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clansayeed · 4 years

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Hey Jack! I wanted to know what your thoughts are on Rheya. Was she really a villain to you? Were her motives justifiable? Was she a good villain? Did you think she deserved to have a redemption arc in chapter 16? What could have been written to make her have a better character story? Any thoughts at all about Rheya!

FOREWARNING: Anon... I accidentally wrote you a 2500 word essay. I shit you not this thing is 2,528 words long. So... I don’t know whether to say you’re welcome or I’m sorry. Just letting you know in advance.

ADD-ON POST-POSTING: I’m fully aware this is an app game. A three book series written with sexying vampires in mind. Where the medium is limited both size and content-wise, where you can’t go into much detail because they can only have so many panels in a chapter, etc. Still thinking what I think though. And if you get paid to create content professionally the least you can do for your own paycheck is go back and double-check your work.

Actually this ask came at a good time since I have to work on some character motivations for her for my series... and I always break down the in-canon versions before working on my own. So anon, let’s talk... are you a mind reader?

Kidding! mostly

So. Rheya.

I actually just finished my first replay of book 2 and at the moment I’ve only ever played book 3 the once. I played it as it was releasing so there were some memory gaps in some places and needed-refreshers in others. But on a whole I have similar thoughts about Rheya as I do Xenocrates, and you can find those thoughts here.

Overall she was a solid setup, good design and potential, and PB pretty much wasted her execution.

I wanna start with a genuine question to the fandom since I’ve never actually been able to ask this... but y’all like... totally saw the Bloodkeeper being related to her coming, right? Like I was so convinced of it that when it was revealed in some big dramatic point at the end I was like “yeah... they told us this...?” and it turns out they fuckin didn’t??? Like I could not understand the people who were like super into her sprite like yes she looks good but here I was thinking she was our ancestor from the get-go so I was... confused to say the least.

Not gonna lie when they started pushing in snippets of Rheya’s past trauma in book 2 (things like her yelling “you know what they did to me/took from me” which is paraphrased but you know what I mean) I really hoped they weren’t gonna do what they did. So of course they did it.

But I wish they’d like... just given her the kid. Just give her Iola and leave the weird suddenly random husband out of it. At this point we know Gaius has an unhealthy idolatry for her, we know Xenocrates adored her in his own way in his youth... but we know fuckall about Demetrius up to and including his existence until literally book 3. Sloppy, IMO. They took something not being mentioned and used it to put in a plot device when the omission should have been strategical.

TBH I thought the whole “you know what they did to me” was gonna get hella dark RE: Rheya and King Kaelisus’ obsession with her. That’s as far as I’ll go there.

But you have a Priestess, a known Priestess, who was definitely faithful enough not to stray even when she thought she was walking to her own death. It’s pretty easy to assume (as I did ngl) that she would be completely devoted to Phampira, including romantically/sexually. It would have been a good setup to explain why she never gave Gaius the goods if anything.

And there’s nothing wrong with having said Priestess have her own family while still being devoted. I just wish PB would have used some fucking forethought and hinted at that earlier on than they did. Because they didn’t hint. They dropped this random fisherman-something husband on us and told us she cared enough about his opinion to make him part of her advisory board but not... to like... mention him in any of her conversations in any of the flashbacks... including those in which he would have been alive.

On that note the whole timeline there is really messy, they obviously threw him and Iola in later on after some things were established/couldn’t be taken back. I’ve studied this shit extensively and it’s really muddled exactly how long Rheya ruled, when shit went down with her family, how much time had passed when Xenocrates staked her, etc.

I would have loved for Iola’s father not to have been there. Give me a strong woman, a strong single mother, who would burn the world for the loss of her daughter. Doesn’t matter who did the deed, Iola was hers and the Sons/Order took that from her and the world would have to pay the price.

If I had been given that I would end all of my complaints right here. I would, genuinely. Because then her descent into madness, her paranoia, her megalomania would all have been explained. And they still technically are but -- maybe it’s just me -- there’s something about her having to factor in Demetrius that just... takes me out of it. IDK.

I didn’t mind the guy... though him being a talking tree of doom was a little much for me... though by that point I had accepted the plot was off the goddamn rails and just kept nodding and going with it. But his presence made the story okay when his absence could have made the story impactful and powerful and emotional. That’s just my thoughts. Which you asked for. You did this.

No takesies-backsies.

Was she a villain? Hells to the yes.

It’s a classic case of obtaining ultimate power and abusing it; of crossing the line between justice and vengeance. Not that she wasn’t justified in her freak-out over the death of her family. But everything after up to and including her fatal feeding schedule was totally unnecessary. For a villain, yes necessary.

For a vampire goddess who could have easily used Gaius’ influence over the vampires of the modern world to form a cult following around herself with an open dialogue about her big ass appetite and probably would have ended up with swaths of willing adorers ready to lend their blood to her cause thus eliminating the need for secrecy and subsequent feeling of betrayal...

You tell me.

I feel like she was definitely more than a little hyped up though. Not even going into my whole-ass issue with the entire Unchained plot and thus the first like 4-5 chapters of book 3, she was hyped up in myth and kind of a let down in person. She could FLY. Walk in the SUN. Heal the DYING. She’s vampire JESUS.

*ADDED IN LATER: She took out THE ENTIRE ORDER OF THE DAWN, WHO HAVE RAVAGED THE VAMPIRE POPULATION FOR LITERALLY 3000 YEARS since they were around in her time after all IN LIKE A THREE-MOVE COMBO BREAK. ALL THIS SHIT THEY HYPED WITH THE ORDER and their entire ERADICATION isn’t even an ON-SCREEN THING. Unless you pay.

Dude if they had kept Xenocrates and the Order and used the two of them against each other; the Order’s long-standing influence on the modern world versus the new world Rheya wanted to create with the human populations not knowing the history behind their hatred, where like the first half of the book is Rheya and MC and gang taking out the Order and Xenocrates only to find out in the middle point that she’s been doing it for selfish reasons and they were on the wrong team the whole time and THEN Rheya becomes the big bad... I would have enjoyed the shit out of that.

Anyway. “She’s vampire JESUS...” and her big evil plan is to... suck face on national television? IDK. It didn’t play the mood right for me. I can see from a writer’s perspective how they kind of played out all of their options and went with a quick and easy solution... but it didn’t work for me. That’s a no from me dawg.

Do I think she deserved a redemption arc? I don’t think anybody deserved a god damn redemption arc, unless they are done with extreme care and attention to detail before/during/after said arc they go horribly, and overall tend to be the plot device pick of lazy writers.

And I take nothing back. No like I think I might have gone into how much I fucking hated Gaius’ “reDEmPtiON aRc” before or at least I have somewhere and to someone. Probably Sofia... no most definitely Sofia. But anyway. They spend TWO GOD DAMN BOOKS hyping Gaius as this ultimately irredeemable bad guy.

OMG I was literally playing the book 2 finale and got a quote hold on... HERE. Adrian literally says about Gaius in 2.16 “It’s like there’s no humanity left.” And that’s just one actual example of the tons of times they make him out to be devoted to Rheya of his own volition, the ultimate example of the line between believing in something and being blinded to everything by it, etc. Like a huge chunk of Kamilah’s and Adrian’s arcs RE: Gaius are about how he was definitely a monster, he turns the people around him into monsters, and while they have worked their asses off to be good and right their wrongs he has not, will not, and would not ever do such a thing.

Then suddenly he’s brainwashed, tried to turn Rheya down and was made into a loony toon because of it, and everything he made MC’s loved ones do that they blamed themselves for but needed to blame him for is suddenly Rheya’s fault and now we should blame her for.

Mmmmmkay sweetie. I’m good, thanks.

But really -- that was the last straw for me when it came to both Gaius and Rheya. There’s a difference between giving the villain something they see as a just cause (ex. Rheya avenging her family) and giving the villain a cop-out that absolves them of guilt (ex. Gaius and... everything about him). Like yes I know MC didn’t have to forgive him, I know Kamilah didn’t really forgive him, but it’s pretty fuckin obvious from how it was put out into the world story that the writers were trying to lean you towards blaming Rheya and letting Gaius off the hook.

I mean... making him save Lula for real when Rheya saved her for fake earlier on in the book, using Lula as a stand-in metaphor for her own child daughter that she finds out she was the cause of her death for, etc? That symbolism is so transparent I could put it in the asset database.

And I’ll only briefly touch on this since I could write a whole other essay on the matter RE: PB and their fucking constant repetition of this, but “let’s give both bad guys similar moral quandaries but suddenly reveal it was a consent issue and the woman is wholly to blame and now gets the man’s crimes piled on with her own” is super common in fiction and hella. fucking. sexist.

But that isn’t to say all of this is necessarily bad.

When done right, everything I’ve complained about above can be a part of a really good story. What “done right” means is different for everyone, everyone has a different example and different thoughts on it. These are mine. I think the better term would be done well. It was not done WELL.

But given things like PB’s weird obsession with redeeming the attractive (apparently) bad guy, PB’s history with narrowing a woman down to one trait or part of her (ex. Rheya’s power corruption centered around her role as a wife and mother and not... a super all powerful vampire goddess...), their obvious lack of attention to detail and overall lack of vision when it comes to the big picture* and more, I personally don’t think they knew what the fuck they wanted by book 3 and were already well into transitioning into whatever adultery-obsessed lingerie shenanery they’re fixated on now; so much so that it’s almost a disservice to the writing done in earlier book 1 and a decent chunk of book 2 when calling it a whole series.

*I keep bringing this up only because it means I can back up stuff like this with real examples of theirs: these guys did not write the plot of this series as a cohesive story. I get that, as a writer writing a big series myself I get the fuck out of that. But you have to solidify some things early on in the development process in order to avoid writing yourself into a hole or, like with this, having to result in trope-y plot devices that work in theory but on paper don’t give the story the full-circle fulfillment it deserves.

Their timelines are out of whack, they contradict themselves in quite a few places, constantly wishy-washy their own lore, and definitely didn’t go back and double check if they’d said something already... and that’s not including where they focused on the details of one unimportant thing and left another more important thing to just be “and this is the way it is moving on.”

I literally have no way/idea how to summarize any of this bullshittery going on in this ask. Did I like Rheya? The character personality, design, and overall idea as this big ass badass power/hungry goddess demanding fealty was pretty cool. Did I like Rheya when they narrowed her story down to her grief over her family (which, again, is valid, but just seemed really disjointed and rushed when compared to everything else they had given about her/shown of her by the beginning of book 3)? Not... as much.

I think they wanted her to seem like she could be redeemed. I mean FFS in the “big battle” she literally just stands there and lets you do the thing. 3000 years imprisoned and however many centuries before that spent taking the power that she was denied all because some bad dudes in masks killed the mortal husband and daughter you would have eventually lost to old age anyway...? And she just stands there???

Even knowing she was really behind Iola’s death they could have stuck with the “madness consumed” plotline and had her be like well... what’s done is done back to taking over now thank you.

But sometimes a bad guy just has to be a bad guy. Rourke from ES, mister capitalism -- can’t remember them trying to redeem him. If they had I don’t think I would have liked it so much. Who else... UGH. Thomas in NB. Crazy zombie man wants all monsters dead because one killed his family (can we stop using dead families for grief porn please and thanks...) another example of a useless villain. Hence why I removed him from my NB rewrite don’t even get me going...

What’s his face in TCATF! Luther! You join up with him and he still tries to kill you in the end! Now that was fucking classic. Hex, who suddenly is forgiven for the literal enslavement of a race of people and the thoughtless murder of a civilization that didn’t agree with her.. and all because she was ‘like a mother’ to the kid genius? Not so much.

I could go on and on and go search out tons of examples but in the end the one thing you can say PB does well is that they stay consistent in their ideas of redemption, of who deserves it and who isn’t, and just how far they’re willing to stretch the fucking story to forgive a character if 1. the sprite is hot or 2. the sprite had a little sprite family somewhere in there.

legit just talk to me about bb/nb

#; ask jack #diving in depth: bloodbound #rheya apostolous #re: bloodbound #bloodbound #consent tw #;; like just a brief sentence about it but wanted to tag accordingly #;; also fair warning this is LONG AS FUCK ANON #;; and in many places real damn preachy #;; so I'm sorry in advance and in no way expect my thoughts and opinions to be the only ones #;; and know much of my thoughts are colored by my experiences and others have their own valid thoughts and opinions #;; which should be a given but I just wanted to put it in writing just in case #;; you know how it be #Anonymous

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snorlaxlovesme · 4 years

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This is just uh. A thing. A long thing. I actually drafted it back in July during Pride Month but chickened out before I could post it. But then I discovered that Ace Week exists and what better time to rant about the quintessential Ace Experience(TM) amiright?

I’ve struggled to define my sexuality since I was like 17. I can remember me and some of my girl friends going to the mall and talking about boys. I was currently teetering around a relationship with one of our male friends and they asked me to define why I was attracted to him and I couldn’t. They didn’t really think anything of it, moved along in the conversation and said “well X isn’t my type, so I guess I wouldn’t get it.” But the conversation stuck with me.

1. Because I never really thought the idea of a “type” was real. I didn’t think people ACTUALLY arbitrarily decided who wasn’t worthy of their affection based on a random set of archetypes. I thought they were shallow for saying that about him. I thought it was a mean concept to not let someone be “your type.”

2. Not being able to identify what I DID find attractive about him was....off. Like sure, he looked fine, but tbh he looked like an average teenage white boy and I couldn’t really pick out a physical identifier that made me want him. That seemed like a bad thought to have about one’s significant other.

Needless to say, that non-relationship went nowhere and I eventually told him I wasn’t feeling it. I thought I just wasn’t mature enough for relationships yet.

At age 18 I had my first kiss. Another male friend of ours. Another relationship I’d been teetering around. I had told him multiple times that I didn’t like the idea of dating him so soon after I had broken things off with X. It felt weird, too soon, let’s hold off. But part of me also didn’t like the fact that I was 18 and had never been kissed. It wasn’t at the forethought of my mind all the time, but it lingered back there. Maybe it was because, puberty-wise, I was a late bloomer. Maybe it was because, in my friend group, I was always somehow dubbed “the innocent one.” I didn’t want to continue being late for every major marker in life, so when Y took me up on a hill at sunset and said “I’m going to kiss you now” I let him.

It was not what I thought it would be. All the magical descriptions of kisses in YA books were drastically over-selling the experience. The first one was nice enough, but I couldn’t help but thinking “this feels exactly like kissing a relative” and being a little relieved and little disappointment that the sensation was exactly the same. The second kiss was much worse because he put his tongue in my mouth and I quickly discovered I hateddd that.

I thought that maybe it was Y’s fault. I didn’t like him the way he liked me, so there was no magic. No spark. But also maybe I was just doing it wrong? He did kind of imply that I wasn’t the best kisser (god, how romantic) and so maybe the more we did it the more I would like it?

We went on one more date after that, and almost every time we made eye contact he tried to kiss me. It was horrible. I spent the better part of the day actively trying to not look at him because I didn’t know how to tell him I didn’t want to do it anymore. That seemed like a bad thought to have about one’s significant other.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out. I’d like to say I handled the situation as maturely as with X, but in reality I ghosted this kid for like 2.5 months and eventually sent him a facebook message saying I wasn’t feeling it. I figured I wasn’t mature enough for relationships yet.

College I had no time for relationships, or so I told myself. Maybe I didn’t have the mental capacity for them because I was too busy wishing I would get hit by a bus (higher education did not go great for someone with undiagnosed ADHD). I kind of assumed everyone also felt the same way, but people were coupling up around me left and right. Everyone had the same stressors I had, maybe even more so, and yet they had time to form new relationships and have noisy sex in the dorm room next to mine. I didn’t have time, though.

