#ranting cos this resonates deeply

[theyluvlyss]

𝐅𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐲

《 ♡ 》 headcanon/rant

───────── 《 .°•♡•°. 》 ──────────

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭 :

this is basically like my personal version of marvel's 'what if...?', I'm so geeked, dude. what if... freddy freeman was never given the powers of shazam? a take from @anon-2019, expanded on by me.

𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 :

none

𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐞 :

non-specified - alternate universe

𝐓𝐖/𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 :

cussing - me and anon's endless thoughts - freddy being the best at everything he does because he's that guy fr🤷🏽‍♀️.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ...𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

───────── 《 .°•♡•°. 》 ──────────

𝐨𝐡 𝐦𝐲 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝. . .

I want you to know how mad I am at the fact tumblr, once again, fucked me over and wouldn't let me edit your original ask as a draft so I had to delete it...

and as you can see, I screenshotted it all before doing so, so I deeply apologize for not being able to just answer the ask directly...

but omg I adore the creativity of this, holy shit dude !!!! personally, I've always resonated with freddy being on the more creative side of things (much like the other job ideas you listed), so flight attendant never crossed my mind ! on that note...

you can't tell me freddy wouldn't be absolutely charming and rizzing up all of his passengers and co-workers😙🤭. and he likes to make a show of doing the whole 'make sure you fasten your seat belts, and this is how to work your oxegyn masks' thing, you know what I'm talking about?

and handing out snacks would be this whole other ordeal, he'd be launching them bitches across the isle if he missed someone or would be settling small disputes with his horribly timed comedy. and babies? yeah, they don't cry on his flights, he's making sure of it, making faces and entertaining them (other attendants are constantly trying to work shifts with him because of this). he gives older kids tours of what he's allowed to show them, telling elderly folk they don't look a day over twenty, all of that shit.

and don't let him work first class !! he's absolutely clapping back at all of the snobby folk (it's a wonder he still has his job), and then on the occasions where they're the nice rich type, bro is popping wine bottles with them, indulging in their life stories, cracking an immense amount of jokes and making MASSIVE tips cuz freddy freeman is likeable in EVERY universe, including yours, idc, I said what I said...

plus, he's flying. he's doing what he always dreamed to do; he's in the sky, free and seeing all of the tiny people, places, and things below him. night, day, clear skies, rainy clouds, it doesn't matter. the shakiness of the turbulence and the sound of a jet engine can be drowned out with earbuds, he can kick back and relax after a long shift, it. does. not. matter. the downs are worth it because he's up.

freddy is flying, and he's happier than a mf doing it, and and and- *starts crying*.

I love him, so much, my soulmate🥹💙.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ...𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ...𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭

𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 :

@anon-2019

𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 :

429 words

𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 :

none :(

[icharchivist]

That's such a gorgeous fate episode, thank you so much for sharing it!

Also, and I'm terribly sorry to be bringing him up again, but we were just recently talking about his breakdown again, Shalem's holiday FE proves that Belial is wrong with his fear of growing close to mortals, since he believes there's no point as they're just going to die and leave him

Shalem is coping much better, having loved and lost, but she embraces the memories and it's bittersweet, of course, but there's still sweetness

It also means there's hope for Sandalphon. One day, when the player character dies, he'll still be able to look back fondly at the time they spent and the memories they've made

And Belial could have that too, but he's playing

Anyway, Shalem queen and we love her

It's my pleasure!! i'm so glad we could share it together <3

but also, no worries on that because i did think about him a bit during this FE, because, yeah, this FE exactly addresses Belial's rant and i think it is really effective on that regard.

When Belial talks about the mortals who end up leaving them primals behind, he focuses on the loss, on what's missing. Honestly it's likely Belial never actually tried to create any bonds with mortal - losing Lucilius was enough to give him a taste of what it is like to live, immortal, while having lost something you loved once, and he probably protected himself from caring about mortals then again.

And while of course we had stories about primals since then living with the memories of humans who once accompanied them on their journey.....

Shalem's FE here really showed just how deeply those past friends cared, and how their memories are still there with Shalem.

And the fact Shalem's friends date from the creation, from so long ago, and yet Shalem still holds on to those memories, make it even more resonant. So much time has passed, so much has been lost, but the warm wishes for a future they will not be here to watch is carried through Shalem's memories.

Shalem is coping as much as she can, especially since she also has the amnesia to account for, but yeah, it's bittersweet, but it's still sweet.

and i just can't get over the physicality of the scarf yaknow? Like memories, feelings, all of that - you can risk having them fading away with time. But this scarf her friend made her, that found her way to keep her warm in the present, is really a show of how much this love can be lasting. The people Shalem knew are gone. Her memories are gone. The world she used to know are gone. But the desire to keep her warm, comfortable, and loved, still found its way to her thousands of years later.

Shalem is pretty much this "better have loved and lost than not loved at all" in term of this specific loss. She still has to navigate how deeply this affects her, and the knowledge that the same thing will happen with MC and co - but it's still worth it. It was worth it then, it is still worth it now.

Belial's loss hold him back from seeing the positive of it all. It's not like he had this love in this life to make him think it was worth it to even lose it.

but if one day Belial come back in the picture i hope Shalem can serve as a lesson. Because Belial was so vicious throwing it at the primals' face that they will need to move on with their grief, that Shalem being here, the proof of it all, being able to tell him that this love will still be there and it's what matters, is such a beautiful way to end this.

But yeah. Shalem is a queen and i'm so soft for her. I always loved her and i found her thematic interesting but the deep dive into this loss and grief in this FE really are so compelling to me that now i'm still a mess. They really nailed it.

And it is admirable that still by the end of it we can go back to the thematic Belial rose 5 years ago and still discuss them. Showcase very well just how funky this little guy is.

[okdeedee]

here i am

cassian andor x gn! reader - 6th installment of latch

masterlist

a/n: alright besties here's another chapter. life day celebrations And other things aka gratuitous party ish scene + Angst + the power of friendship. IN WHICH;;;,,,, cassian andor plays the role of mr darcy for a bit. title from stuck in the middle with you by stealer's wheel because,,, clowns to the left of me. jokers to the right. here i am, stuck in the middle with you.

content? warning?: shara bey and kes dameron cameo x. the introduction of another oc who i Love. she's a 6 foot 9 or 2.05m tall devaronian menace. angst. swearing. ramping up that sexual tension but no smut Probably Ever because i just wont. drinking moderately in a social context, no drunkenness or alcoholism. kissing! amorous touches! this was written with almost exclusively rosalía's motomami album playing in the bg so just keep that in mind. jk.

wc: 10.2k HUH

It’s Life Day, and other than essential personnel, the base is off-duty.

Unless, of course, there is a catastrophe, but everyone has decided there won’t be. You all need a break.

You and some of the mech crew are deemed essential personnel, but just in the morning. There are some Y-Wings that need repair before a mission tomorrow.

You’re working on Shara’s ship – she’s become a fun friend to have around. You hold similar opinions on repairs and mods, and she’s interesting to talk to – always complaining about that soldier Kes, who keeps asking her out.

You know she likes him; she just wants to string him on a bit. The thought of it makes you laugh.

Only a few other mechs are scattered around.

One of them is Lakan, a middle-aged Besalisk who was an engineer before he joined the Rebellion. He helped a lot in your first couple months – he’s endlessly patient and deeply affectionate. It’s sort of like having a father again, and he greets you with his crushing four armed hugs every time you see him.

Another is a younger Togruta individual with vivid blue skin called Eyroa – they’re something of a prodigy, and the sort of being that seems to know what you need before you ask for it. They’re often handing you a different sized servodriver or a drill-bit with a shy smile.

The other mech present this morning is Greda, the Devaronian you have become good friends with. She’s ridiculously tall and covered in tattoos. Her skin is a deep green, her hair is blonde and short – you still haven’t worked up the nerve to ask if it’s natural or not – and she is a complete nuisance.

Greda likes to wear earplugs while she’s working; she says she gets her best work done when she isn’t distracted by other people. Your friendship started on your second day of work as a mechanic, when she approached you right as you were going on your lunch break. You weren’t sure who she was because she’d been holed up working on a Hammerhead Corvette so you hadn’t met her yet, but you were quickly very glad to know her.

Not here today are the following:

Your fellow humans: Yemmi, an older man who is a notorious flirt, Manala and Hasset, the twins who never stop talking, and Riekk, the Bith, who plays a beautiful new genre of music through his speaker every workday.

They’re good co-workers. They were welcoming when you arrived, and you’re fond of all of them.

Greda, however, is being a pain today.

She’s always a pest, but since it’s a holiday, she’s decided she’s going to wreak havoc upon your morning instead of actually getting work done, which is a first for her.

She picks strange hills to die on.

Right now, she’s sitting on top of Shara’s Y-Wing, kicking her feet, and ranting about something. You zoned out five minutes ago and now her deep, resonant voice is just a buzz in your ear.

You hold out a wrench to her so you can root through your toolbox with both hands, and she takes it without thinking, not pausing in her speech.

You find what you need, but you leave the wrench in her hand. If she’s not going to work, she can at least be useful as a tool stand.

A few minutes later, she stops talking and looks at the wrench in her hand.

“Did you give me this?”

“Yeah, like five minutes ago.”

“I’ll drop it on you.”

You laugh. “I thought you were anti-violence. That’s why you’re a mechanic.”

She huffs and jumps off the Y-Wing. “You’re not being fun today.”

You grunt as you pull a panel of the engine off. “I’m more fun when I’m not being interrupted during work.”

She raises her hands in surrender. “Apologies, my liege.”

You swat her with a rag you had in your pocket. “Enough from you,” you reprimand.

Greda starts to walk away, whistling some annoying little song.

“I’ll see you at the bonfire tonight, though, right?”

“Yeah! See you then!”

She disappears into the hull of a G-75, then there is blessed silence, because Lakan works without music.

You find yourself thinking about Cassian, wondering what he’s doing with his day off.

He visits you in the hangars often, just to say hi, or to keep you company for a bit. You feel honoured to receive his individual attention. You’re flustered by it, too.

No matter how hard you try, you can’t quite get used to the intensity in his eyes when he’s focussed on you. You find yourself looking at his lips, or the line of his jaw, or the sweeping length of his eyelashes more often than not these days.

Flustered or not, you cherish those visits – like the one several months ago where you talked about Onderon, and you kissed each other’s hands. It still brings heat to your face and a thrill through your body just to think about it.

Or the one last week where Cassian told you about his childhood and his family.

The hardest are the weeks when Cassian can’t visit at all because he’s on a long mission.

He’s one of the best operatives the Rebellion has. He’s ruthless, efficient, and observant. He’s killed people just to be able to get back home.

You know how good he is at this work, but you’re still terrified that each time he visits will be the last.

A dozen times, he’s come back bruised and battered, and you hold him extra-gently and extra-long in your arms.

Once, he was rushed to the med centre for carbon dioxide poisoning. You stayed by his bedside for a full 18 hours.

You love him wholeheartedly. He’s your best friend. You’re not sure what that means in the long run, but for now it means he has to come back alive from all of his missions, so you get more time to figure it out.

And maybe one day, tell him.

.

Cassian actually has things to do on this day off. Leisurely things.

He and Melshi are going to sit down and have caf and talk, of all things. They’re both off today, and he hasn’t really spoken to Melshi in a couple months because of conflicting schedules, so that will be nice, he thinks.

A year ago, he probably would have baulked at the idea – Melshi is a friend he made out of necessity; a brother-in-arms – not that he doesn’t like him or enjoy spending time with him.

It’s just that they became friends by escaping a slave-labour prison and establishing trust by clinging on a cliffside together for hours, not by discussing their mutual interests.

He used to do it all the time on Ferrix. He’d walk to Brasso’s work just to catch him before he went home, he’d hang out with Bix, deliver something from Maarva to Jezzi, shoot the shit with Xanwan while he was waiting for a transport.

The rebel base on Yavin 4 doesn’t quite have that same homely feeling yet.

Now, he’s warmed again to the idea of talking, visiting people just to see them, thanks to his constant need to see you.

