#pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease and other such words and thoughts

[ladyofthecreeddraws]

Two freaks at the club: the dry-humping prequel~*

And a close-up <3

Also on Bsky!

[hazbinshusk]

25 with blitz

PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE

prompt #25: a kiss that's an accident.

“Okay, this is too wholesome for my liking…”

You stand with your hands braced on your knees as you catch your breath and Blitzø stands beside you, leaning against you with his elbow against your back. You raise an eyebrow at him over your shoulder, and he smirks down at you as though nothing at all had just gone wrong. He opens his mouth to continue, but you straighten as you feel a group approach yours. You turn to see the succubi standing on the sand, an incredibly irritated Verosika Mayday at the forefront.

“Blitzo.”

“Oh, perfect!” Your boss rolls his eyes as he turns to face them too, holding out his hands mockingly. Despite his attempt to be jokingly light, his tone still bites with sarcasm. “That must be the whores!”

Verosika’s expression remains stony.

“That was handled rather…” she smiles coldly. “Obviously. Don’t you think?”

Millie holds up a flask you recognize and says dryly, “I don’t think this belongs to any of us.”

She tosses the flask to the popstar, who catches it and drops it into the hands of another succubus without taking her glower off of all of you.

“Would be a shame if anyone found out you guys were behind a giant fish monster in the human world,” Millie continues, and Moxxie bursts into drunken laughter.

“Oh, Satan! You’re gonna be so… fucked!”

You can’t help but smirk in amusement at Moxxie’s giggling, sharing a sidelong look with Blitzø. He winks at you cockily, smiling back, and you swear Verosika’s scowl deepens as she watches the exchange.

“Yeah, well… you four nasty-ass gremlins will be in shit for not being in disguises!”

You open your mouth to retaliate, but Moxxie takes a step forward and promptly faceplants into the sand. Pushing himself up onto his hands, he slurs, “A human called me a possum. I am not a possum!”

“You know…” you draw the words out in faux-thoughtfulness, fishing the other imp out of the sand. You push him gently towards Millie, who takes him from you with an almost sickeningly sweet look of adoration. Blitzø props his elbow on your shoulder, and Verosika’s eyes narrow dangerously. Hell, she’s practically growling at the two of you. You keep your tone casual, watching Verosika out of the corner of your eye. Part of you wonders what exactly you in particular have done to raise her ire so much. “…I’m sure there’s some way we could help each other out here…”

Blitzø blinks unevenly before he catches your meaning, a sharp, wily grin spreading over his face.

“Yeah…” he draws out the word in a way that makes his ex-girlfriend grind her teeth together. “We could keep this little B-movie scene on the downlow if you agree to let us use that parking space…?”

He holds out a hand for her to shake, still smiling. You have to hold back a laugh.

Verosika doesn’t take his hand, her eyes pointed above you all as she finally grinds out, “…Fine.”

“WE FUCKIN’ WOOOON!” Blitzø cheers boisterously, cackling in triumph. He turns to the rest of you, grinning, and your eyes widen as he grabs hold of your face and pulls you into a kiss. It’s hard and abrupt and you don’t have the chance to react to it before he pulls away and his eyes are wide too, apparently just as surprised by what he’d done as you were. Still, his tail waves behind him happily, and you feel your face flush deeply.

Blitzø clears his throat, spinning on his heel to taunt. “In your face, bitch!”

You’re left blinking away your shock, and Millie is staring at you, too, a wild grin on her face. You catch Verosika’s eye and your blush deepens, but she doesn’t look angry anymore.

There’s something more like… pity marring her features.

“Come on,” she spares you one more glance as she scoffs, waving her posse away. “Let’s get out of here. TEX!”

Millie elbows you as she hefts Moxxie onto her shoulder, and you exhale, opening the portal the way Loona had shown you. Blitzø catches your eye, and he grimaces awkwardly despite the victory still burning in his eyes.

“That was, uh… some hot shit there, tits.” he tells you, jerking both thumbs back towards the succubi. “Gave those cum-suckin’ harpies a run for their—” his eyes widen as he realizes the possible double meaning. “I mean, you did good with the—”

“Let’s just go home, Blitz,” you say, brushing hair out of your face. “You can explain whatever the fuck that was later.”

“Sounds like a… sounds good.” he nods hurriedly, and you swear you could almost see a blush of his own staining his cheeks. “Come on, Loonie Toonie! Let’s go back and park our fat fuckin’ car in our fat fuckin’ space!”

send me a prompt and either husk or blitzø

[myimaginarywonderland]

Also friendly reminder that there is no history being made with this championship other than having a new one.

