#some stuff here is passable ! to my standards at least

[xiewho]

a bunch of bad kids wips/art that i never posted cause i didnt like how they turned out or i was too lazy under the cut :p yes i will be elaborating on each of them because im a chronic overexplainer

i was doing a bad kids clotheswap classswap thing idk its inconsistent i just wanted to swap their clothes okay TT i didnt finish this cause i didnt like how the last 3 turned out HAHAHA i do like this kristen though !! exposing my process rn hands and shoes are the Last thing i do cause they cause me psychic damage

gorgugs cause i still cannot figure out for the life of me how to draw him but people say they like my gorgugs so i may not know what it is im doing right but im doing something !!

yeah i just straight up didnt like how this one turned out LOL i was just doing a study kind of not really idk i just dont like the hair. idk man maybe the whole vibe's just off

there was a "draw this as ur fav duo" thing going on on twt like a month ago so i. yeah. cig figs <3 idk what happened here i think i couldnt figure out how 2 do gorgug's face so i gave up LMAOO i do like the suit rendering though idk i kinda ate

was supposed to be 4 the latest ep but i didnt like the vibe like i think i fucked up at some point and the energy was not correct. i was also extremely sleepy when i drew this so idk whats going on here,, i will draw something but probably another scene or smth

[benis-chillin]

Thoughts and theories on Sonic Prime

So, Sonic Prime has ended, good fellers, and since it's a Sonic thing, I shall simply say…

My feelings are mixed.

So, let's start off with just saying that the animation and voice acting? All good. If the English game cast blew up in a mysterious gas leak, these guys would make for fine replacements. The fight scenes are fluid, though do get a bit repetitive in the final few episodes(cause I think they were running low on budget), and everyone moves better than they have in the games…Maybe ever? Music is passable, but outside of the main theme, it's fairly forgettable. I think they used some game music in those sprites scenes that suck ass, so I don't see why they couldn't use a tune or two. At least use "All Hail Shadow" once, dude.

However, I feel that the writing and premise lets it all down. The premise feels like it would be better for a game or IDW arc instead of the rare animated series, especially since this show doesn't establish what Sonic's world is SUPPOSED to be like for new audiences. Sure, the games are at a decent level of popularity recently, and the movies have boosted the brand considerably in the public consciousness, but at least one episode before we start hopping around the multiverse would've made the stakes feel a bit tighter. Just because this is the game world doesn't mean you can skip basic shit like that. A status quo needs to be established for it to be shaken up.

And yes, I did say this is the game world. Prime is, by standards I will explain in a bit, canon. Sonic fans have been arguing against this because of little details, like Green Hill being used interchangeably with Sonic's world(even though they never outright state that they're the same thing, leading me to believe this is simply a weird writing quirk), Sonic not noting other Metal Sonics exist when Chaos Sonic is introduced(even though he never says, "I have never seen a Metal Sonic before in my life!" Or anything like that), and Sonic having particularly shaky characterization(bad writing doesn't dictate canonicity, as otherwise the 2010's games wouldn't be canon either).

All of this is not good writing, to be sure, and Sega should've cracked down a bit harder on that stuff while making this show, but nothing here outright contradicts canon, if you know what a contradiction ACTUALLY is. It's an ongoing problem in the Sonic community that they don't know how to lore at all, and Prime is a good example of this. You don't have to like Prime, but if you count Colors or Lost World as canon, then you have no reason to not include Prime. Otherwise, you're just basing canon on what you do or don't like, which is an AWFUL approach to canonicity.

Personally, I slot it between Lost World and Forces for the moment, but this could change at a later date. Now, let's sit down and speculate on some things.

What are the Shatterspaces?

Long explanation short, I don’t believe the Shatterspaces to be a traditional multiverse setup. They aren’t variants of Sonic’s universe in the traditional sense, but rather partial worlds built on “fragments” of Sonic and company’s collective psyche, and this concept can explain a few things.

(Note: This is purely fan speculation, and not Objective Canon Zone. We’ve gotten past that point)

Let’s break down each Shatterspace.

New Yoke is a dimension entirely overrun by the Chaos Counsel. Nature has been weeded out, and people live by the “mercy” of the Eggmen.

However, this Space is the only one with any Eggman variants, and this is very deliberate, because New Yoke is Eggman’s dream made manifest by the Prism. Remember, his robot was holding it when Sonic shattered it, so it’s logical that at least SOME of that energy came into his control. Hey, if anyone besides Sonic could control it, it would probably be Eggman, right? And when they make a giant construct at the end of Season 2, it looks like regular Eggman, so maybe there’s something to that?

But of course, that begs the question: Why 5 Eggmen?

Well, 5 Shatterspaces.

New Yoke-Mr. Doctor Eggman

The most similar to mainline Eggman, it feels best that he represent this Shatterspace.

Boscage Maze-Dr. Deep

The more zen of the 5, who may have more of a connection to nature than the others. For the crime of possibly having touched grass, I give this Shatterspace to him. The closest to a nature side that Eggman has.

No Zone-Dr. Don’t

This one is a stretch, but bear with me.

This version of Eggman is still a youth, likely to have wanted adventure and freedom before reality set in and he chose instead to zone out to his video games and other electronic forms of entertainment as a substitute for the action he craved. Eggman’s a playful sort when he’s not trying to rule the world, so it’s JUST possible enough.

The Grim-Dr. Babble

(Where the hell did he get a doctorate as an infant?)

A Shatterspace fairly undeveloped, its potential not yet fully tapped, much like dear Babble himself. Also a representation of Eggman’s childishness, though perhaps it more links to his feelings of being neglected as a child, as hinted at in the Frontiers audio logs? Who knows?

Ghost Hill-Dr. Done-it.

A shadow of the past, barely hanging on, just waiting to die out so the new hotness can take over completely.

Also looks oddly like Eggman Nega? Idk.

However, these are merely reflections of what the Shatterspaces already represent, which are aspects of Sonic's Personality…Save for New Yoke and Ghost Hill. The former is mostly Eggman’s domain, and the latter is just what was left after the Shattering.

Also, I believe the Shattering to be an event localized to Green Hill, and not encompassing all of Sonic’s world, which would explain why they use the terms interchangeably. I can’t fully explain WHY I feel that way, just have a gut feeling this is how it works. My main basis for this is the flashback in New Yoke where Rouge and Knuckles are just in Green Hill when the Eggmen take over, suggesting that perhaps they were “localized” when the Shattering redistributed them.

Oh yeah, let’s explain that. It seems that Sonic’s friends, along with ALL of Green Hill’s residents, didn’t have much control over how they were split among the Shatterspaces, but aspects of them clearly adapted to the worlds they were placed in. For example, Rouge and Knuckles both took charge of the Resistance in New Yoke, which fits them well enough. Knuckles commanded the Resistance in Forces, and Rouge is literally a government spy in the main universe, after all.  Amy likely defended nature in this world, and paid the price for it when the Eggmen turned her into a cyborg. Tails seems to have withdrawn into himself completely, becoming Nine. This universe was made by a villain, so these versions are the darkest ones we could get. The bad ending.

Anyway, back to the other ones.

Boscage Maze represents Sonic’s love of nature, and is thus dominated by it. The people who live in this Space are thus devoted to their natural world, which adapts to be a primitive society led by more primitive urges driven by the need for survival. Rouge naturally leads again, and her more devious nature shines through as a part of her survival instincts, but she’s still doing better than her New Yoke version. Knuckles leans so far into his naivete from growing up on Angel Island alone that it gets remixed into paranoia, Big is Big, Tails seems to have still been isolated to the point of going somewhat feral, but is accepted nowadays by his peers(and has a knack for technology when he finds himself somewhere that it exists), and Amy vehemently defends nature to the point of absurdity. Much like how New Yoke is an example of technology being too dominant,  Boscage leans towards going too far in the other direction. The people don’t suffer as much, but they still DO suffer in the end if they don’t work together for a better tomorrow.

No Zone is Sonic’s love of adventure, and everyone in this space represents that. Tails is at his best, being very sociable and accepted by his peers with no hesitancies, clearly. Knuckles' desire for “me beauty” might be a memory of the Master Emerald, but I wouldn’t put too much money in that. Another theory is that it ties into his role as a treasure hunter, without any echidna honor to reel in any greed. This is overall the most positive Space here, tbh. 

The Grim is simple possibility. The future, what lies ahead for Sonic. He rarely looks to it, never plans it out, instead choosing to just live in the moment, but it’s always there waiting for him.

And yeah, that’s it. The only remaining question is where are these Shatterspaces now that the Prism is restored, and the main universe returned to normal? Well, Sonic gave the energy back that the Prism needed and it didn’t kill anyone, so it’s likely that they exist permanently now, stable outside of the main “multiverse.” Different from a dimension like Blaze’s, and the split timeline caused by Generations. But that’s just speculation. Who knows if these concepts will ever appear again?

Idk, could make for a good fanfic.

[artemisdesari-blog]

Readers, Readers Everywhere, And Barely A Comment Between Them.

Okay, so my title may be a little misleading in my case at this particular moment in time. My current long fic is doing incredibly well for comments by my standards. My standards being based on when I was writing for The Hobbit and I was lucky to get six comments a chapter. I'm getting somewhat more than that now I've jumped fandoms to Star Wars, but the number of comments per chapter has still dramatically dropped now that I'm on eighty-nine chapters compared to what I was getting when I was on only twelve chapters. That's alright, I expect that because people have limited abilities to keep up with reading fic, especially ridiculously long ones like mine has turned into. This particular rant is more for the benefit of others than myself. I'm being thoroughly spoilt right now, but it hasn't always been like that.

My current feast does, however, show me just how important comments are to writers, whether that's here, on AO3, or Wattpad, or even FFN (which I abandoned a few years ago because, frankly, it's dying a slow death and I can't face watching it, a topic for another time). There are many types of writer, from the ones who get an idea and just meander their way through it until they have a story, to the ones who get an idea and meticulously plan every detail, and everyone who falls on some spectrum of in between. There are the ones who focus on one story at a time, and the ones who pump out two or three or a dozen different ones a week. There are the people who write drabbles and one shots, the people who write short stories, the people who write long stories, and the people who are attempting to outdo the longest published stories written. Some post as they go, some have a buffer, some write the whole thing before they post. Some write because they have an idea and simply want to explore it, some want to fix canon, and some people are going through some stuff (or have been through it) and are using writing to help them deal.

All that to say, writers come in all shapes and sizes and motivations. They are all very different, but they are all the same in one area; if they are writing fanfiction they are not getting paid. And if they are getting paid then they're breaking several copyright laws and putting fanfiction at risk of a repeat of the Anne Rice incidents 20+ years ago. So don't pay for it, the rest of us don't want corporate lawyers up our arses.

For those of us who have been around for longer than tik tok and tumblr and even Facebook, we remember the early days of online fanfiction. We remember the purges on livejournal and FFN. We remember when fanfic was scattered about the Internet, never all in one place and sometimes only accessible if you jumped through loads of hoops to get passwords. The people just discovering it today have no idea how lucky you are. But even in those days we got comments. In fact, in those days they were more abundant. I know that sounds like rose tinted glasses, but a quick look through stories posted ten years ago on AO3 versus stories posted now shows a similar trend. The art of the comment is dying.

Now, before anyone shouts "you write for yourself" or "but you're not entitled to comments", I am aware of both. But guess what. If I'm writing for myself and myself alone, why should I bother sharing it?

Writing is hard. Going through it and editing and spellchecking and making sure the grammar is at least passable is hard work. A lot of us do this when we probably (definitely in my case) should be doing other things. I write for myself, yes, because I want to explore how the story will come out. I post because I enjoy sharing, but I enjoy sharing far less when the response I get is crickets. Shouting into the void is not enjoyable, it does not make the work of editing and all the rest seem worth it. Shouting into the void tears apart any enjoyment I might have derived from crafting a line of dialogue or putting together a scene.

I'm not entitled to comments. This I know. I know it all too well. But guess what? Readers aren't entitled to my hard work either. Comments are what keep us going. They are what feeds the muse when we're otherwise in a pit of writers block. They're what helps us work around an awkward plot point when a reader says "but I wonder what will happen when X discovers Y". Comments are what get us to think "I haven't posted this week, I need to get that chapter out", or if it was an absolute beast to write seeing that people enjoyed it makes it worthwhile. I will and have dropped stories that get no engagement, because shouting to the void damages my mental health. It makes my work and effort feel absolutely worthless and I refuse to do that to myself. I know I can see the hit counters increasing, but that could be someone who clicked accidentally, or didn't like the opening chapter and moved on. Comments are essential to keeping up my motivation and while I will never have the absolute audacity to demand a certain number of comments before I update, I will stop. Because my time is valuable to me and I won't spend it doing something that leaves me feeling terrible and worthless.

And I know, people have been known to link some of my stories in rec blogs (I've seen it done), I have a commenter who tells me they read it with their friends. I know other writers who have stumbled on their fic being discussed in fandom discords or on blogs or tik tok, or have been told that it's a subject in a group chat. But guess what? Unless we obsessively search everywhere on the Internet for even a hint that our work is being talked about, we never see that. We never hear about it. The one person who wants to hear you thoughts, who can provide the answers to your questions and the resolution to the plot point, is the person you've cut out of the discussion. It's the person who is looking at their inbox and email and becoming more and more demoralised because there's kudos, and the hit counter is going up, but no one is saying anything.

I know some people have been burned by picky writers in the past. I'm actually not one of the ones who cares. I will take a heart, I will take someone writing "kudos", I will take a sentence or a paragraph or a 4000 word essay (which would be longer than 90% of my chapters but the point stands). What I can't take, and the same goes for many writers, is silence. So please, I beg of you, for the sake of writers everywhere, resurrect the art of the comment.

Feed us, we're starving.

[pollywiltse]

John André, cut by himself while totally wasted. (Or I guess maybe cut by someone else who was even more of an amateur than he was?) There are other silhouettes of him floating around where he has more upper lip and less double chin - this one, from the Library Company of Philadelphia, for example, or the one on p 172 of the Ronald bio (which he credits to the New York Public Library). (Note that the labels on all those portraits must have been written after the fact because he was Captain André in 1778.)

Oh hey, Winterthur has a ton of silhouettes attributed to him (which frankly look pretty amateur - the LCP and Ronald silhouettes don't so much). (I mean, to people who actually know from silhouettes, I'm sure those also look totally amateur, but at least they're passable. In general his artwork is very clearly that of a talented amateur so there's some stuff where you're like, "that's really surprisingly good, actually" and then other stuff that's "....oof".

We don't talk about his poetry. 18th century poetry makes me start bleeding from various orifices so I am unqualified to talk about his poetry. (Ok, with the short poems my eyes just get a little bloodshot, but I don't go near "The Cow-Chase" because it would look like a murder scene.)

Also he seems to have had general satirical tendencies, not limited to making fun of the Americans. The Hatch bio has a page where he was sketching other British officers and it's all snub noses and stockings sagging around skinny calves - not really a catalog of male beauty here. (Somewhere, John André: "Look, not to be a prick, but if I wanted male beauty, I'd just get a mirror." Fair enough, Major. Fair enough.) There's also the sketch of what Flexner - who refers to it as Hogarthian, though I think Hogarth's satire tended toward morals and André was probably just amused - says is either a church or a court and Hatch says is a church (and which is in the Hatch bio) and the Quebec tavern scene, which I don't like. I think it's badly composed, though that might be because it's in pencil and I can never see what's going on in his pencil drawings because of the way everything has faded.)

Amusingly, it looks like Sue McKechnie may have included him in British Silhouette Artists and Their Work which is I think supposed to be the bible for silhouette artists. (And is nearly $200 on Amazon, but I should check Biblio because The Accomplished Lady was nearly $100 on Amazon but less than half that on Biblio, even including the exorbitant costs of shipping from the UK to the US and even including that I had to do expedited shipping because standard said it would take 21 to 84 days to arrive, presumably because they were taking the book on a leisurely walking tour of the Lake District before they sent it to the US and after all that it wasn't even that much cheaper than expedited.) Also sort of full circle because the reason I even know about the McKechnie book is because I was so taken by the silhouette in the Ronald bio and got interested in silhouettes in general.

[alixinwwonderland]

so the universe i started with this fic and this sequel seems to have more in store! part three, here we go! thanks @wonderlandleighleigh @bekindreblog for bouncing ideas with me and for some much-needed inspiration.

(this will probably end up on ao3 at some point, link to come!)

Since Alfie’s little sojourn into the future, Midge has been going into overdrive trying to fix everything that went wrong. And, yes, she even has a brand-new notebook to track as much of it as she can remember, how it all happened, and where she might be able to stop it in its tracks. Her notebooks haven’t let her down yet, so why should this be any different?

