#or to even (as a totally random example) make a post arguing AGAINST those comments

[summergoodwife]

Gonna say it again, "Just stop consuming the genre" is THE WORST POSSIBLE RESPONSE to someone complaining about the lack of representation in their preferred genre!! And "Consume other stuff too" is not much better!!! I don't care how much you think varying media consumption is a Good and Holy lifestyle, not everyone wants to do that! There is no obligation to do that and there should not be! Because it's fucking entertainment. It's not a college major.

And! And and and. I would be remiss to not point out that when you tell someone, "If you want well written (minority) just get out of (genre fandom)" you are, regardless of your motivations, rhetorically aligning yourself with the exact same bigots who just want the pro-representation crowd to shut up and go away.

[prettyoddfever]

why are you so against ryden

I'm literally only pointing out why specific examples of "Ryden proof" don't work, or were misinterpreted by people who don't know much about the band. If me being pro-reality means that you consider me anti-Ryden then, uh… you might want to examine that more.

As long as we're on this topic, I'm going to expand on an older post here and go off on a tangent:

I actually loved the Ryden part of the fandom in the pre-split days! Ryden felt like a fandom-wide inside joke that united so many fans and sparked so much creativity (sometimes it reminded me of inventing bs symbolism in english & art classes lol). I didn’t read the slash, but it’s not like those kids stayed exclusively over in their communities… they were everywhere. A lot of my favorite accounts were massive Ryden fans & fic authors. but even the most die-hard shippers in 2006 & 2007 would scoff if new fans asked if they were ever being serious with their comments. It was all just entertaining wish fulfillment done to amuse themselves. They would act like it was a legit alternate reality and write long funny primers & posts like “look guys, they are in love. this is facts… here I go with my proof," but when it came down to whether or not they actually thought it was real… no, of course not. The fanfic authors were the first to laugh and say they weren’t hurting anyone because nobody actually believed Ryden was real and everyone was on the same page. They argued that every single band had a slash community and it just came with the fame. Some fans genuinely wanted Ryden to be real, while others thought it was entertaining how you could cherry-pick events & isolate them from any context to make Ryden look plausible. And both groups were taking matters into their own hands by trying to tie enough pictures & random dots together to make it look like a happy alternate reality that satisfied everyone. It was funny.

The majority of the pre-split fandom understood that Ryden wasn’t real, so people were on the same page when they shared their “proof.” It was like an inside joke. For example, I’ll argue that unicorns could be real because I know that the person I’m talking to is aware of reality. I can get as creative as I want and just have fun because we’re both on the same page… and the other person will be like “well yes of course they’re obviously real.” It looks like we agree. But that does not mean that we truly believe it lol... we're just bored & entertaining ourselves. Someone else who is unsure whether or not unicorns actually exist might read our convo and conclude that we are certain unicorns are real and have proof! But I never intended for my silly convo with my friend to be taken that seriously.

For me, Ryden was more about the fandom. It was just fun to see a picture or new moment and wait to see if anyone else spotted the same potential too. The slash accounts across different sites/forums would even make fun of themselves for how far they would go to make everything fit Ryden. At times it felt like an affectionate joke about the band and the fandom. 

I’d say the Ryden craze first took over with the huge surge of new fans during the summer 2006 tour (around the time Brendon & Ryan started fully going for the mic sharing each night). This was back when the band still read the forums and different fan sites and were trying to get a sense of what their fans were saying (such a bad idea lol). I was never totally clear on where the guys stood on Ryden in 2006 but it seemed like they were in on the joke… but it was so confusing at the same time. Like one minute they’d complain about the disgusting “pornfiction” in an interview and the next minute they’d be hamming it up for meet & greet pictures. Bden would practically hump Ryan’s leg during a show and then Ryan would suggestively run his hand up Bden’s thigh during a meet & greet exactly when he knew fans were watching… and then they’d both act like they didn’t get why fans ever came up with stories about them. I’m not saying their actions meant they were asking for something btw. I’m just saying that it’s equally true that the guys would claim they weren’t huge on Ryden and that they intentionally fueled the fire to get fans to laugh/scream at the right time. The band was super aware that the Ryden fans were a huge part of the fandom who drove a lot of the hype online… so it seemed like in late 2006 the guys were just trying to connect with a fanbase they were being quickly distanced from as they got more & more famous. Then in 2008 the guys intentionally added extra Ryden elements to their stage routine because they knew what a lot of fans still wanted to see.

So my conclusion was that it was all in good fun (except making suggestive comments to the band irl was horrible… people were even saying some seriously gross stuff to Zack about the boys and taking it waaaaay too far). During the lull of 2007, and even into 2008, there seemed to be a whole section of the fandom that was more invested in their fanfic communities than the irl band (they’d often come onto other boards & communities to ask for facts or details for their fanfics and watching the replies they got was like watching a really bad game of telephone haha so I’m guessing those plots diverged from reality pretty quickly). New fans were also being introduced to the band through fanfiction and seemed more intent on just spotting Ryden moments and learning the fanfic version of history rather than any real-life history. So by late 2008 there was definitely a small crowd who was taking Ryden more seriously and also understood less about the band. But I wasn't always sure if their tone was totally serious or not, because the joking posts had often been written in a serious tone too.

Side note on that: when I started this account in 2020 I hadn't thought about P!ATD much while I had been sick for years. I was just trying to throw myself back into the mindset of 2006 and rediscover a time when my world had been awesome & I was healthy. So when I saw all the sun/moon theories that had formed after I'd left the fandom I was like YES omg this is amazing. I lived for that kind of stuff. But then it was confusing how the same people who were currently posting all of the “ryden was real” stuff were the same ones who would quickly point out that another one of my Ryden posts wasn’t what really happened or that a photo manip that I considered fun was actually fake…  I mean, obviously??? I didn’t get why there was any difference between everything. It took me a few months to get a read on the current fandom and realize that things weren't being done in the same joking spirit. I started struggling to explain why I was posting Ryden-ish stuff if I didn’t necessarily believe what I was saying (and again I’m having a hard time explaining here because it never felt like the fandom was making up crap we didn’t stand behind back then! we were serious that we believed it was a darn good connection/theory or photoshop job haha). Ryden used to be like this shared alternate lens to view events through that felt like teamwork to create. We would intentionally pretend like years of full context didn't exist and create our own parallel narrative that could coexist with reality in our minds. But now it feels like people are sharing "Ryden proof" for real as though the piles of creative nonsense are an actual recap of historic events... and you need to pick some kind of "side" to believe? Idk, it's weird. I dropped any remaining nostalgia connected with Ryden content and ended up shifting the tone & focus of my account to organizing actual facts, media, and info about events I remember.

I don't think it's ok that moments in the band's history are often distorted or erased in order to pass off certain examples of “Ryden proof” as real now. It would be a shame for ridiculous Ryden stories to be prioritized as key info about the band while normal info about band members & events gets ignored now (ex: turning Northern Downpour into some kind of Ryden thing totally erases what Ryan wanted to do with the song). A lot of people have told me that they don’t care what actually happened because they prefer their ideas anyways. And that’s fine, as long as you’re aware that what you’re choosing doesn't track with reality. (Also, I always felt like knowing the real events or original photos from a manip gave me more appreciation for how creative people were… but I suppose that’s because Ryden was more about the fandom for me).

SIDE TANGENT: I drifted away from the fandom after summer 2009 when I got sick, so I don’t know specifically what happened over the next couple years to get so many fans who were impressively uninformed about the band yet super intense about Ryden at the same time... but I'm also not surprised I guess. Some knowledge about the band absolutely faded to the background in the last half of 2006 as the overwhelming amount of newer fans invented their own answers and were more interested in freaking out over cute guys than actually taking the time to learn about the band. The knowledge wasn't lost, it was just drowned out for a while in the midst of their enthusiastic chatter. It felt like a waste of time to correct them too because they were absolutely everywhere and they weren't really harming anyone by screaming things like Ryan took his mom as a date to the VMAs lol. Maybe there was a surge of younger fans by 2010-2011 who didn't have the context to know what they were looking at too, and were very enthusiastic about Ryden? I don't know. This is all purely speculation on my part.

I actually don't care whether anyone thinks Ryden was real or not... that's definitely not my focus and I'm not trying to convince anyone of a "side" either. You can conclude whatever you want. My focus in my posts is simply to provide context for some of the inaccurate stories & examples that are currently being passed around as though they're actual history. I don't expect anyone to care. But at least the info is still available for any younger fans who might be interested in the real-life band.

[ahwait-no-yes]

Let’s talk about if Saihara hated Ouma

So lately I’ve actually seen a bit more comments on how Saihara doesn’t actually like Ouma and people have gone as far as saying he hates him and idk why people genuinely believe it so here I am about to refute that (I’ve been waiting ages to make this post just so you know so this came out as a horribly unstructured ramble more than anything oops)

some notes beforehand:

I have an obvious bias as I do ship saiouma. although i’ll try to be neutral on what I say here, I can’t hide my bias. I have tried to include what people that hate this ship believe to counter them though, also if you ship other things that’s totally fine?? don’t think of any of this as an attack at your ship and I’m not saying Saihara loved Ouma, I’m just tired of people saying Saihara hated him.

You’re allowed to respectfully disagree as long as you don’t berate me or say I don’t know the game when the majority of the screenshots in this are from my own gameplay, lmao. 

and massive whole-game spoilers! Don’t read this if you’ve not finished DRV3!

Glad to know you made it under the cut! now I can begin with where I think people got this idea that Saihara hates him from- the infamous “You’re alone Kokichi and you always will be” line.

I admit this was very cold and still breaks my fragile saiou heart, but to base Saihara’s entire perspective of Ouma on this one line he said while he wasn’t thinking straight is just.. no.. It’s unrealistic. we’ve seen how Saihara is able to adapt his views and grow (I’ll come back to this later), he’s not stubborn in this regard like Momota or even Ouma is, so even if he did mean it 100% (which I doubt because when *anybody* is angry they will say or do things they may regret had they been calmer), it’s not like his view on Ouma from chapter 4 was his final view on him. And that’s what people fail to realise. 

So, how does Saihara view Ouma then?

well, I’d say he’s been interested in Ouma as a detective from the moment he met him with his curiosity piqued at Ouma’s claims of leading a secret organisation.

and he remains curious about Ouma throughout, always questioning why Ouma says certain things, what Ouma is lying for, he just wants to figure him out- and this doesn’t just apply to free time events either

I think you get my point there, now, I think if I didn’t ship saiou and read this, I’d argue these are all pre-chapter 5 and before the breaking line so he may have been curious before but not after- that then brings me to my next point

Saihara was confident- dare I say believed- in Ouma, especially after Chapter 5.

how bold of me to say ikr, but this ties in to Saihara’s ability to adapt his views. He’s sort of like a mixture of both Kaito and Ouma honestly, because naturally as a detective he has to be suspicious and think logically as Ouma does, while at the same time Kaito taught him to believe in his friends which has also helped him to advance in trials. I think he might have extended this belief to Ouma, because he trusts that Ouma is doing what he does for a reason.

In fact, I’d argue he’s the only one of the remaining group who wouldn’t readily accept pinning Ouma down as a villain. If anything, it’s the opposite- Saihara fought to clear Ouma’s name, and never stopped trying to understand whether or not his intentions were true or false

i’ll just drop this screenshot here (that i named THIS MAKES ME SO HAPPY.png in case you were wondering)

this is what I mean when I say he wouldn’t accept it as fast as the others and would second-guess it, bear in mind this is the moment Ouma “admitted” to being the mastermind. and it’s not like this doubt was sudden or anything, cause I can recall this moment (that I actually didn’t catch on to on my first playthrough)

which gives me the idea that hadn’t Ouma purposefully messed with everyone and built up his bad reputation, it would’ve been so much easier for Saihara to disprove him being the mastermind at the point he said it. 

