#re: the origins of this euphemism

[zhuoyichenpretty]

I cannot believe that I sat through 27 episodes of FoF and hours and hours of angst just to be hit with an mpreg joke I am screaming

(In case it doesn't come through in the translation, depending heavily on context of course, "有了" [have (it)] can be a euphemism for pregnancy. ZYC clutching his abdomen and saying "我...我好像有了" or "I...I think I have it," and then reacting the way he did, I'm pretty sure that's the implication they were going for lmao)

[hedgehog-moss]

I randomly found a 500 page French book on OpenLibrary about the etymology of animal names so here are 10 (ish) fun facts:

the French word for poodle, “caniche” looks like it definitely comes from Latin “canis” (dog) but no! It comes from cane / canard (duck) because it was a waterfowl-hunting dog—and its name in English, Swedish, German, Dutch (poodle, pudel, puedel) also reflects this dog’s affinity with water (from pudeln = to splash about). It’s like otters, whose name come from the same root as water...

the canary on the other hand is named after canis / dog, since it comes from the Canary Islands which, according to Pliny the Elder, were named after the huge dogs that lived there at some point. Some historians think these mysterious big dogs were actually seals or big lizards. Then a bird ended up with the name ‘from the dog place’ though it’s unclear if dogs were ever truly involved. (Meanwhile Spain / Hispania comes from the Phoenician i-shepan-im, the place with rabbits.) I like the idea of ancient humans seeing seals or lizards and going “weird dogs”. Like how ancient Greeks saw hyenas and named them “pigs, I guess?”

the fox has a great diversity of names in Europe: fox / Fuchs, zorro, räv, volpe, raposa, lisu, róka, renard... In French it used to be called ‘goupil’, from the same Latin root as the Italian ‘volpe’, but then the mediaeval cycle of poems known as Le Roman de Renart, about an unprincipled fox named Renart, became so popular that renard became the word for fox and goupil disappeared. It’s like if 500 years from now bears in English were called baloos. (The English and German words for fox come from the indo-european root puk- which means tail, like Hungarian ‘farkas’ (wolf) which means tail-having, or squirrel, from the Greek words for shade + tail, there are actually lots of animals that are just “that one with a tail”...)

French has a word for baby rabbit (lapereau) derived from Latin leporellus (little hare) and we used to have a word for adult rabbit (conin) from Latin cuniculus (rabbit)—related to the German Kaninchen, Italian coniglio, Spanish conejo, etc. But ‘conin’ in Old French also meant pussy (there were mediaeval puns about this in the Roman de Renart) and at some point I guess people were like okay, it was funny at first but we’ve run this joke into the ground, and a new and politically correct word appeared for adult rabbit (lapin) based on the pre-existing word for baby rabbit (lapereau).

The english bear is thought to come from the proto-IE root bher-, for brown—I love how Finnish has so many nicknames and euphemisms for “bear” ranging from “honey palm” to “apple of the forest” and English is like... dude’s brown. Same amount of effort with the Swedish and Danish words for fox, räv / ræv, from a root that means reddish-brown. (And the Hungarian word for lion, oroszlán, along with the Turkish ‘aslan’, comes from proto-Turkic arislan / arsilan which comes from arsil which means brown...) And since brown was already taken, ‘beaver’ (+ German, Dutch, Swedish...: Biber, bever, bäver) has been speculated to come from bhe-bhrus-, a doubling of the original root so... brownbrown.

English foal / German Fohlen / French poulain / Italian puledro all come from the proto-IE root pu- which means small (e.g. Latin puer and Greek pais = child)—then the French ‘poulain’ became ‘poulenet’ with the diminutive -et (so, a smallsmall animal) and poulenet became powny in Scots then pony in English, which was then re-imported by French as ‘poney’. Also the Spanish word for donkey, burro, comes from Latin burricus = small horse, and in French Eeyore is named Bourriquet with the -et diminutive ending, so we just keep taking small horses and turning them into smallsmall horses...

The boa (bo(v)a) shares the same etymology as bovine / bœuf / beef, due to a widespread belief that some snakes suckled milk from cows. Pliny the Elder stated this as fact and (not to bully him but) modern research tells us “there is no empirical basis for saying snakes like mammal milk; experiments, indeed, have shown that captive snakes systematically refuse to drink milk”

I was disappointed to learn that antelope comes from Greek anthólops which referred to a mythical creature, because I grew up convinced the origin of the word (antilope in French) was anti-lupus, as in, the gazelle is the generic prey so as a concept it’s the opposite of the wolf, the generic predator. Wolf and anti-wolf. Though it raised the question of why we don’t have antilions (zebra), anticats (mice) and antibears (salmons)

Many European languages have named kites after some sort of flying animal: in English it comes from the word for owl, in Portuguese from the word for parrot, in Italian from eagle, and in French it’s cerf-volant aka flying-deer. There’s an interesting hypothesis for this! Kites came to Europe from China, where they were often shaped like dragons or snakes, and snake is serpent in French and serpe in Old French, so it’s possible that kites were serpe-volants aka flying-snakes. But the ‘p’ and ‘v’ next to one another were a hassle to pronounce so the p got dropped and it became ser-volant, then ‘ser’ which isn’t a word started being mistaken for ‘cerf’ which is pronounced ‘ser’ but means deer... (We did it again with chauve-souris (bald-mouse = bat), which comes from the Gaulish cawa-sorix aka owl-mouse—which makes more sense as a name for bats! similar to the German Fledermaus, flying-mouse, and Spanish murciélago, blind-mouse. But Gaulish ‘cawa’ was mixed up with Latin ‘calva’ = chauve = bald, so now a French bat is a bald-mouse)

I love etymology, it’s all flying deer and dogs named splash and snakes named cow and ponies named smallsmall and five animals named brown and three named tail—words acquire a veneer of linguistic respectability over the centuries and we forget that fundamentally everyone just says whatever

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to those of us who were only dimly aware of finance, especially the problems of complexity as a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.

This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear 'fintech,' substitute 'unlicensed bank'":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

But there's another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that's as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns.

When financial speculators have easy access to credit, they "lever up" their wagers. A speculator buys your house and uses it for collateral for a loan to buy another house, then they make a bet using that house as collateral and buy a third house, and so on. This is an obviously terrible practice and lenders who extend credit on this basis end up riddling the real economy with rot – a single default in the chain can ripple up and down it and take down a whole neighborhood, town or city. Any time you see this behavior in debt markets, you should batten your hatches for the coming collapse. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in crypto speculation, where it's obscured behind the bland, unpronounceable euphemism of "re-hypothecation":

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/10/rehypothecation-may-be-common-in-traditional-finance-but-it-will-never-work-with-bitcoin/

Loose credit markets often originate with central banks. The dogma that holds that the only role the government has to play in tuning the economy is in setting interest rates at the Fed means the answer to a cooling economy is cranking down the prime rate, meaning that everyone earns less money on their savings and are therefore incentivized to go and risk their retirement playing at Wall Street's casino.

The "zero interest rate policy" shows what happens when this tactic is carried out for long enough. When the economy is built upon mountains of low-interest debt, when every business, every stick of physical plant, every car and every home is leveraged to the brim and cross-collateralized with one another, central bankers have to keep interest rates low. Raising them, even a little, could trigger waves of defaults and blow up the whole economy.

Holding interest rates at zero – or even flipping them to negative, so that your savings lose value every day you refuse to flush them into the finance casino – results in still more reckless betting, and that results in even more risk, which makes it even harder to put interest rates back up again.

This is a morally and economically complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, when the government provides risk-free bonds to investors (that is, when the Fed rate is over 0%), they're providing "universal basic income for people with money." If you have money, you can park it in T-Bills (Treasury bonds) and the US government will give you more money:

https://realprogressives.org/mmp-blog-34-responses/

On the other hand, while T-Bills exist and are foundational to the borrowing picture for speculators, ZIRP creates free debt for people with money – it allows for ever-greater, ever-deadlier forms of leverage, with ever-worsening consequences for turning off the tap. As 2008 forcibly reminded us, the vast mountains of complex derivatives and other forms of exotic debt only seems like an abstraction. In reality, these exotic financial instruments are directly tethered to real things in the real economy, and when the faery gold disappears, it takes down your home, your job, your community center, your schools, and your whole country's access to cancer medication:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/greek-drug-shortage-worsens

Being a billionaire automatically lowers your IQ by 30 points, as you are insulated from the consequences of your follies, lapses, prejudices and superstitions. As @pixelpusher220@dmv.community says, Elon Musk is what Howard Hughes would have turned into if he hadn't been a recluse:

https://mamot.fr/@pixelpusher220@dmv.community/112457199729198644

The same goes for financiers during periods of loose credit. Loose Fed money created an "everything bubble" that saw the prices of every asset explode, from housing to stocks, from wine to baseball cards. When every bet pays off, you win the game by betting on everything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble

That meant that the ZIRPocene was an era in which ever-stupider people were given ever-larger sums of money to gamble with. This was the golden age of the "finfluencer" – a Tiktok dolt with a surefire way for you to get rich by making reckless bets that endanger the livelihoods, homes and wellbeing of your neighbors.

Finfluencers are dolts, but they're also dangerous. Writing for The American Prospect, the always-amazing Maureen Tkacik describes how a small clutch of passive-income-brainworm gurus created a financial weapon of mass destruction, buying swathes of apartment buildings and then destroying them, ruining the lives of their tenants, and their investors:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-05-22-hell-underwater-landlord/

Tcacik's main characters are Matt Picheny, Brent Ritchie and Koteswar “Jay” Gajavelli, who ran a scheme to flip apartment buildings, primarily in Houston, America's fastest growing metro, which also boasts some of America's weakest protections for tenants. These finance bros worked through Gajavelli's company Applesway Investment Group, which levered up his investors' money with massive loans from Arbor Realty Trust, who also originated loans to many other speculators and flippers.

For investors, the scheme was a classic heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: Gajavelli paid himself a percentage of the price of every building he bought, a percentage of monthly rental income, and a percentage of the resale price. This is typical of the "syndicating" sector, which raised $111 billion on this basis:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-housing-bust-comes-for-thousands-of-small-time-investors-3934beb3

Gajavelli and co bought up whole swathes of Houston and other cities, apartment blocks both modest and luxurious, including buildings that had already been looted by previous speculators. As interest rates crept up and the payments for the adjustable-rate loans supporting these investments exploded, Gajavell's Applesway and its subsidiary LLCs started to stiff their suppliers. Garbage collection dwindled, then ceased. Water outages became common – first weekly, then daily. Community rooms and pools shuttered. Lawns grew to waist-high gardens of weeds, fouled with mounds of fossil dogshit. Crime ran rampant, including murders. Buildings filled with rats and bedbugs. Ceilings caved in. Toilets backed up. Hallways filled with raw sewage:

https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

Meanwhile, the value of these buildings was plummeting, and not just because of their terrible condition – the whole market was cooling off, in part thanks to those same interest-rate hikes. Because the loans were daisy-chained, problems with a single building threatened every building in the portfolio – and there were problems with a lot more than one building.

This ruination wasn't limited to Gajavelli's holdings. Arbor lent to multiple finfluencer grifters, providing the leverage for every Tiktok dolt to ruin a neighborhood of their choosing. Arbor's founder, the "flamboyant" Ivan Kaufman, is associated with a long list of bizarre pop-culture and financial freak incidents. These have somehow eclipsed his scandals, involving – you guessed it – buying up apartment buildings and turning them into dangerous slums. Two of his buildings in Hyattsville, MD accumulated 2,162 violations in less than three years.

Arbor graduated from owning slums to creating them, lending out money to grifters via a "crowdfunding" platform that rooked retail investors into the scam, taking advantage of Obama-era deregulation of "qualified investor" restrictions to sucker unsophisticated savers into handing over money that was funneled to dolts like Gajavelli. Arbor ran the loosest book in town, originating mortgages that wouldn't pass the (relatively lax) criteria of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This created an ever-enlarging pool of apartments run by dolts, without the benefit of federal insurance. As one short-seller's report on Arbor put it, they were the origin of an epidemic of "Slumlord Millionaires":

https://viceroyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Arbor-Slumlord-Millionaires-Jan-8-2023.pdf

The private equity grift is hard to understand from the outside, because it appears that a bunch of sober-sided, responsible institutions lose out big when PE firms default on their loans. But the story of the Slumlord Millionaires shows how such a scam could be durable over such long timescales: remember that the "syndicating" sector pays itself giant amounts of money whether it wins or loses. The consider that they finance this with investor capital from "crowdfunding" platforms that rope in naive investors. The owners of these crowdfunding platforms are conduits for the money to make the loans to make the bets – but it's not their money. Quite the contrary: they get a fee on every loan they originate, and a share of the interest payments, but they're not on the hook for loans that default. Heads they win, tails we lose.

