#or a glossary! but I literally have no idea when or where or how long anything happens!

[llycaons]

LMAO the authors finally slipped and said 'hour' instead of 'bell' see and NOW I know what time increment is being indicated!!!

[theteasetwrites]

Merciless Beauty

Chapter 3: The Wound Is Quick and Keen

❧ Pairing: Knight Daryl Dixon x Princess Reader ❧ Era: Medieval fantasy AU ❧ Pronouns: she/her ❧ Warnings: mild swearing, scary situation, violence and gore, references to death and traumatic situations (including child abuse) ❧ Word Count: 6.6k

❧ Before You Read...

❧ Glossary

❧ In This Chapter: Sir Daryl escorts you outside the walls of Alexandria for the first time, and though the excursion is mostly pleasant, it is rife with danger. A close call leads the two of you to a secluded cottage that only Daryl knows of, where a bond begins to grow.

❧ A/N: The princess is free! Well, kind of. She is so cute I love her. And Daryl... UGH. Literally the best. I don't have much to say about this part, but I wanna give a quick shoutout to all my friends who have been beta-reading this series! @weretheones @finalgirlrick @darylspissslit @devnmon @purple-witch-23 @littlelovingideas @spncupcake thanks so much friends!! I appreciate you<3 Also pls check out their work because they also write TWD stuff and it's amazing

The long, dark, sepulchral tunnel seemed at once cavernous and claustrophobic, with the light of the knight’s torch only illuminating a few feet ahead, but the feeling of a much wider expanse of darkness, in which shadows that may or may not have really been there lurked within the blackest corners. It was no small wonder they had been not-so-lovingly dubbed The Tombs. 

Though you were sure nothing was behind you, it felt as though an unseen entity stalked you, stepping on your heels despite no real physical weight overcoming you. There were always rumors around court about these tunnels, how they were haunted by the souls of those who perished in the first struggle against the Dead, but you tried not to pay mind to those rumors. After all, that would mean your own mother haunted these dank, miserable passages, and that was a fate worse than death, you thought.

But Daryl knew this tunnel now, having made sure the path was clear and snuck his horse out to meet you at the end of the underpass just an hour before. Still, you found yourself not straying more than a foot from him, his broad, cloaked back becoming a strange source of comfort to you in this abyss of darkness. 

“You’re sure there are no dead ones in here?” you whispered. “It smells of… death.”

“I went through here twice… No walkers.”

“Walkers?”

“Dead ones.”

Oh. A colloquial term. 

Silence settled in again, with only the echoes of globs of water dripping onto the rough cobbled stone to fill the eerie space where words had provided some relief. In that silence, your anxiousness caught up with you―what if Elizabeth’s lie fell through? She’d informed the guards not to disturb you in your chambers, that you had fallen ill and needed rest. She left strict instructions not to check on you, for fear of contagion. And with your father out of town, there shouldn’t have been any chance for disturbances. Even so, the only thing more terrifying than this tunnel was the idea of having less freedom than you already did. Being confined to your bedchamber for the rest of your life, surely, would’ve been the punishment if the king discovered your escape. He wasn’t a cruel man, but his overbearing nature could inadvertently lead to such a cruel decision. 

When a horse’s neigh startled you from your thoughts, you stumbled forward to cling to the knight’s upper arm, which flexed and stiffened in response to your sudden movement. Your chest pressed firmly against his back, he felt you briefly shiver in fear, though as your senses came back to you, you chided yourself for your jumpiness. 

“S-sorry, Sir Daryl.”

If he wasn’t caught in a rather serious situation, he might’ve let his internal amusement at your persistent formality manifest itself in the form of a chuckle, but he only huffed instead. “Just Daryl.”

Blinking hard, you loosened your grip on his arm, reluctantly pulling yourself away. He seemed to radiate warmth, and this tunnel was so cold and frightening. “Sorry. Daryl.”

He peered over his shoulder to speak again. “Stop sayin’ sorry.”

With a sniffle, you nodded your head. “Sor―” You stopped yourself. “All right.”

The further you traveled, the louder the sounds of Daryl’s horse, which provided some comfort now. It meant you were getting closer to getting out of here, and closer to fresh air.

At the end of the tunnel, Daryl placed his torch in the iron sconce hanging on the wall of a modest wooden door, with a thick bar placed across to prevent the Dead (or alive) from getting in. There stood the knight’s horse, too, hardly visible in the blackness that matched his sleek, shiny coat. From what you could see, though, the horse was beautiful, with a long crimped mane of ebony and a long forelock draping messily, yet gracefully, over his eyes. Upon each leg was a slight feathering, just above his hooves, nearly cloaking them. 

“What a beautiful horse.” As he lifted the bar with a huff, he looked your way to see your hands caressing the animal’s neck, and his black nose buried in the loose tendrils of your hair. “Oh!” you laughed. “Friendly, too. What’s his name?”

Daryl wiped the sweat from his brow as he spoke bluntly. “Phantom.”

“Oh.” You sounded a little disappointed. “Well, that’s not a very friendly name for such a friendly horse.”

The knight scoffed as he took the horse’s reigns. “He ain’t friendly. He’s a warhorse.”

He didn’t expect such a look of excited curiosity to form upon your face. “Oh, a destrier? How grand.”

With one hand guiding the horse towards the door, the other unlatching the final lock, Daryl looked back at you. You could see a sliver of bright light pouring in through the thin line where the door was beginning to open. Of course, you’d seen light before, but not like this, not from this direction. Somehow, it was different. 

“You wanna stand around talkin’ about horses all day or you wanna go outside?”

The last thing you wanted to do was spend more time inside this rotten intestine of a tunnel. “Lead the way, Sir―I mean, Daryl.”

Trying to avoid the inevitable smirk that formed on his face, he pushed the door open further, slowly guiding Phantom into the light of day, which allowed the horse’s coat to shine an almost reddish chestnut tone. 

But the horse’s beauty was momentarily eclipsed by the magnificent glade of silver birch trees before you, a simple dirt path diverging through the forest. You’d seen these trees from high above, and from a great distance, outside your window, but never had you seen them so close, so almost within reach. Many times you’d reached your hand out, imagining you could touch the trees, but now, there was nothing standing between you and that forest. 

As you stepped forward, you relished in the feeling of dirt and leaves underfoot. You’d felt the ground before, in the garden and the courtyard, but this was something different, something new. In fact, you wanted to feel it on your bare skin, the closeness of the earth. 

While Daryl busied himself with readying the horse’s saddle, you were stripping yourself of your brown leather shoes, letting one bare foot take your first step as you worked on removing the other shoe. 

The knight looked wide-eyed at you, your feet now sinking into the dirt beneath you. “What the hell are you doin’?”

To his surprise, you let out a sing-song laugh as you took several more steps towards the forest. With your head down, your hair draping all around the sides of your face, you were focused on the movements of your feet, as if you could feel the sensation through your eyes. 

“I used to run around barefoot as a child,” you said, lifting your face to his. He was greeted by a wide, toothy grin, the likes of which he hadn’t seen upon your face. He’d seen the joyful expression upon your face when he offered to escort you outside the walls, but this was something else entirely, accompanied by bright, carefree eyes that captured the glow of the sunlight streaming down to consume the last of the early morning mist. “It’s just not the same in the courtyard at the castle.”

Your attention peeled away from the knight as you took in the trees all around you, tall and magnificent, surely hundreds of years old. The stories these trees could tell, the things they’d seen—you’d hoped that their knowledge would make up for your lack of it for the past ten years. If you couldn’t have seen such things, at least they had.

Absentmindedly, you meandered towards the trees, your arms outstretching the closer you got as you prepared to touch them. Daryl could only look on in slightly amused confusion at your wonderment for such mundane objects of nature, but he had to remember, it’d been a long time since you’d seen these things out in the wilds, outside of the manicured gardens and meticulously trimmed botanicals found within the walls of the castle to which you were confined. Still, the little laughs and sweet giggles that bubbled up from within you were undeniably delightful. 

But Daryl couldn’t let you spend all day admiring a silver birch tree. He hopped upon Phantom and instructed the beast forward, until a blackness swallowed your peripheral vision. As you blinked your attention towards the knight, his hand now outstretched to you, you noticed your shoes had been stuffed carefully inside the saddlebag near his thigh. 

“C’mon,” he said with a nod of his head. “There’s more than this.”

Your bare feet skipped delicately through waves upon waves of tall white beardtongue, the petals of which occasionally tickled your bare thighs when they got caught inside your gown. You had to admit the feeling gave you a rush so strong that you skipped faster through the meadow, careful not to trample over any of the wildflowers.

Daryl’s presence was a comfort to you, him standing at the edge of the meadow with Phantom’s reins in his hand, and your velvet teal cloak draped over the crook of his elbow as he watched dutifully. Though no walkers had come across your path yet, he worried most about the poor, soft soles of your feet being marred by the elements. These thoughts were always immediately dismissed, though, as his job wasn’t to fret over your cleanliness, but your life.

“Oh, Daryl!” you called out, alerting him a bit too well as he instinctively grasped for the hilt of the greatsword strapped to his belt. He huffed when he raised his eyes to see you entranced by the pale blue spotted butterfly resting upon your hand. “Look!”

Again, you let out a sweet laughter, the cadence of which tickled the knight’s spine like a feather being dragged languidly over each vertebra. With the tiny, delicate creature flapping its wings upon your hand, he admired your gentleness, how sweet your eyes turned when gazing upon the beautiful butterfly. It was strange—he’d been out here with you for almost two hours, and yet no walkers or bandits had crossed your path. It was almost as if your purity somehow deterred those things, those horrible things that plagued this land. Indeed, he’d never seen the world like this before, so much happier and sweeter than it had once been. Perhaps you didn’t need this world, but this world needed you. No, of course not. That was silly, he told himself, shaking his head to rid himself of his own thoughts. No one woman could change the world just by existing in it.

“Oh,” you sighed in a bittersweet tone. The butterfly flew away, your eyes following it for as long as it could before it disappeared beyond the hill. 

Don’t be sad, princess, he found himself thinking, his own heart seeming to sink a little when your eyes turned just a little soft with sorrow. Please don’t be sad. 

“Well,” you sighed again, your voice getting louder as you approached him, your hands lifting your gown just enough to allow you to step high over the tall flowers. As if by instinct, his eyes trailed to your bare ankles, then your calves, your knees, and just a sliver of your soft thighs… 

Stop looking, that rational voice in his head commanded. But the improper, unabashed voice replied, But, oh, milady… What fine legs you have.

“This meadow is beautiful, but there must be more to see.” You took your cloak from him to swing it around your shoulders and clasp it around your neck, then circled around the horse to retrieve your shoes from its saddle. “Where are we going next?”

Daryl thought for a moment, but his immediate attention was directed towards the gracefulness of your movements, the way your fingers curled through Phantom’s forelock and tickled underneath his chin, and the way you nuzzled your nose against his… How gentle the warhorse was, as if you had some soothing effect upon him. 

If Daryl was a superstitious man, he’d say you worked some kind of womanly magic upon your surroundings, wooing him and his horse and even the Dead. If he was a cruel man, he’d accuse you of being a witch, demanding to see if you bore the Devil’s mark or if you sank in water. Of course, he didn’t believe in sorcery or witches or Satan, but he did believe you had worked some kind of spell on him, one of a more corporeal nature. 

“Daryl?”

He cleared his throat as his senses came back to him. “Yes, I, um… I know of a lake nearby. Would that, um, suit you, your highness?” He tried to speak in his best chivalric tone, though he knew not why. He never cared much for that before, until right this moment, and it seemed almost against his will. Maybe witches were real, afterall. Still, he wasn’t about to rid himself of this warm, ticklish feeling in the pit of his stomach, even if it was the work of the Devil. 

A sweet, beautiful, kind agent of the Devil.

“A lake would be lovely,” you replied. 

At length, you walked alongside Daryl, who let you guide Phantom this time. You’d insisted upon walking to the lake, giving the poor horse a break from carrying the weight of the two of you. It was no disappointment to the knight, who found that he quite liked spending more time with you, prolonging his time outside the walls to hold your cloak as you frolicked or to kneel and let you hold onto his strong shoulder as you brushed the dirt off your feet. It almost sickened him how much he relished in being of service to you. 

And it was such a beautiful day, the perfect day for you to see the outside world. In your fascination, you were rendered quiet, turning in every direction to catch with your eyes every bird or deer or squirrel or insect that crossed your path. The woods were serene, too, much brighter and free of any pestilence that your father had so ominously warned you of. 

Indeed, you wondered where the Dead were. It seemed too good to be true, considering the horrible memories you had of that night your mother died, of seeing her getting pulled into a swarm of walkers as she reached her hand out to you, calling for you. You still remembered how you struggled to reach for her, your fingers just grazing her trembling hand before you were yanked away by a guard. 

Of course, you knew there was no way you could’ve saved her. Her neck and arms were already being feasted upon, spurts of blood shooting out and sprinkling in crimson globs upon your tear-stained cheeks, while her screams were increasingly drowned by the sound of her flesh tearing from her bones. When her body was taken in completely by the hoard, you heard one last scream—No, please, no!

As this memory inflicted itself upon you, the feeling akin to a knife in the chest, you stopped in your tracks, staring blankly at the vision before you that seemed to have crawled out of your head. Between the trees ahead of you, five or six of the dead lumbered clumsily over sticks and stones towards you. 

When the knight pushed you behind him, drawing his sword, you studied the appearances of the dead men with shock. They wore clothes just like any commoner, one even wearing a blacksmith’s apron, another wearing a simple white linen coif upon her head, not unlike the ones you owned, except yours weren’t caked in dried blood, but the similarity was enough to send a shiver down your spine.

“Dar-Daryl…” Your voice faltered as you backed away, your hands clinging tight to the reins on the horse. “What do we do?”

It hadn’t occurred to him that you didn’t know the first thing about walkers, how to kill them, how to avoid them. He should’ve told you. He planned on telling you, but he got… distracted. So distracted he’d forgotten of the Dead’s existence altogether.

“Just stay behind me,” he said. “If one comes at you, you run.”

Run? Run where? I do not know these woods… 

“All right.”

He held his sword with both hands, and you wondered how on Earth he could hold such a large thing, no doubt made of fine, heavy steel. He must’ve had a great deal of strength, not to mention the heavy armor he would carry in battle. Indeed, he was broad and seemed hearty enough to withstand almost anything. 

A sparkle of sunlight reflected off the silver blade as it sliced through a walker’s neck, severing the head in one fluid motion that caused you to gasp in horror at the sight. 

But Daryl moved so fluidly, with such ease and intensity. Every stroke was purposeful, and every kick and turn and step was made with confidence. As you watched in combined terror and amazement, you realized that he really was a great knight. His chivalry left much to be desired, but you could tell why he achieved his status as knight. Soon, the walkers were all headless, and he got to work plunging the blade of his sword directly into the creature’s severed heads, which appeared to still be alive. 

You leaned forward in awe, curious about how the heads could still be alive when severed from the body. 

But your thoughts ceased when a cold hand wrapped around your ankle, pulling you with great strength down to the forest floor. You came down with a yelp, both from the startling action and the feeling of your ankle twisting in an unnatural manner, creating an awful pain that traveled all the way up to the top of your head to send you nearly passing out.

But the lone, legless walker kept you awake, yanking at your leg with its teeth gnashing horribly, creating a terrible clicking sound with each attempt to take a bite of you.

You pulled away, kicking at the thing’s forehead to get it away from you, but it was relentless, and soon set its sights on your neck as its disgusting, rotting body began to climb up your torso, its mouth dripping foul blood over your surcote as you gasped and panted and screamed in fear.

In the distance, you heard the loud whinnying of Phantom, then the sound of his hooves against the dirt, getting further and further away. 

All this happened in a matter of milliseconds, with the knight moving quickly to tear the dead man away from you, throwing its growling body several feet away from you. With a grunt, he swung his greatsword overhead, bringing it down to slice the creature’s head vertically with a horrid squelch. 

The thing fell back in its final state of death, allowing Daryl to sheath his bloodied sword and hurry over to you, his gloved hands feeling all over your arms and legs and torso. Your eyes widened at the touches, how brazenly he handled you with his strong, filthy hands. 

“You bit?” he asked.

Oh. 

He kept feeling you, lifting your dress to examine your calves with a stoicism and seriousness you wouldn’t have expected from a man with his hands all over you. But then, this was a serious situation. Get your mind out of the gutter, you chided yourself. 

“N-no, I’m fine…” Dizzied from the sudden fall, you raised your hand to your forehead, then stroked it through your now wild hair. As you became aware of your body once again, you realized the dull ache surrounding your right ankle. “Oh, my… my ankle. It hurts.”

He lifted your gown again to examine your ankle, the skin around it inflamed and swollen, and it was angled rather sharply inwards. A grimace contorted the knight’s face. “Sprained,” he said. He knew that well, having seen the very minor injury many times in battle. Of course, if the worst injury one received was a sprained ankle, that was a blessing. 

As his hands cradled you underneath the underarms to lift you, he peered behind his shoulder with a deep huff. “Damn horse,” he cursed. 

Struggling to help lift yourself with your good leg, you realized, too, that the horse had run off in the midst of the chaos. “Oh, no! How are we going to—Oh!”

You felt caught in a whirlwind as the knight somehow slung you over his shoulder, his arm wrapped around the backs of your legs to hold you in place as he began to walk, not wasting any time to catch up to the horse. 

“What are you doing?!” you cried out in confusion. Your sight was momentarily shrouded in darkness as your face was buried in the wool of his cloak, but you lifted your head to see the ground moving beneath dizzyingly as you bounced against his back. “Are you… carrying me?”

“Gotta catch up to Phantom… Ain’t gettin’ anywhere very fast with you limpin’.” He punctuated his sentence with a strained grunt, then stopped briefly to bounce you until you were more securely draped over his broad shoulder. 

“How do you know where he went?”

“There’s a cottage not far from here. He knows to go there.” That, and he could track the horse’s trail quite easily. 

You remained quiet for a while, until he hitched you up again. “You know,” you remarked, “this is not how you carry a princess. A rather large sack of potatoes, yes, but not a princess.”

He tried to hinder his laughter. It was difficult. 

