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floralovebot · 3 years ago

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Helia and Tecna friendship headcanons? -lambofzenith

AHHHHHHHHHH okay so

helia is really bad at technology right? pretty much anything that isn't covered in red fountain lessons, he's a complete no-go at. tecna takes it upon herself to try and help him understand basic technology a bit more and it goes so wrong. helia is literally the mom that squints their eyes and holds their phone away from their face while using One pointer finger to type everything. tecna hates it so much.

helia naturally doesn't understand a single thing that comes out of her mouth when she's talking technology but he still supports her nonetheless

helia is surprisingly rational most of the time! he's a firm Push All My Emotions Down And Then One Day I'll Die kind of person so even during really stressful missions, he's good at keeping a level head about things. tecna really appreciates this and it's not rare to see her, helia, and timmy discussing mission-related strategies During The Middle Of A Fight

tecna has a tendency to talk while she works (only noticeable around people she's comfortable with though) but she gets a little self-conscious about it. she knows it's not Bad or anything, but it doesn't seem Right either so she tries to keep quiet most of the time. helia on the other hand is so used to working while it's noisy that he's totally chill with it. they've gotten used to just vibing in the same room, working on their own things, and not actually talking to each other during it. they're comfortable around each other :) helia doesn't mind when she rambles out loud and tecna doesn't mind him pacing around the room every five minutes. symbiotic relationship.

tecna doesn't like talking about what she went through in the omega dimension, even with timmy. however, she does occasionally draw things out when she really needs to vent and can't think of any other way how. she's always been good at sketching due to her background in designing gadgets so this wasn't a weird transition for her. helia told her about this anonymous place for artists to submit their art with absolutely no names attached and after checking to make sure it was legit and she was completely safe, she started to submit one or two a year. she doesn't like to do it often but it does help to sort of "get it out" without actually talking about it.

while helia is notoriously Bad at video games, he does actually like the more "physical reality" ones (think that virtual reality tecmy scene!) mainly because it feels close enough to real life that he doesn't need to rely on just technology to do it. tecna and helia often have very competitive gaming matches but specifically within those kinds of games otherwise, he's really bad at it and she gets annoyed that he can't remember any of the buttons.

speaking of competitions, helia has an inner bet going on of How Much Can I Pretend To Not Know Jackshit About A Specific Technological Topic Before Tecna Notices. what he doesn't know, is that tecna knows he does this and has her own inner bet of How Long Can I Explain This Specific Topic Before Helia Gets Bored And Moves On. so far, the score is mostly even, with helia only winning because timmy isn't aware of this mental battle and will often jump in to explain things too. helia is very smug about this and tecna can't say anything to timmy otherwise she loses the fight that no one actually set firm rules on.

timmy is just really happy that his two best friends are also friends and sometimes he tries to invite helia and flora on their dates. tecna is okay with this only because she thinks it's funny. florelia were also okay with it but started to not be because they realized that their version of a date and tecmy's version of a date was extremely different. they've started to come up with increasingly ridiculous excuses for why they can't go and so far timmy is the only one that hasn't noticed. poor timmy, he genuinely thinks flora's best friend cactus is sick and needs care 😔

when timmy isn't available, helia will call tecna for any technology related issues he's having. on one hand, she likes that he trusts her and can rely on her, on the other hand, she's told him ten separate times not to leave his computer running all the damn time. (tecna: please turn the computer off when you're not using it. this will immensely help solve all of the problems you've been having. helia: okay so i'm gonna leave it on all the time?). he's not trying to be difficult though. he just forgets everything and assumes it should work regardless (he a little stupit).

roxy gets so much gender envy from both of them and it confuses her all the time. they have no idea what a gender envy is though and they're mostly just wondering how they stop giving it to roxy since it seems like it agitates her??? help please???? researching the matter doesn't help and it ends up becoming a meme on winx stan twt because tecna made a very official and serious post asking about the severity of "gender envy" and needing to know how contagious it is. now whenever either of them posts, earth teens just comment gender envy at them. helia still doesn't know what it means.

they don't watch movies/tv together but they will binge-watch the same shows and then talk about them later on. tecna's formatting is still very formal and functional meanwhile helia bounces off multiple points and forgets to make a conclusion. he stresses her out so much.

helia notices when tecna has stayed up too long for too many nights and will occasionally send her a "please sleep" message when he knows timmy is already asleep and can't do it. she doesn't always listen but sometimes she will, but not before sending the same message back because why the fuck is he up at this hour huh dumbass?????

tecna has a pet bird and helia has multiple cats and they absolutely cannot be in the same room together. her bird is constantly trying to fight his cats and while they're usually well behaved, he's genuinely scared they're gonna try to eat it (tecna: stop calling my bird an "it"; helia: stop putting your bird near my cats 😐)

they actually don't like hanging out when one of them is upset. they both have a hard time talking about their emotions (for different reasons obviously) and they always end up feeling like they have to say something when they're together. they just really prefer hanging when they're both in a good mood or at least calm. whenever one of them gets upset, they stop hanging out together until that person feels better.

connected to the last point, you'd think that would mean they don't know a lot about each other, but they surprisingly do! they're both relatively observant people (tecna gets better every year) and they're actually really good at figuring out why the other is upset and what would help. they just don't talk about it.

although, on a similar note, the one time they did have an emotional talk, it was about timmy. tecna was feeling upset again and worrying over whether or not she's "too logical/not emotional enough" and it was the one time where she actually allowed herself to hang out with him while being upset. they had a genuine heart to heart about things and especially about how she's way too hard on herself. they thought it would be awkward since they actively avoided this kind of thing but it wasn't! it went very naturally and helia even teared up a bit. he's very proud of her and the effort she makes every day and since that talk has been much more vocal about it.

when they went to earth in s4, they both spent way too much time learning about Earth Things; tecna about earth media (canon), and helia about animals since that's what flora was talking about. he started calling tecna "chip" after that because chipmunks reminded him of her. she disagrees with this assessment and he refuses to admit he mixed up chipmunks and squirrels. he still calls her chip to this day, and fortunately, it's grown on her. unfortunately, he calls timmy "chip" too, and now it's a hassle to figure out who he's talking to.

helia is surprisingly interested in zenith technology despite not understanding it all! he enjoys walking through the streets of zenith with tecna while she proudly points things out so he can go "ooo aaa" at everything. sometimes she tries to explain how things work and his mind starts playing elevator music automatically. tecna has gotten really good at knowing when helia is just. brain empty no thoughts because she recognizes the Empty look in his eyes. she enjoys catching it live and trying to figure out why he's just. not thinking (usually it's because he either doesn't understand something or got bored) (this happens often when sky starts talking) (sorry sky)

tecna is one of the winx (besides flora of course) that helia trusts the most. not in an emotional or friend way, but in a physical, we're on a mission way. she has good control of her magic and knows how to use it. she's good at thinking of strategies and applying them properly to the situation. and after the omega dimension, he had a newfound respect for her previously unknown to him survival skills. if he were even in severe danger, she would be the first winx he'd call (depending on the situation, she is occasionally ahead of flora).

helia is really bad at sharing details. he tends to go straight to the conclusion but doesn't share how he got there (adhd king 😌) and tecna is the best person to call in when this happens. her logical questioning makes it seem so easy because she has the patience and knowledge to connect the dots and ask the right questions. when anyone else tries its more like (helia: i'm sitting in a pool of blood; person: uhm do you know where it's coming from?; helia: probably the stab wound; someone: did you get stabbed??; helia: oh yeah definitely.)

#lamb.. i love them so much...#the comedy potential with these two are just off the roof #winx club #winx tecna #winx helia #answered #lambofzenith #mine.headcanons #ugh ik i mentioned it on the trivelia post but this made me think of the backstory i made up for helia #because tecna plays a big part in it later on in the story #i have an entire rewrite that i refuse to ever actually write ajhgljadlg #but tecna plays a big part in helia's Main Arc in the story... and its so self indulgent i just really love these two #posting now.. when no one is awake.. ajkdhljaghdlj

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andrewmoocow · 4 years ago

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Steven Universe Alternate Future chapter 11: In Dreams (originally posted on March 29, 2021)

AN: Hope you all packed your bags dear readers, cause we're gonna go on a real trip. One of my initial ideas for Alternate Future was with the addition as Aquamarine as a more major antagonist, we'd also have a mini-character arc about Peridot blaming herself for Steven's capture at the end of Season 4 even years later, which I felt was kind of a waste of possible character development for the little nacho. Regardless, it's time I finally see it through myself. And trust me, I'm really gonna put Peri through the wringer.

Synopsis: Steven's dream powers start acting up when he and Peridot want to watch TV.

Cast:

Zach Callison as Steven, Stefan

Shelby Rabara as Peridot

Johnny Hawkes as Cookie Cat, Rodrigo

Marieve Hernington as Jasmine

Della Saba as Marine, Aquamarine

The night was dark as Steven strolled through Beach City on his way home after a long day until he heard music. Racing to the beach house, he discovered that colorful flashing lights and loud music were coming from inside the house, and that got him super excited.

"All right!" Steven gasped cheerfully. "Now that I've saved the universe, I finally get to party!" When he raced to his front window, Steven could see all his friends inside dancing the night away. Garnet, Amethyst & Pearl, Lars and the Off-Colors, Lapis, Bismuth & Peridot, Connie, even Onion was breaking it down. Before he could join the fun, however, the door and windows suddenly vanished, leaving behind an empty wooden wall. "Huh? Hey guys, let me in! This isn't funny!"

"STEVEN!" a booming voice echoed from above. When Steven looked up, he discovered that Obsidian's head was replaced with a giant Cookie Cat looking down on him with a taunting grin. "NOBODY NEEDS YOUR HELP! SO WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?!"

"What?!" Steven cried before the porch opened up like a trap door under him, forcing the boy to fall through the sky screaming.

"STEVEN! STEVEN!"

A little voice broke Steven out of slumber and back into the real world in his bedroom. "Why do I keep having these dreams?" he mused to himself. "Are they telling me something?"

"STEVEN, OPEN UP!" the voice cried out while pounding on the door.

"Peridot?" Steven began to recognize the green Gem's nasally voice as he walked downstairs and let the former Kindergartener in.

"STEVEN STEVEN STEVEN STEVEN!" Peridot chanted, beetling in place while holding popcorn and drinks. "Today's the big day! Did you tape the premiere?!"

"What premiere? I have no idea what you're talking about." Steven said coyly.

"But you promised me!" Peridot whined, not realizing that her half-organic friend might be joking.

"Oh, you mean the premiere of the reboot of the classic Great North teen camping drama Camp Pining Hearts that I recorded," Steven revealed as he pulled out a VHS tape. "on this very tape?"

Peridot gasped at the mere mention of the show she had awaited for so long and began squealing excitedly. "Yes, it's finally here!"

"THE RETURN OF CAMP PINING HEARTS!" the pair declared joyfully.

Steven and Peridot raced upstairs to watch the Camp Pining Hearts reboot when Steven realized someone was missing. "Hey, where's Lapis? I thought she was a big fan of CPH as you are."

"Oh, she declined to attend our viewing because she feels this reboot will be an abomination." Peridot answered as she sat down at the foot of Steven's bed. "You know that United Defenders of the World show? She really likes that too, and that's gotten a reboot much like Camp Pining Hearts, but she doesn't like how that is so dark and depressing because apparently, it's more adult. I mean, come on! Can't we go one minute without any intense violence or Mangolin yelling so many nasty wo-"

"What, she's not coming because one show clouds her judgment of another?" Steven rolled his eyes at Peridot's explanation while putting the tape into his VHS player. "That's a little silly. But I'm glad you were still able to come because I've been having these weird dreams lately. Like, are any of them real or-"

"That's not important Steven!" Peridot shut her fellow fan's mouth. "Now press play already you monster!"

Steven chuckled for a bit before he started the tape, and the theme song for the Camp Pining Hearts reboot began to play while two attractive young actors were credited for the roles of its leads, Jasmine and Rodrigo. Steven excitedly ate popcorn while Peridot waved a Great North flag around as the show began.

Fifty-two minutes later, the credits finally rolled, and Steven & Peridot were left stunned, silent, and disappointed.

"L-Lapis warned me, and I didn't listen." Peridot quivered in shock.

"W-what?" Steven added, just as horrified. "What…."

"WHAT HAVE THEY DONE?!" the pair roared in unison.

"What is with that Rodrigo guy?!" Peridot began complaining and clawing at her face. "He has no charisma! He is clearly inferior to the old cast!"

"And can we just talk about the cinematography?" Steven added just as furiously while Peridot got up and marched towards the TV.

"They changed all the characters, and I don't care about any one of them!" Peridot threw a tantrum and began venting by picking up the set & slamming it to the ground. "How could this happen to us?!" she began to cry her eyes out on the television. "Camp Pining Hearts was my escape when I first arrived on Earth, when my whole world was nothing but chaos!"

"CPH brought us all together." Steven comforted his green friend, though he was sobbing as well.

"And now, just look at this nightmare!" Peridot yelled with a hand to the TV screen when it stopped showing the Camp Pining Hearts reboot. Instead, it began playing Steven's dream from last night. "Wait, Steven, when were you ever an actor?"

"What? No, they didn't!" Steven exclaimed as the dream continued on television. "Is this my dreams?" When Steven watched himself fall from the beach house in his dream, the TV then switched back to Camp Pining Hearts. "Whoa! My dream powers must be messing with the TV signal!"

"How in the world is that even possible?!" Peridot raised an eyebrow at this revelation, but it also gave her an idea. "Wait just a second. Steven, you realize what this means?!"

"I should start wearing a tinfoil hat?" Steven asked, unaware of what the little genius had planned.

"No!" Peridot answered. "If we use your dream powers on the TV, we can make our own Camp Pining Hearts! We'll reboot the reboot!"

"Reboot the reboot?" Steven realized and excitedly stood up. "Peridot, you're a genius!"

"I know." Peridot smugly declared.

"Plus, it would be really fun to fix something small this time." Steven said before Peridot wrapped a lime-colored arm around his neck.

"This shall be the beginning of Peridot & Steven Productions!" Peridot triumphantly declared.

"Yeah!" Steven added, and then he fell from Peridot's grasp.

Later that day, Steven and Peridot were now standing in front of a whiteboard detailing all their plans for fixing the Camp Pining Hearts Reboot, bouncing more plans off each other in regards to shipping.

"So Peridot, you think Jasmine's endgame should be Khaz or Rodrigo?" Steven asked Peridot while looking at a web of pictures of the characters from the reboot.

"It seems the characters are trying to railroad us into a Jasrigo relationship, despite turning everyone else into complete jerks just because they don't agree with-" Peridot began, but then she started getting irritated. "Gah, these characters have no chemistry together! It's like they're being shipped just because they're the leading man and woman!"

"Just can't get into Rodrigo, eh?" Steven asked his writing partner.

"He's just so passive and quiet, it's positively irritating!" Peridot yelled. "He has none of the old cast's personalities that made them so memorable!"

"Sure he may be really quiet and soft," Steven assured Peridot. "but what if we try to do something with his social anxiety and peanut allergy despite them not being connected to the larger story, like make him a foil?"

"A foil, you say?" Peridot raised an eyebrow at Steven's idea. "Okay, I'm listening."

"I got it!" Steven declared before he sat down in front of some pencils and paper and began to draw. "I call him Stefan." He began explaining while drawing. "He's a hunky lifeguard friend with nice muscles that everyone likes and wants to hang out with. His popularity is both a blessing and a curse, yet always makes time to help his buddy Rodrigo boost his confidence." He handed his final drawing over to Peridot, which turned out to be a sketch of a more muscular Steven.

"So he's like your self-insert!" Peridot beamed at her friend's work. "I like your ideas, Stefan!"

As night fell, Steven got back into bed with a bowl of chili in his lap while Peridot inserted the tape into the VCR player.

"Uh, why are you eating at bedtime?" Peridot questioned Steven's choice of a bedtime meal.

"Oh, you mean my chili?" Steven replied, gesturing to the chili in his hands. "I read that eating spicy stuff before bed makes your dreams super vivid."

"I appreciate your initiative, fellow creator." Peridot grinned at Steven's idea while he continued eating his chili.

"Thanks, Peridot." Steven thanked Peridot before putting the bowl on his nightstand and tucking himself in. "Okay, good night."

"Good night Steven. But remember," Peridot said as she started whispering into Steven's ear. "action-orientated storytelling."

"Hey Jasmine, I hear you love birds." A tanned, muscular version of Steven said flirtatiously to a cute brown-haired girl examining a bird perched in her hand.

"Sure Stefan." Jasmine giggled cutely.

"Well, a little birdie told me downstream that there's a special island somewhere 'round here." Stefan replied, leaning against a tree and giving Jasmine a wink while pointing offscreen. "I hear it's full of rare specimens."

"Did you hear that?" Jasmine gasped elatedly. "Thank you so much Stefan!" Stefan responded by giving Jasmine another wink.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo was by himself at a campsite reading an instructional book on how to date when Stefan came racing to him.

"Rodrigo, I've got terrible news!" Stefan exclaimed, catching Rodrigo's attention. "Jasmine's in danger!"

"Wait, what?!" Rodrigo did a double-take in response.

"She's headed for that island full of dangerous birds!" Stefan revealed, propping one foot on a rock and dramatically pointing to the river nearby. "But if we go downstream, we can surely save her!"

"Okay Stefan, you're the best!" Rodrigo shouted. "Let's go save Jasmine!"

The pair raced for a pair of canoes docked close to the campsite and began rowing through the river to rescue Jasmine.

"Thanks for telling me Jasmine was in trouble Stefan, you're such a great guy." Rodrigo complimented Stefan.

"You're welcome Rodrigo." Stefan replied gratefully. "You're pretty great yourself, y'know, great enough for Jasmine to like you."

"You really mean it?" Rodrigo asked eagerly.

"I can tell by the way she looks at," Stefan began, but then he started getting sidetracked by Blue Diamond with the body of a dolphin, a gargantuan pineapple with Yellow Diamond's face on it, and a pair of White Diamond's feet right next to the fruit. "you? Huh?"

"Stefan, is something the matter?" Rodrigo asked Stefan, or rather Steven, who had now replaced Stefan in the dream.

"Oh no, not again!" Steven began panicking as he started to glow pink yet again, not knowing how things ended up like this.

As Steven woke up in his bed, he found Peridot standing at the side of his bed, looking very excited at how the experiment went.

