to this or update it flam, I know how overwhelming it can get with so many messages and after a while u get desensitized to it. u can literally reply "thx. itfmlam is abandoned" and I would still be amazingly star struck. anyway has gotten way too long and I need to sleep and I'm sorry u probably won't see this so I'm just talking to myself right now but bye!!)

and thank you so so much for writing itfmlam.

aaaah hello anon!

thank you so so much???? I am so??? honored??? that ifmlam rates so highly to you, and also that you've read my other fics??????

the answer to the "is ifmlam abandoned" question is probably the worst possible one, which is pretty much "I do want to finish it, both for the folks that still want closure as well as it bothers to me have abandoned projects that are in the public eye/ already partially published, but also, it is last on my current writing projects list"

my current actually active writing projects list, kind of in order of priority, is

I'm literally three chapters away from being Actually Fully Done with the not-quite-first-not-quite-second let's call it 1.5th draft of an actual?? full?? original?? novel?? Opus which of course then goes out to beta readers and then gets who-knows-how-much edited and then maybe beta readers again if a lot does change and then a copyeditor my mom, my copyeditor is my mom, and maybe my little brother he's one of the betas but is very good at catching typos and then I!!! get to publish it!!!! which is the single thing I am most excited for!!!!!!!!! this should be closed up in the next week or two, and then take a while for people to actually read the draft and get back to me.

I really desperately want to finish my open-but-like-90%-written fic, which means we raise it up, the final chapter of to the bottom of the river bc I realized that it was kind of incomplete, and the second chapter of a buried and a burning flame because any more work there will need to wait until the author publishes the next book in the series. this should be closed up in the next month or two.

Speedwrite the draft of the second book of the Opus series so that hopefully by the time book 1 edits are happening, I have an almost complete draft of the second book. this is mostly me side-eyeing myself about taking nearly four years to write the first book, but that is solidly in part because I had so many other open projects which point 2 is about clearing that docket. this should be done in the next year.

And then just have my major projects be, at least until books 1-5 are written and published, books 1-5 of that because that is arguably the first major 'plot arc' of the series, so if I'm looking for a pause point on writing, that's probably where to stop.

There are two or three other short side projects (a weird fun second person short story tentatively titled witch-queen, a collection of four short stories Memoirs about a not-so-evil necromancer and the shenanigans he gets up to trying to rule a kingdom, working title Perfectly Normal Recipe Blog which is a collaborative project about a perfectly normal recipe blog that definitely doesn't include anything out of the normal) that will happen when they happen

There are other projects that are on the backburner -- The Numanok Files, a series of probably 12-15 short novellas about a mercenary/ bounty hunter esque person in space whose specialty is dealing with hauntings, but, like, 80% of their jobs is actually "you are effectively a space home inspector pointing out faulty wiring reacting to solar flares/ there's a weird alien fungus/ it's carbon monoxide okay change your atmosphere filters" and 20% of it is punching ghosts; there's a post-post apocalypse novel that I want to write that I know characters and general pacing and half the setting but need to work out the other half and figure out how much aesthetic I want to commit to; there's Strangeside7 aka spacerace book that is my reaction to how much I love how Redline the anime movie commits itself to "no we are about a race, like 60% of the screentime is just fully going to be an utterly ridiculous sci fi space race"; there's even a ridiculous YA trilogy that I would have to completely transplant the setting but might end up writing because the interplay between angel-physics and physics-physics was one of my favorite things in the world. and I guess the weird ridiculous technically a sequel series to ifmlam that was going to be published as original books that was basically me having fun with 'okay I fucking love star wars prequels old rotting space bureaucracy galactic republic style' except with seers and that also still might happen because it does have some of the coolest sci fi concepts and honestly I thiiiink that's all?

but the tl;dr of that timeline is I'm trying to finish a punch of projects Right Now, so that I can write books 2-5 of Opus, and then when I'm done that (which honestly, my average fiction-writing output is close to 100k a year. if I'm concentrating purely on one project, and writing books that are about 100k, we are talking four years. although my job situation is super up in the air in that period and writing might get put solidly on the backburner as I try to make it in academia, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) I will re-evaluate which projects go next, and that's when ifmlam is likely to come up for review.