She makes a schedule to remind herself to spend a certain amount of time each day (or at least every other day) with each of the kids. It goes against everything in her nature not to turn that into a bit for her act, too, but if “Mrs. X at the Gaslight” could still come back to haunt her, then the last thing she needs is some greasy-haired dweeb recording her confessions of terrible motherhood just enough to have them pop up when Ethan and Esther are old enough to be permanently scarred by their mother joking about forcing herself to spend time with them. She’s not even forcing herself to spend time with them, just to schedule when that time is, but she suspects that’s not a distinction that will play well with audiences or with the kids. So, out of the act it goes, against Susie’s objections.

The family stuff, ironically enough, is easier than some of the professional. She’s still laboring away at Gordon’s show, and while it’s better than her first go-round, filled with unwanted flirting from the boss and constant opposition from coworkers, it’s still not what she wants to be doing. She knows, in the back of her mind, how future-her solved the “writers can’t be on the show” problem, but she’s not ready to take that leap or burn those bridges just yet. 

Besides, there’s a bigger problem at hand: namely, Susie having a rare lapse in street smarts and getting herself and Midge entangled with the mob. That, again, is not something that Midge wants to relive the way it was in Alfie’s version of the future, so she’s stuck with trash-can musicals once again. 

And now, she’s stuck in Chicago, doing a couple of sets at a club owned by a “friend” of Frank and Nicky’s, whose headliner pulled out at the last minute for reasons not clearly explained. It’s a weekend, and she’s got nothing to do on Saturday afternoon but explore a new city and try to figure out how to extract herself from this mess. Susie doesn’t seem to have seen as much in her vision as Midge did, or if she did, she’s keeping it secret even from Midge, and all she’ll say is that she’s “working on it.”

When she decides to indulge in a hearty sandwich for lunch, Midge picks a deli at random, knowing deep down that it’ll probably be disappointing by her standards, but hoping it will be at least passable. The bigger surprise is when the woman seated on the stool next to her turns her head and Midge realizes that she knows her, at the exact same time the other woman realizes the same thing.

“Hi,” Mei says.

“Hi,” Midge answers.

“What are you doing here?” Mei winces. “Sorry, that came out a lot ruder than I thought. I just meant—”

“Didn’t expect to see me here?” When Mei shrugs in agreement, Midge nods. “You and me both.”

Then Midge looks at Mei — really looks at her, and a thought occurs to her: a memory of a months-ago conversation with Frank and Nicky, and an allusion that Mei’s family is frightening enough to even scare off hardened mob goons.

It’s probably a bad idea. It’s almost certainly a bad idea. But, fight fire with fire, as they say, right?

“Hey,” Midge begins. “I know I have… absolutely no right to ask you this. Or ask you anything, really. But, honestly, I’m desperate.”

“I’m flattered,” Mei says dryly, and not for the first time, Midge gets the sense that, in some other life, she and Mei could have gotten along pretty well.

“My manager, she doesn’t usually get things wrong, but when she does, boy do things go wrong,” Midge continues. “Which circles back to your first question.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Exactly,” Midge says. She lowers her voice slightly, aware of the public space they’re in. “Couple of years ago, Susie made some … friends, let’s say. And now business is picking up and they’ve turned out to be less of friends and more of…”

“Ah. That kind of friend,” Mei says delicately. Midge presses her lips together tightly and nods.

“So here I am, in Chicago, using up the only free time I’ll have all month, doing sets for their friend’s club. I had to emcee a musical about municipal waste! There’s no end to it. They said they own us,” Midge hisses. “And now Joel’s sniffing around, and knowing him he’ll try to do something stupid out of some misplaced savior complex about me and the kids, and then—”

She stops and looks back at Mei.

“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to bring up—”

“It’s okay.” Mei shrugs it off. “I mean, you’re not wrong.”

“Look. I know we’re not friends, not in any definition of the word. But I may have heard … things. About the kinds of circles your family may or may not run in, and the kinds of people who are scared of them.” 

A faint grin appears on Mei’s lips. 

“And you were hoping, what, that I could call in the cavalry and save all of you from your own naivete and stupidity?” Mei asks, blunt as can be.

“Wow, they definitely haven’t gotten to the ‘bedside manner’ portion of med school, have they?” Midge cracks. 

“It’s overrated,” Mei parries back, and there’s that dry, dry humor again that makes Midge wish things had gone differently. “Okay,” she says, getting off her stool and putting a few bills by her plate to pay.

“Okay?” Midge echoes back, startled at the abrupt shift. Mei picks up her purse from the counter, then turns back to Midge.

“Your manager — Susie, you said?”

“Yeah. Susie Myerson.”

“Well. You tell Susie to keep an ear out. And if some guy shows up to deliver Chinese food but without the food, you tell her she should invite him in. Good luck with your shows, Midge.”

Mei is already almost out the door when Midge gets with the program enough to hurry after her, tossing her own money on the counter and nearly losing a shoe on the way out.

“Mei!” she calls out, hurrying after her on the sidewalk. Mei stops and turns around. When Midge reaches her, the only thing that falls out of her mouth is, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you do this for me? After everything that happened — with Joel, and with everything else — you’re just going to … help me? Without even asking for a favor or something in return?”

Mei’s eyes narrow.

“First of all, I don’t do that favor bullshit. My family might, but in case you haven’t noticed, I’m here by myself, on my own merit, no favors called in. Draw your own conclusions.”

“I’m sorry, I know you — I didn’t mean —”

“Second. You’re right that Joel is exactly the type of man who would puff himself up and try to fix things and get himself into trouble instead. And as … as badly as things ended, the image of how that could turn out isn’t one that I’m interested in seeing. And it’s not one that your kids deserve.”

Mei takes a deep breath and seems to relax a little as she looks squarely into Midge’s gaze.

“And third? I sort of owe you, anyway.”

“Me? What did I do?” Midge asks, trying to sort through her limited interactions with Mei to figure out when she’s ever done something to actually help instead of make things worse. Mei smiles, and it’s an actual smile, not a sarcastic or ironic one.

“That night, in the hospital, while we were waiting for news about Moishe, and you started in with all the questions about co-parenting and managing the kids’ schedules and me and Joel living together, and all of that.”

“I thought I scared you off with that. Joel thinks I scared you off with that,” Midge can’t help adding. Mei lets out a short huff of laughter at that.

“Of course he does. And I guess from his perspective, that’s what happened. But from mine, it’s that you showed me, clear as day, what that life would look like. What my life would have looked like, if I’d stayed and gone through with… with all the plans. I don’t know, it felt like—”

“A glimpse of a future you realized wasn’t for you?” Midge asks, a little wry. 

“Yeah. Yeah, exactly,” Mei says softly. Midge smiles.

“I know what you mean.” They’re quiet for a moment, until Mei shakes herself out of it.

“Remember. Susie. Chinese food. Don’t forget.”

“Got it. Thanks, Mei. And… good luck. I think you’re going to be a really, really great doctor.”

Mei grins.

“You bet your ass I am.”

Mei’s good to her word. A week later, Dinah ushers a skinny, bespectacled man in a suit into Susie’s office. Midge never finds out what, exactly, was in the briefcase he brought over, nor will Susie tell her what was said during her conversation with Frank and Nicky. 

“Better that you don’t know the details,” Susie says ominously.

Whatever blackmail is in there, though, it does the trick. Frank and Nicky will never be fully gone — that appears to be the cost of doing this kind of business, even if it makes Midge wary — but it’s much better than being “owned” by them. And that, Midge thinks, is good enough to make a start.

[jonriptide]

Writing schedule v2

So by previous writing schedule has been taking a bit long, I know that. Mostly it has been life happening and reduced amount of writing time this year, however, writer's block has been taken a toll as well.

For the first part, I can at least say that I have no intentions of abandoning writing at the moment. Though life is life you know. I'll try to keep a better pace than I have had this year, but in no way expect a chap every week. Busy dude.

For the second part, I have decided to restructure the way I schedule my writing. In the past I have written whatever I felt like, with some stories updated often (by my standards), while others were left in oblivion. That's the reason I changed to a fixed schedule, though braving through writer's block on a stuck story didn't help, especially when I could have made progress elsewhere instead of being stuck.

So, I've decided to make adjustments (an evolving process). Mostly, I'll try to keep my priority list, but whenever I am stuck I'll move to write the next story in my list and so on, while constantly getting back to the first story to see if I can get it unblocked. Here are the ground rules:

I am still not committing to any dates, as I am terribly slow, people still know that. The schedule is for fic writing order, not dates of publishing.

Still giving more priority to updating the fics that have stayed the longest without update, and to my Ron Weasley series.

I will still keep publishing new stories, because is fun and refreshing and already have stuff written about a bunch of them.

I have a very long schedule, I will put all of my active stories with progress so you can get an idea of how much work is pending on your favorite and how many stories I have to go through before I revisit it.

That being said, here it is:

Ron Weasley and the Chamber of Secrets. Chapter 6. (Sequoia Locklear). Haven't started writing this one yet.

Harry Potter and the Ships of War. Chapter 5. (The Ship that Must Not be Named). Solid first scene completed, but haven't started with the rest.

(New Story)... I have a few stories to get around

Rainbow Hermione. Chapter 2. (Sunshine) Haven't written a single word about chap2

Uncrushed. Chapter 5. (L'Esperto Turistico - Hermione's POV) I have 0 words written of this one, but it is going to be a riot to work on.

Back In Time: The Lightning Thief. Chapter 7 (Grover IV). Passable draft which I need to work on.

Broken Conscience. Chap 2 (Afterwards) I have like 10-20% of the chap done.

Harry Potter and the Founders' Scroll. Chapter 4. (The Fresh Appeal of Ancient Runes). I have literally 0 words written about this one. It might take a while

Harry Potter and the Unity Cup. Chapter 2 (The Unity Trials). I have zero words of this.

Harry Potter and the Halfblood Weasleys. Chapter 10 (The Woe's of Mr Malfoy). I have 0 words for this one, but know exactly where it's going.

The Marauders and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Chapter 3 (The Boy Who Lived - Lily's POV). I have an old draft to work for this one. Shouldn't take long to finish once I return to this story.

Potters, Weasleys and the Son of the Legend. Chapter 5 (Tidings of War - Ron's POV). Next chap is like 80% done. I still plan to get the previous ones checked by my beta.

Hermione is an Owl. Chapter 6 (Tarantallegra) 0% done.

Mighty Morphin' Potter Rangers. Chapter 3. (Lavender's POV). 0% done.

Harry Potter and the Gatekeeper's Book. Chapter 6. 0% done

(UPDATED IN 9/18/2024)

I'll update this when new progress is done.

[bmaxwell]

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

The modern XCOM games have always been near-misses for me. I like my tactical combat games, but the “elite military versus aliens” theme does nothing for me at all, and I find the XCOM brand of challenge more frustrating than delightful. When I heard that the longtime series lead Jake Solomon was making a new tactical game based on a Marvel property, I didn’t pay much mind. The news that the game would have card-based gameplay piqued my interest a little, though it seemed to have the opposite effect on most people. 

It was Solomon’s interview on Waypoint Radio* that convinced me to get the game. His passion for the source material - Marvel’s Midnight SONS, a superhero team that appeared mostly in a crossover capacity in the nineties - was infectious. He talked openly about the challenges of making a Marvel XCOM game, namely how having superheroes with a % chance to hit and miss doesn’t feel good. He wanted a fun way to bring some randomness to the combat that somehow felt in line with the superhero power fantasy. He’d also been playing a lot of Slay the Spire lately...

Fast forward to December of 2022, and I’m mulling over whether my top game of the year is Elden Ring, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, or Midnight Suns. It was pretty close. My hope was that the card-based tactical battles would be fun, and that the rest of it would be passable, or at least easily ignored. What I got was a game where, like Hades, the play switches between 2 experiences that I find equally engaging. And, like Hades, this often resulted in me sitting down to play for a little bit, then spending many hours with the game. 

You play as a hero created for this game called The Hunter. You are the offspring of Lilith, waking after a long coma, to deal with your dear old mom and the impending return of Cthon.*** You are living in a monastery with Lilith’s sister The Caretaker, and a ragtag team of superheroes called The Midnight Suns - consisting of Blaze, Nico, Magik, and Ghost Rider. You’ll eventually get mixed up with Spider-Man, Wolverine, Captain America, Dr Strange, the Hulk, and more. 

It didn’t take long for the abbey to feel like home to me. You’ll spend half of your time there, as you upgrade your cards, explore the grounds, and build social bonds with your superhero buddies. I did not expect to find this as engaging as I do. The writing is fun and fits the style I expect from a comic book series. After a mission I looked forward to swinging by the forge to see which upgrades Tony Stark had for me, training with Blade, and maybe attending a book club which may or may not be a way for Blade to try to get to know Captain Marvel better. Who could say?

When you’ve exhausted your activities in the abbey, you choose a mission, select a crew, and head out. You’re generally choosing 3-4 heroes to take along on a given mission, and the opportunity to find synergies between them was a constant joy for me. They each start with a small pool of cards that you can improve and expand upon, but the deckbuilding never gets overwhelming. There’s a lot of freedom and room for creative play here. Like 2022′s excellent Sparks of Hope, you can generally spend as much time as you like each round swapping between your characters until you are ready to pass the turn to your enemy. 

The combat missions feel like playgrounds. You’ll be leaping off of things onto bad guys, knocking them across the map into one another, slamming into streetlamps, and other stuff you’d expect from a comic book brawl. There are henchmen who die in a single hit, standard enemies that take a little more effort, and then tough bosses. The cardplay is a joy. You are building combos by taking out bunches of weaker henchmen, and making the occasional huge flashy attack, as well as everything between. Use the environment to your advantage, knock dudes into your allies for a combo, or smack them into an electric fence to stun them. These attacks always feel weighty and satisfying, and between choosing your team composition and building their decks there is a ton of room for customization. The pool of cards for each hero is small, so the deckbuilding element never takes center stage. 

I was always looking forward to the next thing. The next hero to be added to the team, the next new card to unlock or upgrade, the next mission, the next hangout session with a teammate. Lord help me, I even found the story engaging. I don’t generally care for superhero stuff, and videogame stories are pretty hit and miss for me. There I was though, tweaking the deck for Captain Marvel, debating whether to spend time hanging out with Nico or Wolverine,** and worrying about whether Scarlet Witch would be okay.

Before I knew it, the game had its hooks fully in me. For a few weeks, this game was constantly at the back of my mind. If I wasn’t playing it, it was rattling around some part of my brain. The game failed to meet sales expectations which isn’t surprising to me (card games usually don’t have huge mainstream appeal) but it’s still disappointing. I heard a lot of complaints about the writing too, which surprises me. Marvel’s Midnight Suns might just be one of those games that hits me just right but misses for most other people. I’ll put it on the shelf alongside Days Gone I guess. More cards for me. 

* Fuck capitalism. Go home.  **Nico is the right answer here.  ***Legally distinct from Cthulhu.

[danganronpasurvivoraskblog]

Hidey-Life

Tea, coffee and juice is all on the table everyone.

Hoo! Nice! Thanks Kuripa!

Did you remember to follow my instructions?

Sure did. Thanks by the way. I don’t brew coffee usually, so don’t expect it to be up to an incredible standard.

I expect it to at least be passable.

Dude, just promise me that you didn’t do the toilet stuff before you made the drinks?

I would have washed my hands or showered before then! But no, I’m gonna go do that now.

You sound eager. Can’t say I’ve ever heard someone sound so enthusiastic about cleaning out several people’s combined-

Ok, don’t make us all throw up breakfast!

No one said I was enthusiastic about it...But if a plumber can spend his life doing this kind of dirty work, then so can I.

Then I hope you know you don’t need to shoulder this responsibility on your own. You can always hand your chores onto us every now and then.

Thanks Boss. I am aware. But at the same time, I am basically freeloading off you guys. I don’t want to be dead weight.

Come on, you’re not dead weight, you never could be. You’ve helped us out plenty even before now.

Be that as it may, I’ve still gotta pull my weight even now. I’ll take care of it this time, ok?

Alright...

*Kuripa leaves the camper vehicle to go and clear out the refuse.

Ah, good morning Kuripa.

Ah, Bosswife-I-I mean, Mrs Naegi. Here you are. I thought you were still in bed.

Hehe. You can call me Bosswife if you want. I quite like the casual way that you address me.

Alright, well...there’s tea and coffee in the kitchen for you. O-Oh, and also here, I got something for you.

What’s this? A present?

A parcel that showed up earlier. I double checked it and it seems to be from Chihiro.

Thank you. Mind waiting a second just for me to confirm the contents?

Sure thing.

*Kuripa grabs a bucket and rubber gloves while Kyoko examines the parcel.

Hm. A coupon for a restaurant. Guess he wants to make sure we’re well fed.

He also left some kind of note. He said that this is basically a parting gift, since he’ll be deleting our general location from record.