It’s ridiculous how often he finds time to visit the hangar. The first few times, he pretended it was because he had something else to do and he just happened to run into you, but he can’t be bothered to lie anymore.

You always greet him with a smile and touch his arm with your hand, or if he’s coming back after a mission, you’ll hug him.

What you don’t know is that Cassian comes to the hangar most days he’s on base, but he’ll only talk to you if you’re alone.

Often, you’re talking to Shara Bey about her Y-Wing (or about that ground soldier, Kes, that keeps hitting on her), or chatting across the hangar to one of the other mechanics. Sometimes, you just look like you’re concentrating really hard, and he doesn’t want to disturb you.

He gets embarrassed for some reason and walks away with a little ache in his chest.

Cassian is still bewildered by how obviously overjoyed you are to see him every time he visits. He’s not sure what he did to deserve the smiles you send his way – you smile with your whole being. It’s like being a plant in the sun; like he needs it to get through the day.

He’s pretty sure he’s in love with you.

He doesn’t expect to ever tell you, doesn’t entertain thoughts of crossing the physical boundaries the two of you have. He only dreams of you once every month or so, and that’s out of his control.

He’d rather never tell you he loves you that way than chance losing your companionship. If he made you uncomfortable and you drifted apart, he’d be so shattered that he’d probably become more reckless than usual with his work.

If he dies on a mission one of these days, he doesn’t think he’ll regret that decision.

The rebellion always comes first, now.

.

It’s evening, and Life Day festivities are starting.

Some of the more artistically inclined members of the Rebellion have decorated a sizeable part of the runway outside the temple.

There are random different sizes and kinds of lamps hanging on wires that are precariously strung between generators and trees, scraps of spare fabric (mostly orange, likely from pilots’ jumpsuits), and a massive bonfire being constructed in the centre of the clearing.

There are a few fold-out tables laden with portions of vastly contrasting foods in mismatched containers or piled on mess-hall trays.

For the last couple of weeks, a lot of the rebels who went off-world for missions or recon made pit-stops to pick up different ingredients for cultural delicacies they wanted to make for Life Day.

You smile to see a couple dishes your pilot friends mentioned in passing on the table.

There’s jaunty music playing at an agreeable volume through the runway PA system.

You watch over the next half an hour as more of your comrades fill the space, bringing food or musical instruments, some not in uniform, all relaxed and happy.

The bonfire is lit, during which there’s a song sung by some of the rebels in a language you don’t recognise, but you don’t mind – you feel a part of it regardless.

You’re basking in the joy and freedom of this night until someone practically tackles you from behind and you stumble.

“Hey, babycakes,” Greda says, a little too loud right next to your ear.

You grunt trying to bear her weight. You shove her off, laughing. “Babycakes?”

“Just trying something new,” she says breezily, “you like it?”

You shake your head, but get distracted by watching everyone mingle, unable to keep the smile off your face.

The two of you stand there, soaking it in, until Greda gets fidgety.

She hums that annoying song from this morning and circles you like a loth-wolf, looking around at everything, until she stops and pokes your shoulder over, and over, and over again.

“Greda, what the hell are you doing?”

“Who’s the little grumpy dude watching you from the corner?”

Your head whips around. “Where?”

She points to a dark corner of the runway, right near a path into the forest. You follow her hand and at the end of it is Cassian Andor. He glances away as soon as you clock him.

Shit.

You yank her hand down and give her your fiercest glare.

“Stars and planets, Greda, are you allergic to discretion?”

She grins. “Oh, calm down. Who is it? So tiny and angry.”

You huff. “Everyone’s tiny to you, you’re almost seven feet tall.”

“Still.”

You turn her away from him and watch him over her shoulder. You feel flustered, all of a sudden. “That’s Cassian. He’s – uh – we –”

“So, you’re on a first name basis with the Captain Andor? Interesting.”

You frown, and Greda has a mischievous glint in her eye, and you’re realising this is probably a set up.

“You just implied you didn’t know who he was.”

“That’s on you. Everyone knows who he is. I was just trying to figure out if you knew him.”

You shove her with your hip. “Asshole. Why do you care?”

Greda grabs your hands and swings them between you like you’re dancing.

“Because,” she says in a sing-song voice, “you’re so mysterious, and I can’t tell if you have any friends. I wanted to know if you knew him because he was looking at you like he wanted to take all your clothes off.”

“I have plenty of friends – and I’ve known you for months now, I would have thought you count,” you say, taking control and swinging her arms more violently.

“You didn’t deny that he looked like he wanted to take your clothes off,”

“I wasn’t planning on dignifying that with a response, you perv. And how did you not notice Cassian and I were friends? He visits the hangars like twice a week.”

“I don’t know, I’m busy. I don’t really pay attention to other people,”

You scoff. “Next time you accuse me of being mysterious, get your head out of your narcissistic ass first.”

She makes an exaggerated sad face. “You’re not nearly drunk enough for me to lead this conversation where I want it to go.”

“I’m stone-cold sober, Greda.”

“Exactly.”

Then Lakan and Yemmi join you, so that conversation trails off.

You haven’t had easy, relaxed fun like this in a long time, so despite her threat, when Greda offers you your first drink of the night (with no repayment in order), you take it.

You dance with all of the mech crew in a big, messy circle, copying each other’s moves and tripping over yourselves. Manala and Hasset try to teach you a dance they made up as children, but it’s really quite intricate. The two women can’t stop laughing at you.

Later, when you get a rush of self-confidence, you leave your crew and go chat to Bassa who’s standing by the fire. She’s gruff, as always, and pretends she’s not happy to see you.

You know she is – you can tell by the extra crinkles around her eyes that she’s doing her version of smiling.

She tells you about a couple of her recent missions, and retires pretty early, bemoaning old age.

Greda offers you a second drink maybe an hour later. You accept.

By about 2100, you’re relaxed, just a little bit buzzed, but you still have top-notch fine motor control. 

You’re sitting with Greda, cross-legged on the ground. For all her tomfoolery, you trust her.

She just has a cheeky streak half the galaxy wide.

You find yourself thinking that if she were to ask you about Cassian, you might tell her the truth. You’ve never told anyone about him – your friendship, your feelings.

You haven’t had enough to drink for that thought to be the alcohol talking, so you’re pretty sure you actually want to tell her.

At that moment, Cassian walks by. You say “Hey,” too quietly and reprimand yourself internally, but he hears you and turns his head.

“Hey,” he responds, a little more rigidly than usual.

Silence.

You smile awkwardly and look between him and Greda.

“This is Greda. She’s part of mech crew. Greda, Cassian. Cassian, Greda.”

Cassian acknowledges her with a nod. She grins, nods back.

“What are you drinking?” He asks.

You open your mouth to speak, but Greda interrupts, “Corellian Rum and some kind of soda I nicked. I needed our Wompy to relax a little. You know how it is. It’s been a difficult few months.”

You gape at her incredulously.

“How have I not been relaxed? And more importantly, how do you know about that fucking nickname?”

Cassian smiles, just barely. His dimple is just visible from this angle. Your face gets warmer.

 “A little birdie told me.”

You groan. “Bassa?”

“Indeed. A few months ago. I was just keeping it for the right moment.”

You cover your face with your hands.

There’s a pause. You see Cassian’s feet shift through a gap in your fingers, and you hear him sigh.

Your heart sinks just a touch – he’s probably not interested in this conversation, and he’s not super sociable so he won’t sit down and talk to you and Greda.

“Sorry, Cass, you were going somewhere. I interrupted.”

“No, it’s okay – I’m just… I was just leaving.” He shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Ah. Well. Have a good night,” you try.

He nods. “Thank you. You too.”

With that, he walks away.

You sigh out deeply.

Greda starts cackling. “What in the seven hells was that?”

You punch her shoulder. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” you mumble under her laughter.

“No, really. What just happened? You call him Cass? Cute. But I thought you were friends? That was so awkward. And he just stood there staring at you.”

You tilt your head back and look at the stars, trying to find something to get you out of this.

You find nothing, except your mind’s eye replaying the image of Cassian smiling in the firelight.

“I think he’s the love of my life,” you say before you can think.

Greda stops laughing abruptly.

“Oh, my gods.”

She turns to you and her face is serious. You stare back blankly, “What?”

Greda starts ranting in her mother tongue - by the tone of her voice, you think she’s swearing.

She finishes her tirade in Basic:

“Really? Andor? He’s so cranky and you’re so… likeable.”

Something blooms in your chest at the confirmation that Greda, who likes just about no one, likes you. You smile at the ground.

“Why?”

Your mind floods with a ridiculously detailed montage of interactions with Cassian over the last year and you can’t help the beaming smile that appears on your face.

Greda groans in disgust.

“Shut up. Cassian’s been there for me ever since I joined the Rebellion. He’s… intelligent. He’s very good at what he does. He’s easy to talk to.”

“You sound like you’re recommending him for a job.”

You narrow your eyes at her. “You are not making this easy. I can end this conversation whenever I want.”

She has the decency to look a bit sheepish. “Sorry.”

“We trust each other. He’s got a very gentle heart underneath it all. And… he’s – he’s very-”

“What?”

Your whole body feels warm. “I like his face.”

She snickers. “He is pretty. In sort of a depressed, haunted loth-cat way.”

“I can’t stand you.”

You shove your foot into her shin, but it doesn’t hurt her. All it does is throw you off balance, and you topple backwards and end up flat on the ground.

Her giggling turns into fully fledged booming laughter.

“You are such a child,” you reprimand through your own giggles.

Greda doubles over and slaps your leg repeatedly, laughing so hard she’s silently shaking. 

Fucking Devaronians.

.

Cassian comes to see you in the upper hangar two nights later and thank the stars, you’re alone.

He’s pretty sure you’re working on Shara’s astromech, an R5 unit.

There are droids that do that sort of work so you don’t really have to, but he remembers you saying you were happy to help and you needed the practice, and Shara was happy to lend a her droid to you.

The speaker next to you is playing soft music, and you’re sitting cross legged on the floor in the lamplight.

Cassian can hear you talking the astromech gently through what you’re doing – it’s powered down, so talking to it is completely redundant, but he’s endeared by your kindness.

He doesn’t want to ruin your peace, but he needs to ask you something.

He’s about to greet you when you turn to get something and see him approaching.

You give him a tired smile and his heart races.

“Hey, Cass,” you say. You reach out your hand up him and he instinctively takes it. You give his hand a squeeze and sigh contently.

“Hi,” he says, trying to keep his voice soft.

“What brings you here? It’s so late,” 

He takes a fortifying breath and says what he came here to say.

“Would you do me a massive favour?” He asks.

You nod immediately. “Yeah, ‘course.”

“I just – I need a mech, for an operation next week, and they said to pick anyone I wanted, and I want you,” his face flushes, “I mean - I wanted to ask you. I know you don’t like active combat. You’re not gonna be in danger.”

Wariness takes over your face. A mission?

“Tell me more.”

.

The plan is to land near a city on Numidian Prime. Cassian will go into the city undercover, into one of its many gambling hubs, and try to gamble information from someone who knows someone who’s supposed to know the whereabouts of a Rebel informant who’s recently gone missing.

This informant is vital to the function of the Rebellion, it seems.

The mission is somewhat complicated for Cassian, but your role in it isn’t too stressful. The Rebel Alliance has an old U-Wing model that, with a little paint job, can pass as the sort of vintage ship a rich gambler might own instead of an Alliance ship – the latter of which could cause a lot of problems. The only shortcoming is that because of its age, it can really only survive one trip into hyperspace before repairs have to be made.

Which is where you come in.

As soon as Cassian leaves the ship, you need to get to work on repairing it, replacing any parts necessary (which might require a trip into town yourself) and making sure it’s ready to fly back to Yavin 4.

Despite the importance of the operation, it isn’t particularly intense. No one bats an eye at another souped-up looking ship on a planet filled with smugglers and gamblers in hiding, and Numidian Prime doesn’t have a government or law-enforcement agency that might enforce a parking fine or impoundment – or even check the details of ships that land there.