My roommate asked me in those first few years if maybe I was asexual. I actually got mad at her for even implying it. Asexuals were emotionless robots who were so repulsed by sex they didn’t even want to THINK about it. I talked about sex with my friends all the time! I masturbated when she wasn’t around like every other day! How dare she even insinuate that I might be one of those people. I just wasn’t ready to be in a relationship yet.

And sure, I’d been on tumblr for years at that point. I’d been relatively educated about the LGBT community and its various factions. But nothing about it screamed ME. All those people seemed to have the same shared experience of knowing who they were since forever, of experiencing some form of discrimination based on who they were. I had always been straight, right? And no one’s ever discriminated me for who I liked.

It was weird, though. Getting older and hearing more and more people talking about sex and just like, NOT feeling the same way. Was talking to my friends in a group chat one day, and one of them was head over heels for one of her coworkers. Not in love, but I-wanna-rip-off-your-McDonald’s-uniform-and-fuck-you-right-here-in-the-break-room (do McD’s even have break rooms? whatever) lust. She’s like, “you know that electricity you feel when you’re next to someone you really, really like. where every time you get close to them you feel this MAGNETISM and your entire body feels hot--”

--and all I could think of was how that sounded EXACTLY how Bella described her feeling towards Edward in Twilight, and just how ridiculous it sounded. That’s some YA bullshit, that’s not real.

And then our other friend in the chat was like “yeah.”

Oh. Well I guess I just have a lower sex-drive than you guys. That’s whatever.

I didn’t really identify as asexual until I saw a post about an aspec identity called autochorissexuality.

The term autochorissexual describes a subset of asexuality which is defined as: a disconnection between oneself and a sexual target/object of arousal; may involve sexual fantasies or arousal in response to erotica or pornography, but lacking any desire to be a participant in the sexual activities therein.

That...kinda sounded like me....

Like I said, I masturbated and all that jazz so I assumed I couldn’t be asexual. I literally loved orgasms. I read smut and watched porn to get off like I assumed the rest of the world did, not even really realizing that a lot of people...get off...thinking about people doing stuff....to THEM.

I do not think about people I know when I masturbate. It feels incredibly weird for them to pop up in any of my fantasies, and I kinda just assumed that meant I wasn’t attracted to any of them (which I’m not), so it was fine. It didn’t really occur to me that I literally NEVER fantasize about myself when I get off. If I read smut I’m thinking of the characters. If I watch porn I’m thinking of the actors. Never am I imagining someone hot and sexy doing hot and sexy things to me. I’m not even very good at getting off based on my imagination alone, unless I’m basically writing my own smut in my head and imagining what THEY enjoy. The thought of imagining things being done to ME feels weirdly...embarrassing? I don’t know. I don’t dig it, so I don’t think it.

Again, it did NOT even occur to me that that might not be how other people operated.

I also didn’t know that asexuality COULD have subcategories like that, other than aromanticism, which was an identity I toyed with for a while and ultimately am still unsure about.

But learning that liking orgasms =/= allosexual was kind of a wake-up for me.

After learning about autochorissexuality (which, while I am incredibly, infinitely grateful that someone coined that term so I could learn more about myself, I will never identify as because it is a mouthful and I honestly don’t know how to pronounce it), I began identifying as asexual. I was 21 at the time. I’m almost 26 now.

A couple people know. Mostly people who follow me on tumblr that I also know in real life. I never really had to “come out” to them per se because they saw my posts and rolled with it. Wasn’t a big deal. I think that I actually had a conversation and TOLD those friends in that group chat, but that didn’t feel like coming out, more like all of us finally coming to a realization about me we should have figured out a lot earlier. Also, they’re friends from tumblr, so they’re not the types to make a big deal out of that stuff either.

Even though I have a couple of tumblr friends that I skype with regularly, I don’t really bring it up in conversation that much. Like two of my irl friends (who, again, follow me on tumblr) know, and we don’t really talk about it much either. It’s there, we all know, but if I don’t bring it up, they don’t either.

I’ve never really “come out” before. Had to sit someone down and have the conversation. Part of me thinks it’s kind of pointless, because whether or not I’m sexually attracted to others isn’t any anyone else’s business, really. It doesn’t super impact my work life or my life with my friends or family, so why does it need to be said? If I decided I liked women and wanted to date one, that would be a big change that I’d have to address to someone. But me being asexual is just me continuing to not have sex with anyone, the way I always have. Seems like a weird thing to cause a fuss about.

But it’s part of me. And I want to talk about it sometimes.

But I don’t even know how that conversation would go. Asexuality is a relatively invisible subset of the LGBTQIA+ community. Like, it’s the last letter, the one that often gets cut off. And when people do bring up the A, it’s for Ally. I’m not gonna get into the discussion about that, I don’t know enough queer history to form a hot take, but the point still stands that many people don’t know about asexuality. And while it seems relatively easy to explain, I guess--

”I don’t experience sexual attraction”

--it also feels way more complex than that. And I’m not very good at articulating why I’m NOT something else when I have a hard time identifying what that something even IS. I was the kid who thought having a “type” was shallow and mean! It didn’t occur to me that people’s sexual fantasies INCLUDE THEMSELVES AS PARTICIPANTS. So how do I explain my lack of attraction to people?

But maybe I’m being too reductive of the masses. Like, I’m not the brightest bulb in the bunch but *I* was able to learn what was asexuality was on my own. Who’s to say others haven’t? Maybe I won’t need to give an informative slideshow every time I come out to someone.

...But what if I’m wrong? What if I get into a relationship one day and I find myself INCREDIBLY attracted to my partner? What if I get into a relationship with a WOMAN one day and realize that I was les/bi/pan this whole time? I know that demisexuality exists, I know that sexuality is a spectrum and people are constantly learning about themselves and evolving. I don’t want to downplay that or..or...invalidate that. I know. But I’m an idiot. And I can’t help feeling that if I come out and commit to fun new adjective about myself and then all of a sudden that adjective doesn’t fit me anymore I’ll be labelled as fraud for forever and ever.

I know that’s probably unlikely for the most part. But it’s still something that’s there in my mind that I feel every time I think about talking about it.

I don’t know. Part of me doesn’t know why I’m writing this post because there isn’t some grand conclusion to my narrative or sweeping answer to my problems. My story continues for as long as I live and maybe things will change and maybe they won’t. I’d like to be able to come out one day and say it. To my sisters. To my coworkers. To some random dude hitting on me who seems kind enough to understand there’s a reason I’m reluctant to flirt back. Probably not to my parents. I don’t know if I want to present the slideshow to them about my lack of sex life, nor do I think they would handle my act of vulnerability with grace or tact (boomers, y’know).

I guess I can end this post by saying that it’s not all bad. Not being “out” kinda sucks, but right now, knowing is enough. There are a hundred other micro situations from my past similar to the ones I spelled out above that made me wonder what was wrong with me. I wanted to be able to like someone the way other people did, to have a normal relationship, but I couldn’t force myself to do it and I didn’t know what was stopping me. The whole am I just broken conversation whirled through my head many a night in college when insomnia prevented me from sleeping and depression stopped me from giving myself a fucking break. It sucked, and maybe it’s a little grim to think of asexuality as a diagnosis to a lifetime of symptoms, but that’s kind of what it felt like.

And that’s not bad! Why? Because i know that I’m not alone and that this is NORMAL . Being asexual is not being broken! It’s something that many people identify with! And honestly that thought alone thrills me enough to make this whole ridiculous narrative worth it. There’s a whole world of people out there feeling the exact same way as me, and none of us are wrong for feeling that way. It is unreal the kind of confidence that gives you.

My friend from earlier, the one who desperately wanted to bang her co-worker, she said something to me the other day that struck me with how far I’ve come in terms of my identity. I was sobbing to her on the phone about a shitty thing in my life, as one does, and she pointed out how the strangest things will get to you while others don’t even have an effect. If someone mentions how I don’t have my drivers license at the ripe old age of 25 I legitimately have a breakdown on the phone with her about it, but if people make jokes about me being a virgin I don’t even bat an eye.

And it IS weird. If someone would have made a virgin joke at me at age 20 I probably would have spiralled into one of my late-night, crying-into-my-pillow sessions about how much I fucking SUCK at being a human, but at age 25 it’s just...whatever. As someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction, why WOULD I have had sex already? If I don’t seek it out, don’t want it, it’s not gonna be a part of my life, you know? And I don’t care. Past me, without this identifier, would have cared deeply. Current me could go her entire life without having sex and I don’t think it would drastically effect her mood.

It’s weird how one little word can turn things around for you like that.

#ace #long post #asexual awareness week

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aesirfalling · 4 years

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From your writing asks: #1, 8, 10, 26, and 28 :) I wasn't sure if you had wanted me to answer any specific ones myself, but since it was an ask I wanted to respond properly~

I definitely wanted you to answer some specific ones yourself :^)

What themes would you like to write about that you feel don’t get explored very often?

I think this is obvious to everyone who’s read my more recent fics (so like... my fics from 2016 onwards?), but I like to write “realistically,” especially in regards to joys and pain. When people write about angst things like breakups and depression and physical illnesses they are sometimes hesitant (rightfully or understandably so, in many cases) to really get into the nitty gritty, and in many cases, uglier parts of them, but like, they’re a part of life and people in our lives don’t have a good time (or even many good moments at all) when these kinds of things happen to them. Those moments are still important, though, and I personally feel like embracing the dark aspects of those things makes getting through them in the end more emotionally and existentially powerful? If that makes sense. I’m definitely still wrestling with, like, the extent to which I should write such things (esp. since like, in most cases, fic readers are not reading your fic to suffer), but I think my underlying sentiment as a writer is to examine/meet feelings and life unflinchingly and with some kind of grace.

(I’ll get to the joys eventually. I swear. I have that draft of the second chapter of Lost and Found in my Google Drive. There’s Radiance and the mood in that, too. I just don’t like to write too much preemptive joy.)

The other thing I want to bring up as well is a kind of like... infrastructural realism? Or is it like, socioeconomic, worldly things? Like we’ve talked about this as well RE: how I’m covering Hope in my fics and how you worldbuild a lot around missions and such in yours. I think this is mostly a fic thing since to do this well requires a longer fic with a lot of forethought, and most people don’t have time for that. And honestly most people don’t like Hope for the structural engineering work he put into building new planets either

Favorite dialogue in your wip? (If asked more than once, respond with a new piece each time)

Oh man this interlude is going to be CHOKE FULL of dialogue that will kill me and most of them haven’t even been written yet

But the things that I’ve already put down on my dump file are like all dialogue

Here I just wrote up this thing

Snow: Go on then. Tell me that you don’t miss the stars. Tell me that you are okay with just sitting here day by day, pretending that you don’t know anything, pretending that you don’t have regrets and wants. Tell me that you don’t care if I won’t invite you to the wedding with Serah, if Light finds another man, or if some orphanage is burning on the other side of town. Tell me -

Hope: I don’t think you understand. I never needed anyone to motivate me.

Hope: I needed someone to stop me.

What scene was the most fun to write for you and why?

Hmm... we might have to establish a definition for ‘fun’ :P

I think in more recent memory, I’ve had the most fun writing the dialogue between Hope and E1 in the Intermission, because I relish all opportunities to write him (especially in FWWCH where I’m usually banned from writing in his POV) and writing two of him is just double the fun. I also adore all occasions where introspective idiots have to talk to other versions of themselves because it’s kind of like. The inevitable 404 error when they realize they are actually empathizing with themselves is tearjerker and heartwarming central.

What do you feel like you need to work on as a growing writer? How can you improve?

Oh lordy there are so many things. Lemme just list a few off the top of my head

1) Linguistic ability: There is definitely a part of me that is sad about the fact that leaving my home country at the age of 11 has left me in a place where I am kind of bilingual but kind of... not really “Native” in either. Like, I have this lingering feeling that I’ll never get to the level of a “Native” English speaker/writer, and I definitely hit like language ability walls all the time when I write - things wouldn’t feel naturally lyrical, I’d run out of words, I wouldn’t know how to describe something the way it should be described, the sentence structure variety is pitiful, etc. I think it’s especially apparent when you’re writing a long fic, where like you have to deal with the same things over and over (e.g. writing Hope cooking, or how Lightning physically perceives him, etc) and there’s more of a limit on where natural inspiration can take you. I should read more good prose (since that’s apparently how I get better at English) but, ugh, effort.

2) Characterization: how many times have I whined about how much I suck at writing Lightning lmaooooooo I think the general thing is like, everyone is decent at writing someone they personally relate to, but we struggle when we try to write outside of our comfort zone. Lightning is definitely the poster child of “character unlike me that I’m trying to get a hold of,” but I think I struggled even more trying to write Fang, and I’d probably struggle trying to write someone like Cid seriously. I think a large part of the struggle is trying to morph yourself into that character (or, like, dissociating from yourself and just... “becoming” that character depending on how you view writing meta??) since like, just understanding someone is not enough. Just understanding someone won’t let you write convincing dialogue where they talk and move around the way they usually do. You have to like, become them and that’s really hard when you have a strong writer’s ego (I know, shocking, coming from me.)

3) Worldbuilding: wtf am I even doing with Hope’s White Lotus thing lmaoooooo anyway a world could always be more interesting, consistent, realistic, nuanced etc. And not necessarily through more word count on the worldbuilding-y stuff. I think it’s more about understanding the factors driving the world than anything else. Like what the resources are, who has power/agency, how things are done (e.g., in our world, decisions are mostly made by individual nation states, although large corporate entities often have immense political influence). AND THEN JUST LIKE CHARACTERS THERE’S THE STRUGGLE WITH EXECUTING THEM - like just because I understand there are rich oligarchs behind things doesn’t mean I’m good at writing the Great Gatsby. I dunno, I have a perpetual sense of imposter syndrome when I try to understand and write things about the world, regardless of whether or not the world is real. I feel like a large part of this goes back to the fact that I’m still only in my 20s and haven’t seen much of the ‘real world’ as they say, although I guess I’m technically still way ahead of most fic writers.

4) General writer’s attitude: this influences themes and the heart of one’s writing. When I say that I care a lot about the grace and dignity of my narratives and my characters, it ties back into this - I want to tell human stories, and I want to tell stories that reflect on our struggles and our faith despite said struggles. It’s the kind of lens that I filter all my words through and impacts every word I write. The obvious problem, then, is that my writing’s only ever going to be as perceptive or sympathetic as I am, and that’s something that I can and should always work on. Am I too obsessed with tragedy? Am I honestly far better at posing questions than providing solutions, even when I highly value solutions? How do I become the kind of writer and person that I want to be without driving myself insane or losing touch with the people that I want my writing to speak to?

5) Discipline: Am I ever going to finish FWWCH (or H&L or any of my other WIPs lmao)? Stay tuned.

I think a lot of my self-doubt as a writer comes from just how much I know I can improve on tbh

Do you need background noise to write? If so, what do you listen to?

I wouldn’t say I work with “background noise” - I work with mood-appropriate playlists (did you know I’ve been gratuitously naming all my fic chapters after songs?), or you know, the good ole 2 o’clock cosmic silence. It’s pretty interesting to me actually, since I also have an engineering degree and like... I need silence when I’m trying to logick things like math or the correct wording for a formal writing thing (e.g. a grant or policy proposal). So my creative hemisphere wants stimulation while my mechanical brain wants silence. Figures.

