#or I was obscenely busy when I wrote this post

[wherevenusholdssomeofficespace]

Can I just say the storyboards for Step Into the Great Unknown highlight even further what the song itself was already highlighting. Because the song is basically just each member of the gang one by one deciding to commit to finding Candace.

It starts with Phineas, he's been Candace's little brother literally his whole life. We see the most of their relationship. There is very little that fazes him, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. He adores his older sister and would go to the ends of the earth without hesitating for her. He's an inspirational type of leader, so he tends to be the one to provide the gang direction and encouragement when they start showing doubts and that's exactly what he does here. The one who kind of lays out the situation to the gang but also is the first to affirm he's going anyway.

And then Ferb. He's been Candace's little brother for years now too at this point, and of course he stands by Phineas for most things. But this movie does show that Ferb cares just as much about Candace in his own way, with what he chooses to say and the affection Candace gives him. He's a man of action so he demonstrates his position by quietly joining in the dance. And Ferb is almost always on Phineas's side, but while Phineas is defined by being completely unfazed by nearly everything, Ferb DOES get fazed by more than Phineas, though less than the rest of the gang. He's generally cautious about supernatural threats as such, so unknown threats would be something that are more likely to give him pause even if they aren't supernatural per se, and we've seen him avoid Candace before due to this aversion. But aside from that aversion he is usually as unfazed as Phineas. Of course he wouldn't leave either of his siblings hanging.

And then Isabella joins in the song. The girl across the street. Who has also known Candace for a long time. Literally future sister-in-laws, but already basically sisters. Isabella and Candace sort of have a relationship built on mutual understanding. They occasionally talk together about crushes, and team up when a situation is gender specific. Candace is one of Isabella's fireside girls. Of course Isabella would join. She's said no to Phineas about dangerous things before, but only rarely. When someone they care about is on the line, there's no way. She's as tough and doesn't hesitate to put herself in danger unless there is literally no reason to. Candace is more than enough reason to. For this she'll follow Phineas to the end of the universe, and take the lead if she has to.

Buford and Baljeet are the last to join. They've only been part of the gang since this summer. So they're the most hesitant. And I do think when it comes to personal safety they are a bit more sensitive (see Buford freaking out NOTLP, Baljeet being paralyzed by indecision in Primal Perry, Buford freaking out about Baljeet's safety in the Beak... those two are the most prone to panic in general). But when push comes to shove on something as important as saving the tri-state area, or rescuing Candace, they're in on it too. They don't really WANT to deal with all this scary stuff... but to them the alternative of not going along isn't an option either.

All of these kids love Candace so much. She may be obsessed with getting her brothers caught, but in the process she's become big sister to all 5 of them. I've said it before I'll say it again. I LOVE the sense of community in the series.

And it's so uncommon for the kids to be nervous about something. So the fact that they are nervous does help raise the stakes a bit. And Phineas has to muster all of his leadership to say hey: This will be scary, you don't have to come but I can't just leave her. And the other kids going. Yeah well. Not without us.

They just all care about each other so much.

[panharmonium]

Hi! I love your Naruto thoughts and meta posts with all my heart and I want to ask your thoughts on something that has been on my mind literally since I was 13: what do you think about the relationship between Sasuke and Sakura? I went from being a hardcore shipper when I was a teenager, to being against any romantic relationship in Naruto after finishing the anime when I was in my early twenties. Nowadays I'm very into platonic love and depictions of friendship and I think the anime's obsession with forcing the "romantic interest" curse upon the main female character robbed us of... so much. There are a few wonderful moments in the anime where Sasuke and Sakura acknowledge each other, but because she's always "the girl with the crush", her actions are so often interpret as irrational or selfish by the fandom.

Hi @riemmetric!  It's great to talk to you again! Sorry it's taken me so long to answer this; RL has been making demands of me lately and it took me way longer to finish writing this up than I wanted it to (then again, I knew from the minute I read your original ask that my reply was going to get long, so I suppose I should have predicted a delay XD)

It's funny, my sister once asked me to choose between Sasuke or Sakura for an “unpopular opinion” meme, and I ended up doing Sasuke solely because I think the negative fandom opinions about Sakura are so unhinged and divorced from the actual text that I wouldn’t even know where to start.  People are entitled to dislike whatever characters they want, obviously, but there are some fandom takes that are, for me, so obviously rooted in bad faith viewings/readings that there’s no urge in me to discuss them.  That said, since you asked, I’m happy to go into my own thoughts on this a bit, with the disclaimer for other potential readers that I only write about fandom things for my own personal enjoyment, not as a contribution to The Discourse. If you don’t like Sakura, great!  I have no interest in changing your mind. Please consider this a sincere invitation to scroll on by and go enjoy whatever parts of the fandom appeal to you.

In general terms: I love Sasuke and Sakura’s relationship as much as I love all of the relationships in Team 7.  If we’re talking about them specifically as a romantic couple, then I probably fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, because I do like them together in a post-canon (to be clear: non-Boruto) setting, after time has passed and they’ve continued to develop individually and reconnect with each other, but I also wouldn’t exactly call myself an intense “shipper,” in the sense that I have no interest in pulling things out from the text and incorrectly citing them as evidence that Sasuke has hidden romantic feelings for her during the canon period. He cares about her in the canon period, just like he cares about Naruto and Kakashi.  That’s not up for interpretation; it’s the text.  But Sasuke during the canon time period does not demonstrate specifically romantic interest in anyone.  

[A note before people who might ship Sasuke with Someone Else emerge to rail against this statement - please just scroll past and continue enjoying fandom in whatever way is most fun for you. It is cool to ship whatever fanon thing you want; I think that’s great!  But earnestly citing any loving or emotional thing Sasuke does re: various characters in this story (yes, Sakura included) as indicative of specifically romantic love isn’t supported by the text. I know there are always going to be enormous subsets of any fandom who insist that it is, and I'm certainly not going to barge into anyone else's space to complain about that (because other people having fun together is harmless and none of my business), but I'm not obligated to indulge it on my own blog, either.]

Anyway, that said - the reason why I love Sakura and Sasuke’s relationship (from here on out I’ll use “relationship” in a general, non-romantic sense) is precisely because Sakura isn’t just “the girl with the crush.” Sakura has an arc when it comes to Sasuke, and its trajectory moves in the exact opposite direction of “irrational” or “selfish.”  She specifically goes from “the girl with the crush” to “the girl who steels herself and tries to put her personal feelings for Sasuke aside for the greater good” to “the girl who knows she can’t put her feelings aside, but who also knows full well that Sasuke doesn’t reciprocate them, and who still wants to save him regardless, because he matters to her as a person and a friend.”

[I'm putting the rest of this under a cut to save everyone's dash, and also to emphasize once again that this is a personal post on my personal blog which I wrote in response to a question from a personal acquaintance, the full content of which no one is obligated to read. I am not sending this post to random strangers and forcing them to look at it. I'm not even putting it in the character tags. I'm typing it up on my own blog and putting it under a cut. If you already know that you don't like Sakura, but you still click the link/read the post and then feel an urge to comment and complain, I am going to copy-paste this disclaimer and remind you that I specifically recommended that you scroll past and go have fun with fandom in your own way. Thanks in advance for responsibly curating your own fandom experience!]

So, from the top:

1. the girl with the crush

Sakura is, obviously, completely obsessed with Sasuke at the beginning of Part 1.  She’s also deeply clueless about him and his history (bizarre though it is, the story seems to indicate that she initially doesn’t know what happened with his family, the same way young!Obito is initially clueless about Kakashi’s father).  But what I like about Sakura and Sasuke’s Part 1 relationship is how this changes over time.

The critical scene that kicks this off happens right at the beginning of the manga, when she and Sasuke are talking by that bench - she complains about Naruto and blames his behavior on him being all alone/having no family to scold him; and even says she’s jealous that he doesn’t have parents to nag him all the time.  This obviously triggers an outburst from Sasuke, who tells her she has no idea what loneliness means and that she “makes him sick”/she’s “annoying” (importantly, the exact same thing Sakura said to Naruto in anger earlier that day), which in turn prompts Sakura to reassess herself and wonder whether she’s been making Naruto feel this terrible all the time, too:

From that point on, it’s a process of her putting little pieces together.  She still has a MAJOR crush, and she still acts like a twelve year-old, but as we approach the end of Part I, Sakura actually has a more accurate grasp on Sasuke’s current state of mind than Naruto does.  Naruto is initially excited to fight Sasuke on top of the hospital, because he feels like Sasuke’s finally acknowledging him, whereas Sakura is the one who immediately recognizes that something is wrong about this situation.  She is also the one who, after this fight, is concerned that Sasuke is really unwell and might do something drastic like run off in pursuit of the power Orochimaru promised him, but when she communicates this to Naruto, he assures her that this would NEVER happen:

(Sakura isn't convinced, though, because she goes to monitor the exit out of the village anyway.)

I’m not criticizing Naruto for his response here.  I ADORE hearing him say that Sasuke is too strong to need Orochimaru, with such perfect confidence - I love seeing how much respect and admiration he has for Sasuke underneath all their fighting, because that’s the whole reason he’s always baiting Sasuke and yelling at him and claiming “you're not so great!” He looks up to Sasuke; he wants to be like Sasuke; he thinks Sasuke is awesome! (It’s that Obito @ Kakashi behavior, you know?) But the fact remains that he is clueless about what’s actually going on with Sasuke in Part 1, and he remains clueless(ly optimistic) for a long time.  

(Eg, when he catches up to Sasuke during the retrieval arc and Sasuke climbs out of that cursed seal coffin, Naruto waves at him and calls "Come on, let's go!" as if Sasuke has been successfully rescued and is now going to come running home.  Even in Part II, when Naruto hears that Sasuke killed Orochimaru, he beams and immediately says, “So he must be on his way back to the Leaf Village!”  And everyone else in the room is like, “....,” because they know better.  Naruto doesn’t yet fully understand [or doesn't want to accept] the extent to which Sasuke has willingly chosen this path, and it’s not until after Jiraiya’s death/the Pain attack/the Five Kage Summit that Naruto really starts to understand Sasuke more clearly, which is something he himself admits.)

Sakura, in Part 1, has access to more information about Sasuke - she’s there for his first dissociative monologue during the bells test, she’s there for the curse mark’s placement, she’s there for his first violent transformation in the Forest of Death - she is, in fact, the unwitting catalyst for it (“Sakura…who did this to you?”), and her compassion is the reason Sasuke is later able to overcome the curse mark’s influence - so she has a more accurate/complete picture of “how he’s doing,” for lack of a better phrase, whereas Naruto, who doesn’t know about the curse mark in the first place, is still in the dark.  This means that Sakura is able to accurately discern that Sasuke is struggling more than Naruto realizes, and specifically to predict that he’s going to run away.  

(This dynamic is then interestingly flipped in the back half of Part II, since at any point after the Five Kage Summit, Sakura doesn’t have access to extremely relevant [if currently questionable and unproven] details that would in any other circumstance inform her behavior).

Of course, just because she has more info in Part 1 doesn’t mean she has some kind of miraculous insight into Sasuke’s every thought and feeling.  There are parts of her attempt to convince Sasuke to stay in the village that are as clueless as any of Naruto’s assumptions, and they showcase the kind of magical thinking common to childhood - like when she says that if he stayed with her, she could give him happiness, she’d do anything for him, even help him get his revenge - this idea that she herself can do something to make him feel better, that she can love him powerfully enough to defeat his pain - obviously none of that is rooted in realism.

Is this part of her approach irrational and immature and inadvertently self-centered?  Of course it is!  But it’s no more irrational and immature and inadvertently self-centered than Naruto’s stated plan to drag Sasuke back to the village even if he has to “break every bone in [his] body!” 

Hating on Sakura for her Part 1 attempt to convince Sasuke to stay in the village while simultaneously lauding Naruto for his feels like a bad faith misread of what is, to me, pretty clear narrative intention.  The story doesn’t at any point intend for us to see her begging him to stay as a selfish or conniving attempt to get something she wants.  She’s begging him to stay for the same underlying reason that Naruto is: she cares about him.  She thinks he’s making a mistake that will only cause him more pain in the end (she’s right) and she wants to make it so he feels less pain right now (she can’t.  But she doesn’t understand that/isn’t able to admit that, and she’s willing to try ANYTHING that might help).  

It’s critical that this farewell scene is set in front of that same bench from their first important confrontation - she references that day and how angry he got at her, and this time she tells him that she understands his reaction.  She’s learned things and she recognizes how insensitive she was being back then (“I know what happened to your clan, Sasuke”), even though she still can’t fully grasp all the complexities of the situation. She tells him that him blowing up at her back then helped her understand what loneliness actually meant (as opposed to her previous shallow understanding of it), and she challenges him about his choice right now: "So that's it, you're choosing the lonely path?" And when she tells him that she'll be very lonely if he leaves, we're immediately shown a panel of Sasuke thinking of both his friends, with the very clear implication that if he goes through with this, he will be lonely without them, too - that he's still struggling with the idea of leaving them, no matter how hard he tries to pretend:

Sakura at this point knows that Sasuke isn’t interested in her the way she is in him, but she still wants to give him happiness, however fantastical and immature her ideas sound to us (and, I’m sure, to him).  “I’ll do anything, even help you get your revenge/we'll have fun every day, and...and you'll be happy! I'll make sure of it!” - of course, it’s completely childish.  It’s irrational.  It’s ridiculous to think that any of this would ever be effective, but no more ridiculous than Naruto’s belief that he can simply break every bone in Sasuke’s body and keep him in the Leaf by force.

Both Naruto and Sakura are children who have a deeply oversimplified understanding of Sasuke’s situation.  They both still think they can fix him themselves.  They both think they can save him themselves.  They both think they can convince (or force) him to do what they want, what they think is in his best interests.  Both of them don’t yet understand that he has to want to come back, if it’s ever going to mean anything.  Their attempts to keep him in the village are immature and unrealistic, yes.  What they aren’t, however, is selfish, because neither Sakura nor Naruto are doing any of this with the intention of advancing their own interests.  They’re only thinking about Sasuke - how to keep Sasuke safe, how to make Sasuke happy - even when neither of them are taking an approach that will actually work.

Naruto and Sakura are children.  They’re afraid of losing somebody they care about.  Their attempts to prevent that from happening are desperate and messy and ultimately ineffective, but they are also genuinely felt and rooted in a true desire to rescue Sasuke from his pain, which - and this is the single most important thing that should impact our viewing of Part 1 - is something that Sasuke RECOGNIZES.  He doesn’t spend that agonizingly long moment bowed over Naruto’s defeated body so we can pretend he doesn’t understand that Naruto was just trying to help him.  He doesn’t take the time to murmur, “Sakura…thank you,” before laying her out carefully on a bench, just so we can discount it and pretend that he doesn’t recognize and appreciate her genuine intention to make things better for him, however clumsy that attempt might have been.

2. the greater good

If Stage 1 Sakura is "the girl with the crush," then Stage 2 Sakura is a progression to “the girl who decides to put her feelings for Sasuke aside in order to protect innocent people, including (but certainly not limited to) Naruto.”  She’s driven to this decision by interactions with Shikamaru, who all too recently had to grow up fast himself (“We're not kids anymore...we can't allow a war to break out between the Hidden Leaf and the Hidden Cloud because of Sasuke") and Sai, who risks his new friendship with Sakura and Team 7 in order to speak some hard truths and deliver one of my favorite lines in the whole story: “I don’t know what promise Naruto made to you, but it’s really no different than what was done to me.  It’s like a curse mark.”

(INCREDIBLE.  How can anybody be complaining about a season where Sai gets to say something that goes THIS HARD and Sakura LISTENS and takes DRAMATIC ACTION that actually propels the story forward in a meaningful way - )

[Okay, yeah, brief personal opinion interlude - it is just bonkers wild to me that there are people who complain about Sakura in the Five Kage Summit arc. That entire season is the greatest character arc she ever has.  Literally she has never been more interesting and dynamic than in Season 10; it’s the first time she ever gets to be as deep and fascinating as the boys; what is everybody so worked up about?  Oh, “she lied to Naruto that one time” - Sasuke joined infant-kidnapping baby-murdering human experimentation machine Orochimaru when he was twelve years old in order to (dare I say it????) selfishly pursue his personal goals and yet, somehow, we are still able to root for him.  He abandoned his friends/allies to imprisonment and death (Suigetsu and Jūgo) or outright stabbed them in the chest himself (Karin) in order to (SELFISHLY) get what he wanted, and yet, somehow, we are still able to love him, understand him, and be on his side.  Naruto is canonically not upset with Sakura about her lie after receiving context for the situation and I think we can probably take our cues from him without feeling the need to bring her up on war crimes; please calm down]

[Sorry, I just really love most of Season 10 and think it’s one of the best examples of how good this story can be when every single character gets to do something that matters (as opposed to things being all Naruto, all the time) so I get a little bit worked up over people complaining about some of the best writing Sakura ever gets.  I don’t understand what certain elements of fandom want from her. People complain about her being “useless” and not doing anything that contributes to the story, but then they complain just as much when she does finally get to act decisively and have just as complex/dynamic an inner world as the boys.  She’s “weak” for being unreasonably in love with Sasuke, but when she tries to be “strong” and put her love for him aside and eliminate him in order to protect Naruto and the rest of the world, she’s evil, because she should have been more understanding of his situation (despite the fact that she doesn’t KNOW anything about his situation).  But then when she can’t go through with killing him after all because she cares about him too much despite the things he’s done, she’s not "compassionate" or "kind" or "a good friend," she’s “weak” again. Nothing Sakura does in S10 is more wrongheaded or rash than any of the batshit, buckwild things Naruto and Sasuke have done in the past (and will continue to do in the future), but when Naruto and Sasuke have big feelings or take bold action, it makes them interesting characters, whereas Sakura can’t breathe in anyone’s direction without being minutely scrutinized for moral impurities.]  

Anyway. Back to a more measured response.  

Every single piece of development Sakura has with regard to Sasuke in this season satisfies me so much.  Her initial shock and disbelief at hearing that Sasuke had joined the Akatsuki?  Good, appropriate.  The fact that she starts to acknowledge the reality of what Sasuke’s done sooner than Naruto does?  Also extremely appropriate, very in-character for both of them.  Her taking Sai’s words to heart and deciding that the promise she asked Naruto to make when they were children is causing him to suffer and she has to relieve him of that burden?  Juicy!  AND thematically significant (promises!!!!  the burden that a promise places on a person, especially when it can't be kept - we've seen that before in this story and we'll see it again).  Her anguished pivot from wanting to protect Sasuke to realizing that she has a responsibility to protect the countless innocents who will die because of the war he’s trying to start?  HELLO THIS IS INCREDIBLE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.  Her knocking out the classmates who agreed to help her so they don’t have to share in her burden (and so the only person Naruto will hate when it’s over is her)?  BRUH.  Her being so committed and focused on her goal of saving innocents and protecting Naruto (not just from being harmed by Sasuke/the Akatsuki, but by the possibility that Naruto will someday have to hurt Sasuke himself) that she tries to take everything on by herself and walks into a confrontation that she absolutely cannot win??  INCREDIBLE.  (Literally the first time I watched this, I said, “Finally!!!  It’s Sakura’s turn to go off the rails!”  I laughed with my sister about how Kakashi isn’t even mad, because Naruto and Sasuke have been pulling stunts like this for years and Sakura was way overdue for her own meltdown.)  And then, after Kakashi intervenes in the fight - Sakura barreling back into the battle when she realizes he’s going to take on the burden of killing Sasuke himself in order to spare her and Naruto the horror - “I can’t let Kakashi-sensei bear this burden!”  I love her for that.  

And then, of course, in the end - her not being able to do hurt Sasuke after all.  Despite committing herself to the act, despite forcing herself to put her feelings for him aside, despite resolving to stop him from starting a war and killing innocent people, she can’t harm him.  She cares about him too much.  This, too, is thematically significant - think about Itachi’s “you don’t have enough hatred” - she doesn’t have enough hatred to kill someone she cares about, even if it seems like he deserves it, even if would be the right thing to do to protect others.  She can’t do it, and Sasuke almost kills her for her compassion.  

I love the dynamic this sets up between her and Sasuke, for a few reasons:

1) Personally, I think Sasuke respects Sakura much more for trying to kill him than he would have if she’d just tried to talk him out of his behavior or beg him to come home (a la their original confrontation in Part 1).  This is the first significant interaction he’s had with Sakura in years, and the fact that she does something SO contrary to his memory of her is an important demonstration of the fact that she’s not the same girl she used to be.  Sasuke spends a lot of time after his defection declaring to his old team “I’ve changed; I’m not that person anymore,” but this is one of the moments where he’s forced to acknowledge that his teammates have changed, too.  Time didn’t just stop for them when he left.  While he was turning into someone new, so were they.  They grew up without him, and his old memories of them can’t encompass the whole picture of who they are now.  

(This is a little tangential, but in general, I love the spectrum of reactions that Naruto, Sakura, and Kakashi have in this sequence, and the way that all of them are ultimately messages Sasuke needs to hear.  Sasuke - who we know textually regrets what he did here, who apologizes to Sakura for it later - for “everything,” in fact - needs Naruto’s aggressively optimistic open-arms policy, yes, needs that potential, that unconditional possibility of return.  He also needs Sakura’s refusal to let him hurt her friends and start a war that will kill thousands of people, needs her surprisingly ruthless attempt to take him down; needs just as much her failure to do so, because it shows him that she still loves him too much to kill him even as she condemns him.  And he needs Kakashi’s grim line in the sand, needs someone who very possibly won't hesitate like Sakura (despite the horrifying personal cost), someone who will try to reach him but also won't let him escape and become the next generation’s Orochimaru, who won't let him cause untold suffering to untold numbers of people just because a teacher loved him too much to stop him when he had the chance. 