Anyway, going back to my point- excluding Kaito (cause Ouma directly told him), Saihara is the first to bring up Ouma’s innocence, and this is what I mean when I say Saihara believed in Ouma

note that I say believed in. believing Ouma and believing in Ouma are different, it’s like how loving someone and being in love with someone are two different things, so don’t argue that by saying “he didn’t trust him” because ik that and that’s not what I’m trying to say.

but he did believe that Ouma had his reasons, and he tried to discover and understand them. I mean, take this for example

he’s already on board lool look at him go, but no really look at the confidence

he’s both confident in himself and in Ouma not lying here, then goes back to being curious about his intentions

oh and let’s not forget who it was that searched Ouma’s lab to find clues to prove he is a remnant of despair. Why do you need to search for evidence for something you (and the others even more) think is irrefutably true? the answer is obvious- he was doubtful of it from the start, and needed evidence to convince himself it was true, but then as he found nothing to prove it (and even evidence against it), he had to convince the others of it too- and prove Ouma’s innocence

(the last screenshot was from Hikkie’s playthrough on Youtube) 

But as you can see, he’s clearing Ouma’s name as the leader of the Remnants of Despair. 

Now, I bet someone would argue that this only proves Saihara was determined to find the truth in general, because he’s mister detective, so I’ll raise you the fact that Saihara didn’t need to try figuring why Ouma does the things he does- he could leave it at just knowing the truth and if he really didn’t like Ouma like people say then there’s not much merit to it. 

“So what if I know this now? I didn’t care about him, it’s pointless” he could’ve thought something like that, but no

(I also think the “you’re lying again kokichi, there’s a method to your madness” moment fits here too)

Not only this, but there’s also how Saihara learnt from him.

honestly im still kinda mindblown from this ever since I first realised it, but when you think about it, Ouma hinted to Saihara in his FTEs how to win the game.

(those 3 screenshots are from justonegamr’s kokichi’s FTE video; random fun fact this was the playthrough that i watched while first getting into drv3)

But if you think about it, Ouma tried this again in his own trial in his attempt at ending the killing game and then Saihara also used this to actually end it

Not only that (which personally i think is pretty powerful in itself), but Saihara also tries to take Ouma seriously and picks up hints he leaves and uses them later

as well as

et

(and generally just)

generally, Ouma will hint and then Saihara will pick it up. it’s been like that for the whole game- why should Saihara give any extra thought to what Ouma hints if he dislikes him?? really, he could’ve just ignored him the same way he did at the end of chapter 4- but again, he didn’t “”hate”” Ouma enough to keep ignoring him, he considered him a friend in the end anyway.

and the end is what I’ll talk about now, too.

first- can we just acknowledge this?

he doesn’t ignore Ouma at all here. even though he didn’t trust him, he was sad to have lost him. 

Not to mention the way he thinks about lying at the end of Chapter 6. (like, please this is just-  *chefs kiss*)

IMAGINE Ouma was alive to hear him say that omg but Saihara could (and probably would) extend what he says here to Ouma himself- y’know, the ‘embodiment of lies’

by thinking about lies in a different angle instead of at face value like this, he gets a more neutral view on them rather than just thinking “they’re bad!!”, why wouldn’t he be able to do the same for Ouma? especially now that he knows Ouma was innocent and actually hated the game as much as they all did. I mean hey, even after chapter 5′s trial he sort of already thinks about lies differently

and throughout this post, I’ve tried to avoid talking about his free time events or his salmon mode ending because people always say “well they’re not canon” and to that I say not canon to the plot, yes, but still canon to the characters. so yeah, I don’t disregard any of them.

from this point onwards these all technically happen before chapter 5, so it’s not entirely relevant to my point that saihara still liked ouma even after the end of chapter 4, but it’s still something that shows he liked him beforehand at least. I mainly just wanna ramble though haha

one thing I’ve always thought was interesting was how Saihara easily lashed out at Kaito in his own free time event

and Kaito is undeniably Saihara’s best friend who he holds in high regard. If Saihara having backbone means he doesn’t like someone then damn bye bye momota have a nice trip in space

in terms of ouma and saihara though 

how about the fact that Saihara willingly sat there and played rock paper scissors (janken pon!) with Ouma 100 times?? bruh I got bored playing that with my brother after 8 rounds yesterday how would Saihara manage 100?? would you really have the patience for that when you don’t even like the person you’re playing with?

how about his third free time event too?

(from justonegamr’s kokichi fte video)

Saihara wanted to spend some time with Ouma, that’s- its literally written there I don’t know what you want from me the guy wanted a nice time with someone he supposedly doesnt like

what I love about this is how “reaching out” could be taken both literally and figuratively. Wanting to understand someone and trying to find a way to but them being too unwilling to trust anyone.. damn 😔👊 also shuuichi either wanted to handshake or hold hands, what else do you do when you reach for someone’s hand come on

oh yes and how about that he’s content with the refusal because it allowed him to figure out a small thing about Ouma? understanding that Ouma has a different way of being reached out to? mhm please think about that for a bit

that parallel in the salmon ending too...

he considered how it’ll be like with him after they get out and how he’ll learn about him, then ultimately decided when ouma reached out to him that he does want this, and even comments on the warmth of his hand... afhskfdlj

his blush when ouma mentions how his lies didn’t bore saihara was also a very cute moment

ooh and what about the love hotel???

there’s that one line “I know i’m meant to be Kokichi’s ideal in this fantasy but when he tells me he loves me I feel like he means the opposite” or something like that- i’d argue it’s because he’s cautious of Ouma for one but also am I getting something wrong here or is he talking about how he, Shuuichi, thinks Ouma doesn’t like him?  because I see people argue this is proof saihara doesn’t like ouma but all he’s really doing is just doubting ouma loves him

well in any case

WHY would he want him to stay in a love hotel of all places if he disliked him?! I know I’m just a broken record at this point but I can’t think of anything logical for it. they didnt even need to include that line in the scene at all but they did like they could’ve easily said something to do with realising where he was instead but nah. even after the event’s over, he says to himself

doesn’t he sound disappointed by it? and the fact that he even questions if it was a dream- okay  

ooh, something i’ve realised while writing this as well: it kind of seems like Saihara might not want to like him but does anyway; he quickly ‘smothered the thought’ of staying with Kokichi, didn’t want to admit that Ouma’s lies never bored him, and I also thought about how in one of Kaito’s free time events he says to himself “I shouldn’t be talking about another boy like that”- well, maybe it’s similar for how he thinks of ouma? it’s not like Saihara didn’t care for the others’ opinion on him (probably the opposite ngl if you mess up in class trials he says something along the lines of“Ah I screwed up! They probably think I’m a fraud”) and considering nobody else liked ouma (except for maybe gonta) I wouldn’t be surprised if he felt shame for liking him, thus repressing that feeling (especially around the others, there’s that part in trial 4 where he’s trying to convince kaito he isn’t siding with ouma cause he knows by doing that could damage his friendship with his bro)

I mean this is something I only thought of just now, but it could be plausible (i hope?)

One last thing- I find it incredibly funny how in chapter 2 when ouma is literally on top of saihara he doesn’t freak out or scream and everyone else in the room is also completely chill with it and unquestioning. no really they’re just standing there.. and how long was ouma even in that position for??

Now, I think that’s all. So to finish off, I’ll just say

People get the idea that saiouma is bad because some don’t realise Saihara can still like a person without idolising or putting them on a pedestal. Idk if this is gonna sound controversial or not, but I honestly do think he did exactly that to Kaito and Kaede- which doesn’t make what they have with him toxic or bad at all, I just think his view on Ouma is a lot more realistic and less clouded. Heck, if Saihara canonically liked Ouma as much as he does with the other two I don’t know if I’d ship saiouma as hard as I do (it is fun to imagine though).

If you actually read through this then.. wow? I’m surprised you got through this unstructured mess? I hope you can agree with me for some of my points at least but I’m not here to convince you or anything, this has just been on my mind for weeks now I needed to get it out somehow.

I said it at the start and i’ll say it again now too- i didn’t intend on attacking or comparing saiou to any other ships so I do apologise if I seem like it, i’m just terrible with my wording (lmk if something genuinely offended you, i’ll probably change it) but you’re free to ship whatever you like cause at the end of the day it’s just a bit of fun. that being said, I don’t want to actually argue on this so please don’t haha, i’ve contemplated just deleting this but I’ve put a lot of effort into this post even though i cant analyse for 💩

I hope you can enjoy the rest of your day!

have the kokichi gaygun as a farewell present

[gayerplease]

Sublimation

In case anyone's wondering, in psychology, sublimation is a defense mechanism that involves transforming unacceptable impulses into more socially acceptable action or behaviour. It was one of the defense mechanisms mentioned previously. So no, those are not random words I added for no reason. I'm in love with a psychology geek, so I pick up a few things once in a while :)

Funny how I can give define and give examples for all of them but I don't know shit about the book tested in the literature examination tomorrow.

Masterpost

---

"Roman!" I shriek. "For the love of [redacted]! Stop fucking singing!!"

Roman glares, and sings louder, Patton fighting for his disapproval of my language to be heard over the cacophony of noise.

The day honestly didn't start out that badly. There was a huge breakfast laid out for us, firstly. It was incredibly awkward to sit there and eat it, but the food was good and we managed to convince Remus not to start a food fight, so not bad, overall. And then… Well actually that's about the only thing that's gone right this morning, unless you're willing to count Logan, Apathy, Depression and Anxiety disappearing off somewhere so there are technically less of us arguing to be a win. Yeah. Even I can't imagine the arguments that would break out if they were here too. Between Roman's singing, Patton's fussing over my language (Listen, sophisticated my ass, you make puns, you can't talk. Fuck happens to be exactly the word I'm looking for and I'm fucking using it!), Remus's comments, Deceit's comments (Yes keep talking you're certainly not distracting me) I swear--

"Hey since like Anxiety's not here can we go back to our rooms?" I speak up.

"Fine!" Deceit gives in, head buried in his bowler hat. "But you come back here the instant I summon you!"

"Sure thing Jekyll and Lied!" Roman grins, skipping off. "Bye nerds! No! Remus don't follow me--"

"I'm going to go eat a cookie." Patton declares, earning a raised eyebrow from Deceit.

I just sink out, ignoring the look on Deceit's face. Stupid Light Sides. Stupid Deceit. Stupid Remus. Stupid Anxiety or Protectiveness or whatever the hell that monster is.

I scream in frustration, slamming my fist into the nearest punching bag. Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid--

I pick up the nearest thing, a spherical lead weight, and throw it at a target. It shears through the padding, landing with a heavy crash. Ignoring the sudden pain in my shoulder, I rip a dagger off the wall and hurl it too. I stomp about the room, kicking away anything in my path, tossing thing after thing at the dartboards, and then at my punching bags when I've successfully destroyed all of the targets with everything from knives to axes to actual darts.

The cacophony of crashing and my own yelling helps. A little. Not enough! I strike at the punching bag again. I don't miss the tough leather.

… I also don't miss the brick wall. I draw back, snarling obscenities as I cradle my injured hand. Is it fractured or just badly bruised? Did I sprain my wrist? I growl. Hell if I know. It's definitely a lot bloodier than one punch ago though. I groan, sinking out. Anx will be giving me shit all week if I don't get it wrapped up right away. Higher risk for infection or whatever. He's always grouching about how none of us take care of ourselves. Fucking hypocrite. Well, no matter, he'll have it bandaged up in a matter minutes, like always. Then I can go back to punching stuff (with my non injured hand, since I'm not a fucking idiot).

I freeze as I take in the scene before me. Anxiety wrapped around Thomas, Logan, Apathy and Depression as they chat semi-causally, some random show playing in the background, atmosphere only slightly tense. Oh. Right. That's not Anx, even though the way he looks up when I enter is still exactly the same. That's not the Anx I know, even though the way he shoots forward is exactly the same.

"Hurt!" He shrieks, and I barely stop myself from putting my hands over my ears.

There. That's not the same. He doesn't take a hasty step back and respect my boundaries when I shout at him not to touch me. He doesn't tell me to sit down. He doesn't give me a fidget cube to play with until I'm calm enough to hesitantly offer up my injured appendage. He doesn't quietly nod and take my hand and wrap it up. He doesn't ask what's bothering me. He doesn't nod understandingly when I say no. He doesn't listen patiently as I begin to rant not thirty seconds later. He just grabs my hand and does his stupid stupid stupid stupid healing thing.

There are no bandages. Then there is no injury. I growl at him, jerking my hand away as soon as he's done. There's no recovery period. There's no yelling for me to take it easy. There's no follow-ups. He doesn't demand to check it every two hours to ensure it hasn't gotten infected. It's just healed and that's it. Stupid Anxiety and his stupid healing.

