#she’s too good for the haters I’m her number 1 defender

[rawonton]

Look at my famously hated wife, I love my universally hated wife 💞💞💞💞

[ccfever]

thinking about how pete maravich’s coach was his dad and according to the voices in my head (i read it somewhere and forgot where) the team ran the offense mostly through him, and that’s why he got the record and got insane usage. doesn’t mean he’s a bum but the team never won anything with the system running through him like that.

cc reached 3,668 points on 2,582 FG attempts.

pete maravich reached 3,667 points on 3,166 FG attempts.

makes sense because of the 3PTer and shot clock, but what’s more impressive to me is the fact that caitlin reached those numbers while being on a winning team. back to back national championship appearances, 3-time conference champions.

the difference imo is encapsulated in the fact that caitlin lead the country in points and assists. she just impacted the team in a way that lead to wins. a literal one woman offense.

her greatness doesn’t just elevate herself. it elevates the team. lebron esque.

i feel like people understate that part of her identity. nowadays she’s reduced to being a “good passer” but she’s averaging nearly 20 PPG with a broken shot. what’s gonna happen when her threes start falling?

all i’m saying is no one’s ready bro. she’s been playing bully ball lately too. when she gets a middy it’s so fucking over it’s not even funny lmfao

plus she’s a good team defender, comes with the IQ. she should be the worst defender on the team if you want to contend for a championship tbh. PGs are never meant to be defensive stoppers. but caitlin has more blocks than players like jackie young or dijonai carrington. so she’s not a net negative defender. not the best 1 on 1 defender for sure, but the coach should scheme to hide caitlin on that side of the ball.

i’m just growing tired of people not understanding the magnitude of her talent man like the haters are doing such a good job of downplaying who she is and what she can do as a player

[miggydiaz]

For the salty ask 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 16, 20, 22, 23 and 26 for cobra kai pretty please

My answers are so long, so I am putting this under the cut @wonderwolfballoon! Also I just noticed your Daniel icon I SWEAR I’M NOT DRAGGING HIM TO BE MEAN!!!

1. What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get?* My biggest IDGI ships for CK are probably Elimetri or Kiaz. I’m not here to yuck other people’s yums or anything, but I do think there is something to the idea that Migueli isn’t popular because it’s a ship predicated on mutual respect for one another. Kiaz has the obvious enemies to lovers vibe and I just generally don’t sail those ships. Elimetri has... its problems, IMO, most especially around the idea that Demetri has to like... save Hawk from himself? Idk. I just like romances that I feel are based on love and mutual respect and not ...tropes.

 I am also not a Lawrusso shipper although I have a lot of those on my dash and you all are great! Again, not yucking yums! Daniel just makes me want to head butt him too much to pair him romantically with anyone 😂 I don’t even want his wife with him. He needs to self reflect~ 

4. Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?* 

I once saw someone ship Amanda and Anoush and I noped out of that so fucking fast I almost tripped over myself. I’m not sure if they’re popular. I just think some people feel the need to get Amanda out of the way to sail their ship and stuck her with Anoush which... no. Just no. Let Amanda be a messy single queen with a martini hobby, thanks! 

5. Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?* 

Not in CK. I’m lucky because I pretty much stick to my little Migueli bubble and I’m okay with that? Lmao lord knows the Squad on my dash is all about the DISCOURSE™️ so idk if I just don’t feel the need to get sucked into the wider ship wars because we have good healthy debates, but so far, so good. 

6. Has fandom ever made you enjoy a pairing you previously hated?* 

I never hated it... I just didn’t have many feelings on shipping with this show in general at first. Then I was in the CK tag one day and I saw Migueli fan art. Then I discovered @afurioushawk‘s falconry series and it was all over for me after that! So fandom DID make me love a ship, just not one I hated.

9. Most disliked character(s)? Why? Oh boy. How much time do you have? In some instances, it’s a good thing season 3 happened because otherwise, this would be a multi-page essay on the problems with race and class privilege as it pertains to Sam LaRusso and just some... generally not nice comments about Demetri that I’m conflicted about because I’m not sure if the writers are intentionally trying to write him a specific way and it’s just not translating to me or what. But season 3 revamped both of their images with me a lot. I’m way more flexible in terms of Demetri, but lmao I was the number one Sam LaRusso hater for a minute there (or maybe number 2, I can think of at least 1 other person who was in that boat with me back in like... August/September, but I won’t call them out because I don’t want them to get hate...) However, I have grown a bit in my opinions of Sam, and even though I still think she’s responsible  for a lot of shit she NEVER gets held accountable for, I also think that’s a reflection of the adults around her too, and this includes my otherwise unproblematic queen, Amanda.

But honestly, my most hated character (other than the obvious villain that is Kreese) is Daniel. No matter how handsome Ralph Macchio looks in cable-knits, because Daniel has always been a sanctimonious, shit starting drama king and I say that about KK Daniel too. I’m not saying Daniel was the ~true villain~ or anything, or that Johnny was innocent -- I can only drink so much Red and Yellow Kool-Aid -- but Daniel’s always been annoying to me as a protagonist, and turning him into a smarmy wealthy car salesman who is also a class traitor did not do him any favors in my book. I will say, I also like Daniel more in season 3 than I have in previous season, but since he is the adult, I will be mad at him longer than I will be at the kids, ya feel?

10. Most disliked arc? Why?

 Johnny’s entire season 3 storyline. The sheer level of REGRESSION at every turn drives me bonkers. It’s like watching him go through all of the stumbling blocks of season 1 all over again, but without the “he’s learning! He’s going to make mistakes!” free pass that I was willing to give him the first time around. He regularly jeopardizes Miguel’s recovery and it’s played for laughs. He fucks up on every level with Robby. He spends most of his time running away when things get hard or too real. He drops the ball completely with Hawk, and like, not to put too fine a point on it, but a lot of Hawk’s issues are because Johnny put Hawk on this ‘flip the script and be a badass’ path and then offered him no guidance for how to walk that path and instead left him in the hands of Kreese. And then he has the nerve to go to Hawk and basically be like “I made you what you are!” lmao yeah Johnny, you sure did, that’s why he’s breaking peoples arms, hoss. And then all of the nonsense with Ali and Carmen, like... if you were planning on teasing KK fans with Ali and him getting back together, why write her as married in the first place? Why even tease the idea of Carmen and Johnny until after you were sure what you were going to do with Ali as a character? Instead, they do what they did in season 3 and it makes him look like a colossal jerk. So yeah. Literally every choice they made with Johnny this season, I hated.

14. Unpopular opinion about your fandom? People who hate Tory are not valid, sorry not sorry.

16. If you could change anything in the show, what would you change? I would have kept Miguel entirely out of Tory and Sam’s beef. Or at least not directly inserted him into it like he was with the kiss. I know the writers thought it was necessary to push Tory to the point of inciting a fight at school, but I am just so exhausted over girls being unable to fight about anything but boys. Also I would bring Aisha back.

20. What is the purest ship in the fandom? 

I am probably biased, but I still maintain it’s Migueli. Look, Miguel stood up to Kyler for Eli and Demetri both. Hawk joined CK because he saw what it could do for some skinny nerd who was getting his ass kicked. And he took to CK, really took to it! Even flourished before he started getting mixed messages. And he and Miguel were pretty much inseparable after that. They coordinated their wardrobes ffs. Hawk dubbed him El Serpiente and no one else calls him that — it’s Hawk’s nickname for him. Miguel confides in Hawk only secondary to Johnny, who is like a father to him. The entire Coyote Creek exchange shows they can fight and disagree but... well, to use the cliche, they don’t go to bed angry, you know? They’re square the very next day. Hawk is the first person at Miguel’s side when he gets kicked over the balcony and the LOOK he gives the second floor where Robby is? That boy is out for blood immediately to avenge Miguel. So much of his s3 behavior is fueled by that need for vengeance because MD is wholly responsible for what happened to Miguel. And Miguel is so confused and betrayed by Hawk’s shift in behavior, and yet still holds out hope that Hawk will see through Kreese’s BS and come with him to The Dojo I Refuse to Name. And when Hawk does make that deflection finally, he shows up at MD with Miguel. There’s so much more that I know I’m missing but whether someone ships them or not, that is a tried and true love and respect for one another, a willingness to fight for and defend one another that you don’t often see in TV friendships... or even in most tv relationships. And I just think that’s the best ❤️

22. Popular character you hate?

 Daniel, hands down. I mean... I don’t even necessarily hate Daniel, you know? I just think it’s really, pardon the pun, rich that a guy of immense wealth and privilege can’t get a therapist or turn to his far too patient wife for help with his existential crisis over his high school bully opening up a karate dojo to make some money and help a kid who is getting the crap kicked out of him. I get that Daniel’s narrative is necessary for the rivalry, but it does nothing to make him sympathetic as a character.

23. Unpopular character you love?

 Tory, definitely! Everyone hates her and then there’s me and the Squad over here banging away on our Coors Banquet cans yelling TORY RIGHTS! Seriously she catches so much flack for a teenage girl who is... the sole income provider for her family? At 17? While caring for a sick mom and a little brother? And fending off a creepy landlord? Tory has it so rough and then she meets a cool girl at her dojo who asks her to hang out at some fancy ass country club which is probably the nicest place Tory has ever been in, and then she gets talked down to and accused of being a thief and has another girl lay hands on her, only to find out that same girl is her new boyfriend’s ex and... ugh. I HATE that Tory gets shit all over when Tory and Sam wouldn’t even have beef if Sam had apologized to Tory as she SHOULD have. Tory isn’t innocent, but damn, I’d be pressed too.

 My other unpopular character I love? Nathaniel. Seriously that kid is THE best. He’s a literal child but is out there like I WILL FUCK YOU UP, even though he’s MD. Honestly, his Cobra Kai energy is so ferocious I won’t be surprised if he moves back to CK eventually. Anyway, I love him.


26. Most shippable character?

 Miguel, hands down. It’s because he’s so affable and sweet overall. And because his hair is so fluffy and pettable that no one can resist touching it. I like to imagine that one day he and Hawk are talking about their hair and Hawk makes a joke about how Miguel’s mane is getting so long that it’s going to be bigger than his own, and then he reaches out to ruffle it and internally has a bisexual meltdown because oh no IT’S SO SOFT AND NICE. But uh... anyway, yes. Definitely Miguel.

[thoughtfulpaperback]

Charmed 03 x 13 SPOILER REVIEW!!!!

GENERAL THOUGHTS

Okay it's Saturday, but that episode felt like too much emotionally. They better not make this a Kat moment with Jordan and not bring my man back because I will riot. Overall this was an emotionally heavy episode entertainment wise it was a solid 8/10. But overall kind of frustrating for me for a number of reasons which I will go into in my dislikes section.

DISLIKES

1) Stop Torturing Black Male Characters!!! Also they really had Jordan pull a Galvin.

Now, just as I did with Galvin season 1. I take issue with the whole leaving right when the gal is the most emotionally attached. It’s really cruel of the writers. With both Jordan and Galvin, I can see how the events they went through would have them needing a moment. I do. Unlike with Galvin, I feel it was totally unwarranted with Jordan. I mean to say that Galvin up until the event that caused his trauma, hadn’t really been that involved in the magical world or faced anything that scary. So I can totally see how what happened caused a break without putting him through the wringer continually. I just feel that this event shouldn’t be the breaking point. What I mean by that is that the writers shouldn’t have done it. Not that Jordan shouldn’t have felt the way he did. I would have preferred him taking a break before having to deal with the tomb. In some ways, this felt like a Detective Morris moment (Torture the mortal black man until he breaks and can’t take it) more than it did with Galvin and I always hated how the writers treated Darryl. I think its because of the fact Jordan has been thrown into one crisis to another (my man has almost died multiple times) continually. I love Jordan and because we’ve seen him so much outside of a romance arch (unlike Galvin) I’ve grown attached and I hate to see him so beaten down that he has to leave. I think he would have been valid and in character for him to need time for himself before the tomb. I don’t think they should have put him through it to send him away. Well I have hope he will be back soon so I am not going to fret, but I can still say my piece over the unnecessary torture of POC characters. 

Though if they replace Jordan screen time with Antonio screen time I will freak out because that would be wrong y’all. I’m not talking about shipping wise! It would just be a real misstep if they “replace” screen time devoted to a black man to a light skinned Latino. Colorism is real y’all and I get enough of it in my novelas, don’t need it in Charmed anymore than it has appeared in the past.

2) Are we done with showing Abby’s abuse now?

If there is one thing I hate it is showing abuse on screen. I hate seeing it, I find it triggering as someone whose sibling was thrown in the trunk of a car while the adults laughed. I don’t think abuse justifies Abby’s actions either, in that showing how she was abused doesn’t make me dislike her past actions any less. Nothing will change my mind on those. Same with hearing Abby’s good intentions behind her good deeds. 

Listen, I don’t think Abby is all bad. But villainous actions are still villainous. She has done some good and it wasn’t all selfish, but that doesn’t mean the heinous stuff she did was any less heinous. Whatever the writers choose to do with Abby, as long as they have her put the work into redeeming herself, then I’m cool. they seem to want to do that with her and have started her on that journey. So we shall see if they pull it off. 

3) They really giving the Bisexual the unrequited love twice over

This show isn’t good to the LBGTQ+ community like it likes to make itself out to be. I don’t think Abby’s interest in Mel is a threat to the Ruby x Mel thing since last episode they seemed to seal Mel and Ruby as a solid couple at least for now. But I don’t think we need competing queer ships. I felt the mess that was melko versus jada x mel, was unnecessary and I don’t want to see a repeat. At the same time I think it is awful to sort of give the bisexual character the crappiest luck when it comes to being rejected twice. Technically, Mel hasn’t outright rejected her, but not bringing it up is like the nice way of rejecting her and letting her keep some sense of dignity after having her secrets violated.

4) This episode was really the Abby show in a lot of ways.

While there were interesting developments and reveals (by which I mean obvious, but welcomed ones), this episode was basically for the Abby lovers and in a way the Abby haters to convince them that they are wrong about her. And I just didn’t need it. I don’t think Abby haters will ever not hate her and I think dedicating an entire episode to defending her only fuels them further. I think they should have further explored Abby’s past and issues in small doses spread out through this season. I don’t want to be told she is redeemable, I want to come to that conclusion on my own by watching her behavior.  I think the show always messes up when it comes to developing concepts over time. Abby has been a series of missteps from the writers in my opinion, but I think with this episode they are trying to come back from those, but I think it wasn’t done as well as it could have been and the way they did it may only further the whole Abby hate train, not take away from it. 

LIKES

1) We finally doing the whole Perfecti are the big bads

You all know that my biggest issue with Charmed in it’s previous seasons is always the bait and switch with villans. I hope, since we are 13 episodes in and it has been pretty obvious that the Perfecti are going to be a big problem, that the rest of the season will be dedicated to taking them down and dealing with any trouble they cause. technically they haven’t been around long, but I hope that the writers focus down on this now and we don’t get anymore bait and switches saved for the last two episodes. I like these guys as the bad guys it’s a classic storyline and I am not against the classics. 

2) Teaser for more Celeste

Now I know lots of people felt like she would be the big bad and all elders are scum kinda of stuff. And I mean there is still time and we may get baited and switched again this season. But I actually like Celeste. I didn’t at first because I generally don’t trust older white females who ignore consent because their intentions are good. But I like having a remnant of elder knowledge around. I thought she was dead, because the last time we saw her Mel suggested that by taking the time thing she would start to age rapidly. But whatever! I choose to ignore it if the writers are choosing to ignore it. 

I still don’t feel that Harry’s need to be mortal is pressing. It should take a backseat to the bigger issues at hand in my opinion, but I won’t say no to seeing what knowledge Celeste has having been the one to create Whitelighters. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

Perfecti think Abby is chaoatic and think Jordan is guilty by association

Abby accepting her fate and just saying well sucks for Jordan

Macy’s “ If she wants hostile...”

“Even in a tomb built before the dawn of time a black man still gets imprisoned for something he didn’t do”

Abby’s feelings for Mel confirmed in a violation of her privacy via truth serum

Abby’s mother’s testimony

Abby saying she will give Macy’s powers back

Jordan leaving to recuperate his mental health 

[colbybrocksmolder]

Tumblr – Colby Brock x Reader

Tumblr is…a mixed bag. You’d made some of your closest internet friends on this poorly run website, but you’d also received more than your share of crazy fangirl hate. What’s crazy though, is how easy it is to make friends in the Sam and Colby fandom on Tumblr. 99% of everyone you’ve met is super nice and the group kind of shuts down the haters pretty quickly.

This last round of drama kind of wore everyone down. It all started with a hate anon that your friend DaddyDobrock received. “If Sam and Colby saw half of what you guys wrote on here they wouldn’t want you as fans 🙄.” She handled it well. She laughed and told the anon to lighten up and fuck off. You guys were pretty used to petty hate anons and rarely answer them, but boy was this asshole persistent.

Absolute-randomness-forever replied to a similar message with “If you don’t like what we post, don’t follow us?” Again, not really feeding into any drama.

Sp00kybrock got one trying to get her opinion on the whole thing. “Don’t you think most of the Sam and Colby tumblr fandom is toxic? Like, I bet Colby would cringe so hard if he went on this site. 🙄” She defended her friends, laughing it off. “My friends and I aren’t toxic. We post memes and joke around, but we support the boys 100%.”

Jakeywebber commented on a few of the new posts. “Does this person even watch the boys? They obviously don’t know that their sense of humor is exactly like ours.”

The anons continued to come in, a few other people getting them but not replying. They always ended with 🙄. The problem with one toxic anon is that they attract others that want to feed into the drama, and soon the hate is taken too far.

Someone got an anon telling them to kill themselves. Eye rolling emoji included. The blog posted the anon with no comment other than “deleting now” and went offline. To say that the rest of you were up in arms is an understatement. Lightenupbrock, that-one-brock-boy, badassbrock, the-sun-is-dark, colbyjacksmack, rewindfridaynight, xplr-lurker, brockboytrashz…you all jumped in and defended your friend. You sent them messages making sure they were okay, trying to convince them not to delete.

*Twitter notification* Colby Brock Tweeted : “FYI we see more than you think we see. Don’t pretend to be our fan and then treat other fans like shit. Especially anonymously. 🙄”

Daddydobrock posted “Anyone else see this?” with a screenshot of the tweet.

A few of the others reblogged it, adding comments. By the end of the thread, your group of friends was convinced that Colby either had a tumblr or occasionally lurked on it.

*tumblr messages*

Xplr-lurker : Hey, have you heard from the girl that got the kys anon?

You and Xplr-lurker had been tumblr friends for about 6 months. They messaged you after they saw how you interacted with the other blogs. You were always helpful, kind, encouraging…You had a reputation for being a sweetheart and Xplr-lurker had messaged you thanking you for it. You two became friends pretty quickly, asking how each other’s days went and such. Neither of you ever really posted your personal info on your blogs, but you knew a bit about each other. You both lived in Cali, you were about the same age, and you loved sending each other super emo tumblr posts when you were bored. Usually hella late at night. He knew you were a girl and you knew he was a guy. Other personal details kind of trickled through in your everyday interactions.

Y/n : Yeah. She doesn’t want to be online for a while, but she isn’t going to delete her blog. I gave her my phone number just in case she needed to talk.

Xplr-lurker : I figured you would 😊 I’m glad she’s okay.

Y/n : Me too.

Y/n : Hey, did you see Colby’s tweet? I think he saw all of this go down. I mean, maybe I’m just assuming too much, but he ended a tweet about anon hate with that stupid eye roll emoji just like the anon does.

Xplr-lurker : I mean, he said he checks his dms all the time. Maybe someone sent it to him?

Y/n : Maybe.

Y/n : Honestly, I’m just as mad for him and Sam as I am for the girl. How shitty is it that they have to watch the people who call themselves fans treat other fans like garbage? And they can’t do a thing about it.

Xplr-lurker : That sounds like it would suck.

Y/n : Right?

You had written a whole big post about how hypocritical it was for this toxic anon to accuse everyone else of being bad for the fandom when they were so willing to go out of their way to harm other fans. You reminded them about the videos Sam and Colby used to post about being confident and helping others. Their entire YouTube career started with them making videos wanting to help people. Just like every other post, you signed it with two black heart emojis. 🖤🖤

You had continued talking to xplr-lurker as you wrote the post. Venting a little bit about how frustrated you were.

*Twitter notification* Colby Brock Tweeted : “Don’t worry, we know there are amazing fans out there, too. 🖤🖤”

Y/n : Dude. I think I’m paranoid, now.

Xplr-lurker : What do you mean?

Y/n : Nothing. I’m exhausted. I just need sleep, lol. You do too, nerd. You said you needed to be up by 9 and it’s already 4am.

Xplr-lurker : Holy shit, my friend is going to kill me if I’m falling asleep tomorrow, haha.

Y/n : Haha, good luck! I’ll talk to you later.

Xplr-lurker : Thanks. Sweet dreams.

See, it’s pretty common for social media influencers to have secret accounts. It gives them a way to like posts and follow fans without starting drama. After collabing with CrankThatFrank, Colby was convinced to make a tumblr. He picked Xplr-lurker so that it made sense for him to interact with his own fans. He mostly just reblogged cool edits and funny traphouse memes. He’d comment on funny posts and throw his two cents in on theories and gossip. For the most part, it was kind of fun. People on tumblr were brutally honest but fucking hilarious. He never planned on talking about tumblr or letting anyone he interacted with on tumblr know that he was behind the username…but then he found your blog. He’d contemplated telling you for a few weeks now. The two of you talked almost every night and he felt bad. He felt like he was lying to you.

He’d first messaged you just to say a quick thanks for being so positive in the fandom, but the more he talked to you the more he kept wanting to talk to you.

The 🙄 anon stopped sending people messages after Colby’s tweet. Your friends on tumblr were able to go back to posting ridiculous screenshots and cool photo edits over the next week or so. You’d reblogged a gif of Colby about to lose his shorts on a waterslide with the caption “I feel like Elton has been trying to get Colby naked in vlogs since the start of TFIL”.

Xplr-lurker : *sent waterslide post*

Xplr-lurker : This is a fat fact. Lol.

Y/n : Right? Hahahahaha

Xplr-lurker : I think he does it for views.

Y/n : Probably. It’s the same reason Colby gets shirtless in his own videos. He knows people will click the thumbnail, haha.

Colby sat on his balcony laughing. You were absolutely right.

Xplr-lurker : Is that why you clicked?

Y/n : Haha, nah. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a beautiful human being. You’d have to be blind not to see that. But I found Colby through TFIL.  

Xplr-lurker : What made you keep watching him then?

Colby felt bad for baiting you out, but his curiosity got the better of him. As far as you knew, he was just another fan. This is when he’d get your most honest answer.

Y/n : A lot. First, he’s a huge goofball. Watching him and his friends do dumb shit to make each other laugh is the best.

Y/n : And everything him and Sam have done together? Those two dudes are fearless. They just remind me that I’m the only one holding myself back, you know? One day I’ll actually get out of my own way and make something of myself.

Y/n : He also seems super genuine. He never seems afraid to speak his mind or call something like it is. It actually bums me out watching some of his “friends”, If you know what I mean. I know that not everything they put out there is 100% accurate to how they actually are in real life, but I hate that slimy feeling I get knowing that a lot of them use Sam and Colby and don’t actually give a shit.

Y/n : I know I sound like a massive fangirl at this point, haha. I think I just needed to get that off my chest.

Colby sat there trying to figure out how to respond. He had a huge grin on his face seeing you spill your guts like you did.

Xplr-lurker : Haha, don’t worry about it. You just sound like you care. That’s not a bad thing.

Over the next few weeks, you guys continued to talk like normal, but it got a little more personal. He wanted to be able to call you a friend, but he was still afraid to tell you who he actually was. You two talked more about your passions and the things you struggle with. You’d always sent each other music to check out, but he’d confessed that he’d been dabbling in trying to write lyrics. He needed to find a way to talk to you as COLBY and not xplr-lurker.

*Twitter notification* Colby Brock Tweeted : “You feel so close but in reality I’m sitting here on my balcony alone.”

One of your tumblr friends had screenshot the tweet, adding the caption “This is how it feels to have better friends on the internet than in real life.”