In other words, these crooks are intermediaries – they're platforms. When you're on the customer side of the platform, it's easy to think that your misery benefits the sellers on the platform's other side. For example, it's easy to believe that as your Facebook feed becomes enshittified with ads, that advertisers are the beneficiaries of this enshittification.

But the reason you're seeing so many ads in your feed is that Facebook is also ripping off advertisers: charging them more, spending less to police ad-fraud, being sloppier with ad-targeting. If you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But if you are paying for the product? You're still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

In the same way: the private equity slumlord who raises your rent, loads up on junk fees, and lets your building disintegrate into a crime-riddled, sewage-tainted, rat-infested literal pile of garbage is absolutely fucking you over. But they're also fucking over their investors. They didn't buy the building with their own money, so they're not on the hook when it's condemned or when there's a forced sale. They got a share of the initial sale price, they get a percentage of your rental payments, so any upside they miss out on from a successful sale is just a little extra they're not getting. If they squeeze you hard enough, they can probably make up the difference.

The fact that this criminal playbook has wormed its way into every corner of the housing market makes it especially urgent and visible. Housing – shelter – is a human right, and no person can thrive without a stable home. The conversion of housing, from human right to speculative asset, has been a catastrophe:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Of course, that's not the only "asset class" that has been enshittified by private equity looters. They love any kind of business that you must patronize. Capitalists hate capitalism, so they love a captive audience, which is why PE took over your local nursing home and murdered your gran:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Homes are the last asset of the middle class, and the grifter class know it, so they're coming for your house. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is" and We Buy Ugly Houses defrauds your parents out of their family home because that's where their money is:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The plague of housing speculation isn't a US-only phenomenon. We have allies in Spain who are fighting our Wall Street landlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks

Also in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

The fight for decent housing is the fight for a decent world. That's why unions have joined the fight for better, de-financialized housing. When a union member spends two hours commuting every day from a black-mold-filled apartment that costs 50% of their paycheck, they suffer just as surely as if their boss cut their wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

The solutions to our housing crises aren't all that complicated – they just run counter to the interests of speculators and the ruling class. Rent control, which neoliberal economists have long dismissed as an impossible, inevitable disaster, actually works very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

As does public housing:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias

There are ways to have a decent home and a decent life without being burdened with debt, and without being a pawn in someone else's highly leveraged casino bet.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

Image: Boy G/Google Maps (modified) https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

[alleyskywalker]

Some of Louis’ choices in the finale do make me raise my eyebrows a little bit at him. He's got all the right to be pissed at Armand, no question. But why does this automatically redeem Lestat in his eyes? OK, sure, Lestat saves him - that's new information to him, but...First, this doesn't change anything about Lestat's part in Claudia's death (which is what he primarily confronted him about in the tower) nor the fact that Lestat willingly participated in the trial. Nor does it change the fact that Armand saved him from being starved to death. Technically, they both saved Louis, but at different points and in different ways. (If Armand really wanted him dead, he could have just left him in the wall or could have warned the coven about Louis’ plan to destroy/attack them, etc. And even though he lied about the proportion of his role, Armand had already admitted to knowing that the coven was planning to kill Louis and Claudia. And…Louis makes the choice to warn Armand to not be at the theater before he gets the “full” story of how much Armand knew/participated. At that point, all Louis “knew” was that Armand had saved him, which…wasn’t even technically a lie in and of itself, just, again the degree of things.)

So, what really changes re: Armand and Lestat in the final reveal? For Armand: he participated in the trial more actively and in saving Louis less than originally supposed. For Lestat: he participated in saving Louis, whereas initially Louis thought he hadn’t. So ultimately…both Armand and Lestat actively participate in the trial and then both participate in saving Louis. (Granted, Armand lies more in the process. But on the other hand – Armand can’t really be expected to care about Claudia and Lestat can; Armand had attachments and commitments to the coven and Lestat didn’t…) If Louis had just walked away from Armand as well, that’s fair enough. But how does Lestat suddenly warrant a reconciliation (and apology??) when a similar level of participation in this whole debacle warrants Armand – Louis’ partner for decades, whom he had supposedly forgiven for the worst of what happened in Paris, who has stuck with him through various self-destructive behavior trying to fix what he'd broken – an immediate break up (with some physical violence to boot) with no questions asked? (And he has to be at least somewhat over it if he hasn’t bothered to hunt down Sam despite them knowing all about where he is and what he’s up to these days.)

Speaking of questions for Louis, here’s one. So, Armand claims that the coven “improvised” a death sentence from the word banishment. He says this in the context of claiming that he saved Louis by mind controlling the crowd into sentencing Louis to banishment instead of death. But what if…it’s not true that the coven “improvised”? Perhaps “banishment” has a double meaning or gets used as a euphemism for those sentenced to die of starvation in the wall or just who get buried in those crypts after committing crimes. I’m not saying, btw, that this is indeed so, but we don’t actually have evidence that it isn’t. Satiago getting flustered at first indicates that this isn’t a formal way to refer to this kind of punishment/sentencing at least, but when he tells the coven to “tuck him in nice and tight” everyone know exactly what he means, so there’s a basis to assume  the possibility of some common understanding of banishment = getting shoved into the wall, alive or not, whether slang, euphemism or similar. So, let’s for a second assume this is true.

Armand wouldn’t admit this context to Louis while he’s lying about saving him at the trial, because it takes away from Armand’s role as his savior, so if he’s going to lie about mind controlling the crowd, he has to lie/bend the truth about how much the coven needed to improvise to arrange for a death sentence regardless. It also makes sense then that Armand might not have taken this road to trying to save Louis, in fear/knowledge that it would/could just come out worse.

So, what of Lestat? Lestat knows the rules, conventions, and language customs around the coven because, well, he founded/was part of it. So if “banishment” could be easily interpreted as “banishment to starve in the wall,” then Lestat would know that or could be expected to. Yet, this is the punishment he chose when he could have mind controlled the crowd into saying anything. Hell, why didn’t he mind control them into saying “not guilty?” Would have solved a lot of issues, yk?  Would this make Lestat kinda extra vengeful/sadistic? Sure, but…he did just willingly participate as the star witness in a trial to burn Louis and their “daughter” to death. Is this really sooo out of character from what Louis knows or thinks he knows about Lestat at that point in time? Like, not even to question Daniel’s suggestion that Lestat saved him – even though, the script is not actually evidence of that, just that Armand might have had a more extensive role in the play? (And…he could have still been under duress to direct it as much as he would have been to just not tell Louis about it. But Louis doesn’t ask about/consider this either.)

I’m not saying that’s how it went, mind. The reunion scene with Lestat makes it pretty clear that Lestat had in fact wanted to save Louis. But Louis can’t/doesn’t know this, certainly not prior to the reunion scene. Did Lestat actually save him? Is there any other context he might be missing? This is just a theory Daniel has after all. Does Claudia’s death no longer matter then? Doesn’t this just mean that both Lestat and Armand belatedly tried to save him? He’s obviously shocked and not thinking straight – I’m not saying this to bash him or anything (and leaving Armand would have been a justified reaction regardless, just for the lying). But it’s kinda crazy to me that Louis is apparently so eager to believe the worst of Armand and find any reason possible to forgive Lestat at the drop of a hat.  

I don’t really have a point here. Just…need to throw thoughts into the void because the show melted my brain a bit. Forgive me, etc. I do love/enjoy all these characters.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Breaking news: Catherine’s photo is now “unkilled” but with notation about the edits (the Express)? I need to schedule a chiropractic adjustment; I have whiplash. This nothingburger merely gained Catherine’s pic - which already had, what, over 50 mil views? - even more media attention! You can’t buy this kind of press! (Not that it’s KP/the Wales who are lusting after increased PR attention.) 

PS: If the sm euphemism for “killed”/“died” is “unalived,” would the equivalent of “unkilled” be “un-unalived,” as in C’s pic is now “un-unalived”? Or would it simply revert to “alived”?

*****************

Exactly. IMO, they realized how badly they fucked this up and are now trying to walk it back. 

While I don’t know what’s really behind why they’re walking it back and have “unkilled” the photo (and I haven’t really been following the developments closely), my theory is that they realized the wormhole they’ve opened and they’re trying to get that horse back in the barn. There’s now an expectation that they need to evaluate and scrutinize every single photo that enters the media for edits or photoshopping, and certain segments of the public will hold them accountable to it. After all, if you do that for the Prince and Princess of Wales, why can’t you do that for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex? The Kardashians?  The Trumps? The {whover is the hot celeb of the moment}? The {whoever celeb in crisis/recovery PR mode}?

It’s like I said in my original post. This was going to backfire right from the get-go. It doesn’t matter which “side” you’re on or who you think is at fault; it’s backfiring on everyone:

The wire services who rushed to judgment. Now they have to re-evaluate their rules and processes for what qualifies as “too much” editing to be published and their position as a neutral media organization has been questioned.

The reporters who went all “off with their heads” to KP. Now they have to deal with an even-more-standoffish and press-averse Prince and Princess of Wales.

The Sussexes or an associate who tipped an AP source to look at the photo. Now they have to reckon with the Sussexes’ own media being scrutinized for edits.

KP who didn’t respond to the inquiries and questions as soon as they first started coming in. Now they have to deal with even more conspiracy theories.

Now, let’s say that there really were legitimate concerns by the press or the public about the photo being edited. What could they have done instead of going for the nuclear option? A couple of things immediately come to mind:

Privately reached out to KP to ask what was happening and not say anything until they responded. It was the weekend, and a holiday, of course they’re not going to respond immediately. And with the Oscars taking place, the photo would’ve been buried soon enough..

Put a community note or a disclaimer on your publication/posts of the photo explaining your concerns instead of blasting your listserv with “this is fake, take it down.”

Not done anything at all and handle it privately offline with the palace.

But everyone’s made their bed. Now they’ve got to lie in it. But will they?

Spoiler alert: They won’t.

[vidavalor]

So I was re-reading the Fish meta just now trying to figure out where taramasalata would go in all that, when the thought occurred -- I don't know if there are many sushi restaurants in the South Downs, so A. and/or C. might get into doing home-made stuff (e.g. from 'Sushi For Dummies or smth); do you think Ineffable Husbands speak would make a distinction between restaurant vs home-made sushi?

Hi, love! Your Asks always make me hungry lol. 💕 What I think your ask has to do with bacon, Hamlet, coffee, the "fomenting" of 597 AD, The British Museum Cafe, the kimchi that Brenda so desperately needed to bitch about to Her Ron in S1, and a hidden language joke related to Crowley's 1941 hat under the cut. (Sorry this one took a minute-- your Ask got my brain percolating a bit. 😊)

One of the reasons why I think it's sushi that Crowley & Aziraphale chose to go out for on their sneaky dinners circa 2008 is that sushi is predominantly made up of fish (usually raw but not always) wrapped up in fermented rice. I'm not an expert in the history of sushi but one thing I have learned about it is that it was originally invented as a way to preserve fish for longer back in ancient times when there wasn't a way to keep fish chilled. Then, it was called narezushi.

Narezushi involved salting fish after skinning and gutting it, then letting it ferment for a few months in the salt, before then removing the salt and stuffing and covering it with rice, and fermenting for even longer. Fish would be stored in rice for the better part of the year and, much of the time, the rice wouldn't actually be eaten afterwards-- just the fish. Over time, it evolved into the sushi that we know today, which is still made with a kind of fermented rice. Fermentation is the same process used to make alcohol and several different kinds of bread-- including black bread and sourdough, the two Crowley and Aziraphale are coded as being.

In bread, the yeast in the fermenting process is what causes the dough to rise and in alcohol, it's the ethanol fermentation that turns the sugars in the fruit or grain into alcohol. We know that bread, fish, and alcohol are all common sex euphemisms in different ways in their speak so what's with the focus on fermentation?

I think it's a couple of things at once. One is that fermentation is an analogy for arousal. Another is that, in talking about sushi and fish-- things like pickled herring, etc., as well that also are about preserving fish-- there's also a romantic sense to it. They've been together a long time. Food that can be made to age-- wine, cheese, pickled and preserved fish and other food, etc..-- is food that lasts a long time, if not as long as they do. It's bits of the past carrying into the present. Still another aspect to it would be a nod to delayed gratification. If a food involves fermentation and can last longer than most other food, it's analogous to aspects of things like edging that are alluded to in a half-dozen or so different scenes.