I suddenly remember exactly who my audience is. Thomas and Logan are staring, Depression and Apathy, at least, are pretending nothing's happening for the sake of my pride. I'm still panting slightly, my hair and clothes messy and drenched thoroughly with sweat, my arms shaking from the exertion, tension and residual waves of anger.

"What?!?" I snap, irritated, fighting to shove Anxiety off as he tries to massage my aching muscles. He's too strong, obviously, and I end up seated on the couch, the glass of water that was forced down my throat already refilled, the pain in my shoulders gone far too fast for it to be natural.

"... Nothing." Thomas answers after a moment. "Er… are you alright?" He asks. "Do you… Do you want to talk about it?"

I growl at him, finding his tone and questions to be far far far too much like Anx's for my liking.

"What do you care?! Fuck off!"

Thomas swallows.

"... That wasn't very nice."

"Did you think I'd be nice Sanders? I'm wrath dumbass!!"

"I…" Thomas visibly fumbles for an answer. "We do care." He finally says, "I care."

"You didn't know I existed before yesterday afternoon!!" I snarl. "You don't know me!"

"I'd like to get to know you." He mumbles.

I flip him off. His face drops, but then he manages a tight smile.

"Stay a while. Watch some TV with us. We don't have to talk, just… Stay?"

"Like I have a choice." I grouch, squirming against Anxiety's grip before giving up and settling down.

Stupid Anxiety. Stupid Thomas. Stupid Light Sides. Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Stupid feelings.

---

Funny story, I was actually having writers block up until the thing that happened to Wrath actually happened to me. Well not all of it obviously. I was just practicing Taekwondo and uh. Swung a little too hard and didn't miss the cupboard door. Whoopsies. Nothing too bad, just a bruise, but then I realised that that'd totally be something that'd happen to Wrath!

Poor guy, he really misses Virgil, even if he won't admit it. How many characters are in denial? Definitely not practically all of them on one level or another.

Taglist (taken from the taglist repository and those who I saw interacted with the previous post, tell me if you want to be added or removed): @legendsgates @rainbowbowtie @10moonymhrivertam @callboxkat @nonasficcollection @supernovainthenightsky @evoodo123 @katelynn-a-fan @dwbh888 @grouptalekindnesssoul @the-hoely-bleach @anvil527up @fanficloverinthesun @gigglyscribbles @sure-i-exist @reconditesocks @quietmob @angrycatlovesfandoms @battlebunnyteardropsinthesun @kismet-ignis @lgbtqiaemo @relatiwiki @selenechris @bumbybee3 @torotitanium @kuroyurishion @insert-chaotic-enby-name @seren4d3 @mcgonagalls-witches @b-o-o-o-mep @the-sympathetic-villain @ace-in-a-shopping-cart @melochy @naturallyunstablegamer @waywarddemigod221b @ironemrys @croftersjam15 @weird-gremlin @janusissmol @coffeeoverdosedshipper @gayerthansnek-stans-lisa @bloopadboop @silvarraven @wasinotwantedatthisexactsecond @itzfemalemarionette1-fazbear

[pcudoodoo]

PCU and Argent Dawn

Obvious throwaway account. I’ve been debating on making something like this for a while, because this is an issue that has been growing increasingly concerning every single time that something new happens in game. However I’ve been hesitant to actually post something about the topic I’m about to delve into. Why? There are several reasons. First and foremost, I’m not a person who lives for drama. I’m a very secluded person, who suffers from mental issues that I really won’t get into. I do not say this for sympathy points, I say this to make the point clear that drama is the very last thing that I want to get involved with. Secondly as this title suggests this is going to be about the PCU - a group that is very notorious for going to extreme lengths to harass and shit talk people that they deem as enemies. And lastly, well, this is all happening on EU servers. I was hesitant to bring up this topic because let’s face it, it won’t get as much attention as it would if this was happening on American servers. People generally do not care enough over here to do anything about this, and while it is extremely disheartening to see I figured I may as well speak my mind.

Apologies in advance for my rambling nature and the length of this post.

What is the PCU? This question has come up quite a lot on the Alliance side of the server, but for anyone who plays Horde even the mere mention of the name will get you nothing but praise from the people that align with them. To put it bluntly, the PCU (Perroy’s Cinematic Universe) is a collective group of people that follow an individual named Perroy, and as the name suggests, go around making guilds following this guy’s “guidelines” to roleplay on the server of Argent Dawn. And when I say they go around making guilds, I mean quite literally that as of the date of this posting they have 11 Horde guilds and 11 Alliance guilds that have the tag [PCU] in their guild names or descriptions. Every single time a new thing is introduced to the game you can bet that the PCU will make a guild about it. You want a guild full of Zandalari Trolls? Well of course they have a guild for that. Vulpera? Have to be the first guild on the server to have one of those too. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing mind you, they just also seem to have a monopoly of guilds that all sing about providing “quality roleplay to the server of Argent Dawn.” But don’t take my word for it. Take Perroy’s word for it yourself: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/the-pcu-now-recruiting-updated-op-server/54704

What’s the issue there you might ask? What’s so bad about wanting to provide a server full of people with quality roleplay?

The issue isn’t the goal that the PCU claims to strive towards, like I stated previously it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have a guild full of trolls or vulpera or knight roleplayers. But the monopoly itself is one of the biggest issues of the server. Let’s say for example that for some reason you’ve done something to upset a member of the PCU. That member goes to complain to the rest of the guild, who then complains to the leader Perroy, and then suddenly your character is shunned from roleplaying with 20 - 30 other people in that guild. No big deal, you just go on to roleplay with someone else, right?

However, as one might have taken from the scenario, there is a major issue that stands out. Anyone who speaks out against the PCU are labeled as “Anti PCU” and are vilified in their community. A quick search on the EU Argent Dawn forums brings up plenty of PCU labeled topics, a majority of them promoting their army of guilds and going through the comments any one that has a problem with them are very quickly jumped on and are harassed there. And while that behaviour could be limited to the forums, unfortunately it is not. PCU members frequently go around in game “infiltrating” other guilds with their own members, spreading rumours and falsehoods about people that they do not like. And lord forbid you happen to enjoy ERP in the comfort OUTSIDE OF THE GAME. If a member even catches a whiff of you enjoying adult orientated content in roleplay in general, not just wow related, you are blacklisted. Period. Suddenly that character who was shunned just by one guild is shunned by two. Or three. Or five. And soon they find it difficult to find anything other than random walk up city roleplay.

Which in itself lies another issue. Since the PCU strives to make the entire server roleplay their way or the highway, they have frequent ‘raids’ on the two faction capitals of Stormwind and Orgrimmar. Long time server roleplayers know about the infamous raid when the Void Elves were announced - there were mobs and in character lynchings against other player’s will, all for the sake of causing havoc and to express their disdain for the new race. These raids continue to this day, and while the PCU’s side of the argument is that “if you don’t like the roleplay then don’t show up to it”, their argument is impossible to accommodate to. There is simply no way for someone to ignore a massive faction wide roleplay in a major city hub when people are /y typing curse words and emotes. Even if you ignore one person doing it, two more will pop up doing the same thing. The only way to “not show up” is to avoid a major rp hub, which is one of the -only- rp hubs on the server.

Argent Dawn, known for being a roleplaying server, is one of the most difficult servers to roleplay on. People whom I’ve talked to simply do not wish to deal with the PCU so they either don’t RP anymore, or they leave to go somewhere else. And my main issue that I personally have with the PCU isn’t their vile comments, the reports on members being homophobic and racist, the complete narcissistic nature of Perroy or even the bullying and harassment the members do to players. It’s the complete and total lack of empathy from them. Every single argument made against them will be counter argued with “Just don’t ERP”, or “Just go somewhere else if you don’t like what we do.” Their complete lack of self awareness and self righteous gatekeeping on a game that they themselves have no rights to nor do any of them own is what gets to me. Again, I do not wish for drama. I don’t type all of this out to start shit with the PCU or to bring harassment upon their users. I type this because I, as a very tired almost thirty year old, am so sick of seeing the same shit over and over again while I’m in Stormwind or Orgrimmar. For anyone wondering why I didn’t provide any screenshots or “proof” of my claims, the tumblr page https://consequencesofargentdawn.tumblr.com/ has more information than a single person can provide. I suggest looking there.

And with that, thank you for those who read through my ramblings and stuck around. I wish you all nothing but the best and remember. At the end of the day it’s all just a game. And a game is supposed to be about fun.

[five-wow]

Hi, I'm a fellow writer in the fandom and I admire your work. I wanted to ask, as a popular writer, do you get fixated sometimes on the number of kudos/comments/hits etc that your new work gets, and does this impact your motivation/inspiration? I think comparison is the thief of joy, and I really want to get over this feeling when I post my own work, so was wondering if even popular and regular writers such as yourself feel like this to, and if , what's your secret? Thanks!

Hi! 1) You are so sweet, ahh, and 2) YES, I DO. Gosh, yes, I absolutely do get insecure about those kinds of things, and I think that anyone who says they don't ever feel that way is either lying (to themselves, possibly) or maybe just pure magic, like some cross between a writer and a unicorn.

I love ao3 and I love all of its metrics and I love numbers and statistics, but there’s definitely that shadow side where having all of that easily available makes it deceptively easy to compare your own work to other people’s. I do it all the time! It honestly makes it a little hard for me at times to read h50 fic and fully enjoy it, because I keep... looking at it and wondering how my own stacks up against it, unwillingly. That's not a relaxing experience, and sometimes not even a very fun one. (Another part of it is that I just write SO MUCH for h50 and there is SO MUCH I still want to write, and I don’t want to risk reading something that’s very close to an idea I had and then never being quite sure if what I write after that was influenced by the other person’s work or if it’s really still my idea, because I have this (pretty irrational) fear of accidentally stealing someone else’s work even though one of the really great things about fandom is that it’s a very collaborative process as a whole and being inspired by other people’s stuff is usually totally okay, buuuut that’s a different rambly story.)

And I definitely do also get... some cringey feelings, hardcore, around fics I posted that don't do very well numbers-wise. Sometimes it's expected - fic that doesn't follow traditional formats or doesn't feature Steve/Danny, for example, is always something where I KNOW it won't get as much attention because I know how fandom works and that lessens the sting because it doesn't HAVE to hold up to those other fics that perform way better, because I already know it's not really comparable. The truth is, of course, that most fic is not really comparable to other fic, but it’s easy to fall into that trap anyway. If I post something that seems like my average kind of work and it gets less kudos or comments than usual, I do start to doubt the fic and second-guess myself - is something about this weird? Is it too [insert quality x]? Is it bad? Did I unknowingly do something terrible and people are now avoiding me? The answer to all of those is probably no, and going through it a bunch of times has definitely helped, because what usually happens is that I end up somewhat avoiding the fic in question because it makes me a little ashamed and awkward to think about it (a relative failure! oh no! I'm human!) and then, eventually, I return and reread the fic. By that point I have enough distance from it in time that I can look at it a lot more objectively, and it's way easier to see what works and what does not than when I posted it and I had just read it a dozen times in twenty-four hours and the words were burned into my brain. And upon that reread, inevitably, I realize that, holy shit, it was NOT AS BAD as I had made it out to be in my mind! It’s actually kind of fun! Imagine the ego boost of realizing your most cringy recent work is actually pretty okay, haha, and it's silly, but it's a revelation every time. The quality of a fic is not dictated by how many people read it or comment on it or like it, and intellectually I absolutely know that, but it’s hard to remember when it’s about yourself and you’re still in that emotionally vulnerable place of having just shared your work with the world and it feels like the world is not as into it as you thought (or hoped) it’d be. It’s honestly very, very reassuring to have those experiences to fall back on, but sadly the only way I know to get there is to just tough it out and feel super awkward for a while.