"Oh my stars Steven, you did it!" Peridot cheered excitedly. "You just fell asleep and started turning pink, which started happening in the dream! Here, I'll show you!" She then ran over to the TV and began playing Steven's dream again. "Our script, our story, it's on the television and it's wonderful!" she kept on praising. "Not sure what you were going for with that bizarre imagery towards the end but I'll admit, seeing Yellow Diamond's face on a pineapple made me laugh."

Amid Peridot's eagerness, however, Steven then started to get drowsy again.

"Steven, are you okay?" Peridot asked with concern.

"Sorry Peri, just feeling a little off." Steven assured her. "Maybe eating that chili wasn't a great idea."

"Yeah yeah, don't believe everything you read online and all that." Peridot japed. "We got none of the money in the world, and all the time in our hands. Hey, I've got a great idea of my own! Picture this, a mysterious young woman with a teardrop tattoo on her face arrives at the camp because she wants to kidnap Stefan for her own dark designs. But before she can succeed, Pierre from the original Camp Pining Hearts comes in to save the day!"

"Uh, okay then." Steven replied awkwardly while trying to make himself comfortable. "But you're right, let's pull off a do-over. We can try as many times as we want until we get it right."

"Less talking, more sleeping." Peridot pushed a star-shaped pillow into Steven's chest and forced him onto his mattress before pulling his eyelids down.

Every time Steven went to sleep, he was back to canoeing with Rodrigo to rescue Jasmine. And every time, Rodrigo was replaced in his canoes by some very unexpected characters.

The first time this happened, Rodrigo was suddenly replaced by Dogcopter, of all things. As Dogcopter flew off using the propeller on his back, Stefan reached out to the flying canine before Steven awakened with bags under his eyes.

The second time, Rodrigo's place was taken by Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl. The three Gems then flew away from Stefan just like Dogcopter did, and Stefan cried out for them before Steven woke up yet again, and the bags were starting to get darker.

The third time, Rodrigo didn't disappear. Instead, he started getting more unnerved as Spinel's massive Injector was present in the background, and Stefan was suddenly replaced with Steven as a baby.

Suddenly, a young woman with a teardrop tattoo on her face, just like what Peridot had described, snatched the baby Steven from the canoe with a maniacal laugh before Pierre, who now looked like he had green-lensed glasses and triangular hair, boldly stepped in and stood up to the woman.

Steven once again woke up, his baggy eyes now at their darkest, while Peridot just sighed in defeat.

The next morning, Steven sat down to some cereal and milk in the kitchen when Peridot suddenly appeared with a big stack of papers in front of her. "Uh, what's all this?"

"I've concluded that a script just wasn't working!" Peridot proudly announced. "So I've decided to take a more visual approach and made a whole series of storyboards for us to use! Besides, I've seen tons of cartoons use more storyboards than scripts, for better or for worse."

"You made all of these in one night?' Steven gasped in amazement at the triangular Gem's feat while looking through the storyboards.

"Duh, I'm good at everything!" Peridot bragged. "Now please study these in preparation for tonight."

"Hey, I got a question." Steven said while putting out one of the storyboards that featured the same tattooed woman from his dream. "Who's this girl, and why does Pierre look so much like you now?"

"Uh, that's Marine, Pierre's new arch-foe!" Peridot answered, awkwardly twiddling her fingers and looking in every conceivable direction. "She is totally not based on anyone we've met before."

"Are you sure?" Steven asked suspiciously while flicking through more storyboards featuring Marine. "Cause her haircut and location of her tattoo kinda reminds me of Aq-" Suddenly, he stopped to discover a new storyboard of Stefan having a romantic moment with Jasmine. "Wait, why is Stefan kissing Jasmine?"

"It's perfect!" Peridot yelled eagerly. "Right as Rodrigo is about to save Stefan from this reverse damsel in distress situation, he discovers that Jasmine got to him first, and they're already kissing too! Imagine, Jasmine defying gender clichés to save Stefan, unaware that they're stroking the fires of Rodrigo's jealousy!"

"I can't do Rodrigo this dirty!" Steven objected to the idea. "It's not only a betrayal of the friendship we gave him and Stefan, but it's also poor romantic drama too!"

"Whoa, take it easy Steven, they're just characters. No need to become so addicted to their love lives!" Peridot tried to excuse herself. "This is a story, and a good story needs conflict!"

"No, I still don't want to do this!" Steven declared angrily, startling Peridot before she came to an understanding.

"Look Steven, I can see you're pretty worn out from last night." Peridot said sadly as she began to get up and walk away. "Let's just scrap the whole project."

"What?" Steven replied in shock.

"There's really no point in continuing if it stresses you out that much." Peridot sighed as she grabbed the door handle. "Besides, I got classes to teach at Little Homeworld anyway."

But when Peridot was close to opening the front door and leaving the house, a flash of pink convinced Steven to change his mind. "No, wait!" he exclaimed, stopping the little Gem in her tracks. "I'll do the scene."

"Really?!" Peridot turned back with a cute smile and stars in her eyes.

"Anything to make you happy." Steven replied wearily. Though he was happy that Peridot was happy, he let out a heavy sigh as he was forced to put his friends before himself yet again.

"Oh no, that dastardly Marine has Stefan captured!" Rodrigo cried as he quickly rowed downstream to save his dear friend. "Jasmine said she's going to help him, but I haven't heard from her since!"

But just as Rodrigo finished his sentence, he finally found Stefan and Jasmine safe from harm, while Marine was left tied up beside them.

"You won't get away with this Stefan!" Marine yelled before she noticed Rodrigo, and had another fiendish idea in the works. "Hey Rodrigo, look! Your best friend's a cheater!"

"What?!" Rodrigo exclaimed, staring straight at Stefan and Jasmine kissing passionately. "Stefan, how could you?!"

"Rodrigo, this isn't what it looks like!" Stefan cried to Rodrigo in Steven's voice, but he wasn't there. And neither were Jasmine and Marine. And right before Stefan was a very angry-looking Connie. "Connie?"

Suddenly, Connie began to grow into the size of a giant and then turned into Obsidian. Stefan meanwhile was turned back into Steven as the Connie-Obsidian hybrid raised a foot and lowered it to crush him.

Steven then woke up in his old room wearing his old pajamas. Just like in the real world, Peridot remained by his side watching the television, but she was eerily silent, a far cry from her usual smug and loud yet cheerful nature.

"Peridot, my dreams are going nuts!" Steven informed Peridot while getting out of bed and walking over to her. "First everyone disappeared, then Jasmine turned into Connie, and she tried to squish me which is how I ended up here!" However, Peridot said nothing and continued facing the television. "Peridot?" Steven asked as he grabbed the green Gem's shoulder. "Are you okay?"

When Steven turned Peridot to face him, her visor and gem were now filled with SMPTE color bars and her expression showed no emotion at all. Steven's old bedroom abruptly vanished, and his PJs turned into his normal clothes as he noticed Peridot emotionlessly marching towards the beach house from the dream he woke up from the previous day. "Peridot!"

"Oh, poor little Steven." A familiar bratty voice called to Steven as he chased after Peridot. From the clouds came Aquamarine, still as haughty as ever and now in possession of her wand once more. "Don't you see? It's all her fault that I kidnapped you, that you had to learn all those horrible things about your mother! And yet not once did her blatant betrayal ever come up again."

"You don't know Peridot like I do, you little twerp!" Steven yelled at Aquamarine as he gained on Peridot, who was about to open the front door. "She's changed ever since we first met. She once tried to kill me like every other Gem who's ever antagonized me, but now she's become so sweet and funny!"

"Oh please, just because you like her now doesn't mean you should completely forget about all the ways she's harmed you." Aquamarine taunted before she restrained Steven with a tractor beam, but his iron will allowed him to resist as he tried to stop Peridot.

"Please Peri, don't go in there!" Steven strained from resisting the tractor beam and reached out to Peridot. "I still really want to hang out with you!" Just then, the floor disappeared beneath Steven and Peridot just like in the earlier dream. Peridot seemingly floated in midair while Steven leaped to the edge of the porch and continued reaching out to her, as the front of the house turned into color bars as well. "We always had something to fix together! The Cluster, the Diamonds, Spinel, but I don't know how I can be anyone's friend without something to fix!"

"Why can't you just surrender already?!" Aquamarine yelled as she tried to reel Steven in like a fish. "Your suffering is all because of her, and she's felt so worthless because of you!" Unfortunately for her, the tractor beam broke and the small, flying Gem was catapulted away from the pair. "We'll meet again brat!"

"I-I just can't do it anymore!" Steven cried to Peridot, unaware of the dream version of Aquamarine's failure to catch him. "I'm just so tired, and now I'm even trying to fix something in my dreams!" He soon started to cry as he got closer to Peridot. "I'm sorry I can't do this for you! Just please don't leave me!"

Peridot remained stoic as Steven kept on grasping for her. "Don't…leave."

The dream ended just like a VHS tape being removed from a VCR before a muffled voice began calling for Steven.

"Steven? Steven!"

Steven was suddenly shook awake with tears in his eyes, and he discovered Peridot leaning over him crying just as much.

"I saw everything Steven, and yes, it is true!" Peridot admitted sorrowfully. "A good reason why I was using your dreams is because I never got over how you were kidnapped because of me! I was so worried the other Gems would declare me a traitor, but they never bothered to bring it up. You know what, we don't have to do this anymore!" Steven then gave her a tight hug. "I don't care about the show anymore, or Rodrigo especially! I just want what's best for you! I'm such a clod!"

"It's okay Dottie, it's okay." Steven comforted his green pal. "I kind of knew something was up when you first mentioned Marine and Pierre, but I didn't know you've bottling this up for so long."

"I know, it's so unhealthy of me." Peridot wept. "I just needed something to vent with, so that's why I wanted to spend time with you. It's okay if you don't want an excuse to hang out anymore."

"But I do want to keep hanging out." Steven assured Peridot. "With or without all this trauma. We're friends, right?"

"I guess you're right." Peridot smiled sadly.

"You still want to watch CPH together," Steven offered. "even if it's terrible?"

In response, Peridot took off her visor and began wiping some tears, shedding the mask she had kept up for her entire stay. "Of course."

"How could you lie to me like this Rodrigo?!" Jasmine yelled crossly at her love interest while Steven and Peridot laughed as it all went down. "I bet you just can't help being an awful person!"

"You just buried a dead body Jasmine, and you're getting mad at Rodrigo for cheating at cards?!" Peridot cackled, pounding her fist on the floor. "Some protagonist you turned out to be! Oh my stars, this show is the worst!"

"This show is the best." Steven smiled contently before the pair leaned up against each other with smiles on their faces.

Like I said, wasted opportunity for more Peridot development. And yes my friends, that United Defenders of the World show was a total middle finger to dark & edgy teen drama reboots of family-friendly properties with fans of all ages. It happened to Archie, it happened to Winx Club and it's even gonna happen to the Powerpuff Girls soon. But I'm getting off topic, this was a pretty fun chapter to write since I love Peridot so much and she has an incredible dynamic with Steven. Speaking of green Gems, next chapter goes into original territory once again as we finally shine a light on a corrupted Gem that's seemingly been erased from existence come Future. That's right Nephrite, come on down!

#steven universe #steven universe future #fanfiction #steven universe alternate future #steven quartz universe #peridot

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petalsbloomed-a · 4 years ago

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itaru talks about noah - part 1.

1. what’s the strangest/weirdest thing mun has watched on youtube? you know those raunchy parodies of rap songs and the versions where people are quite literally screaming the lyrics of songs? yeah, he watches that stuff a lot.

2. what’s the strangest/weirdest movie the mun has watched? i don’t know if he’s watched any movies that have been known for being strange, but a lot of the horror stuff he finds can get pretty creepy at times.

3. what’s your mun do when they become sad? do they hide it or talk about it? it really depends. most of the time, i think he hides it at first and then opens up when things start to go really wrong. it’s probably because he doesn’t want to feel like a burden.

4. how long does the mun stay upset for? again, it really depends on the issue. he does struggle with really bad mental health, so it’s possible for something to weigh him down for quite a while. i think a lot of it has to do with his willingness to communicate with others.

5. what’s your opinion of the mun’s fashion sense? basic bitch. well, more basic than me, but at times he does like to mix it up a lot and put jewelry together with a top that just...don’t naturally fit. i mean, have you seen the earrings he wears to class?

6. is the mun prone to mood swings? oh, very much so. one moment he’ll be so down to write, being all bubbly and completely running his mouth about the things he likes, the next he’ll get frustrated and upset and go to watch some funny shit on youtube or listen to music to hopefully help to stabilize his mood.

7. what was the strangest thing the mun has done that made the muse confused? doing kpop dances in the middle of his school’s hallway. that’s all i’m going to say.

8. does the mun like to shitpost/make funny posts a lot? he doesn’t shitpost a ton over here, but on his anime blog, i swear, sometimes the shit that he thinks of and comes out of his mouth is so strange that it’s just funny.

9. has the mun ever scared the muse? not in any particular way that comes to my mind immediately.

10. what about the mun does the muse find annoying or bothersome? sometimes he just can’t stop talking. i can never tell if it’s because of his ADHD or if he’s just excited about something, but sometimes he just completely interrupts my peace and quiet seemingly out of nowhere.

11. do you like the backstory your mun gave you? he didn’t really give me a backstory; he adheres to what my creators did for me. but he did give my sister a pretty nice name.

12. is mun a social butterfly or a loner? he’s a pretty social person, but he does have his moments. he likes to keep his distance, even though sometimes it’s hard for him to tell when he should be less energetic or give someone their space.

13. did you once not like your mun? if so, why? i don’t think i’ve ever actively disliked noah. he can be a bit obnoxious at times, but he’s a pretty cool dude.

14. do you wish your mun was more open to those around them? in real life and on tumblr? he’s pretty open with people in real life, but who am i to criticize him or even give him advice on the matter? i struggle with being open about who i am myself, so i don’t think it’s appropriate for me to judge him.

15. does your mun draw or write? if so, what work are they most proud of? he writes a lot and he does have some experience with art, but most of his focus goes into the things he writes. it’s hard to say what he’s most proud of, because he always describes his works as ‘short, sweet, and mindless,’ but i do enjoy whatever angsty stuff he writes. he says he’s not good with angst, but sometimes when i read his angst fics i can really get the sense of some things he may be struggling with in his unconscious. some of the things he writes just roll off the tongue, and in such a beautiful manner.

16. how long does it take your mun to draw/write a piece of work? it really depends on what he’s doing. an art piece, even a small sketch, can take him up to an hour, but his fics can usually take him between thirty minutes to two hours. his short and soft fics he usually spends about half an hour on, but his longer ones, like his angst and relationship fics, he can spend up to two hours on.

17. what other social websites does your mun use? other than tumblr, he’s probably most active on his anime twitter account as well as some discord servers he’s on, but he also has a facebook, instagram, ao3, and sparingly uses deviantart, reddit, pinterest, soundcloud, twitch, quotev, and wattpad.

18. who are the first 3 people the mun thinks about when asked for blog recommendations? obviously, the mun is a bit biased, so he’s gonna first off recommend his best friend’s blog orang3lover. they post a lot of cute memes and social stuff, and they follow each other on their main blogs. here in the tumblr rpc, he’s really been enjoying writing and interacting with demontragedy’s chikage, aka my lovely boyfriend, and gloomyheart10′s banri, who is the bane of my existence but miraculously still considered to be my best friend.

19. how many people are in your mun’s close-knit circle? he has a few friend circles actually. the one he interacts with the most would probably be his friend group from high school, but he also has a lot of friends, less of a circle, that he talks with a lot and hangs out with in college. this college friend group all consists of music majors, so he feels really at home with them. he does also have a few small friend groups online, but they’re pretty sparse and don’t have as many people as his irl friend groups.

20. how does the mun feel about their blog/blogs? i get the sense that he’s really happy with the blog he’s set up here in the tumblr rpc, but he has mentioned that with his personal blogs he wants to be a bit more creative about the content that he releases. his main blog is like 99% reblogs, so he wants to think about how he can release more original content that will attract more people to his corner of the internet.

21. what ask meme does your muse like the most? i don’t think he has a specific one, but he does like to reblog a lot of fluff-based sentence starters.

#itaru: ic #munday

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aboutcaseyaffleck · 4 years ago

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Actor Casey Affleck Reflects On The Past And 'The World To Come'

The last time I saw Casey Affleck was after an 8:30 a.m. Sundance Film Festival screening of “Manchester by the Sea,” which left my colleagues and I so emotionally drained we were pretty much useless for the rest of the day. Affleck finds this very funny. “Oh man, that’s awesome,” he laughs. “That was a tough screening. At Sundance I’m usually just going to sleep at 8 a.m.” We’re talking on the phone a few days after the festival’s virtual premiere of his latest movie, “The World to Come,” which made its Sundance debut last month under very different circumstances. “It’s so strange doing these things sitting in front of your computer,” he sighs.

Directed by Mona Fastvold, “The World to Come” is a powerful period piece about a forbidden love affair between pioneer women played by Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby, set in upstate New York during the early months of 1856. Affleck produced the picture, in which he plays a supporting role as Waterston’s uncomprehending husband, and he did his best to soldier through a crowded Zoom Q&A after the Sundance screening, with results pleasant enough, but nonetheless missing that in-person festival magic. “I used to love going to film festivals and talking to journalists and seeing all the movies and talking to other filmmakers,” he laments. “Sitting here alone in a little office in my house is such a drag. But it was nice to know that the movie was getting seen, at least.”

While big brother Ben plays Batman in studio pictures, Casey has exhibited a restless independent streak ever since he was a student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. (Our ninth-grade classes competed against each other in the Mass. High School Drama Guild Competition. His won, perhaps unsurprisingly.) A longtime friend of the Brattle Theatre and former creative advisor for the Independent Film Festival Boston, the younger Affleck has always seemed more at home in indies. Not a lot of actors would follow an Oscar-winning role in “Manchester by the Sea” with a microbudget art film like “A Ghost Story.” But then his internalized, minimalist acting style is often at odds with the concerns of contemporary blockbusters. There’s a weird dissonance watching something like Disney’s hokey Chatham sea adventure “The Finest Hours,” with Affleck going full Montgomery Clift while surrounded by CGI silliness.

“The World to Come” is the most ambitious project yet from Affleck’s Sea Change Media, which partnered with Pamela Koffler and Christine Vachon’s legendary NYC indie institution Killer Films for the arduous production that began with a conversation between Affleck and novelist Ron Hansen nearly a decade ago. “When I did ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’ I got to know Ron Hansen, just because I loved the book so much. Ron has a very unique talent for writing 19th century language. He’s just from another era. I asked him if he had something he wanted to work on together, and I thought he would send me one of his things. Instead, he sent me this story by Jim Shepard. It was beautiful. I said, why don’t you and Jim write the script? And they took about six years, but it came together beautifully. Good things come to those who wait, I guess.”