Got it. Thank you for doing all of this Kuripa. I hardly usually find the time for these things, so I appreciate you making the effort.

Still, I am concerned you seem to be bending over backwards for all of us. We allowed you to come with us, but not to be our errand boy.

Um...isn’t that basically what I am to Boss though?

What I mean is there anything we can assist you with? Do you have any sorts of concerns you wish to get off your chest?

Me? No, I’m fine. Just happy being able to work for Boss, and the others too.

I don’t have some sort of bloodsworn obligation, or subject myself to a life of servitude or anything like that. I’ve just got a better life than I did before I met the guy, so I owe him.

If your current life is this frugal, I have to wonder what your previous experience was like.

You trying to pry?

So long as your not a suspect of a case, I’ve no reason to. I’m simply saying that I’m glad you feel comfortable with us. And whatever traumatic experiences you’ve been through are in the past now.

Oh...everything would be so easy were that true...

Sorry?

Nothing. Really, I appreciate the sentiment, but there’s nothing I really need outside of a home and a workplace.

You are still young, you know? You should still be enjoying life. You shouldn’t allow your past to overshadow that.

Of all people who could lecture me about not wasting my youth, it’s you? Seems kinda hypocritical.

You’ve got a point. But maybe I’m just saying you shouldn’t repeat my mistakes.

It is true that I’ve got my own personal vendetta against Zetsubou and Gyalusetsu, and...I don’t want to rest until I’ve collected both of their blood...

But this place that Boss and Mukuro gave to me is the only place I ever knew how to call home after I lost Kotoko. And now, even if it’s just for her sake after death, I’ve gotta try and keep it.

Bottom line is that I don’t feel like changing my ways, and I can’t promise I won’t cause trouble later down the line...but know that none of what I do is done out of spite for you, Boss, or any of the Future Foundation.

I see...I will keep that in mind.

???: Um...excuse me?

Huh?

Hm?

*As they have their conversation, a mysterious man suddenly approaches Kuripa and Kyoko.

???: Excuse me...are you perhaps Kyoko Naegi? Formerly Kyoko Kirigiri?

Why...?

...

*Kyoko and Kuripa are immediately put on guard.

???: Please! There’s no need to be so on edge. I’m not your enemy.

*The stranger pulls something out of his pocket and shows it to them. A familiar looking badge.

A badge? You’re...Kisaragi Foundation?

Kisaragi: Yes, I’m part of a foreign offshoot of the Kisaragi Foundation in Japan. I tracked you down and came to find you under orders of Tsurugi Kinjo himself.

The hell does your boss want with us? Why don’t you go back to him and tell him to fuck off and mind his own business?

Kuripa!

Kisaragi: Mr Kinjo was merely concerned for you, and wanted to make sure you were still alright. Don’t worry, we don’t plan on stalking you or keeping you on a leash. At most, we’ll come to periodically check on you.

And like I already said, he can fuck off...! We’re Future Foundation, not his lapdogs.

I wouldn’t put it as crudely as my associate here, I do agree with the basic argument. If Mr Kinjo continues to monitor us, that will just draw more attention to us. We would like to avoid it if possible.

Kisaragi: Yes, but Mr Fujisaki officially gained Mr Kinjo’s cooperation, so temporarily, the Future and Kisaragi Foundation’s are combining into one and sharing each other’s facilities, providing each other troops, etcetera. Mr Kinjo would like to be well informed of your current status.

If you can deliver a message back to Mr Kinjo, then please tell him to relinquish his need for regular checks. We could frankly do without them.

Kisaragi: Very well ma’am. I’ll do just that. I’ll leave you to enjoy your morning, but just one more thing before I do.

Make it quick.

Kuripa!

Sorry...!

Kisaragi: Lately, our precinct has been doing some hired work for a very large financial conglomerate. They seem to have been targeted lately by a band of miscreants whom they’ve been unable to catch.

Miscreants?

Kisaragi: Unfortunately that’s all I know of the situation, but from what we can gleam, they appear to have several offenses against this corporation, Fang Inc. in particular. There are multiple cases of property damage, theft and otherwise on their backs. I’m not hiring you for a case or anything, but I’m just asking a favor. Keep an eye out, and if you see anything, please let us know.

*He turns to leave.

Kisaragi: I think I’ve wasted enough of your time. Have a good day.

*Kuripa and Kyoko watch him leave.

Well, THAT was something...

Great...Now we’ve got a heist squad? Why is it we can’t go anywhere without something cropping up?

Let’s just hope we don’t end up running into any trouble...

[arecomicsevengood]

TOP TEN OLDER MAINSTREAM COMICS I READ THIS YEAR

I kept track of all the comics I read this year, and not all of them were new. I have no idea who this will help or benefit but at least the circumstances of me only listing the completely arbitrary older work I read for the first time this year will deter anyone from arguing with me. However, for the sake of possibly being contentious, let me mention two comics that fall outside the top ten, because they’re bad:

Trencher by Keith Giffen. David King did a comic strip about Keith Giffen’s art style on this book in issue 2 of But Is It... Comic Aht that everybody loved, and made me be like, ok, I’ll check it out. But it’s basically just a retread of Lobo in terms of its tone and approach, but without Simon Bisley. I don’t really know why anyone wouldn’t think Bisley is the better cartoonist. Also, those comics are terrible. Thumbs down.

The Green Lantern by Grant Morrison, Liam Sharp, and Steve Oliff. I bought the first year of these comics for a dollar each off a dude doing a sidewalk sale. Found them sort of incoherent? I haven’t liked a new Grant Morrison comic in ages, with All-Star Superman being really the only outlier since like We3. This is clearly modeled off of European comics like Druillet or something, and would maybe benefit from being printed larger, I really dislike the modeled color too. But also it’s just aggressively fast-paced, with issues ending in ways that feel like cliffhangers but aren’t, and no real characters of interest.

As for the top ten list itself, for those who’ve looked at my Letterboxd page, slots 10-8 are approximately “3 stars,” 7-4 are 3 1/2 stars, slots 3 and 2 are 4 stars, with number one being a 4 1/2 star comic. The comics I’m listing on my “Best Of The Year” list that’ll run at the Comics Journal alongside a bunch of people are all 4 1/2 or 5 star comics. This is INSANELY NERDY and pedantic to note, and I eschew star ratings half the time anyway, because assignations of numeric value to art are absurd except within the specific framework of how strong a recommendation is, and on Letterboxd I feel like I’m speaking to a very small and self-selecting group of people whose tastes I generally know. (And I generally would not recommend joining Letterboxd to people!) But what I mean by all of this is just that there is a whole world of work I value more than this stuff, and I’ll recommend the truly outstanding shit to interested readers in good time.

10. Justice Society Of America by Len Strazewski and Mike Parobeck. Did some quarantine regressing and bought these comics, a few of which were some of the first comics I ever read, but I didn’t read the whole thing regularly as a kid. Parobeck’s a fun cartoonist, this stuff is readable. It’s faintly generic/baseline competent but there’s a cheap and readable quality to this stuff that modern comics lack. Interestingly, the letters column is made up of old people who remember the characters and feel like it’s marketed towards them, and since that wasn’t profitable, when the book was canceled, Parobeck went over to drawing The Batman Adventures, which was actively marketed towards kids. It’s funny that him and Ty Templeton were basically viewed as “normal” mainline DC Comics for a few years there and then became relegated to this specific subset of cartooning language, which everyone likes and thought was good but didn’t fit inside the corporate self-image, which has basically no aesthetic values.

9. The Shadow 18 & 19 by Andy Helfer and Kyle Baker. I’d been grabbing issues of this run of comics for years and am only now finishing it. Kyle Baker’s art is swell but Helfer writes a demanding script, these are slow reads that cause the eye to glaze over a bit.

8. The Jam 3-8 by Bernie Mireault. I made a post where I suggested Mireault’s The Jam might be one of the better Slave Labor comics. Probably not true but what I ended up getting are some colored reprints Tundra did, and some black and white issues published by Dark Horse after that. Mireault’s art style is kinda like Roger Langridge. After these, he did a crossover with Mike Allred’s Madman and then did a series of backups in those comics, it makes sense to group them together, along with Jay Stephens’ Atomic City Tales and Paul Grist’s Jack Staff, or Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, as this stream that runs parallel to Image Comics but is basically better, a little more readable, but still feeling closer to something commercial in intention as opposed to self-expression. Although it also IS self-expression, just the expression of a self that has internalized a lot of tropes and interests in superhero comics. If you have also read a lot of superhero comics, but also a lot of alternative comics, stuff like this basically reads like nothing. It’s comfort food on the same level of mashed potatoes: I love it when it’s well-done but there’s also a passable version that can be made when depressed and uninspired. But drawing like Roger Langridge is definitely not bad!

7. WildC.A.T.S by Alan Moore, Travis Charest, et al. I wrote a post about these comics a few months ago, but let me reiterate the salient points: There’s two collections, the first one is much better than the second, and the first is incredibly dumbed-down in its nineties Image Comics style but also feels like the best version of that possible, when Charest is doing art. Also, these collections are out of print now, a friend of mine pointed out maybe they can’t be reprinted because they involve characters owned by Todd McFarlane but Wildstorm is owned wholly by DC now.

6. Haywire by Michael Fleischer and Vince Giarrano. I made a post about this comic when I first read a few issues right around the time Michael Fleischer died a few years ago, but didn’t read all of it then. This feels way more deliberately structured than most action comics, with its limited cast and lack of ties to any broader universe, but it’s also dumb and sleazy and fast moving, and feels related to what were the popular movies of the day, splitting its influences evenly between erotic thrillers about yuppies and Stallone-starring action movies. The erotic thriller element is mostly just “a villain in bondage gear” which is sort of standard superhero comics bullshit but it’s also a little bit deeper than that. The first three issues, inked by Kyle Baker, look the best.

5. Dick Tracy by John Moore and Kyle Baker. These look even better! A little unclear which John Moore this is? There’s John Francis Moore, who worked with Howard Chaykin and was scripting TV around this time, but there’s another dude who was a cartoonist who did a miniseries for Piranha Press and then moved on to doing work for Disney on Darkwing Duck comics. Anyway, Kyle Baker colors these, they’re energetically cartooned, each issue is like 64 pages, with every page being close to a strip or scene in a movie. I’m impressed by them, and there’s a nice bulk that makes them a nice thing to keep a kid busy. (For the record, my favorite Kyle Baker solo comic is probably You Are Here.)

4. Chronos by John Francis Moore and Paul Guinan. I was moving on from DC comics by the late nineties, but Grant Morrison’s JLA was surely a positive influence on everyone, especially compared to the vibe there in the subsequent two decades. These are well-crafted. There’s a little stretch where it uses the whole “time-traveling protagonist” thing to do a run of issues which stand alone but fall in sequence too and it’s pretty smooth and smart. The art is strong enough to carry it, the sort of cartoony faces with detailed backgrounds it’s widely agreed works perfectly, but that you rarely see in mainstream comics. The coloring is done digitally, but not over-modeled enough to ruin it.

3. Martha Washington by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons. A few miniseries, all of which sort of get weaker as they go, but all in one book it doesn’t feel like it’s becoming trash as it goes or anything. When Miller dumbed down his storytelling in the nineties it really was because he thought it made for better comics, the tension between his interest in manga and Gibbons’ British-comics classicism feels productive. I do kind of feel like the early computer coloring ruins this a little bit.

2. Xombi by John Rozum and JJ Birch. Got a handful of these on paper, read scans of the rest. This is pretty solid stuff, not really transcendent ever, but feels well-crafted on a month-in, month-out level. I read a handful of other Milestone comics, and a lot of them suffered from being so beholden to deadlines that there are fill-in issues constantly. This is the rare one that had the same creators for the entirety of its run. There was a revival with Frazer Irving art a decade ago but I prefer JJ Birch’s black line art with Noelle Giddings’ watercolors seen here. They’re doing an early Vertigo style “weirdness” but with a fun and goofy sense of humor about itself. I haven’t read Clive Barker but this feels pretty influenced by that as well. (The Deathwish miniseries is of roughly comparable quality. I read scans of the rest of that after I made my little post and, yeah, it does actually feel very personal for a genre work, and the JH Williams art with painted color is great.)

1. Tom Strong by Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse, etc. I got bored reading these as a teen but getting them all for cheap and reading them in a go was a pretty satisfying experience. It’s partly a speed-run through Moore’s coverage of the concept of a comic book multiverse seen in his Supreme run, minus the riffing on Mort Weisinger Superman comics, instead adding in a running theme of rehabilitating antagonists whose goals are different but aren’t necessarily evil. It’s more than just Moore in an optimistic or nostalgic mode, it also feels like he’s explaining his leftist morality to an audience that has internalized conflicts being resolved by violence as the genre standard.

[yamisnuffles]

Dig Down

Part 9 of Too Much of a Good Thing

Hell comes to congratulate Crowley on the Spanish Inquisition. When Crowley's curiosity gets the better of him, he ends of shaken to the core.

Read on Ao3

-

“You, my friend, are a terrible model.”

Crowley arched an eyebrow at Leonardo. “What? How can anyone be a terrible model? All I have to do is sit about. Maybe you’re just a terrible artist.”

“Maybe so.” Leonardo laughed and set his sketch aside. “But I would hardly call what you do sitting.”

Crowley had one foot tucked underneath him and the other thrown over the arm of the chair. He was reasonably certain he hadn’t started in this position. He’d done his best to channel Aziraphale, back straight and hands folded neatly on his lap, when first Leonardo had started his drawing. He flung both of his legs out and used the momentum to stand. His floor length braid swung pendulously behind him.

“Can’t help it,” he said with an easy shrug. “Sitting around that long is unnatural.”

Leonardo gave him an appraising look. “What’s unnatural is the way you walk.”

Crowley stilled instantly. “What’s wrong with the way I walk?”

“I didn’t say it was wrong. Really, it’s quite pleasant to watch but it does make me long to see the muscle and bone beneath. There is certainly something intriguing going on there.”

Aziraphale had commented a few times on the way he walked. Then again, Aziraphale had also commented on his hands, his nose, his hair, his eye, his freckles, his knees, his teeth, and everything else about him. To hear it from another, he worried he didn’t look as convincingly human as he hoped. It made him conscious of every step to a degree that very nearly caused him to trip. He saved himself by leaning against the table where Leonardo’s sketch had been cast aside.

He plucked the red chalk drawing up between long, spindly, ostensibly human fingers and examined it with eyes he knew were not a color found amongst mortal men. The face was cleverly rendered but everything from the shoulders down was decidedly more gestural.

“Mind if I take this?”

Leonardo dismissed the image with a wave. “Go right ahead. I can hardly use it for anything, though perhaps you can repay me by sitting for a portrait. Your face makes for a good study, even if the rest of you refuses to behave. You’d make an interesting angel, I think.” When Crowley sputtered incoherently in response, Leonardo laughed again. “A piece I was commissioned for,” he explained. “Or, part of one, anyway. For now, I have other work to do and I’m sure you’re eager to get back to your angel.”

Crowley felt his cheeks burn. Rather than try for a reply he knew would only come out as a garbled mess, he carefully rolled up the drawing and bobbed his head in thanks. “Well, whenever you want to get that portrait done, you know where to find me,” he said as he hastily made his exit from the studio. He could only take so much embarrassment in one day and he was sure Aziraphale had stored some up for him back at their villa.

Once he was out of the busy streets of Milan, he snapped his fingers. A note appeared, tucked into the drawing. A gift from our mutual friend, it read, to help you anticipate my return home. A grin and another snap sent it ahead.  He could have gone with it but he enjoyed walking the Italian countryside. It put him in mind of breathless, startled confessions of love and kisses under the stars that added a spring to his step. He couldn’t bring himself to worry if that walk was passably human or not. He was all but skipping down the sun baked road when the smell of something putrid wafted through the summer air. He skidded to a halt just in time to avoid tripping over Hastur as he rose up through the hard packed dirt.

Crowley scowled. He should have miracled himself home and saved himself the trouble. He could very well still leave but if Hastur was bothering him, it was for a reason. It always was. It was also always something miserable that he didn’t want Aziraphale dragged into. He’d had a few hundred year’s peace after their initial meeting and, while Hastur hadn’t come around with any more job offers, he usually bore information. Wretched, gut wriggling stuff that Crowley was probably better off not knowing but could never seem to resist.

He had enough time to collect himself, to cross his arms and pretend at calm. Annoyance. He knew he could fight if he needed but he really preferred not to. Luckily it had been some time since a demon had forced him to it. Chances were today would be no different. All the same, he’d keep himself wound and ready, should it come to it.

Hastur emerged fully with a sneer already on his face. Crowley resisted the urge to push him right back down into the earth and instead asked, “What do you want? You’re sort of ruining my attempt to enjoy the fresh air.”