I do not have any expectations that I will make it as an original author. I'm planning on posting all of my stuff online for free, but, like. it is incredibly difficult to convince people to try out even a piece of free and easily accessibly original work even if one has a huge following, I am a very small fanfiction author, and from what I can tell the majority of the people who are interested in my work are mostly interested in me finishing ifmlam. writing is a hobby for me, and while I'm writing mostly for me--and hence the for me bit at least for the next five years is pretty solidly going to be this series that I am deeply excited about and have sunk my heart and soul into every single aspect of--I'm human, and I don't really like shouting into the void, and I expect if I spend five years publishing to absolutely no response I will either stop writing for a while and do other things gods know my life is busy enough, return to fandom in general to write some other fanfic about whatever I get deeply into, or return to a work that I actually get response to. so ifmlam will probably start getting worked on a bit at that point one way or another. unless, of course, we are in the incredibly rare timeline in which I do make it as an original author, there are people who are deeply hyped for my original works and an actual demand for them, in which case as you may have noticed there are enough ideas there to keep me busy for a decade or two, and they will just get my full attention instead of fanfiction*. in this timeline, I will do what I was considering doing a few years ago, which is officially declare ifmlam otherwise abandoned and make one more giant chapter update which is a full and cleaned up outline of what I was going to write, interspersed with the scenes already written, and have ifmlam be given at least that closure.

*I want to make it clear that I very much love fanfiction and am proud to have been a fanfiction author and in my heart of hearts would keep writing it forever, I just also have a lot of ideas for characters and settings and magic systems and Aesthetics and I have been biting at the bit to write something that is //mine// and all mine and only mine for a while, I don't see original work as superior so much as there are a dozen fandoms that I am currently in and bursting to make content about except oops these fandoms currently only exist in my head, and I want to correct that

of course given how much as writing is my vent activity and I write what I'm in the mood for, there's a chance I'll feel ifmlam cravings before then, just... expect it to take a couple of years for an update, but also for there to be an update one way of another in a couple of years? but as for right now, I'm turning to original writing, because that is what brings me joy.

but I am really deeply honored that it brought you so much joy!!! and while I will never publish spoilers in a public place, if you message me off anon I am perfectly happy to give a run-down of my current plans for the ending, bc I know "wait a couple years and see" is not the most satisfactory of answers! and hey maybe you'll be like me and once you've given Opus a try you'll decide you like it better too, it does have Seers although they are deeply different Seers than in ifmlam but imo it's very gay and fun and at least politics on one side

[karinzany]

Tagged by @silvadour (thank you for the mention and sorry for the late reply).

Why did you choose your url?: When I was in 9th grade, all of the guys in my class were playing League of Legends. So I caved in under peer pressure and installed it. I had to make up an original username, so I chose something that sounded whimsical but was still similar to my real name. Since it's so weird, I can use it everywhere, because no one has copied it. (Btw, I only played the tutorial, it was too boring for me)

Any side blogs? Nope, everything goes in this one. It's mostly One Piece or other anime, so it's cool.

How long have you been on tumblr? According to the archives, my first post was on August 15th 2015, but it feels like it's been less time, honestly.

Do you have a queue tag? No, I don't see the reason to do that. I just log in, reblog 20 posts in a row, and sign out.

Why did you start your blog in the first place? I've noticed tumblr is a great place to find fanart and fanfiction of my favorite series, so I started a blog just to archive the things I like all in one place. I don't usually post original content, but when I do, it's One Piece related.

Why did you choose your header? Cool group shot with the Strawhats looking badass. Never found out who the author was.

Why did you choose your icon? Because Jinbei became an official member of the crew and I love him, so I edited one of his pictures to match my header. My previous icon was also Jinbei.

What’s your post with the most notes? I Unfortunately, it's a collage I did in 2018 with the "The One Piece ships that aren’t canon yet". When I get notifications, I cringe internally, but it's a reminder that I've grown older and wiser.

How many followers do you have? Right now, 679. Not sure if they are all "real", but I'm not gonna check.

How many people do you follow? 3988, and counting. It's never enough.

Have you ever made a shitpost? Yes, mostly One Piece memes.

How often do you use Tumblr? Everyday I'm tumblin'

Did you have a fight/argument with a blog once? Nope. I have no idea who anyone his.