“How did you find this place?” you asked, sat upon a dusty old floor pillow beside the warm, burning hearth.

The cottage was small, just one room. You’d never seen such a modest home, with straw blanketing the dirt floor and a small hole in the roof to allow the smoke from the hearth to escape, with only one small window to let in a tiny stream of afternoon light. 

You watched Daryl crush some mix of pungent herbs, water, and oil with a mortar and pestle, his hair hanging like chocolate colored silken drapes over his concentrated face. 

He looked up for a moment, his hooded eyes peeking out between those brunette strands of hair. He chewed his lip, eying your swollen ankle. The guilt hadn’t stopped washing over him since it happened. How could he be so negligent to let you get hurt? 

“I, uh… Found it a long time ago, when the plague broke out.” With the herbs crushed into an oily paste, he carried the stone mortar over to you, kneeling down to lift your ankle onto his thigh. You watched curiously as his fingers scooped up a glob of the slightly purple-toned concoction, then spread the paste over your swollen ankle. “Was fighting the Dead,” he continued as he rubbed more of the coarse cream over your skin. “A swarm cornered me here. Wasn’t much safer, though… An old man and his wife, but the old man had turned, was just about to take a bite of the woman, but I put him down.”

He noticed your shiver, then crossed the room to quickly procure a thick woolen blanket from the small straw bed. 

“Here.” He draped the warm fabric over your shoulders. “Sorry it’s not much.”

“It’s quite all right… What happened to the old lady?” 

He shook his head as he returned to his treatment of your wound. “She was already bit. I was too late… Cared for ‘er as long as I could, but no one knew back then that even just one bite means you’re dead. The fever killed ‘er… And then, I didn’t know she’d turn, too. Found out real quick that’s how it spreads, and that you gotta kill the brain.” He gestured accordingly to his own head. “And now this place is mine, I guess.”

“I thought you lived on your lord’s fief?” you asked. “You live here?”

He used his teeth to rip a piece of cotton gauze from its roll, then lifted your ankle from its place on his leg to wrap it and conceal the herbal remedy. “I travel between,” he said simply. “Stayin’ in one place never suited me.”

To an extent, you understood that. Though you always valued your home, you’d been stuck in one place for so long that it became less of a home and more of a hostage situation. “You must value your freedom,” you remarked. “Tell me, what did you put on my ankle?”

He scoffed through an ever-so-slight, crooked smirk. “You ask many questions, princess.”

A rosy pink blush bloomed upon your cheeks, accompanied by a gentle heat that wasn’t just radiating from the nearby flame of the hearth. “Well,” you said, straightening your back as his words reminded you of your status, “I think I’m entitled to know what kind of remedy you’ve applied to my wound, knight.”

He gently replaced your skirt over your ankles as he spoke, listing the ingredients. “Arnica, witch hazel, lavender… All good for pain and swelling.”

“Oh? You’re skilled in herbalism?”

“Another question…”

You tilted your head in faux offense at the observation. “I’m entitled to ask whatever questions I wish, knight.”

With a huff, he leaned back to scoot himself onto his own pillow, then kicked off his heavy leather boots. “I wouldn’t say ‘skilled’,” he replied at length. “Just… somethin’ I had to learn.”

Curiosity made you raise an eyebrow at that, and your prying was certainly nowhere near its end. “Why?”

Any other person had asked him this many questions about himself, he might’ve lost his nerve and said some rather vulgar things, but you were a lady. More than that, you were a princess. More than that, you were… something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He knew you were beautiful, of course. He had eyes. There was more that drew him to you, that made him care what you thought of him and made him care about you. 

Despite his usual tendency to become frustrated at this kind of questioning, he couldn’t bring himself to feel agitated at all. In fact, he felt at ease, like he wanted to tell you about himself. Somehow, that look in your eyes told him you weren’t just asking because it seemed the proper thing to do—you were asking him these things because you cared to know about him. No one had cared in that way before. Maybe the duke came close, but he didn’t have this effect on the knight. It was unique to you, this wave of earnestness and openness. For such a closed-off man, he found it very hard to keep his guard up much longer. 

Still, he wondered, if he let his guard down too far, could he stop himself from scaring you away? You were a sensitive thing, he’d realized. You were innocent, too. The things he’d seen and done would surely frighten you, chase you away from him when he’d only just begun to grow fond of you in some strange way. The more you knew about him, the more you’d find him repulsive, he thought. And yet, it was still so tempting. 

“Left home when I was sixteen,” he said. “Had to learn how to take care of myself. Well, learned most of that when I was...” He had to stop himself, his lips hanging open slightly in midair. If he kept going, he might’ve revealed too much, how “pathetic” his life had been. Surely you wouldn’t understand. You’d think he was trying to earn your pity, but all he wanted, as he looked into your eyes and melted into them like they were two pools of warm liquid honey, was to know that you cared about the words that struggled to will themselves into existence. Those soft, warm eyes would prove successful in swallowing him whole, into an abyss of unabashed honesty. Why was he bearing his soul? What good would it do? He didn’t know. In fact, he was sure it would only cause you to look down upon him, but he was wise enough to know that no one before had ever really asked about these things. No one before had ever cared like this. That was why he was hesitant—it was simply uncharted territory. But, then again, everything about you was uncharted territory, and if you asked, it must’ve meant you cared.

“When I was a child, my mother died,” he said. “My father couldn’t handle it… Turned to the bottle, became a lousy sot.” He swallowed hard as a bit of bile came to rise in his throat. He wasn’t sure what came over him—except, well, he’d never spoken these words out loud before. Certainly not in front of a princess. You didn’t stop him, though. In fact, you held a soft gaze, encouraging him with your pleading eyes for him to continue, not with pity, but with sympathy. How strange, you opened him up with just your kind, understanding face. “He, uh, would hurt me… Enough to break skin.” He gestured loosely towards the leftover salve. “This stuff would help with the bruises. Needed other things for the cuts, but I know all of it. Helps in war, too.”

Understanding his hesitancy to speak more about his childhood, you inquired about that—war. Perhaps it wasn’t a much more cheerful subject, but there was something you’d been wondering about since you first met the mysterious knight. 

“War… Is that how you got your scar?”

It took him a moment to register your question, as he had so many scars now, it was hard to keep track of them all, but you gestured your finger to point towards his face, and he cursed himself for not thinking of the long red stripe running down over his left eye, At times, you yourself had forgotten it was there, its pigment blending in with the tone of his tanned skin in certain lights, but it had intrigued you since you first saw him. 

“It’s a battle scar,” he answered. “Yeah…” 

“I read that battle scars are honorable to knights.”

“They are,” he responded quickly, as if defending himself, despite a lack of anything to really defend. But his tone soon shifted as he processed your words. “You… read about knights?”

Swallowing hard, you averted your gaze to try to find some respite from the embarrassment of admitting that you found his kind to be fascinating. To say you read about knights would be an understatement. Your father housed an impressive collection of literature in his cabinet, many of which you’d secretly take to the solar and read by candlelight in the wee hours of the morning when a particularly restless sleep became too much to bear. Among those books were the most popular chivalric romances—The Knight’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Le Morte d’Arthur, Erec and Enide, Sir Eglamour of Artois… Daryl wasn’t like any of those knights, though. He was… better, you decided. He was real.

“I do,” you spoke shakily. “I—I… know a bit.” You never stuttered. Why were you stuttering? Eugene had all but trained you out of the habit in your public speaking lessons. He hadn’t prepared you for the intensity of Sir Daryl’s gaze, how it reduced your poise to a shiver. And yet still, you were the most poised woman he ever met. 

In fact, he didn’t notice your stuttering at all. It was hard to let anything distract him from every word you said, every open and close of your plush lips that were made glossy and smooth from suet and marjoram, with just a touch of red wine to paint a delicious tint across the plump skin. The musky amber scent of civet oil mingled with the floral marjoram to tickle his nose so heavenly, even from this distance. Each movement of your lips only carried the scent further, like it was floating on angel’s wings to him, and only him. For a brief, anxious moment, he pondered upon the taste, and the texture… How his lips would feel against yours. 

Lust is a sin, he told himself, despite having not paid a visit to a chapel since his knighthood. Still, a knight should respect the laws of God. Like all the knights in the stories you read, he was beginning to face temptation. 

With a quiet huff, he yanked himself from his intrusive thoughts to face you with a slight smirk. “I guess you’re fond of Sir Lancelot?” he asked. 

Not at all, you thought. I am more fond of Sir Daryl. 

It was twilight when you arrived back at the castle, slipping through the Tombs and coming out into the gloomy dungeons in the dark underbelly of the keep. To distract the guards that stood near your chambers, Daryl alerted them to a “walker that must’ve slipped through the walls,” but used the opportunity to sneak you into your room. 

The knight ushered you in the room with a frantically waving hand. With a slight limp from your injury, you stumbled in laughing. Giddy, that was the only way to describe it. You were giddy from adrenaline, and felt a surge of fiery energy flow through you like a match being struck. Indeed, the whole day had been exhilarating, though terrifying at points. Ultimately, it was everything you’d dreamed it would be, and more. 

And you couldn’t help but admit that it felt wonderful to break the rules, to do something reckless for once. You were a little afraid it would become an addictive habit, but it was worth it. To see the things you saw, to behold new landscapes and to feel unburdened by the oppressive walls of that old gray castle… Oh, it was a wonderful feeling.

You couldn’t contain your excitement much longer—when the heavy wooden doors closed with a quiet clack of the latch, you opened your arms to rush towards the knight with an exuberant, but hushed, “We did it!”

His eyes widened as he felt your warm, soft arms around his torso, his chest pressed against yours so close that he could feel your swift heartbeat pounding against your ribcage. Whatever overcame you, it must’ve been born of your excitement, and he couldn’t hide the fact that he was excited, too. For what, he did not know. The day was over, his task was complete. He’d taken you outside the kingdom, allowed you to do as you please as he kept a watchful eye, keeping you safe from harm… Well, there were some slip-ups, but he was successful in his mission. 

Perhaps he was excited because he, too, felt the adrenaline rush, the excursion having been the most treacherous crime he’d ever committed, and he’d committed a few. Petty theft and a few drunken brawls, to be specific, but you’d never know that. Not as long as he could help it. 

Despite his hands and arms floating awkwardly around the curves of your waist, he didn’t dare touch you. There was an innate desire to, of course, but it wouldn’t be right. None of this was right, in truth, but there was no going back now, and he didn’t want to go back. He didn’t regret a thing, and that scared him a little bit. How on Earth could that scare him? Nothing scared him. His own feelings baffled him, especially when that musky amber scent came back with a succulent vengeance to assault his senses with the most indulgent perfume he’d ever had the pleasure of falling victim to. For a moment, he closed his eyes, taking in a quiet, deep inhale. That was the closest he could let himself get to doing anything he might’ve been wanting to do.

When you realized he wasn’t holding you back, you pulled away from the stoic man. Clarity returned to replace the intoxication of the adrenaline, and you cleared your throat to change the atmosphere back to that of knight and princess, not acquaintances of equal standing.

“Thank you, Sir Daryl,” you said. He winced for a moment at the title, having gotten a little accustomed to the simple name upon your lilted voice. Now, it was formal again, direct yet gentle. It still sounded beautiful, the way you spoke, but it was different. Only now, he noticed that it softened even more, as if your words were resting on downy pillows that filled with increasingly plush goose feathers each time you spoke to him. “Today was the best day of my life.”

Quite frankly, he found that very hard to believe. So hard to believe, in fact, that he let out a puff of air between lips that formed a wry smile. “What’re you talkin’ about, woman?”

“Woman?”

“That’s what you are, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes… What I mean to say is, what you’ve done for me today was what I’ve wanted for so long, and now I feel as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Thank you.”

A pregnant silence hung in the air between you before you turned to cross the room over to your vanity, where your jewelry casket sat. You rummaged through to once again procure his payment. 

“No, your highness,” spoke the knight, his steps getting heavy as he approached you from behind. “I told you, I can’t accept that.”

You turned to face him with a smile, and a glimmering ruby brooch encrusted in silver filigree, characterized by delicate, swirling arabesques. “Nonsense,” you replied. “Please, knight. It would please me so for you to take this… And, there’s always more… For next time.”

Raising his eyes from the gem in your hand, he searched your gaze for earnestness. Indeed, you looked not unlike you had that night you begged him. You had that desperation in your eyes, that lust for freedom and exploration. The difference was, there was now a smile upon your face. That was even more tempting for him. A smile like that was dangerous, as he was sure you could just about convince him of anything. 

“Next time?”

“Yes, next time my father is gone. Of course, if you’re agreeable to it.”

Agreeable to it? Your beauty was intoxicating, and exposure to it was like radiation—surely no good for him in the long run. That all being said, there was something tempting about the danger of it all, the wrongness. He hadn’t felt this way in so long, not since before he was bound by the laws of chivalry. It was wrong of him to do this with you, but it had an effect like theriac; it was both an antidote and an addiction. 

With a hefty huff, he took the jewel from your hand, stuffing it into the simple embroidered chaneries hanging from his belt. 

That night, he agreed to another excursion, whenever that might be. Now, he seemed to be officially at your every beck and call, waiting for the signal to come and rescue you from your entrapment. In a way, he himself had become trapped, a chaperon condemned to serve you until your whims ebbed and flowed away from him and his outside world that he knew so well. It wasn’t this in itself that frightened him, though—it was the fact that when he thought of the next time he’d have to be your escort, subject to your will, he smiled. This realization of his devotion to you made the subconscious depths of his mind aware of one important thing: you weren’t just any princess, you were his princess.

~

Thanks for reading! Likes, reblogs, and/or comments are always appreciated!

Series Masterlist Next Chapter ➳

[dynared]

Hello! I'm sorry if you're tired of this topic, but I can't help but be glad that I'm seeing more and more people criticizing IDW comics!

Once I also wrote a post about criticism of these comics, and my main problem was that there is absolutely no lore in these comics, and if there is anything, it is very little.

I just can't believe that for so long the authors haven't brought anything to the transformers lore. During this really huge amount of time and an impressive list of issues, I expected just a ton of worked-out world and everything else. And as a result, the depth of the lore was approximately equal to the depth of the drying puddle.

I don't understand why many fans praise these comics for the politics and the worked-out world, when this is absolutely not the case. Politics is mainly based on some personal conflicts and intrigues, we practically do not immerse ourselves in the structure and work of the political apparatus, ideas, influence on social structures and lifestyle, the response of different segments of the population to this. No, I understand it's difficult and the age audience is not suitable, but maybe you can't make the central theme of comics something that you can't describe and don't understand how it works?

The authors do not know how to describe a truly alien race and, despite their hatred of human characters, have made Cybertronians so similar to humans that it is absurd.

For example, why is functionalism bad? I understand why this would be bad for humans, but why for another species whose lifestyle should be completely different? In fact, this is the most logical way of life for an alien race, because what is the alternative? Is there an alternative? Can Cybertron switch to equipping itself with conventional technology? What will the Cybertronians who are released from work do, what other jobs and activities are there? The authors do not go into this much and we do not see clear ideas of what a Cybertron society should be without functionalism. Well, or I didn't have enough of what the authors gave me.

But well, we have functionalism. Why is it that the elite of society under this regime are mostly the owners of "useless" altmods? Why not those who transform into scientific or very powerful military equipment? In general, under such conditions, the power on the planet would have been seized by the military part of society long ago.

It's not worth talking about the fact that the usual daily life of Cybertronians is described in almost no way. Along with the culture, we have received very little information about it.

Oh, maybe we know something about the transformers themselves then, right? Not really. Basically you can only find headcanon materials. And what about IDW? Maybe they offered us their glossary, terms, schemes? No, there's nothing. Moreover, already at that time, fans on the forums came up with everything and drew the structure of transformers, and the IDW authors were too lazy to even steal any ideas, except for a few.

But if the authors can't work with these topics, do they describe relationships and love well? Again, no, literally all relationships are either built from scratch, or do not develop, or are full of manipulation, deception and emotional swings (yes, everyone's favorite "the only good" pair of Chromedome X Rewind), or end in nothing, as if nothing ever happened. And it doesn't depend on whether it was a gay relationship or a completely straight one, all the relationships there are very poorly written. If this, like Arcee, is a representation, then it looks more like a direct insult.

And, by the way, if love is for everyone, then where is the love between a transformer and a human? Oh yes, authors hate humans. Love is not for everyone!

And in general, it's good, the authors want to add love and romance, but it needs to be justified! Love relationships are not a necessary phenomenon for species, a lot of stars have to come together for this kind of social interaction to be like that. How did the Cybertronians come to this when they don't have any prerequisites for it? How did they get the Conjux Endura ritual (or did you want to say "bonding"? ;) ).Why does such a strict government, as we were told, disapprove, but not prohibit such types of relations, if in all other respects it is totalitarian and cruel?

How do Cybertronian diseases work? Why did Ratchet die of this disease, but not the characters older than him? This point is generally very similar to a cheap way to soften the reader.

I can go on like this endlessly, but I'll stop here. Roberts is not just a fanfiction writer, he is a very mediocre  fanfiction writer who may have a couple of interesting ideas, but lacks the talent to show them. And then, ordinary average writers understand what they are doing and why, and do not get paid for it. It's even more insulting for the authors of fanfiction, who, even for the sake of their strange plots and ideas, try and spin like they're on a frying pan, go out of their skin, coming up with a justification for everything inside the fanfiction. Roberts can't do that.

In the end, I respect the Kiss Players more because the author knew perfectly well what he was doing and wanted to anger the audience, and the audience reacted appropriately. The authors of the IDW comics thought they were doing something smart and great, but they weren't. But the audience presents it as something great.

P.S. I apologize for the mistakes, I use a translator.

There is no need to apologize, you managed to point out the issues with IDW Transformers and why no one really bothered to read them outside of that specific hardcore audience, and not even a general hardcore audience, but an audience that agreed with one specific interpretation of the material, and everyone who had other interpretations could go suck a lemon.