#thank you for sending these in ;_;#writing tag #long post

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whetstonefires · 5 years

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Why do you think every other character's problematic canon is taken as writers being bad, the fandom for the most part completely ignoring canons or changing them to portray their faves in a good light, but it's not the case for Dick? Dick's canons, however bad they've been, until Ric most of it is used in fics, almost none of it is dismissed or excused away with "bad writing" That actually includes Dick being insensitive to outright abusive, depending on where you look it's not forgotten.

Also noticeable, other than Ric, a few Devin Grayson arcs and that annual where he cheated on Kory, his mistakes are blamed on him. A fictional character. This is on par with Bruce and Damian’s getting there but how many times people have said Jason isn’t like that it’s ooc writing n how many times has that been said for Dick? Just saying, most of his canon is okay to keep, even if it’s bad writing. If I look at the big picture, in a way Dick is the most hated, even by his own blind fans.

Last anon, what I’m saying is, from looking into all sides of this fandom n ficdom, it seems to me that for characters like jason, fans disregard most of the canon because it’s problematic/ badly written, a lot of canon for Bruce or Damian n Tim (abuse, toxic friendship, manipulation, sexism, murder…) but for Dick barely anything is disregarded. Even if it seems like Dick’s been turned into golden goody two shoes his bad canons aren’t disregarded no matter how much of a fan they are.

Lmao idk, I think Brothers In Blood for example is ignored as much for Dick’s sake as Jason’s. And he’s been running a damn long time; we courteously ignore a lot of weird and kinda sexist or racist stuff that’s a result of having been a teenager in 1962, while not giving as much of a pass to i.e. Damian in 2008.

(Which allows Dick to be effectively clean of a lot of little pecadillo-level flaws because the ones that were canon are no longer considered relevant to the current self, and haven’t technically been canon in 35 years, so there’s effectively nothing there, and you’re free to project an idealized past backward in time.)

But you do have a point about the phenomenon. I think it’s a few different things in play.

1) Dick’s bad qualities don’t really appear in his reputation, so you tend to find them by digging down into the meat and nitty-gritty of his history, which makes them feel more genuine and less like character assassination.

2) Most of the bad or asshole behavior in Dick that people acknowledge and don’t strike from the record doesn’t…taste like the creators put it in there from a place of hostility or dislike toward the character; it’s written sympathetically, and so fits into the overall shape of him as a person better, and so feels less like derailment.

3) A significant subset of it, as such, is written with the intent of making him more interesting as a main character. And it frequently works. Dick is awesome enough he’s in danger of becoming boring if he doesn’t fuck up or demonstrate that he is fucked up occasionally, tho tbh the trauma conga he’s been through is just sad.

4) Dick Grayson fans are not on the whole in a position to feel defensive about liking him. Loving Dick Grayson is a pretty mainstream position.

So they feel safe critiquing him and digging into his flaws and errors, without expecting anyone with clout to pop up and go ‘Ah-hah! You know he has this trait, how can you like him anyway?!’ Nothing shuts down critical thought like defensiveness.

Bruce used to have a similar status, but things changed and he’s been being dragged down and dogpiled so much for so long that his hatedom is large enough that ‘liking Batman as a person’ is now a mildly controversial position that must be defended within the Batman fandom.

For which I mostly blame DC. No forethought. No consistent themes. Only melodrama. Grrr.

#fandom #in the end we are all superboy prime #dick grayson #batfam #nightwing #continuity #defensiveness #ask #a nonny mouse #hoc est meum #Anonymous #meta

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serceleste · 5 years

Text

tagged by @rain-sleet-snow !

Author Name: celeste9

Fandoms You Write For: I’ve written for quite a few over the years but right now mostly Star Wars, and then MCU.

Where You Post: These days, just AO3, and sometimes snippets or short random stuff on Tumblr.

Most Popular One-Shot: By far it’s No More Secrets, and it continues to boggle my mind how often it still shows up in my daily kudos emails, 5 years later! It’s a Merlin/Arthur (BBC Merlin) kidnapping leads to magic reveal fic I wrote for a gift exchange after I had already begun falling out of love with the ship, and it’s one of those things where I’m absolutely thrilled people loved it so much but it’s not one of my own personal favorites, so.

Most Popular Multi-Chapter Story: In a Palace by the Lake, what I think of as the secret Prince Finn fic, lol. Not that surprising it was popular, it’s mutual pining where Finn’s a Force-sensitive prince and Poe is the idiot in love with him, ha. It was posted fall 2016, so it missed the true heyday of stormpilot frenzy but was still early enough that it was a genuine fandom juggernaut at the time.

Favorite Story You Wrote: Oh, damn, I don’t know. I judge everything I write but it’s nice to realize that there are stories I genuinely love, even if I always think they could have been improved. So I could name a number of fics here, but the first one I always think of is This Is the Road to Ruin (We Started at the End), my Finn/Poe/Rey/Kylo Ren First Order AU. It remains the longest and most ambitious thing I’ve ever written, and I’m honestly still really proud of it.

Story You Were Nervous to Post: All of them!

How Do You Choose Your Titles: I keep a list of song lyrics and poetry I can dip into, and when that fails usually something fairly generic from the fic itself.

Do You Outline: Nope, who has time for that?? I fly by the seat of my pants!! And it probably shows, lol. In seriousness, I write as stuff comes to me and then go back and fill in the blanks where needed, and I do put forethought into where I’m trying to go, but just in my head, never in a structured outlining way.

Complete: 541 fics on AO3, plus IDK how many drabbles and 3 sentence fics and other assorted tiny things I never posted there, and there’s a handful of cringey things I never bothered moving over from ffnet.

In-Progress: lol, this will take a while!

- Poe/Rey pwp

- Finn/Poe/Rey touch starvation

- time travel Poe/Rey + Kylo/Ben

- canon AU where Muran shows up alive, Finn/Poe + Poe/Muran

- canon AU Poe/Kare/Iolo where Iolo doesn’t join the Resistance with them

- SW/MCU fusion Bucky/Finn/Poe/Rey

- Poe/Luke where Poe went to Ahch-To

- dark Rey/Poe where Rey gains control of the FO and defeats the Resistance, capturing Poe in the process

- Finn/Kylo redemption fic involving hugs

- Finn/Poe undercover fake married

- Poe/Jess friends with benefits

- Finn/Poe leaning into the age difference

- Poe/Kylo where Poe goes undercover to the FO to try to turn Kylo back to the light

- sequel to the Prince Finn fic

- Poe/Leia through the events of the Poe comic up to the end of TFA

- sort of a Leia & Luke epistolary fic, letters she never sent him while he was missing

- Finn/Poe/Rey stranded on a planet with Luke

- vague possible follow up to the darkjedistormpilot First Order AU where they find the Resistance

- that Inside Llewyn Davis Llewyn/OMC fic I started once

- I have tons of little snippets of stuff that may or may not ever get turned into actual fics, Rey/Jess, Rey/Poe, Finn/Poe, Poe/Hux, Poe/Ben(Kylo), Finn/Poe/Rey, Poe/Leia, Poe/Jess...

- I have a lot of partially finished fics from old fandoms and/or fandoms I still write for but are just so old that I’ve forgotten where I was going with them, and it feels sad to admit they’re never going to be finished, especially the ones that had a lot of words!

Coming Soon/Not Yet Started:

- I still want to write the “5 times Finn wouldn’t let Poe blow something up + 1 time he did” fic

- I have a bit of something I cut from another fic I always meant to recycle into a developing relationship Rey/Jess fic

- still want to turn a snippet into a “5 times Poe and Lando had a one night stand + that time they realized five one night stands might be a relationship” fic

- always meant to write my Poe/Black One fic

- sometimes I think about the Finn/Rey figure skater/hockey player AU I wanted to write while I was in the middle of an exchange

- the dream I had where Bucky was rescuing tied-up bearded Steve wearing the stealth Cap uniform really wants to be a fic

- I never wrote the Leia/Holdo/Poe fic of my dreams

- I’m always thinking about crossovers

- ...I have a lot of ideas, okay

Do You Accept Prompts: I do, but I’ll be honest, if you prompt me at the moment I’m not going to write it, I’m lucky if I churn out a couple hundred words on the weekend and I still have likely unattainable goals of finishing some ST related WIPs before Ep IX comes out.

Upcoming Story You Are Most Excited to Write: tbh right now I’m excited whenever any words at all get produced, it’s a low bar

#meme #writing #star wars #marvel #me

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eldunea · 5 years

Photo

POKÉMON PROFILES: TAVO.

species: talonflame cockatrice. ability: gale wings. primary moves: brave bird, flare blitz, roost, double team, dragon dance. secondary moves: acrobatics, will-o-wisp, tailwind, façade, defog, dragon claw, protect. length of time spent with lotor: 6 years (since age 10). other notes: can breed with the dragon egg group as well as the flying one.

HISTORY.

they say never to breed a bird with a dragon. or, if you do, never let a dragon incubate it. well, some fuckwit thought that both of those things were good ideas. and thus, tavo was born.

his breeder paid the price for her transgression. when the five-day-old half-noivern hatchling opened his eyes for the first time, the woman was immediately turned to stone. this could have spelled freedom for the young chick--at least until some dumbass trainer scooped him up thinking he could use his power to win battles. but unfortunately for him, the freakshow that she promised him to remembered what she had offered, and they weren’t going to let a little thing like “the other party to the deal being dead” get in their way. sneaking up on him from behind, they managed to capture him and bring him to their traveling circus. they got the added bonus of several free statues during their attempt.

he was treated just as well as you might expect from an industry that uses whips and bullhooks on lions to “tame” them. he was put in blinders half the time, dragged from place to place in complete darkness and a too-cold cage, only allowed to see during performances and rehearsals when he was to showcase his deadly power. if he froze someone due to their own carelessness, he was mercilessly beaten as though it were his fault. one might think that he would be able to just freeze them all--but it is often the case with abuse that even the most powerful animals can be thrashed into helplessness. if that weren’t true, circus shows would never be able to feature dangerous animals at all.

he suffered for years until that one fateful day when lotor spotted the headline in the news: circus sued by dozens for turning audience members to stone. and as if that weren’t bad enough for his pokémon-loving heart, he also read in the article that they were considering killing the cockatrice. incensed, he immediately took tavo’s side. it wasn’t the bird’s fault that it was born with a deadly skill, and it wasn’t the bird’s fault that audience members were getting killed--it was the circus’ fault for being irresponsible enough to have such a creature in their shows! he decided he must immediately rescue this bird, as well as all the other animals in the circus’ possession. he raided their encampment, letting loose all except the talonflame cockatrice, which he captured. as an eleven-year-old boy he did not exactly think this through--wild hybrids tend to wreak havoc on ecosystems--but at least he had the forethought to realize that the cockatrice was the most dangerous pokémon in the collection, and he knew what was coming to it if the authorities had to deal with that.

at first, tavo hated him. he thought he was going to be just another one of those assholes who beat him into doing things he didn’t want to do. he particularly didn’t like the fact that lotor kept the blinders on whenever the two of them interacted because he didn’t want to get turned to stone. but the only reason why lotor kept him in captivity was because he knew that if tavo were released into the wild, he would be hunted and killed by the authorities. (sure, many of the other hybrids lotor set free faced this fate, but………eleven-year-old kid, everybody. even with genius intelligence, it would be impossible for him to get everything right.) tavo was the one that he knew for sure it would happen to, because a hybrid cockatrice would be considered too dangerous to be allowed to roam free and harm whoever they like. the bird grew to love and trust his new owner, allowing lotor to ride him as a mount--and eventually, to use him in battle.

ABILITIES & SPECIES TRAITS.

tavo fights blind in official tournaments and friendly matches, relying on his hearing and lotor’s instructions. using his stone-turning abilities in battle is illegal under international pokémon battling law, and he can still turn opponents to stone even if his eyes are semi-covered by their nictitating membrane. thus, lotor has to put blinders on him every time he enters him in a competition. lotor has been working on developing lenses for him that will allow him to look at others without turning them to stone, but he hasn’t managed to do that yet. in the meantime, though, tavo’s willingness to fight without his eyesight is a show of the complete and utter trust that he puts into his trainer.

like eel and basilisk pokémon, he has a pharyngeal jaw inside his beak--a second jaw that grips onto prey and helps to drag prey down his throat. also like basilisk pokémon, he is capable of speaking human language.

though he is not dragon-typed, his ability to use dragon dance and dragon claw come from his cockatrice nature.

i should draw him tbh but he has scales as well as feathers, and instead of a talonflame’s feathered tail he has a scaled, spiny, prehensile one.

pokémon such as blaziken and delibird are his natural enemies. while he won’t die if he hears a rooster crow, he does have a phobia of any chickenlike pokémon and they will have a massive advantage over him in a fight.

lotor, being the science-loving genius he is, figured out how tavo could use roost without having to land on the ground. roost only requires that the pokémon be nonmoving, and he figured out that if you don’t technically move yourself but are still falling through the air, that also counts as nonmoving. thus, tavo can use roost while free fall diving at the constant rate of gravitational acceleration, 9.8 m/s^2. lotor most often likes to have tavo use roost as he dives using brave bird, allowing him to fill up to 100% HP and get that gale wings move priority every fucking time. this gives tavo the extra bonus of being a wall and a physical striker at the same time: he has legitimately outstalled the likes of cofagrigus, umbreon and milotic with this strategy.

lotor has also effectively figured out how to use tailwind to raise attack as well as speed: he has his pokémon use momentum to enhance the power of their attacks.

PERSONALITY & PERSONAL TRAITS.

when lotor first met tavo, he was timid and submissive like a scared child. he didn’t do anything to contradict lotor’s orders even though he loathed being around a human. but as their relationship progressed, tavo became so angry that he could make the birds from angry birds look like pacifists. he was violent, often snapping with his beak and sending bursts of flame at lotor--he has scars from it as well.

tavo expected to be beaten for this. but lotor took this with a bit of amusement, telling him “it’s good that you have a fighting spirit.” this is what changed his opinion of his master, and so his true personality began to be revealed. far from the stereotype of the fiery fire-type, tavo is calm and stoic, never showing negative emotions or bending under pressure. under his abuse he used to be afraid of everything, but under his trainer’s care his true fearlessness was unmasked. he knows now not to be scared.

if only he knew how to properly express the feelings that he did have.

tavo has a dedicated relationship with narti, lotor’s basilisk serperior. cockatrices and basilisks get along famously so when lotor first got him, he introduced him to her so that he would have her comfort. narti had her eyes and tongue ripped out by humans so she couldn’t turn her abusers to stone or call for help, so she and tavo could also relate due to their stories of suffering at human hands. the two of them love each other very much. tbh initially, one of the main reasons he decided to stay with lotor was to be with narti.