How do you feel about “you need to reblog this post”? I fucking hate it. I actively avoid reblogging those. I came here to have a good time, not to be guilt tripped into reblogging something I don't even care that much about.

Do you like tag games? Do you like ask games? I like them, but it depends on the subject. I ignore the ones that make very personal questions. I prefer the ones about a particular fandom.

Which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous? Probably none, let's be honest. I also don't know who the famous users are.

Do you have a crush on a mutual? As I said before, I don't really know who these people are. But I feel proud when my mutuals reblog my posts, I'm like "thank you for the validation, bestie".

Tagging: @blueboltkatana @biscuithead20 @tevali @aster-ria @pancakeitaliano @useless-bi-otch @ii-luffy-i

[vidalinav]

tbh I feel so done with this series - and I only stayed because the Nesta book was coming in the first place. Like, I find it so interesting how people love to point out SJM her her thousands of problematic issues (as they should) but continue supporting her. It's ironic if you acknowledge the toxicity she promotes but spend money to get the book anyway. This is probably why I'm done with the series. Like do I still love Nesta very much? Yes! But I feel all the attention isn't going to make sjm change, instead give her the benefit of thinking people still obsess over her books

I don’t know how to respond to this. TBH. So I’ll try my best. But it is your right to leave the fandom, everyone grows out of content, or gets tired of certain things, or favors one character over another, gets disappointed. It’s chaos to get obsessed over a book series or a television show or whatever. I happen to really love chaos, so I’m really okay with this. I will complain about it loudly, but at the core I LOVE chaos.  

I generally like how SJM writes, and for the most part it’s not too bad, on a regular basis. It’s just with this book for some reason, things were just wayyy lower quality in specific areas. Which again I really hold against her editor and her friends who did not tell her that so many things were inaccurate to what she herself wrote or was just plain stupid. I don’t find her writing any more problematic than any other person’s writing. Personally I feel that every piece of media consumed is problematic at its core. All human beings are problematic and therefore anything that features them should probably portray a level of wth is going on? Of course, this doesn’t mean you should love it or want it or promote ideals that are wild or immoral, but just that it’s impossible to get around and very subjective to the nature of things. I really don’t think SJM is THAT bad, but she did make a book that could have been WAY better and I will stand by that claim. She’s a writer that needs growth as much as her characters, maybe needs different point of views to really show her where she can flourish. But again, the process of promoting, the instagram lives, the covers, the actual book makes it seem to me that it’s an institutional problem rather than one SJM herself is actively trying to do. So I feel for her if that’s the case. 

I also can’t say what will happen in the next book. So it could be actually really great, which would be sort of disappointing because Nesta’s arc deserved sooo much better. It could also be really shitty and at that point than you can be like (if you haven’t already) well this fucking sucks I can’t stay any longer, which maybe will happen. (Shrugs) I don’t know. I personally just don’t like waiting for anything. I’m very very impatient. So I hate that I don’t know what’s going to happen in respect to who the next POVs are. Because tbh if we knew that, it would be fairly easy to connect dots on how this is going down. It would be a relief but I’m also sure she might lose some fans with whatever she chooses. 

But I’m going to be completely honest and say I am here for Nesta. I want to see Nesta from every POV. I hope to god she still causes problems and is the character that is a main focus even if she’s not always in the light, even if she’s completely sweet and I don’t recognize her and she’s fully IC, I’ll take it! Because well I read the whole ACOTAR series, reading for Nesta in Feyre’s POV, and I thought it was fine. I wrote fanfiction for three years based on small snippets. SO, look I’ll die with this fandom who’s yelling blasphemy about Elriel or Elucien or Mor and Emerie, or Gwynriel, or Anti-Rhysands, Anti-ICs, Anti-Amrens, I’ll even chant yell louder, but instinctively I’m like take your fucking ships, your opinions, because as long as Nesta is featured in that book, I’m good to go. 

I’ll stay for my girl and that is the truth. 

[ardenttheories]

The issue with “Dubiously Canon”.

“Dubiously canon” was a term used by Hussie to describe both the Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck^2. To his mind, this meant something very simple; in the greater canon of Homestuck - that is, the story it tells and the actual events that happen in its timeline - whatever happens in this continuative media paradoxically is and is not relevant. 