(And then even Kakashi chooses not to deliver a killing blow when he has the opportunity -)

(I know that in fandom people are more likely to be all, “oh, Naruto Good, everybody else Bad,” but I don’t think the narrative frames Sakura or Kakashi as “worse” than Naruto in any way.  The story goes out of its way to make it clear how desperately they don’t want to hurt Sasuke and how much they care about him.  And [this is just my interpretation, so obviously I won’t claim it as fact], I personally think that Sasuke - Sasuke, who, looking back, can see how lost he was then and how tortured he would have been if he’d gone through with many of his plans - would be grateful to Sakura and Kakashi for making an attempt to stop him when he couldn’t stop himself.)

2) On the other side of this, the fact that Sakura wasn’t able to deliver the killing blow means a lot. Sasuke was incapacitated under that bridge; he was completely at her mercy - but she stopped with the kunai an inch from his back.  She couldn’t kill him, even though she knew that he was completely willing to kill her (because he'd attempted to Chidori-assassinate her from behind just a few minutes ago).  That’s huge!  Sasuke is too out of his head right now to process this or understand it, but later, it's going to matter.  She stayed her hand.  She spared his life.  She loved him too much to hurt him, even when he’d given her every reason to take him down.  She hesitated, and he almost killed her for it, but her inability to strike him ultimately gave him yet another chance to come home, another chance to get better, another chance to have a life outside of his pain.  Despite everything, some part of her still hadn’t really given up on him, and that knowledge will matter later, when he’s finally able to acknowledge it.  

The point of all this is to say that I really have no complaints about Sakura and Sasuke’s dynamic in their S10 confrontation.  This season is the point where Sakura fully grows past her “girl with a crush” stage and into her “shinobi must make very harsh decisions” adulthood, but it never means that she doesn’t care about the person she’s trying to take down.  Her ultimate inability to deliver the killing blow remains a dangling lifeline for her relationship with Sasuke, an open door that Sasuke is able to walk through at the end of the story (literally, in fact, when Sakura opens that portal for him and saves him from Kaguya’s desert prison, and figuratively, too, when Sasuke apologizes to her).

3. she only wants to save you

The last stage in their relationship is what Sakura settles into during the war arc.  She started off Part 1 being just a girl with a crush, then tried to harden her heart and put her feelings for Sasuke aside in service of the greater good, but she was unable to actually follow through and kill him, and because of that, what she’s come to accept by the war arc is actually two things: that 1) Sasuke truly is willing to let her die if it furthers his goals, and 2) she wants to save him anyway.  

She has no intention of pursuing Sasuke romantically.  She knows full well that Sasuke isn’t interested in her.  She even knows that Sasuke isn’t really on their side (there’s a great scene where Sai questions Sakura about Sasuke’s return, and she reassures him that everything is fine, and Sai sadly thinks to himself “even I can tell your smile is fake”).  She’s well-aware that Sasuke didn’t try to help her when Madara stabbed her.  She’s well-aware that he left her to die in the lava pit.  She’s also well-aware that none of this is enough to make her stop loving him.  He doesn’t have to care about her - she still cares about him.  She still wants to help him.  She still wants to save him.

This is not hidden, hard-to-parse character development.  It’s explicitly articulated on the page:

Sakura’s not trying or wanting to make you hers!  She only wants to save you.

I’m not sure if people look at this last confrontation and unquestioningly take Sasuke at his word (as if we haven’t just read 71 volumes/watched 700 episodes showing us how how painfully distorted his thinking is), or if they stop reading/watching before the end of the scene, or if they don’t understand that Sasuke saying something doesn’t make that statement an accurate representation of reality.  The entire point of this scene is to show us how deeply mistaken Sasuke is about Sakura (and, by extension, the rest of Team 7).  He’s locked into a false pattern of thinking.  His single-minded focus on revenge and destruction has blinded him to the unconditional love his friends feel for him; he’s become so accustomed to using others and being used that he can’t understand or accept that someone would care about him without needing a reason, without needing him to love them back, without needing to receive something from him in exchange.

Sakura’s not trying or wanting to make you hers!  She only wants to save you.

Sasuke matters to Sakura as more than a love interest.  He always has.  She does love him romantically, yes, but she doesn’t only love him romantically, and her desire to help him is not and has never been contingent on him returning her feelings, romantically or otherwise.  Sasuke isn’t able to acknowledge that in this scene, but that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to just sit back and agree with his warped perspective.  Kakashi is the one who’s explicitly positioned as the voice of the narrative here.  We, as the audience, are supposed to recognize that Kakashi is the one telling us the truth.

[tangential thing 1: You don’t have to love Sakura's last plea to Sasuke here. It’s not my favorite, either - the best part, other than Kakashi’s speech at the end, is the moment after Kakashi collapses when Sakura’s expression changes from pained uncertainty to pure rage, when she grits her teeth together - when I first saw that, I almost leapt out of my seat like “Oh my god.  She’s finally going to let him have it.  It’s finally happening - ”  I wanted that so badly, and I still think it would have been a more effective writing choice for Sakura’s last words to lean more into her anger at the suffering Sasuke is causing all of them (himself included!) and less into yet another of Kishimoto’s “let me have Sakura articulate what a shame it is that she can’t do as much as Naruto despite the fact that I literally just went through a major reveal sequence in the war to show that she’s caught up to the boys; I can’t make up my mind about whether I want her to progress or not” - it’s extremely frustrating (and it's something he does at the very end of the S10 Team 7 reunion, too, which is the ONLY moment of S10 that falls flat for me).  But at the same time, even if there are ways this sequence could be more satisfying, it doesn’t change the fact that her plea to him is not remotely motivated by a desire to be with him romantically and not anything to condemn her for.]

[tangential thing 2: I do like how she remembers that moment when Sasuke says “Thank you.”  That panel precedes her saying “If there’s even a tiny corner of your heart that thinks about me…” (which I’m sure is one of the things that people like to criticize about this scene, aka “oh she’s sooooo self-centered” etc), but that particular line of dialogue is preceded by that particular flashback panel for a reason: Sakura knows that Sasuke DOES think about her.  He thinks about all of them.  Sakura remembers that “thank you,” and it reminds her that despite everything Sasuke has done and said since, despite all evidence to the contrary, she knows in her bones that his expression of gratitude back then was genuine.  He cared about her once.  He cared about all of them.  She’s trying to reach the part of him that still does, if it exists.]

[tangential thing 3: The fact that Kakashi says “she suffers from loving you,” and it triggers Sasuke to remember his own family - thinking about how much he suffered (and still suffers) from loving them - “Perhaps…those are the ties to a failed past” - the idea that it’s not worth it to have bonds if it means you suffer this much…that it’s too difficult, it’s too painful, and if Sakura and the rest of Team 7 were smarter they would just give it up (all Sasuke knows how to do now is sever potential bonds before they can hurt him; so why aren’t Sakura and the rest of his teammates doing that, why can’t they let it go, why are they making this so hard - ) << yeah, he clearly doesn't care about her/them at all.]

4. the shadow of my family

This has all been a really long way to answer the original question, but the short response to “What do you think about the relationship between Sasuke and Sakura?” is “I really care about it,” just like I really care about the relationship between Sasuke and Naruto, just like I really care about the relationship between Sasuke and Kakashi. And I don’t think the story ever asks me to choose between them.

I’m not sure whether it’s the impact of Boruto-era “canon” that gets in the way of other people approaching things this way (I don’t consider sequel material when I evaluate the original story), or if it’s Kishimoto’s frequent disinterest in/disrespect towards female characters, which yes, does sometimes make it harder, or if it's a shipping thing (bane of my existence), or some combination of factors, but for me, taking one member of Team 7 out of the equation hobbles the rest of the story.  I can’t read/watch Naruto while hating one of the protagonists and loving the other three.  It doesn’t work like that for me.  The story wasn’t written that way, and there’s nothing in the text that would cause me to receive it that way.

That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with disliking one of the main foursome (or any character, for that matter) - obviously we're all going to have different preferences, and everyone is free to enjoy or reject whatever parts of a story they want, or to like or dislike whatever characters they want. I know that some people have more fun disregarding canon and doing their own thing, which is fine.  My own personal zone of enjoyment comes from receiving the story as closely to how I think it was intended to be read as I can, and personally, when I look at this particular story, what I see is that all the members of Team 7 clearly demonstrate their love for Sasuke in ways that he himself later recognizes and acknowledges. All of them are driven by their desire to save him and their unwillingness to hurt him. All of them make repeated choices to chase after him when he runs away, to trust him when he hasn't exactly earned it, to give him another chance when he doesn't appear to deserve it. ALL of them, not just Naruto, do these things multiple times throughout the story, and Sasuke owes his life (and thus his eventual recovery) to ALL of them, many times over. Kakashi disobeys Hokage-elect Danzō and breaks the law to negotiate for Sasuke's life with a foreign head of state. Sakura and Kakashi both have opportunities to kill Sasuke in the Land of Iron, and they choose to spare him instead. Kakashi stops Sasuke from killing his only friends at two different points in the story, which would have been a mistake Sasuke couldn't have recovered from. Sasuke would have died in Kaguya's desert dimension if Sakura hadn't saved him (Sakura, who knew that Sasuke wasn't even truly on her side yet, who knew he'd abandoned her for dead multiple times already that day). Kaguya's bone bullet would have killed Sasuke too, if Kakashi, with his intention to die in Sasuke's place, hadn't leapt in front of it (Kakashi, who also knew that Sasuke wasn't fully on their side yet, who also knew that Sasuke had abandoned him for dead earlier that day). Sasuke and Naruto would have BOTH died in the Final Valley if Sakura and a severely injured Kakashi hadn't chased after them to heal their injuries.

Remove any one member of Team 7, and Sasuke never makes it home. Without the combined efforts of all three of his teammates, he doesn't survive.  That’s the way it should be, thematically, for a story whose first and most foundational premise was the importance of teamwork, and since Sakura was just as essential to that framework as everyone else, I’m just as invested in her relationship with Sasuke as I am in his relationship with everyone else.  You can’t remove one leg from a four-legged stool without damaging the integrity of the entire structure, and for me, discounting any single member of Team 7 irreparably damages the integrity of the entire story. 

TL;DR: I love all of the Team 7 relationships, including Sakura and Sasuke's, because despite what some segments of fandom seem to believe, the text of the story never gives me any reason not to.

[magpiepills]

DIY

Rating: EXPLICIT! 18+ ONLY! MDNI

Pairing: Javier Peña x AFAB reader

Word count: 1.6k

Summary: You need to get fucked, but Javi is feeling lazy and makes you take matters into your own hands.

Warnings: Smut- PIV, unprotected sex (don’t actually do that.) oral (m receiving) smoking, slightly mean Javi, slightly dom Javi, Lazy Javi, no use of y/n no age gap specified, smoking, alcohol consumption, big dick Javi,

A word from the author: I wrote this after I saw those gifs that @palioom posted, and lusting over reclined, smoking Javi with @secretelephanttattoo

Word Count 1.6k

You walked back into the bedroom to find Javi still dressed, not even bothering to take off his jacket. He was just reclined, lit cigarette clutched protectively with the embers toward his wide palm.

You’d waited all day to have him to yourself, and now that you’re finally home, you can’t wait any longer. You’d changed out of your work clothes into something more comfortable and let his eyes rove over you, in a tank top that stretched obscenely over your tits and left little to the imagination, and silky red panties with a little bow on the front, and thin strips of elastic low on your hips connecting the front and back.

Javi’s eyes were dark, and he smirked almost imperceptibly as he nodded.

“What is it, cariño?” He knew exactly what you wanted, but he was going to make you work for it. “Something on your mind?”

You had no time for his games.

“Just you, Javi.”

“Me?” He was playing dumb now. Cute.

“Mhm. You know I needed you all day. You didn’t text me back.”

“Had a busy day, now I’m kind of tired.”

“But I need you, Javi.” You were leaning over him now, your left hand sinking into the plush white leather of the chair that he referred to as “the cuck chair” because of how it was angled toward the bed. With your other hand you started unbuttoning his shirt and slipping your hand inside to run his warm chest.

“Said I'm tired, baby.” If he wants you to beg, you’ll beg. You’d do anything for him tonight. You’d been soaked all day, squeezing your thighs in vain as you thought of him fucking you for all he was worth, stretching and filling you until you were so fucked out you didn’t know your name. You were desperate now, and he knew that. He knew it from the way you’d texted him at 10 am, a picture of your skirt hiked up to expose your lace panties, fingers splayed over your seam, and a short caption “all yours.”

“If you want it, you have to work for it.” Luckily, you liked a challenge. You climbed into his lap and unbuckled his belt while you kissed his neck and along his jaw, just slightly scratchy. You wiggled and simpered, breathing into his ear as you told him how you couldn’t concentrate at work because you needed his big dick so bad. He knew he was gifted but you knew he liked hearing you say it. You finished unbuttoning his shirt and worked open the button and zipper on his dark jeans. You smiled into his kiss when you felt his hard length straining against his boxers, but you kept your hands around his neck.

When he still refused to give you anything to work with, wouldn't touch you, just let you kiss him and slowly try to undress him as much as possible, you gave him a pout and sank to your knees between his legs. He watched as you peeled off your tank top and palmed your own breasts, pulling at your nipples and pinching them until they were still and sensitive, eyes locked on the only man who could give you what you needed.

Javi looked on with what may look like disinterest, but his voice had dropped just a bit deeper since the little game began. “That all you got? Just gonna play with your tits?” He asked as he blew a cloud of smoke into the air over your head.

“Javi, you’re so mean to me. You know I want you.”

“I’m right here. If you want it, take it.” His voice was level, but the way his lips were parted and his chest rose and fell betrayed him.

The carpet was soft and thick but still burned your knees as you rose to pull his jeans open further. Javi lifted his hips just enough to let you pull down his jeans and boxers past his hips before settling back in, lazily puffing at his cigarette between sips of whiskey from a wide glass. His cock spring free and you could see where the sparse hair along his hip had been smeared with precum. It gave you a small bit of satisfaction knowing he was enjoying himself.

You took a moment to marvel at him. His cock was big, leaning to the left a bit, heavy and tan, with a smooth foreskin covering the head. It was a beautiful dick, you both knew it. People often called Javier Peña cocky, but if they only knew…

Sucking just the head into your mouth, you took your time swirling your tongue around it, smoothing your tongue over the slit, sucking gently. Looking up through your eyelashes, you saw Javi’s brows knit together, and you pulled away to let a long line of saliva drip from your already swollen lips down over his cock. There was a soft groan from above you when you wrapped your hand around his thick cock and pumped up and down in a tight glide before replacing your hand with your mouth, hollowing your cheeks and bobbing up and down before slowly pushing as far as you could, just to the point of gagging. You knew he loved coming down your throat, and you loved how he looked when you opened your mouth to show him that you’d swallowed every drop.

You didn’t do that, though. Instead you stood up, took the glass from his hand and sat it on the coffee table, then tugged his pants down, letting them pool at his ankles, not even bothering with his shoes. You just needed him exposed. If he wasn’t willing to do any work it didn’t matter anyway. Once he was as bare as he was going to get, you admired your work.

His chest and neck were flushed, his cock was hard and throbbing, and his arm was dropped uselessly over the arm of the chair, still clutching the smoldering cigarette.

“Still tired, Javi? Ready to go to bed?” You stood in nothing but the red panties with the obvious wet spot, “Cause if you are, we can stop.”

The annoyed look he shot you told you all you needed to know. You pushed your panties down your legs and took a step forward until one of his legs was between your own. His gaze was locked on your hand as you cupped your pussy, sliding two fingers through your dripping folds. Enough was enough. “Come here, cariño.” He murmured, finally relenting just the smallest bit, but it was enough for you.

You settled yourself on his lap, knees on either side of his narrow hips, and rubbed your slick onto his cock. Satisfied that you were ready to take him, you guided his cock through your folds, teasing your clit, before notching him at your entrance and sliding down him as slow as you could, until you were fully seated. javis hands found their place on your hips, gently guiding you to rock back and forth until you were acclimated to the stretch. “Fuck me. Fuck you’re so tight” he gritted out between clenched teeth. “Take it, baby. Take what you need. Ride my cock. Want to see you come all over it. Come on.” He was beginning to sound desperate.

You picked up your pace, bouncing gently, rolling your hips, grinding your clit against his pubic bone, relishing in the sensation of being so full. Javi watched you fuck yourself on his cock, and cupped your tits, rubbing his thumbs over your peaked nipples while he told you how good you were doing for him. “That’s right, sweetheart. Just like that. Yeah. Yeah, oh fuck. Look so good like this.” You loved when he got talkative. His deep voice, his rough hands on your tits, his cock filling you to the brim, his coarse hair rubbing your clit just right reached a sudden crescendo that washed your orgasm over you like a wave. Your body jerked and your eyes were shut tight, lips in a silent o.

As you came down, your body felt light and boneless, nearly forgetting that there was a man under you who probably wanted to get off too. It didn’t take much, luckily. You braces yourself on his knees and leaned back, giving him a perfect unobstructed view of where your bodies met, letting him see how wet and swollen you were for him. You spread your knees wide and carefully lifted as far off of him as you could, leaving just the tip, before squeezing him tight and taking him all the way back in. You continued, and wiggled your hips a little, and as you worked up and down his length, you moved a little fast, a little harder, wet sticky sounds grew a little louder. “Goddamn. I’m close. Fuck. Fuck I’m going to come. Where do you want it?”

Javi really liked painting you with cum. It didn’t matter where, your tits, your face, your stomach, your ass, he loved seeing you wearing it. “Like a badge.” He said. You thought of telling him to cum on your pussy. It would have been easy. Instead though, you circled your hips and sighed- “inside.” It took Javi a best to register when you said, but when he did, he grabbed your hips firmly and thrust up hard. In moments he was spilling into you, rope after rope of his thick white cum.

Panting and covered in a thin layer of sweat, Javi held you against his chest, rubbing your back, gently squeezing your thigh, both of you catching your breath.

“That what you needed?”

“Yeah Javi. That was it.”

[sunkendreams]

twenty minutes.

➾ pairing ; mickey altieri x fem!reader.

in which mickey sneaks into your dorm room and things become more heated than usual.

format: drabble — not requested.

word count: 2.5K.

warnings: SMUT (mdni), risk of getting caught, slight corruption kink, fingering (f!receiving), making out, biting, dry humping, dirty talk, mild degradation (use of slut), choking, obsessive behavior from Mickey, begging, teasing, finger sucking, very slight edging, ambiguous ending

author’s note: I wrote this because I love Mickey and I want to write a part 2 with phone sex 💀 also, first time ever writing for him, so hopefully it’s good and people enjoy it! I am also working on requests, but I’m also on-call for work, so I get pretty busy. Hoping to have a lot of stuff finished & posted next week! thank you all for your love & support !!! :)

Mickey Altieri reminded you of a cat — elusive, cunning, and prone to climbing trees without much of a hindrance. The thick, sturdy oak that hovered by your window in the Delta Zeta House provided a place for your boyfriend to scuttle about, thumping a palm against the glass pane of your window.

He had a look in his eyes when you caught sight of him — devious and full of desire, glazed over with a sheen of mischief. It’s coupled with that pearlescent grin as you clamor toward your window, swiftly unlatching it as you glance over your shoulder. Your roommate is in the shower, a worthwhile time for him to come crawling in.

His timing is always impeccable.

This nightly ritual of him sneaking into your room is always accompanied with a giddiness and thrill. His dark tresses are disheveled, sporting a dark sweater that clings to his musculature. He climbs through with a silent grace, reaching for you before you can open your mouth.

“I’m doing all of the work here,” Mickey smirks, pressing a string of kisses along your jaw. “When are you going to climb through my window?” He questioned, tone playful as could be as his hands roughly pressed into your hips.

You and Mickey were still in this honeymoon stage of your relationship, where everything was glowing and bright, with sparks always flying in every direction. He oozes charm and charisma with every breath, and it never fails to pull you right in. He was becoming your addiction — your vice.

Sandalwood and bergamot cling to him as he sighs, hunching in over you as his mouth nips at your jugular. It elicits a low, simpering whine from you, serving as encouragement as Mickey turns that playful nip into a brief, rough bite. You taste saccharine underneath his tongue.

“I can’t climb a tree,” You protest, fingers curling into the front of his woolen sweater. “You have twenty minutes.” You huff, knowing that your roommate won’t be in the shower forever. It’s always the same heated routine — kissing until your lips are swollen, his hands grabbing your breasts, he leaves a hickey, and then he disappears.

Mickey groans into your sweet flesh, teeth idly grazing over your neck. “I want more than twenty minutes,” He uttered, peering down at your choice of wardrobe. It’s a ditzy nightgown that reminds him of summertime, speckled in hundreds of little flowers. He pinches the fabric between his fingers. “It’s not enough.”

“Kiss me, Mickey.” You mumble, a soft gasp tearing past your parted lips when he delivered a rather passionate kiss, open-mouthed with a desperate bout of tongue. He tugs at your nightgown, calloused fingertips tracing across the bare flesh of your thigh.

He was a dutiful boyfriend — eccentric and charming, a natural flirt with an obscene amount of wit. You adored that about him, but above all, you loved how much he spoke about you to other people. Mickey had this thing about staking his claim, and you weren’t about to tell him otherwise.

You can’t see it now, but there is a darkness festering inside of him. It’s always just at the forefront of his lascivious gaze, as if it might lash out and strike you. Mickey’s obsession with you transcended any normalcy, perceived as erratic and strange, but thankfully, you are none the wiser to his impulsive tendencies.

He loves your oblivious nature — it’s easier to control you that way.

Goosebumps form along the column of your spine, prickling along your body as his fingers slip underneath your nightgown, trailing along the waistband of your panties. He’s always teased you, but something feels different this time — it’s electrifying and exhilarating as he pets at your soft skin.