#headcanon. || POKÉMON AU #pokémon. || TAVO #animal abuse*

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weryourlegacy · 5 years

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Fletcher and Kay

SEND ME A SHIP AND I’LL TELL YOU─

where was their first date ?:

They probably have no idea what their first date was. Back in college it was so just a lot of parties and hanging out without any real labels. Even now when they hang out, it’s never defined. Fletcher’s probably too scared of Kay rejecting him to ask for a proper first date. (Wow have they never had a real first date? Am I sad the first question in?)

what my muse would do to cheer your’s up:

I think while the usual response would be for Kay to try to distract him physically or with banter, if he’s really down she’d have a quiet moment with him and even if she doesn’t know what to say, she’d lean on him to let him know she was there and offer to let him talk. You know...if she’s not the reason he’s upset.

how my muse would wake your’s up:

Kay would let her hands roam his torso and plant kisses along his back and shoulders until he started to stir and she could tell he was waking up. Then she’d got a little more playful and nibble on his ear and be more teasing with her kisses.

who would start a food fight while baking or cooking ?:

Kay would 100% be a little shit and toss little ingredients at him while Fletcher was trying to cook them a nice meal.

who said i love you first and how ( or when ) did they say it ?:

LOL I don’t even know anymore. I think it would have to be Kay. I don’t think Fletcher would ever risk saying it unless it was right before he was about to cut ties for good, and even then it wouldn’t be malicious, it would just be sad and defeated, because if he’s ending things he needs her to know just once. It it’s going to happen for real, Kay’s gotta be the one to open her heart first. But when she said it, it wouldn’t be this big declaration, it would be small and vulnerable. She’d probably do it when she thinks he can’t hear her the first time like when she thinks he’s asleep or something.

who would get into a physical altercation over the other ?:

Kay would throw punches for Fletcher in a fucking heartbeat. He’d be the one having to hold her back. He’d probably have to physically pick her up to stop her from starting shit if it was bad enough.

who insists on purchasing a pet together ( and what kind of pet ) ?:

Kay’s got a senior german shepherd named Apollo, so Fletcher’s just going to have to accept that he has a dog now too.

who takes more risks ( in and out of bed ) ?:

Kay is the risk taker b/c she feels like she has nothing to lose and doesn’t give a shit about what happens to her, and lbr if Fletcher doesn’t hate that about her, he’s incredibly annoyed by it. In bed, they’re about even. They encourage each other, but it’s not like they get up to a ton of weird kinky stuff. They don’t put that much forethought into it.

describe their typical kiss:

Their kisses are so hungry and needy because they never know which kiss is going to be their last, and they’re just trying to hold onto the pieces of the other that they get. But there’s also a gentleness to every kiss that hides behind the sarcasm and hunger.

how my muse shows their love for your’s:

They always do it through actions. Just the fact that they keep coming back to each other despite all the pain they bring each other is a way that they show it. The fact that they can never be chill with each other is another way. I think more than anything, they do what they can to make the other see what they see in them b/c they’re both broken and it’s hard for them to see why the other keeps hanging on.

who is more dominate ?:

They’re both dominant and they love the fact that they get to play with that power dynamic with each other. It’s like a game for them.

who sings in the shower ?:

Kay sings and dances in the shower along to her music and Fletcher thinks it’s hilarious and adorable and will tease her mercilessly about it.

who washes the other’s hair in the shower ?:

Fletcher washes Kay’s hair. The first time she didn’t get why he wanted to do it, but she’s since grown to love it. It relaxes her in a way few other things do.

who initiates shower sex despite being in a rush ?:

They both do. They think they can squeeze it in, but they always wind up being late. Fletcher says they need to be more time conscious next time, but Kay knows the same thing is just going to happen again.

who would initiate dancing in the rain ?:

I think they both would. Fletcher would be the one to instigate a more cute romance movie type dancing in the rain, Kay would initiate a more chaotic, club style dancing in the rain.

who would be the one to suggest marriage ?:

Uuuuuum I’m gonna say that it would have to be Kay again. She’s scared Fletcher off from asking for more too much, so she’d have to be the one to bring it up. TBH I can see her being the one to propose to him.

who would their children take after more ?:

Those kids would be something else. Hopefully both their parents minus the baggage. They would have a lot of things to work through before they’re ready to have kids, but I think Kay would hope their kids would be like Fletcher, and Fletcher would hope for a happy medium.

#kay x fletcher #meme #paperdoll-hearts

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midnightlie · 6 years

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title: i really should have thought this through ocs: jess, sophie, kai notes: as some of u may or may NOT know.....i have this mermaid story that i wanna maybe get down some day. the general idea is that a boy rescues the first mermaid ever caught from her exhibit in an aquarium while interning there during the summer and his stubborn little sister gets caught up in the mix lol.

tbh, it’s really fun to try writing something new, and it’s very short, just a quick character study, really, so i’d love it if you could check it out!!!

Jess generally doesn’t know how to deal with feelings to begin with. Sure, he feels them strongly and emphatically, but acting on them? Interpreting them? A fool’s errand. On his best days, he wears his blasé attitude like a shield, invulnerable and confident, but ever since he met her - since he saved her - he can’t help but wallow in his emotional ineptitude.

He wants to be soft, wants to understand, but he doesn’t know how.

Kai sits next to Sophie on the other side of the campfire, rubbing at her sore legs with firm hands. Sophie helps, looking up at Kai with heady concern.

“Are they still hurting you?” Sophie asks, frowning, her hands working unhelpfully against Kai’s shin.

Kai nods, matter-of-fact as she has always been, and Sophie’s frown deepens. With a little smile, Kai shakes her head and stops rubbing one of her calves to touch Sophie’s bare arm. Not for the first time, Jess wishes that there was a better way to communicate with Kai. He furrows his eyebrows as he watches the exchange, Sophie’s expression changing as she tries to make sense of the sensations Kai passes to her through the physical contact.

Sophie retracts her tiny hands from Kai’s legs. “Not….bad?” she tries out in an attempt to understand. “They don’t hurt as bad? You mean, like last night?”

Kai nods enthusiastically, and tucks one of Sophie’s stray hairs back behind her ear. Sophie turns to her older brother and smirks victoriously. “She talks to me more than you.”

He leans back on his hands and rolls his eyes. “Whatever.”

“Just admit you are jealous and that I, your adorable little sister, am superior to you,” she says smugly. Far more smugly than any ten year old ought to have a right to be.

“I’ll admit it when you actually learn how to pronounce ‘domino’ like a normal person,” he quips. He really isn’t jealous at all when there is an easy sort of camaraderie in the silences that he shares with Kai. He prefers the quiet, anyway.

Kai makes a strange noise that he can only surmise is her version of a laugh. He has wondered before if it sounds the same underwater. Does she laugh when she’s underwater, in her element? He pauses at that. Do mermaids laugh at all?

Sophie sticks her tongue out at him and leans into Kai’s side. “I’m only ten, you heathen. Cut me some slack.”

He doesn’t know where the hell she learned the word “heathen” but he makes a mental note to track down the source and eliminate it. When they get back. The last thing he needs is for her to get in trouble for bullying some scrawny kid at school. “Stop pulling the ‘I’m ten’ card. We know. It’s not cute.”

“Kai thinks I’m cute.” Sophie wraps her arms around Kai’s waist and smiles at him angelically. To her credit, Kai looks sheepish as she glances up at Jess, giving him a little shrug as she brushes the ends of her long ponytail back from her shoulder.

“Jesus in heaven, give me strength,” Jess mutters, disengaging from the conversation before it escalates into a fight. He leans back onto the grass, peering up at the diamond-studded sky. It’s a moonless night, and the void of darkness is strangely comforting in the concept of absence. Sophie begins to talk again, chattering this time at Kai, who without the means to interrupt, falls victim to the little gremlin’s endless prattling.

Jess tunes her out, as he is well trained to do, and instead lets his thoughts drift. It’s been two weeks on the run like this, and he’s starting to feel the weight of his decision. He doesn’t have a car, and the only money he has left is a $50 bill tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket. They are famous, plastered across every news article and showcased on every TV station. Sophie hasn’t had a proper bed to sleep on since that seedy motel last week and he still doesn’t know anything about Kai other than her name.

And god, his parents were going to murder him for dragging Soph into this.

He sighs and tucks his hands behind his head, listening to the sounds of the night life around them and the crackling of the dying fire. Distantly, he’s aware that his sister’s voice slows and quiets. He only stirs when he hears that it has stopped completely.

The fire has become a bed of bright embers, and on the other side, Sophie sleeps with her mouth wide open, leaning heavily on Kai who runs her long, delicate fingers through Sophie’s dark hair. Kai looks up and meets Jess’s gaze when he shifts into a sitting position. He laughs quietly at the scene.

“I should probably put her to bed,” he almost whispers, so as not to disturb his sister.

Kai gives a little dip with her head toward the tiny two-person tent that is popped open under an evergreen a couple yards away.

“That’s alright; I got her,” he replies, understanding her gesture easily enough. He rolls onto his feet and moves to Sophie’s side, scooping her up into his arms with as much grace as he can muster. She snores a little at the disturbance, and he has to fight not to laugh as he places her gently on top of her sleeping mat and pulls the blanket up over her shoulder.

Once he has extracted himself, he makes his way back over to Kai and sits down beside her, leaning back against the fallen tree behind them. He can feel her heat beside him, radiating, despite being a foot or so apart, and he can sense that she wants to speak but she can’t, so he does.

“Are your legs really feeling better?” he asks softly, staring at the embers and their muted light show.

She sighs and he takes that as a no. He kind of wants to scold her for lying about it, because there’s no use in hiding something like that from them, but he also kind of gets why she would. There’s only so many of their water bottles left after all.

Jess reaches for Sophie’s half-drank bottle discarded hours ago to the side and turns towards Kai. She sits there with her hands outstretched palms up, her gaze downcast, as though she’s ashamed of her weakness. Like, he’s not an expert or anything - what emotionally constipated 17 year old boy is? - but he’s pretty sure that feeling guilty for something as wildly unavoidable like dehydration is outrageous.

“Is it worse?” he presses, tipping some of the water into her hands.

Even in the darkness, with just the softest glow from the embers, he can see the sheer relief that breaks across her face like a sunrise. A blissful sigh tears from her as the water falls through her fingers and onto her bare legs. She rubs the moisture into her skin delightedly, and immediately the tension he hadn’t known she’d been holding onto totally disintegrates.

Now entirely soothed, she leans back against the tree, boneless, and he can’t make out her expression but he’d guess that she is at ease. He vaguely sees her make a gesture and he recognizes it as one of the only sign language gestures he had known and taught to her the first day that he had pulled her from that tank in New York.

“You’re welcome,” he says, handing her the bottle. She drains it eagerly and discards it beside her. Jess leans back beside her again, and turns to stare at the embers. He takes a deep breath of crisp, summer air, and releases it. “I’m sorry it’s taking us so long to get you home.”

He doesn’t jump when her still-damp hand slides over his jacketed arm and down to find the bare skin. When she finds his wrist, an overwhelming wave of gratitude so potent that it nearly chokes him, and then her touch disappears, and the gratitude is gone.

He smiles to himself, crossing his legs, running a hand through his disheveled hair. “You know, if I had stopped for five seconds to think up an actual plan, this would have been a hell of a lot easier.” He fights to keep his self-depreciation from getting out of hand. “I didn’t even have a car, for fuck’s sake.”

There is insistent tapping on his shoulder and when he glances over, he can see Kai looking at him, but he is unable to read her expression. She begins violently signing, determined to get her point across.

Thank you, she signs. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

He wonders what else she would say, if she could. Jess gives her a tired, lopsided smile and crosses his arms over his chest. “Hey. I know. I know.”

She shakes her head as if to say, no, you don’t know, but she merely sighs in frustration and straightens, facing the darkness before them.

Slowly, the embers finally die, leaving them almost totally blind. He expects her to go to bed, but she stays put as firmly as him as the minutes pass. Jess turns his gaze back to the sky and watches as a satellite skates smoothly over the curve of the Earth. “I have so many questions for you,” he says.

Her hand searches awkwardly for his again, so he holds it out so that she can touch it more easily. There is a timid openness to the sensation she passes to him. She wants him to ask her questions, and she wants to answer. He doesn’t know whether the limitlessness to this feeling makes him happy or wary.

“We’ll figure it out,” he says, and then she gives him warmth and knowing. He doesn’t know what makes her so confident in him. If it’s the whole saving her life thing, that was a total fluke and as his obvious lack of forethought has shown, he hasn’t done a single thing deserving of her assurance since. She lingers for a moment and then pulls her hand away.

“We should probably get to bed,” he says, using the tree behind them to stand up. “We have to get moving tomorrow since we’re running out of supplies.”

She shifts, too, and then follows him to the tent. Jess zips the entrance up once they are both inside. He turns around to see Kai’s shadow stretch out languidly beside Sophie and pull a blanket up over herself, settling comfortably into the idea of sleep.

“Good night,” he whispers, slithering to the other side of Sophie. After a few long moments, Kai begins to breathe more heavily. Jess lets out a low breath, and tries to ignore the sticky humidity of three people crammed into this tiny tent. He rolls onto his side and finds his face pressed into the wave of Sophie’s hair. His eyes flutter closed, and instead of pushing her away, he sinks into a dream where Kai finds freedom back in her waters and he brings Sophie safely home.

#taylor writes things #mermaid story #idk if it has a tag but that's what i'll make it for now #my ocs

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gonslight · 6 years

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Do you think Killua's love for Gon might be conditional? Like he was content to stay by his side as long as Gon was "light" but the minute he shows a flaw and falls off the pedestal Killua put him on, he ditches him for alluka? Like I loved this ship but that ending was bleak.

i don’t think that at all........ expecting killua to be 100% okay and the same after what he went through is really unrealistic and unfair. not only was killua forced to watch gon fall apart right in front of him, but he watched gon LITERALLY self-destruct due to his own guilt. that’s fucked up. that’s traumatizing and terrible and so heartbreaking it hurts me to think about sometimes tbh. & then, on top of that, killua realized that through his family’s manipulation, he had abandoned his sister to be locked up and forgotten. though i do not in any way blame killua for this, it’s clear that he does blame himself.

with gon and alluka, he’s taking on so much guilt and regret and responsibility. when they hurt, he hurts; when they grieve, he grieves. and to have them be in these awful, sometimes life-or-death situations—it’s unbearable for him. that’s a lot of pressure to put killua under, all while remembering that he’s literally not even 14 yet.

& then, after all this, killua decided to put himself and alluka first to try & heal from what happened. and that is justified. it’s a good thing.

it has nothing to do with gon losing his “light”, considering that killua was ALWAYS aware of gon’s flaws. gon’s impulsiveness, his lack of forethought at times, his love for other people, the darkness and pain hidden underneath that love — killua’s been aware of it since the beginning. that’s why he knows what to say to get gon to calm down, or when to hide things from gon in order to keep him calm. we especially see this during the chimera ant arc, like how killua hid his fight with rammot, or how he didn’t reveal the full truth of the situation to gon during his confrontation with pitou. always, he took into consideration gon’s flaws and weaknesses & tried to protect him from those things. did it always work? no. but killua certainly never acted like gon was perfect.

what killua did do was just… love gon. he loved gon with EVERYTHING he had, poured his heart and soul and truth and sanity into gon until killua couldn’t exist without him. but after the CA arc, suddenly killua did have to exist without him, at least for a little while. & that opened his eyes to how much gon could hurt him—how much power he had given gon without knowing it. so he took a step back, reprioritized, and i think now he’s trying to understand what happened, trying to find a balance between love and sacrifice in the aftermath of all this awfulness.

so, was the ending bleak? for sure. do gon and killua have a lot to work on and figure out? undoubtedly. does that mean killua is somehow to blame? does that make killua shallow or his love inherently conditional? absolutely not.

#as always. i hope no one thinks that i inherently blame gon for this either #BOTH of the boys were wronged and hurt and struggled so much #& i would defend both to the death #but diminishing killua's struggle with like #'he didn't really love gon' or 'his love was conditional' is..... silly......#asks #anonymous

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armsdealing · 6 years

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a muse questionnaire

▸ IS YOUR MUSE TALL / SHORT / AVERAGE ?

at six feet tall, misha won’t be the tallest person you’ll ever meet, but he’ll be tall enough for you to remember it, especially if you’re shorter than him. he poses a somewhat inconspicuous built -- you don’t realize immediately how muscular he is until you’re right in front of him. he mostly looks lean, with a toned definition, a bit of fat around the belly area, and muscular arms and legs.

▸ ARE THEY OKAY WITH THEIR HEIGHT ?

sure.