It is a term that allowed Homestuck to continue without actually being “Homestuck”; to carry its name without supposedly tarnishing its branding. It was used to posit a very simple question, and one that is actually fairly interesting to ponder: what is canon? 

This, of course, comes from the background of Homestuck’s community. Homestuck has thousands of fanfiction pieces, thousands of AUs, thousands of posited artworks - everything which is non-canonical, because it did not happen in the core story of Homestuck. 

Hussie, with the suggestion of “dubiously canon”, offered his fandom the choice of pseudo-canonicity; Homestuck is over, and anything that comes after is just one in a series of potentials that might have eventually happened. A piece of fanfiction detailing the life of John as he struggles with depression and eventually finds solace in Dirk is as potentially canonical as a fanartist’s design of Rose wearing her Seer uniform and becoming an actual goddess. 

Nothing is true, everything is permitted, to copy from a rather famous game’s quoting. Homestuck has no actual “end”, so everything we create is as real and unreal as anything else. 

This, of course, is a perfectly valid and reasonable claim to make. Dubiously canonical content allows the fans to be validated and recognised in the context of Homestuck. It’s saying to us, quite simply, that we have been a huge part of the creation of Homestuck - and from here on out, we are as real as Hussie is as authors, as creators for Homestuck. 

What causes it to fail, however, is when Hussie himself then makes a continuation. 

Hussie is the author and creator of Homestuck. In the grand scheme of things, he is the word of god, the lore creator, the one who envisioned it. If Hussie recognises something, it automatically stands out above the rest. It is inherently more canonical because Hussie, as the creator of Homestuck, has looked at it and said, “hey, this is something that could probably happen in Homestuck”. 

As the author, his word is miles above our own. He wrote Homestuck. He made a series of decisions that created Homestuck; without him, it would doubtlessly be completely different from what it is now, if it even existed at all. If Hussie says, “this is Homestuck”, then it simply is - because that’s what being an author means. You create the lore of your world, and anything that you recognise as part of that world is immediately brought into the canon. 

So, of course, the publication of the Epilogues and of Homestuck^2 is a significant issue. This is canonically Homestuck; this is how Hussie has determined that Homestuck would naturally continue. It’s obvious enough with how he described the Epilogues as Homestuck’s “drop-off” point; you can see the Epilogues and turn back, stay with the original story of Homestuck and all of its fanon content, or you can progress into Homestuck^2 and the story Hussie - the author - wants to tell.

By putting his name on it, posting it on his own website, and adding his own thoughts and ideas to it, Hussie has completely negated the point he was trying to make with “dubiously canon” content. Canon is canon because the author decided what is and is not part of the original universe. Whether Hussie wants to recognise it or not, he has declared that the Epilogues and Homestuck^2 are the actual continuations of Homestuck. That this is how Homestuck ends, and carries on. 

Another part of this issue is that Hussie’s name makes it official. Even if this was truly dubiously canon - in a paradoxical place of being both canonical and noncanonical - Hussie’s name and the fact that it’s being written by authors chosen by Hussie, that Hussie is paying to write the content, slaps an incredibly blatant “official” sticker on Homestuck^2 and the Epilogues that can’t be ignored. Money is changing hands. Several voices have been picked out of the crowd and one story has been chosen among thousands to be the Hussie mandated continuation. These are the official people and the official words of Homestuck - and with official branding comes canonical privillages.

Nobody is going to look at a work of fiction on AO3 and say that it has the same weighting as Homestuck^2 does. Nobody is going to look at a fan-made AU and say that it is as canonical as Homestuck^2. 

People already see Homestuck^2 as canon. Not as something that is dubiously canon, but as canon complete. June should not be lauded as a canonical figure, and neither should transmasc Roxy, because in theory they have the exact same canonicity as transmasc John and transfem Roxy - but by being in Homestuck^2 specifically, by being acknowledged by Hussie, the fandom sees them as more canonical than other fandom headcanons. They’re not just headcanons anymore - they’re real. But, in all technicality, they shouldn’t be if Hussie’s ideology is true. 