The last reason, though, could be because it reminds them of 597 AD and the brief bit of ferment/foment/frumenty wordplay confusion.

I wrote about this at one point I think already but the jokes in this scene are based around the fact that they both keep saying or thinking of words that sound like "ferment." Crowley says he's "spreading foment"-- a word that does mean spreading discord but also is used to describe oils/potions applied with warm water. Foment is bath soaks and Crowley is super uncomfortable in that suits and knows Aziraphale is too so he's all let's quit and go take a bath.

Aziraphale gets that Crowley is wordplay-flirting with him (showing up and posing with "and you have found your [little] death" made that a bit clear) but he is confused by what the hell foment is because they usually flirt in food terms. Aziraphale thinks Crowley is going for a food euphemism-- "is that some kind of porridge?"-- because there was a new porridge called frumenty that had come up around the same time and that sounds like a word that Aziraphale could see Crowley using-- it's food, it's phonetically linked to fruit, even!-- but Crowley clarifies that, no, he was using foment. What is extra-confusing is that both words link to ferment and the process of fermentation, which is already a thing for them.

Crowley makes his meaning more clear and they figure out what each other is saying but it's a fun scene because Aziraphale just assuming that Crowley was trying to food-flirt with him then makes this one of the scenes in the series that make it more obvious that they are, in fact, doing just that. (Otherwise, you have to think that Aziraphale thought Crowley got dressed in a knight's outfit and schlepped around a damp woods spreading actual porridge and why on Earth would Aziraphale think that was an actual answer to what Crowley was up to? lol)

Later scenes suggest that it's in 597 AD as a result of the ferment/foment/frumenty conversation that Crowley and Aziraphale experimented and figured out the truth about their ability to do miracles and this is suggested in a few places, like we looked at in other metas, as to be how they figured out they could have all the sex without killing each other. That... seems like it would place fermentation in a pretty revered position in Ineffable Husbands Speak lol so whether they're getting sushi from a restaurant or making it at home, fish with a history related to fermentation seems like it would be top of the list for sexy dinner night.

One of the other jokes about fermented food in the series is about one of the most famous examples of it-- kimchi-- and it's the one in the scene where Aziraphale possesses Madame Tracy during one of her "psychic sessions." Crowley and Aziraphale refer to possession in highly-sexualized terms, to the point that when Aziraphale appeared to Crowley after being discorporated and they started talking about Aziraphale needing to possess someone to get back to Earth, the "receptive body", etc. innuendo is just blatant and not at all coded.

Brenda chose to take the time Aziraphale gave her to speak to her husband to go on to Ron about how scandalized she was to be served Korean food at the wedding she recently attended and it's when she starts to talk about "the kimchi" being brought out, that is when Ron finally flips out and loses it at her from beyond the grave, right? Poor Ron never got any fermentation in life and he's not about to keep being tormented in death. 😂 Not exactly an example of true passion, Brenda and Her Ron were...

After the whole interlude is over, we hear King of All Fermenting Aziraphale pause and then dryly remark: "Wasn't that touching?" Hilarious in its own right and a comment that Crowley would have found even funnier, since neither touching sentiment nor physical touching seemed to be very prevalent in the sad marriage of Brenda and Ron. They could have done with eating a bit more kimchi.

I do think Crowley & Aziraphale would differentiate between homemade and restaurant sushi, if only for the fun with messing with the words-- because I think they subtly actually already are from some other scenes in the series.

We heard in S2 that one of their alternate rendezvous spots is The British Museum Cafe, which is pretty hilarious from an euphemistic standpoint. They had to pick a place that they could be said to have just been in at the same time should they get caught and also museums are the indoor versions of public parks in spycraft stories but we've also seen them use restaurant/cafe/place that provides food euphemistically for a lover. The two of them meeting each other in secret in the cafe of The British Museum when they are literally older than dirt is just very funny. What kind of cafes are they to each other? The kind related to the stuff that's been here forever-- the ones that provide coffee and lunch and snacks amongst all the fossils and ancient art.

Cafe and restaurant-- like rendezvous-- are also obviously French loaner words in English; they are French words that have been absorbed into common use in English. When you say them in a sentence, you are, technically, speaking two languages at once. There is a technical name for that and it's related to something that lives in plain sight in the bookshop so we'll come back to that in a second...

Cafe is also obviously the French word for coffee. Coffee, in GO, seems to live at the symbolic intersection of sex and America. (A very complicated intersection lol.) There are other posts around these parts about coffee and its role in the American Revolution and all the American symbolism in Give Me Coffee or Give Me Death in S2. Coffee as a beverage in the whole food-and-drink thing, though, is a drink produced by grinding together coffee beans, which are actually seeds, which really feels like another meta at this point so getting to that Seeds of Destruction post soon...

Crowley and Aziraphale are actually also drinking coffee after wine at The Ritz in S1 and Crowley is being pouty about Aziraphale having put him on half-rations of late while in his angel feelings and not talking to him about those feelings as much as Crowley would like when he tells Nina this is what he wants to drink:

Share them frozen peas, Aziraphale... Anyway, if that's restaurants and cafes, then do they also already have a concept of home? I think they do and we can see it in some of the words they're using.

The word home itself has a rather interesting history, especially from a GO-related perspective. It's related to the root words of ham and hem (food/seamstressing.) You can see some of that linguistic history still remaining to this day in what we call a little human settlement that isn't quite as big as a full-on town-- a hamlet.

Yes, really lol. Of all the plays for them to have attended, eh? Yet another reason for it having been Hamlet, in addition to the content of the play itself. (My favorite being that Burbage is mixed in louder around them at The pangs of despised love/the law's delay/the insolence of office and the spurns... Yep.) Whickber Street could also be described as a hamlet within London Soho and Aziraphale is largely responsible for having developed it. But what about the bookshop itself? Is it a home for both of them within the hamlet?

You've undoubtedly heard the idiom "home is where you hang your hat" and we've seen in several scenes that the in-universe explanation for Terry Pratchett's hat hanging on Aziraphale's hatstand in the bookshop is that it's Crowley's hat from 1941. This isn't just a visual, literal execution of that idiom but also a different joke related to the hatstand, not the hat, and wordplay.

One, old-time-y word for a coat rack/hat stand like Aziraphale has in the bookshop is a portmanteau. This word means a half-dozen different things, including also a large, old-fashioned trunk that would have been used as a suitcase. While these are literal things-- physical objects-- the word portmanteau also has meanings when it comes to languages.

In linguistics, the word portmanteau can be used to refer to two different kinds of language things, both of which involve words that are blended together.

When we use words from more than one language in a sentence together, the sentence could be defined as a portmanteau. Most of us make these kinds of sentences without consciously intending to do so and fairly often-- especially with relation to food. Like the use of the words restaurant and cafe in sentences spoken in English that we mentioned above.

Aziraphale is actually making a pun about portmanteaus in S2 when he uses jardiniere in his French sentence because the word jardiniere exists in French but is also a loaner word in English, where it has come to mean a garden box/flower planter. It's French that was adopted into English, which altered its meaning a bit, and then Aziraphale puts it back into the sentence he's speaking-- which is all otherwise in French-- but using its English-language-derived meaning to form the innuendo. He's made a portmanteau in the process.

This isn't the only linguistic meaning of portmanteau, though. The other is actually the even more commonly used one and it's a word that is created out of mashing up two or more words together. One example is popsicle (pop, as in soda pop + icicle = popsicle) which is the American word for one of the desserts they buy during the body swap scene in the park. Another relevant to Crowley and Aziraphale is breakfast (break + fast, the meal they're getting-- no matter the time of day lol-- when it's been a minute since they were together but which, ironically, it doesn't seem they actually have a lot when it comes to literal food itself, since there's suggestion that they're not usually together in the mornings.)

A portmanteau-the-hat-stand is also an umbrella stand... The S2 posters with the umbrellas... Frou frou cocktails with little umbrellas... All of these things-- hats, umbrellas, wings, etc..-- provide the same function as another word we've heard recently:

They're all canopies... and so is the bookshop, really, as it's a form of shelter that keeps them safe and under the roof of which they've probably had their share of vavoomy kisses... The portmanteau where Crowley hangs his hat in the bookshop-- a place full of words in books and wordplay with his partner-- is a physical representation of wordplay that relates to the word used to describe different words and languages blended together, like how they're trying to do together as best as they can through the bonkers circumstances we've seen them in.

But we're not quite done with a concept of home yet because let's go back to ham for a minute... So, we talk about fish a lot in these here parts but not so much about jokes related to meat and since ham is now home, let's get into the meat and potatoes of it. (*groan* I know... that one was beneath me lol.)

In S2, meat became a whole damn thing after we had the ox ribs scene, right? The first food Aziraphale ever ate was (a lot of) meat, which feels right and just for the self-proclaimed The Southern Pansy... but meat had been lingering around in the wordplay already for a bit-- including in God's intro to Crowley & Aziraphale in S1.

The word meat is, of course, a homophone for the word meet.

Just as God uses "quarter" twice in her opening monologue in 1.01 and encourages us to look at multiple meanings of words in doing so, She uses "meeting" twice in her intro to the St. James' Park scene that serves as a paragraph of language lessons in Ineffable Husbands Speak. The word is used in the first and last sentences and with relation to the multiple meanings of clandestine meetings that are happening on and under the surface-- secret agents, secret lovers, and secret language within the world of both of those.

While there's the secret agent comparison happening, there's also the other connotation of a secret meeting and God encourages us to bring in historical context to what's happening on the surface by saying that St. James' Park "is and always has been" the best place in London for a clandestine meeting. It doesn't take more than a brief Google search to learn that St. James' Park was originally one of the most notorious hookup parks of history-- making it then already amusing in S1 when God then finishes her intro by saying that Crowley and Aziraphale "have been meeting here" in St. James' Park "for quite some time." After S2, though, this is even funnier.

Meeting here, did you say, God?

Probably also worth mentioning that another way to have said that sentence is "Crowley and Aziraphale have been coming here for quite some time" since you go to a meeting and... yeah lol.

Or, in S2, when Aziraphale flirts with Crowley during the party they're having in their home by telling him that he was hosting a business meeting and then holds out a tray of vol-au-vents in a knowing imitation of how Crowley once did with the ox ribs.

As we all know, ham is meat that comes from a pig. When you crisp that meat up, it's called something else-- bacon. The word bacon comes from the same root words as that of the word back-- a word with two meanings that cross together when it comes to a sense of home made with a romantic partner.

We have bacon coming from the word back as a noun-- referring to a part of the body-- but the word back is also a verb that refers to returning to a place. This is referred to more frequently as coming back and now we've, well, come back to wordplay around the verb to come... not unexpectedly lol. Your home is the place where you hang your hat and to which you keep returning.

Crowley leaves the house during the 2.01 argument and then returns and dramatically announces: "I'm back."

The bacon has come back home, should Aziraphale wish for any makeup meating at any time. Glasses off and everything.

Aziraphale drolly replies: "Yes. I can see that."

"I can (container, often for food) see (homophone: sea) that (contains hat)." Welcome home, dear. Guess who will be doing a dance?

Remember Muriel in the tie-in notes describing Crowley as "grumpy + nice" and musing that this new word could be called "grice"?

As we looked at in another meta, the word already exists and a grice is a pig. And Harmony describing Crowley as "a swine" in 1941? It's from pigs that we get ham (home) and bacon (coming back, returning to that home) and Crowley and Aziraphale keep being tied to pigs... which is a word that can also be used to refer to those with a dirty sense of humor.

Furthering that, there is the other, non-pig definition of grice, which refers to being someone who is very enthusiastic about trains.

Within grice though is also, of course, the word rice...

...and ice, which replaced fermentation in fish preservation...

...and, so, back at the sushi we arrive. 🐠

Meta the Ask references for anyone who is wondering what we're on about regarding fish:

[f3maled0g]

“What’s eating you?”

Edmund Pevensie x Fem!Reader

Warnings - We live in a society, allusions to sex, innuendos.

Summary - Gurl I dunno.

A/N: Don’t repost, re-blogs are absolutely fine

—————

“Pevensie!”

There you appeared with a moonshine induced stagger. One could have sworn Edmund Pevensie’s eyes shone. He quickly assumed his original demeanour. Cold and unbothered, although now with a certain lightness to his shoulders. All the while, you made your boisterous trek to his spot, sporting a lopsided grin.

“Hello,” you sung, albeit badly.

He released an audible humph.

“Geez, something crawl up your trousers, old boy?”