I’ve said it before, this is a prime example of “Writing a comic about a comic” where the use of lore and specific characterizations is so specific to the franchise that any story that is told is Greek to anyone outside of the bubble, which accounts for IDW’s horrible sales. Skybound’s story so far has been criticized by some hardcore fans as a G1 redux, but even if it is, it’s still a well told story with universal themes, consistent, easy to understand characterizations, and characters that are likable for the heroes and hatable for the villains. It has a clear tone, something both IDW and IDW2 failed at utterly. Roberts, meanwhile was a terrible writer, but he was good at engaging the audience the same way fanfic writers do, focusing on the relationships that get the most dialogue, and leaving openings for others to fill in, via discussion or their own fic. But that’s useless when it comes to engaging a general audience. Most of the audience didn’t want to do the work of filling in the holes themselves, they wanted to have the story do that, or at least provide enough context to paint a picture.

As for Kiss Players, while I don’t know if he wanted to purposefully offend the audience or just create shock value, it was a side story comic. It didn’t shape shows afterwards causing them to tank, and doesn’t have people looking at the last show aired and yawning out of sheer boredom.

[pluralgang-practitioners]

On Exomemories/"System Lore" and How it Complicates Spirituality

by (mostly) Artura and (somewhat) Nova

This will be a bit of a long post, so to save you all the hassle of scrolling for an eternity, it'll be under a cut for convenience. Seriously. Don't expand this unless you want to hurt your hands (or just hit the J key on desktop for your own convenience).

Content warnings for this piece include discussions of: headmate on headmate violence, abuse, trauma (including religious trauma), repetition

[ID: A text divider comprised of 10 gold-colored suns, using the sun pattern1 material from Clip Studio Assets user patternMaker.]

This may touch a little bit on some other subjects that we want to discuss at a later date (which can be seen on our Topics page). For now, let's define some terms as a baseline and talk about the matter of today's post. We'll assume that the reader is unfamiliar with these terms entirely, but if you find this section to be redundant, you may skip ahead.

Glossary

exomemories - memories held by headmates that are not biographical in nature; for example, an introject may remember their time being the source of their identity. These may be referred to as past lives, and we will be using these concepts interchangeably. Similar experiences can be found in otherkin spaces regarding kintypes and varied information known about said kintypes.

introject - a headmate whose form is determined by external sources. For example, a fictive is a type of introject in which a headmate forms based off of a fictional character. Some introjects may also come from original work.

divinekin - an umbrella term referring to anyone whose otherkin identity is related to divinity in some way; subkintypes include angelkin, demonkin, god/deitykin, etc.

iterative - headmates that share common identifying traits and may be "variations on a theme," so to speak; these may also include reiteratives, which are specifically chronological versions of an identification.

[ID: A text divider comprised of 10 gold-colored suns, using the sun pattern1 material from Clip Studio Assets user patternMaker.]

Intro: Prefacing Notes on System Structure

It is worth noting that not all systems may share our experiences on this matter. In fact, we would largely expect the opposite to be true, because we are an adaptive, polyfragmented system. That means that we are uniquely formed to respond to the circumstances of our being and upbringing.

Worth also noting here is how our system formed in response to religion. We grew up undiagnosed as autistic, with two different members of our family pulling us towards their religions (these being a form of Christianity and a form of Buddhism). The most notable similarity between both pulls is the idea of changing the world through prayer (or worship, in Christianity's case). When you have autism and you believe that prayer can literally change anything, but are still put into abusive situations again and again... well... It gives you some baggage, to put it one way.

Our system is comprised of many layers and subsystems, which makes identity sometimes difficult to determine. Many of our subsystems are, in fact, comprised of members who share the same face (to a degree). Most notable of these subsystems is ours (Artura and Nova's), which contains over a dozen individuals all identifying with Nova's face.

That in and of itself is not unusual in polyfragmented systems. They also happen to be largely involved with how we write; we are iteratives of Iz. Where it gets strange is how this interacts with our subsystem's spirituality.

[ID: A text divider comprised of 10 gold-colored suns, using the sun pattern1 material from Clip Studio Assets user patternMaker.]

Artura and Nova

I, Artura, am the innerworld God of Light, Knowledge, and Linear time. Nova was, as close as I can explain in words that this world has, something akin to a priest of mine. I gave him power, but unlike how the relationship often goes, I expected nothing of him in return. This was the first timeline, and this timeline was left to atrophy by Fate.

In this time, Nova became adept at using the magic I gave him, until eventually turning his back on my siblings and I. I was the first he consumed, and then were the other five. By this, Nova became the God of Magic. But I did not dissolve, and the two of us instead became intertwined.

He became part of me, and I became part of him. And then we were the God of all those things I once held, and magic as well. He was content in that timeline to do as he pleased, and I did nothing as he enjoyed what brief time he had left.

I knew what was coming, after all.

It was only when Fate finally turned its eye back on the first timeline that it saw what had transpired. It deemed the timeline to be a failure, and unmade it. As I said, however, Nova was a part of me, now, and could see from the other timelines what damage had been wrought by his actions. His timeline went unmade, and him the only remnant of it.

A part of him resented this action by Fate that ended his timeline. Another part felt only inconvenience. And another did not care, so long as he was a part of the gestalt.

Appointed by Fate, Nova is a part of me, and part too of that which is the closest thing the innerworld has to an afterlife, tending to all the dead versions of himself from the many timelines. In our system, he and I run the subsystem known for sailing us smoothly through college.

He is my "bitchy headmate," as he would put it, and we get along like bickering roommates, generally. The destroyed time is the worst we ever had together. But it does color how we approach spirituality, if only because of what came after.

[ID: A text divider comprised of 10 gold-colored suns, using the sun pattern1 material from Clip Studio Assets user patternMaker.]

Artura and the Others

In every other timeline, the man that would have been Nova in the first has a million relationships to I as that which grants him undefined, nonjudgmental power. These are the iteratives that make up our aforementioned subsystem.

It is also to these others that Fate pays its attentions, having never done so with Nova in the era of his timeline until it came to do away with it entirely.

In some timelines, he follows the echoes of Nova's steps, seeking to destroy or replace gods that have stood distant in hardship's times when they were close at youth. Echoes of Nova's idea come from Fate's hand in the story. What Fate wants is a good story, after all, and what better way than to play at conflict? There is emotion there for it to sink its teeth into.

In other timelines, he who would be Nova steps away, taking the magic and wandering eternity in a world as a specter of magic. Fate is less so interested of him, but I know he is in enough timelines to grant me rest and comfort.

And in others still, he comes back after finding peace, and I ask him to join me as Nova has. There is always work to do, and unlike Fate I incorporate perspectives into that work in much different ways.

At the center of our innerworld is that it was a creation of emotion, first and foremost. I understand it as little as Fate, but I welcome those that do in their willing assistance.

There are certainly others more, which to the system are mysteries we are not allowed to perceive until it is their time to be seen.

[ID: A text divider comprised of 10 gold-colored suns, using the sun pattern1 material from Clip Studio Assets user patternMaker.]

A Brief Interlude on Divinekin Experiences

Now, if reading all of that didn't already clue you into it, it's worth mentioning that because of mine, Nova's, and the other timeline's instances of him, a lot of our system experiences divinekin (or adjacent) feelings.

I am the innerworld God of Light, etc., etc., and so on. Of course I would be drawn to this label, I miss something that I cannot have in this world beyond helping Fate to spin it as a story instead.

But with the other timeline's instances of who Nova is, there are often complex emotions within divinekin-like packages. Some aspire or envy that which wei represent. Some simply scorn it.

A complex relationship to divinity is given for all within our system, and it would not surprise me if the structure of our system has allowed us to process a lot of biographical trauma surrounding the body's religious upbringings.

[ID: A text divider comprised of 10 gold-colored suns, using the sun pattern1 material from Clip Studio Assets user patternMaker.]

Cycles in Our World

There are plenty cycles in our world. You want me to joke about the water cycle?

The reason I pivot back to it here, however, is to highlight the repetitive nature of trauma as it pertains to our biographical history. We won't be getting into the details of our trauma, but it is worth a brief tangent on account of certain details.

As mentioned prior, we have experience being torn between two different religious paths. One of which is notable due to how it was taught and reinforced in our upbringing. Reincarnation gets a footnote here obviously, but the common misconception about how karma works is particularly of interest; that is, the idea of "what goes around comes around" as opposed to what karma means in-context.

Yes, this is despite that family member being Buddhist for over a decade at the time of our body's birth. We're chalking it up to it being a weird branch of Buddhism.

Being raised under the pressure of this misconception of karma colored our experience of repeated, seasonal trauma. Ergo, it cannot be ignored that many of our exomemories parallel our philosophy of the world as experienced through repeated trauma.

Every year, without fail, we would return to trauma. Was this punishment for transgressions in a past life? Or had we committed some act in this life so heinous in our infancy to justify it?

There is also, of course, the concept of the cycle of abuse, which until fairly recently in our life always hung like a blade over us. The idea that we are doomed to repeat that which our forefathers pressed upon us in bruises and scars is... unwelcome, we shall say.

Repetition is part of everything we have experienced, a maddening and festering thing that, inevitably, would lead to an innerworld structured the way ours is.

[ID: A text divider comprised of 10 gold-colored suns, using the sun pattern1 material from Clip Studio Assets user patternMaker.]

Cycles in Our Exomemories Regarding Biographical Trauma

As we have attempted to make clear in this exploration, the nature of our exomemories is that, at the end of the day (especially in this life), they are stories meant to evoke and tear emotions from our mind. We are set pieces, characters, the fictional in thought. As much as I dislike it, it does explain the repetition ad nausea of certain stories and themes.

Put one way, there is always the gestalt that embodies chaos, order, or atrophy; or any other schema you would like to call upon. Our exomemories are our own, but they are also echoes of the pain that wrote their tales.

I am fictional, but I am sitting in the body of that which wrote me, typing about my own experiences as being fictional and understanding that the same fiction which birthed me is not the truth that caused that pain.

We repeat so as to escape the past.

[ID: A text divider comprised of 10 gold-colored suns, using the sun pattern1 material from Clip Studio Assets user patternMaker.]

Cycles as Comfort

Understanding the nature of repetition as it relates to our trauma, as well as what we can get from the exomemories we are made of that repackage said trauma, I feel it is important to add that none of this is without some positive consequence. I would not allow us to share this were that not the case.

The abuse, yes— I do not pretend any of that was positive. There are parts that were as an oasis to a desert. We would not have survived otherwise. But none in the system will make excuses for the hardships our body faced. Abusers can do nice things. They are still abusers.

But the encryption of this pain into exomemories as we have put distance between us and our abuse has given the system important things to cling to in times of distress.

First: the understanding that not all things must be guaranteed in this world; that to escape hardship is (generally) possible, even if that hardship may in time find you with a new face. It is possible to be happy. This is a human emotion we all deserve to feel. It may require fighting for it, in many cases, but there is joy in this world. Fleeting joy is worth that fight too.

Second: if there is anything to remind us that there are things to cling onto in this world, it is the small things that become so hard to experience when the world makes us feel small. There is comfort in knowing that the sun rises each morning, that clouds mean rain, and that every year the trees grow a little taller, a little thicker. Just because so much repeats does not mean it stays stagnant or festers, either. Does a tree think the harsh winds of Spring will give way to lightless Summers? To struggle is the capacity of all things. So too is to relax and find safety.

When the clouds break, even if thunder still roars, the sun will still shine soon enough.

[ID: A text divider comprised of 10 gold-colored suns, using the sun pattern1 material from Clip Studio Assets user patternMaker.]

Conclusion

I'm honestly not sure what to put here, considering how much I've just written about our system structure and exomemories in an attempt to try to communicate to the readers some iota of our spiritual experience.

Not everyone in the system is attached to the innerworld, so not everyone in the system relates to this. Some are introjects of characters that were hurt by all this nonsense, and some are perpetrators of innerworld harm themselves.

If anything, it has been an interesting experience coming to terms with just how much the innerworld means to us from a spiritual place. I don't even know how I feel about it, entirely. I don't know if I ever will.

I at least recognize that there is something deeply important to us about this experience, in a way that can only be called spiritual.

[ID: A rectangular crop of artwork depicting a man with closed eyes, facing away from a stained glass mural behind him of the glowing sun. He cries golden tears, with a thoughtless expression on his face, as if dreaming.]

[mister-e-muss]

Backlog report time: How did February ‘24 treat me?

Turns out this was a bit of a light month for me.

AI: The Somnium Files

I blame a fun demo, a very generous eShop sale, and my mutual @sakuracat96 for getting me into this one. I don’t really play visual novels. Ever. To my mind the only exceptions to this are the Ace Attorney games, 13 Sentinels, and now this game, and that’s because there is actual gameplay attached to the story.

If there’s one thing about the game that I can say it’s that it is fundamentally weird. It’s concept is about entering people’s dreams, and trying entirely off-the-wall solutions to progress. Even outside of the dreams, there’s a careful balance of humor and grit.

I loved this game. I feel almost bad for stealing this game for 8 dollars. While I’ve heard that it’s sequel is a mixed bag, I can’t wait to see where this series goes.

Chrono Trigger (DS)

Honestly what can I even say about this one. It’s goddamn Chrono Trigger! We’re talking about one of the original ‘best game of all time’ best games of all time! This is one of the founding fathers of JRPG greatness: a game that compares unfavorably with, depending on who you ask, maybe two other games! There is literally nothing I can say about this game that hasn’t been said at least three times before.

For being almost 30 years old, it is incredible how well this game holds up. Combat isn’t as large or complex as more modern entries in the genre, but it’s effective and fun. The soundtrack is just as good then as it is now. The story is involved, with reveals and new characters coming at just the right pace to keep you hooked.

I genuinely think that this game has not aged in the slightest. That isn’t to say there aren’t games that do certain things better, but it is great as a total package. Do I think that Magus and Frog are deeper characters than say Renne Hayworth/Bright? No not really. Do I think the soundtrack is better than The World Ends With You? No. Does it have a long runtime wherein every nook and cranny is packed with content? Again, no. In fact the DS versions’ extra content is just plain tedious, and feels like padding.

But I think its short run-time is an under-appropriated aspect. I play Xenoblade and Trails, so you know that I love long-running games. Especially when they use that time to really dig into the world and characters and how things work. That said, a long run time is not necessarily a good thing. If you’re gameplay loop isn’t fun or is just tedious, then long run times just extend the discomfort. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in English, it’s that bigger is not better. It’s not a writer’s job to bend the dictionary over their knee, or break a thesaurus’ spine, or demand the reader suddenly memorize an entire Glossary’s worth of terminology to make a book make sense. A writer’s job, in plain and simple terms, is to tell the story as best they can. This is Chrono Trigger’s hidden strength: it’s compact and succinct. Frog might not be as fully realized a character compared to others, but there’s enough of an arc to make the player feel for him. The story might be comparatively short, (my run clocked in at 28 hours, and I spent two of those doing that annoying bonus content I mentioned) but it does so much within that time.

I genuinely feel like Square Enix could release a remake or port in every console generation, and it would still stake up. In fact, I have no idea why Square isn’t using their HD2D engine on this one.

[pomefioredove]

oh god this is long. warning for bad english and incomprehensible rambling

a brief forward:

my credentials in this area are "religious studies major" and not much else. I am not Irish, nor am I pagan, and my knowledge/study in Irish mythology is very secondary to Catholicism. I have been close to and spoken to a handful of experts within the field.

furthermore, I would classify myself as a reconstructionist, meaning that I solely draw from old/ancient/historical sources, and reject eclectic and appropriative wiccan ideas. this has been a seven year long labor of love, but I'm still not perfect, and continue to sift through my sources every day.

(I implore anyone in this field to correct any mistakes I make)

additionally I've only read a little bit of book 7 so I may be totally crazy and wrong. this is just a speculative piece, after all.

a glossary of knowledge:

for the purpose of this essay, I use "fae" as an umbrella term, which includes pixies, medieval French fae, the aos sí, and the Tuatha de Danann*

*please note that the Tuatha de were gods in their original sources, but were changed to fairies (and occasionally kings) in later Catholicized retellings.

I will be focusing most on ancient beliefs, with vague mentions of medieval/post-Catholicism ones. Irish Catholicism is extremely important in the context of these stories, as it was the Catholic monks who preserved them in written form, and it's quite literally impossible not to mention. it's had a huge influence.

etc.

when talking about folklore, mythology, or religion, it's literally impossible to draw definite lines. it's why I hate when people say "well this religion stole this thing!" because religions intermingle, they share, they swap, they sometimes even meld with each other into something unique. ever-changing and different and the same. the Romans adopted their beliefs from the Greeks, and they shared gods with the Gauls, and then Christianity used the image of Jupiter as God. a big part of being a history major is understanding how to draw connections between cultures and peoples.

Admittedly, I am not entirely familiar with the French idea of fae. I know that it is medieval. post-Christianity. it's a fairly loose term that denotes a "magical woman, skilled with words, herbs and stones" (via Wikipedia) and not much else. this is relevant to the Sleeping Beauty story, in which all the fairies are women. Maleficent's guards are not fairies, but ghouls (is that the right word?). I couldn't tell you the exact origin of French fairies, but it's not far-fetched to say they could have had "Celtic"* influence

*in reference to more than one culture in this context. scottish, manx, welsh, irish, etc

It is, perhaps, more important to add that French fairies are romantic figures in nature. very... fairy-tale esque. characters such as the fairy godmother and the good fairies in Perrault's version of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are good examples of this.

TWST fae... are... a little different. obviously. while it may be easy to simply argue that "it's twisted, so they're darker" or "Briar Valley is based off Maleficent's domain so of course it's dark", it's implied (and shown!) that good entities come from Briar Valley, too. pixies exist in TWST, for example. then there are the good fairies from Sleeping Beauty, which have to exist alongside Maleficent in the canon of TWST. The fae here are layered, much more so than in their sources. This is where I start seeing shit.

Let's start with the war we're introduced to in Lilia's dream in book 7. "war" and "fairies" are probably not two terms a classic fairytale enjoyer would associate with each other, but, God, you know who would? me.

the entire concept of humans invading fae land, using resources and pushing the fairies out, resulting in a war, is so so very Book of Invasions to me. as in, that happens in the fucking Lebor Gabála Érenn itself, the war between the supernatural entities (in this context, the Tuatha de Danann) and the humans over control of land is a huge part of the story. the humans win at the end, however, and become the ancestors to the modern Irish people, while the Tuatha de return to their homeland and become the ancestors of modern fae (in this context, the aos sí). This is quite literally the very first thing I thought of when reading chapter 7.