▸ WHAT’S THEIR HAIR LIKE ?

the first word that comes to mind for his current do is stylish. right on par with his wardrobe choices and an overall handsome appearance, misha’s hair may be one of the first things people notice about him. it’s free-formish high top twists/locs, with the locs of varying lengths flowing and occasionally dropping in an almost casual manner, and a fade for the sides of his head. here’s a reference / 2. it’s recent how long it’s gotten -- you may spot him with shorter variants depending on how he’s feeling, or even just a short afro, or even just but that’s the overall intention when he lets his hair grow. it’s also important to note that occasionally his hair will be covered with a headwrap, usually monochrome/black but can also go black/gold baroque/damask-esque patterns.

▸ DO THEY SPEND A LOT OF TIME ON HAIR / GROOMING ?

i wouldn’t say crazy amounts, but he does spend the necessary time to keep his hair well groomed and growing healthily. over the centuries he’s always tried new ways to wear his hair. he keeps daily routines for his face and skin and weekly routines for his hair and beard. he’s mindful.

▸ DOES YOUR MUSE CARE ABOUT THEIR APPEARANCE / WHAT OTHERS THINK ?

while he puts a fair amount of thought and effort into his appearance, he does not care about what others think. he doesn’t present himself the way he does for other people’s enjoyment, but for his own. if people like it and compliment him, he will be flattered, but if they don’t, he doesn’t think much about it. your opinion’s ya business, not his!

— PREFERENCES.

▸ INDOORS OR OUTDOORS ? he likes both in equal amounts, i believe. he’s an introvert, so he’ll never turn down a vast, empty room or a cozy bedroom solely for himself, and at the same time he often partakes in long, thoughtful walks through both cityscape and nature. he basks in his solitude, so you could say he leans just a little more towards the indoors.

▸ FOREST OR BEACH ? forest. mikhail grew up used to icy slavic air and the sight of endless trees and thick foliage. he won’t turn down a beach, though, but he’s a winter kind of guy :^)

▸ PRECIOUS METALS OR GEMS ? as the golden god’s high priest, mikhail naturally leans toward precious metals in general. he wears rings and other jewelry often, so you may see gems as well.

▸ FLOWERS OR PERFUMES ? flowers. there’s very few perfumes mikhail does like.

▸ PERSONALITY OR APPEARANCE ? personality. misha may look young, but he’s rather old at heart, and he best bonds with someone he can have good conversations with, for that’s his preferred form of intimacy. that isn’t to say he doesn’t pay any mind towards beauty -- he’s the aesthetic king after all.

▸ BEING ALONE OR BEING IN A CROWD ? being alone. misha doesn’t like crowds. he learned very early on in his life while in the imperial russian army. either as a low-level officer or as a war general, he never really enjoyed the spotlight. he also does not like eurocouncil meetings for this reason -- he does not like to deal with too many people, so he will proceed towards the fringes. he thrives on his own, or in small groups.

▸ ORDER OR ANARCHY ? when it comes to rules, misha will only follow them if he feels they make sense, and if so he will follow them digilently -- once he feels a rule does not make sense, he will have no trouble breaking them. so i think he most often leans toward lawful with a side of anarchy when he feels it necessary. misha has always ruled his life with precision and forethought, and he knows how to think several steps ahead (which made him a formidable tactician back in the day) but he also knows sometimes a little spontaneity can provide an edge seldom achieved with by-the-book approaches.

▸ PAINFUL TRUTHS OR WHITE LIES ? misha is very sincere, but you kind of never know if he’s ever telling the truth or lying -- he kind of gives an unreliable air, not aided by his occasionally obsfuscating eccentricity. when he needs to pick between telling a painful truth or lying, though, when it matters, misha will say the truth plainly.

▸ SCIENCE OR MAGIC ? it’s the same to him.

▸ PEACE OR CONFLICT ? he rather enjoys peace. after an early life plagued with conflict and bloodshed, mikhail is perfectly content not being at the centre of a dispute. when he gets involved he will not turn back from it, though. not at all.

▸ NIGHT OR DAY ? both.

▸ DUSK OR DAWN ? both as well.

▸ WARMTH OR COLD ? he’s a cold weather type of person, as i said -- catch him in those sweaters and coats. but that just means he is all the happier when it’s a sunny day.

▸ MANY ACQUAINTANCES OR A FEW CLOSE FRIENDS ? few close friends, some acquaintances.

▸ READING OR PLAYING A GAME ? reading.

— QUESTIONNAIRE.

▸ WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR MUSE’S BAD HABITS ?

complexity. mikhail can get lost in the minutiae of a conversation, and can be hard to follow once he gets into it. he also has a tendency not to ever let you know just how much he knows, or the reasons behind what he does or says. he can be a bit shady tbh. see back on his honesty/lie answer above.

▸ HAS YOUR MUSE LOST ANYONE CLOSE TO THEM ? HOW HAS IT AFFECTED THEM ?

he’s been around for quite a bit, so he’s lost a lot of people. he’s made peace with it.

▸ WHAT ARE SOME FOND MEMORIES YOUR MUSE HAS ?

any and all memories related to his father, mother, and siblings. at this point, it can be hard for him to remember them, so he treasures the ones he does have and has made a point to keep a record of them by means of journaling. a couple come to mind: wrestling around with his siblings in the grass when he was eight years old, and his mother, a gifted linguist at the time, teaching him languages, and getting him interested in them, when he was as young as ten.

▸ IS IT EASY FOR YOUR MUSE TO KILL ?

it is. he does not like it, but he has the training for it. he will kill if he has to, but only then.

▸ WHAT’S IT LIKE WHEN YOUR MUSE BREAKS DOWN ? he retreats into his own mind, just sort of closes up and goes especially thoughtful. if spoken to, he will keep his answers brief and simple. mostly, he will stay quiet and go somewhere else to think and rearrange his thoughts.

▸ IS YOUR MUSE CAPABLE OF TRUSTING SOMEONE WITH THEIR LIFE ?

he is capable of it. doesn’t mean it happens a lot, but he is capable of it.

▸ WHAT’S YOUR MUSE LIKE WHEN THEY’RE IN LOVE ?

careful. misha is careful with everything in his life -- his words, his mannerisms, there’s an inherent softness to it all, a gentleness, but also a formality. he’s not one for passionate, hot outbursts. his love will take the shape of small physical gestures, and affectionate words. he will want to talk to you, and enjoy your company even if it’s doing something as simple as sitting together in silence while enjoying a nice view. he will also want to know everything about you and remember every single thing. for that matter, he still remembers all the people he’s ever been with (they’re not too many, for that matter), and he’s gone as far as to immortalize them, either by writing about them, or painting them, or composing music.

tagged by: @thefirstwcman tagging: @neotropical + @isolctions + @rekant (pick a muse), @ourbest, @guttedthroat

#jesus i didnt realize how long this was until i was midway through #but now we know misha a lil better so its good tho #* mikhail.#hc.

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ifiwerebraveenough · 6 years

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I’m bored so here’s an ask submission

1. What was the last present you gave? -I gave my friend a bookk 2. What was the last present you received? -also a book lol 3. What animal best represents your personality? -hmm an elephant 4. What are you most afraid of? -never fully living life 5. Who is your favourite villain? -Maleficent 6. Who is your favourite family member? (we all have one, admit it) -my nana 7. If you could name your own planet what would it be called? -Fuxida 8. Stars or Moon? -stars though i love both 9. Do you have/want kinds? -i dont have any but undecided, but i think yes 10. What is your greatest life goal? -make myself someone I am happy with 11. What is something you can’t live without? -my dog 12. What is a place you associate with your childhood? -a huge oak tree at my grandparents old house 13. How was your first kiss/how would you like your first kiss to go? -it was exactly how you’d expect a first kiss. 14. What is some life advice you have acquired? - “Don’t let your loyalty become slavery. If they don’t appreciate what you bring to the table, let them eat alone” 15. Who in history has influenced you? -Sigmund Freud 16. What is something strange that you think about often? -What kind of tree I want to be when I die 17. Baths or Showers? both duh. 18. Tea of Coffee? - both duh 19. Alcohol or soft drink? -not both. alcohol. 20. Writing or typing? -depends what I’m working on. The more personal it is, the more I want to write it. 21. What is you most favourite thing in your bedroom? -right now my dog, but if we’re talking inanimate objects, probably the photograph of my mom, dad, brother and me. 22. Spontaneous holiday! Where are you going and with who? -Somewhere tropical and with someone I can stand to be around for days at a time. 23. Introverted or Extraverted? -more extraverted but it’s a pretty fine line 24. Describe yourself in two words. -moody badass lol 25. A song that always puts you in a good mood. -Feel It Still by Portugal. The Man. 26. What makes you feel? -music 27. What was your favourite concert?- Halsey, October 19, 2017, Infinity Energy Center 28. Any plans for a tattoo? -soooooo many, but I think I’m getting Freya’s paw print next 29. What was the first book you ever read? -Mickey Mouse and the Haunted House 30. What was the first movie you saw in cinemas? -Spirit Away 31. What do you think of when you hear ‘portrait’? -The old paintings of people, and that people did. ie. Mona Lisa 32. Tell me about your partner/ideal partner? -Someone who can make me laugh, keeps me on my toes, doesn’t let me get away with my bullshit, someone comforting, someone who knows and has the decency of human kindness, someone who is passionate and supportive and loves me even on my worst days. 33. Tell me about your siblings, if you have any? -I have a half brother. He has a cute kid. 34. What is a topic you would like to talk about more? -What we can do to better ourselves as humans so that we can help those who cannot help themselves 35. What are you a big advocate for? -basic Human Rights all across the board 36. If you’re comfortable to answer, what is the sickest you have ever been? -when my appendix had to be removed 37. When were you the most scared in your life? -When my grandmother told me she had cancer. 38. Ever had a paranormal experience? -several 39. Biggest celebrity crush at the moment? -Johnny Depp. It stays that way too. 40. What is something happening in your life right now? -I’m almost done with my Master’s degree. 41. What is your favourite mythological creature? -sirens/mermaids 42. Marvel or DC? -I dont feel like i should have to answer a question as stupid as this but it will. Obviously Marvel. 43. What object would be on your family’s banner? -probably a gun of some sort 44. Favourite flower? -Dalias 45. One characteristic you like in a partner? -loyalty 46. What planet/star would you travel to if it were possible? -One in the next universe over 47. What is your favourite meal… ever? -tacchino, fagiolini, e riso di Emanuela ovviamente 48. First time…. doing anything. Describe your first time doing something? -my first time visiting new york city. everything was fascinating to me even though I was sick. I think that is what inspired me to want to travel so much. Just experiencing a different culture, and place. Sightseeing and getting turned around in circles. it was exhilarating 49. Who is your favourite superhero? -Probably Starlord 50. What is your favourite poem? Recite it?- When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. -The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry 51. What is an exercise you despise doing? -burpees 52. Secret talent? -I can juggle 53. Current song on replay replay replay? -broken hearts club by gnash 54. Recommend me anything. Seriously… anything. -Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman 55. If you weren’t in your current occupation what would you be doing? -Working for travel writing blog/journal 56. What is the first thing you notice about the person you fancy? -their smile 57. If you had one wish that would definitely come true, what would it be? -for the people in the world to be more kind to one another 58. If you could time travel, when and where would you visit? -I’d go back to the 60s and 70s and travel the US in a volkswagen bus 59. What is your lucky number? -13 60. If you adopt a pet what would it be and what would you name it? -I adopted a dog and her name is Freya 61. Do you believe in fate/everything happens for a reason? -absolutely 62. What is your favourite thing about your personality? -I carry a heart full of compassion 63. What is your favourite thing about your appearance? -my hair 64. What is your favourite clothing store? -uhm, tbh I really love Ross 65. What is your favourite online store? -amazon 66. Use one word to describe your most favourite person? -loving 67. How do you usually have your hair? -in a messy bun 68. What was your favourite subject in high school? -literature (imagine that) 69. What makes you feel empowered? -completing an assignment/project that is perfect 70. What motivates you to do something? -usually stress and anxiety 71. What advice would you give someone who is going through a rough time? -Even on your worst days, when you think you cannot possibly endure anything else, remember that your track record for getting through rough days is 100% and that’s pretty good. 72. Ideal date? -Picnic in a field away from cities and cars and lights. middle of the night, light music and star gazing 73. What is the best date night movie? -beetlejuice obviously 74. What is something you are currently looking forward to? - Vacation with my family 75. Tell me a funny joke? -What do you do when you see a spaceman? - Park your car man! 76. Do you like musicals? If so, what’s your favourite? -yes and wicked or Hamilton 77. What is your favourite song currently? -Feel It Still, PTM 78. What song never fails to make you dance? - see above 79. What is your favourite “classic?” - classic movie? classic book? classic song? 80. What is the best advice you have ever been given? - I thought we’d already been over this. 81. Where did you ancestors come from? -Here and there. Native American, Irish and Welsh. 82. What have you learned from your parents/guardians? -yes mom: never settle, dad: control your temper 83. What is a phrase you heard a lot growing up? -are you hurt? are your bleeding? then why are you crying? 84. Do you believe in magic? -yes 85. What reminds you of your best friend? -music festivals (and almost every other thing in my life) 86. What are you passionate about? -teaching 87. Tell me a story from middle school? -we were in gym one day and they were playing music and letting us dance to it and they played pop, lock and drop it and this girls boob came out. 88. Who was your favourite teacher and why? -Ms. Lindall, fourth grade, she was the most caring and helpful person I had ever met. 89. Can you roll your tongue? -mhm 90. What made you pursue what you are studying? (including school subjects) -Amy Ellison. and my love for reading 91. Where would you like to travel to? -all over, but Im planning an asia trip 92. What is something on your bucket-list? -swim cage free with sharks 93. What is home to you? -home is where the heart is 94. What do you do in your free time? -sleep a lot 95. If you could buy anything right now, what would it be? - an island with my own private beach house 96. If you could see anyone, living or dead, right now, who would it be? -my greatgrandfather moore 97. If you could choose, what would your last meal be? -see about about tacchino 98. How would you like to die? -late, in love and a little drunk 99. List five of your favourite pieces of art (paintings, books, songs etc) -1. Adagio in D minor, 2. Neverwhere by Neil Gaimain, Atlas sculpture by Michaelangelo, Dante’s Inferno by Dante Alighieri, A thousand splendid suns by khaled housseini 100. What would you change about this world? - That everyone had all basic necessities and that people were kind to one another just to be kind.

#random asks #asks #ask submission #boredom #ask me anything #ama

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ssaalexblake · 7 years

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What's your opinion on Karen Page? AJAKSKKSKS

I have some random half formed opinions on Karen, and the Daredevil narrative for her in general. And maybe how the defenders writing didn’t really mesh with how she’d been portrayed before, and if it did, then it showed her in a vaguely hypocritical light.

Also, she’s a legit straight up murderer and it’s kind of vaguely hilarious in an ironic way that she now works for a living digging up other peoples dirt, because she honestly wants to see justice done. She’s not somebody who wakes up in the morning thinking something malevolent, she’s by all accounts, somebody who has aspirations of goodness. Her moral grayness her so much more interesting in that light, tbh.

(but, like, honestly, I neither like nor dislike Karen, she doesn’t particularly grab me but i don’t you know, hate her or anything, i’m just personally not captivated).

Anyway, I’ve been listening to a podcast lately hosted by 2 bona fide behavioural analysts (jim clemente and Laura Richards) and honestly, hearing them talk about it, while simultaneously watching S2 of Daredevil, was thought provoking.