When I’m writing, on the other hand, I usually don’t really think about what other people might think of it. I have the advantage that (pretty much) all of my work consists of fairly short stand alone stories, which means I don’t have to struggle with keeping my motivation up for a second chapter of something but I get to start fresh every time, and that’s nice, because I can just lose myself in the joy of throwing words around and making characters do things that make me giggle. That’s not to say I never think of the outside world while writing - I realized, pretty recently, that I occasionally end up constructing paragraphs or pieces of dialogue a certain way mostly so it will make for a good excerpt to put in the eventual fic description, which might give me a sense of accomplishment because it’s nice when things work out and look good, but in all fairness it’s probably far more motivated by attempts to package the finished work attractively so other people will want to click on it than by anything else. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I don’t think so - I don’t feel like it lessens my work and it doesn’t interrupt my enjoyment of it in the moment, which are the key elements for me - but other people might disagree.

But the heart of thing is, just, there are SO MANY factors that influence a fic’s numbers, and not all of them are visible (I’d argue most of them aren’t, in fact), and it always helps me to keep that in mind. It puts things in perspective somewhat and softens the harshness of a black and white kudo count judgment. Numbers can depend on when you post a fic (what day of the week, time of the year, time relative to big fandom moments, whether you’re in the middle of a global pandemic or not), how you pick your title, what you put in the description, how you use the tags, what genres or tropes are popular in your specific fandom, the genre of your fic in general (pwp as a rule tends to get lots of hits and few kudos or comments, for example, making it totally unfair to compare it to G-reated fluff fic with super different ratios), how much you’ve posted before (because if someone likes one of your works, they’re often likely to check if you have more in the same fandom), how many fics other people post around the same time (because yours might be gone from the first page of most recently updated works in a fandom or ship tag very quickly if others push it out), how big your fandom is(!!!) (over two thirds of my works on ao3 are for h50, but h50 only makes it into the top 10 of my most kudo’d works by the skin of its teeth) and definitely also what your fandom’s culture is like (compared to a lot of other fandoms, h50 fans are a-ma-zing when it comes to leaving comments, my gosh, and as a writer I adore all of you), how old your ao3 account is (the longer you’ve been around, the more likely a higher number of people is subscribed to you as an author or has read your previous work or has encountered your name, etc), how long your fic is (under a thousand words in my experience generally does less well than 1-5k, but longer fics might end up with lots of chapters which switches things up because people come back to it when there’s an update, and even if a long work is all in one chapter it will probably stand out for the wordcount and might attract attention that way, etc), whether or not your fic is part of a series (in my experience it will probably get more hits because it’s a chain of fics that leads you to the next one, but the kudos might not go up at the same rate because people might forget a kudo or reread previous works when a new one is added), whether you make a habit of commenting on other people’s fic (I’ve had comments saying MY comment on their work led them to my fic!), if you have social media like Tumblr or Twitter where you can promote your work (it’s advertising, basically), and any of a bunch of random little other factors. Sometimes, I see a sudden little cluster of kudos on an old fic in the daily ao3 kudos email, and I assume someone somewhere maybe recced that fic, but it usually remains a total mystery who or where or even if it happened at all and wasn’t just a weird coincidence to begin with. Sometimes the thing a fic’s popularity depends on is really just whether it clicks with people at that point in time, whatever that means, which is an even more impossible thing to grasp or predict than anything else.

Or you can look at things from a totally different angle and not try to make yourself care less about numbers, but just accept that you do because you’re human and we all crave validation, and instead try to roll with that. A brain hack: when I do start getting down about numbers, it also helps me to focus on one work and just... try to visualise what those kudo (or hit or bookmark or comment) counts mean, if you were to translate them to the real world. While it can be super helpful to remember that there’s a LOT going on that you can’t see and that’s virtually impossible to really explain, it’s also nice to somewhat do the opposite and try to make things as concrete as possible instead. I like measuring in school classes (~25-30 heads, I’d say) and “my fic only has fifty kudos but this other person’s has ten times as many” could easily make anyone sad and demotivated, but “my fic has fifty kudos and that’s TWO WHOLE CLASSROOMS packed full of people that all read my work and liked it so much they wanted to give me a little thumbs up for it” is actually pretty cool and encouraging, I think. Or you could measure in sports teams (I don’t know sports, but soccer has 11 players on the field per team, so as soon as your fic has 33 kudos that’s three teams which means you’ve got yourself a little beginning league! how exciting!) or in DnD campaigns (variable of course, but most of mine have had around four players plus a DM, so if you have twenty kudos? that’s FOUR WHOLE DnD campaigns that enjoyed reading your fic, and it’s fully up to you how many half-orcs that includes). You could apply this method using literally any other measurement that works for you, too. If you have a hard time painting a mental image of numbers, you could even open up a Paint doc or get a piece of paper and start counting out little dots or copy-pasted images of a person, or get a big bag of physically present M&Ms and count them out, or take a good look at your dog and then go around the neighborhood and collect forty-nine more dogs and pile them all into your home and be slightly frightened by the utter delighted fluffy chaos that ensues in your living room. That’s how many people liked your fic! That’s a heck of a lot of wagging tails! Who knew a kudo could bark this loudly!

Disclaimer: maybe keep the dog thing as your very last resort, because your neighbors might not be super into their pet getting dognapped for the purpose of visualizing fanfiction stats. The point is really just to remember that there’s an actual person behind every kudo you get, no matter what the cumulative number is, and even if you have seven or five or three kudos, that’s seven or five or three very real people that hit that button. That’s pretty damn awesome. Also keep in mind how you feel if you read a fic, and take some time to realize that every single person that left you a kudo went through that same process of spending time reading words (the words you wrote!) and experiencing that story and THAT’S why they left that kudo. It’s a real person’s real investment.

This ended up very long and rambly, so tl;dr: You are in no way alone in feeling that way, it's okay and normal and so very very human to feel like that, but you still shouldn't let it get you down, because numbers fake being meaningful very well but are deep down just little squiggles on your screen and they’re more scared of you than you are of them, while at the same time there are real individuals that enjoy your work even if you usually never see them. Your fic is worth posting. That’s the one factor in all of this that’s a constant, not a variable.

(And as a very important sidenote, just be kind to yourself, always. Does it truly stress you out? Are you feeling really bad about it today? Does it make your anxiety spike? Then give yourself room to take a little step back and allow yourself some time away from it. Go watch something you enjoy, or read something nice, or do something else that makes you feel good. Fic is something that should add to your life, not subtract from it. You don’t owe anyone anything, not even yourself in this context, and I used to push myself occasionally to get something finished TODAY, and eventually I started realizing, well, why? Why not instead of reading it over again just get some sleep or watch an episode of something I want to watch, especially if I literally just finished the fic and I feel a little unsure about it and it might actually be beneficial to me and my own feelings about it if I just give it a day or even a week and let it rest and then look at it again and THEN post it, if I want to, whether that’s with some changes beforehand or not? Who set me that deadline that’s apparently looming over me? I did, and it’s fake, and it’s there for absolutely no good reason. Breathe. Put yourself first. Be really really really selfish about your own fic writing experience, even, because it’s supposed to be something you enjoy (that’s what a hobby is!), and the rest is secondary.)

[sunshinedevotee]

a very neccessary taehyung rant

[you guys i’m about to get really pissed, salty and aggressive right now]

so you guys know taehyung...often described as the member that’s

handsome

cute

stage-presence king

weirdo/alien

is this right?

NO BITCH!!

(i mean ofc he’s gorgeous a bitch is not blind but-)

listen here taehyung isn't just there to be cute and we need to acknowledge him as a performer in general not just as 'tae-oppa is my husband!!1' or ‘lol he’s so random xD’ cause he is more than that.

i feel like it would take some armys too long to think of anything good to say about taehyung that doesn't have to do with the way he acts/his appearance and that makes me sad. like actually think about it yourself and be honest with yourself.

now about his talentTM~

i’m sure even the fake stans that linger in this fandom have at least heard stigma, so you must know the guy’s got pipes (tae’s voice wasn’t my cup of tea at first cause i normally have a preference for higher-pitched vocals but that was until i heard stigma and the covers) 

anyway why do people barely talk about it? like he had to hit that high note in stigma for people to start acknowledging his vocal range. also let’s talk about how there are barely any bts songs suited for his baritone vocal. um why did that one commercial suit his voice better than any of their songs?

[although he really did shine in ‘her’ i’m so proud!!]

his voice is not only amazing but it’s so soothing i mean 4 o’clock, i listened to that song on repeat while studying for exams, also i’ve no idea what he sings about in ‘hug me’ but i lip-sync very passionately to his cover and ‘even if i die’.

some of you guys might argue that at least he gets more lines than jin, but honestly half the time it’s cause he’s the only one that can go as low as they need or like ten seconds of growling and growling is not a line. for example jin may not have gotten lines in not today, but what tae had wasn’t lines fight me 

[no trying to argue that jin doesn’t have it worse than tae when it comes to lines]

i want people to discuss and elaborate on his vocals more the way they do with jimin/jk (same for jin ofc) which is why i'm very thankful for this video existing. 

now he’s not only only an underrated singer but also an underrated dancer (i still dky he isn’t in dance line? like top ten mysteries scientists still can’t answer) anyway i never and i mean never see posts about his dancing,

 literally just searched ‘taehyung dance’ to find a gif as an example 

but nooo

all i find is gifs of taehyung hip thrusting/grinding on stage, taekook fans losing their shit over their part in dna or posts about other members’ dancing

i mean why would there be taehyung dancing? in the taehyung dance tag?? in this economy??? that’s just insane!!

hell i can’t even find youtube videos of him dancing, they’re all funny videos or him being ‘disrespectful!1!’ i’m really getting pissed off let’s move on

[like literally though the boy can dance i need u in heels wtf]

taehyung gets hate too

just cause he’s a popular member doesn’t mean he doesn’t have haters. not to bring this back but he struggles when it comes to hitting the high note in stigma, which is totally understandable. i mean he’s probably so exhausted from previous performances and then he has to hit that note? he’ll obviously strain, like i’m not one of those people that just defends everything bts does

but the hate

the overlooked hate

armys themselves defending the hate

honey i literally run a blog dedicated to armys sharing their unpopular/negative bts opinions, i know very well that not everything armys have to say about the boys is going to be good. but this isn’t just criticism. “it just hurts my ears” smh

sympathize with your “bias”, the fact that this is/wasn’t just a high note that can be hit like that for tae and yk what? he bit off more than he could chew. but we know he can hit the note. he didn’t make the song for the sole purpose of performing it live, he did it for the album and maybe for himself, and i’m sure as hell glad he did cause it is one of my favourite songs.

mind you those are just comments from one video, about one thing. there’s more i’m not going to get into right now.

[ofc there’s also hate from the armys who claim he interferes with ships (as if that’s a valid reason to hate him) but let’s not get into ships right now :)))]

so is he an underrated member? debatable.

i don’t think anyone wants to say it, but the reality of the matter is the reason why he has a lot of fans is probably cause people fall in love with his personality (if not his visuals). it’s not a good thing. he is underrated in certain aspects and not at all in others.

ok i’m concluding this cause it’s getting too long but as you guys can tell i uh...have a lot of thoughts...

i don’t want him to end up keeping up this “weird” thing, cause it’s his branding.

let’s remember that he is not just taehyung but also V. let’s defend him against haters not become them, if you are tae biased you are tae biased through the highs and lows and you will stick with him through the bullshit, not drop him when he screws up. let’s recognize him as an artist. and for god’s sake let’s put him before the damn ships/ship wars.

i will now end this with some gifs of taehyung being a pure cutie x

nothing but respect for my (other) golden maknae. (before you come at me)

(might make a part 2 i have so many things in mind)

[qrhymes]

Tales of Berseria Analysis - Magilou’s character arc - Contradictions.

And then just one was left…

MAGIKAZAM!!!!!!!!!!!!

Magilou is a difficult character to talk due to the ambiguity in her own character…and while the game and other characters have, also, a grade of ambiguity, most of them come in consequence of the themes they explore …Magilou’s ambiguity, in the other hand, is in her presentation (Because for a big chunk of the game the only thing that we know about her is that she is a “Great Witch”, that she is NOT and exorcist and that she is NOT the traitor, that would be to obvious…

Oh, hi Alvin) 

...and in her persona and in order to read her we need to ask us,; How much truth are in Magilou’s says and actions?

She is an apathetic witch that just stayed to end because she was boring or maybe she had her own agenda?  How much important was Bienfu to her?  She joins Velvet only for the opportunity to find Bienfu or she wanted to use Velvet to generate chaos and destruction for her own selfish reasons? She had a change of heart in some point or she just followed the group to the final battle, just to see how everything ends? She just found the Menagerie interesting or she grew to care for them?