I don't think it's supposed to be a 1:1 parallel ofc but I DO find the parallels absolutely fascinating. there are a few other things, like the use of masks, the importance of magical weaponry, the connection with nature and animals, and such that also reminds me of common themes in Irish history and mythology. if we want to play with the whole "Lilia is a vampire fae" idea I can point you to the Irish myth of Abhartach, which some claim to be the actual inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula! then we can also talk about the Fomorians and how the Fomorians had animalistic features in many accounts and intermarried with the Tuatha de, etc etc there's a lot going on. Irish mythology is far more complex than people give it credit for.

And then Halloween exists in TWST. which indicates to both Christianity and later Samhain traditions (though not ancient Samhain itself, which is different still from Halloween), Samhain (pronounced sah-wen) being one of the four big seasonal holidays in the ancient Irish calendar, what I would argue to be one of the Irish new year, a time when the "veil" between worlds grows thinner.

speaking of which.

Let's talk about the worlds. for all intents and purposes I will be referring to this place as Tír na nÓg, thought that's just a more specific name for "the otherworld". the home of the Tuatha de, of all fairies, really, which overlaps our own world. at certain points in the year- Samhain, the beginning of winter, and Bealtaine, the beginning of summer- the "veil" separating our world and the next becomes thin. this is a popular notion in later Ireland, and those who argue for Samhain's connection to Halloween point to this a lot.

Now, Tír na nÓg is frequently (and often, accidentally) host to many mortals. Oisín is probably the most recognizable/famous example of this. by all accounts, crossing over to Tír na nÓg is rather easy- traveling west over the sea can get you there (like I said, the worlds overlap; they exist alongside each other), or you can go through burial mounds (or fairy forts), or you can be invited or "summoned" by an inhabitant. sometimes even kidnapped, if we take later ideals into account.

So why is this so important to me?

Yuu, us, we're unknowingly and unwillingly transported into another world, one of magic. the exact reasoning of why or how is never explained, but if we're drawing parallels between how worlds work in our fae's mythology, is it so strange to assume that we were kidnapped? summoned? there are lots of stories about fae women being smitten with mortal men and sweeping them away to "the otherworld"

Who's to say that the same thing didn't happen to us?

Do I think the TWST writers have an intimate knowledge of Irish mythology and are purposefully making allusions to drive me insane specifically? no. obviously not. is it possible that these myths have influenced the general idea of fae, of other worlds, and thus were included in the writing process unconsciously? yes. absolutely! the unfortunate thing about Irish mythology is that it is not held as sacred as I'd like it to be, and has been very subject to appropriation and misinformation over the years, leading to a disconnect between the stories and their sources. I would bet anyone here that they'd been exposed to ancient Irish stories/holidays/customs without even knowing it. it's very possible that some of these common themes got passed along without intent.

Anyway. I guess I just find the parallels very interesting. and this is just about the writing, if we wanted to take a canon approach it wouldn't be crazy to say that modern-ish TWST fae are descendants of a Tuatha de equivalent. which carries its own implications.

the thing w the fae origins is that I just could not even BEGIN to describe how massively important that information would be to the main plot. it would take so many paragraphs to even scratch the surface. the implications of it have me rocking back and forth going crazy over like maybe 2 or 3 parallels that normal people wouldn't even think twice about

[baeddel]

Please. Please can you tell me what a baeddel is and why people (terfs?) used it in a derogatory manner on this website for a hot minute but now no one ever uses it at all

you asked for it, fucker

[2k words; philology and drama]

baeddel is an Old English word. i have no idea where it actually occurs in the Old English written corpus, but it occurs in a few placenames. its diminuitive form, baedling, is much better documented. it appears in the (untranslated) Canons of Theodore, a penitential handbook, a sort of guidebook for priests offering advice on what penances should be recommended for which sins. in a passage devoted to sexual transgressions it gives the penances suggested for a man who sleeps with a woman, a man who sleeps with another man, and then a man who sleeps with a baedling. so you have this construction of a baedling as something other than a man or a woman. and then it gives the penance for a baedling who sleeps with another baedling (a ludicrous one-year fast). then, by way of an explaination, Theodore delivers us one of the most enigmatic phrases in the Old English corpus: "for she is soft, like an adulturess."

the -ling suffix in baedling is masculine. but Theodore uses feminine pronouns and suffixes to describe baedlings. as we said, it's also used separately from male and female. but it's also used separately from their words for intersex and it never appears in this context. all of this means that you have this word that denotes a subject who is, as Christopher Monk put it, "of problematic gender." interested historians have typically interpreted it as referring to some category of homosexual male, such as Wayne R. Dines in his two-volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality who discusses it in the context of an Old English glossary which works a bit like an Old English-Latin dictionary, giving Old English words and their Latin counterparts. the Latin words the Anglo-Saxon lexicographer chose to correspond with baedling were effeminatus and mollis, and Lang concludes that it refers to an "effeminate homosexual" (pg 60, Anglo Saxon). this same glossary gives as an Old English synonym the word waepenwifstere which literally means "woman with a penis," and which Dines gives the approximate translation (hold on tight) male wife.

R. D. Fulk, a philologist and medievalist, made a separate analysis of the term in his study on the Canons of Theodore 'Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore', collected in Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England, 2004. he analysed it as a 'sexual category' (sexual as in sexuality), owing to the context of sexual transgressions in the Canons. he decides that it refers to a man who bottoms in sexual relationships with another man. i don't have the article on hand so i'm not sure what his reasoning was, but this seems obviously inadequate given what we know from the glossary described by Dines. Latin has a word for bottom, pathica, and the lexicographer did not use this in their translation, preferring words that emphasized the baedling's femininity like effeminatus, and doesn't address the sexual context at all. Dines, however, only reading this glossary, seems to decide that it refers to a type of male homosexual too hastily, considering the Canons explicitly treat them separately. both Dines and Fulk immediately reduce the baedling to a subcategory of homosexual when neither of the sources to hand actually do so themselves.

by now it should be obvious why, seven or so years ago, we interpreted it as an equivalent to trans woman. I mean come on - a woman with a penis! these days I tend to add a bit of a caution to this understanding, which is that trans woman is the translation of baedling which seems most adequate to us, just as baedling was the translation of effeminatus that seemed most adequate to our lexicographer. but the term cannot translate perfectly; its sense was derived from some minimal context; a legal context, a doctrinal context, and so forth... the way Anglo-Saxons understood sex/gender is complicated but it has been argued that they had a 'one sex model' and didn't regard men and women as biologically separate types, which is obviously quite different from the sexual model accepted today; in any case they didn't have access to the karyotype and so on. the basic categories they used to understand gender and sexuality were different from ours. in particular, Hirschfield et al. should be understood as a particularly revolutionary moment in the genealogy of transsexuality; the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft essentially invented the concept of the 'sex change', the 'transition', conceived as a biological passage from one sex to the other. even in other contexts where (forgive me) #girlslikeus changed their bodies in some way, like the castration of the priestesses of Cybele, or those belonging to the various historical societies which we believe used premarin for feminization [disputed; see this post], there is no record that they were ever considered men at any stage or had some kind of male biology that preceded their 'gender identity.' the concept of the trans woman requires the minimal context of the coercive assignment at birth and its subsequent (civil and bio-technological) rejection. i have never encountered evidence that this has ever been true in any previous society. nonetheless, these societies still had gendered relations, and essentially wherever we find these gendered relations we also find some subject which is omitted or for whom it has been necessary to note exceptions. what is of chief interest to us is not so much that there was such a subject here or there in history (and whatever propagandistic uses this fact might have), but understanding why these regularities exist.

a very parsimonious explanation is that gender is a biological reality, and there is some particular biological subject which a whole host of words have been conjured to denote. if this were the case then we would expect that, no matter what gender/sexual system we encounter in a given society, it will inevitably find some linguistic expression. if, like me, you find this idea revolting, then you should busy yourself trying to come up with an alternative explanation which is not just plausible, but more plausible. my best guesses are outside the scope of this answer...

anyway, all of this must be very interesting to the five or six people invested in the confluence of philology and gender studies. but why on earth did it become so widely used, in so many strange and unusual contexts, in the 2010s? we're very sorry, but yes, it's our fault. you see apart from all of this, there is also a little piece of information which goes along with the word baeddel, which is that it's the root of the Modern English word bad. by way of, no less, the word baedan, 'to defile'. how this defiled historical subject came to bear responsibility for everything bad to English-speakers doesn't seem to be known from linguistic evidence. however, it makes for a very pithy little remark on transmisogyny. my dear friend [REDACTED] made a playful little post making this point and, good Lord, had we only known...

it went like this. its such a funny little idea that we all start changing our urls to include the word baeddel. in those days it was common to make puns with your url (we always did halloween and christmas ones); i was baeddelaire, a play on the French poet Baudelaire. while we all still had these urls a series of events which everyone would like to forget happened, and we became Enemies of Everyone in the Whole World. because of the url thing people started to call us "the baeddels." then there was "a cult" called "the baeddels" and so forth. this cult had various infamies attatched to it and a constellation of indefensible political positions. ultimately we faced a metric fucking shit ton of harassment, including, for some of my friends, really serious and bad irl harassment that had long-term bad awful consequences relating to stable housing and physical safety and i basically never want to talk about that part of my life ever again. and i never have to, because i've come to realize that for most people, when they use the word baeddel, they don't know about that stuff. it doesn't mean that anymore.

so what does it mean? you'll see it in a few contexts. TERFs do use it, as you guessed. i am not quite sure what they really mean by it and how it differs from other TERF barbs. i think being a baeddel invovles being politically active or at least having a political consciousness, but in a way thats distinct from just any 'TRA' or trans activist. so perhaps 'militant' trans women, but perhaps also just any trans woman with any opinions at all. how this was transmitted from tumblr/west coast tranny drama to TERF vocabulary i have no idea. but you will also find - or, could have found a few years ago - i would say 'copycat' groups who didn't know us or what we believed but heard the rumours, and established their own (generously) organizations (usually facebook groups) dedicated to putting those principles into practice. they considered themselves trans lesbian separatists and did things like doxx and harass trans women who dated cafabs. if you don't know about this, yes, there really were such groups. they mostly collapsed and disappeared because they were evildoers who based their ideology on a caricature. i knew a black trans woman who was treated very badly by one of these groups, for predictable reasons. so long-time readers: if you see people talking about their bad experiences with 'baeddels', you can't necessarily relate it to the 2014 context and assume they're carrying around old baggage. there are other dreams in the nightmare.

the most common way you'll see it today, in my experience, is in this form: people will say that it was a "slur" for trans women. they might bring up that it's the root of the word bad, and they might even think that you shouldn't use the word bad because of it, or that you shouldn't use the word baeddel because it's a slur. all of this is a silly game of internet telephone and not worth addressing. except to say that it's by no means clear that baeddel, or baedling, were slurs, or even insulting at all. while Theodore doesn't provide us with a description of how we can have sex with a baedling without sinning, and it may be the case that any sexual relations with a baedling was considered sinful, sexuality-based transgressions were not taken all that seriously in those days. there was a period where homosexuality within the Church was almost sanctioned, and it wasn't until much later that homosexuality became so harshly proscribed, to the extent that it was thought to represent a threat to society, etc. and as i mentioned, there are places in England named after baedlings. there is a little parish near Kent which is called Badlesmere, Baeddel's Lake, which was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Domesday Book (as having a lord, a handful of villagers and a few slaves; perhaps only one or two households). it's not unheard of, but i just don't know very many places called Faggot Town or some such. it's possible that baedlings had some role in Anglo-Saxon society which we are not aware of; it could even have been a prestigious one, as it was in other societies. there is just no evidence other than a couple of passing references in the literature and we'll probably never have a complete picture.

[aro-culture-is]

Hi... uhm... I ask here for a little help... I literaly didnt realize this until yesterday when it hit me like a ton of bricks and right now Im a bit confused as to WHAT I am.

A guy in a class likes me, but I dont like him back, and I suddenly realize the thought kinda made me uncomfortable. Which I found weird because I always thought I wanted a romantic relationship but then suddenly thought "DO I? Or do I only like the IDEA of it?".

Ive confirmed that Im Aegosexual, so that part of me is clear just took a while but I have no doubt.

But the romantic part is where I have doubts. I did a little research but Im not really sure if Im demiromantic, cupioromantic or aegoromatic. Or if Im aromantic at all...

I-I dont know... was the guy just not my type? In my life Ive literally had only 4 crushes, and Im almost in my 30s, but I think ive always liked the idea of love. To support and be supported by someone, to take care of them... but... I dont know if the part of the romatic attraction was THERE... so... Im... confused... AM I aromantic? Am I? ... Im not sure...

I can't tell you with any certainty what your identity is. However, having only 4 crushes by your late 20s sounds very unusual for an alloromantic individual not in long, committed relationships during that time. I think you'd likely benefit from checking out the tag "am i aro" on this blog and seeing how others began to notice/identify as aromantic. It is possible that this guy just wasn't your type - but the degree to which you are questioning makes me inclined to suspect you're somewhere in the aromantic spectrum.

This may make your questioning more complicated, but I also think it is worth understanding amatonormativity and how you may experience it. It may also be worth investigating queerplatonic relationships and attraction, and listening to people who talk about their experiences with such. One great website to look at for more established terms in the aro community is AUREA and their glossary. I'd advise caution if you use the LGBTQIA fandom wikia, as that was devastated by an aphobic fandom wikia developer less than a year ago, iirc. It may be recovering, but there at least was someone who had the power to delete and change things with malice.

I hope this helps to at least provide some framework for your questioning. I'll tag this post "am i aro", and you can explore the tag by clicking on that on my blog.

[goji-pilled]

MK-S: Another set of Candeloro role play journal entries!

Feb 20: It is done. Through much of our financial offerings and to reward our patience, Those That Breath Of Poison Mist have completed their cruel work. As needed necessary as the deed was, I cannot help but feel some form of pity for the Rat King and his followers; Vile beings they were, yet I cannot help but feel that even they deserved to die in battle, rather than the fate of clawing at their throats as the air they breathed turned foul and treacherous (Oh, I like how that line turned out. Air “turned foul and treacherous”, much cooler than just “the poisoned air/mist”.) Perhaps it is just my honor as a [Warrior? Adventurer? Explorer?] (Is explorer honor even a thing? I don’t think I ever selected an actual backstory for this. Note to self: Determine that later.) But alas, there was no choice. I was but one Warri (I just did this literally a sentence ago. I’m going to have to stop putting that off and make some sort of dictionary glossary of terms that I can reference.) against a legion, and to lose one battle is to lose the war itself. (Yeah, electrical fire would definitely win in a fight against the house. And despite being a mermaid, I don’t think Oktavia has any water summoning powers. It’s funny, for all the magic everyone here has, none of us actually have the ability/magic-power to readily handle a house fire…heck, we’re more likely to start one. I’d say Ophelia is more likely given her flaming head, but I’ve seen Oktavia have some careless moments every now and again, and honestly, I’ve done some careless stuff to…where was I again? …Oh yeah, showing honor towards fallen foes.) I had hoped for an honorable duel against this vile villain. But now? Now he is just another body, indistinguishable amongst the rest of the dead. (Not looking forward to the cleanup of dead rats, but it has to be done.)

Feb 28: A stranger arrived to our land today. Save for her headpiece, she was dressed as any of us might. She came with claims of distant ancestors who once called our lands home. The stranger…alright, I’m going to break character for a moment, so I can just get this all written down first.

We had an unexpected guest drop by today: Another Domesticated Witch. And since I’m still waiting for the walls to not be toxic, and I’ve been itching to write again, I figured I might as well let this double as a journal/diary. Her name was Klarissa; yeah, just like some of Oktavia’s familiars. (I wonder if Witch/Familiar Names, wherever they come from, come from a finite source. If not, then that’s still a fun coincidence.) Oh! I can work that in! Her being some sort of foreign ruler from the land Oktavia’s familiars come from…idea’s really rough, and needs some serious polish/rewriting, but I wanted to jot it down before I forgot.

She didn’t have a last name though, which is unfortunate for her. She seemed really uncomfortable when Oktavia asked for her last name; I think our lovable mermaid forgets how fortunate she is that her Witch Name came with one. At least I think she can relate to Klarissa’s old name issues; from her expression, I’d guess that she ended up with a similar aversion to her old name. I’m guess I’m lucky that “Mami Tomoe” doesn’t give me an identity crisis. (Or maybe Oktavia’s unlucky? I guess it depends on what the average Domestic Witch goes through; we’re still only in the double digits for saved girls, so I don’t think that’s a large enough sample size to know if old name aversion and negative reactions are common or a rarity)…I got sidetracked again.

Anyway, long story short, Klarissa took an impromptu trip expecting to find family, but apparently we’ve since bought and moved into their old home. Took her a moment to get the idea, had to explain there was no “Anthony” here. (No idea how she was going to explain the name change to him if she found him here. She gave me a funny look when I brought that up. Guess she never really gave it any thought.) We’ve offered to let her stay a night or two in the guest room. If we weren’t all witches and magical girls, I’d say that would be a really dumb idea, letting a complete stranger into our home. Thankfully, it seems my thoughts are just falling soundly into mother’s paranoia, and not justifiable suspicion. (If she tries to hurt Nagisa or Yuma in our sleep though, I will kill her without question, hesitation, or mercy…wow, being a witch and a mother really does change your outlook on certain things.)

Now, how can I incorporate her visit into this story? I did hear part of a conversation when I walked by the guest room. Couldn’t hear the other end, and it almost sounded like a one-sided conversation with someone named “Phil”. I’m just glad this girl has a friend somewhere; being a witch with no one at all would probably be horrifying. I digress. Anyway, what to name her in this? Hmm…well, I call Oktavia “Lady Seckendorff”, so I guess I can use “Lady Klarissa” for-

Had to leave and lost my train of though. There was a loud noise from the walls. Better not be a surviving rat, we just paid good money to have those things killed. And I don’t want our guest to know we had a rat problem, or that I delayed an exterminator to role play while killing them (wow, that’s a bit messed up when I write it like that…and yet I don’t mind…heh.) Klarissa was surprised/woken and kept asking where her hat went, but I sent her back to bed and told her we’ll find it in the morning. Speaking of, I’m off to bed myself.