As your lips part, you stare at him incredulously, attempting to decipher his next move. “We can’t,” You protest, though it’s weak and lacking any sincerity. Your roommate, whilst prone to taking endless showers, won’t stay put forever. “Mickey.” You whisper.

“Why not?” He purred, teeth nicking your neck, which caused you to let out a soft gasp. Mickey’s lips soothed the bite with passionate kisses, tongue swirling over the newly-formed mark. “You going to stop me?” His lips curl into a faint smirk.

His laughter is delicious, alluring and full of a teasing mockery, one that causes goosebumps to coalesce along your spine. Mickey keeps it hushed, but you won’t be heard, not over the buzz of Duran Duran from your roommate’s radio.

His digits slip beneath the waistband of your panties as he hurriedly parts your legs, rucking your nightgown up towards your hips. “Maybe,” You squeak, voice barely above a hushed whisper. Mickey’s spindly digits playfully trace over your cunt, declining to touch your clit. “M—Mickey!”

You sputter, clinging to him like a drowning woman, grabbing fistfuls of his sweater as he swipes his fingers along your wet cunt. He’s devilishly enticing, and if you closed your eyes, you could envision his forked tail and silver tongue that continued to seduce you time and time again.

“This says otherwise,” Mickey’s tone has a playful edge of mockery to it as he kisses your jaw, unable to withhold the salacious expression that creeps onto his features. He revels in the way you whimper, hips jolting forward into his hand in an attempt to relieve even a lick of friction. “Want me to stop?”

He’s cruel.

Your pitiful, desperate expression screams for him to continue as you shake your head back and forth a hundred times over. “No, no!” You whisper, moaning when his thumb lightly traced over your clit. “Jesus, please don’t stop!” Your volume becomes heightened, and at that, Mickey decides to conceal it.

Mickey chuckles — it’s a dark and dangerous sound, but that’s why he has you so hooked to begin with. That aura of dominance emerges so quickly, and you’re enthralled, powerless to stop him. “You need to be quiet.” He cautioned, feeling you grab his wrist as you encourage him to keep going.

He does, much to your delight, fingers deftly tracing along your slit, drinking in the softness and wet warmth, thumb drawing circles around that sensitive clutch of nerves. Your cunt clenches pathetically around nothing at all, yearning for the sensation of his practiced digits.

A hapless whine leaves your lips when Mickey begins to test your limits, two fingers nudging at your entrance. It’s sluggish and teasing as he deliberates, gaze roving over your countenance. “You think about me when you touch yourself?” He questioned, mouth ghosting over yours as he pressed a string of kisses there, and then to your jaw.

Embarrassment rippled through you at the crass question, prompting your boyfriend to stop pleasuring you. Any sensations ceased, and made you moan in protest. “H—Hey,” You whimpered. “Mickey, baby, please don’t stop.” You groaned, feeling his hand lightly clasp around your throat.

“Answer me, and maybe I’ll keep going.” He chuckled, head cocked to one side. His muscled form loomed over you, casting a shadow across your body, moonlight swallowed whole. Mickey appeared predatorial and hungry in this light — ravenous for you.

“Y—Yes, I do, I — I think about you.” You mumbled, and to your relief, his thumb returned to your clit with a feather-light pressure. You rucked your hips forward with desperation, chasing after his hand. You were flustered to no end, burying your face into his chest, which he promptly stepped away from.

“Jesus,” Mickey sighed, drinking in your smitten expression. “You look so pretty like this.” At that, he sank forward, digits nudging their way inside of your cunt. Tightness followed, consumed by liquid heat as he began to piston his fingers in and out of your slit.

Another wave of goosebumps coalesced along your flesh, making you tense with excitement as Mickey gripped your throat with his other hand. Fingers squeezed underneath your jaw, applying pressure as he bit at your lip, surprisingly rough, hard enough to draw blood.

A startled gasp tore past your mouth, accompanied by a keening moan as Mickey found a rather vigorous rhythm. His practiced digits pumped in and out of your tight cunt, coated in your slick as this thumb brushed over your clit. Your body reacted in a violent fashion, desperately clamoring forward, friction electrifying.

The shower was still running, and you were awash with pleasure, cunt clenching around his fingers as he withdrew another moan from you. Mickey loved feeling your throat bob and tighten underneath his grasp, tracing the pad of his thumb above your pulse point. It was racing — beating at the speed of sound.

Molten heat pooled within the pit of your stomach as Mickey callously lapped at the blood coalescing along your lower lip, noticing the sheen of surprise within your eyes. “Doesn’t bother me,” He uttered, kissing you again with a force that made your head spin. “Tastes like you.”

Jesus — if it weren’t for your roommate, you would’ve been screaming. Your entire being ached for him in every way imaginable, hands grasping at his sweater. Mickey turned you around, pressing your knees into your mattress as he deftly felt his way around your body.

“Fuck, I wanna be inside of you.” Mickey snarled, brazenly biting at the dip between your neck and shoulder, having tugged your nightgown into all sorts of directions. His erection was prevalent, grinding against the curve of your ass as he pistoned his fingers in and out of you. “Would you let me?”

It all felt so quick, just heat and carnality, desire that had all rolled into an amalgamation of want. You hadn’t gone all the way yet — part of you wanted to save it for a time where your roommate wasn’t a few feet away.

“M—Mickey,” You whimpered, hips rolling and jolting into his hand, palms grasping at his bicep and forearm, something to steady you. “Please, please don’t stop!” Everything felt so feverish, as if you were trapped in some thick haze, unable to break free.

Mickey huffed, countenance etched with a playful disdain as he nibbled along the shell of your ear. “Would you let me fuck you right here?” He asked again, more pointed and aggressive this time, accompanied by a harsh flick against your clit.

Your head bobbed up and down over and over again in a series of indiscernible babbles and nods. “Yes! Y—Yes, Mickey,” You might’ve said it over and over again, back arching as he began to curl his digits into you, right into a spot that made your bones turn to dust. “M’close!” A desperate whine left you.

His cajoling laughter made the hairs along the back of your neck stand up, thighs rubbing together. “Course you would,” Mickey murmured, kissing at your neck, attempting to give you another hickey, something that he succeeded in. “You’re my little slut.” The sudden degradation made you bristle.

Admittedly, you shouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as you did, squirming and writhing against him as he toyed with your clit. You moaned, fingers clamping down into his arm so hard that you were afraid of leaving bruises. Mickey didn’t slow or stop, continuing that same, brutal pace as he brought you to your climax.

His hot, labored breathing fanned across your neck and shoulder, causing you to shiver as he grinded himself against you. The rough denim made contact with your haunch, content to rut against the curve of your ass. Mickey knew you were close, and with another steady barrage of digits, you shuddered.

You were drowning in a white-hot ecstasy, reduced to a sticky, whimpering mess at the hands of your boyfriend, whose grin was etched into the back of your neck like a brand. Mickey let you ride it out, spasming and mewling, hoping to let it simmer before your roommate finished her shower.

Mickey caressed circles into your clit, feeling your knees wobble, thighs quivering as you trembled like a leaf, rocking back against him. He was akin to the cat who’d caught the canary, pearlescent teeth glittering through the dim light as he slowly removed his fingers from your weeping cunt.

“Mickey,” You sighed, feeling him nudge you, coaxing you to turn around as he sat you down against your mattress. There was something vulnerable and exhilarating about it all as he loomed over you, head cocking to one side. “That was amazing.”

He smirked — a haughty, salacious smirk that made your insides turn to mush, heat pooling between your legs once more. “I’m not done just yet, sweetheart.” Mickey crooned, reaching forward to squeeze on either side or your jaw. “Open for me.”

An innocuous confusion fluttered across your features, and he drank it in — you were so innocent, so pious that Mickey fed from it. He watched in silent rapture as you opened your mouth, and again, his smarmy, playful grin was prevalent as he placed his digits upon the flat of your tongue.

A swarm of saliva began to pool within your mouth, a whimper erupting from the depths of your throat. You knew what Mickey wanted, and you elected to obey, able to taste the remnants of your orgasm.

Shyly, you began to suck on his fingers, watching the way his countenance blossomed to life with an insidious desire. “Good,” Mickey purred, placing his other hand against the back of your head, cradling your skull as he urged you closer. “Should’ve brought my camera.”

That comment alone forced you to press your thighs together, and your boyfriend, ever the watchful and observant creature, took notice. Through the dim light of your bedroom, he was as coy and cajoling as the Cheshire Cat, slipping his fingers down your tongue.

“Would you like that?” His voice contorted into something else — malefic and low. You barely noticed the lack of static noise as your roommate turned the shower off. “Should I film us together next time? Might make for an interesting movie.” Mickey uttered.

A familiar heat thrummed against your ribcage, slipping through the cracks as it rippled across your body. You suddenly realized that your roommate had finished her shower, and Mickey hadn’t moved a muscle — he knew. A whimper threatened to break free from your chest, hands tight and fisted within your lap.

When footsteps began to inch closer, Mickey took his fingers out of your mouth, replacing them with his lips as he kissed you. You exhaled, sharp and excitable, reaching for his chest again. It was hot and crackling with tension, even still. His erection pressed against your inner thigh.

“Next time, I’ll sneak over.” You murmured, feeling his lips curl into a grin as he pressed a string of kisses against your neck. As Mickey began to slink away, you grabbed his arm, staring at him with doe-like eyes. “We’ll have more than twenty minutes next time.”

Mickey smirked, beginning to climb out of your window and back onto the boughs of the oak. “I’m counting on it.” He chimed, and began to scale the tree back down and into the darkness. You watched him go, chest tight with the sensation of yearning.

Unbeknownst to you, Mickey intended on making a phone call tonight — and you were set to be the star.

[forestenjoyer]

tw leftist meme

this is more of a vent post than anything so be nice and bear with me. i was feeling down earlier so i did some writing to try to get my thoughts straight, and i wrote this.

Every time i feel down, i wonder what it that makes me feel this way. And there are many things. Is it species dysphoria? Sometimes. Is it fear of the future? fear of never living my one life the way i want to? Dread of the increasing amount of people who seemingly hate my kind? Fear for me and the people i love? Climate Anxiety? Loneliness? Yeah, sometimes. But sometimes I can't figure it out, and there is a thought in the back of my mind, and it never goes away. I try to tell myself that some days I'm just not feeling it, and thats true. But sometimes i get upset because i cant really disprove the thought. I'm scared of capitalism, and I'm scared of the way it poisons everything that i love.

When I first heard the thought, i was a social democrat, and it was easy for me to just tell myself that i was being ridiculous. but after time, the thought dawned on me, and everywhere i looked, i saw evidence.

Corporations exist to make a profit. They don't care about us being satisfied unless it's profitable to them. When they get influential enough, people begin to become dependent on them. Once this happens, they can gouge prices for more profit, as they are doing now. What will the government do? Nothing, because more often than not, they have an incentive to support the company. Perhaps the company is a donor, perhaps they are bribed, perhaps the obscene wealth makes them look good by some measurements, or perhaps they themselves are a CEO.

So, right. The government, who is allegedly supposed to take care of us, the people, isn't going to help, as it hasn't. So it's up to us, but say this company provides a vital service and is the only one who does so at any reasonable quality (Google), or has people addicted (Meta, McDonald's), or has so much variety and power that avoiding it is incredibly difficult (Disney, Nestle). If this is the case, which is is, it's very hard to boycott them.and those who advocate for change or participate in attempts to force change are mocked and taunted by bad actors and gullible folk. And by bad actors, I mean people who defend the company because they too own businesses. Landlords, local business owners, and so on. They are middle class twats who have never had to suffer the struggle of a normal person. And yet they LARP as us, calling themselves everyday hardworking folk, but actually own a business or an estate and have never had to confront the fears of tenancy, homelessness, poverty, and so on.

And i despise these people. They pretend to be us, and trivialise our struggle, saying lifes not that hard, and even call us elitists and entitled, and complain about us. And they manipulate and lie like this and act like they suffer while they collect rent from tenants after their third overseas holiday of the year.

And maybe you believe in reform. I did too. But do you ever find yourself asking 'How?' Do you ever grow weary of politicians throwing you and your movement under the bus? Or failing to fulfill their promises? Do you ever catch yourself thinking 'this is hopeless'? What do you do when you hear that, or when others tell you that? A reasonable person would take it in good faith, consider it, and try to find its flaws. And if you really knew that reform was possible, or realistic, you could explain why to yourself. I never could. I would joke around and throw insults because I couldn't argue with it, and everyone else did the same. I thought 'those stupid leftists are so foolish' and said it was ridiculous.

And thats why I caved, After all, if you cant see a way for peaceful protests and voting alone to bring change, and have watched it fail to over and over again, is it not reasonable to turn to the ideas that can give you answers, that being anarchism? The government cannot ignore a riot like it can ignore a peaceful protest. And if the government cannot and will not help us, we will have to help ourselves and each other.

And this is only a small part of it. I hate how it has ruined and weaponised science and strangled art. I hate how it destroys the environment. and i cant stand the way it does so with such self righteousness and entitlement

[iceyrukia]

IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS

PART ONE

When you are a public figure, people will write and say false things about you. It comes with the territory. Many of those things you brush aside. Many you ignore. The people close to you advise you that silence is best. And it often is. Sometimes, though, silence makes a lie begin to take on the shimmer of truth.

In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it, as Jonathan Swift wrote.

Take the case of a young woman who attended my Lagos writing workshop some years ago; she stood out because she was bright and interested in feminism.

After the workshop, I welcomed her into my life. I very rarely do this, because my past experiences with young Nigerians left me wary of people who are calculating and insincere and want to use me only as an opportunity. But she was a Bright Young Nigerian Feminist and I thought that was worth making an exception.

She spent time in my Lagos home. We had long conversations. I was support-giver, counsellor, comforter.

Then I gave an interview in March 2017 in which I said that a trans woman is a trans woman, (the larger point of which was to say that we should be able to acknowledge difference while being fully inclusive, that in fact the whole premise of inclusiveness is difference.)

I was told she went on social media and insulted me.

This woman knows me enough to know that I fully support the rights of trans people and all marginalized people. That I have always been fiercely supportive of difference, in general. And that I am a person who reads and thinks and forms my opinions in a carefully considered way.

Of course she could very well have had concerns with the interview. That is fair enough. But I had a personal relationship with her. She could have emailed or called or texted me. Instead she went on social media to put on a public performance.

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it. But I mostly held myself responsible. My spirit had been slightly stalled, from the beginning, by her. My first sense of unease with her came when she posted a photo taken in my house, at a time when I did not want any photos of my personal life on social media. I asked that she take it down. The second case of unease was her publicizing something I had told her in confidence about another member of the workshop. The most upsetting was when she, without telling me, used my name to apply for an American visa. Above all else was my lingering suspicion that she was a person who chose as friends only those from whom she could benefit. But she was a Bright Young Nigerian Feminist and I allowed that sentiment to over-ride my unease.

After she publicly insulted me, it was clear to me that this kind of noxious person had no business in my life, ever again.

A few months later, she sent this affected, self-regarding email which I ignored.

Friday September 15 2017 at 4.35 AM Dearest Chimamanda, Happy birthday. I mean this with all my heart, even though I know I have fallen (removed myself?) from your grace. It would be impossible for me to stop loving you; long before you gave me the possibility of being your friend you were the embodiment of my deepest hopes, and that will never change.I think of you often, still – stating the obvious. I grieve the loss of our friendship; it is a complicated sadness. I’m sorry that I caused you pain, or to feel like you can no longer trust me. There’s so much that I wish could be said.I pray this birthday is the happiest one yet. I wish you rest and quiet and abiding stability, and of course more of the kind of success that means the most to you.I hope mothering X is everything you hoped and prayed for and more.Have a wonderful day today. Love always.

About a year later, she sent this email, which I also ignored.

Thursday November 29 2018 at 8.42 AM Dear Chimamanda, I realise this is long overdue and vastly insufficient, but I’m really sorry. I’ve spent so much time going back and forth in my head and my email drafts; wondering whether to write you, how to write you, what to say, all kinds of things. But in the end, this is the thing I realise I need to say.I’m sorry I disappointed and hurt you by saying things publicly that were sharply critical, unkind and even disrespectful, especially in light of all the backlash and criticism you experience from people who don’t know you. I could have acted with more consideration towards you. I should have, especially given the privilege of intimacy that you had offered me. There are many reasons why I chose to behave the way I did, but none of them is an excuse. And I clearly realise now, after many, many months of needless sadness and angst and hurt and actual confusion, that I did not treat you as a friend would—certainly not as someone would to whom you had offered unprecedented access to yourself and your life.You’ve meant the world to me since I was barely a teenager. It’s been very hard navigating the emotional fallout of the past several months, knowing you were displeased with me but truly not quite understanding why, then deciding I didn’t care, then realising that would never be true. I’ve always cared. But I was too mixed up about the situation to be able to make sense of it, or properly see past my own justifications. I’m sorry it took me so long to grasp how I let you down.I realise that I don’t have room to ask anything of you, but I would be grateful for a chance to say this in person. Still, even if I never get that, I really hope you believe me.Congratulations on restarting the workshop, and on all the other amazing successes of the past several months. I think of you often; it would be impossible not to. You look so happy in your pictures. I really hope you are well. All my love,

I hoped never to hear from her again. But she has recently gone on social media to write about how she “refused to kiss my ring,” as if I demanded some kind of obeisance from her. She also suggests that there is some dark, shadowy ‘more’ to tell that she won’t tell, with an undertone of “if only you knew the whole story.”

It is a manipulative way of lying. By suggesting there is ‘more’ when you know very well that there isn’t, you do sufficient reputational damage while also being able to plead deniability. Innuendo without fact is immoral.

No, there isn’t more to the story. It is a simple story – you got close to a famous person, you publicly insulted the famous person to aggrandize yourself, the famous person cut you off, you sent emails and texts that were ignored, and you then decided to go on social media to peddle falsehoods. It is obscene to tell the world that you refused to kiss a ring when in fact there isn’t any ring at all.

I cannot make much of the hostility of strangers who do not know me – fame taints our view of the humanity of famous people. But the truth is that the famous person remains irretrievably human. Fame does not inoculate the famous person from disappointment and depression, fame does not make you any less angered or hurt by the duplicitous nature of people. To be famous is to be assumed to have power, which is true, but in the analysis of fame, people often ignore the vulnerability that comes with fame, and they are unable to see how others who have nothing to lose can lie and connive in order to take advantage of that fame, while not giving a single thought to the feelings and humanity of the famous person.

And when you personally know a famous person, when you have experienced their humanity, when you have benefited from their kindness, and yet you are unable to extend to them the basic grace and respect that even a casual acquaintanceship deserves, then it says something fundamental about you.

And in a deluded way, you will convince yourself that your hypocritical, self-regarding, compassion-free behavior is in fact principled feminism. It isn’t. You will wrap your mediocre malice in the false gauziness of ideological purity. But it’s still malice. You will tell yourself that being able to parrot the latest American Feminist orthodoxy justifies your hacking at the spirit of a person who had shown you only kindness. You can call your opportunism by any name, but it doesn’t make it any less of the ugly opportunism that it is.

PART TWO

When I first read this person’s work, which was their application to my writing workshop, I thought the sentences were well-done. I accepted this person. At the workshop, I thought they could have been more respectful of the other participants, perhaps not kept typing dismissively as others’ stories were discussed, with an air of being among people below their level. After the workshop, I decided to select the best stories, edit them, pay the writers a fee, and publish them in an e-magazine. The first story I chose was this person’s. I wrote a glowing introduction, which the story truly deserved.

They sent this email.

Fri, Aug 7, 2015, 8:20 AM Thank you so much for that introduction. It means so much to me and I’m going to keep reading it to get through the rest of my stay at Syracuse. I sent it to my mother and she got nervous about the piece because you said ‘it disturbs’, said she’s not sure how she’s going to feel when she reads it. But she’s also one of those ‘let’s leave the past in the past’ people. My sister approved, which meant a lot because our childhoods were each other’s.All that to say, I’m so grateful you gave me the space to write the short version of this piece, the encouragement to write the longer piece, and now, a platform for it. I definitely have plans to write more about Aba.Thank you, with all my heart.PS- I wanted to sign off gratefully + gracefully in Igbo but I said let me not fall my own hand 🙂

About a year later, they sent another email to let me know that their novel would be published.

Wed, Jun 8, 2016, 8:20 AM Greetings! I hope all’s been well with you this past year. Belated congratulations on the baby’s arrival, I hope she’s being a delight (I’m sure she is), and on the Johns Hopkins honors.I was thinking about how this time last year, I’d just received the email from you about Farafina and I wanted to reach out with a quick update. I’ve just accepted an offer for the novel I excerpted as my application and it feels like the workshop was a catalyst for the events that’ve led me here. So, thank you, for the workshop and your words and the Olisa TV series and listening to me babble on about my story at the hotel. I deeply appreciate all of it and you. All my best,

Before the novel was published, I spoke of it to some people, to help it get attention. I had not been able to finish reading it. I found the writing beautiful, but the story false-hearted and burdened by bathos. When I spoke of the novel, however, it was the former sentiment that I expressed, never the latter.

After I gave the March 2017 interview in which I said that a trans woman is a trans woman, I was told that this person had insulted me on social media, calling me, among other things, a murderer. I was deeply upset, because while I did not really know them personally, I felt they knew what I stood for and that I fully supported the rights of trans people, and that I do not wish anybody dead.

Still, I took no action. I ignored the public insult.

When this person’s publishers sent me an early copy of their novel, I was surprised to see that my name was included in their cover biography. I had never seen that done in a book before. I didn’t like that I had not been asked for permission to use my name, but most of all I thought – why would a person who thinks I’m a murderer want my name so prominently displayed in their biography?

Then I learned that, because my name was in the cover biography, a journalist had called them my “protegee” and they then threw a Twitter tantrum about it, calling it clickbait, viciously disavowing having received any help from me.