“Okay.” Edmund raised a brow. Then, another.

You paused, maintaining deadly serious eye contact as if about to divulge the most sordid goss.

“What’s eating you?”

“Excuse me?”

“The phrase,” you jabbed at an explanation. “What’s bothering you?”

“In what world are you from where they use that euphemism?”

“Give a girl a break, concern is the most honourable gift I’ve ever bestowed upon anyone,” you returned a salute.

He scanned your hopeful countenance with a critical eye and took a generous swig of brown from a suddenly procured flask in his hand. Ed sighs, his thoughts muffled by the wild clamour of teenagers coupled with the cantankerous ambience that parties generally possessed without fail.

“So,” you inhaled, teetering on the edge of a conversation doomed for death. “Wanna get out of here?”

His lips twitched with a growing smile at the sight of your determined look in his periphery, more than prepared to bolt at the door. Not that you ever noticed the subtle glances, after all, stoicism was his magnum opus while yours ignorant bliss.

“Suit yourself,” you concluded with a shrug and waltzed out the exit and Edmund felt obligated to follow, legs mechanically willing themselves in your direction. Someone had to look out for you.

Just when he thought he’d lost you, Edmund found you leaning against the stout wood of an old oak. You bathed in the staple warmth of summer air, skin set aglow by the moonlight streaming through cracks of the foliage.

“You know, it’s considered rude to stare.” You whispered with closed eyes, conscious of his burning scrutiny.

He lingered at a comfortable distance from you, enraptured by your surreal tranquillity. Your eyes fluttered open, the reflection of the moon evident in your dilated pupils. He drew closer, your presence willing him to motion, like a magnet, until he was close enough to hear the rhythmic pattern of your breath.

The proximity was agonising, enticingly so. Your tangibility rushed him into a confused frenzy. He wanted to touch you. Worship the deity that you were. Longing nagged at him. How was it you were so close yet out of reach? It was aggravating. You were aggravating and this puzzle could only be solved in one way.

You looked at him through your lashes, a haziness dancing across your face. “What’s eating you, Pevensie?”

What passed in the moment was a blur.

Edmund stood before you, obscuring the view of the moon. You tilted your head, the bare slope of your neck appeared so inviting. It took everything to restrain himself. To maintain his resolve. But if you would just ask nicely, sweetly. Edmund’s heart would yield.

Your stare was a siren call to him. Beckoning and beckoning. It seemed his heart was not the only appendage at your beck and call. Edmund’s hands had a mind of their own and commanded forward. You bristled, the grip snaking around your waist shook your guard.

“Is this o-”

“Yes,” you gasped, much like a fish out of water.

Edmund chuckled, “You didn’t even let me finish, love.”

“In the biblical sense, I just might if you got on with it already.”

Seriously, you were rushing this? He pictured this a little differently, wanting to take his time with the pretty thing before him and explore the contours of your soul. After all, not only was Edmund Pevensie a fighter but a lover too.

Impatient hands latched onto his shirt collar, willing him forward and flush against you. The contact stirred something deep within your lower belly, something reserved only for him. He kissed you hard, then pulled away, noses nudging each other’s. You smiled, baring your teeth with closed eyes.

“Y/N,” Edmund breathed, “Look at me.”

“Hmm?”

“I like you, alright?”

“Alright. I like you too.”

Resolve broken.

You laughed heartily. “So, why don’t you just get it over with, buddy boy?”

“Buddy boy, huh?” He pulled away, extending a hand to pull you from the mighty oak. “You really are something.”

“Thanks a bunch, Eds,” you scoffed, jutting your tongue out. “Not only am I aroused, but aroused and disappointed.”

You turned to leave but Edmund stopped you.

“Listen, it’s not that. I just-”

“Are you a virgin?” you deadpanned, “Is that what this is?”

Edmund pouted, wounded. You raised two brows.

Ignoring the blow to his ego, he pressed on, “I just want to take my time with you, is all.”

Oh. You warmed from the explanation.

“So, that’s what’s been bothering you.”

You approached again and this time planted a kiss on his cheek, his face unusually ruddy from the affection.

“Well, at least let me take you home?” he suggested.

“I do have a curfew.”

“So, about the sex…” you began, looping an arm around his.

Edmund rolled his eyes, “Name the date.”

[maditalksmusic]

An Analysis of Jeff Buckley's Grace (1994)

I still remember vividly the first time I listened to Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should've Come Over". It was a rainy winter evening in 2021, and I was in a bit of a music rut. Everything I’d been listening to on repeat for the last month or two had become annoyingly redundant, and in a rather torpid attempt to reinvigorate my consumption of music, I decided to put my Spotify-generated “Discover Weekly” playlist. A few songs went by that, weren’t bad per se, but certainly weren’t all that memorable. When that opening harmonium passage graced my ears, chills washed over me. I stopped my Pinterest scroll, turned up the volume, then laid back in bed and just listened. Six and a half minutes later, I found myself uncontrollably weeping. To this day, “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is still my favorite song ever made. 

Jeff Buckley’s charm lies in the fact that, as it was best said by Dominique Leone in her 2004 review of Grace for Pitchfork, he was “a songbird, like the kind that used to receive roses and blown kisses from the debutantes in the balcony after performances.” While technically classified under the extremely broad umbrella that is rock music, Buckley effortlessly blurs the lines of genre on Grace. He incorporates a myriad of sounds characteristic of not only rock, but also jazz, blues, and folk. He got his start in Los Angeles and then moved to New York City and joined guitarist Gary Lucas’ band, Gods & Monsters, prior to entering a record deal as a solo artist. Buckley performed at cafés at tiny venues around Lower Manhattan through 1992 and 1993, most frequently at Sin-é, which inspired the release of his debut solo EP, Live at Sin-é, in 1993. A standout from the EP is “Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin”, which translates to “I do not know the end” is a sort of cover of the original Edith Piaf song, loosely translated to English from the French lyrics. 

Released in August of 1994, Grace is Jeff Buckley’s first and only complete studio album. Since his tragic passing on May 29, 1997, songs from projects titled Sketches for My Sweetheart The Drunk and You and I were released posthumously in 1998 and 2016, respectively. The original version of Grace, distributed by Columbia Records, features ten tracks. However, in 2004, Columbia decided to re-release a “legacy edition” of the album, featuring an eleventh track, "Forget Her", that was never intended to be released. The ethics of that decision are still heavily debated, as Buckley himself stated that he despised the song and did not want it on the album, despite Columbia’s original attempts to convince him to release the track. 

Grace opens with the hauntingly fervent track "Mojo Pin", inspired by a dream of Buckley’s. It’s title is a euphemism for an almost overwhelming sort of addiction to someone, to a point where you have to have them. The term “mojo” originated in the Southern United States in the 1920s, adapted from the Gullah word “moco”, referring to magic, and came to be used as slang for heroin and other drugs in the 1960s. I don’t think this track would have functioned nearly as well anywhere else in the album - it starts off softly, reaching a desperate crescendo by the end of song as Buckley lets his vocals soar with the repetition of “Black beauty, I love you so,” in tandem with an intense snare finish, driving in the sheer emotional power that is held through the duration of the album. 

Following “Mojo Pin” is the album’s title track, "Grace", which sounds completely different, yet still manages to encapsulate the same wretched yet hopeful yearning that is interwoven throughout the whole album. “Grace” was inspired by Buckley’s experience saying goodbye to his girlfriend at the airport. It explores the interplay between the struggle with the passing of time and the ways that love can carry a person through those difficulties. As Buckley croons “it’s my time coming, I’m not afraid / Afraid to die” in the first verse, it’s easy to see death as a sort of beautiful conclusion instead of a violent end. Listening to Grace very closely resembles a religious experience, at least for me. The cover of Leonard Cohen's 1984 "Hallelujah"  featured on the album brings this sentiment to a very literal level. While it isn’t my favorite song on the album, Buckley’s cover is the most beautiful rendition I’ve heard. It remains one of his most popular songs and for many, is a gateway into his music. 

Interestingly, three covers are featured on Grace. “Hallelujah” is known by the vast majority of listeners to be a cover, however "Lilac Wine" was composed by James Shelton in 1950 for the musical Dance Me A Song and "Corpus Christi Carol" is an English hymn written in the sixteenth century. Buckley’s version of “Corpus Christi Carol” is based specifically on an arrangement by Benjamin Britten. Both “Lilac Wine” and “Corpus Christi Carol” have become closely associated with Jeff Buckley as his personal sound still shines brightly through both songs, his unmistakable voice working beautifully with any variety of instrumentation. 

The juxtaposition of “Hallelujah” and “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” immediately next to each other in the track list is a very clever sort of storytelling. Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” differs from others in that it doesn’t feel nearly as hymnal. The production is incredibly minimal, putting the width of Buckley’s vocal range on full display. It doesn’t feel like a church service so much as it is akin to finding yourself alone in a cathedral, reaching out from the depths of your soul to bathe yourself in the elusive notion of God’s love. It’s almost as if the music is trying to achieve some sort of salvation before it plunges into the heartbreaking ballad that is “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”, a song that begs for forgiveness at the cost of mind, body, and soul. Much of Grace has its roots in Jeff Buckley’s relationship with Rebecca Moore, with some even considering her to be his muse. However, “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is most specifically about the end of their relationship. The track holds some of Buckley’s strongest songwriting, and quite frankly some of the best in history. “All my blood for the sweetness of her laughter” and “She’s the tear that hangs inside my soul forever” are some of my favorite lyrics out there. It’s a particularly gorgeous song on the record, but live, even if only seen through a decades-old recording, is soul-crushing. The performance Buckley did for JBTV Chicago in November of 1994 is forever seared into my mind. 

The conclusion of Grace has become a rather controversial topic due to the 2004 addition of “Forget Her” with the release of the Legacy Edition by Columbia Records. I enjoy the song independently, but I never listen to it as a part of the album. If  it was added at an earlier point in the tracklist it could debatably work, either between "Last Goodbye"  and “Lilac Wine” or between "So Real" and “Hallelujah”, though I believe Jeff Buckley’s original thought process on keeping it off the album was absolutely sound. The final two tracks, "Eternal Life" and "Dream Brother" on the other hand, tie up the album perfectly. 

“Eternal Life” is the ‘heaviest’ song on the album instrumentally, more aligned with a traditional rock song than anything else on Grace. It stands out considerably from the sounds on the rest of the album, even while those sounds are so wonderfully varied, but it does so well. Departing from the more autobiographical lyrics of many of the songs on the album, “Eternal Life” is focused on the struggles of being human, written as a product of Buckley’s anger, according to Genius over world events such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, World War II, killings in Guyana, and more. It’s an expression of an anger shared by many at the time of its release, and an anger that many people today continue to feel as we see the horrendous effects of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and feel the stress of the upcoming presidential election. “Dream Brother” is an ideal conclusion to Grace. The song serves as a warning in a sense, inspired by one of Buckley’s friends who left a pregnant girlfriend, telling him not to be like “the one who made me so old”, referencing his father, Tim Buckley, who only met his own son once and died of a drug overdose at 28. “Dream Brother” can serve as a reminder to us all to be accountable for our actions and allow ourselves to fully experience our emotions. 

The constant sense of raw and unbridled emotional vulnerability is what makes Grace what it is. I always do my best creative work after listening to some Buckley, because he’s an artist that can open you up and force you to dig into the depths of your psyche by means of song. That emotional vulnerability is the driving force behind Jeff Buckley’s ability to craft such enchantingly gut-wrenching music, and ultimately that is what every listener can take away from Grace. 

[moreespressoformydepresso]

re: ask game

⭐️ i would love to read your director’s commentary on When The Clock Stops Ticking (We'll Be Painted Red) :D

Oh boy what have you unleashed? I hope you have some time because I will not be able to contain myself to one thing this time.

I spent months on this fic, there is so much.

Instead of the doomed endeavor that is organizing this mess or singling out a single topic to talk about at length, I'm gonna go through the fic chronologically and pick the things most important to me. If you want more afterward, don't worry. I will have more.

So the opening and closing lines mirror each other, and fragments of it come back periodically so we'll start there. There's a lot of red imagery in here for fairly obvious reasons and some hidden double meanings. There will be a lot of that tbh. The more explicitly stated meaning is, of course, the usage of red as a euphemism and/or metaphor for blood. It's a way to show Treech's changing perception of the world as everything he's living through starts to affect him in both big and subtle ways. Hence why parts of that opening line keep popping up throughout the fic. While we're talking about that line, lets actually take a look at the wording:

"Blood coated the iron, colored the floor and the rubble, splattered his clothes."