You reblogged it and tagged xplr-lurker. You added “I wouldn’t trade our late-night talks for the world.”

Xplr-lurker : *sent tagged post*

Xplr-lurker : Yeah?

Y/n : Duh. You know that.

Xplr-lurker : Same.

Colby sat there, his fingers hovering over the keyboard on his phone.

*Twitter notification* Colby Brock Tweeted : “1 like = 1 ‘don’t be a pussy’ whispered in my ear.”

Xplr-lurker : Not to sound like a creepy internet person, but have you ever met any of your internet friends in real life?

Y/n : Haha, I don’t think you’re creepy. And yes! I’ve met a few of them. Why?

Xplr-lurker : I know we live in the same city and I’ve always wondered if you’d want to get coffee or something.

Y/n : That would mean that you’d get to see how awkward and clumsy I am in real life. I don’t know if I’m willing to put you through that, hahaha.

Colby laughed. That response was better than the “fuck off, creeper” he expected.

Xplr-lurker : Oh, shut up. You’d be the one dealing with me being awkward.

Y/n : Suuuuuuure. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.

Y/n : I’m actually walking home from my favorite coffee shop right now, haha. It’s called 101. They’re open until 3 am and they have the best food.

Xplr-lurker : WHY ARE YOU WALKING ALONE SO LATE AT NIGHT?!

It was well past 2am and the thought of you walking the streets of LA by yourself kind of had Colby on edge.

Y/n : I live like 5 minutes away. Don’t worry.

Colby pulled up 101 Coffee Shop on his phone. It was less than a 10 minute drive from his apartment. *We actually live pretty close* he thought, switching back to the tumblr app.

Xplr-lurker : Tell me when you make it home safe. LA is scary at night.

Xplr-lurker : Also, that coffee shop is not far from me. If you ever want to meet up there, I’m down.

Y/n : I just walked in my front door. Stop worrying, mom.

Y/n : And I’ll be headed back there tomorrow around midnight. My roommate’s boyfriend is obnoxious and he comes over every night around then. I usually hang out at the coffee shop and work on stuff on my laptop for a few hours.

Xplr-lurker : I’m glad you’re safe. I’ll definitely try to make it there tomorrow.

Y/n : I’ll be the one with the messy bun, laptop, and baggy Y&R hoodie, lol.

Xplr-lurker : If I don’t chicken out, I’ll wear an XPLR hoodie.

Y/n : Well I need to go to sleep. If I don’t see you tomorrow, I’m sure I’ll still talk to you on here.

Xplr-lurker : For sure! Have a good night!

Y/n : You too. 🖤🖤

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.” Colby said, sighing. This was it. He was either going to walk into that coffee shop and blow his cover or he was going to chicken out like a little bitch.

The whole next day he had a hard time paying attention to anything or anyone. He was too busy trying to figure out the best way to tell you who he was.

“Colby!” Sam laughed, waving his hand in front of his friend’s face.

“What? Sorry.” Colby said, shaking his head and turning towards Sam.

“You okay?” Sam asked. Colby just stared at him for a minute. “I’m going to take that as a no?”

“I’m not, not okay.” Colby answered, sounding cryptic.

“Okaaaayyy.” Sam said slowly. “Care to explain?”

“I’m just nervous to meet up with someone later.” Colby tried to sound casual. “It’s nothing big. I’m just anxious, I guess.”

“Who?” Sam asked.

“A girl I met online.” Colby said, waiting for Sam to tease him.

Sam furrowed his brows. “Like on a dating app?”

“No.” Colby shook his head. “She’s a fan.”

Sam made a confused face. “Not to make it sound like I think you’re stupid, but are you being catfished again?” He laughed.

Colby couldn’t help but crack a smile, hiding his face behind his hands. “No, actually. I don’t even know what this girl looks like.”

“What?!” Sam asked, confused.

“That’s not the weirdest part.” Colby said, peeking through his fingers at his best friend. “She doesn’t know I’m me.”

“Is this for a video or something?” Sam asked, not understanding at all what was going on.

“Nope. I made an account to interact with fans and we just kind of clicked.” Colby tried explaining. “We’ve been friends for like 6 months, but we only ever talk through our usernames. The more I say this out loud the crazier it sounds.” Colby laughed.

“Sooooo, you’ve never seen a picture of her?” Sam asked.

“Nope. Not for sure. I THINK I found her personal blog, but I could be wrong.” Colby answered. “I only know her name because it’s in her profile, but she’s never asked me mine.”

“Is she going to be mad?” Sam asked, trying to wrap his head around the whole thing.

“That’s kind of why I’m so nervous.” Colby said, biting his lip. “She told me where she’s going to be tomorrow night and I don’t know if I should just show up or if I should rip the band-aid off and tell her who I am in our dms before we’re supposed to meet up.”

Sam had a blank stare on his face. “I honestly have no idea how to help you.”

“Don’t feel bad. I don’t know how to help myself.” Colby laughed.

“Tell me how it goes?” Sam asked.

“Of course.” Colby nodded, zoning out again.

At around 11:30pm you’d walked to the coffee shop. You ordered a drink and your late dinner and sat down in the corner booth. You worked on some things you were currently writing and gone through and caught up with your emails. At about 1am, you’d convinced yourself your tumblr friend had chickened out.

Right around 12:30am, Colby was stood in front of the coffee shop he was supposed to meet you at. There were only a few people currently in the shop, so it was pretty easy to figure out which one was you. He’d taken a deep breath and walked through the door, darting to the counter when he started to panic. With his back to you, he ordered a coffee. *I don’t even like coffee* he thought to himself. He kept peeking at you from the pick-up counter while he waited for his order. You had headphones in your ears, mouthing the lyrics to whatever song you were listening to. When the barista called out his name, he grabbed his coffee and left the shop.

Xplr-lurker : I’m stuck.

Xplr-lurker : You’re normally the person I go to for advice, but I feel like it’s unfair to put this one on you.

Xplr-lurker : You’re beautiful, btw.

You looked up from your computer, searching for your friend.

Y/n : Thank you? Are you here?

Xplr-lurker : I was. I chickened out. I kind of panicked.

Y/n : Aww, I promise you have no reason to panic. So why are you stuck? I’m always here to listen and give advice when I think I can help. You know that.

Colby sighed, sitting in his car.

Xplr-lurker : I guess it’s better just to come out with it.

Xplr-lurker : My name is Colby.

You waited a few seconds for further explanation.

Y/n : Okay? I don’t get it.

Xplr-lurker : Like, I am Colby Brock. I made this account to interact with fans.

Y/n : Please tell me you’re just fucking with me as a friend and not a delusional fanboy that’s trying to actually convince me he’s someone he’s not.

*Great* you thought to yourself. Not only did you have to walk home at night by yourself in LA, now you had to keep an eye out for a crazy person who wanted you to believe they were Colby. You thought this person was your friend and now you were afraid to leave the coffee shop.

Xplr-lurker : Neither? I know I fucked up by not telling you sooner.

Y/n : Well, since whoever is on the other end of this message knows I’m here alone, I’m going to call my roommate to pick me up. You know, you were really cool. You were my favorite person to talk to. This really sucks. You didn’t have to be anyone but yourself.  

When Colby tried to reply to your message, the chat said that he had been blocked. “Oh, fuck.” He said, jumping back out of his car. When he got to the door of the coffee shop, he could see that you were packing up your stuff.

“Y/n!” he called from the door, walking towards your booth.

Your eyes flew towards the boy walking in your direction, your hands frozen holding your laptop.

Colby slowly slid into the other side of the booth you were sitting in, putting his phone down with the tumblr app open. “I’m so sorry.”

“What the fuck?” you whispered, still not moving.

“You have every right to be mad at me and I swear I never meant to freak you out. I didn’t really think it through when I told you who I was. Is your roommate coming?” He asked, talking so fast you could barely process what he was saying.

You sat your laptop down and grabbed his phone. “My roommate wouldn’t come pick me up even if I did call her.” You said, looking at the tumblr app on Colby’s phone. You were the only person he had messaged.

“You were going to walk?” Colby asked, grabbing his phone when you handed it back to him.

“I was going to order an Uber.” You laughed. “This is crazy. You’re crazy.”

“Are you mad?” Colby’s face was apprehensive, waiting for you to tell him to fuck off.

“A little.” You nodded, laughing. “You asked me questions about yourself! I fangirled to you about you!” You remembered, covering your now blushing cheeks with your hands, hiding your face.

He laughed. “I feel the need to say this in person…You’re beautiful.” He watched as you peeked over your fingers. “And I’m the one that should be embarrassed about that, not you.”

“Why did you ask me to meet if you didn’t want me to know who you were?” You asked, remembering that this whole thing was his idea.

He laughed, reaching to grab one of your hands. “I’ve been trying to nut up and tell you who I am for over a month.”

“Why me? You didn’t even know what I looked like?” You were still trying to take in the fact that Colby Brock was sitting here in your favorite coffee shop holding your hand.

“I didn’t really care what you looked like. You’ve been a great friend to me since we first started talking and I was just some random person you met online…That has nothing to do with how someone looks.” He explained, blushing before continuing. “The fact that you’re also adorable is just an added bonus.”

You laughed, pulling your hand out of his so you could re-do your messy bun that was currently falling. “This is crazy. I want to re-read everything I’ve ever sent to you to make sure I didn’t make a complete fool out of myself.”

“Y/n.” Colby laughed. “You didn’t. I promise. There’s not a single thing you’ve told me that I don’t like.”

You stared at him for a moment, trying to figure out what the hell you were supposed to do now. “I have one question.” You said, leaning your elbows on the table.

“Ask away.” He answered, leaning forward the same way you were.

“What’s the REAL reason Elton always tries to get you naked in his vlogs?” You smirked, hearing Colby bust a gut laughing.

“Honestly, I’ve questioned it myself. The only answer that keeps me sane is clickbait.” He shook his head. “So, we’re good?” he asked.

“I mean, I don’t know WHAT we are, but I hope it isn’t bad.” You laughed.

“Well, we’ve been friends for over 6 months. I’d like to still claim that even though you know now that I’ve been a dumbass this entire time.” He smiled.

“I think I can deal with that.” You smiled back at him.

“Should I push my luck and ask you if I can buy you another coffee?” He asked, a shy look on his face. “I think coffee is disgusting, but I hear coffee shops make for great first dates.”

“You went from being afraid to show your face to asking me on a date.” You laughed.

“Well?” Colby said, waiting for your answer.

You nodded, your cheeks turning pink. “I’d love another coffee.”

I can remove any of the tumblrs I’ve used if you’re uncomfortable being mentioned. @daddydobrock @absolute-randomness-forever @sp00kybrock @jakeywebber @lightenupbrock @that-one-brock-boy @badassbrock @the-sun-is-dark @colbyjacksmack @rewindfridaynight @brockboytrashz 

[lizzybeth1986]

Quick Thoughts on TRR Book 1 Chapter 8

• So…umm…I LOVE this chapter! More in hindsight than when I was actually playing it because back then it just sounded like a jealous woman trying to sabotage the MC and failing. But now having played through this chapter and even written a fic about it…I have to say there’s a lot going on in this one.

• I’ve often found the 8th chapter in the series pretty interesting. This was the first chapter in the series to feature diamond scenes from all three of the original LIs in a single chapter. This would happen again in Book 2, but by Book 2 the imbalance was a lot more tangible. I will speak more about this later…but suffice to say that back when we had just two books in the series, I would call the 8th chapter The Magical Number Eight.

• A common misconception that seems to stem from this chapter (and others, often by Kiara-haters) is that Kiara “agrees to be our friend” this chapter, and then jumps ship to Madeleine in Book 2. That’s bullshit. Kiara never mentions the word friend. She says ally. And she delivers.

• THIS is also where you get the first little inkling that Maxwell could be romanced, though we would only know for sure by the middle of Book 2. This chapter is also where you also get the first of many Drake’s plot related scenes. Which meant that sometimes, even if a fan did not like him, they would end up buying his scenes anyway for some crumb of information on their LI. Drake was already getting popular, but dropping hints of plot into his scenes gave him an added edge and often encouraged fans of other LIs who didn’t like him, to buy his scenes.

• Anyway, since the buildup took an entire chapter, the book pushes us straight into the dressing room for this one!

• Title: A Waltz to Remember.

Alternative Title: Lizzy Turns This QT into a Kiara Gush-fest And Does Not Regret It (Even If It Gave Her Hand-Cramps).

I love how over the course of three books, this particular dance form of Cordonia has gained the importance it has. And it’s lovely how - even though we’re not meant to like Olivia at this point - our first glimpse of Cordonian culture through this dance, is in her estate.

• Hana’s silver dress makes its debut here! Honestly, I kinda would’ve liked this one a LOT better as a gown than as the bodycon it eventually became. That pleated bodice really needed a long, flowy skirt to work. I’m always going to be a little sore they made it a short bodycon instead 😑

• Okay I love both our options for the ball, okay. They’re both big, and glamorous, and make a real statement. Which is necessary, because the plan is to show Olivia up at her own home.

Winter Goddess is gorgeous - it has that vintage Hollywood feel to me, and the caption for it sounds pretty romantic (“will capture the winter moonlight”). Snowflake Sweetheart is very on-point for the whole snow/ice theme Lythikos itself has going on. I’m very fond of the crystals and the illusion sleeves on the second one….but I have to say that silk-satin one with the fur stole is the winner for me 😅

Me Back Then (on one of my million replays): If I really have to take a diamond option, I’m taking the second one. I’m cheap.

Me Now: Still cheap. I’m not spending 25 whole diamonds on another gown when there’s already a cute one free in my closet.

• Maxwell is trying hard to channel Bertrand 2.0, and is badgered enough by 1.0 over the phone to almost succeed.

• One of the formal phrases he uses is “a diamond of the first water”, a phrase you’d see very commonly in the Regency era…which kind of solidifies my belief that Regency England was one of their world building inspirations even back then.

• We don’t fully understand the kind of power the hostess can wield in her homeplace, until this sequence. On principle, Olivia is not exactly answerable to anyone, not even the royals visiting her in Lythikos - she can decide on seat arrangements, she can give instructions to the staff on who gets the best portions of the meals and who gets the worst, she can monopolize on the Prince’s time with her if she wants. And she takes full advantage of that.

• However, her being the hostess doesn’t always leave her completely free to do what she wants, without consequences. Lythikos is not just a turning point for us - it’s one for her as well. And not exactly in a good way.

• Here’s what Olivia does to sabotage us at the ball:

- seats us away from our sponsor, and away from the head table. In fact this is something she does to all the suitors - Maxwell tells us that not a single one has a place at the head table.

- seats us way back, next to a commoner who is also constantly given the same treatment - which Hana points out is meant to be viewed in the court as an insult. To an MC who is still learning the ways of the nobility, this move is pretty much a miss…but it does give us a very clear idea of how hypocritical the nobility and royalty can be. Hana is not immune to the prejudice either (seen as she does not censor the statement when she says it in front of Drake, a commoner), but she eventually grows to fiercely guard him and defend him from those kind of attitudes later on… and you can see a lot of that growth in TRH’s Walker Ranch chapters.

- has her servers give us ice-cold lobster bisque on purpose, thirty minutes after serving has begun. With no lobster in it. Remember, we’re in a wintry region where you require piping hot, creamy, fattening foods to stay warm. This isn’t just ruining a meal: Olivia is sending a clear message about how unwelcome they are, by giving them cold food devoid of the main protein, in the freezing cold of Lythikos.

- given the timing of her kiss on Liam during the waltz, she probably did that to send a message to us as well. It happens shortly after our dance with him, and from her reaction (angry, immediately establishing claim on him) to Liam’s dance with the MC, we can tell she’s more affected than she’d like to admit, and that’s what informs her actions during her second dance with him.

• Me Back Then: There is a nice option and a rude option. It’s Drake, but he’s Liam’s bff and I want to be nice.

(+ romance point)

Me Back Then:

Me Now: Romance points in Lythikos fall from Drake the way pee falls from someone with weak kegels. One tiny laugh and pssssshhhh.

• From the rude option you find out that Drake plays chess and often wins in his matches with Liam, so that’s a nice touch.

• The MC can acquire the fresh bisque for herself and her friends if she dramatically faints in front of a server. I quite like this (optional) moment because it shows her thinking on her feet and quickly ensuring she gets her way. The other options are pretty hilarious too, though, the obnoxious “do you know who I am” option comes with a Game of Thrones reference 😂

•

Me Back Then: …someone should leave Drake hungry at a party till the wee hours of the morning with access to only whiskey bottles. Whiskey for entrèe, whiskey for main, maybe we’ll be kind and give him brandy for dessert. Let’s see how far his love for whiskey goes then 😈

Me Now: Holy shit, Me Back Then, you just predicted the best scene in Book 3 🤣.

• One of my favourite TRR Tumblr posts ever, was the one where someone took a screenshot of Drake saying “I’m not one to complain about food” from this chapter, and placed a gif of Nicholas Fraser’s “Why You Always Lying” lyrics just beneath it 😄 If that isn’t the truth idk what is.

• Most of the chapter after this will focus on the Cordonian Waltz, Olivia’s little stunt and getting allies, so the buildup to Drake’s scene will happen now (and Hana’s just before we meet Drake). Hana will be dancing with Tariq, and then other partners in the meantime, so no opportunities to dance with her there.

I loved this dialogue option when I first saw it, but now that I know how much in love with dancing Maxwell is, this scene is ten times more fun! 😃

• On first playthrough…this didn’t seem like that big a problem. Maxwell was fun, and seemed to genuinely like us, and was berated a great deal by Bertrand - so it was easier then to perhaps forgive his gaffes and want to comfort him instead. But when you approach his character as someone who brought a complete foreigner to his country and then didn’t make much of an effort to educate her with what little time they both had…I wind up finding his character a lot less endearing. I’m honestly more irritated by his carelessness. There was a lot he could have done even if he forgot or didn’t know what to do. He could have asked around! Hana was right in front of him! He could have found out what to prepare for if he didn’t know or if Bertrand didn’t handhold him (which Bertrand himself isn’t exactly doing a good job of in the first place). The other LIs shouldn’t have to constantly step in and do his job as sponsor and guide!

• It’s only when we’re dancing that Maxwell realizes he’s not taught us the dance. Of course, if you bought Hana’s waltz scene, she whispers her advice just before you dance with him, and you give her credit for teaching you. If not, you go into it knowing very little (but because the options are easy to choose from, so you can still manage). Maxwell does explain its uniqueness in terms of the flirting potential and the fact that it’s a courtship dance…but the true beauty of that description only comes with Hana.

• Istg, if Hana weren’t around to repeatedly save our ungrateful asses…

• So THIS is the first opportunity you get to ‘romance’ Maxwell. He looks sad and tells you that you should only be here for the Prince, but it’s also that vague kind of sadness that you can interpret differently and write detailed fanfics about! I think a huge part of Maxwell’s appeal (besides the overall sparkling personality, and the fact that he was so different from both Liam and Drake) was the “will-he-won’t-he” nature of the LI question itself.

• We now move on to Liam, who is fighting a losing battle with his desire to favour the MC exclusively, but wants her to know that she is special to him. Notably he does say this in the “courtship” part of the dance.

• How do you know that the Cordonian Waltz was a strategic choice? Because Olivia chose to dance with Liam twice! And because she’s the hostess, it’s harder for Liam to refuse.

I remember being pretty uncomfortable with this scene the first time I saw it, I still am, and often I wonder if I’m the only one who feels that way. Whenever I see this scene being referenced, it’s often referenced in the most flippant ways. And it baffles me.

• Honestly, Olivia was clearly overstepping her boundaries here and didn’t even bother to ask Liam before doing it (Liam himself mentions he was “caught by surprise” and calls it an “unexpected advance”). Was Olivia doing it out of complex, understandable reasons? Like jealousy or frustration or showing the MC up? Well, sure I guess. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that her doing so was nonconsensual and downright wrong.

The funny thing is often this incident is either downplayed or erased completely, especially in contexts where people try to argue that Olivia “deserves better” than Liam, or sympathize with her for loving a man who “does not care about her”.

Does Olivia deserve to be loved back by a person she loves? Absolutely.

Is Liam a lesser person for not loving her back? No, and he shouldn’t have to be penalized or judged by a fandom for not doing so.

Is the fact that most people who uphold this “penalizing/blaming Liam for not returning Olivia’s feelings” argument, also tend to forget/downplay this particular incident…particularly disturbing? Well, yeah, definitely.

• Even the narrative fails with regard to this, actually. It is written in a comical style, with a couple of out-there dialogue options (like screaming loud enough of break poor Maxwell’s eardrums) and the MC is given a chance to lash out at Liam for not reacting fast enough or throwing Olivia off of him. And guess what his reaction is. Sad, contrite, trying to explain his position. It’s almost like it’s okay for him to feel guilty about something that was done TO him, that he was never asked permission for.

Olivia does suffer consequences, but more for her “power play” than for anything else. Her move isn’t viewed as negative for what it may do to Liam, it is negative because it is seen as a direct “fuck you” she is delivering to her competitors. The scene itself is written for laughs…which I’m surprised more people don’t find even a little uncomfortable.

• The reactions from the other suitors is pretty on point for their character types at this point. Madeleine is smug and condescending, confident that she will never be “unrefined or insecure” enough for such “ostentatious displays” (says the woman who will bully her entire court, run around Italy roaring drunk and name a drink after herself in Book 2). Penelope doesn’t exactly have a personality at this point, she merely comments that the kiss was a bold play. It is Kiara who points out the power dynamics involved and views it as the last straw in her waning support for Olivia.

Remember - the ladies of the court weren’t treated half as badly as we were, but they were probably more aware (than us) that they were being denied a seat at the head table, and had to put up with Olivia monopolizing Prince Liam’s time. While Kiara’s suspicions that Olivia is “mad with power” here probably aren’t too far off the mark (even though her feelings of jealousy and confusion may be involved, we can’t deny that there is a clear sense of “I’m the hostess here, I can do what I want”), it’s not just an assumption that simply stems out of nowhere.

• Maxwell sees and opportunity to gain allies, and encourages us to capitalize on it. The wrong options are pretty interesting: if you mention “slapping the smirk off Olivia’s face”, Maxwell tells you that the political equivalent would be to “attack her alliances”. If you suggest making out with Liam in public, Maxwell exclaims that doing so would lead to people gunning after you. Which is telling, because in Book 1 PDA is mostly shown as being frowned upon in Cordonian society in general. So Olivia’s very public kiss isn’t just brazen and bold to the courtly ladies, but also viewed as inappropriate and a jab at their own lack of power in this situation.

• I love that Maxwell gets the opportunity to encourage us to play politics. Love it. He is the first one to notice the change in Kiara’s attitude towards Olivia, and he recognizes that the time is ripe for us to captialize on it. While Bertrand, or Bertrand-and-Maxwell, are the ones who tell us the importance of gaining support from the press and the royals, getting the court to support us is wholly Maxwell’s idea. This added another layer to the way he was built in the story, and I’m not happy that we didn’t see a lot of that perceptiveness and skill around court later on. By Books 2 and 3, he was mostly relegated to the funny guy, the court jester. Book 1 Maxwell may make a lot of mistakes but you bet he’d be too smart to toss brushettas in the face of dignitaries at the UN. It was like his own writers forgot Maxwell was capable of more.

• OKAY SO THE KIARA SECTION IS A FAVOURITE OF MINE OKAY. And it only wound up being a favourite when I realized there were changes in her dialogue between my Esther playthrough and my Persephone one. I mean if I weren’t already a fan of her…this definitely would have converted me.

Before I get into the actual gushing…I’ll just summarize what the MC has to do to gain her approval:

- Language: Kiara is known for her proficiency with languages - it is the skill that defines her in court (to the point that you barely notice her other qualities). Her home language is French, and if you know how to respond to comment ça va she is cheerful and more willing to hear you out (if you choose the fromage answer she’ll a bit surprised but not too hostile, and if you say voulez-vous coucher avec moi, well…of course she’ll be pissed off because you just accidentally asked her to sleep with you). In any case, to gain her approval you need to respond in French.

