#probably won't do this for actual story posts

[the-oblivious-writer]

Let the Light In |10|

Tara Carpenter x Female Reader

Chapter Ten: Static Frequencies

summary: three weeks of radio silence have passed since valentine's day. tara's been making herself scarce through a rotation of hookups and parties, while you've been doing what you do best—avoiding everything that reminds you of her. when Anika finally drags you to a party, you meet someone new, but some frequencies are harder to tune out than others.

warning(s): swearing, underage drinking, party atmosphere/socializing, pining, and two stubborn idiots.

notes: prraaaying that this summer'll let me post more consistently, i'm officially off after the 26th.

taglist: @t-wylia @lesbianpepsi @jennasfav @alyciaddict @justafoolinlove @steffido1993 @niqmandu @severelyuniquereview @darklron @ravenousinferno @smut-religiously777 @beautifulmongerbanditsalad @vanatalye

masterlist | previous chapter | next chapter

The bass from whatever generic EDM track was playing downstairs vibrated through the floorboards of your apartment, courtesy of the neighbors who apparently thought Thursday night was the perfect time for a rager. You'd been staring at the same page of your chemistry textbook for the past twenty minutes, the molecular structures blurring together like some kind of scientific abstract art.

Your phone buzzed against the desk surface.

Nika: party at jake's tonight. you're coming.

You: Hard pass

Nika: wasn't a question. be ready in an hour

You: I have studying to do

Nik: you've been "studying" for three weeks straight. even hermit crabs leave their shells sometimes

You groaned, letting your head fall forward onto the open textbook. The thing about Anika was that she had this annoying habit of being right about everything, especially when it came to your self-imposed isolation. Ever since Valentine's Day—or more specifically, ever since that moment on Tara's couch when everything shifted and then promptly crashed back to earth—you'd been keeping your head down and your schedule packed.

It wasn't avoidance. It was strategic distance.

Your phone buzzed again.

Anika: also tara won't be there. she's at some other thing across town

The fact that Anika felt the need to mention Tara's whereabouts told you everything you needed to know about how transparent your "strategic distance" actually was. You'd been doing a stellar job of pretending the past three weeks of radio silence didn't bother you, but apparently your poker face needed work.

You: How do you even know where she is?

Nik: instagram stories. girl's been documenting her party tour like she's a social media influencer

You definitely hadn't been checking Tara's Instagram. And you definitely hadn't noticed the steady stream of party photos featuring different faces, different locations, different people pressed close to her in dimly lit rooms. The fact that she looked happy in every single one was just an observation, not something that kept you up at night.

You: fine. one hour. but i'm not dressing up

Nik: wouldn't expect anything less from you

An hour later, you were pulling on the same blue jeans and flannel combo you'd been rotating through for the better part of the semester. Anika had texted that she was on her way up, which meant you had about thirty seconds before she started her usual commentary about your "commitment to consistent mediocrity" in the fashion department.

She didn't disappoint.

"You know they make other colors of flannel, right?" she said, not even bothering with a hello as she pushed past you into the apartment.

"This one's clean," you replied, grabbing your keys and wallet. "That's all that matters."

"God, you're like a cartoon character. Same outfit, same energy, same emotional availability of a brick wall." She was scrolling through her phone as she talked, probably checking to make sure her party intel was still accurate. "Jake's place is like a fifteen-minute walk. You ready?"

The walk to Jake's gave you time to mentally prepare for the social interaction you'd been avoiding. Anika filled the silence with updates about her latest dating app adventures, which was both entertaining and a welcome distraction from the knot of anxiety forming in your stomach.

"I'm just saying, if someone's idea of a perfect date is 'Netflix and chill' spelled out in actual words, they're probably not bringing much creativity to other areas of life," she was saying as you approached a house with music spilling out onto the street.

"Revolutionary insight," you replied, but you were smiling despite yourself.

Jake's place was packed in that specific way college parties always were—too many people in too small a space, everyone talking slightly too loud to compensate for music that was slightly too loud to begin with. You followed Anika through the crowd, dodging couples who were definitely violating several public decency laws and groups of people who were definitely violating several fire codes.

"Drinks first," Anika announced, steering you toward the kitchen. "You need to relax."

The kitchen was marginally less chaotic, though someone had apparently thought it was a good idea to turn the island into a makeshift beer pong table. You grabbed a beer from the cooler, mostly for something to do with your hands, and leaned against the counter while Anika worked her social butterfly magic with a group of people you recognized from various classes.

"You look like you're at a funeral," a voice said from beside you.

You turned to find a girl with shoulder-length auburn hair and an amused expression. She was holding a red solo cup and wearing the kind of effortless smile that suggested she was actually enjoying herself.

"Just thinking," you replied.

"Dangerous habit at parties like this," she said, extending her hand. "I'm Maya."

"Y/N."

"So, Y/N, what's got you looking so existentially conflicted at what is objectively a very mediocre college party?"

There was something disarming about her directness, the way she'd managed to read your mood without the usual small talk preamble. It reminded you of someone else, which was both comforting and problematic.

"Just not really a party person," you said.

"And yet here you are."

"Roommate intervention," you admitted, nodding toward Anika, who was now engaged in what appeared to be a very animated conversation about something involving a lot of hand gestures.

Maya laughed, and the sound was warm and genuine. "Ah, the old 'you need to get out more' approach. Been there."

"Let me guess—worked on you too?"

"Hook, line, and sinker. Though I have to say, meeting someone who looks as thrilled to be here as I feel is kind of refreshing."

You found yourself relaxing slightly. Maya had this way of making conversation feel natural, like you'd been friends for years instead of strangers who'd met five minutes ago. She was funny without trying too hard, and when she laughed at your sarcastic observations about the party dynamics around you, it didn't feel forced.

"So what's your major?" she asked as you both watched someone attempt to do a keg stand with questionable success.

"History," you replied. "You?"

"Psychology. Which means I'm professionally obligated to ask what's really bothering you."

You nearly choked on your beer. "Excuse me?"

"Kidding," she said quickly, though her eyes were still studying your face. "Mostly. But you do have this look like you're trying very hard not to think about something."

The accuracy of her observation was unsettling. You'd spent three weeks perfecting the art of not thinking about Tara—not thinking about the way she'd looked at you on Valentine's Day, not thinking about the comfortable silence while you watched movies, not thinking about how she'd somehow become the person you most wanted to talk to and the person you most wanted to avoid.

"It's complicated," you said finally.

"The best things usually are."

There was something about the way she said it that made you look at her more carefully. She had these light brown eyes that seemed to catch everything, and when she smiled, it was like she was letting you in on some private joke.

"Want to get some air?" she asked. "It's getting pretty stuffy in here."

You followed her out to the backyard, where the music was muffled enough to allow for actual conversation. The night air was cool against your skin, and you realized you'd been holding tension in your shoulders that you hadn't even noticed.

"Better?" Maya asked, settling onto a bench near the back fence.

"Much." You sat down beside her, leaving a respectable amount of space between you. "Thanks."

"So," she said, turning to face you. "Complicated situation. Want to talk about it?"

"Not really."

"Want to talk about something else?"

"That would be great."

Maya launched into a story about her psychology professor who apparently had strong opinions about the correlation between coffee consumption and academic performance, and you found yourself genuinely engaged for the first time in weeks. She was smart and funny, and she had this way of making even mundane observations sound interesting.

"I'm convinced he's conducting some kind of long-term study on us," she was saying. "Like, tracking our caffeine intake versus our participation in class discussions."

"That's either really dedicated or really creepy."

"Why not both?"

You were laughing when your phone buzzed. Without thinking, you glanced at the screen.

Nika: how's it going with mystery girl?

You looked up to find Anika watching you from the kitchen window, giving you an exaggerated thumbs up. Maya followed your gaze and waved at her.

"Your roommate's got good timing," Maya said.

"She's got strong opinions about my social life."

"Can't imagine why," Maya replied, but she was smiling. "You seem like the life of the party."

"I have hidden depths."

"I'm sure you do."

There was something in her tone that made you look at her again. She was still smiling, but there was a different quality to it now, something that made your pulse quicken in a way that was both familiar and entirely new.

"Hey, uh," you started, not sure what you were going to say.

"Yeah?"

Your phone buzzed again, and this time you ignored it. But Maya had noticed the notification, and something in her expression shifted.

"Someone important?" she asked.

"No," you said quickly. "Just my roommate."

But even as you said it, you knew it wasn't entirely true. The buzzing phone was a reminder of the world beyond this backyard, the world where Tara existed and where you'd spent the last three weeks pretending she didn't matter.

Maya seemed to sense your internal conflict. "You know, for someone who says it's not important, you look pretty conflicted."

"It's not—" You stopped, frustrated with yourself. "It's complicated."

"You said that already."

"Because it is."

She was quiet for a moment, studying your face in the dim light from the house. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"The person you're not thinking about—are you in love with them?"

The question hit you like a physical blow. You'd been so careful not to examine your feelings too closely, to keep everything filed under "complicated" and "better left alone." But hearing it said out loud, so matter-of-factly, stripped away all your careful defenses.

"I—" You stopped, realizing you'd never actually said it out loud. Not to anyone, not even to yourself. "Yeah. I think I am."

"Think?"

"Know," you corrected quietly. "I know I am."

Maya nodded slowly. "How long?"

"Since high school." The admission felt like a confession, like something you should have kept locked away. "Feels like longer."

"And they don't know?"

You let out a bitter laugh. "They hate me. Or they did. I don't know what we are now."

"What happened in high school?"

This was the part you'd never told anyone, the part that made you look like either a complete idiot or a hopeless romantic, depending on who was doing the judging.

"I was an ass," you said finally. "I pulled pranks, got into arguments, did basically everything I could to get their attention. But not good attention. I was like a kid pulling pigtails on the playground."

"Because you didn't know how to ask for the attention you actually wanted."

"Because I was fifteen and stupid and didn't know how to handle having feelings for someone who was completely out of my league."

Maya was quiet for so long that you started to worry you'd said too much. When you finally looked at her, she was smiling, but it was different now—softer, more understanding.

"You know what's funny?" she said.

"What?"

"I came over here because I thought you were cute and brooding and might be up for some harmless flirting. But now I'm sitting here giving relationship advice, and I kind of like it better."

You felt heat rise in your cheeks. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"

"Don't apologize," she said quickly. "I'm not complaining. But can I suggest something?"

"Shoot."

"If you've been in love with someone since high school, and you're still thinking about them at a party where you're talking to someone new, maybe it's time to do something about it."

"It's not that simple."

"It never is. But sometimes the complicated things are worth fighting for."

Your phone buzzed again, and this time Maya gestured for you to check it.

Nika: tara's here

Your blood ran cold. You looked up toward the house, scanning the crowd visible through the windows, but you couldn't see her from where you were sitting.

"The complicated person?" Maya asked, reading your expression.

"Yeah."

"You want to go find them?"

"I want to go home."

Maya laughed, but not unkindly. "You know that's not going to solve anything, right?"

"It'll solve the immediate problem of me potentially making a fool of myself."

"Or you could stay and see what happens. Take a chance."

"I don't take chances."

"Maybe that's the problem."

Before you could respond, the back door opened and Anika stepped out, looking around until she spotted you.

"There you are," she said, walking over. "We might have a situation."

"What kind of situation?" you asked, though you had a feeling you already knew.

"The kind where Tara just walked in looking like she's ready to set something on fire, and when she saw me, she asked where you were."

Maya looked between you and Anika with growing understanding. "Tara," she said. "That's the complicated person."

"That's the complicated person," you confirmed.

"And she's looking for you."

"Apparently."

Maya stood up, brushing off her jeans. "Well, this has been fun, but I think I'm going to go find another drink and let you two handle whatever's about to happen."

"You don't have to leave," you said quickly.

"Yeah, I do." She smiled, and there was no hurt in it, just understanding. "But hey, Y/N?"

"Yeah?"

"Good luck. And if it doesn't work out, I'll be by the kitchen wondering what could have been."

She squeezed your shoulder as she passed, and you watched her disappear back into the house.

"I like her," Anika said.

"Yeah, me too."

"But?"

"But nothing. Let's just go home."

"Absolutely not." Anika grabbed your arm as you started to stand. "You've been moping around for three weeks. Whatever happened on Valentine's Day, you need to deal with it."

"I don't need to deal with anything."

"You're in love with her."

It was the second time in ten minutes someone had said it out loud, and it didn't get easier to hear.

"It doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters. It's the only thing that matters."

"Anika—"

"No, listen to me. I've been watching you two dance around each other for months. The arguing, the glancing, the way you both go out of your way to avoid each other while somehow always ending up in the same place. It's exhausting."

"We're not dancing around anything. We can barely stand each other."

"Right. That's why you spent Valentine's Day with her watching movies and looking at her like she hung the moon."

"What—"

"She told me. Well, she told me some of it. The rest I figured out from the way she's been acting like a feral cat ever since."

Your heart was doing something complicated in your chest. "What do you mean, acting like a feral cat?"

"I mean she's been going out every night, bringing home different people, and generally acting like someone who's trying very hard to prove something to herself. Sound familiar?"

It did sound familiar, because it was exactly what you'd been doing in your own way—burying yourself in schoolwork and isolation instead of dealing with whatever was happening between you and Tara.

"It doesn't matter," you said again, but it sounded weak even to you.

"It's the only thing that matters," Anika repeated. "And right now, she's inside looking for you, which means maybe she's finally ready to stop running."

"What if I'm not?"

"Then you're an idiot."

"Thanks for the pep talk."

"I'm serious, Y/N. You've been in love with her since high school. She's been in love with you since at least the beginning of this semester. You're both miserable without each other. What exactly are you waiting for?"

"She's not in love with me."

"Oh my God, you're both so stupid it's painful."

Before you could argue, the back door opened again, and this time it wasn't Anika who emerged.

Tara stepped into the backyard, and even in the dim light, you could see the tension in her shoulders, the way she was holding herself like she was ready for a fight. She looked around until her eyes found yours, and the impact of that gaze was like a physical blow.

"Anika said you were out here," she said, her voice carefully neutral.

"I was just leaving," Anika announced, backing toward the house.

And then she was gone, leaving you and Tara alone in the backyard with three weeks of silence hanging between you like a wall.