We know that Karen murdered a man, afterwards she was traumatized by his actions (the kidnapping and threats against her) and that she was even more traumatized by her own actions, she just gunned him down, The End. The show could have painted this in a number of ways, but imo it clearly painted this as a murder, to be honest. I mean, he was victimising her at the time, but this shock killing was not narratively described as a valiant bid for freedom where a woman shoots herself out of a hostage situation. It’s painted as Karen shooting him, and her being left alone in a room with a gun and a blood soaked body.

She’s terrified she’d get found out. I haven’t seen that season for a long time now, but also, i think it’s relevant that a chunk of her fear after this was fear about what Fisk would do if he found out she did it, and for her own safety thereafter, rather than the action of killing a man.

In that light, fashforward to season 2 and the intro of Frank Castle. Karen is the character in the entire show who is the most okay with Frank. She sees Frank’s honour code and understands it, she isn’t afraid of him harming her despite him being genuinely terrifying. She also isn’t nearly as bothered by his methodology as the others. Frank believes killing the wrongdoers is the apt solution to Hell’s Kitchen’s problems (and anywhere, really).

It’s interesting, because, throughout the whole time Nelson and murdock are defending Castle, she is trying to convince Matt and Foggy of the merits to his actions. She’s trying to justify it. This is why I mentioned the podcast, because in it, they explain that people who have thoughts and feelings that are generally considered by society to be abhorrent or wrong (and i mean, actual fucked up things, not shitty bigotry) they will attempt to find the same behaviour in others they trust and respect, to prove to themselves that they’re not Bad™.

Karen, with both Foggy and Matt, the two she is closest to in Hell’s Kitchen (in the world really), BOTH get this line of questioning from her, where she tries to get them to admit that hey! maybe killing bad people is okay and fine. This, to me, seems that Karen is looking for some kind of absolution. Not the kind where she denounces what she did, or what Frank did, but the kind where others prove her ‘correct’ and absolve her of her sins by justifying them. The kind where she doesn’t have to feel bad or be in trouble for her actions.

In the end, Matt and Foggy, having no clue all the while that this is personal to her, brush off every justification she gives, both of them basically going ‘what the hell! no! bad!’. Because while matt is a vigilante, he’s also one who does not approve of being judge jury and executioner. Foggy was even less likely than Matt to play part to that line of thinking, because he thinks Matt goes too far, let alone Castle. Them doing this, rejecting her without even knowing it, leads Karen smack into the figurative arms of Frank Castli, who is obviously intimidating to her, and goes too far in her eyes, and freaks her out, but he’s the one she’s most in tune with. Her philosophy is far closer to his than it is to Matt and Foggy. Frank even says it himself, he knows she’d have taken the shot, she means business, even if it’s lethal.

I have no idea what to say about Karen and Matt. Narratively it’s never made sense to me, and i honestly thought that her reaction in the defenders to him needed a hell of a lot of background filling out between daredevil s2 & this show to make sense. It needed background we weren’t given, but Karen’s /always/ been pro daredevil, we needed a filler to tell us what happened in that gap of time to cause her to treat matt’s vigilantism as an addiction. Foggy, Foggy it made perfect sense because there was background, with Karen who had always been pro devil, it needed explaining. As it is, it kind of came across as Karen being pro vigilante as long as it’s not her friend, which is kind of harsh? It can ruin somebody else’s life but not somebody who i like? Which they could have done, but i’ve also never really thought of karen as selfish in that type of sense, either.

But, honestly, i feel like the main facet of Karen’s character, her absolute defining trait, is curiosity.

Karen’s curiosity knows no bounds, and i mean that. No bounds. Karen got into trouble in the first place in episode one because she saw something and didn’t let it go (she continues to not let it go the whole season, even when she’s warned, even when it’s dangerous, through everything). It’s interesting, because Karen’s curiosity doesn’t appear to have much more ground than wanting to know things, she’s a Ravenclaw type, you know? Her curiosity isn’t really tied to morality, or special interest, he is just curious.

Unfortunately, her curiosity isn’t necessarily tempered by a hell of a lot of forethought. She drags Ben to a nursing home because she dug something up, and when i say drag, i mean lies and tricks!!! Ben there with her, being pretty damn underhand tbh, i mean, it was low. And then Ben’s name ends up in the log book and then because of that, Ben is murdered.

That was an example of Karen being driven by her curiosity, bullheaded, and not thinking it though. In S2, the person she gets in trouble at the end of the season is herself. She does it again. Curiosity with no heed to consequence. She is merely lucky Frank saved her.

I mean, narratively, Karen ending up a reporter is perfect for her as a person, i’m not surprised we ended up there. She is bullheadedly curious, she is tough as nails (hello that kidnapping by the hand), and will legit do any dangerous thing to get her story. She also is curious for curiosity’s sake, so her boss doesn’t really run the risk of her only researching one thing or causing a moral shitstorm.

I’ve never really seen the show as portraying Karen as a moral goodness or whatever cliches come with the blonde noncombatant tropes in these types of stories, to me, Karen’s never really been the goodness personified in the show. To me, that is Foggy. I like it, to be honest, because lets be real, the blonde haired blue eyed ~angelic looking woman, not being the epitome of goodness???

I wouldn’t call Karen moral, i would call Karen curious, with aspirations of goodness. She wants to be a good person, but she’s thoughtless and chaotic and sometimes just kind of… amoral. No other real way to put it. I’ve also never really seen the show as portraying her as the goodness centre, i mean, i can see how the other characters would think it about her, but the audience? We know more about her than them.

Foggy and Matt don’t know she killed somebody. Her boss doesn’t know that. The stuff with Ben? that’s for us to know, too. We’re the keepers of Karen’s secrets, not the other characters. As such, the way they treat her as special and good in the show doesn’t bug me too much, from their pov, it probably looks that way, it’d annoy me if she got a good job and the show tried to tell me it’s because she’s a ~good~ person and deserved it, but imo, the show has not done that.

Her ~aspirations of goodness are all the more interesting, imo, because she does not appear to have them as some kind of attempt at penance. That would make it redemption, or an attempt at it. She’s not trying to redeem herself.

tldr, , i think Karen is curious, chaotic, wants so hard to be good, but finds herself coming up short and is scared of it. I also think the only person in the universe who accurately has her number is Frank. And also, that even if Matt’s vigilantism hadn’t destroyed their personal relationship, that in the end, the total polar opposite creeds they both have would have done the same thing in the end.

#defenders spoilers #idk how to tag this lol #reids-curls #idek if u meant to send me this but it was fun t b h #i like talking about other things #i do have karen opinions #i just don't really like her as a person much?? but yes as a character #anyway #karen page #for my own tagging #also notably claire is a bastion of goodness #but her goodness like... overpowers her shady #with karen it's the other way

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ineverhadmyinternetphase · 7 years

Text

In My Way - Chapter 22

AO3 link, First Chapter

Genre: Chaptered. Actor!Dan AU, fluff, bit of angst, slow burn, getting together (eventually)

Summary: Fiction. Daniel Howell is 21 and Britain’s newest star. He’s just been cast in the much-anticipated film adaption of Last Man Standing, the popular teen fantasy novel with a huge fanbase hanging off his every tweet. In other words, Dan has made it big.

Phil Lester couldn’t care less. He’s a stressed out PHD student working part time at a bookshop while he struggles to get into post-production. He’s 26 and still lives in a tiny flat on the fifth floor of a building with a lift more broken than it is in use. He loves books, but he thinks big film adaptions screw with the plot too much.

Needless to say, Phil is less than impressed when Last Man Standing is getting filmed in his hometown. And he certainly doesn’t want anything to do with obnoxious, arrogant, so irritatingly perfect leading actor Daniel Howell.

Warnings: Swearing, Ace!Phil, Bi!Dan, slight a- and bi-phobia, discussions of sexuality

Word Count: 5000-6000 per chapter (ish)

A/N: Another chapter finally! Sorry for the delay, usual life things like university happen ^_^ thank you so much to everyone still reading and leaving comments, they really mean a lot to me, and as ever, huge thanks to Meg my beta. Now just three chapters to go!

Also, two amazing pieces of fan art have been done for this story, you can see them here:

By illoura (I actually love this one so much it's currently my phone background): here

By heartbreakerlester (I especially love the Phil): here

---

It was true – Phil could get down to London again for the weekends, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still absolutely terrified. So he did his best to focus on the time he got to spend with Dan, rather than the fact that he was soon to be loudly announcing his place at Dan’s side in front of a whole bunch of cameras.

Phil had to admit, though, that having a more concrete schedule for seeing Dan was doing him good. He liked knowing that every weekend he could hop onto a train and be down with Dan again. He didn’t even mind all the travelling involved. Returning to Manchester at the end of the weekend was softened by the knowledge that he’d be back in London again soon enough, that he’d have Dan back in his arms again at the end of another week.

It wasn’t easy to leave him, but it was easier than it would have been otherwise.

Phil spent the rest of the week in Manchester desperately brushing up on the last of his uni work. His final assessment, his viva, was creeping imminently closer, and Phil was feeling less than prepared.

As much as Dan was a wonderful addition to Phil’s life, he was also something of a distraction. Phil’s mind hadn’t quite been where it should be over the past few months.

But still, Phil had managed to hand in his thesis on time, and despite everything he thought it had turned out rather well. Now he just needed to get all of that knowledge stuck in his head, ready to be grilled by two of the most senior people in his department.

Nothing to be worried about at all.

The next weekend with Dan was giving Phil something to look forward to, which was much needed as he was once again drowning in books and sources and articles. Spending any time apart was proving to be difficult, and Phil found himself calling Dan up most days, or sometimes, waking up in the middle of the night to the insistent buzzing of his phone by his ear because Dan had no sense of time or normal waking hours.

The distance wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as difficult as it could have been. Nothing felt impossible. In fact, Phil was starting to entertain the very real, very dangerous possibility that he might just get to keep Dan in his life more permanently.

That brought with it some terrifying ideas about the future. A future in London, with Dan, in Dan’s world. He still hadn’t completely decided what to do, but there were internships, places that would take him, especially once his PhD had gone through. He could edit professionally, full-time, not just the bits and pieces he did for PJ between his own work. And Phil loved education, he really did, but after his PhD he was itching to get out and try some of his work in a more public setting.

Meeting Dan had helped with that, he had to admit. Seeing Dan’s world, or the bits of it he’d been privy to so far, had lit something inside of Phil he wasn’t sure had been there before. Something that desired to make good things, and be brave enough to put them out into the world.

He’d talk to Dan about it, this weekend. See if he thought Phil could do this, if he should apply to somewhere in London, and exactly what that would mean for the two of them.

Phil hoped it would mean good things.

Travelling down to London that weekend brought its own set of nerves, something Phil wasn’t sure he’d get over no matter how many times he saw Dan. There was just something about the deliberate, planned nature of going to see him that felt more real, and scarier, than bumping into him on the film set had felt. This spoke of something that required forethought.

But Dan would be at the end of it, and that was enough for Phil.

He leaned his head against the windowsill, watching the countryside flash past the window, becoming gradually more and more built up the closer to the city he got. He mourned the loss of green, the wide open spaces slowly narrowing and narrowing, but there was the upside that he was drawing closer and closer to Dan. Every minute brought him nearer.

Dan was waiting for him at the station again, although this time a little more surreptitiously. He was wearing normal casual clothes, a giant baggy grey jumper and black jeans, stuff that blended in with the people around him. Dan himself still stuck out like a sore thumb, though. He was just so much taller than the people around him, and being aware of that fact just made him more awkward than he already was.

Phil greeted him with a smile and a quick, cautious hug. After what happened the last time they met at a station, they both knew to be more careful, even if Dan did pout at him a little.

“You set the date for coming out,” Phil reminded him as he shouldered his bag and followed Dan out of the station. “The premiere. No overshadowing the build-up, remember?”

“I know,” Dan grumbled morosely. “I just miss holding your hand, it’s been an entire week.”

Phil bit back a self-satisfied grin. He’d missed Dan too, but it was still reassuring to hear it from Dan’s own lips, just how much being apart hurt. It was making Phil consider serious things about the future, about their future.

But he kept those thoughts to himself for now, and instead walked faster so they’d be safely back behind closed doors soon.

Dan’s flat was empty, Tyler being out at a shoot, so Phil took his time putting away his suitcase and then taking Dan into his arms, remembering what it felt like to have him close again. They curled up together on the sofa, half-heartedly watching old reruns, but more interested in focusing on having each other back in their space again.

“I missed this,” Dan said lowly after a few minutes.

Phil shifted a little to look down at where Dan was sprawled across his lap. Gently, he drew a finger through Dan’s curls, for once not straightened to within an inch of its life, and pulled him closer. “Me too. I don’t like it, being away from you.”

“Me neither,” Dan grumbled, shifting into Phil’s touch. “I don’t think you should actually be allowed to leave, tbh.”

Phil’s lips twitched. His thoughts skittered back to the possibility of not having to leave – of having somewhere permanently within Dan’s reach.

The thought was a good one, if a little terrifying.

Phil cleared his throat, knowing if he didn’t bring it up now then he’d never really be brave enough. “I kind of agree, actually.”

Dan twisted to send him a confused look. “Not fighting me for once? That’s a novelty.”

“Shut up.” Phil nudged him, then gathered him back in close, fighting the nerves beginning to swirl in his belly. “I meant, like, maybe there’s a way I wouldn’t have to leave.”

Dan arched a brow and waited.

“I’ve been giving it some thought.” Phil gathered up his courage and looked determinedly at the wall next to the tv. “There’s a few possibilities. Editing companies here that would take on someone with my qualifications. If I ever get my degree, that is.”

“Your third degree,” Dan reminded him with a snort.

“Yeah, well,” Phil shrugged, “Depends on how my viva goes next week. And then there’s no guarantee anyone would actually take me.”

Dan went very quiet. He stilled in Phil’s arms, so Phil glanced down at him curiously to see a little furrow between Dan’s eyebrows.

“What’s a viva?” Dan finally settled on asking, still not meeting Phil’s eyes.

Phil blinked. “I told you before. The final assessment, where I have to explain my thesis idea to two professors and they rip it to shreds in front of me.”

Dan didn’t laugh, though he did offer Phil a comforting half-hearted smile. “They won’t rip it to shreds.”

“You don’t even understand it,” Phil berated him.

“Yeah, but I’m a dropout.” Dan stretched. “You’re actually intelligent, you’ll be fine.”

Phil nodded slowly. If he was honest, this wasn’t quite the excited reaction he’d been expecting from Dan if he brought up the possibility of actually moving to London. The support was nice, sure, but he’d kind of hoped Dan might squeal a little and jump on him.

All in all, Phil was actually a little disappointed.

Dan shifted again in his lap, glancing up with the little furrow still present in his brow. Phil reached down to wipe it away. “So you wouldn’t mind?” Phil asked. “If I… thought about applying here?”

“Mind?!” Dan shook his head vehemently, reaching up to cup a hand to Phil’s cheek. “The opposite. I want you to be here all the time, Phil, I thought I’d made that fairly obvious.”

Phil’s nose wrinkled. “A little, maybe.”

“I want you to be here,” Dan promised, sitting up and leaning closer, his palm still cupping Phil’s cheek. “In fact, there’s nothing I want more.”

Phil’s heart flipped over in his chest, and he was still getting used to it doing that. Feelings like this were still new and a little bit overwhelming, but the more time he spent in Dan’s presence, the safer he felt. The butterflies still hadn’t stopped, though.

Dan was looking at him very intently, his dark eyes warm, and then he leaned in to press a kiss to Phil’s lips. Phil melted against him, as he always did, because Dan knew just how much to give him, just how much was good, and had learned never to push him further than that. How had he got so lucky, Phil wondered. How had he ever managed to find someone who would appreciate his boundaries, never mind that someone being actual Dan Howell.