The youngest one is still Seb, the first one with RedBull is Seb and the first Dutch world champion in a car category is Nyck de Vries and the first Dutch world champion in a broad sense is Jeffrey Herlings.

This wasn't history being made, don't let than narrative fool you. This is merely the case of another one.

[andromeda3116]

So let's talk about the Lost Generation.

This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they -- in retrospect, optimistically -- called it the "war to end all wars". And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.

On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.

And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It's often referred to as "the Spanish flu" because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.

Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.

But once it was finally contained -- anywhere from a year to a year and a half later -- the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.

Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women's skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.

Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they'd seen and done and all that they'd lost, and lost for nothing.

Reality seemed so pointless. It's not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre -- J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis -- both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.

(There's a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn't live his whole life there. There's a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)

It's also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.

It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn't new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn't been open to them before.

There was also horrific -- and state-sanctioned -- violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.

It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos -- god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.

Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn't fit their mold.

There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn't, and that's the fact that they did it first.

We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren't any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.

I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.

We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There's a reason modern audiences don't find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling -- they're different kinds of humor from different realities.

I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We've been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn't then: there is a future.

The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art -- in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared -- is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.

So don't bottle it up. Don't pretend to be okay when you're not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else -- not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.

Because, to quote the inimitable Terry Pratchett, "in a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive."

[your-turn-to-role]

so a friend and i were talking about dnd last night, in particular the sending spell

and, jester has made everyone very aware that sending has a 25 word limit

but what the spell also says, is that no matter what language you're speaking, if the recipient has an intelligence score higher than 1 (what's needed in dnd to understand language), then they comprehend the meaning of your message

now, this is just a handwavey magic way to get around speaking different languages, but

my friend and i are both bilingual (mandarin and french, respectively), so we're very aware that language translation isn't one on one like that. and in fact, you wouldn't want to send a message in dnd's equivalent of french, bc you'd send 25 french words and get back about 15-20 english words.

so what's the best language to send a message in? what has the smallest number of words for the largest amount of meaning?

well, maybe something like russian with fewer articles. maybe something like latin which uses cases to modify its nouns and verbs in the place of certain pronouns and prepositions. or maybe, my friend pointed out, it doesn't matter, because nothing in the spell description states you need to be speaking a recognised language. you can make up a word that means a whole sentence, and, rules as written (though probably not rules as intended), it will be understood by the target, without needing to waste more words!

and, you know, if you happen to be smart enough to work that out and you have a native language that already has a reputation for frankenwords, you can talk as long as you goddamn like

basically what i'm saying is caleb with sending is only less feared than jester because he doesn't have her drive to bother people

[loving-jack-kelly]

thinking about the ending of the martian. the way the entire planet was pulling for mark and "houston this is hermes actual. six crew safely aboard" and mark seeing another human being for the first time in a year and a half. thinking about the rest of the ares III crew giving up so much of their lives not even sure the rescue plan would work. thinking about mark adjusting back to people again. thinking about mark getting back to earth and realizing he can't sleep without white noise anymore because silence means the life support has stopped working and waking up to it is instant panic. thinking about mark joking about not liking potatoes anymore but also really not being able to eat them anymore.

[neeasworld]

missionary so you could spit in my mouth and we could look at each other’s pretty faces 🥺

[backhurtyy]

what it means to hold hands

1 - touched by another no2 (2010), amanda tonkin-hill [ID: a simple oil painting of two hands shown from the wrist down with their fingers laced together, holding each other. the back of one larger hand is visible, while the smaller hand's fingers come around and rest on it. the background is white and in the corner is the artists signature, tonkin-hill '10. /End ID.]

2 - city of bones (deleted scene), cassandra clare [ID: "He reassured her, but he felt her soft laughter travel through their joined hands–how did that happen?–as they made their way downstairs. / And he understood. He understood why people held hands: he’d always thought it was about possessiveness, saying This is mine. But it wasn’t. It was about maintaining contact. It was about speaking without words. It was about I want you with me and Don’t go." /End ID.]

3 - heart part 2 (05x13), she-ra and the princesses of power [ID: a screenshot from the animated show she-ra. adora's arm, covered by a white long-sleeve shirt, extends down from the top right corner. in the middle, her hand grasps catra's hand, extending up from the bottom left corner. the background is light pink, purple, and yellow.]