The corners of Hastur’s mouth widened slow and sloppily as the filth he reeked of until it formed a too wide smile. “Just came to congratulate you, Crowley. You’ve really outdone yourself this time.”

Crowley merely blinked. He couldn’t think of anything of note that he’d done in the past couple of centuries. Really, he’d been remarkably good, even by his own sometimes nebulous standards. He’d helped inspire a saint or two, been a patron of the arts, and had handed out the occasional blessing. Mostly he whiled away the time with Aziraphale, wherever they found themselves living as Aziraphale did jobs for Heaven. He’d even taken on a few of Aziraphale’s jobs, first as a way to let Aziraphale chase his own pursuits and then simply because he’d wanted to. Aside from helping a fellow angel skip work, he’d practically been a model angel.

“Hit your head on the way up from Hell, did you? I haven’t done anything.”

“Don’t be so modest. Weaponizing questions, really. Everyone Downstairs is impressed with this one. I’m almost jealous.”

Crowley felt a prickling down his spine. Something about this put his teeth on edge. Other than the obvious, that it was Hastur speaking to him, he didn’t know what it was about this that made him so uneasy. He wanted urgently to be home with Aziraphale. It wasn’t just the usual desire to be with his husband but something deeper than his bones. Deep as his very essence. This was the sort of warning urge that had sent him deep into the stars, once upon a time, a warning that things would shift irreparably if he did not act.

He shook the stiffness from his limbs. No need to be tense. No need to run. It was just Hastur and whatever he was babbling about. He hadn’t done anything- he really hadn’t- and nothing the demon said would change that. He took a step to walk around the demon. “If you’re done…”

Hastur angled himself to stop Crowley. He would have grabbed him if Crowley hadn’t already been on the defensive and ready to slip away. “Tell me how you did it? How’d you talk the humans into this Inquisition in Spain?”

- - - -

Crowley wasn’t sure what day it was. He wasn’t sure where he was but the near empty bottle in his hand implied a tavern or something of the sort. Usually drinks were poured into cups, though, so there was a chance he’d grabbed a bottle and taken it somewhere. That, or someone had let him simply drink from the bottle. Either way, probably not any sort of fine establishment. He wasn’t sure if he felt good or bad, either, but that was by design— don’t feel anything, don’t think. Seemed to be working fantastically judging by the fact that he could neither see, sit, nor think straight.

“There you are.”

That voice was familiar. Made something warm settle into the sloshing sea of alcohol in his system. “Here I am,” he agreed.

“Perhaps you should stop drinking a moment and look at me.”

Crowley sank down to embrace the bottle. The glass was cool against the side of his face. It felt nice. “Nah. Think I’ll just stay like this,” he said. Or, tried to say, judging by the slurred garble that slipped out of his mouth. 

There was a long sigh. “Crowley.”

The bottle was carefully pried from his grip. He tried to resist, muttered a few choice curses, but was easily left slumped against his own folded arms. A gentle hand landed on his right elbow and when he turned to look at it, a face came into view. It took a moment for him to focus well enough to bring any of the features clarity but it could have stayed a bright, blessed blur and he would have known that face anywhere.

He picked up his head and beamed. “Ziraphale, s’good to see you.”

“I’m surprised you can see anything, judging by the state of you. Why don’t we get you home?”

Crowley shook his head. He abruptly stopped when the whole world seemed to shake with it. “Nope. Too drunk. Would probably discorpra- discapor- die if I tried a miracle.”

“Well then, why don’t you sober up?”

Aziraphale’s voice was low, sharp, and even. It was the sort of voice that in any other situation would have had Crowley worried but he’d done too good a job of getting rid of silly things like worries at least half a dozen bottles ago. Maybe more. He’d lost track after the first five or fifteen.

“Told you,” he said, resting his chin in the palm of one hand, “no miracles. B’sides, I don’t wanna.”

Aziraphale stared at him. “You don’t want to?”

“Nope.”

Crowley popped the ‘p’ and then repeated the sound until he fell into a fit of giggles.

“Then allow me—”

Everything was too murky for Crowley to remember why exactly the idea of sobering up sent his heart pounding and his stomach plummeting but he instantly snatched Aziraphale’s wrist to stop it from happening.

“No.”

“If you really feel so strongly about it, I won’t. Can you at least tell me why?”

Crowley opened his mouth. Closed it. Shook his head. Every time he reached toward the source of that feeling, something fractured and threatened to fall away completely.

He heard another long sigh. An arm wrapped around his back and another under his legs. Suddenly he was being carried. The lift into the air made him dizzy. He buried his face in Aziraphale’s chest. His shirt smelled nice. Like… flowers or something. Something pretty and nice. Like Aziraphale.

“You smell nice.”

“I’m glad,” Aziraphale replied flatly. “Do you have a room?”

“Dunno.”

“You don’t— where have you been staying all this time?”

“Dunno. Has it been a long time?”

Yet another sigh. Crowley felt like he should start taking count.

“It’s been over a week since I expected you back.” They started moving and Crowley had to squeeze his eyes shut to stop feeling dizzy. “Well then, if you don’t have a room and you won’t let me sober you up, what do you say to me bringing us both back home?”

Home. For much of his existence that had been a moving target with Aziraphale as a constant center. It didn’t need to be a physical place, the heart of it would always exist someplace beyond, but at the moment it was. More importantly, it was somewhere away from here. Whether he could articulate why he didn’t want to be here any longer, he knew how happy he was at the thought of leaving, particularly in Aziraphale’s arms.

Crowley hummed appreciatively and pressed in as close as he was able. There would always be a part of him that worried he would forget this form if he shifted back into his serpentine one but he missed the simplicity of it. He could never feel quite so much as a snake and he could instead rest easier, coiled around Aziraphale’s shoulders. Maybe he still would, when he sobered. He knew that Aziraphale would love him no matter his shape. It might not be better but it would be easier and, at the moment, that sounded very tempting.

There was a feeling of compression and then expansion as a miracle sent them both home. Instantly Crowley was inundated by the rich smell of oak from Aziraphale’s heavy wooden desk with a whiff on top of ink and parchment. He remembered the sound of wind rustling through the olive trees and the scratch of a quill as Aziraphale passed the nights writing while Crowley slept. Or tried to, anyhow. Oftentimes he would lay with one eye open and watch Aziraphale work by candlelight.

He thought of those nights as Aziraphale laid him on a bed that was far more comfortable than it had any right to be. Aziraphale took a seat on the edge of the mattress. Apparently neither of them was willing to break the silence that had fallen between them. Instead, Aziraphale quietly ran his fingers through Crowley’s hair. Or tried, as he got caught in hair that had managed to tangle despite being braided.

“When was the last time you brushed your hair?” Aziraphale asked as he drew his hand back to himself. “Or bathed? Or did anything to care for yourself?”

“You said I’ve been gone over a week? Then, uh, yeah. Probably something like that. S’not like we need to bathe or anything. Not like humans do.”

“You do if you’re going to soak yourself in alcohol and drunken humans.”

Crowley groaned and buried his face in a pillow. As it happened, an angel’s metabolism didn’t allow for passing out drunk, or that had been his experience over the last however many days of attempting to reach blissful oblivion. Maybe he could sleep, though. That might be alright.

He forgot why he’d been avoiding sleep until it overcame him. He’d gotten complacent since his marriage to Aziraphale. Even in the worst of times, life with his Principality had been a waking dream and the sleeping world had shaped itself accordingly. But the world wasn’t painted in only soft shades of cream and powdery blue, sometimes it was the harsh, steely grey of cruel human ingenuity or the slick scarlet shine of blood. The blood wouldn’t wash from his hands no matter how ferociously he scrubbed. It gathered under his nails, stained his skin, and blemished the band of gold around his finger.

Then there were the screams. They were never ending. If he pressed his palms tight as he could over his ears, they still rattled through his bones. He suspected he would continue hearing them even if he banished his ears altogether with a miracle. He just wanted them to stop. He screamed for them to stop. He begged and pleaded like he had for little else in his long existence. 

Silence returned with two words. “Wake up.”

Crowley’s eyes snapped open. He breathed in gulps through a raw and ragged throat. He looked impulsively at his hands but they were clean. The screams had been his own, the blood imagined, and yet he couldn’t seem to free himself of the sensation of either. He rubbed senselessly at his forearms until a pair of arms encircled him like a vice and forced him to stop.

“It’s alright, dearest. You’re alright.”

“It’s alright? I’m alright?” he repeated, each statement transforming into a question in the mouth of a non-believer.

“Yes. I’m here. You’re safe.”

This time there was no doubt. There never would be, not in Aziraphale. He relaxed into Aziraphale’s arms.  “Yes.”

“How about a bath?” A snap and the scent of lavender filled the suddenly humid air. “I’ll take care of it. All you’ll have to do is relax.”

Crowley let out a hollow puff of laughter. “Is that all?”

Aziraphale gripped him by the shoulders and sat him up so that they were face to face. There were tears obscuring his storm grey eyes. “Then you don’t need to do even that. Simply let me take care of you as best I can, alright?”

Crowley nodded when his throat tightened too much to make a reply. He loathed seeing Aziraphale cry.

Aziraphale helped him to his feet and out of his clothes. Each article of clothing was removed with more care than it deserved, stiff and smelling as it all did of a week’s worth of drinking in whatever establishment would have him. If he thought too closely on that he was liable to consider once more what had driven him to drink in the first place and, for Aziraphale’s sake, he was determined to at least try to relax.

He set his eyes on their bath. It was a lovely thing made of delicate white marble. Carved on the outside were scenes of angels dancing and drinking and generally having a lot more fun than real ones did. Bathing came and went in vogue with humans, but Aziraphale had developed a special fondness for it in Rome and so they’d kept a private bath wherever they settled since. Such, he supposed, was the luxury of not worrying whether the locals had plumbing anymore or not. One quick miracle and they had a full tub with steam that rolled in easy clouds off the surface.

“Come now,” Azirphale said as he took one of Crowley’s hands, “let’s see if this helps you any.”

Crowley let Aziraphale lead him to the bathtub and then climbed in without letting go of Aziraphale’s hand until he’d lowered himself most of the way down. Aziraphale carefully undid the braided hair that trailed after Crowley like a train. Once done, he gathered it up into a careful coil and deposited it in the water with Crowley. The water rose to the edge but didn’t spill over. It was just enough for Crowley and not a drop more.

Crowley let out a long, trembling breath as the hot water worked its wonders on him. He wasn’t quite as fond of bathing as Aziraphale but he did very much enjoy the act of being bathed. It was a bit like sleeping, without the danger of nightmares. Instead it was the very best sort of dream, shaped by the one he loved the most. Strong, calloused hands worked at the tense muscles in his shoulders and scented water poured over his head from a glittering copper vessel. The ritual of it was a comfort bordering on the sacred.

Aziraphale rubbed a small dab of scented oil on Crowley’s temples. “I got Leonardo’s sketch,” he said.

“I should hope so,” Crowley replied, “or I would have to worry my miracles are starting to go awry.”

Aziraphale nudged Crowley into a seated position so that he could better comb out water loosened tangles. “It was quite lovely. I do hope that you told him that and that you thanked him for his patience. I could tell you were as restless as ever at your sitting.”

“Er—” Had he thanked Leonardo? He couldn’t remember. “Oh! He asked me to come back for a proper portrait. Said I’d make a good angel.”

Aziraphale laughed softly. “At least someone thinks so.” The comb hit a snag and was replaced for a moment by careful fingers. “I don’t know how you managed this.”

“Dunno.”

“You do have a talent for finding trouble.”

When one segment was finished, Aziraphale moved to the next and the next in meticulous fashion. Crowley’s eyes fell closed as he sank into the comfortable rhythm of it. He felt like a bit of flotsam tossing gently in the waves without a care in the world. 

“I suppose this hair is what put Leonardo in mind of angels,” Aziraphale continued. “I don’t think you’ve had it this long since Eden.”

Crowley opened his eyes again as he pulled himself from his quiet reverie. “I mean, I was a snake for quite a while after that, so hair was sort of off the metaphorical table.”

“Indeed. But… it’s nice. I like it quite a bit when it’s this long. Of course you know how I love it no matter the length—” Crowley ignored the burn in his cheeks and Aziraphale continued to comb. “—but it’s nice to remember simpler times.”

“For the, what, handful of minutes we had them?”

“Even so.”

Simpler times. Crowley hardly remembered them. Yes, he’d forever recall his first sight of the delightfully soft Principality, high on the eastern wall of Eden, when he’d been nothing more than an out of place Seraph with perhaps a few too many questions on his lips. But any memory of that time was overshadowed by what came after. And then what came after that. And after that. And on and on and on despite all the good mixed in.

Crowley pulled his knees up and hugged them close. “Hey, so, uh, with my rude awakening earlier, I think I’ve sobered up enough to, er…” He ran his tongue over his teeth and pressed extra hard on his left incisor, which had always run a bit sharper. He didn’t want to talk about it but it was a dark and hungry secret that he worried would devour him from the inside out if he didn’t. “I remember everything, if you wanna hear about it.”

Aziraphale stilled for a moment and then continued combing Crowley’s hair. “Only if you want. You can take whatever time you need.”

“No, I should— I want to now. Maybe then I can start to forget without an ocean of alcohol to help me along.”

Crowley squeezed his eyes shut but when he did, he could see that faces of humans contorted beyond recognition by unfathomable pain. It was no wonder Hell was impressed. The humans were up here serving up the sort of punishments even demons might not have dreamed of. He looked instead at his hands beneath the surface of the water and reminded himself that they were not stained in blood. He tried to remind himself also that they were clean of any guilt in this, but he was less successful on that count.

“So,” he continued when Aziraphale didn’t make any response, “ran into Hastur on the way home.”

“What did that wretched demon do this time? If he’s the one that caused all this, I’ll… I’ll… well, let me think on it but it will be suitably ghastly, I assure you.”

“No, it’s not— he didn’t do anything. Well, guess he did but not like that. Not that I’m against the idea of you laying down some holy wrath on him, if you’re so inclined. But I’m—” Water splashed as he gestured broadly at himself. “Because, well, how much have you heard about the Spanish Inquisition?” He only waited half a heartbeat before charging on. “Hell thinks I cooked it up, since it’s all being done in Her name and with the whole, you know, inquisitive nature of it. Aziraphale, it’s awful.” He emptied his lungs into that word and still it didn’t seem to be enough. “Monstrous. Wretched. Abominable. Really, really… bad. I’d say hellish but apparently they hadn’t even thought up half the things these humans have. Got the impression they’re taking notes.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale’s voice sounded so small behind him. “Oh, Crowley. Why did you go look?”

“Had to, didn’t I? If everyone thinks I did it, I should at least know what I’m getting my name on.”

Aziraphale’s hands fell away from Crowley’s hair as he rushed around to the side of the bath. “But you didn’t have anything to do with it! You know you didn’t, my dear, so why torment yourself over what a pitiable bunch of damned creatures think?”

“Well, it’s not like they’re completely out of bounds thinking I’d gone and corrupted the humans again, are they?”

“It’s not— Crowley, how many times are we going to have to have this argument? You can’t take all of humanity’s sins on your shoulders.”

“I can try.”

“You certainly can and I know that you do, but I wish you wouldn’t. The humans will do whatever they will do, for good or ill. You know that. Not even the Almighty can stop that.”

“Why the blazes not?”

Aziraphale froze except for a sudden fluttering of his lashes. “What?”

“Why can’t She put a stop to this? They’re committing atrocities in Her name. She’s fucking well put a foot down in the past, drowning a whole load of people and—”

“Stop!” The walls of the villa shook at the command and for a moment Aziraphale seemed much larger. He shrank back down as he grabbed either side of Crowley’s face. “Stop, please. Not another word like that.”

Aziraphale crushed their lips together in a fierce kiss. He kept kissing until Crowley no longer had the mind or breath to argue further.

“Please,” Aziraphale said once more. “Not this. If there’s one thing in the entirety of existence you don’t question, let it be this. For me.”

Crowley could feel the drip of tears onto bath wet skin as their foreheads pressed together. He wanted for all the world to agree to that. Even being able to lie about it felt like it would be a weight off his shoulders. His life— their lives— would be so much easier if he could. If he could just trust in whatever damned plan there was, he might not have spent the last week drunk out of his mind.

He pulled back enough to look Aziraphale in the eyes and frowned at what he saw. “I made you cry again.” He bent forward and kissed the tear tracks off round, ruddy cheeks. “I’m sorry, angel. I won’t say anything like that again. Not to you.”

Aziraphale’s brows lowered over watery eyes. “Not to anyone.”

“Right. Not to anyone.” Crowley sank into the bath and deeper into himself with a hunch of his shoulders. “I promise I’ll try not to even think on it, not ever again. I just want to be with you and to be happy with that.”