"Hi," you said finally, because someone had to say something.

"Hi."

Tara was still standing by the door, like she was ready to bolt at any moment. She was wearing a black dress that you tried not to notice, and her hair was down in loose waves that caught the light from the house.

"Anika said you were looking for me."

"I was." She took a step closer, then stopped. "We need to talk."

"About?"

"About Valentine's Day. About the last three weeks. About whatever the hell is happening between us."

Your pulse quickened. "I thought we were back to pretending we couldn't stand each other."

"Yeah, well, that's not working out so well for me."

"Join the club."

She took another step closer, and you could see the conflict in her expression, the way she was fighting with herself about whatever she'd come here to say.

"I've been thinking," she said.

"Dangerous habit."

"Don't." The sharpness in her voice surprised you both. "Don't do that. Don't deflect with jokes. Not right now."

You nodded, chastened. "Sorry. What have you been thinking about?"

"About why I've been avoiding you. About why I've been going out every night and bringing home people whose names I don't remember. About why I can't stop thinking about you even when I'm with someone else."

The honesty in her voice made your chest tight. "Tara—"

"I'm not done." She was closer now, close enough that you could see the way her hands were trembling slightly. "I've been thinking about high school, about all those stupid pranks you used to pull, all those arguments we had that never seemed to be about anything important."

"Those were—"

"Let me finish." She took a deep breath. "I've been thinking about how I used to look forward to those arguments. How I used to get disappointed on days when you didn't try to annoy me. How I used to wonder what it would be like if you put all that energy into something else."

Your heart was beating so hard you were sure she could hear it.

"And I've been thinking about Valentine's Day," she continued. "About how easy it was, sitting there with you, watching movies and talking about nothing. About how it felt like we were finally being honest with each other."

"We were."

"No, we weren't. Because I didn't tell you the most important thing."

"Which was?"

She looked at you for a long moment, and you could see her gathering courage.

"That I've been in love with you since sophomore year of high school. That every time you pulled one of those pranks, I thought maybe it meant you saw me as more than just another person to annoy. That when you stopped doing it, I thought maybe I'd been wrong about everything."

The world tilted on its axis. Everything you thought you knew about high school, about the way she'd reacted to your attempts to get her attention, about the way she'd looked at you sometimes when she thought you weren't watching—all of it shifted into focus like a camera lens finally finding the right setting.

"You what?"

"I'm in love with you," she said again, like she needed to practice saying it. "I have been for years. And I know you probably don't—"

"I do."

She stopped mid-sentence. "What?"

"I do. Feel the same way. Have felt the same way. Since I first laid eyes on you."

"You—what?"

"All those pranks, all those stupid arguments—I was fifteen and didn't know how to tell you I thought you were the most incredible person I'd ever met. So I settled for any attention I could get, even if it was you being annoyed with me."

Tara stared at you like you'd just spoken in a foreign language. "Are you serious?"

"Dead serious."

"But you—we've been—"

"Idiots," you supplied. "We've been idiots."

"For years."

"Epic levels of idiocy."

She started laughing, and the sound was bright and disbelieving and so purely Tara that it made your chest ache with how much you'd missed it.

"Oh my God," she said, pressing her hands to her face. "We're absolute morons."

"One-hundred percent."

"I can't believe—" She stopped, looking at you with sudden seriousness. "Wait. If you've felt this way for years, why didn't you ever say anything?"

"Because you hated me."

"I never hated you."

"You had a funny way of showing it."

"I was trying to protect myself," she said quietly. "I thought if I let myself like you, really like you, you'd just use it against me somehow."

"I would never—"

"I know that now. But then? I was just a kid who didn't know how to handle having feelings for someone who seemed to enjoy making my life difficult."

"I never wanted to make your life difficult. I just wanted you to notice me."

"I always noticed you," she said. "I noticed everything."

The space between you felt charged, like the air before a thunderstorm. You could feel the weight of all the years of miscommunication, all the missed opportunities, all the times you'd both been too scared or too proud to say what you really meant.

"So what now?" you asked.

"I don't know," she admitted. "This is kind of uncharted territory for me."

"The being honest thing?"

"The being honest with you thing."

You took a step closer, and she didn't back away. "We could try it. See how it goes."

"It might be weird at first."

"Probably. But weird might be good for us."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. We've been doing the same dance for years. Maybe it's time to try a different song."

She smiled, and it was soft and real and directed at you in a way that made your heart do complicated things in your chest.

"I'd like that," she said.

"Good. Because I've been wanting to ask you something for about years now."

"What?"

"Would you like to go out with me? Like, on an actual date. Where we both know it's a date and we're not pretending it's something else."

Her smile widened. "I thought you'd never ask."

"Is that a yes?"

"That's a yes."

You felt like you could float away, like the ground beneath your feet had become optional. Years of wondering, of wanting, of thinking it was impossible—and it turned out to be as simple as finally being honest.

"Can I ask you something now?" Tara said.

"Anything."

"On Valentine's Day, when we were watching the movie—were you going to kiss me?"

Heat flooded your cheeks. "Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"Okay, definitely. But then you got that look like you were about to bolt, and I didn't want to push."

"I got that look because I was thinking about kissing you and it scared me."

"It scared you?"

"Terrified me. Because I wanted it so badly, and I thought if I let myself have it, I'd have to admit how I felt. And I wasn't ready for that yet."

"And now?"

She took another step closer, close enough that you could see the flecks of gold in her dark eyes.

"Now I'm tired of being scared."

"Good," you said. "Because I'm tired of pretending I don't want to kiss you."

"So why aren't you?"

"Because we're at a party in someone's backyard, and when I finally get to kiss you, I want it to be somewhere that means something."

"Somewhere that means something?"

"Somewhere that's ours. Not borrowed, not temporary. Ours."

She looked at you for a long moment, and you could see something shift in her expression, something that looked like understanding.

"My apartment," she said. "Tomorrow night. I'll make dinner."

"You cook?"

"I order takeout very efficiently."

"Even better."

She laughed, and the sound was warm and familiar and full of promise.

"It's a date," she said.

"It's a date."

From inside the house, you could hear the music getting louder, voices getting more animated as the party hit its stride. But out here in the backyard, it felt like you and Tara existed in your own bubble, separate from everything else.

"I should probably go," she said eventually, though she didn't move.

"Probably."

"I came with friends, and they're going to wonder where I disappeared to."

"Right."

"And you should probably go back to that girl you were talking to. She seemed nice."

"Maya's great," you said. "But she's not you."

"No," Tara said, and there was something satisfied in her voice. "She's not."

"Are you jealous, Carpenter?"

"Maybe a little," she admitted. "Is that weird?"

"No weirder than me spending three weeks stalking your Instagram stories to see who you were with."

"You were stalking my Instagram?"

"Observing. Casually."

"Uh-huh."

"Okay, fine. Stalking. But in my defense, you were posting a lot."

"I was trying to make you jealous."

"Mission accomplished."

She smiled, looking pleased with herself. "Good to know."

"So tomorrow night," you said.

"Tomorrow night."

"What time?"

"Seven?"

"I'll be there."

"Good." She started to turn toward the house, then stopped. "Y/N?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you. For being honest."

"Thank you for not running away when I did."

"I almost did. I've been sitting in my car for twenty minutes trying to work up the courage to come in here."

"I'm glad you did."

"Me too."

She headed for the door, and you watched her go, still not quite believing that the conversation had actually happened. Just before she reached the house, she turned back.

"Hey, Y/N?"

"Yeah?"

"Wear something nice tomorrow. I want our first real date to be special."

"Define nice."

"Something that's not flannel."

"You're really going to limit my options like that?"

"I'm sure you'll figure it out."

And then she was gone, disappearing into the house and leaving you alone in the backyard with the biggest smile you'd had in weeks.

You pulled out your phone to text Anika, but she'd already beaten you to it.

Nika: saw tara leave. she looked happy. please tell me you two finally got your shit together

You: We have a date tomorrow

Nika: FINALLY. i was starting to think i was going to have to lock you in a room together

You: don't get any ideas

Nik: too late. already planning the wedding

You were still smiling when Maya appeared beside you.

"So," she said, settling back onto the bench. "How'd it go?"

"Really well, actually."

"I can tell. You look like someone just told you you won the lottery."

"I did."

"I'm happy for you," she said, and she sounded like she meant it. "Even though it means I'm going back to the drawing board for my evening plans."

"Sorry about that."

"Don't be. Like I said, the complicated things are usually worth fighting for."

"Yeah," you said, thinking about Tara's smile, about the way she'd looked at you when she finally said the words you'd been waiting years to hear. "They really are."

The rest of the party passed in a blur. You found Anika and told her you were ready to go home, and she was so pleased with herself for orchestrating the evening that she didn't even give you grief about leaving early.

As you walked back to your apartment, you couldn't stop thinking about tomorrow night. After years of wondering, of wanting, of thinking it was impossible—you finally had a real chance with Tara. And this time, you weren't going to let fear or pride or miscommunication get in the way.

This time, you were going to get it right.

[thelioncourts]

Please do talk about the racism in the IWTV fandom. I wish more white people spoke up about it because the Black people who do are harassed so badly.

I can't encapsulate all of the racism in the fandom in one post (it rears an ugly head in almost all aspects of iwtv fan-stuff) so I'm going to focus on the current video-views conversation happening because my mind is blown at how dismissive people are being - I shouldn't be surprised, but !! I continue to be last year, during sdcc, I made a couple tweets about how the fandom was more than ready to sideline jacob and louis and how interviews spent more time focusing on a not-even-close-s3 than on s2 which had only finished airing not even a month earlier and, let me tell you - people did not like that I said that. I got so much flack for it, from a million different parts of the fandom, and there was nothing to do but move on from it. however, we've seen this to be true over and over again and it continues to be true.

now, to talk about the video views, let's talk about what that is; in creative company (my faveeee interviewers that interview the iwtv cast) did an interview with jacob and an interview with sam. jacob's has not even half of the views sam's interview has, despite being posted first and everything.

we've got people on twitter saying this is the fault of "so called" louis stans who don't actually listen to jacob and have a fanon version of him in their head. and you know what, I think there is absolutely conversation to be had about that...but that conversation is not relevant to this, because this is systemic racism and bias at their worst.

jacob videos get less views for a multitude of reasons, and each reason is genuinely based in racism. I probably won't even cover all of them here, but I'm going to do my best. 1. this isn't necessarily unique to iwtv. audiences of shows with black and white characters almost always favor white characters, even if the black character is the lead/one of the leads. if there is an ensemble with a diverse cast, you will almost always find audiences lean toward the white characters as opposed to anyone else. this can be seen in stuff like sleepy hollow, the star wars franchise, and here's a link to an article about a study that breaks down racism in the entertainment industry

2. I've seen people try to point out that, statistically, lestat is just a more popular character than louis so this makes sense. and lestat is more popular than louis and that does make sense given that lestat appears in every tvc book and is the protagonist for almost all of them. but the show /is/ an entirely different beast. jacob is more well-known than sam, having been on GoT, having a successful music career (predominantly in the uk but successful), and having been more active on social media pre-2020 contributes to that. and he has been the main lead of the first two seasons of iwtv, the only two seasons that have aired. and it's not like jacob isn't charming and personable and beautiful and intelligent and stuff sooooooooo what's the difference? 3. there are more people than the iwtv fandom likes to think/knows about that detest this show because it's the "woke" vampire show, because they've changed so much of AR's story, because jacob doesn't look like louis in the books, etc. I was scrolling on facebook just today and had a recommended tvc post that popped up and it was ragging on the show and praising the movie, but in the comments the people were talking about how sam is a perfect lestat (he is) and they wish he was on something better, AR would have loved him but clearly hates the show even from her grave because her son refuses to comment on it, etc. this is not the first time I've seen this sentiment, not the last I'll see it. there was a recent article posted about the show and several of the comments on it were racist, going as far as using slurs, because people do not fuck with this show because jacob was cast in it and he is black. again, I'm sure there are more reasons, but it's crazy to watch people dismiss this when the answer is simultaneously simple and not even necessarily an accusation of the entirety of the iwtv fandom. those views and that view difference are not a fandom difference - that is a larger problem that is rooted in systemic racism and bias by general audiences and that bleeds into fandom and we see it every single day

[funeralprocession]

#1, I wrote a thing... This is weird, self-posting without sticking a Nagito sprite on it but I'll endure, probably.

I'm not sure how often I'll write, probably not very? And this is actually the second Oumaeda thing I wrote (the first one isn't getting posted, it's not terrible (like, in terms of the subject matter, it wasn't scary or anything) but it was exceptionally low-effort as well as being overtly smutty).

For the record, everybody in dangan is an adult to me. Just putting that out there, short, annoying adults are still adults, even if you find them annoying (and short) XD!!

The first story is referenced in this one a few times, but the important things to know about it are: - Kichi was deliberately staying close to Nagito, testing him to see if he was going to get bothered enough to leave - He was doing everything in his power to force him away if he was going to go - It didn't work XD!! Nagito is slightly out of character (here and in the first one); we (Skyler and I) figure Nagito would be incredibly unfamiliar with someone showing him that type of attention... Not just hanging around him a lot, but when Kichi started being aggressively flirtatious, that was new and he didn't know what was happening, essentially. He's not normally this nervous, but he didn't have anyone showing him that type of attention prior.

Anyway, here's the thing, if you're reading this right now it means I actually posted it XD!!! (I'll also be colour-coding their speech, since I didn't always denote which the speaker was, hopefully that won't be too distracting or whatever.)

- - -

"Ask me something," Kichi commanded; his tone was friendly but it wasn't a request. "Aww, I couldn't do that," Nagito complained and averted his eyes, "Scum like me has no right to ask anything of you." "I'll answer whatever you wanna know," Kichi responded playfully, knowing his response might be a lie but electing to leave that part off.

Nagito was equal parts frustrating and intriguing - Kichi couldn't settle on either thing for certain. It was a good thing, of course - Kichi wouldn't get bored with him. He felt like he'd picked an interesting one, and had nothing to regret.