Cassian looks like he’s worried you’ll say no.

The thought did cross your mind, but you’d much rather be with Cassian on a mission in a non-combat capacity than stay on Yavin 4 and hope he’s alright.

Your only qualm with the whole situation is really his choice of mech.

“Why me?”

That seems to be the last thing he was expecting you to say. “What do you mean?”

You shrug. “Lakan has years more experience than me, Eyroa’s practically psychic when it comes to ship diagnostics. Riekk is much more efficient than the rest of us.”

There Cassian goes again, with his earnest face. He strokes your hand with his thumb.

“Because I trust you.”

You chew on your lip.

“Okay.”

.

There are a couple meetings over the next three days. You, Greda and Eyroa spend your spare moments detailing the old U-Wing, painting and buffing so it attracts normal, ship-enthusiast attention on Numidian Prime.

It’s interesting being part of mission briefs again, after a year and a bit off. You listen raptly and are incredibly thankful you don’t have to do what Cassian does.

His alias is a man called Dimik Kayo – a man who frequents the casinos of Canto Bight but is looking for more high-stakes and tucked away places to make money. Thus, Numidian Prime.

They gave him some clothes to wear during the mission, and he won’t show you, but he doesn’t seem pleased. You’re sort of morbidly excited to see how bad the outfit is.

The day comes, you get in the U-Wing with as many tools and parts as your mech team can spare and get on your way.

.

The flight is relatively short, only a day and a half. Cassian spends a fair amount of it sleeping; he’s just off the back of a last-minute mission and hasn’t slept for a couple days. You amuse yourself by watching him or going through the Mechanic’s Manual for the U-Wing.

As expected, the landing on Numidian Prime is easy. You’re a couple kliks out from the main city in a clearing, surrounded by trees. No one comms in and asks for identification – one of the perks of dodgy planets.

Cassian’s getting changed. You wait in the copilot’s seat, your back to him. You’re completely silent - you feel anxious about the mission and just nervous in general.

Then you hear the click of dress shoes walking towards you. 

“This is as good as it’s gonna get.” 

You turn around, and as soon as you set eyes on Cassian, you’re filled with an all-encompassing want.

You’ve always thought of Cassian as attractive. He’s a beautiful man and a good person, and those big brown eyes of his definitely don’t hurt. 

But the difference between this moment and every other time you’ve interacted with Cassian is that - it’s just -  

It turns out that Cassian Andor is hot. 

He’s tried to comb his hair back, but it’s still pretty messy. His facial hair is grown out at the moment, but he’s just trimmed it, so his cheekbones and jaw look extra sharp. 

And the clothes he’s wearing. A muted, dark blue suit jacket with a high rounded collar, with the top two out of six buttons undone. You can see the entirety of his clavicle and some of his chest. The sleeves are tight, and they make him look particularly built. 

The same with the legs of his trousers. They’re snug around his thighs, and you have to tear your eyes away. You can hear your pulse in your ears. 

‘As good as it’s going to get’ is … very good. 

Stars, he’s so hot your tongue feels numb. 

He’s talking, but there might as well be static in your ears. 

His hands. 

There are rings on his fingers. 

Half of your mind is taken up by a montage of all the places you want his hands to touch you, the other half sounding the alarm that it is not ideal to desire your best friend carnally, it will lead to a wealth of problems. 

He takes a step closer, and you can smell him, the cologne he just put on, and if you weren’t already sitting your knees would give out from under you - 

“Are you listening?” 

You snap your mouth closed. “Hm?” 

“I’ll call you ‘Wompy’ just to annoy you into paying attention.”

You’re sort of thinking he can call you anything he wants when he looks like that, but instead you say, “I’ll kick you in the shins if you do,” uncharacteristically combatively. 

He frowns, a little concerned.

You curse internally; you’ve been thrown off your rhythm. 

“Sorry,” you wave a hand in the air vaguely, “lost in thought. What were you saying?” 

.

You’re acting weird. 

You’re fidgeting in a way Cassian hasn’t seen from you since that first time you spoke in the forest of Yavin 4 after Nar Shaddaa. The last few things you’ve said have gone just a touch past your usual level of banter into defensiveness. 

While he was talking through the order of operations, it seemed like you were zoning out. 

Cassian’s attaching his comm to his inside jacket pocket, tucking a blaster in his boot, watching you in his peripheral vision. You look deep in thought, one of your legs bouncing up and down. 

Nervous? 

He turns slightly towards you, debating on whether to talk to you or not.

You glance up like you feel his eyes on you. He watches your eyes scan his body from head to toe, and he feels his face heat up. 

He feels ridiculous in this getup, it’s a lot less coverage than he’s accustomed to wearing when he’s working, and it’s like half of his torso is on display. 

Cassian was already feeling unsettled, and now you’re acting strange, and he needs to sort this out, otherwise he’ll just be worried about you for the whole mission.

He runs a hand through his hair (freshly gelled, which feels slimy and disgusting) as he makes his way over to you. Then there’s residue on his hand and he can’t wipe it off on his trousers, so he just stares at his hand, standing in front of you. 

Force, what is going on today? 

“You want a cloth for that?” You ask, cutting through his mile-a-minute thoughts.

He nods. “Please.” 

.

So you stand up to get a cloth without factoring in his proximity to you, and suddenly you are almost chest to chest. You put your arms out in front of you to brace yourself and they land on each side of the deep V of his suit jacket. 

He’s warm. You stare at his neck for a second to gather your wits, which doesn’t work very well because his neck is just as nice as his…everything else.

Then you look up, and he’s already gazing intently at your face. 

He’s very close. And his eyes are so beautiful. 

You have the compulsion to chew on your lip out of pure stress, but what if that’s weird and Cassian notices, so you just purse your lips in to stop yourself from doing anything stupid with them. 

Cassian immediately looks at your lips and you feel your entire body go stiff. 

He frowns, and the hand that isn’t covered in hair gel comes up and squeezes your upper arm. 

“Is everything alright?” He asks softly. You can feel his breath on your face. 

You let out the most stupid, timid “yep” of your life and you want the ground below you to cave in.

He searches your face. “Come on. Tell me.” 

You let out a sharp sigh. You have no idea how to get out of this. 

His hand moves from your shoulder to the side of your neck, and it practically sends sparks through your entire body. “Are you nervous?”

Silence.

.

Cassian starts to stroke your cheek with his thumb without thinking. He just wants that eopie-in-the-headlights expression on your face to fall away. “This is an easy mission. Plus, I’ll have you in my ear the whole time. You don’t need to be nervous-”

“Maker, Cassian, don’t do that!” You push him away, and that comforting warmth of your hands on his chest disappears. 

He’s scrambling, trying to figure out if he overstepped - he doesn’t think he did, he’s touched your face before. 

You rub your hands over your face vigorously. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap.” 

Something in his chest aches to see you out of sorts like this. You laugh a little bitterly, which confuses him even more. Then you look at him and take a deep breath. 

“I am nervous. Not about the mission. It’s fine. I’m sorry I’m being so weird. Don’t worry.” 

“What are you nervous about?”  

You look flustered, and you indicate to him with a vague wave of your arm.

“Me?” 

You cringe. “Yes.” 

His mind is racing. “Did I do something wrong?” 

.

You can see Cassian is panicking that he’s made you uncomfortable, and you shouldn’t have said anything, but he needs to know he hasn’t done anything wrong, so you say:

“You -” you gesture uselessly, “you look… You look really good and I’m…just sort of…”

Realisation dawns on Cassian’s face, but he’s still and silent. 

You can’t stop yourself now that you’ve started. “Like, stars, Cassian, do you think they made your sleeves tight enough? And those stupid rings? And they really picked the right colour for the suit, didn’t they?” 

Cassian’s got a tiny, incredulous smile on his face as he looks at you. His eyes are bright. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” you say in an embarrassingly weak voice. 

That smile turns into one of those stupid little smirks he does. 

There is a long pause, where you’re just looking at each other. 

.

“You really like this outfit?” He asks. 

You groan and cover your face with your hands, muttering a muffled “I hate you.” 

Outside, he looks calm enough. Inside, his heart is racing, his body feels too hot, and he thinks he’s going to lose his balance. 

You, the most gorgeous, radiant person he has ever seen, are flustered by him in formal wear. You think he’s attractive, so much so that you’re stumbling over your words. 

He can’t help but laugh for the pure elation the idea brings him. 

You cringe and peek at him through your fingers. “Don’t laugh!” 

He schools his face. “I’m not-” You glare at him. “I am, I’m just. I’m not laughing at you.” 

You roll your eyes, set your jaw. There is a tiny hint of a smile on your face. “I’m getting you a cloth for your stupid hand.” 

He watches you walk away, eyes the lines of your body, the movement of your hips. It’s not the first time he’s done it, not by a long shot.

You return with the cloth and hold it out to him, arm completely outstretched for maximum distance between the two of you.

He takes your hand anyway and pulls you toward him, which makes you gasp. Cassian desperately wishes he didn’t have a mission to do right now. 

You shove the rag into the centre of his chest and yank your hand out of his grip.

“Go be good looking somewhere else.” 

Cassian feels like he’s about to jump out of his skin. 

Neither of you move. 

Cassian wipes the gel off his hand and tosses the rag on the floor.

You lean closer in. 

Stars above. 

He knows physical intimacy. He’s plenty experienced, but his hands are shaking anyway, because it’s you. 

Instinctively, Cassian reaches out, wraps an arm around your waist, pulls you against him. 

“Cass,” you warn, but you’re sliding your palms up the front of his suit jacket anyway. Cassian shudders and reaches his hand up to the side of your face. You press your cheek against his hand, and the movement exposes the wide expanse of the other side of your neck. 

He can’t hold back, not anymore, so he leans in and kisses you in that soft space just above your collarbone, once, before he can even think about it. You gasp softly, and one of your hands moves up to the back of his neck. 

He knows this is a good sign, so he kisses you again, a little higher. You make a gentle, breathy sound in the back of your throat that makes his heart trip. Another kiss, lingering, a little higher. You tilt your head further back for ease of access, and his hands squeeze involuntarily on your waist. He feels like it’s his first time kissing someone.

This time, when his lips meet your neck, he sucks on your skin for a second or two. 

.

Your mind is ridiculously hazy, overwhelmed entirely by the situation, but when he sucks on your neck you have a moment of clarity.

The mission. 

“Cassian Andor, don’t you dare start something you don’t have the time to finish.”

It comes out much more breathily than you would have planned - in your head you were more authoritative, but his beard feels so lovely against your skin and you can’t quite breathe. 

Cassian just shushes you, the bastard, and kisses along your jaw, getting closer to your lips. He pulls away, about to kiss you again, but you grab his chin and make him look you in the eyes. 

He looks flushed, his eyelids are half closed, and he’s breathing heavily. 

Whatever you were about to say goes into hyperspace and exits your mind. You open and close your mouth a few times, trying to come up with something to say. 

There’s a lazy smile on his face, like it’s fun for him to watch you struggle. You grip his chin a little harder and he laughs, breathy and low. 

“Cass-”

“I know,” he murmurs, drawing back. He doesn’t move his gaze from your lips, though. 

You pull his bottom lip down gently with your thumb. He makes a little pleading sound, which is probably the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard.  

You let his lip go. “Kiss me again after the mission, gorgeous.” 

His jaw drops and you laugh deliriously in shock at yourself.

“Sorry. It slipped out,” you push him away and he takes a couple of wobbly steps backward. 

“Off you go.”

“You can’t just call me that and then tell me to leave,” he appeals. 

You’re still laughing. You cover your mouth with your hand. “The sooner you go, the sooner you can come back.” 

He stares you down affectionately with those ridiculously intense eyes of his, and it’s hard not to cave in and fall back into his arms. 

He shakes his head at you minutely and he’s trying not to smile. 

You’re still grappling with the events of the last five minutes, but you’re so elated it’s hard to focus. 

“Stop loitering,” you tease. 

He scoffs good-naturedly and walks backwards in the direction of the shuttle ramp. His gaze meanders up and down your body, which makes you feel like you’re on fire. 