I knew this person had called me a murderer, I knew they were actively campaigning to “cancel” me and tweeting about how I should no longer be invited to speak at events. But this I felt I could not ignore.

I sent an email to my representative:

From: Chimamanda Adichie Date: Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 2:06 PM I’m writing about X She attended my Lagos workshop two years ago and I selected hers as one of a few pieces I published after the workshop. Apparently I was referred to as her ‘mentor’ and/or she was referred to as my ‘protege,’ in some articles, which led to her tweeting about it. Her tweets were forwarded to me by friends. In them, she reacted quite viscerally to my being called her ‘mentor’ and her being my ‘protege.’ To be fair, she is not technically my ‘protege,’ and it is perfectly fine that she feels this way, but her ungracious tone and the ugliness of the energy spent on her tweets surprised me. I recently received her book and noticed that my name was included in her official book bio. I was stunned. Surely if she is so strongly averse to my being considered a person who has been significant in her career, (which is my understanding of the loose use of protege/mentor) then it is unseemly to make the choice to include my name in her bio. I found it unusual, as I don’t think I’ve seen it done before in a book bio, but I also now find it unacceptably cynical. It is only reasonable for a person who sees my name as it is used in her bio — ‘her work has been selected and edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’ — to assume some sort of mentor/protege relationship. To publicly disavow this with a tone bordering on hostility and at the same time so baldly use my name to sell her book is utterly unacceptable to me. I’d like you to please reach out to her publishers and ask that my name be removed from her official book bio. I refuse to be used in this way. Chimamanda

After contacting her publishers, my representative wrote:

They have asked whether your preference would be to remove the Acknowledgment to you in the back of the book also, in future reprints.

I replied:

I don’t think that is my decision to take, and so will not answer either way, although it would be ideal if she herself made the decision to do so.

On the subject of how to go about it, I was absolutely determined not to be used by this person, but I was also sensitive to the costs the publisher might incur, as this was not in any way the publisher’s fault. Instead of pulping the already printed copies, I asked that the jackets be stripped and rebound. To my representative I wrote:

I’m completely determined that I not be used in this opportunistic and hypocritical way. But I want to make sure to proceed reasonably.

I was assured that my name would be removed and I moved on.

But from time to time, I would be informed of yet another social media post in which this person had attacked me.

This person has created a space in which social media followers have – and this I find unforgiveable – trivialized my parents’ death, claiming that the sudden and devastating loss of my parents within months of each other during this pandemic, was ‘punishment’ for my ‘transphobia.’

This person has asked followers to pick up machetes and attack me.

This person began a narrative that I had sabotaged their career, a narrative that has been picked up and repeated by others.

The normal response would be to ignore it all, because this person is seeking attention and publicity to benefit themselves. Claiming that I have sabotaged their career is a lie and this person knows that it is a lie. But if something is repeated often enough, in this age in which people do not need proof or verification to run with a story, especially a story that has outrage potential, then it can easily begin to seem true.

My addressing this lie will indeed get this person some attention – may they bask in it.

Here is the truth: I was very supportive of this writer. I didn’t have to be. I wasn’t asked to be. I supported this writer because I believe we need a diverse range of African stories.

Sabotaging a young writer’s career is just not my style; I would get no benefit or satisfaction from it. Asking that my name be removed from your biography is not sabotaging your career. It is about protecting my boundaries of what I consider acceptable in civil human behavior.

You publicly call me a murderer AND still feel entitled to benefit from my name?

You use my name (without my permission) to sell your book AND then throw an ugly tantrum when someone makes a reference to it?

What kind of monstrous entitlement, what kind of perverse self-absorption, what utter lack of self-awareness, what unheeding heartlessness, what frightening immaturity makes a person act this way?

Besides, a person who genuinely believes me to be a murderer cannot possibly want my name on their book cover, unless of course that person is a rank opportunist.

PART THREE

In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.

[handeaux]

18 Modern Words That Had Very Different And Curious Meanings In Old Cincinnati

Some words we use daily today meant something totally different more than a century past. Here are a few normal, everyday terms that once had surprisingly altered definitions long ago in Cincinnati.

Affinity In the early 1900s, “affinity” meant something very much like “soulmate” does today. In Cincinnati newspapers, “affinity” usually shows up in articles about divorce. Many a husband sought a divorce because he had found his “affinity”, and it wasn’t the woman he was married to. Jacob Pels told the Cincinnati Post [31 October 1907] on the occasion of his second divorce: “Twice I thought I found my affinity, and twice I made a bad mistake.”

Blue Today, if you’re blue, you are mildly depressed. Back in Old Cincinnati, “blue” meant risqué, or even obscene. Cincinnati ministers erupted in indignation when Millie DeLeon, the “Girl In Blue” (wink, wink!) performed at Heuk’s People’s Theater on Vine Street in 1901. And, when Cincinnati Redlegs Manager Clark Griffith excoriated the team after a dismal spring training game in Georgia, the telegraph company refused to carry the Enquirer’s dispatch [14 March 1909]: “Wishing to be perfectly accurate, we wrote out the rest that Griff said, but the telegraph man would not send it. He said his wire was a family wire of good and regular habits, and he would not insult it by asking it to carry a lot of blue language.”

Boom This old term had nothing to do with firecrackers or other explosions. It meant to promote, or to hype, or to publicize. When Judge Andrew J. Pruden wrote to the editor praising a Cincinnati Post editorial, the Post headlined his letter [6 January 1893]: “Judge Pruden Indorses The Post In Its Efforts to Boom The City.” An editorial an 1888 edition the old McMicken Review at the University of Cincinnati encouraged students to “Boom the ‘Varsity!” Cynical Thomas Emery, a pioneer real estate developer, told the Post [1 July 1886] he was concerned about future investments: “Boom Cincinnati? Can you boom a dead dog? I don’t mean that Cincinnati is dead exactly, but she’s overbuilt.”

Brace To brace somebody meant to cheat them, and Cincinnati was swarming with galoots just salivating at the opportunity to brace someone. The bracers needed to watch out who they braced, though. Frank Y. Grayson in his classic “Pioneers of Night Life” tells the tale of Frank James, Jesse’s brother, getting fleeced at a Cincinnati card game: “James dropped $800 on the night. He knew that he had been braced. Before he left he said genially, ‘Well, boys, I’ll say one thing for you, you get it easier than I do.’”

Cake We’re not talking pastry here. This word figures into one of the most obscure lines in Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s classic “Casey at the Bat” from 1888:

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake, And the former was a hoodoo, while the latter was a cake;

A “hoodoo” we still recognize as a jinx, but a “cake”? In 1888, everyone knew that a cake was a fool. Within the context of baseball, a cake was a loser.

Candlelight Many a romantic evening has been conducted by candlelight. In the days before electricity, “candlelight” was a time of day, specifically that time of evening when you lit your candles. The Cincinnati Gazette [11 June 1857] presented this line: “The preacher gave notice that, if the weather was fair, he would preach at candlelight, but, as it sprinkled a little, there was no congregation.”

Card There is not much call for classified advertisements these days, when everything is advertised online. Ads used to be the main source of income for newspapers, who called small advertisements “cards,” as in this example from the Enquirer [22 November 1890]: “Mrs. Pollock did not stop at advertising her business in circulars. She inserted a card in the Sunday Newsdealer.”

Cockpit Did you ever wonder why the place an airplane pilot sits is called a cockpit? It’s named for an actual pit in which roosters (or cocks) fought to the death. Cock-fighting was popular in Cincinnati, though intermittently illegal. The Cincinnati Commercial [11 January 1847] advertised a new venue: “A regular Cock Pit having been established in the rear of the “Lunch House,” fights will take place three times a week.” If cock-fighting was too high-class, Cincinnati also hosted rat-pits from time to time in which small dogs battled rodents.

Combination Strictly speaking, in the 1800s, a “circus” was that entertainment taking place withing a sawdust “ring” which in Latin was “circus.” The other aspects of the modern circus – the traveling zoo known as the “menagerie” and the “side-show” or “exposition” – were considered separate enterprises. The first impresarios to “combine” all of these shows called them “combinations.” So, we have the Cincinnati Gazette [8 June 1872] reporting: “Warner’s big combination show attracted an immense crowd of spectators yesterday afternoon and evening.” And old John Robinson advertised his traveling spectacular as “Robinson’s Great Combination.”

Dashboard We use “dashboard” today to talk about status displays on our computer screens, which derived from the instrument panel in our automobiles, which referred to the array of gauges and dials in an aeroplane. But there was a much earlier and practical use of this word as the actual wooden board at the front of a carriage that kept stones and mud from being kicked into the driver’s face. From the Cincinnati Dollar Weekly Times [1 November 1855]: “The mare was put between the thills of a nice light buggy, her harness thoroughly adjusted by the owner, the reins carefully laid over the dashboard, and the usual chapter of advice opened concerning her management.”

Drummer An old definition of this word, metaphoric in origin, has nothing to do with music. A drummer was a salesperson, usually a traveling salesman, and usually a man on commission. The Enquirer [22 December 1871] reported: “The State of Maryland has in force a statute similar to that of Tennessee and several other States, which classes ‘drummers’ selling goods by sample for houses out of the State with peddlers, and exacts a license from them so heavy as to prohibit effectually sales in those States.”

Embarrassed If you realize, after ordering at an expensive restaurant, that you left your wallet at home, you might be embarrassed. That is close to the old-time definition of this word. It meant bankrupt. The Cincinnati Gazette [27 April 1837] related the story of a scoundrel named John Law: “With him perished all Law’s hopes for regaining his personal fortune. He became embarrassed; suits were commenced against him.”

Grocery So many old-time groceries offered liquor by the glass that “grocery” came to mean almost any saloon that emphasized the hard stuff over beer. Here’s the Western Christian Advocate [20 May 1836]: “When I hear a man say ‘my cigars cost me two dollars a week’ – I should not be surprised if I see him drinking in a grocery or tavern.”

Hilarious The history of comedy reminds us that we find drunks to be humorous. Back in the day, “hilarious” did not mean funny; it meant extremely inebriated. The Enquirer [14 January 1870] recounted one such case: “Night before last, this identical phonographer, who now calls himself Henry Henderson, was found in a highly hilarious condition, enjoying the society of ugly females in a bad house on Eighth street.”

Map There are abundant synonyms for physiognomy, but Cincinnati in the 1890s had a good one – “map.” In regaling his readers with memories of post-midnight culinary delights, Frank Grayson recalled Simon the Hot-Corn Man, who slathered his steaming ears of corn with “a substance that passed as butter.” Grayson recollected how “There were a lot of greasy maps decorating Vine Street in the wake of Simon.”

Queer In recent times, “queer” has settled into a linguistic niche as a sobriquet for what used to be called “alternative lifestyles.” Around 1880, however, the primary connotation of “queer” was financial. It referred to counterfeit money. The Cincinnati Gazette [28 October 1873] reported on the trial of M.Y. Morton: “He is an old gray haired man, and told the detective that he had been ‘pushing the queer’ for thirty-five years, making a good business in buying and selling counterfeit.”

Slut Ever since it became a term of sexist opprobrium, “bitch” has been ruined as the technical name for a female canine. Few today remember that “slut” was synonymous with “bitch” and also referred to distaff dogs. An advertisement in the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [21 June 1870] sought: “Dogs – Two full blood Scotch rat terriers dog and slut. Must be a year old or older.”

Snide You rarely hear this word today outside the phrase “snide remark.” When you do, it often has the tint of sarcasm. In old Cincinnati, however, “snide” meant fake, cheap or counterfeit. The Cincinnati Daily Star [23 January 1880] recorded that “Ed. Kline was pulled in yesterday for selling ‘snide’ jewelry.” The term applied to people, too. The Enquirer [5 April 1880] noted: “A snide party styling themselves Tennessee Minstrels were rotten-egged and mobbed in Easton, Maryland, on Friday night.”

[saleintothe90s]

492. Ed's Party in Lockerbie (June 2, 1989)

Sometimes kids have ideas, and they should just stay ideas, you know? Sometimes we shouldn't listen to the kids--but Pan American Airlines did.

Shortly after the December 21st, 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, 14 year old Ed Blaus of New Jersey sent a request to Pan Am to send the children of Lockerbie Christmas presents. Seems weird that a 14 year old would ask an airline to do this, but ok. A small child, maybe, but a fourteen year old?

I'm sure he meant something like a gift drive for the kids in town who lost everything that Christmas. Pan Am would give presents to the kids that following Christmas, right?

No, there was going to be a party for all of Lockerbie, and boy when the victims families found out, they were pissed and were assaulting the airline in the press:

Susan Cohen, of Port Jarvis, N.Y., who lost her 20-year-old daughter Theodora in the bombing, said the party was 'tasteless' and charged it was a publicty stunt by Pan Am 'to polish their tarnished image.'

'We're appalled by it,' Theodora Cohen's father Dan Cohen said of the party. 'Right now the rock band should be playing on the soccer field about a block and a half from where 75 bodies were found -- which is obscene. They should end their mourning but this is ridiculous.' 3

[...]

"I'm outraged," said a tearful Florence Bissett, whose 21-year-old son, Kenneth, was killed in the bombing. "How can they do something like that - picnic where bodies were found?"

Susan Cohen of Port Jervis, N.Y., said, "We feel Pan Am should be putting its money into security, not parties."

Joe Horgan of West Point, Pa., a member of the Victims of Pan Am 103 group, was quoted by the Dumfries and Galloway Standard as saying, "It is good for them to have a party, but Pan Am's involvement is despicable. We see this purely as a public relations exercise on their part." 4

"Having this picnic is cruel . . ." said Lynne Fraidowitz of Staten Island, whose 20-year-old son, Daniel Rosenthal, was killed. "It would have been easier on me if they had just ripped my heart out." 5

From what I've read in the scant articles I've found, Pan Am played a "he said, she said" with Ed and his idea. In one article, the airline stated that Ed conceived and raised money for the party, but also wrote the airline for help. The airline stated that they simply flew Ed and his family to Scotland. 1 However, a resident of Lockerbie said that PanAm had the idea of a "Summer Christmas", but townspeople suggested it be a party instead.2 Originally, Disney was going to send some costumed characters to Scotland, but due to outrage from the families, this was redacted. Hebrew National who was to supply food for the party also backed out. 3 

(Business Insider)

While families picketed outside of the PanAm headquarters in New York City, in Scotland the party went on with a concerts, bagpipes and food. 2 A football coach from Syracuse University (which lost 37 students in the bombing) came to give kids football lessons, which was a peculiar choice. Apparently there was no representation from Pan Am at the actual party.3

I found a Facebook post from the Annandale Herald and Moffat News on the 30th anniversary of the party. Most partygoers who were probably kids at the time, mostly remembered eating pizza.

Kinsey Wilson. 1989. "Kin of Jet Crash Victims Assail Plans for Party in Lockerbie: [NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition]." Newsday, May 21, 38. 

Daily Press. “Reaction to Lockerbie Party Mixed.” June 4, 1989.

Deseret News. “CONTROVERSY DIDN’T DASH LOCKERBIE BASH,” June 4, 1989. https://www.deseret.com/1989/6/4/18809762/controversy-didn-t-dash-lockerbie-bash.

"Lockerbie Party Outrages Bereaved: [Final Edition]." Edmonton Journal, Jun 04, 1989.

Joseph W. Queen. "Party in Lockerbie, Outrage in NY: [NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition]." Newsday, Jun 04, 1989, Combined editions.

[davidkarofskyindie]

kingofthemirkwoodelks​:

Lee nodded before closing the door to his office behind the journalist. “I do want to apologize for making you wait for a while, it’s been pretty busy and I haven’t had the time to look at my schedule properly. It’s thanks to my assistant that’s how I knew about this.” After seeing the tape recorder, he then took a seat behind his desk. “I have nothing to hide. Everybody wants to know the ups and downs of what I do so I will not hold back on anything.”

Originally posted by leepace-daily

Jackson watched as Lee casually walked around, the confidence just emanating from every pore as he went to take a seat. Mentally Jackson was already taking note of some descriptive terms to use when he wrote about this later but kept getting stuck on ‘obscenely gorgeous’ which felt like the wrong thing to bring up in a professional piece. “Well then I better not hold back on my questioning... though we can start easy, work up to the harder stuff” he said with a kind smile, rubbing his hands for a little warmth “So let’s start, how did you get started in the industry?” he asked, his face earnest as could be.

@davidkarofskyindie (for Jackson)

“So, my assistants tell me that you’ve been wanting to snag this interview with me for quite sometime now. Lucky for you I managed to clear my schedule for the remainder of the afternoon.”

[yamanorakuen]

Okay but what if the characters met someone special to Mc who’s now dead?

Like the opposite that would be angsty but so cool!

Feel free to ignore this ask lol

Obey Me! Brothers meeting MC's desceased loved one

Thanks for the request! Sorry this took quite a long time, I've had a busy week and I wrote a little bit every day instead of binge-writing the whole post in one to three parts like usually.

That's a really sweet idea! I tried to come up with many different relations to MC so they all can't be accurate to everyone's experience; and I do assign some sort of personality to each desceased loved one that might differ from your experience and reality; but I hope as many people as possible can find at least one that makes sense or hits home in one way or another. I also hope these don't come across as offensive in any way, that is not my intention.

TW: Mentions of deaths and causes of deaths (illness, car accident, suicide, second-degree murder, old age). It's quite a dark topic but not very descriptive.

[Side character's vers.] HERE

Lucifer had thought about your family more times than he'd like to admit.

He holds his brothers dear to him and is sure you have someone out there that you care about deeply that shares blood with you.

However, he never asks, letting you speak to him if you so wish.

But you never talk about your family.

So one day his curiosity gets the best of him and he goes through your file again in hopes of finding crumbs of information on your family.

He finds absolutely nothing.

But it all changes one day when Diavolo summons him to the castle.

There he found a ghostly woman, screaming at Lord Diavolo and Barbatos, her face red with anger.

"Why have you demons kidnapped my niece/nephew?! Return them back to the human world this instant!" The lady yelled, stomping their feet. Lucifer couldn't help but sigh.

"Ma'am, take a deep breath. We assure that your niece/nephew has been and will continue to be safe with us." Barbatos tried to explain calmly but the lady was having none of it.

"You're demons! How could I take your word for it?!" She continued to yell obscenities. Lucifer noticed a frown of Diavolo's face so her just had to intervene.

"Excuse me, ma'am. My name is Lucifer Morninstar and your niece/nephew lives under my roof-" Lucifer didn't even get to finish his introduction before the woman started to target him.

"They live with YOU?! Lucifer Morningstar himself?! Oh Lord have mercy on my sweet baby.." She started to make the cross sign, shaking her head.

"Why yes, MC lives with Lucifer and his six little brothers, under their protection. I can assure you that they are highly competent to take care of them." Diavolo smiled politely to the woman.

"They. Live. With. Seven. Demons?!" It almost looked like the woman would have a heart attack any second now, "You wretched demons have seduced my sweet darling and tricked them to make pacts with you that doom them forever! How I wish I could've protected them better.." She found the closest chair and just crumpled, sitting down while holding her head in her hands.

"How did you learn all of this? Better yet, how did you find us?" Lucifer finally asked after a brief silence.

"I knew MC had been chosen as an exchange student in some faraway land.. I didn't know it would be another realm altogether," the woman sighed, "Not until I died. I passed away and didn't even get to say my goodbyes to them! Things back in the human world are chaotic right now, a virus is going around, claiming lives of many.. I'm honestly happy they're not there right now."

"Did that virus kill you?" Lucifer questioned and the woman nodded as an answer.

"And I was offered a chance to check up on my loved ones, so of course I had to pick my sweet MC.. And to my horror, I ended up here, IN HELL of all possible places. I've always been a good person, as has my niece/nephew, we don't belong here!" it was as if your aunt was trying to prove something with their words.

"So you wanted to say your goodbyes to MC and was surprised when you found yourself in here, yes?" Barbatos peeped in.

"Yes. I can see everything now I used to be blind to. It's truly odd," she smiled sadly, seemingly calming down and her previous fury having been converted to wistfulness, "Would you please let me see them? For one last time? So I can tell them not to look for me when they go back home.. They're going to go home, right?" The woman questioned with tears in her eyes.

The Fantastic Three exchanged meaningful glances. At the beginning of the exchange program they had told the exchange students they were not allowed to bring any family or friends to Devildom but this situation was different. First off, you hadn't asked your aunt to visit. Second off, she had just died. Thirdly, you had the right to know if something like that had happened in your private life.

Diavolo's and Barbatos were looking at Lucifer expectently, letting him to make the final call whether he'd let this woman under his roof to see you.

Lucifer on the other hand was staring at the woman, a battle inside his mind. At the same time, this woman had been incredibly rude and mean towards their whole race but on the other hand, that anger had came out of fear and confusion of the new place and their new state as recently desceased. All the information you must receive upon death must be overwhelming.

"Yes, you may. But only briefly." Lucifer finally gave in. He saw a lot of you in your aunt, so naturally he was partial in some way. And he wanted you to have that special chance to meet your aunt for the last time.

Your aunt's eyes lit up at Lucifer's answer, a wide smile appearing on their mouth. She dried her eyes and got up quickly, straightening her clothes.

"Show me the way! I want to see them!" she demanded, a pep in her step as she already started to make her way out of the room.

Lucifer shot an exasperated look to Lord Diavolo and Barbatos before following her out, taking her to the House of Lamentation.

Lucifer let you two speak in private, making sure no one was going to intervene as you exchanged your teary goodbyes. And when your aunt was finally gone, Lucifer made sure to lessen some of your school work and pampered you with some small gifts as his way to show support through grief. He might have not gotten along with your aunt that well but he saw how the news had taken its toll on you.

You were visiting the human world alongside with Mammon, letting him meet your family for the first time. To your surprise, no big scandal had yet taken place.

You introduced him as Marcus though as you did not want to disclose your boyfriend's demonic identity to everyone quite yet.