"I do have something," Nagito finally spoke up, his voice calm and cool as usual. "Let's have it." "It's really none of my business…"

Kichi groaned and slumped his shoulders - was Nagito really going to ask about his organization? He was hoping he would ask something more fun than that. He didn't blame him for being curious, of course… After he'd gone digging and found absolutely nothing, that had to be--

"Have you ever kissed anybody before?" Kichi yelped in immediate surprise, "Have I ever what?" "C'mon," Nagito smiled serenely, "I know you'll never tell me anything about your organization. I wouldn't expect you to." "When I told you to ask me something, I was--" Kichi huffed, crossing his arms over his chest and feigning indignance, "We're… Uh…"

He forgot the word. He was so flustered by being asked that question, he forgot the word he wanted. The longer he fixated on it, the more nervous he looked-- This was bad.

"Is that a 'no'?" Nagito was still smiling casually, "Too busy with your leadership responsibilities, huh?" "Y-yeah, busy," Kichi quickly agreed, "I… I'm surprised you would even ask that, it's-- It's not like I have time for that kind of… Whatever! Never wanted to, never needed to! If I wanted to, I definitely could have, though--" "Of course," Nagito nodded slightly.

That tone of voice - Kichi heard it every day for the last several weeks… Or months? He wasn't sure how long it'd been, but he'd heard Nagito speak often and in that very specific way… The reason he couldn't tell whether Nagito was frustrating or intriguing was, in part, because of that voice. The way he expressed himself… The things he said, the way he insulted himself but it felt like his actual target was--

It was intriguing. Kichi decided, it was intriguing. Nagito was an incredibly fascinating individual.

Things had been a little… Not tense, but 'unusual' between them, after the incident, when Kichi was testing Nagito to see if he would finally be pushed away… But it wasn't because Nagito had been avoiding him. Was Kichi feeling… Guilty?

"Hey," Nagito spoke up after a rather lengthy silence, "Are you ok?" "I'm fine!" Kichi responded too quickly, feeling even more embarrassed in an instant.

"Y'know…" Nagito began after another slightly awkward pause, "I'm not judging you, I know you're busy with your organization and all… You're not a loser like me… I haven't kissed anybody before, but that's just what you would expect out of someone like me, isn't it?" "I'm sure you were too busy too," Kichi waved a dismissive hand, "Not everybody has time for… Bullshit, or whatever."

Kichi hated everything he was saying, but he was too flustered to stop and express himself properly. Had he completely lost the upperhand? Everything he was saying and feeling was so awkward and annoying-- Did Nagito know what he was doing? Was it an accident?

"I appreciate the benefit of doubt, but I really wasn't busy at all," Nagito confessed, "I guess I wasn't really trying, but there wouldn't have been any point-- not much, anyway."

Kichi started thinking about that day again… He couldn't stop - something about the discomfort and the conversation was making him think about that time… Feeling Nagito rubbing him… First with his hand, then…

Kichi squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force the thoughts out of his mind. "Sorry," Nagito gently apologized; Kichi glanced at him and found he was still smiling faintly. "Sorry for wh--" "I'm sorry for putting that thought in your head," Nagito clarified, "The thought of… Anybody… With me, I'm sure that was disturbing. Sorry you had to see that." "It is not disturbing!" Kichi asserted too quickly once again, "I mean-- It's fine, I wasn't even thinking about that." "You looked troubled. I assumed that was why."

Did… Nagito not remember what happened? Had he really forgotten? Kichi didn't want to ask in case it had completely slipped his mind…

"Guess I've been thinking about things recently," Nagito began, "Stuff I didn't really bother with before, mostly." "Huh? What kinda things?" Kichi straightened his posture; the topic change could prove useful. If Nagito had something on his mind, the distraction might pull Kichi out of the gutter he was suddenly struggling to drag himself out of--

"I have no right to ask, of course--" "Just say it, Nagito!" Kichi complained, "We're friends, right?" "We are?" Kichi furrowed his brow and glanced over, unsure of what that was supposed to mean… Was Nagito saying he didn't think of Kichi as being his friend--

His expression was… Normal. He didn't look upset or bothered in any way. What did that mean?

"Yes," Kichi responded resolutely, forcefully, leaving no alternative, "We're friends." "Ah."

That was how Kichi conducted himself with everyone else: nothing was up for debate. He just took what he wanted. He didn't wait for permission, he didn't ask politely, he took control, he steered, even if they fought back… So why was it so difficult now? What was wrong with Nagito? What about him made Kichi so… Flustered? And why was Kichi enjoying it?

"I like you too," Nagito informed him, "I said that before, but I figured how I felt wouldn't mean anything--" "You remember!" Kichi blurted, "W-what happened, I mean? You remember?" "Of course," Nagito chuckled, "Did you think I forgot?" "I mean, kinda," Kichi slumped his shoulders again, "Since you… I dunno, didn't… Whatever."

He was embarrassing himself again; he couldn't stop.

"That's why I'm here, isn't it? Because you said I'm yours now, you weren't going to let me go?" "Y-yeah," Kichi confirmed, "That was a loyalty test." "Hmm," Nagito glanced at Kichi from the side of his eye, the corner of his mouth slightly upturned in a faint, wry smile.

"Have you done that with many of your associates?" Nagito asked after an uncomfortable silence. "Th-they received specialized-- Ok, fine! No! What do you want me to say?" Nagito chuckled softly and shrugged, "Nothing in particular, we're just having a conversation."

Kichi's face was burning with embarrassment. He couldn't remember anybody ever getting the upperhand over him at any point - if they ever had it, they didn't keep it very long. He had a way to weaseling out of situations, but Nagito had a way of keeping him completely off-balance. He couldn't tell if Nagito was even aware of it-- He must have been. There was no alternative. There was no way it was an accident. Nagito was clever, and constantly besmirching himself was just another tactic - Kichi was sure of it.

"Have you ever heard of the Pocky game?" Nagito asked casually. "Of course!" Kichi sat up straight and pushed his shoulders back, determined to regain his control over everything - himself, the conversation, Nagito, everything. He was fairly certain the feeling he had - that unusual enjoyment, was just because the experience was a new one. No one had ever backed him into a corner before and kept him there. It wasn't boring. (Was that even what Nagito was trying to do? Did he have an angle? Was Kichi getting in his own way?)

"I kinda wanted to do it," Nagito mumbled with a slightly embarrassed shrug, "N-not right now, I mean… Just in general, at some point, but--" "What's wrong?" Kichi grinned and nudged Nagito with his shoulder playfully, "Don't you like me? Am I not good enough~?"

Kichi felt like he was trying too hard but he refused to back down.

"I couldn't," Nagito chuckled, "Someone like me?" "You're not so bad, Nagito," Kichi felt his nervousness dissipating - it really was him getting in his own way. Nagito wasn't doing anything, he was sure of it now, he'd just been imagining--

"Are you sure you want to?" Nagito asked in a somewhat ominous tone, "You seemed kinda distressed before… Are you sure it's ok?" "Oh, that," Kichi waved his hand and grinned, "That was something else, I was thinking about-- Never mind, it's not important." "Ah, I see," Nagito smiled faintly once again, "Good, I was starting to think I was bothering you, maybe you were reconsidering." "Reconsidering?" "What you said before, about how I'm yours now," Nagito reminded him casually, "I was thinking you had regrets, even though I would completely understand if you did." "Nah, you're mine," Kichi nonchalantly asserted, "You just kinda threw me off before, but I'm fine." "You really thought I was going to try to ask about your organization again, huh?" "Nah," Kichi grinned, "You're not boring. You know better." Nagito smiled once again, the silence setting Kichi on edge immediately.

Something about silence from Nagito, even when he was smiling, was unnerving. Kichi assumed it was because he was difficult to read and figure out… Which wasn't entirely bad, just nerve-racking.

"What have you done? With another person, I mean," Nagito requested softly after a momentary pause.

Kichi couldn't remember if he'd directly admitted to never having kissed anyone before - why would he do that? Did he lie or not? He couldn't remember!

"Besides what we did with each other, I mean," Nagito clarified after another brief span of quiet, "Sorry, excluding that." "You go first," Kichi grinned mischievously, suddenly realizing he couldn't lie his way out of the situation at hand. "Ah, that was my first time," Nagito replied modestly, "Not a surprise, I'm sure… I… Doubt it was even any good, I didn't know what I was doing…"

Thinking about that event again--

"Ha," Kichi chuckled breathily, then barely managed to regain composure, "Y-you weren't bad." "Do you have any Pocky around here? I noticed… Sorry for paying attention but I noticed you like sweets." "You're allowed to notice things, Nagito. In fact, that's a good quality to have in a servant." "Servant?" "Well, yeah," Kichi adjusted his tone, pretending to get impatient, as if the matter was an obvious one, "You're my servant now, what did you think I meant when I said you belonged to me?" "Oh, aha," Nagito chuckled softly, "That makes sense." "I could send you to go get some for us-- some Pocky, I mean," Kichi rambled, attempting to maintain the illusion that he had secured control, "But there's no rush. We can do that any time." "That's true," Nagito nodded slightly in agreement.

He was struggling. He didn't want to let Nagito out of his sight. He didn't want to have to wait for several frustrating minutes - or longer, if Nagito got held up somewhere, if someone pulled him aside and started talking to him… He liked the idea of having the game as a cover, but he couldn't possibly wait that long. He wished he'd had some on-hand but it was obviously too late, it would do no good to stew about it.

"I just decided, we don't need it," Kichi stated firmly, "U-unless you would rather have it…" "Huh?" Nagito blinked, "You actually want my input?" "Why wouldn't I?" "Because I'm just a servant," Nagito stated simply, as if the answer was obvious, "Surely you wouldn't require feedback from me." "Will you stop that," Kichi huffed, "Why are you this way? Who hurt you, Nagito?"

Nagito was silent for a moment, which was strangely disturbing.

"Are you actually asking?" "Of course," Kichi responded quickly, "Did something happen to you?" "People just don't really care how I feel about things," Nagito shrugged passively, "It's not important." "It's important to me, I care about how you feel!" Kichi insisted, "Y'know, I might be annoying and pushy but I'm not mean - ok, I am but I'm not mean all the time." "You're not," Nagito confirmed, "You're not any of those things." "Call me 'master'," Kichi turned his nose up and smirked, suddenly deciding his mission was to push Nagito out of his self-hating comfort zone, beginning with forcing him to address Kichi using an embarrassingly respectful title. Surely he would fight back - maybe.

"Ok, master," Nagito nodded without any hesitation; Kichi felt like someone punched him in the stomach as soon as he heard those words. "Hey!" Kichi objected without delay, "You're supposed to-- I mean--!" "What's the problem, master?" Nagito asked serenely, "I'm your servant, and that sounded like an order." "You're too agreeable," Kichi complained, "You were supposed to get mad, you were supposed to be offended!" Nagito shrugged passively once again, completely unphased by the command he'd been given.

So maybe the self-deprecating 'facade' wasn't a facade at all. Perhaps Nagito really was like that? And the way he spoke was genuinely how he felt?

"Are you messin' with me?" Kichi demanded, "You have to tell me if this is a joke!" "Sorry, I'm not the best at jokes. My reputation precedes me in a lot of ways, but that isn't one of the things I'm known for."

It was uncharted territory - most of the time, people fought back against Kichi and his attempts to control situations and conversations. He actually preferred it, since it was a challenge to eventually get them to fall in line via any means necessary. Not violence, of course, but trickery and lies - the fun ways. He thought it was funny when people would lash out at him using violence; they were so bothered by his behaviour, they resorted to their baser instincts. It was funny, but also boring - it was predictable and they were being so normal.

"I want you to…" Kichi began his next command, feeling like he could have more fun with Nagito than expected. Nagito waited for Kichi to locate his words, showing absolutely no signs of distress, just like he hadn't before.

When Kichi was following him closely, tugging him around by his elbow, even shoving his hands into Nagito's pockets just to see how far he could be pushed before he began to push back… Nagito was completely unphased by it all. He was either incredibly patient? More-so than anyone Kichi had ever met? Or he might have been enjoying someone wanting to be around him.

"I want you to teach me how to kiss," Kichi grinned triumphantly, "With tongue, that's an order." "Wh-what?" Nagito stammered, "I told you, I don't know how--!" "Too bad, that was an order!" Kichi grinned even more, "Also, don't forget to call me 'master'!" "This is an impossible request, master, I'm sorry--" "It's not impossible, you're just being a quitter!" Kichi complained, "I gave you a task, now do it, Nagito!" "Ha," Nagito chuckled and brushed his hair away from his eyes, only for it to fall right back into place.

'Pleasepleasepleaseplease,' Kichi was silently pleading, begging Nagito would actually attempt to follow orders. He discovered he didn't want to issue commands and take charge - not all the time, anyway. How could he get Nagito to give him what he wanted without commanding him?

"C'mon, Nagito," Kichi whined, "I need you." "Huh?" "Yeah, I was too busy with my organization before, not like I can just… Y'know?" "Hmm," Nagito's gaze softened; it wasn't that he had been upset, but slightly concerned with the task he'd been assigned. "You asking me if I ever… It made me realize that I kinda missed out? And I don't like that," Kichi explained, "I mean, I don't like that I missed out, you asking me things is fine. Sorta, depending on what you're asking."

"Am I gonna get in trouble if I teach you poorly?" Nagito asked after a momentary silence, "I mean, I would deserve it but I did warn you, I don't know how--" "Nah, you won't get in trouble," Kichi asserted firmly and waved a dismissive hand.

Something was wrong… Even if Nagito did what he was commanded to do--

"I want you to teach me as if you already know what you're doing," Kichi clarified. "That's impossible!" "'That's impossible, ~master~'," Kichi corrected mischievously, "And it's not! You're just being obstinate!" "You're being obstinate!" Nagito argued before shrinking back, "Ah! S-sorry!" "No, do that!" Kichi asserted sternly, "Tell me I'm being annoying, I am being annoying! I'm getting on your nerves! Tell me off!" "I don't know what you want!" Nagito fretted, "This doesn't make any sense, master." "Sure it does, you're just afraid of making a mistake, and you're not making one," Kichi assured him, feeling an odd sense of deja-vu from the time before, "I'm not setting you up, you won't get in trouble."