They drew apart again, Phil’s arms having found their way wound tight around Dan’s waist, but Dan ignored his insistent tugging and instead leaned back to meet Phil’s eyes.

Phil looked back, because he always would, and because seeing Dan this close to him was a thrill after a week spent apart.

Dan licked his lips. “I… I want to tell you something.”

“Anything,” Phil promised.

Dan swallowed, and when he spoke again, his voice cracked a bit. “I did something. And I’m going to tell you, but – but you have to promise me you won’t get mad, ok, and there might not—”

The sound of the door slamming interrupted Dan and made them both jump wildly. Dan pulled back, and Phil wanted to grab him, to hold him still and listen to whatever he was about to say, but then Tyler came waltzing into the room, chattering a hundred words a minute as he went.

“You wouldn’t believe the hours I’ve been working, there are so many actors on that shoot, and if I never have to wipe another person’s sweaty brow – oh, hi Phil – another sweaty brow, it will have been too long, I’m telling you, never again.” He visibly shuddered as he threw himself down onto the sofa across from them.

Dan watched him with a small smile. He was still wrapped up in Phil’s arms, but he wasn’t looking at Phil anymore, so Phil nudged him and quirked a brow. “Tell me later?”

Dan bit his lip, threw another glance at Tyler, and nodded quickly. Then he turned back to Tyler with a small smile. “So long day, I’m guessing?”

“Horrendously long.” Tyler was lying dramatically on his back with one hand flung across his forehead. “I’m dead, that’s it, I’m never rising again.”

“That doesn’t look particularly comfortable,” Phil observed softly, making Dan snort.

“Excuse you, Mr. Northerner,” Tyler responded airily, then twisted to send Phil a look. “Oh! Now you’re here, we can go shopping, excellent.”

Dan groaned.

“Don’t think you’re getting out of it, Howell,” Tyler warned. “I told you. If you’re making a statement at this premiere, then you have to get the look exactly right.”

“I hate shopping with you,” Dan whined. “It takes hours and you make me try on every single thing in the shop.”

Tyler shrugged. “At least you’ll have company this time.”

Dan sent Phil a sharp grin.

“Oh, oh no.” Phil shook his head, looking helplessly between them. “No, come on, I thought you were joking.”

“I never joke about fashion,” Tyler said seriously, and then flopped dramatically back down onto the couch. “Give me five minutes to recover, and we’re leaving.”

Dan groaned again, and this time, Phil didn’t even rebuke him.

---

Clothes shopping with Tyler Oakley turned out to be an… experience.

He did indeed force Dan to try on every single shirt, but it wasn’t even reduced to one shop. Instead, they were dragged around the whole high street, and in every single place they went Tyler seemed to know at least three of the people who worked there.

Phil spent most of his time loitering between shelves of clothes he didn’t even dare look at the price tag for, watching as Tyler and Dan bickered over which thing looked best. Dan was holding some form of black shirt that had an uncountable number of zips in places where there should not be zips, and Tyler was attempting to talk him out of it.

For once, Phil sided with Tyler. The thing looked absolutely ridiculous.

“You’re awful,” Dan told Phil, pouting. “This is the worst kind of betrayal.”

“I’m just telling the truth!” Phil defended himself. “It looks like a hamster designed the pockets.”

“Hamsters could have good taste, you don’t know.” Dan clutched the shirt closer to him when Tyler attempted to take it, glaring.

Tyler sighed heavily, but relented, grabbing another shirt from the pile and shooing Dan away with both of them. “At least try this on too, but go, see for yourself the ridiculousness of your own decisions.”

Dan made a face, but disappeared readily enough back behind the changing room curtain.

Phil shifted a bit uncomfortably on his feet. He hadn’t been left alone with Tyler much yet, and he wasn’t proud enough to admit that he still found Tyler slightly intimidating. Tyler was just so exuberant about everything, and Phil was very much not part of Tyler’s world. With Dan around, things were easier, but alone, Phil felt a little like a ship sailing on its own on a giant, unknown sea.

Tyler, however, seemed completely oblivious of any tension. Instead he thumbed through the rest of the items on the rack, humming under his breath, and every once in a while giving Phil a considering look.

Phil tried not to look like a rabbit in the headlights.

“Good eyes,” Tyler informed him after a minute.

Phil jumped. “Excuse me?”

“You’ve got good eyes.” Tyler didn’t look up from the shirt he was considering. “Don’t match Dan’s at all, of course, but I can theme an outfit around them.”

Phil swallowed. “I, uh – I don’t think anything here would really fit me.”

“Nonsense,” Tyler answered breezily, giving Phil another considering look before continuing to look through various items on a shelf in front of him. “You’ve just got to know what you’re looking for.”

Phil did little more than helplessly nod. If there was ever a fish out of water, Phil was currently that fish.

Much to Phil’s surprise, Tyler stopped looking through the clothes racks to instead turn and level Phil with a serious look. “How are you feeling about all this?”

Phil blinked at him. “Uh – all what, exactly?”

Tyler smiled, the expression slightly pitying. “All of this.” He waved an airy hand around the (very fancy) store they were in. “Dan’s world. Our world. A life of fame and vanity.”

Phil swallowed. Put like that, it didn’t sound very appealing at all – in fact, exactly the opposite of anything Phil would ever have thought he’d want.

But for Dan – with Dan – this world didn’t seem very frightening at all.

“It’s a little out of my comfort zone,” Phil answered, deciding to be honest. Tyler was important to Dan, after all. “I’m not used to it. I don’t think I’ll ever quite fit in.”

“Give it a few months,” Tyler replied wisely, giving Phil a look full of scrutiny. “I’m not so sure. Dan seems to like you, and although his taste in fashion is awful, his taste in people is usually better.”

Phil smiled without realising.

“Plus,” Tyler continued breezily, “You look good together. And the Twitter thing – it really helps that you’re active on that. Good decision.”

“It was never really a decision,” Phil answered weakly, thinking back to the first time he’d engaged with Dan online, the slight terror at all those people watching that still occasionally twisted his innards upside-down. “I just – it seemed like a good way to get his attention.”

Phil had never admitted that out loud before. He was surprised to realise he wasn’t embarrassed.

Tyler grinned. “It helped a bunch. Public flirting like that, people love it – perfect set-up for the premiere. All Dan really has to do is confirm it, no one will be surprised at this point.”

Phil carefully kept his face impassive. He didn’t really agree. He knew plenty of people who would be surprised – not least of all, his mum. He still hadn’t quite worked up the guts to tell her, though she’d called him three times since he and Dan had decided to go public. The words just… never fit into the conversation.

He had no idea how to vocalise any of his life to her now.

“You don’t have to be so afraid,” Tyler continued, mistaking Phil’s look of consternation for one of nervous fear. “Premieres are all focused on the outfits and the film, not the gossip of the actors so much. You’ll be a sideline at most – you and Dan. And like I said, most people won’t even be surprised. You haven’t exactly done a great job of being subtle.”

Phil nodded, trying to look like he meant it.

Thankfully, he was saved from having to look any more positive about things because of the reappearance of Dan, holding both his own choice of shirt and Tyler’s out with a deep furrow in his brow. “Ok, so you were both right about the black one, but Tyler – I can’t wear this thing, it’s got ruffles.”

“Trust me, Howell,” Tyler tutted, taking both from Dan and holding up the dark blue ruffly one again. “It’ll be good.”

“I’m not wearing ruffles,” Dan muttered, and he looked so much like a toddler about to throw a tantrum that Phil snorted. Dan glanced over at him, arching a brow. “What?”

“Nothing.” Phil was still grinning, all nerves completely settled back in the presence of Dan. “Come here.”

Dan went to his side easily enough, still pouting, so Phil just wrapped one arm around his waist and tugged him close. Dan smiled, but still turned his head to do a quick, darting check that no one was watching before he leaned his weight into Phil’s side.

Silently, Phil knew that he wouldn’t miss times of having to watch their every move.

Tyler was still holding the blue ruffly shirt, but at a glare from Dan that threatened much more than just a tantrum if he was going to insist on it, Tyler threw his hands up in the air and admitted defeat, wandering off to have another look at the aisles.

Phil released a tiny sigh. They’d been here for hours, and clothes shopping really wasn’t his thing.

Dan seemed to notice, as he leaned back against Phil and murmured, “Tired?”

“Not really.” Phil shrugged, nestled his head against Dan’s. “Just normally do this kind of thing on the internet, from my bed. You know?”

“Believe me, I know.” Dan’s tone turned dark. “I hate when Tyler drags me out to these things.”

“So you just inflicted it on me, too?” Phil grumbled.

Dan grinned at him. “What’s mine is yours, and all.”

Phil rolled his eyes, but he’d be lying if he said that comment didn’t warm him just a little. Here he stood, in public, with Dan Howell nestled against him, perfect and warm and accepting of everything. He even grumbled with Phil about being outside, about having to be here and do this when they both knew it was for their own good in the end. What did Phil know about what to wear to a film premiere, after all?

Tyler came back shortly, two items on his arm, and his grin was positively wicked. “I’ve got the perfect thing for both of you.”

Phil glanced at what he was holding and paled considerably.

Dan, however, actually made a noise of interest. He disentangled himself from Phil (with a final squeeze to his hand) and then made his way over to Tyler, fingering the clothing. “Hmm.”

“You bet, Howell.” Tyler was practically glowing as he lifted the two sparkly blazers, one dark gold, one bright silver. “Matching and perfect for both of you. The perfect couple.”

Phil blanched, but Dan made another interested noise. “I want the silver.”

“Dan,” Phil complained weakly. “Really?”

Dan span to face him, a small grin tugging at his lips, his dimple just appearing. “Come on. We can be sparkly together.”

Phil made a face at him. “They’re just a bit… ostentatious. Aren’t they?”

“That’s the point,” Tyler enthused. “You’re making a statement.”

“A sparkly statement,” Dan added with a grin.

Phil looked between them, from one excited face to the other, and then back at the jackets. The silver was definitely the brightest, Dan could have that, but the gold… it was a dull gold, bold but tasteful, and it looked subtle next to the silver, present but quiet. Just like him next to Dan.

Phil walked over and ran two fingers along the cloth. Soft; inviting.

“Try it on,” Tyler urged. “Then tell me you hate it.”

Phil looked at him, then back to Dan, then down at the jacket. He let out another little sigh. “Alright. I’ll try it on.”

---

The silver and gold jackets were a go, it was decided. Dan loved his the instant he put it on, and Phil felt comfortable enough in the gold blazer to accept it. He’d been to formal occasions before, after all, he knew he always felt a little out of place in fancy clothes. His mum said he’d grow out of it. Phil never had.

He had the flat to himself, which was a strange feeling. Tyler was out at a job, and Dan was out at a meeting with his agent. Phil planned to use the rare time alone to call his mum, to tell her where he was and who with and everything. So far, all she knew was that he’d gone down to London with that actor he’d been friends with. Phil needed to explain everything before the premiere, and that was happening in exactly a week.

He was running rapidly out of time.

Still, it was hard to actually pick up the phone. Phil was currently sitting with it in his lap, staring blankly at the tv screen in the giant living room which was paused on an episode of Game of Thrones that Dan had randomly decided they needed to rewatch, and then promptly left halfway through. Typical behaviour really.

Phil caught himself smiling fondly in the darkness of the screen, and quickly fumbled for his phone again. The sooner his mum knew, the better. And telling her wasn’t going to be bad, was it, after all, the thing he had with Dan wasn’t bad. She knew Phil. She knew he’d never had feelings like this for anyone before, despite her gentle pushing every now and then. She’d know, wouldn’t she? And she’d be happy for him?

Phil had always been close to his mum. He just felt like that could be about to change.

Either way, it was much better she heard it from him rather than through the news. So Phil took a deep breath, picked up his phone for the third time, and determinedly pressed ‘call’.

She picked up on the fourth ring. “Hello child, I’m out right now—”

“I’m with Dan Howell.” Phil said the words faster than he’d meant to, all in a rush, because he was sure if he didn’t then he’d never say them at all.

There was a startled silence. Then—“Phil, dear, I’m at the shops, give me five minutes…”

“Ok.” Phil sat there, heart in his mouth, and listened to the distant rustling on the other end of the line.

It felt like days before his mum’s voice came back. “Alright, what was that you said?”

“I’m with Dan Howell,” Phil answered, and then, guiltily, “Uh – did you finish your shopping?”

“No, but I’ve come and sat in a toilet cubicle while we chat.” His mum sounded soft and warm, the same as ever. “Dan Howell the actor?”

“Yeah.” Phil frowned. “You didn’t bring your trolley into the loo, did you?”

“Of course not, it’s in the aisle. With him how exactly?”

“I thought dad told you not to abandon it anymore.” Phil swallowed. “Uh. With him… in London. And. Um. Another way, too.”

“Your father hasn’t had a say in my shopping habits for years,” she pointed out with a low chuckle. “With this actor, hm? What’s he like?”

“He’s great.” Phil folded his arms, curled his legs in tight to his chest, air feeling tight in his lungs. “Out at the minute, but. I’m in his flat. I’m going with him to a premiere next week.”

“Well, that sounds fancy,” she answered. “Have you got something to wear?”

Phil swallowed, his heart in his mouth. “Yeah, his friend helped us – he’s sort of a stylist – but, mum, I’m with him. You need to understand, it’s going to be everywhere soon and I have to tell you first, because I didn’t want you to see it somewhere else—” he was close to hyperventilating, he could hear it. Sharp, harsh breaths high in his throat.

His mum shushed him gently down the phone. “Phil, honey, you aren’t making sense. What are you trying to tell me?”

Phil took in a deep breath, hating that it still sounded high-pitched and weak. But this was exactly what he was most terrified of, and now it was right here, happening right now, he was on the brink of taking this step and then he’d never be able to take it back.

An image of Dan floated into his head. Dan, smiling, happy, dimpling. His.

“I’m with Dan Howell,” Phil said as bravely as he could. “With him as in, in a relationship with him. We’re together. I love him. I’m pretty sure, anyway.”

There was a short silence.

“Oh, is he the one?” His mum said finally, sounding a little surprised, but not – not horrified, at least. “I did wonder.”

“Mum,” Phil shook his head. “Wonder what? Mum?”

“You haven’t said much about your life lately, darling, not real details anyway. I wondered what you’d been hiding, or who. So it’s this Dan, is it? I did wonder, after that article the other month.”

Phil bit his lip, but there was an odd, tight sort of relief pushing at his shoulders. His mum knew a lot more than he gave her credit for. “Yeah. The articles are kind of the problem.”

“And you said something about a premiere?” His mum made a proud noise. “So it’s serious, then?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Phil swallowed, wondered how much to say in one go. That he was even considering moving for Dan, away from her, away from his family. His previous life. Everything and everyone he knew, for something new, and terrifying, but also insanely exciting.

“How are you feeling about that, darling?” His mum’s voice was the same as ever, soft and caring, home. What had Phil even been worried about? Why had starting this conversation been so hard?

He drew in a breath. “I’m nervous. Scared. But it’s the right thing, mum, and Dan – Dan’s right for me. This is good.”

“So you’re happy?”

“The happiest.”

“Then that’s wonderful,” his mum soothed, “And everything will happen for the best. You just hold his hand out there in public and show the world how happy you are. That’s all I want for you, sweetheart.”

Phil was biting his lip, hard. “Thanks, mum.”

“Anytime, darling. Anytime.”