You were gathered at a family meeting at your aunt's house. Almost all of the extended family from that side of the family was present.

Mammon, being the avatar of greed, decided to take a sneaky look around for any valuables he could swipe. He had promised you not to, but he's instincts were just overpowering him!

He walked around the house, taking looks at the room, silent as a mouse.

Then he finally saw it.. In one of the bedrooms, there was a cupboard full of medals and trophies of some sort. Mammon walked closer, seeing they were from a variety of sports - mostly baseball, but also track and football.

'Maybe no one notices if I take one or two...' Mammon thought to himself before opening the cupboard door, reaching for one of the medals...

"Stop right there. Those are mine." he suddenly heard a voice behind that made him jump.

At the door stood a boy, around your age, crossing his arms with a scowl on his face. Mammon quickly shut the cupboard door and tried to come up with a believable lie.

"I was just taking a look, ya hear!" he explained himself, trying to keep his cool, "Who are you, dude? I don't think we've been introduced yet.." Mammon spoke as he walked closer.

"I'm MC's cousin. You must be Marcus, right?" the boy nodded, not moving from his place at the doorway.

"I'm Mam- Yeah, Marcus!" Mammon nodded furiously, remembering their secret plan to keep Mammon's demonic identity secret from MC's family, "I can see the similarities," Mammon grinned as he put his hand around your shoulder. Only his hand phased through the boy, "W-What?!" he screamed, looking between his hand and the boy.

"Why do you think you haven't been introduced to me yet," the boy shook his head and walked up to his nightstand, taking a picture and showing it to Mammon. It was from his funeral, "I died at a car crash some years ago." he told Mammon with a sad smile.

Mammon's mouth hang open after hearing that, too flabbergasted to say anything at all first. MC had never mentioned their deceased cousin to him before.. Had they? Mammon racked his brain, thinking back to all the times MC had told him about their family but couldn't recall this one.

"Oh, um.. So what's up, bro?" Mammon turned his frown upside down with a grin, wanting to ease the tensions in the air.

"Not much is going on once your dead," your cousin rolled his eyes, "Other than my cousin's boyfriend breaking into my old room, lookin for stuff to sell, it seems.."

"Eh, let bygones be bygones! I barely even remember doing that!" Mammon shook the comment off, shrugging.

"Whatever.. I won't be doing much with my trophies anyway.." the ghost sighed and picked up another framed photo. It depicted you and your cousins as children. The ghost of your cousin looked down at the picture, smile filled with nostalgia.

"Is that MC?" Mammon looked over his shoulder and pointed at the little kid in the photo that resembled you the most. The young man nodded.

"Yeah, that's them. We were always real close growing up. Like Bonnie and Clyde or Jekyll and Hyde," he chuckled, "They were really excited for me when I got my drivers liscence. They brought me a keychain for my car keys and we celebrated together. The night before I died.. They called me and we talked about future and such. I wanted to be a professional athlete and MC always believed in my dreams.. And the next day.. All of those dreams were snuffed out, just like my life."

Mammon could sense the pain and bitterness behind his words and didn't dare to stop him, just looking at the photo with intent.

You looked so happy and young in the photo.. So did your cousin who was now dead. He was once again reminded by your mortality and short life span and it felt like a punch in the gut.

"Why are you here, then?" Mammon asked the boy who finally put the photo down, turning to face Mammon.

"Can't I be a little protective over my darling cousin, hm?" the boy mused with a smile, "I know you're the same. You're looking after them too, right? You want to protect them, even if sometimes it feels like it's the other way around. They have that effect on the people around them."

Mammon's cheeks flushed as he looked down at his feet, "Y-yeah.." he muttered, scratching the back of his head absentmindedly.

"I don't really have much other purpose. I guess I just wanted to be introduced to you like the rest of the family.." the boy shrugged, "Mammon."

"Huh?! Whatcha call me?" Mammon's eyes shot back up at the words. Had he let his real identity slip? Mammon's comedic reaction caused your cousin to laugh.

"I'm dead. We know way more than the living. You might fool my mother and my father, but not me," he snickered, "I know you're a demon.. But I really don't mind. At least you're bound to my cousin.. And you'll stay with them until they're old and gray."

Mammon was silent, both from being flustered and from thinking. 'Maybe he's right..' he thought silently.

"Oh, but could you give this back to them?" the cousin suddenly exclaimed and handed a keychain to Mammon, "They bought this to me as a gift, remember? I want them to have it back. They have more use to it than I do anyway. Don't you think about selling it!" he made Mammon swear on MC's name that he'd give the keychain to them and not sell it for profit. Mammon didn't think he could break a promise sworn on MC's name.

"Just tell them you found it while exploring. Don't mention me." the ghost of MC's cousin spoke before walking off without another word, leaving Mammon alone in the room. A moment passed in silence where Mammon was inspecting the keychain.

"Marcus! Where did you wander off to?" He suddenly heard you calling for him, knocked out of his trance. He pocketed the keychain before walking out of the room to see you and press a kiss to your temple.

Leviathan was visiting the local Game Stop all alone, which was rare to him, but you had asked him to pick up a physical copy of a certain game you wanted and he just couldn't say no to you.

He was looking around the area where the game was supposed to be, but found nothing. Maybe it had been sold out..?

That's what he thought but just as he was about to text you about the sad news and whether you wanted him to pick up another game, someone poked his back.

He turned around and saw a girl, perhaps a tear or two younger than you, standing behind him, holding a copy of that game you wanted.

Leviathan's eyes widened and he didn't know what to say; that girl had the last copy of the game you so wanted, but his anxiety went through the roof when he thought that he had to confront the girl.

Luckily for him, the girl spoke up first; "This is the game MC wants, right? Here." she offered the game towards Leviathan with a small smile.

It took a moment for Leviathan to compute what the girl had said even though his hands reached out for the game automatically, "Wait, how did you know? How do you know MC?" he finally questioned, squinting.

"I'm MC's friend! And they always loved to play games like these.. I was picking it up for them, but then I remembered, well.." the girl trailed off, his smile turning upside down.

"Remembered what?" Leviathan was utterly confused.

"They can't see me anymore," the girl sighed, shoulders slumped, "I'm around them all the time, but they just can't see or hear me. None of you usually can."

"What are you talking about?" Leviathan pressed further, his head swimming with the possibilities. This sounded like straight out of some anime!

"I'm a ghost," the girl sighed with longing in her eyes, "I took my own life, I just couldn't take it anymore. But I felt bad leaving my best friend behind, so.. I kinda got to hang around. I'm with her often, daily, but she just can't sense me.."

"W-W-Wait, you're a ghost?!" Leviathan yelled, not believing his ears, "Then, why can I see you now if we don't normally see you?"

"Perhaps it's because we have a common goal," the girl shrugged, "we both want to make MC happy, right?" she grinned at Leviathan, her smile bright like sunrise.

They both fell silent for a moment after that, Leviathan trying to catch up with all the sudden infromation that had been dumped onto him, your friend trying to find a way to convay her feelings and thoughts in an effecive way before Levi leaves.

"Hey, Leviathan.. Can I ask you for a small favor?" your friend asked, her voice small. Leviathan turned his gaze at her again.

"What do you want?" he asked, unsure.

"Can you tell MC... That it's not their fault I did what I did. I know they tried their all to help me... And I'm grateful for their friendship. Tell them that I'm always watching out for them and that I feel better now than before. That I'm okay. That's all." the girl laughed, tears in her eyes as she looked at Leviathan with hope. Those eyes had seen so much despair in their lives.. Yet now, they were shining with hope.

Leviathan was silent for a moment before nodding, "I know how much friends mean.. I mean, MC is like Henry to me- I guess you don't know about TSL, but calling someone your Henry is like calling them your soulmate in a way! I guess MC was kinda like Henry to you too, right? So of course I'll keep this promise! I swear on my love of anime!" he rambled, unable to stop himself from talking until he heard the girl giggle.

"I'm glad," she kept giggling, "I was about to tell you that if you ever break MC's heart, I'll haunt you but- I don't think I have to worry about that!"

Leviathan didn't know whether to feel offended or complimented by that comment.

"Well.. I gotta go. I feel tired.. But I'll be around. I'll always be around, okay?" the girl smiled before slowly fading away..

Leviathan stood there for a moment, head reeling, before taking the game and walking up to the counters to pay for it. He was already thinking how to bring up this meeting with you without making you feel weird or overly upset.

You and Satan had found abandoned young kittens from the side of the road one day while walking home from school.

Obviously you couldn't leave them to fend to themselves so Satan wrapped them up in his jacket and you two carried them back to his room in secret. You knew Lucifer wouldn't let you keep the kittens had he learnt about their existance.

After that day you started to raise the kittens together

You had started to call Satan the kittens' daddy, because it was both cute and funny. Satan didn't find it all to funny, but couldn't complain when he saw the look on your face when you called him by that name.

One day you had asked him, "Does it bother you that I call you their dad? You know, with the whole business with you and Lucifer and all.." you looked into Satan's eyes seriously.

"Not really, at least not anymore," Satan shrugged nonchalantly, "but don't call Lucifer my dad." he sighed, shaking his head.

"Oh, yeah! Sorry, my bad!" you chuckled apologetically but fell quiet soon afterwards. Satan started to realize there might have been something more behind your question.

"I'm sorry if I'm disrespecting your privacy but.. I don't remember you talking about your father before. What is he like?" Satan inquired curiously yet carefully.

"My dad.." you trailed off, a gentle smile appearing on your lips, "he was a funny guy. He never missed a school event. He was very protective of me." you laughed at the memory but fell silent and serious again right afterward.

"You said 'was'.. Do you mean he's-" Satan began but you cut him off.

"Yes. My dad is dead. He succumbed to cancer five years ago." you sighed and Satan saw tears forming in your eyes.

Satan took your hand into his and soothingly massaged your palms, telling you to take deep breaths.

After you had calmed down and fallen asleep in Satan's bed, he decided to find out more about your father.

So what's a better idea than some good old fashioned ✨ necromancy ✨ ?

He literally summoned your father with a purpose. He just wanted to meet the man.

He just watched as your father's spirit emerged from the ground, eyes closed, with a knowing smile on his face.

"Hello. You're MC's father, I presume?" Satan greeted the man, eyeing him with curiousity. You had similar smiles.

The man opened his eyes with a calm demeanor, "Yes, you got the right person. Why have you summoned me?" he asked Satan.

"I just wanted to meet my father-in-law. I got curious after hearing MC talk about you." Satan admitted, his keen eyes studying the man in front of him, noticing every similar trait you might have in common.

"We were always close, yes. My passing was hard on them," the man nodded with a solemn expression, "How has my baby been?"

Satan tells about what you've been up to; getting chosen for the exchange programs and all of your fun adventures, albeit leaving out the parts where you got almost killed like.. Ten different times.

Your father listened with a content smile on his lips, not interrupting Satan even once.

"Satan.." your father spoke up after Satan had finished talking, "I think you should write their story down. Write everything down exactly like it happened so that when it's MC's time.. You still have something left of them. You'll always have a piece of them by that." he smiled gently.

Satan froze, deep in thought; he knew human lives were not as long as demon lives and he would most likely outlive you, but he hadn't wanted to think about it all that much. Thinking of your passing was way too painful for him.

But the man's words were correct, too. There was one thing scarier than losing you and that was to forget about you; your face, your voice, your name, your story. And if anyone should write your story down, it should be him, right?

Maybe that book could even be used as some sort of grimoire to summon your soul if all other ways to keep you with them would fail..

"Do you have anything you'd like to say to MC? I can write it down." Satan requested and after a brief silence, the man nodded. Satan took out some paper and a pen.

"MC, I'm very proud of how far you've come. You've found your own way in the world even when I haven't been by your side physically. You'll always be my baby, and I'm forever thankful for the day you entered the world. Your dad loves you. Always." the man spoke with sincerity, his eyes slightly tearing up.

Satan wrote every single word down diligently, wondering what it felt like to have such a good relationship with your father.

He felt kinda envious of you in a way. Obviously he felt bad that you had lost someone so close to you but the jealousy stemmed from his strained relationship with Lucifer.

However, he still sealed the paper in an envelope and vowed to give it to you when the time was right.

After that Satan let your father go, stopping the communication. Necromancy is not something he had done often so he felt strained and tired.

He hid the letter in a safe keeping before clambering into his bed, pulling your sleeping body close, cuddling against you, taking in your scent with a peaceful smile.

Asmodeus had decided to take you on a grand, romantic date, pampering you and being as touchy with you as he possibly could in a public place.

Honestly, the date was going perfectly in Asmodeus' mind. He felt so good and solid in his position that he failed to notice that you seemed to be a bit... Off.

You had to bring it up yourself, "Asmo.. Can I confide in you for a second?" you mumbled, your voice slightly wobbly.

"Of course, doll! What is it?" Asmodeus questioned, realizing the tone in your voice to be serious. He wanted to wipe that frown off of your face and see you smile again.

"Today is a.. Difficult day for me.." you trailed off, deep in your thoughts. Asmodeus wrapped an arm around your shoulder, holding you close.

"How come?" Asmodeus inquired with a low voice.

"Today, two years ago.. My partner passed away." you finally told him and Asmodeus could just feel his heart sinking. So many pieces started to click in his head; why you kept your distance to Asmodeus when you first arrived to Devildom, why you were hesitant to date him at first, why have you been slow to give him physical intimacy.. It all made sense now.

"I'm so sorry, love.." Asmodeus sighed and planted a kiss on top of your head, "Do you want to talk about it?"

"They.. were beaten up so bad in a fight.. That they went into a coma and never woke up.. They just slipped away.." you explained as tears start to stream down your face. Asmodeus just held your hand over the table, leaning in to wipe away your tears, but they just kept coming, "I'm sorry.. I need to go use the bathroom.." you excused yourself, not wanting to embarrass you or him further.

Not long after you left, someone approached Asmodeus' table, sitting down without even asking for a permission.

"Sorry, this table is taken. I'm just waiting for my darling to come back from the bathroom!" Asmodeus quickly exclaimed but the person just kept staring at him with a serious expression, silent.

"Did you hear me? You can't keep sitting there.." Asmodeus sighed, not used to being ignored like that.

"You love MC, right?" the person asked suddenly, leaving Asmo speechless, "You're not just playing with their heart, right?"

"Of course I love MC! They're the most wonderful being I've laid my eyes on, besides me of corse~" Asmo hummed, quickly pulling himself together.

"I know guys like you.." the person groaned, closing their eyes in annoyance, "you're a playboy I've ever seen one."

"Moi? A playboy? Well, maybe I was in the past, but I really do love MC!" Asmo pouted, crossing his arms.

"That's what they all say," the person shook their head, opening hus eyes and staring down Asmodeus, "look, if you ever hurt my MC or break their heart, I'll haunt you till the verge of insanity." they spoke coldly.

Asmodeus thought back on their words, "Okay, I've got like, three questions. First, how are they YOUR MC? They're mine. Second off, how do you know MC? Are you a stalker or something? Third.. Haunt? Are you telling me you're a ghost or something?" Asmodeus questioned, a bit taken aback.

"Listen, pretty boy-" the person started but Asmo cut them short.

"You think I'm pretty? Well of course you do! Who wouldn't?" Asmo winked, causing the ghost to roll their eyes.

"I loved MC first, got it? Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I stopped loving them. I'll always love them. But.. They deserve to move on. They deserve to be loved by others.. So that's why I'm letting you have them, even if I'm questioning their choice in men.." the spirit spoke, finally dropping that threatening act.

"Oh.. Oh? Oh!" realization dawned on Asmodeus' face, "You were MC's lover, the one they told me about!" Asmodeus exclaimed, many emotions running through him at the moment.

"They still talk about me, huh?" your ex-lover chuckled sadly.

Asmodeus almost told him that you had brought them up just now for the first time, but bit his tongue, keeping the secret safe with him. Even if you hadn't told him before didn't mean you never thought about them, right?

"Today's the anniversary of your death, right? Is that why you're here?" Asmodeus deflected the question with a question of his own.

"Yeah, today's the day, alright," they sighed bitterly, "And technically, yes? I don't want to get in the way too much.. Dead should stay dead.. But I still like to take a look at how they're doing on important days like these.. Our anniversaries, their birthday, my birthday, my death day.." they explained.

"Hm, sounds like reasonable times to pay a visit to your lover~" Asmodeus mused carefreely, "Are you here to give them a little gift, hm?" he questioned with a smile.

"Actually..." the person shuffeled around before taking something out of his pocket, "I do.." they showed it off to Asmodeus; it was a music box. Your dead lover opened it and it played a music that sounded slightly familiar to Asmodeus.. And instead of a ballerina, there was a couple holding hands spinning around together.

Asmodeus looked at the gift, judging it silently, "That's.. Cute? I guess? But wouldn't it be better to buy them something more.. Extravagant?" he asked, confused.

Your lover shook their head, "No. This is more sentimental.. I bought a music box similar to this to MC on our six months anniversary. It actually plays a song that played when we first met, too." they explained with a soft smile on their face, sweet longing and pining in their eyes that Asmodeus had seen many times before..

"Oh.." Asmodeus nodded, realizing how sentimental this gift might be to you.

"I'm sorry if I seemed a bit hostile before," the ghost sighed, "At first I wanted to hate you. You got to love MC when it should have still been me.. But now that I think about it more.. I'm just glad they have been able to love and be loved again in return, that they've been able to take that step to fall in love and move on. I just want them to be happy, you know?"

Asmodeus just nodded, eyes glued onto the music box, "Me too. I sometimes fear my sin gets in between us but.. I would do anything for my gorgeous MC." he looked back up at the ghost sitting in front of him, grinning charmingly.

"Can you give this present to MC? You don't have to say a word about me, I just.. Want them to have this. Would you do that for me?" they asked with pleading eyes, handing Asmodeus the music box.

Asmodeus took the frail box into his hands, inspecting it closely yet delicately, "Yes." he simply replied, placing the music box carefully into his coat pocket.

"Thank you.." He heard a voice say as he did so.

When he looked up again, your deceased lover was gone and he saw you returning from the bathroom with a smile on your face, seemingly much more chipper than earlier.

Asmodeus stood up, pecked your cheek affectionately and lead you back to your seat, holding you by your waistline.

Seeing you smile again, he didn't want to give the music box to you quite yet. It'd likely cause you to weep again. But in his mind he swore he'd give it to you once you two go back home.

You were visiting in the human world, just having fun and visiting the places you used to love as a child.

You told Beelzebub so many fun stories of your childhood, all the adventures and trips you had.

You even opened up about some difficult things, feeling like it was safe to do so with him.

Beelzebub loved to hear all the stories you had told him, whether fun or sad. He loved his family and he loved hearing you talk about your family too.

You were at an amusement park that you used to love as a child, just having a good time when you needed to go use the restroom.

Beelzebub went to the food court, buying himself tons of fast food and candy while waiting for you, saving some of your favorites for you.

He was just spacing off when he suddenly felt something small tug the fabric of his pants.

He looked down and saw a small girl, no older than 6, clutching onto his pants and looking up at him with her big eyes.

The girl looked a lot like he had imagined you to look like as a kid.. She had the same eye color.. The same hair color.. What a fun coincidence.

Beelzebub smiled down at the girl, trying to appear more approacable than usually, "Well hello there, little girl. Do you need my help?" he asked the girl.

The girl shook her head, pouting, "Up!" she requested, stretching her arms towards Beelzebub.

Beel looked around to see if he could spot the little girl's parents in the crowd looking for her but didn't see anyone. Then he just shrugged and lifted the girl up, seating her on his knee.

The girl kept her eyes on Beelzebub, her expression stern, "So you're the man my sibling loves?"

Beelzebub nearly choked on his coke, "Your sibling? Who is your sibling?" he asked, confused. He swore he had never seen this girl before.

"How many people have you gotten under your spell, you demon?" the girl shrieked, horrified, "My sibling's name is MC! Don't you forget that!"

Beelzebub's confusion turned into realization as he smiled widely, hearing from your sister that you loved him felt nice, "Oh! I'm sorry, I just didn't know MC had a little sister." he apologized sincerely.

"Twin!" the girl exclaimed proudly, "They are my twin sibling. Just like you have a twin brother. Samesies!" she giggled, her mood suddenly getting better.

"But you're so little and MC is.. Well, older and taller than that at least.." Beelzebub's confusion was back, stronger than ever.

"Yeah! That's because I couldn't stay for long before I was needed elsewhere and a big hand picked me up. MC stayed with ma and pa, because ma and pa needed them more." the girl explained with an innocent smile.

"Who took you? Where?" Beelzebub asked with furrowen brows. Was this girl kidnapped?

"Angels! They knew my body was growing weak and tired so they carried me to a place where I didn't have to feel pain and sadness anymore." she exclaimed with a wide smile.

"You went to Celestial Realm? What are you doing here then?" Beelzebub continued to bombard the little girl with his questions.

"I came to see how my twin is doing! You if anyone should know how deep the bond of a twin can go." the little girl hummed.

"Do you get to visit the human world often?" Beel just made small talk with the girl, waiting for MC's return.

"Not really," the girl sighed, "I wish I could come more often, especially now that MC's no longer home. I know it's all hard on ma and pa.."

"I'm sure your mom and dad would be happy to know their little girl is an angel." Beelzebub smiled and ruffled the little girl's hair affectionately. The girl's face brightened right up.

"Look! You should win this for MC!" she suddenly exclaimed and started to pull Beelzebub towards one of those carnival games, "Our pa won us a unicorn just like this a loooong time ago! I loooooove unicorns!" she giggled while pointing at a huge unicorn plushie. Beel glanced and the girl's smiling face and knew he couldn't say no to that.

Luckily for Beel, the game was one of those high strikers, so he had an adventage thanks to his physique and demonic strength.

He broke the high striker.. Oh well, he still got the huge unicorn plushie.