There was something absurd about everything that was going on. Kichi still wasn't entirely convinced Nagito's self-loathing wasn't an act and yet there he was, trying to force him to stop. Was it possible? Was this going to be the thing that forced Nagito away? The realization hit Kichi like an ice cold tidal wave. 'Oh no.'

Before he could fully regain control of his senses, he was suddenly laying on his back with a pair of greyish eyes staring down at him behind a lock of fluffy white hair. "N-Nagito?" Kichi asked timidly. "Is there a problem, master? Didn't you tell me you wanted me to teach you how to kiss?" "Y-yes!" Kichi agreed in an instant, suddenly self-conscious about how over-eager he sounded.

"Can I sit up?" Kichi whined, attempting to disguise his eagerness from a moment before, "This is weird. Why are you on top of me?" "I want your full attention," Nagito cooed, "And this way, I have it. Master." "Ha," Kichi panted, finding he was already getting excited despite how nothing happened yet.

"I can't… N-Nagito," Kichi attempted to close his knees but Nagito was kneeling between them, "H-hey." "What's wrong, master?" Nagito asked, his tone somewhat gleeful, "Did you need something before we start?"

Kichi wasn't sure if Nagito was just that good at feigning confidence, or if this was proof that his normal demeanor was false. It didn't matter, it didn't change what was happening.

"Can… Can you please move?" Kichi asked meekly, "I can't… Uh…" "Sorry, I can't," Nagito responded calmly, leaning in a little closer and gently pinching Kichi's chin between his thumb and forefinger, "It's part of the lesson. I don't want you closing your legs." "Ha, fuck," Kichi panted before regaining control over himself and whining, "Th-that wasn't part of it!" "Would you like to call it off? Master?"

Was that what was going on? Nagito was attempting to force Kichi's hand, make him rescind the order so he wouldn't be forced to fulfill the obligation?"

"No!" Kichi asserted, "Teach me how to kiss! Let's see how good you are, I don't even need to close my legs, I'm not uncomfortable at all!" Nagito chuckled softly, "I don't believe you, sorry."

It was always fun when people obeyed Kichi's commands - but it was also fun when they reacted with force and hostility, refusing to follow his orders. This was… Even more fun than both of those things combined.

"Let's go, I'm waiting~" Kichi grinned, clasping his hands over his abdomen, doing his best to appear casual while he was stuck laying on his back. Nagito caressed Kichi's cheek very softly with his fingertips; Kichi's grin disappeared. Nagito was studying his lips for a moment before glancing back up, looking Kichi in the eye. "Stick your tongue out," Nagito ordered very softly. "Huh?" Without responding aloud, Nagito leaned in and gently licked Kichi's bottom lip, slipping his tongue inside without delay; Kichi eagerly cooperated and carefully adjusted his posture as Nagito laid down on top of him.

Kichi realized he'd never wanted to before? He didn't know why… But he never wanted to, with anyone. He wasn't sure if he regretted that - never even considering it at any point, or if that was speaking for itself: no one was ever interesting enough to him, apparently--

"Ha," Kichi panted, grasping onto Nagito's arms in an involuntary bid to keep him from pulling away. "This lesson's a pretty bad one, huh?" Nagito smirked faintly, his breath tickling Kichi's neck, "Not sure what I'm doing here." "Y-yeah," Kichi agreed, unsure what he was agreeing with, just that he didn't want to argue about it, wanting Nagito to continue as quickly as possible.

It was one of the few times he had nothing to say - or rather, didn't want to have a discussion.

"Why are you breathing so hard, master?" Nagito teased quietly, "Are you ok? Do you need something?" "I'm fine!" Kichi asserted, flustered, "Whatever!" "I dunno," Nagito continued, supporting himself by leaning on his left elbow, delicately caressing Kichi's cheek with his right thumb again, "You were making some noises…" "I said I'm fine!" Kichi insisted, unable to explain something he couldn't even remember doing. "You sure?" "Yes!" "Well, if you say so… Just kinda sounded to me like… Maybe I just got your dirty-voice out of you, but we weren't even doing anything yet… I heard it before, you know."

Kichi was blushing hard - he couldn't lie about that, either. He'd completely lost control of himself before; Nagito had him at a couple of distinct disadvantages.

"I'm sure I'm making a mistake," Nagito cooed softly, "Imagine… Someone like me? Getting that type of reaction out of you when I've barely even done anything at all~? That would be so embarrassing for you, huh?"

Before Kichi could respond in any way, Nagito leaned back in, a little more forceful that time, initiating a new kiss that Kichi eagerly participated in. He attempted to covertly slip his hand down between his legs and rub himself as he was getting uncomfortably hard, but Nagito pulled his hand away and pinned it onto the bed by his wrist. "Nope," Nagito smirked, "Sorry, master." "Hey!" Kichi huffed, "That wasn't part of it! You were supposed to teach me to kiss, there was never anything about I'm not allowed to jerk off!" "It was implied," Nagito responded casually, his voice as calm as ever, "I'm not done with you yet, so you're not allowed." Kichi whimpered pathetically and attempted to sit up enough to initiate a kiss on his own; Nagito obliged, laying him back down immediately without separating from his captive.

- - -

That's it, sorry about the abrupt ending but that was all I wrote on that one, it was just going to get worse anyway XD!!

[superkooku]

The idea of mentioning Asclepius and Atalanta probably came from my posts, lol.

I'm a bit more skeptical and vocally voiced my preference for the "canon" relationships in multiple posts.

But I kinda agree with your point and can completely see where you're coming from.

Personality if the crackships are funny and/or make sense thematically, I'm ok with them. EXCEPT if the figure is explicitly virgin or monogamous (seeing Athena or Hippolytus shipped with someone, Hera cheating on Zeus... NOPE).

For example, I can see where the Polyidus x Asclepius idea could come from. They're both medicine enthusiasts who like snakes and have a link with prophecy (the former is a seer and the latter the son of the prophecy god).

In fact, they swap roles according to sources. It's so much of a coincidence that I headcannon Asclepius had something to do with Polyidus finding the cure to resurrect the dead.

Maybe he transformed into a serpent or gave the serpent the herb for Polyidus. Because a random-ass snake putting some herbs in its mouth CAN'T literally undo Thanatos' work, I refuse to believe that 😂. An animal randomly accomplishing a miracle, without divine intervention or something, never even happens anywhere else in Greek mythology.

So yeah, it's less out of pocket.

Asclepius being shipped with Atalanta made me upset but mostly because of specific context. Thinking about it, it isn't THAT bad or even this book's worst flaw.

But, in the specific retelling I'm reading, the randomness of it is also mixed with a personal pet peeve of mine : that a deep and affectionate male and female friendship tends to mean "future romance" That's why I'm so upset about it.

Idk, I just prefer seeing Asclepius with his doctor wife. Plus people actually have flexibility to invent her a personality since she's a minor character. And there are a few other choices for Atalanta.

Asclepius x Atalanta (or x Polyidus) could work as a thing before Epione but I don't see the retelling randomly cancelling on the couple it advertised, not even for myth accuracy. Especially since Epione isn't a popular figure. That's not how these kinds of stories usually work, they have to be endgame.

Perseus X Medusa is 1000 times worse to me, I won't deny it, because he killed her AND that's actually an insult to the beautiful romance with Andromeda

Also, if you want to be insane, come on ! At least dig deep enough ! Even the original sources (Achilles x Medea) and a fricking Google search accident can make more creative mythology crackships than that.

And ofc, I criticize the ship, not the shippers, I still respect them, they do what they want to do, bla bla bla.

(Also, Pasiphae cheating on Minos is a really ironic concept when we see how she cursed him for when he cheats on her with other women 😂😂)

tl;dr : I'm fine with discussing mythology crackships that could make sense, can be inserted in the timeline or are so insane it's funny and... platonic friendship between men and women as a focus point is underrated.

sometimes i gotta lock in and remember that I'm not even a mythology purist, I'm actually quite ok with crackships. i guess when the crackship or fanship gets too popular it becomes annoying as fuck or nonsensical. or peoples lust for money and using crackships to pursue that audience without caring for mythology. if a crackship becomes the main ship, its not a crackship and it sucks. Basically, I don't even really care if Atlanta's being shipped with Asclepius lmao. and I like those two characters. but I do care if Medusa is being shipped with perseus.

shout out to my personal ship ideas

Polyidus x asclepius pasiphae x Daedalus oh and danae x medusa

[silenzahra]

... Wait, what do you mean it'll be the first anniversary of my fic Keeping you warm in only ten days.

TEN DAYS.

WHERE DID TIME GO.

[racke7]

As I don't want to leave negativity on someone else's post, but saw something WILDLY out-of-character, when an actual in-character relationship is RIGHT FUCKING THERE.

Sakura and Shirou's kitchen-relationship:

Shirou: "I need to get there first and start breakfast, or-"

Sakura: *innocently smug* "Hello senpai, I got started without you"

Shirou internally: "Noooo, my kitchen-time is being stolen"

Shirou externally: "Ah. Well, if you've already started, how can I help?"

Sakura internally: "Yay! I won first-place, and I get to make senpai happy with my cooking now!"

Rin and Archer's kitchen-relationship:

Rin: "How dare you-!"

Archer: *smirking like a bastard* "Oh? Have I touched a nerve, Rin? Were you under the mistaken impression that your chocolate-chip cookies are in any way adequate beyond the bargain-bin at a kindergarten bake-sale?"

Rin: "... I will fucking END YOU"

Archer: *scoffs* "I should be so lucky"

[avirael]

The Frozen Lake

It was the third day since he had stopped feeling like dying.

About a week ago he had woken up from his far too lifelike fever dream and a few days later the last spikes of the fever itself had been gone too just like the hallucinations it had brought in his sleep.

He still had been sick though and welcomed Rael telling him to stay in bed until he was perfectly healthy again all too eagerly.

While he still sneezed every now and then, it was at least tolerable now, still annoying but he didn’t feel incredibly uncomfortable anymore.

That day, just like the last and also the ones before that, he had awoken late. Against Rael’s order to stay in bed he had found the courage to get up and take a look out of the window. It was a sunny day, which in Coerthas still meant that it was bitterly cold though. But the sun was shining brightly and already high in the sky too which meant it had to be almost midday. He had slept way too long again, way to many hours for a surprisingly dreamless sleep. Or maybe it was exactly the lack of dreams that allowed him to finally rest, after all in the past there rarely had been good ones…

For a moment he considered to go downstairs and ask for a late breakfast if that wasn’t too insolent given the late hour but then a knock sounded from the door.

Quickly he hurried back to bed, just in case it was Rael, but the person who carefully peeked into the room a few seconds later wasn’t a viera.

“Ah, you are awake! That’s good!”, Haurchefant exclaimed happily and brought a small tray with hot soup and also something warm to drink. “It is so late already, you must be horribly hungry. Alphinaud checked in on you earlier but you were still fast asleep and he didn’t have the heart to wake you.”

A little uncertain on how to answer to that, A’viloh just nodded. Haurchefant grinned, put down a mug on the bedside table and handed A‘viloh a comfortingly warm bowl filled with some rather delicious smelling stew.

Instead of fetching the chair from the small desk by the window, Haurchefant sat down at the lower end of the bed balancing the tray with his own lunch on his knees. Rael once told him that ishgardian society had an absurd amount of strict and antiquated rules and so A’viloh couldn’t help but wonder, that although it seemed like a very appropriate distance to him, in Haurchefant’s hometown the fact alone that he dared to sit on someone else’s bed was probably scandalous.

“I hope you don’t mind me having lunch with you.”, the Elezen asked as he noticed A‘viloh staring.

Quickly the Miqo’te lowered his gaze to his bowl of soup. “Not at all.”, he muttered and tried a spoonful of the food just to change the topic. “Mhh, this is very good!”, he mumbled, still chewing, surprised by how good this really was compared to the bland food and bitter teas Rael had usually brought him these last few days. It must have been the Viera’s way of punishing him for running away.

Haurchefant laughed and then for a while they ate in silence.

“You look a lot healthier already.”, the Elezen stated after a while with an amiable smile on his face before taking a sip from his mug.

A‘viloh shrugged a little embarrassed, since it had been his own fault that he hadn’t been well in the first place. “Only because all of you took so good care of me.”

Haurchefant nodded. “You know, you had us all horribly worried right?”

“Sorry about that.”, he said and guitily looked into his mug.

Curiously Haurchefant eyed him for a moment. “Why did you do that anyway? Run out into the storm.”

A bit surprised A’viloh looked up. Had they all thought he had done this on purpose? “There wasn’t a storm when I left! What do I know about weather? I didn’t expect it to start snowing, let alone that much!”

That made the Elezen chuckle again but he still looked at him expecting an answer.

“Still… why did you leave?”

“I assumed Rael told you…”, A’viloh replied not sure what Haurchefant wanted to hear exactly. He nodded. “Rael did. But maybe I want to hear it from you…”

A’viloh sighed. His plan hadn’t been very smart and he felt a little uncomfortable having to explain his reasons to someone else, when in retrospect it didn’t make much sense even to his own ears.

“You know the… circumstances under which we fled Ul’dah… I couldn’t… um… the fact that we didn’t even know what happened to our friends… I wanted to find out, because it doesn’t seem fair to me that we escaped while all of them didn’t…”

“Mhh…”, Haurchefant nodded thoughtfully but let go off the topic for now. Instead he asked, „And how are you feeling today?”

Somehow that question confused A’viloh even more.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a simple question, isn’t it?”, he said still smiling politely.

Of course it was a simple question. Just the answer felt unreasonable complicated to him. To make things even more difficult people who asked such a question usually wanted to hear “I‘m fine, and you?” or “Very good, thank you.” for an answer and rarely the truth. They certainly didn’t want to hear “A few days ago I was convinced I was going to die and honestly it wasn’t that bad, so now I‘m still not sure wether I am happy to still be alive or not”.

“Alright… I guess.”, he mumbled instead. He had never been a good liar and could only hope that this fact wasn’t too obvious for the Elezen.

“You know what?”, Haurchefant proclaimed after watching him thoughtfully for a second. “Today is a wonderful day. We should go for a walk.”

“A walk?!”, A’viloh exclaimed wide-eyed, as if he had just asked something unreasonable of him.

“Why not?”