4 - perry poetry [ID: "Your fingers entwined / slowly with mine, / and suddenly, / life made sense." /End ID.]

5 - backs in the distance (ep. 22), fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood [ID: a screenshot from the anime fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood. ed holds winry's hand in between his automail hand and his gloved hand. /End ID.]

6 - braeden phillips [ID: "What else does holding someone’s hand represent other than love? Friendship, trust, and affection all have their root in love. To love someone is to take their hand in your own, and walk along the waterfront as the sun begins to set. / That’s love. That’s being alive. That’s what it means to hold someone’s hand." /End ID.]

7 - the last stand (04x13), the legend of korra [ID: a screenshot from the animated show the legend of korra. asami and korra are shown from the back, asami on the left and korra on the right, with their hands clasped between them. beyond them is bright yellow and green light from the spirit portal. /End ID.]

8 - why otters hold hands, bill walsh [ID: "I remember the otters holding hands / while sleeping / so they won’t drift apart." /End ID.]

9 - holding hands feels so intimate (2020), claudia barbu [ID: an oil painting of two hands resting in each other, done in browns, pinks, reds, and whites. the background is green, blue, and white, and the paint strokes are easily distinguishable from each other. /End ID.]

10 - aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe, benjamin alire sáenz [ID: "My mother and father held hands. I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand." /End ID.]

[black-and-yellow]

⭐Rockstar ⭐

The more I see of Aizawa and Mic's personalities in the latest chapters the more I realise I accidentally made a really good AU.

[dumblr]

[restlesshush]

Forever thinking about how Cas being a better love interest for Dean than Anna in season 4 isn’t just because Cas and Dean have infinitely more chemistry: it’s also baked into the very nature of their characters!

Anna is too self-actualised, really, to be a foil for s4 Dean in the way Cas was: she has already chosen to fall, and this has absolutely nothing to do with Dean. Whereas Cas is only just falling! Anna couldn’t do “can I tell you something if you promise not to tell another soul?” or “prayer is a sign of faith” because her questioning of heaven is already entirely out in the open, and she actively does not want to cultivate faith in heaven (or anything adjacent). All of which makes her a fascinating character who they absolutely should have done more with! But it also means that the incredibly romantic symmetry of one teaching the other faith while the other teaches them doubt would just never really have been available to a Dean/Anna storyline.

The tension of the beautiful room scenes in a hypothetical Lucifer Rising with Anna instead of Cas would also be completely different: pre presumed brain-washing, Anna was already completely on the side of humanity over heaven, whereas Cas was just being pulled past teetering! It would be a question of Dean winning her back to her own previously held beliefs, rather than winning her properly over to his, the way it played out with Cas. “I did it, all of it, for you” is wild as a line from a character who was ostensibly not a love interest, while on the other hand Anna wouldn’t even be able to say it afterwards, because it wouldn’t remotely be true. As hilarious as it is that they didn’t really bother to give Cas a character motivation beyond being in love with Dean, it’s also pretty amusing that they gave Dean’s intended love interest a sufficiently strong separate character motivation, that it would be doing her a disservice to imply he was anything more than incidental to her journey.

Something something Anna puts her hand over Cas’s handprint but it’s his handprint and his hand was always meant to go there.

[simonjadis]

extremely good Twitter thread and I recommend reading the whole thing [X]

“I’m gonna need ppl to stop framing anti-shipping and pro-shipping as ‘one group vs another’ and not ‘an extremist group vs everyone else’ If you aren’t an anti-vaxxer are u a ‘pro-vaxxer‘? If you aren’t a flat-earther are u a ‘round-earther’? No ur a normal ass person lol”

“I’ve long discouraged the use of ‘pro-shipper’ as a moniker because of this fact. You do not belong in a special group because you aren't part of an Internet-wide purity cult that believes fictional characters have inalienable human rights “

“I’m getting fed up with people weighing in on this issue when they have absolutely no fucking idea what it actually is Anti-shipping is a hate movement. It began with extremists (namely TERFs) infiltrating fandom spaces and instilling their rhetoric in young people.“

(quoted the tweets in case the screenshot is inaccessible, either for darkmode or for someone using a screenreader)

[wedarkacademia]

“He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt.” ― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

[clownkillsyou]

what is your problem

[notanotherinfjblog]

How to spot an INFJ

A few years ago, I made a post about how the cognitive functions manifest in our behaviour and now I’m going to expand on that and give a more detailed, visually accompanied overview for each type, now for the INFJ.