…What is the truth behind Magilou?

It difficult to assure, but, I want to believe that the moments in which she is completely and genuinely honest, without a trace of doubt, are her faces to faces with Melchior, both, in Hexen Isle and in Meirchio (And her scene with the Menagerie before facing Melchior, but that one is far more straight forward that the other two)…and from them, is where we started to build up her true character.

Those are our first direct taste of what Magilou is, no more reads between lines, no more interpretations, no, here she just throws it her own truth…and it’s quite revealing.

Being in an unconscious level or not, Magilou may still have some sort of affection for Melchior (And taking into account how much of a bastard Melchior has been, not only with her, it say something about how much she desires the embrace of a loving family, even if that family have to be Melchior…or Bienfu…and yes there is an optional conversation later with Grimoirh that confirm this but I liked that we also have it in the main story)…but the real gut punches doesn’t come until later.

Magilou is a deeply cynical person, we know that, and she always expects the very worst of people, thing that is pretty in line with the beliefs of the Abbey and Melchior’s teachings. She is very pointy about other people’s flaws, their mistakes, their hypocrisy (Again, the best example here it’s probably her comments to Velvet for treating Phi as a tool or as a replacement for Laphi) and she seems to have developed sort some of enjoyment from that…and she hates it.

Magilou hates herself (Or, at the very least, has a very low opinion of her), Melchior and all of that logic and reason represent.

Her speech in Meirchio let us know about all of her deep anger and resentment against Melchior’s beliefs and her lines about the Menagerie and herself (and Melchior) being different of each other’s let us know how she sees herself and the others…and then you put it together and it’s when really hits home.

She sees herself as someone weak, unfeeling, someone that cannot endure the inherent pain of emotions and has choose to refuge in the comfort of the teaching that she despise but also protect her from that pain…

...a contradiction that she hates and may be the trigger that made her develop her funny persona, as a copping mechanism, and maybe, as way to inject a little of chaos and irrationality in a world she hates.

“…Despite the pain, the anguish, they embrace the life they've been given…”

Magilou admires the party and the strength they have and she doesn’t, it’s unlikely that she had decide to follow Velvet right from the begging for this reason, instead she probably developed this deep admiration and respect in some point between TItania  and Aball (I would want to say that she developed her feelings in random moments during the journey and she just don’t fully acknowledge them until Aball when she saw Velvet overcome the same thing that destroy her …it’s pretty vague and I may be overanalyzing the all thing, but the throwaway line in Hexen Isle “if Velvet could do it…there’s no way I can’t”…again, it’s pretty vague, but it just make some much sense to me)…and if you take the “Stab on the chest” line in the context that we were discussing , she may indeed get hurt by the “less that kind” treatment that she receives from the Menagerie from time to time…but that pain is just another part of her emotions, a side that she may be ready to enter  one more time…

“If that’s what you call ‘evil’, then I will live and die with evil as my mantra!”

…but only after she has an emotional close to all her traumas, in the final fight against Melchior.

Even as absolute follower of the ideas of reason and logic, Melchior is finally defeat by his own love by flowers, his own emotions…it was a stupid move for him in that situation, foolish, a completely irrational act that leads him to be devoured by Velvet…I would say myself but I think Magilou said it better.

Hey…master…Emotions are a real pain, aren’t they?

A real pain in deed, but a necessary one…and, most important of all, one that you can’t really throw away, not even the greatest supporters of reason could cut they are attach to the chains of emotion, not totally at least.

Magilou doesn’t change to much after this but, in the same way than Velvet, we can argue that she, at least, has made peace with the contradictions in herself and her own past, and that she has finally started to embrace this side of herself that she left aside long time ago, her own emotions…and this is show specially in the Majelu side quest, trying to avoid that Majelu and Valta walks to the same path that she and Melchior (a kind gesture born just form  pure empathy…and it is very sweet)… and some of the skits post the battle.

Sorry guys but this skit…it just destroys me…it is so beautiful.

Magilou is an incredible character by herself, but she is also one of the final pieces to complete this great map of Emotion Vs Reason that Berseria wants to shows us.

There is a lot of collateral damage product of this ideological clash, but as with all the other character and their respective arcs, Magilou’s perspective is unique. Meanwhile Velvet is much more proactive about her own situation or Phi which took the better aspect of both sides, Magilou is the one that gets ripped apart by this war and finally ostracize from both sides…living as just that, a contradiction…

All the members of the Menagerie are flawed people, they have a lot of troubles and issues in their backs, but most of them were emotionally functional (and when a mean most, I’m talking about of Mid Game Velvet, which goes to really dark places, to darker to called healthy) and then it is  Magilou…just staying there, apathetic to everything and isolated from everyone…growing to give us that genuine laugh at the end of the game…

and then i just realize how much I have grown fond of her character…

It’s funny; actually, how much this all situation reminds me of other of my favorite character, Jade from Tales of the Abyss.

The snarkiest of the main party, with a military past, funny and sarcastic personas that hide a more apathetic and unfeeling side to themselves, an arc mostly centered in the inner change of their views of the world and themselves and a heartwarming friendship with a main character who has an amazing character arc (And don’t get me wrong, both character are completely different, their purpose, their meaning, etc, etc. I was just pointing some similitudes of two characters that I love from a franchise that I also love).

…I consider Jade one of my favorite characters, and I say that in a general sense, he is one of my favorite characters. PERIOD. And when I thing “Holy shit, I may love Magilou even more than Jade” that means that Magilou may just become one of my favorite characters. PERIOD...

Well maybe it’s a little too early to decide that…but what I can assure right now is that Magilou is an incredible character and my absolute favorite in a cast that is already great.

Magilou is amazing, the Menagerie is amazing and this game has been just an incredible experience.

Part 1: Tales Series Retrospective

Part 2: The Elements of a Wonderfull Game

Part 3: Velvet’s character arc - Blindness and toxicity

Part 4: Rokuro’s and Eleanor’s character arc - Obsession and Conflict.

Part 5: Laphicet (Phi)’s and Eizen’s character arcs - Coexistence and Romanticism.

[palestinianliberator]

koshersexfantasy

so making Aliyah during Birthright isn’t smart bc I already paid the housing deposit and (by that time) the tuition for next year. I might as well stay here until next summer BUT then my parents will have “wasted” money for tuition for me SO I might as well wait until after I graduate, which is the smartest option? I think bc then I’ll have a degree in government and international relations, which I’m hoping will help me land a job there even tho it’s another country. Also if I make Aliyah now I have 24 months of IDF service (which I am totally fine with) and it gets smaller as I age, which I’m also fine with but I was thinking that if I join the IDF I’ll have more of a chance of landing a job, I believe… I’m trying to work all this out without telling my family members and most of my friends bc if I tell my family, they’ll get pissed bc they’ll see it as me wasting my career and most of my friends hate Israel (well one does and the rest are tired of hearing her bitch at me about it) and also I’m pretty sure my bf wouldn’t support my decision So while I’m in Israel I’m going to talk about it with my Israeli family and see what they think (my uncle married a woman who made Aliyah around my age) so then I’ll be able to get more info and I’ll probably talk to some recruiters while I’m there I also don’t want to deal with the social media backlash of moving to another country bc ppl are going to ask why and there’s so many reasons but one of the main ones is “the antisemitism and blatant Christian normativity/ superiority complex here gets on my nerves” and I feel like that’s not an acceptable answer you know, and then also people already hold me accountable for literally everything israel does once they find out I’m Israeli and I don’t want that to be multiplied by ten I’m still seriously considering making Aliyah though

palestinianliberator

Funny that “…blatant Christian normativity/superiority complex here gets on my nerves” while the Israeli superiority complex and erasure of Palestinian culture and identity doesn’t~

I’d comment on the irony but oh well

koshersexfantasy

Funny that 1-you thought my post was an open invitation to comment on, when it wasn’t 2- Your comment is coming off as “The Jewish normative culture in the state famously labeled as the Jewish State is annoying and Palestinian culture is being erased even though I know you didn’t say anything about the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.” So I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but the demographics of the State of Israel is very diverse. One fifth of Israelis are not raised in Jewish homes, and that does not account for those who identify as non-religious. Israel pays money to help institute Sharia courts, sends aid to imams and other Islamic institutions, and there’s the case in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, there is the Muslim Quarter (which is the bigger piece of Jerusalem and much bigger than the Jewish Quarter), the Jewish Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Armenian Quarter. As someone who has been there during Ramadan, I can certify that all Muslim holidays are respected and observances are allowed for- sometimes even state-wide (look at the markets on Fridays, for example). Also, I’m not sure if the Palestinians you are referring to are in the West Bank or in Gaza. Israel left Gaza in 2005 and instead of instituting any sort of functional government, Hamas took over and uses Gaza as a rocket launch center, committing many human rights abuses. Israel sends aid and supplies to Gaza while providing health care for those injured in the crossfire for free. If you’re referring to the West Bank, I’d focus on the schools that the PA provides, which recently denied UNWRA funding because, in order to get the funding, the schools would have to stop teaching suicide terrorism and terrorism in general as something to be glorified. So if a culture that glorifies suicide terrorism, car ramming, and stabbing random people is being quashed, I don’t see why you’re fighting for it, as that would effectively state that you support state-sanctioned terror and terrorism in general. You could also look at the recent arrest of a cancer patient coming out of Gaza who had tried to smuggle in explosives. If the culture you want to preserve preaches sick people, women, or children smuggling explosives, I think that says a lot more about you than it does me.

(I’m making the post like this because the moron blocked me after spouting complete lies....typical)

Your post is full of bullshit and was tagged with Palestine, so yeah I couldn’t care less about you not extending me a personal invitation to comment on it. It’s typical for Israelis to leave Palestinians out of the conversation anyways.

And you can interpret it as you wish, but the fact remains that Israel is only in the place that it is through the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of Palestinians during its founding, as well as the ongoing apartheid & settler colonialism that sees our homes destroyed and our land stolen.

The irony here is hilarious to me because you speak of how you’ve been to Jerusalem during Ramadan...whereas despite the fact that both my parents were born in Jerusalem, none of our family is allowed to set foot there without sneaking in [which isn’t too difficult given how inept Israeli soldiers tend to be].

Your claim about the PA and terrorism taught in schools is nothing but a backwards, racist lie. For starters, the part about funding being denied is just entirely untrue and I don’t even know where you pulled that from. Second, as someone who went to school in the West Bank [where we learned about the holocaust and were taught in religion class about all major religions and that to kill anyone in the name of religion is the ultimate sin and spent our time writing letters to pen-pals around the world], /no/ textbooks me or my family ever used had any ounce of what you claim they have in them. Furthermore, a freaking US State Department study concluded that Palestinian textbooks feature no “incitement against Jews” or “promotion of terror”, but again, I wouldn’t expect someone so in love and brainwashed by Israel to accept facts, or even the word of someone who has lived through what you’re trying to speak about.

I won’t even comment on your blatantly racist remarks about Palestinian culture, as they are both untrue and seeped in such great amounts of your typical racist Israeli dogma that I’d have better luck arguing with a literal pile of shit.

[gamer2002]

On recent Milo controversy

Recently, a video with cuts from one year stream went viral, and with it followed accusations of Milo supporting pedophilia. I’m going to post the stream, transcript of its fragment in question and 2 links to Milo’s defense.

Here’s the stream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azC1nm85btY

Here is a transcript:

PaulsEgo: The whole consent thing, for me, is, it’s not this black and white thing that people try and paint it. Are there some 13-year-olds out there capable of giving informed consent to have sex with an adult? Probably. But I was also a 13-year-old. I hung around with 13-year-old guys, you know, when I was 13, and there were some of them that still thought girls were f*cking icky at 13. Like not many, but like, they were just coming out of that phase. I don’t know that I was ready at 13 to get f*cked in the *ss by a 28-year-old black drag queen is what I’m saying. So, you can’t, the reason these age of consent laws exist is because we have to set some kind of a barometer here.

Yiannopoulos: I completely understand…

PaulsEgo: We’ve got to pick an age and go, okay, look, this is the age where we can reasonably be assured you’re an adult, you can give informed consent, you understand the risks of pregnancy, all that bullsh*t.