A’viloh couldn’t think of a good reason why not, other than that he was supposed to stay in bed, so he shrugged.

“Where’s Rael?”, he asked instead.

Haurchefant smirked. “Do you need Rael’s permission to go outside?”

“Of course not.”, the Miqo’te protested. “But Rael will be mad if I run off again, especially against their orders to stay in bed.”

“Rael and Alphinaud went to the observatory earlier.”, Haurchefant explained. “We’ll be back before they are, I promise.”

What was A’viloh supposed to say against that and also against the expectant look on the Elezen’s face. He took another glimpse towards the window and decided that it looked nice enough to go outside.

“Fine.”

“Good!”, Haurchefant exclaimed happily and collected their empty bowls and mugs. “There should be warm clothes for you in the wardrobe. If you need anything else just ask someone. I’ll wait for you by the northern gate.”

After Haurchefant had left, A’viloh remained sitting in his bed for a moment longer contemplating on the Elezen’s question. Yes, he felt better again. But better in what comparison? Better than a few days ago when he had felt and also been half-dead? Though he didn’t feel sick anymore now, there still was a weigh on his heart. From his plan that had failed so spectacularly and even more so from the dreams he wouldn’t have minded to keep on dreaming forever.

Vehemently he shook his head and decided not to think about that now or he would just crawl back under the blanket of his comfortably warm bed again. Instead he got up and took a look into the wardrobe. Almost none of these were his own clothes of course since all he possessed were the ones he had worn on his body that day they fled Ul’dah. Very unsuitable for this climate. But neither did he see the borrowed clothes he had worn that night when he had tried to run away. Everything in here looked even softer and warmer like someone had wanted to make sure he was feeling comfortable. To his surprise the things didn’t look that much too big for him either, unlike his last set of clothes. Besides a few Hyur most people here at Camp Dragonhead were grown up Elezen but these clothes looked like they belonged to neither. Maybe it were clothes for Elezen children, he wondered and also thought that in that case someone must have brought them here just for him.

Grateful for so much effort he picked a few pieces and got dressed. Lazily he ran his fingers through his hair to get rid of the worst knots but the look into the small mirror at the washbasin, where his tired face stared back at him reproachfully, just made him sigh. Once he was ready he took the warm coat out of the wardrobe too and went out to look for Haurchefant. Just as he had said, the Elezen was standing by the gate that led to the north-east, towards the ruins of the Steel Vigil.

From afar Haurchefant already recognised the Miqo’te, his bright red hair a singularity among all the people living here. Pleasantly smiling as always he waved at him and A’viloh couldn’t help but smile a little too and wave back as he hurriedly walked towards him.

“There you are! I see the clothes fit you nicely.”

A’viloh nodded.

“They do. Thank you very much for these.”

Haurchefant dismissively waved with one hand. “It’s the least I could do…”

But he had done a lot more than that, A’viloh thought. “I think there’s more I need to thank you for. Rael told me it was you who saved my life.”

“Mhhh…”, Haurchefant tilted his head as if he wasn’t sure if this statement was entirely the truth. “Rael is too humble. They played a bit of a role in that too. After all it was Rael who noticed you were gone. And it was also Rael who didn’t leave your bedside and tried their best to heal you.”

A’viloh remembered waking up and finding the usually quite touch-averse viera cuddled up to him with a look on their face so horribly sad like he had never seen on them before. Rael had pretended it was nothing but it had been a very unconvincing performance. Asked about it Alphinaud had only offered a few sentences about how worried Rael had looked and how they had used all kinds of spells he himself had never seen or heard of before, all of it to try and save him. It had made him feel even more guilty for his stupidity.

So maybe Haurchefant was right. But still it had been him who had risked going out into the storm to find him.

“Anyway. I still want to thank you! Honestly.”, he insisted. But how honestly was it really?

Sure, he was glad to still be alive. After all his plan hadn’t been to run out into a blizzard and freeze to death, although some of them seemed to think that was the case. But once he found himself in this situation he had to admit that he had welcomed his fate rather willingly. A fact that shocked even himself a little looking back at it now.

“You’re welcome. After all you wouldn’t be any help to your friends frozen to death out there.”, Haurchefant joked with a wry smile on his lips.

“I guess not...”, A’viloh muttered, the topic of his friends making his mood visibly sink again.

Of course the Elezen noticed and his smile turned into a playful grin. “But I acted a little selfish too, you know? I think Camp Dragonhead is a lot friendlier with your company and I would like to have you and your pretty smile around a little longer.”

For a moment A’viloh’s eyes shot up to look at the others face before he quickly pretended that something somewhere a little bit to his left was a lot more interesting. Sometimes Haurchefant randomly said things, A’viloh hadn’t had the slightest idea how to react to. Not because he was that oblivious but simply because it puzzled him. Nonetheless the air suddenly didn’t feel that cold anymore on his face.

Haurchefant was always very kind to him. Well, he mostly was kind to everybody but sometimes he seemed to admire him especially. Him of all people, although there was nothing special about him. Haurchefant sometimes spoke of him like he was one of the greatest heroes of all time and it felt so ridiculous to him. He was just silly, cowardly A‘viloh! What had he ever achieved in his miserable life to justify such admiration? The people called him a Warrior of Light but wasn’t that some grand overstatement? Some days he thought all of this had been a horrible mistake. A great misunderstanding! Then he wondered how he had ever gotten entangled in this madness in the first place and also if he ever would get out of it again. But what else should he do with his life anyway...

While A’viloh’s brain still screeched in desperate search for a proper response, Haurchefant seemed to realise he had flustered him and glossed it over by gesturing to the gate.

“How about we walk a few yalms? There’s something you need to see!”

Still too dumbstruck to speak or to even wonder what the Elezen was talking about, A’viloh nodded and then proceeded to follow him out into the snowy landscape.

After a few minutes Haurchefant paused and took a deep breath. “Isn’t the air wonderful today?”

A’viloh followed his example, breathed deeply and let his gaze wander over the snow covered landscape with a few pines here and there and the mountains and ruins of the Steel Vigil in the distance. The air was cool and fresh, still cold enough that the warm sun couldn’t melt the snow. Instead the rays of sunshine made the scenery shine and sparkle as if everything was covered not in ice but in millions over millions of tiny diamonds.

“It is.”, he answered and smiled, surprised how beautiful this inhospitable landscape could be, before with a sudden spark of curiosity he finally asked. “Where are we going?”

“It’s not far anymore.”, Haurchefant said with a grin on his face and pointed into another direction. Shortly after and only a bit further ahead they reached a small lake.

As they got closer A‘viloh noticed that it not only was covered in a layer of snow and ice but also that quite a few off-duty soldiers, given the proximity to the camp he assumed they had to be, were standing right on top of the frozen lake. No, they were not quite standing. It looked more like they were dancing or flying maybe. More or less gracefully they moved over the lake‘s surface in fluid swift strides, some just moving in wide circles and other swirling around this way or that. A’viloh had never seen something like this and it looked strange and impossible but at the same time very beautiful to him.

The two of them had almost reached the lake by then, A’viloh a few steps ahead to get a better look at the wondrous people on the ice and he already wanted to ask how they did that, when his attention was drawn elsewhere by a curious squawking sound.

“Oh! Look at them!”, the Miqo’te exclaimed, his fascinated smile still turning a little brighter, as he gestured to a small flock of wild geese resting at the shore of the lake. With ruffled feathers they sat closely huddled together at the edge of the ice and suddenly A‘viloh couldn’t help but worry about them. They looked so unbothered by his presence, sleeping through the day and all the hubbub around them, looking all exhausted and frozen with their puffed up feathers. Like anything could happen to them and they wouldn’t even mind.

Strangely he wondered what he himself had looked like when Haurchefant had found him unconscious in the snow. He must have been a pitiful sight. Had the Elezen thought him beyond saving too, just like he himself had. What if he had found him a little later or not at all? Maybe that would have been better, a voice murmured to him just like it had so many times before and for a moment, tempted by the grief heavy on his heart once again, he almost believed it.

But no, he would be dead then and while he would have liked to imagine that this would mean he could be with his loved ones again, it was not exactly what either of the tribes he had lived with believed.

Vaguely he remembered his father working for hours, digging a grave at what used to be Wellwick Wood. An elderly woman too exhausted by their long journey, his grandmother if he remembered correctly, had died shortly after they had arrived there. With a sad smile on his face his father had explained to his children, who had stared down into the hole in the ground with confusion in their eyes, how by returning her body to the earth there could still grow new life from this death.

Or the drake tribe of the Sagolii Desert, who always burned their dead and left the ashes to be carried away by the desert wind, believing that it would make it easier for the deceased‘s aether to return to the Aetheric Sea and create something new elsewhere.

With a sudden sharp pain in his heart A’viloh realised that neither of the people he loved had gotten the burial they would have wanted for themselves. And neither had A‘viloh himself wanted to die in the coldness of Coerthas and be forever forgotten under a thick layer of snow and ice. He had thought about dying before but never had he been this close to it. For a second he wondered if this was something worth speaking to Rael about, but he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t misunderstand and get mad at him again.

“Why do you make such a sad face now?”, Haurchefant asked having noticed the smile slip from the Miqo’te’s face. But A’viloh just vehemently shook his head and focused on the geese again.

“They must be horribly cold.”, he wondered in a voice that suggested he already planned to take all of them to the safety of his comfortably warm room.

Haurchefant chuckled. “Don’t worry, they survived the storm out here after all. They keep each other warm, that’s why you‘ll rarely see one of them alone. A bit like you and your friends.”

“Maybe…”, A’viloh answered thinking about this comparison for a moment. “I just wish it wouldn’t always be me who needs to be taken care of. But as proven in Ul’dah and now once again I am simply too weak and useless to keep myself alive, not to mention anyone else.”

The Elezen’s face got a little stern as he folded his arms in front of his chest. “Don’t say that, I am sure it’s not true! This was just bad luck! You are neither weak nor useless!”

A’viloh shrugged. “But that’s how I feel right now...”

Slowly Haurchefant nodded before speaking again with a silent but determined voice. “Listen. I‘ll never forget how bravely you fought for Francel although you barely knew him. You could have gotten yourself in trouble with that and you helped him anyway.”

“It’s not like I did that on my own -”, A’viloh tried to protest but was immediately interrupted. “But you still helped! And I’m sure even without Rael you would have done so!”

Another shrug was all Haurchefant got in response, so the Elezen thought for a second before making an offer. “You want to make yourself useful, right? Get stronger? I could teach you how to fight like a real ishgardian knight, with sword and shield. Or we have some dragoons at Camp Dragonhead too! I’m sure there’s a lot you could learn from them.”

A‘viloh‘s face turned to disbelief. “I really don’t think I could fight with armor and weapons this heavy…”

“You can’t say so if you don’t try! And I have you know that dragoon armors are surprisingly light. How do you think they could still be this agile otherwise? Promise me to at least try training with them a little!”

He didn’t really want to agree to that. He knew he would make a fool of himself. But how could he say no with Haurchefant trying everything in his power to cheer him up. Weakly he shook his head and muttered: “Fine…”

“Perfect!”, Haurchefant exclaimed with a bright smile on his face. “I think an early reward for your efforts is appropriate then!”

Confused A’viloh watched him take a small bag off of his shoulders, which he hadn’t even noticed until now. For a moment the Elezen was busy undoing a knot before he opened the bag and presented to A‘viloh a set of two weirdly shaped blades attached to pieces of wood with leather straps. He had no idea what these constructs were meant to do and that was plainly visible on his face. “What’s that?”

“Ice skates of course!”, Haurchefant said as if that would explain it all but the Miqo’te‘s face remained clueless, so Haurchefant gestured to the lake behind them. “You attach them to your boots so you can walk on the ice like this!”

“Oh!”, A’viloh exclaimed as he understood what Haurchefant was planning. “I don’t think-… I mean I‘ve never-… You don’t really want me to step on that lake do you?” The idea somehow scared him.

“Why not?”, Haurchefant asked for the second time today with this smile that made the question sound like a challenge.

“It’s just a bit of ice!”, A‘vi objected. “What if it breaks?”

The Elezen shook his head and proceeded to fasten the metal blades beneath his boots. “Ah, don’t worry. The ice is thick enough, it will take at least a few more days to melt.”

“I don’t know…”, was all A’viloh replied as Haurchefant pressed another pair of skates into his hands. But the Elezen remained determined and took a few wobbly steps through the snow and onto the ice. “See! I can stand on it and it doesn’t break! You are a lot lighter than me, so why wouldn’t you be able to?”

Oh, you don’t know my bad luck!, A‘viloh thought but Haurchefant didn’t look like he would take that for an excuse. Instead he stretched out a hand towards the Miqo’te. “Come one! Believe me, this is going to be funny!”

For a second A‘viloh pondered his options. The idea of nothing but a little bit of ice between him and the water still terrified him but Haurchefant seemed so excited about this and the other people actually seemed to have fun too. Maybe he should at least pretend to try... Reluctantly he sat down on a rock and tried to put on the skates just like Haurchefant had done a moment ago.

“The clasp on the back too. Make sure none of them are loose… Yes, that looks fine!”, Haurchefant helpfully explained. As A’viloh got up, he almost flopped right back down into the snow. It was a weird feeling to balance his whole weight on only two thin pieces of metal. As he carefully took the first few steps towards the lake Haurchefant reached out for him once more. “Here! Take my hand! I don’t want you to fall…”

Hesitantly A‘vi stepped onto the ice and immediately felt like the ground was being pulled away beneath his feet. He struggled for balance, feeling himself falling backwards, so Haurchefants arm was a very welcome thing to hold on to.

With a chuckle the Elezen tried to loosen A‘vi‘s desperate grip on his arm and instead took each of his hand in one of his own before carefully making slow steps backwards pulling A‘viloh over the ice, which A’vi could swear was making suspicious crackling sounds below them. There was no way to tell the blades beneath his feet not to move, so all A’viloh could do was try not to fall and plead to Haurchefant with ears flat on his head and panic in his eyes, as he slowly was pulled further onto the lake. “No, no, no. Take me back, that’s a horrible idea!”