Flirting. That’s new. 

“I’ll be talking in your ear for the entire mission. You won’t even have time to miss me.”

He meets your eyes. “I wouldn’t be so sure, angel.” 

You freeze, bewildered by his chosen term of endearment. Cassian’s rendered you speechless and he knows it, so he grins. A mischievous, joyful smile that makes your knees weak. 

He turns and walks down the ramp. Then he’s out of sight. 

Angel. 

The speaker crackles to life in the cockpit, and it’s just Cassian laughing over the comm. You're somewhat embarrassed, but you feel like you’re about to take flight or something. His laugh. 

“And you had the audacity to complain about me calling you gorgeous. What the fuck, Cass.” 

He’s still laughing as you pull out your toolboxes.

.

You both focus entirely on the mission, after that. You're both good at compartmentalising.

Cassian plays the role of a sleazy, womanizing gambler, and you hurriedly repair the ship.

Several hours later, the comm crackles on again.

.

“Success?” You ask. 

“Yeah. Coming back now.”

“Alright. I’m just replacing a floor panel, otherwise, I’m done.’

He makes a satisfied “hm.”

You grumble into the comm as you replace the floor panels of the shuttle, “That was fast on your end, though. You should dress up as a money hungry man-whore more often.” 

“Hey,” he reprimands.  

“What was this character’s name again?” You ask as you search your toolbox for a wrench. 

“Dimik. Kayo.” 

“Yikes,” you grunt as you put your bodyweight into tightening a bolt. 

“What’s wrong with ‘Dimik’?” Cassian asks. 

“Oh, you know…” 

It dawns on you while you’re talking with Cassian that this is all brand new. The comfortable, easy friendship you’ve developed has changed irreversibly, regardless of how things go when he gets back to the ship.

You trust Cassian. That’s the easy part. 

But romantic relationships are not particularly familiar to you, and you’re in the middle of a war, and the what ifs start piling up. You’re not sure you really want the newness when everything around you is already changing all the time. 

.

Cassian notices you trail off mid-sentence. He figures you need to concentrate fully on your work for a second. 

But after a minute or so of silence, he checks in. 

“Hey, are you okay?” 

A pause. 

“I’m gonna ask you something, and you have to answer me honestly,” you start softly. 

His heart thuds like a death knell in his chest. You sound solemn.  

“I would never lie to you.”

“Are we going to be alright? After…” everything that just happened. 

Cassian’s steps almost falter. “We are,” he says. 

Do you regret it? Do you want it to be a one-time thing? You said he could kiss you again when he gets back, but was that a joke? Heat of the moment?

He realises that the idea of not getting to kiss or hold you again is a source of stress, which throws him into a panic.

He’s not ready for this. You’re his best friend. Knowing you is easy, and integral to his life. Kissing you was easy – he enjoys it, he’s good at it. And he… likes you.

But those two components together are –

They’re daunting. He’s never wanted to give all of himself to a person before. He never felt he had much to give.

Your voice is timid as you say, “I can’t lose you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“You won’t. I - you won’t lose me.”

You hum, deep in thought. 

Cassian is still making his way to the shuttle. He waits for you to speak. 

“Okay,” you start, voice uneven. 

His heart just about melts. “Yeah?” 

“I - care about you a lot, okay, and I’m not sure I’m good at relationships. Romance.” You sigh. 

He wants to run back to the shuttle and wrap you tightly in his arms, but he thinks if he saw the look in your eyes right now, he wouldn’t know what to do, so he keeps walking at the same pace.

“This was so much more coherent in my head. I just want - I don’t want this to be weird. I don’t - I don’t want anything to change. Between us.” 

Cassian tries to stay calm, but his heart is sinking. So you do regret it? 

He asks in a very neutral voice, “As in, you don’t want to be more than friends?”

“Shit, no - sorry - stars, I’m doing a terrible job of this,” you mutter, “let me start again.” 

Cassian takes a deep breath. “Okay.” 

You curse quietly. 

“Okay. I love you, Cass. And I want you. Every part of you in any way I can get. But I’m not so familiar with dating or partnership and I really don’t want to fuck it up. Would we just be the same we’ve been but with … new physical aspects? Or is there something else I’ll need to be? I’m bad at flirting, I think I just turn mean. I don’t know how to be…sexy, or attractive, I don’t know. I think I’m scared that that’s what I need to bring to a relationship, and I won’t be able to, and you’ll leave eventually, and I will have lost my best friend. So.”

It’s like he’s floating in antigrav. Or like he’s high off some top-quality spice. “You love me.” 

You sigh gently but exasperatedly, “Yes, of course I do. Did you hear everything else I said, though?” 

Whoops. “Yes. I-” The shuttle comes into view. Shit. “- I did. I heard you.”

“You don’t have to respond right now. If you need time to think.” You’re making a valiant effort to accommodate him, but your voice is wobbly.

The thing is, at the heart of all his worry, Cassian knows this:

No one’s ever been as kind to him as you. No one’s ever been so considerate. No one’s as steadfast, as non-judgemental. He has never trusted a person like he trusts you. 

He knows he doesn’t deserve you. It’s selfish, but that won’t stop him from holding onto you until his dying breath. He decides in that moment that he wants to do whatever it takes to keep you by his side.

He reaches the hangar the ship is docked in. 

“I don’t need time to think.” 

He hears you take a shallow breath. “Okay.” 

.

You’re waiting for Cassian to speak when you hear footsteps up the ramp. You whirl around, about to grab something from your toolbox as a weapon, when you realise it’s Cassian, which in this very moment is scarier than if it was a random attacker.

You stand stock still. He takes his comm out and puts it in his pocket.

Your pulse is racing, and you can hear your blood in your ears. 

The two of you stand there a metre and a bit apart for what feels like a little eternity. 

Then Cassian takes a few purposeful steps towards you and takes you in his arms. 

He’s so warm, and he smells so good, so you tuck your face into his neck. His hand moves up to cradle the back of your head. 

“Hey,” he whispers. 

“Hi,” you say, muffled.

You can’t lose this. The feel of his arms around you, the warmth of his chest against yours.

But you need an answer now, so you whisper, “You said you didn’t need time to think.” 

Cassian’s fingers sift through your hair. “I don’t.” 

There is a pause. 

Then Cassian says gently in your ear;

“You don’t need to be anything you aren’t already. I love you because of who you were when I met you, who you are now. Who you’re always gonna be. Nothing else.”

He loves you. You’d fall to your knees if he wasn’t holding you up. You don’t know what to say, but you can’t leave him hanging. 

“Cassian-” 

“If it helps, I always thought you were attractive. Sexy.” 

You think you might die with his soft, raspy voice in your ear saying that. 

“And hey, if the physical stuff takes some time, I don’t mind. I want you, too, but I’m ready when you are. Any way you want me.” 

You tilt your head and whisper in his ear, “Andor, I’m gonna do something indecent if you keep talking to me like that.” 

He smiles, and you feel it against your cheek. “Like I said. I’m ready when you are.” 

He runs a hand through the hair at the nape of your neck, and you release him from your hold to put your hands on either side of his face. 

His expression is so soft. You can see the dimple on his left cheek, and his eyes are catching all sorts of light. 

This beautiful man. 

“You love me?” You ask, trying and failing to hide a smile. 

He lets out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, I do,” 

You make this funny sound, like halfway between a single laugh and a hiccup, because your body can’t quite process the joy you’re feeling.

Cassian snorts. “What was that?”

You shake your head giddily, grinning. “I don’t know!”

“Stop making weird sounds,” he murmurs. His eyes don’t leave your lips.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” you mumble as you close the distance between you.

His lips are ridiculously soft, and they’re moving languidly against yours like you’ve got all the time in the world. His facial hair is a little scratchy, but in a pleasant way that makes your face feel hot.  

It goes like this for a minute or so - until his tongue runs across your lips. You gasp, and your hands fall from his face. You sling your arms around his neck while he licks into your mouth, filthy and slow.

You try to give back as good as you get, but stars, this man can kiss.

Suddenly, his lips aren’t on yours anymore, and he’s walking you back into the wall of the ship.  You hit the wall with a soft thud and then Cassian starts kissing your neck again.

You feel like a teenager again.

“Cassian,” you manage to choke out.

He grunts in response.

He lingers on one spot on your neck for so long you’re pretty sure there’s going to be a mark, which will be fun to explain when you get back to base.

Cassian’s hands start to roam all over you, and you’re getting a little restless. You pull his face back up to yours and kiss him again as fervently as you can manage.

You’re there for Force knows how long, exploring each other in this new way, until the pace slows and you’re both breathing heavily. You start to pull away, but Cassian bites your bottom lip and tugs on it a little.

You make a soft, surprised sound and he chuckles, low and gentle. You feel another wave of heat rush through your body.

He gives you one more searing kiss, steps back with a smug little smile on his face and starts to get the ship ready for take-off.

You flatten your palms against the wall. Your head falls back in a haze.

You look over at Cassian.

It seems like it’s his personal mission to make you swoon today, because he’s sitting in the pilot’s chair with his headphones on, his hair all messy, still in that suit. His posture is relaxed, his eyes are focussed on the switchboard before him.

You love to see this man in his element.

You stand there leaning against the wall of the ship in a daze while he goes about his work.

He’s about to take off, so he turns to you to tell you to take a seat, but he sees your expression and he stops. There’s a quizzical look on his face.

“What?” He asks.

His shoulders look so broad in that suit.

You have too many thoughts in your head to be able to pick one to say, so you stay silent and just keep following the lines of his body with your eyes.

He fiddles with his hands. He looks embarrassed or even a little shy, which sends a thrill running through you.

“Are you gonna sit down?”

You’ve succeeded in flustering the notoriously stern and unflappable Cassian Andor, and it feels fantastic. You do take a seat, but you don’t stop blatantly watching him. You can’t look away.

He shifts under your gaze, but he manages to take off and get the ship into the atmosphere without any issues.

You let yourself get lost in thought.

.

It’s been silent for a while, and Cassian is calculating the hyperspace route on a datapad. He’s finally feeling like he has control over the situation when you ask, “Are you planning on keeping the beard? It felt so nice on my neck.” 

Cassian drops his stylus, but he manages not to choke on air, so he thinks he handles that pretty well.  

He leans down to grab it, but you get there first. You offer him the stylus and your hand lingers on his for a second.

His hand shakes as he types in the coordinates. This is a lot to deal with. 

“Uh, maybe? It’s sort of annoying to take care of.”

“Hm.”

Is it warm on the ship? He checks climate control.

Maybe it’s just him. He undoes a button of his jacket and rolls up a sleeve.

He looks over to you while he’s working on his second sleeve and you’re still staring at him, a little dazed. Your eyes meet and you quickly look away. 

Cassian feels powerful, that he can make you look like that. He’s also terrified – did he make the wrong choice? Are you better without him?

The screen flashes to notify him that the engines are ready, so he pushes the lever forward and the ship launches into hyperspace.

He watches as the inside of the ship is washed in faint blue from the streaks of light out of the window. Watches the colours playing on your skin.

It occurs to him that the two of you are alone on this ship now for an entire cycle. 

A silence stretches out between you, punctuated by accidental eye contact when both of you try to sneak a glance at the other and get caught. 

At some point, Cassian stands up, walks over to his pack and grabs his water canteen. 

Out of absolutely nowhere, you say very nonchalantly, “I wish there was a shower on this ship.” 

Cassian’s mind goes to about fifteen very naked places it’s not supposed to be, and it almost gives him whiplash. “What?” 

“Your hair’s all crunchy from the gel. If there was a shower you could wash it off.” 

The hair gel isn’t bothering him, so he’s a little confused. “I’ll be able to wash it off tomorrow,” 

You nod. “I’ve just always wanted to run my fingers through your hair because it looks so soft, and I figure you’d let me do that now. But the gel is in the way of that right now.” 

Suddenly, the hair gel is bothering him. A lot. 

“I thought you said you were bad at flirting,” he manages to rasp out. 

“You think that’s flirting?” 