The way it's written isn't really how a normal person would think on a day to day basis, is it? It's a lot more flowery, especially with the euphemism. It's almost like he's thinking about paint on a canvas in an art studio rather than Teslee's blood, which is intentional. He's using this language, this metaphoric description, in order to avoid acknowledging what it actually is. He doesn't want to think about the fact that he just killed someone or that he's about to kill someone else. Originally the fic was supposed to start a little later, right before he kills Lucy Gray, but I decided to move it back a little and start by introducing his current state. The first few paragraphs are slow, with Treech mostly considering his survival options and the unbearable heat. It's in part to introduce where we're at in the games and in part a way to show he's distancing himself from what he's about to do, which only becomes apparent at the mention of footsteps. It's only then that we realize he's about to attack Lucy Gray, who's introduced by her fluttering dress rather than her actual name or face. She's the rainbow songbird, a stage sensation, rather than the actual Covey girl who made it to the top 3 in the games. It's easier for Treech to reconcile killing someone whose face he can't see or whose identity he doesn't think about than it is to kill someone who he knows had a family waiting on them, and it's only later on that he lets go of that mentality, which we'll get back to.

Red comes back later when he drags Lucy Gray to Reaper's morgue, as it's the color of the flag. Treech doesn't explicitly call it out, but he does refer to the color of the flag as blood red, so that in combination with the euphemistic usage from earlier leads to imagery of the flag being a literal pool of blood. Panem is literally built on blood to the point where it's represented by it. It's symbolized by it. It's celebrated by it, as the anthem is sung to the flag, which is hung at every national celebration. Then we get another glimpse of whose blood is being spilled as Treech sees Lamina's body, from her red hair to the blood that spread out from her stab wound over the floor after her death. In turn, that red reminds him of Teslee, someone he killed himself. It's a chilling reminder to Treech that he grieves for Lamina over what happened to her, despite having done that exact thing to two other children, strengthening the guilt he already feels but is trying to ignore. Thoughout the entire fic, Treech consistently sees red as the color of blood and it haunts him, illustrated by the last sentence of the story:

"Blood coated the iron, colored the floor and the rubble, splattered his clothes. 

It drenched his hands, too."

It's the exact same sentence, with two key differences. Firstly, there's the adition of it drenching his hands, an obvious play on the saying "to have blood on one's hands" due to the three deaths he mentally attributes to himself. Secondly, there's no longer a euphemism. There's no more paint imagery, erasing the distance between Treech and the events of the story. It's a show of his loss of innocense (as he's no longer capable of making himself see it as just paint) the same way him no longer swinging his legs on the beams was. Reaper actually calls him out on the second one, playfully calling him a child, but that's why it's so important (to me) that I specifically call out that he no longer does it when he climbs back up after Reaper's death. Treech didn't know Teslee or Lucy Gray, but he did know Reaper. He didn't witness Lamina's death, only the aftermath, but Reaper died right in front of him. That combination kind of shatters him mentally, hence why he spends the last parts of the story so aimless and unfocused. I'll get back to that. Regardless, the one thing more powerful than a euphemism here is the lack of one, especially because Treech is very metaphorical in his thought process. He's an art kid who writes the plays his theater group performs, he even got his hands on some pre-Panem works, and I tried to let that be reflected in the way he thinks about the world. He draws lots of parallels to District 7 and there's lots of metaphors and euphemisms in his inner voice, that's just his usual way of being which he uses to deal with his situation. So when that all falls away for the hard truth, it shows he's lost part of who he is. There are metaphors in the ending paragraphs because it's such an integral part of who he is to describe the world like that, but in the end it's not how it used to be. There's a rawness now and while most of him is still him, in the end he's not the same person he was hours ago.

Now, aside from this obvious euphemism, red also has a symbolic meaning. It's a little dark in context to the story, but it's there. Red is, after all, the color of passion. The color of anger. The color of love. And these three things come back in the story quite a lot. Yes, Treech has killed Teslee and kills Lucy Gray, but he did it with as much compassion as he could. Both died quickly, with one life-ending strike of the axe. In the end, none of them deserved to go home any more or less than the others, and all of them fight just as passionately to get home. Every single tribute was trying to get someone home, whether that's themself or someone else. When Reaper lays dying, Treech tries everything to keep him alive despite knowing it's useless because he doesn't want to let go. He still has that drive to try, even when he knows it won't do anything. Treech is literally drenched in red in that scene as the blood seeps into his clothes and stains his hands and arms, which is both incredibly traumatizing imagery to him and a metaphoric representation of what he's feeling in the moment. He's too filled with passion to keep someone alive to really accept that he has to give up. He's also too filled with love. It's not very explicitly romantic between them, not like Meet Me In The Stars (When There's Nothing Left) was, but the undertones are definitely there. Think to the hyacinths Treech uses for Reaper's figurine. Specifically the myth of Hyacinth and Apollo. In that final scene, Treech loves Reaper too much to let him go and accept that he'll have to die. Several times, he basically begs the universe to give them even just a second longer together. Life is leaving Reaper's body and it's fueling Treech's fiery desire to keep fighting because to love is to lose and he's lost too much already. You can see it as platonic love or ignore the red metaphor entirely, but I won't. These two have my entire heart and they can keep it because I'm writing the Vipsania POV rn to create some setup for later.

Red is also the color associated with anger, which comes back in the fic too. Because while Reaper and Treech hide the bodies of the dead beneath the red flag as a show of respect and care, and while they spend their happy moments separated by it (one on each side of the flag, literally two kids and the love between them), they also rant over it. They sit on the beams, high above that sea of red, and spew venom at the unfairness of it all. At the pain they've had to endure. They fuel the flame of love in each other just as much as the flame of hate, because they understand each other. Treech bitterly talks about Vipsania the way he's wanted to all week, but didn't know who to talk about it to. Lamina's mentor was nice, and she'd been having a hard enough time already so he didn't wanna burden her with it. But Reaper? Reaper gets it. And he can see that Vipsania cares at least a little, but he doesn't push it because he understands. Just because she changed her mind doesn't erase the terrible way she treated him, and Reaper gets it. They understand each other's anger and they love each other all the more for it.

The flag here also encapsulates Treech's feelings on Vipsania as a whole, specifically the dichotomy between his care for her and his utter disgust and pain at what she's put him through. She let him starve to win the prize and Treech will never know for sure how much Vipsania did for him and how much she did for herself even when she did start to care, because not even she knows that. In everything I write, Vipsania has a long road of becoming a better person and most of it is spent convincing herself she's not doing it for him. In this universe, it's actually only at the end of the games that she admits to no longer giving a damn about the prize. It takes her watching him face death for five days straight to fully realize that over time it stopped being about winning and it started being about getting him home alive. The only real sign we get in the games is the water she sends him to stop Reaper from killing him, and that's entirely between the lines. He's not in the headspace to consider things and realize that Vipsania would have won the prize regardless of whether he lived or died. As Highbottom said, their survival isn't a necessity. Vipsania could've sat back and waited it out but instead tried what she could to save his life. The prize was hers, Treech had more sponsors that Reaper and has been far less controversial, and his beautiful singing won a lot of hearts, but Vipsania would have burned that prize if it got Treech out of the arena alive. It'll become more clear why she didn't do so again in that Vipsania's Version fic I'm working on. Regardless, Treech doesn't know that she cares about him, at least not for certain, so he's feeling very confused about her. He can acknowledge that she's changed over time, but that doesn't mean he has to like what she's done to him.

Red means a lot of things, and that contrast between the different interpretations that all work at the same time felt very fitting for me. It's kind of the theme of the whole stor, something can be beautiful and ugly at the same time. After all, the story is about love, romantic or not. Red is everywhere, and it's both the best thing in the arena and the worst thing. Love can be wonderful and it can be horrible, it hurts but it's worth it until it isn't. You wish you'd never felt it so the end wouldn't be so painful but at the same time you don't know how you'd have lived without it. If Treech wasn't so attached to Reaper his death wouldn't have hurt so much, but their time together meant so much to him. It showed him life's worth living, even if the loss that followed left him unsure of how to continue on. We live for the good moments, but they're what makes it hurt so much more when they end. That's honesly Treech's experience in a nutshell.

I can't believe I've gone this long just talking about a color what is wrong with me? I had a lot more to say but this is stupidly long so I'll go to the things I've already mentioned and try to wrap this up. I was gonna talk about my choice of timing and the stupid amount of foreshadowing in Reaper and Treech's conversation or the stuff I cut out but uhm... Maybe another day. I need to post this eventually after all if I discuss everything this post will take me as many months as the actual work took me.

So I mentioned before that Treech starts out removing himself from everything surrounding him by seeing everything in terms of the games and only the games. Lucy Gray is the rainbow girl, the girl from 12, the songbird, because that public, manufactured perception of her is a façade and he knows that. When he kills her, he's even further removed from reality by relating the snake she throws at him back to an everyday scenario back home. It's just another block of wood he's gotta hit, and Lucy Gray herself is just the lumber he works with on a daily basis. It's only when she's dead that he gets away from that thinking just enough to try and give her memory as much respect as he can, but despite that his descriptions of everything are flowery like he's writing a poem or a script to a shakespearian play. It's still doing it's damnest trying to avoid the harsh reality, even when he's face to face with it. It's a sort of shield he's built up over the course of the games that really solidified when Lamina died. If he goes cold, he can't break. However, once he and Reaper enter their awkward truce that ice he's grown around himself starts to melt and things get difficult, because as he lowers the shield he's gaining a friend, sure, but he's also leaving himself vulnerable. Reaper lets him forget the reality of their situation, but that means that when it comes crashing back in it's all the more painful. Over the course of his conversation with Reaper, the metaphors and flowery language stop being a constant shield and starts becoming an attempt to put into words all the ways in which Reaper makes him happy. So when Reaper dies, all he has left are his raw feelings with none of the pretty words to make them seem softer. He uses metaphors, but they're not artsy or pretty. Instead of kids games and the everyday life he found joy in back in 7, it's ice cold rivers and harsh winters that can easily take one's life. Instead of having fun climbing trees it's drowning in a frozen lake. And there are far fewer metaphors than before because Treech is too emotional to make it sound fancy. He's trying to process this but he can't and it's literally taking away who he is.

Finally, I want to point out that I put plenty of thought into all the times Treech nearly got himself killed in this story, because it will come up in that (far shorter) Vipsania's Version. Most of it will be focused on her complicated relationship with Treech and the guilt she feels for how focused she was on herself and stupid High School drama when she should have been worried about the literal child whose life she was responsible for, but the rest will be showing a more complete version of what happened than Treech can give. Specifically in regards to all the times he nearly got himself infected with rabies due to not being aware Reaper has it. There are moments where Treech nearly drinks from the same bottle as him and when they're sharing the apples one gets Reaper's saliva on it. It's only his insistence that Reaper keep it after his stomach growles that saves Treech. These moments go together with the slowly escalating symptoms Reaper is showing to make Vipsania tear her hair out worrying about him. Treech didn't know rabies was even in the equasion, so he's having a severe case of observer's bias here. Sure, Reaper is starting to behave a little eratically, but that could be the dehydration and heat. Treech has never experienced such severe heat before, so it's probably just something he doesn't understand. The loss of focus and confusion definitely tracks with Treech's own experience in this case, and the irritability... Well, they're in the hunger games. Of course Reaper's irritated! So to him nothing particularly bad is going on until the hallucinations because he doesn't have the information available to make rabies the most logical explanation, especially since that means Reaper is going to die and as I've explained Treech is having quite a case of denialism here.

The denial is part of the grieving process, which he's already going through at the start of the story and which he goes through again with Reaper. Once he's gone through the stages of disbelief, denial, anger, and bargaining (least explicit, it's the part where he's going through all the things he would do to get Reaper to stay with him), he ends up at depression. There's inklings of acceptance in the part where he starts singing, but after Reaper finally dies he goes right back to depression. Just mixed in with the guilt that's been popping up all throughout the story but has now involved into a whole state of being. It's not helped by the fact that he has enough grounds to blame himself here. Lamina, he couldn't have done much about without an alliance. Teslee he didn't know, so he can cling to the fact she'd have to die for him to live anyway no matter how guilt-stricken he is, but Reaper is the final straw. Because he didn't kill Reaper, but his friend killed himself specifically to protect him. So basically the guy did die because of him, even though he would have died anyway. That's a hard reality to accept, so Treech sticks with the part where Reaper's throat gets slit and doesn't have the emotional energy to think of much else. It's all too much for him. These past few days have been so draining on a deep emotional energy that his only relief was Reaper. Now that Reaper's gone, Treech now not only has a massive heap of extra guilt to deal with, he also has to deal with the many regrets he can't fix anymore. For example, the implied feelings Treech has for Reaper won't be resolved (in this timeline) and he's coming to terms with the fact that he'll never get to admit them and get closure. Reaper literally saved his life, by sacrificing himself but also by stopping him from accidentally catching rabies several times without knowing it. And Treech will never be able to thank him for it because Reaper is gone. All these kids are gone, and there's nothing Treech can do but wait to go back home and try to move on, so he kind of aimlessly wanders through the arena figuring out any way to give them respect because what else is he supposed to do?