“Calm down. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I promise.”, Haurchefant said soothingly and continued to explain to him how to move on the ice skates. And in fact the Elezen’s calm voice slowly made A’viloh feel less anxious. His hands, frantically clasping at Haurchefant’s, relaxed along with his legs. It was still a weird feeling to be standing on the ice but now it felt a lot easier to remain balanced. He glanced at the people around them while remaining as still as possible, studied their movements for a moment and then tentatively tried to mimic the way they slowly pushed their feet above the slippery surface. To his surprise he really moved forward without much effort and also without feeling the sensation of falling again, closer to Haurchefant who had steadied him with his outstretched arms so far.

“See! It’s not that difficult.”, he said while making another step backwards so A’viloh had to follow with another step forward. The Miqo’te, strangely excited about the fact that he was actually moving on these weird ice-blades, laughed happily. “You are even going backwards!”

Haurchefants laughed. “One step after the other. Let’s teach you how to go forward first, hm? I‘ll let go off one of your hands but don’t worry, I still got you. One feet after the other just like you did before…”

In fact it almost felt easier now that he could use one of his arms to balance himself. Very slowly at first they floated above the icy surface of the lake but soon A‘viloh got braver. Once he almost lost his balance but for a comparably tall and strong person like Haurchefant it seemed like a very easy task to keep a small Miqo’te on his feet. Almost falling had felt like a shock for a second but only moments later they were laughing about it and in the end A’viloh was surprised and also a little proud how quickly he had learned and how much fun this was.

He wasn’t sure how much time they spent there on the frozen lake but at some point a bell sounded from the nearby Camp. Startled A’viloh looked up (and almost lost his balance again). “How late is it? I’m sure you have more important things to do than this! I’m sorry if I’m keeping you from doing your work.”

But Haurchefant just laughed and teased, “What could be more important than prove to you that not all of Coerthas is a deadly wasteland trying to kill you? But I think we really should return soon. I don’t want you to get cold again and after all we also don’t want Rael to find out about this little excursion, do we?”

For a second A’viloh wished the viera could see him now and wondered what their reaction would be like. The thought made him chuckle.

And as they floated, one last circle around the lake, A’viloh couldn’t help but wonder that maybe it was happy moments like this. The reason he was still here. Moments that made his life worth living.

---

inspired by the poem The Reversal by Leila Chatti

[raiiny-bay]

the degenerates: out of context

[dandylion240]

Colton: what are you doing here?

Ryan: I was worried about you.

Colton: I'm fine.

Ryan: Alone on Christmas? Why don't you come home with me?

Colton: I said I'm fine.

Ryan: You shouldn't be cooped up in here by yourself on Christmas. You haven't even decorated.

Colton: I worked all weekend (shrugs) I didn't see the point of decorating.

Ryan: well you're in luck. I have everything we need to get you in the holiday spirit.

Colton: why do I have the feeling I dont' have a choice?

Colton: where did you get all these decorations?

Ryan: we have lots of decorations at home.

Colton: won't your dad's miss them?

Ryan: naw we have plenty.

Colton: in other words they let you have them.

Ryan: I asked and they helped me box everything up.

Colton: tell them thank you for me.

Ryan: you could tell them yourself if you come over for dinner.

Colton: is that an invitation?

Ryan: it is.

Colton: you're cute when you're nervous.

Ryan: who says I'm nervous.

Colton: you squeaked

Ryan: did not.

@izayoichan

[mimi-cee-genshin]

I think I finally have Chapter 7 of my Wanderer fic done. Literally months later 😭.

[arolesbianism]

So I may or may not have spent a good chunk of my day trying to learn how to look into onis code and while I may not have yet succeeded I will likely keep fucking around with shit tomorrow and if I manage to succeed it'll spell great doom for my sanity as oni becomes the interest I've officially poured the most effort into analyzing

[chemicalarospec]

My experience with Hannibal so far:

Jeff the killer: kills people. Mutilates and eats them too.

Me: Yeah that's alright with me (skipping the eye gore tho)

Jeff the evil liar: evilly lies to someone about the cause of their psychosis

Me: I Am Not Okay With This

[yurilvr4]

nerd armin hc's! art by musapylsa on tt/twt

cw for implied public sex, lots of biting, + tongue piercing, somnophilia(nsfw)

-

the type of guy to wait when your classes are over. he would loiter in the hallways , the jocks and popular kids brushing past him as he fixes his glasses, holding science books to his chest as he fiddled with his phone - checking your schedule.

he's a creeper, a stalker. as far as you were concerned, you always saw him hangout with his two friends, eren, mikasa and some other folks, jean..sasha?...connor? wait no, connie!

you would sometimes catch him staring way too long, eyes always on you and when you finally notice, he would blink and fix his glasses, a knuckle raising to arrange it on his face.

he would "accidentally" drop something on the ground if he was ever randomly beside you, and he knows how nice of a person you are, so you pick up whatever he dropped and he just smiles inwardly, checking you out from the back with zero to no shame.

the type to literally take pictures of you secretly and masturbate the fuck out of them the moment he's home.

"o...ohh...ahnn.." his hand fists his cock aggressively, throwing his head back as he whimpers, thighs shaking as he finally comes down, cum dribbling down his fingers.

-

another thing about him is he owns porn magazines, he stashes them away under his bed and fantasizes all the girls on the pages are you.

he would full on hump the covers, his pillow just to imagine some type of body underneath his, squeezing and moaning like a dog in heat, his brain can only think of one thing and that's you.

other times when he's not ejaculating, he talks about you to his other online friends when he games.

"they're so...h-hot..like.." he says in the microphone, grinning ear to ear as he talks about you in excruciating detail.

the guys on the other side would either cheer him on or snicker at his desperation, "woah..dude, did you like, jack off to them or something??" typical. they wouldn't get it.

"s-something like that." armin bites his lip, finishing the game and logging off.

obsessive crush behavior

this man is always on his phone/laptop so for sure he's got some online stalking habits you're not aware of at all.

he analyzes all of your old posts, every story and event you've been to, and even have them memorized in case you ever talked to him.

+ he's probably the type to over intercept basic kindness as 'romantic interest', "they smiled at me! they must want me!"

-

random stuff he does

• compliments you in an awkward, creepy sort of way, "hey....y-your collarbones are pretty.." then he'd mentally face palm thinking about how miserably bad he is at flirting.

• stares at you wayyy too long for any normal person, a hand on his chin as his eyes hyper-analyze your movements, then panics when he gets caught.

• brings up painfully niche hyperfixations and info dump people about it, (comics, anime, gaming) and they would have NO clue what he would be talking about LMFAOO

• does that nervous push glasses thing, how? uses his middle finger to nudge the bridge of his glasses up. he's particularly nervous when you finally speak to him or is around him suddenly.

if you're in a relationship

he's actually ecstatic, finally having you all to himself, that means he could do whatever he wanted right?

he's willing to share and do everything with you, from sharing his clothes, to showering, sleeping in the same bed. all of it.

the type to just touch you all over. hugs and cuddles you, kisses your neck and bites the same spot he touched with his mouth.

only for you to have tons of red bruises littering your skin the next day.

• doesn't let you go until you really beg him to let you go.

"i won't even be that long... seriously." you say, waiting for a response , only for your boyfriend to glare at you albeit a little pouty.

"...f...fuck. you can't just leave me here, i want your attention too."

he nervously plays with the ends of his sleeves, drawing the cloth over his knuckles and fiddling with it.

sometimes you couldn't help but feel bad, even though there was nothing to feel bad about.

"...fine. i'll stay.. okay?" you nod defeated, reaching out for him to hug his head to your tummy.

he immediately reciprocates, pressing his face into your torso and inhaling deep.

-

sometimes in public, he would drag you to a small spot where he swears no one goes to, and just grinds his body over yours, just to get some friction.

making out with you is his favorite activity, besides fucking the shit outta you at home.

he grinds and grabs your everything, hands all over your ass, squeezing as he bites the inner corner of your neck, sucking the skin until he's satisfied with the new colour.

you feel the cool metal of his piercing lave over your hot skin and you whine for him to stick it in you already.

• WOULD make you suck him off under the seat of his desktop space WHILE gaming.

he's so nasty he doesn't even hide it, "hey?! can i get an assist? cmon!" someone online yells into the microphone , he's pretty skilled with using the keyboard with only one hand, so he easily guides your head with his fingers rooted into your scalp and helps bob your mouth just right until he feels his cock twitch, eventually cumming inside and you have to swallow it.

he tries so hard to hide his little huffs of satisfaction, wryly grinning as he sees your cum painted face under the seat.

-

has this 'habit' he's never told you about.

whenever you would sleep before him in your shared bed , he would climb over you and just go to town. removing each layer of your clothes, and leaves you vulnerable in your underwear, spreads your legs open and makes you cum in your sleep.

you involuntary shiver when you feel his tongue lave over your hole, his fingers playing over where you're most sensitive and coat his tongue in your juices.

'how are you not waking up?' a few sleeping pills dumped into your drink earlier must've did the trick. he wouldn't tell you though, or you'll probably, seriously hate him.

and that was the last thing he wanted. besides..he's got you all to himself now!

-

+ note this fanart literally revived the aot fandom idc i had to write something. link to the art! link 2

[k0mmari]

SYSTEM! SHEN YUAN AU

Okay, look, I've head a System SY idea for a while now (in fact, some of the ideas for this were used when I was first planning out Locked & Loaded), but after seeing @/artsarasp's System!SQQ AU, the brainworms have been once again come alive and I just need to get this out into the world. This is a very bare bones idea that I (probably) won't actually write, so walk with me for a second! Also this is going to be a very, very long post.

In this idea, the System actually is an interdimensional organization that deal with creating new worlds based on stories and making sure these worlds continue working as intended and (eventually), sending transmigrators to worlds that need 'improvement' (this improvement being very subjectice depending on which worker is assigned which story).

In SY's case, he's just someone who usually works behing a screen, in the most exciting cases he gets to guide transmigrators around but most of the time he just makes sure the stories 'code' is running normally and nothing world-breaking is going on in the stories (like someone managing to find a hack to skip defining plot points, or activating God-Mode somehow). He's very happy with this arrangement, btw! He was never one to run around and his boss has warned him once or twice for apparently being 'way too harsh' on the few transmigrators he got to be a System for.

Unfortunately, one day he is assigned to 'manually inspect' a world because a certain co-worker of his (Shang Qinghua) had been sent down there to handle a glitch but had gone missing instead. When SY asks why was he being the one asked to do this (not that he doesn't care for his friend, but he REALLY isnt made for running around), his boss says SY is the only other one who is familiar enough with the world to not get lost.

So that's how he find out SQH had managed to get himself stuck on the world he created (as a joke even, he hadn't even expected that when he was messing around with the company's program he would actually be able to create a new world based on the shitty novel he'd written as a human). And of course, SQH only having one friend, subjected SY to the story.

SY grumbles and denies ever seeing anything about SQH's story (or liking it, even if his boss kindly points out they never mentioned SY liked it) but eventually he agrees; and that's how he finds himself being teletransported onto the world of PIDW, carrying a pair of Debugging Sheers he'd never thought he would have to hold (he calls them Big Scissors), with the mission of finding SQH and dealing with the glitch that was still somewhere in the world.

Though, when he goes to message his supervisor about the specifics (where he should go or what was the last known location of SQH), he finds out that his Personal System has apparently already been affected by the glitch ("ALREADY??") that he was realizing worked more like a virus. Fortunately some messages were still going through, and his supervisor notified him they couldn't send him directly to the location he needed to be, specially because the virus seemed to have fragmented and spread to various parts of the stories timeline. SY now has to jump around through time a few times and slowly cut doen the glitches caused by the virus.

Thus begins Shen Yuan's Great Narrative Haunting (in real time.).

Luckily, for him, the place he first appeared was already one of the spots the virus has infected the world, and it seems to be in a town not too far away from him, so with a quick activation of the 'Ghost Mode' function (avaiable for all System staff to make it easier when they have to manually fix something, making them invisible and untouchable), SY heads to the town.

The glitch actually doesnt take too long to find (it was a buggy tree clipping onto a nearby river, which only needs a snip of the Big Scissors to disappear from reality), but when SY and passing through the town to find some better signal for his Personal System so he can jump forward to the next stop, he sees a group of snickering kids leaving an alleyway. A bit curious, he passes by the alley and barely manages to see through the pouring rain and spot a trembling figure on the floor. Of course, PIDW was never meant to be a happy or forgiving world, so SY is not surprised at the idea that some kids were bullying a smaller kid, though it still makes him upset.

He kneels close to the child and turns off 'Ghost Mode', pulling out an umbrella from his inventory (yes, System staff ALSO get an inventory, no one wants to have to carry aroung those big ass scissors), covering him from the rain. The boy is shaking from the cold, and even if SY can't check the boy's identity (since his system is still buggy), he reasons the probability of him coming into contact with an important character is very small, and even if System staff aren't supposed to interact with characters, he limits himself to at least getting the boy out of the rain.

Luo Binghe later wakes in a bench underneath a small shop's roof, covered in a thick cloth, having no idea how he'd gotten there besides the vague dream (or memory?) of a strangely dressed person patting his hair and taking him into their arms. He notices the rain has stopped and he's perfectly dry. Shen Yuan, seeing the kid seems to be doing well, finally jumps to his next location.

It doesn't take long for SY to figure out where he is when he loads onto the next mission location, in fact, he's almost certain he'd recognize the bamboo forest and calm, almost dream-like atmosphere of Qing Jing Peak anywhere. Seeing there that Qing Jing even exists in the first place, he deduces Binghe is still not emperor, so this time he makes sure to not be seen by any characters. It also doesn't take for SY to find his next target, as a commotion behind him catches his attention.

And oh, if he isn't familiar with the scene. A few older looking disciples push around a smaller looking boy, while a girl insistently shouts for the leader of the older disciples to stop. SY barely managed to appreaciate how Luo Binghe looks so cute as a child before (who he assumes is) Ming Fan snatches rips an amulet out of Binghe's neck. It's quite the heartbreaking scene to watch live, poor Binghe fighting for the only remaining piece of his adoptive mother without even knowing he's destined to never see it again. SY's Personal System may be buggy but it's still functional enough to detect if SY has a direct impact on the main storyline, so SY is basically forced to stand still and watch.