Aziraphale laced their left hands together so that their rings pressed together. “You have me and you always will.”

[gascon-en-exil]

But What If You Want to Come Out on Vers Bottom?: A “Coming Out on Top” Review (Part 2)

Part 1

The main substance of Coming Out on Top - and around 80% of its wank material - lies in its main story love interests, so each of them deserves a dedicated section for review and...erotic evaluation, if you will. It would be much too cluttered to try to cover all six in one post however, so this one will only include the first three with Part 3 to follow with the remainder. Note that I’ll be doing these in alphabetical order, except for the sixth who was added in an update and whose route comes with some mechanical differences that warrant leaving him for last. I wouldn’t want to seem biased, would I? But I’ll be ranking them from most to least favorite at the end anyway.

Also, if anyone is wondering why most of my screenshots are from dialogue scenes rather than CGs, it’s because there are remarkably few CGs in this game that are both interesting enough to include in a review and tame enough for Tumblr’s censorship standards.

Alex: Mark Makes the Grade (With His Ass)

And how fitting it is that I get to start with Alex, fresh off over a year of involvement in the fandom of Fire Emblem: Three Houses and all its exaggerated pearl-clutching over that game’s teacher/student relationships. That’s exactly what Alex’s romance with Mark is, begun under more innocuous circumstances wherein Alex judges Mark’s alcohol preferences (the uncultured barbarian favors whiskey, and has nothing to say if you have Mark order a glass of presumably passable cabernet) but then progressing rapidly to hot for teacher territory once Mark discovers that Alex is his anatomy professor. As expected a handful of jokes - and one sex scene, kind of - hinge upon Alex’s field of expertise, but compared to the other routes of CooT this one is remarkably tame. It’s the only one in which it’s impossible to have sex with the love interest during the game and still get his ending, and the story requires the player to thread a fine line between expressing attraction to the man and respecting his professional boundaries. Alex is nothing if not ethical, almost to a fault, and the game also doesn’t allow you to lose sight of how strange his connection with Mark is...allegedly, anyway. I personally don’t see much issue with it, when Mark is of age (this isn’t even the largest age gap of the main love interests) and about to graduate. Eh, I’ll chalk it up to a cultural difference and move on.

The plot of the route also pivots around the potential scandal to be found in some hot one-on-one anatomy lessons, as Mark finds himself embroiled in the cutthroat world of tenured professorships and overworked postgraduate toadies moonlighting as paparazzi. I guess I lucked out in my much more reasonable graduate advisors, but I think I would have taken well to snooping around in men’s locker rooms looking for hot gay action/blackmail material. With all that going on it’s little wonder that there’s no real sex to be had on the full route, and that the one potential steamy encounter Mark can have with Alex in the professor’s office swiftly ends the romance then and there. I suppose it’s worth noting that Alex is also the only primary love interest who will never bottom for Mark in any encounter the player gets to see, so props if you’re looking for a total top. He’ll give head though, so that’s nice.

That said however, I can’t help but feel as though CooT wants to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to the teacher/student fucking. Amidst everyone being reasonable and ethical about the situation Mark can have a dream in which Alex fingers him and gives him a prostate orgasm as a live demonstration during a lecture - unquestionably hitting some of those teacher crush buttons even as it comes with the easy out of being a dream sequence. I’ve also seen reactions to this route labeling it as an example of the type of lover/beloved relationship found in ancient Greek pederasty, in that Alex is lowkey masc4masc and that he and Mark bond over the ancient and manly sport of, er, racquetball (I don’t know, just go with it). You also have to keep Mark’s grades up to get Alex’s full ending, which is both entirely logical - Mark is trying to date his professor after all, even if he doesn’t fully get there until the semester is over and he’s ready to walk the stage - and an extension of the idealized pederastic relationship as an educational one for the beloved younger man. If you’re into that kind of thing, Alex’s route is among the better options in this game to find it.

There’s also this obscure random line, which triggers an unusual extra CG added in an update that might be pet play? It’s honestly hard to tell - and I say that as someone who likes pet play. Something you may notice in my review is that, while the five romances included in the game on initial release are all fairly mundane, the writers clearly felt more free to get weird in the later additions. 

Brad: Frat Boys Gone Wild Parts 2, 5, and 7

Do you like beefy jocks, and huge dicks, and harsh but realistic indictments of the unequal attention lavished upon athletics departments at most American universities? One of these things is not like the others, but thankfully the route knows where to place most of its priorities. This is the story that puts Mark to work in his job as a writing tutor, tasking him with saving a hunky frat boy from failing his composition class and losing his scholarship in the process. Much unlike my own time as an undergraduate writing tutor however Mark is required to make house calls, setting him on a collision course for Brad’s burgeoning homosexuality and almost getting his ass kicked by the other equally hunky - but tragically straight - members of the frat. Brad is indeed the only one of Mark’s love interests who struggles to any degree with his sexuality, but it’s a muted part of this storyline and only really comes up in one scene involving Brad’s overbearing older brother. Despite some heavier moments here and there CooT is still a lighthearted dating sim at its core, so don’t expect too much in the way of angst even for a character who under more realistic circumstances would likely have to keep his inclinations on the DL.

Where there is plenty of intensity though is in those tutoring sessions, because, well -

- Mark ends up with a serious case of blue balls from all the UST and frequent teasing of Brad’s behemoth cock. Disclaimer: despite years of professional phallus measurements, this reviewer is unable to determine if Brad’s endowment is measurably more impressive than those of the other love interests based on his CGs alone; all pronouncements to this effect may thus be taken as the hyperbole of a horny size queen.

An even bigger source of tension in this route is the cheating angle: during their first meeting Brad will attempt to pressure Mark into writing his paper for him, remarking that American football players at universities get this kind of preferential treatment all the time and that their grades are basically irrelevant. Mark can actually take him up on this offer, and end up quite a bit richer for it via a little bribery (a nice perk if you’re angling for Ian’s friendship ending). Doing so will make it impossible to obtain Brad’s good ending but will instead lead to an alternate storyline with its own set of CGs, culminating in some saucily unethical fellatio as Mark proves to Brad that he can provide just as many perks as the rival female tutor who’s been capturing the jock’s attention with blowjobs and amateur porn. Incidentally, while it very quickly ends the route I like that Mark has a dialogue option to offer those exact services to Brad in front of the other tutor. It’s almost as funny as the earlier option about rimjobs that also ends the route but results in a dream CG of the straight frat guys having their way with Mark. That’s like wish fulfillment Inception, or something.

But no, to finish this route properly you have to keep both Mark and Brad honest, and convince Brad to write his own essay with Mark’s help...and provide genuinely good help, so I hope you know the basics of how to structure an academic essay just kidding you can save scum through that stuff. Many heartwarming life lessons are learned through all-nighters, ruminations on long-term career prospects, and mutual masturbation, until at last the two of them succeed and celebrate their victory with full penetration. How exactly you prefer the penetration to go down isn’t the most intuitive set of dialogue options in the world, but bear in mind that on initial release the only possibility was Brad splitting Mark open with that ginger club swinging between his legs. As I brought up in Alex’s section, the later additions usually get rather freakier. In this case that means an extended dream sequence with football role play (which is a thing that exists, I guess?) followed by some actual sex, with Brad bottoming in both scenes and much loving detail lavished upon his meaty ass. It’s...clever, I suppose, but I think I prefer the original version. Maybe that’s just because I always thought American football uniforms looked ridiculous; where’s the sex appeal to be found with those ridiculous shoulder pads?

Ian: Oh My God They Were Roommates

Even years later I still don’t know for certain whether including Ian so casually with the other love interests counts as a minor spoiler. He’s introduced alongside Penny as Mark’s longtime roommate, and in that first scene it’s also established that he has an on-again, off-again girlfriend. I’m going to err on the side of it not being a spoiler however, because well before his route proper begins the game drops hints that there might be more to Ian than a goofy slacker best friend with appalling personal hygiene. His route progresses as might reasonably be expected from Mark’s coming out, with Ian as the fantasy gay-friendly straight guy who turns out to be not quite as straight as initially advertised. 

There’s just one very large problem with that and it’s not the size of his dick. Because Ian is first and foremost Mark’s roommate he has the privilege of appearing as a supporting character in routes other than his own, and in fact there are CGs featuring him in some of those routes. This results in Ian receiving the most overall development of any of the love interests, ranging from the oddball humor that he injects into situations all over the story to his raging and, er, adventurous libido leading to all manner of masturbatory mishaps for Mark to, most jarringly, poorly-disguised jealousy over the other love interests should Mark choose to pursue them. One would expect this to result in a fantastically fleshed-out character and an excellent foundation for a route of his own that builds off Ian’s simple charm and manic energy to craft an excellent best friend romance.

Yet...it kind of doesn’t? It took me until my most recent playthrough to appreciate this properly, but more than any of the others Ian’s route is written as the most conventionally romantic. It incorporates a host of romcom staples - UST, misunderstandings, miscommunication, more than one romantic false lead, a wedding at the end, mood lighting for its softcore bondage scene - and while most of the other routes include one or two of those elements as well this is undoubtedly the only one that ever comes close to feeling cheesy or maudlin. Unfortunately however that kind of writing just doesn’t play well with Ian’s over-the-top comic relief antics, and so for most of the latter part of his own route he comes off as oddly bland. The writing mines some jokes out of his growing jealousy of the other men Mark expresses interest in dating, and it offers Mark a devastating early sex scene bad ending opportunity in the form of Ian coming onto Mark while drunk and forcing the player to choose between a rimjob now or double oral and/or flip-fucking later. Sure, that setup and some of what comes before it plays right into who Ian is as a character - a well-meaning idiot with a lot of insecurity surrounding his relationship to Mark - but after that point whether you take the rimjob or not Ian practically fades into the role of generic romantic lead as Mark must work to repair their friendship and then guide it into uncharted territory.

To illustrate the point I’m trying to make, contrast these two CGs. The first is from Ian’s friendship ending (something only he and Penny get, based on spending time with them on weekends among other factors); the second is from his romantic ending.

Which of these images tells you more about Ian’s characterization, or about his dynamic with Mark?

I’m not going to deny that Ian has sex appeal, or that he doesn’t have a slew of genuinely funny lines all over the game’s script, or that there’s nothing satisfying in watching Mark and his best friend fall in love with each other - but it’s the lack of integration between Ian the comic relief roommate and Ian the love interest that doesn’t sit well with me. When I was reviewing Chess of Blades I name-dropped Ian in comparison to that game’s own best friend love interest Arden. I’ll do the reverse here: Ian may be sweet and a ton of fun, and there may be far more options for which pegs go into which slots in this storyline, but Arden’s character and story stick in my mind more because they’re never at odds with one another. Ian in the earlygame and outside his own route is so goofy that it’s very hard to take him seriously as someone who could be a romantic partner for Mark, and unfortunately that comes across all too well when the occasion finally arises.

[kunrendeotaku]

Chapter 13

“Ughh. You’re right. I’m an awful princess.” Star slumps against a rail separating one half of the restaurant from the other, waving her empty cup in her hand. “Just like today, I can never get what I’m supposed to do right. If I do remember my lessons, it's always exactly the wrong ones.”

I lean against the rail next to her and pat her shoulder, then shrug. A bit of self reflection will be good for her, I don’t actually want my city burning to the ground after all. “Hey. Maybe you’re a bit of a screw up. But that just means you have to keep trying, and more importantly, it's what lead you here. We wouldn’t have the chance to hang out like this if you’d never had to be sent to Earth.” Much as my day hasn’t been the best, I’d trade massive highs and massive lows for the stagnant boredom of my usual life any day. Fight a demon, lose your hair, fun and despair all nicely paired together. Doesn’t change the fact I plan to mourn Rodrigo properly later tonight, but it helps get my head straight with the idea of Star altogether-rainbows and fire, amazingly wonderful but definitely going to get me horribly killed one day. I… like it a little too much.

“Aww. That's so sweet. You’re right! I just have to do my best, and listen to my Earth guide. Speaking of which… why are we carrying around empty cups??” Star tilts her head, bright blue eyes clouded with confusion. Perfect timing, she’ll be distracted by the drink machine for sure.

I walk us on over towards the machine in question, thinking that after that little detour our food will likely be ready by the time we finish off with the machine. “Behold! A soda dispenser. You just hold your cup against one of these levers, and carbonated sugary deliciousness comes out! This one here is for ice.” I quickly demonstrate by filling up my cup with ice and root beer, all the while noticing how wide Star’s eyes are.

“It… is it free? How do people not come in and just drink all of it?” I was wondering if she had any real concept of money. I guess she did have some economics lessons sink in during childhood, though I doubt she did much small money purchases as a princess.

“Ah! You see, that’s the ingenious part. We buy our -cups-! You can’t bring in your own cups or you get in trouble, so you fill up these empty ones we bought.” I flick my still lidless paper cup to show my point.

Star just responds with a roll of her eyes. “Is that all?! Anyone could cheat that! Look, look, I can do this super easy.” The crazy girl twists her head to the side and slams the side of her face into the various levers used pushed for soda, holding her mouth wide open. Immediately a small river of three different colors and kinds of soft drink pour onto her face. She doesn’t seem to care at all, other than a twitching eye from a stream of mountain dew pouring directly onto it.

Lord save me from the shenanigans of this idiot. I take a few moments to allow myself the brief stress relief of a face palm, Star giggling all the while as she glugs perhaps a third of the diet coke heading for her mouth. The rest, of course, just soaking my new exchange student’s head and upper body. Once appropriately facepalmed, I yank Star away from the soda fountain by the back of her dress and just glare at her.

She giggles nervously upon seeing my look. “I, uh, guess that's against the rules too?” I give the girl no answer for the moment, as I am too busy grabbing an absolute mountain of paper towels.

“Hold still.” I order her, before beginning to wipe her down. I swear that it feels sometimes like I’m already a parent. My mother can be a messy eater as well, and it stresses me the hell out to the point where I used to carry a handkerchief around all the time just for cleaning up any messes on her, though after one particularly grueling summer of training I disabused her of the habit enough that I no longer bother to carry one. Perhaps I should start doing so again.

I find myself thinking how odd her cheek marks are. I thought they were stickers at first, perhaps magical ones considering how they sometimes changed to reflect her emotions, but now that I’m wiping her cheeks I can clearly feel they are just her skin. She looks a bit uncomfortable at the vigorous scrubbing of her face and neck, but one look at my face convinces her that escaping me when I’m in my mothering mode is a terrible idea. I dry off what I can of her hair next, but that will likely be damp and sticky for a while.

For whatever reason, she blushes deeply when I dry off the front of her dress. Maybe the soda had started to stick and felt uncomfortable, I dunno. Ignoring her cherry red cheeks and the fact that she appears to be considering hitting me now instead of being just uncomfortable, I brush my hands off and declare “Passable. The art of cleaning is one not practiced well enough by people. If I had some wet wipes you’d be good as new, but we’ll have to be satisfied with adequate.”

Star glances towards the floor, muttering “Turnabout's fair play, I guess?” before simply shrugging and letting the tension out of her shoulders with a sigh. I’ve got no clue what she means by that, but I blame Janna. She glances back towards the soda fountain and stretches out her empty cup this time, bless her soul. She starts by grabbing some ice that quickly goes into her mouth to help chill out the blush on her cheeks. A crunching noise sounding out nearly throws me into a full on return of the rant I had on our first meeting, but I manage to just barely keep it in. Ice is bad for teeth, but not even normal humans usually care.

“C’mon Star, get something. I think we’re holding up the line.” I look behind me to see a number of impatient people who were rather unamused to be held up by our antics at the soda fountain. Thankfully Star avoids the dilemma of deciding what to choose by filling up her cup with a bit of every single type of soda. Snapping on the plastic caps for both our cups and grabbing a pair of straws goes relatively smoothly after that, after which I lead us to a booth. They’re just more comfortable than tables, you know? Even if we only have a couple people.

“This. Is. Amazing.” Star is absolutely sucking down her soda, the joys of carbonation or perhaps simply her straw made clear by the sparkling of her eyes. I’m not sure which, I still haven’t pinned down the exact technology level of her old dimension, but it seems vaguely medieval. “It’s tingly like magic potions, but instead of swamp water and magic it takes like sugar water! Best thing I’ve tried on Earth yet, hehehe.” She snags a seat on one side of the booth and slides up against the wall, then glances up at me curiously when I don’t follow her.

“If you think that's good, just wait til you try nuggets with their sweet and sour. Absolutely divine.” I kiss my fingers like what I imagine a food gourmet or chef might, then giggle a bit. “I’ll be right back, I figure our food is ready by now.” A quick run to the counter and back, and our wonderful meal of boxes of nuggets and fries is ready to be served. Naturally, I slide into the other side of the booth across from Star and get ready to dig in. Before I can touch a single bit of food, however, Star holds up a hand with a squint in her eyes.