Cassian thinks he might not survive this flight. “What do you think it is?” 

“That’s just my stream of consciousness.” 

‘Stream of consciousness.’ Stars help him. 

Cassian’s still a little drunk on you saying you love him and feeling your hands and mouth on him, so his self-preservation skills are lacking. 

Plus he’s never been one to think much before he acts. 

This is what leads him to ask; “What else is in your stream of consciousness?” as he takes a sip from his canteen. 

A contemplative hum.

“I was thinking you look hot with your sleeves rolled up.” 

He chokes on his water. 

You watch him, alarmed, as he coughs up his lungs. It’s embarrassing, but he can’t stop coughing, to the point where you rush over. 

“Shit, are you okay?” You reach out to touch him.

Cassian waves your hand away as he tries to get his breath back. 

Once he manages to take a few blessedly uneventful breaths, and you take the opportunity to stroke the side of his face. Your eyes are so wide, so concerned. You’re the most beautiful person he’s ever seen. 

His chest aches. He doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve you. 

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to-” 

And now you’re apologising. For complimenting him. For calling him hot. 

“- Stars, Cass, I thought you were dying for a second there, is there anything I can-”

He rushes you backwards against the wall of the ship again and does his very best to kiss you breathless. 

Before he can even think, he’s pushing his knee gently between your legs. You let out a very soft moan. 

He can’t stop. He’s kissing every bit of your skin he can find, and your hands are roaming everywhere on his body. 

Maybe if he makes you feel good; if he pleases you, keeps you happy that way, you won’t notice how wrong he is for you. 

“I love you,” he murmurs as he moves to kiss your lips again, “I love you,” as he pulls away to take a breath, “I love you,” before he bites your earlobe. 

You gasp and grip his shoulder. 

Something dark and possessive runs through him. 

He can’t lose you. He can’t.

But he knows he shouldn’t do this to you, either.

.

Cassian’s moving with reckless abandon, his lips and teeth and tongue are everywhere he can reach. 

The tenderness and joy of the first few kisses you shared are washed away by this intensity, this focus. 

And it’s not that you don’t like it, the urgency, but when you catch Cassian’s expression, it’s as stern and intense as he is during a mission. 

Something’s wrong. 

You brace your hands on his chest. “Cass, are you okay?”

He ignores you and presses his lips to yours. 

You try a couple more times with gentle coaxing, to figure out what’s going on with him, but he doesn’t respond, so you grab his face, press his forehead against yours, and say, “Stop, baby.” 

His eyes fly open and he wrenches himself away from you without a word. 

He paces the length of the ship over and over again, and you watch the furrow in his brow get deeper.

Slowly, you slide down against the hull of the ship and sit on the floor. 

You’ve known Cassian long enough to be able to identify some of his habits and patterns of thought. You trust him enough to know he didn’t lie when he said he loved you, but there’s something stopping him from giving himself to you. 

He’s the sort of person that will give love, but not accept it back. 

He stops and looks at you. “We can’t do this.” 

Twenty minutes ago, you would have allowed this, given up and nursed a bruised heart for months. 

But this is now, and you’re not letting the man you love forfeit something that could make him happy because he thinks he doesn’t deserve it. 

He’s obviously not expecting the calm expression on your face, or how you say, “Sit down.” 

He sits immediately, leaning against the other side of the hull. 

“I’m gonna say some things, and then I’ll give you time to think, and you can come back and respond, okay?” 

Cassian nods, dumbfounded. 

“If you don’t want this, you tell me that. Otherwise, don’t make my choices for me. You haven’t tricked me into loving you. I’ve loved you since you walked over to our table in the mess hall, dead on your feet with your grumpy face, looking like you were about to kill someone. There isn’t an expiry date or a condition on that. I’m not going to wake up one day and decide that I don’t love you because of what you’ve done, or who you are. You’re a good person. You deserve to be happy. To be loved. I’ll love you regardless of whether you’ll accept it or not,” you smile a little, “if you look at it that way, you could find that you may as well make the most of it.”

His eyes are shiny - more than normal - and you realise there are tears there, waiting to spill over. You want nothing more than to go over and hold him, but you don’t need physical contact to keep distracting you from conversations that need to be had. 

“Make sense?” You ask. 

He nods. 

“Good. I’ll be here for you. I’ll still be here for you when we land back on Yavin, no matter how long it takes. Just take your time, sweetheart.”

.

If anyone else called him ‘sweetheart’, Cassian would start a fight, but when you do, you say it like you mean it. Like you think he’s good, or precious. 

You put the meaning of the two words in it. ‘Sweet’ and ‘heart’. It would be enough to make him cry on a normal day, let alone this one. He clears his throat to keep himself under control. 

After a while, you move to the bench in the middle of the ship and lie down on it. You didn’t get much sleep during the flight here, so Cassian isn’t surprised when your eyes fall shut almost immediately.

So he sits on the floor of the hull in silence, and he thinks.

.

A few weeks pass and Cassian hasn’t visited you in the hangars once.

You assume he needs space away from you to think. You said you’d give it to him and you are, but you’re not endlessly patient, and doubt is creeping in.

You trust Cassian, you do, but what if he said he loved you because he felt obliged to, or because of the heat of the moment? What if he’s never going to visit you again? What if those kisses were the only ones you were ever going to share with him?

Greda, for once, is being tactical. She seemed to notice something was off, but she hasn’t mentioned it except for asking you how you are once or twice.

You’re entering the lower hangar with a late-night cup of herbal tea when you hear the alarm for an emergency landing going off on the runway.

You and Riekk are on the night shift tonight, which means you do some mech work or personal projects, but mostly you’re on call for any emergencies ship-wise throughout the night.

You run up the stairs to ground level, your tea left on the bottom step.

When you get to the runway, there’s a BTL Y-wing half in flames, haphazardly landed.

Through the smoke, you see two figures making their way out of their seats on the ship.

K-2 and Cassian.

K-2 might be a little banged up, it’s hard to see from here, but Cassian is hunched over, holding his side. His other arm is limp.

You comm the med centre and ask for the medics on call to bring a med-rig.

The med team arrives while you and Riekk are putting out the last of the fire, and Cassian is taken away on the rig before you can see him.

In the adrenaline rush and anxiety, you manage to convince yourself that Cassian won't want you there with him in the med centre. You need to keep giving him space. He's not dying, just injured. You'll only be an annoyance in the med centre anyway.

So after you've gotten a couple of the bigger maintenance droids to tug the Y-wing out of the middle of the runway into the upper hangar, you trudge back downstairs to work on some carbon scoring that's built up on one of the Corvettes.

You pick up the tea you left on the bottom step and take a sip, but it's been steeping too long, so it's bitter and cold.

[thefirsttree]

A personal update + my next game

OK, time to do this. I’ve been meaning to do a big DAVID WEHLE™ update for a while now and explain why I haven’t released a new game yet, but you know how life gets in the way. Especially when life is a quarantine hellscape, you have three beautiful, amazing, exhausting kids to raise, a spouse’s job you support, a viral YouTube channel that turns your brain to mush, a thousand emails waiting in your inbox since your game is free on the Epic Games Store (with an impressive number of redemptions too! … meaning lots of emails and customer support issues), etc., etc. What also contributes to my lack of updates is because… I just don’t really like posting online. Fascinating correlation, I know!

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a venting/ranting blog post (well, maybe a bit), because my life is seriously AMAZING and INSANELY BLESSED and LUCKY. I can’t believe how many dreams keep coming true, so much so that I feel I don’t deserve it and I really pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes… but I did want to at least be honest, because I owe that to myself.

Wow, where do I even begin? Well, how about we start with the reason I’m even a full-time indie game dev now: The First Tree. This small hobby project I worked on at night morphed into this gargantuan beast (or fox) that took over my life the past 5 years. Which is great! I’m living the dream! And yet, I really didn’t expect it to do as well as it did. At its core, my game is a slow-paced, sad walking simulator (ahem, I prefer the term “exploration game,” but you know what I mean) that somehow seemed to launch at the right time to the right audience. It resonated deeply with some of you, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I still get emails almost daily how my game changed their lives in some formative way. I’m beyond honored.

However, with that spotlight came criticism and demands from the ever-present, insatiable internet. I would randomly be surfing the gamedev subreddit trying to decompress, and I would see a comment by some rando saying how much I didn’t deserve my success, and how it was all one huge lucky fluke. And I believed them!

And to add to it, some devs considered me an indie marketing “guru”, which I was uncomfortable with. I worked hard to market my game every week, and after my GDC talk, people assumed marketing was my passion; the reason I got up every morning. Just to clarify… NO, I don’t like marketing, and I hate being the center of attention. I don’t like asking people for money and wishlists. But I did what was necessary because I was passionate about telling stories, and I wanted to give my story a fighting chance to be seen on the crowded pages of Steam.

So now, you’re probably wondering “well then David, why did you make fancy YouTube videos showing off your success? Not very modest if you ask me.” This honestly could be a long blog post all on its own, because my experience of putting myself in the spotlight and becoming a “content creator” is… complicated. It was an unusual step for me, especially since I never even showed my face online (as a game developer) until my GDC talk.

First off, I always wanted to teach and start a YouTube channel. I love video editing, especially since I’ve been doing it longer than making games! It’s a huge passion of mine. And teaching people who didn’t know they could make and finish games was a huge motivator (and it’s been so rewarding already). But the second reason is, I was scared. I was self-employed, and I was riding the success of a “huge lucky fluke” that would probably not happen again. I wanted to make sure I could provide for my amazing family, and give them food and health insurance and security in these tumultuous times. I was turning my lifelong passions and hobbies into a business, and it wasn’t as simple of a mental transition as I thought.

So, I went all in on YouTube and the accompanying online course called Game Dev Unlocked. I spent years editing the scripts and videos, and polishing them to a shine. At first, no one watched my videos, no one was buying… and in the blink of an eye, the YouTube algorithm picked up my main autobiographical video (“How Making Indie Games Changed My Life”), and I started getting 5,000 subscribers a day. Right now, I’m at 150,000 subs, which is still hard for me to believe. I always had a dream of earning 100k subs on YouTube, so I was pretty happy with the whole thing. Sales were OK, but mostly people didn’t want to buy the course. Then the emails came in…

Something you should know about me: I am a textbook “people pleaser,” and if someone asks for my help, I take it very seriously. If someone is mad at me, even if I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s all I can think about, and it ruins my day. So, taking an onslaught of people begging for help and multiplying that by an impossible amount of people for my brain to truly comprehend thanks to the internet… and let’s just say it wasn’t a healthy mix.

I received thousands of emails from people who were begging me for some kind of reassurance that everything would be OK. That their dreams would come true too. And I wanted to help every single one of them. I went from a nobody working on a game for fun to becoming a spokesperson for the indie game dream. I couldn’t even get a shake from the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru without someone recognizing me and asking for game dev advice. And it didn’t stop there… I would get emails from suicidal kids asking for help, teenagers from Afghanistan asking me to get them out of their country, and on one occasion I received an email from a hopeful game developer in a war-torn country who had just experienced a bomb blowing up their neighboring village. His friends were dead, and he was hoping he could finish a game before he died too, and he needed my help. How do you say no to something like that? Didn’t I owe it to everyone because I was lucky with my hit game and I needed to “pay it forward”? (Something people constantly reminded me of)

And then to top it off, after you’ve given everything you’ve got to other people in need… you get hate mail in your inbox. You spend the whole day serving your children and strangers on the internet, then when the kids are finally asleep, you hit the bed to relax and take a look at your phone to decompress, and you randomly come across an angry gamer in your Twitter mentions telling you your game they got for free sucks, and that you took away a potentially great game from them and that your apology isn’t good enough.

Long story short, I went to a mental therapist for the first time in my life. I was broken trying to care for two toddlers and a new baby in a pandemic (which is very, very hard), taking care of my course students who gave me their hard-earned money and demanded results, and the countless people begging for help on the internet. I was this introverted, internet-lurker trying to take on the weight of the world. I was so tired and hurt that no one cared about me and my needs… only what I could do for them.