His conversation with Reaper reminded him of all the ways in which these kids deserved to live, but it's too late. They're already dead, and all he can do is try and make sure they're remembered. So he uses every district funeral practice he knows of in an attempt to show them the respect they deserved, but also in a way to try and fill the void in his heart left by the loss he's just faced. To distract himself from the confusing emotions grief, guilt, and the general stress of the past few days have caused him to feel. His time with Reaper made him feel literally warm, and now that he's gone and night is falling, he's cold and going numb with shock as he's screamed out the emotions of the moment. He doesn't know what to do as he literally freezes up both physically and mentally, leaving him to try anything to pass the time in hopes he'll have figured it out once he's done. Spoilers, he doesn't figure it out. At the end of the story Treech is kind of out of it, almost more of a wandering ghost than the literal ghosts surrounding him.

Oh yeah btw if you really wanna hate me, there's some minor implications of ghosts. Reaper's when Treech cleans him up in the morgue and Lamina's when he's sitting alone on the beams and talking himself out of contemplated suicide.

Throughout the story, Treech refers to the arena as a tomb haunted by the ghosts of the other kids, and in the end it's almost like he's the one haunting the arena, detached from his body as he tries to process everything that's happened and come to terms with the fact that it's over now. There's no more maybe's left because everyone is dead. Even him, because while he's still breathing he's lost everything in the span of days and he's so riddled with grief and guilt that he'll have to build himself from the ground back up. Now that there aren't any threats left in the arena to worry about and he's gonna go home, he has to truly contend with the fact that he's the only one who made it out. Reaper, Dill, Lamina, Teslee, everyone, they all had families, and he's the only one who'll see theirs again. In the end the only thing that keeps him going is the fact that he's the soul survivor, so if he dies too it'll all have been for nothing. They'll all have died for nothing. Now he has to take that responsibility, no matter how tempting it is to give up and end himself so he won't have to deal with the emptiness anymore. Even when the what-ifs haunt his every thought and the memories will plague his nightmares, he has to keep going. It's a show that when Treech calls himself a selfish coward he's lying his ass off. Being a scared kid doesn't make him a coward, and while he may be tempted to do the selfish thing, he always chooses the selfless option in the end, which is the important part. He brought Lucy Gray to the morgue despite the dangers, he insisted Reaper take the water and food when he felt the other needed it more, and he stopped trying to save Reaper and instead tried to comfort him when he realized there was nothing he could do and Reaper deserved to be comforted in his last moments. Especially since Reaper didn't mind dying if it meant Treech got to live. And in the end, his motivation to keep going is entirely selfless. Even when he doesn't think he can handle living anymore, he keeps going for his family and for the other tributes. No matter how much Treech self-depricates, he proves himself wrong all throughout the story. I'll cap this post here because uhm... This is a lot, and although I could talk/type about this for ages I do have a sense of when a post gets too long, but as a nice little bonus gift have this cut piece of dialogue that I didn't feel fit quite right into the story, it's right after Treech tells Reaper about his late night sneaking and stealing with his friends:

"One time we defaced the peacekeeper barracks while we were at it.”

“Are you really admitting this on live camera?”

“Oh fuck uhm… Whoops? D’you think they can hear our conversation clearly?”

Against his slightly delusional hopes, Reaper nodded with a certainty that was impossible to go against. Even when, a second later, he suddenly looked a lot less certain for some reason. Looking around slightly dazedly, Treech searched for a little bit before his eyes fell over the camera. 

“H-Hey uhm… hey mom, and dad. I don’t know if you’re, like, watching but… Sorry about that. And sorry for worrying you.” He looked away from the camera for a second, contemplating the pros and cons of doubling down, before deciding this was as good a time as any to have a bout of teenage rebellion. “In my defense- The peacekeepers that caught us thought it was hilarious.”

“You were caught?!”

When he turned back to Reaper, he couldn’t help but feel slightly sheepish at the worried and exasperated look. Kind of like the look of a scolding parent, but with some confusion mixed in as a reminder that the other was also a kid who knew what standard peacekeeper behavior was like. 

“Ha, yeah, when we were almost finished. Technically they didn’t catch me, but I came out of my hiding spot once I realized they weren’t gonna shoot us on the spot. Solidarity with my buddies and all that.”

“I can’t believe they let you all get away with that!” Reaper exclaimed, with a voice that made it sound like he was having an actual crisis. 

“Well this was in the Fringe... It’s not like we were writing anything bad. Call it street-art in an… intentionally unfortunate place.” He smirked slyly. It melted off his face quickly though. “We only did it because we knew who was in those barracks. They don’t mind our antics. If anything, they found it even funnier than we did. If we’d tried it with anyone else…”

“You’re even ballsier than I thought you were. Won’t any of you get in trouble back home since you’re saying this?”

[best-overplayed-song]

Re: Take Me To Church in response to anon-- a take by someone who first heard it a bit After it came out at the age of 20, was concerned it was overhyped, and on listening had to admit that it was in fact good. (Also disclaimer, I've got less context about like, Irish/English history and stuff than OP so uhhhh sorry this is just gonna be my own personal vibecheck)

Tw: sex mention.

A lot of my feelings on the song are more related to this bit: Take me to church I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies I'll tell you my sins, and you can sharpen your knife Offer me that deathless death and revolve around a. Possibly more sexual interpretation, so take that as you will (I was horny at 20 what can I say)

Okay first off let's talk about Why Church Is Horny. Religion and sex are both things that people often have a lot of feelings about. Christians specifically have even more feelings about sex, usually because they're saying it's bad. However, from a Catholic perspective, there's often a LOT of erotic imagery and stuff going on behind the scenes. See: lactating Jesus, saints' mysticism (for instance, Theresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena), and honestly just general medieval saints… people were SO horny for God. Plus, from an anti-sex Christian perspective, stuff still gets horny more often than you'd think. Milton was a Puritan, and that doesn't stop Paradise Lost from having originated Sexy Satan as a trope. All of which boils down to, coming from Christian, English-speaking cultural context a lot of your feelings about sex and religion, both of which carry enough baggage on their own, become intertwined.

So. All of that means you get the invocation of Christian stuff in the Bedroom anyway--lots of people say stuff like 'oh god' during sex, for instance. Think about the popularity too of the sexy nun trope, or even Destiel. A lot of people find desecration of the (Christian) holy, hot as shit, though it remains taboo.

For that reason! "Take Me To Church" being a song about sex?? About a woman referred to as a "lover," not a wife? Sex as worship? Get all those cultural hotbuttons pinged. (And that's just the first line we're looking at.)

I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies Hoo boy. So, again, worship = sex? That's a lot as seen above. Invoking the dog imagery as part of deference to a woman also gets into stuff about gender roles, taboos, and the breaking thereof. There's a lot to unpack here-- deference of a man to a woman, of an animal to the holy, the admission that it is a shrine of lies, and tied into all that is the implied desire and consent to do these things. That's sexy!

I'll tell you my sins, and you can sharpen your knife Shame is a strong feeling-- one that comes up a lot when we look at this religion/sex network. Telling of sins evokes the Catholic sacrament of confession. And then we get to the knife. I don't know how to explain my interpretation of this without getting real kinky so uh, let's just say that pain and blood can have significant associations with both Christianity and sexuality, and the use of the knife thing in this context brings in Yet Another hot-button thing.

Offer me that deathless death I always just interpret this as euphemism for an orgasm. But! That's not to belittle it. Could a deathless death also be an assumption to heaven? In the context of the previous line(s), it takes on so many alternate connotations it's insane. Has he been stabbed for his sins? (That carried penetration imagery with it fyi.) Has he been forgiven his sins and gets to go to heaven? Or is it sexual release? With the ambiguity the song leaves, all three are possible, keeping up all those threads of violence/pain, shame, ecstasy, sex, divinity, submission… there's A LOT here.

Anyway I'm gonna stop there cuz this is too long. I don't even like this song THAT much, I'm just here to explain why people do.

OH YEAH AND PS: ADD TO ALL OF THIS THE SHAME/RELIGION/SEX FEELINGS AND ASSOCIATIONS CAUSED BY THE LISTENER BEING QUEER okay bye

I loved reading your interpretation! Thanks for the breakdown!

[donfadrique]

Part Two

4/🗡️

I'm in love with the screenplay (I hope I won't regret it later xD). It is close to the book and at the same time original; there is logic in it and there are no errors that could force historians to cover their ears; it is made for people with a sense of humor; the characters’ lines are like aphorisms; the screenplay is the backbone of the movie and makes it dynamic and interesting.

5/🗡️

So Diego returns home. He doesn’t know why his father needs him and thinks that nothing has changed in California during his absence. And we see that the true Diego is not only a brave cadet. The true Diego smiles nostalgically and charmingly in a tavern while listening to a local folk song. The true Diego is polite, but he is used to giving orders.

NB! Diego is dressed in expensive and beautiful traveling clothes not because he is pretending to be a fop, but because he is the son of the Mayor (Alcalde), His Excellency Don Alejandro.

6/🗡️

Having met Capitán Pasquale, Diego still does not wear the mask of a sissy. He asks the Capitán in a harsh tone what the hell is going on and why his house has turned into barracks. However, upon hearing that power in the city now belongs to the new mayor, who is supported by the military led by Pasquale, Diego forces himself to smile sweetly (Power perfectly portrays a man who has to think very quickly and change his style of behavior on the fly).

Capitán Pasquale, reveling in his power, is showing off in front of Diego, the son of the FORMER Alcalde, and his flattered chuckle in response to Diego’s remark "How can I refuse a man anything with a naked sword in his hand?" is especially noteworthy. (If any of you were waiting for ambiguous remarks and situations, then they got the first one of them. However, irony and "multi-layered" jokes are characteristic of the screenplay and make it so wonderful.)

I toy with the sword. Do you fancy the weapon? © Capitán Pasquale

You may see a double bottom in or not, but the idea of flirting (wittingly or unwittingly) was introduced by Capitán Pasquale. (And this was unexpected, yeah.)

NB! Looking straight ahead, Diego is frowning and worried, but turning his face to the Capitán, he smiles kindly. Thus, the viewer sees that Diego is pretending so as not to get into a trouble before meeting his parents.

The idea to portray a dandy is also not entirely Diego’s! By lying to Pasquale that he was not interested in weapons, Diego hid the fact that he was a duelist and a military man. When Inez Quintero, the wife of the corrupt Alcalde, enchanted by the handsome young caballero from Madrid, invites Diego to accompany her while she goes shopping, Diego instantly complements his new personality with new details, thus becoming a sissy and a fop.

Luis Quintero: That's one little peacock that won't give us any trouble.

Pasquale: You think not?

Flattering nickname "Cockerel" vs derogatory one "Peacock" — what an excellent play on words!

Luis Quintero: Ha-ha! The Capitán is jealous. The fop has pricked the fencing master. Touché.

The implication is that Diego has charmed Inez (whose lover the Capitán wants to become, and the Alcalde has to put up with it, so he's glad the Capitán has a rival).

So YES, in this movie the sword is not only a sword, but also a euphemism, a phallic symbol. (Nowadays they have almost forgotten how to joke so subtly, alas. They talk about sex rudely and directly, which is why this masterpiece is considered "old-fashioned".)

Well, Diego now needs to try to charm and fool Pasquale (while Diego himself is enchanted by the young Lolita).

It's funny how Rathbone managed to sit on the table in such cavalry boots, and sit elegantly! He was a very talented person :)

7/🗡️

Wow, Lolita is interested in Diego, but Inez tells her to calm down and not rush to get married, otherwise she will send Lolita to a convent. Everyone is competing for Diego's attention 😏

8/🗡️

Don Alejandro says "Two wrongs don't make a right". He refuses to go against the government he served for 30 years. He refuses to break the law the way local authorities do. In addition, Don Alejandro understands that the caballeros' uprising will be easily suppressed by the soldiers. But Fray Felipe is indignant, and when Diego pretends to be indifferent, the Fray is disappointed in him.