For the purpose of this guide, I’m taking a look at several interviews (1, 2, 3, 4) with Colin Morgan, a Northern Irish actor. I’m breaking my unspoken rule of focussing on a single interview here, but you’ll see why later. You can find the links to other type spotting guides below which I will update over time when new guides are being added.

The dominant and the auxiliary cognitive functions that people use are those that are the ones that are really noticeable in the quality of their gaze, in their speech style, in their facial expressions, and their whole general demeanour, and so these are the ones that I will be focussing on here. In case of an INFJ, these functions are Ni and Fe. Thanks to this combination, INFJs are the most detached of all the types. It might seem like a contradiction at first, but their focus is indeed directed outwards, particularly at other people, which is where the infamous “INFJ stare” comes from. Like the ENFJ, yet taking it a step further, they will just stare right into your soul with a completely blank expression. And the more people there are in the conversation, the more they forget that they are a real person that, too, is part of the conversation and should play a role in. But they don’t as it’s like they tuck themselves away and become an empty vessel inviting everyone’s words and feelings in, and since their own identity is almost kind of hidden from themselves in that moment, they are unable to emote a reaction or to even speak because there is just not much to give right now. All they do is stare at the person talking and at everyone else listening to look for their reactions, without reacting themselves, as you can see nicely in the gif below. When they really need to listen to your words, however, they have to detach themselves even further and stop looking at people entirely. Instead, they will stare intensely into space without actually seeing anything.

This detachment that is mainly due to dominant Ni obviously has some serious impact on their interactions with other people, which actually becomes a dead giveaway for their type: there is always some kind of disconnect between the INFJ and everyone else. As you can see in the gif below, Colin Morgan (on the left) is standing completely still, just watching everything without moving or talking, just listening. And people generally have no idea how to deal with that and typically need quite some time to get accustomed to them as a person because, let’s be honest, it is a bit unsettling (and I say that with utmost affection), so there is quite a lot of emotional space between the INFJ and everyone else as if they were standing behind a glass window. They are not lost in thought, they are mentally present, and yet they are like an island in their midst, separate from everyone else, even when the INFJ is a beloved member of the group. However, this is why they typically radiate calmness and some kind of solemnity wherever they go. Interestingly, though, I find that this disconnect is slightly less severe around other FJs as they seem to be the ones best equipped to adapt to them.

But don’t be fooled, INFJs are generally very comfortable with their auxiliary Fe and know exactly how to charm people and can turn it on in an instant like a light switch so that their whole demeanour can change from aloof to charming jokester from one second to the next. Particularly when there is just one single person to focus on, they will go all out and use their entire face as a communication device. The gif below demonstrates this full-on Fe-blast very well. Whenever you have a person with a face this expressive in front of you, there is an almost 100% chance that it’s an FJ (or the occasional ExTP) you’re talking to. But it’s not necessarily a genuine emotion the INFJ is currently feeling that they want to get across, though if it is, then it‘s more of a conscious choice and slightly exaggerated. Mostly, they want to emphasise a point or make everyone feel comfortable and themselves more approachable, and there is often a lot of mirroring involved. Generally, the fewer people are around, the more animated they become. They always anticipate how they need to say something and which facial expression they need to make in order to be liked. Even when what they are trying to say is a delicate matter, they are good at finding a way to say it in a way that circumvents any kind of possible conflict and without coming across as rude. They can usually navigate unpleasant conversations in a lighthearted manner without actually answering uncomfortable questions, yet remain polite and friendly enough that it can take a moment for you to even notice that they subtly steered the conversation into a completely different direction. Another thing that INFJs are extremely prone to is speaking in metaphors.

Like all the intuitives, INFJs can also have some trouble articulating what they mean. High Ni typically leads to long pauses in their speech that they rarely fill with “uhm” and this is kind of their default so that their speech seems quite deliberate, but when they are following a train of thought and let it flow freely, like the ENFJ, they can and will drop their sentence and start a new one before finishing the last without caring if what they’re saying is even still grammatically correct, which can lead to an absolute train wreck of a sentence, but then they cover it up with a whole range of facial expressions. Despite being on the Ni/Se spectrum, INFJs can occasionally come close to a speech pattern that is almost reminiscent of high Ne. Unlike NPs, they will not stutter and rapidly repeat the beginning of a word, but they will repeat the whole word or phrase and make a little verbal mess in not quite as infinite run-on sentences, but still rather long ones. This is also what sets them apart from ISFJs because unlike high Ni users, high Si users are usually amazingly good at expressing themselves and can keep a sentence grammatically intact even after suddenly embedding another thought into it and can then carry on without missing a beat, while the INFJ along with the other NJs have already forgotten how their sentence even started. However, I chose an example of the more deliberate default pattern from yet another interview on a character he played that had to fight in World War I:

And I think it’s hard for ... people of our generation now ... to ... connect .... with that ... and to ... understand ... what it is to put so much trust ... into something ... like serving your country ... something which you ... from a young age were conditioned to believe was ... was comforting and something y-you could absolutely believe in ... could betray you so ... badly. There is a real sense of duty. I think there is a real sense of ... honour and pride ... I think ... whenever you’re representing someone’s life ... because ... there’s no way ... they could’ve ever thought something like this was going to happen, so there’s a sense that you ... then have to do them proud.

A little bonus: In contrast to the gif above where you can see Colin Morgan staring into space, but listening intently, the gif below shows what it looks like when an INFJ is functioning while suffering from a stage not too far away from sensory overload and trying very hard to keep it together. He’s trying to focus on the conversation and trying to be polite, so he’s still half-absent-mindedly nodding along, but his eyes jump around because there is too much sensory information all around that is difficult to block out and it just looks like he is mostly set on Fe-auto-pilot throughout the interview to simply endure whatever is going on. This is what inferior Se does to you, so INTJs experience that as well. 

Other How to spot type XY guides so far: ENFJ, INTP, ESFJ, ISFP

[seokwoosmole]

I LOVE LOVE LOVE how The King's Affection did well by Dami's character. So many "strong" female leads fall victim to what I call Taming of the Shrew Syndrome (yes, it needs a better name, but it's a working title at the moment) where the strong independent FL who stands out because she's badass or is capable of taking care of herself suddenly is rendered weak and useless once she's in an established relationship with the ML. It. Happens. All. The. Time. Some examples are Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, Are You Human Too?, Bring It On Ghost (there's many many more). I love the dramas that I mentioned but all of them feature a female character that is first introduced as this butt-kicking strong baddie who can knock down villains easy peasy but suddenly when the plot demands it...suddenly she sucks at fighting and the ML saves the day? Excuse me, writers...THE MALE LEAD CAN STILL BE COOL WITHOUT WEAKENING THE FEMALE LEAD SO HE SEEMS MORE CAPABLE IN COMPARISON!!! And I'm not saying that every drama from this point on needs to have a weak ML and the FL must do all the saving. For example in The King Eternal Monarch, we all know the iconic "Protect her! She is the future queen of the kingdom of Korea!" scene. But I don't think that Lee Minho's character doing all the saving ever took away from the fact that Kim Goeun's character was a strong and tough cop who could kick butt. BUT. If you're going to introduce a character as a "strong female lead", there has to be consistency, and in my opinion, The King's Affection gave us that consistency. Dami learned how to fight...and she does it incredibly well. Oftentimes, she saved the day and I definitely wouldn't label her the damsel in distress. More often than not, it was Ji-un who needed more saving. BUT! There were times when Ji-un saved Dami as well. And during those times, Dami was never reduced to a damsel in distress and her role as the strong female lead never faltered. Any time Ji-un saved Dami, I never felt like the writers weakened her character just so that she could be saved. She was a beautifully written, well-rounded character who is strong and capable, but she also has weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and when those weaknesses and vulnerabilities came into play, that did nothing to change her character. It seems like an obvious thing, but so many shows screw this up. I feel like this is often done because they don't want to emasculate the ML but c'mon writers, say it with me – A FL CAN BE STRONG AND CAPABLE WITHOUT TAKING AWAY FROM THE ML👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 I know the fandom (AND ME) loves to point out how the traditional gender roles with this couple are reversed and joke around that Ji-un's the wife/side chick in the relationship and we love to see him swoon and geek out over his love interest watching her spar with heart eyes as he holds a giant basket of flowers, and talk about his very mediocre fighting skills, but NONE absolutely NONE of that was emasculating to his character. The writers were consistent with him as well – never making him out to be more capable than he was portrayed to be, but still showing that he is capable of many things that serve to complement Dami, as opposed to take away from her character. Again, I feel like most people know this already, but clearly drama writers aren't "most people" so for The King's Affection to acknowledge this is so important to point out.