The film eventually shot in Romania with a break built into the schedule to accommodate the changing seasons that are so crucial to the movie’s rugged, outdoor textures. “We were way out in Transylvania, out in the mountains,” Affleck explains. “We were just in some valley and they built a couple of farmhouses. I like being far away in a new place. It makes you feel outside of your life. And I love working in weather. There are so many aspects of moviemaking that are artificial, but when there’s extreme weather, it’s real. I did this Disney movie about a boat rescue, and it was, like, December in friggin’ Quincy and they were just soaking us with water every single take. There’s not a lot that you have to quote-unquote act. You’re just standing there, teeth-chattering, shivering, just being.” This reminds me of the scene in “Manchester” when he and Lucas Hedges have an argument walking in the blistering cold and can’t remember where they parked. “I forgot about that one,” he laughs.

I’d never say so on the phone, but I consider Affleck’s performance as Lee Chandler in “Manchester by the Sea” among the finest I’ve seen in my 22 years of reviewing films, worthy of discussion alongside Brando’s Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront” in its aching, inchoate longing. Lee holds his grief somewhere very private and dear, as if to begin to forgive himself would be an act of betrayal. The movie nails a gruff, emotional constipation popular among men of a certain stripe, especially in New England. (My mother offered my favorite review of the film: “Why don’t they just talk to each other? Jesus, this is like watching you and your father.”) Words don’t come easily to most of Affleck’s movie characters, but he chafes at the description of them as inarticulate. “It’s funny, I find the characters in ‘Manchester’ to be sometimes very articulate,” he argues. “There’s misunderstandings, but they end up communicating what’s inside.”

“The World to Come” is rife with such mixed signals and miscommunications, about which co-star Katherine Waterston raved during the Zoom Q&A after the Sundance screening. “It was so much fun to play the scenes with Casey,” she said. “A lot of these scenes are written as dances, where somebody tries to reach out and engage and they’re misunderstood. Inarticulacy is a very interesting thing to see in film. The failed attempts. Failed communications. It’s actually fun to play those things. You don’t know what the other person’s going to throw at you. It keeps it really alive on set. Mona and I felt if we had the money we could have kept shooting this thing for months, because the scenes were so much fun to explore.”

Affleck agrees. “When Katherine’s character writes in her journal or she starts talking to Vanessa, they have this beautiful, expressive way of speaking to each other,” he enthuses, whereas his character “says what he’s gotta say in as few words as possible. He’s very brusque and curt, which I enjoyed. The way that he talks is the communication equivalent when he gives her a birthday gift of sardines and a tin of raisins.”

Indeed, her increasingly florid diary entries — originally intended as a ledger to keep track of the farm’s monthly expenses — become the heartbeat of the film, providing an emotional release otherwise suppressed by the rigid formality of the era and the ugly drudgery of day-to-day farm life. “The World to Come” is ultimately a movie about the need to share our stories, and how through telling them we make sense of ourselves. As producer Koffler explains in the press notes, “Part of the film’s vision is to dramatize a very basic human impulse: to create, to connect, to say ‘I was here, and I mattered.’”

This has become a recurring theme in Affleck’s recent work. In 2019, he wrote, directed and starred in “Light of My Life,” a little-seen but strikingly tense post-apocalyptic road movie about a father and daughter hiding out in the wilderness after a pandemic has wiped out most of the women in the world. The film begins with Affleck telling the little girl a bedtime story that runs almost 13 minutes and sneakily sets up the movie’s major themes. Then in last month’s well-acted but regrettably soggy “Our Friend,” he starred as real-life journalist Matthew Teague, whose soul-baring Esquire story about his wife’s struggle with cancer became a national phenomenon.

“Matt Teague wrote that article and then wanted it made into a movie as his way of processing everything that had happened,” the actor elaborates. “You transform pain into other things as you go through life. That was all him working through it. I like stories about storytellers and I like stories within stories. Obviously, I wrote and directed a movie that starts with a 12-minute bedtime story. I love that. I know that other people don’t love it as much as I do, so I have to be careful about it.”

That kind of love led to last summer’s “Stories From Tomorrow,” a project initiated during lockdown by Affleck and his schoolteacher mom Christine, encouraging children to send in poems and short stories to be read on social media by celebrities like Matt Damon and Jon Hamm, as well as his “The World to Come” co-stars Waterston and Kirby. “That was something I started out at the very beginning of the quarantine as a small project to encourage kids to write creatively, because I know it can be a great way of processing anxiety and working through feelings that you aren’t really talking about or aren’t aware that you’re having. It wasn’t something I thought would go on forever; once the kids are back in school that ought to be where they should be doing all that kind of work. But while they were sitting at home, I thought it would be a good way to get their attention off the awful news and into something more imaginative. And I also got a chance to read all these super-cool stories! Really creative stuff that kids sent from all around the world.”

Finally, as a Boston publication it would be dereliction of duty not to mention the hysterical Dunkin Donuts commercial parody from when Affleck hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 2016, so dead-on in its depiction of a local 'regulah customah' that on one of my critics’ poll ballots that year I tried to nominate the sketch for Best Documentary. Alas, the performer shoots down a pet theory I’ve been hanging onto ever since, that the dirtbag Boston guy in the Bruins hat is secretly a grown-up version of Affleck’s scene stealing, bug-swallowing Morgan from “Good Will Hunting.”

“I hadn’t thought about that, dude. That’s really funny. It never crossed my mind." He pauses before confiding, "I wasn’t that great on SNL… I just wasn’t all that funny on the skits, because it’s live and you’re reading the cue cards and it was my first time. But when we went to make that little pre-recorded short film of the Dunkin’ Donuts ad, I really felt like that was my wheelhouse there. I could’ve played that character in a movie. I could have gone to work and played him every single day, and I would have had a blast. That was really fun to do. I would love to do another one of those. That would be funny to see that character again.”

I bet that guy’s got some stories.

“The World To Come” is now in theaters and will be available via video on demand Tuesday, March 2.

[source]

#casey affleck #the world to come #quote #photo #movies

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whoslaurapalmer · 4 years ago

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3 (an afternoon long ago), 6 (all phone, no sex)

3. Which part of [an afternoon long ago] was hardest to write?

the whole thing. which is funny because the second i saw the prompt i had to get down a 357-word scene sketch (i do not always have my very original scene sketches from my first thoughts because i usually wind up taking them apart and writing around them so they just become something else, but this one i do??? 357 words in the middle of the night.) because i was immediately struck by the thought and by the idea of bertrand and lemony meeting there and was filled with a million emotions that i had to get down.

actually writing the fic, though!! going in the next day with the intent to make it all make sense and read like good writing!!! was emotionally wrenching!!!!! getting the right amount of detail, of internal character thought, of dialogue, all to fit in, what really amounts to like, a minute, i guess?? one whole minute after fourteen years of these two not seeing each other?? sometimes it’s hard to put one word down after another because words are terrible, and sometimes it’s hard because i get consumed by a real, physical agony of whatever character i’m writing. if a character is feeling it, so am i. this is fine. this is also, terrible. i also debated a lot about, just word choices, certain sentence structures, the right balance of vfd thoughts, and had to give myself a specific deadline to stop messing with sentences and just post it so i could move on with my life. (also sometimes that is fine. sometimes i think it makes me rush things.)

also, as i’ve said before, picking the right poem, that was difficult. still pleased with proserpine, though.

6. Which scenes did you cut, and which were added in [all phone, no sex]?

all phone, no sex was like, such a mess when i was writing it. there were really little sentences i added or cut out, but most of it was me rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting, the same sentences, the same dialogue, the same actions, in such minuscule different ways, because i couldn’t get the rhythm exactly right, i couldn’t figure out what all of the dialogue should be and how to get it to be as funny as i wanted it. like, the line about bertrand wearing a watch and beatrice taking it off, one of the earlier versions of it (that i happen to actually have???) was --

“I just mean, is it really necessary? All these pillows, Lemony! All these sheets!”

“We have one sheet.”

“All this – ” Beatrice looks around. There’s very little on this bed besides her and Bertrand. Bertrand himself offers his socks, pointing at the neatly folded little socks on the edge of the bed. “Bertrand, I will not stand for socks on this bed.”

the original “some fun you are!” comment from beatrice went differently as well, and i struggled with moving around that crossword puzzle --

“Just for that, I’m filling in every answer on your crossword!”

“Bea, don’t you dare!” Bertrand races back into the bedroom, snatches the crossword from her, and takes it with him, holding it behind him as he returns to the fridge. Trust Bertrand to still care about modesty.

Beatrice sticks her tongue out at him, even though he can’t see it to fully appreciate it. “Some fun you are,” she says.

it really was just, cutting and rewriting the same kind of idea, each time. i went through the fic line by line and just rewrote like, every fifth sentence down in a notebook, and then typed it up, and then scribbled all over it in editing again, and then took out more. oh boy i just opened my notebook to last summer to see my edits and i have, in all caps, ‘pick other beatrice letters quote’ which i did not do, it was the sperm whale quote all the way through.

lemony’s needs/knees joke was not the original joke. originally it was going to be, this is embarrassing, idk, an x files reference, but i didn’t know if it landed right or not? so i took it out, and i’m still embarrassed about needs/knees too and don’t think it’s perfect but it really did make me cackle so i think it’s better than the original -- after lemony says “i may just die, beatrice,” and beatrice says “well we can’t have that,” the joke was, “‘You know what they say,’ Bertrand puts in, raising his head. ‘Autoerotic asphyxiation would be a pretty undignified way to go, all things considered.’” i don’t know if i had recently watched that episode (i watch clyde bruckman like once a year or so) or i was just digging around in my brain for a passable situational joke?? we’ll never know.

i don’t think there was anything big that i added? in my head it was pretty much just, the three of them being cute, and that’s what it is. and sadly, i did not ever intend to include any actual phone sex in it. have i tried? yes! do i think it’s successful? .......not entirely? writing it is an acquired skill, i think, one i have still not, totally acquired.

#thank you!!!!!!!!#lulu talks about the sad lemon man #tangentiallly

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chloe-clegane · 5 years ago

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My Devotion and Mah Protection, Our Love - Chapter 3

These Precious Family Moments

Summary - Now that they've arrived it's time to spend a bit more time with family.

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AO3

The morning after they arrived Rayla was woken up by a peppering of kisses on her face and neck. Callum was on his side beside her under the covers and his hand was grazing the hem of her night shift. Her clean nice smelling hadn’t been traveling for a week and a half nightshirt.

“Goo’mornin’ to you too” She giggled.

He mumbled good morning while kissing her neck. She stretched her arms and tried to shake off the remnants of sleep. Then she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him in for a kiss.

“Campin’ was nice and all, but I like clean sheets.” She rubbed her arms and body against the bed to emphasize.

“You know? I think I can agree with that” He kissed her again and then looked at her with what is arguably her favorite grin, wicked licentious prince grin (although she assumed that that name was unsalvagable after yesterday). She hummed her happy contented hum and bit her lip. That was the approval Callum had been waiting for and his hands pushed the fabric up and out of his way. He moved his peppery kisses down from her chest and past her stomach and they turned slow and purposeful the lower then got. She shifted her legs open for him and he repositioned himself. Then he stopped and looked at her with a smirk. “You know the sheets aren’t the only thing that’s fresh and clean”

“RUDE!” She moved to kick him but be grabbed her arse and she laughed. Then without warning, he licked her opening and she moaned louder than she would have preferred. She could feel the cocky grin from between her legs. He moved his tongue back and forth and up and down. She laced her fingers in his hair and settled into the very welcome wakeup call. She sighed and gasped every time he flicked that sweet little bundle of nerves. She felt her leg twitch and the tingling sensation built from her back. She did her best to control the volume of the “oooohhhhh” that left her lips. “Callum-OOHH!” after she came down from the high she tried to catch her breath. He kissed the inside of her thigh a few more times.

“Did you like that? I couldn’t really tell.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and had stupidest smug grin oh his face. Stupidly cute.

“Oh shut up!” She slapped him playfully with a pillow. It quickly devolved into tickling, squealing, and giggling. They just ended up making out.

He pulled away to look at her. “You know we slept in right? Half the day is already gone.”

“Seriously?” She looked out the window, the sun did in fact seem high in the sky

“Let’s get up! I want to do something important today” He jumped out of bed and started pulling his clothes on while he spoke. “You stay here, freshen up, get dressed and I’ll go get us some breakfast-er lunch... Lunfast?” he looked thoughtful.

“Mah people call it brunch... ya weird human”

“Oh… That sounds better than my version”

She rolled her eyes “ok go get food, I’ll get ready.” She muttered about him being a goober as he left.

Rayla lounged in the bed for a few more minutes enjoying her post-orgasm gladness. She looked around the room in the light of day. She’d only been to Katolis two other times with Callum since the original visit. Both of those times she had been sneaking into his room to sleep at night and then returning to her own before a soul could see. They were always much more careful here and at the Silvergrove than they were anywhere else. So now she looked around the room and took it in.

She got up, washed her face and changed her clothes. She looked around at the sketches, tracing her fingers over them, there were so many. It was interesting that during their infrequent and arguably short visits he hasn’t seemed to change anything. These 4 walls were a time capsuled of his life before… all of it changed. The desk was cleared off but things were sticking out of the drawers she opened one. It was more sketches. Some were funny little cartoons. One weird one looked like a marshmallow dessert man being burned, or she supposed, toasted alive by a Dragon. It made her smile because it was exactly the kooky humor she’d fallen in love with. She returned it and closed the drawer.

She made her way over to the wardrobe, she’d seen this before, she put a few things in it last night. But she looked and pushed to the back at the clothes he’d grown out of.

“Hey are you being creepy?” he was amused.

“No! Just picturin’ yer life, before I met you.” She smiled, and she knew it must look sappy.

He sat down the tray “Hey we both know my life was incomplete without you so whatever.” he smiled and directed her towards the food. “Eat!”

She japed about not sharing because he’d already eaten breakfast. He told her that although she is delicious, she was also not very filling.

They rode into the burial site of the kings and queens of Katolis. The clifts were adorned with giant statues of long-gone rulers. It was a little intimidating but also somehow peaceful. Rayla had been here one other time. Her first time to Katolis as an actual visitor. They had come for the winter holiday. Part of the festivities was paying respects to the late Queen Sarai, it was her birthday. They had come in the snow at sunset, they lit up her statue with candles. Her sons laid out jelly tarts as an offering, poppyseed and honey, her favorite.

That was the first time they had to carry out this tradition without their father. It added an additional layer of hurt for Callum and a new kind of hurt for his brother. Candles were lit for both their parents now. They had stayed long after the courtiers and townsfolk had left. In the candlelight, Callum had introduced her to his mother. It was a sad, bittersweet moment. Rayla had wiped his tears and held not only Callum but Ezran too. Together, the three of them stayed wrapped in a blanket eating dessert while Callum told stories. Rayla knew Ezran had heard them before but it was the way the young boy learned to mourn the woman he never got to know.

This time it was in the light of day and not flame. When they arrived at Queen Sarai’s statue they dismounted. Rayla stood looking up at the effigy, her hand outstretched, her face captured her compassion. Callum reached for Rayla’s hand and brought her out of her trance. She smiled sadly at him and they approached the statue and knelt before it. Quietly Callum removed two candles and some jelly tarts and laid them out. He used sun magic to light the candles with his fingers. Neither spoke for a few moments, she watched him intently. Finally, he took her hand and looked up at his mother.

“Hi, mom… I miss you, I think at this point you know I always do.” He paused and took a deep breath to keep himself steady. “You remember Rayla of course... from your birthday from a few years ago. Well… we have big news.” He looked at Rayla with a smile full of sorrow, she squeezed his hand. “We’re getting married mom. And I’m so happy, I want you to know that” Callum’s tears rolled down his cheeks but he kept his breath and voice controlled. It occurred to her that her own tears had begun to flow. “Mom, I think you would love her. She’s brave and kind, sorta like you. She loves me and looks out for me.” This time his voice was starting to break. She loved him so much and seeing him like this never failed to break her heart “Dad used to say that you made him better. She does the for me…” she rubbed his back while he wiped his tears. “I love you mom, I hope you like the jelly tarts” He finished his speech and let the flood gates open. Rayla held him while he cried, kissed his forehead as the swayed with the breeze. He eventually looked up at her and smiled.

“I love you Rayla”

“I love you too Callum” After that, they stayed for a while. She spoke a few words, at first it felt awkward to speak these kinds of things aloud, but she knew it meant the world to the person she loved. She looked at that kind face and asked for approval and promised to keep her son happy and to love him always. The expression on the statue was so soft and it was easy to imagine she was starring right back at her. Eventually, the tears dried and they headed back to the castle.

As they rode Rayla thought about her own parents. Trapped in some dark magic prison. Who knows if they were awake and aware or suspended in a silent coma… She hoped it was the latter. When Callum had watched the memory of her patents battle with Viren he saw the coins but really they knew nothing about them. Rayla had sat Ethari down and discussed it after the battle at the storm spire. It gave him faint hope, Runnan’s flower had never touched the bottom of the pool so he was convinced that Tiadrin and Lain were not the only ones trapped. The magic flower also had a soft glow, thus the dormant and not dead theory. Rayla had always felt hope was a double-edged sword, it brings comfort and reassurance but it also risked greater devastation and disappointment. So she did what she always does, shove it to the back of her mind and stop thinking about it.

By the time they made it back into the town Callum had broken the silence and returned to his usual goofy self.

“Hey Rayla,” he was grinning eagerly. “knock knock.”

“Nooooooooooo, I haaaaate these” she whined and tossed her head back.

“This one’s good I promise, c’mom” he pleaded.

She grumbled, “Who’s there?”.

“Banther” He was holding in a laugh like if you poked him too hard it would pop out.

“Banther who?” It came out as a sigh.

“Your banth-er falling down” He was cackling. She didn’t get the joke and just looked at him with a blank face. “Haha you know? Because Banther sounds like Pants-are” He was clearly pleased with himself. Laughing uncontrollably

“Uuuuugggggggghhhhhhh Callum, that’s the worst one!” She had her face in her palm “It’s so bad!”

He composed himself and smirked. “You just don’t understand my refined sense of humor,”.

She feigned surprise “Oh! Is that it then?”.

Suddenly a rock hit the ground forcefully in front of them, Rayla’s shadowpaw spooked but she tightened the reigns and looked where it had come from. A man stood in a doorway, scowling.