Fray Felipe: To think that the boy that I helped to raise, the boy that I taught to hold a firm wrist behind a true point, has turned into a puppy! Bah!

Don Diego Vega: Well! Tsk, tsk, tsk! How vexatious!

[septimusprime]

So me and my fiance have been re-watching the original show, and after the scene where Millie and Wolfwood share a plate of sandwiches, fade to black, and then wake up together the next morning, we've started using "have sandwiches with" as a euphemism.

So I read these tags as "maybe knives just needed to get boned" and honestly??

They call me millions knives cos that's how many knives it takes me to make a sandwich cos I keep putting them in the fuckin sink

[roman-cates]

"… What do you mean when you say you try to rest 'between jobs'? What's considered 'a job'? Maybe that's not a question you can tell me the answer to, I know…"

Bryce smiles a little at Roman's ability to ask questions.

"Not in great detail, but generally I can. It's still a tough question to answer. I personally tend to think of one job as a contract that takes either a certain amount of time -- This job, right now, I'm here til January. Doing a lot of shit during that time, but if Boss wants me beyond then we'll re-negotiate. Or it goes until a problem is solved or a deal is made. If it's a deal, I'll work on commission, otherwise it's generally a flat fee."

That's not really what he was asking, though. Bryce thinks for a second.

"I solve problems." These days, a problem is usually not even a euphemism for 'person'. "So far this year I've helped negotiate deals, pointed out flaws in infrastructure type plans and provided alternative ideas," listened to Boss bitch about the politics of keeping everyone happy behind the scenes, kept notes on Mal -- the real reason I was called out here, "Tracked down Avery twice, and thrown my name around to intimidate a lot of people. Among other things."

Previous

"Not in great detail, but generally I can. It's still a tough question to answer. I personally tend to think of one job as a contract that takes either a certain amount of time -- This job, right now, I'm here til January. Doing a lot of shit during that time, but if Boss wants me beyond then we'll re-negotiate."

He tends to think of jobs that way? So it's not really something that's clearly defined? Here til January... Is that what he had been referring to when he brought Roman here originally? He had said something about six months, hadn't he?

"Or it goes until a problem is solved or a deal is made. If it's a deal, I'll work on commission, otherwise it's generally a flat fee. I solve problems. So far this year I've helped negotiate deals, pointed out flaws in infrastructure type plans and provided alternative ideas, tracked down Avery twice, and thrown my name around to intimidate a lot of people. Among other things."

Roman nods a little. He's not really sure what to do with all of that information. It's quite a bit more than he honestly expected to be told. It's interesting, though.

"So..." Roman furrows his eyebrows a little, thinking. "Are you, like... part of the mafia? Or is this something unrelated to that— some other crime syndicate..?" Is that even the right word? How many of those are there? Are they all technically included under the umbrella term of mafia? Is mafia an umbrella term?

[olanganadesign]

Modern Interior Style

Understanding the ultramodern Style of Décor Modern design was meant to be the antipode of the former design styles which used heavy textures, busts and wood tones throughout the home. thus, utmost factors of ultramodern design, from the cabinetwork to the shape of the apartments, includes clean, straight lines with no fresh detail. This differs slightly from contemporary design, which uses angles and broad lines, ultramodern design’s lines are crisper sharper and veritably spare

Olangana- designs- modren- baptizing Origin and Developmemt The ultramodern style is simple and unornamented. It's connected to the age of intrigue and is frequently appertained to as that of the 1920s to 1950s. The ultramodern style movement continued to grow in fashionability throughout the first half of the 20th century, and latterly derivations of this style are known asmid-century ultramodern and postmodern.

crucial characterstics of the Style This gospel behind the ultramodern style makes it a perfect decorating choice for those who like simple, tidied spaces with clean lines and a lack of fussy doodads. It goes well in the open bottom plans that accompanied the development of this style.

still, then are a many effects you should know, If you ’re thinking of decorating a space in a ultramodern style.

Structural rudiments( similar as concrete or shafts) frequently left exposed • Emphasis on vertical and perpendicular lines with smaller angles

Lack of finickiness or fluff • Low, vertical furnishings with clean lines

festivity of natural light and unornamented windows • Natural accoutrements similar as uncolored wood, essence, leather, and natural filaments.

A neutral colour pallets • Reflective shells similar as sword, chrome, or glass

Natural forestland and wood veneers Best- innards- developer- in- kr- puram Use of Colors A neutral is a colour that acts as a subtle background tinge, which can fluently be concentrated with other stronger colours. That makes neutrals a great blank oil for you to get creative, giving your artwork and architectural features a chance to shine. A neutral color scheme can be anything from light neutrals, similar as cream and white, to darker tones, similar as chocolate or Charcoal. Use- of- colors- in- houses For further details please visit http//www.home–designing.com/2016/02/a–pair–of–modern–homes–with–distinctively–bright–color-themes Lightings Considerations Euphemism has enough solid parameters. Form is veritably important in ultramodern design. You may see geometric shapes, rigid places or impeccably simple circles and spheres, with many embellishments to intrude the inflow of the piece. Light- consideration- in- himes Lightings- consideration- for- modren- baptizing For further details please visit https//www.allmodern.com/lighting/cat/lighting–c29056.html

Wallpapers Ultramodern wallpaper walks the line of sharp complication and stark glamour. These high- fashion designs put a fresh, ontrend spin on design alleviations, frequently bringing simplistic patterns and colours to life with a bold, clean look. Setting the most fashion-forward design and colour trends, contemporary wallpaper brings geometrics, textures, florals and further to futuristic heights of a la mode seductiveness.

Modren- style- Wallpapers For further details please visit

https//www.brewsterwallcovering.com/modern–wallpaper &

https//www.muralswallpaper.com/ca/styles/ ultramodern/ Furniture and Decor Modern cabinetwork features fluid silhouettes and minimalist aesthetic. Modern principles embrace a simple, clean look. Its main principles include Minimalistic design, smooth face, clean straight lines, warm neutral colours, accoutrements that includes both wood and essence

[magz]

ID: Screenshots and excerpts of Jesse Meadow's Medium article, "You're Using the Word 'Neurodiversity' Wrong", with pink background. Text says: You're Using the Word "Neurodiversity" Wrong It's not a euphemism for disorder. [meme by the author: an edit of the globe that says "Neurodiversity", with an astronaut looking at the globe while saying "Wait, it's political?" and a different astronaut pointing a gun at them while saying "always have been". End of meme] The term "neurodiversity" is everywhere lately, and it's being used in ways that appear to be progressive, but underneath, are really just the same old pathology paradigm re-packaged. Discussing autism, ADHD, and dyslexia, this Forbes article claims the term neurodiversity was created to "shift the focus from the negative connotation of these conditions toward the positive, " a statement that waters the entire concept down into a floppy milquetoast version of its former self. [original article has link to Forbes article in it] It's not a nice euphemism for autism, and it's about far more than just fighting negative connotations. Neurodiversity is a paradigm, a lens through which we look at human neurology, and it stands in opposition to the pathology paradigm. The pathology paradigm says: there is a normal, healthy brain and an abnormal, unhealthy brain. People with abnormal brains have something wrong with them and need diagnosis and treatment to become more normal. The neurodiversity paradigm says: there is no such thing as a normal brain. Variation in neurology is natural, and none is more right or wrong than another. The term neurotypical exists as an alternative to the word normal, but it does not describe a type of brain in any biological sense. It describes a way of being, or a disposition, as scholar Damian Milton says, that is culturally valued and socially advantaged over other dispositions, which we call neurodivergent. Milton writes: "... there is no neuro-typical to deviate from other than an idealised fantastical construction of Galtonian inspired psychological measurement. " (Galtonian referring to Francis Galton, who invented eugenics.) [meme with strong Doge labeled "Neurotypical Students" and weak Doge labeled "Neurodivergent Students". "Neurotypical student" says "i do all of my homework every single day and have time to hang out afterwards". "Neurodivergent students" says "i thought about starting my homework for two hours and when i finally did it took me an hour to do a math worksheet" the meme is commented with "Behold, the "idealised fantastical construction" of the neurotypical doge." Source: Just.autistic.thinqs. End of meme] Usually at this point in the discourse, someone pops in and says, but Judy Singer, who coined the term neurodiversity, was just referring to biodiversity! It's separate from the neurodiversity paradigm Walker was writing about! To which I would counter that Singer has written on her blog as recently as February of this year to re-assert that yes, "neurodiversity" is a political term: "..my intent was political, unifying and liberatory, not divisively intent on putting individuals 'under a microscope'. " You can't be "diagnosed with neurodiversity', and it is also not a club that admits people based on a list of accepted diagnoses. There is much clamoring over who "counts" as neurodivergent, but we don't need to define which DSM diagnoses count because the entire point of the neurodiversity paradigm is opposing the pathology inherent in DSM diagnoses. "Neurodiversity ' also carries with it a certain amount of flux and contradiction. It can't be easily defined and it's not totally agreed upon, and that's probably a good thing. In the essay Defining Neurodiversity, Robert Chapman describes the concept as a "moving target" that will continue to shift and change in meaning: "I do not think it is the kind of thing we can or should hope for a final definition of. " According to Chapman, neurodiversity is an "epistemically useful concept" that helps us "access and generate new forms of knowledge" and "imagine the world differently to how it currently is. " But if your use of the term is just re-branding the pathology paradigm we already live in, you're not doing that. End of ID.

just transferring found some posts i found helpful over to tumblr, with credit ofc. this article and post is by jesse meadows, original post linked in the source.

image description needed!

[just-here-for-the-moment]

FRIEND!!

May I humbly request Pero Tovar and "every inch of you is the most beautiful thing God ever created."

Heat level up to you.

Thankyou!

YES!! You absolutely may request it, and I hope that you're okay with me turning it into Part 2 of The Innkeeper's Daughter, because, damn... I'm loving that man!!

The Innkeeper's Daughter, Part 2

One MILLION "thank yous" to @fandom-blackhole who let me take inspiration from This Ask for the original Anon and This follow-up Ask from me, and let me run wild with the premise of Pero Tovar falling in love with a woman who works at an inn.

The Innkeeper’s Daughter, Part 2

Part 1

Word count: 3000+

Rating: Explicit, 18+ only

Outline: Pero Tovar x “You” (OC cis/het female reader, “blank canvas”/no physical description/no use of “Y/N”)

Warnings: Reader’s first time (but this is NOT meant to be a ‘virgin kink’ fic); mature and vulgar language; euphemisms; slow-burn; Pero Tovar being super sexy and caring; kissing; vaginal fingering; oral sex/F receiving; unprotected P/V sex; a little bit of morning-after insecurity on Reader’s part

You broke the kiss and leaned your head back against the wall, breathing heavily and thoughts running wild. Pero’s face was still so new to you, up close. You were learning to read him better. His stony scowl seemed to make up the bulk of his expressions, and other than the pure hatred and anger that had twisted his face after the other man had called you a ‘whore,’ he only seemed to have a softer version of the scowl. On anyone else you would have called it a frown, but on Pero it practically registered as a glow.

You looked up into his eyes as he brought one of his broad thumbs to your cheek to sweep away a tear.

“I have to finish serving the customers. I can’t leave Father alone on a Saturday night.” You kissed him again, and then another before you found the strength to pull yourself away again. “But I want to see you tonight. After I’m done.”

Pero nodded and tilted your chin up with his calloused fingers. “Tonight. I will come to your room.” He kissed you deeply, then scattered a trail of kisses up your nose to your forehead. He pressed his lips to the top of your head and then murmured. “Until then, mi alma.”

You broke the embrace reluctantly, steadying yourself with a sigh as you walked away, smoothing your apron down. You looked back once at Pero where he stood at the end of the hall. His face looked soft, and the hint of a smile tugged at one corner of his mouth as he gazed at you. You fought the urge to abandon your post and run back to him, and you lifted your fingers in a little wave as you re-entered the barroom.

Thankfully all of the guests had returned to their own affairs, resuming their raucous drinking and eating, the bar brawl entirely forgotten. Your father looked at you with an arched eyebrow and you smiled and shook your head, reassuring him that you were fine. You busied yourself with attending to customers, tucking coins into your pockets and ferrying empty plates and mugs to the kitchen.