"Yaaay! Unicorn!" the girl screamed while hugging the plushie that was bigger than her. She buried her face into its white fur. She really did look like an angel.

Beelzebub just looked at the little girl, smiling. He kinda wondered what it would be like to have a daughter of his own..

Before long, the girl handed the unicorn plushie back to Beel with a smile, "I can't take this to where I'm going. I think you should give it to MC. I'm sure they're going to love that."

Beelzebub took the unicorn plushie with a blank expression, "Are you sure? You seemed to really love this thou-" he couldn't even finish his sentence when he heard a voice behind him calling for him.

"Beel! There you are! I was looking for you!" You yelled as you ran up to Beel before your eyes focused onto the plushie he was holding.

"This unicorn...!" you gasped, holding yours hands out for it, "It reminds me of the one my dad once won for me when I was a little child.."

Beelzebub handed you the unicorn plushie, "Yeah, your twin sister said I should win it for you." he chuckled.

Your face turned into one of sorrow, "My twin sister?" you questioned, staring straight at the unicorn you were holding.

"Yeah, she's right here, look-" Beelzebub turned around to point at the little girl, but she had vanished, "...Where did she walk off to?" he mumbled with a concerned tone.

"Beel, my twin.. She's gone. She died from heart disease when she was six." you explained with a depressed tone, hugging the unicorn close to your body, "She loved unicorns. She always wanted mother to read her about them. And when she was at the hospital.. She always carried that unicorn plushie of hers everywhere.." you smiled sadly against the unicorn plushie, a familiar, comforting smell lingering.

"...Oh.." Beelzebub finally realized and shuffled his feet awkwardly. For a moment everything was silent, but not before long you felt Beelzebub's strong arms enveloping you into a tight hug.

"I'm so sorry for your loss, MC.. I can't imagine life without Belphie, so hearing that you've lost your twin.. It makes my heart break. Losing Lilith was hard enough.. But a life without Belphie would be even darker and gloomier.." Beelzebub sighed as he held you close to his body, "You're so strong, MC. Just the fact that you are smiling after losing your twin is just amazing.."

Belphegor was asleep. Not very surprising, seeing that he's the avatar of sloth and basically slept over half the day away on a daily basis.

Belphegor was used to all kinds of dreams; good dreams, daydreams, nightmares, lucid dreams.. Most of his dreams were lucid anyway as he had a good control over himself and his environment in his dreams.

But this dream he was having right now felt a bit.. Different.

It felt so realistic; like he had been transported to another place and he was actually awake.

Belphegor found himself in a living room of some house; he saw the lace curtains, the floral print sofa cushions, the tea plates along the walls.. The air smelled sweet.

It all felt so real..

Then Belphegor spotted it; an old woman sitting on an armchair, sipping some tea with a peaceful look on her face.

The woman seemed inviting and somehow... Familiar.

Then the old woman opened her eyes, smiling up at Belphegor, "Come on in, I have been waiting for your arrival, young man." she spoke, her voice unwavering.

Belphegor felt conflicted; he still didn't particularly love humans, but something about this felt important.

So with apprehensive steps, Belphegor walked closer and sat down on a sofa. There was a bowl of candy on the table and an assortment of cookies and biscuits were lined up on a small silver tray that had already lost its gleam.

"Why did you call for me?" Belphegor questioned with raised eyebrows, "Who are you?"

The woman took another sip of her tea, "I am MC's grandmother. I just wanted to meet my grandchild's friend, that's all."

That word, friend, stung a bit. Are you two just friends and how would this old woman know about any of that?

"So you're MC's grandmother, huh?" Belphie thought out loud, taking a long look at the woman. She did bear some resemblance to MC, "How did you manage to make it into my dreams? That's no simple task for a human with no magical qualities."

"It might be difficult for any living being, but the story is much different for the deceased, dear." the grandmother laughed dryly, taking a cookie and taking a bite out of it.

"You're dead?" Belphie questioned with a surprised tone and the old lady just nodded, "How did you die?" he continued.

"Oh, my years just caught up to me and I was ready to cross the stream. Might not be familiar to your kind, but we humans know when it's our time to go." a small smile was tugging at her lips when she spoke.

'My kind, huh?' Belphegor thought to himself, 'she must know that I am a demon.. I was expecting a lot colder reaction from MC's family if they knew who their child was seeing..'

"So.. You're okay with me being.. What I am?" Belphegor asked before he could stop himself, "After all that I did?" He could feel guilt starting to eat him up inside again, thinking all the sins he had commited towards you.

The old lady's smile faltered for a second. She took a deep breath before speaking up, "I've always told my darling MC that she can be what they are around me and that they can love whoever they love. I don't see any fault in loving someone. I'm just glad they're being loved and looked after by someone.. And what comes to you.. Well, you've made many mistakes and crossed many lines. If I was living and heard about what you've done, I'd probably tell MC to run as fast as they can, but.. We dead don't get to make those choices anymore. And the more I've thought about it.. The more I've realized that your actions sprung from a place of pain and agony. It doesn't excuse your actions, but sheds some light to what went through your head. I may never fully understand, but I accept that it happened, that my grandchild forgave you and that you mean so much to them."

Belphegor could feel a strange sensation in his throat as he listened to the old woman speak. And for a moment, he felt like a little child again, running around in the dark, stumbling, hanging onto everything he could get a hold of and searching for a way out in a panic.

He just wanted to lay down in a fetal position while hugging a comfrot blanket, sucking his thumb until he fell asleep and slept away this pain in his chest.

"What did I do to deserve forgiveness?" Belphegor asked, his face blank. He couldn't understand.

"Nothing. Forgiveness doesn't usually come with a condition. That's why only some people are capable of such an act of selflessness." the grandmother smiled before offering candy to Belphegor. He took the candy with a small nod of his head. It almost felt like he was actually tasting it.. How he wished he could've brought some to Beelzebub.

"I told you earlier that I just wanted to see my grandchild's friend, but that was a lie.. There's something I wish you to do if that is not too much to ask for?" she suddenly said and Belphegor turned his expectant eyes to her.

"What is it?" Belphegor asked, not quite sure if he was capable enough to fulfill the old woman's wishes.

"They have a tendency to burden themselves with everyone else's problems.. They're just selfless and caring like that. Will you please look after them? Just make sure they're not overdoing it. I know they're big now, but.. They're still my baby, even if I'm not around." MC's grandmother smiled sadly, her eyes glued to her mostly empty tea cup.

"Of couse. I'll always take care of them. Even if it just means forcing them to take a nap or helping them with their homework, I'll always do it if it's for them." Belphegor swore, hand on his heart.

"We seem to have an understading. Thank you," the old lady's smile brightened up immediately before her eyes softened and her voice grew more quiet, "Belphegor, I think it's your time to wake up."

"Do I have to leave? Will you ever visit me again?" Belphegor questioned as he could feel his head growing heavier and the world around him dimming.

"Yes. You have a responsibility to fulfill, yes?" the woman laughed, "You know where to find me, son." she spoke as the world fell dark.

When Belphegor opened his eyes again, he found a pile of rather familiar candies next to his pillow.. He made a mental note to share those with both Beelzebub and MC.

A/N: I'm someone who has lost a lot of loved ones; I've been to over twenty funerals; so writing these was both hard and catharctic.

[homosexuhauls]

15 JUNE, 2021 by Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie

IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS

PART ONE

When you are a public figure, people will write and say false things about you. It comes with the territory. Many of those things you brush aside. Many you ignore. The people close to you advise you that silence is best. And it often is. Sometimes, though, silence makes a lie begin to take on the shimmer of truth.

In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it, as Jonathan Swift wrote.

Take the case of a young woman who attended my Lagos writing workshop some years ago; she stood out because she was bright and interested in feminism.

After the workshop, I welcomed her into my life. I very rarely do this, because my past experiences with young Nigerians left me wary of people who are calculating and insincere and want to use me only as an opportunity. But she was a Bright Young Nigerian Feminist and I thought that was worth making an exception.

She spent time in my Lagos home. We had long conversations. I was support-giver, counsellor, comforter.

Then I gave an interview in March 2017 in which I said that a trans woman is a trans woman, (the larger point of which was to say that we should be able to acknowledge difference while being fully inclusive, that in fact the whole premise of inclusiveness is difference.)

I was told she went on social media and insulted me.

This woman knows me enough to know that I fully support the rights of trans people and all marginalized people. That I have always been fiercely supportive of difference, in general. And that I am a person who reads and thinks and forms my opinions in a carefully considered way.

Of course she could very well have had concerns with the interview. That is fair enough. But I had a personal relationship with her. She could have emailed or called or texted me. Instead she went on social media to put on a public performance.

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it. But I mostly held myself responsible. My spirit had been slightly stalled, from the beginning, by her. My first sense of unease with her came when she posted a photo taken in my house, at a time when I did not want any photos of my personal life on social media. I asked that she take it down. The second case of unease was her publicizing something I had told her in confidence about another member of the workshop. The most upsetting was when she, without telling me, used my name to apply for an American visa. Above all else was my lingering suspicion that she was a person who chose as friends only those from whom she could benefit. But she was a Bright Young Nigerian Feminist and I allowed that sentiment to over-ride my unease.

After she publicly insulted me, it was clear to me that this kind of noxious person had no business in my life, ever again.

A few months later, she sent this affected, self-regarding email which I ignored.

Friday September 15 2017 at 4.35 AM

Dearest Chimamanda,

Happy birthday. I mean this with all my heart, even though I know I have fallen (removed myself?) from your grace. It would be impossible for me to stop loving you; long before you gave me the possibility of being your friend you were the embodiment of my deepest hopes, and that will never change.

I think of you often, still – stating the obvious. I grieve the loss of our friendship; it is a complicated sadness. I’m sorry that I caused you pain, or to feel like you can no longer trust me. There’s so much that I wish could be said.

I pray this birthday is the happiest one yet. I wish you rest and quiet and abiding stability, and of course more of the kind of success that means the most to you.

I hope mothering X is everything you hoped and prayed for and more.

Have a wonderful day today.

Love always.

About a year later, she sent this email, which I also ignored.

Thursday November 29 2018 at 8.42 AM

Dear Chimamanda,

I realise this is long overdue and vastly insufficient, but I’m really sorry. I’ve spent so much time going back and forth in my head and my email drafts; wondering whether to write you, how to write you, what to say, all kinds of things. But in the end, this is the thing I realise I need to say.

I’m sorry I disappointed and hurt you by saying things publicly that were sharply critical, unkind and even disrespectful, especially in light of all the backlash and criticism you experience from people who don’t know you. I could have acted with more consideration towards you. I should have, especially given the privilege of intimacy that you had offered me. There are many reasons why I chose to behave the way I did, but none of them is an excuse. And I clearly realise now, after many, many months of needless sadness and angst and hurt and actual confusion, that I did not treat you as a friend would—certainly not as someone would to whom you had offered unprecedented access to yourself and your life.

You’ve meant the world to me since I was barely a teenager. It’s been very hard navigating the emotional fallout of the past several months, knowing you were displeased with me but truly not quite understanding why, then deciding I didn’t care, then realising that would never be true. I’ve always cared. But I was too mixed up about the situation to be able to make sense of it, or properly see past my own justifications. I’m sorry it took me so long to grasp how I let you down.

I realise that I don’t have room to ask anything of you, but I would be grateful for a chance to say this in person. Still, even if I never get that, I really hope you believe me.

Congratulations on restarting the workshop, and on all the other amazing successes of the past several months. I think of you often; it would be impossible not to. You look so happy in your pictures. I really hope you are well.

All my love,

I hoped never to hear from her again. But she has recently gone on social media to write about how she “refused to kiss my ring,” as if I demanded some kind of obeisance from her. She also suggests that there is some dark, shadowy ‘more’ to tell that she won’t tell, with an undertone of “if only you knew the whole story.”

It is a manipulative way of lying. By suggesting there is ‘more’ when you know very well that there isn’t, you do sufficient reputational damage while also being able to plead deniability. Innuendo without fact is immoral.

No, there isn’t more to the story. It is a simple story – you got close to a famous person, you publicly insulted the famous person to aggrandize yourself, the famous person cut you off, you sent emails and texts that were ignored, and you then decided to go on social media to peddle falsehoods. It is obscene to tell the world that you refused to kiss a ring when in fact there isn’t any ring at all.

I cannot make much of the hostility of strangers who do not know me – fame taints our view of the humanity of famous people. But the truth is that the famous person remains irretrievably human. Fame does not inoculate the famous person from disappointment and depression, fame does not make you any less angered or hurt by the duplicitous nature of people. To be famous is to be assumed to have power, which is true, but in the analysis of fame, people often ignore the vulnerability that comes with fame, and they are unable to see how others who have nothing to lose can lie and connive in order to take advantage of that fame, while not giving a single thought to the feelings and humanity of the famous person.

And when you personally know a famous person, when you have experienced their humanity, when you have benefited from their kindness, and yet you are unable to extend to them the basic grace and respect that even a casual acquaintanceship deserves, then it says something fundamental about you.

And in a deluded way, you will convince yourself that your hypocritical, self-regarding, compassion-free behavior is in fact principled feminism. It isn’t. You will wrap your mediocre malice in the false gauziness of ideological purity. But it’s still malice. You will tell yourself that being able to parrot the latest American Feminist orthodoxy justifies your hacking at the spirit of a person who had shown you only kindness. You can call your opportunism by any name, but it doesn’t make it any less of the ugly opportunism that it is.

PART TWO

When I first read this person’s work, which was their application to my writing workshop, I thought the sentences were well-done. I accepted this person. At the workshop, I thought they could have been more respectful of the other participants, perhaps not kept typing dismissively as others’ stories were discussed, with an air of being among people below their level. After the workshop, I decided to select the best stories, edit them, pay the writers a fee, and publish them in an e-magazine. The first story I chose was this person’s. I wrote a glowing introduction, which the story truly deserved.

They sent this email.

Fri, Aug 7, 2015, 8:20 AM

Thank you so much for that introduction. It means so much to me and I’m going to keep reading it to get through the rest of my stay at Syracuse. I sent it to my mother and she got nervous about the piece because you said ‘it disturbs’, said she’s not sure how she’s going to feel when she reads it. But she’s also one of those ‘let’s leave the past in the past’ people. My sister approved, which meant a lot because our childhoods were each other’s.

All that to say, I’m so grateful you gave me the space to write the short version of this piece, the encouragement to write the longer piece, and now, a platform for it. I definitely have plans to write more about Aba.

Thank you, with all my heart.

PS- I wanted to sign off gratefully + gracefully in Igbo but I said let me not fall my own hand 🙂

About a year later, they sent another email to let me know that their novel would be published.

Wed, Jun 8, 2016, 8:20 AM

Greetings!

I hope all’s been well with you this past year. Belated congratulations on the baby’s arrival, I hope she’s being a delight (I’m sure she is), and on the Johns Hopkins honors.

I was thinking about how this time last year, I’d just received the email from you about Farafina and I wanted to reach out with a quick update. I’ve just accepted an offer for the novel I excerpted as my application and it feels like the workshop was a catalyst for the events that’ve led me here. So, thank you, for the workshop and your words and the Olisa TV series and listening to me babble on about my story at the hotel. I deeply appreciate all of it and you.

All my best,

Before the novel was published, I spoke of it to some people, to help it get attention. I had not been able to finish reading it. I found the writing beautiful, but the story false-hearted and burdened by bathos. When I spoke of the novel, however, it was the former sentiment that I expressed, never the latter.

After I gave the March 2017 interview in which I said that a trans woman is a trans woman, I was told that this person had insulted me on social media, calling me, among other things, a murderer. I was deeply upset, because while I did not really know them personally, I felt they knew what I stood for and that I fully supported the rights of trans people, and that I do not wish anybody dead.

Still, I took no action. I ignored the public insult.

When this person’s publishers sent me an early copy of their novel, I was surprised to see that my name was included in their cover biography. I had never seen that done in a book before. I didn’t like that I had not been asked for permission to use my name, but most of all I thought – why would a person who thinks I’m a murderer want my name so prominently displayed in their biography?

Then I learned that, because my name was in the cover biography, a journalist had called them my “protegee” and they then threw a Twitter tantrum about it, calling it clickbait, viciously disavowing having received any help from me.

I knew this person had called me a murderer, I knew they were actively campaigning to “cancel” me and tweeting about how I should no longer be invited to speak at events. But this I felt I could not ignore.

I sent an email to my representative:

From: Chimamanda Adichie

Date: Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 2:06 PM

I’m writing about X

She attended my Lagos workshop two years ago and I selected hers as one of a few pieces I published after the workshop.

Apparently I was referred to as her ‘mentor’ and/or she was referred to as my ‘protege,’ in some articles, which led to her tweeting about it. Her tweets were forwarded to me by friends. In them, she reacted quite viscerally to my being called her ‘mentor’ and her being my ‘protege.’ To be fair, she is not technically my ‘protege,’ and it is perfectly fine that she feels this way, but her ungracious tone and the ugliness of the energy spent on her tweets surprised me.

I recently received her book and noticed that my name was included in her official book bio. I was stunned. Surely if she is so strongly averse to my being considered a person who has been significant in her career, (which is my understanding of the loose use of protege/mentor) then it is unseemly to make the choice to include my name in her bio. I found it unusual, as I don’t think I’ve seen it done before in a book bio, but I also now find it unacceptably cynical.

It is only reasonable for a person who sees my name as it is used in her bio — ‘her work has been selected and edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’ — to assume some sort of mentor/protege relationship.

To publicly disavow this with a tone bordering on hostility and at the same time so baldly use my name to sell her book is utterly unacceptable to me.

I’d like you to please reach out to her publishers and ask that my name be removed from her official book bio. I refuse to be used in this way.

After contacting her publishers, my representative wrote:

They have asked whether your preference would be to remove the Acknowledgment to you in the back of the book also, in future reprints.

I replied:

I don’t think that is my decision to take, and so will not answer either way, although it would be ideal if she herself made the decision to do so.

On the subject of how to go about it, I was absolutely determined not to be used by this person, but I was also sensitive to the costs the publisher might incur, as this was not in any way the publisher’s fault. Instead of pulping the already printed copies, I asked that the jackets be stripped and rebound. To my representative I wrote:

I’m completely determined that I not be used in this opportunistic and hypocritical way. But I want to make sure to proceed reasonably.

I was assured that my name would be removed and I moved on.

But from time to time, I would be informed of yet another social media post in which this person had attacked me.

This person has created a space in which social media followers have – and this I find unforgiveable – trivialized my parents’ death, claiming that the sudden and devastating loss of my parents within months of each other during this pandemic, was ‘punishment’ for my ‘transphobia.’

This person has asked followers to pick up machetes and attack me.

This person began a narrative that I had sabotaged their career, a narrative that has been picked up and repeated by others.

The normal response would be to ignore it all, because this person is seeking attention and publicity to benefit themselves. Claiming that I have sabotaged their career is a lie and this person knows that it is a lie. But if something is repeated often enough, in this age in which people do not need proof or verification to run with a story, especially a story that has outrage potential, then it can easily begin to seem true.

My addressing this lie will indeed get this person some attention – may they bask in it.

Here is the truth: I was very supportive of this writer. I didn’t have to be. I wasn’t asked to be. I supported this writer because I believe we need a diverse range of African stories.

Sabotaging a young writer’s career is just not my style; I would get no benefit or satisfaction from it. Asking that my name be removed from your biography is not sabotaging your career. It is about protecting my boundaries of what I consider acceptable in civil human behavior.

You publicly call me a murderer AND still feel entitled to benefit from my name?

You use my name (without my permission) to sell your book AND then throw an ugly tantrum when someone makes a reference to it?

What kind of monstrous entitlement, what kind of perverse self-absorption, what utter lack of self-awareness, what unheeding heartlessness, what frightening immaturity makes a person act this way?

Besides, a person who genuinely believes me to be a murderer cannot possibly want my name on their book cover, unless of course that person is a rank opportunist.

PART THREE

In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.

[kmorales1]

Office Affairs

Pairing: Javier Peña x f!reader

Word Count: 2.2k

Rating: Explicit (Anyone under 18, go away, thanks.)

Warnings: Uh, unprotected sex(this is fiction please wrap it before you tap it), i'm bad at this. One(1) mention of spit(whoops).

A note: Hey, so I wrote this in an hour and (maybe) a half. This entire thing is purely based off my intense yearning for Javi the past few days(more like weeks). Also he's incredibly hard to write for so I hope I was able to capture his character. This is also my first time writing smut, let alone posting it. Be gentle with your critics lmao. It might not be entirely cohesive but I tried really hard but anyway this is what my brain popped out.

Javier Peña is the type of guy to take you home for a quick fuck, cuddle you like he’s in love with you, and then leave an hour later without barely a glance in your direction. You know this, you’d heard the whispers about him in the embassy when you were making your way to the filing room, or to the break room for your afternoon lunch.

And you believed them.

The first night Javier took you home you were 99% sure that you’d get the best fuck of your life out of him and then he’d be gone before you could even ask him to stay the night. And let’s be honest you wanted him to stay the night. To feel him pressed against you, his broad chest against your back, his breath fanning over the back of your neck. God, you yearned for that man. Or maybe just a man, it’d been a while.

You weren’t entirely wrong though, you did get the best fuck of your life out of him, but you also found the Javier that was sprawled in your bed, a lit cigarette between his lips, wasn’t the same man he was in the daylight of the office.

He was quieter, soft spoken, almost open.

The first few times he had stayed for a bit after to lay pressed beside you talking about work and you had even managed to pull a few details about his life back home. A few. But those few details only left you craving more, and who could blame you. He was intoxicating. You hadn’t been expecting it and now that you saw it, you wanted more.

“You know, you’re different like this.”

You had practically whispered the words to him, a little scared you might somehow push him back into the person he was in the light of day. But he only offered you something almost like a smile and leaned forward to press his lips to yours.

“I think, maybe i’m just different with you.”