“Go back to Xadia you grubby monster!” Then he slammed the door.

Callum’s hand shot up to draw a rune but she grabbed his wrist. “It’s not worth it, let’s just hurry up.”

“Rayla that was a fucking rock!” He growled

“He threw it at the ground, not at me.” She tried to say it calmly but she knew her anxiety was slipping through.

“But-” he argued.

“I want tae go back, let’s go back... please” she was pleading with her eyes and her words.

He scowled and they picked up their pace.

When the arrived back at the castle he mumbled he was going to train. Rayla knew that just translated to I’m going to throw lightning at things until I feel better. It’s turned out to be a very emotional day… for both of them. The situation made her uncomfortable, she wanted to pull out her blades and teach him a lesson as much as Callum did. But it was just one angry old man.

As per her usual strategy, she let her fiance vent his frustrations for a half hour or so. Then she went to him, they talked through a few big-big feelings and he agreed that the visit to his mom had affected his temper, it flared more than it should have. After all, it was just one angry old man. They’ve dealt with much worse, they’re’s nothing to worry about.

After dinner, Ezran, Soren, Amaya, Janai, Callum, and Rayla were all spending time together in the royal family’s den. It was a cozy room with a large hearth. There were two couches near the fire with a small table between them, then there was a bigger table suitable for games with cushioned chairs. The room had a large bookshelf in one corner full of exciting novels, towards the bottom were children’s storybooks. Beside it was what looked like a toy chest and a bit cozy armchair, large enough for cuddling. Rayla imagined a very small Callum in the lap of an adoring woman, holding toys and listening to stories. She could picture that kind face that looked down at her today, looking down at a small boy with happy bright green eyes. That sweet little boy had become a wonderful man, now sitting in that same chair with his bare feet tucked under him, drawing in his sketchbook. She loved this man.

She smiled at him and then pulled herself out of her reverie. Right now Rayla had more important things to worry about. Beating Soren! She called her numbers and rolled the dice.

“HA!” She roared and pulled Soren’s loot towards her end of the table. Currently, it was a few coins, a candy bar, a leather bracelet, and a pretty rock.

“AGH! NO!” He whined.

“You ready tae admit defeat human?!” She knew she was grinning her intense competitive grin.

Soren was clearly working on some mental math. Based on how badly she was beating him, she could only imagine it wasn’t very good math. “Ok one more” He pulled a dagger from his boot and placed it on the table. It looked well made and had a mother of pearl inlay on the pommel. She’d gladly take this off her friend’s hands.

He called and rolled, his numbers were good. Rayla took a moment to contemplate the dice she would select from the pile. When all of a sudden there was a guard at the door.

“Excuse me, Your Majesty, there is a Moonshadow elf gentlemen here to see the Prince and his companion Rayla. Should I allow him in?” Rayla’s head whipped up, what? who?

Ezran looked up from the board game he’d been playing with Janai and Amaya “Yes of course. Bring him here”

“Very good Your Majesty” he closed the door. Everyone’s attention was brought away from what they were doing. Rayla tried to bring her mind back to the game, she called her numbers, threw her dice and then the door opened.

“YES I BEAT YOU! TAKE THAT RAYLA!” She barely heard Soren’s cries of victory or saw him pulling the pot across the table.

“ETHARI!” She jumped to her feet and ran to him. He caught her and they embraced. “What are you doin’ here?!”

“Rayla I got your letter and I left as soon as ah could. Ah had tae talk tae you in person” He held her shoulders and looked at her seriously.

“Wait, no!” Callum tried to get up out of the chair but the foot he was sitting on had fallen asleep and he tumbled forward. “Ethati you can’t say no or stop us from-”

“What are you talkin’ about?” Ethari looked confused and then laughed “I’m not here tae stop you both” He hugged her again. “Ah needed to tell you congratulations in person. Plus you said nothing of when the weddin’ would be, ah was afraid ah would miss it.”

“Aghhhh that tingles” Callum muttered, wiggling his toes while he sat on the floor “So we have your blessing then?”

“Callum you don’ need it.” He smiled sweetly “but yes. There is an energy that connects people, ah had that with Runnan and Rayla, your parents had it, ah see it in you two.” He had always been one to believe in greater forces in the world, trust instinct, and serendipity.

She held Ethari and tried not to cry. Oh, how she loathed crying in front of other people and it’s been happening far too often. She hadn’t anticipated him refusing but similar to Callum’s family, they expected some small amount of apprehension. She looked down at her Fiance agh, I love him sooooo muuuuch. Admittedly it was a very strang reaction to a grown man rolling around on the floor hissing and shaking his foot. He started pulling himself up and she grabbed him by his jacket and jerked him over into a hug with her Uncle. Rayla was so unbelievably happy it warmed her from the inside out.

Ezran spoke up, kind as always. “Ethari, welcome to our home, it’s good to meet you again.”

“Oh yes, and an impressive home it is” He bowed but Ezran urged him not to. “Ah thank you for receivin’ me like this, probably should have written ahead of time. Ah didn’t think about it until I had already left” he chuckled, made a face and knocked on his forehead.

“We’re going to be family soon, you’ll always be welcome here” Ez smiled so genuinely.

Rayla stood back a little and looked at her uncle, he was road-weary “You’ve been travelin’, you must be tired” Rayla started to fret. “Are you hungry?”

Ethari was never one to complain “Oh it’s alright, I just uh” Almost on cue his stomach rumbled and he shrugged.

Ezran spoke to the guard “Would you please ask Barius to make a plate for Ethari and bring it here. Please also see to it that a room is ready and a bath prepared”

Her uncle wiggled his eyebrows at Rayla and whispered “ah feel so fancy”

“You’ll get used tae it” she winked.

“Oh and bring some wine. I would like to toast our expanding family” Rayla tried not to laugh when Amaya mean mugged her nephew, when Ez saw it he recoiled “uh… and a cup of juice…” he looked deflated but Rayla winked at him.

Now it was Amaya’s turn to stand, Janai translated for her (she’d become very good at sigh language in the last few years). “Please sit with us and feel welcome” She pulled the extra chair out and gestured for him to sit. He thanked her and accepted, she returned to her own seat beside him. “We’ve never been formally introduced. I am Callum and Ezran’s aunt General Amaya, this is my girlfriend Janai, Queen of Lux Aurea”

Ethari’s eyes went wide and he scrambled to bow. Janai pinned his arm to the table and spoke for herself laughing. “No need to bow. If this was my royal court, or if I was my late sister it would be another story. I don’t need so much formality.”

“Yeah this is called the family den for a reason” Ezran pointed out. “Bowing is banned in this room”

“Oh, ah see, well I’ll be sure to respect the laws of the den.” her uncle smiled.

Amaya pointed at Callum with her thumb “I’m surprised you want her to marry this weirdo, I love him but still” She smirked. Rayla knew the teasing was still retribution for the licentious prince thing. Callum cried out about her being mean to him. They all fell into a friendly conversation after that.

Rayla came up behind Ethari, resting her chin on his head and wrapping her arms around his neck. She always forgets how much she missed him until they’re reunited. Her Uncle Ethari had a calming presence in her life. The person she would go to with her problems when her parents were gone. He would braid her hair and they would talk and talk. He placed his hand over hers and they swayed slightly. Without using words the two of them had a tender exchange. The distance was gone.

Callum had put his sketchbook away and pulled his armchair closer to the table. It was their turn to have a silent exchange. He was happy her uncle was here and he loved seeing her happy like this.

Soon a generous tray was brought for Ethari, it seems the cook wasn’t sure what to serve the elf and so he sent about four options. Along with the juice and wine, he also sent up a large batch of warm jelly tarts. Everyone ate and toasted the happy couple and they picked out another game that would accommodate the whole group.

Rayla finished her cup of wine and poured another small cup. While the board game rules were being explained. Rayla quietly took Ezran’s cup and swapped it with her own. She put her finger to her lips and winked. They shared a grin. Callum shot her a look that said do not get my baby brother drunk! She went and sat in his lap and whispered in his ear. “You saw nothing.” she kissed his cheek “it was just a wee bit” Ez grinned at her as he tried to drink the alcohol without making a face.

Callum pulled her close “You’re a bad influence”

“Yeah but you like it” she teased.

“You got me there. Hey Rayla?

“Yeah?”

“This ” He motioned with a look “feels perfect” They shared a warm smile and a loving kiss before being harassed by the group. His Aunt instructed the “Get a room”.

#My Devotion and Mah Protection Our Love #rayllum #older rayllum #myfics #rayllum fic #quality family time #Rayla and Soren best buddy hour #the dragon prince #ao3 #rayla #Callum #fanfic #my fics

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sally-mun · 5 years ago

Text

BIRTHDAY PARTY TIIIIME!

TIME TO TALK ABOUT MY AWESOME BIRTHDAY PARTY~ below the cut since it’s a biggie!

So as is tradition in our household, I’m sequestered in my room while the party is set up downstairs. I mostly spend the day watching Dance Moms (shut up) and playing Animal Crossing, amusingly to get my birthday party there as well. Eventually @fini-mun comes to my door and summons me, and says if I want to record it I should start. I got my phone out and recorded the “First-Person Leda Experience” as I called it. I’m glad I did, because THIS WAS AN EXPERIENCE.

So right outside my door is this chufty motherfucker:

Deebs explains that this is a time machine that’s powered by imagination, and we’re going to take a journey through time. At this point I’m a little puzzled, because the time traveling thing makes me wonder if the theme is Doctor Who, but this clearly isn’t a Tardis so I guess not??

Turns out, I’m correct that it’s not a Tardis; it is, in fact, a Time-A-Tron. Deebs first says we’re going to go into the future and encourages me to turn the dial clockwise. And, well...

WELL THAT DOESN’T BODE WELL. Deebs and I abort this idea and I turn the dial the other way. It turns out, we were going back to the 80′s and 90′s! This was SUCH a great idea for me because I whine all the time about how much I miss these two decades, so I’m very excited to do my time warp!

Deebs sends me on ahead to go back in time, mentioning that they’ll catch up because they want to check out that apocalypse first. So, I head through alone.

There’s a pretty cool warpy swirl on the door ahead of me to give me the full time vortex experience, then I head downstairs. There’s lots of 80′s and 90′s themed swirly banners hanging from the ceiling, balloons with various animal prints all over the floor, and garland in the kitchen doorway featuring boom boxes and sunglasses and lightning bolts and all kinds of nostalgic icons! My friends are waiting for me and I quickly realize they’re dressed for the past too: Jay is wearing overalls and Ivan is wearing a Metallica shirt.

As I’m descending the stairs music suddenly starts -- music from the 80′s radio channel on our TV, and I can’t help myself from bopping around, so the camera got a little shakey at this point (sorry, future!me). We have a little mini dance party at this point while waiting for Deebs to catch up. I even flip my phone around to do my best at filming myself dancing, and upon reviewing the video as I write this I KINDA DID SHOCKINGLY WELL.

(Yeah I normally don’t post pics of myself but I just HAD to show off how well I did for filming myself completely blind.)

I also used the opportunity to teach my young friends the Hand Jive, proving once and for all that even in my prime I am nothing even remotely resembling “cool.”

So finally Deebs rejoins us, and now also has a great retro shirt! It’s got “Totally Rad!” written on it with lots of color splashes. Deebs then explains that in the future Water World is how the world ended, and as a result the survivors elected Kevin Costner as Godking due to his experience making the movie.

We then move into the kitchen and review the food: McDonald’s chicken nuggets, which I loved as a kid and still do to this day! Macaroni and cheese, for the same reason! Little weenies wrapped in bacon, which I only discovered last year but are fucking delicious! Faygo Red Pop, which I practically drank intravenously as a wee one! And of course, ZEBRA CAKES!

The plates and other food vessels are all retro and neon, and I can see that the party’s goody bags (which have become a tradition of our parties at this point) are all very neon as well.

Then Deebs brings out the cake: A DIRT CAKE~ I haven’t had a proper dirt cake since I was like 12 years old!! Deebs even went the extra mile and got rock candies and gummy worms to mix in to enhance the delicious dirtiness~ Deebs also mentioned worrying about having gotten the recipe right, but I pointed out that there are like a thousand “recipes” for dirt cake and there’s no single right way.

I’m so excited and already having such a good time, and I make a passing comment that I’m glad I wore a neutral shirt since it’s not something that would clash with our time traveling. Deebs says it’s funny I should mention that, then hands me a present and tells me to go to the bathroom and change. I obey, and I find that I’ve been given this shirt to wear!!

IT’S SO AMAZING AND I LOVE IT!! It’s like THE essence of what I love about the 80′s~

We all get food and go sit down to hang out, and Deebs mentions we should watch a retro movie. My mom starts flipping through the TV guide, and I can hardly believe my eyes: Coincidentally, THE WIZARD IS ON!! I direct my mom to go to that channel, and it’s actually still pretty close to the beginning of the movie. I just CANNOT believe that this happened to be on during my party, I’m fucking stoked.

We watch the movie and make some pretty great commentary over it, though I notice that one of my guests is spending a lot of time on her phone and the other is preoccupied with a book he brought. OH WELL, THIS IS MY PARTY AND WE’RE WATCHING THE WIZARD. DEAL WITH IT. Besides, I can’t fault them TOO badly because let’s face it, most of us just watch that movie for the game battle at the end anyway. (Speaking of the ending Deebs and I got each other going and eventually concluded that the actor playing the host of the game tournament spiked several small children into the floor. It’s a long story.)

So once we’re done eating Deebs hands out the goodie bags, and holy shit they’re amazing. They’re so smartly put together: A slap bracelet, a pencil and mini-phone book (because we don’t have cell phones yet so this is the only way to save numbers!), some Pop Rocks and Bazooka gum, and we each got a miniature version of a classic 80′s toy of some sort: Mini Rock’em Sock’em robots for Jay, a mini Rubik’s cube for Deebs, a mini Etch-a-Sketch for Ivan... and guys, I nearly rocketed through the roof when I saw I got A MINI LITE-BRITE!! I legit lost my mind for a minute, I didn’t even know this EXISTED as a mini and I was SO EXCITED because I fucking loved my Lite-Brite as a kid and I couldn’t believe Deebs found something like this for me!!

So after we have dirt cake and the movie wraps up, Deebs brings me the rest of my presents, and I was not prepared for how many there were. The gifts carried through the theme very well, as I got some new classic Sonic dolls, an officially licensed Genesis controller for the PC, and 80′s/90′s-themed card games! Ivan was also very shrewd in getting me a couple of Rurouni Kenshin graphic novels, as I’ve not only mentioned to him several times that it’s my favorite anime but also that I have a very, very strong preference for 90′s anime in general!

After that Jay had to leave, so Ivan, Deebs, and myself went up to my room to unwind from the excitement by watching Youtube for a while. We did what we call a “friend pile,” aka where we all try to cram onto my little-ass twin bed and just sort of watch TV and cuddle and hope our limbs don’t all go numb. We took turns suggesting videos to watch, which exposed us all collectively to a lot of new stuff. Some of the videos were fucking insane.

All in all, it was a pretty fantastic day XB I’m very satisfied with my time traveling adventure! Thank you SO SO MUCH to @fini-mun and my friends for showing me such a great time!!

#Sallymun parties #we've done enough of them now that I guess I should do a tag

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changeling-rin · 5 years ago

Note

It's fairly easy to tell with most of the guys, but I've been wondering: what kinds of things are Lore afraid of? How does he react when he's forced to face those things?

Oh! @ask-the-dimensional-links did a thing on this! Give me a minute, I’ll go and dig up that post-

Click Here To Read It

Also, I went back through my message history and found the original thoughts I sent them regarding that Ask in the first place. However, it is long, and I have recently figured out how to stop spamming people with novel-length posts, so! The LONG answer shall be under the cut ;)

(But if you don’t want to read the whole thing I’ll put Lore’s in bold so you can just skip to it)