In fact even Kiara’s goodbyes vary based on whether she becomes your ally or not. If she’s your ally, she says à bientôt before leaving (which is “see you soon”). If she’s not convinced by your arguments, she says adieu, which has more of a sense of finality to it and is often said when you don’t expect to meet again (in fact I’m surprised they had her say it) and is different from au revior (which means “until we see each other again”).

- Olivia’s Actions: Kiara reiterates to you what she’d just told the others - Olivia is on a power trip, and while Kiki is well aware that she’s not a top contender in this competition, she is not going to stand for being treated like she is lesser than the ones who do have power. Interestingly, in both Chapter 7 of Book 2 and this chapter, Kiara’s first visible signs of discontent/frustration come when both Olivia/Madeleine go on massive power trips (“she even named a drink after herself. Quelle narcissique”, Kiara says about Madeleine in the next book).

I feel like Kiara’s frustration may have already been there with Olivia’s treatment of the ladies of the court at the start of the Ball (but perhaps she may have been brushed it aside as a strategy you could expect from a noblewoman in her own estate) but it is Olivia kissing Liam and trying to establish a claim on him that is seen as the tipping point for her.

However, she’s also pretty pragmatic and is lowkey impressed with Olivia if you state that she went too far. She is irritated by the message Olivia is sending, but acknowledges that not many would have dared to do that in her place. A more neutral response works well with Kiara’s train of thought, because to her the important thing is seeing what works in the long run, and the MC has to convince her that she is a good alternative.

- Alliance: Kiara already anticipates this, since she is the one who straight-out asks this question. At this point Kiara is not exactly aiming to be Queen - she knows she is up against more powerful people, people who have more access to the royal family (perhaps her dad Hakim would have had a similar amount of access if Constantine wasn’t such a dick). She is not going to waste her time wishing for what she won’t get, when she can easily network instead. The answer that works best with her is the one where the MC speaks of Olivia’s friendship as being a one-way street where she always gets her way, which is ironic considering how the MC behaves in a likely worse manner towards Kiara in Book 3.

• One of my favourite Kiara lines is from the wrong option (“I’m nicer than Olivia”) for the Alliance segment: “Nice? Nothing about being here is nice. If I wanted nice I’d buy a teacup pig. 😡”

• Back in Books 6’s QT, I mentioned Queen Regina and Duke Bertrand as being the two people in the first book who watch out and keep track on our progress. Bertrand does it because he is our sponsor, Regina does it because after all we are one of the candidates for her stepson’s hand in marriage, and we’re the one he eventually shows the most interest in. But there is one other person who seems to be taking notice of our good performance as well:

On my fail run, where Persy doesn’t gain approval either from the press, or from the royals, those last two lines simply do not appear. She asks us about whether we’re looking for an alliance, and we immediately answer her. She will still join hands with you if you convince her (I did a test run where Persy said all the right things) but those words will not feature anywhere. Because the dialogue is coded such that it will only appear if you’ve done well in your previous two tasks.

That is fascinating to me, because Kiara is the only lady of the court who is written as noticing these things at such an early stage in the competition (the Lythikos Ball is only the third event in the social season, and the maximum approvals come from the Derby, which was the event just preceding it). She is the only person, besides Bertrand and Regina, who keeps track of our progress (even if that is only uptil this point, because if you win her support here, it stays that way until the Coronation). Even Madeleine, who has been part of a social season before and is viewed as having a lot of experience in the court, compared to the other ladies, spends most of her time simply underestimating the MC. It isn’t until Applewood and Ramsford that Madeleine even begins to think there might be more to this person.

Kiara, on the other hand, is observant. She is competitive but she knows when other people have the upper hand, and she will honestly acknowledge that you have an edge if you have proven yourself to the press and the Queen. For someone who would be seen as just a lady of the court….that level of foresight, observation skills and pragmatism is pretty phenomenal to me.

• I’ve said this many times and I will say it again: Kiara has always been upfront about what she’s bringing to the table in an alliance. She isn’t your friend and she won’t pretend to be your friend either. She mentions she will put in a good word and support you in becoming Queen, and she keeps her promise.

She keeps her distance from you otherwise, so you can’t dub her a ‘friend’ even then, but she will do her work as an ally. She doesn’t get involved in smearing your name while supporting you to your face. At the end of the day, she is a woman in the court trying to thrive and carve a space of her own, but she won’t dirty her hands to do that - and I don’t think she gets enough recognition for that.

• Alright I’ll stop gushing about Kiki otherwise this QT will never end 😂

• We now meet Liam, who tells us about the hot tub in his room, and invites us there. The intent is clearly romantic (the MC specifies as such, smiling, and Liam winks at you before he leaves).

• This chapter also marks the second time you see Penelope with Liam, after which you will only see her directly interact with him at his Coronation. Funny how Kiara doesn’t get even one opportunity in the narrative to talk to him.

• It’s the end of our big night in Lythikos, and we’ve got three invitations to spend time with an LI! Liam’s setting up candles near the hot tub, Hana is playing exquisite melodies on the piano, and Drake is drinking whiskey in Olivia’s wine cellar. Maxwell is…doing Maxwell things that we are not privy to yet. Or taking a nap.

• I won’t be going too much into detail esp for Liam and Hana’s scenes - because I have essays written on both! Both will be under the “Liam: Diamond Scenes” and “Hana: Diamond Scenes” sections of my essay masterlist if anyone is interested 😃 They will be titled “Hot Tub at Lythikos” and “Piano at the Parlour”, respectively. (another recommended read is “Exploring Hana in Her Context” where I talk about this scene, and her characterization. It’s a little further down on the masterlist).

•

(Screenshots for Drake from the HIMEME YouTube channel)

Liam: This is undoubtedly meant to be a romantic scene, and is hinted as much in the lead-up to it while still giving the MC the space to not go (since she says “I won’t make any promises”). He puts candles around the tub, and the tub itself is situated in an area where you can get a wonderful view of the mountains.

This scene is divided into two parts: the first where Liam gets to sincerely tell the MC he trusts her (optionally) and where they lightly flirt, and the second where he admits to feeling conflicted between giving in to his feelings and being fair to the other women. At this point he knows his feelings for the MC are stronger, implicitly trusts her (“I thoroughly believe that if you thought I was a pompous ass, you wouldn’t hesitate to tell me. I trust you, MC. Anything you say”), doesn’t want to call it love just yet but is well on his way to doing so. He tells us about his brother Leo, hinting at the events of the RoE series and explaining that seeing how love affected him made Liam think more about it. It’s not one of Liam’s absolute best scenes…but it is a sweet one where Liam tentatively explores his growing love for her - in some ways leading to his “almost-declaration” of love at the Forgotten Falls. In each scene of Liam’s, he takes a step further, and another, and another, to admitting his love for her and growing less guilty about his desire to be with her. He is still torn between his duty and his desire at this point, but you can already see him slowly inching towards the prospect of keeping what he wants first, for once.

Hana: This, in my mind, is Hana’s most powerful scene. As many adjectives as I can use to describe her in this scene would be inadequate, because it’s that good, that layered, that rich with nuance and detail. But I do think I can sum a bit of it up with a quote from a Book 3 Liam scene that instantly took me back to this one:

“Hana’s a tough one. She’s clearly had the kind of lessons I’m giving you now, and then some. Her posture is almost always polite and attentive…but when she feels strongly about something, you can sense her real feelings even before she speaks up. Her eyes grow darker and more serious.”

Compare the scenes from last chapter where she speaks about ice-skating, or even waltzing, to this one. In both those scenes, her expression is mostly neutral (or joyful when she is imparting her knowledge), speaking of it in a way that makes you understand that her heart isn’t truly in doing those things. But in this one, she is lost in her music when she plays it, she is feeling its melody in her bones, she speaks of guarding her most precious skill fiercely against her parents’ control because it’s the one thing she wants for herself. She is fierce and passionate and absolutely beautiful in the way she expresses her love for music.

In an essay I did on exploring Hana’s character in her larger context, I spoke at length about how this scene is important because it highlights that her struggle for her own autonomy began at a very young age - she recognized her art as sacred to her and had the foresight to understand that parading it around the way her parents wanted her to, would make her love it less. This scene is amazing because Young Hana is described as pushing back in the only way she knew how, so she could keep what was hers, on her terms.

The other thing this scene explores is her childhood loneliness and lack of friends, and how music helped her in those difficult times too. At this point we now know how deep that loneliness was, and how damaging to her, but back then this scene gave a wonderful insight to Childhood Hana.

So for her to trust us with her art - with the art she fought to keep her own…that’s a tremendous leap in that relationship - whether the MC is a friend or a potential lover. Romantically, she is at the point where she is slowly…slowly getting comfortable with the MC’s touch, allowing it to linger before she pulls away from her. She’s a bit like a butterfly who doesn’t know yet if she’s ready to leave her cocoon.

Drake: The picture presented to us of Drake here is the diamond-in-the-rough, the underdog, the one who views court and palace differently from everyone around him. He is there to remind us that this is not the charmed place we think it is, that even friends can stick knives in our backs. He speaks of the forced politeness of the nobility, the fact that he’s here only to protect Liam, that the MC is an innocent woman who doesn’t know what she is getting into and needs protection as well.

This scene comes with what was regarded as an important plot point at the time: who almost sold pictures of Liam’s bachelor party to the press? Drake and Bastien managed to get hold of them and prevent them from being published, knowing that having those printed before the social season would cast Liam in a more negative light, and make things harder for him. At this point, Drake is sure that someone he knows and possibly considers a friend is involved (close enough, but not quite there yet), but can’t yet figure out who (because, yknow, Olivia was the brains between the two, she cracked that mystery in under five minutes or something).

If you don’t buy this scene, you only get to know about the pictures in Book 2 Chapter 4. A lot of Drake’s scenes involve important plot points - some of which we won’t even hear the same way - or at all - if we don’t buy the scene (eg. the flashback scenes about Hana’s return and the Italian restaurant scene about Liam’s assassination). I recall buying quite a few of his scenes in the latter half of Book 1 and most of Book 2 just to find out stuff about other LIs.

The scene is pretty sweet - it highlights his now-famous whiskey obsession, has Drake openly show his protectiveness towards her minus the jaded sarcastic veneer, and has him warn her about the nature of this court. It has a line that I quite liked when I first saw the scene, but that fandom has pretty much ruined for me - “the moments in between”. Where he speaks of how the nobility are so busy schmoozing and being superficial that they miss the really important parts. It’s a beautiful thought, but the fact is I’m still paying like 17 diamonds to get it, which makes it a…pretty expensive moment.

But overall…it’s a nice scene. The look and feel of it is different from the other two, and so is the purpose.

• The focus of all these three scenes is clearly trust.

Liam completely trusts her opinion of him and confesses openly his desire to let go of all that is holding him back, even though he is still confused and conflicted about his own feelings.

Hana trusts her so much, that she will share piano pieces that she lovingly composed to the MC, even though she never performs for people. It is a measure of how much Hana values the MC that she will share such a secret part of herself with her.

Drake, who once came this close to calling the MC a crown chaser, now views the same woman as an innocent who doesn’t know what she is getting into. He will later tell her that that aspect of her journey reminds him of Savannah. He trusts the MC enough to give her important information about something he still views as a possible plot targeted at Liam, and tells her their moments mean something to him.

Chapter 8 of the second book took this theme forward for the initial three LIs, by showing us trust in other forms. Liam’s firm belief in his father’s dedication to his nation (which will crumble soon). Drake’s being convinced by the MC to stay on and hear out his sister, to give her a chance to explain what really happened to her, and his emotional reunion with her. Hana’s scene…was more about gaining someone’s trust - particularly Penelope’s. (it is also one of the worst scenes the series has ever given an LI, whoever wrote that one can fall on a cactus).

We are approaching a midpoint in the story, so at this point the narrative is progressing each of these relationships towards the point where they trust this woman, view her as a valuable person in their lives, and inch ever-so-slightly towards that eventual realization that they are in love with her.

•

Another point in the Tariq shoe tally!! I wonder if this ‘ghost’ deals with 'future misdeeds’ as well…

• We spend a few more days in Lythikos before we move back to the Capitol for the Royal Regatta, and both Esther and Persy are like “YOU HAD A FEW DAYS TO ASK IF I KNEW WHAT A FUCKING REGATTA WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MAXWELL”.

• So…a lot happens this chapter. The MC begins to rope in (or not) her first allies in the court, she has a strong foothold by now and is beginning to get noticed as more than just a random contender who wouldn’t last, she gains the trust of the people she is growing close to.

But most of all…Lythikos is where Olivia begins to lose the hold she once had on the court, and this is never more apparent than if you are losing supporters rather than gaining them (if you are more popular, it won’t be that apparent, since you will move far ahead of the competition). There will be times when the press may not pay attention to her, there will be ladies who club the MC and Olivia both together as “not a proper fit for becoming a queen”. She is still very much a frontrunner, she may win the Regatta if you fail all the steps to the boat race, but after this it will be harder for her to gain support whether or not the MC succeeds.

Shortly after this point, Olivia also doesn’t antagonize the MC as blatantly as she did in Lythikos, save for a snide remark to the MC (with a life jacket of all things) if you choose to go to her yacht in the next chapter. She will eventually begin to thaw towards you in Applewood.

• Constantine and Regina are conspicuous by their absence this chapter, and Constantine announces that he is stepping down the next. Which probably means he found out sometime between the Masque and this event that he was ill (since we don’t see him at the Derby). I’m headcanoning that they visited Leo around this time (optionally with the RoE MC, since the housewarming party in Newlyweds seems to happen sometime around the social season (it could be earlier or later too…but humour me 😂)

• So…Regatta in Chapter 9! Lots of sun, fun and (Persephone-willing) PLENTY of mess.

• Before I sign of, here is Persy’s Share of Mess this chapter (except for the bloodcurdling scream she gives when Olivia kisses Liam, I forgot to screenshot that 🙈 How on earth did Maxwell’s poor ears survive??):

• Until next week, folks!

–

• Tally Counts:

Number of Times Drake has Called Esther/Persy by Their First Names: 5

Number of Times Tariq Has Mentioned His Shoes: 3

Number of Times Drake Has Taken An Alcoholic Drink that’s Not Whiskey: 1

Number of Times Someone Has Called A Reigning Monarch 'Your Highness’: 2

Number of Times You Can Leave Hana Shook. SHOOK I TELLS YA: 4

Number of Times We See Penelope’s Angryface: 2

–

[sombrz]

Hello please talk about king explosion murder

THE BOY!!!!!

can you believe i spent months trying to be lowkey about my bakugou ships? it took me a while to even admit he was my favourite despite the fact i knew from the start i’d end up a bakugou stan. i never had a ‘oh no this kid’s a mean terrible person’ phase - it was a ‘oh, i can’t Reveal my character tastes like this. not like this.’ phase.

this got…..long. so uh. under the cut it goes:

ANYWAY: i ship bakugou with…..uh…….a lot of characters. kiribaku is the easiest to explain - dumbass jock boyfriends who do shit like baku using kiri as a hammer to make mochi. and kiri being gung-ho about testing his unbreakable mode (which, btw, was motivated by bakugou’s words!!!) by having bakugou fucking. use howlitzer impact on him. you know how i feel about bro ships (hint: i love them). how kiri went from ‘man this bakugou guy is nuts!!! we have to stop him!!!!’ to ‘wow bakugou is so manly and cool and i wanna be by his side’ in the span of (1) one-on-one convo. HE LIKES BAKUGOU SO MUCH. IT’S CUTE. LIKE, I DON’T THINK BAKUGOU GETS HOW HAPPY HE MAKES KIRISHIMA LMAO. how bakugou so readily accepted kiri as an equal - bakugou, who only had two categories for people [extras vs rivals], never thought to seriously think of kiri as anything but an ally and a friend, people always talk how kirishima was the first classmate bakugou even bothered remembering the name of, and with reason, since it says a lot. kiri’s got quite a bit of mlm subtext going on, tbh, and bakugou’s the source of almost all of it. soooooo there’s that too. 

but i’ve also fallen Deep into bakudeku. it’s the shared development, okay. the history and complex emotions and the slowburn to becoming partners. there’s just so much, and they’re so ENTRENCHED in each other. for better or worse, for how much they might dislike the fact they can’t stop thinking about each other, they just can’t help it. they couldn’t understand each other at all but somehow still knew the other inside and out. and deku’s been so smitten since he was like a baby 3 year old and it breaks my heart. it’s honestly one of my favourite shounen rival ships bc it keeps subverting your expectations. and every episode/chapter that deals with their issues and nudges them closer to the ideal - the endgame - is guranteed to be among the best. they’re the backbone of the series, and i love watching them grow together. the fact that they’re currently HEALTHY RIVALS AND TENTATIVE FRIENDS (like deku feels so comfortable gushing over bakugou to his face again and bakugou is so invested in deku’s improvement & is only snappy w/ him out of reflex lmao)….that bakugou is deku’s secret keeper and deku is the one person bakugou allows himself to be vulnerable around……HOO BOY. i just imagined bakugou holding out his hand for deku to take - or accepting deku’s hand at all - and died.

ALSO, TODOBAKU….my darkhorse ship, which hit me in the face one day when i realized how a) hilarious they are together and b) how the series keeps shoving them together (sometimes literally - thanks slidin’ go for giving them the group hug they deserved). i love how they’re so different yet similar - bakugou is loud and obnoxious while todoroki is stern and quiet, but they’re both rude prodigies who needed to be jumpkicked into realizing that they could become better people with the help of others instead of letting anger and bitterness swallow them up. and the provisional exam course made it so they were forced to hang out with each other 95% of the time for three whole months and i LIVE FOR THAT. i love how funny they are - todoroki is snarky & doesn’t even bat an eyelash over bakugou’s tantrums but genuinely tries to be nice and make friends with him! bakugou is so petty and wants todoroki’s attention soooo bad but don’t think i haven’t noticed that most times we’ve seen him genuinely smile has been in todoroki’s presence (ok, then todoroki reacts to it and bakugou instantly goes back to a snarl but STILL). also the fact that the narrative doesn’t want us to forget that bakugou eavesdropped on todoroki telling deku about his family, and bakugou is always Alert and keeping an eye on todo whenever endeavour is involved bc he’s sympathetic and y’know??? cares????? SO GOOD. AND THEY’RE SUCH A GOOD TEAM - SURPRISINGLY IN SYNC AND THEIR QUIRKS MATCH UP AND I LOVE THEM!

GOD, HORI…..BAKUGOU/URARAKA WOULD BE SO GOOD. like, can you *imagine* the sheer potential of a ship that you only really have them interact during one goddamn tournament fight and yet it becomes arguably the most popular het ship in your series (w/ only the main character and his canon love interest as real competition????) i love them though, like,,,,i find it so interesting that uraraka has shown, despite again - minimal onscreen interaction - that she understands bakugou better than most. she knows how he’d handle their fight and uses that to her advantage. (and while she still lost, she gained his respect and a new drive to get stronger!) she’s the one who brings up how HE’D feel about the plan to go rescue him - that his pride would prevent him from easily accepting help. i’m desperately trying to figure out a way they could animate that omake where uraraka plants herself in deku’s seat and demands that bakugou bury the hatchet with him while gently but firmly calling him out for his root issue of fear and his defense mechanism of violently pushing deku away. and it managed to calm him down and honestly, i wouldn’t be surprised if he ruminated on those words for a while. IT’S SO GOOD, WHY WASN’T IT IN THE STORY ITSELF!!! and like, the mere fact he respects her a lot and ended up *psyched* to continue fighting her - and after he’s told deku had nothing to do with her plan, i don’t think he’d make that mistake again, which makes it easier for him to understand her back. he knows she’s smart and talented and that everyone else was wrong to underestimate her. also, i love that uraraka thinks bakugou is like…..funny? he’s out there threatening to murder kaminari and uraraka’s like ‘hahaha :’’)))’ bc she has such a Bro/vulgar sense of humour. like, i think they’d have a lot of fun together. LET THEM TALK MORE, PLS!!!!

THOSE ARE MY MAIN SHIPS BUT I ALSO SHIP HIM WITH THE REST OF THE BAKUSQUAD! BOTH PLATONICALLY AND ROMANTICALLY! I HAVE NO SHAME! baku/kami is so underrated and great - kaminari is just as much bakugou’s bff as kirishima is, tbh, and he has absolutely No Chill which makes their interactions - especially the further the story goes and bakugou’s edges soften - so much fun. one moment, he’ll be casually commenting that bakugou is the worst and needs to change his whole rotten personality - then the next second, he’ll be sprawled all over him, calling him kacchan and defending his honour from actual haters. and bakugou just fucbdhfhd lets this happen. bakugou likes kaminari enough to just let him. do whatever the hell he wants. ALSO, THE BAND. admittedly, sero is the only one with enough common sense and actual standards to avoid dating bakugou (’HE’LL NEVER BE BEAUTIFUL’ ghdhfhd sero) but i still adore them. sero’s so tricksy and loves playing the reverse psychology trick on bakugou, who just constantly falls for it. i bet he was the first person bakugou let just hang out in his room, and he probably appreciates that sero actually gives him his space when he needs it! i can’t believe baku/sero is the Real ‘bakugou pining’ ship. @ hori: GIVE MINA AND BAKUGOU ACTUAL INTERACTIONS, GDI. i’m forced to headcanon their whole dynamic from near-scratch. whereas kiri and kami are more the type to glue themselves to bakugou’s back, i imagine mina’s the type to actively drag bakugou along places. she probably cried when she found out that a) his parents are rich designers (’BUY ME CLOTHES, BAKUGOUUUU’) and b) his glycerin-based quirk and taking after his mom means he usually has perfect skin and has never broken out in his life. she doesn’t speak to him for a week until he takes her out to dinner and buys her a cute dress. and i’m super fond of baku/jirou. i love that their dynamic is like…..while the rest of their friends are doing dumb shit For The VineTM, they’re on the sidelines waiting for shit to hit the fan. they’re punk buds and prob do that couples clothes switch thing a lot just to see if anyone notices. jirou bosses him around and he takes all her advice seriously and like, they trust each other! they have great team synergy! she was the first person bakugou both consciously protected and asked to protect him in turn!! DID I MENTION THE BAND?? i also ship him with camie! it’s just such a funny concept to imagine - like imagine you’re in class 1A and bakugou shows up out of nowhere with a hot girlfriend who talks. like that. and she makes him laugh??? and no, seriously, does he actually understand what the hell she’s saying???? WHAT’S HAPPENING. but yeah, she very casually teases him but also seemed comfortable w/ him right off the bat and i know in my heart that bakugou relented and let her have his phone number. also, i find it funny people started shipping him with shindou after bakugou was the one to call him out for being duplicitous. bakugou’s the type of character that just needs to interact with another character once and *someone* out there will be like ‘what if………..they were dating’ and that’s so valid of them.

good bakugou ot3/ot4s: kirishima/bakugou/uraraka, todoroki/midoriya/bakugou, todoroki/inasa/camie/bakugou. i reblog a looooot of kirishima/kaminari/bakugou and bakugou/uraraka/midoriya even tho i don’t actually ship either as an ot3 that much, oops? they’re good ships tho.

is there something i’m missing? I MIGHT BE MISSING SOMETHING.

[makistar2018]

10 Years Later, Taylor Swift’s ‘Fearless’ Still Slaps

When it was released in 2008, Swift’s sophomore album launched a thousand takes. Today, it’s best remembered as a simple time capsule

By LAUREN M. JACKSON November 12, 2018

Taylor Swift during the "Fearless" tour at Madison Square Garden on August 27, 2009 in New York City.

Theo Wargo/WireImage for New York Post

Like Propel water, The Scarlet Letter and mechanical pencils, Taylor Swift’s Fearless pairs well with the sporadic squeak of team-issued sneakers, overpriced hot lunches and the kind of angst that defines comfortably suburb-bound teenage years. Sliding open the album on Spotify with my iPhone 8, I can still feel my limbs stretched in all directions, hear the snap-crackle-pop of a dozen adolescent girls’ joints going through the motions of yet another warm-up to what would become the soundtrack of my high school varsity dance team’s inner and outer lives, as well as leave poptimism forever changed.