Yiannopoulos: Of course, of course, and I think the law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age, I think it’s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them. People who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world, by the way. And in many cases, actually, those relationships with older men — this is one of the reasons I hate the left, this sort of stupid, one-size-fits-all policing of culture, this sort of, this arbitrary —

Ben: You know, Milo —

T.J.: Let him talk.

Ben: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was just —

Yiannopoulos: This arbitrary — I’m just gonna — I’ll be quick. This arbitary and oppressive idea of consent which totally destroys, you know, the understanding that many of us have of the complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex, and actually, in the homosexual world particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, those kind of coming-of-age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable — a sort of a rock for when they can’t talk to their parents. Some of those relationships are some of the most —

Unknown: It sounds like priest molestation to me.

Ben: It sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me.

Yiannopoulos: And you know what? I am grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him.

Ben: Oh, my God. Oh, my God, I can’t handle it.

Unknown: What is wrong with you, Ben? Come on?

PaulsEgo: It’s funny because Ben gave me some homework on you, Milo, he gave a few videos to watch to brush up on my Miloisms, and one of the things you said in one of these clips was that transgenderism is the new, you know, frontier of, you know, rights, my wording is bad here, but, um, you know, it’s the new frontier of social progress and the next thing in line is gonna be pedophilia – and yet, here you are talking about how, look, you know, some of these kids that get diddled by these priests, I mean, it’s a good thing for them! They’re getting this love! Now they are also getting a d*ck —

Yiannopoulos: You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to someone 13 years old who is sexually mature.

PaulsEgo: OK, febephilia [hebephilia] or whatever.

Yiannopoulos: Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet, who have not gone through puberty, who are too young to be able to understand the way their bodies —

Unknown: Ann Coulter.

Yiannopoulos: That is not what we’re talking about.

T.J.: Ann Coulter.

PaulsEgo: Sure, granted.

Yiannopoulos: You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you think that I’m defending it, ’cause I’m certainly not.

PaulsEgo: No, no, no. I’m not saying you’re defending it, I’m saying you’re walking the borderline.

Yiannopoulos: No it’s not. You said I was defending it, and you’re wrong.

PaulsEgo: OK, OK, fine. I retract my statement, Milo. I retract my statement. I shan’t slander you further. But you are advocating for cross-generational relationships here, can we be honest about that?

Yiannopoulos: Yeah, I don’t mind saying, I don’t mind admitting that, and I think particularly in the gay world – and outside, the Catholic Church, if that’s where some of you want to go with this – I think in the gay world, some of the most important, enriching and incredibly, you know, life-affirming, important, shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men, they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys, they can even save those young boys from desolation, from suicide, from drug addiction, all those things, provided they’re consensual. Provided they’re consensual.

Here are Milo’s FB post that are his take on it:

https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/posts/851263248344905

https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/videos/851905428280687/

That’s the reporting part. I’ve gave you the video in questions and Milo’s own defense, so you could make up your own mind. Here is my Q&A take, based on various reaction I saw. I’m hiding it under a link, since that’s my solely personal opinion.

Did Milo advocate pedophilia?

Unfavorable interpretation of his words can be that he believes young boys of 13 having sex with older men can be ok in some cases. However, he does state agreement with consent age laws. Besides that, he made a crude joke about being molested as a teen (a news for me).

How about his defense?

He says he has a right to joke about being himself molested. And I believe he does, as he specifically mocks only his own (supposed) situation. He also says that by “young boys” he meant young people past age of consent. Given that, his support of cross-generational relationship applies to situations like when partners are, for example, 17 (UK age of consent is 16) and 29. He claims that is his example of his own relationship with an older man (so in line of UK age of consent), which he meant. Unfortunately, the only age mentioned, though not explicitly stated by Milo as the one he would approve within a relationship, is 13.

If we follow the court rule of reasonable doubt, there is a lack of strong enough evidence to disprove Milo’s defense of himself. He could wrongly say things at a late night.

Is this same like with Sarah Nyberg?

No. Sarah called herself a pedophile, stated she wanted relationship with her ~10 years old cousin and claimed this was her joking. Milo said a thing that can be interpreted as a support of relationships with pre-age of consent teens, and stated he meant post-age of consent young people (though he still claimed on the steam that there exist exceptions to the age of content, but it’s unclear which country’s country age of content he meant).

Besides, I myself explicitly refused to call Sarah a pedophile until it is proven in courts. I hold same standard for Milo.

Is this same like with Alison Rapp?

No. Alison Rapp made an archived statement that indicates her being against imprisoning people for child porn and denying idea that consensual sexuality before 18 can be dangerous. Milo supported age of consent laws, saying that most of times they get it right, and argued that some pre age of consent teens can be an exception (without explicitly stating how young he meant). Highly debatable, but far cry from calls for decriminalizing child porn. As for Rapp’s comment on sexuality before 18, more US states have constant at age 16 than 18. But there is a context of her supporting people with child pornography. 

Is this same like pro-pedo Salon pieces?

Possibly alike, but definitely no on technicality. Putting aside what was dug about their author, Salon’s first piece was about a plight of having pedo urges and not giving in. Putting aside if it wasn’t intended to cause outrage on the right with its title, as an asking for sympathy opinion it has some similarity with Milo’s statement on young gays needing guidance of older gays. However, Milo rejects it being about pedophilia, he claims his example is 17-29 relationship. And he didn’t make an opinion piece for publication, he was having a random dispute in middle of a night stream.

So what is it, then?

In my opinion? A fragment from a single one year stream, where Milo said some dumb shit in a way that could be used against him. There’s no evidence suggesting him being a pedophile. The evidence doesn’t prove him advocating revoking consent age laws. He claims existence of exceptions to the consent age, which is a claim that an caught on the act pedo would make, but as long he acknowledges the consent age laws, he is just digressing in a middle of an almost 3 hours stream. It’s unclear which age he meant. The support of cross-generations relationship doesn’t have to mean him advocating relationship of adults with 13 years olds (but that they talk only about 13 years olds make it very understandable conclusion), and he denies it does, claiming he thought about his 17-29 relationship with an older man (again, UK consent age is 16, most of states 17-16). He made a crude joke (holy shit, Milo makes a crude joke) about being molested, but that was on his own expense.

Does Milo has as a right to complaint over such attack? Isn’t it how he does them himself?

When Milo written about Sarah, he and Breitbard made six requests for comment. Apparently, the video hit him suddenly without warning. As far I know, Milo does hold a standard of requesting for comment people he writes about. He has a right to complaint about not being allowed to defend himself or prepare himself for the video, since, even as a sensationalist, he grants such things himself.

So what, then?

I’ve written what happened and stated my honest thoughts. Milo fans can defend him, I always stated that everyone has a right to be defended and defend others (I did it also during the Sarah’s scandal). Because of the video, Milo is deplatformed from CPAC and, given the timing, I don’t doubt that his opponents on the right are responsible for this. CPAC has a right to deplatform him because of his comments and other things he says. However, the way Milo was attacked (no ability to defend himself first, edited out portion from the vid about him supporting age of  consent laws) was pretty scummy and intended solely to cause outrage that is blown out of proportion (again, sole fragment of a single near 3 hours stream from year ago - were you fucking sleeping all that time?).

The truth is that Milo always was the “I want to win” type, and he got attacked by bigger “I want to win” types. But putting aside if it was or wasn’t worse than his own tactics, I’m disappointed in those who were against his mentality (which I didn’t approve myself and thus I didn’t share it) and yet celebrate what happened, with disregard if there wasn’t anything wrong here. This is proving him right, that winning over the opponent is all that matters.

And of course, those who sticked with Sarah, Rapp or Salon, but now attack Milo, are hypocrites who defended worse than you can even argue he did. Same with anybody from Guardian, that published an opinion piece arguing to let women statutory rape boys.

And if Milo wants (and he states he wants) to defend himself on shows of journalists that attacked him, I say he should be allowed to do so.

It is a fuck up for him, from before he expected to become this big. But he can say this isn’t what his opponents want it to be. And it can be a worse hit than he would make.

[miss-m-calling]

Chocolate Box 2019 letter

Requests (all fic):

Adult Wednesday Addams (web series) -- any (Wednesday/Brian, Wednesday & Warren Agency Interns, Wednesday & OFC, Wednesday & OMC, Wednesday/OMC)

American Gods (TV) -- Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney

Black Sails (TV) -- Miranda Barlow/John Silver

Dear writer,

Hello and thank you for writing for me. I’m very excited to read whatever you come up with. Without further ado…

Requests:

Adult Wednesday Addams

any (Wednesday/Brian, Wednesday & Warren Agency Interns, Wednesday & OFC, Wednesday & OMC, Wednesday/OMC)

I belatedly discovered this webseries, and it resurrected (see what I did there?) my love for Wednesday and how the Addams Family canon runs on the endless possibilities of this loving, happily eccentric family being 100% true to themselves and the world just having to deal with it. The show was everything I never knew I wanted till I watched it, the perfect blend of Addams-macabre and cozy slice of life with bonus Wednesday navigating the world (and not just any ol’ place, but shiny, plastic, image-conscious LA!) alone, without always knowing her family will back her up, and it made me crave more of adult Wednesday’s mini adventures in LA. For this canon, I’m good with gen or, if you want to write that, more of Wednesday’s adventures in dating guys who really aren’t up to the challenge. I’m keeping the prompts pretty short, just to (hopefully) pique your creativity:

-Wednesday goes to IKEA

-More of Wednesday’s interactions with the nice interns at her receptionist job. Maybe they invite her out to happy hour, or to the beach or a club. Or maybe we get to eavesdrop while they shoot the breeze on their lunch break, possibly over barbecue-chicken pizza from CPK.

-More of Wednesday’s gigs. She already babysits and walks other people’s dogs, what else might she do for extra cash that would be both really common and seemingly ill-suited to Wednesday, except she totally makes it work for her? Cat sitting (especially if the cat belongs to someone incredibly rich whose house is full of secrets – and expensive things for the cat to knock over), driving an Uber/Lyft, becoming an AirBnB host, catering/server, working the late shift in a New Age/occult supply store where none of the woo is real…?

-Or, alternately, Wednesday finds a career that is perfect for her, in which she can have success and respect. What ever could that be and still fit into the non-Addams world?

-Wednesday tries speed dating

-Or, she runs into Brian a.k.a. chains guy (I cackle with glee every time I rewatch the bit when he tries to kiss her at the pet store) a third time – how does it not go quite as he wanted or expected this time?

-Wednesday takes an evening class, or goes back to school part time, or enrolls in an online degree program

-Wednesday takes a road trip, alone or with her apartment mates/colleagues/Brian/strangers she met for carpooling purposes. Bonus points if you work in real roadside attractions, or tourist traps, or famous sites/landscapes.

-It’s Dia de Muertos, and Wednesday goes out to celebrate and soak up the atmosphere. It may or may not live up to her expectations.

 American Gods (TV)

Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney

I ship it. Yes I do. They had me at “gimme-my-coin-dead-wife”-flicks-him-into-wall. The snarky road trip was the best thing I never knew I wanted until it happened, and I adored every second of it. They’re both such assholes and so fascinating, even if they mellow toward each other a bit in the last two episodes, and all the gods/magic/resurrection stuff swirling around them begs to be explored further. Plus she’s half his size yet can and does beat him up with literally one finger, and then there’s the angst of he having killed her, feeling really guilty about it, and then bringing her back.

Please give me either missing scenes from the road trip (if you can work in a divergence, that’s great - for example, I like Salim, but if you want to have him boot Sweeney and Laura to the curb and go off on his own, or Sweeney to boost his taxi before Salim catches them, or whatever else to have those two alone, go for it!), or something about these two post-S1:

-Laura discovers (how? you decide!) that Sweeney gave her back the coin after their accident – whatever happens next, some punching may be involved.

-Wednesday’s big war finally comes, and “don’t you dare die on me, you asshole” is a line either Sweeney or Laura (or both) might say to each other.

-Laura asked “What does Wednesday have to lose?” and the answer is…? (Yes, give me that sweet poetic justice.)