((For greatest fears… well, honestly I’ve only addressed this a couple times, because most of my interpretation of being the Holder of Courage means that said Holder isn’t afraid of a ton of stuff. That said, I have tried to give each Link something that they ARE afraid of, if only because Courage also means overcoming your fear and doing the thing anyway. I probably haven’t mentioned them all in-story because not all of them came up through natural events or dialogue, but hey, now I can! Gen is afraid of spiders. I did this because, in his game, they’re freaking enormous and have a nasty habit of dropping out of absolutely flipping nowhere, landing on his head, and proceeding to try and eat him then and there. Granted, the spiders in Twilight Princess can be equally large, but you can usually see them coming. Plus, Dusk has very sharp teeth and that quick-time event thing with Midna and her magic, so he’s much better equipped to take them out swiftly whereas Gen has to stab the thing and usually get spider guts on himself too.Speck worries about getting stepped on. One of the very first things he learned about being small is that almost nobody pays attention to you, and they certainly don’t pay attention to where they’re walking. Most of the time he uses this to his advantage, like his fighting style. But he always makes sure to keep to corners and to walk in places where he can’t easily be spotted, because getting crushed to death by an unobservant human sounds absolutely terrifying.The Four don’t like being alone. It’s something that’s developed more in relation to the more time they spend together; there’s something really intimate about sharing thoughts the way they do, and they’re a little bit worried about how they’re going to handle it all when they have to put the Four Sword back. To them, noise means people and people mean life and warmth and laughter and a bunch of other good stuff. Their hive-mind means that they’ve always got each other, but especially now that they’ve gotten used to having ten-plus siblings around, being alone just sounds so… lonely.Ocarina is scared that he can’t measure up. It’s a lot of pressure, to take a nine-year-old boy and tell him, “Hey, you gotta save the world.” Now, though, he’s in a body that he’s still getting used to (he never had the opportunity to grow into it, after all), and there’s a future version of himself hanging around who’s confident and cocky and everything Ocarina’s not. He’s afraid that Mask might look at him one day and say, ‘You’ll never be me. You’re not enough.’ Common sense, of course, tells him that this is obviously never going to happen, because otherwise that would be a massive paradox and plus Mask just isn’t that kind of person, but fear isn’t exactly rational.Mask got over that whole inferiority thing a looooong time ago, but now he’s got a new issue: he can’t stand being left behind. Not in the kind of ‘You’re too slow’ way, but in the 'people move on without him’ way. It started when Princess Zelda sent him back to his child years (without actually consulting him on it, might I add), and suddenly here he is with all these memories surrounded by all these people who have no idea what he’s been through. Mask would have much rather continued as he was, with the people who shared the experience with him. Then Navi left, for reasons he’s still trying to figure out, and he literally left the country and went to a new one searching for her. This is part of the reason why he resonates with the Skull Kid; they’ve both got the same fear.Neither of them are very fond of Dead Hands, though. Dusk doesn’t like losing people - at all. He’s so protective that the idea of one of the people he values getting hurt terrifies him. After all, what did he do when his adoptive brother got kidnapped? (That’s Colin, by the way.) And what did he do when Colin nearly got tossed off a bridge by King Bulblin? He went nuts on the guy. Same thing when Speck almost got crushed. He’s a wolf, and the pack means everything to him. He’s going to fight until he literally can’t anymore to keep anything from happening to his family.Vio, Blue, Red, and Green each have a diluted version of Link’s original fear, because they’re one personality split across four bodies. Basically, Link hates being the person who screwed up. The reason that Vaati is free in the first place was because he drew the Four Sword, breaking the seal and letting the sorcerer loose. (If you’d like, the Blue in him outweighed the Vio and instead of thinking of other ways to rescue the Princess, he went for the immediate option.) In a roundabout way, the whole mess is his fault (or at least he thinks it’s his fault), and he’ll do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen again. For his four split selves, this manifests into a general desire to not be the person in the group to botch the timing on a combat plan and to have their teamwork, at least, be smoothly-running.Lore, for a while, didn’t think he had a fear. Then he met the group and he abruptly realized, that, yes, he actually does. Lore’s afraid of rejection, that one day these people that he’d come to regard as family will say 'That’s it, we’re done, you’re too weird and we can’t cope with it.’ He actually reigned himself in, at first, just a little bit, because he liked these people and he wanted to stick around and for some reason, the idea of them looking at him in apprehension and confusion the way most other people did bothered him. He’s let loose by now, obviously, because he knows that none of them are going anywhere and neither is he, but it’s just one of those things that comes up in a bad dream every once in a while and always ends with him spending the rest of the night awake.Sketch has a straight-up phobia of water. I’ve covered this one fairly in-depth in the story, I believe, so I won’t reiterate it too much. But Sketch is always going to look at the ocean differently than the rest of the group will, because The Rain Incident is never too far in his mind.Realm is secretly afraid that one day, he’s going to get lost on his way to save somebody and by the time he finally gets there it’ll be too late. Or, that he’ll lose his sword and be unable to fend off an attack, or lose his shield and be unable to defend someone. This is why he never stops trying to find whichever item he misplaced or whichever location he lost track of this time. He’s going to get there whether it takes him two weeks or not, because the alternative isn’t an option. He’s better nowadays, because somehow hanging with the group cuts his travel time by about eighty percent and he still can’t believe that it’s normal for people to get where they’re going in less than a week, but it’s awesome and he’s not complaining one bit.Wind is afraid to lose. Not exactly in the traditional sense, but more like he’s terrified of what will happen if he fails. What would have happened to Aryll if he’d failed to save her after she’d gotten kidnapped? What would have happened to Tetra if he’d failed to get her out of Ganondorf’s hands? What would happen to her now if he fails to find Bellum? And, the current one, what will happen to existence if they fail to stop Demise? (I guess he’s afraid of the Game Over scenario, heh.)Steam never says anything about it, but he sometimes sees things that nobody else does and they freak the living daylights out of him. He’s started suspecting that there’s some form of spirit world sharing the space with their physical one. He’s learned to ignore it, for the most part, although being able to see it did come in really handy when Zelda lost her body. Unfortunately, that led him to think that he’s seeing the afterlife, and that was just uncomfortable.

Shadow likes to pretend that he doesn’t have a fear and he gets away with it too, because what he’s actually afraid of never actually occurred to anybody else. Which is funny, because he’s actually really obvious about it. He doesn’t like sunlight. Kinda like Sketch and his water phobia, Shadow’s afraid of sunlight because it hurts. He’s never tempted fate to see what would happen, but judging by the smoke that starts coming off his hair he doesn’t think he wants to find out. Hence the cloak he wears, and why he’s always under a shady tree somewhere.Oni dislikes the idea of losing his legacy. He’s the very first Hero, after all, he’s gotta protect his kids. Plus, if they’re gone, who’s gonna beat up the evil that pops up all the time? He’s like the formal older brother/father who’s actually an enraged momma bear if you manage to trigger his fear.))

#Changeling Answers #Greatest Fears #Whoo boy it's a long one again #The DL Links #Dimensional Links

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contrabbandiera-di-elia · 6 years ago

Text

Doodles

I’m full of Elippo energy recently, so I did this thing on my phone. It may be full of mistakes because I’ll probably bother my beta only if I decide to post it on AO3, but I guess it’s still readable.

Based loosely on this thing which made me believe Elia can draw really well, at least in the cartoonish style, and some ‘different style challenges’ I’ve seen recently.

Happy Birthday, @azozzoni! I hope you’ll like it! 🎁

—

“What’s that?” Asked Filippo, picking up a piece of the paper lying on the floor among Eleonora’s papers. She was doing general cleaning, as she used to do always a few weeks after the end of the school year. She was organizing the notes and other kinds of papers, deciding which ones she wanted to keep because they may be useful in the future, and which were to be thrown away because they’re useless. This year Edoardo was helping her, as he was so called cleaning specialist, or at least he claimed to be.

At first glance, Filippo thought what he had picked up was just a piece of paper full of unimportant doodles. But then he took a closer look and realized these were quite interesting drawings. All of them presented one person but in different styles of drawing. All of them were cartoonish. Some of them he recognized, like Winx Club or Adventure Time, but most of them he didn’t. They were mostly black and white, but he knew precisely who they presented. That hairstyle, that striped shirt, and most importantly – red lips, the only thing in every drawing that was not black and white. It was obviously Eleonora.

“Oh, I completely forgot about it,” he heard over his shoulder, as the person in question studied the sketches. “It’s Elia’s. One time he was waiting for Martino at the radio’s room. He got a bit bored and asked if he can draw me. It was not quite what I expected to see, but I liked it, and he let me keep it.”

“It’s good, actually. But I’d never tell Elia could be an artist.”

“Right? I was surprised myself. But when I asked him, he said it’s just a hobby.”

“Who’s Elia?” Asked Edoardo. He didn’t even look at them from where he was putting the notes Eleonora decided to keep into a binder, but Filippo could hear this minimal jealousy in his voice. Well, it was quite understandable. He probably wasn’t too pleased to hear that some random guy spend some considerable amount of time drawing his girlfriend even if these were just cartoonish sketches.

“Martino’s friend. Oh, please, don’t tell me you don’t recognize him! You saw him multiple times!”

Edoardo frowned, but then suddenly he seemed to match the name with the right face. His girlfriend's irritation probably speeded up this process.

“Ah, this Elia! Okay, that changes everything.” Eleonora rolled her eyes at that but didn’t say anything.

Filippo was still looking at the drawings. He wasn’t sure why, but he liked them a lot. They were done with a black and red fineliners (Filippo’s guess, and he knew a thing or two about artistic tools) and in a very clear way. There was no single line made with a pencil, everything was put straight on the paper using only the fineliners. Nevertheless, there were almost no mistakes. Well, maybe there were some slight shortcomings here and there, but Filippo had to pay close attention to even notice them. And the longer he was looking, the more fascinated he was. As he counted, there were seven different drawings, and he inspected all of them acutely. He was never a fan of drawings, neither cartoons, but he found these few little figures interesting and funny. He started to be a bit jealous of his own sister having something like that made about her. Elia had surely put some work and consideration into that, even though it was just a thing he did out of boredom.

“Filippo?” Eleonora’s voice brought him back to the reality out of his thoughtfulness. “If you like it so much you can have it.”

“I don’t need a piece of paper full of your face. I have too much of it every day, darling,” he sighed, putting the drawings aside. “I just think it’s nice. I like how it's done, the style and everything, but also I think it's quite interesting someone took their time to do something like that for the person he barely knows. You know, gazing at you for long minutes and everything. Are you sure Elia doesn't have a thing for you?”

“Elia? No way. He was just bored, and we were the only two people in the room, so it’s not like he had a lot of models to choose from,” she said, not even slightly bothered. Edoardo, on the other hand, seemed to be bothered for the both of them.

“I hope so!” He announced from the other side of the room. Eleonora ignored him, focusing on her brother.

“Hey... Is it me, or you look a bit down? Is it about Dario? Maybe you should talk to him after all or...”

“No,” Filippo answered quickly, shaking his head. “Dario is a closed chapter. It doesn’t make sense anyway. He needs someone calmer and more mature, he said it himself. And I need someone who’d be able to keep up with me. Someone more spontaneous, more confident, more... you know.”

“I know,” she claimed. She did. She knew her brother long enough to know what kind of person he needed in his life. And she hoped he’d find this person someday.

Filippo was never into birthdays. Or rather, he was never into his birthdays. It was simply not a big deal. His parents never remembered, and he never fully got over it, so there was this dose of disappointment every year. He was trying to get rid of it by getting his friends, hitting some club and finding someone to spend the night with, but it was never his dreamed birthday. There was no special birthday parties, no singing ‘Happy Birthday’ over the birthday cake with a group of friends, no more than one present, so it was pretty sad.

The only thing that made everything better was the existence of Eleonora. She always remembered, she was singing ‘Happy Birthday’ over the birthday cake or at least suitable replacement of a one, she was coming up with a present. So every and each year Filippo was grateful for having her because he knew without her none of his birthdays would make any sense.

But that year Eleonora outdid herself. Completely.

Filippo came home from a university with a plan of getting together with his friends and going out, and the last thing he expected to see in the living room was Eleonora with Martino and their respective significant others singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in the most unsynchronized way he had ever heard.

“Look what we have for you! And no, you definitely didn't expect it,” said Martino, as he and Eleonora came up to him with something that was supposed to be Filippo’s present.

It was wrapped in a paper, but judging by the shape, it could be a painting. Or a large photo. Or maybe some framed poster. He looked at Eleonora and Martino suspiciously, but they only hurried him to unpack it, both seemingly impatient. That made Filippo unsure because Eleonora and Martino being excited over the same thing couldn't end up well.

Fortunately, he was wrong.

After he ripped off the paper, he saw a bunch of drawings drew on a framed bristol board. He quickly realized it was exactly what he saw among Eleonora’s papers some time ago – a bunch of drawings presenting one person in different cartoon styles. Except that there was no seven of them, but probably about twenty. And they were sighed, so he knew which drawing was made in which cartoon's style. Moreover, no black and white with small additions of red, but colorful, and made with much more care and precision. And they didn’t present Eleonora. They presented Filippo.

He carefully studied his own face in multiple cartoonish versions. Winx Club Filippo, Adventure Time Filippo, Simpsons Filippo, Flinstones Filippo, Sailor Moon Filippo... And in the middle of the frame, slightly bigger than every other drawing, was Filippo drew in unsigned style. Probably author’s own style. Elia’s style.

“And? What do you think?” Asked Martino, a hint of uncertainty in his voice. Filippo looked at him quickly before turning his eyes back to the drawings.

“It’s... wow, it’s great, seriously. I love it,” he said finally, his eyes tracing every drawing as if he couldn’t believe it was all him. It was a bit weird to look at his own face like that, but interesting nevertheless. “Did you get Elia to do that?”

“Well... yes. But we were helping."

“We just provided him with materials and occasionally some ideas,�� commented Eleonora making Martino roll his eyes.

"Well, that's still some kind of help," he decided with a little shrug.

"I think we actually did him a favor, " Niccolò cut in, a mischievous look in his eyes. "He seemed to be quite eager to draw you. I'd say he enjoyed it definitely more than..."

"Oh, come on, Nico," Martino didn't let him finish, hitting his arm playfully. "The most important thing is that Filo enjoys it. Now let's get to the cake." That made Edoardo happy.

"Thank you! I went through a lot of effort to get a cake that has a rainbow both inside and outside. I want to see if it was worth it."

They all spent the whole afternoon eating and talking, but for some reason, Filippo couldn't get the author of his birthday present out of his head. He wanted to believe the reason for that was the gratefulness, but the truth was that Niccolò's words still lingered on the back of his head. He tried to ignore them, but they were coming back to him all the time. Finally, he decided it's pointless just to sit and think about it and decided to do something about it. He was feeling a bit stupid asking Martino for Elia's number to 'thank him for the effort and all,' but in the end, he got it, so he decided to at least try and see how the conversation will go.

After a third signal, Elia picked up with a simple “hello?” Filippo cleared his throat, suddenly feeling uneasy. He wasn’t even sure why exactly he wanted to call him in the first place. But there was no turning back. It’d be stupid to leave Elia hanging at the other end. Nobody liked dead calls.

“Hi, it's Filippo,” he said, but before he managed to add anything to that, Elia spoke up.

“Hi! How did you like the drawings?” He asked, seemingly excited to hear the answer. Filippo couldn’t help a smile forming at his lips.

“I love it, seriously. It’s amazing. Thank you so much for making it.”

“You’re welcome, I’m glad you like it. I’m not sure why Eleonora and Martino wanted so badly to have it as your birthday present, but I guess as long as you enjoy it it’s fine.”

“I’m thinking about hanging it on my wall, to be honest,” confessed Filippo, because he was, in fact, thinking about it. It'd be wasting art not to have it hanging on a wall.

“Woah, so much?”

“So much,” he nodded, even through Elia couldn’t see it. Then he decided to take the risk and try going a step further. It was his birthday, maybe he could get some birthday luck or something. “Listen... I thought maybe I could get you a coffee as a thank-you?”

“No way,” Elia said quickly, and Filippo wanted to punch himself for even asking that. Of course. But before he got to back off and say he was only joking or something, Elia continued. “That’s a present. You don’t need to get me anything in exchange. They asked me to do that, I had nothing better to do, I actually enjoyed doing it a lot, so I don’t need any sort of payment from you.”

“But still,” insisted Filippo, suddenly feeling brave again after those words, “I’d like to thank you in person. Don’t think about it as payment. Think about it as a... nice meeting with a receiver of your art.”

Elia’s laughter reverberated in his right ear and made him a little gooey inside. He closed his eyes to compose himself. That was interesting.

“Okay than. Let’s do that.”

When a week later Filippo was laying in his bed, Elia’s lips moving along his neck, Elia’s hand working on a zipper of his pants, Elia’s drawing hanging on his wall right above the desk, he vowed to himself he’ll never ever refuse Eleonora when she asks him to help her sorting her notes.

#skam italia #skamit #elippo #elia being an artist #filippo moping #eleonora being a good sister #edoardo being a dork #martino knowing everything better #niccolo noticing small things #happy birthday azozzoni #i tried my best #my fic

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recentanimenews · 6 years ago

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Manga Editor Yumi Sukemune on Making Princess Jellyfish and the History of Shojo

Most writing about manga focuses on the artists and writers credited on the covers of the books. But there’s another role that’s indispensable to the creative process for most manga series: the editor. In addition to managing the manga production schedule, editors provide creative guidance for artists, in some cases acting as equal partners in coming up with the storylines and characters of their series.

A year ago at Anime Expo 2017, I sat down with manga editor Yumi Sukemune to chat about her work with Akiko Higashimura, the artist behind the josei (adult women’s manga) series Princess Jellyfish about a group of geeky women living together in a Tokyo apartment complex. But our conversation wandered a bit outside of her day job, revealing an editor with a critical, feminist perspective on the history of shojo (girls’ manga).

Thank you to Ms. Sukemune and Kodansha interpreter Misaki Kido for the interview opportunity, and for their patience as this interview sat in draft form for an entire year. It took a while to get this one out, but I think it was worth it!

First off, how did you get started as a manga editor?

I joined Kodansha 12 years ago right out of college. I’ve been assigned to the Kiss Magazine Editorial Department the entire time. The editor of Attack on Titan joined Kodansha the same year.

What titles have you edited?

Princess Jellyfish and Tokyo Tarareba Girls, which is Higashimura’s follow-up series about 30-something-year-old ladies. It’s like a Tokyo version of Sex and the City. A lot of titles that aren’t published outside of Japan. I always have five to six titles that I’m looking at at any time.

How typical is it for a manga editor to be editing multiple titles at the same time?

It’s pretty common.

What’s the process for how editors are assigned to titles?

For those existing series, there might be editors already assigned to them, but in Japanese companies, people rotate from department to department fairly frequently. So when some editor leaves the department, if the title needs a new editor, then that’s an opportunity where you might get assigned to an existing title.

In my case with Higashimura, there was another editor before me, but then that person left. But besides that, I was already close with Higashimura because we both liked Johnnys idol groups. That was our connection.

So when the previous editor left, because I was pretty personally connected to Higashimura, I became the editor.

Is Higashimura going to do an idol series?

(laughs) She loves K-Pop right now.

Being an editor is a creative role in addition to an administrative one. Is that assignment process partially based on story fit in addition to being good at managing an artist?

There’s no test for it or anything like that, but when you’re being hired into the company, in the interview process, they’re looking at the way you talk, the way you express yourself. The people looking for new hires are picking up those kinds of personality traits. So those are some of the challenging aspects.

In other cases, when you first start to become an editor, you team up with more of a veteran, “sempai,” editor. Then, when they go together to a creator’s house and they have a meeting, the sempai editor will ask you things like, “What would you do in this case of the story?” You’re on the spot and you have to express what your opinion is.

A lot of the editors love manga of course, but they also study and watch a lot of movies and stuff like that too. There are a lot of movie otaku.

I imagine they read a lot of books too.

Yes.

So in terms of the creativity, of course there’s individuality, but at the same time … being in love with the character, that’s just being a fan. As an editor you have to really think about where the story’s going: beginning, middle, and end. You need to look at it constructively and then put your opinions into those critical perspectives. That’s something that’s expected from an editor. And then, depending on your level of skills in addition to your creativity, you could become a hit-maker editor or not.

The Manga Editing Process

What’s a day in the life of a manga editor like?

My working hours are flexible. Most of the manga artists work at night. So in the morning, a lot of people just watch movies and things like that. Around noon-ish, that’s when we go to work. But then we won’t be able to go back home until the last train.

In terms of shojo manga artists specifically, it’s kind of a one-on-one relationship of manga artist to editor, so as long as we can stay in touch with those artists, we can work from anywhere. We can work from home too.

Regarding Higashimura, she works on so many series at once, but she also has a lot of assistants and they’re kind of set up like a studio. Their schedule usually starts at 11 AM and goes until 7 PM. So in terms of Higashimura, she definitely doesn’t work beyond those hours. She won’t pull all-nighters, she won’t work on weekends. She keeps a work-life balance.

Do a lot of very successful manga artists do that?

It’s not regular at all!

Because it’s set up like a production studio, the main artist Higashimura just does the rough sketches for the story and she also does the penciling. But from there on she actually works with other staff, and they finish her work.