I am 27 now, still anxious but inflexible, no longer clinging (as) tightly to singular albums to tell the emotional landscape of my life — but back then, Fearless was god. Swift was barely into legal teenagedom when compiling her sophomore album’s original 13 tracks, but more than the happenstance near-synonymy of our ages (I’m younger by 1 year, 6 months, 27 days), the four-walled, high school claustrophobia induced by the album is a matter of skilled musical mood setting. From the first downbeat of the inaugural title track to the last flippantly rebellious “hallelujah” on “Change,” Swift traps us in the mind of an ungainly teen as she was once trapped, as I was, as so many others wading the ambiguity between comportment and desire that doesn’t quite end when gowns come on and caps fly up.

Like so many notebook pages on the golden screen, Fearless is filled with boys. Stans and haters have their theories, but I like to think of each song as an archetype, less true stories of relationships gone sour than a young woman’s true to life hetero-ethnography. There are the boys who do good — the “Fearless,” “Love Story,” “Hey Stephen,” “The Best Day” boys (the last a tribute to Dad) — the boys who nurture and love intensely. They do all the usual country boy things, all the usual cinematic things: driving slow, kissing in the rain, flouting archaic inter-familial squabbles. They honor their promises and, most of all, leave the narrator better changed for her affection.

These boys who do good are short-lived. By Track 2, “Fifteen,” we’re already checking in to Heartbreak Hotel for the upteenth time with an account of that age generic enough to warrant a fan-made montage of clips from Degrassi: The Next Generation. The song tells an allegedly universal story of freshman year woes, complete with riding in cars with senior boys who also play football (because of course). It’s saccharine, sung in the vernacular of normative coupling that would become Swift’s enemy in the gossip pages. But the limited lexicon is not necessarily untruthful. “Fifteen” has aged about as well as anyone would expect, but some of those refrains make me yearn for arms long enough to slap all the powers that be responsible for belittling the whims of young girls. And according to the greater duration of Fearless — tracks like “White Horse,” “Breathe,” “Tell Me Why,” “You’re Not Sorry,” “The Way I Loved You,” and “Forever & Always” — the greatest threat to the happiness of teen girls are boys.

November 2008 looks rosy from here. America had just elected its first black president, the man who promised too much hope and change to possibly be true, but faith felt good back then. Men had committed just five mass shootings over the past year with one more on the way in December (2018 has 307 mass shootings to its name so far). The nation boasted just under 150 recognized active white supremacist groups (that number would climb to over 1,000 during Obama’s presidency). Global finance was in crisis but cable networks were still winning Emmys. Amy Winehouse was alive. Kanye still made sense and a bright-eyed, hair-tousled new country darling was exclusively concerned with dating, rather than local politics. 

Like any celebrity who is also a woman, but also in a lane quite her own, Swift’s relation to mainstream feminism wanes and waxes with the season. A female artist beloved by the girls for whom her songs are written, Swift and her music are therefore more scrutinized, more rigorously excavated for signs of harmful messaging than her male singer-songwriter peers. Fearless frayed Swift’s reputation in a way that wouldn’t let up for years, if ever, largely because of its critical success. Swift took home four Grammys at the 2010 awards, including Album of the Year, beating the Dave Matthews Band’s Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, The Black Eyed Peas’ The E.N.D., Beyoncé’s I Am… Sasha Fierceand, most egregiously, Lady Gaga’s debut studio album, The Fame. The perceived slight invited robust inquiry into this supposed album of the year, and the aesthetic discrepancy between the two quickly turned to politics. 

Autostraddle’s Riese called Swift “a feminist’s nightmare,” the enemy of “brave, creative, inventive, envelope-pushing little monsters” everywhere. An accompanying infographic, “a symbolic analysis” of Swift’s works to date, cataloged her most damning motifs, including “virginal” imagery, “the stars,” “crying,” and the 2AM hour. At Jezebel, Dodai Stewart agreed that Gaga was the rightful winner, speculating that in a race between “Gaga the liberal versus Taylor the conservative,” the latter “makes the Academy feel more comfortable.” One joy of pop culture is the revelation of how melodramatically things can change. Last month, Swift announced her endorsement of Tennessee Democrats Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper for the midterm elections; meanwhile, Lady Gaga hews the path of glamorous respectability on her lengthy A Star Is Born Oscar campaign. 

Feminist readings of Fearless weren’t wrong, exactly. Allies on the album come in strictly male form, while other girls are competition for Swift’s persecuted first person. Even the red-headed bestie Abigail becomes a lesson in chastity, losing her virginity — “everything”! —to the boy who broke her heart (the foil to Swift’s main character, whose dreams of living in a big ole city protect her from such a fate). The charting single “You Belong With Me” is a bouncy jaunt through the valley of me versus those other girls. The video that won Best Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards over Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” — to seismic effect — stars Swift as both the frizzy blonde, bespectacled weirdo in band and the sleek brunette cheerleader with the man (Lucas Till who now plays MacGyver on CBS). In true romantic comedy fashion, Good Swift, clothed in white, ends up with the guy in the end, defeating Bad Swift, whose only crimes it seems are great taste in footwear and not appreciating her high school boyfriend’s likely moronic sense of humor. Both the song and video became emblematic of a kind of Swiftian all-for-one girl power. Her 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do” resurrects and buries all sorts of Swiftisms, including the iconography of the uncool girl who features so heavily in the Fearless-era of her oeuvre. 

Pop music exists not to elevate our souls or our politics, but to safely wade in the muck of our pettiest appetites, whether they come with trap drums or in serenades. Pop music deserves interrogation, but it will never exceed us. Fearless was a diary, sounding like the selfishness that bubbles up regardless of one’s intellectual or political guards against it.  The debate it ignited wouldn’t happen were it released today, amidst all this. It’s a relic of a time when determining exactly what an album meant, culturally and aesthetically, was a crucial discussion to have in public, when nuance had stakes. Compared to the basic moral tenets we now expend so much of our energy defending, such communal acts of criticism feel small and regretfully scarce. Fearless was a moment, now relegated to a time capsule, no longer a prompt.   

Rolling Stone

[jaeheekangisimportant]

1/4 As someone who went from walking into the secret endings thinking that the Rika hate was just classic sexism to really, really disliking her, I can assure you that a lot of the Rika hate... actually DOES come from people apologizing/excusing her actions. I know it's easy to chalk it up and say "no one defends her actions" but the victim blaming against V, equating an abuse victim (Saeran) to his abuser, and outright denying Rika's actions (like blinding V) is actually a /VERY/ real issue.

2/4 Espsecially when you have popular blogs brush off hating Rika for her atriciously abusive actions as just “ignorance on mental illness” and trivializing abuse victims who latch onto characters like Saeran and V because of shared trauma as just “jealous fangirls”. I’m not saying that V and Saeran did nothing wrong but at the end of the day, they are Rika’s abuse victims no matter how you slice it. So people are obviously going to be able to empathize with them more.

¾ It’s important to note that, despite male villains usually being more well recieved, this type of trivilizing treatment is treatment that people who despise abusive male characters actually don’t recieve. Because like… you obviously can’t be accused of being a sexist, jealous fangirl if you hate a male villain. Rika isn’t a bad villain at all; however the huge back lash she recieves isn’t simply because she’s female character in a fandom of Straight GirlsTM but rather because she’s a

4/4 very realistic portrayal (far more realistic than most male villains tbh) of an abuser in a fandom where people can easily use her gender as an excuse to wave off the hatred as just “misogyny” rather than an instinctual reaction to seeing a character who walks, talks, and acts like a real life abuser. There’s nothing wrong with liking Rika, but I think some perspective is necessary before just throwing your hands up in the air and going like “she’s a woman and we only like hot men. the end”.

Okay, I actually think there are a lot of really good points in here and I do agree with most of it, there are also a few things I would contend with, and also some things I’d like to discuss in more depth now that I have an excuse to, but before I do that I have two things to say that I think are very important for everyone, including myself, to keep in mind

There are a lot of layers to any discourse, and I can’t cover every angle of every discourse all the time. I do try to be fair and objective and not totally one-sided but I also want to be clear and honest about what my position is and I also try to stick to whatever has been brought up in the asks I get. If somebody sends me an ask that’s like “hey V fucked up and I wish people acknowledged that”, well then, that’s what I’m going to talk about and there’s not always a lot of room for me to give attention to the other side

It’s impossible for everyone to have interacted with every single member of a fandom and ultimately no one will have the exact same experience with a fandom. I can only talk about fandom issues through the lens of my experience and what I have seen and been exposed to, and that won’t necessarily be universal

The rest is going under a read more because this got unexpectedly rambly and I’m truly sorry for that. I’m also sorry that it’s so unorganized I kind of started with a solid idea of what I wanted to say but then every time I thought of some new thing I kind of just went with it

So, about Rika. Whenever people have brought up misogyny in relation to her, I have always tried to be careful to say that I don’t think Rika hate is always inherently misogynistic but that I do think that some anti-Rika sentiments are rooted in it. I probably could have made that more clear and I apologize if there was any confusion. I have frequently said that there are totally valid reasons to hate Rika which is why I try not to go after Rika haters too much. When I see people hating Rika for the simple fact that she’s important to the other characters, or when I see people using very gendered language to insult her, that’s the kind of stuff that I think can reasonably be criticized for misogyny. But like, obviously there are perfectly good reasons to hate Rika so I don’t take issue with hating her in itself, and I have tried to say that as often as possible. I don’t think it hurts to examine where Rika hate comes from and, more importantly, how it actually manifests (I’ll come back to this in a minute). I do agree that brushing off all Rika hate as just internalized misogyny is wrong and counterproductive and very trivializing, which is why I try not to fall back on that argument. But I also don’t think that misogyny is entirely irrelevant to the Discourse about her. I think that “Rika hate isn’t inherently misogynistic” and “a lot of people would treat Rika differently if she were male” are ideas that can coexist

As for what you said about people defending Rika, this relates to Point Number Two I made up there. Most of the people in the MysMe fandom that I still follow these days are Rika fans, and honestly I have never seen any of them try to say that Rika did nothing wrong. I don’t doubt that people have done that, and I also am glad that I’ve never seen people like that, or at least if I have it was rare enough that it wasn’t a significant problem for me and I could just forget it. I think I’ve made it clear enough that I think Rika did very wrong. I have consistently called her a villain, I have repeatedly said that I think she deserves punishment for her crimes, I have referred to both Saeran and V as victims of her abuse (and I’ll get to them soon too). Even if I do like Rika and consider her a tragic and sympathetic character, I am really not okay with people pretending Rika didn’t commit any of the crimes or abuse that she did. I didn’t talk about it because I haven’t seen it, but if I’m wrong and people are doing that then all I can say is YIKES @ those people and please don’t assume I’m one of them

The subject of mental illness is one that the fandom really handles terribly and honestly the game handles it pretty badly too. I’m very mentally ill myself and I actually recognize a lot of my symptoms and issues in Rika (violent intrusive thoughts, the feeling that there’s just something inherently wrong and bad in me and I’m only ever faking being good, paranoid and dramatic/emotional outbursts that even I know aren’tproportionate to the situation, self-harming, self-sabotage and suicidal ideation), so I was inclined to sympathize with Rika. It’s also why I was so viscerally disgusted by the way V talked about her mental illness. Having said all of that, I really don’t like people blaming a character’s abusive actions on mental illness, as if mentally ill people can’t help being bad and violent. Like, I know a lot people probably think they’re sympathizing with us, but you realize that exact same sentiment is used to demonize us, right? You’re not helping anyone by saying that mental illness is an excuse for bad behavior

People really need to learn that there is a difference between an explanation and an excuse. My anxiety flaring up might explain why I’m so irritable sometimes, but it doesn’t excuse me from snapping at well-meaning people. My depression getting really bad might explain why I isolate myself for weeks and sometimes months on end, but it doesn’t excuse me from completely shutting out and ignoring my friends and family who really just want to know why I haven’t spoken to them in so long. Mental illness can make me act out in a lot of ways that are bad for me and for other people, but I would never try to use it as an excuse and I would never want people to use it as excuse for me either. There are still very real consequences to my acting out, I still need to apologize and make up for them, and I still need to try my best to correct that kind of behavior no matter how easy it can be to fall into (and I do try, and I have gotten much better)

Rika’s mental illness and backstory does explain a lot of her behavior. It explains it, it doesn’t excuse it. She’s still very much accountable for her shitty actions. I do think that Rika could have been a very different person if she had gotten proper and intensive help with her mental health, and I wish she had gotten it. I don’t think she’s completely one-dimensionally evil and I do think that, at the very least, she had the potential to be a good person. I do think that she’s partially a victim of her circumstances. But, I also think that arguing about what a character could have been like under different circumstances is pretty moot and that’s why it’s another argument I try not to fall back on. It doesn’t really matter what characters could have been like. What matters is what they are actually are like and Rika is. Well. Rika

I think that there is a lot to criticize about the way Rika is written in the game, mostly having to do with the fact that she perpetuates the Depraved Bisexual trope, or that portraying a mentally ill character as villainous is always going to come with some issues, or the extremely frustrating fact that aside from Jaehee there are no female characters in the game that we’re really meant to like. I kind of wish we could discuss the game’s actual writing issues more because uuum there’s a lot of really bad and messed up stuff in here actually

Also, when I say things about how I think Rika hate is out of hand, it actually doesn’t have much to do with how people react to Rika as a character. It has more to do with people harassing Rika cosplayers at cons, leaving rude and aggressive comments on Rika fan art, attacking her fans even after they’ve made it clear that they only like Rika as a character/villain. That’s more the kind of stuff I’m thinking of when I say that Rika hate can be unnecessarily vicious, when it extends to actual real people who are mostly just minding their own business and trying to have fun with a character they like. I understand that Rika is controversial and for good reason, but come on guys, it’s not hard to have basic decency toward each other

Okay now let’s finally get to V and Saeran. I’ve never denied that they are victims of Rika’s abuse so let’s get that straight right away. I’ve also been careful to avoid equating their actions with Rika’s. I know I have repeatedly said that Rika has done worse things than both of them. And I do deeply sympathize V and Saeran. Almost everything I’ve ever said about Saeran has included a sentence that started with something like “I love Saeran and I sympathize with him but”. And yes I do in fact sympathize with V and I have mentioned this before, but since I’m also pretty harsh on V a lot of the time I suppose that point can get buried.

As a sidenote - and I’m not accusing you of doing this, anon, it’s just something I do want to address - I really don’t like it when people assume that someone must have no experience with abuse or trauma just because they may feel differently about something. Abuse and trauma are heavy subjects and of course people want to make sure you actually know what you’re talking about if you’re going to be talking about it, but like, no one should be required to disclose their personal abuse/trauma history just to prove that they’re qualified to have an opinion. I just… we really should be more careful about things like that

Back to V and Saeran (I’m really sorry I’m all over the place and I’m probably making less sense as I go), even if I do sympathize with them a lot, and even if I can relate to Saeran on a deeply personal level that I don’t much like to share with people, I don’t think it’s right to completely dismiss their wrongdoings. It’s possible for characters to be victims as well as victimizers and I would consider V, Saeran and Rika to be both those things, though obviously to vastly different degrees. 

Just because I understand and sympathize with V doesn’t mean I think it’s okay that he enabled Rika’s unhealthy behaviors, romanticized her mental illness, treated her like his art piece rather than as a person, and remained silent and complicit in her crimes. 

Just because I understand and sympathize with Saeran, doesn’t mean I think it’s okay that he attempts to kidnap MC, threatens violence against both her and Seven multiple times, and actually does shoot V. And I was actually being generous there by only counting things that he did in Seven’s route and the secret endings, aka the canon stuff that ultimately matters most. If I was going to count all the shit he pulls in other routes (blinding Yoosung in one eye, as an example), in bad endings (sexual assault, kidnapping, torture, murder, as examples), in Another Story and in his own damn route (kidnapping, sexually harassing MC and almost crossing the line to sexual assault, keeping her locked up and being verbally abusive with her), it would be asking me to excuse a lot more. I do both sympathize and empathize with Saeran! I really do! He’s one of my favorite characters ever and he means a lot to me, I can’t even begin to tell you how much!! But a lot of his antics are still inexcusable!!

And again we have to go back to my point about people’s fandom experiences being different from each other’s. I haven’t seen enough Rika defenders for it to be an issue for me, personally, but do you know what I have seen a lot of? And I mean, a lot of? People talking about how hot it would be if Saeran abused and/or raped them, people saying that they would be perfectly happy to let V treat them exactly how he treated Rika, people insisting that anyone who even tries to say that something V did was Not Good are terrible people, or that liking Rika at all in any capacity or even just showingneutrality toward her makes you a terrible person. That was the kind of stuff I saw a lot of back when I was really involved in fandom and that was the kind of stuff that made my experience in the fandom so deeply unpleasant. So, when I talk about fandom issues, that’s the kind of stuff that comes up for me, because those were the issues that I had. Maybe you’re lucky and you missed a lot of the shit I saw. Maybe I’m lucky for missing a lot of the shit people are spewing in defense of Rika. And maybe reducing it to an issue of “Straight Girls only care about hot guys” is not exactly right or fair of me, but… well, Straight Girls who only care about hot guys have been a significant source of annoyance for me in this fandom so when I’m feeling particularly salty they become a very easy target for it. Again, not saying that’s right or fair of me

More often than not what I’m trying to do with V and Rika discourse is get people to realize that the situation was not as black and white as they make it seem. Rika was not one-dimensionally evil and V was not wholly good, that’s all I ever want to get across about those two. And what I’m trying to do with Saeran discourse is… okay honestly I don’t even know what I’m trying to do here I actually wish I could just stay out of Saeran discourse entirely but if it comes up I guess I’ll talk about it. I am extremely uncomfortable with many of the more popular fandom interpretations of Saeran but he’s also too important to me for it to sour my opinion of him (since Ray’s route has come out it’s been a pretty close call tho let me tell you and I swear if this fandom ever does make me stop liking Saeran I’ll never forgive them). I really want nothing more than to stay out Saeran discourse but lately it keeps finding me. I’m honestly kind of tired of discourse-ing about V and Rika on theseblogs because at this point I’m running out of new things to say about eitherof them and I think I’ve already made my thoughts and feelings sufficientlyclear in numerous posts, I’m not sure what else I can do. But again, if people bring it up, I’ll usually be willing to talk about it. 

I don’t really care if people hate Rika, and I don’t really care if people love V, I only wish people wouldn’t oversimplify either character and I wish people were more open to accepting that their situation was a complex one where, even if one of them (Rika) is undeniably guiltier, neither person was 100% innocent

[vxsxnyx]

elia is unbowed, unbent, unbroken true

y’all elia haters or r+l=j shippers gtfo this rant. i’m not accountable of your feelings. 

Elia Martell is one of the best women, if not THE best, in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.

i know how the show never gave her the highlight. i know how the show degraded the Sand Snakes, and Ellaria Sand, and practically every Dornishman they showed us. i know how little Aegon and Rhaenys were mentioned throughout the SEVEN seasons. i know. and you know.

therefore, i want you non-book readers to know these facts first:

(1) Elia Martell did not marry Rhaegar Targaryen merely out of duty. she loved him (in the show, Oberyn also confirmed this to Tyrion) and he was fond of her. fond is not the same as love, but tell you what, Rhaegar did not think of her as a nuisance. no. 

(2) Elia Martell loved her children very much. again, in the show Oberyn also stated this. she never gave them to wet nurses and breastfed them herself. 

(3) in the book version of House of the Undying, Daenerys Targaryen saw Rhaegar and Elia rather than Drogo and Rhaego. there, Rhaegar said to his wife that there was no better name for a king than Aegon. let me tell you that THEIR son was named Aegon and his older sister was Rhaenys.

(4) this moron Rhaegar humiliated Elia (what? do you deny that? would you want your men to do the same to you, giving flowers and such to other women, at parties? congrats) in front of the WHOLE court. why did he do that? you will find out later in my arguments below.

(5) “Prince Rhaegar loved his lady Lyanna and thousands died for it,” said Ser Barristan Selmy. this was the sole reason we all knew behind every action of his and every misery that doomed Westeros for generations. the reason which started this game of thrones of the Seven Kingdoms and beyond. the reason why the Targaryen Dinasty vanished, the kingdoms torn apart, the great houses went extinct, knights and soldiers and civilians perished, Dany and Viserys fled, and so on. and if Ser Barristan, as Rhaegar’s best friend, knew this, that means Elia as his wife knew it too.

(6) Elia died alone. with her children, yes, but without anybody else. she was taken ‘prisoner’ in King’s Landing under Aerys Targaryen’s command to ensure the Dorne did not take part in the rising rebellion. Elia was nursing her babe Aegon when Gregor Clegane and his friends stormed in. Aegon snatched off her breast, Elia raped and brutally murdered by a beastly man, her Rhaenys ran away and hid under Rhaegar’s bed only to be stabbed several times to death, and finally Aegon’s head was smashed against the wall until those who were presented his corpse by Tywin Lannister found it hard to examine him or even to stomach it.

(7) Elia did marry Rhaegar. now this must be surprising for you non-book readers? Oberyn himself stated this in the show. he said the last time he came to King’s Landing was for his sister’s wedding to Rhaegar. she wedded him. and in the books, not only they were married, but they also had presented their children to both King Aerys and Queen Rhaella. Rhaella welcomed her grandchildren and Aerys refused to touch Rhaenys because he said she smelled ‘Dornish’.

(8) Rhaegar ‘coupled’ with Lyanna in Dorne. i use the word ‘coupled’ because it is not stated in the books that they were married or not. the show only briefly said it. the highlight is, he was with her in Dorne. IN DORNE. D O R N E. while Elia was being raped and murdered in King’s Landing, he was in his legal wife’s birthland, coupling with the woman of his dream and leaving his family (to be slaughtered) altogether. 

and now, my fave part, the arguments of why i don’t support the R+L ship. beware. i won’t back down defending my opinions.

(a) as I wrote above, Elia loved fair Rhaegar and he was fond of her, yet he was actually in love with Lyanna. we all knew how love outmatches fondness greatly. but really, a married crown prince with legal wife and two kids chasing after a teenager in her sixteen? oh, my sweet summer child. he was not much older, though, but it was ridiculous. his action shook the whole realm, you know? that means nobody had ever done it before.

(b) Elia loved her children, yes. but did Rhaegar? i imagined him so. if not, why would he play A Song of Ice and Fire to Aegon? why would he name him Aegon, a name only fits for a king, if he had not hoped him to be the heir to the crown? and why would little Rhaenys tried to hide under his bed before she was assassinated? that means, Rhaenys was close to her father. she was seeking for his protection. wanting her father’s protection. 

(c) Rhaegar humiliated Elia at the tourney. ew. why did Elia stay calm? nobody ever stated that Elia was outraged or such. no. Elia stayed silent upon seeing her husband’s foolish action of crowning Lyanna Stark as his queen of love and beauty. she had gave him two children despite her delicate health and he crowned someone else his queen of love and beauty. in my opinion, Elia was strong. she was, albeit having gentle wits, a strong woman for putting up with shit like that. and definitely she was not a doormat. do you know why she stayed silent? because if she were outraged, Dorne would rise a rebellion against the crown for Rhaegar’s action of dishonoring their princess. you see? Elia avoided bloodshed, avoided a rebellion, all to keep the realm peaceful for her babies to live in. she endured it all herself. 

(d) the reason that fueled Rhaegar’s future actions to couple/marry Lyanna was probably due to his obsession of the prophecy. he had his Aegon and Rhaenys already, but Elia was not strong enough to bear more children, therefore he went to Lyanna to not only have her as his woman, but also to have his Visenya. remember, the dragon has three heads. Aegon, Visenya, and Rhaenys. he did not expect another son; he did not expect another Aegon (Jon). if he were there after Jon was born, i’m sure he would welcome him proudly bc he loved Lyanna, but the prophecy could not be happening, still. 

(e) the show said he annulled his marriage to Elia. i was laughing. annul? only a king could annul a marriage. did Aerys force him to take another wife because the Mad King dislike Elia as she was Dornish? and why would Rhaegar annul it, if he really was noble and gentle and all the good things people like to associate him with? Elia already had two children with him. his legal kids. annulling his marriage to Elia meant he neglected Aegon and Rhaenys and made them bastards. how could he put his living, innocent children aside for a child that had not been born? the showrunners messed this up. Aegon Targaryen I married both Visenya and Rhaenys--Visenya out of duty, Rhaenys out of desire--so the showrunners could just say that Rhaegar revive that custom. it was not a big deal because what matters is not only Elia’s feelings and status, but also her children’s. imagine the father you love so much neglect you for another child born from his other wife. Elia would always put her children paramount. she would never be okay with her moronic husband making them bastards (even though Dornishmen never despise bastards, as Oberyn said to Cersei and Tywin in the show, but Elia was a princess and legally married to Rhaegar at the first place).