None of the events of Homestuck^2 should be seen as any more viable than any written fiction by a fan - but even the authors of Homestuck^2 see their word as law, their choices as canon, and their headcanons as the most legitimate. It is impossible to dismiss the canonicity of Homestuck^2. 

It is not the same, does not hold the same weighting, as a piece of fanfiction that maybe went down a route that we didn’t like. It isn’t something that can be brushed off. This isn’t an unknown author making a work of fiction for a piece of media they like; it’s Hussie’s official team, Hussie’s official word, making the official continuation of Homestuck. 

“Dubiously canon” cannot work when the author continues his story. It is no longer “dubious”, it is outright canon. It no longer allows for the fandom to be validated, to be as genuine, as he intended for them to be. Through the sheer effort of writing Homestuck^2, Hussie has completely devalued the entire basis of its literary theory. 

There is, of course, yet another issue, and a fairly significant one at that: the profitisation of the Epilogues. 

The point of the Epilogues was that they were meant to replicate AO3′s fanfiction format. It was meant to show that they were as fanon as any other piece of fiction, and that they held no bolder position in the grand scheme of Homestuck than any fan’s work. 

No fan can profit from their work. No fan has the capacity to publish their fanfiction, to have it sold in stores, and set a price for it. Legally, they cannot get away with doing anything of the like - because they do not own the rights to Homestuck, and their publication could pose issue for Homestuck if casual readers mistake it for an actual piece in the canon. Donations are the best a fanfiction author can hope for, or perhaps Patreon subscribers. 

The point of fanfiction is that it is done for free. The enjoyment of something enough to create for it - and to create something that can never be achieved in the same way official content can - is what makes fandom and fan content what it is. You physically cannot profit from it because it is not your story to profit from; not your character set or your universe to claim. If profits can be found, it is through legal channels that VIZ and Hussie have explicitly allowed, such as commissions. Individual basis, rather than mass-production.

You can likely see where I’m going with this. 

The publication of the Epilogues completely ruins its fanfiction format. It is no longer a piece of fanfiction, styalised on the internet and mirroring what fanfiction authors do every day. It is no longer hosted in that category of fan work. It simply can’t be, because to be published, paid for, stocked on shelves - it has to be canonical, has to be written by the author, or at least endorsed by him. 

To have it published directly separates it from every piece of fanwork it was trying to celebrate. 

Their format was originally designed to emphasise the fact that it’s as non-canonical yet as relevant as other fan works post Earth-C - and is only one variant of the End-Credits continuation. Publication instead emphasises that the Epilogues are the official and canonical ending - because it’s the one that the unknowing public will accept, because it has Hussie’s name on it, and because it is no longer a replica of fanfiction but is instead on par with the other published Homestuck books. 

Yes: publication of the Epilogues puts it in the same place of canonicity as the canonical story of Homestuck, likewise published by VIZ. This is no longer a “drop-off” point; it is what bookstores genuinely cite to be the “long awaited ending to Homestuck”. The issue being, of course, that the Epilogues aren’t an ending; they’re a beginning - one that leads directly into Homestuck^2. Which, by proxy, provides canonicity to Homestuck^2. There is nothing dubious here. 

The problem being, of course, that as an author you cannot claim that your piece of media is meant to validate fan works by being in the style of a fan work, and then actively monetise and profit off of it. You cannot put it into bookstores with your name and your copyright and still claim that it is exactly the same as fanfiction. It just isn’t. It hosts a series of legalities that differentiates it completely from fandom.

The point of “dubious canonicity” is tarnished because of this. No fan author will ever be able to get that level of validation to be published above any other work. No fan author will be seen as that canonical to be praised as the “ending to Homestuck” by book stores. No fan author will receive a penny for the works they create on a similar scale. 

The Epilogues are Homestuck. By profiting off of it, they have explicitly stated that this is how Homestuck ends. They have made it clear that this is part of Homestuck’s canonical story.

The point they tried to make - both in regards to what canon is and how canon and noncanon works in Homestuck^2 - simply can’t exist with the way they have created it. “Dubiously canon” is a contradictory statement, one that doesn’t work for an official piece, and especially is lost when that piece is then profited from. Had it been left as a hand-off to fans, this would have been completely different - but the moment an author then continues to write, dubious canonicity hosts no meaning.