When the artist sets up a production studio-type of setup, then they can actually work on more than just one title at a time. But not too many female artists actually do it like that. Usually if you work with shojo manga artists they’re working with their friends and just barely making the 30 pages each month.

You mentioned in the Kodansha panel earlier that Ms. Higashimura is the most prolific current shojo manga artist. That she has the most titles.

That’s true. She works with all the major publishers.

Speaking of staying in touch with artists, we were looking at your phone before. Could you talk about the process? You two are on LINE sending “names” (rough manuscript drawings) back and forth, right?

(She shows me her LINE message history with Ms. Higashimura.)

Yesterday Higashimura sent a name. I usually just loosely say “I kind of want to see the first draft by this day.”

The name stage is usually very simple. But for her, she makes it very detailed. This one has notes on how to finish these panels for the assistants. So, “Put the shadow on here, on the blue.”

Here’s what I’m saying in these messages: “Sorry about the delay of this post. I think the name is really awesome. I think we can use it just the way it is. Especially the scenes in the past and the scene about grilled fish. You’re actually connecting them indirectly. I think it’s really well done. I am here in LA in the morning. I was in awe for a minute. If you’ve got a continuation of these pages please send it to me.”

What stickers do you use on LINE?

We mostly send photos. Not a lot of stickers.

(She shows another name with red pen marks on it.) This is proofing. I use red pen to mark things.

Princess Jellyfish is a really honest portrayal of fujoshi and otaku culture and social anxiety. What sort of conversations do you two have about telling this kind of story?

She often models these characters off of her real-life friends. There’s a friend of hers who’s into dolls. Also all her assistants are super manga otaku. While they’re working, they’re always chatting, for example, having a funny conversation with different ways to end a sentence. The way they talk is unique. She picks it up while she’s writing. Whenever I meet her or even on LINE, Higashimura mentions, “Oh this funny thing happened.” I say, “That’s really funny, why don’t you write about it?”

Communicating and keeping friendships with people outside of work is one of the main reasons she insists on doing the 11–7 shifts, the work-life-balance. Tokyo Tarareba Girls is really based on all her friends who are editors, who are always bitching about something. It’s like, “I’m working so hard, but I have no boyfriend. What’s going on?” She writes about that.

As her editor, my main job is to figure out what she’s into, what her main focus is right now, and to encourage her, to ask “why don’t you write that into the story?”

Shojo and “Waiting for Men”

In the panel earlier you talked about how shojo has changed. You said it was about waiting for a boy to discover you, and now it’s about girls saying “this is my way of life.” Why do you think that is?

I think the biggest influence was Sailor Moon. I’m 34 now. When I was little, Sailor Moon was a current, ongoing series. Up until the emergence of Sailor Moon, all the manga was really about an average girl being discovered by a boy. That was the classic formula. But as soon as Sailor Moon hit, everything changed into a new generation of girls who had the ability to do what they wanted to do in life.

Around that time in the history of Japan, women were starting to get accepted into regular workplaces. The timing in history might have contributed to the message too.

For those girls who grew up with Sailor Moon and keep that true to their hearts, as they get older they become these really strong women and do things for themselves.

Do you think the cultural shift influenced Sailor Moon? Or the other way around?

Sailor Moon was originally supposed to become an anime by the time it started. There was a project for the anime too, they worked on them together. So instead of waiting for the stories to finish, they actually continued the story at the same pace in manga and anime. Because it was a collaborative project between the artist and the animation studio, it wasn’t really up to the creator herself. The creation came from the anime production team as well.

Princess Jellyfish is josei though, not shojo, right?

Yes. The magazine is a josei magazine, although story-wise, none of them are working, so it’s more in the realm of shojo manga, really. And definitely the style is shojo manga.

How much of what you were describing about shojo applies to josei?

In the josei manga genre, unlike shojo manga, it’s not all pure and fresh. It’s not that kind of puppy love story. But in terms of the main character opening up the door to their own life, it’s actually consistent between both shojo and josei manga.

Was josei already doing that, though?

Even in josei manga back in the day, even though they were working women, the formula of an average woman being discovered by men was still the same. It’s like all the characters are mature adults, but it’s still this bubbly romance.

There’s a series called Tramps Like Us (Kimi wa Pet) in Kiss Magazine. It’s a story about a girl picking her favorite boy and keeping him in her house. The pet is a boy.

That change is interesting. Early shojo manga like the works of the Showa 24 Group weren’t about women waiting for men.

Those series like Rose of Versailles are very eternal, evergreen titles. Those tend to be the formula of the character seeking their own path. Those legendary creators: Keiko Takemiya, Moto Hagio. Series that actually stick around long enough to be classics, they tend to be based on main characters finding their own path. But series that became very popular hits but eventually as time goes became lost and forgotten, those are the ones with the formula where the girl gets discovered by the boy.

I feel like in the 1980s shojo manga went in that direction a bit.

Yes, during the bubble economy. Back in the ’80s during the economic boom, it was all about what kind of relationship can you have as a person. That was the biggest focus.

Keiko Takemiya was told by an editor that a story was not going to be a hit; it was complicated, it should be more romance. But she really felt strongly about writing those kinds of stories. So she created The Poem of Wind and Trees (Kaze to Ki no Uta) from there. It’s a really famous Boys Love manga now.

It really shows how hard it was for those female creators in the ’80s to stand up for what they wanted to write about and to execute their expression and get published.

There have been a lot of fans who have been supportive of creators like Takemiya, but at the time, those fans were a way smaller fraction of fans. But post-Sailor Moon people began to accept and understand and like those formulas too. In terms of The Rose of Versailles, it’s inspired by the sort of “fantasy” admiration toward French culture. So that brought in the audience. It’s not really because of feminism. It’s because France is cool.

But it sounds like Sailor Moon represents more of a true feminist shift.

I think so.

There’s an element of romance in Sailor Moon with Tuxedo Mask but that’s not the focus of the series and that’s not the reason why she’s fighting. She’s also looking out for her teammates and friends.

In the US a lot of fans had a very similar response. Because we didn’t get a lot of female characters with that kind of agency.

Everything is connected. No matter where you’re from you really want to cherish and respect yourself in terms of your personality.

As an editor, I always question the difference between the audiences. Like, the school life in America and Japan is different. Is that something that affects the popularity of manga?

The portrayal of the cool, attractive boys seems to be very different here in the US too. I think that might affect whether a manga series becomes popular overseas, not just in Japan. Series like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, ones set in fantasy-based worlds, are kind of rare in shojo manga. They’re just a fraction, and the rest of the titles are focused on school life and slice-of-life stories.

Even the editors and executives in Japan, they’re thinking that whatever is available here and the shojo manga outside of Japan is just a fraction of the shojo manga that is available.

The High School Formula

Have you edited any of those high school titles before?

I have a series called Love’s Reach. In shojo manga, there are a lot of teacher-student relationships, but elsewhere that’s illegal, right? Love’s Reach is the standard shojo manga formula: school life, always a big event with some emotionally thrilling moments. So if people actually get into these series and accept these kinds of stories then we can introduce a bunch more shojo manga. A lot of the shojo manga that’s available here, like Princess Jellyfish or Nana, is kind of irregular compared to the rest of the shojo manga in Japan.

Is there anything different about editing for one of those school life series versus something more irregular?

For Princess Jellyfish, the creation starts with Higashimura’s inspiration, ideas, and imagination. In terms of things like Love’s Reach, there’s the standard formula and then you put a good talented artist on it. So during the meeting, I say things like “do you want to go on a school trip now?” Like, “this is a good time now.” We have these formulas so you can sort of test the artist to see if they can work creatively with those frameworks and make them their own. That’s how each of the creators’ talents emerge.

Because the history of shojo manga is so long in Japan, there are readers who just want to read a formulaic story. Instead of going into a really fresh story that’s very imaginative, some people just want to read the same old story right before they go to bed after coming back from a long day of work.

In fact, a lot of the digital shojo manga sales in Japan happen after 11 PM. It’s interesting. They probably just buy it and read it and just fall asleep. Maybe right before you’re going to bed and you’re relaxing, you might not want to be introduced to super fresh, super imaginative ideas.

(laughs) The Rose of Versailles is too heavy!

(laughs) I might dream about it or something!

Of course sexy titles and “ero” manga too. Manga that you don’t want to have as a book also sell during nighttime.

It’s important for big publishers to fulfill all these people’s needs. Of course we want to create something new, but we also want to produce something that our audience would want.

Thank you so much for your time!

Manga Editor Yumi Sukemune on Making Princess Jellyfish and the History of Shojo originally appeared on Ani-Gamers on October 2, 2018 at 10:14 PM.

By: Evan Minto

#Anime #News #Ani-Gamers

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todisturbtheuniverse · 7 years ago

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FIC: Truth-Telling

Rating: M Pairing: f!Adaar/Josephine Montilyet Tags: Violence Warning, Pre-Relationship, Mutual Pining, Hurt/Comfort Word Count: 4000 Summary: Adaar tells a number of stories about the way she lost half of one horn, each one better at parties than the last. The truth is just too ugly to tell. Post-Promising. Also on AO3. Notes: *inexplicably writes more for this pairing after nearly two years of nothing*

Sometimes, if Adaar does it right, a thick book and a furrowed brow keeps away the various entities who want to talk her ear off through dinner.

She could just take the meal in her quarters, of course, and dispense with the entire rigamarole of it, but—and this is hard to admit, even to herself, but she has to do it—the dim quiet up there unnerves her. Since Haven—since the last, longest night—she does not like to be alone. She is, regardless; there is a distance between her and every other person here that she can’t bridge. But as long as she is among them, nearby them, the creeping tightness in her chest does her a damn favor and loosens up a bit. As long as she can hear the pointless chatter of guards off duty (three of them trying to cajole a fourth into making her feelings known for a fifth, the stout dwarven woman who never smiles; Adaar finds her lips quirking up at that), and the occasional laughter flaring in the grand hall, and feel the body heat warming the place in a way that even repairs to the walls haven’t done, then the dark press of a night filled only with a sickly green flare falls backward.

And there’s a particular laugh that, if she’s lucky, she’ll hear. No chance of that in her lofty quarters.

She takes up another spoonful of stew—the parsnips are awful, but the potatoes good—and as she’s scanning the next page of the dusty tome unearthed from Skyhold’s cellar, she hears it, from across the hall where a crowd of better-dressed people are gathered, drinking wine that was not unearthed from Skyhold’s cellar: a carefully-pitched laugh, perfected for the nobles, seamlessly putting them at ease.

Not as good as the real thing, but good enough. Josephine puts on a certain...mask...while she interacts with diplomats. Adaar doesn’t like describing it that way, but it’s true; she wreathes herself in some invisible stuff that allows her to work an entirely different kind of magic on these people than the kind that the world is currently tearing itself to pieces over. It’s a little unnerving.

But what chance does she have, these days, of getting a few minutes with Josephine without that mask? Slim to none. The Inquisition is booming. She’s in demand, every hour of every day and some hours of the night, besides. The days of Haven—when Adaar could sneak in an hour here or there, under the guise of business but always devolving into gossip and friendship instead—are at an end.

So Adaar stays where she is, half her mind on her book, eating by rote, and sifting through the voices in the hall to listen to the conversation surrounding Josephine. It’s almost like being there, even though she can’t catch quite all of it.

“And that’s...the horns?”

Nobles who haven’t yet met or identified the Inquisitor yet, then. If Josephine can talk them out of coming over to gawk at her, Adaar will be impressed.

“Yes, that is Inquisitor Adaar.” There’s an edge to Josephine’s voice. Adaar clearly missed some insult in the noble’s question, or maybe Josephine is just taking offense to someone pointing her out by her horns. A fond smile uncurls over Adaar’s mouth.

The noble’s voice lowers further, in contrast to the firm tone of Josephine’s. Even a newborn in The Game would have realized that her voice meant, go no further down this path or some of your tasteful and useful alliances will become a burden to you, but this noble’s got the bit in his teeth.

“Do you...one...broken?”

Ah. A point of fascination to the indiscreet: her broken horn, the one that got caught on the roof of a cave because she’s so, so tall, the one that got snared in a trap meant for a bear because she was young and clumsy, the one that got knocked against stone when she hit the ground in a drunken brawl and simply could not hang on after that. Varric has nineteen tales for how he came by Bianca, none of them true; Adaar has many more for how she lost part of that horn.

“I have not presumed to ask.”

Well, this won’t do. Josephine shouldn’t ruin all her hard work in this conversation protecting Adaar’s imagined pride or privacy or whatever. Without any indication of planning to do so, she abandons stew and book and pushes back from her seat; a few people nearby gape at her in surprise at the movement, startled. She ignores these, finally locating Josephine and her hangers-on with eyes after an evening of using only ears, and she strides around the table to make straight for them.

Those funny little masks do so impede the vision; even the fellow asking about the horn doesn’t notice Adaar coming. Josephine, though, does, and her eyes meet Adaar’s with a clear warning: Stay out of this.

She underestimates Adaar, sometimes. Doesn’t she realize that Adaar’s put on a stupid mask before, too, doing a number of dances before nobles who wanted to hire her—her skill, her brutishness, her body—but didn’t want to think about what might be tucked between those horns?

She snags a glass of wine off a nearby platter, thanks the stars that she put on a nice clean coat this afternoon after sparring with Cassandra, and steps smoothly into the conversation. “I hope you don’t mind the interruption,” she says, with an easy smile and a sketch of a bow. No, she is not cultured, she is casual, she is a funny oddity at a museum, here for them to gawk up at. She can’t make out their expressions through the masks, but she knows body language, the stiffening of a spine to steel one’s resolve, the shuddering of a shoulder giving away the flinch of fear.

“Not at all,” one of them says a little breathlessly, the first to bend her knees in a curtsy; the rest hastily follow suit with their own bows and curved necks. “Your Worship,” she adds, and the brief delay of the appropriate address says: I may be afraid, but I have my pride.

Well, that's what Adaar thinks. She's willing to admit she doesn't read these spaces between words as well as some other people probably do. But she likes to make up things to fill them, regardless.

The man who’d asked about the horn gives the briefest bow of them all, and when he straightens, his eyes fixate on it again. Greedy, fascinated. Josephine—Adaar is standing close enough beside her to hear every irritated rustle of her dress and chain of office, however minute—opens her mouth, probably to divert the conversation, but Adaar says, dismissively, “Ugly, isn’t it? Sometimes I miss being symmetrical.”

The greedy eyes widen. Startled that she noticed his blatant stare, impressed by the low bar she’s cleared with her powers of observation? They expect so little of her.

“I didn’t mean to offend, Inquisitor,” he says, lowering his gaze.

“Oh, please, not at all. It’s quite the story, if you’re interested.” She casts an apologetic look at Josephine, playing it up. “Though if I’m interrupting business, please, just say the word. Lady Montilyet tells me I can’t just go blundering into these things.” A laugh, a self-deprecating chortle. “If I’d had her around five years ago, maybe I’d still have the horn.”

She can see in their eyes that they’ve all begun to smile, indulgent, almost patronizing—but interested. Chomping after that bait. And the body language, previously fearful, begins to relax. That’s right, she thinks. I’m just a big funny bear here to do some tricks for you before lumbering away where you don’t have to worry about me anymore. Enjoy the show.

“Surely we have time for a tale from the Inquisitor herself,” another of the women says. “I’ve heard so many stories.”

Josephine regains control of herself. Maybe this is unfair; she never lost control. But she is thinking again about The Game now, not about Adaar’s imaginary pride. “Please,” she says with a gracious smile, “it is a wonderful tale.”

Adaar tells the version best suited for Orlesian nobles: it involves an ill-placed tapestry, an aggressive nest of tuskets, and a job completed despite the loss of the horn. She tells it to polite laughter increasingly becoming uproarious, until even Josephine’s eyes are crinkled at the corners and her laugh has become real again. Even though she knows this is just another story. She’s heard several of them, by now, some in detail and some in passing.

As the story winds up and everyone catches their breath through a few lingering chuckles, Adaar turns to Josephine with a smile. “Can you spare a moment?” she asks. “There’s a correspondence that really should be finished up this evening—I’d like your final review on it.”

She’s regaled them, she’s entertained them, and now she hints at what they really need her for: holding the world together. There are a few tiny nods of approval, of seeing that she has some business sense in her head.

And Josephine plays along. “Of course,” she says, and “please, help yourselves,” to the nobles, and they all murmur goodbyes and do their silly curtsies and bows—Adaar makes one of her own, sharper this time—and they drift away to talk to others in the hall.

In silence, Adaar leads Josephine toward the door not so far off, the one that passes through to her office. Adaar opens the door for her and Josephine walks by, dipping her head in gratitude, and in the glimmer of light, Adaar notices something strange: a shiny bit of fire agate dangling on a slim golden chain in Josephine’s hair. She recognizes it as the gemstone she found in the mud on the Storm Coast a couple of months ago, something she sent back to Josephine after cleaning it.

Her heart swells. That this is some acceptance, some return, of her affection does not cross her mind; she is only happy that Josephine liked the gift enough to utilize it. To wear it in front of Adaar’s betters.

The door shuts quietly, and in the dim room, with the low-banked fire, Josephine draws a slightly ragged breath. None of her attendants are here; it is just them.

“I’m sorry I got involved,” Adaar says, returning her voice to normal with effort. She does not shed the act easily; it’s why she prefers not to put it on at all. “I know you wanted me to stay out of it.”

Josephine lets out a little laugh. A sad little laugh. “I only wanted to spare you from talking about something I know is unpleasant to you. No matter how you dress it up. Foolish of me. You handled them very well.”

“Thank you,” Adaar replies—more for the first sentiment than the last.

“You always surprise me.” Her voice is so soft that Adaar wonders if she was really meant to hear it.

“For the better, I hope.”

“Very much.”

Adaar hesitates, thinking. She shouldn’t take this particular plunge. It’s not a good story, after all. It won’t make Josephine laugh. But she feels...compelled, somehow, toward some imagined closeness.

“You’ve heard a few different versions now,” she finds herself saying. “Which one is your favorite?”

Josephine turns to face her. “My favorite? It’s hard to choose. You tell them all with such gusto.”

“Do you ever wonder…”

She does not need to finish; Josephine takes her meaning immediately, and a thoughtful frown crosses her face. “Of course,” she says. “But I wouldn’t be rude enough—callous enough—to point and whisper about it.” In the wash of firelight, there’s a sharpness to her features, a coldness. She carries daggers of her own; if that dim noble could hear, he would flush from the impropriety she’s accused him of.