-On a similar note, Wednesday told that luckless cop that Sweeney had been against the big gods’ war from the start, and while Wednesday lies, Sweeney definitely seems to be participating out of a sense of obligation and lingering guilt over the war he ran from long ago, rather than lust for a good fight or even a dominant death wish. What if he decided to hell with Grimnir and his war and his having Sweeney kill random people? I’m guessing Sweeney too drank three glasses of mead so he can’t back out without dire consequence - but he does have a fierce, dead woman in his corner.

-They go to some as-yet-unnamed old god (feel free to bring in whatever mythology you want) in order to bring Laura back to life. Between Sweeney’s mouth and temper, and Laura’s mouth and temper, it doesn’t go well. Now one or both of them are in big magical trouble with a pissed-off deity and have to get themselves/each other out of it.

-Things happen and Laura finds herself in the position to throw Sweeney under the bus but also help/save him, and while he knows it’s only karma, he can still be pissed about it - how do they navigate this?

-Somehow or other, Laura’s croupier skills come in handy when dealing with gods and trying to get alive again.

-Laura gets fully alive again, but traces of her (un)dead state remain – what are they, how does she cope, what price did she/he/they have to pay for her resurrection, and how does their relationship change? I’d especially be curious how it would work if they’re already a sorta-maybe-item and *then* she’s alive again and it’s weird in a new way.

-All the old gods hide their true appearance to an extent. A situation arises in which Laura sees Sweeney’s true, or at least old, self (I’m thinking of his surprise!poignant monologue about when he used to be a king, and the glimpse of him in full Celtic warrior mode in the S2 teaser). How does she, the ultimate skeptic even when she’s on the other side of the mirror, react? Does it change her opinion of/attitude to Sweeney or the hidden realities of the world?

-The power of names: Sweeney basically stops calling her “dead wife” (or anything else) toward the end of S1 – there comes a time when he (has to) call her by her actual name, and that’s a tricky moment for them to navigate. Or, Mad Sweeney is almost certainly not his actual name, since true names have great magical power and so must be kept secret; Laura discovers or learns his name, from someone else or from himself; what does she do with that knowledge? Or, Sweeney gets to say “cunt” in a situation (sexual or otherwise) where, not only does Laura not peel his lips from his gums, but she finds that she can’t object, even though she knows that he knows that he’s getting away with it.

-My perfect AG spinoff would basically be Sweeney and Laura tooling around America, looking to get her resurrected (whether they succeed or not is up to you), stealing ever more ridiculous vehicles, arguing/fighting and having those pesky moments where vulnerability and genuineness creep in – and fucking. So yessiree I’d be down for porn, including “it’s technically necrophilia/zombiesex” porn.

-If you wanted to throw in some worldbuilding, maybe something exploring living death. Magical bargains. What kind of favor did Sweeney do for Ostara that would be worth her bringing someone back to life as repayment? What other powers might Sweeney have (he doesn’t seem on a par with someone like Wednesday and Ostara, nor is he really a god, more a mythological being/kinda-deified former-mortal)? How long can a dead wife keep going before she’s “soup”? What other superhuman abilities might dead!Laura have? Can the dead do magic?

If it helps your inspiration, you can find some of my meta and lots of tag-burbling about these two here. I have read the book though I remember it only in bits and pieces, and while I prefer the show characters and the fact that they get thrown together, you can use or riff on book material if you want. Also you can, but absolutely don’t have to, use the glimpses of these two in the S2 teaser. With reference to one of my DNWs, for this canon, describing Laura’s physical decay is totally fine. Also, Shadow/Laura don’t interest me except as a part of Laura’s backstory (so if your story wants to include Laura figuring out or having already figured out that pinning all her hopes on Shadow to make everything right is unrealistic, unfair, and not how it works – by all means, go for it!), and Shadow/Sweeney interest me not at all. Also also, I’m not really into Laura being Essie’s reincarnation/descendant, or a lot of emphasis being placed on how Sweeney’s history with Essie may influence his relationship with Laura – I saw Emily Browning playing both parts as more of a fun stylistic choice, maybe a hint that when one lives almost-forever like Sweeney, the people who make an impact and whom one remembers tend to blend together, rather than some big foreshadowing or what have you, so I’d prefer it if you didn’t write about Essie or Essie-Laura.

 Black Sails

Miranda Barlow/John Silver

Ah yes, my they-never-really-interact-in canon-at-all ship. I see this as an early seasons ship, not just because Miranda was, you know, alive, but because the early Silver was the ever-scheming trickster with a smile and a smart-allecky comment always up his sleeve, ever ready to lie, cheat, steal, and murder to his best advantage, yet already with glimpses of a capacity to care about people other than himself. What I’m saying is, he was fun to have around in a way the later Silver somewhat lost as the price of his character development.

We know Miranda has an eye for a handsome man. I suspect S1-2 Silver totally would bed the captain’s woman if he thought he could get away with it or it could be a way to manipulate Flint, only Miranda is smart and pragmatic, has a core of pure steel, and can see right through Silver, which I’m convinced she would. Unlike Flint, Miranda has done her grieving and she’s so ready to move on and feel alive again. Not saying that Silver would become another great love of hers, but they could have fun. He’d make her laugh. After years of Flint’s moods, Silver would be so easy to get along with. The sex could be great and not angsty or merely dutiful. He’d inevitably find an angle to play, but then Miranda’s no stranger to maneuvering around and with people, so maybe she’d find that his manipulative ways are half the fun. They might even fall in love for real, though that’s not a requirement, and I definitely don’t think love would be the same as absolute trust in this case. (Also I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make the relationship revolve around their shared fixation on Flint, or focus on Miranda’s angst about Thomas or the legacy of Thomas/Flint. These can be mentioned, but I’d prefer that doesn’t hijack the story.)

Prompts:

-Flint sends Silver to Miranda with a message or on an errand, and thinks nothing more of it (or possibly he wants Miranda’s assessment of how much he can trust the “new cook”). But then Silver and Miranda are intrigued by each other and start finding excuses to see each other again. Bonus points if they orchestrate encounters in a way which allows them both to pretend they don’t actually want to see each other again, it just happened, sometimes things just happen but now that they’re both here they might as well take advantage of this opportunity, etc.

-S2 divergence: James dies at Charles Town, and Miranda lives. Silver may or may not lose a leg. Silver and Miranda have to assume at least temporary leadership of the crew in order to get everyone safely back to Nassau. Do they become pirate co-captains or lady captain and her quartermaster? Do they dissolve the crew and try for a different life? Do they make a play for the Urca gold, after Silver confesses his double-dealing to an angry, grieving Miranda (Jack maybe doesn’t capture the gold, it’s still up for grabs, or if Jack does how does that play out)? I mention lower down I’d prefer no angsty sex for these two, but in this scenario I could see any sex that may happen being, at least at first, angry and angsty, but also conducive to emotional healing.

-Actual witch!Miranda. I mean storybook witch, with a cauldron in which she brews that invulnerability potion for Flint and possibly some broom-flying, rather than a Wiccan or another kind of real witch. Maybe she needs a human participant or human-sourced ingredients for some of her most powerful spells, and since Flint isn’t really comfortable with magic Miranda decides that the new ship’s cook will do, only magic has a way of binding people together more closely than they intended. Or maybe she attempts to bind a familiar, hoping for a cat or a bird, and the magic picks Silver, much to her (and his) initial consternation? Maybe Miranda doesn’t really know what she’s doing, she used to dabble in London but hasn’t tried making a spell in years and has none of her books of magic with her, or she’s heard the crew’s rumors about her and decided to give this whole magic thing a go, and oops it actually works! Either way, there would definitely be snark and “if I give you X for a spell, what’s in it for me?”

-Flint respected and cared about Miranda, but also kept her waiting on the sidelines while he did stuff. Gimme Miranda and Silver at a point where they trust each other, maybe not completely, but enough that they can scheme together, where she is impressed by his quick wits but she’ll also tell him when one of his plans is likely to go wrong in XYZ different ways. Then, obviously, they execute a plan/heist by drawing on their combined skill sets.

-Fucking someone is easy. Sleeping the night through next to that person is hard.

-Speaking of which: sex. With or without plot. In the bed, in the kitchen, in Nassau, on The Walrus when the rest of the crew is on shore-leave, or a stolen moment during the journey to Charles Town. First times, later times. Any position is good, I’ll just mention a couple possibilities: Cunnilingus with a side of mind games. Pegging. Fingering (of either by either). Intense (emotionally and physically) PIV. I could see them both initiating sex and wanting to “direct traffic” at one time or another, both wanting to keep up a front but then being ambushed by actual emotion and vulnerability. Let it be happy and giggly, or passionate, or playful, or unexpectedly tender, or seemingly casual and then very emotional and heartfelt – just please don’t let it be angsty.

-Miranda discovers she likes to get her fingers in Silver’s hair during sex, both gently and not. He likes it too, which is not to say he’ll necessarily admit he likes it.

-Sexual role-play: the demure lady abducted by a wicked pirate, only it turns out the lady’s resistance is symbolic at best. Who gets to play the lady and who the pirate is entirely open. If Miranda’s the lady, I suspect early seasons!Silver’s attempts at being menacing and dominating may make her break character for a giggle – and if Miranda’s the pirate menacing the demure and naïve, er, young gentleman, I’ll just say that I think she should wear Silver’s clothes (after washing them or making him bring a spare set).

Two general points: whatever you end up writing, please don’t kill off Miranda or imply she dies “off-screen.” Let her live to fuck Silver another day. Also, I love Flint/Miranda in all their angsty glory, and I love all the intense, complicated emotion of Flint & Silver and the potential of Flint/Silver. I know I said not to make the fic revolve around Flint’s influence on their lives, but I’m fine with Flint in a walk-on role, if you want to write that. I don’t see him making too big a fuss, Miranda definitely treats her brief affair with the pastor as her business and her business alone – I can see Flint being exasperated that Silver hanging around Miranda is now a thing, or suspicious of Silver’s intentions but also trusting Miranda to handle it.

 Likes:

I love pre-canon, canon, post-canon, canon-divergent, and missing-scene stories. I love character-driven and plot-driven stories equally, and I love fics which mix humor and angst/serious business when appropriate for the canon.

I love stories about characters at work and play, group dynamics, family dynamics (including constructed families), professional partnerships, friendships, alliances, rivalries, intimate couples (new lovers/first times as well as long-term/established couples), UST-ridden couples who are not just UST-ridden but connected in other ways too, etc.

I love irony, snark, humor as well as angst arising from the characters rather than the plot crowbaring it in, linear, non-linear, and 5+1 stories, hopeful endings, happy endings, bittersweet endings, worldbuilding, spiky characters who keep their jagged edges and spikiness in adversity as well as when their lives are going well, square-peg-in-round-hole characters, characters who are their own worst enemies as well as those who can get over themselves when the occasion calls for it, characters with conflicting values which may or may not be reconciled/resolved, characters who treat each other with respect and as equals even if they hate/annoy/can’t stand/love to dislike each other.

I especially love workplace stories (this can mean anything from an actual workplace/casefic/procedural setting to anything that revolves around the canon world in which the characters live) in which the characters are competent and dedicated to the job, and while they may not be exactly friends and they may well irritate one another, they still manage to rub along to get the job done and maybe even grow to care about one another (much to their surprise and sometimes reluctance/discomfort). Or, if they can’t get along, show me why not and what’s preventing them from finding common ground.

In terms of ship dynamics, I love (where it fits the characters) banter, competitiveness or antagonism shading into attraction (this tension need not be resolved), oh-god-why-did-it-have-to-be-you-what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this, bickering yet loving couples, faithfulness, characters who are serious about their romantic interests, characters who think they are much better at flirtation than they actually are, characters forced to work together only to prove much more compatible than they initially assumed, fics which mix an exploration of characters’ professional and everyday lives with shipping. A dynamic I cannot resist is shipping a couple who are incompatible in some important way (they are ideological enemies, cop and criminal, spies from opposite sides, one betrayed the other or they betrayed each other), and while they love and want each other they’re also not willing to change sides or surrender/compromise their identity for the other’s benefit, and how they might (or not) make their relationship work anyway.