Quitting my day job and making this hobby my full-time job has stirred up… mixed emotions. This statement may disturb some of you, but I was definitely 100% happier when I had a full-time job and I was working on my game at night. I missed working with the amazing team at The VOID, working on Star Wars… back when the success of my game was this abstract thing I could only daydream about. Mostly, I was making my game for me with no outside expectations to pay the bills or satisfy the ever-demanding internet, and that brought me a lot of joy.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! I’m actually very happy now and in the best shape I’ve been since the pandemic started. I’ve had to confront my weaknesses and personality quirks, but I’m a better person for it (and I’m sure these issues would’ve come out eventually). I hired an awesome community manager for Game Dev Unlocked who is helping SO MUCH with the emails, I can’t even tell you the mental burden it alleviates. I even leased a co-working office to help separate work from my home, and that’s been a huge help too. I’ve decided to work with my old friends from The VOID on a cool, new VR experience. It will take me away from my projects a bit, but I’m ecstatic to work with a great team again (and not manage anything, whew).

These are all things I would’ve never guessed I needed, because I thought I knew myself pretty well… turns out I didn’t.

The reality is: running a business is HARD. Running it solo is even harder. You have to remember, I was burnt out on The First Tree well into the Steam release in 2017, but I kept working on it for 4 more years due to my fears of failing again and not earning enough money for my family.

So, I was wrestling with the age-old concept of commercialism and art. There was this dichotomy of doing whatever I wanted and being true to my vision (what most people assume the indie dev dream is like), and doing only what customers wanted to buy. This is something that has killed me with YouTube… in one specific instance, I was super excited to make the exact video I wanted to make. I loved every part of its creation, and I thought it had a message that would inspire everyone. I lovingly edited it over several weeks, posted it, and excitedly waited for the stats… and it was by far my worst performing video.

This is not a new problem. Even the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo was a commission forced upon him by the very violent Pope Julius II. My wife and I regularly talk about the fine balance between artistic integrity and commercialism, a problem she is very familiar with as an artist who constantly needs to balance what she wants to make with what the customer wants to hang up in their home.

For The First Tree, I was lucky. It was pretty much what I wanted to make (I had to compromise a lot of things of course), and it turned out millions of people wanted it too. Recently, I thought the safe business decision would be to do it all over again, so I started work on a spiritual successor to The First Tree (an idea that I may revisit one day since I do love the story idea). But that isn’t happening anytime soon. Trust me when I say I am now currently burnt out on animal exploration games.

So that realization left me with a question: what do I do next?

I’ve decided I need to make a game that I want to make, for me. It will be a bit different and I’m almost certain most fans of The First Tree will not love it… but it’s an idea that gets me super excited. It’s an idea that could help me fall in love with game development again.

A few more details: this game will be story-driven, first-person, and will use the Unreal Engine. That means development is gonna be slow going, because I have to learn a whole new tool. The “smart business” decision would be to make something quickly in Unity which I’m already familiar with… but I want to do this for me, and UE5 looks like a lot of fun. I’m also shooting for an early-ish release date so I avoid burn out and I keep the game short: I want to release it in Fall 2022, but knowing game development, it will probably take longer.

With the help of my therapist, I’ve also concluded that I’ve been too accessible on the internet and that my self-worth isn’t determined by the amount of people I try to help online. Of course, I love helping people and seeing them succeed, but I need to step back and focus on my family and myself. I will delete my social media apps on my phone (I will still post big updates occasionally) and stop responding to most emails, tweets, DMs, etc. It’s not that I’m ungrateful… in fact, if I don’t say thank you or at least acknowledge the incredibly nice people who share a sweet message about my game or want to tell me how I inspire them (still hard for me to believe, lol), I feel a ton of guilt… but I need to let that go. Please know I’m extremely grateful to all the fans who follow my work, so even if I don’t thank you directly, I truly mean it: thank you.

I will still post and stream occasionally on YouTube when I want to (and I still do live Q&A’s for my GDU students). The online course sales will help support my family as I work on a potentially risky game idea (and my new job will help alleviate the risk too). I’m gonna try one more marketing experiment and sell a mini-course soon (and add an Unreal section), and after that I’m done working on it. A gigantic thank you to the people who bought my course and are part of the amazing community, it has helped me and my family tremendously, and it’s inspiring seeing the games you make!

I’m a bit worried about the whole thing since this new game idea could flop, which could definitely affect my family. But a sappy, high-school yearbook quote is coming to mind…  I think it applies here: “A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are built for.”

Thanks for reading,

David

[turneverybodyintopuppets]

Hi. The following is my attempt to systematically hash out the “Mr. Infodump” controversy in the TS fandom. It’s primarily for my benefit, but I’m posting it on the off chance it helps someone else who’s just as confused/dismayed as I was. I’m not attempting to argue for blind absolution (”Thomas is an angel who can do no wrong!”) or cancellation (“He’s no better than the likes of J.K. Rowling!”), just to present as intellectually honest an assessment as I can make of what happened and the degree to which the TS team is responsible.

Laconic: Thomas Sanders, a content creator on youtube, posted a skit in which a character calls an aspie-coded character “Mr. Infodump”. Several fans have expressed hurt and anger over the use of a trait associated with neurodivergence as an insult.

My own initial impression: I’m on the autism spectrum myself, and personally, “Mr. Infodump” didn’t register as offensive to me; in fact, as a huge Logan kinnie, I liked that a neurodiverse trait I see in myself was being explicitly linked to my favorite character. That said, there are many in the community who feel deeply hurt and betrayed, and it would be a) irresponsible and b) close-minded to handwave their concerns. Thus:

[Abridged version: Bolded]

Context for use of the word:

Line from Roman: “I was going for regal sophistication [in last commercial pitch], but Mr. Infodump over here [*gestures to Logan*] wasn’t cooperating.” Defensive tone, alluding to the fact that Logan’s commercial pitch included excessive product information that would leave buyers disengaged.

History: Roman regularly invents nicknames for fellow sides and employs them in a manner that can range from fond teasing to a juvenile way of insulting the side he’s presently bickering with.

Names previously directed at Logan include “Calculator watch,” “Egghead,” and “No-Funsen Honeydew… Doo.” They generally play off of Logan’s tendency toward being uptight, stereotypically nerdy, and eager to furnish the group with information in the capacity of a teacher.

In this particular instance, I doubt anyone would say the word’s use was “malicious,” but it wasn’t “affectionate” either. Roman is visibly preoccupied and defensive in the scene, throwing out a nickname offhand.

Power Dynamic: There is no imbalance of power between Logan and Roman that would indicate anything resembling a bully-victim relationship. Logan responds to the word in the same manner he does Roman’s other antics and displays no particularly hurt reaction.

In-Universe Response: No character corrects or condemns Roman’s use of the term. This may, however, be because Logan is the first to respond, armed with his own complaints about the others’ commercials.

Meta-Level Implications: The audience is not encouraged to agree with Roman’s sentiment that infodumping is a negative trait anymore than they are his other commentary on Logan via nicknames like “Egghead,” because Logan’s role in the story consistently proves it wrong; all that infodumping saved an unconscious Roman from his murder-happy brother, for one, and the audience knows it. Given the posturing and defensiveness that accompany Roman’s delivery of the line, it’s clear the creators were communicating that he was in the wrong to say it. That, and Logan will almost certainly reinforce this by verbally decimating someone in the next episode, as per usual.

I think that last point is key. People will accuse others of infodumping in a negative way IRL—I know I’ve been called far worse for failing to mask—and to pretend that such things don’t exist in fiction is misrepresenting reality. Instead, creators can and should include minority characters (race, sexuality, gender, neuroatypicality, etc.) *confronting* discrimination, dealing with it complexly, and showing both the misguided character and the audience how wrong they are. Logan resonates with me—and other aspies, I think—largely because of how he clearly struggles in dealing with the other sides’ occasional criticism of his eccentricities, but he ultimately remains committed to his identity and ideals. If the TS crew continues to write a show that reinforces the fact that his neurodivergent qualities are what make him strong—and god knows there's not much media that does this well—, they’re doing something incredibly important for us.

The issue here, then, wasn’t the show promoting ableism as a message, because its handling of the conversation here doesn’t. Rather, it was the use of a term that many consider inherently ableist as an insult. So:

“Infodump” the word:

I find this fascinating, actually—Science is discovered. Math is discovered**. Language? Language is unequivocally invented. We’ve create these words with combinations of mouth-sounds, and we’ve assigned them meaning.

But the thing is, people have different backgrounds and experiences that define both who they are and the nuances of the meaning they tie to those mouth-sounds

Basic example of varied mental prototypes: I live in the northeast USA, so when I hear the word “bird,” the first thing that pops into my head is a bluejay or robin. If you ask my friend who’s studying in Brazil, though, he’d likely think of a macaw or toucan. 

For me, “spring” = my mom’s pink zinnia garden and “chocolate” = a square of hershey melting against gooey marshmallow. This idea of memories and experience informing word-meaning mapping, of course, extends to a) more nuanced concepts and b) a more subconscious level of understanding. Poetry in particular, I think, tends to play with this to invoke the sensory experiences it does... I could infodump about translated poetry but that’s a whoooollleee other thing and I’m getting off track.

But essentially, an individual’s experience of any given word, to a degree, is subjective. Our dictionary definitions are merely approximations of a collective understanding of that mouthsound-to-meaning mapping, and we have to update those definitions as language evolves (remember when “Google” couldn’t be used as a verb?)

So, what happens if I look up “infodumping”? TVTropes tells me it’s a “type of exposition that’s particularly long and wordy”. UrbanDictionary says its “used to deposit large amounts (usually entire articles) of information in online forums without summarizing or paraphrasing the information.” I reach the resources that explain it in the context of autism and ADHD over halfway down the Google results. The word “infodumping” has quite a few circulating meanings, and the one associated with neurodivergence isn’t as visible as we’d like it to be.

From what I understand, Thomas Sanders and co. merely knew “infodumping” as the practice of talking at length about a subject, like closing a rant with a friendly “aw, sorry for infodumping on ya” and such. This was exactly how Logan opens his commercial, so they stuck it in as a—frankly, kinda feeble—nickname á la the creative genius behind “Mr. Smarty... Pants”. They had no knowledge of the term’s gravity to the autism and ADHD community, because they haven’t been exposed to settings that use that definition.

So, where does that leave us on accountability? If they’re ultimately not producing ableist content, do Thomas Sanders and his team have the responsibility to be aware of how an insult featuring this particular word might be inherently triggering to a community?

Many accounts show that the inclusion of the term caused real emotional harm and as content creators—particularly ones with a relatively young fanbase—the TS team should have taken more precautions. A more diverse staff/writing room may have caught this, given how egregious some fanders found the error. Furthermore, why shouldn’t it fall on neurotypical people in general to “educate themselves” on these issues, as in the cases of other minority groups?

That said, however, can any creative team be reasonably expected to know of any-and-all potentially triggering content? I’ve avoided speaking of Thomas Sanders’ personal character to maintain some impartiality, but a long history of promoting representation and careful content warnings does suggest a genuine commitment to self-correcting. Accepting the well-intentioned criticism of fanders—many of whom are so broken up by this precisely because of the amount of faith they place in the TS team—and taking active steps to change is ultimately the best course of action, and I, for one, will be sticking around to see the results.

[witwerlove]

Ok, I know I always say that I don’t particularly like gossiping about Sam’s personal life on here, however I'm always prone to doing it anyways. Even if it makes me super uncomfortable. But something has come up and it definitely brings a new perspective to things that have long since been left in the past. And I’m choosing to talk about it on my own because I feel it’s important and it’s relevant, not just in regards to Sam....but life and the society we live in today.

So as some of you that have been following me since damn well near the early months of this blog’s creation, Sam used to date Chloe Dykstra. Their relationship began in June 2014 and quietly ended sometime in 2015. While they were together, the two of them seemed to be genuinely happy and very much in love. Hell, I encountered them together in real life with my own eyes when I met them back in May 2015. But sometimes you learn that even if someone appears to be happy with someone, that is not always the truth.