“I can tell you,” Adaar offers. “If you want.”

Josephine’s eyes—murky in this dim light—search Adaar’s face, reading something there. “Only if you want,” she says, unbearably gentle, “if it would help to have an ear, then of course, I am here to listen.”

Adaar looks down at the glass in her hand, the untouched puddle of wine. “I think I’ll need something stronger than this.”

Josephine immediately goes to her desk; Adaar watches, increasingly amused, as she shuffles around through a few cavernous drawers and eventually comes up with a thick-bottomed glass bottle full of a fine amber liquid.

“Antivan brandy,” she says, and with an air of defensiveness, adds, “it’s very good in tea. Late at night, you understand. When I should really be sleeping anyway.”

A smile breaks over Adaar’s face, a fond laugh following it that she can’t stifle. “Its medicinal properties are best when unhindered by tea, though, wouldn’t you agree?”

She pulls a few tea cups from another drawer. “I’m glad we understand each other, Your Worship.”

For a moment—just a moment—Adaar nearly tells her to hang formality, but she resists. This is Josephine’s way of showing Adaar respect, the respect that she thinks Adaar deserves and doesn’t receive, and it would be unkind—cruel, even—to throw that back in her face. Adaar takes it for the compliment it is and lets it lie.

Besides. After a little brandy and a gruesome story, the names will come out. Just like that night in Haven. There is a little guilt—only a little—that Adaar can look back on that ugly week with any fondness, but in times as they are, she’ll take what comfort she can.

They settle on the settee in front of the fireplace, with their teacups of brandy and the bottle between them, and Adaar turns the cup in her hands, considering how to begin. She’s never told this story to anyone.

“I’d been with Shokrakar and the Valo-Kas for about a year,” she says finally. Context. Context is important for truth. “I was maybe twenty years old. We took a job to clear a cave system that was close to a town—lot of giant spiders, they were causing problems for the villagers. We got in, did our job, and camped out that night in the mouth of the cleared cave.”

Josephine listens, teacup perched delicately in her hand. Adaar takes a gulp of her own brandy, shakes off the old cobwebs with the burn of it in her throat, and continues.

“I was on watch duty. Middle of the night, and I was tired. Struggling to keep my eyes open. And already a little injured—my kind of fighting, I have to get pretty close to a thing to hurt it, and giant spiders are a lot bigger than me. I’d gotten a bit chewed on. We had a mage—Kaariss—and he’d healed me up, but it always leaves you...tired.” She almost adds, you know? before she remembers that Josephine duels with words, and maybe hasn’t been chewed on before.

Nevertheless, she nods in agreement.

“So that’s why these toughs from the village caught me off guard,” Adaar says, wincing at the memory of her own sloppy work. “Knocked me out. The others woke up and fought, but the villagers managed to drag me away. I woke up in one of their houses.” She clears her throat. “They’d already sawed halfway through the horn, at that point.”

Josephine must have seen this coming, because her next breath is just a little sharp, not an outright gasp. And she doesn’t ask why, but Adaar tells her, anyway.

“Guess some of the villagers took exception to mercenaries. And Tal-Vashoth, in particular. Thought we were using the job as an in to walk around town and maybe terrorize and rob anyone we wanted. Or maybe it’s simpler than that; I didn’t ask them.” She shrugs. “No nerve endings in the horn, understand. They get itchy around the base when the weather’s too hot and dry, but the horn itself? I could feel where I was tied up, where they’d strapped my head to the ground so I wouldn’t move, but the only reason I knew they were sawing into the horn was the sound it made. And the saw itself, making my head move back and forth, just a bit, with every stroke.

“They were pissed I wasn’t screaming and wailing and crying from the pain. Idiots. They did me more damage when they knocked me out with that rock. But they kept at it, anyway, sawing away, and one of them decided it would be much more satisfying if I would just bleed, so he got out a knife and started cutting right down my cheek.”

She touches the lingering scar. It’s a long time past, now, but she can still feel the too-dull edge of that knife pulling through flesh, approaching her jaw. She can remember the panic of that moment, the blind desperation of it, as she realized that the knife would pull down her neck and she would die. And despite how improbable it had seemed—that she would only last one year with the Valo-Kas and then die to some backwater villagers with prejudices—that knife had kept cutting. She puts the cup of brandy down so that when her hands shake, it won’t betray her.

“I don’t remember the next part very well,” she admits. “I was bleeding out, and then there was a lot of noise, and the knife went away. Someone’s—Kaariss’s—hand was over my neck, fixing the wound. And then all the noise died down and I heard Shokrakar say, ‘Sorry, Adaar, the horn’s almost all the way off, anyway,’ and there was this...thump...as her axe swung down and cut the rest of the way through it.”

Josephine has put her cup down, too, though Adaar missed when. This is why she’s never told the story: unlike anything else, unlike any other memory, it has the ability to put her back in that awful, dank room—the cellar, she’d figured out later, so that hopefully if she screamed it would be muffled by the earth and the village wouldn’t wake. With the knife coaxing the lifeblood from her. With the broken piece of her horn lying beside her.

Josephine’s hand creeps over to curl around hers, putting her back where she should be: in a cozy room on a comfortable settee with the brandy burning in her gut. And Josephine’s hand is warm, soft—with little callouses here and there from her many writing implements, in peculiar places—comforting.

“We didn’t get paid,” Adaar says, summarizing now. “We just got out. I could hardly believe they came and got me. Mercenaries. You don’t expect it from them. But Shokrakar...she complained about it all the way to the next job, but she came back for me. That was what mattered.”

She doesn’t know what else to say. This is the truth, as neat as she can make it, skirting some of the worse details: that the Valo-Kas had fled, ceding payment, because no matter what those villagers had done to Adaar it likely did not excuse the slaughter of the lot of them. At least in the headman’s eyes, probably. They hadn’t stayed to find out.

“After you had done nothing but help them,” Josephine says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“Shokrakar took me off talking-duty for a while, after.” Adaar manages a smile. “When I first joined up, they liked me to talk to the clients. I’d lived among humans—and a couple of elves, the occasional dwarf—my whole life. I talked to them like I was one of them. That was all I’d ever understood. But that...changed, after. I saw why the Valo-Kas were the way they were. Not so high a price to pay for understanding, I guess. I got better eventually.”

Josephine’s hand squeezes. “You nearly died.”

“And we all nearly died when the Breach opened up,” she replies, “but we’re no closer to understanding that. In comparison, it’s the more worthwhile near-death experience.”

She dares to look up at Josephine. Josephine, who’s fighting tooth and nail for control of her own expression; her pretty eyes are haunted, staring at something that Adaar doesn’t see but can imagine clearly.

Adaar’s hand squeezes, this time. “I know it’s bad,” she says softly. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to go all stoic on my account.”

“It’s awful,” Josephine says, in a voice that’s low and strained. “I don’t see how you just...make stories out of it.”

“Easier than the real thing. Better at parties.”

Josephine’s eyes refocus on Adaar’s. The pale attempt at humor doesn’t work. There’s a deadly seriousness in her face now, an anger. “No one will do that to you,” she says. “Ever again.”

Adaar’s smile widens, just a little. “Are you going to protect me?”

Not a mockery, not teasing. A real question.

“By the time I’m through,” Josephine says, jaw set with a grim determination, “they will be too in awe of you—too amazed by you—to dare. The stories they hear will make you into someone who cannot be trifled with.”

“There’s always the odd cultist,” Adaar points out.

“That is what Leliana is for.”

Adaar brays out a laugh—her first real laugh of the entire evening, loud and unabashed. “And this,” she comments, holding up the gloved hand that shows only a trickle of light from the anchor, “if they get close enough.”

At this, Josephine laughs, too, the sound of it a little wild. Adaar sloshes more brandy into both of their teacups and they drink deep in between hiccups, dulling the raw edge of the moment. Their hands broke apart, at some point. Adaar already misses that contact.

“I’ve probably kept you too long,” Adaar says, when the silence has grown so comfortable that she’s in danger of never breaking it. “I interrupted, earlier.”

“They will be there in the morning,” Josephine says without hesitation, decisively, waving this away. “We haven’t talked in far too long. This has been very somber, but I...I’ve missed you.”

Her face flushes a little red as she says it, her eyes darting away, lowered beneath long, dark lashes. Ah, hope. Traitorous hope. Glimmering like that piece of agate in her hair, catching the firelight. Pretending that the blush is because she’s embarrassed to admit her true feelings, not because of the alcohol catching up to her.

“Let’s talk of pleasanter things, then,” Adaar says, and—because there has been brandy and a painful, personal story, and it has made her a little brazen—she reaches out to touch the gem dangling from the chain. “Did I tell you where I found this? You wouldn’t believe it.”

Startling, Josephine reaches up to touch the gem, too, and their fingers brush. It is a different energy entirely than when Josephine held her hand through the ugly tale, offering comfort; there is an electricity here—maybe imagined by Adaar, maybe not—reminiscent of a thunderstorm.

“Oh,” she says, still coming off a little flustered. “You noticed. It was just so pretty, I didn’t want it to sit away in a box.”

“It is,” Adaar agrees. “It suits you.”

Josephine opens her mouth to say something, but what, Adaar doesn’t know; she closes it again, sheepishly, as if she’s lost her train of thought.

“Better than the muddy grave some fool left it to,” Adaar adds, and then she’s off again: telling a (slightly embellished) story of a dirty, wet fight on the Storm Coast, a tumble down a muddy path, a deluge of rocks dislodged at the end of it. Josephine laughs—and laughs, and laughs—disbelieving but fond regardless.

This is enough, Adaar tells herself. It has to be.

#josephine montilyet #inquisitor adaar #f!adaar x josephine #f!adaar/josephine #biowarefemslash #dragon age #inquisition #universe writes #warning for violence #oc backstory #mutual pining #pre-relationship #hurt/comfort

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sketchy-yy · 3 years ago

Note

10 , 15, 20, 27, 38, 69, 153, (I need more moot form my moots)

And how did you break a bone if you’ve broken any.

10 - Height 168cm :)) I have no clue what the feet system is soo

15 - Favourite Quote? Bro. I have NO clue lmfao but I vaguely remember something I liked as a kid which was something like "If someone requires you to fit in their box to be their friend, you can shove that box up their ass" OR SOMETHING LMAOO

20 - First thing you notice about a person? Their strength lol. I'm not sure why, but every person I see has me immedietly analyzing if I could beat them in a fight or not. I don't even notice I'm doing it until I get too in depth about the chances in my head. I'm also good at knowing who're good people or not yk? Like it's easy to see through people for me. I know what peoples actual intentions are. Dunno why.

27 - Meaning behind your URL? Sketchy has always been a majour name in my life. I remember when I was younger my brother asked "do you even know what 'sketchy' means?" and I thought it meant like.. a sketch. A drawing. "So I said: "I'm Sketchy!" thinking it meant I like to sketch lmao. So one time I was sketching a bubble and then somehow I adapted the name "Sketchy Bubbles" to myself. Over the years it changed but it's always been sketchy in someway for every username. I liked the idea of "Red Shadow" in my cringe phase and turned it into japanese for my oc and it was Akai Kage, so my main oc (which I still have!) was called that for like a week and then I went 'wait Imma just name you Sketchy Kage". then it was just Sketchy. A very recent version is 'SniperSketch' for a few gamer tags. the '_yy' is because the actual name is taken so I usually make it that. SORRY FOR THE LONG ASS ESSAYS LMAO

38 - Why Tumblr? Idk.. I think I first made my account so that I could like a post I saw after scouring the internet for Enid Rhee x Reader stories lmfao. I found an @ called @ / enidrheesgf and made an account so I could start following them. Eventually I began to get comfy in tumblr and now it's probably my favourite social media.

69 FUNNY NUMBER - Nicknames? Other than Sketchy, not really. Unless 'dumbass' counts XD. Ofc, I also have home ones from my parents but man they made a shit ton lol

153 - Closest Tumblr Friend? Honestly?? Probably you :)) I have a few mutuals but you're the main one I talk to along with someone else I've spoken to in reblogs and comment sections.

How did I break my bone? Oh god ok so when I was 6, Mum would have to drive my brother and I to her work which was in a town abt 30-40 minutes away. Sometimes she'd let us go to an indoor playground called 'Chipmunks', which we'd always be excited for. Anyways, a few seconds after we went inside, my brother started to climb UP the slides. Each slide was a bright colour and there were clothes at the top of them which you'd sit on to help you go down. Basically, I went up the yellow slide and didn't see the yellow cloth, putting my hand on it and having my arm slip. My right pinky stayed behind and bent all the way backward after it snapped under my weight. 😁 ✨

ANYWAY SORRY FOR WRITING SO MUCH I JUST FIND THIS FUN LOL

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Why the Coming to America TV Series Was Made to Fail

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As Amazon Prime Video’s premiere of sequel Coming 2 America ends decades’ worth of wait for fans of the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy classic, Coming to America, it seemed as good a time as any to look back at the first attempt to capitalize on the franchise, the 1989 spinoff television pilot. Indeed, it’s an endeavor of which few fans are aware, and a fascinating failure during an era in which television was churning out cinematic-inspired sitcoms left and right.

Of course, the Coming to America movie was a resounding success, a widely-accessible romantic comedy that permeated pop culture in a manner evocative of the A-list heyday of star Eddie Murphy. The 1988 film, put in the stable hands of director John Landis, wrought $288 million worldwide box office success, which made the notion of a sequel seem inevitable, despite how long it would take. However, the property first became fodder for Murphy’s burgeoning TV production company, which—bearing the name of the star who skyrocketed off his SNL run—had designs to conquer the small screen via producer’s proxy for a similarly-titled spinoff television series.

Yes, folks, there was a Coming to America television series, specifically an unsold pilot (archived for posterity on YouTube, as seen immediately below), which starred a stupendous standup comedy talent in Tommy Davidson, who would eventually achieve fame—alongside Jim Carrey and the Wayanses—on early-90s sketch series In Living Color. In one of the pilot’s few wise moves, Davidson wasn’t there to fill Murphy’s substantially-lucrative shoes to play a generic television version of Zamunda’s Prince Akeem Joffer. Rather, the pilot opted to expand the movie mythos by having Davidson star as Prince Tariq, the heretofore unmentioned—and even more spoiled—younger brother of Akeem, who has sent him to Queens for a similar journey to sow his royal oats.

Overall, this premise was far from the worst possible setup for a would-be Coming to America spinoff series. In attempting to replicate the film’s Akeem/Semmi dynamic, the pilot further solidified its movie connections by teaming Davidson’s Tariq with a character from the movie, royal servant Oha (best remembered for belting out his “Queen to Be” wedding song), a role reprised by Paul Bates (who is also back for Coming 2 America). With that, the pilot centered itself on Tariq and Oha’s struggles to survive in Queens after the spendthrift prince had quickly blown through his royal allowance, forcing the duo to—again, replicating the Akeem/Semmi dilemma—resort to the unfathomable measure of earning wages through some sort of manual labor—in this instance working at a diner owned by their exceedingly generous landlord, Carl Mackey (John Hancock), operated by his family in wife Pauline (Hattie Winston) and daughter Phyliss (Paris Vaughan).

So, what went wrong with the Coming to America pilot? The short answer is everything. As an extensive oral history on the pilot by Bonsu Thompson makes clear, the would-be series came to fruition as a gesture by Paramount to Eddie Murphy, who had just formed his Eddie Murphy Television shingle. Seeing as the star had just delivered the studio its biggest film of the year, a pitch—by the star himself—for a television series based on said film seemed like a no-brainer. Thus, the pilot was greenlit as part of a first-look deal with Paramount and CBS, which was dangling an initial 13-episode run. However, after being unable to procure original movie scribes Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield, the pilot, directed by Tony Singletary, eventually took shape in 1989 under the auspices of showrunner/writer/executive producer Ken Hecht (reportedly deceased), a white creator who had fielded successful runs on shows centered on black stars such as Diff’rent Strokes and Webster; success that he was not destined to replicate here, purportedly due to creative clashes.

Paramount Network Television Productions

“The executive producer, Ken Hecht, had carte blanche,” explained Davidson. “The material was wack. I had a great cast, but it was more of a dictatorship style of TV: ‘Just do what I say.'” It was a hard pill to swallow for the talented Davidson, who, within industry circles had become one of the hottest prospects out there, and a clear contender to Eddie Murphy’s throne as box office king; a notion that led some behind-the-scenes personnel to speculate that Murphy—despite having an office ten minutes away from the stage, according to Davidson—neglected the series, possibly out of professional spite. Indeed, Davidson reveals that, at the time, he was circling on offer—by CBS, no less—to co-star alongside Candice Bergen on the gestating sitcom that would become Murphy Brown, and even had a three-year holding deal with Disney to, as he put it, “do anything I wanted.” Yet, to his peril, he ended up choosing Coming to America amidst a candidate pool that consisted of a teen-aged Marlon Wayans and, interestingly, eventual Coming 2 America co-star Wesley Snipes.

Consequently, with Murphy—who was a credited executive producer—having purportedly left the small screen Coming to America in the lurch, Davidson lacked an advocate powerful enough when butting heads with Hecht, which allegedly created much of the behind-the-scenes friction that resulted an array of uninspiring comedy and inauthentic African cultural tropes. Yet, Davidson wasn’t alone on that front. As Clint Smith (Vice President of Eddie Murphy Television) also divulged, “Oh, me and Ken bumped heads all the fucking time. I thought he was an asshole. His script was horrible. We were like, ‘That shit ain’t funny!’ But he had some credits. The studio wanted him and me and my partner were rookies. Tommy almost saved it.”

Movies

Coming 2 America Review: Eddie Murphy’s Zamunda Needs New Blood

By Nick Harley

Movies

Coming 2 America: How Wesley Snipes Got Into Rhythm with Eddie Murphy

By Tony Sokol

The Coming to America pilot would be rife with the low-hanging-fruit of artificial-sounding contemporaneous pop culture references—notably with one scene in which Tariq looks through a copy of Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” for advice to make quick cash in real estate—and relied on Davidson frequently delving into his bag of standup impressions, notably Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, both of whom—perhaps by no coincidence—Murphy had famously done on SNL. Thus, despite an admirable effort, the pilot practically fell apart in front of the viewers. Moreover, it seems that even the casting of Davidson left the project snake-bit from the start, since producers had their hearts set on another candidate. “Tommy Davidson was pretty good, but we wanted Marlon Wayans. Marlon did a really great audition.” Explains Smith. “He was a kid, but he killed it. He was a natural. But he already had commitments.”