I don’t have any very specific likes for smut, other than smut fitting the characters – show me how their canon dynamics spill over into the bedroom (or other place of congress). I also like sexual scenarios that subvert expectations a little and surprise the characters themselves (e.g., the person who’s usually quiet or more passive taking charge, the more aggressive person goes with it possibly snarking or commenting on it as long as they can). And I like sexual scenarios that contain an element of competition, antagonism, oh-god-this-is-a-bad-idea-but-we’re-going-for-it-hammer-and-tongs, not wanting to admit feelings or show vulnerability except oops it happens anyway, whether the characters acknowledge it or not, or just people getting way more into it or being more affected by it than they thought they would. When it fits the characters and their canon dynamic, you also can’t go wrong with we-both-wanted-this-for-forever-and-now-we-both-know-it-so-here-we-go-diving-in-headfirst. For het and/or slash, oral, vaginal, anal incl. pegging, manual (ifyouknowwhatImean) – it’s all good. You can go as veiled or as explicit as you like, but please avoid excessive medical jargon – I don’t find a lot of mention of “penis” or “clit” sexy.

 DNWs:

MPREG, A/B/O, knotting, D/s, kinks, incest, underage, genderswap/genderbent characters, poly, xeno, non-/dub-con, torture and abuse (this and non-/dub-con can be mentioned if the story needs it, but please don’t dwell on it in loving detail or subject any of my requested characters to it), unrequested crossovers (please have the mods ask me!), dwelling on bodily fluids (mentions of gore/blood and come are fine), toilet humor, character bashing, issuefic, soulmates and soul marks, major character death (unless it’s canon), serious illness or injury, pregnancy and children, holiday or wedding setting/theme, secondary characters shipping the main pair like it’s their job, reference to RL current events, 1st/2nd person POV, AUs which have nothing to do with canon

[evelyntransitions-blog]

Day 39 recovering from crap

It’s been a while since i’ve posted here, mostly from depression and because a lot of lame shit happened we’ll start from the top. -Fuckin’ Kekistan ball won the battle of the balls. Mostly because the admins used a bunch of bots. Then kept making fun of all the leftist esc’ balls. Top tier trolling but kinda shitty. Don’t cheat at your own contest. That’s lame. -Speaking of anarchy I had this little debate with one of the admins, that stemed from me trying to see the good in people from all the political philosophies, and that they were misunderstood leading them to fend for themselves because of their ideal society. Nevertheless most peoples ideals come from wanting to help other people, even really die hard Conservatives don’t want a bunch of lazy people, who can’t have any faith in anything good and want to save their kids from hurting themselves or going to hell. They seem to care about their country too and hate immigrants on the grounds of wanting to look out for their family, because they believe immigrants are making things like healthcare inflate due to the mass amount of people on it. It’s fucking awful and prejudice as fuck, but they’re still looking out for their own. As terrible as ingroups are, to care about a group of people still shows some compassion. No one is truly selfish. They can be evil, but not truly selfish.  So random anarchy ball admin praises me on acknowledging how “Selfish” people become in the face of adversity and explain, that An-caps are selfish too but they don’t want to hurt anybody they just want to make money and be left alone. This is obviously false because if you do something like own a business you’ve created a hierarchy volentary or not, you’ve gained control of other peoples lives for the sake of survival. One could argue all philospohies would implement this, but business overall demands a person strip away their identity for production more often than not blah-blah-blah etc. etc. etc. That’s why people say they’re not real anarchists because they suppress a persons identity for the sake of giving others power or something like that. I actually talked to the purple and black ones, one of them gave me a long reading. Sheesh. It’s a good read none the less, but I think i’ll stick cleaning up the environment and hopefully in the future growing food for the less fortunate and giving it away for free to spite corporations and businesses that sell food or take up land. I don’t want to stick myself into a dogma though. But I digress. I try to explain that people aren’t necessarily selfish, they can do good things and this admin seems to take it really personally, and goes all out in treating me like i’m naive and says people just do good things to feel good. Boi’ you don’t know my life. Have you dealt with someone who’s co-dependent and tried to help them when you have depression because you don’t want to see them kill themselves, not because you want them around (because frankly they’re a burden to your happiness as awful as that sounds), but because you see how wonderful of a person they are and want to see them love themselves, when i’d be easier just to leave. Fuckin’ parents raise kids and make sacrifices sometimes not out of romanticization of motherhood-fatherhood but just because they care. This isn’t as common as people think, but it happens. Forgiveness within itself exists not out of feeling good but knowing it’s right and compassionate. In reality forgiveness is alturism because having to put up with someone who wronged you, and risking feeling like shit (and also feeling like shit for having to listen to them and apologize or hear them apologize) is fucking work, and annoying as piss. I have a lot of stuff to do some i’m not going to go into personal examples. Point is the guy to me sounds like he’s trying to justify sociopathy and i’m not down for that. So we argue but it doesn’t get far. I take the cheap example and go for people who risk their lives on impulse to save others. If people naturally risk their lives without thinking or wanting to feel something, they’re more naturally selfless or at least have the capacity to be totally selfless. There’s HOPE. They have nothing to say to that. Nevertheless I spent 2 days post this between volenteer work and work-work debating myself to make sure I was correct. In case this example tanked, I tried to look for another one in my life or a person and thought back to when I wronged my now best friend as a child, and left him for a girl. I remember meeting up with him and him wanting to serve me shit or tell me to fuck off, as he often tells, but he decided to forgive me. He didn’t even want people around. He wanted to be alone and to die. Maybe he secretly wanted someone, but it wouldn’t make sense that the childhood shithead (me) would be that person. I have faith that he decided to be selfless on his own accord. I’ve grown to love him, and we’ve risked our lives for each other, between standing up to oppressive people, and keeping each other from killing ourselves. We’ve had co-dependent patches when we started but nothing too insane. It’s become guiene love and we can respect each other as opposed to looking at what’s best for us. Little human sacrifices.  Faith-Hope-Love that’s what Christians, they’re clearly unto something. Heh’. Nevertheless the whole discussion made me depressed because I started worrying about the person. All political philosophy aside, if this person is that cynical, I want to know what’s eating at them. Solving that mystery and feeling good about helping them is selfish, and would probably lead to backlash, but I hope they find peace and ditch their cynicism. This  tore me up and fed my depression; me worrying about someone I didn’t even know.

-So more politics but no anarchy. This part isn’t bad but a quick note. The Libertarian party is doing pretty well and they seem optimistic. Though i’m not from New York i’ve looked into a particular candidate named Larry Sharpe. I’ve been watching his posts for a while and he seems to sacrifice a lot of his personal beliefs for what he thinks is fair and liberates the masses. He seems to hate taxes and his opponent. His opponent hasn’t said much about him so far, but seems to mean well too. He’s tried to help a bunch of people from what I gather, but has raised taxes so high that small businesses are failing and people can’t move to new locations are get their bills paid. In helping people he overstepped his shit, and fucked up. I gather this from the comment section on his posts. Generally speaking, people don’t like him on those grounds, but the ones who do only like him because he’s nice. This constant debate on how much people should help is fucking with my head. What really is best for humanity? It’s fucking with my head, but I can’t let it control my life. Personal shit/Shit regarding taking care of myself. I went to my therapist and he’s being a butt. I gather he’s worried about me transitioning because he asked a lot of questions about my presentation as a (trans) woman. The questions felt very intrusive asking why I don’t do “x”. Some of them were redundant and I felt the need to justify everything. I don’t like being put on trial, my Dad that and it fucked me up. I wanted to give him the right answers as opposed to how I felt, or just be avoidant. There was a lot of glaring and him sounding stressed. So when Mr. Therapist did something similar, it fucked me and I had an “episode” and began spewing out a bunch of information and asking him what he’s going to do, what he thinks, if he would just listen, that he doesn’t trust me and that all the doctors visits make me feel less like a woman and more like a lab rat. They feed my dysphoria. I had sort of this weird out of body experience where I was just talking but my body felt like it wasn’t there. That I had separated myself form reality to keep myself safe. It was pure anxiety and miserable. He proposed that I didn’t trust him and that I thought he was against me, but I tried reassuring him and it just ehhh. I kept going over the possibility that I might have autism (See next paragraph) considering my psychiatrist keeps thinking that because I can’t always communicate my thoughts, and it was a mess. I “yelled” a lot trying to get my points across, not really angrily but my voice was raised. He gave me a journal to write in. Even after he said our time was up, I got really selfish and glued myself to the couch wanting him to reassure me and asking him questions with what ifs. Like what if I just took estrogen, and he said he’d support my decision and root for me. This is why I think he’s decent. None the less the intrusiveness and lack of transparency bother me. The think that bugged me most is that he said he didn’t think I was ready because I had “one last hurdle to overcome” And when I asked “What?” He said he didn’t know. Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I spent the time after in my car having a panic attack and feeling numb. I didn’t even schedule another appointment. I wanted to just die but my inner voice told me to breathe, strap in my seatbelt, drive home and get some sleep. I posted on Facebook about my depression and everyone got worried. I’m glad I got good friends. I went home and got to sleep. Woke up and went out with chinese food with my roomate and her boyfriend(?).

-I went to get tested for (Asperger's) Autism earlier in the week because my psychatrist seems to think I have it. Every doctor I have says one thing, while others suggest different. It’s the same with friends and family. Mom thinks I have it. Best friend doesn’t think I have it. Mom knows me at home, Best friend however has autism and has autism run in his family. Am I autistic? Who knows. I’m sure right wing neckbeards edgelords would think I am, because I respect women generally speaking. Nonetheless they did an interview sort of thing, and i’m able to go in and get officially tested. This will be when I have money. That doctor said it was a 50/50. The visit was the same as all the others XP

- After a good 3 bottles of Mikes hard practically in a row I finished that fucking English Essay and turned it in. -I was able to talk to my school councilor for the first time in months. She’s the best. I’ve had her around since I started figuring out my gender identity (I think that’s a stupid as word tbh, considering the brain is an organ, so to some degree i’m female). I gave her an hours worth of rambling and she as always responded with kindness, listening and sincere advice. She doesn’t care for my therapist or psychiatrist from what I can gather, and I already know she doesn’t care much for my parents. She did want me to try to be more honest with the therapist though, despite the panic, and just address my needs upfront. I’m not sure how capable i’ll be of doing that, but I can respect the advice, mostly because it’s her. I can almost fully trust her. She’s at like 99% where most people are at like 40%. My best friend is at 100% unless it’s making plans. He tends to fuck up with that. Oh well, nobody is perfect.

- I did some volenteer work over the weekend which was nice. Blockers/lack of energy and stiffness in my limbs didn’t fuck with it too much. It feels nearly impossible to lift boxes at my work though.  -Though it doesn’t have to do with me, some fucker stole shit at my work and got caught. It was a thing of cool whip, in which he’d do something that a manager described post arrest as “whip its” in which a person would inhale nitrogen from a whip cream can. Personally if he wants to do drugs and ruin his life that’s his own business. Sure someone cares about him but trying to prevent shit like drugs via police seems to cause more problems. Just let people voluntarily go to rehab and be there for them. I am glad he got caught for stealing though, i’m not a fan of stealing unless someone is trying to feed their kids, or themselves because they’re living in severe poverty and prices for x company are high. Even still a lot of businesses can be decent at times and if you tell them you’re poor they sometimes really help people out (been there done that). You’d think someone who prasies things like anarchy would be like “DOWN WITH THE COORPERATE GREED” you could also argue that someone who’s okay with Captalism would be like “NO THIEVERY PEOPLE EARNED THAT MONEY” there’s also the thought of “HOW DOES ONE LIKE ANARCHY, CAPITALISM BUT HATE ANCAPS. WHAT ARE BELIEFS (I’ll talk about that in another post).” Nope my reaction is that stealing is terrible for everyone because x company will just give employees less hours or jack up prices. It makes things harder on the poor. Stealing also lets in police prescence and furthers the police state. If people really wanted to piss on the government if applicable be totally obidenent and expose police violence. If people don’t believe in police and don’t feel a need for them the state would eventually defund them or people wouldn’t become cops. It’s happening in the county I live in, and it’s awesome. Hopefully one day there won’t be any police or at the very least police that are more social workeres than anything. I could live with social worker police. Some countries have that. That’s how it’s supposed to be (except in terms of major riots which may not happen due to less police, and kidnappings. Police existing to hunt down kidnappers is ideal. I wouldn’t mind private cops to do that though) That’s it, no go outside =w=