Your chest ached every time you inhaled, desperate for the evening to end, to see if Pero would fulfill his promise of coming to your room. You weren’t nervous, far from it - you were eager and willing and excited. You weren’t a high-born lady, required to keep her maidenhead intact in order to form an alliance with some prince. You just hadn’t had the opportunity yet. None of the young men in the village had been interesting enough for you to want to steal away to a hayloft or secluded part of the forest with. But Pero… he was different. Mysterious and well-traveled, closed-off until he had bared his soul to you in the back passage. You were ready, well past an age where you could make up your own mind, and you had said yes, grasped the opportunity to lay with a man who excited you.

You weren’t sure exactly what would happen after tonight, whether Pero would stay in the village or leave, ask you to come along with him or insist that you stay put. You dared not think too far ahead, letting your immediate tasks occupy you as the conversations of the guests flowed, filling your head with a buzz that blessedly distracted you from the clenching and throbbing in your gut.

Finally, after what seemed like eons, the last customers dribbled out of the door, laughing and shouting their way down the lane. You washed the final stack of dishes, wiped the tables, and handed Father the last of the coins from your pocket. Your beaded brow had nothing to do with the exertion of your labor, and everything to do with thoughts of the handsome Spaniard who had promised you a visit.

You fairly flew to your room at the top of the stairs, discarding your soiled apron and dress. You poured fresh water into your basin, adding a few dried summer wildflowers from the sachet in your drawer, and used part of a cake of fine soap that Father had gifted you at Christmas. It was nothing like the exquisite ointments or fancy perfumes that ladies used, but when you were done your face and body were scrubbed clean, and you were certain that Pero would be enamored of your efforts. He had noticed your dress, after all.

You donned your cleanest nightdress and then hesitated. Should you get into bed, or sit in your side chair? You decided to tuck yourself under the covers and read for a bit by the lamp. You heard no noises from the rest of the house, though you listened with eager ears, only half-attentive to your book. Time dragged on interminably. Just as you were growing a bit drowsy, you heard a tap at your door. Your pulse raced and you swung your legs out of bed, dashing the few steps to the door.

“Who is it?” You whispered.

“Pero, mi alma.”

You swung the door open, beaming up at him. You reached one hand out to take his and pulled him into the room, almost not believing that he had come. But as you closed the door and he crowded you against it to kiss you again, you sunk into the reality of it. He was here, he was real, he was yours.

You felt a sense of urgency, the desire to pull him into your bed immediately and get right to lovemaking. But you fought against the urge to hurry, tried to memorize every one of Pero’s kisses as he held you tight between him and the door, one large arm wrapped around your waist while the other cupped your jaw tenderly. You found yourself almost whimpering as he kissed you, his tongue sweeping your mouth with passion. This was heaven. If this is how men made love, you could get used to this.

At length, Pero pulled away from you, gazing deep into your eyes. “Mi alma… you are a maiden, yes?”

You nodded, feeling suddenly shy. He had guessed as much in the hall downstairs, telling you that he would show you everything you needed to know, show you how to please a man. Now that it was a matter of actual discussion, your lack of experience felt like a burden. Would you be able to please him? Would he still be in love with you if you were clumsy or awkward?

Pero tilted your chin up and spoke low, serious in tone. “I will be gentle. It may hurt at first, but after that you will feel great pleasure. I will make sure of it.”

You breathed a sigh of relief, realizing that Pero’s question wasn’t meant to embarrass you, but rather to ensure that you would be comfortable and safe. Your shyness ebbed away, replaced by a glowing pride that you had chosen such a careful man to be your first.

“I trust you, Pero. I am ready.” You smiled and leaned up to kiss him once more. He stepped back and you took his hand to lead him to your bed. He sat on the edge and you paused for a moment.

“Should I put the lamp out?”

Pero shook his head, that gentle smile tugging at the corner of his mouth once more. “No, mi alma. Leave it lit. I want to see you.”

And there was that eagerness again, your heart pounding against your ribs as Pero took your hand and pulled you to stand between his knees where he sat. He placed both hands on your hips and gazed up at you with the same expression of hunger that you had seen on his face downstairs when he professed his love in the passageway. A quiet moment stretched long and sacred between you.

Pero dropped his hands to the hem of your nightdress and lifted it, looking up at you for permission. You nodded and he pulled it higher, skating the material against your thighs and hips, until it reached your waist. You took the fabric in your hands and lifted it up and off your head, dropping it on the floor at the foot of the bed. You felt as if you should be shy, but you couldn’t find it in yourself. The way that Pero gazed at you, the way his hands stroked from your thighs to your hips to your waist, the fact that you could see his erection straining against the thin material of his trousers - it made you feel powerful and special.

Pero wrapped one of his hands around to cup your butt, bringing you closer against him. You draped your hands over his strong shoulders. He cupped one breast and brought his mouth to the nipple, licking and then suckling against you, his tongue hot against your skin. You felt desire stirring, a throbbing between your legs that mirrored your heartbeat. You tangled your fingers in his hair and moaned softly.

“Oh, Pero. That feels wondrous.”

He let go of your ass and brought his hand to your front, softly stroking your thigh and nudging your legs apart. He cupped his hand there, holding it firmly against your sex, and you nearly wailed at the sensation, the delicious contrast of Pero working his mouth at the same time that his hand was touching you so intimately.

You closed your eyes and threw your head back, feeling his fingers explore you. He stroked your center softly with his largest finger, bringing wetness forth and then pushing it back between your folds. You felt your pleasure building, something below your navel twisting itself higher. Then Pero’s finger found your sensitive bud and he began circling it, building the pressure until you felt the dam burst. You brought the back of your hand up to your mouth and stifled a moan as you felt your cunt throb and quiver, stealing your breath and sending your head reeling.

As the sensation began to slow, you felt Pero stroke you again and then insert his finger up into your folds. It felt amazing, like it belonged there. He probed you gently and then pushed it further in. You felt the breath return to your lungs and then you looked down at him. He released his mouth from your breast and placed a kiss to your stomach.

“Is this alright, mi alma? Am I hurting you?”

You shook your head. “No, Pero. It felt good. It feels good.”

He smiled and then released you. “Lay down for me.”

You lay in the center of your small bed, looking up at him expectantly as he stripped his tunic off. You nearly gasped at his beauty, his golden skin marred by scars, his broad shoulders muscled after hours and hours of fighting. And when he peeled his pants down from his narrow hips, you were astonished at his cock, bobbing proudly up and erect. You wondered again at your lack of shyness, finding only that you felt womanly, proud of the way that his body was making his desire for you so apparent.

Pero kneeled on the bed next to you and surprised you by peppering kisses across both of your ankles and shins. His soft scruff tickled your skin, and you giggled at the sensation of it.

You reached a hand out to touch his shoulder. “Pero, what are you doing?”

He paused and looked at you, "Every inch of you is the most beautiful thing God ever created." Pero laid a kiss to one kneecap and then the other, continuing his trail up your thighs. “It would be a grave sin if I failed to worship every inch of you with my lips, mi alma.”

He kissed across your belly and ribs, your arms and breasts, and finally came to a stop at your lips. When you tangled your fingers in his hair, he brought his hand once again to stroke your sex, bringing a moan from you that he matched with his own deep growl.

He pulled away and positioned himself near your knees.

“Open your legs for me. I want to kiss you there, mi alma.”

You smiled at Pero and shifted your knees apart, watching his face grow darker with lust as your legs fell open. He whispered a few words in his native Spanish and licked his lips before leaning down. The first laps of his tongue were gentle, and you watched him close his eyes in satisfaction. His tongue grew more insistent, and you soon closed your own eyes, biting your lip to keep quiet as you tossed your head back in ecstasy.

Pero worked his tongue across your sensitive bundle of nerves, pausing only to insert two fingers into you before he continued to lick you with vigor. You felt your climax building again. With a few strokes of his fingers inside of you, Pero brought you to the precipice before your pleasure overtook you, throwing you over the edge as you clenched hard around his thick fingers.

When you opened your eyes, you found him gazing up at you, lazily stroking your hip before dipping his head to place a kiss there.

He shifted himself to kneel between your legs, stroking his proud length a few times. You looked up at him through your haze of desire, reaching your arms up to circle around his neck where he leaned over you. He dipped his head to kiss you once.

“Open your legs very wide for me, hmm?”

You nodded and propped your feet wide apart, knees bent up. You felt Pero position himself against your folds, then a slight pressure as he entered you, stopping just inside. He searched your face as you took two deep breaths and nodded up at him, encouraging him to continue. He slotted his mouth against yours, tongue working deep into you as he slid his cock inside of you the rest of the way. You inhaled sharply through your nose as Pero continued to kiss you. It did feel painful, but the feeling lessened as he moved inside of you and back out.

Pero pressed his forehead against yours. “Are you alright, mi alma? The first time is the worst. After this you will only feel pleasure.”

“I’m alright, Pero,” you whispered. “It did hurt but it’s getting better. Keep going, my love.”

He kissed you again and kept his pace even, thrusting into you again and again. As the pain ebbed away you started to feel another pressure building, and this time you knew what would happen when the dam broke.

You closed your eyes and let the feeling of Pero’s cock brushing against your sensitive bud carry you into your third climax. At the first throb and clench, Pero buried himself deep and stayed there, reaching one hand down to thumb at your clit. The thrumming in your core intensified, and a deep groan issued from Pero’s throat at the feeling of you squeezing around him. This third climax was the best one yet, slow and steady, and you felt it from your scalp to your toes. You wanted it to last forever, and you were sad when it burned itself out with a whisper.

Pero kissed you deeply, then nudged your chin up with his nose to place kisses along the column of your throat.

“Better, mi alma?”

“Yes,” you whispered. “So good.”

Pero hummed against your skin and then thrust into you a handful of times more before he unsheathed himself and sat back on his heels. His face was intense, almost a scowl as he stroked himself to completion, catching his spend in his open palm.

He unfolded his legs and crossed to your basin, wiping his hand on your damp linen washcloth before coming back to where you lay on the bed.

“Do you want me to stay, or to go, mi alma?”

You sat up and reached a hand out to him. “Please stay.”

The next day dawned bright and sunny, the light from the thin curtains streaming across your face. You smiled at the warmth of it, mirrored by the warmth of Pero’s bulk pressed against your back, his solid arm slung over your midsection. Were it not for waking to his presence, last night might have been a dream.

You rolled over to face him, finding his face relaxed. You pressed a kiss to his soft mouth.

“Pero,” you whispered. “Wake up.”

He cracked one eye open and grunted at you. You laughed softly and kissed him again.

“Was I good?” You whispered to him. “Last night, I mean? Were you happy?”

Pero opened both eyes in surprise and regarded you with confusion. “Yes, mi alma. But why are you asking me that?”

You felt a bit shy but answered him honestly. “I was worried. I thought that if I was not experienced at coupling with you, that you- well… you might not be pleased, and you would fall out of love with me.”

Pero sat up and pulled you to rest against his chest. You heard his heart beating and closed your eyes. He would not be doing this if he were displeased. He would not have stayed the night with you.

“I told you in the passageway, mi alma, that I had fallen in love with you. But that was not the truth.”

Your breath caught in your throat. If that was a lie, then why had he come to you in the night? Why had he done those things with you?

Pero continued, “The truth is that I fell even more in love with you last night, when you gave yourself to me so openly and let me bring you pleasure. If you will let me, I will spend the rest of my life between your legs, mi alma. I want nothing more than to pleasure you every day for the rest of my life.”

Tears sprang to your eyes. Was he proposing marriage?

“Pero, I-”

“Mi alma, if you will have me, I want to be your husband.”

You drew your head back and looked up into his deep brown eyes. His face was the most open and relaxed you had ever seen it, the scowl entirely wiped from his visage.

“Yes, Pero. Yes.”

He released a breath you didn’t realize he had been holding, and then Pero rolled you down into the sheets to kiss you with abandon.

---

Pero Tovar character masterlist

Main Masterlist

“Everything bagel” tag list: @quica-quica-quica @anaaaispunk @justanotherblonde23 @gracie7209 @nicolethered @honestly-shite @driedgreentomatoes @dihra-vesa @1800-fight-me @the-queen-of-fools @juletheghoul @kesskirata @honeymandos @silverwolf319 @mourningbirds1 @greeneyedblondie44 @spacedilf @maxwell–lord @anxiousandboujee @cevvie @sherala007 @writeforfandoms @libellule2001 @deadhumourist @mandoalorian @javierpinme @eri16 @mandocrasis @pilothusband @bastillealmighty @eri16 @jitterbugs927 @babiiface95 @toomanystoriessolittletime @yespolkadotkitty @fisforfulcrum @prettylilhalforc @mswarriorbabe80 @littlemisspascal @wildemaven @coreychick @castleamc @coreychick @astoryisaloveaffair