And that is what brings us to the catalyst for this rant.

Yesterday Chloe posted an article about her ex and his abusive behavior towards her behind closed doors when they were together. She didn’t give any names, but everyone knows that it’s about Chris Hardwick. And today, it’s blowing up all over the internet. Let me just say it was heartbreaking and hard to read. Honestly, I cried. Because of Sam, I formed a connection to Chloe. I got to meet her, talk to her, and hug her, however brief. But she was so incredibly nice and sweet to me. And even though she and Sam have been broken up for years, I still sporadically keep up with her and I’m still a fan. Which is why her words really resonated with me. And also because I’m not a cold and heartless human being that lacks empathy. I’m so proud of Chloe for finding the strength within herself to finally break free of Chris and his abuse, despite it being so difficult to do. I hope she has finally gotten the closure she spoke of wanting. And that Chris gets what he deserves. What he truly deserves. Because he is absolute scum. And even before all this came out and exploded all over the internet, I never liked him. I’ve read some stuff on twitter and people aren’t surprised about his behavior. I personally feel like I can’t speak much volume because I don’t know him. I have seen very little of Chris, but the vibe I got from him was just not good. I didn’t know why and I didn’t think about it, but now it feels like....intuition.

But tying all this back to Sam, Chloe does mention him in the article. Not by name, of course. But as someone who followed their relationship, I am absolutely sure that it’s him.

She refers to Sam as a “knight in shining armor”. Which, out of context, would seem so sweet. I don’t know Sam personally, obviously, but I feel like I have been around him enough to know that he is a genuinely good person.

I remember a couple years ago, I got an anon message asking me how I felt about Chloe “cheating” on Chris with Sam. After reading Chloe’s article, re-reading my response to the ask, and putting the pieces together, I feel a bit bad now. I had no idea who Chloe or Chris was before she was dating Sam. And none of us knew about what she was going through with Chris. But I never wanted to believe that Sam would willingly participate in infidelity. I feel like I might have swept that under the rug. I think maybe because I didn’t want to believe that someone I admired and respected so much would do something so.....problematic. And it was in the past. Sam and Chloe (and Chris) had clearly moved on from it. But after reading that article, it shines new light on everything. We still don’t know the whole story and we never will. Because that article wasn’t about her finding salvation in Sam, it was about being her trapped and breaking free to tell her story. Which I commend her for. I’m so proud of her for being able to find her light through the darkness. I wish her all the happiness in life.

Another thing Chloe mentioned was that after she left Chris, he used his connections to get her fired from jobs and furthering her career in the entertainment industry. She was completely blacklisted. Reading about that made lights and sirens go off in my head. Because back in 2014, Sam had been cast to be in a video game called Tales from the Borderlands. And who was his co-star? Chris Hardwick. Then a few months later, it was quietly reported that Sam had been replaced by Troy Baker. No explanation given. I remember being so upset because Sam had spoken of the job at cons and I always get excited when he has a new project. But I just brushed it off as perhaps there was a conflict between Sam and Chris in relation to Chloe....maybe? And in hindsight, to some degree, I was right. I just never thought it was that serious. Back then I was just upset that Sam lost a job. Whether Chris got him fired or Sam left on his own, I’m glad he was never a part of it.

So I'm definitely having some feelings about this whole thing and just wanted to vent about it. Because I am with Chloe. I believe her 100%. She or any women who have came/come/will come forward about abuse have nothing to gain from lying. The women who share their experiences have more to lose than their abusers. We as a society are getting better at rectifying this, but we are not entirely there, as Chloe said. 

That being said, please DO NOT bring this to Sam. I beg for you to NOT tweet him about it. So far, so good. But I’m sure it will get to him if it hasn’t already. But I don’t think that it’s our place to get involved. If anything, please send words of encouragement to Chloe. Because this is about her and her trauma. Sam is just a piece of the narrative. I’m feeling a tad bit hypocritical talking about this, when I preach that I don’t like talking about Sam’s personal life. But it’s there. And I obviously don’t know the whole story, but this is how I feel about it. I feel affected by this, in a small insignificant way. As a fan of both Sam and Chloe, but more importantly, as a woman. I’m glad Chloe was able to get out of this situation and  share her story with us. I hope human garbage Chris Hardwick gets dumped. And I hope Sam is not affected by this.

I never expected to revisit this, but here we are. There appears to be no bad blood between Sam and Chloe (that I know of). They both seem happy in their lives. And I hope it stays that way. I love them both, long after their breakup. They are both wonderful people. And even though I know he won’t say anything publicly, I really do hope that Sam reaches out to her. 

And with all that being said, I’m putting this thing to rest. I feel like I had to come back to this and put things into perspective. For myself. And for my love and support for Sam and Chloe moving forward.And just how I feel about it as a woman and a human being. I will continue to love and support Chloe and all who support and fight for the #MeToo movement. The heat may have died down, but the fire still burns. Every day. If you have been abused or assaulted, of any kind, no matter who you are, know that my heart is with you. I have been fortunate enough in my life to not had to go through such horrors, but I am deeply sorry for any and all who have and do. You are brave, strong, and beautiful. You are important and you are worth so much. You don’t deserve anything less than feeling safe and loved in the healthiest way possible.

I don’t know what else to say, so I’m gonna leave you with this adorable picture of Sam and Chloe in happy times because I’m feeling nostalgic. :)

[nopomegranets]

hey, um

i wrote this to myself earlier because i was getting very stuck in a doom-and-gloom situation revolving around Bo Burnham's Inside. writing all of this out helped me relax and reminded me of nice things.

the following is for anyone whose been a little bit Too affected by the special existentially. specifically anyone whose fallen down a scary everything-is-horrible way of thinking that's been brought out by a few songs and Bo Beardman.

i wrote this in two parts. in the first part i let myself say whatever awful shit came to my mind, and i let the hurt and bruised part of me yell and rant (because she really needed to)

in the second, i tried addressing those concerns and speaking to myself directly, to help gain some perspective and offer a bit of kindness (internally).

this feels weird to post but this is a fake account so i can do whatever i want. i hope this helps someone else.

The Sad Part:

I cannot stop thinking about the fucking special. I don’t know if I made this like, awful choice by deciding to watch it or what. Because it so perfectly lays out exactly how I feel about the internet, how its really unhealthy for all of us to be surrounded by human suffering constantly, be told what to think and how to act, dress, etc. Like we all KNOW that we’re being told this, but to have him say it, to have him confirm it in this way that doesn’t feel pander-y or false is…

It’s really fucking confronting.

The puppet song, fucking Funny Feeling - these songs tap very deeply into a sad and disturbed part of my mind that truly hates this world with everything I have in me.

I hate the society we’ve created and I fight like hell every day to not hate the people. And I scour the tumblr tags and reddit comments to find someone who doesn’t just feel the same way I do (as it turns out, that’s a lot - or Bo’s songs wouldn’t resonate so deeply with everyone.) but who has advice, who has words for me, hope, something - anything.

And I cannot fucking find it! We’re all just soaking in how bad everything is and its like the goddamn man of the people whose whole platform is self awareness on a dizzying level that makes you feel self conscious to criticize him or criticize his work (I don’t really want to criticize it, I just wish I had the option). He seems like a good person and he doesn’t SEEM like an asshole whose whole purpose is feeling like he’s figured everything out and everyone else just needs to catch up but that’s how I FEEL so can I be mad at him for it??? No!! I don’t know!! He’s unstoppable, like a fucking god, because you find yourself shaking your head at every single positive or negative comment about him, it’s stupid, it’s dumb, but I don’t actually know if HE’S created this, or if his fanbase has. Maybe its some of both. But I think that’s what causes me to fall down this hole because there is no out there is no alternative there is no out there is no alternative there is no out there is no alternative.

I want to love this world but I can’t. Because Bojangles is fucking right he’s right about everything he has taken exactly how I feel and how i view the world and he’s put it into words and he’s shown it to me and he’s shoved it in my face and he says how do you feel about this being your worldview? Do you feel enlightened? Do you feel lucky? Do you wish you could scrub your mind clean and live in a world of lies and deceit? I do not fucking know, Mister Burnham. I do know that I hate it and I want it to stop.

I hate it and I want it to stop. I hate it and I want it to stop. I hate it and I want it to stop.

THE WORLD IS SHIT AND ITS NOT SHIT IN AN EDGY OR COOL WAY ITS SHIT IN THIS WAY THAT GENUINELY MAKES ME FEEL SICK TO MY STOMACH AND I HAVE BEEN HURT SO MANY TIMES AND I KNOW SO MANY PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN HURT SO MANY TIMES AND HOW DO I GET AWAY FROM IT??? HOW DO I ESCAPE??? HOW DO I FEEL OKAY???

I think the key to life is putting your head down and loving those you can.

I fucking hate to say it, it makes me feel powerless and hopeless, but there is no stopping this goddamn machine from chewing us all up and spitting us all out and killing us again and again and again and again. There is no escape!! There’s no bloody escape!!! I am aware of all the evil in the world, all at the same time, and I have no power to stop it. This world is truly hellish. Just how do I fucking deal, though.

Bo Burnham fucking ripped me open man, I can’t close myself back up.

....

The Nice Part:

There are good things in the world.

It’s not all bad. I know it seems hopeless and horrible, but you cannot let yourself fall down this path because it will really hurt you. I know it seems hard, and counterintuitive, and lazy, and useless, and cowardly, but there is literally nothing you can do about it. Think of it as living in an evil empire. It’s confusing, because you’re told by everyone everywhere that this empire is not evil. That people are doing fine, that they’re happier than you, that this world has given them amazing things. But it is evil. Just never forget that one part.

You know what isn’t evil? Nature. Nature is not evil. It isn’t benevolent or cruel, it just is. It has beauty and chaos and so much to offer, but it just keeps going. Birds fly and squirrels run and animals are for the most part incapable of becoming sociopaths. Think about dogs. Dogs love to lick their owners faces, and get pets, and they will help people when they’re sad.

Cats too. Birds, fucking rats even.

Pets, that’s a good thing. That’s something not really tainted.

You hear an ambulance go by right now? Think about emergency services. They exist to preserve the lives of other people (we will be excluding cops from this exercise). People sign up to save others from burning buildings and from disease, and they live their lives helping. Helping, helping, helping. This exists to preserve lives.

Think of how much cheaper it would be to not have hospitals and emergency services. Think of that. But we insist on them, because humankind is about co-operation. And that’s why we’re all so miserable in this world!!

Think about that too. If people really were intrinsically evil, then they would not be appalled by things. They would not be commenting “This is exactly how I feel” on the Funny Feeling YouTube videos. They would not care that it was hellish.

He was feeding the ducks because he was feeding the ducks because he was feeding the ducks.

There are so many good people in the world. Think of that lady who devoted her life to helping AIDS victims. Think of fuckin, Ms. Neilson. Your English teacher who wrote you a note when you were going through tough times and she got you a cookie from the caf and left it on your desk. What did she have to gain from that?

It is bad. I never want you to forget that. It IS bad. It shouldn’t be happening, it is unfair, it is cruel. Everything is tangled together and everything is burning but remember that there are people who are willing to push head on to make someone’s day better or to save a life. Remember that laughter exists, that we smile for evolutionary reasons. The key is people, not systems. People. Individuals. We as a collective are scared, and easily swayed, and make bad decisions. Those in power have no souls or life in them. Anyone who profits from human suffering is unconscionably hated by billions.

Stuffed animal hospitals. People who (oftentimes for no profit) will fix up a stuffed animal that was loved by someone else. They will spend their time, money, resources, and energy on doing something that does not have any other purpose than making another person feel better. They will fix up a little toy they have no attachment to themselves, because they want to make someone else feel better.

Dude, that’s amazing. That’s fucking amazing and you know it.

Don’t let the Bezos and the Gates and the pedophilic empire sway you away from the fact that there are good people in the world. Bad and amoral people RUN the world, because we’re a young race and we have some things to work out - but there are still really good people!