March 1: Found Klarissa’s hat; for some reason, it was covering the wall hole I used to get in. Guess someone thought it a good idea to cover up the hole. Or maybe her hat walked over and was poking around in it. Saw some sort of tendril/tentacle thing retract from the hole and into the hat really fast when I picked it up. Turns out “Phil” is some sort of Familiar of hers that she keeps in her hat. It’s like a pocket dimension, similar to Homura’s shield, or something like that. She wouldn’t elaborate much, (as if a Familiar is more complicated than being a Familiar) though she did say she’d like to come back to visit in a few months. She also apologized in advance if Phil did anything funny to the walls as some sort of “gift”. (I didn’t say anything, but it might have just been eating rat corpses. Here’s hoping; that would save me a cleanup. No idea what a familiar could leave as a “gift”.)

I’ll be going into the wall again tomorrow so I can finally get back into character. Still going to use “Lady Klarissa” as a char-

Again with the wall noise. Yeah, I’m checking that spot first thing in the morning. I think I decided on making maps while checking for more chewed up wires. Not as dramatic as hunting down the scourge of the Rat King, but beggars can’t be choosers. Well, off to bed tonight for the adventure tomorrow!

March 2: What in the actual fuck?!?

March 5: Wow, was that really all I wrote three days ago? Yikes, I even swore. I never swear. Let me just strike that out. Yeah, I have no idea what Klarissa’s Phil familiar-thing did, but yesterday was impossible. Literally impossible. I was going over to where I heard the banging sound inside the wall the other day, go straight, take the left because it’s the only turn possible…

This time there was a right path too.

Let me emphasize that; there was an interior to a wall, where there was NO WALL! I even got Nagisa to feed me a set of tape measures taped together to check; there’s at least a full 20 meters of wall that DOES NOT EXIST in this house! This isn’t even some type of Labyrinth thing, it just defies the laws of physics in every way I can imagine.

March 6: Nagisa and Yuma asked me when the next “Adventurer’s Journal” would be. (Guess that’s what their calling it, but I reserve the right to figure out my job title myself at a later date.) I told them I’m not quite sure with the new interior wall defying space-time. (Honestly our house is probably now worth a fortune to physicists. Ah, who am I kidding, it would totally be confiscated for government research. Can you imagine the weapons that could be developed…(okay I wrote that as a joke, but then I realized it could be used to make actual bottomless magazines, and that was too entertaining to not write down.)

They both made it clear they care more about my safety than my stories (God bless my girls, they are so sweet!) but they did bring up a good point: I truly do have something I can explore now. A region I can properly map out. I’d need to make some road signs so I don’t get lost…

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to come around to the notion that this might be a “gift” after all…

Well, “The Gap” seems to have expanded, and by decree of the House of Tomoe, I, Candeloro, shall undertake this task personally. (Oh, it feels so good to get back into character!)

MK-S: We’ll, I hope you enjoyed that set of Candeloro journal entries: she had to break character for quite a bit of it, but this was more or less just background setup for Klarissa’s visit, for the narrative purpose of Phil making a cool setting for these journal entries.

I have fun when writing these things; I’m essentially role-playing Candeloro, role-playing an adventurer. And that allows for some fun in-character meta commentary whenever I catch myself making a mistake while writing, such as the accidental use of “Warrior” after I personally just said I’ll need to figure that out later. This is also the first time I’ve actually sworn in any post I’ve made, but I figured it was an appropriate reaction to seeing something that shouldn’t exist in your own home.

I also had fun with Candeloro’s perspective on Klarissa trying to hide the fact that she’s Candeloro’s (niece?) and Oktavia’s daughter. (Just realized the Reverse Witches AU don’t know about familiar babies yet. Or is that not the right title where Anthony didn’t remove the despair in time? I know we had one in which it was Sayaka, Candeloro, and Ophelia, but I can’t recall the name of that one, assuming I didn’t get the AU names mixed up.)

Well, I hope this was fun to read! With the rats dead, we now have Phil supernatural shenanigans, horrors, and adventure set up in the walls.

GOD I love these, its such a fun read

[oumakokichi]

What are the differences between the original and localization?

Hmm, that’s a very simple question with a pretty lengthy answer! I did answer some similar questions in the past, but that was a long time ago, much closer to when the localization was first released. There are probably a lot of people whose main experience with the game has only been with the localization, and who don’t really know or remember those differences anymore.

For that reason, I’m going to go into kind of a “masterlist” of things that were changed in the localization in this post. This will be very long, but I really want to explain the whole story behind the localization and its differences from the original to people who might only be hearing about this for the first time. I’m going to cover full spoilers for the game obviously, so be careful when reading!

Also, please feel free to share this post around, as I think it contains a lot of information that might be interesting to people who’ve only experienced the localization!

Before I really get into it though, I want to stipulate that the differences I’m covering in this post are mostly going to be things that I believe could’ve been handled or translated better, not every single line that was changed verbatim in the game. This is because a localization’s purpose is incredibly different from a literal translation.

Where a literal translation seeks to keep as much of the original authorial intent as possible and has the leeway to explain various Japanese terms and cultural specifics to the readers in footnotes or a glossary, a localization is usually much more targeted towards a specific target audience, usually one more unfamiliar with Japanese culture or terminology. As a result, some things in a localization are occasionally changed to make them more understandable to a western audience.

So, for example, I’m not going to fault the localization for changing Monosuke’s extremely heavy Kansai accent in Japanese to a New York accent in the English dub. It’s much easier for western players to immediately grasp that, “hey, this guy has a very specific regional accent that the other characters don’t,” and it works really well as a rough equivalent. Similarly, localization changes like changing a line here or there about the sport of sumo to be about the Jets and the Patriots also helps get the point across to players quickly and easily without having to explain an unfamiliar sport to western players in-depth before they can get the joke.

That being said… there were some liberties taken with ndrv3’s translation which I don’t believe fulfill the point of a localization, and which changed certain deliveries or even perceptions about the characters in a way that I just don’t agree with.

Let me explain first how the localization team actually worked, to people who might be unfamiliar with the process. Ndrv3 had four separate translators working on the localization. When NISA first announced that the game was being localized, these four translators introduced themselves on reddit in an AMA, where they also mentioned that they were by and large dividing up the 16 main characters between themselves, with each translator specifically assigned to four characters.

Having more translators working on a game might sound like a good idea in theory, but it’s often not. The more translators assigned to a game, the harder it is to provide a consistent translation. Translation is messy work: often there are multiple ways to translate the same sentence, or even the same word between two different languages. If a translation has multiple translators, that means they need to be communicating constantly with one another and referencing each other’s work all the time in order to avoid mistranslations: it’s difficult work, but not impossible.

However… this didn’t happen with ndrv3’s translation team. It’s pretty clear they did not reference each other’s work or communicate very well, and the translation suffers for it. I’m not just guessing here, either; it’s a fact that various parts of the game have lines completely ruined by not looking at the context, or words translated two different ways almost back-to-back. I’ll provide specific examples of this later.

Many of the translators also picked which characters they wanted to translate on the basis of which were their favorites—which, again, isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but which does raise the risk of letting character bias influence your work. No work is inherently without bias; all translators have to look at their own biases and still attempt to translate fairly regardless. But because translators were assigned four characters each, this meant that while they might be really enthusiastic about translating for one character in particular, they were less enthusiastic for others. These biases do reflect in the work, and I will provide further examples as I make my list.

This system of delegation also leaves more questions than it answers. It becomes impossible to tell who translated certain parts of the game, particularly in areas where the narrator is unclear. For example, did Saihara’s translator translate Ouma’s motive video, as Saihara is the one watching it in chapter 6? Or did Ouma’s translator do it, since it’s his motive video? Who translated the parts we see at the beginning of certain chapters, where characters from the outside world make occasional comments? It’s really unclear, and I’m not even sure if the translators divvied up these parts amongst themselves or if only one person was supposed to handle them.

To put it simply, there were quite a lot of complications and worrying factors about the way the translation was divided by the team, and the communication (or lack thereof) between said translators. It’s impossible to really discuss the main problems that ndrv3’s localization has without making it clear why those problems happened, and I hope I’ve explained it well here.

With that out of the way, I’m finally going to cover the biggest differences between the original game and the localization, and why many of these changes were such a problem.

1.)    Gonta’s Entire Character

To this day, I still feel like this is probably the most egregious change of the entire localization. Gonta does not talk like a caveman in Japanese. He does not even have a particularly limited vocabularly. He talks like a fairly normal, very polite high school boy, and the only stipulation is that he’s not very familiar with electronics or technology due to his backstory of “growing up in the woods away from humans.”

Gonta does refer to himself in the third-person in Japanese, but I need to stress this: this is a perfectly normal thing to do in Japanese. Many people do it all the time, and it has no bearing on a person’s intelligence or ability to speak. In fact, both Tenko and Angie also refer to themselves in the third-person in the Japanese version of the game, yet mysteriously use first-person pronouns in the localization.

I wouldn’t be so opposed to this change if it weren’t for the fact that Gonta’s entire character arc revolves around being so much smarter than people (even himself!) give him credit for. He constantly downplays his own abilities and contributions to the group despite being fairly knowledgeable, not only about entomology but also about nature and astronomy. He has a fairly good understanding of spatial reasoning and is one of the first people to guess how Toujou’s trick with the rope and tire worked in chapter 2.

Chapter 4 of ndrv3 is so incredibly painful because it makes it clear that while Gonta was, absolutely, manipulated by Ouma into picking up the flashback light, he nonetheless made the decision to kill Miu of his own accord. He was even willing to try and kill everyone else by misleading them in the trial, because he thought it was more merciful than letting them see the outside world for themselves. These were choices that he made, confirmed when we see Gonta’s AI at the end of the trial speak for himself and acknowledge that yes, he really did think the outside world was worth killing people over.

Gonta is supposed to be somewhat naïve and trusting, not stupid. He believes himself to be an idiot, and other characters often talk down to him or don’t take him seriously, but at the end of the day he’s a human being just like the rest of them, and far, far smarter and more capable of making his own decisions than anyone thought him capable of.

Translating all of his speech to “caveman” or “Tarzan speech” really downplays his ability to make decisions for himself, and I think it’s a big part of why I’ve seen considerably more western fans insist that he didn’t know what he was doing than Japanese fans. I love Gonta quite a lot, but I can’t get over the localization essentially changing his character to make him seem more stupid, instead of translating what was actually there in order to more accurately reflect his character.

2.)    Added Some Slurs, Removed Others

It’s time to address the elephant in the room for people who don’t know: Momota is considerably homophobic and transphobic in the original Japanese version of the game. In chapter 2, he uses the word “okama” to refer to Korekiyo in an extremely derogatory fashion. This word has a history of both homophobic and transphobic sentiment in Japan, as it’s often used against flamboyant gay men and trans women, who are sadly and unfortunately conflated as being “the same thing” most of the time. To put it simply, the word has the equivalent of the weight of the t-slur and the f-slur in English rolled into one.

This isn’t the only instance of Momota being homophobic, sadly. In the salmon mode version of the game, should you choose the “let’s undress” option in the gym while with Momota, he has yet another line where he says, “You don’t swing that way, do you!?” to Saihara, using his most terrified and disgusted-looking sprite. This suggests to me that, yes, the homophobia was a deliberate choice in the Japanese version of the game, as Momota consistently reacts this way to even the idea of another guy showing romantic interest in him.

The English version more or less kept the salmon mode comment, but removed the use of the slur in chapter 2 entirely. Which I have… mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I am an LGBT person myself. I don’t want to read slurs if I can help it. On the other hand, I really don’t think the slur was removed out of consideration to the LGBT community so much as Momota’s translator really wanted to downplay any lines that could make his character come across in a more negative light.

This is backed up by the fact that both Miu and Ouma’s translators added slurs to the game that weren’t present in the original Japanese. Where Miu only ever refers to Gonta as “baka” (idiot) or occasionally, “ahou” (a slightly ruder word that still more or less equates to “moron”), her translator decided to add multiple instances of her using the r-slur to refer to Gonta specifically, and on one occasion, even the word “Mongoloid,” a deeply offensive and outdated term. Ouma’s translator similarly took lines where he was already speaking harshly of Miu and added multiple instances of words like “bitch” or “whore.”

To me, this suggests that the translators were completely free to choose how harsh or how likable they wanted their characters to come across. Momota’s translator omitting just the slur could maybe pass for a nice gesture, so people don’t have to read it and be uncomfortable—except, that’s not the only thing that was omitted. Instances of Momota being blatantly misogynistic or rude were also toned down to the point of covering up most of his flaws entirely. His use of “memeshii” against Hoshi (a word which means “cowardly” in Japanese with specifically feminine connotations, like the word “sissy” in English) is simply changed to “weak,” and when he calls Saihara’s trauma “kudaranai” (literally “worthless” or “bullshit”), this is changed to “trivial” in the localization.

Momota’s translator even went so far as to omit a line entirely from the chapter 2 trial, which I touched on in an earlier post. In the original version of the game, Ouma asks Momota dumbfounded if he’s really stupid enough to trust Maki without any proof and if he plans on risking everyone else’s lives in the trial if he turns out to be wrong. And Momota replies saying yes, absolutely, he’s totally willing to bet everyone’s lives on nothing more than a hunch because he thinks he’s going to be right no matter what.

This is a character flaw. It’s a huge, running theme with Momota’s character, and it’s brought up again in chapter 4 deliberately when Momota really does almost kill everyone in the trial because he refuses to believe that Ouma isn’t the culprit. But the localization simply omits it, leaving Momota to seem considerably less hard-headed and reckless in the English version of the game. If anyone wants proof that this line exists, it is still very much there in the Japanese dialogue, but it has no translation whatsoever. This goes beyond “translation decisions I don’t agree with”; omitting an entire line for a character simply because you want other people to like them more is just bad translation, period.

3.)    Angie’s Religion

In the original Japanese version of the game, neither Angie’s god nor her religion have any specific names. She refers to her god simply as “god” in the general sense, and clearly changes aspects of their persona and appearance based on who she’s trying to convince to join her cult. Everything about her is pretty clearly fictionalized, from her island to the religious practices her cult does.

Kodaka’s writing with regard to Angie is already a huge mess. It feeds into a lot of harmful stereotypes about “crazy, exotic brown women” and “bloodthirsty savages,” but at the very least it never correlated with a specific religion or location in the original version of the game.

This all changed when Angie’s translator, for whatever reason, decided to make Angie be Polynesian specifically and appropriate from the real religion of real indigenous peoples native to Polynesia. That’s right: Atua is a real god that has very real significance to tons of indigenous peoples.

In my opinion, this decision was incredibly disrespectful. It spreads incredible misinformation about a god that is still very much a part of tons of real-life people’s religion, and associates it with cults? Blood rituals? Human sacrifices? It’s a terrible localization decision that wasn’t necessary whatsoever and to be quite frank, it’s racist and insensitive.

As I said, the original game never exactly had the peak of “good writing decisions” when it came to Angie; there are still harmful stereotypes with her character, and she deserved to be written so much better. But associating her with a real group of indigenous people and equating a real god to some fictional deity that’s mostly treated as either a scary cult-ish boogeyman or the punchline to a joke is just… bad.

4.)    Ouma’s Motive Video

Some of the decisions taken with Ouma’s translation are… interesting, to say the least. In many ways, he feels like a completely different character between the two versions of the game. This is due not only to the translation, but also the voice direction and casting.

A lot of his lines are tweaked or changed entirely to make his character seem much louder, less serious, and less sincere than the original version of the game. Obviously, Ouma lies, a lot. That’s sort of the whole point of is character. But what I mean is that even lines in the original version of the game, where it was clear he was being truthful via softer delivery, trailing off the end of his sentences, and seeming overall hesitant about whether to divulge certain information or not are literally changed in the localization to him pretty much yelling at the top of his lungs, complete with tons of exclamation points on lines that originally ended with a question mark or ellipses.

Tonally, he just feels very different as a character. The “sowwy” speak, lines like “oopsie poopsie, I’m such a ditz!”—all of these things are taken to such ridiculous extremes that it feels a little hard to take him seriously. Even in the post-trial for chapter 4 when Ouma starts playing the villain after Gonta’s death, a moment which should have been completely serious and intense, the mood is kind of completely killed when the line is changed from him calling everyone a bunch of idiots to him calling everyone…. “stupidheads.” These changes don’t really seem thematically appropriate to me, but overall, they’re not damning.

What is damning, however, is the fact that Ouma’s motive video is completely mistranslated and provides a very poor picture of what his motivations and ideals were like. I still remember being shocked when I played the localization for the first time and discovered that they completely omitted a line stating that Ouma and DICE have a very specific taboo against murder.

Literally, this is one of the very first lines in the entire video. The Japanese version of the game makes it explicitly clear that DICE were forbidden to kill people, and that abiding by this rule was extremely important to them. By contrast, the localization simply makes a nod about him doing “petty nonviolent crimes and pranks,” without ever once mentioning anything at all about rules or taboos.

This feels especially egregious in the localization considering Saihara later uses Ouma’s motive video as evidence in the chapter 6 trial and states there that Ouma and DICE “had a rule against killing people,” despite the game… never actually telling you that. It not only skews the perception of Ouma’s character at a crucial moment, it also just straight-up lies to localization players and expects them to make leaps in logic without actually providing the facts. So it winds up sort of feeling like Saihara is just pulling these assumptions out of his ass more than anything else.

I actually still have my original translation of Ouma’s motive video here, if anyone would like to compare. Again, translation is a tricky line of work, and obviously not all translators are going to agree with one another. But I consider omitting lines entirely to be one of the worst things you can do in a translation, particularly in a mystery game where people are expected to solve said mysteries based on the information and facts provided to them.

5.)    Inconsistencies and Lack of Context

As I mentioned earlier, there are many instances of lines being completely mistranslated, or translated two different ways by multiple translators, or addressed to the wrong character. This is, as I stated, due to the way the translation work was divided by four separate people who appear to have not communicated with each other or cross-referenced each other’s work.