(f) Elia died alone while Lyanna was protected by Kingsguards. lmfao. what is this? i know that probably Rhaegar thought Lyanna was more delicate as she was heavily pregnant, but Elia also had a small child and a baby who was still nursing. i also realise that the numbers of Kingsguard were few, and not all could protect everyone, but why did not he at least put two to guard Aegon and Rhaenys? and you know what? Rhaegar knew King’s Landing was dangerous because he was aware of his father’s unstable mental. he still left Elia and his kids there. did he think KL was safer bc the gates were closed and Aerys had his Kingsguard with him? then he was even more stupid. Aerys openly hated his wife and children, why would he leave them with his father? even RHAELLA AND VISERYS FLED THE CITY. even the Dornishmen MARCHED to KL in defense of Elia, because she was left open and vulnerable. why, Rhaegar? i hope GRRM gives clear explanation of this--or a prequel, yay. but anyways, you get my point.

(g) as i mentioned previously, when Rhaegar crowned Lyanna before everyone’s eyes, Elia stayed calm. no. i don’t think it was because she was weak. i don’t think she did that to secure her seat and image; she was born as a princess, she did not need to mantain anything for anyone. Elia stayed cool because she knew how much her Dornishmen and women loved her. they all would wage wars for her. and she would see no wars. Elia kept calm during the uproar at the tourney because she avoided the bloodshed. i’m very sorry, but what did Lyanna and Rhaegar do? obviously, though she would never want her father and brother to be killed, and thousands of men to die, she would have known the consequences of running away with a married prince, while she herself had already been promised to the heir of Stormland. Rhaegar too, was said to be more of a scholar than warrior, so surely he would have known wars would come if he abducted the daughter of a noble house, right? moreover, he could have caused the STARKS, BARATHEON, and DORNE to march against the crown. did he do that in hope of overthrowing his father? so he could be king and restore the realm’s peace, freeing it from Aerys’s madness? nobody knows. the deal is, both Rhaegar and Lyanna were reckless and foolish for running away without a word to anybody, and the whole realm bled to pay for their selfish action.

(h) i love Jon. don’t call me a hypocrite; that child had been born, had grown up, and be his own man. you don’t judge a child based on his parents. Jon had never known his parents and thought of Ned as his father. i’ll be glad that way. because of what? because Jon Snow would never agree to Rhaegar and Lyanna’s escape. Jon would never agree with Rhaegar abandoning Elia and his two children just to pay more attention to the love of his life. Jon would never agree with the brutal murder of a woman, a babe, and a girl. Jon would never agree with somebody who pulled the trigger to cause wars just because he could have his prophecy happen. Jon was all Ned and that made me glad. he grew without anyone’s influence on him, like Dany, and be his own person. he has qualities both Rhaegar and Lyanna lacked. again, i love Jon, but i never legitimise the actions of his parents. it was atrocity they committed.

(i) the showrunners CANNOT just neglect the existences of Elia, Aegon, and Rhaenys. no. not after you killed Oberyn defending their honors. not after you killed Oberyn who tried to make Gregor Clegane confess his animalistic actions towards Elia. not after you wrote dialogues that clearly stated that THERE WERE ELIA, AEGON, AND RHAENYS living in Westeros, as Oberyn Martell’s older sister and nephew and niece, as the wife of Rhaegar Targaryen. 

in summary, i don’t hold any hard feelings towards you R+L shippers. i just want to state the facts and my opinions. you might want to think twice that this pair is not romantic at all--their song was the song of stupidity and selfishness. 

have a good day!

also, i’d love to thank these lovely people for posting beautiful and/or logic posts regarding Elia Martell and her status in both show and books: @rhaenysbloodofoldvalyria @lavellenchanted @jeweljessicajones @asoiafhistory @visenva @windinyoursnail @namea123 @sana-bakkoush @itseleanormontgomery @eliamvrtell @frozenrevenant @naiariddle @femagorgon <3 

honestly, there isn’t enough love for elia 

ps: i will not argue in the comment section. DM me if you’d like to share opinions concerning this topic. make sure your argument is valid and not childish, though :D

[jjkfire]

Wrapped Around; pt.5

Jimin x Reader x Tae // College!AU // 12.6k words

Summary: Freshman year was a mess and sophomore year doesn’t seem to be looking too good either. You know boys like them are no good for you but maybe they’re just your kind of type

Genre: Fluff, Angst

A/N: weow 1 month later here is part 5!! thank you for your patience ya dumplings (’:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 2.5 | Part 3 | Part 3.5 | Part 4 | Part 6

Previously…

Tae was right, he warned you to watch yourself around him and you felt so dumb, so hurt that you had let yourself become one of those girls. You had sworn that you wouldn’t let Jimin get to you but here you were sitting in your bed feeling as broken as all the other girls that had slept with the player that was Park Jimin. Stupid, stupid you.

Glancing at the time on your phone, you pick up the pace of your steps. Your cousin had given you 10 minutes to get to the restaurant before he makes you buy your own meal. The cold winter air bites at your skin as you sprint towards the entrance of the diner, hoping and praying that the heater had been turned on to its highest setting in there. You were so cold that you were sure your fingers were going to fall off at any point now but damn it you’d do anything for free food.

Stepping into the diner, you let out a sigh of relief at the wave of warm air that hits you. Honestly, how can anyone enjoy winter when it’s so horridly cold? You shrug off your hood, eyes scanning the establishment as you look for your cousin.

“Y/N!”

Damn.

“Mina,” You smile stiffly as you watch her drape her coat over the back of her chair.

“You made it!” She beams and you hesitate for a while before walking over to take a seat next to your cousin who only looks at you in shock. “I told you she would!” She exclaims, turning to your cousin who now had his head in his hands.

“Crap, I can’t believe you actually got here in time,” Your cousin groans as he pulls out his wallet to count the number of bills he had. “Remind me to never underestimate your will when it comes to getting free food.”

“I told you not to bet against me, didn’t I?” You laugh, trying your best to cover the look of disdain as you sit across Mina, envy running through your veins at the mere sight of her.

“Whatever,” Your cousin huffs, dismissing you with a wave of his hand before he turns to Mina. “What’re you doing here so late anyway?” He asks.

“Well I could ask the same,” She quips.

“We had a busy night so we got up pretty late.”

“Huh, what a coincidence… Me too,” She smirks and you let your fingernails dig into your palm, wishing nothing more than to wipe that smirk off her face.

Your eyes scan the menu, choosing to stay silent as you do so and you genuinely hope that Mina can’t tell that you were groaning internally at the thought of having to eat lunch with her. For the first time, you’re honestly thankful for your cousin’s ability to talk for days on end, his stories keeping Mina pre-occupied as you device a plan to get out of this situation.

You rest your cheek on the palm of your hand after letting the waitress take your order, your mind slowly drifting off to numerous other thoughts, anything to distract yourself from replaying the memory of a haphazard looking Jimin skipping out of Mina’s house.

“So, what happened last night? Your aunt, is she okay?”

There’s a long silence before you realize that Mina is staring at you, waiting for an answer and you blink your eyes, still in a slight daze while your cousin shakes his head at you disapprovingly. “She’s still half asleep,” He laughs.

“Yeah, she had an allergic reaction to the crawfish,” Your cousin finally answers. “But it’s nothing too serious, she’s fine now,” He smiles and Mina nods her head quietly.

The three of you exchange passive glances, a slightly awkward silence hanging in the air now and you panic a little because the other two must’ve noticed by now that you’ve been awfully quiet today. You glance back at the kitchen, silently hoping that the food would be served soon so you had an excuse for not wanting to speak. You stare longingly at the entrance of the kitchen but when there’s no movement, you turn back towards the table only to find Mina looking at you expectantly. You know she wants you to ask her about her night but you honestly didn’t want to hear about any of it. She beams at you, her beady eyes lit up with excitement and you relent because you didn’t want her to grow suspicious. Taking a deep breath, you ask the question in the most upbeat tone you can muster.

“How was the rest of the ball?”

“It was so fun!” She squeals. “Jimin and I danced all night and then we went back to my place,” She giggles sheepishly as she unwraps the scarf that was hanging around her neck.

You spot the hickey right away and you guess that was Mina’s intention because she smirks at you when your eyes finally meet hers. Your blood boils at the sight and you clench your fists slightly under the table and you know she’s waiting for you, waiting for you to ask her how she got it but no, this time you won’t give in.

“And then what happened?” Your cousin questions, eyes fixed on the mark on her neck.

Goddamn it. Why did he have to ask?

“Then he went down on me and we did the dirty deed. All. Night. Long,” She winks, punctuating the latter part of her sentence with a small pause between each word for dramatic effect. “I’m surprised the both of you didn’t hear us,” She smirks and you couldn’t help but let out a light laugh at the expression on your cousin’s face.

“Well I sure as hell am glad that I didn’t,” He scoffs.

Me too, cousin, me too.

Mina goes on and on about every detail of the night, starting from the ball and the flirty whispers that they had shared, to the way he undressed her. You were on the brink of grabbing the menu to hit her on the side of her head to make her stop but you only look at her wistfully because you’ve seen this one too many times. She reminded you of all the girls back on campus who were enamored with Jimin and you laugh internally because you guess both you and Mina are now members of that club too. 

More than that, you’re laughing because she reminds you of yourself. You want to tell her that she shouldn’t get her hopes up, that he was going to leave her high and dry but the genuine happiness on her face keeps you from saying anything. So, you listen, listen to her talk about how his lips felt on hers, how his hands roamed her body and you tried your best to block out the mental image of him doing the very same thing to you justa few weeks ago. You tried your best to ignore the sharp pain that sat in the middle of your chest when you remember what it felt like to wake up with his arms wrapped around your middle but no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t get rid of the image of his stupid bed head hair and his stupid smile.

In an attempt to calm yourself down, you glance at your phone to reply a few texts and though you weren’t paying full attention to Mina’s story, you hear just enough of it to fully register that you hate Park Jimin. You hate him with every single fibre of your being.

“I can’t believe Y/N came for the ball especially after the whole speech she gave about how much she hated events like that,” Hoseok chuckles.

“Right? And she even brought a date who was quite the asshole to be honest,” Jimin huffs.

“What’d he do?”

“He called me Jumin,” He frowns and Hoseok rolls his eyes at him. “I mean honestly, he just had that vibe to him, you know? He struts around the room as if he owns the place,” He huffs, trying his best to defend himself. Dickbag, Jimin whispers under his breath.

“Geez, someone’s a hater,” Hoseok laughs.

“Whatever, like who is he anyway? All the girls were drooling over him and I don’t even know why,” He scoffs, tone laced with jealousy. “He wasn’t even that good looking.”

A light bell rings, the front door to restaurant swings open and Taehyung runs over as he dodges the peanuts that Hoseok is throwing at him. Both Jimin and Hoseok scowl at him as he smiles apologetically and takes a seat at the booth.

“Finally!” Hoseok exclaims. “We’ve been waiting for you for 20 minutes,” He groans as he calls the waiter over.

“Sorry,” He grins bashfully. “What’s with him?” Taehyung questions, pointing at Jimin who was staring off into the distance.

“Jimin was just bitching about the guy Y/N brought to the ball last night,” Hoseok chuckles. “Apparently, he’s a dickbag.”

“What’d he do?”

“Called him Jumin,” Hoseok tries to say with a straight face but his lips betray him.

“My God, how terrible, truly scum of the earth,” Taehyung drawls sarcastically to which Jimin replies with a playful shove.

“From what I hear, he’s actually a nice guy,” Taehyung shrugs.

“And who told you that?” Jimin asks.

“Y/N.”

“Of course, she did. He’s her fucking boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend? Where did you get that from?” Taehyung laughs. “He’s her cousin.”

Wait what? Fuck.

“He’s her c-cousin?” Jimin repeats.

“Remember she said she was staying here with her aunt?”

“Yeah, but she didn’t mention anything about a cousin…”

“Maybe not to you,” Taehyung smiles as he lifts his eyebrows.

“No way, I don’t believe you,” Jimin snorts. “They were slow dancing in the middle of an almost empty dancefloor and she absolutely hates slow dancing.”

You had mentioned it to him with a brief chuckle once one night with your head gently placed on his chest while your arm rested at the curve of his waist. Your voice barely a whisper when you told him about how your prom date in your second last year of high school had made a comment about your sweaty palms and your two left feet that fateful prom night and ever since then you never wanted to ever slow dance with anyone again. Jimin remembers laughing uncontrollably, you scowling at him as you threatened to kick him out of the bed but between laughs, all he could think about was what he’d give to slow dance with your adorable self.

You don’t just do things you hate for anyone. You were incredibly stubborn like that. That guy had to be your boyfriend. He just had to be or else it would mean that Jimin had screwed up big time.

Taehyung sighs as he opens up his conversation with you and hands his phone over to Jimin.

[12:01] Taehyung: “I hate events where you have to dress up and come with a date,” said Y/N

[12:01] Taehyung: Then that same Y/N actually comes to the ball with a DATE(?!!) and doesn’t even bother to drop by and say hi before she leaves?

[12:01] Taehyung: Can you believe that??? She’s actually such a dick?

[3:28] You: …

[3:28] You: who’s Y/N?

[3:28] You: who’s this?

[12:01] Taehyung: don’t even try

[12:01] Taehyung: you’re not getting out of this one

[3:28] You: ☹

[3:28] You: okay first of all, I really didn’t want to go but my aunt forced me to go

[3:28] You: and my DATE(?!!) was just my cousin so please calm tf down

[3:28] You: he’s a really nice guy. y’all should meet him sometime.

[3:28] You: and yeah I had to leave because my aunt had an emergency.

[3:28] You: are you going to hold that against me? hmm??

[12:01] Taehyung: oh crap. wait what emergency?

[12:01] Taehyung: Is she okay?

“Believe me now?”

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Jimin doesn’t answer, his lips pressed tightly together in a straight line as he moved to type a text on his phone. Now everything made sense. You only showed up last minute because you were forced to go. You knew your date’s mum because she was your aunt… But could he really be blamed for thinking he was your boyfriend? He wasn’t the only one… He heard the whispers of those around the room, cursing you for being able to land the man they had been pining for as your date while he wondered how on earth he’d lost you to some stranger. He felt like a world class idiot. Making up wild stories in his head about you and your date while you were probably worrying about your aunt alongside your date who was your… cousin… But it was an understandable misunderstanding, wasn’t it? You’d forgive him, wouldn’t you?

[12:01] Jimin: hey nerd

[12:01] Jimin: did you and your family get back home okay last night?

[12:01] Jimin: is your aunt alright?

Jimin drifts in and out of the conversation as he mindlessly stuffs food in his mouth. He just couldn’t help but feel like an asshole as he played back the night in his mind. He remembers how he had purposely let his hand linger on Mina’s waist, how he had stared at her lovingly. It was all in an attempt to make you jealous, to show you that he didn’t need you. Then, he spent his night with Mina in order to forget about you because he thought that if you could toss him away just like that then he could do the same to you. Shit. It’s fine, he tells himself. It’s fine.

*Ding*

The alert tone brings Jimin back to reality and he quickly looks at his screen, his thumbs already hovering to send a reply. Except, it isn’t his phone. He glimpses over to see Taehyung smiling at his phone happily typing away his reply to you.

“Ah, Y/N said her aunt had an allergic reaction to the food last night.”

Jimin opens up his conversation with you. Maybe his messages didn’t go through?

[12:01] Jimin: taehyung said your aunt had an allergic reaction to the food at the ball

[12:01] Jimin: was it a severe reaction?

[12:01] Jimin: is she okay now?

The continuous dings from Taehyung’s phone only made Jimin sulk more and more. Why weren’t you replying him? You can’t be mad at him about Mina… All he did at the ball was hold her by the waist. Surely, you weren’t that easily ticked off, right? You can’t possibly know what had happened between him and Mina last night… She had promised that she would only talk about it to those who had been on her case, always asking when she was finally going to get laid and you’re definitely not in that category, or at least he thinks you aren’t.

Maybe he had done something wrong or maybe you were upset with him because he said yes to going to the ball with Mina? But then again you could be mad at him for a dozen other things and he wouldn’t even know. You were so difficult to decipher because you had a habit of bottling up your feelings and Jimin always had to coax them out of you. Jimin sighs and clicks the lock button on his phone. Perhaps, he should just give you some space. Tomorrow was movie day anyway and maybe he’d be able to talk to you after the other two boys leave the theatre. That is if you wanted to talk to him at all… or maybe, just maybe you weren’t mad at him and he was just overthinking everything? God, he hated this. Having a genuine crush on someone is so stressful, he groans internally.

Movie day. You never miss the thrice a week allotted movie days that the 4 of you have and here on the 2nd one, you don’t show up again.

Oh, she just has some errands to run, is what Taehyung says whenever Jimin asks why you hadn’t showed up to any of the outings. Errands, my ass. You were on holiday, living in your aunt’s house. What kind of errands did you have to run? He was beginning to worry that you were trying to avoid him. Instead of texting this time, he calls you but that goes to voicemail…

As a last-ditch effort, he goes through your social media, hoping that you would leave a clue as to why you were ignoring him, he was searching for anything, something, but there are just pictures of you together with your cousin and Mina. He lets out a sarcastic laugh. It just seemed odd to see the three of you within one frame. The two people standing beside you are the very same two people that had gotten him in this situation… Not that it was their fault, it was completely his but looking at the picture seemed like the universe was taunting him, as if the universe was trying to tell him, look at what a huge idiot you are.

He scrolls down a little further and he sees a picture that Tae had tagged you in, a group picture of you grabbing brunch with Taehyung and Hoseok. What the hell. He grips the phone so hard his knuckles begin to turn white. The picture was taken just yesterday, on a Tuesday, a day you knew that Jimin reserved as the day to visit the gym in order to keep his rowing training in check. He swipes right to see another picture, taken on the same day, one where Taehyung had one arm slung around Hoseok’s shoulder and the other around your waist.

What…

Tuesday was the day all 4 of you had somehow decided that would be used to do other things, it was sort of a silent agreement that Tuesday was off limits for group hangouts because Jimin hated being left out. Yet, here the three of you were, munching on scones on a Tuesday, without Jimin. He felt betrayed, hurt even and he shouldn’t be because hell, he wasn’t 12 anymore… If this had happened last week or the week before, he would’ve been annoyed at most but with how things were between you and him at the moment, he couldn’t help but feel a huge pang of pain in his chest. Not to mention, the huge smile you wore on your face while you stood next to Taehyung… but that was irrelevant. He gives you the benefit of the doubt because maybe you really were busy running errands and Tuesday was the only day you had some free time. He couldn’t hold that against you, could he?

You invite Taehyung and Hoseok out to a last minute brunch on Tuesday. A strategic decision on your part because you didn’t want to see Jimin but you didn’t want it to be too obvious. In a quiet little café away from the main street of town, the three of you meet up and chat about the oh so scandalous night of the ball over scones and eggs benedicts. Through the brunch, you realized you had been so preoccupied with yourself and your feelings that you hadn’t even noticed that Hoseok had totally fallen head over heels for the girl he had attended the ball with. She never really stood out to you until Taehyung points her out in all the pictures of the parties the four of you had been to over the past 2 weeks and you suddenly feel so horrible. No wonder the boy was always on his phone half the time when all of you were hanging out. Hoseok seemed so adorable as he gushed about her in short, quiet sentences but you were absolutely delighted for him, glad that he’d finally found someone for himself.

When the table finally falls silent, you quickly ask Taehyung about his night and his answer is less than stellar, describing the night as just ‘meh’. You quickly throw out any topic that comes to your mind because you catch Taehyung’s glance and you know that he knows something is up between you and Jimin but before he can say anything, Hoseok takes the bait and carries the conversation forward, not giving Taehyung a chance to ask the question that was burning at the back of his mind. You smile to yourself and Tae side-eyes you but you pretend you don’t see it, letting yourself become completely absorbed in the story Hoseok was telling.

The conversation moves onto the usual banter and you’re reminded of just how much you love spending time with them, so much so that being apart for 3 days almost felt like too long. It’s a shame that you let your feelings for Jimin take this all away from you. In fact, you’re not so sure why you’re this upset with Jimin. It’s not like you didn’t see this coming. After all, you have seen the way he operates, you knew how he was like, how he just couldn’t seem to keep it in his pants and yet somehow your mind had seemed to have forgotten all of that just because he kissed your cheek and held your hand in the theatre. God, you were a sucker for simple intimate gestures. For all you know, he did that with just about every other girl too. For all you know, he was just trying to butter you up for round three but you were starting to become just a little too much work for a quick fuck and so, he abandoned you for Mina. Was it a dick move? Yeah… but it’s not like the two of you were officially dating so you can’t technically hold all of this against him. Boys, you sigh. They always made life a little too complicated for your liking.

The three of you had just about finished your respective meals when a call from his girl has Hoseok getting up to leave faster than you have ever seen him move in his entire life. Both you and Taehyung are left there sitting, stunned at the fact that he had quite literally just ditched the both of you for a girl.

“What happened to bros before hoes?” Taehyung shouts.

“She’s not a hoe,” Hoseok winks as he throws down enough bills for the meal before dashing out of sight.

Between giggles, you rise to your feet collecting the bills to take them over to the counter to pay for the bill.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Taehyung clicks his tongue. “You might’ve fooled Hoseok with your ‘I’ve just been really busy lately’ but I know you Y/N and I know when you’re lying.”

“I don’t know what you’re on about,” You mumble as you stack the bills together.

“Sit,” Taehyung demands. “Please,” He adds with a smile but you only smile back, ignoring him as you pull out your wallet to add in your half of the meal.

“I’ll pay for half of your meal,” He offers, a smile dancing on his lips because the way you quirk your eyebrow at him tells him he had said just the right thing to make you stay. You slowly lower yourself back onto your chair and flash him the largest smile as you return a few bills into its rightful place, back into your wallet. You know what he was going to ask you and you didn’t necessarily want to talk about it but this meal turned out to be slightly more expensive than you thought it would’ve been and your broke college ass would do anything to save a few bucks.

“What’s going on between you and Jimin?”

“I don’t know,” You sigh. T’was true, you really don’t know what exactly is going on between the both of you.

“Why are you ignoring him?”

“I’m not, I’m just busy,” You shrug.

Taehyung simply rolls his eyes at you. You were a terrible liar. You were looking everywhere but his face, your fingers playing nervously with the hem of the table cloth.

“Doing what?”

“You know… stuff.”

“So you’re too busy to reply to his texts but have no problem replying to mine and Hoseok’s?”

“Oh, that… must’ve slipped my mind, you know?”

“Sure,” He drawls sarcastically. “So you’re not trying to avoid him?”

“Nope.”

“So what you’re saying is we’re not here in this restaurant, that just so happened to be on the other side of town, far away from the gym that you know Jimin would be at today.”

You lick the corners of your lips nervously, trying hard not to cave but damn it, Taehyung had you all figured out.

“What? Of course not,” You answer. “T-This place had a pretty decent rating on Yelp. It’s the sole reason I chose this restaurant.”

“None of the restaurants in this town are listed on Yelp, city girl,” He teases.

Shit.

“Well…”

“You really have to work on your lying skills, Y/N,” He laughs, patting you on the head. “So tell me, does it have to do with Mina? Thought lover boy only had eyes for you?”

You knew Taehyung knew that you and Jimin had something brewing between the both of you, often sending disapproving looks when Jimin wasn’t looking but you had guessed, he was just being jealous.

“Go on, say it, I know you’ve been waiting to,” You sigh, resting your chin on your palm.

“I told you so,” He huffs. “I told your ass to watch your back around him and what do you do? You fall for all of his tricks,” He sighs, shaking his head at you. “You stayed back and watched another movie with him when I left the cinema early the other day didn’t you?”

You nod, exhaling deeply through your nose.

“He probably chose either a horror movie or a rom com.”

“Rom com,” You mumble.