The Internet is good only in small doses. Stay away from Twitter and TikTok. Don’t allow yourself to consume so many video essays that you start criticizing anything you see. Just fulfil, enjoy, do what makes you smile or what makes those gears turn. Stop doom scrolling and hate-searching. It will do you no good. It will make you a defeatist. You may not be able to save the world but you can save yourself. And you can make the lives of the people around you (however short they may be) better in the time we have. Bo Burnham says things that you agree with, but he is not God. He speaks to the part of you that is hurt and worried, but do not let that be the only piece spoken to. You are still trying to heal from childhood, love. Let yourself relax. Let yourself feel. It will all be okay in the end.

[edene1023]

Introduction, Reading II (Design and Knowledge) by Janne, 29.9.2019

Texts of the reading two were an interesting collection of really different excerpts. Drucker’s Graphesis was more of a textbook reading about visual knowledge, Gleick’s part bit into the origins and aspects of memes in a striking type size and Mills’ text was a lovely rant against the revolting nature of capitalist mass consumer culture and designer’s role in it.

Visual knowledge is (naturally) based on seeing but essentially what we see is a co-operation of our vision and cognitive capacities. What we see is just our very own impression of the world and it is deeply interesting to try to imagine how the world looks by the eyes (or brains) of others. Is my truth the same my companion has and how does it differ if it differs? Is my world more made-up than the world of someone else? And moving from vision to other senses: would it be possible to build universal languages based on sound, taste, smell or sense of touch? I’d imagine that some simple principles could quite easily be found but that the collaboration of senses and brain of different human beings differ so much that it would be quite hard to come by with a set of complicated and universal rules.

I’m fond of the idea of a complete graphic language system but am slightly skeptical that there ever would be one unified system that the whole world (or a large part of the population) could use. Cultural differences, differences on how we see and experience the world and how the visual knowledge we have at the moment transforms and develops are matters that complicate the task. In a way this reminds me of the last readings dialogue about designer being an author: is it possible, reasonable or needed to take the concept from one field and try to duplicate it to another? Would it be possible, reasonable or needed to have this “complete graphic language system” that holds true in all situations or would it just be another sorry attempt to organize the world the way it should and could not be organized?

I understand René Thom’s view about the two ways of communicating knowledge. The numbers seem to be really honest and unambiguous but as we move on to even written language and especially to graphic images the attempt to transfer a message from people to people the sheer number of interpretations becomes massive. And then we come to the fact that the numbers, those neutral ambassadors of knowledge, are also a made-up system by us humans – the masters of non-objectiveness. We might just be trying to make sense of the world our whole lives and as the end comes nigh and we realize that there is none we reach for the cross-star-crescent and give up. Life might just be the meme of memes: a neat collection of memes (of very varied quality) bundled up and passed along time after time.

Is a graphic designer, or a concept of a graphic designer, a meme? Designers might have quite strong and consistent characteristics and behavior patterns especially in the eyes and minds of other designers and I’d say that non-designers also connect some of those stereotypical traits easily to a designer. Let’s say the original idea (or meme) of being a graphic designer was that the designer is creative, full of ideas that one can execute wonderfully and has great freedom to do whatever one wants. Have I become a graphic designer just because somewhere along my life I’ve got that certain image of “a designer” into my head? I’ve then followed the meme, spread the meme, and eventually kind of embodied the meme – and as the meme is not something one can be, I became a meme vehicle and the meme in my head developed to something else than it was before and I continued spreading a different meme of being a designer – for example the meme of a romantic, pseudo-miserable specialist who loathes the mass-consumption culture and tries not to abandon one’s values.

I must say the text that resonated with me the most was Mills’ part: I’ve been thinking about those subjects during my work as a graphic designer and before that when studying the trade. I enjoy quite a lot finding and reading books or texts that have been written a long time ago (long being a relative term of course, in this case 61 years) where the message is as relevant as ever. Sami Hynninen sang in 2007 that “Christs may come and Christs may go but Caesar is forever” – the good stuff does not get old.

It is interesting and scary at the same time that a designer in Finland might struggle with same issues in 2019 than a designer in the United States in 1958 – about being just a disposable money-making tool for companies, advertising stuff that nobody really does not need in any way (unless living in this psychosis-like state of mind where the market is driving us) and ditching one’s values for maintaining the standard of living. Maintaining meaning more, more, more (expressed the way Billy Idol did in Rebel Yell) as the economy is growing endlessly, right?

I began a basic python programming course two weeks ago and the first, kind of classic, script can be seen below:

def main():     print("Goodbye, World!") main()

[douglasacogan]

Prez Trump has reportedly soured on politics of criminal justice reform after FIRST STEP Act achievement

This lengthy new Politico piece portends some dark clouds for federal criminal justice reform efforts in the months and perhaps years ahead. The full headline summarizes the essential: "Trump snubs Jared Kushner’s signature accomplishment; The president thinks criminal justice reform is a political loser, and hasn't been shy about saying so."  Here are some extended excerpts:

When President Donald Trump huddled with campaign aides in the late spring to discuss his bid for reelection, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner told his father-in-law he should highlight last year’s historic passage of the First Step Act — a sweeping criminal justice reform bill that eluded previous administrations and has earned celebrity support.

Kushner reiterated the positive selling points of that bill during the Oval Office meeting as Trump campaign officials and White House aides ticked through the president’s achievements, wondering which would resonate most with his adoring base.  But Trump wasn’t interested and told Kushner he didn’t think his core voters would care much about a bipartisan deal for which he’s since accused Democrats of trying to steal credit. “It was clear he thinks it’s a total dud,” said a person familiar with the meeting. “He made it abundantly clear he doesn’t think it’s worth talking about.”

Kushner, whose own father spent more than a year in federal prison, worked closely with Democratic and Republican senators to get the criminal justice reform bill over the finish line last year — often telling his tough-on-crime boss it was worth expending political capital to seize a rare opportunity to overcome the deeply partisan divide on Capitol Hill and solidify his image as a pragmatic deal-maker.

But now, Trump “is telling people he’s mad” at how criminal justice reform has panned out, according to a person close to the president. “He’s really mad that he did it.  He’s saying that he’s furious at Jared because Jared is telling him he’s going to get all these votes of all these felons.”

Indeed, for months, the president has glossed over his son-in-law’s signature legislative achievement at his campaign rallies. If he brings up criminal justice reform, it’s almost always to mock his predecessors for their inability to get it done. Otherwise, as he did at his three most recent campaign events, he skips it entirely, indulging in long-winded rants about unresolved issues like trade and immigration instead of plugging one of the few bipartisan triumphs of his administration.

The subject’s notable absence from Trump’s 2020 stump speech offers a raw look at the president’s political instincts, which strongly veer toward partisan fights and away from the soaring appeals to national unity of past White House incumbents. And it lacks appeal to his base of rural and older white voters, who often respond better to hard-line rhetoric on the topic of law and order.

The nub of the issue for Trump, say White House officials, congressional aides and friends of the president, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly on the matter, is that he no longer sees criminal justice reform as a résumé booster heading into 2020.  He brings it up at official events, in response to reporters, and to religious groups — and it was a key part of Trump’s State of the Union address in January, when he welcomed home the first inmate to be released under the First Step Act — but it’s far from a permanent fixture of his reelection campaign.

“It would be difficult to say it’s a change of heart. I don’t think his heart was ever really in it,” said one White House official, adding that some Trump aides questioned why the president — who once declared himself “the law and order candidate” — endorsed the First Step Act in the first place....  In response to this story, a White House official said, “This false premise is another convoluted contradictory, media-manufactured joke. The president is clearly proud of all of his record-setting accomplishments — including the landmark bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform that data shows will save money, reduce crime and make communities safer.”

During the Oval Office meeting this spring, Trump complained that Democratic co-sponsors of the First Step Act skipped the bill signing at the White House last December (Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island was the only Democrat to attend) and have refused to give him credit for passing prison reform when his immediate predecessor couldn’t, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.  He’s said as much publicly in recent days, tweeting earlier this month: “I got it done with a group of Senators & others who would never have gone for it. Obama couldn’t come close.”

The tweet came after NBC’s Lester Holt omitted any mention of Trump’s role in advancing criminal justice reform during a televised town hall on the network. The president felt the televised special was disingenuous and thought singer John Legend, who participated in it, “paraded himself out like he was the great savior of criminal justice reform,” according to a senior administration official....

“He’s been telling Jared, ‘I got nothing from that,’” a person close to the White House said of criminal justice reform, adding that the president feels duped by claims that his popularity has grown and that he is frustrated with Kushner’s attempts to “jawbone” the issue into every speech he delivers.  “Jared has got all these stats like ‘every rapist in Florida is now going to vote Republican,’” quipped the person close to Trump.  “Trump doesn’t believe it and he’s mad Jared sold him this thing,” the same person said. (The First Step Act gives only certain nonviolent offenders a chance to shorten their sentences, and excludes sex offenders from early release.)

Kushner has claimed publicly that more nonviolent ex-felons in Florida, where they recently became eligible to vote, are registering as Republicans than as Democrats. In a rare television appearance in April, he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that he found that statistic “very pleasing” and one “that will surprise a lot of people when they see the new coalition that President Trump is building.”  But it is unclear how Kushner and his team procured such data. As of March, more than 2,000 formerly incarcerated felons had registered to vote in Florida, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, which did not disclose the new registrants’ party affiliations. An aide to Kushner did not provide details on the source of the data in time for publication.

Some Trump allies argue that Kushner, who continues to monitor implementation of the First Step Act, is unlikely to persuade media personalities and Democratic lawmakers who support either to credit Trump with working across the aisle to get the measure passed.

“Van Jones was happy with Trump for a day. That’s all Trump got,” said the person close to Trump, referring to the liberal CNN pundit and former Obama adviser, who once described the First Step Act as “a Christmas miracle.”  Jones did attend a White House summit on prison reform this April — months after the bill passed — and recently met with Kushner to discuss its impact.  Jones, who co-founded the bipartisan criminal justice reform nonprofit #cut50, noted that he’s continued to sing Trump’s praises on the topic, including in a recent interview with CNN in which he celebrated Trump’s role in signing the First Step Act into law.... “There’s always been a bunch of people in the building, they didn’t like it before, during or after, and they’ve always been able to leak out anonymous bullshit quotes that then very quickly have egg on their faces because Trump does something else positive in this direction or throws in another line in a speech,” said Jones, who confirmed that Trump has been frustrated with the lack of credit he’s received....

Some Trump allies worry that the more the president talks about criminal justice reform, the more vulnerable he becomes if a prisoner released early under the restructured sentencing guidelines is ever accused of committing another crime.  When Republicans battled over criminal justice reform last fall, a small group of conservative senators who ultimately opposed the bill warned Trump of the dire consequences he could face if an inmate who won early release became a repeat offender.  “You let people out of jail early, commute sentences, something bad happens because of this effort [and] it’s going to be one more egg on their face — or even worse, blood on their hands,” said a former Senate Republican staffer.

Another GOP aide pointed to a negative ad campaign Republican gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone recently launched against Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards over his support for statewide sentencing reform. The ad accuses Edwards of putting “dangerous” and “violent” ex-felons “back on our streets where they robbed, attacked, [and] murdered.” A person familiar with the ad buy said it was prompted by the September arrest of a Louisiana man on burglary charges who was released early last year as part of a parole reform bill passed by the state Legislature in 2016. “Any smart political person would not go out bragging that they let criminals out of jail,” the GOP aide said.

This reporting is quite interesting, but not really all that surprising in light of Prez Trump's personal and political history. It also has me wondering whether Attorney General William Barr, who seems to be in good with Prez Trump and does not seem inclined to be a big fan of the FIRST STEP Act, might be having some influence on how the Prez thinks about these issues. Most fundamentally, this story serves as yet another reminder of just how fragile political support for criminal justice reform can be and how critical it can be to get reform work done whenever a window of opportunity is open.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247011 https://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2019/09/prez-trump-has-reportedly-soured-on-politics-of-criminal-justice-reform-after-first-step-act-achieve.html via http://www.rssmix.com/