He didn’t elaborate or say anything more, and you didn’t say anything in response. Cause what could you say? He’d pressed you open into the mattress a few minutes later his head between your thighs. Taking you apart slowly whispering filthy things as he brought you over the edge.

Your heart clenched as he laid his head on your thigh afterwards, his hair an unruly mess.

You wanted him like this all the time.

You weren’t naïve,though. So you didn’t think much of the way he laid beside you, or the things he said to you. He could feed any pretty woman words to make them feel special, and no matter how much you wanted to be different, something told you weren’t.

That became apparent when you started seeing less of Javier and hearing more about his informants and the other women he would bring home some nights. You weren’t mad, nor jealous, but you weren’t exactly fine either.

Coming home from a late night at work you had passed him and who you assumed was one of those said people that were whispered about. She was laughing at something, his arm locked tight around her waist guiding her down the hall. His face didn’t match hers but he certainly didn’t look unhappy, and when you crossed their path trying hurriedly to get into your apartment before seeing something you didn’t want to, he barely spared you a side glance.

Fine.

You stopped giving him the attention he silently would ask for in the daytime. His gaze burning hot on your body as you silently sipped your tea in the corner of the break room. Or the way he would brush your shoulder as he passed your desk. It’s almost laughable how he could seemingly seek your attention out one minute and then act like you didn’t exist the next. You didn’t play into it and things were fine.

Until they weren’t.

“You’re ignoring me, princesa.”

He’s got you cornered in the filing room his broad form practically towering over you. This is the closest you’ve been to him since you’d seen him that night, or the occasional time he would purposeful bump into you in the office.

“Hello Javi,” You barely managed to hold onto the papers in your hands. His close proximity to you slightly knocking you off center. You weren’t entirely lying when you said things were fine, but him being so close and the smell of him nearly overpowering was reminding you of the parts that were exactly not fine.

“I’m sorry i’ve been so busy.”

That’s a lie. You know it’s a lie, he knows it’s a lie. Things had been incredibly slow the past couple of weeks. Pablo in hiding from a recent raid that hit a little too close to home.

“I think we both know that’s a lie,”

And oh, is his voice a little breathier.

You curse yourself quietly, because you’re supposed to be putting this behind you. This man only sought you out when he felt like it when he was bored. But the way he’s pressed so close to you, if you just leaned forward a tiny bit. His eyes are skimming over your face, like he’s taking in the changes he’s missed in the past few weeks he hasn’t seen you.

There’s a tilt of his head and a small push forward and his lips are a near inch away from yours.

“Don’t you miss me, baby?”

Your knees nearly buckle.

He called you that exactly one time before. A rough raid with Carrillo had him stumbling into your apartment at nearly 1 am, luckily you had just gotten home from work and were still awake. His shirt was damp with sweat, the color of it slightly darker than the original pink, a stray mark of blood on his face- you later found out wasn’t his. He’d been needy, the way he had pressed you into the counter in your kitchen, fucked you within an inch of your life it felt like. Growling filthy things into your ear, praising you, before pulling you roughly to the floor(his back didn’t forgive him for days after that) and sliding you onto him. You’d rode him hard and fast nearly sobbing your release. He’d came up to cradle you to him. Whispering baby and your name reverently into your hair. You didn’t talk about it, what had made him so frantic. You had to practically peel yourself away from him and when you did it had broken the spell. He was up, fixing his jeans, kissing your forehead and then he was gone out the door before you could even get words out.

Javier whispering your name brings you back to the present, his eyes are locked on your lips and fuck-

Your fingers are dropping the papers and urgently sliding up his back to curl in his hair, pulling him the last bit of distance to bring his mouth to yours.

You’ll tell him later that you don’t forgive him for that debacle with the woman he brought home with him and you’ll also tell him the other things that have been pent up for the past almost month. And if he doesn’t like it oh well, but god right now all you want is to be fucked by this infuriating man.

“Javi-“

Your plea is broken as his tongue swipes the inside of your mouth his hands holding firmly to your hips.

“Javi please”

He shushes you, his leg coming to press between your thighs, right against where you want him the most and you nearly keen at the relief it gives. His thigh flexes and applies just the pressure to send your hips sliding forward.

“Quiet, princesa you don’t want anyone to hear,”

Oh fuck. You’re at work right now. You’re at work fuck. You’re at work. You remind yourself again.

One more time you’re at work-

But no one really comes back here. (that’s a lie)

His hands are guiding your hips roughly, and you’re practically riding his thigh. The feeling is too much and not enough all at once.

“Anything, Javi please.”

You’re breathless whimper has him growling under his breath as he pushes you deeper into the cabinets. His hands tear your skirt out of the way, pushing your panties aside before dipping his fingers into your center.

“Baby, fuck you’re so wet,”

His fingers leave you momentarily to slide into his mouth. The hum that leaves him is enough to push a wave of slick out of you, and you eagerly grip any part of him you can reach.

“Is this for me? You have missed me,”

The smug look on his face makes you want to roll your eyes, and you would if he wasn’t currently sliding his fingers back into you and curling them just like that-

“Fuck! Javi,”

The hand that is grasping your hips leaves to hurriedly slap a hand over your mouth. His eyes are burning into yours his teeth bared slightly.

“I said quiet, do you want our coworkers seeing how much a slut you are for me?”

He licks a line up the side of your neck before coming to suckle and bite lightly on your ear.

“Youd like it wouldn’t you?”

You’re practically dripping at his words, the squelching noise from his fingers fucking into you roughly is nearly obscene. You’re so close you could cry, if he could just give a little more.

“More,”

It’s a desperate plea for anything and it’s slightly muffled by his hand but he gets the message. His hand drops and you’re caught off guard by him roughly undoing his belt and pushing his pants down enough for his cock to spring free.

You nearly moan at the sight, long and thick with precum gathering at the tip. Fuck it’s been so long you want to taste. But he’s got you shoved back up against the nearest filing cabinet, his hand back over your mouth as he nudges his cock against your clit.

You keen at the slight pressure it gives before you jerk at the feeling of him sliding into you fully his hips flush to yours.

“Fuck, hermosa,” his teeth are clenched tight the cords of his neck strained as he whispers praises into your ear.

"Baby you’re so tight, missed you.”

You don’t even have time to process the last part before he’s almost urgently pulling out to slam back in. You want to worry about the noises that are being made but just as the thought comes in it’s gone. He’s fucking into you hard, his hand still covering your mouth tightly, trying hard to mask the moans that are escaping you. The slight jingle of his belt buckle as he roughly pounds into you shouldn’t be as erotic as it is. His head is pressed to your shoulder and you can feel the air from his mouth as he pants.

You’re so close you can practically feel yourself dripping down your thighs. One of your hands is curled tightly in his hair and the other snakes down your body to rub between your clit. Your breath is coming out harsh from your nose meeting the warm skin of his hand and god the thought of his hand over your mouth as he fucks you is so much you think you might come now.

But then his hand slips away and he’s sliding it in your hair to tilt your head back. Baring his teeth he gives one particularly hard thrust before demanding.

“Open.”

Immediately your mouth snaps open and he spits.

"Fucking swallow it."

You do, quickly before you lift eagerly to meet his mouth, teeth clinking harshly.

“Javi i’m gonna come-“

He’s pulling back, whispering urgently in your ear .

"Do it baby, do it now. Cum for me."

You’re pushing to meet his thrusts hurriedly chasing the orgasm you feel tightening in your stomach.

“I said now,” The harshness in his voice sends you reeling. You keen, a little too loudly to be in your office building, the thread snapping as you tumble over the edge. Your cunt clenching hard around him. Somewhere through the haze you feel Javier bite roughly into your shoulder and his cock jerk inside of you as he cums.

His hands are sliding around you to pull you into him his face meeting your neck as he pants, his cock softening inside of you. There’s a pleasant sounding hum from him as you card your fingers through his hair your nails scratching lazily at his scalp. The room is humid and sticky you suddenly come back to yourself, sinking down from your post orgasm high.

“Javier,”

The change in your voice has him pulling back to look at you before his eyes widen in understanding.

Yes, basking in the after sex glow isn’t the best idea at the moment.

“We can talk after work okay?”

There’s a nod from him before he’s sliding out of you with a hiss and tucking himself back into his jeans. And there’s a lot to talk about, he isn’t off the hook, and you’ve got to think it over because you know you have technically no right to even be upset.

You’re adjusting your skirt when you feel him cup your cheek.

“I really did miss you.”

Its said quietly, almost like it’s a secret.

And momentarily, you forget everything you need to be confused about with him.

"I missed you too."

[jawllines]

Sorry to be annoying but I asked awhile ago and I think tumblr ate my ask but did you ever do tattoo Harry blurb? I love them and I miss them:( I’ve looked through your tags and there isn’t any on there if you have posted one

I CAN POST ONE I WROTE A WHILE AGO RIGHT NOW :D I DONT THINK I POSTED HERE BUT LET ME KNOW HERE YOU GO PET 

i.

“Baby -- baby, c’mon!”

It was rare that Harry ever woke Y/N with more than kisses and cuddles. Maybe an abrupt shoulder shake if the both of them slept through their alarms (and, considering that they are the only ones with the key to open up their own respective stores, they never typically arrived late facing happy employees -- or in Y/N’s case, employee -- Niall, in particular, was always more of a grump in that situation than Riktor even), but even that still managed to be tender, and soft. He always treated her so delicately, as if she were made up of porcelain in the morning and it was imperative to speak in a low, soothing voice with careful touches or she might shatter. And she really didn’t think it was because she was an absolute terror to wake up -- Y/N did quite well, even as early as 5 AM she was still in somewhat of a pleasant mood, certainly nothing to be fearful of -- she thinks he’s just gentle in the morning. He’s gentle all the time, but for some reason or another, he’s extra soft with her then.

They had both had a bit of a busy day, so by the time that they made it back to Y/N’s flat (Harry said he liked it there best because it smelled like her, and -- well, he softens her up and calls her Darling when he wants them to go over there, so it’s hard to say no), both of them were ready for bed. Neither of them could barely keep their eyes open as they scarfed down the burgers they’d picked up on the way home, and once they’d finished and brushed their teeth, they toppled into each other on the mattress. Y/N would reckon they both fell asleep before their heads had even hit the pillow -- she doesn’t even remember crawling beneath the blankets.

Apparently she had though, because now as her brain tunes in with the world around her and she realizes that the distorted voice that had begun to prod her dreams was actually a grumpy, dry throat Harry, she’s cuddling herself closer in the covers. This only makes him grumble at her more, “You’re such a blanket hog,” he whines and Y/N finally blinks her eyes open, being greeted with Harry’s disgruntled, pouted face illuminated by the sunlight beginning to slip through the blinds, “I’ve been trying to unravel it for like ten minutes, but you’re all wrapped up! I’m cold.”

Y/N smiles sleepily at him, not understanding the gravity of the situation entirely as she begins to un-burrito herself from the covers, “G’morning, beautiful,” she murmurs as she does so, finally disentangling from the blankets and while she was a little less warm, Harry was quick to wiggle in beneath them, “Sorry.”

“Don’ be sweet when m’tryin’ to be angry with you,” she puckers her lips at him dramatically, and though he sighs, he leans in and presses their mouths together softly, “Your kisses aren’t g’na sweeten me up, m’still grumpy, blanket hog.”

She can only hum as she cuddles closer to him, “Sorry,” she repeated, this time adding, “Like to swaddle myself like a lil’ baby. Reckon you weren’t holdin’ me well enough last night.”

An offended gasp leaves through his lips soundly, enough that it startles her, but his arms worm around her waist and draw her closer to his body, “Brat,” he grumbled, dipping his nose into her throat, “I held you so well and you just wiggled right out of my arms and took all the covers with you.”

“Like a worm -- I wiggled out like a worm or somethin’,” she tried to sit up but his arms tightened around her, “This worm has to pee though and she’ll soak the bed if she isn’t allowed.”

His arm loosens around her, “This worm sounds like she’s a sleepy sort of delusional that requires about two hours more of rest.”

Y/N stumbles toward the bathroom in her room, “Noooooooo,” she whines, frowning at nobody, not bothering to swing the door shut before she plops on the cold toilet seat to relieve herself, “We’re supposed to go get hot chocolate, no more sleep.”

“Baby, it’s 6 AM and I’ve been up the last 30 minutes freezing my bits off!” He calls back to her and she giggles some, her eyes trying to accommodate to the bright white lights of the bathroom, “Sleep just a bit more and we’ll get the hot chocolate when we wake up next.”

She waits until she flushes and washes her hands to respond to him, and though she knows that she is definitely going to crawl back in bed and fall asleep, she stands at the foot of it with her hands in fists at her hips. He had let his eyes flutter closed by then but she thinks he could feel her eyeballing him, so he looks up past the mountain of blankets now covering him so she could only see his eyes and his nose, “What’re you doing?”

“You’re telling me, you don’t wanna go at 6 AM, three hours before the kiosk even opens to get hot chocolate with me? You must really hate me, don’t you?”

He huffs a sharp breath through his nose which is how he usually laughs in the morning, when he can’t muster up the strength to have a proper giggle, “Absolutely loathe you, baby doll, but could you please come back to bed so I can loathe you in the warmth?”

It takes little persuading -- as she said, she knew she was just going to crawl right back in beside him -- and instead of relying too heavily on the blankets to provide her warmth (like wrapping up half of it around her so she was cocooned entirely. . .this is what she normally does, and she would say that’s probably why Harry almost never has any of the covers in the morning), she relies on him. Picks up his arm so that she can fit herself underneath it and lies her cheek on his chest, “Your pits better not be smelly.”

“I make no promises.”

.                             .                         .

“I love your hair.”

“Stop it, Sweetheart, I’m g’na start blushing.”

They had slept for four more hours rather than the two Harry had originally suggested, but that always happens with them. Y/N would say that they are just too content cuddled up with one another that they milk it for all it’s worth. If one of them wakes up before the other, then they just settle their head back down and close their eyes again. Unless they had somewhere to be, of course, but Harry had a free Saturday (no clients schedule, even though Saturday’s could often be some of his heaviest days) and he’d elected to spend it with her -- whether they were awake or asleep didn’t much mater, they just liked to be near each other.

When they finally did wake up, they lazily got dressed into about thirty layers so they wouldn’t freeze outside. The weather had grown frigid quite quickly this November, and neither of them stood the cold very well, but there was a park lined with little pop-up kiosks with hot chocolate, sweets, little holiday goodies, and an obscene amount of knitted blankets (it was a clever marketing tactic, Y/N thought -- everyone is more willing to spend money on a blanket when they’re freezing cold - she and Harry had certainly fallen for it today). Y/N bought them shoe warmers to keep their toes at least not numb, and Harry lets her borrow a pair of his gloves because she keeps forgetting to buy some of her own. They both have hats fitted over their heads too, and since Harry’s let his hair grow out, his curls stick out from beneath the pumpkin orange print and Y/N can’t stop staring at it. She’s always loved his hair, she told him as much one of the first nights they’d sat on her bookstore’s floor and talked about just a bit of everything. Back when she barely realized she had a crush on him. . . .when she didn’t know that in just a little time, she would be over the moon.

And she’ll never forget that people used to make him feel like shit about his hair, so she maybe overcompensates by telling him every time she has thought about loving it. Which means today, in the span of a short three hours they’d been awake, Y/N had complimented his hair about twenty different times. If she was running her fingers through it, fixing his beanie, or just staring at him, she let him know just how much she adored his curls.

“I hate to tell you this, Button, but your cheeks are already red as apples,” she shifted the paper cup of hot chocolate from her hand closest to him to the other, so she could reach up and tuck them behind his ear, that had reddened from the cold, “The air has you more bashful than I ever could.”

“Not true,” he murmurs, lowering his voice as he knocks closer to her ear, “I always blush when you go down on me.”

“God,” Y/N shakes her head, “You’re too much, d’ya know that?”

He laughs, nudging her with the cold tip of his nose, “You want the peppermint bark? We’re coming up on the seller.”

“Of course, I want peppermint bark,” she reaches for her wallet, “I’m stocking us up for the next hundred years or so.”

Harry slows for a moment, sliding his gloved hand into her own and squeezing, “Hey,” he begins, his voice soft, somewhat reflective and it brings her attention to him at her side, “Y’know when -- you remember how you said you just get random flushes of love for me and s’a whole lot and you just don’t know what to do with it?”

Y/N nods, “Yeah, like every waking minute practically. Why?”

He smiles shyly, “I’m having one of those moments.”

“For the peppermint bark?” She teases, but his brows furrow and he swats her shoulder playfully, “Hey!”

“I’m trying to be sweet on you, and you’re still going on about this bloody chocolate,” he rubs the arm that he swats, even though Y/N has so many layers on plus the blanket that she bought wrapped around her, that he made no real contact with her body.

Y/N pulls him in for a hug, narrowly avoiding a child running past them as she does so, “Oh, you know m’only kidding. I love you too, Bug, more than words can describe and ten times more than the chocolate I reckon. . .well, unless it’s made really well this year.”

“I’ll leave you here, blanket hog.”

[handeaux]

Cincinnati Photographers Dealt With The Bizarre, The Salacious And The Macabre

With almost everybody these days carrying a camera-equipped cell phone and posting fresh images to social media hourly, it is difficult to remember a time when photographs were rare, expensive and inconvenient. Cincinnati’s photography studios caught our citizenry at their best and their worst and sometimes at their weirdest.

In the 1880s, for example, it was common to print a photographic portrait on a person’s skin. Young women often had pictures of their beaux fixed on an upper arm or lower leg. One Cincinnati photographer told a reporter for the Times-Star [30 July 1884] about a young woman who was infatuated with a traveling salesman:

“We can photograph on flesh very nicely now and I made a good print. I fixed it thoroughly and she went away happy. A month later she came back with blushes and wanted it taken off. Her lover had turned out to be a married man, and of course she hated him for his cruel deception. However, she wears it yet, as I told her to let it wear off.”

Photographs could serve to bring couples together, the photographer said, describing a rather unusual request he had received from a young woman.

“A woman, handsome and determined, had a picture made holding a pistol to her head, as if about to suicide. This she sent to her lover, who was probably getting tired of her. Underneath the picture she wrote: ‘If you don’t, I will.’ He understood. It had its effect, for in two weeks I made a group picture of them both, and she was attired as a bride.”

Women, it seems, made the most outlandish requests of photographers. One Cincinnati portraitist told the Post [7 September 1883] that women regularly requested photos of one foot, or one hand, set against a backdrop of black velvet. Women particularly proud of their hair arranged for photos from behind to show their mane in all its glory. Other women had photos from the rear for an entirely different reason:

“Some girls, who have caught on to an unknown correspondent, through an advertisement, get the backs of their heads or a coquettish corner of their faces pictured to send them.”

Some photographers produced images that went way beyond the coquettish. A studio owner told the Cincinnati Penny Paper [16 October 1882] about a colleague of his who was just starting out in the business and had yet to engage a suitable number of clients. One day, a young man stopped by to inquire whether the photographer had any photos of nude women for sale. The photographer did not, but asked the young man to return in a couple of days.

“Soon as his customer left he called his wife and told her he wanted to take her nude and sell it. She hesitated at first, but finally consented to sit. She had an exquisite figure, and the young man, who had never met the lady, was so well pleased with the photographs that he bought a dozen. He showed them to his friends, who purchased more, and finally the photographer’s income from selling his wife’s nude photographs became the most lucrative part of his business.”

The Penny Paper reporter asked his source whether the wife knew how widely distributed her nude image had become.

“Oh yes, but she does not care a copper. She laughingly said one day, ‘It is dollars and cents to me, and as long as the public like my form, I will sell them copies of it.”

The unidentified photographer probably sold his wife’s images from under the counter, because Cincinnati wasn’t ready for nude photographs. In 1890, George Morrison and Frank Jennings, photographers based in the West End, were hauled into court on charges of making obscene pictures of young women from the area – otherwise known as the Red Light District. According to the Cincinnati Post [18 October 1890] the judge ruled that testimony in the case was “too filthy to be heard” and fined the pair heavily.

It's a bit ironic, because another photographer told the Post [7 September 1883] that “bad” women generally requested “respectable” pictures:

“To tell the truth, their pictures are more modest than many of the society belles of upper tendom.”

The women of that “upper tendom,” the high-society classes, posed provocatively, leaning seductively forward with bare arms and a plunging neckline.

“Why, here is one young girl who had my wife photograph her in her chimise. Her father got hold of the pictures at home, and burned them, then forbade me making any more prints.”

Perhaps the most bizarre photographs taken in Cincinnati involved dead people. A woman showed up one day at a photographer’s studio pushing an infant in a baby carriage. The infant had died hours earlier and the mother wanted a photograph to remember the child. The photographer admitted that photographing corpses was “not nice work.”

“We sometimes make post-mortem pictures, but don’t hanker for it. We have made a picture of a corpse, and by retouching both the negative and the print made it life-like – eyes open, and color in the cheeks. But photographing a corpse is almost as bad as shaving one.”

One might think photographing dead people would give the photographer a bit of advantage because corpses wouldn’t move during the long exposures required back then. It turns out that photographers, at least in Cincinnati, were slow to adopt newer and faster photographic processes. A photographer in 1884 complained that his subjects couldn’t sit still for the thirty seconds it took to capture their image. He wondered how their parents endured the four or five minutes of immobility required for a good Daguerreotype portrait, while admitting that he was aware the latest plates allowed exposures of one-thousandth of a second. The American Israelite [21 January 1881] was having none of it:

“They can instantly photograph express trains going at sixty miles an hour, so that it looks, smoke and all, as if it were taken at a stand-still. And yet they can’t or won’t photograph a man sitting in a chair, without screwing his head round in a vice like a moveable doll and keeping him looking at a smudge on the wall, till his lip drops, and his eyes water, and the pleasant little speech he meant to think about, just to hold the expression, goes maundering through his head like the ghost of a homeless echo. Every ‘photographer’s studio’ must be at least twenty years behind time. Why is it?”