“Let me guess, the 2 seats… back row, but not the corners. That would’ve made it too obvious,” He grins.

“Yeah, the seats just off the centre of the back row,” You sigh.

“Kissed you when the main characters were kissing?”

“Yeah… okay yeah, I get it,” You groan. “He played me like all the other girls. What’s your point?”

“That I would’ve treated you better,” He smiles wistfully.

“Please,” You scoff. “The both of you use the same playbook to pick up chicks. How are you any better?”

“Need I remind you that I had a girlfriend last semester? At least I’m capable of a relationship!”

“Oh yeah your relationship of what? Two weeks?” You laugh.

“And a half. Two weeks and a half,” He defends, his voice small and sad. It almost makes you stop to giving him a comforting hug but the smirk on his face wipes that thought off your mind.

“Boy, those 3-4 days sure make a huge difference.”

“They do, alright? Relationships are hard work,” He groans.

That you could agree on. They were complicated, messy, time-consuming and you wonder what it is about relationships that had everyone wanting one… yourself included. You knew the pain that came with them and yet you let yourself fall for a boy.

“Go on then, show me that you can treat me better,” You smile. “I mean an ice-cream… a free one at that sounds like a good idea, no?” You question as you glance through the dessert menu that stood in the middle of the table.

“You’re kidding,” He scoffs. “It’s freezing outside and you want ice-cream? Plus, dessert here costs an arm and a leg.”

“See? I knew you were all talk,” You sigh. “How bad can it— Damn,” You whisper as you spot the prices listed on the menu. Was the ice cream here served with gold flakes? No way in hell would a sane person pay that much for a dessert.

“Right?”

“Let’s get outta here. This place is a damn rip off,” You scoff.

You spend the rest of the day with Taehyung in a tiny ice-cream shop that served the best mango flavoured ice-cream you had ever tasted. Taehyung groaned all the way to the shop, completely against the idea of having an ice-cream on such a cold day but the puppy eyes you flashed him made him grow weak in the knees. The conversation that went on between you and Taehyung was like all the ones you’ve ever had with him, a good mix of light-hearted jokes and mildly heavy topics. He throws in a flirty line or two from time to time but unlike most of the time, they barely had an effect on you. Just a wink from Taehyung used to send your head on a whirlwind but he could be kissing you senseless right now and you wouldn’t even feel a spark. Oh, you were screwed, so screwed. You keep telling yourself you hate Jimin but who were you kidding? Even you knew you didn’t hate the boy.

It’s the 3rd movie day you’ve missed now and Jimin is really starting to worry. He’s left you a few calls and some texts, all of which are left unanswered and he begins to panic. He replays the night of the ball again and again in his head and he can’t seem to find anything that would make you shut him out like this. He asks Taehyung if he knew what was going on with you and he simply gives him the cold shoulder, shrugging as he said that you were just ‘busy’. He asks Mina for what must be the 100th time if she had said anything to you to which she vehemently denies which then leaves him back at square one.

Jimin contemplates going over to your house just to see you, to ask you why you’ve been avoiding him but he knows better than anyone that you would end up hating him even more if he inherently forced you to answer him but damn… this whole silent treatment stint was driving him mad.  Actually, now that he thought about it… he didn’t know where you lived either.

Stupid ball and his stupid assuming ass.

He felt like he was finally beginning to get somewhere with you after that kiss the two of you shared in the theatre but now he’s pretty sure all of that was out the window. To think that he had ruined it all because he was such a jealous prick only made him feel like punching himself in the face.

He restrains himself from checking your social media after accidentally liking a 45 week old photo on your Instagram just the other day. He had never double tapped a photo so fast, curse words flying out of his mouth at the speed of light, hoping that the quick subsequent double tap would stop the notification from showing up on your phone but he was sure you would have probably seen it by now. He resorts to going through his camera roll to look at the only 2 pictures he has of you. It was taken on the very same day Jimin kissed you for real, for the first time. It was the first kiss that he had planted on your lips while completely sober. It was a pure simple gesture that he had been wanting to carry out ever since the end of the semester. He remembers pulling away from the kiss, his heart soaring as he watched you smile back at him. He had hoped that you couldn’t feel the way his heart was thudding in his chest when you moved to lay your head on his shoulder that day.

Jimin stares at the pictures, swiping between the both of them constantly. During all of the group hangouts, you were always the one taking the photos, never the one in them and whenever he or anyone got a decent picture of you, you’d make them delete it on the spot but you were so preoccupied that day, you must’ve forgot.

You’re beaming in the first photo, the brightest smile he’d ever seen on you as you stand next to the arcade machine, your initials on the top of the leaderboard. God, he misses your smile. In the second photo, Jimin’s standing next to you with a smirk on his face, one arm resting on the top of your head while the other hand was pointing to the top of the leaderboard where his initials now replaced yours. You’re side-eyeing him in the picture, your signature scowl on display and Jimin can’t help but let out a small laugh. God, he misses seeing your scowl, dearly so and he doesn’t understand what’s wrong with him, why he’s pining for you like this. He repeatedly tells himself that you didn’t mean that much to him, that he should forget about you but he can’t bring himself to because he was whipped, utterly and completely whipped for you. A lovesick fool, he was.

Aside from the short brunch with Tae and Hoseok, you’ve spent the last 5 days solely with your cousin and occasionally with Mina. It was a change to your usual schedule but that’s alright, you were going to see both Hoseok and Taehyung plenty of times once classes start again while you weren’t going to see your cousin again until next Christmas. You feel your phone buzz in your hand and you look down at the caller ID before putting it away in your pocket. Jimin, you scoff. You can’t believe he actually had the nerve to call you and leave you texts as if everything was normal, that he hadn’t just played with your heart like it was some game. Did he really think you’d just let him do that, that you’d fall right back into his arms again? Hell no. You don’t even bother opening up his texts because he didn’t even deserve to be left on read. Prick.

You wanted to hate Mina you really did, but she was the innocent one in all of this. She was just a girl with a huge crush on a boy she had loved since she was 13 and you can’t blame her for doing what she did. She’s not at fault at all because you and Jimin weren’t even a thing as per se so how was she supposed to know? In fact, you pitied her. You catch her checking her phone regularly and you know she’s waiting for a text from Jimin almost all the time. He must be a horrible conversationalist because you watch Mina reply with a sulk on her face but you don’t let your mind dwell on that fact. You wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t waste her time on him, that she deserved a boy far better than the one she was after but she always had on the most genuine smile you’ve seen when she talks about him so, you let that thought slip away. As long as she’s happy, you guess… so, you tune her out whenever she speaks about him because as far as you were concerned, Park Jimin was no longer someone you wanted to think about anymore.

“Y/N?” Your aunt calls.

“Yeah?”

“Can you do me a favour?” She asks.

“Sure,” You nod, getting up from the couch.

“A parcel was misdelivered to our house. Can you drop it off at the right one?”

You take the parcel in your hand and notice that the postman must’ve misread the house number because you lived in house no. 37 while this box was supposed to be delivered to house no. 73. You sigh at the thought of how long the walk was going to be. Picking your phone up from the coffee table, you enter the address of the following house and put on your coat, wincing as the cold winter air hits your skin when you open the door.

You stop occasionally along the way, trying your hardest to find your bearings because your phone shuts down occasionally in the cold winter weather. You take a wrong turn or two, okay… maybe a few more than that but this neighbourhood honestly felt like a maze, especially since all the houses looked exactly the same. After a long 20 minute walk, you finally find the row of houses that were in the high sixties.

67, 69, 71…

73

Crap.

You let out a heavy sigh when your eyes skim over the plaque that rested above the house number.

Home of the Park Family, it stated in gold, cursive font. You glance at the house and it looked slightly familiar but you’re not sure if that had to do with the fact that you had just seen some 30 odd houses that looked just like it, your cousin’s included. Maybe it wasn’t his house. Park is a common last name, you shrug. You stride up the driveway and reach the front door in a few steps. Please don’t be home, please don’t be home, you chanted to yourself as you knocked lightly at the door.

“Who is it?” You hear a woman call out.

“I-It’s Y/N.”

“The door’s open! Please come in!” She answers.

You twist the door knob hesitantly and push the door open. The interior of the house looks familiar and you confirm that this is in fact Jimin’s home.

Please don’t be home, please don’t be home.

“Ah, Y/N! Are you looking for Jimin? He’s not home at the moment,” She frowns.

Thank God.

“Oh no, I’m not looking for him,” You laugh. “Um, a parcel was delivered to my house but I think it was meant for yours,” You smile as you hand over the package.

Mrs. Park, wipes her hands on her apron before taking the parcel out of your hands. Her eyebrows slightly furrowed as she twists the box around.

“Must be for my husband,” She mutters. “But, thank you for coming all the way here to deliver it,” She smiles.

“Oh, it’s no problem at all,” You smile in return.

You turn on your heel, ready to bid Mrs. Park goodbye when she says the magic word.

Cookies.

“Oh, would you like some cookies? I just baked them this morning!”

Food. Your one true weakness.

“Sure!” You answer delightedly as you follow her into the kitchen. The smell of fried shallots filled the air and you let out a small hum of delight. As if she had heard you, Mrs. Park lets out a light laugh. “I was just starting on dinner prep when you had knocked on the door,” She quips and you nod, peering around the kitchen curiously.

She hands you the container and your eyes instantly light up. You waste no time, quickly taking a bite of the deliciously gooey chocolate chip cookie, throwing a thumbs up her way as you stuff the rest of the cookie in your mouth.

“I’m glad you like it,” Mrs. Park chuckles. “Please have some more!”

Don’t mind if I do.

You nod eagerly at her, already reaching for another cookie even when your mouth was still full.

You must’ve been on cookie number 3 when you realize that shit, Jimin could come home at any time now… so you quickly close the container, moving to the dustbin to dust the crumbs off your hands.

“Oh, Y/N can you stir this pot for me please?”

“O-of course,” You answer as you quickly move to grab the wooden spoon sitting in the pot.

“Mr. Park just closed a big deal yesterday,” She grins. “So, I thought I should cook up a little something special to celebrate,” She gestures around the kitchen.

A little, would’ve be an understatement. She was downright preparing a feast.

“T-this seems like a little too much for only one person to handle,” You blurted out.

“It is a bit much isn’t it?” She sighs. “But my husband has been working so hard lately and I just wanted to do something nice for him,” She laughs.

You felt a little bad as you watched her slave away all on her own, her hair disheveled as she frantically zips around the kitchen. You wanted to offer her some help but… you definitely were no master chef and not to mention the fact that Jimin might walk in at any time now lingered at the back of your mind but poor Mrs. Park looked so stressed.

Well, you had time to spare and she did give you cookies…

“I could help you if you like… I mean I’m not a good cook or—“

“Oh you would?!” She exclaims. “I’d love some help!”

Mrs. Park directs you around the kitchen and you admire the way she moved around expertly. Considering the fact that most of your cooking experiences for the past few months only consisted of pouring hot water on top of a block of instant noodles, it takes you some time to fully get the hang of things. You listen intently at the instructions she gives you and quickly get to work, washing the bag of potatoes that she had given you.

As you pat the potatoes dry, you glance at the cooking book that laid open atop the counter and your mouth waters at the prospective dish that Mrs. Park has in mind. It was a recipe for some Cheesy Hasselback Potato Gratin and you almost cry as you imagine taking a bite of the dish. Two of your most favourite potato dishes cooked in a combined style? It sounded like heaven. Mrs. Park wouldn’t mind if you stayed for dinner… would she?

She must’ve noticed the drool threatening to spill out the corners of your lips because Mrs. Park lets out a light laugh when she places a finger under your chin to gently shut your mouth that was wide open. You flash her a nervous smile before grabbing the knife to thinly slice the potatoes, making light conversation with her as you did so.

“This dish is going to taste so good, Mrs. Park!” You exclaim over your shoulder as you arrange the potato slices around the casserole dish carefully. “Potatoes are like that one magical vegetable that tastes amazing no matter how it’s cooked,” You say more to yourself than Mrs. Park but she catches it, letting out a hum of agreement.

“Jimin wasn’t joking when he told me about how much you love potatoes,” Mrs. Park laughs. “Said he’d always catch you sitting alone at the dining hall close to closing hours whenever a potato dish was being served.”

You let out a nervous laugh, confirming it with a nod that you did indeed go back to the dining hall to catch supper whenever you spotted baked potatoes on the dining hall menu. You tilt your head a little in confusion. Why in the world would your love for potatoes ever come up in a conversation between Jimin and his mum? You swipe away that thought. It’s not like you cared anyway because Park Jimin was nobody to you.

“Guilty as charged. I’ve loved them ever since I was young,” You chuckle. “Actually, when I was 5 my dad tricked me–”

“–into thinking potatoes were cow poop!” Mrs. Park exclaims. “I know this story! I laughed so hard when Jimin told me the story,” She sighs.  "Such a horrible prank for your father to pull on you but you were such a gullible child too,“ She shakes her head.

Ah, yes. The one time your father decided it would be funny to prank his 5-year-old daughter aka the time you felt like the world was going to end. You were sat at the dining table, proclaiming your love for potatoes as you put a spoonful of mashed potato into your mouth. Your dad reached out for your hand, a solemn look on his face and you turned silent, a look of worry quickly washing over you.

"Y/N, you’re 5 years old now, such a big girl,” Your father hummed.

You tilted your head to the side, not fully understanding why he would suddenly bring that up.

“I am,” You nodded, flashing him a smile as you held out your palm, showing him the number 5.

“I think it’s time I tell you a little secret now that you’re old enough to understand.”

“Secret?” You asked, your voice low and quiet. Your dad nodded at you and you quickly leaned in, eyebrows furrowed as you await the reveal of this little secret of his.

“You love potatoes, don’t you?” He asked and you nodded furiously, a large smile gracing your lips.

“Do you know where they come from?” He questioned and you rested your chin on your palm, giving it some thought before shook your head from side to side.

Your father leaned in, curling his finger at you so that you would come closer. You scooted closer towards him, your tiny hand cupping your ear as you waited for his answer.

“Cow poop.”

“W-what?”

“Potatoes are actually cow poop,” He answered with a straight face. 5-year-old you, searched his face for a hint of a smile, anything to tell you that this was a joke but you are only greeted with a blank expression. Horrified, you pushed away your bowl of mashed potatoes and reached for your cup to take a large gulp of water. Your father watched on as you scurried off to the bathroom, presumably to wash your mouth out and he snickered to himself. Damn, your mum was definitely going to give him a piece of her mind when she finds out but he couldn’t help himself… You were just a delight to tease.

“I was,” You laugh. “But in my defense, my father was a really convincing liar.”

You laugh along with Mrs. Park as she asks about the small details in the story and you zone out a little when she tells you what a menace Jimin was when he was younger. You stand there, adjusting the position of the potato slices, nodding while you let the fact that Jimin tells these little stories about you to his mother, sink in. Maybe he just talked about all his friends in general in this detail and that you were just overthinking the situation. It was a rather funny story you guess, perhaps something you would tell your own parents if it were the other way around… You have a nagging feeling though that this is only one of the many stories about you that Jimin has told his mum.

Unsurprisingly, your suspicions are confirmed when Mrs. Park asks if your father had always worked on an oil rig and if your mother enjoyed the traveling aspect of her job. You answer the questions with no hesitation because you didn’t mind talking about your parents but the thing is… you don’t exactly remember telling Jimin this much about your parents. Oh, right, there was that conversation you had with the boys in the supermarket which to you seemed pretty insignificant now. Odd. This whole situation seemed a little too odd for you but then maybe, maybe he was just explaining to his mother as to why you had suddenly just showed up in this town of all places. Yeah, that had to be it… nothing more, nothing less.

When you set the casserole dish which held the potatoes, topped off with a generous amount of cheese into the oven and finally pushed the door to it shut, both you and Jimin’s mother let out a collective sigh of relief. At least that was one dish down.

Mrs. Park was some goddess in the kitchen because as you worked on that potato dish alone, she had somehow managed to get three other dishes almost close to completion herself and you’re simply flabbergasted. You stand next to her, stirring a pot of creamy soup that she had left simmering on the stove as you made light conversation with her.

“So how was sophomore year for you? Not too stressful I hope.”

“Ah, it was alright,” You lie. “I had—“

Both you and Mrs. Park whip your heads towards the front door when you hear it being slammed shut.

“Sorry!” You hear Jimin squeak and Mrs. Park mutters under her breath about how Jimin never understood the concept of holding the door so that it would shut softly.

Crap. Jimin.

She calls out his name but he was already making his way to his room, his heavy footsteps thudding against the wooden staircase.

You try to remain calm but a 101 thoughts are running through your mind and you panic at the thought of having to speak to Jimin, or even having to see him. You’re stood there stirring the pot with shaky hands, a blank expression on your face but really all you’re thinking about if it was socially acceptable to dash out of a person’s house without providing a reason.

You were horrible at lying under pressure, your gestures and words often coming out over-exaggerated but hell, you were desperate. If there was a time for you to display your highly unpolished acting skills you obtained from your first semester drama elective then this was definitely the time.

“Gosh, look at the time,” You gasp as you glance at the clock hanging on the wall. “I should head back before it gets too dark.”

“Oh, you mean you won’t be staying for dinner?” She questions, a look of surprise on her face as if it was so absurd that you hadn’t been planning to stay all along. “Stay!”

“Ah, no I’d hate to impose,” You laugh nervously. “I mean this is a family dinner to celebrate Mr Park’s recent achievement after all.”

“Exactly! It’s a celebration so we’d love for you to join us!”

Well… this was definitely not how the conversation played out in your head.

“M-My aunt is expecting me home for dinner,” You lie. Your aunt was going for a fancy dinner with the mayor and his wife but Mrs. Park didn’t know that, or at least you hope she didn’t.

“I’m sure she’d let you stay if you ask,” Mrs. Park smiles. “I mean you do want to taste the potato dish you practically made all by yourself, don’t you?”

You almost cave. Almost.

“That’s really tempting Mrs. Park,” You laugh. “But I’d hate to disappoint my aunt.”

“Alright, I understand,” She sighs with a deep-set frown. You frown in return, partially because you felt absolutely horrible for lying to her but also because all you actually had waiting for you at home was some sad soggy pizza from lunch.

“Thank you so much for the cookies and everything, Mrs. Park,” You smile sheepishly. “I really had fun today.”

“Oh please, I should be thanking you,” She chuckles. “It really is getting dark out there,” She hums as she looks out the small window that sat above the kitchen sink. “I’ll get Jimin to walk you home.”

“Oh no that’s fine—“ You begin but it’s too late. She is already shouting his name before you can complete your sentence.

"Yeah?” You hear Jimin answer as he makes his way down the stairs.

If you run now, you could probably reach the front door before he sees you but Jimin’s mother has a soft grip on your shoulder, almost as if she knew whatever you were planning in your head.

“Sorry I took so long. I was—“

Jimin pauses when he spots you standing there, timidly shifting your weight from one foot to the other.

"Nerd… w-what—”

“She came here to deliver a package and I held her hostage,” Mrs. Park chortled. “She helped me with dinner and I’ve been trying to get her to stay but she’s a stubborn one.”

“Yeah, stay… you should s-stay,” Jimin stutters nervously, still in shock at seeing you here, standing in his own home.

“I really can’t, I’m sorry,” You reply while staring at your feet, unable to make eye contact with the boy before you.

“Maybe, next time,” Mrs. Park suggests. Oh no, definitely not. There will be no next time… not if you could help it. “Jimin, walk her home won’t you?”

“Of course,” He replies quickly, a little too quickly, he thinks.

“Really Jimin, it’s fine, you don’t have to.”

“No, I insist,” Mrs. Park remains adamant. “It’s either you stay for dinner or he walks you home.”

You pull your lips into a taut line before forcing on a smile as you bid Mrs. Park goodbye, Jimin following closely behind you, much to your dismay.

“Sorry about my mum,” Jimin laughs nervously. “She can be a little bit too much sometimes.”

“It’s fine,” You mumble. “I like her. She’s nice.”

You’re so quiet, your answers are short curt sentences and Jimin can feel the awkwardness that surrounded the both of you, the pure discomfort that seemed to be radiating from you.

When the two of you finally step out of the house and let the front door close, he finally works up the courage to ask you what was wrong… or at least something like that.

“Hey nerd, we’re fine right?”

You spin around, quirking your eyebrow at him and he realizes this is the first time today that you’ve looked him in the eye.

“Are you angry at me or something?”

“No.”

Okay, so you were angry with him.

“Then why aren’t you talking to me?”

“What do you mean? We’re talking right now.”

“No, this isn't— never mind,” He sighs. “Why have you been ignoring me?”

“I haven’t, I’ve just been busy,” You shrug, glancing down towards your feet as you shift nervously on his front porch.

Unconvinced, Jimin simply shakes his head. “Did I… did I do something wrong? You’re talking to me but you’re not talking to me…”

"I don’t understand.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t because we’re talking right now, aren’t we?” You huff. “What? What do you want to talk about now? I’m all ears.”

If you had asked him an hour ago, he would’ve been able to fire 5 questions all in one shot but now that you were standing physically before him, his mind had chosen to completely betray him. Blank. His mind was drawing a complete blank.

You tap your foot impatiently and lifted an eyebrow at him. There he was complaining about not talking and when you give him a chance, he’s completely silent. Boys. They will always be a complete mystery to you. You turn around, ready to make your way home

“Your aunt!” He exclaims, his eyes wide when he realizes that he had said that a little too loud. You turn back to face him and he pulls back, straightening himself up before he continues. “Your aunt…” He starts, this time much softer. “How is she? The allergic reaction wasn’t too serious, was it?”

“She’s fine. Nothing a shot of anti-histamine couldn’t fix,” You answer. A heavy silence hangs in the air and you let out a sigh. You promised him a conversation so you might as well hold up your end of the bargain. “Was a shame we had to leave. How was the rest of the ball?”

“Uneventful,” He’s quick to answer.

Uneventful. What bullshit.

“That’s not what Mina had to say,” You scoff. The nerve on this boy. If he wanted to lie, he should’ve at least told a believable one.

The moment the sentence slips out of your mouth, Jimin’s eyes go wide and you rolled your eyes so hard it almost felt like you could see the inside of your head. Did he honestly think you were an idiot?

“That’s not— I-I can explain.”

Of course. Of course, Mina told you. Even after he specifically asked for her not to.

“You don’t have to,” Is all you say before you begin moving forward, stepping onto the driveway. Jimin immediately runs after you, softly grabbing your hand to stop you.

“Please let me explain.”

“Jimin, please just leave it,” You sigh as you pull your arm away from him.

“Nerd please, I want to explain because you and I, we… we—“

"We what?” You interrupt and Jimin stays silent, unable to put his thoughts into a coherent sentence.

“Look Jimin I get it,” You sigh. “We’re not dating or anything so you can sleep with whoever you want alright? It’s none of my business.”

“No, you don’t understand, that’s not what happened! I didn’t sleep with her!” He groans.

Alright, now he’s just pissing you off. You had saw him leave her house, sex hair and all. You had heard the detailed reiteration of the night, courtesy of Mina and he actually had the audacity to stand here in front of you and tell you that that’s not what happened? Did he really think you would believe him?

“I really don’t care what happened Jimin, it’s none of my concern,” You huff.

“Then why are you mad at me? Why are you being so cold?”

“I’m not.”

“You are! See, you just did it!” Jimin exclaims as he runs his hand through his hair in frustration.

“Did what?”

“This isn’t how we usually talk to each other and you know that.”

“I’m too tired to argue with you right now,” You exhale.

“Then don’t argue. Just listen and let me exp—”

There’s a loud crash from inside the house and you hear Jimin’s mother let out a light yelp. The both of you run to the door immediately, quickly ducking in to check if Mrs. Park had hurt herself.

“Mum! Are you okay?” Jimin questions as he rushes to her side, helping her pick up the assorted cooking utensils that laid across the floor.

“Yeah I just dropped the pan that I was trying to store,” She grumbles.

It’s selfish of you to do this, an absolute dick move but as they’re preoccupied with the conversation, you take it as your chance to escape. You bolt out of the house and down the street, trying to the best of your ability to remember which turns you are supposed to take and you hope to god you’re taking the right ones. When you feel you’ve gained enough distance, you take out your phone to look at the map and you’re relieved to find that you weren’t that far off track… oh and there were a few or so missed calls from Jimin plus a handful of worried texts but you could deal with those later, or maybe never.