Though, since he had a clear view of the whole scene, when Ming Fan throws the jade pendant into the forest, SY can perfectly follow the arch of the necklace and sees where it landed, which is when an idea pops into his head. Distantly hearing Luo Binghe and NYY frantically searching for a necklace they'll never find, SY spots where the fake jade glimmers high up on a tree brench, though it's glimmer is distorted by the distinct sight of a glitch corrupting it's form. If SY were to follow standard procedure, he'd just have to bring out his Sheers and snip the necklace out of existence, but looking at it... Would it be so bad if he debugged the necklace the longer way?

Besides, if Binghe has the necklace or not, it's not like this one item is going to interfere with the major story anyways. SY isn't stopping Binghe from falling into the Abyss, he's just... Returning a lost item to it's intended owner.

Later, after an exhausting afternoon of what seemed to be searching through every nook and cranny of Qing Jing Peak's surrounding forest, Luo Binghe goes back to the shed he sleeps in utterly defeat and feeling strangely hollow; that is, until he opens the door and finds a new, thick blanket neatly folded in the middle of the shed, way too clean to be anything he had previously owned, and atop of it, his precious jade pendent, sitting there as if it never even dissapeared. Luo Binghe distantly notices that nobody that visits the shed ever lets the door closed after they visit.

The third location SY goes to leaves him no time to acclimatize, as he's immediately attacked by a beast, and only after (struggling to) kill it, does SY notice the unfortunate situation he was placed into: the Immortal Alliance Conference. By this point, he's already figured out his Personal System is most likely using Binghe's energy as Protagonist to make up for the energy it can't use due to it being partially corrupted, and the energy it needs to save up so SY can go back to the System's head quarters, so it really wasn't a surprise that he would be sent to this specific plot point, but dammit can't he avoid having to be near the place where his favorite character is thrown into hell??

And, well, there's also the problem that a beast attacked him, which meant it saw him, which meant his Ghost Mode was also glitching out, and after fiddling around which a half functioning System interface, it seems that the presence of the virus here is stronger than the other places, though still not the biggest chunk. Truly, just the cherry on top of his situation that he'd have to scurry around and somehow manage to not bump into anyone.

As is his luck, as SY tries to head closer to where his System is signaling the glitch's presence, other monsters continue attacking him, which besides slowing him down a considerable amount, it also causes the risk of him being picked up by the people watching the Conference through the Spirit Eagles circling the area, which is the last thing he needs.

Eventually he goes to the closest spot he can to the glitch, but a snapping sound behind him sends him into full panic. A person stands behind him, which leaves SY wondering how he managed to miss someone sneaking up on him like this. "You seem to have dropped something." the person says, and SY eyes immediately fall to his body, scanning himself to what he might have lost, and his hand basically flies to his throat when he notices the tassle that is usually nestled there is missing. He quickly turns around, only to come face to face to the golden protagonist, mister Luo Binghe himself.

Binghe tries interrogating SY as to what he's doing, sneaking around the supposedly sealed off Conference grounds, and SY, in his panicked state (slightly fuelled by a fanboy-induced craze) tries to fumble for excuses, but only when Binghe finally understands that the feeling he gets when looking at this strange person is an undeniable sense of deja-vu and tries asking SY if they'd met before, a loud rumblind shakes the ground: the Abyss has opened.

SY feels even more panicked, cause what this means is eventually, not only will he be discovered by Luo Binghe (his supervisor is going to kill him), but he could possibly be discovered by Shen Qingqiu, of all people! He doesn't get too much time to think about his grand escape however, as a piercing shriek comes from the Abyss rift. Right, how could he forget about the Black Moon Rhinoceros Python? And-- Oh, of course! Of course the damn thing would be virus-infected object!

After teaming-up with Binghe, the both of them manage to subdue the monster long enough that SY managed to snip it, though while they both catch their breath, SY belatedly realizes he just helped Binghe fight with the monster he was supposed to fight. Alone! The monster who was supposed to break his demonic seal! And, like clockwork, he can distantly hear what can only be SQQ's hurried steps through the forest! FUCK!!

With no other option, and Binghe now wanting to continue his interrogation, SY hurriedly start to walk towards the Abyss rift, frantically giving Binghe tips about what he could do in the Abyss to have an easier time, though when he catches a glimpse of green robes between the trees, SY types something on a floating screen and jumps backwards, Binghe letting out a shocked scream. Unfortunately, the protagonist won't be able to do nothing about the seemingly insane and way too familiar man who just jumped into the Abyss, as a rustling sounds behind him, and he's met with a newly regenrated Black Moon Rhino.

SY feels horrible about spawning a new one after Binghe just finished fighting one, but the story must continue, and with his Personal System finally free from most of the virus corruption, SY leaves one last gift as an apology and warping away before hitting the Abyss' ground. Later, when Binghe wakes up at the bottom of the rift after being pushed by SQQ, the first thing he sees is a qiakun pouch, full of useful items and tiny note at the bottom that reads 'Sorry!'

Pt.2

Pt.3

[thankskenpenders]

Thoughts on two specific areas of the writing in Sonic X Shadow Generations

The best new 3D Sonic game in over a decade (or even two, depending on who you ask) dropped late last year. And I didn't write anything about it! Sometimes life happens. Well, I've finally sat down to finish Shadow Generations, and by now everyone has already been singing its praises for three months. This is the rare instance where the entire Sonic fandom, and even mainstream reviewers, are in agreement on something. The level design is the best it's been in a long, long time and the cool factor is off the charts, embracing Sonic's peak cringe era in an incredibly confident way. It's great. If you're even reading this post, you probably don't need me to tell you that. So I won't!

No, what I'm really interested in here is the writing. Because this is me we're talking about. But I actually don't want to talk about the main narrative of Shadow Generations, which is really solid little story about Black Doom trying to mold Shadow into his perfect soldier. No, I'd like to zero in on two other aspects of the writing here: the revisions made to Sonic Generations, and Gerald Robotnik's unlockable journal.

The updated Sonic Generations script

The new package mostly presents Sonic Generations how you remember it. There are some tweaks, but it's not a major overhaul. Graphically, I don't think the game has been touched much, if at all. I certainly can't notice any difference without a side-by-side comparison, despite playing it on a PS5. The most notable update is that the game's script has been rewritten by Ian Flynn.

Naturally, this caught my attention. Generations always had a nothingburger story, so with Ian rewriting Pontac and Graff's lame dialogue there was nowhere to go but up. (I don't like to pin the blame for those games' stories entirely on them, as a ton of it was dictated to them by Sonic Team, but, well, I don't think they're very good dialogue writers.) But it's less a complete rewrite and more like Ian was brought on as a script doctor for some minor touch ups here and there. Many lines of dialogue are completely identical to how they were originally written in 2011, and many others only have slight wording changes. Ian was clearly not allowed to request additional scenes or extend the ones that already existed. He has to match the original beat for beat so that they can reuse 99% of the cutscene animations. Don't expect it to be a whole new experience compared to the original.

Still, I think the new script is an improvement, albeit a minor one. Various things have been tweaked to maintain characterization consistency. Cream calls Sonic "Mr. Sonic" instead of just "Sonic." Instead of calling Sonic "buddy," Rouge uses the pet name "Blue," like she tends to do in things like the IDW comics. Espio doesn't have to remind you in the dialogue that he's a ninja, and he no longer has a line making it sound like he has some kind of soul reading power. I also like that Modern Sonic now actually has responses to what his friends say when he rescues them, rather than being silent like Classic Sonic. They won't blow you away, but they make Sonic feel a little more engaged with everything.

In general, the altered dialogue just seems tighter to me, and some of the more childish or trite wording of Pontac and Graff's script has been altered. Here, let's actually make a direct comparison, just because this stuff is interesting to me as a writer. Here's a couple lines from after the Egg Dragoon fight late in the game, in the original script:

Modern Eggman: Ooooh... I can't believe this! I was supposed to beat you this time. Modern Sonic: Aw, I'm sorry! I didn't get that memo. I beat you every time! [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat this guy every time. It's like it's our job or something!

This is a simple exchange. Eggman is mad that he lost. Sonic is unflappably confident because he always beats Eggman, and he explains this to his younger self. But the wording here isn't particularly good. Eggman's simple and direct wording makes him come off like a little kid who's mad because his older brother beat him at Mario Kart, rather than a mad scientist who just had his plans foiled. It's making light of the situation.

And I've never liked Sonic saying "It's like it's our job or something!" That doesn't feel like a thing Sonic would say, it feels like a thing an outside observer would say about Sonic. This is a frequent problem with so-called "MCU dialogue," where quips meant to echo the commentary of a casual, somewhat disinterested audience are inserted into the story itself so that the writers can be like "See? We get it. We're genre-savvy, too!" It also just reminds me of bad Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric lines like "Rings! It's like they're made for me!"

And then here's Ian's rewrite:

Modern Eggman: I recalibrated everything! This was supposed to be my time! Modern Sonic: Oh, please, keep dreamin', Egg-head. I beat you every time. [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat him every time. Our score card's flawless.

Eggman's still mad about his defeat, but the line "I recalibrated everything!" makes it more specific. He put all this work into the engineering side of his latest scheme and got tunnel vision, thinking if he got his creations just right there'd be no way he could lose. "This was supposed to be my time!" also turns it into a time travel pun, which is a bonus. He's still pitching a fit over losing, but it feels more like Eggman pitching a fit, rather than sounding childish.

And then instead of saying that beating Eggman is "like his job or something," Sonic says he's got a flawless score card against Eggman. He doesn't take Eggman seriously as a threat—at least, not to his face. He acts like it's all a game. But he conveys this in a way that feels truer to the character, rather than feeling like the words of a real world observer poking fun at the tropes of the Sonic series.

Is this amazing, A+ dialogue that blows me away? No. Again, it's not a completely different scene from the one we already had. Ian had to fit the beats of what was already there. He couldn't go all out and write an all new story confirming his longstanding headcanon that the Time Eater is a remnant of Solaris or whatever. But the wording here makes the existing story land a little better and feel truer to the characters in subtle ways.

But to me, the main change is that the Sonics and Tailses seem to have a more solid understanding of what's going on with the timeline and the Time Eater, compared to how idiotic they sometimes seemed in the original game. Which is good! No more standing outside Green Hill and wondering why it seems so familiar. Thank god. As part of this, yes, there are a few more references to past games in the dialogue, like Sonic briefly being confused about the fact that they're time traveling without the Time Stones, or South Island and Westside Island being acknowledged as the normal locations of Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Yes, ha ha, insert joke about how Ian loves references here. Look, it's Sonic fucking Generations. It's a game built entirely out of nostalgic references. Just own it! And, again, in this instance Sonic and Tails come off as less stupid when they make it clear that they do, in fact, remember their adventures from presumably less than a year ago in-universe.

Eggman, too, seems to have a better understanding of the powers he's toying with. Where in the original vesion his focus was simply on going back in time to undo his previous defeats and he seemed kind of oblivious to how much the Time Eater was actually fucking up the universe, here Eggman says he wants to use the Time Eater to give himself complete control over the entire timeline. Eggman also makes way fewer references to his own failures and shortcomings. Of course he won't admit that Sonic has defeated him time and time again. To him, he's never truly lost—Sonic just keeps delaying the inevitable total victory for the Eggman Empire.

So, yes. The new Sonic Generations script is better. It won't blow anyone away, but it's better than it was. It's been elevated from "kinda lame" to "fine." No, if you really wanna see Ian flex his ability to breathe new life into old Sonic stories, look no further than...

Gerald Robotnik's Journal

Hoo boy.

The story of what happened aboard the ARK has always been... a bit confusing, to say the least. Fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the script for every route of Shadow '05 may disagree, but it's the truth. We've had all the pieces to understand the story for a long time now, but that info was given to us out of order by a pair of unreliable narrators—Gerald, who became a vengeful lunatic shortly before his death, and Shadow, who was subjected to multiple rounds of amnesia and altered memories. Some of the ambiguity left by Sonic Adventure 2 was cleared up in Shadow '05, but that game also retconned in a bunch of new elements to Shadow's backstory (aliens!) that lead to further confusion. Not to mention the fact that that game had multiple routes and only revealed the truth about Shadow if you sat on the ultimate final boss battle for WAY longer than the fight would normally last. Or the fact that Sonic X made its own tweaks in its telling of the story. Or the fact that none of these things ever had the best English translations. I can't blame anyone who hasn't played those games in two decades for not remembering the truth about these characters and getting some details mixed up.

What we needed was something to piece together all of the info we have into one coherent backstory, told in chronological order. And thanks to Shadow Generations, we have that, in the form of an official journal tying together what we knew from Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow '05, and Sonic Battle into the tragic tale of Gerald's rise and fall.

Ian Flynn was the perfect man for the job here as the guy who started his career by tidying up the mess that was the first 159 issues if Archie Sonic. This is what he excels at: taking disparate bits of weird Sonic lore from multiple different sources, boiling them down to their most interesting elements, and connecting it together in a way that will make the audience see the dramatic potential he's always known was there. Rather than feeling like a cynical exercise in franchise building, going back and explaining things that never needed explaining so that people can add more bullet points to the wiki, he puts a new spin on things that retroactively enriches those past stories. The story here means something to the characters involved and gives us a better understanding of them as people, rather than as plot devices to motivate Shadow.

(And, of course, Ian didn't do this journal alone. He wrote the story, but I also have to give a huge shout out to Evan Stanley, who made the final product. All of her handwritten journal entries, sketches, and "photos" included throughout. The physical damage done to the journal over the course of 50 tumultuous years, passing from Gerald to Eggman to a certain special someone at GUN. The way Gerald's handwriting gets less and less legible as his mental state declines. So much love was put into what could have been a mere text dump in a menu, and it really elevates it to the next level. Congrats on officially getting hired by Sega, Evan, you've sure as hell earned it!)

The main idea the journal conveys is that Gerald was under a lot of pressure from a lot of different parties—GUN, the President, his colleagues aboard the ARK, Black Doom, even his own family—and boy did it get to him. The known incidents aboard the ARK mentioned in previous games are put together here to form a story where everything slowly spirals out of control as Gerald keeps compromising his morals to further his research, thinking he'll eventually find some way out of all this because he's a genius. I won't recap that whole story here (if you haven't already played the game and read the journal entries, I would highly recommend at least reading it on the Sonic wiki), but I'd like to highlight my favorite elements of the story, as Ian tells it here.