[watching-pictures-move]

Put On Your Raincoats #21 | Double Chinn Double (Double) Feature (with Hyapatia Lee)

By the time the '80s rolled around, Bob Chinn, best known for his collaborations with John Holmes (the inspiration for Boogie Nights), had been directing movies for over a decade. For much of that time, he'd been making them for peanuts (in an interview with the Rialto Report, he recounts being once asked to make a movie for five thousand dollars, which was handed to him in fifties on the spot), but in the early '80s, he was directing for Harry Mohney's Caribbean Films, working with respectable budgets (by porn standards). Some of these films starred Hyapatia Lee, one of the most popular porn stars of the era and one of the first contract girls. Now, I suspect these aren't necessarily the defining works of Chinn's career, and I do intend to get to some of his movies with Holmes. But Vinegar Syndrome had a sale and there were two double features of their collaborations going for dirt cheap, and because I am weak and foolish with money, they ended up in my cart and a few weeks later in my grubby little paws. How did this happen? Through the magic of Canada Post, of course! Anyway, what I found was that these didn't represents any extremes of artistic ambition. They were neither seeking to elevate the genre, nor were they hackwork. Rather, they represent a happy medium, movies that seek to deliver the genre's goods in a polished, diverting package. Slick cinematography, courtesy of Jack Remy. Catchy theme songs that wouldn't sound out of place if you caught them on the radio. Flashy titles. Lee recounted the atmosphere on set as one of professionalism and engagement, where everyone present wanted to do as good a job as possible. Chinn claims to have been losing interest in his work at this point, but the results onscreen are the result of confident execution by somebody who had been doing this kind of thing for years and knew how to put the production's resources to good use.

The first one I watched was The Young Like it Hot, where the operators at a phone company worry about being replaced by computers. To keep their jobs, they scheme to go the extra mile in helping their callers. As this is a porno, most of this help is sexual in nature, as when Rosa Lee Kimball stays on the line while an obscene phone caller played by Bill Margold finishes. (In an interview on the DVD, Margold says after shooting his scene, he was invited to record additional dialogue. Being the method actor that he was, he insisted on whipping it out during the recording session despite the lack of cameras.) Sometimes they are informative, as when Bud Lee (real life husband of Hyapatia at the time) explains why the perineum is referred to as taint ("cuz it taint cunt and it taint ass"). But the highlight of their efforts are Shauna Grant's increasingly life threatening home improvement advice to one poor sap played by Joey Silvera. Hyapatia Lee is ostensibly the star, and has a certain charisma, playing the supervisor, but this is really an ensemble piece, and she's joined by more experienced actors like Kay Parker and Eric Edwards. The latter I've occasionally found bland elsewhere, but he has a nice obnoxious quality that serves him well as the villainous manager whose idea it is the automate the operators' jobs. The movie reflects a very real concern (that's very much still an issue in the modern workplace), but overall this is a breezy, affable comedy.

A bit more serious in tone is Sweet Young Foxes, a coming of age story whose dramatic parts are more sensitively realized than I expected. The screenplay was written by Deborah Sullivan, Bob Chinn's wife at the time, and this is a case where a movie definitely benefited from having been written by a woman, and it seems like an earnest effort to capture the anxieties and yearnings of its young women protagonists. Lee moves closer to a real starring role, and is joined by Cara Lott and Cindy Carver as her friends, who aren't quite as strong actors as her but do have decent chemistry. I can believe they're friends even if their line delivery can be stilted. (That the movie has a good ear for genuine sounding dialogue also helps.) Kay Parker is especially good as Lee's mother, hitting some of the same notes as Taboo, and has a credibly emotional masturbation scene in front of a mirror that did not leave me unmoved. (In what way? That's none of your damn business.) This was shot by Jack Remy, the same cinematographer who worked on The Young Like it Hot. That movie looked nice and slick, but this one is a little more stylish, with the solo sex scenes in particular resembling magazine centerfolds. There's also some nice new-wave-ish music that shows up on the soundtrack, which I certainly didn't mind. I do wish some of the sex scenes didn't run quite as long (the previous movie kept them refreshingly concise) as I'd prefer more of the runtime was dedicated to the dramatic elements, but what's there is still good.

Body Girls goes back firmly to comedy territory, where Hyapatia Lee and the members of her gym are trying to win a bodybuilding contest despite a rival gym's attempts to undermine them. This comes in the form of a pair of schlubs in yellow tank tops who break into the gym after hours to sabotage their equipment, only to be foiled by Hyapatia and her girls who just happened to be having sex in the locker room as people do. Of course, despite Lee's attempts to teach them a lesson (which depending on your proclivities, may have the opposite effect), they don't give up, and during the contest threaten the judge at gunpoint. Not one to take things lying down (okay, poor choice of words here), Lee finds a way to influence the judge back in her favour. (The judge is played by Francois Papillon, bringing a dopey charm to the character as he fumbles through his lines in his French accent.) Her method is pretty ridiculous and certainly in service of genre requirements, but I did laugh.

Now, there's probably a dilemma in audience sympathy here as both Lee and her rivals are cheating, but Lee's methods are more agreeable and directed at the judge instead of her rivals so I guess we ought to root for her. She's also buoyant, charismatic and has a real star quality, and is joined by such fan favourites as Shanna McCullough and Erica Boyer, all of whom sport wildly different hairstyles. As can be expected given the exercise theme, most of the ladies have toned, athletic bodies (and given the decade, voluminous coiffures), with the exception of Tigr, who brings a wiry punkish energy that stood out to me despite her limited screentime, and she also performs the miraculous feat of making a mullet look cute. (I'd previously been moved by her work in Kamikaze Hearts, the great mockumentary about a porn production and her relationship with Sharon Mitchell. She didn't stay in the industry for too long, but I'd be interested in seeing more of her work.) The screenplay was written by Lee with her husband Bud (who plays the judge's assistant with an agreeable presence that's neither too alpha nor too schlubby) and is full of exercise-related dialogue. Most of this is pretty clunky and calling it wordplay might be a bit generous ("sexercise" features at one point), but I did appreciate the effort. Also as is requisite for the premise, the longest set piece in the movie is an orgy in Lee's gym with the various participants snaked around different pieces of equipment. I must note that one of the male actors resembles Barry Gibb and that Francois Papillon is shown to wear a tiger-striped speedo. Did I enjoy the movie? Yes, but not for reasons cited in that sentence.

At the end of Body Girls, Bud Lee suggests to Hyapatia, "Let's get physical", which is the title of the next movie. (Body Girls also features a character looking at dirty magazine with stills from Sweet Young Foxes and ends with a plug for some of these other movies, anticipating the MCU's narrative and marketing strategies by a few decades.) Now, all of these movies have had decent theme songs, but the one in Let's Get Physical has lyrics that are plagiaristically close to those of Olivia Newton-John's 1983 hit. (The delivery however is more shrill but not unpleasing.) This movie is a drama where Lee plays a dance instructor trying to put together a ballet performance despite her strained relationship with her impotent husband played by Paul Thomas. (In the interview I listened to, Lee speaks well of almost everyone she worked with on these films, with the pointed exception of Paul Thomas. If there was bitterness behind the scenes, it arguably helps their performances.)

Lee wrote the screenplay for this one, and unlike Body Girls with its surface level references to bodybuilding and exercise, the dialogue here feels packed with knowledge of the real thing, which is understandable given Lee's real life interest in dance going back to her childhood. (I looked up "Luigi jazz dancing" after finishing the movie and was pleasantly surprised to learn it was a real thing.) This movie goes all in on her star power, and features a number of dance numbers that seem genuinely interested in the form rather than just leering at the performers. (There is one scene where the song Lee dances to sounds suspiciously like "Beat It".) I did appreciate that the sex scenes were kept relatively concise and tied into the dramatic aspects, although in some cases, the choices made could be goofy, like the scene where Lee makes love to her student Shanna McCullough while Thomas, in a dramatically justified but still awkward gesture, watches from another room and jacks off. (I assume he's playing the audience in this scene. Also, McCullough's character remarks "I've never done this before" when going down on Lee, and yeah, okay Shanna.) Other highlights include a car stunt that may or may not have been lifted from elsewhere but still looks decently executed, as well as a dream sequence where Thomas (or his character at least) plays the piano and sings a song. This is held back a bit by the genre's demands, like when it places a completely superfluous sex scene at the end after Lee's reconciliation with Thomas, but on the whole this is probably the best one of the lot.

[jebazzled]

They can’t ALL be serial killers: keeping your villains funky fresh

Ah, villains. Spicy assholes. Tricky buggers.

Villains can be very intimidating to write: writing requires you to put yourself in the shoes of another person, which is one thing to do with a decent person. But when you are putting yourselves in the shoes of a bad one - whether it be someone who is simply not very likeable or someone who functions in an antagonistic capacity to a story or rp universe’s hero - well, it can be uncomfortable. 

I didn’t start writing villains until well into my rp career, and I can’t think of a single character I wrote in my undergraduate creative writing degree who was an asshole. I now write a small handful of them - and like most things, I don’t think writing a villain is quite as scary as we sometimes build it up to be in our minds!

That said, writing a villain is an exercise in nuance, and this is something that is often missing from antagonistic characters. In this tutorial, we’ll talk about what makes a villain, and what makes a villain a well-rounded character. 

Triggers, mentioned largely in passing as examples: criminal activity, murder, assault, child abuse, car accident, drunk driving, animal abuse

What makes a villain?

Generally, when we talk about villains, it’s in the context of a narrative, some sort of overall plot theme where there is Good and there is Evil. Think: Death Eaters, the Dark Side, the Horde, the Daleks, the Orcs, etc, etc etc. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’m talking about characters who serve in that antagonistic role, but everything can also be applied to characters who are just shitty people without a part to play in any larger scheme. 

In a plot context, per Oxford Languages, a villain is “a character whose evil actions or motives are important to the plot.” To be important to the plot, you do have to post, and if that’s something you’re struggling with, you might want to check out my Writer’s Block TED Talk ;)

A villain can have any number of reasons for being Like That: perhaps they were raised with a particular worldview, or were targeted by a negative influence at an impressionable and vulnerable stage, or genuinely believe they are doing the right and good thing. Maybe they’re just an asshole. In-character, your character likely doesn’t identify as a villain (because everyone is the hero of their own story) and in-character, your character might have friends, allies, and others with varying knowledge of your character’s misdeeds. 

However, out-of-character, you and other writers should recognize that your character is a shitty person. Writing one-dimensional, universally terrible assholes isn’t much fun, though. Which is where nuance comes in. 

Give your character other traits than “evil.” 

Unless your character is THE Big Bad - the Voldemort, the Sauron, the Hordak Prime - there is no reason for them to be Ultimate Evil, and writing them as an endless wash of evil will be boring for you to write and boring for other people to read. Your character should be something other than naughty. 

Using my own handful of villains/bad guys as examples, since obviously I take my own advice, and with apologies that 99% of my rp writing is in the HP verse:

Claude is a Death Eater as well as second-in-command of the magical mafia. He’s an expert blackmailer, has no qualms with murder, and can get pretty gruesome about it if he’s pressed to make a point. He also doesn’t drink, is a devoted father (has framed finger paintings in his study! drinks the pink lemonade his daughters love in crystal rocks glasses!), uses weird slang (”beat it, bozo!”) and takes the family spaniel on daily walks through Kensington Gardens. 

Cleo is a Death Eater and a lifelong bully, prone to theft, physical abuse, and with a knack for the Cruciatus Curse. She’s also deeply insecure, with an unshakeable need to be seen as useful; she’s competitive, and she’s horny enough to drop her purist pretense if a Muggle girl is what’s easiest to get her rocks off. 

Sadie is a squib spying on Order-organized safehouses for the Death Eaters. She’s also intensely curious and ambitious, determined and self-directed, and if she doesn’t understand emotions, it certainly doesn’t stop her from understanding how to manipulate them to maintain the illusion that she is not a threat. 

All three of these character concepts are more compelling than:

Veronica is rude, hates people, is outwardly mean to everyone she meets, uses cultural slurs on the regular.

We get it! Veronica is a shitty person! What else is she? In real life, shitty people typically do find camaraderie somewhere, somehow. Maybe Richie is a total asshole but has made a lot of money from his hedge fund, and he is generous enough with his yacht, ski condo, and jet that he has an entourage he thinks are genuinely his friends. Maybe Kaiytlynn is selfish and entitled, but her access to the entire royal family of Spain keeps her gainfully employed, and she’s genuinely good with her bedazzled bra business. Maybe Claudia is a giant racist, and she’s also YouTube’s most popular craft video creator. 

In real life, maybe there are some shitty people who exhibit fully antisocial behaviors and are rewarded for it. But this is fiction writing, and moreover, it is collaborative fiction writing, and Veronica is not a character who is fun or enjoyable to plot with. Antagonistic plots can have more trouble finding their footing than strictly romantic ones - but they can be fun and rewarding, provided that the antagonist is a compelling one. 

Let your character be something other than “evil.”

Give your character a cover.

More specifically than a trait other than “evil,” give your character a cover. By this I mean: give your character an angle that obscures their true colors, something that lures people - good people and bad people - into a sense of safety. 

Give your character something that keeps other characters from taking one quick look at yours and immediately clocking them as a bad guy. 

In real life, it often takes time to realize toxic people are toxic. In real life, people enjoy circumstances that make people less likely to view them as toxic - just look at the number of people who think Jeff Bezos’s obscene wealth is a marker of his merit as a human being. 

If your character commits a murder a week, is actively abusive to everyone they meet, and has no relationships with any other characters who might vouch for them - idk, man, I think your character is going to get caught! If your character is a quiet and unobtrusive owner of a vintage boutique, however? Well, they certainly don’t scream “IT’S ME! I’M BAD TO THE MOTHERFUCKING BONE!”

In the case of my bad guys:

Claude is a doting husband and father, notably not ascribing to purist tendencies that discourage women from work outside the home. He does legitimate work in real estate and investments, in addition to his shady dealings, to have a legally-sound paper trail should he ever be investigated. His family money funds an entire wing at St. Mungo’s Hospital, and he contributes to political campaigns for centrist politicians. He presents as a harmless goofball. He killed a man well before he turned seventeen. He almost went to Azkaban before graduating from Hogwarts. (”Oh, but he’s on the straight and narrow now!”)

Claude’s cover is that he masquerades as a genuinely good person, and a nice person. When people think about his old-money Sacred 28 family and what that might mean for Claude’s political activity, they also think about how he is a Gryffindor - not known for churning out Death Eaters - and they think about how he doesn’t seem intense enough to be a Death Eater. They don’t suspect enough to have much to go on. 

Cleo works as an Auror, and she’s genuinely good at her job - if only because she manipulates cases away from incriminating Death Eaters and their allies and occasionally Imperiuses a contact or two from her days as a Knockturn Alley bouncer to frame them for a crime. She doesn’t use slurs like “mudblood” at the office and doesn’t talk about blood status there, either. She doesn’t pretend to be nice, and her honesty there makes it easier to believe she’s not pretending when she does her job. It helps, too, that she is not Marked. 

Cleo’s cover is that while she seems like an asshole and is an asshole, she works in the agency tasked with eliminating Dark wizards and she’s good at her job, as far as anyone can tell. She is an asshole, but there isn’t reason to suspect she is an asshole who is part of the Death Eaters, and it is not illegal to be a dick.

Sadie goes out of her way to be friendly to every new safehouse occupant, acting as a guide to newbies about how to live in the shadows. She performs the role of caretaker, therapist, and confidant, carefully doling out the reveal that she is a squib for sympathetic effect. 

Sadie’s cover is that she manipulates other people into viewing her as too weak to be any kind of threat, and she intentionally manipulates people into relying on her for support and guidance. 

If your character is not experiencing social repercussions for being an asshole, they need to have a cover. If they are being an outright asshole, this should negatively impact them somehow. 

An outright asshole might be stuck in a dead-end job because no one wants to promote someone who’s not a team player. An outright asshole might be super lonely without the self-awareness to realize that their garbage personality is the reason for their romantic troubles. An outright asshole might not be able to talk their way out of a problem. 

If your character is an outright asshole and experience no repercussions whatsoever, they’re probably a bit OP. 

Give your character a motive. 

Now the big question: why is your character Like That? Like, for real. It’s so easy not to be a dick. Why are they a dick? What’s in it for them?

Yes, some characters might be an asshole because they think it’s fun and they like to watch other people suffer. But if all your characters are like that - isn’t that kind of boring?

If all your characters are like that - are you actually writing distinct, well-developed characters, or are you just spitting out the same edgelord with different faces?

Some of your character’s reason for being a dick can be because they think it’s fun. It can’t be the entire reason. It especially can’t be the entire reason all the time. 

Of course you can come up with a big tragic reason why a character is an asshole - but it truly doesn’t have to be that deep. (Tips on tragic backstories here.)

Of my baddies:

Claude is a purist because someone has to be a lesser class, and it’s sure as shit not going to be him! Claude is a Death Eater because his father saw a business opportunity - both direct work (e.g. the DE contracting Claude and his goons out for a hit, trafficking dark goods, doing deals with purist groups in other magical organized crime outfits across Europe) and indirect work (e.g. having stronger appeal to some of the most influential wizarding families.) He doesn’t love being branded with the Dark Mark (HE is the master of his fate, goddammit!) but hey, it’s a living.

This is a motive centered around financial gain and expediency. Claude is shitty to value money over human life, and he has no qualms about violence - but the motive is not “fun.”

Cleo is a Death Eater because, as a girl from a pureblood family of no importance, she recognizes that many of the people in the Death Eaters are important and influential, and she wants that kind of power. Additionally, she does get a kick out of violence, but she’s a weapon more than she is a fighter: she’s a tool who needs someone to wield her, to give instructions, to give her purpose. The Death Eaters offer both.

This is a motive centered around status and around order - Cleo being a person who needs order externally forced upon her. 

Sadie is working for the Death Eaters because she believes they will win the First Wizarding War, and she wants to secure a place in their new order - ideally something more than she had previously as a squib. She figures if the good guys are really good they’ll forgive her for keeping herself alive - but that the bad guys won’t forgive disloyalty. Also, her boss in the Death Eaters indulges her research in the Dark Arts, which is fun. 

This is a motive centered around security and self-satisfaction. It’s very selfish and cold, but it’s not, like, Sid from Toy Story. 

Why is your character Like That? What do they get out of Being Bad? What do they like about it? What purpose does it serve for them? 

If you can’t think of a reason your character would be a Bad Guy beyond that you want to write a Bad Guy, you should probably rework the character. It’s tricky to write someone who really should just be a Good Guy as a Bad Guy because, depending on your site’s setting, you might end up being a Bad Guy Apologist, leaning into the positive qualities of your character without writing them as an actual villain/antagonist/baddie - and remember, Death Eaters are shitty people! Antagonists antagonize! They should be complex, but you should never lose sight of an abusive class being abusive! 

And finally,

They can’t all be serial killers.

It’s tempting, since we’re writing fiction here and we all love drama, to reach straight for a Big Evil when we’re writing a baddie. They murdered ___! Egads!

If all of your baddies murdered their spouse/parent/sibling, again I ask you: are you actually writing distinct, well-developed characters, or are you just spitting out the same edgelord with different faces?

(If all your baddies specifically murdered a woman, might I ask you to examine this choice? Misogynistic violence is not a shortcut to character development.)

Cast of characters aside - what is it your character does that makes them evil? It is worth noting that bad behavior exists on a spectrum, and to jump to the far end of that spectrum without building the character up to it is often jarring and confusing. There are many, many things your character can do that might contribute to their Bad IdentityTM without killing anyone!

Baby Bads: No one gets hurt in a serious way, but the character is unpleasant. Think: a schoolteacher might not let you go to recess. You might get detention. Examples:

petty theft

general assholery

bullying

lying, small & large scale

general unkindness

minor manipulation for personal gain

Middling Misdeeds: These might cause some harm - physically, emotionally, or otherwise - but there’s some room for smart-talking or otherwise evading major consequences. Think: suspension. Examples:

larger theft and other money-related naughties: money laundering, ponzi schemes, etc

physical assault/battery

blackmail

bribery

large-scale manipulation for personal gain or for fun

hate speech (to be clear, I, JB, think this is way more than middling, but in art as in life, a lot of characters are going to do it and get away with it.)

Terrible Transgressions: The far end of the spectrum of antagonistic behavior. If your character is doing this shit, it shouldn’t be coming out of the blue. If your character is doing this shit, there’s got to be a character-driven reason beyond “flavor.” These are things that would get you expelled and moved into criminal court. A lot of things that are viewed as standard topics requiring a trigger warning fit into this category. 

murder

sexual assault

torture

child abuse

It’s easy in rp, where there are often way more criminal types in a character population than we hope exist IRL, to forget that murder is.... like.... it’s a BIG DEAL. It’s not something everyone has done. And thank dog, right?

If you’re attached to your character being someone’s cause of death, for specific character-driven reasons, you might think about alternatives. For example, if you hope to convey that Brandon Baddie is a callous asshole, instead of having him kill his roommate over a household chores dispute, you might have him drive drunk, hit a pedestrian, get out of the car, see the body, and drive away. If you hope to convey that Sandy Sadist is cruel, you might have her threaten her sister’s dog, but not actually hurt it, enjoying the fear of the sister and of the dog more than she would enjoy actually hurting either. If you hope to communicate that Ruthie Reckless is thoughtless, you might have her driving 100 mph speeding to the edge of a cliff while her father sobs in the passenger seat, stopping just inches from the edge. 

There are so many ways to make a point. If you’re going to kill someone to make a point, do it sparingly, and with very deliberate purpose.

Whether you’re starting your first villain or hoping to hone your villainous sword, I hope you found this tut helpful! Best of luck, and happy writing!