One of the clearest examples of this that I can think of off the top of my head is in chapter 3, where Ouma mentions “doing a little research” on the Caged Child ritual, and Maki in the very next line repeats him by saying… “study?”

On their own, removed from any context, these would both potentially be correct translations. However, it’s very clear that the translators just didn’t care to look at the context, or communicate with each other and share their work. The fact that characters aren’t even quoting each other properly in lines that are back-to-back is a pretty big oversight, and something that should have been accounted for knowing that four separate people were going to be translating various different characters.

This lack of context causes other, even more hilarious and blatantly wrong mistranslations. At the start of the chapter 3 trial, there is a line where Momota mentions that he couldn’t perform a thorough investigation on his own “because Monokuma disrupted him.” In the original, Ouma responds and tells Momota that he’s just using Monokuma as an excuse to cover for his own flaws. However, what we actually got in the localization was… this.

I don’t even have words for how badly this line was butchered (though I could make several hilarious jokes about Monokuma “over-compensating”). Presumably, this happened because Ouma’s translator saw Ouma’s line without any of the lines before it or the context of what Momota was saying, had no clue who Ouma was actually supposed to be talking to, and just ad-libbed it however they could, even though it literally makes no sense and doesn’t even fit into the conversation.

There are other similar instances of this, too. For example, did you know that the scene after Saihara faints in chapter 2, just before he wakes up in Gonta’s lab, is actually supposed to have Ouma talking to him? The narrator is unnamed, but there are several lines just before Saihara wakes up where Ouma tells him “come on, you can’t die on me yet!” and keeps prodding him and poking him to wake up. This is never explicitly told to you from the text… but it becomes pretty obvious when you look at the context and see that a huge CG of Ouma looking over Saihara as he starts to wake up is the very next part of the scene.

In the localization, however, Saihara’s translator pretty clearly had no idea what was happening or who was supposed to be talking to him, because they translated those lines as Saihara talking to himself, even though the manner of speech and phrasing is clearly supposed to be Ouma instead.

I could go on and on listing other examples: Tsumugi makes a joke in the original about Miu being able to dish out dirty jokes but not being very good at hearing them herself, but it’s changed in the localization to Tsumugi saying “I’m not so good with that kind of stuff,” and a line where Momota protests against Maki choking Ouma because she’ll kill him if she keeps going is instead changed to him saying “you’ll get killed if you don’t stop!” In my opinion, the fact that this is a consistent problem throughout the whole game shows that the translators weren’t really communicating or working together at any point, and that it wasn’t simply a one-time mistake here or there.

6.)    Edited CGs and Plot Points

I have made an entirely separate post about this in the past, but at this point I don’t think anyone actually knows anymore: the localization actually edited in-game CGs and made some of them completely different from the Japanese version of the game. I’m not accusing them of “censorship” or anything like that, I mean quite literally that they altered and edited specific CGs to try and fix certain problems with them and only ended up making them worse in the process.

In chapter 5, Momota gets shot in the arm by Maki’s crossbow when trying to defend Ouma, and Ouma gets shot in the back shortly afterward when attempting to make a run for the Exisals. These injuries are relevant to how they died, but they’re not actually very visible in the CGs of Ouma and Momota shown later in the chapter 5 trial.

There are a whole bunch of inconsistencies with the CGs in chapter 5 in general: Momota gives Ouma his jacket to lie on under the press, but is magically still wearing it when he emerges from the Exisal himself at the end of the trial (I like to think he snuck back into the dorms Solid Snake style to get a new one from his room before joining the trial), the cap to the antidote is still on the bottle when Ouma pretends to drink it in front of Maki and Momota, etc. None of these things really deter from the plot though, and so I would say they’re fairly unimportant.

However, for some reason, NISA decided that “fixing” at least some of the CGs in the chapter 5 trial was necessary. They did this by adding bloodstains to Momota’s arm while he’s under the press, to better show his injury from the crossbow…. and in doing so, for some completely inexplicable reason, they changed the entire position of his arm. Here’s what I mean for comparison:

This is how Momota’s arm looked in the original CG from chapter 5, shown when the camcorder is provided as evidence that it’s “Ouma” under the press.

And this is how the localization edited it to look. I can understand and even sympathize with adding the bloodstains, but… changing the entire arm itself? Moving it to be sticking out from under the press? To put it nicely, this change doesn’t make any sense and actually makes it harder to understand Ouma and Momota’s plan.

The whole trick behind their plan was that nothing was supposed to stick out from under the press, other than Momota’s jacket. They waited until the instant when the press completely covered every part of Momota’s body, arms and all, and then performed the switch to mislead people. But the edited version of the CG in the localization just has Momota’s arm sticking completely out, hanging over the side, meaning it would’ve been impossible for the press to hide every part of it and the whole switch feels… well, stupid and impossibly easy to see through in the localized version.

Again, this shows a total disregard for presenting the facts as they actually appear and actually makes things more difficult for English players of the game, because they’re not being given accurate information. I really don’t understand why these changes were necessary, or why the bloodstains couldn’t have just been added without moving Momota’s entire arm.

7.)    In Conclusion

This has gotten extremely long (nearly 10 pages), so I want to wrap things up. I want to specify that my intention with this masterlist isn’t to insult or badmouth the translators who worked on this game. I’m sure they worked very hard, and I have no idea what time or budget constraints they were facing as they did so.

Being a translator is not easy, and typically translators are not very well-paid or recognized for their work. I have the utmost respect for other translators, and I know perfectly well just how difficult and taxing it can be.

I am making this list because these are simply changes which were very different from the original version of the game, and which I believe could have been handled better. Personally, I disagree with many of the choices the localization made, but that does not mean that they didn’t do a fantastic job in other places. I absolutely love whichever translator was responsible for coming up with catchphrases and nicknames throughout the game: little localization decisions like “cospox,” “flashback light,” “Insect Meet n’ Greet,” and “cosplaycat criminal” were all strokes of genius that I highly admire.

I only want to stress that the Japanese version of the game is very different. Making changes to the way a character is presented or portrayed means influencing how people are going to react to said character. Skewing the information and facts presented in trials in the game means changing people’s experience of the game, and giving them less facts to go off of. Equating fictional gods to real-life ones can cause real harm and influence perception of real indigenous peoples. These are all facts that need to be accounted for before deciding whether a certain change is necessary or not, in my opinion.

If you’ve read this far, thank you! Again, feel free to share this post around if you’d like, since this is probably the most comprehensively I’ve ever covered this topic.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Hi there! Do you have any/multiple recs for sites/books about sex, mostly? Literally, sex 101, from by oneself to straight cis to queer af. It would be really helpful. Thank you!

hi anon! sorry this has taken me a couple of days to address; it's just that I had to physically restrain myself from designing a full semester-long curriculum in response to this ask. you might say I was a little excited about this.

I managed to restrain myself, a little, but while it sounds like you're mostly interested in the how-to guides, I'd be remiss as an educator if I didn't also direct your attention to some resources that dive deep into the hows and whys of the way people learn, think, and talk about sex in this hellscape we call the 21st century. context is everything, after all.

for a little bit of just about everything, ranging from anatomy to kink, there's nothing I'd recommend like Dr. Lindsey Doe's sexplanations channel on youtube, which is where I got started on my own sex ed journey. Dr. Doe is delightful and totally down to talk about absolutely anything in an upbeat and educational way, which I absolutely adore about her.

Scarleteen is also a pretty neat site for sex 101! it's aimed primarily at teens and other young people, but offers cool, shame-free advice to anyone who asks as well as sex ed vocab and articles about everything from the warning signs of an abusive relationship to making DIY sex toys.

speaking of vocab - if you want to learn what's what, you can't do much better than Planned Parenthood's own glossary of sexual health terms.

for those who a.) have vaginas or b.) are interested in having sex with people who have vaginas and want to understand what's going on up in there, I recently found Dr. Emily Nagoski's book Come As You Are to pretty a solid and comprehensive guide to dispelling unhelpful myths and embracing a more varied view of pleasure.

for more reading that unpacks fixed, limiting ideas about sexuality, might I also recommend Meg-John Barker's aptly titled new work of illustrated nonfiction, Sexuality?

for a quick primer on keeping sex inclusive for folks with all kinds of bodies and comfort levels, why not peruse A. Andrews' Quick and Easy Guide to Sex and Disability?

I don't just use the Clue app to track my own menstrual cycles - I read their articles and use them for quick and easy reference guides when I answer a lot of questions here about menstruation, discharge, hormones, and... more!

on the more social side of sex, I found Rachel Hills' book The Sex Myth to be a very formative read when I was a burgeoning sex witch, since it does a very tidy job dressing down all kinds of baseless ideas people have about what constitutes "normal" sexuality. (spoiler: there is no such thing.)

if you want to get a little more into the history of why we are like we are, a good and fairly accessible starting point is in Hanne Blank's work - Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality does a great job breaking down the relatively recent notion of discrete sexual categories, plus a great deal of things that were historically considered quite queer indeed; while Virgin: The Untouched History basically ruined my life by making me realize virginity is a total scam that falls apart the second you think about it too hard.

and then back to a more hands-on level, I haven't had a chance to read it yet because life is unfair but I've always heard good things about Allison Moon, and her latest book Getting It: A Guide to Hot, Healthy Hookups and Shame-Free Sex is billed as "a comprehensive and fun-to-read guidebook for people of all sexual identities and experience levels," which sounds pretty rad to me.

so uuuuh let me know if this isn't enough because I can and will keep going with increasing niche book recommendations; I really cannot emphasize to you how many books about sex I've read in my young life.

[thestonelady]

Theory for POV

Warning: possible spoilers

During one of my replays I noticed something interesting in the background of Andvari's workshop :

What may that weird piece of cloth be? To answer that, we need to look at two versions of the same tale, that traces its origin back into the Migration Period (c.  300–500 AD to be precise)

These are The Völsunga saga and Nibelungenlied.

Part of the Völsunga saga can be found in the Poetic Edda as well, that part being called Reginsmál (the Lay of Regin). Here the dwarf Regin tells his foster son Sigurd how his family acquired Andvari's gold :

One day Odin, Loki and Hœnir walked alongside a river. There an otter just left the water. Loki killed the otter and the three gods went to Hreidmars house to spent the night. But when Hreidmar saw the dead otter he knew it was his own son, Ótr. At first Hreidmar demanded a life for life, but then he settled on a weregild. Loki returned to the river, the Andvarafors, with a fishnet he got from the goddess Ran. With that fishnet he caught a pike.

Loki spoke :

Who is the fish

that swims in the river

and from misfortune cannot save itself?

Save your head from death

Give me the flame of the waves.

The pike answered :

Andvari am I

and Oin my father.

Many a fall have I fared,

An evil Norn

In the olden days

doomed me in water

to dwell.

To save his life, Andvari gave Loki all his gold, but hid one ring, the Andvaranaut. But the god saw it and took the ring from him as well. So Andvari cursed both the gold and the Andvaranaut :

Now shall the gold that Gust once had,

bring death to brothers two,

and evil be to heroes eight,

no one will my use wealth.

Loki gave the gold to Hreidmar. But he soon after was murdered by his other son Fafnir. Fafnir took the gold and ran away, turning into a dragon... (I included this because I have no idea how much the fandom knows about the myths, so I apologise for making this so long)

(Also, is this the fishnet from Ran?)

Now in the Nibelungenlied this part is completely absent. But we know both tales tell the same story. Due to being orally told from generation to generation for centuries, the details changed and some parts were forgotten.

Codex Regius which includes Reginsmál was written down in the 13th century in Iceland, and the Nibelungenlied was as well written down in the 13th century, but in what is now modern day Germany.

But what has all of this to do with that cloth?

The answer is simple, it is in the Nibelungenlied where a dwarf named Alberich had an magical cloak (die Tarnkappe) that could make the wearer invisible and it gave them the strength of twelve men. Siegfried acquired Tarnkappe from Alberich and most notably used it to help his brother-in-law Gunther to get Brünhild as wife (poor Brünhild).

And what has this to do with Andvari?

Well, from what I've read, thanks to comparing the two tales we know  Sigurd=Siegfried, Regin=Mimer, Gunnar=Gunther, Brünhild=Brynhild, and... some scholars say Andvari and Alberich are counterparts of each other (which would mean elf boi is a twice crowned king because Alberich is the king of the dwarves and thanks to French translations Alberich turned into Auberon (Oberon) the king of the fairies)

So is the weird piece of cloth actually die Tarnkappe from the Nibelungenlied? We shall see in future updates if it turns out to be more than just a pretty background decoration.

Word glossary:

Andvarafors - literally means Andvari's waterfall, the place where Andvari lived

Andvaranaut - translates as 'Andvari's gift'

Hœnir - an obscure Aesir god. In some versions he helped Odin create the first humans

Ran - is the wife of the sea god Aegir. She’s usually mentioned in the context of drowning unfortunate seafarers and dragging them down to dwell in her underwater abode.

Weregild - in ancient Germanic law, a fine paid by a person who committed an offense to the injured party or, in case of death, to his family

Side note: if anybody wants to ask for my sources, they are: the English and German Wikipedia entries; a Czech translation of the Völsunga saga; and Auguste Lechner's adaptation of the Nibelungenlied. 

If anybody wants to add something or correct me feel free to do so, please ��

[bonktime]

Weather the Storm

Prologue: Lay of the Land

Ezra (Prospect) x f!reader (no y/n) 1861 Lighthouse au 

Masterlist //  Chapter One: Taken Aback

Rated: Explicit (bit of a slow burn but we’ll get there)

Warnings: Language for now (smut will come later)

Summary: Ezra travelled with the tides, let the sea carry him where it willed and never stayed long. The lighthouse keeper was the opposite. Where he moved she stood firm, defying the waves and the tide as if carved from the cliff herself. They’re drawn together, but opposing forces so strong are always destined to cause a storm.

A note: I kinda apologise for historical inaccuracies but 1861 was a proper shite time to be a woman so we’re mostly glossing over that. Also the lighthouses mentioned hadn’t even been built yet. Another thank you to @danniburgh​ who I threw ideas at to see what stuck. As of right now this is shaping up to be 7 chapters and an epilogue of sea puns, yearning, angst and definitely smut. I intend to update weekly but that may vary depending on work! I’ve put glossary at the end so you know what I’m talking about. Written in the third person.

Let me know if you wanna be tagged!