1) The Eclipse Cannon

Here's something that never quite made sense in Sonic Adventure 2: why does the ARK have a laser that can blow up the Earth built into it? It was supposed to be a peaceful research colony. Sure, Gerald went crazy and swore revenge on the Earth, but, like... when did he have an opportunity to go back up to the ARK and modify it? Did he have someone else do it? How? The ARK was raided by GUN and shut down! And then they arrested him, held him in prison for an unclear period of time, and executed him by firing squad when he was no longer useful! It doesn't add up. Shadow 'the Hedgehog '05 would give its own answer by introducing the Black Arms and saying that the Eclipse Cannon was always supposed to be a secret trump card against the Black Comet. But, like... we know that's kind of a bullshit answer, right? You don't need enough power to blow up a whole planet just to destroy a comet.

Well, the new journal retains what we already knew, but it paints a much more complete picture.

See, long before Gerald ever made a Faustian bargain with Black Doom, he had already made one with an even greater evil: the military. GUN gave Gerald much of the funding for the ARK, Gerald's personal utopian research station in space, but it didn't take long for GUN to start pressuring him to design them weapons. Gerald tried to get GUN off his back by personally contacting the President of the United Federation, and the President gave him an alternative: how about, instead, you just use your genius brain to figure out the secret to immortality for us, so our soldiers can be immortal? Gerald was initially sickened by the notion and found it completely absurd, like chasing a shadow... but given no other option, the sarcastically named Project Shadow soon began in earnest. (Maria would later put a more positive spin on the name after Shadow's awakening, pointing out that a Shadow can show us the direction of the light, like she says in the game itself.)

Of course, this search for the ultimate life form didn't go very well, and without any results on that front GUN kept hounding him for weapons. Gerald would throw them a bone here and there to get them off his back. His research on Chaos resulted in the Artifical Chaos prototypes, which he worried would be used for warfare but could at least theoretically be used for search and rescue missions in floods, in his mind. But that wasn't enough. So he gave them Chaos Drives to power their mechs. And that still wasn't enough. He's got Emerl. He'll give them Emerl. They're not impressed by Emerl. They'll shut the whole ARK down if Gerald doesn't give them something big.

Fine! GUN wants something big? Gerald builds a huge fucking laser cannon into the ARK. However, as a middle finger to GUN, Gerald makes it so powerful that it would destroy the Earth if it was ever fired at any target on its surface. In other words, GUN now has their ultimate weapon of mass destruction, fulfilling his contract, but they can never actually use it. Oh, the delicious irony. (And also Shadow will blow up the Black Comet with it in 50 years yada yada yada.) Is this perhaps extremely shortsighted and naive of Gerald, to believe that such a weapon would never actually be used just because of the risk? Of course. But hey, that's Gerald for you. And I love this as an answer.

(Also, this, uh, kinda echoes something from real life! Remember the bit in Oppenheimer where he says all nuclear war will become unthinkable, and Edward Teller responds "until somebody builds a bigger bomb"? Yeah, Teller went on to conceptualize a superweapon codenamed Project Sundial that would have been able to kill all life on the planet, as the ultimate deterrent for war. This was never made for obvious reasons, but hey, there's a basis for this sort of thinking outside of heightened sci-fi! There's a whole Kurzgesagt video about this if you're interested.)

2) The Biolizard

The Biolizard is, of course, brought up as the initial failed prototype of the ultimate life form, from before Gerald met Black Doom. We don't really learn all that much about it that we didn't already know, but I just love the way it's framed in the story.

As you can see above, we actually get to see a picture of Maria holding up the cute little salamander that would end up mutating into the Biolizard through Gerald's experiments. (Researchers want to figure out how to replicate salamanders' regenerative abilities for humans in real life, too, so this was a natural starting point for the project.) And then, after it grows to a monstrous size and goes out of control, Gerald has to lock it away in an unused sector of the ARK. He needs to keep the poor thing alive for his research into harnessing Chaos Energy, building life support systems directly into it, but he doesn't have the heart to tell Maria what happened. So it just becomes this first dark secret weighing on his conscience. The Biolizard becomes Gerald's Tell-Tale Heart beating beneath the floorboards of the ARK. I love that.

3) Lost Impact was the breaking point for the ARK

Remember the level Lost Impact in Shadow '05? The flashback level on the hero path where Shadow is running around fighting Artificial Chaos enemies on the ARK 50 years ago? Yeah, that wasn't just a random incident. That was important, as we now know due to its placement on the timeline.

See, Emerl's rampage aboard the ARK that was chronicled in Sonic Battle and Dark Beginnings set off a domino effect. Emerl riled up the Artificial Chaos, causing Gerald to lose control of them. They became violent, and so Shadow had to stop them, as depicted in Lost Impact. The thing is, that incident sent an SOS signal to GUN telling them that shit was going down on the ARK. Gerald didsn't fully understand the trouble he was in and assumed that he'd simply be reprimanded by the higher ups, or maybe face legal action. But, well... the next time he heard from GUN, armed troopers were raiding the ARK.

So Lost Impact was the straw that broke the camel's back. I just really like that detail.

4) Maria

And, of course, there's Maria herself. Maria has often been more of a symbol than a character, this perfect embodiment of everything that's good and pure in this world who gets killed to motivate Shadow and Gerald's revenge plots. But I really like the wrinkles this journal adds to her and Gerald's story, and their relationship. This is the most fleshed out they've ever felt.

For one, the journal leans into the idea of Maria's intellectual potential. The rest of the Robotnik family is all geniuses, after all, and she was proving to be a really bright kid. She excelled in her studies on the ARK, and she even helped design Shadow's jet skates and inhibitor rings. When Maria died, the world didn't just lose a symbolic personification of purity. She genuinely could have been a hugely influential scientist who did so much good for the world. That's what Gerald wanted for her. But we'll never know, because GUN killed her.

Speaking of her family, their presence isn't just mentioned for the sake of fleshing out the Robotnik family tree. It's mentioned that as Gerald struggled to find a cure for Maria's illness through his genetic research, he faced mounting pressure from his family. They didn't want Maria to be up on the ARK forever. They wanted Gerald to hurry up and find a damn cure, or otherwise just send her back home to Earth so she could be with her family again. She'd been up on the ARK for so long that Gerald's coworkers started thinking that she had been born up there. Eventually she gains a baby sister on Earth who she's never met. A rift forms between Gerald's two sons, and he's unable to really deal with it because he's so consumed by his work. There's this sense that the family is falling apart, and that everyone is dreading the possibility that Gerald will never find a cure and that Maria will just spend her final years up in space and die far away from her family, because Gerald just couldn't let go. If that happens, it'll break the whole family. But he can't stop now. So he just keeps working. Curing Maria is the only way to win his family back, in his eyes. It can't all be for nothing.

But my favorite detail regarding Maria is this one paragraph:

Maria is growing into a lovely young woman. It breaks my heart that someone as bright and energetic as her is diminished by disease. There are no visible effects, and I've caught my fellow researchers muttering to each other, doubting her illness. It is infuriating. I find all my reason and restraint vanishes when she's slighted.

This is SUCH a great addition to the story! It's always been true that Maria doesn't really seem all that ill, just looking at her in cutscenes. With this one little comment, Ian flips that issue on its head and turns it into a story about invisible disability. She doesn't act like she's in chronic pain, so she must not be, everyone thinks. And this really, really gets to Gerald, as does the pressure from his family. He's dedicating his whole LIFE to saving her, and they think she's faking it?! It's such a small addition, never referenced elsewhere in the journal, but it adds so much flavor to the story, as does the implied family drama. It grounds Gerald and Maria and makes them feel more like real human beings, rather than being pure archetypes. It's just enough info to let my imagination run wild filling in the blanks.

You also get the feeling that Maria being such a walking ray of sunshine was the only real source of joy Gerald had left in his life before Shadow was awakened, and the only thing keeping him from snapping under pressure sooner. All this stuff just keeps piling on, everything's spiraling out of control, but at least Maria is keeping her chin up, right? It makes so much sense that losing her would make him go off the deep end when it's framed like this.

It's just... man, I never thought I'd care so much about Gerald and Maria. But that's the Ian Flynn touch. After years of less than stellar Sonic writing that seemed to be embarrassed of itself, I'm so happy to have new games coming out that fully embrace the history of the series like this, making its world feel so rich and real instead of just serving as an excuse for a string of platforming levels. I don't even like Shadow '05, but I'll be damned if Ian and the rest of Sonic Team didn't make something amazing by "yes, and"-ing Shadow's cringe past here. Sonic has truly reached levels of "we're so back" never thought possible.

[hamilando]

ੈ✩ real housewives of monaco (smau) ੈ✩

pairing : max verstappen x reader

tw : chaos, negligent parenting, side comments, trolling, diet culture, bodyshaming blood, mentions of domestic a!

fc : Yasmin Wijnaldum

a/n :AHHHHH, it's finally out y'all!! you guys don't even know how much drama i have planned for this one - anyways feedback and taglist is always open -

·:｡･ﾟﾟ･ ✩ ･ﾟ ･ﾟ·:｡･ﾟﾟ･ ･ﾟ·:｡･ﾟﾟ･ ✩ ･ﾟ ･ﾟ·:｡･ﾟﾟ･･ﾟ·:｡･ﾟﾟ･ ✩ ･ﾟ ･ﾟ·:｡･ﾟﾟ

liked by maxverstappen, alexandramieux, lando and 1,372,938 others

ynaldum RHOM, EP-1

view comments

user1 did we all collectively see how max had his hand on her waist ALL THE TIME

user2 when they entered the ball-

user3 all the elderly couples were probably regretting

user4 considering the age, do they even have money ?

user5 MAX IS A FOUR TIME WOLRD CHAMPION, YN IS THE HIGHEST PAID MODEL IN EUROPE

user6 love those two for being real in that ballroom

user7 the air was suffocating man

user8 i could see in max's eyes the need to escape

user9 yn probably regrets joining that shitty show lol

user10 at least she and max served looks

liked by user1, user2, user3 and 723,478 others

huluofficial Episode 1 of RHOM just streamed !!! Did you catch up on the drama?

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user1 DRAMA !?!?!?! MORE LIKE A SOB SHOW

user2 love how all the ladies got emotional over martha's 'struggle' of motherhood while yn was side eyeing

user3 'MOTHERHOOD HAS BEEN A STRUGGLE FOR ME' girl you literally have a mini kelly, with a hermes stroller for your kid, have 3 NANNIES handling your 2 month old who can't even speak or move-

user4 THE ONLY THING HARD FOR HER HAS BEEN THE SURGERY RECOVERY FROM HER TUMMY TUCK MAN

user5 idk martha seems fake man

user6 exactly! like throughout the episode, i haven't seen hold her son once- its always the nannies handling him

user7 and the fact all others are looking at her as if she said philosophical ?

user8 yn was just like let me have my free champagne

user9 THE SIDE NUDGE SHE GAVE

user10 ' you could try carrying your own child instead of your kelly'- I LOVE HER FOR THIS

user11 i feel bad for the son man

user12 she may have struggled with the postpartum thing but hell no on handling the kid man

user13 SHE LITERALLY CONFESSED THAT SHE DOESNT EVEN KNOW HOW TO MAKE THE CHILD WEAR A DIAPER

user14 "it's taxing, handling an infant, and buying there stuff and doing all the duties." MA'AM YOU HAVE THREE NANNIES, A BILLIONAIRE HUSBAND AND YOU'RE CRIBBING ABOUT DUTIES AND MONEY !?

user15 the ONLY thing nice was yn visiting the japan gp for max

liked by marthasinclair, user1, user and 327,468 others

rhomgossip episode 2 just premiered and what the actual hell in body-shaming?

view comments

user1 did that 60 year oldie just say that!?

user2 ON INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION ?

user3 mate this is straight up body shaming

user4 this is so fucked up

user5 can we just boycott the show ?

user6 THE FACT MARTHA IS LIKING IT AND SUPPORTING THE OLDIE ?

user7 my god, yn is a model, just because she is thin-

user8 probably jealous atp

user9 they can't afford the surgeries like yn

user10 you do realize even if yn got surgeries, NO ONE has the right to comment on her diet or figure

liked by maxverstappen1, lando, alexandramieux and 1,462,845 others

ynaldum McDonald's after Alexander McQueen

view comments

user1 THE SHADE -

user2 she said not today martha bitch-

user3 girl serving meals and looks

user4 girl just proved dieting is not the only thing to stay like her

user5 it's surgeries

user4 EXCUSE ME !!?!?! HAVE YOU SEEN HER WORKOUTS

user6 you won't survive half and hour

maxverstappen the prettiest ❤️, kfc date ?

ynaldum ofc, be ready in five

user7 MAX CLAP BACK

user8 max said i am not going to watch you defame my women

user9 even i want kfc now

user10 this show has ruined everything

liked by user1, user2, user3 and 2,469,826 others

f1wags BREAKING NEWS! A source from YN Verstappen's private account has leaked the stories posted by her where she is seen with a face full of bruises. Even as fans observed the shooting of RHOM, YN was seen covering her face and wearing full clothes, covering herself.

view comments

user1 this is jawdropping

user2 WHAT ARE YOU IMPLYING

user3 oh my god max

user4 WHY WOULD SHE POST MAX HITTING HER

user5 the pcitures tho-

user6 this source needs to be slapped, why would you leak that -

user7 i enevr expected max to hit her-

user8 AND THEY CONTINUE SHOOTING !?!?!

user9 this is so messed up ?

user10 the face covering, the clothes it all makes sense

user11 if a girl is wearing full pants and shirt, she is being abused-!?!

user12 YN can wear anything uk ?

user13 but with the timeline...

user14 that is deifnitely punched bruise coming from a boxer

user15 the blood-

user16 max cannot do this, i am pretty sure !?|

user17 DONT TRUST MEN ! WE SAW KIM SOO HYUN RIGHT ?

user18 let yn comment man

et me know if you want to be added or removed to the tg!

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