---

After he’d hung up with his mum, Phil curled up on the sofa staring blankly at some more Game of Thrones until the door blew open again. Dan came back into the flat with abandon, waving his phone in the air. “Tweeted a photo of our jackets for the premiere. Twitter’s already going crazy. And my agent’s setting up an audition for me, a stage show which sounds really exciting – why are you staring at Kit Harington’s face? Is one famous actor not enough for you?”

Phil blinked, drawing himself out of his thoughts and turning to find Dan standing over the sofa, pouting at him. “Hm?”

“Oh, nothing,” Dan flopped down on the sofa next to him, “Just wondering when you’re going to replace me.”

Phil shoved his side, then grabbed his hand. “You’re ridiculous. Come here.”

Dan nestled up against him, laying his head against Phil’s shoulder. Phil wrapped an arm around him and drew him in closer, pressing his face against Dan’s hair. It was straightened today, made neat for the people outside to see him. Phil much preferred it curly and messy, the Dan he knew, not Daniel Howell the actor.

He loved both parts of Dan’s life, but he was still scared of the public side. He’d adjust, he supposed, but it was just – scary.

“I told my mum,” Phil murmured into Dan’s hair, keeping him pressed close. “About us.”

Dan stilled in his arms. Then he turned his face up, met Phil’s gaze with questioning eyes. “You did?”

Phil nodded abruptly. He bit his lip. “She’s happy for me. For us. She’s going to watch the premiere with my dad and brother and his girlfriend, I think.”

Dan studied him, and then slowly smiled, just the hint of a dimple appearing. “And how do you feel about that?”

“Good,” Phil said after a moment, and pulled Dan into him. “I feel good.”

“Well,” Dan was properly smiling now as he clambered determinedly into Phil’s lap. “That’s good. I feel pretty good too.”

Phil held him, and glanced up, and hoped that every reaction would be as good as mum’s. But there was still the quiet voice in his head that said this wasn’t right – that his relationship with Dan somehow wouldn’t stand the test of prying eyes. After all, Dan might be bi, but Phil – Phil wasn’t. Phil was something else. And he didn’t quite know how to handle that when it came to something like this.

“What’s up, though?” Dan asked after a moment, in a moment of incredible telepathy. His fingers skimmed Phil’s arm, rubbing up and down in a soothing rhythm. “Something’s up. You’ve gone all quiet.”

Phil huffed, hiding a smile in Dan’s hair. “What’s wrong with being quiet?”

“Nothing, unless I can tell you’re hiding something,” Dan clarified, settling in Phil’s lap, still gently rubbing his arm. “What is it?”

Phil held his silence for a moment, and then let out a sigh. “I just – this is all a lot, you know?”

“I know,” Dan murmured gently. “Is it too much? We can stop anytime, you know – if you’re uncomfy—”

“No, that’s not it,” Phil disagreed with a quick shake of his head. “No, wow Dan, I just – I can’t wait to be able to hold your hand in public and not be constantly checking for cameras or any of your strange stalkerish fans to be following us.”

Dan stifled a smile. “Same, honestly.”

“Exactly. It’s just—” Phil paused, thinking his words over carefully before continuing. He didn’t really know what the source of the unsettling feeling growing in his stomach was, jangling around like nerves, twisting up his innards. Telling his mum had gone well. There’d been no questions at all. And that just – it threw Phil, a little.

Partly because he didn’t think he’d really said anything, yet. Not about him. People were just… assuming, and Phil worried they were assuming the wrong things.

He had no idea how to verbalise any of this.

But Dan was still looking up at him with something close to worry hidden in his gaze, and Phil didn’t want to leave that there. He wanted to wipe that look away, replace it with Dan’s smile.

“I suppose,” he started softly, “That my mum, and Tyler, and everyone – everyone we tell at the Premiere, everyone on Twitter – they’re all going to assume something about us that… isn’t true?”

Dan tilted his head questioningly. “Like what?”

“Well,” Phil floundered a bit, “They’re going to think that, like – we’re in a relationship? Which obviously we are, but – not in the way everyone thinks?”

Dan tilted his head. “I’m guessing you mean some of the more… physical stuff. Because of, like, you being ace.”

Phil bit his lip. It still shocked him, occasionally, to hear that word spoken out loud when it had lived alone in his head for so long. But he nodded. “Yeah. And I know it doesn’t matter really – I’m just glad to have you, and you understand and that’s all that matters, but—”

“But it’s still annoying to not be able to talk about it,” Dan said softly.

Phil nodded again, morose. “I don’t know why, exactly, even. I just… feel like everyone is assuming something about me, and it doesn’t always sit quite right.”

“I get it,” Dan said after a moment, still gently rubbing his hand up and down Phil’s arm. It was a soothing touch.

Phil leaned into him. “I shouldn’t care, I know. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”

“No, it should,” Dan disagreed. “It’s important. I get it – and I’m scared of that too, Phil, honestly.”

Phil sent him a quizzical look.

“Not in exactly the same way,” Dan said with a small, wry smile. “But – I’ve had relationships with girls before, you know. Publicly.”

“I know,” Phil replied, a little more darkly than he felt. He remembered all too well his deep google searches about Dan’s past with actresses.

Dan grinned. “Jealous. But yeah – people will know about them. I’m scared telling them about you will make people say I was lying before, somehow, or – or like those people were just shields, or whatever you want to say. But they weren’t. I loved those girls – I did. At the time.”

Phil bit his lip, drew in a breath. Hearing about Dan’s past relationships wasn’t really making him feel better. His fingers slid down to find Dan’s, gripping his hand hard.

Dan chuckled, leaning in. “Nothing to what I feel for you. Not even close, Phil.”

Phil looked down, embarrassed he’d needed that reassurance, but feeling better for it regardless.

Dan squeezed his fingers. “It’s just – if people see me with you, they’re going to assume I’m gay, that I’ve always been gay, that I’ve just been hiding it. But that isn’t true. I’m not gay.”

“Nor am I,” Phil agreed.

“I know.” Dan nestled in close, and then snorted. “We’re both coming out and everyone’s going to say we’re gay when that’s exactly what neither of us is.”

“Ironic,” Phil agreed, smiling despite himself. He held Dan close, hid his face in Dan’s hair, breathed him in. That was all he really cared about. Having Dan close.

Dan leaned into him, squished somehow in his lap despite the fact that Dan really was taller than him, and probably far too big for this. But Phil didn’t care. He liked holding Dan, having Dan lean into him.

“It doesn’t really matter, though,” Dan added, squeezing Phil’s hand again. “We know what we’re like. We can correct the people close to us when they get it wrong, and – and at the end of the day, it isn’t their business. We are us. That’s all that should really matter, and that’s all we’re showing next week. That we’re just… us.”

Phil glanced down at him, struck silent by those words. Dan had just said it perfectly.

Being them, Phil could do.

“Yeah,” Phil agreed, and squeezed Dan tight, pressed a kiss to the top of his head “Yes. Let’s just be us.”

#phanfiction #phanfic #phan fluff #phan AU #ace!Phil #bi!Dan #inmyway

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serenagaywaterford · 6 years

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6) a flip of the dime. The nasty parts were always there, but he concealed/controlled them. Maybe bc said parts wouldn't exactly make him endearing to others? Anyhow, your interpretation makes him quite the interesting antagonist/villain, so I'm rolling with it, lol. /// There was another thing that was bugging me about S2: the baby's name. Obviously, Serena chose Nic(h)ole as a "fuck you" to Fred. But June in the finale? Of course, she stuck to it for Nick's sake, but also bc she recognized

7) Serena’s selfless (well, if you can call it that) act. Thoughts on this? /// As for your older responses, I forgot to describe what an epiphany it was for me to realize the significance of Serena’s use of the word “rape” for the first time. The anger I felt after 2x10 blinded me to the VERY OBVIOUS connection between her realization in 2x10 and her outburst in 2x11. (Silly me!) Imagine how much more intense that fight would have been if they included the marital rape. I remember a writer

8) that June didn’t kill Serena, bc she actually felt sorry for her in that episode. (Ngl, June’s kindness baffles me at times.) I knew that she wasn’t gonna do it of course, but it was 50/50 whether I wanted her to shoot them or not. /// Something I have not addressed so far is how lukewarm I found their explanation for June getting away with all the shit she does. Well, she’s no Janine (who loses an eye) or Emily (who gets mutilated), but still. Like you said, Serena and Fred might get away

9) get away with a lot more bc of their privilege, but June? Hm. // I’ll start quoting later (or maaaybe tomorrow).

———–

I always thought that was a really weird sort of thing for June to do. And it seems to be entirely because of Serena? Like, it was Holly, Holly, Holly. Even when she was talking to Nick. Then she has the exchange with Serena, and suddenly she adopts Serena’s supreme dickmove of a babyname?

And I LIKED Holly. It meant something. Nichole (I HATE THAT SPELLING SFM LMAO) means nothing to June? Can you imagine the convo:

“Mommy, why am I called Nichole?”

“Well, baby, you see, your Daddy’s name is Nick, so the lady that stole you decided to name you after him to eternally piss off her husband who she clearly hates and wanted him to be reminded that he’s impotent every time he looks at you.”

Like, on the one hand, Serena is fucking brilliant and it just shows the extent of her hatred for Fred. But then it’s kinda shitty to use a child as a pawn in that.

Then again, maybe there’s another reason Serena chose that name? I know there’s like a whole history about St. Nicholas and his role as a patron saint of childless couples, or something. (I can’t recall exactly rn). And there was something about St. Nicolette and babies. (Which is where the names Nicole and Collette come from.) Something like she raised a dead baby back to life. So, I guess, at a stretch perhaps that was her inspiration? I doubt it, knowing Serena. LOL.

It’s really curious June’s decision though. Despite EVERYTHING Serena’s done, June just wipes it clean and names her fucking baby after Serena’s choice? Maybe she was trying to retain the memory of Nick for Nichole? I dunno. And not only that, but she seemed 100% genuine when she said that farewell blessing and held Serena’s hand (again).

I dunno, June’s own preoccupation with Serena is something I don’t truly understand but she clearly thinks there’s some odd connection or something. It’s funny cos I was reading a review about S2 and June’s choices in the finale, and her constant support of Serena despite ALL the reasons not to, and lemme see if I can find it…

Nah. I can’t. Anyway, it was something about how we all know June’s going back for Hannah, but this writer thought June was also going back for Serena.

I’m not convinced about that tbh, but I can see the argument cos June is strangely protective and compassionate towards Serena considering. I just have a sinking feeling that the show is gonna play that “Oops, Serena is evil again!! SHE WAY MAD JUNE GIVE BABBY AWAY trolololol!!!!” and make her despicable in order to get Nicole back. If that is the case, I’m gonna roll my eyes right outta my head. I have no issue with Serena having regrets, tbh. I think that’s pretty understandable and expected. But having Serena go hogwild with abuse and using Fred’s power to get back at June or something is just going to fucking piss me off cos like, c’mon my dudes, been there, done that. Over and over already. It’s the 3rd season and either you’re gonna put this bitch on a mild redemption arc or you’re gonna make her a full-on villain. Make up your minds. The will-she, won’t-she thing is old by now.

I dunno that was a random OT rant.

Also, TRUTH! Serena’s use of the word “rape” was important. Like, part of me is like DUH how did you JUST figure that out?! And, honestly I feel like the marital rape is sort of necessary for Serena’s epiphany to get recognised. I think, Serena is just wilfully ignorant enough to not truly consider the Ceremony rape. I honestly do not think she totally understood what she was suggesting with the 2x10 rape. (Serena really does lack forethought for like…all of her actions. That’s sorta her whole problem.) I think she thought it would be just like a sort of unsanctioned ceremony. But by the end she did seem to recognise what it truly was. And having her raped by Fred in the previous episode would have really helped with that. (Then again, it’s really hard to understand how a woman who was just raped turns around and basically suggests it. And this person is supposed to be not Satan. A pure evil woman sure. But Serena’s not meant to be that.)

I think Yvonne’s delivery of the line was interesting too. Part of it was like, “HOly shit it was rape” and part of it was like, “ha! you’re a monster!! you did that!” Like she had no culpability in it. I want to know if Serena has realised that ALL ceremonies are RAPE yet. I wonder if she’s got there. I’m not totally convinced she has. But… I dunno.

Oh! I hadn’t read that about June’s reasoning! That’s interesting. I mean, it fits with June overall but it’s a very odd thing. Like, to be holding a gun trained on the couple that literally held you down and raped you not 24 hours earlier… and feel SORRY for the woman (whereas the general population’s consensus is that Serena is even worse than Fred for doing that to another woman)? I went and watched it after reading your message I didn’t really see that on June’s face. (But that’s really neither here nor there since editing, directing, etc. all differs from what the writers/showrunners had in mind and those are the guys doing the interviews!) I take that back! I watched it again and I can deffo see that if that’s what they were going for. Totally missed it and likely wouldn’t have picked up on it if not for this convo.

That said, I totally see June reasoning it out that way. For some strange reason, whether it’s Stockholm Syndrome or whatever, June seems to have a blindspot/softspot for Serena and she seems to have unlimited Get Out Of Jail Free cards for her. Like, c’mon, she literally held her down to be brutally raped, and at this point it seems like Serena could murder June and June’s ghost would just be like, “Hey youuuuu, wanna be my bestie in overthrowing the patriarchy?” (Okay, I’m not at all complaining cos I love their dynamic and I ship them soooooo… lol. On a personal level, it works very well for me and my crackshippy fantasies. I choose to believe June honestly sees something nobody else does and believes in Serena’s capacity for redemption–WHICH IS INSANE. But hey. I love it.)

So, for June to feel sorry for Serena, even after everything really does fit when you think about it. And also when you think about book!June’s attitude towards true power being in forgiveness.

I remember sitting around watching the ep the first time and thinking “I don’t want June to shoot them and be a killer” but also, “WHY ISN’T SHE SHOOTING THE FUCKING PLACE UP! DOES SHE NOT WANT TO ESCAPE????” And I was sitting there with the wifey and she was like, “She can’t. What if she misses? Then you’ve got 2 incredibly angry people chasing you.” And I was like… “Uh. Reload? Shoot them as they’re coming up the stairs.”

Because I have never fired a gun in my life so to me it seems really easy lmao. But to me, I didn’t even care about her shooting Serena but I did have an inkling she didn’t want to shoot Serena with the amount she paused. That would have been a perfect shot with teh type of ammo to take out –or at least injure– two people at once. I was like, “You gotta kill Fred and Serena is pretty useless then. It’s not like they have mobile phones! You can then choose to leave Serena to die there lol, or hostage her. And steal the car. You could get pretty far since nobody knows that Fred/Serena are even there.” To me, rationally, it didnt’ make sense not to shoot them. But… emotionally, obvs, I knew she wouldn’t cos a)the series would like… end rather abruptly lol, and b) that’s just not June.

AND yeah, June getting away with all her bullshit is insane in comparison. Janine literally lost an eye for backtalking once at the Red Centre! June has, well, done so much more and just kind skates away from ALL serious punishment. (Well, living with Fred and Serena is a pretty awful punishment in general.) And, sure part of it was cos she was preggers but … how Aunt Lydia/Fred/Serena/TPTB trust this crazy Handmaid not to KEEP breaking the rules is insane. I feel like nobody would trust her to just be a docile little thing after running away for 92 days. Not even Pervy Freddo. Despite all his creeptastic fetishes, he’d be like, “OMG she is way too high maintenance. i just don’t have the patience. give me that baby so i can shut my annoying wife up and then get me another more docile babyslave to play Scrabble and shave!” The plot armour is strong in this one!

Anyway! I got a bit carried away there…

#Anonymous

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