Wordcount: 851

~~~~~~~~~~

Everything Ezra could see was grey. Heavy clouds loomed above, threatening rain but not ready to give it up, their reflections transforming the sea into mercury. Even the huts in the bay appeared drab, colour sucked out by the beating of the weather. He wondered if the people would be the same, colourless and cold like the land that surrounded them. He had often found that humans adapted to their environment so well they almost became a part of it, blending slowly together until inseparable and indistinguishable. In a way he was envious of them, to go where the work was had never allowed him to stay too long and get too comfortable. It made him stand out, always a newcomer, an outsider unable to make real acquaintances. He liked it though, the freedom, the adventure of it. He was certain that he always left an impression when he’d gone: a bruising kiss, a couple missing teeth, a scar. He marked the places he'd been, like carving his name into a tree.

The North Sea was an apt name, he decided. He’d read that it had once borne many others, Morimaru, Oceanum, Mare Germanicum, but only North had stuck. There appeared to be no other words that could correctly depict it. North as in north of everything, north as in cold, north as in nothing else is important except it's northernness. It seemed curious that it had managed to shuck the title the Dead Sea, where floating freshwater stilled the waves and becalmed boats, where hidden reefs wrecked ships making it one of the deadliest coasts in the country. He supposed with the new technology, those aboard had ample warning to avoid getting dashed upon the rocks, only needing to keep a weather eye and ear out.

Finding work had been easy, the fishing season was starting, and with his experience the trawler ‘Mistress’ was all too eager to have an extra set of hands, willing and able to pay the devil. It was dangerous work that paid adequately and offered some compensation, money to a family he didn’t have if he died, a stipend should he be crocked into retirement. Enough that, if he scrimped a bit, he should have no trouble travelling wherever he wanted to go next.

"Four days at sea, three on land. You're lucky, we used to run six and one but tired men make mistakes that cannot be afforded." Ezra nodded in response, dead sea indeed. The man in front of him was writing the ledger and had barely glanced at him the whole time, giving Ezra ample opportunity to stare. He was probably in his sixties and had clearly known the sea well before taking to the books when his bones could no longer bear it. His face showed every year of hard work, of the wind and the salt but as much as he appeared like the jagged cliffs of the bay, his ruddy cheeks surprised Ezra and there was a twinkle of good humour in his eye. Not all cold and salt after all.

"Do you know of any pleasant lodgings in the local area? I'll need somewhere to find respite when on land." At this the old fisherman sat up and for the first time properly looked at Ezra. Sharp eyes scanning his face, focusing on the scar on his cheek and then his eyes, so intensely he could feel the man making his judgement. There was a moment's hesitation.

"3 miles up the coast there's a lighthouse, the keeper rents out a room in the cottage. You'll have to get there quick though, else you won't beat the tides" he stood creakily and stuck his roughened hand out for Ezra to shake "See you Monday, 3 hours before dawn. If you're late, you get left behind." Ezra shook it and, with a nod, left him to begin his walk up the coast.

The wind bit his face as he looked up at the looming tower across the causeway, from here the island seemed lonely, a last stand against the beating of the waves. The lighthouse itself had once been painted white but Ocean spray had dirtied it, turning it the same grey as the sky. The Old Salt had been right about the tide, it had begun its approach. Slowly covering the rough path to the island where the lighthouse and its cottages sat, cutting it off. Crossing it wet his feet and numbed his toes but guaranteed a room for at least the night. He would be stuck there until the water receded. 

As if warding him away the water rose around him, appearing to speed its ascent and forcing him to lift him bag high as he waded, knee deep through the icy water. Reaching the island, a solitary figure appeared out on the rocks, it turned and headed towards him, sure footed despite the terrain. 

Ezra hadn't known what he was expecting from a lighthouse keeper. Probably an old man with a large beard, weather beaten and bad tempered.

Whatever he was expecting, she certainly hadn't been it.

⧫⧫⧫

Morimaru: Celtic for dead sea

Oceanum: latin, literally means ocean ,you probably got this one

Mare Germanicum: latin for germanic ocean

Becalmed: stuck without wind or currant

Trawler: sailing fishing boat invented in Brixham 19th century

Pay the devil: tarring a part of the ship called the devil, known as one of the worst jobs

Crocked: injured, I dunno how rare this one is but I’m never entirely sure if I’m using geordie words or not

Old Salt: means old sailor, endearing

If I missed anything let me know. If you read all this I hope you enjoyed my love of research and homesickness coming together!

[donotexterminateupgradepudding]

English language release of SVSSS and TGCF volume 1 review

I was excited to get my copy of the first volume of The Scum Villain’s Self Saving System on Tuesday.  I’m actually not a huge fan of light novels overall, I was raised on a diet of novels and manga. Light novels are something I’d either want to watch the anime/donghua/drama of than sit down and read the novel.

I’m not pooping on light novels as a genre, more that for the most part they have a higher cost of admission if you are reading one that has been translated from another language and cultural context.  What I mean is that they will assume that the reader ‘gets’ a lot of things from a single word/statement/phrase that is based in the original context.  I used to be like this when I first started reading manga and have those original Viz editions of Ranma 1/2 where they weren’t sure what to do with okonomiyaki, so everyone my age had this weird concept that they were like pizza - which they totally aren’t (though very delicious!) or that the entire premise of Maison Ikkoku was really confusing to a place where you don’t have college entrance exams and instead applications based on other things.

Therefore, to jump into the world Chinese light novels would mean finding a way to bridge a lot of those gaps that happen when you lack the context for them.  As a result, I was hesitant to really dive into the entire MXTX catalogue.  I went with SVSSS since it is my favorite series of the three; I had watched the TGCF donghua which was visually stunning and decent enough, but I couldn’t quite get behind the idea of 800 years of suffering.  Though, I’m a fan of the ‘godlets’ or the alternate forms of Mu Qing and Feng Xin, Fu Yao and Nan Feng who hide in plain sight.  And Ling Wen who has academic burn out vibes.  Oddly enough, I have watched all of the MDZS donghua and the cdrama The Untamed, yet all my attempts to read the translation of the original novel just - ugh - I couldn’t do it.  Plus, with a disappointing season 3, MDZS fell in my eyes.  I very much liked the concept from the first two seasons of the donghua.  The drama was too bloody long and I found myself laughing at serious scenes.  What really got me was how almost all the female characters of significance died and I just wanted a few to not die.

Why SVSSS? Is it worth it?

This is my favorite MXTX novel.  In part, I like it since it has more of a levity to it and keeps things fresh.  Shen Yuan/Shen Qingqiu is the most relatable protagonist out of all of MXTX mains.  He’s a smart guy, a total prude, he works hard to save himself but along the way starts saving others.  I read it online but with the shift to publication, I waited for the print edition since it would have an editor behind it to smooth things out.  As awesome as fan translations are, most suffer from a lack of consistency or get picked up and passed along by different translators making it more of a mess.  Again, this isn’t to be a dick about it, more that having one editor cover an entire work at once makes it smoother.  It is clear that the print edition reads well, for example the translation settled on describing SQQ’s clothing as teal in color instead of flipping between blue or green.  Someone who is into the most literal translation is likely shaking a fist or throwing sleeves somewhere about how teal doesn’t capture the true meaning of the color of SQQ’s garments, but if there is no match in English, why confuse the reader who has a close enough match?  Don’t even get me started on the translators who refuse to translate words into their exact English equivalent because they don’t like the actual English word . . . it helps the reader to use the reference they know.

Additionally, the translation isn’t buried in footnotes, which sometimes are necessary if the statement really is too difficult to explain without out a small paragraph.  What impressed me about this book was the extensive Glossary at the end.  It had descriptions of key concepts, meanings of colors, additional meanings of numbers, names and other important definitions.   The pronunciation guide is helpful for those of us who are linguistically challenged or may have speech/sound impairment.  Again, it isn’t perfect, but it gets the reader closer to a better idea of what a name will sound like.  I honestly have a bone to pick with the person who came up with the how to transfer Mandarin into pinyin.  I get they wanted to make it clear that this sound is different than English, but did you have to use combinations that force the reader to memorize a whole new set of sounds?  As I’ve mentioned with others, I have a speech impediment and can’t distinguish/parse out certain sounds.  So, if they have a sort of idiot proof guide that gets me to about 70% of what it should sound like, it is a win in my book.  And, I’d never get to 100% due to the aforementioned impediment anyways. 

My only slight gripe is that they decided to keep all of the martial arts/wuxia terms for older martial brother, younger martial sister etc which all sound sort of similar to me and all of them start with shi-something.  However, I can see why they stuck with them, first keeping that nuance that would be quite wordy to translate into English and secondly, with a lot of the readers coming from a background of other East Asian media they already memorized similar terms and suffixes.  For obvious reasons, I know what a Shizun is, and -shidi and -shimei my brain can handle, but the rest require me to keep looking them up.  I’ll get there, I’m just not as familiar with Chinese terms . . . What made me laugh were the quick color guides.  I had thought that yellow was the death flag color, but it just means someone is wealthy.  In retrospect this makes sense, since in sometimes the Emperor wears yellow/gold, but these are in a wuxia/xianxia context where the secular government isn’t a thing.  I also appreciated the number information since I’d seen the repeat of a certain word frequently enough that I was scratching my head what it meant.  I distinctly remember this from the Fourteenth Year of Chenghua with the idea of ‘snow snow white’ cooked bok choy being an added effect of how the food should be prepared exactly.

I did take Asian art history classes and have a pretty decent grasp on Buddhism, but my fuzzy memory of reading Tao Te Ching/Dao De Jing by Lao-zi/tze/tzu for fun in undergrad appreciated the basic refreshers on all the Tao/Dao specific terms and concepts.  Since all I could remember of the Dao/Tao was everything was a sort of duality and it confused the heck out of me.  I did have a quick laugh that ‘dual cultivation’ was specifically defined.  The more modern take on jokes/fandom/media concepts were perhaps a bit much, but I’m thinking that the publishers wanted to cover all their bases. The character guide with artwork is a nice touch; I wasn’t expecting that since it was already clear that they’d include the in chapter illustrations.  What really amazes me is that each translation of the novel gets different artwork for each language/region and I like how they don’t match but are still clear about who is who. 

For the physical book, I appreciate the decent paperweight.  It is nice and crisp, the font is a good serif font and the sans serif font for the System makes it very clear when the System is addressing SQQ.  The chapter decisions make sense and are apparently based on the original print version as opposed to the webnovel chapters which makes for a less interrupted read.  I was expecting the chapters to stay the same but it would have sucked to read that way.  I liked the fact that the back cover has color profiles for our early important characters; LQG, YQY and SHL it really matches with the overall vibe of things. 

My only other minor pet peeve is the need to always write out a character’s full name each time they are mentioned.  Shen Qingqiu did this, Shen Qingqiu did that.  I wonder if this was how he was described in the original, so, it is a direct translation?  I personally like to see more variety in how you describe a main character to me.  e.g. The Qing Jing peak lord sighed as he looked over the mountain. or The man as elegant and refined as his weapon indicated did whatever.  I like to keep it fresh as I know that both of these are talking about SQQ.  But really, a minor pet peeve as the translation so far does a good job of having the characters change how they refer to themselves when speaking to others, which is so nice to see in action.

I guess I’ll be buying these into 2023?

After finishing SVSSS, I was curious about TGCF.  As I stated previously, reading about 800 years of suffering isn’t something I’m really into.  Especially with us entering almost two years of covid-19 and lots of other bummer things and frustrations.  I’m a cautious person; I first bought the e-book version of TGCF.  If it caught my attention as a donghua viewer, I’d give it a more honest go. When there are books I’m on the fence about, I’ll frequently purchase the e-book version first and if it hooks me, I’ll go back and buy the physical copy.  I made it halfway through TGCF and figured I might as well get the book.  My oblivious self, in line with what we see of Xie Lian in book one, went to Barnes & Noble after work on Friday and stared at all the cars and people bustling about before realizing they were Christmas shoppers.

Unfortunately, I live in a small city and they had plopped the books in the manga section where light novels took up a single bookshelf with about three copies out on the shelf at a time.

Just like I said as far as SVSSS, the book is high quality.  I was even more excited to see that they adjusted the Glossary to be specific to TGCF!  Good on you Seven Seas team!  If you were lazy, you’d include the exact same information in all your books but you didn’t.  Some terms are repeated while others are specific to the novel.  Nice job, really nice job.  No character sketches at the end, but it has a much larger cast of characters taking up the name and background pages.  Which are only going to get larger based on my limited knowledge of the series. I will look into having a local bookstore pre-order this for me in the future.  I already have my next volume of SVSSS with Right Stuf, but it looks like the next one for TGCF comes out sooner.

What made the difference for me was taking the time to read more of the e-book to get the slightly different vibe than what is presented in the donghua.  The low grade sarcasm/snark in the novel is totally my thing.  I’ve watched the donghua twice and that type of humor/commentary is harder to depict only by character actions when there is a bit more monologue from a few characters.  Additional details here and there really help out with it.  I felt that the screen time for Nan Feng and Fu Yao had to be more over the top to get at their unique personalities with a lot of visual cues but some of the subtlety was lost.  The explanation of Xie Lian’s seal/spiritual binding was also appreciated when the donghua just has him hiding it from San Lang with an ashamed feeling as opposed to it being a clear sign that he got punished. All of this resulted in a very pleasurable reading experience for both books.

Is it a fair price?

I am not opposed to the price tag of ~$20 since it is clear they put a lot of effort into this and everyone deserves to be paid.  The team at Seven Seas clearly must be fans of the genre and really did a great job to make the book high quality.  The fancier cover with the flaps as opposed to a single cover material, will help them hold up a bit better.  The number of people involved can easily show how it retails for the price it does.  Having to negotiate terms for license from MXTX and her legal rep, paying the artists for the cover and interior artwork, the translators, editors, typesetters and other people on the physical side.  Then you have your sales reps, PR people and HR in the company you’d not immediately think of.  Lastly, the publishing industry is currently straddling a tight line and even if these are ‘successful’ it will be unclear how much of that is divided among the creative contributors. I already prepared myself for $80 for all of SVSSS, though I’ll think less deeply about the final cost for TGCF.  I mean it is spread over two years anyways.  The digital copies are cheaper, which would also help someone spend less on it.  There is something more basic and tactile with having a physical copy, yet at the same time I have really tried to cut back on having lots of books just for the sake of having lots of books.

[cyclesprefectpress]

[image description: a proof of a font of handset type for letterpress printing, displaying every letter, symbol, and special character in the font. it's called "Sixteenth Century Roman," 24 pt., and is a rough-edged serif font with a deliberately worn look. end description.]

hello hello i am return from a deep dive into several reference materials that assumed a little bit more knowledge about how Medieval Latin works than i actually have, but, it was all exTREMEly inch resting to me. i am absolutely not a historian but here we are, a speedrun of my pinballing around trying to ensure that I know what the fuck im storing in my type corridor:

so 16th Cent. Roman, i already knew, was a font Paul Duensing designed based on this incomplete set of old Italian punches he acquired (punches, the first step of old school typecasting, where you carve the relief letter shape into the end of a stick of steel, and you uuuh punch that into the copper matrix, which is then the negative mould-shape you use to cast multiple copies of the lead sorts with hot metal; surviving punches are precious artifacts not the least because they are. they’re hand-carved!! often by the type designer themselves. historical and also wildly cool craftsmanship). these punches were all beat up and probably water damaged, fucky and rough-edged, so he re-did and filled in the gaps in the alphabet with similarly styled letters of his own. very cool. an extremely nerdy lil passion project of a typecaster in the 1960s, very typical of type people. we all find a Thing to obsess over, and sometimes it's reviving an incomplete set of punches from the 1500s that you found in, idk, it's usually a bucket in somebody's basement.

anyway it's got a bunch of ligatures and the long s, sure sure sure, but WHAT are all these gibberish characters with tildas and lines thru the stems of ps and qs and such—

Duensing's full font is in Mac McGrew's specimen book, great, i have that, except McGrew's book has complete proofs and a little bit of history for each font but doesn't always cover what each symbol in a unique alphabet is for, and i knew just enough about Latin to guess that they were abbreviations but not what each of them stood for. a little bit of searching got me this far, which is to say, "Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography," a translation of an Italian essay on the subject from 1929. It is prefaced by the translators with gems like: "Take a foreign language, write it in an unfamiliar script, abbreviating every third word, and you have the compound puzzle that is the medieval Latin manuscript." Scribes writing in medieval Latin just tossed out letters they didn't care to deal with, constantly, and had stand-in special characters and abbreviations for syllables/words/particles and there were intuitive rules but way too many variations in time and place and person to make a reasonably-sized, static lexicon. amazing. hope all u paleographers are having fun over there.

the essay has a great big glossary of truncations and abbreviations and so on which clearly cover most of the figures in Duensing's font:

[image description: screenshots of the essay, with various symbols and the Latin syllables they abbreviated. an m with a bar over it, ex., stood in for men or mun. end description.]

ok! BUT this q with a little swoop off the end kept bugging me!! for all these dead-use symbols this essay is using handwritten samples, obviously, and there's clearly variation in execution and also typographers take liberties, and i just thought, sure my piece of type looks a lot like the quod here but it does link the staff to the swoop where the handwritten sample doesn't, and it could just as well be a fanciful ligature for qn which apparently can stand in for quando, and i have no idea which is a more common-use syllable likely to be cast in the font if you're only going to pick your top 14, and i just like to be sure about things.

SO. i went to double-check with Johnson’s Typographia. Johnson made like a thousand pages of printing manuals set in tiny tiny type in the 1820s which are rad as hell and tell you all sorts of things about how to run a shop and build your own press and cast type and going rates for work and employment and also, the alphabets/type case layout for whatever language or symbol set you might have to set type in, when handsetting type was mostly the only way to get stuff printed—English, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, musical notation, astronomical signs, aaaand it’s got a section for "Marks & characters used in the Domesday Book & other ancient records.”

[image description: a photo of a page of the manual, with similar but not always identical symbols for abbreviated use. many of these abbreviations are described as "a Domesday contraction." end description.]

and WHAT is a Domesday contraction, WELL, it's a contraction specifically from/prevalent in the Domesday book, a deeply boring and historically important tome about property distribution in England. It’s literally a survey. who owned what, in 1086. presumably mind-numbing. enormous, handwritten in Medieval Latin, EXTREMELY cool, go look at some images of it at least, very important to historians, economists, linguists, and a complete pain in the ass to set in type when that technology became available, having to cast any significant proportion of these variant characters in an alphabet. Johnson says, (in 1824) “It is an improvement of latter years only*, to have type cast to resemble the abbreviations used in the more ancient manuscripts; they being formerly rudely imitated, either from a common fount, or else were cut in wood for the purposes of any particular work.” wow that sucks. but in 1773 the government really wanted to be able to reproduce the Domesday Book in type, so a couple people tried to cut a set of punches for Domesday abbreviations and Joseph Jackson got it done and it only took 10 years to print an edited version of the manuscript. and then apparently all the type was destroyed in a fire in 1808. WOW that sucks.

but the point is, Johnson has a great big glossary of characters as they were translated into type in the making of the printed Domesday Book, and the Domesday punches were used or refrenced in the printing of other medieval latin works, which consequences a degree of standardization in the abbreviations used in those versions of the text that handwritten manuscripts never had or needed.

notably the Domesday quod looks even more different from my piece of type here which was pretty annoying, so what are the chances this thing is a quando, and anyway that's when my sister texted me back with better computer skills and a different search engine and found me a perfect match on the first try. it’s a quod. this National Diet Library digital exhibition has several different sample fonts, both black letter and roman, with quite consistent letter forms, if not choices about which abbreviations to bother casting.