“Waaaait.” I blink, then my new exchange student dips down under the table. I hear several crashes, bangs, and weird curses. Standard stuff for when I don’t have my eyes on her. Next thing I know her face pops up between my knees. More than a little awkward to have her that close to my crotch, but the pure oddity of her behavior helps to avoid more than a slight blush on my cheeks. “Oh, whoops! Almost got it, hehe.” She disappears back down under the table before popping up right next to me and plopping into the seat with a smug look.

“If you wanted to sit next to me, you could LITERALLY have just stood up and walked around.” Her continued refusal to take the easy way to do anything still baffles me. I notice she’s also managed to pick up another layer of dirt and grime all over herself, and at least three pieces of chewing gum in her hair. Is it actually impossible for her to stay clean for more than five minutes at a time?

“Life is an adventure Marco! You should try it sometime. Besides, if I hadn’t gone over there I wouldn’t have found...THIS!” A muscular arm disappears into her huge mass of hair before ripping out a piece of gum I hadn’t spotted before. “It's squishy and smells like sugar!” I swear my hand has never snapped out faster than in the moment I realized she was about to toss the old gum into her mouth. Whip crack quick the chewing gum is slapped out onto the floor.

“Star! Oh my god, don’t freaking eat things off of the floor! Or the bottom of the table! Or other weird places!” My voice shakes in horror. How had she survived until now? Even now she looks more upset about her stinging fingers and lost treat than the fact she had almost committed suicide by bacteria. I feel the urge to lecture rising sharply in me, and only the threat of our food going cold stops me from doing so. I cut things short with an almost growled “We’ll discuss this later. Now eat your lunch, young lady!”

[heeres-suffering]

Be More Alluring: a Personality Swap AU

[pic description and source will be at the bottom of this post, under the read more]

Start of summary:

“You need to be more alluring.”

"... don’t you mean attractive?”

“I do not. Your attractiveness is adequate, Brooke; if you want to mask your apparently latent queerness, you have to make them want you straight. Isn’t that why your step-father defended you?” 

Brooke Lohst is a loser.

But you know what? That was okay.

She always knew she was a weird one. The intensity of her affection for puppies, picture books, and near-constant daydreaming has lasted well-past a normalcy she can’t seem to grasp; when coupled with her inability to befriend anyone (besides the similarly self-identified loser Michael Mell), it’s not a surprise the rest of her peers have left her behind.

However, there were... ah, worse things in her life to worry about then some mild bullying. She liked her passion well enough, and all of her true insecurities went largely unnoticed, so any insults or weird looks rarely lingered in her mind. It’s not like she was a constant target either, which helped a lot. All in all, she just planned to hunker down, wait out the awkwardness of High School like everyone else, and move on to the rest of her life... 

Except.

When Brooke develops a crush on a girl she’s never talked to, after years of avoiding fairy tale romance and trying not to think about the inevitability of marriage (or how finicky her attraction to boys is in the first place), it feels like her whole world is about to cave in. She’d do anything to make sure her parents, especially daddy, never find out... including buying an edible super computer from the loudest, tiniest guy in school.

End of summary.

Alright!

Hi, hello, it’s Mod Seb, and here’s an AU I’ve been rolling around for a few days! You are free to do with this concept whatever you want, but I wanted to introduce it with a good chunk of the info I’ve already worked out in my head.

So. As the CWs are... too numerous, I’m going to go with a blanket “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” label and encourage you not to read the rest of this if you have any big darkfic triggers that could be upset by mere mention; this isn’t a fic tho, so descriptions of anything awful won’t last long. 

Although, I will mention upfront that Brooke isn’t a binary lesbian. I know the description might read like I’m setting her up to be 100% homosexual; she’s bi with a strong preference for girls, and anyone who presents soft enough in gender or appearance. If it wasn’t for the end-game pairings, her unfamiliarity with smaller details/history of the LGBTQ+ community, and general “gay newb” status, she’d likely ID as a bi lesbian!

(ships and everything else under the Read More)

Okay. That out of the way, there’s quite a number of pairings; I’m pretty sure it’s a super polyamorous and sexual AU, though you’re free to change this list as much as you’d like:

[bolded are end-game ships. italics physically hook up at least once. strike-through means they were in a relationship but break-up in some way before the ending. (H) stands for healthy, while (T) is toxic and/or noncon. underlined characters are pining for the other and may never confess their true feelings]

Brooke/Christine (H), Brooke/Rich (H), Brooke/Jenna (H), Brooke/Michael (H), Brooke/Chloe (T), Brooke/her Daddy (T), Brooke/Squip (H), Brooke/Jeremy (soft T at first bc of mirrored canon-compliant manipulation, H later on), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy (H), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy/Rich (H), Rich/Moses (H), [insert every form of Rich/Mo/Squip/Jeremy here] (H), Jeremy/Chloe (T), Jeremy/Michael (H), Michael/Christine (H), Michael/Christine/Mr. Heere (H; no, seriously), Madeline/Brooke (H)

This is, of course, a role swap AU where Brooke and Jeremy trade places based on my personal lore for their home lives. I always have some pretty fucked ideas as I don’t imagine MB is a great place with great adults, and I pick and choose which parts of canons I use and which I don’t. 

There is no definite ending planned in mind as this isn’t an outline; it’s meta (or an imagine or w/e) for an AU that you’re free to do whatever with. 

So,

The big difference is that Brooke was picked by Michael, while Jeremy was picked by Chloe. Jeremy is trans and hadn’t come out yet; if Chloe had known he was a boy, she wouldn’t have grabbed him. In contrast, Michael’s never gave a shit about potential friends genders.

Jer and B’s personalities... are altered some. Not ALL the way, but kiiinda fusing into their roles, kinda tweaked (I'll get back to that).

The main point of this for me was Brooke/Squip/Jeremy, with B/Jer having a MUCH stronger focus than in canon, and a really bad Chloe acting as one of the major villains.

Michael gets roped into Chloe’s shit, even tho he's still generally a good guy here, bc he's worried about B and thinks she can't properly take care of herself.

While B DOES have a strong crush on Christine, she’s the opposite of the Squip’s “goal”; that’s (obvs) masking, or making passably digestible, her queerness.

Her Mom and step-’Daddy’ have reacted to her friendship w/ ‘openly gay moms, also very flamboyant and GNC’ Michael... poorly.

Michael thinks the solution has to be “act as aggressively yourself as you can, and if they reject you, you know me and the mom’s have a space for you”. This works for him bc he’s permanently hyper-visible, what with all of his own marginalized identities. But, not only has she flied under the radar in comparison to him for years, he doesn’t know everything about her life.

In fact, he doesn’t know most of it. She’s very good at hiding things.

Meanwhile, Jeremy, one of the more popular ‘boy... ish’ (we’ll get to this, too) people in school, is mid-psychosis and self-destruction. He actually has schizo-affective disorder--as is the case with all of my versions of Jeremy--which he needs medication for. Combined that with so many bad influences and trauma, he can no longer fully control himself or his life.

The way he handles this (badly) is to ‘whore around’--which, besides being Chloe’s pet, is kinda why he’s so popular. Nobody respects him, but he’s viewed some form of favorably.

Jeremy is in a relationship with Rich, but he won't let him get as close/protective as Rich wants; Mo and Rich were doing their own man-whoring (but healthy, just droppin’ panties and making dudes and chicks swoon--yeah, Rich is out as bisexual, this is a very ‘the Squips are a good thing’ AU) to gain their standard reputation, but in the course of that, they got together with Jeremy and it became... complicated. Both of them are very "nnn" about how bad his life is for Jer.

The way that their personalities are altered is... okay. To explain this, I have to talk about my characterization of canon-Brooke and Jeremy in relation to this, starting with Brooke:

I imagine B as just a liiittle below the line of "all the way there" for sorta-similar reasons to Jeremy here: trauma, and Chloe (which is why that’s what Jeremy gets in this, it’s just WAY worse when compounded by everything else). She’s also--like me, and like almost every character I write as a result--autistic, in a near-permanent state of “not enough accommodations” and over-stimulation. This leads to a lot of dissociation and a very wandering mind, as well as being perceived as a bimbo or dumb blonde or w/e misogynistic bullshit is projected onto her by the boys she dates (she’s also much more down the middle bi outside this AU).

So, going back to how she is for this AU: she's actually not super nerdy, despite the close connection she and Michael have. Honestly, it’s their general neurodivergent weirdness that bring them together, and so she’s mostly adopted her nerdy interests through him, whether directly a thing he likes, or finding a whimsical variant that fits her tastes.

Obviously, unlike Jeremy, she doesn’t mind being called a loser. She does any insinuation she might be queer. This including anyone who calls her gay or a dyke.

She has too much Cis Male Trauma (unlike canon, where it comes from both cis angles) to really entertain the idea of a Traditionally Male Partner. This means she skews HEAVILY towards hard GNC guys at the very least, and generally finds herself most interested in the idea of enbies and women. she's also not super into butches tho, bc her trauma mixing with her sexuality has latched on to Strong Masc People Are A Threat. 

An expansion on her interests, in canon and otherwise: animals, ASMR/sensual service work (including massages and stuff), spending hours just sorta sitting by herself and letting her imagination wander, fairy tales, and YA-and-under fantasy books.

(Here, she tries to avoid het or f/f romance... except that, this past year or two, she’s started really like m/m stuff--esp after getting REALLY into drag shows, which she could enjoy safely since girls like Chloe have gotten into them too; in canon, she’s a romance fanatic)

Now... this is one of the really darkfic element; she's fucking her step-dad. 

She does this so that he doesn't walk out on her, her mom, and her little sister*. Her mom has a good-enough job as a standard office woman, but he makes enough to pay the rent on their nice townhouse and all the bills she can’t. So, after he expressed interest in Brooke and then casually mentioned he could always just leave if she wasn’t comfortable, she reluctantly entered a relationship with him

(* = her sister is currently know as her brother; he’s like 12 or 13, and started showing signs of trans/queerness which have been Heavily Discouraged. Brooke worries about him a lot)

((I didn’t use she/her pronouns bc I’m not entirely sure he would change them? This is an OC Oli created at the beginning of our interest in BMC, and we haven’t worked on him at all since, so how his characterization will be is up in the air))

Canonically, Brooke's "in love" with her daddy, which is a self-imposed delusion; if she actually addressed it, she’d says she’s well aware that’s not true, but it's so much easier to pretend when you’re cornered like that. Brooke’s life blows.

She’s a lot more honest to herself about hating him here; still, she tries to be as polite and generally-friendly as she can, doing what he says whenever he wants.

OKAY, THAT’S BROOKE. If any of that is badly described or potentially-offensive, it’s just bc I glossed over SO MUCH DETAIL, even in that amount of it!

So. Jeremy.

I don’t have to go over him much and we’re all mostly aware of how I feel about him and also I don’t have the energy to do this again--

(just... read my fics The Devil at your Door or hello yesterday or something... eyyy actually do that, my ao3 username is Sedusa, blah blah blah ANYWAY)

--but basically: He's still very nerdy, like, he’s super into film as well as video games (which is another constant for me), but after being largely ignored in elementary, he's been trailing behind Chloe at her orders since they were in 6th grade. As a result he isn't very open about... any of his interests.

In 7th grade, he came out as trans to everyone. Chloe was furious, but at the same time, intrigued; this was around the time Chloe gets her own... ah shit I gotta go into that too--

--yet another hc of mine is that Chloe gets a Squip on accident around this time at a party (there was one in a “”candy bowl””), and from there, she claws her way up the ladder. I... will not go into that much, but her Squip was crippled by the drugs and alcohol in her system, and therefore largely at her mercy. She’s used his power to manipulate certain things about herself and to sharpen her focus on popularity to the point she’s full-blown Alpha Bitch.

Man, I’ve had to go on so many tangents, I apologize.

Anyway, she drags Jeremy around as a punching bag. She constantly mocks Jeremy's transness, even though she usually calls him by his correct name and pronouns.

This has made the rest of the school follow her lead, hence why I said “boy-ish”; he’s popular, he’s technically ‘well liked’, but nobody really takes him seriously. This is compounded by Chloe’s refusal to let him dress in 'dorky' casual clothes, and, as he’s both too poor to afford designer clothes and also generally hates popular guy fashion, he has to wear the hyper femme clothing Chloe specifically tells him too/

As such, people call him a boy but largely see him as either an idiot, a slut, an attention seeker, or all of the above.

So of course, in Brooke's place, his neurodivergence is more prominent than ever; every day he slips further into this psychosis and self-infantilization haze, as his his mom leaving, his dad severely depressed, Chloe's sexual violence, and other repressed trauma (see: my fic hello yesterday on ao3) all weighing on him. This makes him INCREDIBLY regressed, like, all the time by Junior year.

And then Brooke's Squip (IE: canon Squip) falls in love with Jeremy extremely fucking hard. He pushes her to date him as a way to compromise on her queer desires, since Jeremy is technically a boy, and certainly a few other straight-ish girls have hooked up with him in the past.

WHEW. That is a fucking lot. To wrap this up, lemme go over the interpersonal relationships not already mentioned, and what directions I think it takes.

First off, Madeline has a more prominent role, as I quite like her tbh; she’s a sex worker, she has her own Squip, she’s one of Chloe’s most hated enemies, and she gravitates towards both Brooke and Jeremy. She’s also Actually French, Chloe’s just weird.

(Anyway she prolly sees through Brooke’s straight act and asks her why she’s pretending to be a good little cishet. It rattles Brooke.)

Chloe is scum. This bears repeating. She DEFINITELY rapes Brooke at the Halloween party, and becomes obsessed with her, along with already being obsessed with Jeremy and Jake. 

Jake, by the way, has a lot of regressive behavior and impulsiveness bc he’s been in an abusive relationship off and on with Chloe for years now.

Speaking of Jake, moving on to his best bro: Rich doesn’t set himself on fire. He’s having a good time with his Squip.

But.

He IS set on fire at the Halloween party.

Instead of the Smartphone Hour being about Rich's instability, it's actually about the mystery of Someone Did It To Him But No One Saw Who It Was, They Were Disguised.

The answer relates to the fact that Rich and Brooke are ALSO hooking up, after she’s already with Jeremy, bc he Properly introduces her to him and the three of them hit it off really well.

(She initially wasn’t interested, but while Rich is loud and still kinda abrasive, his Squip doesn’t drive him to act like a bully--and in private, his nerdiness is really obvious and he’s extremely gentle with her and Jeremy. Add to that that he’s bi and trans*, when Brooke connects best w/ queer men over cishet one, and it off-sets his masc-ness enough to make him an Exception.

* = I always imagine him as trans. See: all of Vanceypants fics.)

Sooo... the culprit is actually Brooke's daddy, who sees her with this obvious heartthrob and Cannot let that be.

Chloe convinces Michael that the Squips are Very Very Bad and has him team up with her to force Brooke into drinking Red, with the intention to convince him to kill himself after to get him out of the way, bc she’s really going nuts at this point.

Eventually, he snaps out of it when he and Christine get together (he’s thought he was Full Homo all of his life, but Christine’s prolly genderqueer-ness makes him realize “oh shit, I’m bisexual”) and she starts to question why he’s acting the way he is towards Christine.

He also definitely has a crush on Jeremy and during his time with Chloe he kinda tried to flirt a little but couldn’t really... he’s not up for dating someone as sexually active and a push-over as Jeremy is in this.

However, when he snaps out of Chloe’s manipulation, he and Christine approach Mr. Heere to convince him to straighten up and help Jeremy and also bc they really need an adult to successfully fight Chloe.

This requires a month+ of Christine getting him to see her psychiatrist (the one who prescribes her ADHD meds). Jeremy spends the majority of his time staying with Chloe, and very rarely comes home to gather things or to make sure his dad is eating/still alive, as much as he can remember to in his own haze of mental illness. Anyway, point is, he doesn’t know Christine and Michael are there often... not that, in the course of growing close to Mr. H, they both fall for him hard and it becomes one of my stranger OT3s.

(God, Jeremy goes through a lot of shit in this, tho.)

Pre-Squip, Jenna was kinda-sorta Brooke’s friend--or, well, friendly. However, she’s actually full blown “oh my God she’s wonderful” in love with Brooke.

Brooke isn't aware of that, esp since Jenna tries her not to be around her a lot. She's also trying to hide her own queerness, bc she’s a trans woman and she knows Chloe finding that out would be extremely dangerous.

Eventually, Chloe succeeds in making Brooke take the Red months after canon usually ends, w/o Michael’s help. If you’re curious, Red doesn’t affect her normal Squip bc she’s had him too long and a lot of his receptors and stuff are damaged, so it’s the second one she gets in canon that turns off.

This plan backfires, however, as Brooke’s Squip comes back with a physical body w/ help from Rich and also-bodied-now Moses.