Jimin spends 20 or so minutes, searching the streets for you, his phone constantly pressed to his ear as he hears the dial tone and the familiar message of this is the voicemail box for the number… Goddamn it. You’re an idiot, an absolute idiot. It’s cold out, unbearably so now that the sun has set and the old streetlamps that lined the streets every few or so metres barely did anything to light up the path. Jimin shudders at the thought of you becoming prey to some possible criminal lurking in the dark. Jimin is barely dressed well enough for the weather but he barely feels the cold not when he imagines the way you walk around the streets without any care in mind, never alert, always aloof as if your mind was somewhere else. He didn’t care if you hated him, he would’ve walked well behind you if that was what you wanted… he just needed to know that you got home safe. Just like the night he first saw you at that party, he could hear his heart pulsing in his ears, his mind a mess as he frantically begs for you to pick up the phone but unlike the first night, you don’t pick up. Jimin is left wandering in the dark, unsure of where to go and after what felt like hours of screaming your name, he hears a soft ding from his phone.

[6:18] You: i got home fine thanks

Wow. You had left the house without saying a word, walked home alone in the dark, refused to pick up the phone when he called and all you had to say was… I got home fine thanks? You were honestly driving him insane. Jimin was fuming, absolutely livid because he was so worried that something horrible might’ve happened to you but you obviously seem nonchalant about the whole matter. He types out a paragraph, fingers moving furiously fast as he spewed out his unfiltered thoughts.

How could you just leave like that? Do you know how worried I was? What if some pervert had jumped on you or what if some guy armed with a knife mugged you? Look, I know you’re mad at me but god why would you put yourself in so much danger? I don’t think I’d ever be able to forgive myself if something had happened to you, do you know that? I don’t know if you’ve realized but you’re important to me, more than just a fr—

His fingers hover above the keyboard, wondering if he should continue the sentence but he only holds the backspace button, sighing as he watched the words disappear, only to be replaced by a blinking cursor.

[6:19] Jimin: cool

[6:19] Jimin: let me know when you’re free to talk

Jimin knows you won’t reply to his message. You probably won’t even bother opening it but he had to at least try. He shoves his phone into his pocket and walks as fast as he could but the sub-zero temperatures made his limbs feel like they were completely frozen. Jimin squints in the dark to look at the street sign that was dimly illuminated.

A short honk sounds and Jimin swears he was so startled that he almost jumped out of his skin. Thankfully enough when he turns around he’s only met by his father who had wound down the window to scream at him for being so inadequately dressed. Jimin quickly jumps into the car, nodding his head silently at his father’s words as he basks in the warmth of the car.

“This is so good,” Mr. Park groans as he scoops another spoonful of the potato gratin into his mouth. “I can’t believe you took the time to make all of my favourite dishes, love. How did you even manage to do this all by yourself? You must be exhausted,” He frowns as he takes his wife’s hand in his, thumb circling the top of her hand.

“I didn’t, I had help,” She smiles. “Jimin’s friend, Y/N stopped by to drop a parcel and she offered to help. Made that potato dish all by herself. Such a sweet girl,” She sighs.

“She made this?” Mr Park points at the potato gratin that sat in the middle of the table and Mrs. Park nods. “Jimin, you have to invite her over more often,” He quips as he scoops more onto his plate.

“Yeah, you should!” Mrs. Park chimes in. “I really like her.”

Ha. Funny story mum, I really like her too.

Jimin only nods, his cheeks starting to turn a little rosy when his father connects the dots, remembering Y/N to be the girl Jimin often mentioned over dinner with them… which he hadn’t realize he had been doing. I’d really like to meet her, his father says and Jimin’s face turns cherry red, his parents letting out quiet laughs at the sight of their flustered son. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that you had chosen not to stay for dinner.

“Why didn’t she stay for dinner?” Mr. Park inquires as he scoops some meat onto his plate.

“Her aunt was waiting for her at home,” Mrs. Park frowns.

Maybe that was true but Jimin was 99% sure that it was a complete lie. You hadn’t stayed simply because you couldn’t stand him and boy he wished he could go back in time so bad because maybe, you would’ve been sitting at this table if he hadn’t been such a fool. He was in the wrong, he knew that but maybe you’d be sitting at this table if you had just let him explain.

You don’t have to, is what you said. But he wanted to, god, that’s all he wanted because he didn’t do it… he really didn’t.

Night of the ball

Jimin’s hand slips behind Mina’s back and he struggles to unhook her bra, his finger and thumb unable to get it to unclasp. It was almost as if all the drive he had previously had suddenly dissipated and all he was left with was this overwhelming sense of guilt that this was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Mina spots the worry on Jimin’s face and it only makes her even more nervous than she already is and she squirms under Jimin, unsure if she should help him or just wait for him to finally get it unhooked.

“Sorry,” Jimin whispers as he pulls away, running his hand through his hair while he moved to the side to sit next to where Mina laid.

“I think we shouldn’t do this,” They say in unison.

Both Jimin and Mina stare at each other in mild surprise, unsure of what to say next.

“I—” The both of them start and Jimin lets out a light laugh, nodding his head at her as if to say, you first.

"I’m not ready for this,” She whispers. “I’m sorry. This is my first time… and I’m so nervous about all of this and I—”

"Your first?” Jimin gasps. “Why didn’t you tell me this was going to be your first, Mina?”

Mina sighs before taking in a deep breath, spewing out her thoughts at the speed of a bullet train. "I just… everyone has been hounding me about when I was going to lose my virginity and then you came back and then I saw the ball as my chance and I didn’t want you to know I was inexperienced because you would’ve said no and I just wanted to get it over with and I’m sorry that I—”

"Hey Mina, calm down. It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize,” He interrupts with a smile. With the way Mina was rushing through her sentences, it was almost as if she was afraid that he was going to call her out for leading him on. “I should be the one apologizing,” He smiles sadly as he brought up the blanket to lay it on top of her.

He should’ve seen the signs. The way she seemed like a lost lamb the moment the both of them had entered the room, the shaky breaths that left her lips but he was too clouded by lust to see all of that. Maybe in his mind he had always seen Mina to be someone who had tons of experience under her belt simply by the way she got all the boys in school to fall at her feet. He would have guessed that she had lost it a long time ago but he should’ve known better than to believe those rumours that floated around the noisy high school hallways.

Jimin sinks down to lay next to her, patting her head in hopes that it would provide her some sort of comfort.

“I’m sorry,” She whispers once more and Jimin scowls in return.

“I already told you, you don’t have to apologize. You did nothing wrong,” He smiles.

“O-okay,” Mina murmurs with a half-smile.

Jimin shuts his eyes as he tried to clear his mind. What a mess this was. He climbs off the bed to put on the clothes that he had previously torn off. In the softest voice ever, he asks Mina if she wanted him to grab her some nightwear to change into and she nods, pointing at the nightdress that hung on the coat hanger on the wall. He pads over to the bed handing her the dress as he took a seat at the corner of her bed.

“Jimin,” Mina whispers as she pulls the dress over her head. “Can you do me a favour?”

“Sure…” He hums apprehensively, unsure of what exactly this favour would entail.

“If anyone asks… can you just tell them we did it?”

“Why…?”

“It’s just these girls in town have been calling me a prude for ages, making fun of me… saying boys would never want to be with someone as inexperienced as me and I just—“ She sighs. “–can you please just lie for me?”

“Sure… I guess?” Jimin answers. “You know you shouldn’t really let them get to you though, Mina. You know they’re just talking shit because they’re jealous, right?” He smiles as he ruffles her hair.

“I know,” She grumbles. “It’s just hard to hear sometimes and I just really want them to stop,” She groans and Jimin nods understandingly as he tried to empathize with her.

“Oh, um Mina?” He pauses. “Just make sure Y/N doesn’t hear this story yeah?”

Y/N. Mina hated it when Jimin talked about you when it was just the both of them. She didn’t understand how in just the span of a semester, you had managed to grow so close to the boy she had spent almost all her life growing up next to. She knew him for way longer than you did but it seemed like Jimin cared for you all the same and it was so unfair. Jimin was meant to have eyes for her only, after all, that’s what it had been like all throughout high school but then you come along and suddenly she didn’t have the main spotlight anymore. Mina wasn’t stupid, she knew Jimin was quite the playboy but he never had feelings for all the other girls and if Mina wanted to, she could have him pining for her again with just a few words. You changed all of that though. It was almost as if Mina had been reduced to just another girl ever since you came along and she couldn’t stand that. You were a great person, sure but she wasn’t going to let you get away with stealing her man from her.

“Sure thing,” She smiles and if Jimin had been paying attention, he would have seen a hint of a smirk, one filled with malicious intent. “I’ll only be telling this lie to a select few that ask anyway,” She shrugs.

Jimin lets out a sigh of relief as he allowed himself to sink down into the pillow next to Mina.

“Hey Mina,” He whispers. “Do you think we could um… cuddle for a while?” Jimin asks with a shaky voice, his cheeks beginning to heat up as he awaits her answer.

Mina throws him an amused look, a request she thought she’d never hear from the player that was Park Jimin but she’ll be damned if she gives up the chance to cuddle with her long-time crush. “Sure,” She giggles as she moves closer towards him.

Jimin slips his hand under her body and Mina turns in his hold to rest on his chest. Mina was just like you. She hikes her knee high, letting it rest at his waist while one of her palms rest atop his chest. For a short moment, it felt almost familiar but as he lets the seconds tick by, it becomes more apparent to him that this wasn’t the same… that Mina wasn’t you and that her resting on top of him felt uncomfortable at best.

“You like her, don’t you?” Mina questions.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

Of course he knew but he didn’t want to talk about his feelings right now… especially not with Mina.

“I um… It’s complicated,” Jimin mumbles. It’s not the truth but it wasn’t a lie either. He wasn’t exactly sure what it was that he felt for you or perhaps he just didn’t want to admit it. Either way, he didn’t want to think about it, at least not in this moment because when he thought of you, all he could see was you slow dancing with your date and that was the last thing he wanted on his mind tonight.

Mina was just about your size and maybe if Jimin was drunk enough he could mistake her for you. So how was it that you felt so different in his arms in comparison to Mina? With Mina, it just didn’t feel right. It felt like he was being suffocated, almost as if she was just a large weight that was resting on top of him but he never felt like that with you. When he cuddled with you, he felt warm and safe. When he cuddled with you… as cliché as it sounds, he felt like everything was in the right place. From the way you nestled your head in the same spot every night, to the way your knee rested just below his hip bone, it was almost as if by nature, the both of you just happened to fit each other perfectly. Jimin thinks it’s just his mind playing tricks on him that he was only feeling this way because he felt guilty for being here but he knows that it isn’t all in his head… that there was a bigger underlying issue as to why he was feeling this way.

Jimin had figured out mid-way through the semester that chasing you was going to be different from all the other girls he had pursued after. You were carefree yet cautious, friendly yet reserved, a myriad of other opposites, a true living paradox and maybe that’s what drew him in. You had layers to you, and each time he unpeeled one, he felt himself travelling further down a treacherous path, one lined with potential heartbreak either on your part or his but he’d been through a fair share of girls and he assumed you couldn’t possibly have that much of an effect of him, that he would come out of all of this, unscathed.

He assumed.

That was his first big mistake. You see, things were never really simple when it came to you. There were a lot of what if’s and maybes but if there was one positive that could come out from this night it’s that those mere unknowns that swam around in his mind have now become definite answers instead because…

He used to think that maybe he just liked the idea of cuddling but he knew now that he doesn’t… not unless it was you that was there with him, softly stroking the curve of his waist.

He used to think that the feeling of guilt when it came to sleeping around was simply a construct of the mind but he knew now that it was a valid feeling, a horrible one that came with a lot of weight.

He used to think that maybe what he feels for you is something he’d be able to shake off but he knows now that that simply wasn’t true because you have him undeniably wrapped around your finger.

Jimin groans upon that realization because now all he wants to do is to escape, to run away from these feelings that were bogging him down. He gently pushes Mina, who’s fast asleep, off of him and dashes out of her house. He glances out onto the street to make sure no one was around before he breaks out into a run, hurtling down the street as fast as he can, silently hoping that it would tire him out, praying that it would get his mind to stop thinking about you… except it doesn’t and he returns to his bed, falling asleep to the thought of you, wishing that you were here, lying next to him.

“Jimin, you’ve barely touched your food, is something wrong?” His mother asks.

“No, I just… have a lot of um rowing stuff on my mind,” He coughs.

“Ah, think about all of that later, dear,” She smiles. “But for now, eat please.”

His mother reaches over, scooping a generous serving of the elaborate potato dish you had made, onto his plate. Jimin silently stuffs a spoonful into his mouth and although he had no appetite, the mere thought of this being something you made is enough to push him to forcefully swallow it. He thinks perhaps if he ate enough of it, it could help fill the vague emptiness he felt in his chest but he knew that only one thing could do that and that was you.

A/N: ahh this turned out way longer than I thought it would but lmaooo. Some of you clever beans predicted the plot right in your tags!!! proud of y’all (’: Anyway, thank you for reading! and as always, feedback is welcome (: (p.s: my bro actually tricked me into thinking potato was cow poop when I was 5 and I didn’t eat them for 3 months lol)

[scotwresnet]

Following the second annual Disco Derby back in March, Discovery Wrestling were scheduled to take a break until returning in October but they simply couldn’t wait any longer. As a result, they’re back in the Edinburgh Corn Exchange on Saturday afternoon for Camp Discovery, a show that looks like it will be a day to remember for the Discovery faithful. We’ve got championship matches, we’ve got debuts, we’ve got returns, and we’ve got two members of Bullet Club coming along too!

Joe Hendry vs Rampage Brown

A mammoth singles match will see Joe Hendry taking on Rampage Brown in a battle between two of the UK’s very best unsigned talents. After defeating Timothy Thatcher in November in quite the technical contest, The Prestigious One has been the number one contender to Joe Coffey’s Y Division Championship, with The Iron King refusing to give Hendry his title opportunity until he sees fit. Coffey has stated that he wasn’t scheduled to defend his title again until the October anniversary show and will be living by that fact, which means he will indeed break Lewis Girvan’s record reign at 666 days. With that though, it left Joe Hendry without an opponent for Saturday’s show. Step forward Rampage Brown. The man from Leeds hasn’t been seen in Discovery since his participation in the first annual Hotter Than Hell Edinburgh Invitational Tournament back in 2017, where he had excellent contests with Dave Conrad, Mikey Whiplash, and eventual winner Aspen Faith. In the time since then, Rampage has been tearing it up all over the UK, which included an 11 month reign as the Defiant World Champion. If he’s able to get a pin over the #1 contender to the Y Division Championship, you’d have to imagine he would then also have a claim to be challenging for the gold.

Triple Threat Match for the Discovery Women’s Championship Emily Hayden vs Martina (c) vs Ashley Vega

The most recent Discovery event was the second Disco Derby, a night that saw Martina crowned the new Women’s Champion when she won the 2019 Disco Derby Match. Even though she’s more commonly known as a comedy performer, that match showed that The Session Moth can be a serious wrestler as well as she outlasted the likes of Debbie Keitel, Raven Creed, and defending champion Sammii Jayne to become the second Discovery Women’s Champion in history. Her first defence will see her defend the gold against two of the other competitors in that match, Emily Hayden and Ashley Vega. Both of those ladies have been making their names known around the rest of the UK throughout this year, with Hayden recently being fired from the Fierce Females roster after losing to Sammie Jo in an I Do Match whereas Vega has been making her presence felt in top promotions such as Pro Wrestling: EVE. A win for either of the challengers here would be huge for them – they just need to find their way past the antics of Martina.

Fatal Four Way Match for the WrestleZone Tri-Counties Championship The Sam Barbour Experience vs Jason Reed (c) vs Alexander Dean vs Fraser Thomas

Another multi-man title match will feature one return and three debuts, as Jason Reed comes back down to Edinburgh to put the WrestleZone Tri-Counties Championship on the line against The Sam Barbour Experience, Alexander Dean, and Fraser Thomas. Ever since this one was announced, all four competitors have been quite vocal on social media, namely Reed and Dean. For those who have been following Jason Reed in the last year or so, then you’ll be aware of his intentions to make wrestling great again, something that will be achieved when he defends another promotion’s title inside a Discovery ring. It could result in a new champion making their way up to the Northern Hotel on August 17th, especially given who the three challengers are. All of them are in with a chance of snatching the title out of Jason’s grasp – if we’ve learned anything from Jason though, he’s got a plan in mind for this one, perhaps with a new member of The Reed Cabinet being unveiled in the Edinburgh Corn Exchange.

The Anti-Fun Police (Chief Deputy Dunne & Los Federales Santos Jr.) vs The Kings of Catch (Aspen Faith vs Lewis Girvan)

This is my ultimate dream match – The Anti-Fun Police vs The Kings of Catch. The hater of all things funahhh vs the masters of the Apter Burner. What’s not to love? Chief Deputy Dunne made his Discovery debut back in March at the Disco Derby in a match also involving BT Gunn, Kid Fite, and Aspen Faith. Ever since then, Dunne has ensured he won’t rest until he shuts down all the fun being had by The Kings of Catch, and is even bringing in everyone’s favourite man to back him up, Los Federales Santos Jr. While they may be one of the UK’s premier tag teams, there’s no team better in Discovery than The Kings of Catch. Since coming together in the company, Aspen and Lewis have had classic battles with the likes of The Kings of the North and the team of Chris Brookes and Omari, while Lewis also teamed with Damien in another excellent bout with CCK earlier this year after Aspen suffered a minor injury. We’ll never get to see a proper Kings vs CCK bout due to the recent retirement of Kid Lykos but in my eyes, this could be equally as good. Sure, it probably won’t be the most ‘wrestling’ type match of the night if that makes sense, but you’re in for a good laugh when these four collide. Sometimes, that’s all you need from a match.

Angel Hayze vs Sammii Jayne

Now that she’s back from some time off due to a recent surgery, Sammii Jayne is out for revenge against of her protégés, Angel Hayze. With Sammii defending her Discovery Women’s Championship in the 15 woman Disco Derby Match (technically 14 since Nina Samuels never officially entered), she ended up being just the second person dumped out of the ring at the hands of Angel. Even though Hayze would be the next person eliminated by Ashley Vega, she still holds that fact over Sammii’s head. She may not have won the match, but she’s essentially responsible for the culmination of Sammii Jayne’s 483 day championship reign. Angel is really coming on leaps and bounds this year, with regular appearances up and down the country. She’s made a new home in Discovery throughout 2019, and what better way to leave a lasting impression than with a victory over one of the UK’s very best?

Bullet Club (El Phantasmo & HIKULEO) vs The Nine9 (Dickie Divers & Jack Morris)

When El Phantasmo and HIKULEO were confirmed for this show, I’m not sure many people would’ve predicted their opponents to be The Nine9. Dickie Divers and Jack Morris united in Discovery back in March as surprise opponents for Chris Renfrew and Michael Chase but outside of Edinburgh, they’ve become well acquainted with the fans at both ICW and Reckless Intent Wrestling, even going so far as to earn themselves an ICW Tag Team Championships match with The Kings of Catch at Shug’s Hoose Party 6. This is undoubtedly their biggest match as a team so far, and possibly even of their entire careers (certainly in Morris’ case). They could boost their careers into the stratosphere with a win over Phantasmo and HIKULEO.

Kieran Kelly vs Theo Doros

A change to the previously announced bout will now see Kieran Kelly go up against former House of Saynt member Theo Doros, with his original opponent Josh Terry now unable to make the show. These two are no stranger to each other within a Discovery ring, having faced off a few months ago in an Elimination Match alongside Christopher Saynt and Grant McIvor (who substituted for Damien). That match would see Kelly come out on top but that’s not all we’ve seen from both men in Discovery during the first half of 2019 – they were both part of the second Disco Derby show in March, with Kieran answering Joe Hendry’s open challenge in an unsuccessful effort while Theo went to a no contest with Christopher Saynt in a brutal Unsanctioned Match. Although Kelly vs Terry would have been a tantalising contest, Kelly vs Doros has all the potential to be an equally-as-great contest.

Although he hasn’t got an opponent confirmed at the time of writing, Discovery have announced that The Munndertaker will be back in action at the Corn Exchange following his victory over Martina back in January. Who will dare step up to challenge The Dead Munn?

Tickets in the first two rows have sold out, but general admission tickets are still available, priced £15 for adults, £10 for children, and £40 for a family of four. Doors at the Corn Exchange open at 2:15pm, with the action kicking off at 3pm. Don’t forget that following the show, you can head to the Opium at 8pm for a special live edition of The Joe Hendry Show and How To Become A Pro Wrestler, featuring the usual lineup alongside Discovery co-owner Alan Smith and a select few Discovery roster members to be announced. Tickets to that are priced at £10, or just £6 if you have your ticket stub from this show.

Announced Matches Joe Hendry vs Rampage Brown Triple Threat Match for the Discovery Women’s Championship – Emily Hayden vs Martina (c) vs Ashley Vega Fatal Four Way Match for the WrestleZone Tri-Counties Championship – The Sam Barbour Experience vs Jason Reed (c) vs Alexander Dean vs Fraser Thomas The Anti-Fun Police (Chief Deputy Dunne & Los Federales Santos Jr.) vs The Kings of Catch (Aspen Faith & Lewis Girvan) Angel Hayze vs Sammii Jayne Bullet Club (El Phantasmo & HIKULEO) vs The Nine9 (Dickie Divers & Jack Morris) Kieran Kelly vs Theo Doros The Munndertaker also in action

Preview: Discovery Wrestling ‘Camp Discovery’ (13/07/19)

Preview: Discovery Wrestling ‘Camp Discovery’ (13/07/19)

Preview: Discovery Wrestling ‘Camp Discovery’ (13/07/19)

[dwtsfun]

Dancing with the Stars Season 24 Week 8: I Just Don’t Know Anymore

Here we are. Back for another week of DWTS. Another week of crap. Just a quick note. I’m so frustrated with this season more than any in the past. I hate that the judges (except Len) keep acting like Normani and Val can do no wrong. Meanwhile, they have been tearing the other couples down. We especially saw that tonight. Normani got lavish praise 7 out of 8 times. David and Rashad received unnecessarily harsh criticism for one of their two dances. I really don’t feel like Simone got any actual compliments and Bonner was outright ripped to shreds. It would be one thing if Normani was just far and away the best dancer left and everyone else sucked. But she’s not. Two of the couples are on her level and another is a respectable dancer as well. The only one that is not a good dancer is Bonner and even he didn’t deserve the trash that he was handed in terms of critiques tonight. Especially because he was headed home anyway. It just bothered me. And it clearly bothered both Bonner and Simone and rightfully so. The judges have no right to trash them like that. Now let’s get started.

Rashad and Emma- Jive (Score=36)- I thought this dance was really good. The energy was great and I loved his swag. His feet were nowhere near as bad as the judges tried to make it seem. He could have pointed his toes more, but they were acting like his feet have not improved over this entire season. I’m here to tell you that they have.

Normani and Val- Contempoaray (Score=40)- I called this score as soon as I knew that this was gonna be their style. Not because I knew it would be good. Because I know that the judges were gonna give her a perfect score for a contemporary, whether or not she deserved it. I don’t think this dance deserved it. It was like every other contemporary on this show that I hate. It was overwrought with emotion, flaily and not cohesive. The judges always love and fall for that and so do the viewers, so whatever.

Bonner and Sharna- Argentine Tango (Score=30)- This was a classic Bonner dance. Not terrible, but not good either. He was stiff and lacked performance and connection to Sharna. But he pushed through it and didn’t go off time. So that’s always a good thing. Len was extremely rude to him and to the audience. He has said that people overstayed their welcome in the past, and it has always been rude. But he’s never done it to this level. Yes, Bonner was not good, but guess what? The viewers wanted him there. And if he’s pissy that Nancy left, then he should be mad that they, themselves, didn’t do more to get the public to vote for Nancy over Bonner. The judges have a lot of influence over the audience and they could have done a better job of spreading the love around versus saving the majority of it for Normani and only giving the other couples tiny little morsels of praise (if they were even that lucky). Don’t blame us and don’t blame him. Blame yourselves for the stunts you’ve been pulling this season.