*I don’t……exactly know what he means by this, since Gutenberg and contemporaries absolutely did cast many Medieval Latin abbreviations for their fonts nearly 400 years before this. His dismissal of “from a common fount” might be fair, since i think what he means by it is that you’d have a generic set of abbreviation characters which you would have to use in conjunction with whatever font was the main body of your text, and it’s messy to mix things that weren’t designed specifically to match. he may just mean that it’s new for his contemporary foundries to be casting all these expanded alphabets of abbreviations; Gutenberg didn’t have foundries to buy from and made his own type. he could include as many characters as he had the patience for. maybe Johnson is just a guy from the 1800s that didn’t have the internet and i shouldn’t jump down his throat for not knowing something. idk!! i have homework.

anyway that was my Friday!! feel free to correct me and/or suggest further reading if early typecasting is your Thing or. again. you just have better googling than me.

[bangtanlalaland]

together | ksj (m.)

synopsis ⇣ you encounter the world’s most handsome man, who’s also the richest, only to discover that he’s your long-lost childhood friend.

→part of the bring it back collection!

— 1920′s!au; friends to lovers!au

⇢pairing: millionaire!kim seokjin x textile worker!female reader

⇢genre: angst, fluff, smut

⇢word count: 3.9k+

⇢contents ⨯ warnings: somewhat inspired by the great gatsby, some plots twists in here (have your popcorn ready plz), mentions of pining, soft love making in this, some sad stuff (sorryyyy, just adds to the drama), a splash of 1920′s slang (i tried ok)

a/n: just a reminder you guys, in case you’re wondering or expecting this, I am not basing this story entirely off of what happened in the great gatsby so plz don’t come after me. as stated above, this fic is somewhat inspired by the novel. I’d also like to add that most of the events taking place in this story is like a re-enactment of my own personal experiences, therefore this one is a little personal for me, but I am glad to have this chance to share it with you all. anyways, hope you all enjoy!

song rec: “together” by the xx

glossary

big shot—someone of high status/great popularity

bimbo—tough guy

bootlegging—illegal distribution of alcohol

cash or check—to kiss someone now or later

gay—happy (no connection to homosexuality)

jane—a female

jitney—a small bus that costs 5¢

nookie—sex

quiff—a slut

speakeasy—an underground bar (usually involves illegal distribution and/or selling of alcohol)

wingding—a lively celebration or party

Everything was planned. And you should have known this—that it was all an act/a gimmick. The fame, the money, the chivalry. And it didn’t get you anywhere but strung out on coffee and cigarettes—paired with a broken heart. Part of you wanted to blame your friend Betty for even dragging you to that pointless wingding, and then another part of you wanted to blame yourself for letting your guard down. The moment you saw his stupid, handsome face, you should have just walked away. You should have ended whatever was to come, right then and there.

But, you didn’t.

Instead, you chose to wind up in his bed and smothered by his arms. You chose to let yourself go, because at one point in your life, he was someone you trusted. The never-ending ache in your chest weighs upon you as if you’re carrying a rock that’s the size of New York state. You continuously tell yourself: You should have left. You should have said no. You should have just walked away.

Maybe if you said no, would he have ended up in your life some other way? Would you have been happier than you were during those moments with him? Could you even truly say you regret those experiences, even though at that moment it was exactly what you wanted? The past few weeks, you’d driven yourself mad, contemplating and replaying scenarios within your mind to re-arrange the pieces to the puzzle.

But, you end up with nothing.

You can’t think. You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. You can’t do anything without seeing him. Feeling him. Hearing him. And even smelling him. It’s as if he lingers in the spirit—like a ghost, haunting you every waking second of the day. Except, you know nothing about ghosts and how to rid of them.

And the memories…

You can’t forget the times when life was oh so simple—when you knew who he used to be, the he you grew fond of and loved with every fiber in your being. You can’t get over those shiny, gold, silky sheets you had become accustomed to lace yourself in, wrapped within his embrace. Both of your bare bodies glued together by perspiration, and those deep-chocolate irises that make you crumble under his gaze. Especially when he’d whisper to you with that voice of his dipped in comfort and say,

“I don’t think I’ve ever been more happier in my life.”

However, it’s too late. You tell yourself that it’s over, and there is no going back. Ever.

five months earlier

You wiped away the perspiration, on your forehead, with the back of your hand. As people say, “Another day, another dollar.” Literally. You’re only paid 16 cents/hr for your work at the town’s local textile factory. Your hands often find themselves cracked and dried by the end of your shift. It’s the roaring 20′s and everything was booming. Well, at least for everyone else except you.

“Oh, Betty! I told you already I don’t ‘party’.” You whined, while clutching your purse to head beeline out of the factory.

“You’re telling me that a doll like yourself doesn’t ‘party’ during this Jazz Age?” Your blonde-haired co-worker scoffed with a laugh. “Surely, you ought to be ashamed!”

Your mouth flew agape at her audacity, “Well-” You attempted to muster up a comeback, “Well- speakeasy’s are not even legal!”

Betty added, “Oh, you’re no fun! You know that?” You giggled at her frustrated expression since she seemed so conflicted.

“I know. Which is probably why a man would never want me.” Betty stopped you in your tracks, placing her hand over your arm.

“Oh, nonsense! You’re a doll and you know it.” She contemplated for a moment, “You just need some… opening up is all!”

You nodded in reply, “I suppose so.” Betty’s face lit up as if an idea popped up in that wild brain of hers, “How about this?” She gripped onto you tighter. “Why don’t you join me this weekend at Mr. Worldwide Handsome’s wingding!”

Your eyebrows furrowed, “I don’t think you understand what “partying” means, when I say I do-”

“Now, now wait! Before you say no, it’s not what you think.” She reassured with a beaming smile.

“Who is this Mr. Worldwide Handsome?” You questioned, finally reaching the bus stop to catch a jitney.

Betty hesitated for a moment, “Why I don’t know. Well, I don’t think anyone knows.” You scoffed at her coy way of attempting to convince you.

“Oh, that’s just nonsense, Betty! If this is your way of trying to get me to go with you to that party- then, you’re doing quite an awful job at it.”

Betty rolled her eyes at you, “____, you’ve got it all wrong! I promise. It’s not what you think. It’s just a place where you can be yourself. He holds these gatherings every weekend and it’s so… lively! You can be free and… gay!”

—

You nervously stepped out of the automobile, as you and Betty were dropped off outside of the grand mansion where dozens if not hundreds of people gathered within the entrance of the establishment. Flappers and big shots roamed the premises.

“Why did I let you persuade me into coming here?” You whispered to Betty who had her arm interlinked with yours. You plastered a fake smile amongst the guests. Betty was dressed in a mini, black dress with sparkling fringes, a deep red lipstick adding an extra pop to her porcelain skin.

She cooed back at you, “Because you are my friend, and I was not going to take no for an answer.” As you relayed to your friend earlier in the week, you weren’t one of those “party girls” or “flappers” as they call it.

Seokjin roamed about his mansion, at the top of the stairwell, tapping his feet on the marble flooring below him, sipping on a glass of champagne in his hand. His handsomeness granted numerous glances and coos toward his towering figure. He sported his signature, jet-black mullet that’s slicked back. His white tuxedo glowed effervescently, blinding anyone within his perimeter. Plush, pink lips decorated his dashing face.

He busied himself in obtaining another glass of champagne as another server passed by. But when he turned away to face the entrance of the palace, his heart dropped, his lips parted distinctively, tongue sliding along the bottom of his lip. It’s as if everything and everyone around him had stopped, whilst his almond-shaped eyes landed on a Jane that he grew to be familiar with many years ago—two decades to be exact.

Ever since you both departed, he wanted desperately to find you again just as you did. He missed you, and you missed him, and there hadn’t been a day that passed when you didn’t cross his mind. You both grew up in the same quaint town, but then Jin’s family moved to the big city and that was when everything changed.

You both drifted apart, and it was now a good twenty years later that you both finally crossed paths. But see, that was only part of the plan. Seokjin hosted these grand parties, and spread the word throughout the entire city to fuck his way out of a heartbreak he thought was silly to have. He treasured the attention and the numerous dolls flaunting themselves at him—that eventually he’d forgotten all about you.

It was something about big gatherings, quite like these that made your insides churn. A sense of anxiety resided within you when being in the presence of countless individuals. You felt like all of their gazes were solely focused on you; you’d never been a fan of attention. Although, you were unaware this party would change your life.

Drastically.

You desperately attempted to shake off your anxiousness, scanning the environment for anything or something you could do or use as an escape. And then…

Champagne.

Perfect. You thought to yourself, hurriedly scurrying toward the server, grabbing a glass filled with fizzing liquor.

“Thank you,” You noted with a smile and took a sip, an attempt to calm your nerves. But you still couldn’t shake that feeling, that someone was watching you. And it was as if your worst nightmare had come true, because followed by that feeling, there was a voice. One that was calling your name.

“____?” Your body trembled of chills, and you turned around to discover the voice that was noticeably behind you. When your eyes met the tall, slender form, you nearly dropped your wine glass into shattering pieces.

With a gasp, “Seokjin?” you questioned, placing a hand over your chest where a thumping heart hides from behind. His pupils sparkled with something you thought was admiration, and then he shined those perfect, pearly whites that stole your heart in that moment. You thought to yourself, This is it. He’s the one.

“It’s been so long. Wow, I am speechless.” He stated, with an extended hand, “May I?” He probed, rising his eyebrows. You foolishly lended him your hand, his plump lips pressed a gentle kiss on top.

“What are you doing here?” You asked, curious to understand how the universe joined you both together in this moment.

“Follow me,” was all he said. He lead you through the bustling crowd, and into his office. He removed the jacket of his tuxedo while you admired the maroon-tinted walls paired with large bookshelves and persian rugs decorated the space—modern art pieces adding an extra touch. One in particular stood out to you, in which Jin noticed your stare didn’t break away.

“Edward Hopper’s Automat,” He added, whilst standing beside you and relishing the sight of gorgeous pearls that decorated your neckline—thanks to Betty. He was stunned at the beautiful woman you blossomed into. Considering that the last memory he had of you, was when he’d been taken away in a locomobile, and there you stood at the end of the dirt road—with puffy, wet eyes as you cried out his name, begging him to not leave. And so did he, as he waved you goodbye and tears streamed down his cheeks. It was when his entire world fell apart.

Jin lost himself for a moment, reminiscing on the past. “Seokjin?” You said for now the third time, an attempt to get his attention.

“Yes? I- My apologies,” he replied. You shook it off with a giggle, a warmth having filled up your heart. “No need to worry.” You dropped your head low, as a flash of heat washed upon your face, and suddenly you felt shy.

You felt the cool embrace from Jin’s palm on your back, and when you looked up to meet his gaze, he was already staring at you.

With a sigh of relief, he slipped, “I’ve missed you, ____.” You wrapped your arms around his neck to pull him in for a hug, and he smelt of the liquor he’d been dousing himself in, paired with a tantalizing scent of cologne, notes of bergamot, tangerine and a hint of fruity persimmon. As you pull away, you peer into each other’s eyes, his slender fingers graze underneath your chin and you both lock lips with one another—his own tasted of the wine they’d been soaked in from earlier. The amount of desire drowned by your kisses sent a wave of heat through the both of you, and before you could think of pulling away to catch your own breath, Jin pulled away, his fingers lacing into yours to lead you toward the master bedroom.

“I missed you too,” you replied, maybe a little too late, but you still made him smile. His hands found purchase on your small back, “I can’t believe that you’re finally here. I don’t think I’ve ever been more happier in my life.” You caressed his broad shoulders, admiring how he towered over you. Oh how handsome he’d become, you thought.

It was as if both of you read each other’s minds, an unspoken tension between the two of you—like gravity pulled you two together, your actions in tune with each other. He laid on top of you, caressing your body and placing gentle kisses along your jawline and onto your collarbone. His silky sheets felt like bliss under your now scorching skin.

“Seokjin,” You moaned. His fingers found the zipper on the side of your dress, and he removed his bow tie and waistcoat, while undressing himself completely. He gently pulled the delicate material of your dress down and off your body.

“So beautiful,” He slipped, while trailing kisses along your leg and worshiping your body as if he was truly in love with you—especially when he entered you and buried himself to the hilt.

He was your first and he knew this. When you slipped, “I’ve never- Oh!” He simply caressed your cheek and planted kisses onto your now swollen lips, drips of sweat clinging on his forehead, your hands grazing along his back—the heels of your feet digging into his bottom. You couldn’t get the rest of your sentence out, the feeling of his member too much for your being, but there was this nostalgic sentiment that followed afterwards—a drawn out moan muffled by kisses.

“You’re saying that a Jane like you hasn’t had any nookie? Ever?” He chimed in with a chuckle. You slapped his arm in reply, “Well, don’t make fun of me now!”

But instead, you both broke out into a laughter, having completely forgotten about the party that continued on just one floor below.

“You feel so amazing,” Jin moaned, thrusting his hips into your core, your walls clenched relentlessly around him and it made his cock throb. Leaks of pre-cum oozed into you paired with your own wetness, soaking his shaft completely.

“Oh, Please don’t stop!” He picked up the pace and rammed into you, losing control of himself, so much that the headboard knocked against the wall in a beat-making manner. “Don’t stop! Yes, yes!” You egged him on, fueling his hunger.

“You’re such a doll, you know that?” He slipped between breaths. Your being now glued to the sheets from the sweat that accumulated.

He eventually slowed his momentum as an orgasm shortly approached. Your walls contracted around him repeatedly, and you were instantly drowned in euphoria. You hadn’t processed that Jin’s fingers were rubbing your clit furiously, making your orgasm crash upon you. And right after, you felt the warmth of his semen painting your walls—his bedroom now filled with the harmony of your moans.

Seokjin fell beside you on the bed, his chest rising and falling.

“That was amazing,” He slipped in between breaths. But to his surprise, you’d risen from the bed to re-dress yourself.

“Hey…” He hopped up on his feet, his flaccid cock jumping in the process. “Where you going?” He asked, grabbing your wrist.

“I-I shouldn’t keep Betty waiting…” You trailed off, his eyebrows quirked upwards. “She’s my friend. I came with her tonight.” His strong grip pulled you closer toward him; his fingers caressed your face.

“When will I see you again?” He asked, his grip on you becoming tighter. You shrugged your shoulders, because you weren’t sure when you’d see him again or if you’d have the chance to. Some part of you had hope because you know where he lives now, and you know he’s not far away and out of reach.

When you attempted to pull away, he pulled you back again, “Cash or check?” You contemplated a few moments, and with a tilt of your head, you tiptoed to give him a quick peck.

But it all just felt like a dream. One that you didn’t know would come crashing down. Because that’s all you can remember now. His sheets, his face, his voice, his length, and his scent—everything was Seokjin.

—

You came back and more than once. But the next few times, you came alone. It became a routine, almost. You’d join him during the night, and the two of you would escape into the part of his mansion where no one was around—everyone else having occupied the lower level and the courtyard. He’d always bring you to his bedroom, never letting you out in public together. You should have known that was a sign.

Anytime you both were together, you were alone. Because truth is, Seokjin was embarrassed. He held a high status and couldn’t be seen with someone like you. That’s what he told himself. He thought you wouldn’t have come back after the first night, but then you proved him wrong. And he wasn’t going to turn down free sex, especially since you were inexperienced—which gave him more power in the bedroom. He simply went with the flow, taking you as you gave to him.

Yet, you didn’t understand any of it. Especially when one night you took the lead, riding him with your breasts on full display. He moaned your name repeatedly and admitted, “I love you, ____.” And you fell for it, you actually believed him, with his cock fully sheathed inside of you. You were both wrapped up in the moment, your feels at their maximum. Except, you meant it when you replied, “I love you too, Seokjin.” That was the difference.

But one night, he slipped.

You paraded through his estate during one of his parties, brushing past numerous guests and bumping into some, but you couldn’t find him anywhere. He’d normally await for your arrival at the top of the stairwell, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the courtyard or the balcony or the pool. Your heart thumped with a never-ending beat, and you couldn’t ignore the feeling.

Eventually, you found yourself entering the room that you remember oh so well, and you wished you hadn’t. The sight you witnessed sent a burning ache within your chest. Moans and groans filled the atmosphere as you neared the bed that contained those golden sheets you’d become familiar with. To say you were horrified was an understatement. Jin was plunging into another woman while another woman sat on the other woman’s face, a sudden churn of your stomach ascended—you felt as though everything you consumed that  day would come right back up.

“S-Seokjin?” You let out, and he abruptly stopped his motions, snapping his gaze toward you. His eyes blown wide and lips parted.

“Fuck!” He spilled, stumbling out of the woman he was in. You turned away, heading beeline for the door. He quickly found his grip on you, and you fought him off, pushing him away and continuously slapping him away.

“How could you? How?!” You screamed. The sound of your heels clicking against the marble floor echoed throughout the palace, as you strutted out and never looked back.

He knew that he fucked up, because truth is, he didn’t even know what he really wanted—but he knew he was selfish. He continued hosting more wingdings, and he never stopped screwing more women. He convinced himself that you were just another Jane he checked off his “To do” list. Because that’s who Seokjin had become. He was no longer that sweet, innocent little boy you once knew. He was no longer your only best friend that you could trust. He was no longer who you thought he was.

—

After receiving the test results from your doctor, that’s when everything sunk in, and you made a promise to yourself that you’d eliminate the abuse of caffeine and tobacco you’d taken within your diet. Although somehow, someway, Seokjin found out that you were pregnant (more than likely it was Betty who told him at his still ongoing wingdings, since you spilled who Mr. Worldwide Handsome is), and he had the guts to show himself at your workplace. He paraded through the establishment, calling out your name. To your embarrassment, you remained at your station, internally cursing yourself for having gotten involved with him.

“____!” He raged, searching for your tired figure. You let out a sigh of exhaustion. And there he stood, with creased slacks in his million-dollar man attire, but his gaze was only focused on you.

“____, we need to talk.” He reassured to you, but too loud for prying eyes nearby. You swiped away the sweat that clung to your forehead.

“Well, I am working. How dare you barge in like this as if you have the right?” You retort with a hint of rage in your tone.

He took a deep breath, not wanting to hear it from you. “Listen, I didn’t come to cause any trouble, alright? We need to talk about my baby.”

You scoffed in reply, “Your baby?” His eyes widen slightly, “I am the one carrying our child! This is our baby, not just yours!” He ran his fingers through his hair in a frustrated manner.

“Last I remember, you were too busy having nookie with those quiff’s who were in the same bed you had knocked me up!” Your chest heaves of anger, suddenly feeling overwhelmed.

“You can’t just show up here like you’re this-this- bimbo! Because you’re not!” You hadn’t even realized you’d been yelling the entire time, gaining the attention from your nearby co-workers—who attentively watch your riled up figure, courtesy of your hormones.

Jin attempted to speak, “____, I’m-” but then you cut him off, tiredly yelling, “Beat it, Jin!”

His face instantly contorted into an expression you didn’t like to witness. It was a face of pure defeat. His jaw clenched under your stare, but he turned the other cheek and strutted away. You can’t say you felt sorry for him or embarrassed that you called him out because deep down, you knew that he brought everything upon himself.

—

You had a baby girl, and the moment you met eyes with her, was when you promised yourself you would climb mountains, swim oceans, and fight any battle to protect and love her the correct way—because she is you and you are her. The first two months were tough, yet Seokjin was nowhere to be found. Betty had been there for you through every step of the way, and you were beyond grateful for that. Although, you felt guilty for not letting Seokjin see his daughter, because after all she is still yours and his child. You asked Betty to accompany you to his mansion, where you had hoped to encounter him—but to no avail, you turned up with nothing. The entire palace was abandoned, like a wasteland. No automobiles, no servants, no Jane’s, no Seokjin.

A few days later on your way home from work, you overheard a few pedestrians gossiping about him. “Mr. Worldwide Handsome? I can’t believe it! Is it true? That he’s really on the run?” One of them says, the other woman replies, “Look, it’s in the paper!” Your eyebrows furrow on the spot.

“Pardon me. Can I see that?” You probe, pointing to the newspaper the two ladies were observing, and surely they were right. His photo was in the daily paper, with the headline of the name of Mr. Worldwide Handsome. He was wanted for bootlegging. He never told you who he really was, all he mentioned to you was that he was indeed Mr. Worldwide Handsome, but never confided in you about his supposed work.

Now he was gone, and you had a feeling that he was never coming back, because the first night when you two were reunited, it was in that moment, just as he’d practiced with numerous other women for years—Seokjin had one goal in mind:

To get her.