With a body, and shenanigans, Mo and Squip take out Brooke’s daddy too. His life insurance more than makes up for the loss of his income, as it’s a sizable amount. Now that Brooke feels more empowered and strong, she overrides her mother’s neglectfulness and takes control of the household w/ her boyfriends*, comes out as queer, helps her sister transition, and begin to heal from all of this trauma.

(* = Rich and Mo move in, as does Jeremy eventually, after graduation; Jeremy gets a psychiatrist and a therapist and prolly has to go through some intense outpatient care and possibly a stay in the hospital, before finally making major breakthroughs and looking like himself again. The five of them are now happy and in love.)

Chloe, after her arm gets twisted by the Squip’s protective presence so thoroughly, gives up on Jeremy and Brooke to focus on Jake. This too gets abandoned when Rich and Mo help him cut her off, and so she stays in her own popularity bubble, bitter, until graduating and going to a community college in a different state.

All in all, things work out well in the end, but getting there is a long, difficult process. This AU fascinates me immensely and feels like a great way to examine some of my really dark headcanons about MB, as I think it’s a town similar to Derry in Stephen King’s IT--as in, just chronically The Worst Place Ever, with this, like, miasma of low-key despair around it. People adjust and don’t question it, which is why so much of BMC is this flippant dark humor in the face of some highly questionable shit.

I’m so sorry this post is so long (I’ll be uploading it to AU under my usual Sedusa account, as metas like this are more than allowed), but I really adore these characters and the way they can be twisted around, so I had a lot to say!

Thank you for reading <3

-mod Seb

image description: virtual-like stairs pointed forward and bathed in neon yellow and blue to represent Brook and Jeremy, which I’ve modified from the original blue-only design.

source: x (link description: a free Wallpaper Flare image that I found off Google Image’s “filtered by ‘labeled and reuse with modification” feature) 

[designsfromtime]

A Frank Conversation About Selling on Etsy:

So, you have a hobby. Your friends and family LOVE your work and advise: “You should sell your stuff!” Maybe you need some extra income and you hope you can supplement your bank account with a side hustle. So you open an Etsy store, spend hours wording your “About Me” page, upload some pictures, and then you wait for that first sale…annnd…crickets.

This is a scenario that is repeated thousands of times every day.  I hear it constantly from disappointed and angry Etsy shop owners. So what do you do?  Blame Etsy? Pay money for one of those “opportunists” who promise more sales if you buy in and follow their model with little to no success? Get angry and give up?

This isn’t a post telling you “how to be successful” on Etsy. Rather, it’s a very frank conversation to help with your “expectations” and, yeah, maybe give you a little advice.

Before you open your store answer some very frank questions:  Did you do your homework? - Did you go on Etsy and search for items similar to yours?  Is the market already saturated? – or do you have a unique item that isn’t available? If there are items similar to yours are they of better quality and workmanship? - or poorer quality than your work?  Answering these questions is ESSENTIAL and it will take total HONESTY and objectivity on your part, as well as from your friends and family who are advising you.

The first step is to self-assess your quality of work and your business model, as well as your expectations. The raw truth is, I don’t know ANYONE who has quit their day job and is supporting themselves through their Etsy store – Including ME!!

So let’s talk about each of these topics individually.

DID YOU DO YOUR HOMEWORK:

Whether it’s bath bombs or historical gowns, you have to research your target market. You cannot skip this step!

For example, my daughter recently started a side-hustle making all-natural stain-free bath bombs, sugar scrubs, body butter, and whipped soaps to help with her Bachelor’s degree. Before she began, she purchased items from the most successful company offering bath bombs and tried them out. Turns out, they weren’t the same quality as hers – just mass produced. She researched the pros and cons of bath bombs using the feedback from those in her inner circle. What did they like or dislike about the competitor’s product. The biggest complaint - - they stain the bathtub and they weren’t hydrating! So, taking that feedback she played with her recipe and came up with bath bombs that are not only moisturizing, but DON’T stain the bathtub. She also offers themes and scents inspired by books or movies such as Harry Potter. That’s her hook! That’s what makes HER product stand out.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/NightMareBathandBody?ref=pr2018_faveshops

It’s essential that you do your research before you open an Etsy store - or move to the on-line market in general.

To use historical costuming as an example. Let’s say you bought a slanted riding hat pattern and made yourself a ridding hat to wear at renfaire. You got lots of compliments on your hat and some of your fellow Rennies asked, “Where did you get your hat?” You tell them you made it, and they ask you to make them one. In consequence you decide if “so-and-so” liked my work, maybe I can parlay this into a side hustle?  But before you make that leap, have you researched how many 16th Century riding hats are available on Etsy?

Let’s say there are quite a few listings already on Etsy. Let’s say you look up the seller who has the most sales of that particular item. So, how does your work compare?  Is your fabric smooth on the base, or are their visible puckers? How is their hand-stitching? – are your stitches as small and even as your competitor? How much are they asking?  Be objective! It can be painful to compare your work, but it’s important if you want to be competitive.

Let’s say, your work is passable. Maybe it’s not exactly the same quality as your competitor, but pretty darn good in your opinion, so you decide that your way “in” is to undercut all those who are selling similar items. This is a tactic I see ALL THE TIME. But have you actually calculated your costs?  How many hats can you get out of one yard of fabric?  How many hats can you make with a yard of trim?  Are you buying your bases ready-made, or making your own?  How much does it cost for you to make your base versus buying ready-made? How much is the millinery wire you need to use? How much wire do you need to use for one hat?

All these questions are essential to calculate your TRUE costs. In addition, have you factored in the fees Etsy will charge you once a sale is made – to include the actual listing fees, as well as the cost of shipping.

When you undercut your competitors you cheat yourself, and then wonder why you aren’t making a profit! I’m not talking a few dollars. I’m talking about setting your prices so low you are barely making a profit.  You say: “But, I’ll raise my prices later after people get to know my work!”  Yeah - - I actually did that. BIG MISTAKE! I started off at a competitive price and the orders came pouring in. It felt great! I felt validated. But when I factored in all the extras I was offering that made my work stand out, and was not charging for, guess what happened?  When I started charging what my hats and headdresses were actually worth, and factoring in my actual costs, I saw a drop off in sales. Did I lower my prices again? NO! Every bead, every piece of trim, every stitch has value. So does your time!!!! Value your work and value your time. If it is quality it will stand alone among the hundreds of others being sold.

When you value your time and price your items accordingly, you will attract a caliber of customers who recognize the quality of your work. But your work needs to hold up in terms of quality. This is where you will need to be objective. That process can be painful. Trust me, I know!

I randomly run searches on Etsy to gauge what’s selling and what’s not – what’s available, and how they are similar to mine, and how much they are selling it for. What I often find are sewists selling items at ridiculously low costs. So low, in fact, I often wonder how in the world they can justify selling a gown for $200 when fabric and supplies make up 75% or more of their total listing price. I know what fabric costs. I know how many hours it takes to construct that item, and when I see shop owners selling items at ridiculously low prices the first thing I do is check where they are located. Many times they are over-seas sellers. The US dollar is worth more in many countries, but there are HUGE risks buying from over-seas vendors. I’ve heard too many horror stories, and quite frankly their work just doesn’t stand up to my standards for historical accuracy. But that’s another story for another time.  

NEVER price your items based on the lowest prices! Figure out your costs, to include your Etsy fees, and pay yourself a FAIR wage. Ignore, the bargain basement over-seas sellers. What you need to be putting your energy toward is honing your skills and making your items truly competitive. If an item is of the highest quality, people will recognize it and they will remember you.

If you cannot self-assess your work honestly and be objective and see where you need to improve, chances are you will be disappointed in the outcome of your shop. Just as important is to VALUE your work. If your work is not the same quality as your biggest competitor, you are setting yourself up to fail. Yes, there is a market for everyone’s work, but here’s the honest truth:  Just like you “get what you pay for” you attract a certain caliber of customer by what you charge!

Here’s an example for you! I have a young friend who likes to sew. She made an Outlander costume for her mother for Halloween using the American Duchess pattern. At her mother’s encouragement, she decided to open an Etsy store and she listed the costume she had made for her mother, and set her price at a ridiculously low cost, at least in comparison to mine. A woman who “claimed” to be a reporter purchased an item in January 2019. She ordered a pair of stays and a bodice and skirt. She claimed she wanted to wear it because she was going to “interview” the cast of Outlander. (I called bullsh*t, and her behavior only validated my prediction). My friend followed the same procedure I do, making the stays first and sending them to her, because you need measurements wearing your stays in order to construct the gown and have it fit properly. After multiple messages to the buyer, in which she tried to get the buyer to give her correct measurements, the buyer wasn’t responding, or was avoiding it claiming she was “too busy.” I saw my friend the following AUGUST and the woman still had not complied with her request for proper measurements!! She sent her a picture wearing her stays and expected my friend to figure out her size by the picture!!

My friend asked me for advice on how to handle the situation. With my assistance, we wrote the buyer on Etsy and explained IN DETAIL what she needed and WHY, and informed her that because she had not complied with getting her the specific measurements needed to complete the commission she would place the order on hold until the woman had time to provide her with what she needed. The woman tried to wiggle her way out of the commission after nine months by stating how busy she was in her work, and how she didn’t have a measuring tape and how inconvenient it was for her to find someone to take her measurements, and that maybe my friend should just cancel the order and refund her deposit as she didn’t want to keep “her” waiting. Yeah – Nice try, right?

Well, my friend had used the deposit to purchase fabric and supplies! – Not to mention, after NINE months it was too late to issue a refund. After 60 days PayPal won’t issue a refund.

Come October, two months after she reached out to me for help, my friend was still battling with this woman for the measurements she needed, and the hateful snit complained to Etsy, and then tried to open a dispute with PayPal! She claimed she didn’t believe her deposit had been used for supplies! I instructed my friend to send the woman the unfinished gown and ALL the supplies she’d purchased, stand her ground and NOT issue a refund, and chalk it up as a lesson learned. Bottom line? If this gal really WAS scheduled to interview the Outlander cast, she would have made more of an effort I’m here to tell you! But this client more than likely saw a seller who was just starting out, had only a couple of items in her Etsy store, purchased the costume on the cheap, and then tried to get one over on my friend.

This example is something you need to be prepared to deal with. You will need to be comfortable setting boundaries and being assertive! You need to be able to intuit when someone is trying to scam you, and you also need to know PayPal and Etsy’s policies. One of the mistakes my friend made was taking her conversation off the Etsy site and emailing this client. Communication on Etsy is a pain in the arse, but you CANNOT take your discussion off site! Doing so is against Etsy’s policies. Why? You need a paper trail, so to speak, of your communication. You need to document your conversations in an Etsy thread so that if a dispute is raised, Etsy can review your conversation. In this instance, my friend had documented her difficulties through the Etsy thread and they saw the efforts she had made to gain the client’s compliance and they ruled in my friend’s favor. But this is not always the case!

The moral of the story: If you price your work at bargain basement prices, you will more than likely attract clients JUST like this person. Now that’s not always the case. There are shady people out there, and even if you charge what you’re worth you will find clients who test your patience.

For instance, I had a client order a riding hat from me a few years back. She had a short deadline, so I went to JoAnns and purchased the silk and began construction. After two weeks she tried to cancel the order stating she found a hat to borrow and didn’t need to buy one at this time. I told her it was too late to cancel as I had already purchased fabrics and started construction, so she opened a dispute with PayPal and told them it was a fraudulent purchase! – claiming someone used her PayPal account without her permission. I supplied PayPal with documentation of our conversations, but they ruled in her favor because it fell within their 60-day deadline! It turned out I had another client who wanted a hat in the same color and was the same size, so I went ahead and issued her refund, but I told her that because of her shady behavior I would not accept any commissions from her in the future. She actually had the audacity to become highly insulted that I would refuse any future commissions and actually made ME out to be the bad guy for setting boundaries with a client who had wiggled their way out of a commission by lying!! Yeah…There are some “special” people out there, and it’s all part of working with the public, so be prepared!

I’ve also had people contact me to request I sell them one of my headdresses, but they only wanted the base. They didn’t want me to cover it and decorate it. I’m highly intuitive and I smelled a rat. I knew instinctively that what they wanted was to take my base and replicate my pattern, because I have created my pattern and it’s not for sale - anywhere! Working with the public can make you question the future of mankind, because there are some shady creeps out there with zero integrity. You will need to be prepared to bite the bullet and deal with them if you plan to work in customer service.

IS THE MARKET FLOODED:

There are a TON of historical costumes listed on Etsy.  Your first step is to evaluate what’s being offered and judge whether or not you are offering something that is actually needed. When I have an idea or find an item I want to make, the first thing I do is run a search for that item. If there are tons of the same item, here’s where you need to be objective and realistic. What’s going to attract sales to your store if there are dozens and dozens of shops offering the same thing?

I participate in some of the groups Etsy offers just for sellers. We try out new functions offered on Etsy and discuss our experiences as a seller. I hear people complain ALL the time about their items not selling. But let’s get honest. How can you expect to be competitive if your product doesn’t stand out from all the others? What makes yours unique when dozens of sellers are offering the same thing? Lowering the price isn’t a strategy that is recommended. Running sales and promotions are fine, but as we’ve already discussed selling yourself short may only be a temporary boon. It’s just not a sustainable business model. Not when you are selling your items for less than what your supplies and labor costs.  Find your niche!

If the market is already flooded, perhaps you might reconsider offering that item or reconsider opening a store all together. Chances are, if you ignore that advice, you will not see any activity in your store. That’s probably not the advice you want to hear, but wouldn’t you rather someone be honest with you?

Also, and you’re gonna hate this one as well – Your family and friends are NOT objective! It’s human nature. What might look great to them, might not attract attention in a larger market. That’s a painful truth.

ARE THE ITEMS SIMILAR TO YOURS BETTER QUALITY?

Being objective is painful, but it’s necessary.

If you’ve decided to press forward and offer items that are already being sold on Etsy, the essential next step is to assess the quality of your work. Before you enter the retail arena, take the necessary time to hone your craft. Quality is the ONLY way you will attract attention when you are offering items that are already flooding the Etsy or on-line market.  Again, undercutting costs is not a sustainable business model, so take the time – however long it takes – until your products are comparable and marketable. If your workmanship isn’t on par, then work for the next year or so to hone your skills and find people who can be kindly objective that can counsel you on where or what needs improvement. Don’t take that criticism personally. We all start somewhere.  I wish you could see some of my first corsets!  God, they were BAD. I mean – REALLY BAD!

One of the things you can do to hone your craft is to AVOID commercial patterns! These commercial patterns are not always historically based – In fact, most are not even close! Some are pretty good but DO YOUR RESEARCH. Read books on costuming. Invest and develop your reference library. Participate in historical groups on social media – hopefully you find those who are inclusive rather than snits who pick apart others’ work, and admins who DON’T participate in the petty drama. Unfortunately, that has not been my experience, so I avoid these groups. But for those who are just starting out, they can be helpful to lurk and absorb information. Ask questions if you participate in groups. BUT be prepared to deal with the costume nazis who hide behind the anonymity of the internet and are hateful and judgmental.

Rather than commercial patterns like Simplicity or McCalls, I recommend you purchase patterns that are more historical. Yes, they are expensive, but you need to invest in your craft and having the proper patterns are just as essential as your equipment. If you cannot tell the difference between Medieval, Elizabethan, Tudor, Rococo, Colonial, Regency, Victorian or Edwardian – You need to start studying! – Starting with underpinnings! There are subtle and not so subtle clothing style differences in each era. Nothing drives me more crazy than Etsy sellers or those on Ebay who buy a commercial pattern that isn’t fit for anything but a Halloween costume, and label it, “Renaissance” when it’s a mish-mosh of colonial and medieval eras.  PLEASE, take the time to read and study. Do your due diligence. I have been creating historical costumes professionally since 2012 when I retired early, but I’ve been studying historical clothing since 2001 and I learn something new ALL THE TIME! I push myself and tackle new eras to hone my craft. There will always be someone who knows more than you do. Just keep learning!

I am always available to give feedback, but actually teaching construction techniques over the internet is a challenge for me because I’m generally pressed for time. Watch You Tube tutorials, take sewing lessons, learn how to drape and draft patterns, but along with all of that…Practice…Practice…Practice. I learn something new every time I tackle a new project or venture into a different era.

MANAGE YOUR EXPECTATIONS:

I am busy all year long with commissions, but most of the time we don’t get paid until a commission is complete. I also have expenses such as fees for an upgraded Etsy store, Etsy fees to list items – plus the percentage they take from each sale, as well as website fees – all of which are necessary to get your brand out there.