Simone and Sasha- Foxtrot (Score=36)- I actually thought maybe a 10 or two could have been given to these two for this dance. I thought this was a really good foxtrot. There was one small problem area where it looked like she slipped a little. But it wasn’t huge and could have easily been missed. CAI and Julianne were reaching with that whole connection and emotional and being authentic and not knowing who she is critique though. 1) Because she clearly showed us who she is and why she smiles and all of that during her Most Memorable Year. She smiles because her life could have easily gone a completely different way had her grandparents not stepped in and adopted her and her sister. And really, what other emotion is she gonna show for a run of the mill foxtrot? Please enlighten me. Is she supposed to be sexy for a One Direction song? Sad? Passionate? Why can’t she just smile and have a good time? So of course she was a little disgruntled here. The comments made no sense.

David and Lindsay- Waltz (Score=36)- This was by far, David’s best dance of the season. It was so simple and pure. And yet the simplicity of it was all that was needed to make it a beautiful dance. There were some questionable moments but otherwise, I really loved this dance. It was my favorite of round 1. Also, the shots that Len and CAI took at Rashad in his critiques were not necessary.

Trio Round (I don’t like the fact that the judges chose the trio members)

Rashad, Emma and Witney- Argentine Tango (Score=39)- What does this man have to do to get a 40? This dance was perfect and amazing. I loved the story and I loved his interaction with both Witney and Emma. The lifts were incredible. Honestly, this was the best dance of the season in my opinion. He didn’t even have any problems with his feet this time around. Of course Len thought otherwise for whatever reason.

Normani, Val and Alan- Jive (Score=39)- I actually sort of liked this dance. I think a lot that has do with the energy that Alan brought into it. It changed and Normani seemed like she was having a blast. Now, her feet were not good in this number. And the judges just conveniently looked over that. Meanwhile, they just got done ripping Rashad apart for his feet being a little less than perfect. Not only that, but there was a blatant lift CAI. Why did you not call it and mark her down? It was the same lift that she called them out for in their foxtrot a few weeks ago. If anything, this dance should have been a 36 at the most.

Bonner, Sharna and Britt- Jazz (Score=28)- Well this dance was awful. So to shield my eyes from Bonner’s terrible dancing, I decided to pay attention to Britt because she was killing it. Bonner was awkward, stiff and really hard to watch. But he did show personality. Now I wish he hadn’t been so creepy in his rehearsal package. I was so ready to super hate on the judges (and everyone else) for coming down so hard on him. But he did that, so I’m less inclined to defend him. At least in regards to this number. This does not give Bonner haters a pass to come into my inbox and trash him, fyi.

Simone, Sasha and Brittany- Paso Doble (Score=36)- Simone was doubly screwed for this dance. She was the only celeb to get a pro that was the same gender as her. That makes things all the more difficult for her. She also had the paso which is more of a dance to showcase the man anyway. I thought the dance was fine, but I could tell that she got in her head and was trying to stop herself from smiling. She ended up looking really unsure of herself and just doubting herself throughout the dance. It was clear that Simone was frustrated after that dance though. And CAI’s comments seemed to really piss her off. How is someone “too on beat”? What does that even mean? And then asking her why she wasn’t smiling or whatever was just a way to get a reaction out of her. And I mean she gave them the best answer she could have and a line that I may use. “Smiling doesn’t win you gold medals” was the perfect way to shut CAI down and stop her from talking anymore. I just hope this wasn’t the kiss of death for Simone. The main demo that watches this show, hate it when women (black women in particular) show that they are displeased in any way. And while Simone did exactly what she should have done, I’m not sure if it’s gonna work out for her next week. This is so frustrating.

David, Lindsay and Hayley- Paso Doble (Score=29)- I thought David did an okay job with this dance. He didn’t really get off time or anything. His technique was just horrid. But that’s okay. It wasn’t 29 worthy (probably 30 or 31) but the judges had funky attitudes tonight.

So in the last like 2 minutes of the show, Bonner and Sharna were eliminated. I would have liked for them to have a more pleasant departure, but at least he can relax and rest his body. That’s the biggest thing.

I don’t know what next week’s theme is and I don’t really care. All I know is that I will be livid if Simone is eliminated next week. I’m starting to see that this show has no problem sacrificing an Olympic gold medalist and the greatest gymnast of all time for a woman in a girl group. I love both of the women but it is so obvious that that’s what they’re doing at this point. And I feel like it might work. So yeah, let me know your thoughts and I will talk to you all soon.

[ask-the-phan-site]

Phan Cam: A. Nigma of the School

>A. Nigma High School. Even though we’re just standing in front of it, we can already feel the mysterious vibe coming off of it.

Spirit said he’ll be waiting for us in detention hall. Wherever that is.

Finding it won’t be easy. This school is different from the ones we’re normally used to. Plus, we have that to worry about.

>Yusuke was pointing at some strange looking people in white.

...

Are we going to be okay here?

Not to worry, I have this. Straight from the desk of Max Modell. A message to Principal Gerneral W. Barrage allowing us to come to the school to seek out students would like to transfer to Horizon High.

>We go inside the school. The weirdness was stronger than ever. Even though a lot of things looked a bit normal. We go inside the principal’s office. Even this Barrage guy was an odd character just by looking at him. He takes the message and exams it carefully.

... APPROVED!

For real!? You’d do this?

Barrage: I’ve met Modell from time to time and I’m willing to give his idea a chance!

Thank you. I’m sure Max will appreciate it. In fact, there’s a student here at this school we’d like to interview first. Lee Ping.

Barrage: Ping!? You’ll find him and his little hooligan friends in detention hall in the basement! ... Here’s a map.

>He hands us a map and we go well on our way. After a while, we found the detention hall in the basement. We came in and the first thing we noticed was...

Zzz...

Uh. Hello?

???: Don’t bother.

>We turned.

The guy’s pretty much gone at this point.

Really? How come?

Lee: ... It’s a long story. Right now, Chaz Monerainian is our bigger concern.

Oh! Ve’re finally going to do ze Phantom Zeiving!

Hold it, Holger. We don’t know if we’re going with them.

Actually, we don’t mind if you want to help us. From what I’ve heard, Biffy kun, you’re good with communications. I think you and Futaba might work together fine you would.

Futaba: She’s got a point.

Listen to the chiquita, Biffy. These guys are professionals.

What did you just call Haru?

>Camillio was a little intimidated by Makoto’s glare.

Lee: (quickly) Okay, let’s just check the school new. It should be on by now.

>Biffy takes out his laptop and accesses the school’s website.

Hello, A. Nigma High! I’m Chaz Monarainian.

And I’m Tina Kwee. We’re here to give you the latest at our school. First off-

Chaz: On to Chaz’s Corner!

Tina: I don’t know, Chaz. Isn’t it a little early to-

Chaz: Yeah, yeah, that’s nice, Tina. Anyway, on to our main story.

I can see what the request meant. This guy’s really of himself. He keeps cutting her off.

Chaz: We just received word that eight representatives of Horizon High School (nine if you count their cat) have come here to scout for anyone who is interested in joining their school. I know I might like to try.

Tina: (groaning) Do you even know anything about science?

Chaz: I have a cousin in New York who went to Osborn Academy. How hard could it be?

>Tina just facepalms herself.

Makoto: I feel sorry for her.

Biffy: Did he say you have a cat?

Finally! I thought you guys forgot about me.

Biffy: (gasping with starry eyes) You do have a kitty!

Ren: This is Morgana. And I take you like cats.

Mew!

Biffy: Looks like Mrs. Rumplekittykat likes him... Does Mogana have a mate yet?

Hell no! I already have eyes for Lady Ann.

He says he’s not interested.

Lee: He’s right. Besides, didn’t she already have kittens?

Biffy: You never know.

>Just then, the door slams open and two people come in. One of which is very furious.

Camillio: Vaya, chica. Sabemos que estás molesto.

Tina: Upset doesn’t even cover it! I can’t believe Chaz blew me off like that again!

Better calm your girlfriend, Lee, before she tears the place up.

Lee: Right... By the way, how... On second thought, never mind, it’s you after all. Of course you knew we would be here.

Serpent: Well, it is your place here at school even though you don’t have detention anymore.

Lee: Gotta find someplace we can meet without Barrage or the Cleaners listening in. And we all know Sleeping Ugly over there won’t say anything.

>He was pointing at the sleeping teacher.

Serpent: Be nice to the man. We don’t know if he’ll ever wake up again.

Tina: Alright, we made you Phantom Thieves famous for helping the school with Horizon High, you better return the favor.

Relax, lady. We can do this.

Makoto: We already checked the Nav with Chaz Monerainian. He has a Palace here at this school. Now we just need to know what he sees this school as.

Camillio: The Nav? Oh, that’s what Lee talked about.

Akechi: Yes. To take us to the Metaverse, we need to give the Metaverse Navigator who are target is, a place that the target hold significance to, and what the target sees the place as.

Ryuji: We have the who and the where. Now we need the what.

Tina: If that’s it, I guess we can help with that.

Biffy: My first guest would be a TV station since everyone in his family are pretty much reporters.

Ren: Let’s try it.

>I enter what Biffy said into the Nav.

Nav: Conditions have not been met.

Tina: I guess that would be a bit too obvious.

Futaba: It’s got to be someplace that fits his ego. Maybe a temple.

Nav: Conditions have not been met.

Camillio: How about a circus since media is kind of like that.

Nav: Conditions have not been met.

Holger: How about a zearter?

Ryuji: Zearter?

Serpent: I do believe he means theater.

Lee: Chaz is also a member of the drama club and plays the lead often.

Nav: Condition have not been met.

This is going to be tougher than I thought.

Serpent: If you like, I do have resources that could help us determine what his Palace is.

Makoto: At this point, we’re out of options. I guess.

Serpent: Good... Because I already did it.

>He takes out his phone. It was a recording of Chaz in his home talking to himself in the mirror.

Chaz: Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?

Are you serious?

Chaz: I am so well loved in that school. It’s almost like being in a fairy tale. Now if only that Tina Kwee wouldn’t be such a hater.

Serpent: Shall we try? It sound like fairy tale is just a good an answer.

>We all agreed and Serpent enters the keyword.

Nav: Results found.

Lee: Do I even want to know why you have cameras there?

Serpent: (annoying laugh) Not really.

Ryuji: So, let’s get going in.

Holger: Oh, can ve go in, too?

Tina: That’s right. I’m a bit curious about this Metaverse. Don’t worry, I won’t talk about it on the news.

Ann: Are you sure? It’s nothing like you’ve ever seen.

Lee: We’ve fought an evil cult, clones, weird robots, monsters, and of course, a cybernetic principal. I think that about this time, there’s nothing left to scare us.

Tina: Except that classes are about to start.

Lee: Oh, right. It’ll wait after school.

Ren: Good. We’ll be waiting. In the meantime, we’ve got some students to interview.

>After almost a whole day, school was over for the day. We were waiting in front of the school.

Ren: Okay, what have we got.

Ann: Let’s see. Two older guys called the 15th Graders seem to be interested. They have a lot of experience in shop class. A couple of Skaters also seem interested. There’s also the Dudes of Darkness, the Tree Huggers, an Outcast named Deuce Markowitz, the entire Genius Club, and even a Glamazon who wishes to remain anonymous.

If it’s Kimmie McAdams, she’s definitely not in.

Ryuji: Yeah, I heard she’s a total bitch... Maybe we should go after her after this.

Morgana: We’ll have to discuss it later. Here come the Detentionaires.

>The others came.

Okay! Ve’re ready!

What the!? Why are you in that!?

Lee: Because... He’s Holger. It’s what he does.

So he’s the positive type. That’s good.

Holger: Yes. And yet, not many people in school vant to hang out with Holger.

So is everyone ready?

Everyone: Ready!

Ren: Then let’s go.

Nav: Beginning navigation.

>A red wave passes us and the school was replaced by a fairy tail forest that has more of a sinister feeling to it.

(Insert song: You in Wonderland)

Tina: (a bit amazed) Wow.

(laughing a bit) Looks like you weren’t kidding about not being surprised.

Biffy: But I am amazed that you can talk... RKK, can you talk here too?

Rumplekittykat: Mew!

Biffy: (disappointed) I guess not.

Well, there aren’t many like Mona. That’s for sure.

Tina: So this is the world in Chaz’s heart. He thinks this school is some kind of fairyland where he’s king.

Then we’ll just have to dethrone him.

It’s not the first time we took down a king and I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last.

Let’s take a look around.

Spirit: (will be called that while we’re in the Metaverse) Right. Everyone, stay close together... You especially stay close to me, Tina.

Tina: I’m not sure whether I should be flattered that you want to protect me or insulted that you think I can’t defend myself... But I guess I can stay close just in case.

>We venture into the Palace. It really does look like something out of a fairy tale.

Oracle: It looks like I’m picking something up. Look over there.

>We happen across what looks like a wanted poster on a sign.

WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE: Tina Kwee

Crime: For going up against our most glorious king.

Tina: (really angry) That jerk!

Hold on. It looks like there’s something under here.

>I lift the poster and see something carved on the sign.

Joker: Fox, can I borrow some paper and pencil?

Here. What is it?

Joker: We’ll see.

>I place the paper on the sign and begin rubbing the tip of the pencil on it. Then, an image appeared on it.

It looks like this sign is a map.

It is! Well done, Joker.

Camillio: Okay, homes. Can we get out of here? I get the feeling that-

>Suddenly, an arrow is shot. Luckily, it missed Camillio by an inch. It was shot by a Shadow that looked like Robin Hood.

Shadow: Stand and deliver, knaves! For our glorious King Chaz!

Crow: I’ve never known a Robin Hood who would say that.

Shadow: Never mind that. You have in your company, Public Enemy Number 1.

>He was pointing at Tina.

Tina: Over my dead body!

Shadow: So be it. The kind did say dead or alive.

Oracle: We already know this guy’s weak to Electricity and Curse attack. Joker, Skull, it’s your time.

Joker: Good. It’s been awhile since Arsene was out. Let’s see if he’s still got it. Persona!

Skull: Persona!

Queen: I’ll help as well. Persona!

Spirit: I’ll go, too. Persona!

>Spirit summons his Persona, Tokebi.

Oracle: Here come the buffs! Persona!

>Necronomicon boosts our stats. Archangel uses Psi on Spirit. He dodges it. Arsene uses Eiga. It knocks him down.

Joker: Let’s do this!

>After the attack, Archangel is still up. Captain Kidd uses Zionga. It knocks Archangel down again. He don’t do an All-Out-Attack this time and Captain Kidd uses Assault Dive. Tokebi uses Dream Needle. It didn’t put him to Sleep this time. Johanna uses Flash Bomb. It made him Dizzy. Archangel comes back up. He tries to attack us with Vajra Blast. Luckily, because he was Dizzy, the attack wasn’t very strong. Arsene uses Giant Slice. It was strong because of the boost and that Archangel was Dizzy. Captain Kidd uses Assault Dive again. Then, Tokebi uses Zionga. It knocks him down.

Spirit: Alright, let’s pile on!

>After the attack, the Shadow was gone.

Spirit: Wasn’t that tough.

Tina: I can’t believe they would do this because of me.

Serpent: You can still back out of this if you wish.

Biffy: Heck no. We still want to help.

Holger: Lee of Ping is our friend. We want to go help him.

Crow: Alright. But when the heist execution happens, we ask that you stay behind. We need someone to keep an eye on Chaz and it might get much too dangerous.

Camillio: No hay problema, hombre. We’ll make sure everything’s fine.

Joker: Alight, then it’s settled. We’ll do this.

>We all agreed and leave the Palace for now.

>We’ll be back for the Treasure.

[elementalgypsyheart]

Something I really want to share with everyone about how two writers and their fics really affected me.

I really, and I mean really, love Sakurademonalchemist and Shadowblayze works they are my number one (and very close) two favorite fanfiction authors respectively. 

These two I find myself breaking my own rules for fics to read because I know, just know, I’m going to love there works. Examples? I don’t know the fandom they’re writing about? Fuck it I’m going to read the everlasting shit out of them even if I have to look up just about every other sentence about who or what the hell they’re talking about because it fucking worth it! I don’t read OC centric works because of how few good ones I find? Well Shadow came out with one and I know it going to be epic so you better believe I’m going to read it! I don’t do horror because I’m a wuss? Well Sakura have a horror centric fic so I guess it time for me to bring out my big girl pants because like hell I’m not going to read it!

I get such a fangirl rush when I learn they got into a new fandom that I’m already a big fan of and they plan to make fics in said fandom. Like I feel I died and went to heaven when Shadow started writing FF7 fics and Sakura started writing KHR ones. I keep certain fics of their on reserve that I never read for a day when I have nothing to read but want that whole new fic experience. I even have fics of their’s that I’m ALWAYS rereading. I think I read Sakura’s Golden Queen about 5 times already and Shadow’s Children of the Stars about 3 times. 

I feel like such a fangirl the few times I have message with them and gush so much about how nice and awesome and amazing they are and I always find myself wanting to go ‘ADOPT ME PLEASE!’/ ‘I AM UNWORTHY!’ every single time. Which seeing the only time I every felt like that was towards Grell from Black Butler it pretty wow.

Honestly they are my chicken Mcnuggets AU writers. They’re the only ones I would read such an AU if they would write it. They’re the one where I dream of a collab fic between. Where I feel so happy I could cry when they release a new chapter RIGHT on my birthday by pure chance. Whose writing could honestly turn my day around when I was having such a crappy day (which they so totally done before and I can’t thank them enough). I would stand and defend them with everything I have when someone slander them. I get so so so pissed when I hear they’re being harassed by haters and it make me want punch those people between the legs when they’re being dicks towards them.

These two honestly make me happy. Sakura my number 1 because not only was I reading her fic first but her fics helped me during a really rough time and were one of my brighter points in weeks at times. Shadow similarly I started reading when I was about to go into another rough patch (honestly I have many) and her fics too help me. These two people whom I never met or talk to much have had such an impact on me. Through their writings I learned new things. Thanks to Sakura I gain a love for genderbends, crossovers, and not to take canon as gospel while personality wise she taught me how to be vindictive but not cruel and how to not take everything too seriously and learn to laugh and crack jokes. Thanks to Shadow I gain a love for world building, in depth character analysis, and how to look from a different point of view while personality wise she make me see I’m not the only one who over analysis things, stress too much on details, and fall apart and always on the knife edge from having some kind of panic or anxiety attack and IT’S OKAY FOR ME TO BE LIKE THAT. That I’m NOT overdramatic or ridiculous for being that way but I need to learn to deal with it better.

And some people think fanfiction isn’t important or it doesn’t change lives because let me tell you it does and these two are proof of it.

[iris-sistibly]

Ariana, last na 'to promise! (Sa ngayon)

Explaining the “haters” side the YbraMihan way.

So I am once again here, lying in my bed typing on my iPad. Earlier I have been catching up with the fan pages of Encantadia, YbraMihan, and some really popular fanatics of the show. Then I got curious and decided to check the fan page of Ybriana supporters, now it’s not a surprise of how everyone’s fuming over last night’s episode, and I get that there are also people who are defending their chosen ship and Arra in general, but hey, before y’all tag the YA or AB or other fans who have been unimpressed with Arra and Ariana lately as haters or bashers, lemme just point out our side.

Enough with the intro’s and let’s get started:

1. She was given the chance and she blew it- As an YbraMihan fan myself, I was heartbroken over Amihan’s death and Kylie leaving the show, but when they introduced the whole sarkosi plot, I got interested, I know and I am fully aware that a lot of the YA fans refused to accept this plot because they want Kylie, I want Kylie, but in the end, majority if not all chose to give this story a chance, we gave Arra a chance, but from her very first appearance up to now, how are we going to support her character if her performance on a scale of 0 to 10 is a -10 to 0? How are we suppose to love her character if her performance is unconvincing? We want to sympathize with her, feel what she’s feeling, connect with her! Like have you guys been observing? She seems always confused and disconnected with her character and the rest of the cast members especially with Ru and Mikee? And why is she pulling that same old duck face? It’s annoying how she can’t even show the feel and the facial expression that is appropriate for that particular scene? And the way she said her lines, I was like girl, you’re talking to someone not oral reading, she seems to be memorizing her script and rehearsing than doing an actual scene. And how many weeks has it been? I let her first week pass because I said to myself that she will improve, oh dear, imagine the DISAPPOINTMENT! Her overthinking is not helping and is making things worse, she’s so stiff, she sounds monotonous, her facial expression doesn’t change, and her overall performance is just—no! Stop!

2. She would have redeemed the bad story line with good acting - I know, the cast members have absolutely NO control with the flow of the story. I know the writer should have written something that will really bring out the best in the character. But it’s not always the case, sometimes it’s the other way around, Arra could have saved Ariana’s character if she gave us an acceptable if not a really good performance, going back to number one, she had tons of chances, and she blew it—every.single.one of them.

3. Being a newbie is not an excuse- She joined starstruck and got accepted because she had potential, she has been in the industry for two years, and obviously Encantadia is not her first project. It’s her biggest project, it’s her break. Some people say she’s just starting, she lacks experience, blah, blah, blah. Well what about Sanya Lopez? Ruru Madrid—this guy who has been in showbiz for only THREE years? Kate Valdez? Oh my god that girl is so good! And wait for it—Mikee Quintos who’s LITERALLY ONLY STARTING. But these actors proved that just because you’re new in this business doesn’t mean you can’t keep up with the likes of Glaiza de Castro, John Arcilla, Eula Valdes and other senior artists! She said she attended acting workshops? Well where is it? We wanna see! We wanna see the fruit of her training in starstruck, and the acting workshops she claims she’s been into!

4. She’s letting Ruru do all the hard work- THIS is probably the reason why the entire YA community is angry. You’re a love team come on! Ruru’s working so hard to make this team up as loveable as the YbraMihan or the AleBarro love team yet Arra be like: earth to Ariana? Earth to Ariana? Girl where you at? I want to see a mutual attraction between Arra and Ruru’s characters, mutual unexplained feelings, but I don’t see that on both sides, it only works on Ruru but on Arra’s side? She looks like a pabebe fan girl who just met her superstar crush, that’s how I would describe it in the nicest kind of way. Arra’s doing her best? Well if she does how come the team up still isn’t working? Ruru is doing his best to make her comfortable on screen (judging from their scenes together) but Arra seems to be too…OVERWHELMED (yas! I found the right term!), like is that your first time doing a scene with a male actor? Ybriana doesn’t even have an intimate relationship yet and she’s already making everything awkward.awkward.awkward in a really bad way. Do y’all honestly think people are gonna buy this? Come on!

5. All these excuses are nonesense!- Seriously people I’m so getting fed up of these excuses that she’s a newbie, she’s a sarkosi, and she has no recollection of her past which is why she acts the way she does—ENOUGH ALREADY OKAY? I’m sick and tired of hearing the same old things over and over again! It is heavily implied in the series that she has Ariana’s memories but has Amihan’s heart in it, duh, her heart recognizes Ybrahim and Lira! I’m not expecting her to be full Amihan mode right away, because hello? Character development and transition? Fine, but what about Ariana being all “motherly” to Lira? What about Ariana having this “concern” for Ybrahim? Isn’t it Amihan-like? Ariana is supposed to be having this very vague connection between her, Ybrahim and Lira but the way Arra puts it is not how the way it should be, and the only thing that saves her face in the show I repeat, is the Amihan flashbacks. She should be thankful for that.

Overall, her performance is just crap. The way she registers in the camera is like telling people she doesn’t want to be here, and that she’s forced to do this which I am pretty sure it’s the opposite. If this is already her best, then oh gosh, you’re in big trouble girl. If you want to give your best then step out of your comfort zone and give us some rave-worthy acting, if you want people to believe you then you must believe in yourself as well, if you want people to love Ariana then reflect, contemplate, understand her character and merge with her and please stop posting quotes about haters and all to gain sympathy on social media, because drama is for television, it ain’t gonna work in real life, that’s the harsh reality, there will always be people who’s gonna tell you that she or he have no time for drama, and not all people have really long patience, if you want to stay until the finale then bring out your game face and step up! Time is ticking and you’re running out of it.