Regardless, the increasingly inauspicious project eventually overcame the tumult of its production in time to make the national airwaves on big-three network CBS one 1989 Tuesday evening… which happened to be the Fourth of July! In a move that’s hard not to perceive as an act of self-sabotage, the Eye Network branded Coming to America with its CBS Summer Playhouse anthology label, relegating its one-and-done appearance to occur during a barbecue and fireworks-filled night celebrating American independence, all but guaranteeing that it would be rendered dead on arrival ratings-wise. That, of course, is what happened. The pilot was left unsold and the notion of a Coming to America television series was quickly forgotten by the general public, barely even qualifying as fodder for trivia.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Coming 2 America, which will showcase a very different royal family dynamic than its ill-fated small screen cousin, premieres on Amazon Prime Video on March 5.

The post Why the Coming to America TV Series Was Made to Fail appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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ramenrulz8p · 7 years ago

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The Handsome Boy Next Door

Pairing: Kang Daniel/Reader Summary: You lived in a quiet apartment building until someone finally moved into the apartment next to yours. Tags: Fluffy Comedy with a dash of angst, mentions of Jeon Wonwoo (SVT), reader is an otaku Word Count: 4.1K A/N: I’d been meaning to write this in full fic form but I don’t think I’ll have the time so I decided why not do a scenario post? This is the short version of what what I originally wanted to write but I figured it was good enough XD Hope you guys enjoy!

You moved to an apartment building in your 2nd year of college because traveling from your house back to your campus was a PAIN.

(You could have stayed in a dorm but you did not like having to deal with curfew and the noise level)

Most of your neighbors were elderly women who always questioned why you weren’t dating or married yet.

It almost made you wish you stayed in a dorm, but it helped you master the art avoiding confrontation.

You lived next to the only empty apartment in your building because its owner had apparently passed away there. No one wanted to rent an apartment that might be haunted.

The landlord had been trying to lease that room for AGES and you’d thought she’d given up. But one day, a year and half later, you heard noises from the apartment next door. You were lowkey freaking out because what if it was really haunted???

Then you looked out your window and saw a moving truck below. You stuck your head out into the hallway to see people moving furniture into the apartment next to yours.

You texted your landlord to ask if someone had moved in next door and she seemed happier than she’d been in a LONG time. She’d managed to find someone who was willing to move into the apartment and she made you promise not to mention it could be haunted when you met your new neighbor.

There was a bad taste in your mouth as you closed your phone. What if weird shit started happening? Did that mean you’d have to leave your new neighbor to fend for themselves?

In the end, you decided to make up for it by giving your new neighbor a nice welcoming present.

But what could you even give?

Well, you did have that extra limited edition Saitama figure, but who the heck gave a 150,000 won figure away as a welcoming gift to some stranger? Besides, you didn’t need your new neighbor to know that you were a hard core otaku.

You decided to give them two of the spare jars of kimchi your mom had given you on your last visit home. (She always gave you more food than you could ever eat alone.)

You were about to step out the door dressed in your sweatpants and oversized One Piece sweatshirt when you realized you were not appropriately dressed to greet anyone.

It took you nearly 45 minutes to make yourself look decent. Your brushed out your hair and wore a simple gray sweater and some jeans. You judged yourself for really trying this hard, but you also had to remind yourself that your neighbor probably did not need to know you didn’t have you life together.

You finally walked up to your neighbor's door and knocked. You stood around for a good thirty seconds and no one answered. You knocked again, and again no one answered. At that point, you leaned your ear against the door to try and hear if anyone was on the other side of that wall, but you heard nothing but silence.

Your new neighbor was not home. Great. Just. Great.

You decided to walk back into your house and just give the kimchi to them another time.

With your sour mood, you defaulted to sit out on your patio which was overcrowded with dead plants. It was a small space but it was big enough to hold a swinging chair. You sat completely drained of energy and started to sketch in your sketchbook.

You had been so focused on doodling that you didn’t notice there was a cat on your balcony until it landed straight on your sketchbook.

It meowed up at you and you nervously lifted a hand for it to know your scent and get used to you. The small cat start lapping at your fingers with the thick bristles of its tongue and you laughed at how it tickled.

“You lost, buddy?” you asked it, knowing it couldn’t respond. This cat was obviously lost, there was no other reason for it to be on your patio. You pet the cat’s head and ruffled its ears as it purred. You lifted it up and checked its collar. The name tag read “Rooney”.

When you flipped the tag over, you saw the owner’s name inscribed on the back. Hi! This is Kang Daniel, if you found my cat please call me!

You quickly dialed the number and waited.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Daniel-ssi, I found your cat.”

His tone immediately perked up from there. He kept on thanking you for a good two minutes before he actually asked you where you were. You gave him your apartment building’s address and he started to laugh.

“Is something funny?”

“No, no. I just moved there today. I guess Rooney isn’t used to the new place.”

“Oh, you’re my new neighbor then. I’m in apartment 101, right next to yours.”

“I’ll be right over, thank you so much for finding her.”

You had no chance to protest on him coming over to your door. You looked around and saw how messy your house was. There was no way you were letting him come inside. You cradled Rooney in one arm as you grabbed a paper bag and threw in the jars of kimchi you’d planned to give him.

By the time you were done, he was buzzing at you door.

You rushed to door and looked through the peep hole. You squeaked at the sight of your new neighbor.

He was hot. There was no other way to get that through. Like sure, there were a lot of good looking people out there, but this guy was one of the best looking boys you’d seen in a LONG time.

His soft looking pale brown hair and chiseled chin had you drooling, but you had to remind yourself to behave like a proper human being as your shaky hands opened the door.

“Rooney!” the boy shouted as he reached for his cat. Rooney quickly jumped out of your arms and into Daniel’s.

Dammit he was even more handsome face to face and you wanted to crawl into a hole and hide.

You waited until Daniel was done reconnecting with his cat before you greeted him. He bowed to you in apology as he hugged and petted Rooney. You could only smile at his concern over his cat, because it was really cute how much he cared.

You held out the paper bag full of the kimichi jars as you blocked the view to your apartment. “This is a welcoming gift. I wanted to give it to you earlier but you weren’t home.”

“Oh! Thank you so much!” he gave a shy laugh, showing off his eye smile as Rooney perched on his shoulder. “I wasn’t home because I was too busy looking for this kiddo.”

You nodded and smiled at him, understanding why he was out of breath over the phone now. He was probably searching as hard as he could for his cat.

Before you had to make up some excuse as to why he couldn’t come into your apartment, Daniel bid you goodbye, thanking you one more time. He quickly darted off to his apartment and you realized you hadn’t been breathing properly the whole time.

As you lay in bed thinking about your hot neighbor, you deliberated over how you wanted to deal with said hot neighbor. Like obviously you couldn’t treat him the same way as you treated the old granny neighbors you’d had for the past year and half. But how would you go about approaching him?

In the end, you decided you were going to try and be Daniel’s friend. Not just because he was cute, but because he seemed like a genuinely nice person.

The next day was a Sunday. You weren’t planning to really do much today, except you overhead Daniel say he was going to a friend’s place because he had some stuff he still had to pick up from there when you were having breakfast on your balcony.

You smiled on this opportunity because it meant you had a chance to spruce up your house without him having to see you lug a bunch of trash and dead plants out of it.

You weren’t always fast but when you needed to, you got shit done. In three hours, you’d cleared away all the junk from your apartment that you didn’t need. All the clothes were cleaned and folded. All the wrappers and empty cartons were thrown. All the plates, cups, and cutlery were washed and put away. All the character figures on your shelves were dusted. For once, your apartment looked pristine.

Now what you needed to do was go out and buy some new plants for your patio.

When you were getting dressed, you saw the drastic difference in the amount of sweat clothes you owned versus the normal clothes you owned.

You decided you might as well buy new nice clothes while you go plant shopping.

That night you hauled back half a wardrobe of cute clothes, some new makeup and skincare products, and three easy-to-care-for plants.

When you stared at the giant pile of things in your living room, it made you wonder why the hell you were doing all this. But also why it made you feel so good.

On Monday, you went to school wearing one of your new outfits. A blue chiffon blouse, black blazer, and short shorts. This was the first time in a long time you’d actually bothered to make yourself look good on a day that wasn’t an interview day and, of course, it raised eyebrows.

Your friends wondered what had gotten into you and you just told them it might just be time for a change as you walked the campus grounds with a bounce in your step.

Something, or rather someone caught your eye, and you immediately stopped. Daniel? He went to the same school as you? How had you not seen him in your three and half years going here?

You hesitated on whether or not you should try talking to your new neighbor, but you decided against it since he seemed to be having a deep conversation with a tall actor looking guy.

Then, you saw him again, except this time at the bus stop which would take you both back to your apartments.

You still weren’t going to be the first one to make contact, so you pretended to not notice him as you scrolled through your phone.

Daniel tapped you on the shoulder and started talking to you. It was basic small talk. Exchanging why you were there. Figuring out you both went to the same campus. What departments and majors both of you were in. After a while, there wasn’t really anything left to talk about and awkward silence filled the air as both of you waited for the bus to arrive.

You sat next to Daniel on the ride home because it would be weird to just sit apart after having a long conversation. But neither of you was speaking to the other.

You figured it would be a long ride home until your phone notified you that the chapter of the hottest manga out right now had just updated.

It was as if you were in your own world as you opened up the latest chapter and read the contents of the pages. Your foot tapped nervously as the ground and your face didn’t hide anything as you read through the chapter in horror.

The main villain had pulled out his biggest attack when the chapter ended. You had to restrain yourself from letting out and inhuman noise as you saw the last panel.

Daniel tapped your shoulder again and you suddenly remembered you were sitting next to your hot neighbor.

Great, you just had a serious face journey over a manga next to the neighbor you were trying to be friends with.

Except Daniel didn’t seem to care about the face journey, he asked if you were a fan of that manga.

You had to stop yourself from making a snide remark since Daniel didn’t really know you.

Were you a fan? This was only your life!

It hadn’t even been two days and you were already having to let go of your normal person image. But that didn’t matter, because you were in fangirl mode.

You told Daniel EVERYTHING and for some reason his eyes seemed to light up the more you blabbered on and on about plots and theories. You were even shushed by the other people on the bus when you and Daniel were laughing too loud.

It turned out that Daniel liked anime and manga a lot too - maybe not as much as you - but enough to hold up a decent conversation with you.

That was the main reason that the two of you started growing closer.

It started off as you two meeting up at your house and watching anime on your flatscreen. He once asked about the figures on your shelves and how you collected so many. When you told him, the process and how much it cost for you to get your hands on those figures, his eyes bugged out.

For some reason, your otaku nature didn’t bother him one bit and you found it highly amusing.

You could wear all your baggy clothes and anime T-shirts around Daniel and he didn’t seem the slightest bit put off.

You loved going over to his apartment to play with Rooney and Peter, who seemed to adopt you as their other human.

Either you guys were hanging out at your place or his.

The two of you had grown so comfortable around each other that you spent time together, even on campus.

On Wednesdays you two would get lunch together.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays you’d wait for him to finish dance practice before you two took the bus home.

He would tell you what he honestly thought of your paintings and you would tell him honestly what you thought of his dance routines.

Your lives had began to blur together, it was weird for you to think back to a time you didn’t know Daniel.

Your friends and his friends began to intermingle and you all went on a big outings together.

One time all of you went to a museum for someone’s birthday. It started off just fine but you all realized that it would be impossible to keep the giant group of you together. So everyone broke off into pairs.

You and Daniel were like a default pairing at this point. The two of you broke off away from the rest and roamed the museum by yourselves.

Daniel had gone to the restroom at one point so you waited for him by a fossil display. You were scanning the crowd randomly, looking around as you waited.

Your eyes came across someone you’d rather not see and your heart stopped.

Jeon Wonwoo had been your crush for the first year and a half for college. You two were in a lot of the same classes and somehow always sat next to one another. Then fate pushed it even further and paired the two of you up for a project. You fumbled your way through, hoping it might lead somewhere more, but Jeon Wonwoo had always brushed you off. Even when you tried everything to hold up a decent conversation.

You liked him so much it had made you jaded towards liking other people.

It almost made you laugh because your feelings for the boy were so superficial and only ended up getting you hurt.

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked when he got back from the restroom. He waved a hand in front of your eyes to break your stare.

“Nothing,” you lied as a crappy feeling washed over you.

Seeing Wonwoo again, despite the fact that you were over him, made you feel like shit. The whole rest of the day you were sort of silent and unresponsive as the rest of your friends had fun.

That night, as you as Daniel took a cab home, he took your hand and asked you again. “What’s wrong?”

You didn’t know how to bring it up to him.

You couldn’t say, Hey, I just saw the dude I’d been crushing on for over a year and it short of bums be me because what if we ended up like that.

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

After that, Daniel stopped asking. He let you snuggle up next to his arms and fall asleep as the the cab drove the two of you back to your apartments.

The next day Daniel showed up to your house early in the morning (at noon) with take out and a box of your favorite sweets.

“They told you didn’t they?” you asked, knowing your friends had probably texted Daniel to explain to him why you were acting this way.

“Why didn’t you just tell me you saw your ex?”

You wanted to scream. “He’s not my ex...He’s just…” you hesitated before realizing you should tell Daniel the truth. “He’s just someone I had a crush on for the longest time and it obviously didn’t end well.”

“Well, it sucks to to suck, he missed out on an amazing person.”

“You really think so?”

“Of course!”

“You’re the best, you know that?”

“Of course,” he answered, shooting you a cheeky rabbit smile.

You two spent that whole day together snuggled up under one of your big blankets, surrounded by soft pillows.

Rooney and Peter were running around somewhere under those sheets and you laughed at their antics.

It made you stop for a second and take in just how much of your apartment had been altered because of Daniel.

You’d gotten a litter box for Rooney and Peter. You stocked up your fridge with enough food for twelve people. You had random boxes of jellies lying around for Daniel. You’d even bought special pillows so the two of you could sit down in front of your TV and watch it properly.

What were you to Daniel? What was Daniel to you?

Were you two just good friends? Or was there possibly something more?

Part of you wanted an answer, but part of you was scared again.

You knew Daniel wouldn’t brush you off like Wonwoo had, but to think of you and Daniel not being as close as you were now? That made you legitimately scared.

If you told him you liked him, would it change all of this?

Your mind went through scenario after scenario before deciding to say nothing and stay friends with Daniel for as long as you could.

You regretted your decision.

Because people would never stop approaching you and Daniel asking if you two were dating. It hurt you to say no every time.

It was even worse when people flirted with Daniel and you had no legitimate reason to be mad.

Sometimes you ended up avoiding Daniel to keep your feelings in check and you knew you hurt his feelings when you did.

It went on like this for two months until you decided you couldn’t do this.

In keeping yourself from telling him you liked him, you did the one thing you were trying to avoid.

You had decided you were going to go to his apartment to tell him, when Daniel started banging on your door.

He had a bag of clothes throw in a duffle bag over his shoulder and Rooney and Peter in either of his hands. He looked terrified as he gave you big, sad puppy eyes.

“Going somewhere?” you questioned, hoping he wasn’t leaving town.

“Why did you tell me someone died in my apartment?” he whined, lamely pointing a finger at his door.

You were genuinely lost for a second. “Huh?”

Daniel looked like he was about to cry when he told you he’d overheard the lady who lived below him say the last tenant of his apartment had died in it.

“So, you’re leaving?” You gestured to the bag slung across his shoulder.

“No…I thought I could stay with you…”

So that’s why he was knocking so hard. “Get in here, you big baby,”

Daniel set his bags down over by the edge of the couch and you went to go prepare dinner for the two of you. 1

It seemed like just another normal moment when the two of you were together, but your nerves started to get the better of you as he watched how comfortably he sat on your sofa and scrolled through your TV.

When you set out the food, he came over as quickly and sat down at what had become His Seat™.

You made sure to give Peter and Rooney food as well before joining Daniel at the dining table.

“Why have you been avoiding me lately?” he asked, breaking the silence after shoving food into his face.

You set down your spoon, looking away from his eyes as you spoke. “I was actually meaning to talk to you about that…”

Daniel reached out a hand and placed it over yours. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

You looked him in the eyes, hoping you didn’t look as scared as you felt. “I like you.”

“Huh?” he asked, seeming taken aback by your sudden confession.

You gulped at his reaction.“I like you, Kang Daniel,” you repeated. “Please don’t make me say it again.”

“That’s it?”

“What?” It was your turn to be thrown for a loop. Did he just say ‘That’s it?’ while you were laying your heart out?

“That’s all you had to say?”

“What do you mean that’s all I had to say?” Your voice rose as you got to your feet genuinely angry with Daniel for acting as if your confession was no big deal.

Daniel stood up and walked over to you. He licked his lips as if they were dry and looked down at you with a nervous smile.

“Well, I saw you change out the dead plants to fresh ones when I moved in. And you cleaned up your apartment too. So, I figured you probably liked me.”

“Oh my god.” You were mortified. So he HAD noticed all that.

He held up his hands as he spoke, “It’s okay! It’s not like my apartment is any better.”

“Shut up, Daniel!” You choked out as you were trying not to die of embarrassment.

“If it’s any consolation, I like you, too.” he whispered, pushing back a strand of your hair.

Your face was on fire as you glared and pouted up at him. How could he be so cute and so infuriating?

You tip-toed and kissed him to let out your anger.

There were no fireworks or sparks or anything of that sort.

Just a calmness that soothed all the tension that had been digging into you while Rooney and Peter darted and played between your ankles.

Bonus:

“Here,” you said as you handed him the 150,000 won Saitama you decided not to give him. “This was your original welcome present, but I didn’t want you to know I was an otaku. Now, Saitama can be like your guardian statue, warding off whatever ghost might linger.”

“No thanks, I think I’ll just stay here.” Daniel placed the box back into your hands.

You looked up at him slightly annoyed, “You’re going to have to go back to your apartment eventually.”

“But I don’t want to…,” he said as he shivered, giving you puppy eyes once again.

Daniel perked up when an idea popped into his head. “You know, we should just look for a bigger apartment! One we could share!”

You tried not to freak out over the fact that he’d suggested you two start living together. “You’re getting ahead of yourself. I literally just confessed to you, plus you haven’t even asked me to be your girlfriend.”

“I thought that was just implied.” He just shrugged and laughed. You rolled your eyes but you learned to accept his antics.

From that day on you two started dating for real, and just like Daniel wanted, you did look into bigger apartments- ones which had a very low chance of being haunted.

#wanna one #produce 101 #wanna one imagines #wanna one scenarios #produce 101 imagines #kang daniel #kang daniel scenarios #kang daniel fluff #kang daniel boy next door au

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