Aside from operating fees, I have equipment payments – because just ONE of my embroidery machines cost me over $5,000! But you see, my niche is historical embroidery and highly embellished work. I also have material fees, and repair fees on my equipment. You will need a quality sewing machine that is gear driven, rather than belt driven in order to make corsetry and to sew through layers of heavy fabric that you use in historical costuming. I have two embroidery machines, an air threading Serge/overlock machine, and a Juki semi-professional straight stitch sewing machine, as well as a smaller Brother sewing machine that we use for shirts and thinner fabrics when we both need to do machine work. I also have a cutting table with fold out eaves and cabinets that cost me $1200!! All of these tools of the trade costs MONEY.  You will also need dress forms in various sizes for both men and women. The cheap ones that are adjustable are too flimsy to hold up to these heavy costumes. Dress forms can cost anywhere from $300 to $1000. If you plan to compete, you need the tools of the trade.

There are hundreds and hundreds of hobbyists who are attempting to use Etsy as a platform to sell historical clothing to supplement their income, but there are VERY few shops that offer quality items with quality workmanship. If your work isn’t a cut above, you will find yourself disappointed when your expectations fall short of reality.

Even though we stay busy all year long, I don’t make enough to support myself just on my costume commissions alone. After my husband passed away in 2009, I was fortunate enough that he left me and the kids financially stable. Without his retirement income (he was a police officer who died as a consequence of his job) I could not pay my monthly bills on my commission income alone. Lalana works three days a week doing hair and works three days a week with me in my design studio. We do this more for the passion and the creative outlet, than we do for the money. Neither of us are rolling in it!

I have had young mothers approach me about advising them on how to do costuming so they can stay home with their kids. First of all, costuming is production work. When you have a deadline to meet your clients aren’t going to understand when your kids are sick or when your husband wants to spend quality time with you, or your house is filthy. Self-employment is NOT the answer to staying at home and earning an income. Unless you have extra household money to invest every month to keep you afloat and purchase supplies while you’re waiting to be paid for a commission, you’ll be working at a deficit.

There is also the issue of taxes. Etsy collects sales taxes on your behalf, but they don’t collect your federal income taxes or state income taxes, if you live in a state like California. Working under the table is a risky endeavor! Do you really want to risk being audited for income you didn’t report? My advice: Just don’t do it!! It’s not worth the risk. So, be prepared to hire a tax specialist to do your taxes every year. You will need to keep good records of all your expenses and income. Every spool of thread, every yard of fabric needs to be accounted for in order for you to have a REAL picture of your profit and loss. The purchase of equipment will help, but there again, you need to be able to afford to pay the monthly payments on equipment loans.

In conclusion, there are more CONS than pros to self-employment and opening an on-line business, not just on Etsy. For me, I found Etsy to provide me more traffic in my store than a high-priced website. Unless you have a website manager that constantly monitors your Search Engine Optimization and other such tech stuff that is beyond my comprehension and skills, you won’t get enough traffic to your website to make the expense worthwhile. This is exactly why I switched my fancy-schmancy website to a “Pattern” website via Etsy. It allows me to keep my domain name, while using Etsy’s platform to funnel traffic through my page. I get about 10,000 hits per month in my Etsy store alone.

The bottom line is that Etsy has worked for me, but it may not be a platform that works for you. There are tons of variables – as I’ve addressed above.

So, before you jump into the pond, make sure you know the temperature and depth of the water! Trust me, you’ll thank me for being honest with you.

[natsspammityspamspamham]

Some Anime I Just Finished

Before I start with this stuff, I also finished Nyan Koi, but honestly, don’t watch it. There are no points of this show that I’d recommend. I watched it on a whim. I regret it. It wasn’t bad enough to really make me sit and go have an crisis about what I watched and why I like anime and why I was born, but let’s just say, I should stop watching anime because there are some seiyuu I know in it. But hey, if generic harem ecchi stuff is your thing, there’s something.

Ballroom e Youkoso

That was a lot of hype for a mediocre show. Let’s just say... it was alright and standard with a unique concept that got everyone excited. It took a really unique concept for a sports anime, but the cast wasn’t all that likeable or memorable. The story was generic sports anime stuff, but it was still pretty good. The art was really good. I don’t get the criticism that their necks were too long. We’re watching anime where the waists are tiny, the eyes are huge, and the boobs take up over half the body. Get a grip.

Shingeki no Bahamut: Genesis and Shingeki no Bahamut: Virgin Soul

This anime is a clusterfuck (and so is whatever I’m writing about it because I have a donkey brain right now). It made me laugh at times when it wasn’t supposed to, but I was entertained. I think I was searching for something to fill that SKET Dance-shaped hole, and this... was not it. This was fast-forwarded on my watch list because of the seiyuu, but I was going to watch it some time in the future anyway. Genesis (what I would count as the first season) and Virgin Soul (what I would count as the second) are completely different. I’ve heard of people who watched VS independently, and while you can, it makes far less sense if you do it that way. Not saying that you should watch this anime because it’s really... something else. If you know what you’re getting into, you’ll have a good time. Otherwise, you will not. I also watched this anime because I heard it was based off a card game and went, “YU-GI-OH? AS IF THEY CAN MAKE AN ANIME OUT OF A CARD GAME!” And in that respect, they did impress me. I was judging this series as an anime and not as a “oh, I made this on a dare.” I’m not familiar with the source material. 

Overall: 6.5/10 (Both Seasons)

(SPOILERS AHEAD - but who’s going to commit to 36 episodes? …Besides this idiot right here, aka me)

The characters here are honestly nothing that people haven’t seen before. Uh, this anime has an afro bandit, a knight with a mullet, a zombie, and some white-haired demon that everyone in Tumblr thirsts for because he looks like he’s straight out of that demon dating sim. You’ve probably seen these types of characters before. Multiple times. Rumour has it that you can find a cast of this caliber at your local Walmart or gas station. Season one introduced me to a small cast of characters, so by the end, I was like, “Alright, this is fine. If you give me another season, I can totally get behind these Mary/Murray Sue’s. Maybe.” I look up the cast list for VS and went, “Why are all of them either labelled as supporting or are gone?” VS brings out a whole slew of new characters you know nothing about.  

We had to give up this character? Seriously? Season two at what cost?

VS′s villain’s motives made no sense. His mom was killed by the monster, so he wants to bring forth the monster to defeat it even though it’s literally the doomsday bringer... alright. He even sacrificed his eye and went, “I can still do this. I can end that monster.” Meanwhile, he’s killing and alienating people who would’ve been able to help him. This is even worse considering that VS had 24 episodes to get me into whatever the heck this king was on about. Actually, I can only remember one character that was voiced by Yuuichirou Umehara that made remotely any sense, and this is out of at least 5 characters. Force that character with the main girl in that Romeo and Juliet kind of stuff, and you’ve got a new cast. All your favourite characters from season one are sidelined. You were main character last season? Pssh, that’s water under the bridge. Nobody cares that you saved the world once, it’s up to some kid who can turn into a dragon when she sees a hot guy. I wish I was making this shit up. She really fell for a guy who is ready to kill her. We’ve got more side characters no one knows about. Also, they just had to kill off a character from the first season for funsies and no other reason. They killed him in such a stupid way, and if that wasn’t enough, they brought him back as an even more hideous zombie. I didn’t even like his original design, but even I know they did him dirty. I feel like they should’ve focused on the main cast with maybe some additional characters, but when you add everything at once, nothing is going to work out. This show also really screwed up the ending in a way that I don’t know how. They closed loose ends, but were there any reasons for this buildup? No. Did I enjoy the ending? No. Would I recommend this to my friends? No.

The visuals try to save this anime, but it cut some corners to get here. Alas, MAPPA is MAPPA, so some of that fight choreography was great (but most of the “hype” only came from season one for me). The sound was alright. Good voice acting. It was even great at times. Kenshou Ono played a bastardly idiot in season two which had me really liking his performance because of how much I hated that character. Hiroyuki Yoshino plays another guy like that. Sumire Morohoshi played a 17-year-old in season two, and she was practically 17 when this was produced, so it’s one of the few times that people actually cast someone who’s the same age as the character. I haven’t actually heard Risa Shimizu in main role before, but she did not disappoint. I was disappointed when she didn’t come back for season two. I haven’t seen Gou Inoue play a main character in an anime I watched either. He’s actually pretty good. Maaya Sakamoto and Miyuki Sawashiro appeared as well. Miyuki Sawashiro played a pivotal character actually. I happened to like her character too. Megumi Han sounded badass in this anime too. 

(She looks like Robin from Fire Emblem, the plot is like FE Awakening, and she had so much more to do in the series than what she did in season one. The series would’ve been more interesting if they brought her back. In fact, the whole season season could go under some form of an edit.)

Characters from your local secondhand “lightly used” vegetable sales bin with a story fried at that old McDonalds with the semi-rancid oil thrown together with some chips that you left open the night before that were supposed to be “character development”. It’s passable. Edible. Scrap that together, but now throw out whatever good things you had in there. Throw in that fuzzy tomato that isn’t even red anymore, shady stuff found behind the fridge, and some ranch, and voila, you’ve got yourself this subpar anime. It’s plated nicely with nice visuals and some form of a facade that this anime is going well, and if you’re into guilty pleasure anime like that, there you go. I still enjoyed myself despite all that I said, but I have no intentions of recommending this. It was also really hard to access in my country too. 

[dearlazerbunny]

Lie to Me (Ch. 17 of 28)

Pairings: Loki x Reader

Genre/Ratings: M eventually (aiming for a slow burn here); warnings for kidnapping and subsequent anxiety/PTSD (will be marked before every chapter)

Words: 1500

Summary: If you had to guess what the captured, traitor, trickster god Loki Laufeyson wanted or needed at this moment, a babysitter would be far, far down on the list. (Set after the events of Avengers 1.)

SHOUTOUT TO @molmcb and @jessiejunebug, who fair warning are def laughing at everyone freaking out because they know exactly where the story is going

Requested Tags: @deraniel, @iamverity,  @yasnooshka24, @wegingerangelica, @themusingsofmany, @dark-night-sky-99, @tarynkauai, @stuffandstuff-stuff, @angelicshinigami, @my-current-fandom-is, @geekysimmerthings, @lokis-butter-knife

WARNING: Reader is very not good... like fatally not good.  Be cautious if that is going to bother you!

They don’t bother to right your chair. They just kick you while you’re down.

A lot.

Why they don’t just shoot you is a mystery. You wish they would. Then maybe everything wouldn’t feel like it’s on fire with some unholy Asgardian magical fire that burns a million times hotter than the Earth’s core. You cough, and it sounds sickeningly wet, and tastes of iron. Trying to spit out the blood that pools in your mouth sometimes works, but most of the time it just leaks back onto your face or back into your lungs.

You wonder if you’ll suffocate or bleed out first. Based on the choking, you’re betting on suffocating.

Every SHIELD agent is required to go through three days of standard mandatory torture resistance training. You’d sat in a room with some other linguistics agents and office workers, rolling your eyes at each other when the instructor turned their back because all of you knew you were never, ever even going to come close to any information worth kidnapping you for. A laugh burbles out of you. Shoulda paid more attention. Maybe taken some notes.

Something high pitched and hysterical fills the room, and in the back of your mind you vaguely recognize it as your own voice. A story comes out of you from somewhere, god knows why, and eventually your brain catches up with the words enough to realize it’s one of Loki and Thor, from when they were kids. Your favorites. They never failed to make you hide a smile, or even laugh out loud. Sometimes Loki smiled when he made you laugh. That was nice. He has a nice smile.

“-and Thor loves snakes, right? And Loki knows this. So he turns himself into a snake- he can do shit liked that, he’s magic, he can turn into all kinds of crazy things but don’t ask me what ‘cause I don’t really know-” you stop talking long enough to cough, hard, and gasp in a breath. “Or I guess maybe I do ’cause I know he can turn into a snake. But he turns into a snake in the middle of a field and waits for Thor, and Thor picks him up ‘cause he loves snakes, and then Loki turns back into Loki and stabs him!” Your voice is about an octave higher than normal, and you’re wheezing in some sort of horrible laugh, knocking yourself up over your own bedtime story told on your dying breaths. “Hey, boys! Boys, come back! I do have some info for you!” You shout at the top of your lungs, ignoring the strangling sounds in the back of your throat. “Thor- Thor has a lot of scars! He’s been stabbed a lot!”

No one comes in to marvel at your revelation, just as no one had wasted another look at you once they were done beating the shit out of you. “Ungrateful bastards,” you mutter, and for some reason you find that even funnier than the story. So you laugh yourself silly again, as much as you can with all the pain wracking your every move.

Maybe you’ll die laughing. That’d be a nice way to go.

When you instinctively go to wipe a horrid mixture of blood and tears from your face, you realize your wrists are free. They must’ve come loose or been torn free by those goons. Your ankles, too, are no longer bound, though you’re pretty sure your foot isn’t supposed to be sticking that way. That’s fun. Guess walking is out of the picture. But where would you even walk to? It’s not like they’re gonna give you a goodie bag and let you out the front door.

Maybe… maybe if you can find some place to hide? Some back hallway nobody uses where you can hole up until… well. You know, deep down, that SHIELD doesn’t send in rescue parties for people like you. Hell, the only people who’ll even realize you’re gone are Loki and Thor. You wince as a pain in your chest stabs to life. Okay. Safe place first. Daydreaming about rescue operations later.

Sitting up is the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life. There’s definitely a punctured lung somewhere amongst the mess that is currently your internal organs, because what little oxygen you can gasp for doesn’t seem to be doing much. You’re right about walking, that’s not going to happen- you can’t even feel anything below your knees. But your knees- they’re stable-ish, and as long as you ignore the bones in your wrists shifting around to spots they shouldn’t be in, you might be able to passably crawl your way to victory.

You want to laugh, but that’d probably send a rib straight through your chest. So you don’t.

Crawling on your goddamn hands and knees through a secret underground HYDRA base is by far the most surreal moment of your life. Even more then realizing that hammer in New Mexico was honest-to-Thor Mjolnir. More than casually chatting about the questionable existence of deities with another deity. It’d be funny if your plan wasn’t so horrendously futile. You’re moving at negative two miles per hour. You’re leaving a massive trail of blood behind you. And even if SHIELD does send some rookie agent to track you down, you’ll be nothing but a body to find.

On the other hand, you’ll quite possibly die before any of the HYDRA idiots find you. Maybe you could go semi-peacefully, then.

It’s that thought that keeps you moving. One petty little victory before your demise. Really, you didn’t know you were capable of that much triviality, but hey, might as well respect your one dying wish, right?

Miracle of miracles- most likely the last miracle you’re ever going to see- you find what looks to be a neglected supply closet. The door is unlocked, and you squeeze your way in, then shut the door as much as you can behind you. There’s no light to see by, but your eyes aren’t working that well anyways, so you climb over what feel like discarded Kevlar vests and random pieces of weaponry until you get to the furthest corner you can manage. Tuck yourself up against the wall, dragging your useless feet behind you. Breathe. Cough up some more blood. Breathe again.

Some sort of gun clatters away from the pile you just climbed over and you clutch it to you; a cold comfort. You’ve never fired a gun, but it should be easy enough, right? Point the bad end at the bad guy, aim, pull the trigger. Maybe if someone finds you before you go you can take out one of the bastards with you.

It’s dark and quiet. That’s all you can ask for at this point. Briefly, you wonder if Valhalla accepts stowaways. Maybe Loki will come visit you if they do.

Loki. Loki is a god, right? And you can pray to gods. You have no idea how or if the whole praying thing even works- one of the many questions you should have asked him- but… maybe it’ll make you feel better. Saying your last thoughts.

Um. Loki? Do I need to, like, invoke your full name or something? Loki Laufeyson, son of Odin, Prince of Asgard, rightful king of Jotunheim, God of Mischief and Lies, royal pain in my ass for the past year… yeah, that’s probably enough. Um, hi. It’s me. So, funny story, I might’ve gotten myself kidnapped by HYDRA and then beaten to a pulp. Just a bit. You’d laugh if you were here, trust me. I’m laughing on the inside.

So, I know you’re kinda in a cell, but dying here seems pretty sucky. Maybe could you send Thor to come get me? I mean, I’m gonna die either way, but at least dying in Thor’s muscly arms would be a big step up than this closet.

Sorry, that was a joke. You know I like you better.

Soooooo, yeah. Have a think on it I guess. I mean, don’t think long, I don’t have that much time.

I don’t know if you can hear me. Probably not, I don’t usually get that lucky. But if you can, just… remember that a prince is still a prince, no matter where he comes from. Thor loves you, even if you don’t believe it sometimes, so try not to dagger him unless he really deserves it. So does Frigga. Trust me, I know these things. I really liked hanging out with you, if that’s worth anything. You aren’t anything like I expected, but I’m glad you’re not, ‘cause I don’t think I’d love you nearly as much if you were.

Keep yourself out of trouble, Trickster. For me.